美国在等待它的李鸿章吗？_风闻

《外交政策》4月2日刊登美国作家大卫·克里昂文章《美利坚帝国是21世纪病夫》

文：David Klion

译：由冠群

在艾萨克.阿西莫夫的经典名作《基地》系列中，作者虚构了一个以“川陀”星球为首都的“银河帝国”，在维系了几千年繁荣与和平之后，帝国频临衰落的边缘。唯一看清这种趋势的是心理史学家哈里.谢顿，他用数学方法推算出帝国存续的关键条件难以维持，帝国将在几个世纪内崩溃。

在消化理解老师的演算过程后，谢顿的一名弟子推测道：“随着川陀星球作为银河帝国行政中心的地位日益突出，它也逐渐成为一个更令人垂涎的猎物。皇位继承的不确定性越来越大，各大家族的争权夺利愈演愈烈，已经无人来承担社会责任。”

当阿西莫夫于1951年写下这段话时，论实力美国在世界上可谓无出其右。这段话倒更像是在形容2019年的华盛顿特区，这个帝国首都已沦为精英们角逐的猎物，为此他们不惜相互倾轧。美国的状况和阿西莫夫笔下的银河帝国以及历史上的各大帝国一模一样。

腐朽的统治阶级是如何成为国家安全风险的，又是如何对美利坚帝国的存续构成威胁的？寻找答案就要追溯到1970年代，经济滞胀、能源危机和灾难性的越南战争充分暴露了美国上世纪中期社会契约的脆弱性。

为了应对危机，美国政治精英们采取了私有化、去监管化、减免富人税收、工业岗位外包以及经济金融化等措施。从那以后，不平等现象急剧恶化，美国大部分地区陷入持续凋敝，华盛顿等少数大城市却聚集了金融、技术、媒体等行业的垄断巨头以及相应的游说团体，使财富高度集中，普通人难以生存。事到如今，许多美国人已经看到了这种现象，但很少有人去思考这将如何影响他们在这个世界的位置。

对于美国在世界上扮演的角色，一般而言有两种解读。一种理论认为，冷战时期的两极世界已经让位给单极世界，而美国则是单极世界中无可争议的霸主。部分观察人士认为这是件好事，因此拥护美利坚帝国，而另一些人则认为这是件坏事，所以要反抗美利坚帝国，但双方都认为，美利坚帝国是当前时代的典型特征。

第二种理论与第一种没有本质上的不同，它认为冷战后的世界是多极的，美国在众多大国中占有主导地位，但潜在对手——譬如中国——是有可能超越美国的。

有没有可能这两种理论都是错的呢？几乎所有人都把美国看作一个强大的、统一的全球行为体，但这种观点是经不起推敲、需要修正的。与其说美国是个能够推行自身意志的强国，不如说它是个对外来贿赂完全开放的露天市场，在这里，各种相互竞争的外部势力可以为了达到目的而购买影响力，塑造政治结果，挑动美国党派斗争。

类似这样的故事在历史上有很多。尽管阿西莫夫写《基地》的灵感来自爱德华.吉本的《罗马帝国衰亡史》，但在历史上软弱的统治精英们相互内斗，最后外强中干的帝国被强敌趁虚而入的例子比比皆是。

比如，曾经的波兰立陶宛联邦是个幅员辽阔的贵族共和国，它从14世纪到18世纪以不同形式控制着东欧地区。后来这个联邦从地图上消失了，因为它的邻国发现这里的一切政治决策都可以通过收买议员来阻挠破坏。19世纪中叶，奥斯曼土耳其帝国被戏称为“欧洲病夫”，只能眼瞅着西欧列强蚕食其国土，煽动其境内独立运动却束手无策。同一时期，清王朝统治下的中国被迫向欧洲殖民者割地求和。所有这些帝国都在不到一百年的时间里就分崩离析。

将2019年的美国与历史上摇摇欲坠的腐朽帝国相提并论，听起来似乎有些荒谬。但看看今天的华盛顿吧。几乎所有人都认为——至少私下承认——唐纳德·特朗普根本不具备履行总统基本职责的能力，他本人则是全世界的笑柄。

通过向特朗普的跨国酒店与度假场所输送利益，外国政府得以公然收买特朗普当局。在2016年大选结果出炉后的头一个月，一名受沙特资助的政治说客在位于白宫和美国国会大厦之间的特朗普酒店一次性租用了500间客房。特朗普所属的共和党目前控制着参议院，对司法系统的影响力也越来越大，但他们无意在类似问题上追究下去。当然还有“通俄门”这件小事。截至目前“穆勒报告”中的有限信息显示，特朗普和共和党至少是被动、自愿地成为了某外国势力干预选举结果的获益人。

美国病了，但特朗普只是一个症状，一个最明目张胆、最具讽刺意味的实例，他反映出在过去一代人的时间里，外国资金影响美国政治已经是件司空见惯的事。阿联酋等海湾国家全面影响着美国智库和媒体机构；权势熏天的美国以色列公共事务委员会能让整个美国政府为之卑躬屈膝；中国与美国商会以及某些美国大企业的高层保持着热络关系；海外资金可以通过美国一线城市房地产业流入美国——美国政府已经处于待价而沽的状态。

来自外国的金元不是华盛顿唯一的，甚至不是首要的主宰。总体上，强大的企业利益主导着首都，使民主责任制几乎彻底丧失生存空间。这些利益集团来自美国本土的重要产业，比如金融、保险、能源和科技。但问题在于，现在还有什么产业是美国本土产业吗？最大的企业多数是跨国企业，公司总部遍布世界各大主要城市，公司高管坐拥令人咋舌的财富，与普通美国人相比他们反而跟社会地位相近的外国高管更有共同之处。

美国彻底对竞选献金放松监管并将腐败合法化，其规模之大是别的发达国家闻所未闻的，这导致外国和本国金元政治利益越来越难以甄别。换句话说，美国政府的存在不是为了通过内政外交政策服务美国人民，而是为了让全球寡头的利益固化永存。

说美国外强中干，肯定有人会举出明显的反例，比如美国的国防支出超过紧随其后的七国国防预算之和，美国也在世界上几乎一半的国家里运营着数百个军事基地。美国投射军力的能力遥遥领先于所有其他国家。没有哪个国家像美国这样富有，像美国这样可以自行铸造全球储备货币，或像美国这样拥有强大的软实力。

同时，完全以从上至下的视角看待美利坚帝国会混淆因果关系。比如在2013年的埃及军事政变中，阿拉伯之春后首位民选总统穆尔西被推翻。前白宫顾问本·罗德斯在回忆录中写道，奥巴马政府不是那场政变的主导者，反而被动承受了来自盟国沙特和阿联酋无穷无尽的压力，沙特和阿联酋在与埃及军方策划政变时对当时的美国大使采取了信息战。

罗德斯写道，他收到过一封邮件，里面一张照片显示当时的美国大使与穆斯林兄弟会关系密切。这封信来自阿联酋驻美国大使尤瑟夫·阿尔奥泰巴，此人无处不在，热衷社交，在华盛顿人脉极广。奥巴马和罗德斯不但受到国内建制派的压力，还发现既定的中东政策反复遭盟国绑架——后来也正是这些国家的政府成功游说了美国在叙利亚和也门等地采取军事行动。美国实力哪怕再强大，如果它只是拍卖出去供他人实现目的，对美国仍然毫无意义。

如果美利坚帝国真的在沿着裂痕悄然崩坏，很多人可能会拍手称快。美国霸权是一大灾难，它在全球散播战争和剥削，将生态环境破坏到无法修复的地步。阿西莫夫的观察十分准确，帝国覆灭的原因往往是其过度扩张，纵容精英腐化堕落，所谓自作孽不可活。我们现在所看到的情况，既不是美国在深思熟虑后放弃帝国，集中精力解决内部问题；也不是世界各地饱受压迫的人们造反推翻美帝。实际上这是一个长期衰朽的过程，任何略通罗马或拜占庭历史的人对此都十分熟悉。当你看到世界各国领导人对语无伦次的美国总统投以困惑而怜悯的目光时，就会知道美国是21世纪病夫。

The American Empire Is the Sick Man of the 21st Century

In his classic Foundation series, Isaac Asimov imagines a Galactic Empire, governed from the city-world of Trantor, that has maintained peace and prosperity for thousands of years but that is teetering on the brink of decline. The only person who sees this clearly is the psychohistorian Hari Seldon, who has mathematically determined that the core conditions for the Empire are unsustainable and will crumble over the course of centuries.

As Trantor “becomes more and more the administrative center of Empire, it becomes a greater prize,” a disciple says as he absorbs Seldon’s calculations. “As the Imperial succession becomes more and more uncertain, and the feuds among the great families more rampant, social responsibility disappears.”

Asimov published these words in 1951, at the peak of U.S. global power. But they might as well be describing Washington in 2019, an imperial capital whose elite have transformed it into a great prize to be feuded over as surely as Asimov’s future empire did—and as other empires have done in the past.

How did a decadent ruling class become a national security risk, an existential threat to the American empire? The answer lies in the 1970s, when the weaknesses of the midcentury American social contract were exposed through stagflation, the energy crisis, and the disastrous Vietnam War.

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In response, America’s political elites embraced privatization, deregulation, massive tax cuts for the wealthy, the outsourcing of industrial jobs, and the financialization of the economy. Inequality has skyrocketed ever since, and much of the United States has experienced a steady decline while a handful of major cities, including Washington, have become hyperwealthy and almost unaffordable through the concentration of financial, tech, and media monopolies and their affiliated lobbyists. By now, many Americans know this story—but few think about what it means for their place in the world.

There are two conventional ways of understanding America’s global role. According to one theory, the bipolar world of the Cold War has given way to a unipolar world in which the United States is the undisputed hegemon. Some observers see this as a good thing and champion American empire, while others see it as a bad thing and seek to resist American empire, but both sides agree that American empire is the defining feature of our era.

A second theory, only different from the first by degrees, asserts that the post-Cold War world is multipolar, with the United States as the clear dominant power among many potential rivals, including countries such as China that might conceivably surpass the United States down the line.

But what if neither theory is correct? The near-universal understanding of the United States as a powerful, unified global actor is flawed and in need of revision. The United States is less a great power exerting its will and more an open-air market for global corruption, in which outside powers can purchase influence, shape political outcomes, and play factions against each other in the service of their own competing agendas.

That’s a familiar historical story. Although Foundation drew its direct inspiration from Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, history is replete with examples of seemingly powerful empires run by weak, divided elites and picked apart by outside powers.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a vast aristocratic republic that dominated Eastern Europe in one form or another from the 14th to the 18th century, was wiped off the map by its neighbors, who found they could bribe its senators into paralyzing all political decisions. The Ottoman Empire of the mid-19th century was infamously dubbed “the sick man of Europe” as Western European powers chipped away at its territories and encouraged independence movements against it. During the same period, China under the Qing Dynasty was forced to give up numerous territorial concessions to European colonial empires—all of which, in turn, would themselves disintegrate within a century.

It may seem absurd to compare the United States in 2019 to the decadent and crumbling imperial powers of the past. But consider the state of the capital right now. President Donald Trump, as almost everyone at least privately concedes, is incompetent at fulfilling his most basic responsibilities and a global laughingstock.

Trump’s administration is openly bought by foreign governments via his international network of hotels and resorts, including the one located directly between the White House and the U.S. Capitol, where a Saudi-funded lobbyist rented 500 rooms in the month after the 2016 election. His political party, which still controls the Senate and increasingly dominates the judiciary, has no interest in holding him accountable for any of this. And of course there’s the small matter of Russian interference in the 2016 election; as the limited information known so far from special counsel Robert Mueller’s report confirms, Trump and the Republicans were at the very least the passive and willing beneficiaries of efforts by a foreign power to influence the election outcome.

But Trump is only a symptom, the most blatant and cartoonish example of how the influence of outside money in Washington has become routine over the past generation. From the pervasive influence of the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf monarchies over think tanks and media organizations to virtually the entire U.S. government kowtowing before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to China’s warm relationship with the Chamber of Commerce and with the heads of some of the most powerful U.S. companies to the funneling of foreign money through the real estate industries of the country’s largest and wealthiest cities—the U.S. government is for sale.

To be sure, it isn’t only, or even primarily, foreign money that rules Washington. Powerful corporate interests in general have almost completely crowded out democratic accountability in the capital, including major U.S.-based industries such as finance, insurance, energy, and tech. Then again, is there any such thing as a U.S.-based industry anymore? Most of the biggest companies are multinational, with headquarters in major cities around the world and executives whose staggering wealth means they have more in common socially with their international counterparts than with most Americans.

The complete deregulation of campaign finance and the subsequent legalization of corruption in Washington, on a scale unheard of in other developed countries, have resulted in a capital where the distinction between foreign and domestic monied interests is harder and harder to parse. The U.S. government, in other words, does not exist to serve the interests of Americans through either its foreign or its domestic policies; rather, it exists to perpetuate the interests of the globalized oligarchy.

There’s an obvious counterargument to all of this: The United States still spends more on defense than the next seven countries combined, and it still operates a network of hundreds of military bases spread across nearly half the countries on Earth. No other country remotely rivals the United States in its ability to project military power. And no other country is as wealthy or mints the global reserve currency or wields as much soft power.

At the same time, focusing entirely on the American empire from the top down can confuse causality. Consider, for instance, the overthrow of Egypt’s post-Arab Spring elected leader Mohamed Morsi in a 2013 coup. In former White House advisor Ben Rhodes’s memoir, he describes President Barack Obama’s administration not as the driving force behind this coup but as the passive recipient of relentless pressure from its Saudi and Emirati allies, who waged an information campaign against the U.S. ambassador while plotting with the Egyptian military.

Rhodes writes that he personally received a photo in the mail portraying the U.S. ambassador as an accomplice of the Muslim Brotherhood from Yousef al-Otaiba, the ubiquitous, hard-partying, extremely well-connected Emirati ambassador in Washington. While Rhodes and Obama also faced pressure from within the Washington establishment, they found their agenda for the Middle East repeatedly hijacked by foreign allies—the same governments that also lobbied, with varying success, for U.S. military operations from Syria to Yemen. American power, however mighty, means nothing if it’s being used for the ends of the highest bidders.

So what if the American empire is coming apart at the seams? Good riddance, many would say. U.S. hegemony has been a disaster, spreading war and exploitation around the globe and poisoning the climate beyond repair. And that’s true: As Asimov observed, empires tend to fall because they overextend themselves, spoil their elites, and produce the preconditions for their own demise. But what we’re seeing is neither a considered, responsible withdrawal from empire in order to invest in urgent needs at home nor a revolt against empire by the world’s wretched. Rather, it’s a drawn-out, decadent collapse recognizable to any student of Rome or Constantinople. America is the sick man of the 21st century, and anyone who has watched its president bumble through a gathering of bemused, pitying world leaders knows it.

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