Are we seeing the collapse of the dollar-dominated global economy?
The near future is one of grave uncertainty and instability as the new global monetary regime takes shape.
American empire
The Afghan Correction
But America’s disastrous intervention and ignoble retreat illustrates some uncomfortable if not random truths that are left out of the chatter.
Afghanistan: The Twilight of the Global Empire
Of course, Afghanistan has no oil, and this much was known. But in the 1990s the oil reserves of the Caspian region, adjacent to Afghanistan, had been the object of a game of aggrandizing that led to exaggerating their extent at least of an order of magnitude.
The Rubble of Empire
How can you tell when your empire is crumbling? Some signs are actually visible from my own front window here in San Francisco.
Could Donald Trump be the last world emperor?
Empires are short-lived structures created and kept together by the availability of mineral resources, fossil fuels in our times. They tend to decline and fall with the decline of the resources that created them, and that’s the destiny of the current World Empire: the American one.
The Queen and the Philosopher: What we can Learn Today from the Story of Boudica’s Rebellion against the Roman Empire
We know very little about Queen Boudica of the Iceni (20 AD (?) – 61 AD) and most of what we know is probably deformed by Roman propaganda. But we may still be able to put together the main elements of her story and how it was that she almost threw the mighty Roman Legions out of Britain.
Donald Trump, the Paris Agreement, and the Meaning of America
Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change has sparked a global uproar. Yet America’s reluctance to reduce its use of fossil fuels is, in fact, logical. Not only because of the U.S. president’s overt denial of man-made climate change, but also and more fundamentally because it reflects America’s historical essence and trajectory.
Decline and Fall – Book Review
Very few people will read this book without bristling at least once at things Greer says…which I regard as one of its virtues.
Reinventing America
It’s been more than a year now since my posts here on The Archdruid Report veered away from the broader theme of this blog, the decline of industrial civilization, to consider the rise and impending fall of America’s global empire. That was a necessary detour, and the points I’ve tried to explore since last February will have no small impact on the outcome of the broader trajectory of our age.
In the Twilight of Empires
Last week’s post on the logic of nuclear deterrence in an age of decline got what was, all things considered, a much less irrational response than discussions of nuclear war generally field.