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Some of the things that live the longest in peoples' memories never really happened.

As much as neo-conservative/Zionist ideologues like Robert Kagan write
about the exceptional inevitability of the American world order, there is a
general sinking feeling among the people of the United States that this
country does not have a future.

Is this impression justified? Students of imperial decline can examine
historical observations and parallels to decide.

Admittedly, utilizing historicism to try and predict geopolitical
developments in the short and medium term is an imperfect science, often
taking the form of prejudiced soothsaying or intuitive assertions.

Part of the problem is an overreliance on ancient history, particularly
Rome, as a reference point for understanding the rise and fall of empire.
The lack of specific data regarding the developments that culminated in
Rome’s downfall has led to subsequent commentators to fill in the blanks
through the ideological prisms of their time. For example, 18th-century
British historian Edward Gibbon singled out the Roman elite’s behavioral
decadence as the catalyst for its downfall. Individual moral purity was a
strong fixation for Protestant Englishmen like Gibbons during his time, but
this theory can be challenged by information revealing widescale moral
excesses among Roman rulers during the lead up and fruition of the empire’s
2nd Century AD territorial peak, e.g., the infamously obscene Caligula or
Nero. Today, narratives blaming climate change for Rome’s decline, a 21st
century obsession, have gained a foothold.

A more direct comparison with the downfall of the Soviet Union, where
detailed information is available, is more useful in seeking to investigate
the malaise and long-term viability of the America empire. The United
States of 2024 shares several demographic trends with the Soviet Union of
the 1970s — “the era of stagnation” — that ultimately led to the vast
Eurasian superpower’s implosion in 1991.

When examining the short to medium term (10 to 30 years) prognosis of the
American empire, we will also contrast it with its major adversaries:
primarily Russia and China, and, supplementally (more so in later
articles), Iran.

This author stresses that it is under no impression that either Russia,
China, or Iran can defeat the American empire on their own. All three
countries have different advantages over the United States in their
world-historical struggle against neo-liberal unipolarity, but also
disadvantages as individual contenders, suggesting that a future without
Pax Americana could be a pre-WWII one limited to natural spheres of
influence rather than a recreation of Washington’s ambitious efforts for
world domination. If the three powers coordinate and unite — as China and
Russia’s “no limits” partnership or the two powers’ multi-year pacts with
Iran suggest they have — the Washington-led, post-war liberal world order
may go down sooner than we expect.

Russia and China remain behind America on a wide array of metrics, but what
is impossible to deny is that they are starting to catch up while the
United States is broadly at an inflection point. In 2021, Xi Jinping made
this point in his address, affirming that “time and momentum” were on
China’s side.

One logical point to make is that, generally speaking, life for ordinary
Russian and Chinese people is objectively getting better, while things are
getting demonstrably worse in America. This alone can create divergences in
national morale during a great power competition.

The economic, military, soft power, political, and other factors pointing
to the coming failure and geopolitical neutralization of the US and its
ideology on the world stage will be explored in future articles.

Part I: Demographics

One of the first symptoms of a nation’s decline is a breakdown in social
and human health. Often small changes in data related to population
well-being speaks to an underwater iceberg of more significant and
systematic problems within a people.

At the hump of the USSR’s “Brezhnev stagnation” in the mid to late 1970s,
demographers began speculating about the health of the once seemingly
omnipotent empire after discovering that the nation’s rates of infant
mortality were beginning to rise. Though this increase was minor — only a
few percentage points — it broke a cycle of decades of rapid gains in the
survivability of Soviet infants since the end of World War II.

This was perplexing to mainstream observers at the time, as the Soviet
Union was, financially, enjoying relative prosperity due to a global oil
export boom triggered by the Arab League’s 1973 oil embargo. The USSR under
Leonid Brezhnev (who ruled from 1964-1982) planned its economy to become a
military peer of the United States (especially in the realm of nuclear
weapons), was industrially powerful, and matched or led its rivals in the
world in various cutting-edge fields, such as aerospace.

Yet despite the superficial success of the system, the USSR’s most
important asset, its people, began showing signs of decay and misery.

Today in the United States, we are seeing similar patterns.

In the Soviet context, Central Asian Minorities within the multi-ethnic
Soviet space, who benefited from special economic, social and legal
privileges (before America, the Bolsheviks of the Soviet Union created the
first nation to practice official racial discriminate against its own
ethnic majority citizens, as detailed in Terry Martin’s 2001 book The
Affirmative Action Empire), grew at much faster rates than the less fertile
Slavic population during the 1960s and 70s. By 1979, ethnic Russians
declined to barely 52% of the Soviet population.

As Robert D. Putnam’s 2000 book Bowling Alone has shown, multiculturalism/
multiracialism is strongly correlated with alienation and distrust. As in
the USSR in its period of downturn, America’s racial makeup has radically
changed in the last 50 years, with white people now making up less than 58%
of the population.

Besides the national problems created by racial and cultural alienation,
changes in demographics lead to changes to a society overall. Nations
naturally begin taking on the character of the home countries of the new
people who populate them, which in the American context means falling
behind peripheries of its empire, such as Western Europe, in critical
sectors. This is another commonality with the 1970s USSR, where the Soviet
homeland itself was racked with dysfunction and living standards were
falling behind ethnically/racially homogenous Warsaw Pact protectorates
such as Hungary or East Germany. It may be possible for non-white,
non-Asian nations to achieve success, but this would require illiberal
governance, ethno-cultural cohesion and enforced discipline that thoroughly
multi-racial countries (like America or Brazil) appear to lack.

Predictably, it is no coincidence that the United States is facing falling
living standards and social degradation, including among the once
prosperous white majority, which place it at a grave disadvantage against
geopolitical competitors.

In 2022, the Center for Disease Control reported that American infant
mortality rose 3% for the first time in decades, from 5.44 infant deaths
per 1,000 live births the previous year to 5.60. In 2023, no ground was
made up in tackling this problem: the same figure was reported.

Comparatively, Russia’s infant mortality is now lower. In 2023, there were
4.807 deaths per 1,000 live births, a 3.8% decline from 2022. This is a
remarkable feat of the Vladimir Putin government. In 2003, early in Putin’s
reign, Russia suffered an alarming 16.156 deaths per 1,000 live births,
while the United States had an infant mortality rate of 6.85 at this time.

On the Chinese front, their massive population lags behind the US with 8.4
infants dying per 1,000 births. We can consult with Xi Jinping’s quote
about “momentum” here. China has seen this statistic consistently falling
by over 3% every year, as America suffers the inverse, suggesting that like
Russia they can be forecasted to overcome this hurdle.

Much of this rise in infant mortality correlates with the increase in
America’s minority population. Blacks and Amerindians in particular have
high rates of infant mortality due to neglectful activities such as drug
use, alcoholism, abuse, as well as overburdened or poorly administered
minority-run health care services. At the same time, the infant mortality
rate is going up for white mothers as well, suggesting that these symptoms
of deterioration are harming the white American community as well.

This withering of fundamental life measures is part of a broader trend.
From 2019 to 2023, US life expectancy fell from 79 years to now 76. This
figure is more at home among developing nations than those we consider
advanced. Among developed US liberal peers, Germany’s current life
expectancy is 82 years, UK 82, France 83, and so on.

Following a modest increase from 2022 to 2023, Chinese life expectancy now
surpasses that of Americans, at 77 years, a historic first for China.
Russia, which is fighting a brutal war in Ukraine, still saw an increase in
life expectancy from 2022 to 2023: 72 to 73.

Returning to 2003 numbers, the American life expectancy was 77, while
China’s was 73 and Russia’s 65.

Click here to read the complete article

Subject	Author
The Collapse Of The American Empire, Part I: Demographics	D. Ray
Re: The Collapse Of The American Empire, Part I: Demographics	Lawrence D'Oliveiro
Re: The Collapse Of The American Empire, Part I: Demographics	D. Ray
Re: The Collapse Of The American Empire, Part I: Demographics	D. Ray
Re: The Collapse Of The American Empire, Part I: Demographics	D. Ray
Re: The Collapse Of The American Empire, Part I: Demographics	Lou Bricano
Re: The Collapse Of The American Empire, Part I: Demographics	D. Ray

Some of the things that live the longest in peoples' memories never really happened.

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