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Salient. Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 41 No. 15. July 3 1978

The Decline of US Imperialism

The Decline of US Imperialism

First the massive American war machine had been openly and decisively defeated by people's war. It provided immense encouragement to third world peoples struggling against imperialist domination. It also marked the start of US imperialism's strategic decline.

In the early years following World War 2 US imperialism acted as the capitalist world's gendarme, intervening at will around the world. But with its debacle in Indochina the growing strength and unity of the third world and US inability to arrive at a united foreign policy, US imperialism has been forced into a strategically passive role in a world situation which is rapidly eroding its power.

The relative weakness of US imperialism has been brought home by the aggressive rise of the Soviet Union as a contending superpower. In Angola and Ethiopia it has freely intervened with thousands of Cuban ghurkhas while the US remained paralysed by endless debates in Washington.

It is now the Soviet Union which is trying the role of international gendarme. It threatens US imperialism's world empire on all fronts and its offensive can only end in war between the two rival superpowers. The world situation today is a far cry from that which preceded the US/Indochina war.