Image by John Englart via Flickr
with Chris Hedges
Originally on RT America on Dec 4, 2021
The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel on Jun 30, 2022
On the show, Chris Hedges discusses the decline of the American empire and the new global order with Professor Alfred McCoy, who holds the Harrington Chair in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Professor Alfred McCoy, the chair of the history department at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, looks at past empires and how they disintegrated in his book To Govern the Globe. The familiar patterns of decline allow him to speculate about what lies ahead as the global dominance of the United States crumbles under the weight of disastrous military adventurism, the collapse of public institutions, a rapacious and greedy oligarchic elite and inept political and military leadership.
The new world order, McCoy argues, will see China ascendant. “While Washington was spilling its blood and treasure into desert sands,” writes McCoy, “Beijing had been investing much of its accumulated trade surplus in the integration of the ‘world island’ of Africa, Asia, and Europe into an economic powerhouse.”
The key to Chinese dominance, he argues, is its far-sighted strategic focus on control of the world’s energy and raw materials, increasingly in short supply, and its investment in a technologically advanced infrastructure. “Each transition to a new world order has occurred when a massively destructive cataclysm has coincided with major social change,” he notes, arguing that the climate crisis will be the trigger for a new configuration of world dominance.
Professor Alfred McCoy’s new book is To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.
From the archives:
U.S. Doesn’t Fear “Foreign Meddling,” It Fears Internal Revolt, Part I, by Rainer Shea
A Dystopian Hellscape Beckons: 21 Dark Clouds Over 2021 Amerika, by Paul Street
Michael Hudson: The Neoliberal Exploitation Under a Super-Imperialism Lens
Dandelion Salad 
It’s a grim but sober prognosis. Personally, I think pragmatic predictive mapping is a hugely risky business, as natural events like pandemics, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes can dramatically change everything ~ in some cases.almost instantly, with colossal catastrophic consequences.
We can all speculate about plausible futures; and different disciplines can provide reliable data to evaluate the scale of specific probabilities….but a mature intellect with a magisterial grasp of the sweep of historical events is conceivably better equipped to weigh the pragmatic odds, if the scope of all the applicable factors can be adequately mastered to undertake such a superhuman task.
Whichever way the winds of Fate blow, we can be intuitively sure of one thing: that the universe, or indeed any cosmos we may participate in, will always be far more mysterious and infinitely complex than any one cultural perspective can plausibly encompass ~ however deep and broad our imaginal capacity or native intelligence.
Thank you, David, always appreciate your commentary.
I thought his prediction was a bit optimistic concerning dates, and very anti-China, but was an interesting interview, nonetheless.