On Wednesday the commercial press was full of alarm over this country’s dependence on China for strategically-important minerals, especially the rare earths essential to 21st century electronics and magnets. Today, though, the same outlets report a reorganization of the State Department, including eliminating its Africa office and almost all diplomatic contacts with Africa. Nowhere in the reporting do I see mention of the fact that Africa produces a huge proportion of the world’s strategic minerals, especially coltan, cobalt, and lithium. Most of those mining and processing facilities are owned by Chinese companies. So are the railroads and port facilities that serve them. US imperialism’s attention span has never been long, but four days and a failure to connect these stories is short even for them. And this is not just about Trump. An inability to imagine a foreign policy independent of a single enemy has characterized US imperialism since the mid-20th century and the US has been stepping away from Africa since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I think studying big-ticket projects is another way of assessing where the minds of our finance capitalists are. Let’s look at bridges and tunnels for a moment. They are personally interesting to me because I associate them with my Dad. I was four or five years old when he took me with him to the mouth of the still-under-construction third tube of the Lincoln Tunnel and left me with an electricians’ foreman while he walked in to the front of the Jersey-side excavation. I was ten when he finished engineering and supervising the electrical power and light for the lower level of the George Washington Bridge, which expanded its capacity to fourteen lanes of traffic. Most significant for me was the Arthur Kill Bridge. It took up so much of his attention because its electrical motors had to be powered and controlled precisely and evenly over the longest and highest vertical-lift span in the world.
When New York City completed the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in 1964, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world. Between 1849 and 1981, the world’s longest suspension spans had always been in the United States, including the Brooklyn Bridge (1883) and the Golden Gate Bridge (1937). Today the Verrazano is number twenty. Its span is exceeded by suspension bridges in Japan, South Korea, Denmark, and Norway, along with three in Turkey and ten in China. Perhaps the US has already built all the bridges we need. Perhaps bridges are a bad idea. I want to look at a couple of other mega projects before considering those ideas.
In 2013, Turkey built the world’s longest immersed tube tunnel (running underwater instead of under the sea bed) to connect Europe and Asia by rail. In 2016, Switzerland completed the world’s longest and deepest rail tunnel: 35 miles long and over a mile below the surface. By comparison, the Hudson Tunnel from Jersey City to Manhattan opened in 1907. New tunnels have been recommended for decades, but when the tunnel was flooded in 2012 by Hurricane Sandy it became obvious that it would be necessary to dig a new tunnel in order to close and fix the old ones. That project has been plagued by political cancellations of funds. It is currently projected to be done by 2035!
But maybe we shouldn’t be comparing rail tunnels. Maybe we should look at high-speed rail instead. Japan pioneered this in 1964 with a line running from Kyoto to Tokyo, now at 175 mph. Europe followed, developing international rail networks with trains traveling between 160 and 220 mph. China has 25,000 miles of high-speed rail. The 800-mile run from Beijing to Shanghai averages 180 mph. And what about the United States? Well, we have some routes in the Northeast that we call high-speed. The most popular is the Acela, between Boston and Washington, DC. The Acela is capable of speeds of 150 mph, but only 50 miles of the 457 mile route can handle that. The actual average speed between New York and Boston on the Acela is 66 mph.
But let me not be a buzzkill. There is high-speed rail being developed in the West, in more open spaces where the trains may not have to slow down so much as in the Northeast. There is the Brightline West, which - if completed - will connect Los Angeles and Las Vegas at an average speed of 100 mph. I will note that this is the project of a private-equity firm, but is funded by state-backed bonds. I will also note that it was intended to be complete in time for the influx of visitors to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics and that is no longer an expectation. A publicly-owned system is also under construction with the intent of connecting San Francisco with Los Angeles, and eventually San Diego. But of that 500-mile first phase, only 22 miles of roadbed are now ready for track. Another 119 miles of roadbed should be ready for tracks by December of 2026. That will allow rail service to open between… Bakersfield and Merced. Even the funding for that is uncertain, so maybe I’m being a buzzkill anyway.
What do we build here in the United States? There was that big, beautiful border wall. When he first got into office, President Trump promised 2000 miles, paid for by Mexico. By the end of his first term, he had built about 40 miles and refurbished another 400 miles of previously-existing wall. It’s not that I thought it was a good idea - I thought it was a terrible idea, for so many reasons - but it was a megaproject.
But I don’t want to mislead you. We do build big. We do spend big. Three weeks ago, Lockheed Martin got a $5 billion contract to build precision-guided missiles. Last year, the Navy awarded $10 billion for the construction of an amphibious-assault ship and three transport-dock ships to support it. For the last ten years, the Air Force, Marines, and Navy have been flying Lockheed’s F-35 Stealth fighter planes at an average cost of $100 million each. They fly at 1200 mph and carry all sorts of gee-whiz weapons and detection systems. Meanwhile, Boeing is developing the next generation of fighter planes with features (and costs!) that are secret.
So maybe bridges uproot communities on either side. Maybe hydroelectric projects destroy ecosystems while they reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. Maybe high-speed rail is dangerous to the people who live along its routes. But high-tech weapons development manages to incorporate virtually every kind of deadly collateral effect, while also being designed solely to impose more death on vulnerable people around the world: Making precision air strikes on entire apartment buildings in order to kill one person who might be inside. Rapidly transporting huge numbers of bored and heavily-armed young Americans to places that they can’t locate on a map, where they don’t speak the language, and whose people they hold in contempt.
Again, this is not a Trump problem, although he has definitely accelerated it. This isn’t even an oligarchy problem, although the rise of extreme wealth gaps and diminishing democracy has been growing since the Reagan era. This is a problem a white America that is so identified with its own imperial privilege that it doesn’t even understand the world that makes it possible. How many Americans chuckled at the UK’s belief that they were a superpower, long after the Empire was gone? How many shook their heads at Brexit and the blind certainty that the Eurozone depended on England for its prosperity and not vice versa? Who’s laughing now?
