How is America going to end? Slate lists its top 144 scenorios — some of which I can take semi-seriously, but many of which seem to be symptoms rather than causes:
1. Electromagnetic Pulse: A nuclear weapon detonated at high elevation could knock out the country’s electrical infrastructure, sending us back to the Stone Age. The congressional EMP Commission says an electromagnetic pulse “is one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences.”2. Foreign Invasion: The Red Dawn scenario: A hostile alliance of foreign powers dispatches a team of elite combat troops to America. They launch a coordinated assault with thousands of paratroopers on key military and communications installations, dealing the U.S. government a fatal blow.
3. Russia Hits the Button: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg says the United States should fear “a mistaken attack on our country by the huge Russian arsenal of nuclear weapons.” As recently as 1995, a “retaliatory” nuclear strike was barely averted when Russian officials figured out at the last second that what they thought was an enemy strike was really a craft launched to monitor the Northern lights.
4. Loose Nukes: Taliban fighters wrest nuclear weapons from a destabilized Pakistan. Or al-Qaida acquires a small arsenal of nukes from a disintegrating Russia. The nonstate actors launch against the United States in an attack exponentially worse than 9/11.
5. Dirty Bombs: Terror groups armed with “radiological dispersal devices” — a cocktail of radioactive material and garden-variety explosives — launch coordinated attacks in a dozen major cities. The attacks destabilize the government and break our spirit. The terrorists win.
6. Abandonment: After a series of devastating attacks, Washington admits it can no longer protect large swaths of the nation. The United States contracts to a smaller core that’s easier to defend.
7. Suicidal Tyrant: An Ahmadinejad-like figure strikes at the heart of the Great Satan, launching nuclear weapons at major American cities and pushing the country to anarchy.
8. Internal Guerrilla Warfare: Smugglers and street gangs join forces to contest the authority of the U.S. government—first along the Mexican border and later in pockets of major cities—in order to maintain control of lucrative illicit markets.
9. Mercenary Armies: As in the seventh season of 24, a military contractor goes rogue and attacks the United States. Not even Jack Bauer can save us.
10. Space Attacks: A coalition of malevolent nations with hyper-advanced space programs strikes at the United States from the outer limits, disrupting all of our communications and rendering our conventional Army powerless.
The entries for decadence and laziness link to Niall Ferguson’s 2006 Vanity Fair piece, Empire Falls, which notes that the West has already declined significantly:
In 1900 the West really did rule the world. From the Bosporus to the Bering Strait, from Siberia to Ceylon, nearly all of what was then known as the Orient was under some form of Western imperial rule. The British had long ruled India, the Dutch the East Indies, and the French Indochina; the Americans had just seized the Philippines; the Russians aspired to control Manchuria. All the imperial powers had established parasitical outposts in China. The East, in short, had been subjugated, even if that process involved far more complex negotiations and compromises between rulers and ruled than used to be acknowledged.Western hegemony was one of the great asymmetries of world history. Taken together, the metropoles of all the Western empires—the American, Belgian, British, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish — accounted for 7 percent of the world’s land surface and just 18 percent of its population. Their possessions, however, amounted to 37 percent of global territory and 28 percent of mankind. And if we regard the Russian empire as effectively another European empire extending into Asia, the total share of these Western empires rises to more than half the world’s area and population. This was a political globalization unseen before or since.
What enabled the minority in the West to rule the majority in the East in 1900 was not so much scientific knowledge in its own right as its systematic application to both production and destruction. By contrast, the empires of the East, from the Ottoman to the Qing, failed disastrously to modernize themselves. Their economies remained trapped in subsistence agriculture while the West forged ahead, colonizing and industrializing, devouring sugar and burning coal. Their tax systems were inefficient, forcing Oriental rulers to borrow from Western capital bankers. Eastern armies remained long on pageantry and short on firepower, while the West could deploy well-drilled troops equipped with machine guns and heavy artillery. Eastern navies stood no chance against the Western combination of steam and steel.
Nothing symbolized better the humiliation of the East than the Western military intervention to suppress the Boxer Rebellion, in China, in 1900. The rebels, who had menaced Western diplomats and missionaries, relied on martial arts and magic. Having wiped them out, the Western expeditionary force staged a “grand march” through Beijing’s Forbidden City and then undertook punitive raids deep into Shanxi Province, Inner Mongolia, and Manchuria.
Just a few years later, however, the East began to re-assert itself. Japan’s defeat of Russia on land and at sea in 1904–5 marked a turning point in world history. From that point on, the balance of geopolitical power began to turn, slowly and painfully, back toward the more populous part of the world. It is only when the extent of Western dominance in 1900 is appreciated that the true narrative arc of the 20th century reveals itself. This was not “the triumph of the West,” but rather the crisis of the European empires, the ultimate result of which was the revival of the East — beginning in Japan — and the relative decline of the West.
This has not been a decline in the sense that Spengler envisaged: a kind of corrosive metropolitan ennui. Rather, it has been an unexpected but inexorable military decline. It has been a scarcely perceptible economic decline. It has been a subtle but unmistakable cultural decline. Above all, it has been a creeping demographic decline. In short, it has been a decline in precisely the sense that Gibbon understood the decline of Rome’s empire.
Here’s the bit about decadence:
Perhaps our most perplexing vulnerability, however, is cultural. Gibbon was acute in identifying literary decline as one symptom of a more profound Roman malaise. And if his barbed allusion to the “darkened … face of learning” does not immediately strike a chord, then some of the other symptoms may. While “the corrupt and opulent nobles of Rome gratified every vice that could be collected from the mighty conflux of nations and manners,” Gibbon wrote, “the most lively and splendid amusement of the idle multitude depended on the frequent exhibition of public games and spectacles.” Orgies and circuses are not precisely the favorite pastimes of Western society today. But if you substitute pornography and NASCAR, the parallel is not so far-fetched.