It’s becoming clearer and clearer that we’re looking at a seismic shift in the US’s relationship with the world, between:
- The US dismantling its foreign interference apparatuses (like USAID 👇)
- Marco Rubio stating that we’re now in a multipolar world with “multi-great powers in different parts of the planet” and that “the postwar global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us”
- The tariffs on supposed “allies” like Mexico, Canada or the EU
This is the US effectively saying “our attempt at running the world is over, to each his own, we’re now just another great power, not the ‘indispensable nation’.”
It looks “dumb” (as the WSJ just wrote) if you are still mentally in the old paradigm but it’s always a mistake to think that what the US (or any country) does is dumb.
Hegemony was going to end sooner or later, and now the U.S. is basically choosing to end it on its own terms. It is the post-American world order - brought to you by America itself.
Even the tariffs on allies, viewed under this angle, make sense, as it redefines the concept of “allies”: they don’t want - or maybe rather can’t afford - vassals anymore, but rather relationships that evolve based on current interests.
You can either view it as decline - because it does unquestionably look like the end of the American empire - or as avoiding further decline: controlled withdrawal from imperial commitments in order to focus resources on core national interests rather than being forced into an even messier retreat at a later stage.
In any case it is the end of an era and, while the Trump administration looks like chaos to many observers, they’re probably much more attuned to the changing realities of the world and their own country’s predicament than their predecessors. Acknowledging the existence of a multipolar world and choosing to operate within it rather than trying to maintain an increasingly costly global hegemony couldn’t be delayed much further. It looks messy but it is probably better than maintaining the fiction of American primacy until it eventually collapses under its own weight.
This is not to say that the U.S. won’t continue to wreak havoc on the world, and in fact we might be seeing it become even more aggressive than before. Because when it previously was (badly, and very hypocritically) trying to maintain some semblance of self-proclaimed “rules-based order”, it now doesn’t even have to pretend it is under any constraint, not even the constraint of playing nice with allies. It’s the end of the U.S. empire, but definitely not the end of the U.S. as a major disruptive force in world affairs.
All in all this transformation may mark one of the most significant shifts in international relations since the fall of the Soviet Union. And those most unprepared for it, as is already painfully obvious, are America’s vassals caught completely flat-footed by the realization that the patron they’ve relied on for decades is now treating them as just another set of countries to negotiate with.
I read a Michael Hudson interview a while back when he recounted about what happened when Nixon abandoned the Bretton Woods back in 1971. He said that the newspapers at the time had all anticipated the end of US hegemony - how can the US continue to keep its global leadership position when all the reckless spending in Vietnam had far exceeded its own gold reserves? Nobody knew what to do back then, and the economists all projected that the US dominance would soon be a thing of the past.
The situation of the US empire in the 1970s was not that much better than its predicament today: the Civil Rights and anti-war movements had pummeled domestic confidence in the US government, the rise of class consciousness leading to MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign near the end of the 60s and his eventual assassination, the military defeat in Vietnam and the end of Bretton Woods, being isolated from the international community after the Bangladesh Liberation War and the Yom-Kippur War, the 1973 oil crisis and the stagflation that followed.
Challenged from both within and from without, you’d think that the hegemony of the US empire is soon to become a part of history and the USSR would ascend.
Then… Nixon went to China in 1972. Exporting its industries to China permanently crushed the domestic workers movements and trade unions, and running a persistent trade deficit (ala Hudson’s Super-imperialism) allowed the dollar to retain its hegemony in spite of its reckless spending, and thus regained its control at the world stage.
I also vehemently challenge the notion that Kissinger was some geopolitical genius - if you look at the predicament of the US at the time, Nixon had no choice but to get help from China.
What I do agree with the author though, is that the end of unipolar world is likely here. I think we’ll see China saving the US empire once again. The US can no longer ignore the contradictions of its de-industrialization that led to the Sanders and MAGA movements since 2016 threatening Wall Street finance capital, and China is now mired in a huge property bubble and dampened consumption that would be open to the dollar to come to the rescue. Both need one another, just like how Mao and Nixon saw the opportunity back in the early 1970s.
A renewed status quo is the likely outcome here.
How do you think this will happen? Trump blames China for literally everything, and his base are foaming at the mouth for war with China as much as the propagandists for the ruling class are.
yeah i highly doubt the US is going to scrap its decade+ long build-up for war with China just like that
i think if it does happen they’ll just lie about it. its not like fascist regimes arnt full of contradictions, whats another on the pile worth?
You forget that when Nixon and Mao met, China just fought America less than 20 years earlier with 180k deaths and 200k wounded/disabled on its side.
As bad as the US-China relationship is right now, I guarantee you it was much worse back then during the Cold War, when the world was on the brink of nuclear annihilation.
Like heck, China today is still talking about resuming friendship with the US. You realize that Mao was literally openly taunting the US into dropping its atomic bombs and see which country would survive longer. Mao repeatedly talked about fighting a “ten thousand years war” (lol) against American imperialism even until the final day of the world’s destruction. This kind of language simply does not exist in today’s Chinese diplomacy.
As I said, if Wall Street enters China en masse, then the dollar hegemony will be saved, takes a good cut on BRI (and thus the global supply chain), Trump gets to boast about how he reduced the trade deficits that “China has been robbing us from”.
China gets to revive its slumping economy, relieve the local government debt burden, resume its development and bringing more people out of poverty and improve their living standards, at the expense of giving up its monetary sovereignty.
It’s win-win for the US and China, but not so much for the rest of the world - Europe will lose the most out of everyone. A renewed status quo.
Yea as someone else said, Trump is probably not thinking about it in this way (though what you said may be true).He put China Warhawks in his cabinet picks.
I think he operates with a “businessman” mentality, which just looks like a mess when you’re doing it for a country. He prob just thinks of Xi as another businessman, not really caring about what the actual economic ideology of China is. China could bail US out, because they know what they’re doing, but I also remember Xi telling Biden about the US being an unreliable trade partner.