by CONRAD LANDIN
Could a break-up proffer the end of the empire? Conrad Landin weighs up the arguments.
Picture the scene. It’s 2028, and Donald Trump has been re-elected US president. Having abolished term limits and charmed and connived his way to victory again, he is set to become the first US president since Franklin D Roosevelt to serve a third term in office.
Except… there is no United States left to govern. Piece by piece, the jigsaw has shrunk to the point that even the District of Colombia has declared independence, and the boundary fence of Trump’s White House now forms the US border. Trump can extend his tiny hands all he likes, but he’s the only human being in reach. Wouldn’t it be swell?
The US, we should remember, is a rather young country, and contemplating its unsustainable nature is nothing new. But Trump’s election in 2016 raised the stakes. In his 2021 book, Splitsville USA, Christopher F Zurn advocates for a ‘political divorce’ to address ‘serious institutional problems’ that ‘will quite likely lead either to electoral authoritarianism or massive ungovernability’. He proposes to ‘harness our divisions – our mutual suspicions and hatreds – in the service of a solution whereby all current Americans can live in functioning constitutional republics’.
The foundation of the United States in 1776 was the culmination of a white settler-colonial project which oversaw the genocidal removal of Indigenous Americans and their nations. Since then, and especially since the Second World War, the US has grown to be the world’s dominant imperial power. The death toll of its completed and attempted conquests in countries including Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq is estimated to be as high as 55 million.
Zurn’s is a liberal democratic solution to a crisis of liberal democracy, one he attributes to the vulnerabilities of the US Constitution. But internationalists will instead recognize this crisis as an inevitable outcome of the capitalism so valued by US liberals. As guest editor Nanjala Nyabola put it in New Internationalist’s podcast The World Unspun: ‘Neoliberalism is the handmaiden of fascism.’
Nevertheless, many anti-imperialists believe that the dismantling of colonial nation-states can be a catalyst for a more equitable world order. It’s for this reason that many socialists support the cause of Scottish independence, in the name of ‘breaking up the British state’. Others disagree, citing the dangers of embracing nationalist movements and the barriers that separation would place upon achieving working class unity.
US hegemony in global politics is not achieved by the elected government alone, however. The country has successfully asserted its dominance in military affairs through the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), now held up as a defender of democratic values globally, but whose founding members included the authoritarian Portuguese dictatorship. How would US successor states manage its continuity? Potentially with more difficulty. But in its eight decades of existence, NATO has developed an authority independent of the current US government. It would no doubt survive, and would only become less accountable still – while preserving North American imperial interests – if overseen by multiple successor states. Zurn explicitly states that these ‘would band together productively in exerting diplomatic power in international institutions and relations’.
Indeed, if breaking up the US were a means of maintaining the pre-2016 liberal order, then maintaining NATO’s hegemony would surely be central to that purpose. The same is surely true of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, set up by – and headquartered in – the US.
There are no shortcuts – especially constitutional fixes – in the struggle for global justice
Whither anti-imperialists? A national divorce could still drive a wedge through the dominant ruling class unity which has allowed a huge transfer of power and resources from the poor to the rich, and which sacrifices millions of people, predominantly in the Global South, for the latter’s further enrichment. Others may hope that the recklessness of a president like Trump will do serious and lasting damage to US hegemony in global affairs.
What is clear, however, is that there are no shortcuts – especially constitutional fixes – in the struggle for global justice.
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