The 'declinists' were right
By Justin Raimondo
"Part of the psychology of the Greenspan Bubble – a policy of bank credit expansion that distorted market signals and led to the over-valuation of certain assets, such as real estate – has been the vaunted overestimation of America's staying power as a global hegemon. Standing alongside the hubris that brought down the financial edifices of Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs is the foreign policy corollary: the triumphalism of the neoconservatives, who imagined that American military power could solve all the world's problems: or, at least, most of our own. They sneered at the "declinists," like Paul Kennedy, who pointed to "imperial overstretch" as the cause of our impending economic and geopolitical demise......
By Justin Raimondo
"Part of the psychology of the Greenspan Bubble – a policy of bank credit expansion that distorted market signals and led to the over-valuation of certain assets, such as real estate – has been the vaunted overestimation of America's staying power as a global hegemon. Standing alongside the hubris that brought down the financial edifices of Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs is the foreign policy corollary: the triumphalism of the neoconservatives, who imagined that American military power could solve all the world's problems: or, at least, most of our own. They sneered at the "declinists," like Paul Kennedy, who pointed to "imperial overstretch" as the cause of our impending economic and geopolitical demise......
Our own nemesis is the puffed-up pridefulness of our leaders, who thought they were gods, and believed, as one top official put it, that
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Reality has caught up with the lords of the American empire, and all the frenzied attempts at "creating other new realities" are to little avail. Sure, future historians will indeed study these vaunted creatures, "history's actors" of the year 2008. Yet it won't be with any sense of admiration for their great achievements. They'll be studied as exemplars of failure on an unprecedented scale, economic suicide bombers whose spectacular demise shredded the global financial network – and triggered our own long slide into post-imperial senescence. "
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