#88 World Power: An Aphrodisiac for the Unwary

World power is a subject on its own, and it’s one I turn to now in this blog. As mentioned in the introduction to the last blogs in this series, in these final posts I look to examine world power with a strong focus on the last 70 years since the end of the 1945 global war.

Before the capitalist era, there were no global powers but there were many very large empires. Throughout known history, empires have risen and fallen. Empires tended to be relatively local but often moved across regions.  Geographically, they tended to dominate global trade routes and often lasted for hundreds of years. None were what we would think of as global powers. With the advent of modern capitalism around 1750, and the rapid growth of technology, transport and communication, empires have been transformed. The transformation of the means of transport and communication were the necessary conditions to obtain and hold global power. Rapid transport and the means to communicate instantly across the world became the essential preconditions for global power.

Empires Old and New

None of the pre-capitalist empires has survived to the modern era; most have disappeared as if they had never been. Only the Chinese and the Russian empires have survived the ravages of the last 250 years, and even these two empires have been thoroughly transformed. Unless you look carefully you won’t see anything of the former empires in the world around us, except perhaps in buildings of a “glorious past.”

After 1750, the new empires that arose were global. After this time, most of the wars, while local in part, were connected in with an aspiring global power. At first, the European imperial nations fought among themselves, and Britain won against Napoleon and the French at Waterloo in 1815.  Over the next 100 years, Britain struggled to maintain her dominant global position.  In the second half of the 19th century the German economy grew rapidly, and by 1900 was contending for a place at the top table. They fought each other twice.

The USA’s economy had grown rapidly in the 19th century at the same time as she was eradicating her indigenous populations. By 1900, her economy was the largest in the world and she had control of the territory which today we call the USA. The USA entered the 1914-1918 war only in 1917. Her decision to enter the war on the side of the British and French made the difference between who won and who lost. When global war erupted again in 1939, the USA had her eye focused sharply on becoming the world’s dominant nation. She watched as the Germans and Russian slaughtered each other in their millions. The USA backed the USSR financially and with weapons.  Once it was over, the USA had not just become the world’s dominant power, she had also learnt to strategise on a world scale.

Thereafter, that is after 1945, except for supporting Germany and Japan to revive their economies in the 1940s, the USA has not provided the means for any nation to transform their economy. She has maintained a global army with close to 1000 military bases across the world – and on the sea, air, and now in space. Her military expenditure is far and away greater than the rest of the world combined. Her economy, technology and wealth are in armaments. Every war since 1945, has had something to do with world power. Every move that the USA makes across the world has something to do with maintaining global power. Despite much rhetoric about values and freedom, the USA instead has sought to defeat supposed enemies militarily. Over the years since 1945, the USA has been at war with one people after another.

The Americans and World Power:  An Empire like None Before

Throughout these 75 years from 1945 to 2020, the USA has struggled to obtain and then retain her hold on world power. All the major themes to understand this period of history circumnavigates the USA’s attempts to maintain her position as a global power. The key to understanding the Americans and world power after 1945 is that maintaining her competitive advantage has always been her key political concern. That has meant creating and then maintaining key alliances with a select number of nation-states like Israel and the old colonial nations of Europe, Japan, and to a lesser degree South Korea. All the others were nations that needed to be dominated. Nowhere is this perception more keenly seen than in her approach to the old colonial countries. The industrial development of the rest of the world has never played a role in her thinking or ideology. That was particularly apparent concerning the USSR.

The struggle first to obtain world power and then to hold on to it becomes the all-encompassing goal of the powers that hold this power. Unless readers understand this simple but complex paradigm, I contend, you cannot begin to understand the events of the recent past as well as those of today. The first world war would never have happened if Britain had not wanted to destroy Germany, the main contender for global power. The mainstream history books will not tell you this; the evidence is clear in the treaty that followed the war at Versailles. At the end of 1945, the British did not willingly give up world power, they were forced to by the Americans, as became clear when they attempted an independent attack on Nasser’s Suez Canal in 1952. The Americans stopped the attack a few days after it began, humiliating the British. 

The British have never admitted to themselves that they were already a second-tier power immediately after the end of 1945. The ideology that Britain had a ‘special relationship’ with the USA has been uttered so often that even the people who make up the ideology sometimes seem to believe it themselves. Britain has been a declining power for the last 70 years.  Her conscious decision to leave the European Union was an act of self-harm, based on the supposition that we are more powerful on our own. Britain is the prime example of a world power being an aphrodisiac that goes to the heads of not only the leaders but also a wide section of their population.

Once the Americans had taken on world power, they have developed ever more violent means to maintain it as the next few blogs will illustrate. Their overall strategy was to destroy the USSR as the contender nation in their view. There was no act of violence they would not do to stop the new nation-states attempting to create independence on their own.

The Ideology of the American Empire

I spent a good deal of time describing the ideology of the invading colonial states in the period from 1492 all the way through to 1945. The French, Dutch, and British wrapped themselves in their national flag, described themselves as the most ‘civilised’ people on earth, and used a racialist frame of reference to dehumanise the peoples they had conquered. The Americans, likewise, after 1945 have wrapped up their actions within the American flag. They have continuously evoked the concepts of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ which they infer are the ways to ‘civilised’ behaviour. Meanwhile, they have given themselves the right to invade and destroy any society that does adhere to the economic principles which they insist are the only civilised rules of the world economy.

The problem for the critical observer is to work out the motives of the leading world power. The only thing you can be sure about is that these motives will not be obvious. Imperial powers in these days of digital communication rarely state their motives openly. The USA needs the support of a good section of its own population.  The only thing we can be sure about is that today’s dominant world power will do almost anything to preserve their present position. The following blogs will illustrate this maxim time and again.

I will illustrate these in the following 5 blogs which will cover the following events of the period:

• The fall of the Soviet Union

• The creation of the state of Israel

• The old colonies, development, and underdevelopment

• Nigeria and the Congo

• The Middle East and the War on Terror 

• The Afghan wars and Empire

• Jihad and the rise of Radical Islamic Ideas

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