This article from Salon caught my attention a while ago. It's worth a look, even though I think the "mystery" it identifies is not as much of a mystery as the author thinks it is. In brief, he outlines in detail how, despite the crashing and burning of American attempts to create an "empire," we're still the only nation in the world close to being a superpower, and wars are playing a lessening role in resolving international conflicts.
Well, to paraphrase the husband of the next President of the United States, it all depends on what your definition of "war" is. War, in the traditional sense of military machines colliding across national boundaries, are in fact playing a lessening role in the 21st century. On the other hand, so are national boundaries. The rise of the international economy, and international travel along with it, combined with the rise of the Internet and the spread of digital and wireless communications, have begun to create not only an international common market, but also a global culture, one in which economic and personal interests routinely cross national boundaries, and even circle the world on a regular basis.
In such a world, with little international regulation or enforcement to stand in the way, it has become relatively easy for a handful of multinational corporations to aggregate ownership and control of the world's economic resources, including its workers, to such an extent that even national governments are often useless to stand in the way of their power. In such a world, wars between nations would achieve nothing, except interrupt the flow of profits. It's far easier to simply buy out the national governments, and turn them into capitalists tools to keep the citizens, who are nothing more than fungible employees and/or negligible consumers to the multinational corporations.
In fact, this is often the source of the rioting the article mentions. It is the natural reaction of citizens reacting to the failure of the governments to protect their interests. One can see many examples of this playing out around the world (most recently in Spain, for example). But, of course, here inside the borders of the one remaining, declining superpower, one need not look abroad for examples. The rise of corporate control of our political process, which was gradual for much of the 20th century, has taken off in this century in the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. That control asserts itself in every corner of what's left of our election process, with the modesty of a 42nd Street stripper.
Its peculiar genius has shown itself to be equal to the size of its resources, in that it has created its own AstroTurf "grass roots" movement--the Tea Party--as a way of distracting a large segment of disaffected Americans from the fact that liberalism is the true source of our Revolution, our Constitution, and most if not all of the rights we take for granted. Believe me, there's a reason Richard Nixon wanted the song "Cool, Cool Conservative Men" removed from the film version of the musical, "1776."
To sum up, despite the U.S.'s nuclear arsenal propping up its status as the world's lone superpower, we do in fact live in a bipolar world. The power and competition of nations has been sidelined by the new global war for power--multinational corporations on one side, the rest of us on the other. And yes, Tea Party folks, that includes you. But the economic and global ties that bind the multinationals together are, slowly but surely, binding the rest of us together as well. H.G. Wells was prescient enough to understand that you can't have a world state without a world culture to support it. The good news is that a world culture is being built. The bad news is that, until that building has made more progress, it won't be enough to stop our international enslavement.
One of the keys to building that culture is a right that has long been recognized as a fundamental one here in the U.S.: the right to travel. Now, more than ever, we need to expand the rights of citizens everywhere to move around the globe to work, to visit, to invest, to start families, to enable the whole human race to join hands and become citizens of a global community. That is why comprehensive immigration reform is not just another political issue. In the context of the bipolar struggle I have just described, it may well be the single most important political cause of our time. Every American needs to take it seriously, and work to make it a reality.
And, beyond that, all of us need to understand that, no matter the boundaries, languages or ideologies that seem to divide us, we all have a common enemy. And we have to start working together, in the way the multinationals do, to ensure that we, not they, rule the world all of us share.
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