The Coronavirus is not going to fulfill the daydreams of anti-imperialist pundits and put an end to the current global order. But it will pack several years worth of ordinary decline into a single year. Then, the normal course of events will resume.
If you’ve
looked at the US debt clock anytime in the last month or so, you might have
noticed something different about it. Normally, while the debt goes up, the GDP
goes up nearly as fast, so that their ratio (the number that really matters)
increases by at most two or three percent per year.
I’ve
talked before about how this is largely the result of the powers that be
inflating the currency to cover up a two-decade-long decline in the size of the real economy. Nevertheless, it gets the
job done – the nominal economy grows fast enough to keep the debt from getting
out of hand, and the system plods onward.
But now,
with the Coronavirus shutdown in full swing, spending is way higher than usual,
and GDP is decreasing, so we can expect Washington to close out the year
with a debt-to-GDP ratio of about 130 percent (for comparison, it was around
112 percent this January).
Will this
crash the global economy? Not by a long shot. (Remember all the people who
looked at the trillion-dollar-deficits during Obama’s first term and said that
hyperinflation was just around the corner? Well, they were wrong).
What this
really means is just that five or six years of ordinary decline have been
packed into one year of virus-boosted decline.
To look
at another side of America’s rolling crisis, lots of people are predicting that
the record-high unemployment rate in America will lead to record numbers of
suicides and overdose deaths by the end of the
year. But Americans, especially poor whites, already had dreadfully high rates
of deaths of despair. That’s what you get in deindustrialized economy where
imports are paid for through the exportation of huge amounts of fiat money –
there just isn’t a good market for real, honest labor. The Coronavirus is only
speeding things up.
At the
bottom of all the news that’s coming our way this year is a rather unpleasant
fact: declining empires handle crises poorly.
Why is
the United States an empire? Because it consumes more resources than it
produces. Why do so many people not believe it’s an empire? Because it
hasn’t adopted the costly strategy of conquering huge parts of the world and
administering their territory directly. The American elite has found it more
effective to control the global financial system, hold sole authority to print
the global currency, and pull off the occasional coup or invasion in an
oil-rich country whose policies don’t favor American interests. (Think Iran in
1953, Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, or Syria and Venezuela today).
Remember the
Ledeen Doctrine? “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up
some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show
the world we mean business.”
Well,
America’s ability to pick up crappy little countries is melting away these days.
The Venezuela coup was indecisive. The Syria war ended with Russia, Turkey, and
Hezbollah sitting at the negotiation table. And so forth.
Two days
ago, Iran launched its first military satellite. People like Mike Pompeo want
to make this look like practice for building a nuclear ICBM; in reality, the satellites
themselves will be the last major piece missing from Iran’s defensive armament. The
Iranians already have hypersonic cruise missiles, and with the ability to track
targets from space, the Americans will have no choice but to clear their navy
out of the region whenever tensions flare up.
The
ultimate guarantor of American dominance – the global demand for dollars –
remains in place for now. But even there, the empire is sawing out its own
perch. Trade sanctions (basically, America’s de facto power, as the world’s one sovereign nation, to regulate commerce between all other nations) are easier to
enforce when said nations use American money, which is why so many countries
are beginning the transition from dollars to Yuan.
It will
take a while – two or three decades, mostly likely – before the dollar has been
displaced. After that, America will face a steep rise in the cost of imports,
and severe inflation as dollars are sent home from every corner of the world. In
short, we will have to deal with an economic meltdown like we haven’t seen
since the Great Depression.
After a period of turmoil, America or its successor states will clamber
their way back to normalcy. Who will benefit from this? The American working
man. In a country where imports have to be paid for by an equal value of
exports, there is no outsourcing of jobs. The people on top will likely never
have it as good as they do now, but the people on the bottom will find that
their skills are in much higher demand in a country that isn’t flooded with
cheap imports and swarming with foreign laborers.
But it will be a long, rough road between here and there, and we had better get to work preparing for it.

You and your readers may be interested in congruent arguments by others:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2020/April-May/44/4/magazine/article/10885172/
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blog/kissingers-call-for-a-new-world-order/
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/it-took-covid-to-expose-the-fraud-of-american-exceptionalism/