America’s Twilight

Today we are publishing the first of two editorials on the future of the United States.

For half a century, the decline of the American empire has been so often announced that the expression is now no more than a vengeful cliché whose true meaning has been lost. However, the United States has never been so close to a permanent loss of its power of influence in the world, its capacity for innovation and its economy as it is today.

The moon symbolizes this.

President Barack Obama announced this week that he would not allocate the modest sum of US$3.5 billion (out of a budget of $3.8 trillion!) anticipated for the Constellation Program of manned flights to the moon. Everyone understood. Americans are giving up. Once again, they are giving up space exploration for the foreseeable future. And this may possibly mean forever. Because to relaunch such an undertaking is not done in a day.

We will see what psychological, scientific and economic effect this will have on the United States. For the moment, let us note that, human nature being programmed for exploration, other nations will inevitably take up the reins.

Learning of this defeat, even Iran, which has no chance of entering the race, nonetheless boasted yesterday of having launched animals into space: a rat, two tortoises and some earth worms! India, partnering with Russia, plans to go to the moon in 2025. Finally, China has already completed manned flights and, in secret, is preparing lunar expeditions, which could dazzle, possibly before 2020.

And yet, China is already the bank, the factory and the “imperial” entrepreneur of the planet… exactly what the United States was until not long ago. And, when it will have added the symbol of the moon, educated minds throughout the world will choose to go into exile to invent and to create, no longer in Los Angeles, but in Shanghai — this has already begun.

Thus, the American empire, above all founded on knowledge, culture and invention, will have lived.

Someone said, “empires are not assassinated, they commit suicide.”

Is this accurate?

One thing is certain. The last European empire, that of Great Britain, was truly a victim of the suicide of Europe, committed with the help of the two Great Wars and of various totalitarianists that it allowed and graciously gave to the world. The torch was definitively passed sometime between 1942 and 1945, when America took control of the waterways previously held by the Britons (the symbol, thus, was not the moon, but the sea). Then, the dollar, the transistor, jazz and Coca-Cola did the rest.

In short, the question is whether the American empire is in the process of committing suicide. Partly, yes. But we are also assassinating it.