The Bipolarity which defined the entirety of the late 20th century was incapable of lasting forever. It is inevitable that control of world affairs by the US and the Soviet Union would lead to one of two possibilities: either the Jeffersonian Empire of Liberty is allowed to achieve Unipolarity or the world order becomes redrawn into several regional power blocs, thereby realizing some kind of Multipolarity. The collapse of the Soviet Union clearly demonstrated that a “Unipolar Moment” occurred in the Empire of Liberty, allowing Jeffersonian America to dominate almost the entirety of world politics. However, such a state of affairs is not going to last, as the rest of the 21st century will undoubtedly continue to demonstrate.
In a world order where most nations are Liberal Capitalist Parliamentary Democracies, it can be difficult to imagine that present circumstances are incapable of change. After all, Neoliberalism did assume its proper forms in response to all of the historical events surrounding the Second World War, of which the Cold War was merely its second half. The Empire of Liberty had succeeded in spreading Liberal Capitalism to most nations thanks to an America committed to that Ideology. Even now, there are still no viable alternatives to Neoliberalism that is capable of standing up to it, let alone one proposing its own conception of world order that is antithetical to the Empire of Liberty.
As a former student of International Relations, I remain steadfast in my conviction that the Empire of Liberty is not going to survive the 21st century, at least in its current form. However, I do recognize that there are no viable signs or indications as to what will cause the Empire of Liberty to collapse because nobody knows. It has been speculated since the 1990s on what the catalyst for its eventual demise would entail. The most reasonable contenders had been a united Europe or a resurgent China, but neither poses a serious rival to the Empire of Liberty in any meaningful way. The catalyst may not even be the result of another nation. It might be the result of natural or artificial forces beyond any one nation’s control, although different nations could try to influence the direction of those same forces.
Barring ecological collapse or some other world-ending catastrophe, another likely contender is the growing discontentment among the American people and their unwillingness to sustain the Empire of Liberty. The Empire of Liberty was always dependent on a Jeffersonian America that was willing to spend vast amounts of resources and manpower, all of which needed to come from the American people. The problem is that while the rest of the Western world is supported by the US vis-a-vis the Empire of Liberty, the supposed benefits are not at all apparent to certain segments of the American people.
I am convinced that, at some point in the late 21st century, the costs of maintaining the Empire of Liberty would become a price too high for the American people to support. World History maintains that all empires eventually arrive at that conclusion. Today, there are now more American voices criticizing the Empire of Liberty than there were in the late 20th century, as populist forces in contemporary America view dismantling or diminishing the Empire of Liberty to be in America’s long-term interests. While that epiphany is not going to happen to the American people anytime soon, it is becoming a very real possibility as time goes on.
Honestly, the most realistic catalyst for why America would someday become less capable of sustaining the Empire of Liberty by the late 21st century has to be because of demographic decline in the US. The Jeffersonians were only able to marshal the necessary manpower and resources throughout the late 20th century because of a growing US population. An affluent, motivated and young American people can always be counted on to pursue any geopolitical ventures on a worldwide scale. To ensure that the US population would continue growing, immigration policies were relaxed during that period to attract both skilled and unskilled emigrants from the rest of the world. Fueling population growth through mass immigration ensured that there would be enough manpower and resources for the Jeffersonians to maintain the Empire of Liberty. And even if the US economy somehow managed to rely heavily on automated technologies, the Jeffersonians still need people to run the machines and pay any taxes levied on those machines within economic life.
Unfortunately, the mass immigration which bolstered a large portion of America’s population growth is not guaranteed to last, especially as non-Western countries experience the same demographic stagnation and eventual decline that greeted the Western world after the 1970s. It is significant that, absent any and all immigration to the US, the American population is going to shrink because there are simply not enough young people to maintain the current standard of living in the US. The current US Census projections, released earlier this month, suggested as much. What passes as population growth in the US at this stage in the 21st century continued to be the result of immigration rather than natural growth.
What are the odds that the demographic trends characteristic of the Western world (low birthrates, aging populations and gradual decline) would eventually spread to non-Western countries by the late 21st century? The astronomical population growth outside the Western world will stabilize by then. Latin America, the Middle East, and more recently China have already passed that point. Africa, India and the rest of Asia (barring Korea, Taiwan and Japan) will also follow suit, except that remains to be seen. This brings me to another question: if not even immigration is capable of sustaining the current US population growth in the late 21st century, then what are the odds that the Empire of Liberty’s decline is being cause by demographic trends in the early 21st century? That a lack of manpower was what led to its eventual demise rather than a potential adversary or new Ideology?
Categories: Philosophy
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