Empires Apart (80 page)

So what of the future? Unsurprisingly historians are divided. Former neo-conservative Francis Fukuyama has discovered that history has not ended, and in 2008 supported Barack Obama as the candidate most able to manage America's decline, only to be attacked by Robert Kagan, adviser to John McCain, who seems to have moved his analysis of American history from determined opportunism to determined optimism. The US, Kagan insists, is not in decline, not even relative decline; but as Paul Kennedy demonstrated in his magisterial 1987 study of European imperialism, all empires eventually suffer from ‘imperial overstretch'. Kennedy claimed this was starting to happen to the United States. Kevin Phillips also looked at the Spanish, Dutch and British empires and noted one common characteristic: as they approached their end their richest and brightest citizens stopped exploring and conquering, trading and manufacturing, inventing and creating; instead they devoted themselves to something new: finance. They provided the investment and credit needed to ensure that the rest of the world would grow their food and produce their manufactured goods; they lived on interest, dividends and capital appreciation. In all three cases the financiers and bankers came up with ever more elaborate forms of financial wizardry – some that today would be recognised as options and derivatives – until eventually
the whole imperial edifice imploded. The imperial centre could not live beyond its means for ever. When wealth could no longer be sucked in from abroad the empires collapsed. Phillips was writing in 2006; the financial crisis starting in 2008 may yet presage that a similar fate awaits the American empire.

America is a land of principles and privilege but, as President Eisenhower said, ‘A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.'When the nascent economic superpowers of Asia assert themselves will the world remain as deeply embedded in American culture, values and fads as it is now? What will happen when the rest of the world stops paying for America's consumption? Will China, flexing once again its imperial muscles, usurp America's pre-eminent position? Will America pollute itself and the world into oblivion? When will the road from Roanoke reach its final destination? As with Rurik's road, in the timescales of history it is far too soon to say.

1
Even this is not straightforward. A series of Supreme Court rulings known as the Insular Cases determined that territories such as Puerto Rico belonged to, but were not part of, the United States and therefore, under Article IV, Section 3, paragraph 2 of the Constitution, Congress had the power to determine which parts of the Constitution applied there.

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