Resist Empire

Support TomDispatch
Donate
Tomgram

Alfred McCoy, A World Without America?

Posted on

Yes, the decline of empires has long been as much a part of history, and often as dramatic, as their rise. However, Trump-style decline should, I think, still be seen as a rarity in the history of empires. Though he’s seldom written about this way, Donald J. Trump is quite literally the personification of American imperial decline. In truth, he’s acting it out in an all too vivid fashion — and if I’m already repeating myself here, it’s because, strange as it (and he) may seem, he’s almost never treated that way.

He shouldn’t be Donald J. Trump at all, but Donald D. (for decline) Trump and he’s taking down what was certainly the greatest imperial power in history, the country that, in its own complex fashion, controlled so much of the world, though not (in the old imperial style) as colonies. And give him full credit when it comes to decline: the man who ran for president a second time on the blunt campaign slogan “drill, baby, drill” is also hard at work ensuring that we humans do ever less to preserve our endangered planet. From the mad further burning of fossil fuels to the closing down of wind farms to the opening of more than a billion acres of coastal waters to new fossil-fuel production, Donald Trump is personifying not just DECLINE but the climate-changification of planet Earth in a fashion that should be considered historically unique because, in the past, the decline of empires never involved the decline of the planet itself as a potentially livable place for our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

And in the process, “our” president has handed over any possibility of saving this planet to what could be the next great imperial power (if there continue to be such things), since he’s functionally turned over everything from the production of green power to the production of electric vehicles to China, the rising power (if such a concept can even exist anymore) on this planet. After all, that country’s clean energy sector is already worth an estimated $2.2 trillion and growing fast. With all of that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, the author most recently of an instant classic history book, Cold War on Five Continents, explore the world “after America” on this ever-stranger planet of ours. Tom

After America

The Causes and Consequences of U.S. Global Decline

By

While Washington’s war with Iran drags on, month after month, without any end in sight, the world is witnessing the very real limits of U.S. global power. As President Donald Trump lurches repeatedly from threats of devastation to promises of peace, it's becoming increasingly clear that U.S. military might is no longer capable of subduing even a mid-sized power like Iran, much less holding the rest of the world in its thrall.

Amid all the drama of air raids, drone strikes, and naval blockades, there are deeper geopolitical forces at play that lend a lasting historical import to events in the Persian Gulf -- dynamics best seen by comparing two newspaper editorials with revealing similarities despite the 80 years separating their publication.

Read More
Tomgram

Rebecca Gordon, Endings and Beginnings

Posted on

From torture to wars of so many kinds, cruelty seems to have been an essential trait of American ruling groups in this century and Donald Trump has been anything but an exception. He’s kidnapped the president of Venezuela; used air power to kill so many on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Eastern Pacific Ocean; regularly bombed Somalians (and now Nigerians, too); gone after Iran; and, of course, created grim detention centers (or, as Rebecca Gordon has written, concentration camps) across this country for any immigrant who doesn’t happen to be a White South African. Hey, he’s now trying to let 10,000 more of them into this country (while deporting almost anyone else imaginable, including mothers without their little children)! He remains very much in the tradition of the powerful of this century that Gordon had already written about in her book Mainstreaming Torture when she first arrived at TomDispatch in 2014. She ominously ended her initial piece this way: “If the structure for a torture system remains in place and unpunished, the next time fear rises, the torture will begin anew.”

In some sense, though, you have to give Donald Trump credit. He’s figured out ways to torture so many of us with a world that’s little short of a nightmare in the making. After all, the man who thinks climate change is a hoax has, in torture terms, been doing everything he can to broil us all. In New York City, I lived through a mid-July day in mid-May (yes, May!) when it hit 97 degrees. And, of course, I was lucky, since only recently average peak temperatures in India’s 50 major cities had reached 112.5 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Our” president does indeed have a knack, though, for catching our world and our moment in his own strange fashion. After all, as far as we know, he was the one who chose the all-too-grim name Operation Epic Fury for his (and Israel’s) recent assault on Iran. The New York Times reported him saying, “They gave me, like, 20 names, and I’m like, falling asleep. I didn’t like any of them.” Then, he was offered another option: Operation Epic Fury. That woke him up. “I like that name,” he told supporters at a rally in Kentucky. “I like that name.”

And why shouldn’t he have? Epic fury might as well be his middle name much of the time and he’s certainly been taking it out on the rest of us. I mean, what a truly strange world we live in where Donald J. Trump could even be elected president of the United States not just once, but twice. There’s certainly something epic and furious about that. (At least, it makes me furious, anyway!)

And with that in mind, let Rebecca Gordon, in her last piece for TomDispatch, consider whether the arc of the moral universe (a phrase that was so important to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.), and which seems to be bending in such an unnerving direction in the Trump years, might still, someday, head upwards again. Tom

About That Arc of the Moral Universe

Sometimes It’s More Like a Meandering Sine Wave

By

This is my last article for TomDispatch. For over a decade, Tom Engelhardt has given me a platform to write about pretty much anything that grabs my -- I’ll admit it, easily attracted -- attention. It’s been a wonderful partnership for me, offering not just a place to publish, but a chance to think, talk, and often argue with the best editor I’ve ever worked with.

A rarity in the age of Internet insta-publishing, TomDispatch subjects every article to the scrutiny of three separate proofreaders. Not for Tom the misplaced apostrophe or the confusion between “their” and “they’re.” Unlike the New York Times in a May 12, 2026 headline, no article appearing in TomDispatch would ever go rogue and ask the question, “Did the Fifth Circuit Go Rouge With Its Abortion Pills Ruling?” (The face of the copyeditor who let that one pass should have looked as if some blusher had been applied.)

Read More
Tomgram

William D. Hartung, Raging Against the Machine

Posted on

Imagine this: as the Costs of War Project recently reported, Donald Trump’s bizarre war in Iran, in part by closing the Strait of Hormuz, has already cost every American family on average more than $300 (and those costs are still rising). Of course, it undoubtedly hasn’t cost Trump, his family, and his buddies a damn thing. And even if it has, no problem. After all, he’s the president of the United States and can essentially do whatever he pleases, including recently preparing to use a mere $1.7 billion taxpayer dollars to set up a fund to compensate his buddies who were being investigated by the Justice Department under President Joe Biden. As the New York Times reported, “The Justice Department is modeling the program, in part, on a landmark $760 million settlement fund the Obama administration created to compensate Native American farmers and ranchers who were deprived access to federal subsidies for decades.” In short, in Donald Trump’s world the second time around, doing wrong is just so right!

And while he’s sent this country to war in Iran, he’s been making ever more money. It helps, after all, to be president if you’re looking for a few tips on what’s ever hotter in this world of ours (other, of course, than the weather). After all, as CNBC reported recently, he had the foresight (or do I mean foreknowledge?) to scoop up shares of the defense contractor Palantir — between $247,008 and $630,000 worth of stock, in fact — and then, cleverly enough, laud the company on Truth Social.

What could possibly go wrong or in any way be wrong with that? Okay, it’s true that, given the increasingly mess he’s making of this world of ours, the Republicans could have a few problems in the November elections, but big deal, right? He only recently purchased between $500,000 and $1,000,000 in Nvidia stock, too, and soon after, by utter happenstance — believe me, there could be no possible connection — the Commerce Department announced that it was permitting that company to sell chips to China!

And let me stop there, though I could obviously go on (and on and on), and let TomDispatch regular William Hartung, co-author of The Trillion Dollar War Machine, explore the world of Donald (Disaster) Trump and our Silicon Valley saviors, our new “techno-gods,” as they do their damnedest to… well, do their damnedest. Tom

Donald (Disaster) Trump

And the Fight for a Humane Future

By

Donald Trump's America is a scary place in significant part thanks to an unholy alliance of MAGA devotees who don’t believe in science and see intellectuals as public enemy number one, and a gaggle of Silicon Valley militarists who think that they're the smartest people in the room, if not the universe. Add in White Christian nationalists who abuse religious precepts to sow hatred and division and you have the foundations of the political base that elected Donald Trump (twice!). And worse yet, those groupings are likely to be with us long after our current president has gone off to that great cheeseburger stand in the sky.

Still, it's worth reflecting on whether such an odd coalition of allies can survive without Donald Trump, or even with a president whose policies have become so harmful and irrational that they're doing severe human and economic damage even to his most loyal supporters (not to mention the rest of us). And it's also worth considering whether the pillars of the MAGA movement can manage to stick together in the ever-grimmer Trumpian years to come, not to speak of the post-Trumpian ones, or whether the rest of us can organize a powerful, humane alternative to his politics of hatred and division that could transform this country and the world.

Read More