The Twilight of American Power

[liberalpragmatist]

For whatever reason, there have been a lot of good articles lately about the loss of American influence in the world.

First, there's this terrific pair of articles from Newsweek:

1) Bush’s World View: High Hopes, Hard Facts
The world’s a stage: His ideals are soaring, but now Bush must live and lead by his own code
By Fareed Zakaria

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6857531/site/newsweek /

2) Dream On America: The U.S. Model: For years, much of the world did aspire to the American way of life. But today countries are finding more appealing systems in their own backyards
By Andrew Moravcsik

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6857387/site/newsweek /

The second one isn't even available in the US edition - only in the international edition. Read it. It's simply fantastic.

3) Then there's this piece from that reliable left-wing rag The Financial Times of London, written by former Neocon Michael Lind and available on DailyKos:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/26/144024/687

Excerpt: A decade ago, American triumphalists mocked those who argued that the world was becoming multipolar, rather than unipolar. Where was the evidence of balancing against the US, they asked. Today the evidence of foreign co-operation to reduce American primacy is everywhere -- from the increasing importance of regional trade blocs that exclude the US to international space projects and military exercises in which the US is conspicuous by its absence.

It is true that the US remains the only country capable of projecting military power throughout the world. But unipolarity in the military sphere, narrowly defined, is not preventing the rapid development of multipolarity in the geopolitical and economic arenas -- far from it. And the other great powers are content to let the US waste blood and treasure on its doomed attempt to recreate the post-first world war British imperium in the Middle East.

That the rest of the world is building institutions and alliances that shut out the US should come as no surprise. The view that American leaders can be trusted to use a monopoly of military and economic power for the good of humanity has never been widely shared outside of the US. The trend toward multipolarity has probably been accelerated by the truculent unilateralism of the Bush administration, whose motto seems to be that of the Hollywood mogul: "Include me out."

... Ironically, the US, having won the cold war, is adopting the strategy that led the Soviet Union to lose it: hoping that raw military power will be sufficient to intimidate other great powers alienated by its belligerence. To compound the irony, these other great powers are drafting the blueprints for new international institutions and alliances. That is what the US did during and after the second world war.

4) An article from Slate Magazine about the new CIA Report on the World in 2020 which predicts that by 2020 we will be in a multipolar world:

http://www.slate.com/id/2112697 /

Who will be the first politician brave enough to declare publicly that the United States is a declining power and that America's leaders must urgently discuss what to do about it? This prognosis of decline comes not (or not only) from leftist scribes rooting for imperialism's downfall, but from the National Intelligence Council—the "center of strategic thinking" inside the U.S. intelligence community.

The NIC's conclusions are starkly presented in a new 119-page document, "Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project." It is unclassified and available on the CIA's Web site. The report has received modest press attention the past couple weeks, mainly for its prediction that, in the year 2020, "political Islam" will still be "a potent force." Only a few stories or columns have taken note of its central conclusion:

The likely emergence of China and India ... as new major global players—similar to the advent of a united Germany in the 19th century and a powerful United States in the early 20th century—will transform the geopolitical landscape with impacts potentially as dramatic as those in the previous two centuries.

In this new world, a mere 15 years away, the United States will remain "an important shaper of the international order"—probably the single most powerful country—but its "relative power position" will have "eroded." The new "arriviste powers"—not only China and India, but also Brazil, Indonesia, and perhaps others—will accelerate this erosion by pursuing "strategies designed to exclude or isolate the United States" in order to "force or cajole" us into playing by their rules.

America's current foreign policy is encouraging this trend, the NIC concluded. "U.S. preoccupation with the war on terrorism is largely irrelevant to the security concerns of most Asians," the report states. The authors don't dismiss the importance of the terror war—far from it. But they do write that a "key question" for the future of America's power and influence is whether U.S. policy-makers "can offer Asian states an appealing vision of regional security and order that will rival and perhaps exceed that offered by China." If not, "U.S. disengagement from what matters to U.S. Asian allies would increase the likelihood that they will climb on Beijing's bandwagon and allow China to create its own regional security that excludes the United States."

Finally, a speech today by Republican Ron Paul of Texas (actually, Libertarian - runs as a Republican b/c only way to get on the ballot) - http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2005/cr012605.htm

***

Not all of this is Bush's making. Many of these trends are historical and can't be done away with. No matter what a US president does, much of Asia for instance, will rise. But the animosity towards the US, our policies of America First that have come with Bush have accelerated these trends and turned what could have been a positive for us into a negative. There's nothing inherently wrong about other countries getting power. It's that they are doing so with the intention now of marginalizing the US. A President Gore or President Kerry wouldn't have been able to completely undo this but they understood this far better than the neocons.

Kerry was constantly mocked for his multilateralism and his internationalism. Pundits claimed he was being vague and unrealistic while Bush was supposedly being "realistic about the goals we face" and had "strong, firm beliefs." Even among many voters I talked to, there was a disconnect between what Kerry said about multilateralism and what they were willing to accept. Most of them supported multilateralism generally, but when Kerry talked of the need to cooperate with other countries and work with the international community even when we didn't necessarily have to (for instance, the Afghan war, which Kerry said should have involved NATO) their response was something along the lines of "we can't just do what's popular with the world," or "that's schoolyard behavior," and "we need to stand up for what's right for America." What that told me was that there was a fundamental misunderstanding of most Americans of the necessity of global support. The United States can't lead if no one is willing to follow. We can't be the most powerful nation if we're only feared, not respected.

[Old and In the Way]

1. We are in decline because we are unbalanced.

Ever see a plane fly on one wing? Those that do, don't fly for long. Or row a boat with one oar in the water? I think our country is like that. Power is resident in one wing of our political system today which disenfranchises 50% of the population.

As a result, we are moving in circles, going nowhere.

[teryang]

2. The tragic flaw in many Americans

...is that they are so insular. Generally, they speak only one language. They passively get their news from the same flawed sources they have been following for years.

Therefore, they cannot even imagine what they don't know about the world scene or the perspective of other cultures. In a very real sense this is the old cultural chauvinism of the white man's burden (known in the modern format as the ugly Americanism). It is appropriate to note its flagrant reappearance in the current policy environment of belligerence and neo-colonialism. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt carefully documented the relationship between colonialism and its flawed assumptions and the development of totalitarianism.

In order to cultivate this level of ignorance, traditional American institutions had to be attacked and marginalized. This is what 911 and the contrived "war on terror" was all about. From the outside looking in, it is readily apparent. Manipulators like Pakistans Musharref were all too willing to assist American "young turks" in this destructive and ill fated experiment. You want to tear yourself apart and reward me in the process, go ahead, fools!

The major Asian states are becoming major powers. Now these states are self sufficient in cultural terms and can replace and train their own elites in the modern scientific endeavors. They are nuclear armed and have large standing armies. The burgeoning classes of well to do in China and India along with their huge populations bode ill for American notions of indefinite dominance. As one analyst pointed out, the "middle class" in India is bigger than the entire population of the US. The primary disadvantage of these states militarily is that they have no capital ship navies to project power as we do.

I guess the red state rubes and fascist think tank poobahs believe that, if challenged, we can readily defeat these rivals because of our material advantage in military hardware. They think Vietnam was a "mistake" that we lost on the "homefront." Therefore, they make the ludicrous inference that we can conquer territory on the Asian landmass and hold it. They are making these dubious assumptions on the basis of a combination of ignorance, chauvinism, and racism.