In his classic Foundation series, Isaac Asimov imagines a Galactic Empire, governed from the city-world of Trantor, that has maintained peace and prosperity for thousands of years but that is teetering on the brink of decline. The only person who sees this clearly is the psychohistorian Hari Seldon, who has mathematically determined that the core conditions for the Empire are unsustainable and will crumble over the course of centuries.
As Trantor “becomes more and more the administrative center of Empire, it becomes a greater prize,” a disciple says as he absorbs Seldon’s calculations. “As the Imperial succession becomes more and more uncertain, and the feuds among the great families more rampant, social responsibility disappears.”
Asimov published these words in 1951, at the peak of U.S. global power. But they might as well be describing Washington in 2019, an imperial capital whose elite have transformed it into a great prize to be feuded over as surely as Asimov’s future empire did—and as other empires have done in the past.
How did a decadent ruling class become a national security risk, an existential threat to the American empire? The answer lies in the 1970s, when the weaknesses of the midcentury American social contract were exposed through stagflation, the energy crisis, and the disastrous Vietnam War.
In response, America’s political elites embraced privatization, deregulation, massive tax cuts for the wealthy, the outsourcing of industrial jobs, and the financialization of the economy. Inequality has [color=var(--newCommunityTheme-linkText)]skyrocketed ever since, and much of the United States has experienced a steady decline while a handful of major cities, including Washington, have become hyperwealthy and almost unaffordable through the concentration of financial, tech, and media monopolies and their affiliated lobbyists. By now, many Americans know this story—but few think about what it means for their place in the world.
There are two conventional ways of understanding America’s global role. According to one theory, the bipolar world of the Cold War has given way to a unipolar world in which the United States is the undisputed hegemon. Some observers see this as a good thing and champion American empire, while others see it as a bad thing and seek to resist American empire, but both sides agree that American empire is the defining feature of our era.
A second theory, only different from the first by degrees, asserts that the post-Cold War world is multipolar, with the United States as the clear dominant power among many potential rivals, including countries such as China that might conceivably surpass the United States down the line.
But what if neither theory is correct? The near-universal understanding of the United States as a powerful, unified global actor is flawed and in need of revision. The United States is less a great power exerting its will and more an open-air market for global corruption, in which outside powers can purchase influence, shape political outcomes, and play factions against each other in the service of their own competing agendas.
That’s a familiar historical story. Although Foundation drew its direct inspiration from Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, history is replete with examples of seemingly powerful empires run by weak, divided elites and picked apart by outside powers.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a vast aristocratic republic that dominated Eastern Europe in one form or another from the 14th to the 18th century, was wiped off the map by its neighbors, who found they could bribe its senators into paralyzing all political decisions. The Ottoman Empire of the mid-19th century was infamously dubbed “the sick man of Europe” as Western European powers chipped away at its territories and encouraged independence movements against it. During the same period, China under the Qing Dynasty was forced to give up numerous territorial concessions to European colonial empires—all of which, in turn, would themselves disintegrate within a century.