Head-on | America at 250: An empire showing its age

The United States, which celebrated 250 years of independence on July 4, is the inheritor of the British Empire – and all its imperial warts.

The English colonists who arrived in North America in the 16th century were working-class people fleeing religious persecution in newly Protestant England. Britain did not yet exist as a nation. It would be established only in 1707 when Scotland and England merged to form the United Kingdom.

The English colonists in America came bearing guns and smallpox. They waged war against Native Americans, killed thousands through wars and disease and drove the rest off the land they had lived on for millennia.

But in their new colony, the English in the 1600s needed labour to work on cotton plantations. By the 1700s, Liverpool had become the slave-trafficking capital of the world. British ships left Liverpool port for West Africa laden with goods and sold them to traders in Ghana, Chad and the Ivory Coast.

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In return, they loaded their empty ships with Africans and took them forcibly on a brutal 60-day voyage across the north Atlantic, selling them into lifelong slavery to British colonists in America.

In 1776, Britain (now 69 years old as a country following England’s merger with Scotland in 1707) held only 13 colonies in the northeast of America. The rest of the American continent remained barren. Native Americans had either been killed or pushed into impoverished reservations. British slave ships continued offloading their human cargo from Africa at American ports and in the Caribbean islands of Barbados, Trinidad and Jamaica.

None of this appeared in the US media in the weekend coverage of America’s celebration of 250 years of independence. No mention of slave ownership (most US presidents till Abraham Lincoln in the 1850s were slave owners themselves) nor a word on the impoverished status today of Native Americans.

But it is not just its brutish history that makes the US a worthy successor to the British Empire. It matched the British in inflicting wars (on Mexico in the 1840s and on Spain in the 1890s) and treating its Black subjects with great cruelty.

After losing America, Britain protected the rest of its global empire with increased determination. It fought off rival French, Russian and Ottoman empires. It treated its Indian empire as a milch cow, robbing its resources and exploiting its market for overpriced British exports.

The US learnt its lessons well from Britain on how to ward off other imperial challengers. Ironically, Washington targeted Britain first. The British Empire had begun crumbling after India won independence in 1947. The Second World War exhausted and bankrupted Britain. It was in deep debt to the US.

In 1956, America stopped Britain and France from militarily seizing the Suez Canal from Egypt. The US action marked the real end of the British Empire. In 1957 the British colony Malaya became free, eventually forming an independent Malaysia and Singapore. By the early 1960s, most of Africa and the Caribbean were free of British imperialism – Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Barbados, Trinidad, and Jamaica.

With the British Empire gone, America turned to its next potential Great Power rival, the Soviet Union. The Cold War was the instrument. Deceit was the modus operandi. In 1991, Washington agreed with Moscow that once Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet Union, NATO would not “move an inch closer” to Russia’s doorstep in eastern Europe.

It did exactly the opposite. NATO had 16 member-nations in 1991. Today it has 32. Russia has been encircled by NATO. US sanctions have meanwhile bled it dry and removed it as a credible rival to US imperial hegemony.

While Washington was fighting and winning the Cold War against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, a new economic threat emerged: Japan. By the mid-1980s Japan was the world’s second-largest economy and growing fast. Could it surpass the US economy one day? America’s global hegemony was built on its economy. Losing pole position could abort the American imperial project.

Backed by European powers, now America’s subservient allies, Washington engineered the signing of the landmark Plaza Accord in 1985. The Accord enforced depreciation of the US dollar against the Japanese yen and German deutsche mark.

Japan was the principal target. Within two years, the dollar had plunged by 50 per cent against the yen. It would be the beginning of the end of Japan’s export tsunami to the US.

By 1990, Japan had entered stagflation. In 1995 Japanese GDP ws $5.54 trillion, not far below US GDP of $7.64 trillion. Thirty years later, US GDP has risen to over $30 trillion. Japanese GDP has declined to $4.28 trillion in the same period. One more potential geoeconomic rival had been defeated by US imperial machinations.

But rising silently out of plain sight was a much bigger threat. The US had used China as a counterweight against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In return it turned a blind eye to China’s theft of US technology from American universities and research labs for over three decades.

By 2010, Washington had woken up to what was now the biggest challenge to US hegemony. Washington’s overtures to India in 2005-2008, including the India-US nuclear deal, the establishment of the Quad and closer strategic ties with New Delhi, were designed to balance China’s rise.

China has proved more difficult to dismantle as a threat to America’s G1 ambition. The British Empire was G1 for 200 years. With China, the US has had to settle for G2.

Who is next? India. America paid lip service to India’s fight for independence from the British Empire. But right from 1947, it has used Pakistan to keep India in check.

American imperialists in Washington are farsighted. They saw early that India, poor and broken in 1947, had the potential to emerge a century later as a Great Power. Everything Washington has done since is designed to keep India’s rise in check.

Will it succeed as it did with the British Empire after WW2, the Soviet Union after the Cold War, Japan after the Plaza Accord, and China with sanctions on high-tech AI chips?

While China may fall on its own demographic sword as it shrinks and ages, India has been hardened by invasion, occupation and genocide over centuries. Its ascent has gone past a critical point.

In contrast, America is in slow decline. Its share of global GDP by purchasing power parity (PPP) has fallen from 20.42 per cent in 2000 to 14.26 per cent in 2026. India’s share of global GDP has doubled from 4.30 per cent to 8.49 per cent in the same period.

The first bell for the American Empire has begun to toll.

(The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)