Anybody read this, by Emmanual Todd, self described "empiricist Hegelian"? Like the title suggests, there ain't going to be any Empire. He's right, if not for the right reasons.
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I remembered this title and searched around till I found, for the second time, a brief review at the Asia Times that's part of a breezy overview of recent French thought on American hegemony.
The French strike back By Julio Godoy
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Emmanuel Todd's Apres l'empire (After the empire) looks at what the author calls the "decomposition of American hegemony".
Todd, a renowned social scientist who predicted the end of the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, bases his conclusions on the US dependency on foreign capital. Todd says that the US commercial deficit more than quadrupled during the 1990s. "In the period from 1973 to 2000, during which the US enjoyed its longest economic expansion, the commercial deficit went up from $100 billion to $450 billion," Todd says.
"To pay for this deficit, the US needs to keep importing foreign capital," he says. "If this capital flow were to stop, the US economy would collapse. Despite the repeated claims about US power, the truth is that this country is both a beggar and predator. This cannot last very long."
Todd says that US militarism is nothing more than "fuss" aimed to impress the world. "When you think that the US government only dares to wage war against military gnomes such as Iraq, you have to realize that the whole thing is only to pretend that they are mighty."
Todd says that the US' isolation in its war plans against Iraq (give or take a few not so mighty nations) is an indicator that the world has begun to see the US decline as a superpower. "The fact that Germany, for the first time since World War II, has dared oppose a US military project especially shows this awareness."
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full at http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EC21Aa03.html
Is this, in fact, the central idea: that the constant need for foreign capital to fund the ever expanding deficit is the Achilles heel?
If so, I'd be interested to read a decscription of the weaknesses of this idea.
DRM
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