Nemesis over America

The choice between Donald J Trump and Kamala Harris in the US presidential election was irrelevant to one fact: the ongoing decline of the United States. It has lost leadership, confidence, moral authority, and economic supremacy – and is not about to regain any of these regardless of who is president. D J Trump will simultaneously be the latest flag-bearer of American hubris and pall-bearer of American decline.

Four decades ago Paul Kennedy’s ‘The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers’ provoked controversy by positing “imperial overstretch” as the probable cause of American decline. The challenger then foremost in causing anxiety to Americans was Japan, with its conspicuous wealth, superior technology in cars and electronics, and management techniques better than those taught at the vaunted US business schools.

The pivotal year 1989 began with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. The triumph of liberal democracy wedded to capitalism was proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama in his essay ‘The End of History?’. The Berlin Wall fell and brought down the Iron Curtain with it. US triumphalists claimed that it was the Soviet Union that had fallen victim to ‘overstretch’, not the new-sole superpower.

The Soviet Union agreed to the reunification of Germany in 1990 and Saddam Hussain’s attack on Kuwait initiated the ‘new world order’ aka the unipolar world. The year 1991 brought the US triumph in the first Iraq war and the demise of the Soviet Union.

The decade 1991-2001 marked the apogee of the US as a hyper-power. While the Soviet Union dismembered, China slumbered, and the internet materialised, the US enjoyed what Edward Gibbon called “immoderate greatness” in ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’. America was unchallenged. It appeared that the US would define modernity in the twenty-first century as it had done in the twentieth.

One limpid September morning in 2001, American optimism, witnessed from Tocqueville onwards, collapsed in the face of terrorism and was replaced by hubris, illiberalism, and xenophobia that have never been too far beneath the surface and surfaced again earlier this month.

Two wars and two economic events in the first decade of the twenty-first century greased the slope of American decline. The hyper-power lashed with rage on Afghanistan and with hubris on Iraq. The US lost both wars.

The Iraq invasion was the greatest strategic blunder since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union during World War II. The comprehensiveness of the US defeat in the Afghanistan war cannot be overestimated. It was a multi-decade, multi-trillion-dollar military, technological, strategic, and political catastrophe. Iraq and Afghanistan proved to be proof of Prof Kennedy’s ‘imperial overstretch’.

Two economic events, one a year before 9/11 and the second seven years later have wreaked even more destruction in the US than 9/11 ever did. China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2000 accelerated the hollowing-out of American manufacturing and a mere one decade later made China the second-largest economy in the world; that has since become larger than the Japanese, Indian, and German economies combined.

The sub-prime crisis of 2008 has suppressed Western economic growth for nearly two decades and shook the Western peoples’ confidence in neoliberal democracy and its economic arm, globalisation. While voters in Western democracies began questioning democracy, China was posting a double-digit GDP growth rate not year after year, but decade after decade.

The West won the cold war not just because it had loftier ideals, but because it was, decade after decade, demonstrably richer and more technologically innovative compared to the communist bloc. The Chinese demonstration has cut the umbilical cord connecting liberal democracy to economic strength and, more recently, to technological innovation. No wonder voters worldwide are leaning towards authoritarian populism across the world, from Indonesia to India, Hungary, onwards to the US.

The final piece of American decline is moral; what Gibbon called the loss of “civic virtue”. Hypocrisy from slavery to Abu-Ghraib has, to be sure, abounded in US conduct since the country’s founding. During the cold war, however, as long as the Soviet Union and its satellites suppressed the civil liberties of their citizens, denied them economic rights, and deepened their citizens’ deprivation, and conversely the US was willing to step in with self-serving help to the needy nations, the moral horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be set aside.

The American global-civic virtue that emerged after World War II has lost strength. The US led the creation of new international institutions that were designed to impede, if not forestall, war and help poor nations. The United Nations, IMF, Nato, and the World Bank are the most prominent examples. The merits of these institutions are debatable. What is not debatable is that they undergird American primacy while permitting American piety. The US led the world in providing security, proclaimed and maintained the ‘rules-based order’, and made the cold war into a moral crusade by weaponising the rhetoric for human rights and democracy.

Aspects of American decline have been visible not just in Afghanistan and Iraq. It began in earnest in the four-year period that began with the 1971 forced abandonment of the gold standard, the OPEC oil embargo in 1973, president Nixon’s resignation in 1974 and the fall of Saigon one year later.

The decay hit home in the 1970s ‘malaise’ visible in American cities in the late 1970s, the Oklahoma bombing in 1995, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the murderous shambles in dealing with Covid-19 that killed more than 1.2 million Americans. American cities no longer define the future; Dubai and Shanghai do.

The US still leads the world in military spending and the ability to project military power across the globe. The military spending differential is lopsided; the US spends more on its defence than the next ten countries combined. In this sense, it still is the only superpower.

The American economy remains the largest in the world, with its greatest strength coming from the internet-based surveillance economy that nonetheless masks the erosion of its manufacturing capacity. Soft power wielded by Hollywood and popular culture retains vibrancy. The US dollar remains the world’s dominant currency. The US may be declining, but it is not about to fall a la Rome.

What has fallen? The generosity, openness, and expanse of the spirit of the American people. US political leadership has degraded as precipitously as its democracy. The US has lost even the last shreds of its moral stature by supplying bombs that have killed more than 42,000 unarmed civilians and children last year; and by standing in mute indifference to scenes of pogrom, ghettoisation, and callous mass-murder that have obliterated the Geneva Conventions.

Some would argue that the US is returning to the pre-World War II situation of one among many. Perhaps so. But I, like so many, have seen an open, generous, and welcoming America that tried, however imperfectly, to live up to its founding ideals. No more. I mourn its loss.

The writer has served as Pakistan’s minister for foreign affairs, defence, commerce, and energy. These are his personal views. He tweets/posts @kdastgirkhan