In 1969 Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik smuggled to the West his prescient essay, "Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?"



Amalrik predicted that a collapse of the Soviet system would result from an explosion of suppressed national sentiment in the republics, a moribund economy, the incompetence of a self-selecting leadership, governance based on obedience and adherence to the Party line by loyal apparatchiks unable to cope with reality or to innovate, and an eventual Sino-Soviet war. Of course, it turned out to be the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, not a Sino-Soviet war, which served as the catalyst to overwhelm the Soviet economy and ultimately the Soviet Empire. Amalrik was off in his prediction by seven years, but his overall analysis was uncannily accurate.



In 1976 Emmanuel Todd, a French historian, anthropologist, and demographer, scrutinized demographic data on the decline of birth rates in the Soviet Union, on a rise in infant mortality, and on a striking decline in life expectancy among Soviet males to write "The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere" (1976, Editions Robert Laffont; 1979, Kary Publishers).



When Gorbachev inherited power from the senile Old Guard (the rigid and doddering Brezhnev, followed by the intelligent but doddering Andropov, followed in turn by the clueless and doddering Chernenko), he submitted to political pressure to feed what Khrushchev had called the Soviet Union's "steel-eaters," i.e., the military-industrial complex, and to try to suppress the Afghan insurgency.



At the same time Gorbachev launched a moral crusade against alcoholism, curtailed the state monopoly's production of vodka, limited vodka sales, greatly reduced liquor tax revenues, and increased the central budget deficit, thereby hastening financial and economic collapse. (Oddly enough, during World War I the Tsarist government had done the same thing with vodka production and the national budget, and had suffered the same economic result: collapse.)



Toward the Soviet Empire's end, whether in the outlying satellites and provinces or in the Russian heartland, even lifelong, loyal Communist Party members had stopped believing the lies, the deceptions, and the obvious delusions of their feckless, incompetent, self-serving, utterly corrupt, out-of-touch leadership. The Old Guard's clumsy anti-Gorbachev coup attempt in 1991 proved to be the blunder too far--the mortal wound to the system. Boris Yeltsin stood on a tank outside Parliament to rally Russian democrats to resist the coup, and Mstislav Rostropovich immediately flew to Moscow to camp out at Parliament and show his solidarity with Yeltsin. The coup collapsed, but by then Gorbachev himself had become discredited and irrelevant, and the Soviet Union rapidly disintegrated into its constituent republics.



Todd later turned his gaze to the U.S. in "After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order" (2002, Editions Gallimard; 2003 Columbia University Press). In this second book Todd's demographic arguments are weak (though recent surges in infant morality in the Deep South give Todd's early demographic data retrospective weight), but his economic and historical analysis seems trenchant, and he predicts that in the relatively near term America's financial indiscipline and runaway consumption habits will result in a crash leading to a necessary 15 to 20 percent reduction in American living standards. Todd reasons that the U.S., despite its military prowess, simply lacks the power to enforce its hegemony everywhere it wishes and that its increasingly fragile, debt-dependent economy cannot sustain for long such an overreaching imperial policy.



Todd describes the U.S. as a "superpower living hand to mouth," led by a ruling class "even more rudderless and clueless than its European counterparts," and incapable of achieving its global aims through repeated applications of "theatrical micromilitarism." Todd argues that the disintegration of American hegemony already is in full swing, and he predicts that the Bush American Administration and its neocon theorists "will go down in history as the gravediggers of the American empire."



In "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and military conflict from 1500 to 2000" (1987, Random House), Yale historian Paul Kennedy presented a compelling argument that eerily paralleled Todd's. Kennedy detected an oft-repeated standard formula for great power decline and collapse. Great powers (such as the Habsburg, French, Turkish, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, British, Japanese, Soviet, and eventually American Empires) get in the habit of using military force to protect what they view as their broad economic interests, but in doing so, they divert investment from productive social and economic purposes into nonproductive military ends.



Inevitably, more dynamic, productive economies position themselves to replace the aging great power when its military overspending inexorably leads to its relative economic and social decline, whether gradual or sudden.



Apparently, American neocon ideologues at the turn of the twenty-first century, like Soviet ideologues in the 1980's, "don't know much about his-to-ry." Or perhaps they merely misinterpreted Paul Kennedy and took his paradigm as a tragic Greek template that must be blindly followed.



The more the U.S. seeks to assert its will through diktat and unilateral military force, the more it ensures that the other major players will find it increasingly in their best interests to collaborate more closely with one another to deflect and frustrate the American imperium.



Note the increasing collaboration between rising Asian giants China and India as one canary in the mineshaft. In the past week newly published data showed that China has replaced the U.S. as Japan's major trading partner. Note the deepening commercial relationships between China and Europe. Note the rapidly increasing economic and political collaboration between China and Saudi Arabia. Note the accelerating drift away from the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency. In the past week the dollar fell to historical lows against the euro. Note the robust military collaboration between China and Russia. Note the recent decision by China and Japan to establish a military "hot line." China will hold military exercises with several ASEAN states in the coming year. Note the increasing disinclination of Europeans, notably the Germans, French, Spanish, and Italians, to support--much less finance--American imperial misadventures, such as the rapidly imploding debacle in Iraq. Note the disinclination of the Europeans to continue to tolerate the tenure of American neocon ideologue Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank.



Where and when will the reality-challenged Bush Administration commit its blunder too far? Perhaps that blunder will turn out to be the invasion and failed occupation of Iraq. Or perhaps the ultimate catalytic blunder will occur in Iran, which remains on the neocon wish list as a target for destabilization, intervention, "liberation," and regime change.



The collapse of the American Empire is not over the horizon--an event lurking around a distant corner a few decades down the road. We are already in the very midst of it. It is like a staged train wreck unfolding frame-by-frame as we reflect in head-shaking disbelief on each day's news and on each new blunder by the Bush Administration.



Can the U.S. navigate its way to become a post-imperial, normal country--working responsibly as one great power among several rather than quixotically striving to be the sole global hegemon? Can it do so while avoiding further military disasters and a debilitating financial and economic collapse?



Or will the decline be precipitous and disorderly, accelerated by corrupt, clueless, inept, and rigid leadership, as was the Soviet Empire's collapse?