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America: The Impotent Superpower
American military and corporate power have triumphed over all rivals—so why
does the United States still struggle to impose its will on the world?
July 14, 2014
Protesters burn an American flag during a demonstration in Najaf, Iraq. (Reuters/Thaier Al-
Sudani)
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For America’s national security state, this is the age of impunity.
—torture,
kidnapping, assassination, illegal surveillance, you name it—will ever be brought to court. For
none of its beyond-the-boundaries acts will anyone be
. The only crimes that
can now be committed in official Washington are by those foolish enough to believe that a
government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth. I’m
speaking of the various
to let Americans know
what deeds and misdeeds their government is committing in their name but without their
knowledge. They continue to
in accountability for their acts that should, by
comparison, stun us all.
As June ended, The New York Times front-paged an
of an act of corporate impunity that
may, however, be unique in the post-9/11 era (though potentially a harbinger of things to come).
In 2007, as journalist James Risen tells it, Daniel Carroll, the top manager in Iraq for the rent-a-
gun company Blackwater, one of the
that accompanied the US military to
war in the twenty-first century, threatened Jean Richter, a government investigator sent to
Baghdad to look into accounts of corporate wrongdoing.
Here, according to Risen, is Richter’s version of what happened when he, another government
investigator, and Carroll met to discuss Blackwater’s potential misdeeds in that war zone:
“Mr. Carroll said ‘that he could kill me at that very moment and no one could or would do
anything about it as we were in Iraq,’ Mr. Richter wrote in a memo to senior State
Department officials in Washington. He noted that Mr. Carroll had formerly served with
Navy SEAL Team 6, an elite unit. ‘Mr. Carroll’s statement was made in a low, even tone
of voice, his head was slightly lowered; his eyes were fixed on mine,’ Mr. Richter stated in
his memo. ‘I took Mr. Carroll’s threat seriously. We were in a combat zone where things
can happen quite unexpectedly, especially when issues involve potentially negative
impacts on a lucrative security contract.’”
When officials at the US Embassy in Baghdad, the
in the world, heard what had
happened, they acted promptly. They sided with the Blackwater manager, ordering Richter and
the investigator who witnessed the scene out of the country (with their inquiry incomplete). And
though a death threat against an American official might, under other circumstances, have led a
CIA team or a set of special ops guys to
the culprit off the streets of Baghdad, deposit
, and then leave him idling in Guantanamo or in jail in the
United States awaiting trial, in this case no further action was taken.
Power Centers but No Power to Act
Think of the response of those embassy officials as a get-out-of-jail-free pass in honor of a new
age. For the various rent-a-gun companies, construction and
, and weapons
makers that have been the beneficiaries of the wholesale privatization of American war since
9/11, impunity has become the new reality. Pull back the lens further and the same might be said
more generally about America’s corporate sector and its financial outfits. There was, after all, no
accountability for the economic meltdown of 2007-2008. Not a single significant figure
for bringing the American economy to its knees. (And many such figures made out like
in the government bailout and revival of their businesses that followed.)
Meanwhile, in these years, the corporation itself was let loose to run riot. Long a “person” in the
legal world, it became ever more person-like, benefitting from a series of
and ordinary Americans even as it gave the corporation ever more
of the rights and attributes of a citizen on the loose. Post-9/11, the corporate world gained
, as well as the various freedoms that staggering
and hoards of money offer. Corporate entities gained, among other things, the right to
flood the political system with money and, most recently, at least in a modest way,
In other words, two great power centers have been engorging themselves in twenty-first-century
America: there was an ever-expanding national security state, ever less accountable to anyone,
ever
and less transparent itself, ever more empowered by a
and a body of
no one else could be privy to; and there was an increasingly
militarized corporate state, ever less accountable to anyone, ever less overseen by outside
forces, ever more sure that the law was its possession. These two power centers are now
triumphant in our world. They command the landscape against what may be less effective
opposition than at any moment in our history.
In both cases, no matter how you tote it up, it’s been an era of triumphalism. Measure it any way
you want: by the
Dow Jones Industrial Average or the expanding
, by
the power of “dark money” to determine American politics in
of CEOs and the stagnating wages of their workers, by the power of billionaires and the
, by the penumbra of secrecy and classification spreading across government
operations and the lessening ability of the citizen to know what’s going on, or by the growing
power of both the national security state and the corporation to turn your life into an
.
Look anywhere and some version of the same story presents itself—of ascendant power in the
boardrooms and the back-rooms, and of a sense of impunity that accompanies it.
Whether you’re considering the power of the national security state or the corporate sector, their
moment is now. And what a moment it is—for them. Their success seems almost complete.
And yet that only begins to tell the strange tale of our American times, because if that power is
ascendant, it seems incapable of being translated into classic American power. The more
successful those two sectors become, the less the United States seems capable of wielding its
power effectively in any traditional sense, domestically or abroad.
Anyone can feel it, hence the recent
indicating a striking diminution in
recent years of Americans who think the United States is exceptional, the greatest of all nations.
By 2011, only 38 percent of Americans thought that; today, the figure has dropped to 28 percent,
and—a harbinger of future American attitudes—just 15 percent among 18-to-29-year-olds. And
no wonder. By many measures the United States may remain the wealthiest, most powerful
nation on the planet, but in recent years its ability to accomplish anything, no less achieve
national or imperial success, has shrunk drastically.
The power centers remain, but in some still-hard-to-grasp way, the power to accomplish
anything seems to be draining from a country that was once the great can-do nation on the
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planet. On this, the record is both dismal and clear. To say that the American political system is
in a kind of gridlock or paralysis from which—given
in 2014 and 2016—there
can be no escape is to say the obvious. It’s a
of news reports to suggest, for
example, that in this midterm election–year Congress and the president will be capable of
accomplishing nothing together (except perhaps avoiding another actual government shutdown).
Nada, zip, zero.
The president acts in relatively minimalist ways by executive order, Congress
over his use of those orders, and (as novelist Kurt Vonnegut would once have said) so it goes. In
the meantime, Congress has proven itself unable to act even when it comes to what once would
have been the no-brainers of American life. It has, for instance, been
a
highway bill that would allow for ordinary repair work on the nation’s system of roads, even
though the fund for such work is
and jobs will be lost.
This sort of thing is but a symptom in a country of immense wealth whose infrastructure is
and which lacks a single mile of high-speed rail. In all of this, in the rise of poverty and
a minimum-wage economy, in a loss—particularly for
—of the wealth that went with
home ownership, what can be seen is the untracked rise of a Third World country inside a First
World one, a powerless America inside the putative global superpower.
An Exceptional Kind of Decline
And speaking of the “sole superpower,” it remains true that
of other militaries can
compare with the US military or the moneys the country continues to put into it and into the
research and development of weaponry of the most futuristic sort. The US national security
budget remains a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not –style infusion of tax dollars into the national security
state, something no other combination of major countries comes close to matching.
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In addition, the United States still maintains
of military bases and outposts across the
planet (including, in recent years,
for our latest techno-wonder weapon, the
drone). In 2014, it still garrisons the planet in a way that no other imperial power has ever done. In
fact, it continues to sport all the trappings of a great empire, with an army impressive enough that
our last two presidents have regularly resorted to one unembarrassed image to
it: “the
finest fighting force that the world has ever known.”
And yet, recent history is clear: that military has proven
of winning its wars against
minor (and minority) insurgencies globally, just as Washington, for all its firepower, military and
economic, has had a remarkably difficult time imposing its desires just about anywhere on the
planet. Though it may still look like a superpower and though the power of its national security
state may still be growing, Washington seems to have lost the ability to translate that power into
anything resembling success.
Today, the United States looks less like a functioning and effective empire than an imperial
basket case, unable to bring its massive power to bear effectively from Germany to Syria, Iraq to
, Libya to the South China Sea, the Crimea to Africa. And stranger yet, this remains
true even though it has no imperial competitors to challenge it. Russia is a rickety energy state,
capable of achieving its version of imperial success only along its own borders, and China,
clearly the
its military muscles locally in
disputed oil-rich waters, visibly has no wish to challenge the US military anywhere far from home.
All in all, the situation is puzzling indeed. Despite much talk about the rise of a multipolar world,
this still remains in many ways a unipolar one, which perhaps means that the wounds
Washington has suffered on numerous fronts in these last years are self-inflicted.
Just what kind of decline this represents remains to be seen. What does seem clearer today is
that the rise of the national security state and the triumphalism of the corporate sector (along with
the much-publicized growth of great wealth and striking inequality in the country) has been
accompanied by a decided diminution in the power of the government to function domestically
and of the imperial state to impose its will anywhere on Earth.
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