Johan Galtung, a sociologist and Norwegian professor, who rightly made several predictions, among them being the 911 attack, the fall of the Soviet Union and the Tiananmen Square uprising, has predicted that the world’s super power will collapse while Trump is in the white house.
Long before Trump won the election or even contested for that matter, in 2000 Galtung predicted the US global power will collapse come 2025, but he later revised the year of the collapse to 2020. Galtung is convinced his prediction is materialising following the election of Donald Trump.
One of the final phases of the decline of the US predicted in the professor’s 2009 book, The Fall of the American Empire – and then What?, coincides with the anti-immigrant platform on which Trump’s campaign was built.
In the book, Galtung forecasts the rise of fascism before the country’s power receded and this is already playing out with Trump promising to deport millions of illegal immigrants and build a wall along the America – Mexico border.
While speaking to Motherboard, Galtung insists that he stands by the 2020 deadline at which the US would cease to be a super power. He believes that the election of Trump will speed up the decline, especially with Trump’s critical attitude to Nato.
“The collapse has two faces,” Dr Galtung told Motherboard, “Other countries refuse to be good allies and the USA has to do the killing themselves, by bombing from high altitudes, drones steered by computer from an office, special forces killing all over the place.
"Both are happening today, except for Northern Europe, which supports these wars, for now. That will probably not continue beyond 2020, so I stand by that deadline.”
However, Yet Xenia Wickett, head of the US and America’s programme at think-tank Chatham House does not agree with Galtung’s prediction.
"The US is a global power for many reasons. It has the strongest military in the world, it has the most robust soft power in terms of its universities, ... in terms of its companies and in terms of the reach of its media. It also remains the biggest economy in the world. The idea that any of these things are going to change in the next four years is unrealistic." Wickett told The Independent.
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