Mao and Fidel on the Fall of the American Empire

Mao Tse Tung (in his chapter entitled "Imperialism and All Reactionaries are Paper Tigers") predicted that American militarism would eventually lead to its downfall. He mentioned especially the role of people in Arab countries: "The United States has set up hundreds of military bases in many countries all over the world. China's territory of Taiwan, Lebanon and all military bases of the United States on foreign soil are so many nooses round the neck of U.S. imperialism. The nooses have been fashioned by the Americans themselves and by nobody else, and it is they themselves who have put these nooses round their own necks, handing the ends of the ropes to the Chinese people, the peoples of the Arab countries and all the peoples of the world who love peace and oppose aggression. The longer the U.S. aggressors remain in those places, the tighter the nooses round their necks will become."

The American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002/2003 is a remarkable fulfillment of Mao's predictions. There is no reason to think that the Americans will fare any better in that region than the Soviet Union did (see US military analysis), and it seems likely that it will contribute, as Mao predicted, to the fall of the American empire.

More recently, in a 1998 speech, Fidel Castro has foreseen the economic collapse of the American empire: "When one sees that, for example, just in perfecting and developing nuclear weapons, the United States spends five billion dollars every year; when one reads that it spends twenty-seven billion dollars in espionage and intelligence work every year, and in manufacturing new, modern weapons - known as intelligent weapons - and planes invisible to radars, has millions of men ready for war, hundreds of the most modern warships, lots of aircraft carriers and submarines and bases all over the world, one wonders why and what for. There has to be elaborate forethought for that, a culture of domination..."

"What good will all those weapons do them, when the peoples, a lot more cultivated and aware, learn the truths? What good will those weapons do them, when they have to suffer a deep economic crisis? That crisis will inevitably come when that gigantic balloon of the stock markets which have absurdly multiplied their real values deflates. They are imaginary values, without any material sustainment, artificially created thanks to the privileged conditions of a State that due to peculiar historical circumstances has become the issuer of the main reserve currency accepted and circulated in the world...

"We maintain, based on mathematical facts, that such a neoliberal globalization is not sustainable; that the crisis is inevitable.

"For a moment, I try to imagine what would happen in the United States itself with the tens of million of owners of stocks with inflated value, with those families which deposited their savings in those stocks, if all of a sudden the stock markets collapse and with them those absurdly multiplied values. They cannot avoid that, it is congenital; it is in the genes of the system that begot it, in the laws that govern its development."

Fidel's prediction is supported by the analysis of the Soviet economic collapse as a result of the militarization of the economy, with the only difference being that the Soviet Union, working from a smaller economic base and unable to counter its loses by imperialist profits, was the first to collapse.

The fall of the American empire will leave a void of power and leadership in the world. Will the void be filled by new empires and forms of the culture of war or by a revolutionary culture of peace. The future is in our hands.

To take part in a discussion about this page, go to the Discussion Board Forum for Revolutionaries on the fall of the American empire: