The results will be the same: One bubble after another ... the evaporation of a vast mountain of worthless paper in the sunshine of reality!

VHeadline's Washington D.C. based commentarist Chris Herz writes: No one can accuse either the editors or the writers at FOREIGN AFFAIRS of thinking outside the box. And the borders of this box are that US hegemony is a good thing, and that it is not about to suffer the fate of past empires anytime soon. Certainly we never will find there any suggestion that the bureaucratic managers of empire who are their readership might be so hampered by their own intellectual blinders that they may lose the great game for the USA. Soon.

• While it is only one of many cases, Venezuela is the perfect example of their inability to overcome the effects of their own propaganda.

No one operating within the greater Washington consensus can afford to suggest to peers that Venezuela is not the personal playground of its authoritarian ruler, Hugo Chavez Frias. Nor are any of these people permitted to suggest that US intervention of whatever sort is neither morally, legally, or practically justifiable. Thus imperial policies here tend to be stultified at their very conception. Each misbegotten adventure in subversion (now being moved from Caracas to the Colombian frontier) only results in the strengthening of the Bolivarian government.

Insofar as they consider the deeper ramifications of their policies this immoral and dysfunctional elite write of their triumphs -- the vast size and power of the US military, the huge US financial economy, the success of corporate globalization, etc. -- the constant drumbeat is boasts of success. And, yes, admission is made of the occasional "mistake" (never do we commit crimes) such as Vietnam or now, Iraq.

These people are unable to learn from their own studies of British history, for example. They do not understand how the export of British capital in the 19th century led to the debacle of free trade. Which in turn led to the financial undermining of the real British economy. Just one error duplicated in the annals of the contemporary empire. Their boasting of the size and power of both the US economy and its military subsidiary rings hollow too.

For most of the period following the end of the Second World War, it was obvious to all that the Soviet Union had the second largest economy in the world. This economy, while considerably smaller than that of the USA was still capable of presenting a formidable industrial, and thus military, challenge to the empire. And indeed the USSR was able to constrain US behavior somewhat for many years.

Well, the great collapse of 1989-91 caused the evaporation of the command elements of the Soviet economy -- leaving in the wreckage the remainder, the real economy. This proved rather smaller than that of Brazil.

Similarly, the US financial sector and the military bureaucracy cannot exist without one another. And these things are based solely on command elements; not real goods and services. The ongoing tactical defeat and guerrilla war in Iraq and Afghanistan is producing within the US polity and economy the same sorts of fractures that their defeat in those very venues caused within the Soviet State.

The results will be the same: One bubble after another. The evaporation of a vast mountain of worthless paper in the sunshine of reality. A debt/credit blizzard. And at the end of the day what is left of the real US economy will be incapable of the projection of force beyond its own territory.

In fact, like the USSR, that territory might wind up rather smaller than it is now. Certainly the South and the Midwest would like to become Jesusland, free of a secular control imposed by outside federal agencies, over their societies. The Northeast, and the Northwest plus California lose heavily in the present regime as their taxes are exported to the South, mostly for armament production. Alaska has long thought itself stripped of its resources for the benefit of the lower 48 states. And many in Maine or Vermont would love to join Canada in a search for even rudimentary social democracy. In the event of national bankruptcy such changes can happen very quickly.

But such fears, if they occur at all in the minds of our elites are reserved for solitary consideration in the middle of the night and are never shared with colleagues, still less the general public.

One fine day the real economy of the United States of America will be shown to be so small that, as happened to Russia, money will have to be borrowed from others to finance the return of soldiers from the hundreds of foreign bases where they waste like their lives and our substance.

From the imperial capital

Chris Herz
cdherz44@yahoo.com