Written by  at The New American / July 27, 2017

Republished with permission from the New American

A recently released Department of Defense risk assessment report shows that the “primacy” of the United States in the order of nations is in danger of collapse. The American empire — like others before it — is falling under its own bloated weight. Rather than suggesting a return to the roots of the American Republic as outlined in the Constitution, the report suggests expansions of force, surveillance, and propaganda to reinforce the crumbling empire.

The report — entitled At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World — is the conclusion of a year-long study with input from the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Army. Published in June by the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, the report was sponsored by high-level government and military agencies, including the U.S. Army’s Strategic Plans and Policy Directorate; the Joint Staff, J5 (Strategy and Policy Branch); the Office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development; and the Army Study Program Management Office.

The findings of the study — as outlined in the report — would be bad enough on their own; the recommendations of the report are even worse.

Predicting (and lamenting) the collapse of “the staus quo” of American imperialism, the report leans on one of the favorite beast of burden for statists and tyrants: the threat of violence from abroad. The report says:

While the United States remains a global political, economic, and military giant, it no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors. Further, it remains buffeted by a range of metastasizing violent or disruptive nonstate challengers, and it is under stress — as are all states — from the dispersion and diffusion of effective resistance and the varied forces of disintegrating or fracturing political authority. In brief, the status quo that was hatched and nurtured by U.S. strategists after World War II and has for decades been the principal “beat” for DoD is not merely fraying but may, in fact, be collapsing. Consequently, the United States’ role in and approach to the world may be fundamentally changing as well.

The report goes on to say, “Indeed, while the United States remains a global military power, it no longer can — as in the past — automatically generate consistent and sustained local military superiority at range.”

In short, “the status quo” of interventionism (which stands in sharp contrast to the non-interventionism of American foreign policy as outlined in the Constitution and explained by Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as “in extending our commercial relations, to have with them [foreign nations] as little political connection as possible” and “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none”) is — predictably — “fraying” and “may, in fact, be collapsing.”

That this “fraying” and “collapsing” would be a natural consequence of our national identity crisis (the United States is a republic that calls itself a democracy and behaves like an empire) seems lost on the report’s authors, who — while predicting dire consequences as the result of the fall of the American empire — go on to recommend that the “status quo” be preserved by departing even further (if that were possible) from the founding principles of the United States. The report says, “As a review, status quo forces benefit from and act as the self-appointed guardians of the U.S.-led post-Cold War international order and its components.” As if that were a good thing.

The report goes on to say: read more here – https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/foreign-policy/item/26550-department-of-defense-pentagon-report-calls-for-total-state-as-american-empire-collapsing