End of the American Century

by Bill Totten

Nihonkai Shimbun and Osaka Nichinichi Shimbun (August 25, 2005)

(I've written a weekly column for two Japanese newspapers for the past three years. Patrick Heaton prepared this English version from the Japanese original.)


It has now been sixty years since the end of World War II. A peace memorial ceremony was held as usual on August 6 at Hiroshima's Peace Park. As happens every year, Hiroshima's mayor criticized countries that maintain nuclear weapons. In his Declaration of Peace, Mayor Akiba Tadatoshi said "... [the] nuclear-weapon states are ignoring the majority voices of the people and governments of the world, thereby jeopardizing human survival". He also said it was deplorable that the Review Conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) held in May on reappraising the treaty had ended without progress.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty went into effect in 1970. The treaty accords with a resolution in the UN general assembly that urges nations to conclude an agreement on stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons, since such weapons clearly increase the chance of a nuclear war that would devastate humankind. Every five years the treaty is re-evaluated. This past May the Review Conference of the NPT was held as scheduled but no progress was observed toward extension of the treaty as had been mandated by the UN. The United States, along with nations such as the United Kingdom, France, China, Russia and others, continue to hold 27,000 nuclear weapons.

How long will those countries be able to hang on to their nuclear arsenals? I believe that depends on the coming "oil peak" that I have been discussing since last year. As explained in essays posted previously, what some call an "oil peak" actually is the beginning of the end of an "oil bubble" that began inflating about 150 years ago and now is beginning to deflate. Oil production has peaked even while demand continues to rise dramatically as a result primarily of residents in developed countries using fossil fuels to support extravagant lifestyles. Scientists have not been able to find an equivalent alternative energy source to replace the decreasing supply of cheap petroleum and have no apparent prospects for finding a comparably cheap and abundant source of energy.


The Cheap Oil Bubble and Warfare

Cheap, plentiful oil is also what has enabled the US to maintain hegemony throughout the world since dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the middle of the last century. Cheap oil is a key factor behind the US launching its most recent war on Iraq. To understand the role of cheap oil in the rise of American hegemony, a short historical review may be helpful.

Since time immemorial Anglo-Saxons have used weapons more to attack the defenseless civilians than to fight the armed warriors of their adversaries, and have looted those they conquered. For example, after England invaded Ireland in the twelfth century, it expropriated the locals' land and squeezed crops out of the farmers.

The same occurred in the US Civil War. When the Union armies couldn't defeat the Confederate armies on the battlefields, General Grant sent General Sherman to defeat the South by terrorizing its unarmed citizens - burning their homes, killing their livestock, and destroying their crops. First-degree terrorism.

After the Civil War, General Sherman and others turned their attention to the land of the American Indians. They killed off the buffalo - the lifeblood of the Indians - and when natural resources were found on the land that the government had promised by treaties to the Indians, the government broke the treaties and took the land. American Indians were long the victims of US government terrorism.


Changes in the Concept of War

Over time, the Anglo-Saxon concept of war evolved, influenced increasingly by the availability of inexpensive oil-based fuels. Warfare shifted from hand-to-hand combat to a one-sided use of weapons of mass destruction that could be dropped from the sky to decimate hapless, defenseless civilians. The tankers, aircraft and missiles that carry these weapons to the battlefield all require huge amounts of oil.

Fuels derived from oil also played a role in the development of a new type of scofflaw warfare that flouts international agreements and treaties. This type of warfare began with the US and British bombings of the German city of Dresden during the latter phases of World War II in Europe. In that campaign, American and British allied forces used long-range aircraft powered by refined fuels to repeatedly drop various combinations of highly-explosive and incendiary bombs all over the Dresden area, completely destroying that city and killing tens of thousands of non-combatant, unarmed civilians.

Allied forces then turned to Asia and flew hundreds of bombers over Japan, dropping incendiary bombs on densely-populated Japanese cities, including Tokyo. This well-rehearsed procedure of indiscriminately employing increasingly destructive bombs culminated in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the sixty years since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American people have grown increasingly fat and lazy and too cowardly to risk losing their lives fighting enemies face-to-face. They're now only capable of using high-tech weapons of mass destruction against less technically-advanced peoples such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the current situations in those countries indicate, the indiscriminate nature of American war-making endures: while employing push-button warfare to attack indigenous defenders resisting American subjugation, whenever and wherever possible, the US seeks to terrify, wound, and massacre as many innocent non-combatant residents in those countries as possible.

While pretending to be leading a "war against terror", the United States remains the only country in the world ever to have used the most terrifying weapons in the world - nuclear weapons. Moreover, while pretending to be against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, even today it is the US that most aggressively seeks to develop ever more destructive improvements of such weapons, including more accurate ballistic missiles, more explosive bunker busters, and other more deadly albeit smaller bombs. Currently the US accounts for half of all military expenditures worldwide, and 38 North American companies (one being Canadian) are responsible for sixty percent of worldwide sales of weapons.


Diminishing Oil = Less Hi-Tech Warfare?

Given that US attainment of hegemony until now has depended primarily on its ability to exploit cheap oil to develop weapons of mass destruction and to project their destructive power far beyond US borders, perhaps a decline in oil production will be a blessing in disguise for the rest of the world. Without plentiful oil, belligerent countries like the United States may become less able to bully the rest of the world community by using their weapons of mass destruction to terrorize, maim, and kill unarmed civilians in countries that don't turn over their wealth or submit to their demands. Perhaps this will spell the end of the "American century" - a period that has become synonymous with excessive acts of terrorism such as the bombings of Dresden, the fire-bombings of Tokyo and sixty other Japanese cities, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the chemical warfare on Vietnamese civilians, and so on and on and on.


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/