Are Michael Mann Incoherent Empire's arguments still relevant four years later?

Résumé du document

Michael Mann's Incoherent Empire is a revealing text which manages to address bold political accusations and provide concurrent evidence. His critique of the American empire is timely and arguably more pertinent today than it was when written, after various imperial failures have helped corroborate his claims. However it is still unclear whether or not his prediction of imperial collapse can be determined to be accurate. Mann's essential argument is that "the demise of the new imperialisms will not come from the rise of another power but instead from extremely uneven power resources. The new imperialists are placing too much emphasis on military power." Pinpointing the source of Empires' decline has proven a challenge throughout history, as there are often culminations of factors that lead to instability, however a specific analysis of the US military would seem a logical place to begin the dissection of Mann's thesis.

Extraits

[...] The poverty in Iraq stands as a direct impediment to the democratization and pacification of the nation. Indeed, Mann highlights the fact that the administration had called repeatedly for ‘regime change.' We all knew that the desired change was from Saddam, but what was it (232). This remains a valid question, and the US military has failed to provide Americans or Iraqis with any concrete answer. The regime of Saddam has broken down into a haphazard state of civil war and continued strife, and all the might of the US army has failed to ameliorate the situation and create a state that is loyal to American imperial aims. [...]

[...] The US Defense Department, under the supervision of then under-secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, released in 1992 a report titled Defense Planning Guidance. The report states: first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed by the Soviet Union, which requires preventing any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.” It goes one crucial step further in stating that “finally, we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from ever aspiring to a larger regional or global role” (MRP). [...]

[...] Original missions may become outdated but new missions are developed, not only with the intention of keeping the facility going, but often to actually enlarge Even in 1970 officials observed a trend towards militarism, which is phenomenon by which a nation's armed services come to put their institutional preservation ahead of achieving national security” (23). This trend almost certainly accelerated during the Cold War, when the number of US bases grew steadily from a post-WWII amount of 582 up to a peak of 1,014 in 1967 (MR). It was during this period that President Eisenhower famously warned the country of the military-industrial complex, a network that financed the explosion of military expansion. [...]

[...] The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush's Military- Industrial Complex. New York: The New Press Clark, William R. Petrodollar Warfare: Oil, Iraq, and the Future of the Dollar. Canada: New Society Publishers Demant, Peter R. Islam vs. Islamism : The Dilemma of the Muslim World. Westport, CT: Praeger Desai, Meghnad. [...]

[...] With the US economy leading world production in the inter-war period, and even more so after WWII, it became rational for most participants to simply hold reserves of dollars instead of gold since most of the goods they were buying were coming from the US anyway. Thus, what logically emerged from Bretton Woods was a system that pegged the US dollar to a fixed amount of gold, and all other currencies were in turn pegged to the value of the US dollar. [...]