I kinda think it has the potential to be the long drawn-out death knell of humanity. That’s my most pessimistic take on it, but it’s not an unrealistic take for me. I could see western imperialism sooner ending the world than ceding its power.
But it also often feels like we’re sitting on a powder keg, and the contradictions are growing so severe that the average person is starting to realize there’s no clear paths to a happy and safe life under current economic systems. If we get hit with a bad enough financial crisis, or even some sort of natural disaster the governments of the world are incapable of handling, we might hope to see a resurgence in socialist thought in the west.
I think a lot of it has to do with how well China fares in the coming years. Their existence really does hurt the idea that the ‘american way’ is in any way a requirement for a fulfilling life, as most average westerners believe I assume.
I think the next financial crisis is going to trigger total dedollarization. The US has already set themselves up with their trade war bullshit and sanctions regimes, but as soon as getting dollars becomes difficult the rest of the world is going to dump them immediately.
I think it will be no longer than 10 years at this point.
Unless the U.S. finds another way to give itself a shot in the arm and hobble along for another 25 years (which is possible, I guess) - this country is cooked. It is already so much different than even 2 years ago, just in terms of general consciousness, that if this trend continues, it will fall within our lifetime. Like others have said the contradictions are becoming ever stronger, other countries are increasingly powerful and most notably China and the global south are rapidly growing.
The U.S. will not be able to win a war without deploying nuclear weapons and obliterating the entire world along with itself. I wouldn’t put it past them to try if/when it comes to that, but the period of domination where they could fend for themselves is gone. Recruitment rates are in the shitter and again, the general population is extremely unhappy with the way things are going. Class consciousness still has a way to go, but we’re getting there. It’s not like it takes a whole country to complete the initial stages of a revolution, and more and more people are getting radicalized by the minute.
Ultimately, it’s going to take a serious world event that weakens and splits the bourgeois of this country (which is already kind of happening) and the swift action of the masses to take advantage of that when the time comes. It absolutely has to be soon, not only do I believe that it will be, but it has to be, or climate change and the US lashing out will genuinely cause hell.
In our lifetime ain’t just a saying, people. Get out there
Anywhere between 5-30 years. Ukraine is losing the war, more countries are falling into the Russia-China/Brics camp, especially in the global south, and America is slowly decaying as a country. And once America is decayed enough it’ll be lost as the main rock of western imperialism, and the west will lose most of its bite.
I think American power has already decayed to the point where western imperialism cannot be sustained anymore. The only reason the imperial system continues anyway is sheer inertia. In all of the crises that we see today, the imperial system is rapidly undone while America and Europe are unable to respond adequately. The base has already shifted, now it is time for the superstructure to correct itself.
2-10 years. No way does it have 30 years left.
I disagree a little with the 5 years part as I can see a small chance of “a collapse” happening within that time, but as for the 30 years part it seems possible too.
As they have to steal ever more from their own populations and can steal less from the Global South they will become weaker and fractured, and if, for example, this happens in some parts before others it can lead to fascism in some countries in Europe which might see their neighbors in better shape as enemies, potentially leading to western infighting and an acceleration of their own collapse.
Hopefully such a scenario the conflicts stay internal instead of going global and they only weaken themselves while the rest of the world prosper. And in such a scenario we could even see Global Sout countries with enough power to massively influence western countries perhaps even leading to imperialism against them as the Global South is unlikely to go communist so fast.
Other scenarios might be more plausible though…
Too long. Whatever the actual amount of time is.
Before 2050.
Thinking more about this and these articles come to mind about the US military and the general unsustainability of how things are being run in terms of infrastructure:
https://indi.ca/nothing-to-see-here-just-the-wheels-falling-off-empire/
https://indi.ca/how-americas-military-has-fallen-apart/
If we also consider how coupled the US is to the world economy, a drastic drop in global power could mean the sort of sanctions the US state has been inflicting on other countries end up on it and I don’t see people having enough loyalty to the country to fight such a thing meaningfully. Already, we know how the public feels and what gets implemented as policy has little connection. We are seeing right now people being willing to risk their futures or even lives now to protest genocide in another country, similar to the actions during the US violence against Vietnam. An encounter that the US ultimately lost, even if it did inflict barbaric harm on the Vietnamese people in the process.
Now China with BRICS is rising in influence, anti-imperialism appears to be overall strengthening and western imperialism weakening even if it is not always a straightforward “win” because even under the best conditions, it will not always go the way we want it to for the colonized.
And then there is climate change to contend with too, as well as the US’s general poor handling of covid, where it sacrificed its own people in order to push for faster re-opening and just sort of say “the pandemic is over.” That kind of cynically evil approach might work some of the time at a small scale, but the displacement climate change could cause is not going to be small and ignorable, and there will be no “just wait on a vaccine” moment for it.
All of this is to say that there is a lot levied against the US and western imperialism as a whole, both now and going forward, some of it plain old nature coming home with the consequences of mass ecological destruction.
And if the US loses its hold, I don’t see what other wing of western imperialism would be strong enough to take its place. I hesitate to make any personal predictions on time, but I don’t see western imperialism having any meaningful capability to navigate the consequences of climate change as a power figure, so I can’t see it lasting as a global power beyond that getting bad. If we take covid as a preview, it’s more likely for the violence to turn inward and deteriorate the conditions of the US further and China to be the one leading in acting pragmatically on a large scale.
If we also consider how coupled the US is to the world economy, a drastic drop in global power could mean the sort of sanctions the US state has been inflicting on other countries end up on it
Hell, nevermind sanctions, a drop in US power will mean- as we are seeing- the development of alternatives; the world simply won’t need the US anymore, all their tools of extortion will be undone, and increasingly states will choose the alternatives- or develop their own- rather than deal with the US, which has always, always been a malicious, treacherous actor.
Countries will increasingly develop their own domestic agriculture, where the US had formerly shackled them to its own, discouraged such developments, and supported (in some/many cases, enforced) the development of export economies, wholly beholden on the imperial cores instead. Alternatives to western media, technology, to western institutions ranging from education to international justice or arbitration- will develop. Countries will move past the western chokeholds from all industries, from pharmaceuticals, to industrial development (within their own countries at that!), to developing infrastructure for their own inter-global southern trade (for instance, inter-African trade as a key example of where this is so clearly necessary, and where such struggles are undergoing), to finance, and so on.
And personally, I look forward to seeing it. Whatever is beholden to the west, owned by the west, should not be trusted, and countries are not only seeing the west increasingly once again go mask-off as the bad actors they are, but now, with viable alternatives, moving, slowly but surely, en masse away from it. The future of the west will be pariahs if they keep it up, but even in the hypothetical scenario of genuine communist revolution and establishment within the west- the levers of control the west has only ever abused so far, will increasingly be gone, and the rest of the world is never going to hand them back- it’s all Joever for western hegemony, for western influence, for the western era (500 years of monstrosities, unprecedented terror and actual barbarism).
And if countries don’t like the developing Chinese, Russian, BRICS alternatives- by all means, that’s fine (well, I’d call it nonsense, but it’s fine). For instance, India banned TikTok. More power to them, or whatever. But what we’re moving towards is a world where India, and all these other countries, can make their own TikToks, their own Facebooks or whatever they want- a world where, hopefully, each and every chip of western capital will be lost. Frankly if you ask me? China should probably see about helping India break off from western tech, even if it’s building up their own new competitors, surely an arrangement can be made- but it’s a whole new world, and what is “west” is gonna be on the way out. Hopefully we live to see Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Ford, General Electric, Pfizer, Monsanto, Nestle, Amazon, Coca-Cola, Disney, etc… (basically list any and every western multinational) kick the bucket, to see the west really hit its stride in either becoming irrelevant, or learning to come down to earth and join the rest of humanity (without the levers of coercion- they’re never going back, and the west will never be trusted to develop them, ever) as equals- and as truly reformed, repentant, and thoroughly decolonized equals.
Well said!
Imo the most probable scenario is :
- Neocolonialism is rejected by a critical mass of countries
- The west can’t adapt, so they try to reindustrialize by reverting to industrial revolution conditions (which takes an openly neo fascist movement)
- It goes to war with itself or the outside, either inter European, or West vs new anti-colonial block, or US vs Europe
- After that it undergoes a pink wave like South America, not radical enough to break out of misery but still a bit progressive
Can’t speculate further than that
I don’t see it collapsing anytime within the next 20 years sadly. By 2100, maybe.
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Why do you say so?
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The British diaspora and Western Europeans now depend on a huge influx of legal immigrants of color to support their parasitic lifestyle although they could still gather a reserves of undocumented immigrants as slaves. The open imports of immigrants of color indicates that British diaspora depleted its reserves of Indigenous child slaves and stolen inheritance in the Residential fake School death camps and that Pax Americana could not use the Bretton Woods Institution to steal the fruit of other people’s labor from the debt trapping, misinformation, blackmailing, and puppet governments. The need of elites in Western European diaspora to betray their own wasteful white people for new immigrants of color is a major indication that Pax Americana order is already failing.
