What is the plan for the American empire? Do our feral elite even have one or are they just winging it?

There was the Wolfowitz Doctrine, that outlined a policy of unilateralism and pre-emptive military action to suppress potential threats from other nations and prevent competitors from rising to superpower status from the end of the Cold War, but that was the neocons pet project and they fucked it up thanks to employing neoliberalism as our operating system, with its emphasis on short term greed. The problems arise when attempting to parse out the details because it’s hard to tell where neoconservatism ends and neoliberalism begins and both ideologies involve large dollops of hubris mixed with incompetence.

For instance: our feral elite were the ones who chose to make China our factory and manufacturing workshop in large part to evade labor unions and environmental standards. They were the ones who ceded capacity and know-how. Not only did they export the skill chains that go with manufacturing technology, they degraded the workforce into one that would be hard pressed to engage in relatively well paid manufacturing. The result is that the US actively de-industrialized and off-shored production to China for short-term profits. And they did these things while also profiting off making public goods, housing, health care, education, healthy food, all prohibitively expensive.

So, the plan for the American empire is looting, or am I missing something?

I don’t think I’m missing something but our elite do have a nice ideological cover story of a new environment, where there is one superpower–the United States–and where the “rule based international order” supplants the rule of raw power relations, disputes are settled peacefully, aggression is firmly met by collective resistance, and all people are justly treated.

What’s funny is that too many Americans and foreigners believe this nonsense, but the times, as they say, are changing.

The US was supposed to prevent genocide as the “good guys’ rather than aiding and abetting it as we’re doing in Gaza. Indeed, the greatest threat to the US’s self-proclaimed monopoly on virtue is coming from Israel’s merciless attack on the people of Gaza. And that’s a problem because the whole aggressive post-Cold War U.S. policy as “single superpower” determining the world order was predicated on using the cover story of idealism.

And now, most of the Global South and growing sections of Western populations are horrified by Israel’s destruction of hospitals, mass murder of children and efforts to starve the Palestinians. They see Israel, with full US backing, committing Genocide – in real time, blatant and unrelenting.

I think a sizable portion of Americans are dimly aware that something is amiss. Recent polls show American to be desperately unhappy but poll questions make no mention of the American empire, or how the same feral elite who off-shored their jobs profit from the proxy wars and genocide that have made the US a pariah state.

Update: Heterodox economist Michael Hudson explains the economic costs of the present day American empire:

MICHAEL HUDSON: “Well, economists love to use the word self-correcting, because if economies are self-correcting, you don’t need a government. You can just have the private sector running the economy. And in practice, that means Wall Street.

But there’s no way that the American economy can be self-correcting without a few decades of new investment. You’d have to reinvent the educational system. You would have to take public health into the, health care into the public domain so that you could lower the cost of living so that employers wouldn’t have to pay such high wages. You’d have to provide freer education so that workers don’t graduate into the labor force with so much debt that they need high enough wages to pay the debt. And even so, can’t afford to buy houses.

America, and also, I think, Western Europe, has painted itself into a corner that is now systemic. The whole trend from 1945 to today, all of these 70 years have built up such rigidities that there’s no way that you can break them down. And the idea that somehow there’s a government policy that can fix things won’t work either, unless it’s so radical a policy that it won’t be the current economy anymore.

Nobody’s talking about the need for structural change. They just avoid talking about the debt problem, talking about what makes America high cost. And then, of course, there’s the war spending.”