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The United States hit a dubious milestone this week, announcing that its national debt had exceeded $40 trillion. No other nation comes close to this level of absolute financial indebtedness.
This is not simply a matter of out-of-control financial bankruptcy. It is an ominous sign of an unhinged empire that is desperately trying to salvage its historic failure by scorched-earth tactics of endless war.
The world is being held hostage by a pathological system that is no longer tolerable for the sake of humanity, development and peace.
Perhaps of significance than the total figure – astronomical though that is – is the accelerating pace of U.S. debt growth. Since 2016, the arrears have doubled, up from $20tn. Over the next decade, the U.S. national debt is predicted to climb to $64tn.
In the year 2000, the American account stood at a “mere” $6tn. The last quarter of a century has seen the arrears pile up from endless wars, reckless military spending, and massive tax cuts for the corporate elite. The debt has become irreversible under prevailing policies.
Servicing interest on the arrears now runs at $1tn a year and is one of the largest federal budget expenditures. This means that the United States is caught in a debt spiral from which it cannot extricate itself. It is digging a deeper and deeper hole.
There are profound implications for the United States as a society. As Robert Reich, a former Labour Secretary, noted, the servicing of runaway debt means less money for “schools, healthcare, roads and bridges and social safety nets.” The grim conclusion is that social inequality in the U.S. – already at record levels – will become even destructive. That speaks of social immiseration and collapse.
There are also far-reaching detrimental impacts on the U.S. and global economy. Even mainstream commentators warn of a historic fiscal crisis pending for the United States from soaring interest rates and hyperinflation. That, in turn, will be transmitted to the rest of the world, especially those countries with large holdings of American debt.
But the exceptional U.S. financial mess is not just a matter of economics. It is an urgent issue of global peace and security.
There are several causes of mounting American debt. However, the main driver, by far, is that nation’s relentless warmongering and militarism, as economist Jeffrey Sachs and other commentators have long contended. It is systemic and chronic.
This year saw the United States celebrate its 250th anniversary since its founding as a modern state. For most of its history, about 95 per cent of the 250 years, the United States has been at war, either through conquest or subterfuge, according to its own Congressional records and eminent historians like David Vine.
No other modern nation comes close to this bellicose conduct, and that is a reason why no other nation comes close to the level of financial debt of the U.S.
In short, war and debt are closely correlated as cause and effect.
The worrying thing for the world is that as the U.S. debt spirals at an accelerating pace, the obvious implication is that conflict and wars are also increasingly manifest.
There are few people today who cannot be but concerned by the perception of intensifying tensions, violence and threats to world peace. We are living in a time when World War Three and nuclear conflagration are spoken of as an imminent possibility. While Western corporate media tend to cover up the obvious, polls show that increasing numbers of people around the world view the United States as the main threat to global peace and security.
The current wars in the Middle East and Ukraine and tensions with China all can be traced to Washington’s foreign policies.
The Trump administration has bombed at least seven countries and is threatening to attack others. Just this week, Trump sounded like a Mafia don when he said he would “bomb the shit” out of Oman over some perceived grievance. The U.S. disregard for international law was always a recurring feature, albeit not a widely known one, but lately it has become blatant.
This American president has hinted on numerous occasions at using nuclear weapons to “obliterate” Iran since his criminal war of aggression against that country has so conspicuously failed. The war on Iran alone has clocked up another $100 billion – and counting – on the U.S. national debt just in the space of six months.
George D O’Neill Jr writes in The American Conservative: “The current wars have exposed the shortcomings of our nearly trillion-dollar military and its multi-billion-dollar weapon systems… after years of being told we possess the most powerful military in history, Americans are beginning to realize it is a fantasy.”
It is indeed a cruel fantasy. The U.S. is not an exceptional, virtuous nation, as its propaganda claims; it is an exceptionally violent and criminal empire which has run up a monstrous debt by way of self-indicting evidence.
The real danger is that the empire is rapidly falling apart from its decades of abuse and corruption. And to postpone that reckoning, the U.S. ruling class is ramping up war and militarism as a desperate attempt to create a new world order, which it is gambling will somehow benefit American capitalism.
It doesn’t have to be that way. If the United States actually served the democratic needs of its people, as opposed to the oligarchy and military-industrial complex, it would increase taxation on the super-wealthy and rein in military spending and wars. That is, if the U.S. actually functioned like a law-abiding normal nation, it could avert fiscal crisis and engage peacefully with the rest of the world.
But U.S. capitalism does not work like that. It is a zero-sum system driven by ambitions of world dominance that spawn war, imperialist aggression and debt.
The U.S. debt crisis is a legacy of endless war. It is also a harbinger of future wars. Unless the American system is somehow systematically transformed through revolution or total collapse.
