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This article examines the decline of the American empire and the possibility of a rapid collapse. It compares the decline of other empires, such as the British and Soviet empires, and highlights the crises that weakened them. The article argues that the United States is currently facing its own crises, including the situations in Ukraine, Gaza, and the Taiwan Straits. It suggests that mishandling these crises, along with domestic political challenges, could signify the decline of American global power. The text specifically focuses on the situation in Ukraine, tracing the history of mismanagement and the current challenges faced by the United States in supporting Ukraine against Russian aggression. It notes that U.S. support for Ukraine is wavering and that cracks have appeared in the anti-Russian coalition, indicating a decline in American global influence. The article also discusses the crises in Gaza and the Taiwan Straits, highlighting the Republican Party's reluctance to support Ukraine and the complexities of the Israeli-Hamas alliance in Gaza. It further mentions the increasing pressure on Taiwan from Beijing and the potential test of the U.S.'s stance on Taiwan's sovereignty. The simultaneous occurrence of these three crises poses a risk to American global hegemony. [Extracted from the article]

JANUARY 18, 2022 Throughout 2021, Americans were absorbed in arguments over mask mandates, school closings, and the meaning of the January 6th attack on the Capitol. In a major strategic miscalculation, Washington admitted Beijing to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, bizarrely confident that a compliant China, home to nearly 20% of humanity and historically the world's most powerful nation, would somehow join the global economy without changing the balance of power. In a power play not seen since Stalin and Mao joined forces in the 1950s, the alliance between Putin's raw military force and Xi's relentless economic pressure may indeed slowly be pulling Europe away from America. [Extracted from the article]

JULY 8, 2021 Fifty years ago, on June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon stood before the White House press corps, staffers at his side, to announce "a new, all-out offensive" against drug abuse, which he denounced as "America's public enemy number one." By the end of President Clinton's term in 2000, nearly every state in the nation had stiffened its laws on juveniles, setting aside family courts and sending young, mainly minority, offenders directly to adult prisons for long sentences. Standing alongside the president on that day when America's drug war officially began was John Erlichman, White House counsel and Nixon confidante. As of 2019, this country's prisons remained overcrowded with 430,900 people convicted of drug crimes, while drug offenders represented 46% of all those in federal penitentiaries. [Extracted from the article]

As the countryside slipped out of its control and Taliban guerrillas multiplied after 2004, Washington tried everything - a trillion-dollar aid program, a 100,000 troop "surge", a multi-billion-dollar drug war - but none of it worked. Once the full costs of Washington's withdrawal from Afghanistan become apparent, the debacle may, not surprisingly, discourage potential future allies from trusting Washington's word or judgment. While the U.S. bombing campaign raged through October 2001, the CIA shipped$70 million in bundled bills into Afghanistan to mobilize its old coalition of tribal warlords for the fight against the Taliban. Almost immediately, Washington announced suspension of its military aid to Pakistan until Islamabad took "decisive action" against the Taliban and its militant allies. [Extracted from the article]

Sure, China might be surpassing this country in multiple economic metrics and building up its military power, said Ryan Hass, the former China director in Obama's National Security Council, but it is not 10 feet tall. Similarly, Trump's State Department warned that Beijing harbored "hegemonic ambitions" aimed at "displacing the United States as the world's foremost power." Although China was clearly trying "to establish itself as the world's leading power", he added, America "still has the ability to more than hold its own in that competition", just as long as it avoids Trump's "trajectory of self-sabotage." "Across the ideological spectrum, we in the U.S. foreign policy community", two senior Obama officials would later write, "shared the underlying belief that U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States' liking All sides of the policy debate erred.". [Extracted from the article]

JANUARY 28, 2021 After four years of Donald Trump's fitful tenure, America is awakening from a long, troubled sleep to discover, like the fictional character Rip Van Winkle, that the world it once knew has changed beyond all recognition. While his White House seemed obsessed with gaming its bilateral ties with China, Beijing was stealing a page right out of Obama's strategic global playbook, outmaneuvering Washington by pursuing two multilateral trade agreements that should have seemed eerily familiar to anyone who lived through the Obama years. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the decline of France's neocolonial imperium in Africa, known as "Françafrique," and the rise of Russian influence in the region. Over the past 60 years, France has used various means, including military interventions and covert operations, to maintain control over a quarter of Africa. However, a growing nationalist consciousness in African nations has led to a backlash against French dominance. As French troops withdraw from the region, Russian mercenary army, the Wagner Group, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, has stepped in to fill the power vacuum, establishing ties with governments in several African countries. This shift in power has significant geopolitical implications, potentially flanking Europe and the US and extending Russia's influence across the Sahel region. [Extracted from the article]

Imagine the impact if, sooner or later, envoys from Kyiv and Moscowconvene in Beijing beneath the gaze of President Xi and find the elusivemeeting point between Russia's aspirations and Ukraine's survival. To sweetensuch deals, Ukraine could also allow China to build massive factories tosupply Europe's soaring demand for renewable energy and electricvehicles. Beyond Western Fantasies of Victory At present, Beijing might seem alone among major nations in its concernabout the strain the Ukraine war is placing on a world economy poisedbetween starvation and survival. [Extracted from the article]

The article states that the rise of China as a dominant global power, coupled with the declining influence of the United States, is reshaping the geopolitical landscape. It mentions that by consolidating its control over the continent through the massive infrastructure projects, China mirrors America's post-World War II strategy of encircling Eurasia. It states that recent events, such as the French President Emmanuel Macron's visit to China, highlight the growing influence of China.

The article states that the rise of China as a dominant global power, coupled with the declining influence of the United States, is reshaping the geopolitical landscape. It mentions that by consolidating its control over the continent through the massive infrastructure projects, China mirrors America's post-World War II strategy of encircling Eurasia. It states that recent events, such as the French President Emmanuel Macron's visit to China, highlight the growing influence of China.

The Costs of War With both Beijing and Washington contemplating a possible future war over Taiwan, it's important (especially in light of Ukraine) to consider the likely costs of such a conflict. In its least violent scenario, Reuters speculated that Beijing could use its navy to impose a "customs quarantine" around Taiwan, while announcing an Air Defense Identification Zone over the island and warning the world not to violate its sovereignty. While the world has been distracted, even amused, by the diplomatic tussle around China's recent high-altitude balloon flights across North America, there are signs that Beijing and Washington are preparing for something so much more serious: armed conflict over Taiwan. As Biden acknowledged, by extending diplomatic recognition to Beijing in 1979, Washington had indeed accepted China's future sovereignty over Taiwan. [Extracted from the article]

Farther south, after years of U.S.-led economic blockades and at least one Washington-sponsored coup, Venezuela has hemorrhaged 6.8 million of its citizens in what the U.N. called "the largest refugee and migrant crisis worldwide." Given a genuine investment program aimed at more equitable economic integration, Washington could conceivably reduce, however gradually, the glaring economic inequality between the U.S. and Canada and their southern neighbors. That European Union (EU), in turn, would create unprecedented levels of productivity and prosperity (until, at least, Britain withdrew from the EU and, in more recent times, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine). [Extracted from the article]

The U.S. and China Face Off Some 30 years after that Cold War ended, however, strategic gaps have appeared in Washington's encirclement of Eurasia, particularly along the continent's southern flank. If the world is indeed entering a new Cold War, it bears little resemblance to the final years of that global conflict with its frequent summits between smiling leaders and its arms agreements aimed at de-escalating nuclear tensions. [Extracted from the article]

Last February, in a reversal of Cold War roles, Putin arrived at that Beijing summit as a supplicant, desperately seeking Chinese President Xi Jinping's diplomatic support for his Ukrainian gambit. From his first days in office, Joe Biden and his national security advisers seemed determined to revive America's fading global leadership via the strategy they knew best -- challenging the "revisionist powers" Russia and China with a Cold War-style aggressiveness. As Russia's invasion of Ukraine loomed in late February, the New York Times reported that Putin was trying "to revise the outcome of the original Cold War, even if it is at the cost of deepening a new one.". [Extracted from the article]

As the war in Ukraine heads for its third month amid a rising toll of death and destruction, Washington and its European allies are scrambling, so far unsuccessfully, to end that devastating, globally disruptive conflict. On March 16th, the U.N.'s highest tribunal, the International Court of Justice, ordered Russia to immediately suspend all military operations in Ukraine, a judgment Putin has simply ignored. That April, Putin only added force to his demand by dispatching 120,000 troops to Ukraine's border to stage military maneuvers that Washington even then branded a "war threat.". [Extracted from the article]

To grasp the import of this development, let's freeze frame two key moments in world history -- Communist Chinese leader Mao Zedong's Moscow meeting with the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin in December 1949 and Vladimir Putin's summit in Beijing with Xi Jinping just last month. As it happens, though, given a Sino-Russian alliance so heavily based on the trade in fossil fuels, even if Vladimir Putin doesn't himself go down thanks to his potentially disastrous invasion of Ukraine, both Beijing and Moscow may find themselves whipsawed in the years to come by a troubled energy transition and climate change. Although China has been Ukraine's main trading partner since 2019, Beijing set aside those ties and its own advocacy of inviolable sovereignty to avoid calling Putin's intervention an "invasion." Just as the relentless grinding of the earth's tectonic plates produces earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, so the endless superpower struggle for dominance over Eurasia is fraught with tensions and armed conflict. [Extracted from the article]

Together, the planet's two great imperial powers, China and the United States, accounted for 44% of total CO[sub 2] emissions in 2019 and so far both have made painfully slow progress toward renewable energy. After all, by clinging to coal production on a major scale, while reaching for a bigger slice of the world's oil imports for its transportation triad, China's greenhouse-gas emissions doubled from just 14% of the world's total in 2000 to 30% in 2019, far surpassing that of the United States, previously the planet's leading emitter. Despite its promises to curb greenhouse-gas emissions at recent U.N. climate conferences, China is still promoting coal-fired power at home and abroad. In a joint declaration at the November 2021 Glasgow climate conference, the U.S. agreed "to reach 100% carbon-pollution-free electricity by 2035", while China promised to "phase down" (but note, not "phase out") coal starting with its "15th Five-Year Plan.". [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the 1986 coup attempt at the Manila Hotel in the Philippines. It draw parallels between that event and the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, and notes that both events had similarities, such as crowds of angry loyalists storming buildings and claims of stolen elections. It also describe how the coup colonels attempted to overthrow the government twice more, but both attempts failed, and Philippine democracy survived.

The article reports the significance of the collapse of the U.S. project in Afghanistan and its implications for U.S. global power. It discusses the comparisons to the fall of Saigon in 1975, the author argues that the collapse of Kabul was worse and carries more serious consequences. It emphasizes the decline in the U.S. capacity to build and support allied armies over the many years.