Can America survive?

International relations are changing fast, and one of the major trends is a growing challenge to American power. At the same time, American economic prosperity and political stability are increasingly shaky. A perfect storm is brewing for the greatest nation of modern times, so much so that we might ask whether America can even survive as a unified nation.

That emerging behemoth, China, recently launched an anti-satellite missile, announcing its arrival in the most exclusive level of global power politics, outer space. This action is a direct challenge to American power, specifically aimed at American technological superiority. America dominates outer space, commercially and militarily, and an anti-satellite capability can only be aimed at this dominance.

China, already the second military power, is also flexing its muscles in other ways, continuing to develop a modern military force (it recently unveiled its new home-built jet fighter) and pursuing a more assertive diplomatic program. Its primary aim is to secure natural resources, especially oil, and to raise Chinese influence globally.

Russia is similarly resurgent, the resource-rich, ex-superpower playing the energy card. Still boasting the second largest nuclear arsenal, Russia is threatening to start another missile race in response to American programs. Russia is particularly concerned about an eastwards moving NATO and recent deployment of US forces in the region. Overall, relations between the two countries are the worst since the end of the Cold War.

Both these developments present serious problems for continued American supremacy. There is also the potential that China and Russia will find common cause, the old American nightmare.

Meanwhile, America is losing its current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and reports grow about an imminent attack on Iran, perhaps even a nuclear strike. What is now generally seen as America’s worst foreign policy mistake ever could turn into a genuine global crisis, which would include sky-rocketing oil prices.

All up, America’s military position overseas is dire, and there are growing concerns about the pressure on the US military itself. Under the new thinking, epitomised by Donald Rumsfeld, the US military was supposed to a relatively small high-tech force, but Iraq alone is already stretching it thin.

Furthermore, Washington has signally declined to show any leadership in relation to that looming global disaster, climate change, refusing to join the only serious attempt deal with it, the Kyoto Treaty. This abject failure, shown up by the initiatives of state governments like California indicates the confusion of the American political class.

No wonder international polling suggests that America’s reputation is suffering an unprecedented decline. A nation once highly respected is increasingly feared and loathed, and actually perceived as the greatest threat to world peace of all.

At home, the American political system is in slow meltdown with a lame-duck President who most voters now think is dishonest and incompetent. But George W. Bush’s failure is indicative of a more profound problem within the American political system.

The Democrats are a disorganised opposition with no alternative vision, and the system is corrupt from top to bottom as recent scandals have shown. It is no secret that American politics is nowadays owned by those with the money - Hilary Clinton reputedly has a campaign war chest of a billion dollars.

Even the economy, previously the bedrock of American power, is in trouble. Doubts about the long-term shift to a post-industrial economy and the growing fragility off the dollar suggest that the days of assumed prosperity are coming to an end. Those icons of American industrial power, the big car manufacturers, are in deep trouble and may even go under, out-competed by the smarter Asian and European car-makers.

The rich may be ever richer, but the average American grows worse off each year. At the bottom, workers are mired in poverty even as a large proportion of the lower classes, especially blacks, languish in prison. The American economy is splitting in two, the nervous rich and the increasingly destitute poor.

Abroad the economic situation is no better. For some years America has got away with being the world’s greatest debtor nation, thanks to the role of the dollar as de facto global currency. Now, the euro is emerging as a challenger, and Asian central banks in particular are considering their huge dollar reserves. If the loans that have kept America solvent and consuming dry up, the American economy will immediately tank, and perhaps the global economy will go with it.

With all this going on, one big question arises: can America survive?

The United States has always been a singularly strange creation. It is not a “natural” nation as such, based in some ethno-cultural history, but a conglomerate of cultures held together by government power or economic wealth. It was wrested by colonists from the British because it was just too rich to control from Britain, and the struggle gave Americans a false sense of national identity. Even then the separate colonies saw themselves as more important than any national entity.

Americans then benefited from the richest natural resources in the world and the wide moat that separated their country from war-riven Europe. With few internal physical boundaries and only a small indigenous population to overcome, and with expansionist governments buying or stealing huge tracts of land, white Americans soon claimed the whole north American continent bar Canada. The population rapidly expanded to fill it up thanks to the biggest migration in history from a large number of different countries and cultures.

The vast new nation was so large, diverse and rich that two very different approaches to economic development took off. One, based in industrial production and mostly domestic markets, took off in the north and one, based in agricultural production for export, in the south. Slavery was the basis of the southern economy, and this abhorrent system became the issue that sparked civil war.

The American Civil War remains the great war of American history, the first modern war and one that killed more Americans than any other. It is highly significant that the worst war America ever fought was against itself.

After the war, with the south militarily occupied, northern political and business elites pulled the US back together again, and soon the explosive growth associated with mass-industrial production for national markets largely overcame regional and cultural differences.

National government also took on the job of promoting national-scale economic activity, the ugly side of this being the virulent imperialism that gained the US control over Cuba and the Philippines. A sense of national identity grew as the US became the most powerful nation on earth, economically, ideologically, culturally and militarily. This supremacy was made clear by victory in World War II and then the Cold War.

But this unity has been somewhat illusory: the US has always been riven by great differences, racial, cultural, economic and political. Initially geographically defined in terms of north versus south, they have increasingly become east versus west, or as the most recent political maps show, coastal versus central. Serious cracks are showing in the American project, and as things get worse, these cracks may widen to become real divisions.

Overall, there is a profound shift happening in American politics as a gaping divide opens up between red Democrat America and blue Republican America. The divide reflects that great schism the Civil War, and it reflects the growing gap between wealthy, progressive, cosmopolitan America and poor, white, reactionary America.

This big shift came to ahead with the last two presidential elections. Somewhat foolishly in retrospect, the Republican-right establishment chose as its candidate for president the son of a past Republican President, thinking they were about to get a chip off the old block. For whatever reason - a flaky religiosity, the malign influence of a bunch of Washington insiders known as neo-cons - President George W. Bush has proved to be an enormous risk taker. Furthermore, he has manifestly failed in his most important gambles.

Bush, through starting expensive wars and giving tax cuts to the rich, has destroyed American fiscal stability, running huge deficits and radically undermining the American dollar. He has dismantled almost all serious environmental safeguards, failed to address the health crisis and done nothing about the burgeoning prison population that is merely a symptom of growing class and ethnic problems.

Overseas, Bush has demolished any global collective governance system, got the US involved in two vicious wars, and created ideal conditions for the growth of radical Islamic terrorism. He has failed to deal with the North Korean nuclear and missile programs, and he is threatening to attack Iran for its nuclear program while ripping up the only real anti-proliferation program in existence, the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

He has also radically undermined the US Constitution by denying basic civil rights, including turning the National Security Agency against American citizens, and greatly weakened civil rights by the draconian PATRIOT Act.

Opinion on Bush rule has polarised. The now beleaguered hard-Right support their President with growing ferocity, while the rest of America, which is increasingly shaded brown (and there’s another division - increasingly rich whites and increasingly poor browns and blacks) distrusts him. Right now Bush’s unpopularity is just about the only real unifying force in American politics.

However, once Bush is gone this anti-Bush majority will dissolve and the great split down the middle of America will become all the more obvious. The new presumably Democrat president will face extraordinary hostility from the religious-hard-Right who are much less wary of showing outright dissent than the Democrat-Left.

If this new president is Hillary Clinton, currently the Democrat front-runner, who the Right hates with a passion, or Barack Obama, currently running second to Clinton, an African-American, America could well see unprecedented levels of social and political dissent, and perhaps sustained violent opposition.

The right has always been more prone to expressing dissent through violence than the left. Militarism and guns are icons of the right, while the left prefer to organise and debate. While we should not forget that before the extraordinarily success of the September 11 attacks, the worst terrorist attack in American history was the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Okalahoma City in 1995 which killed 168 people. Those prosecuted for the atrocity were associated with a right-wing, white supremacist group acting in revenge for government actions against politico-religious dissenters at Waco.

A Democrat national government, especially if led by a woman or African-American president, introducing new laws to restrict use of SUVS to conserve oil and limit CO2 emissions, while signing up to international treaties on the environment, would push all the buttons of the religious right. Their opposition would run straight into the comprehensive and increasingly militarised federal counter-terrorism system now in place. It is a recipe for unprecedented political upheaval.

With all these pressures, internal and external, can America remain as a unified nation? Will states and regions, increasingly polarised in their popular sentiments, opt out of the national system. Would rich, smart, progressive California, in itself one of the ten largest economies in the world, be better off alone? Should the wealthy, socially progressive region of New England pull out of the union leaving behind the ever poorer and ever more reactionary Bible Belt states to fend for themselves?

If America suffers the economic, socio-cultural and political meltdown that seems increasingly likely, will the fragile idea of national unity give way to a new sectarianism as those who can do so take to the lifeboats?

American nationalism was born of revolutionary war, and then held together by military force, economic prosperity and global power. Under the combined pressure of external decline and domestic economic and political turmoil, will this great creation - like its erstwhile Cold War adversary - fall apart?

And a final question for those of is who live in that fair land - Australia. Under Prime Minister John Howard Australia has increasingly shifted into the US orbit. In every meaningful way - international relations, environmental policy, economic policy, social policy, cultural behaviour - Australia has gone down the American road. Australia’s own unique experiment in co-operative socio-economic development is being abandoned and a market-driven, American-style model put in its place.

Internationally, where we were once considered a very good global citizen, Australia has tamely followed the Bush line on Iraq, global warming, terrorism, trade, and so on. The Australian military could hardly operate these days without American approval.

So what will Australia - having lost international credibility and having affronted its regional neighbours with its subservience to the US - do if America implodes?

One way or another, fundamental structural change lies ahead for America. Perhaps the greatest attempt at democracy since the ancient Greeks will pull itself together and emerge even stronger, but perhaps not. Either way, the coming Presidential election will mark a watershed, and America in the near future will be a very different place to what it is today.

And either way, Australia will also need to develop new ways of thinking about itself and its place in the world.