In the lead-up to the fifth anniversary of 9/11, George Bush went on vacation to his Crawford ranch, where, when he wasn’t playing cowboy, he apparently did a little light reading. One of the books we’re told he dusted off was Camus’ The Stranger, which The Daily Show’s John Stewart quickly pointed out is a story about an unreflective “westerner who kills an Arab for no good reason and dies with no remorse.” To a great many observers, this sounds like a fitting summary of not only the Bush legacy and America’s fate in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also what will become of Uncle Sam’s stature in the 21st century.

In the 1930s, the great British philosopher of history Arnold J Toynbee theorized that great civilizations, like animal species, become ascendant through supreme adaptation to the world around them. According to Toynbee, attunement to the global environment requires incredible cultural elasticity and creativity. The inevitable problem seems to be that once a civilization becomes dominant, its institutions begin to ossify and simply stop evolving. When this happens, rival cultures that are still responding appropriately to the ebb and flow of the ever-changing world around them surpass the once preeminent civilization, which is so mired in “the cake of custom” that it is invariably forced into a state of decline.

Old-school conservative analyst and former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips, who dedicated his most recent book, American Theocracy, “to the millions of Republicans, present and lapsed, who have opposed the Bush dynasty and the disenlightenment in the 2000 and 2004 elections,” has picked up where Toynbee left off. For Phillips, the most important linchpin of this kind of historical analysis is energy: “The evidence is that leading world economic powers, after an energy golden era, lose their magic—and not by accident. The infrastructures created by these unusual, even quirky successes eventually become economic obstacle courses and inertia-bound burdens.” Phillips’ argument is a strong and nuanced one as he draws parallels between America’s arc and the rise and fall of the Dutch and British empires that preceded it.

From the 1590s to the 1720s, extraordinary innovation in the uses of wind, air, and whale oil created for the Dutch the world’s foremost global trading empire and largest merchant marine force. Holland’s cutting edge windmills and ships were the envy of the world and Amsterdam was the definitive center of international commerce and finance. In the 1760s, however, England began to eclipse Holland, and it wasn’t long before “coal, iron, and the steam engine overwhelmed the windmills that had been so advanced two centuries earlier.” No other 18th century power came close to matching England in coal resources and knowing how to use them. Britain’s unparalleled engineering prowess fueled the industrial revolution, and by the time George Stephenson perfected the first steam locomotive in 1814, the expansive British Empire had already left Holland behind in the dustbin of history, still entrenched in its antiquated fuel infrastructure.

Similarly, by 1914, “the graying temples of what had once been a pioneering fuel culture and infrastructure” were tantamount to a clanky museum of industrial archaeology as America overtook Britain at the dawn of the petroleum era. As a bewildered British traveler to the US in 1923 pointed out, “Travel but a little in this country and you will gain the impression that the modernism of the United States flowed from its oil wells. Outwardly, oil occupies there the place which coal occupies in Great Britain. . . . A network of oil pipe-lines underlies this country, more extensive than the network of railways overlying ours. . . . Does not the American partly live in oil?”

As we all know, the 20th century unequivocally belonged to America, the world’s foremost petroleum innovator. This was in large part due to “getting there first” and the American engineering ingenuity which resulted in the invention of the mass-produced automobile, airplane, and virtually all modern oil extraction and refining techniques, manufacturing processes, and tools of war. It was also due to the petrodollar recycling economy, a system set up by Henry Kissinger to solidify the American dollar’s supremacy as the world’s fiat currency. The system pegged all OPEC oil to the greenback so that as consumers and industry buy up more foreign oil, oil producers wind up with enormous dollar surpluses. Ideally, most of these dollars then cascade back to America in the form of Treasury Bond purchases, bank savings, weapons purchases, and infrastructure investment (i.e., in the kinds of giant American engineering firms that have built up Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar). In the end, all roads lead back to Rome.

America is still, in fact, riding the petroleum tidal wave. But things are starting to get rocky. For one thing, the same Middle Eastern petrodollar hubs that are propping Fortress America up have also long been covertly financing the resourceful terrorist groups like Al Qaeda that want to smash it down. But even if the War on Terror could contain the terrorist threat (though all indications are that it can be no more effective than the War on Drugs), the fact remains that oil has seen its heyday. As we enter the era of Peak Oil, demand will continue to outpace production as America remains embroiled in its very costly entanglements in the Middle East to secure the oil taps and ensure adherence to the petrodollar system.

In order to finance these expansions of the hardening American imperial circuit, the Bush administration has resorted to receiving massive loans of unprecedented scale from the Asian economic powers. In a very short time, the US has gone from the world’s largest creditor to its largest debtor. And now that the Bush administration has given enormous permanent tax cuts to America’s richest citizens and corporations, the mountain of unserviceable debt will continue to grow. To make matters worse, as the Fed prints more dollars to pay back its loans, the dollar will continue to decline in value and desirability as the world fiat currency. And so begins a seemingly inevitable period of economic decline.

As if this weren’t bad enough, global consumers are passing over the gas-guzzling American cars that were once the envy of the world in favour of smaller, more efficient Asian cars. In fact, a skyrocketing amount of production of everything from sneakers to circuit boards is hemorrhaging out of America and into Asia. And now former manufacturing megahubs like Detroit and Pittsburgh must look to the Chinese like desolate museums of a bygone era. With giant factories closing down all over the States, it should come as no surprise that manufacturing has been surpassed by what The New York Times has referred to as “the borrower-industrial complex,” a complicated web of insurance, mortgage, and investment interests that excel in “providing Americans with artificial purchasing power.” The robust American economy that once thrived on manufacturing products for the world has been replaced by one whose biggest industry is keeping Americans swamped in debt. And while the financial sector is growing, more and more working class Americans, relics of a seemingly distant past, are staying afloat only by the good graces of Visa and Chase Manhattan.

Phillips suggests that while both Uncle Sam and Joe Sixpack are drowning in debt within the confines of America’s structural calcifications, China’s star is rising. Not only is its economy poised to overtake the US’s in just a couple of decades, but its current crop of hungry students, who blow American high school and college students out of the water, are going to burst onto the scene with an incomparable wellspring of scientific and engineering inventiveness. It is perhaps in China, Phillips speculates, that the post-petroleum economy will be born, leaving America choking on its more-refined dust.

And where will Canada stand in all of this tumult? Harper’s Calgary conservatives are clearly dead-set on anchoring us to the petroleum Titanic. How long will Canadians march in lockstep to such a Cal-garish agenda? Maybe when the heap of Canadian troop corpses used to plug the brittle Afghan dam becomes sufficiently rancid, Canadians will begin to recognize the untenability of the Project for the New American Century.

Bizarrely, Bush has responded obliquely to such criticism with an inappropriately appropriated Camus quote: “Freedom is a long distance race,” he tells us. We should heed Phillips’ warning that Bush is playing Pied Piper as the West marches blithely into the abyss. dadleman@gmail.com