When the Empire Falls ...
04.02.2025
If all political activists at the grassroots are wondering what on earth is going on in the world, including in Mauritius, and if we cannot get our heads around what is actually happening, nor around how fast it is happening, this is because we are experiencing the fall of an empire. Empires build up over centuries and fall over decades. So, it is new for us to see the stagger of the US empire change into the beginning of its actual fall. It is happening now. This will go on over the next few years, maybe decades. And it will be unpleasant. And it will affect us – our politics, our economics, and our societies. This is what we discussed at the last LALIT central committee meeting, and then are discussing in our branches.
The only “force” big enough to turn this chaotic fall of an empire into anything positive is an organized working class, galvanized behind a socialist program – no less. Without this, the world faces barbarism. In the Israeli war against Palestine, first the people in Gaza, then in Lebanon, with Syria from before, and now the people in the West Bank, all face this kind of barbarism.
We need to follow the fall of the USA, so as to understand what is happening in Palestine, as Israel falls as a colonial project, together with its arms supplier and protector, the USA; so as to understand why Ukraine is losing the war even with NATO backing it; so as to understand the rise of the East-centred “BRICS formation” now bigger than the G7; so as to understand all the political confusion around the simple issue of the UK retreating from the whole of Chagos because the US-UK occupation there is unlawful.
Donald Trump as President of the USA is a symptom of this fall of the US empire. How else could you explain him being elected at all, not once, but twice? And now his being in charge makes us see the signs of the end of the Western Capitalist Empire. Here are some of the signs, starting with the US economy:
1. The USA balance of payments is wildly in the red. The US Government’s spending is wildly in the red. US companies are wildly in the red. US households are in debt up to their eyeballs. The dollar has lost its stranglehold on international transactions, and will further lose it.
2. Donald Trump, though elected in large part because Joe Biden could not control inflation in the short run, now imposes import taxes that will increase inflation in the USA in the short, and probably medium run.
3. Internationally, the USA is attacking its own allies and then gobbling them up. First it used terrorism to destroy Germany’s energy infrastructure, blowing up the North Stream Oil Pipelines – after Biden threatening to do so, and then his Minister Nuland afterwards announced they had done so. Germany did not even complain. But Germany is in ruins – economically and politically. Now the USA is threatening to tax the European union as a whole for anything it wants to sell to the US market, and after Trump insisting on full 2% contributions from European countries to NATO, he is now ratcheting this up to a 5% contribution to military. So, the USA’s ally Germany finds its economy in the red now, too. Germany now has to cower and buy its energy more expensively from the USA.
4. After Europe, Trump is attacking its neighbours, first Canada – threatening to annex it as a 51st “state”, and then Mexico, threatening to cripple a state already under severe threat by gangs.
5. The USA has not only imposed tariffs on its adversaries and enemies, but also sanctions – illegal sanctions. This has unintended consequences for the USA. Both Russia and China have had to become relatively more independent of the US financial system and high tech, so severe are these taxes and sanctions. So, the USA loses out.
6. At the same time as the USA is in free fall, as an Empire, its allies fall, too. France has, in the past year or so, seen its army kicked out of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and now Côte d'Ivoire. The German economy is in tatters, de-industrializing. South Korea is in a completely unforeseen political crisis. Britain’s economy and society is falling apart, and it has lost its last African colony, part of Mauritius, the BIOT.
7. The USA has let itself “follow” Israel into the most hideous genocide against the people of Palestine. Both Israel and the USA come out with ruined reputations, while the Palestinian people emerge heroic. Parties like Hamas and the Hezbollah hold their heads high. The USA has for years now followed Israel’s military will – and this, for decades – in Israel’s “Clean Break” strategy, without the people of the USA realizing it fully. In 1996 when Netanyahu first became Prime Minister, Israel aimed to “take out” any country that supported the Palestinians, after seeing they could not beat the Palestinians by violence. Six of the seven countries on the list of those to be “taken out” have already been “taken out”, to use their language, by the USA. The sixth one was Syria. They were: Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria. The only one left on Netanyahu’s list, and it is the central support for the Palestians .... Iran. Now, the USA is poised on the brink of deciding whether to go ahead with number 7 or not. US General Wesley Clark in 2003, announced that the USA decided after 9/11 to follow this strategy, and did so.
8. The USA may be withdrawing to total control over the Western Hemisphere, starting with North America. So, he needs total control of the Western Hemisphere, from Greenland and Canada, in the North and through Mexico and Panama, in the Southern part. (Note that Trump, just off the bat, declared a state of emergency on the US northern border, and imposed tariffs on Canada! It is outrageous.) For this total control of the Western Hemisphere, Trump will probably need to withdraw from other wars created by Biden, like the NATO-run Ukraine war against Russia. He has begun to extricate himself by stopping all US Aid. He also intends to “end” the Israeli endless wars – whether by forcing Israel to stop its aggression, or by imposing some kind of new Abraham Accords (a chimera?) on the world.
9. Politically, Trump now controls the Presidency, the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Supreme Court. Checks and balances are well-nigh stamped out. Trump is closing down many federal departments altogether, suspending whole branches of the Federal Government overnight, and their empoyees with them. He is ruling by means of executive Orders, just usurping the already-usurped powers of Congress.
10. For the first time since feudalism, Cabinet members include the big bosses themselves: Tesla owner Elon Musk, and the other tech giants who own and run the Empire’s new high-tech sector -- Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (owner of Facebook), Apple boss Tim Cook, Google boss Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos have “higher rank” than Secretaries of State in Trump’s “cabinet”. So, we have a unification of part of the ruling class and the state apparatus, itself.
11. Since Trump and his ilk deny the dangers facing the planet from capitalism’s pollution, in particular its oil pollution, the end of the world via collapse of the eco-system or of climate itself, are nearer.
12. The erosion of the very little democracy capitalism ever allowed makes nuclear war all the more menacing.
13. Meanwhile, some sections of the “left forces” in Europe and the USA that are usually against imperialist wars, actually egged the USA on in Ukraine, and still do, as well as in Syria. Some “leftish” forces – like the mainstream democrats in the USA, the Greens in Germany and Labour in the UK, waged war within their parties against pro-Palestinian members, and still do, accusing them of anti-semitism – are no longer “left”. This too, we have to recognize. In other words, in these example, the very people who actually do protect people from anti-semitism have been made pariahs for supposedly being anti-semites. Imperialist wars have been encouraged by those we expect to oppose it.
All this to say, that things do not always seem to be what they are.
We are all going to do our bit to add to the list of strange happenings in the Western world that we think are probably signs of the collapse of the empire, as we notice them. We need to follow to know what strategies are best.
So, when in LALIT, we put the closing down of the military base on Diego Garcia on the political agenda, it is because we need to save our country from tying itself to the bootstraps of a dying empire like the USA one. It is dangerous for us all.
Edited a typo: North Stream (correction)
