COMMENTARY: The Shrinking American Empire, Glen Ford, 2009

Editors, The Black Agenda Review

16 Sep 2026

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“The Iraq invasion greatly accelerated the process of U.S. imperialism’s decline.”

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003 – using the lie that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction” – few commentators assumed it was the beginning of the empire’s end. Glen Ford was among the few who saw it coming. On the day the US’s savage “shock and awe” campaign against Iraq began, Ford saw “that a crack opened up in time, and it was clear as a desert day that the U.S. empire would be swallowed up in that widening crack.”

In a 2009 Black Agenda Radio commentary titled, “The Shrinking American Empire” – six years after the start of the war on Iraq – Ford foretold our current moment of imperial blowback with the prescience of a fortuneteller: “The U.S. dollar’s days as the world’s reserve currency are numbered, and when the dollar is finally dethroned, only the military aspect of the imperial husk will remain.”

Ford was right. Two decades later, the US is still in West Asia, still struggling for world domination. But as it is being repelled by Iran’s brilliant military strategy, the chickens of the war on Iraq are coming home to roost. Today, the US is at an economic crossroads. Its economic choices and imperial policies have left it in deep debt and spurred rapid de-dollarization. It is facing a global fuel crisis of its own making. Meanwhile, overstretched and antiquated, the “military aspect of the imperial husk” is in question. Ford’s prediction that the US would become “hated much more than feared,” has also come to pass as even former allies of the country now harbor a disdain and disgust toward the US.

If only Glen Ford were still with us to analyze the US’s current quagmire in West Asia and its global repercussions. Our one solace is that Ford could see clearly that “much of the planetary community” would “find ways to break the unequal ties that bound them to the empire” – that empire run by “grotesquely ugly, brutish, irredeemably repugnant human beings.”

We are not saying that the U.S. empire will fall tomorrow. We do know, however, that it is in a deep crisis, a crisis that, as Ford anticipated, will, we are sure, lead to its final collapse. We reprint Glen Ford’s “The Shrinking American Empire” below.

The Shrinking American Empire

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

The day before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, back in March of 2003, I wrote a piece called “They Have Reached Too Far” – “they” being U.S. imperialists. I saw on that day, as U.S. tanks revved their engines in the sands of Kuwait, preparing to cross into what Washington thought would be a glorious future of global domination, that a crack opened up in time, and it was clear as a desert day that the U.S. empire would be swallowed up in that widening crack – maybe in my lifetime.

George Bush and his gang had rolled the dice, betting everything on a land and resource grab designed to save a parasitical system through world-defying theft and awesome – Shock and Awesome – intimidation. But there was not the slightest doubt in my mind that they would fail catastrophically, although no one could predict precisely how the disaster would unfold.

It was also clear that the U.S. aggression against Iraq should not be narrowly interpreted as all about Israel or about oil or about further expansion of U.S. spheres of geopolitical dominance or about beating back the challenge of the euro. It was simultaneously about all of those things, and more. Empires seek to dominate the very planet, to set the terms for every human transaction. Nothing is beyond the ambitions of empire. Imperialists believe that everything can be made into a weapon with which to bludgeon the rest of humanity into submission.

So I wrote, back in 2003, that the impending Iraq war was:

an oil currency war, a preemptive strike against the euro’s potential to challenge the U.S. dollar as the sole denominator of petroleum purchases. By seizing the Iraqi oil fields and positioning itself to do the same in Saudi Arabia, Iran and throughout the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea and South Asia, the U.S. can stop the euro cold and rule as its own OPEC, awesomely armed and dreadfully dangerous.” The dollar would “remain supreme, backed by the oil reserves of the globe.

And that was part of the overall Plan: to set the terms of trade in oil and everything else on the planet, extracting wealth from all the world’s people while creating nothing but terror and, hopefully, submission. But the American threat to humanity was so general, and so generally perceived and felt, it achieved the opposite of what Washington had wished. Rather than the world acclimating itself to the rule of the “New Rome,” as the imperialists were openly calling themselves, much of the planetary community conspired to find ways to break the unequal ties that bound them to the empire.

The Iraq invasion greatly accelerated the process of U.S. imperialism’s decline, so much so that, only a few years later the American Lords of Capital found themselves turning to a Black man to put a dramatically different face on their imperial enterprise. But Barack Obama cannot save them. The U.S. dollar’s days as the world’s reserve currency are numbered, and when the dollar is finally dethroned, only the military aspect of the imperial husk will remain. For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. Glen Ford was BAR Executive Editor until his death in July 2021.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford.

Glen Ford was BAR Executive Editor until his death in July 2021.

Glen Ford

imperialism

Iraq war

Black Agenda Radio

West Asia

Iraq

George Bush

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