In 1988, Samuel Huntington concluded that “the United States is not immortal and its preeminence is not inevitable”. His essay, “The US: Decline or Renewal”, articulated a powerful and prescient dissent against the widely held consensus at that time bemoaning the relative erosion of American power. Huntington was right then — but his final admonition has come to pass today. In fact, not only has the US lost its preeminence, it is just about finished as a great power.
That might sound like an odd thing to say about a country with, indisputably, the mightiest military machine on the planet, one that currently allocates about a trillion dollars a year on defence spending, which is more than the next seven biggest spenders combined. But such figures can be deceptive. Material capabilities are at least crudely measurable — you can count tanks, ships, soldiers and planes, among other things — but our understanding of how those assets translate into international political power remains extremely shallow. In 1985, the Soviet Union loomed as a fearsome military titan. In 1992, the Soviet Union did not exist.
The US is not much like the USSR. But it is, discomfortingly, a lot like interwar France: a great power with a glass jaw. Scholars still debate the sources of France’s military collapse in the Second World War, but its internal atrophy (which also contributed to the ease with which it descended into docile, humiliating collaboration), was well understood, then and now. William Shirer, an eyewitness to the catastrophe, shared the widely held view that in 1925 France was “the greatest power on the continent”. Yet, as others would subsequently observe, it would take “just ten years for the leading country in Europe to become a helpless victim”. And though it is exceedingly unlikely that the US will suffer France’s particular fate, the collapse of its international political influence will probably be as sudden, and as wrenchingly consequential.
There is a yawning gap between apparent military capabilities and the ability to apply that power to well-articulated ends. And there are also limits to what the use of force can achieve. Very often, force fails to deliver the political goods. At the turn of this century, the mighty US could not, despite marshalling overwhelming military force, impose its will or secure its desired outcomes in long wars against two very weak states, Afghanistan and Iraq. More generally, the limits to the exercise of military power also include unintended political consequences. Russia’s war on Ukraine (which also exposed a very large gap between Russia’s material military capabilities on paper and its actual prowess), was disastrous for some of its most closely held international political objectives — witness, for example, the ascension of Sweden and Finland to the Nato alliance. This isn’t to suggest that the use of military force can never achieve political objectives; it is simply to observe that a massive military machine may be a necessary component of what makes a great power, but it is scarcely sufficient.
“The US is, discomfortingly, a lot like interwar France: a great power with a glass jaw.”
Against whom is the US likely to use its military might, and to achieve what? It may be that America will unleash its air force against Iran. If so, it will have been dragged into that conflict, over its previously stated reluctance to do so, by another country, and with uncertain and cascading long-term implications. Such stumbling circumstances are hardly the hallmarks of a great power commanding the grand chessboard of world politics. Moreover, beyond Iran, it is hard to imagine the country against which the US will deploy its vast military power, to bend that adversary to its will. That essential, sobering thought experiment serves as a reminder that political influence is the day-to-day currency of international power — and that the exercise of power, in any form, is only successful if it advances a country’s goals on the world stage. We are, by that metric, witnessing measures in contemporary American foreign policy that are nothing short of geopolitical suicide. And as a result, despite its new obsession with posturing masculinity, the US will be increasingly impotent as a world power, often flexing its large, impressive, and well-oiled muscles — but rarely, if ever, achieving its objectives.
The collapse of American power is due to two interrelated factors that will be difficult to repair. The US is a broken society, riddled with domestic political dysfunction. And those pathologies have led to the election (and, ruinously, the reelection) of a singularly unsuited steward of its foreign policy. Again, though the US is in little danger of foreign conquest, in its domestic political disarray it does eerily resemble interwar France — a troubled and deeply divided society characterised by what one historian described as “the embrace of unreason”. As Raymond Aron recalled in his memoirs, “basically, France didn’t exist any longer.” Instead, “it existed only in the hatred of the French for each other.” Shirer saw a country whose strength was “gradually sapped by dissention and division”, as well as “the ineptness of its leaders, the corruption of its press, and a feeling of growing confusion, hopelessness, and cynicism… of its people”.
America’s political disarray and paralysing polarisation is partially organic (over many issues, it is a sharply divided society), but that polarisation has also been exacerbated by its instrumental manipulation. As Martin Wolf argues in his recent book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, soaring inequality and massive concentrations of wealth at the very top presented a political challenge to the Republican Party: “How, after all, does a political party dedicated to the material interests of the top 0.1% of the income distribution win and hold power in a universal suffrage democracy? The answer is pluto-populism.” That is, of plutocrats masquerading as populists, “a specific elite political strategy” that involves the purposeful inflaming of cultural issues to divert attention from their economic plundering. One consequence of this strategy is that it heightens, intensifies and even radicalises existing domestic divisions.
America’s disfigured political landscape has led its electoral system to produce what would have previously been unthinkable — a personalist autocrat with an utter disdain for the Republic’s core ideals. Where does support for such a figure come from?
As Hans Kohn observed in Revolutions and Dictatorships (1939), “No nation is necessarily Fascist; no nation is entirely immune against Fascism.” In interwar Europe, fascism emerged from disorder, where it found the support of many who craved the restoration of their understanding of “order” — including, crucially, “certain conservative forces” who believed they could harness its power to crush their domestic adversaries, naively thinking they could “control fascism once they had helped it into power”. Or as the filmmaker Paul Schrader succinctly put it a few months ago, “When you vote for a strongman, your assumption is that he’ll ‘take care’ of those other people, and that his strength will benefit you in some way. But you’re just gonna end up on a list. Everyone does.”
The collateral damage of all this is the end of American power. One part of the broader Trump-tastrophe is that fundamental foreign policy questions no longer have obvious answers. What is the purpose of contemporary American power? Can we still speak of something as general as the American national interest? Personalist regimes tend not to pursue national interest, but the interests of the ruling clan and its intimate affiliates. Worse still, in the case of the Trump administration, is the pursuit of foolish, impulsive, and incoherent policies, which leave in their wake the wreckage of shattered international political partnerships that will create opportunities for others to exploit.
Trump’s most astonishing foreign policy blunder has taken place closest to home. One of the unique advantages that America has long enjoyed as a great power — it is hard to think of another example in history — is its uncommonly warm relations with its nearest neighbours. Yet Trump has managed to sabotage US relations with Canada, an act of geopolitical self-immolation that is largely without precedent. It is a blunder on the order of Japan’s decision to attack Pearl Harbor, but at least that howler followed an identifiable deductive logic: since rapacious Japanese militarists aspired to take over half the world, they calculated that at some point the effort would finally bring them into conflict with the sluggish, isolationist US, so perhaps it was best to try to seize the initiative with a devastating preventive surprise attack. That turned out to be a very bad bet, but at least its rationale had a sliver of logical plausibility, which is more than can be said for America’s current behaviour towards Canada.
Burning bridges with Canada has turned out to be the template, not the exception, of the Trump administration’s foreign policy. It has alienated allies in Europe with the barely contained glee of a child playing with matches. In Asia, where, in theory, the US would be well served to try to limit China’s growing political reach, its trade policies have left natural allies, such as Japan, South Korea and Vietnam, injured by, and necessarily on guard against, American behaviour. When it comes to South America, which some would see as falling under the purview of a US “sphere of influence”, Trump’s self-defeating economic policies have once again invited political inroads by others, especially China and the European Union. And beyond a curious concern for a handful of white South Africans, Team Trump recoils from Africa to such an extent that it has withdrawn life-saving humanitarian assistance, achieving little more than sullying the American image.
Ultimately, the only countries in the world that have reason to feel confident in the stability of their ties to the US are the Gulf States, because their relationships are not a function of the American national interest, but rather a reflection of the business interests of the presidential family and their affiliates. (Indeed, any sober assessment of US security guarantees in the region would conclude that, although they may have made sense in the Seventies, they are plainly anachronistic today.)
Trump’s torching of American power extends to many of his domestic policies as well. His war on America’s elite academic institutions, which are the envy of the world, will eventually come at the cost of US innovation in science and technology, undermining almost every aspect of its domestic economy — as well as jeopardising future military innovations. There is an auditorium full of foreign-born Nobel Prize winners who eagerly, often desperately, made their way to the US over the years. One shudders to think what would have been if Trumpism had been embraced earlier. That auditorium would be empty. The next auditorium will be empty. This is to the detriment not only of America’s soft power — its global appeal to the best and the brightest — but also its hard power, as crucial scientific breakthroughs increasingly take place beyond the gated community of this xenophobic kingdom.
Students of international relations are properly trained to recite that in world politics, the future is unwritten, and anything is possible. In an anarchic world, countries must ultimately be prepared for the unexpected, and for the worst. But with the second coming of Trump, the US is stretching that wise admonition beyond the breaking point. American foreign policy is now directed by a wildly mercurial and bracingly untutored would-be despot. Worse still, and in contrast to season one of the Trump show, the president is surrounded by sycophants (some of whom actually know better, but, shamelessly lusting for proximity to power, have renounced their own beliefs), unchecked by timid legislators submissively clinging to their seats, and abetted by a monied class seemingly determined to prove that no value is more important than insatiable chase of still more wealth.
The world no longer has the comforting luxury of pretending that Trump 1.0 was some freak aberration. And the world has surely observed that Trump 2.0 — which must be understood as representing what “America” now is — is a much more radical, and dangerous, and unpredictable enterprise. Such a country simply cannot be counted on by others. Its word is meaningless, its values absent, and its interests, beyond enriching the royal family, are indecipherable. Who is the US rooting for in the Russia-Ukraine war? Would the US come to the defence of its Nato allies in Europe? Would the US really care if China comes to dominate all of East Asia? Not so long ago, it would have been absurd to even ask such questions. Now, who knows?
All of this will matter, and it will matter in ways that will undermine American power by the most narrow calculus of its interest: its ability to get what it wants in the international arena. President Trump is known for his reverence of an early mentor, Roy Cohn, the notorious hatchet man for Joseph McCarthy, and one suspects that Hans Morgenthau would describe American foreign policy today as he did McCarthyism: “a fraudulent, stupid and dangerous farce.” It will not be long before the rest of the world reaches that conclusion.
