Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Tweeting While Rome Burns
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Historian Alfred McCoy is proving to be the Edward Gibbon of our age. Of course, Gibbon wrote his decline and fall of the Roman Empire hundreds of years post-decline. McCoy is following the decline of our modern Rome contemporaneously, hence today’s piece. His hit new Dispatch Book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, is simply a must-read. If, as 2018 begins, you’re in the mood to offer some support to TomDispatch, for a $100 donation ($125 if you live outside the United States), you can get a signed, personalized copy of the book as our thank you for helping us through the age of Trump. Check out our donation page for the details. Tom]
In 1956, in an interview with journalist Anna Louise Strong, Chinese leader Mao Zedong famously said of American imperialism: “In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of; it is a paper tiger.” It wasn’t the first time he had used the image. Ten years earlier he had told Strong that, even with its new world-ending weapon, the atom bomb, the U.S. was a paper tiger, adding of that bomb, “It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter, but the outcome of a war is decided by the people, not by one or two new types of weapon.”
More than half a century later, with nuclear weapons once againon the table, Mao’s language seems a bit dated. Paper? What’s that? And America as a tweetable (or Twitter) tiger doesn’t exactly do the trick, does it? Still, whatever its truth at the time, that ancient Maoist image might possibly have a second life in a new century. You know, the century in which the United States was finally led by a “very stable genius.”
As TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, suggests today, we finally seem to have reached the paper-tiger stage of American imperial history. After all, we have a president who just screened The Greatest Showman, the new movie on P.T. Barnum and the founding of the Barnum and Bailey Circus, at Camp David and is himself, tweet by tweet and statement by statement, turning the empire into a failing sideshow in the ever more riveting three ring circus of Trump. Perhaps it’s fitting that 2017 was the year Barnum’s circus had its final performance. Tom
In 1956, in an interview with journalist Anna Louise Strong, Chinese leader Mao Zedong famously said of American imperialism: “In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of; it is a paper tiger.” It wasn’t the first time he had used the image. Ten years earlier he had told Strong that, even with its new world-ending weapon, the atom bomb, the U.S. was a paper tiger, adding of that bomb, “It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter, but the outcome of a war is decided by the people, not by one or two new types of weapon.”
More than half a century later, with nuclear weapons once againon the table, Mao’s language seems a bit dated. Paper? What’s that? And America as a tweetable (or Twitter) tiger doesn’t exactly do the trick, does it? Still, whatever its truth at the time, that ancient Maoist image might possibly have a second life in a new century. You know, the century in which the United States was finally led by a “very stable genius.”
As TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, suggests today, we finally seem to have reached the paper-tiger stage of American imperial history. After all, we have a president who just screened The Greatest Showman, the new movie on P.T. Barnum and the founding of the Barnum and Bailey Circus, at Camp David and is himself, tweet by tweet and statement by statement, turning the empire into a failing sideshow in the ever more riveting three ring circus of Trump. Perhaps it’s fitting that 2017 was the year Barnum’s circus had its final performance. Tom
The World According to Trump
Or How to Build a Wall and Lose an Empire
By Alfred W. McCoy
As 2017 ended with billionaires toasting their tax cuts and energy executives cheering their unfettered access to federal lands as well as coastal waters, there was one sector of the American elite that did not share in the champagne celebration: Washington’s corps of foreign policy experts. Across the political spectrum, many of them felt a deep foreboding for the country’s global future under the leadership of President Donald Trump.
In a year-end jeremiad, for instance, conservative CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria blasted the “Trump administration’s foolish and self-defeating decision to abdicate the United States’ global influence -- something that has taken more than 70 years to build.” The great “global story of our times,” he continued, is that “the creator, upholder, and enforcer of the existing international system is withdrawing into self-centered isolation,” opening a power vacuum that will be filled by illiberal powers like China, Russia, and Turkey.
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