Covering the 1968 Vietnam war, Associated Press journalist Peter Arnett quoted an American major: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it” and said “he was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties.” The same quote could be applied to Israel bombing Gaza and more generally, the American attitude on the international order that she helped built in the last eight decades.
The current international order was built out of two world wars in an effort to reconstruct peace and avoid the ultimate third world war, after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The victorious powers at the end of the Second World War decided to divide the world between the American-led Free World and the Soviet-led Communist world. By 1991, the United States emerged as the unipolar power after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Instead of dissolving the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) after the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact crumbled, the old rivalry was rekindled when Russia felt that she was excluded from Europe and treated as the enemy. Shocked by the 9/11 attack in New York in 2001, the United States spent the next two decades fighting in the Middle East.
When Donald Trump emerged as President in 2016, neoconservatives in the American military industrial complex identified China as the existential rival, thus setting the stage for a multi-front confrontation for the unipolar power. By this time, the rise of China as the second largest economy in terms of GDP and largest trading partner meant that the unipolar order had begun to shift to a multipolar order. In this decade, this shift became evident with the rise of India, today the most populous country and the fastest growing economy in the world.
From the long lens of history, the United States reached parity with the United Kingdom as the largest economy and industrial power in the world in terms of GDP as early as 1870. Britain was a small island economy that used her maritime power and “divide and rule” political acumen to master colonies comprising one quarter of mankind.
The United States is a continental giant guarded by two oceans with no credible neighbourhood threats. Once the European powers exhausted themselves fighting each other in two world wars, the United States emerged as the undisputed hegemon because she was guarded by two oceans. With superior industrial might and technology, America could fight two fronts with resources to spare.
In 1956, when President Eisenhower forced Britain and France to retreat from their occupation of the Suez Canal, the United States became the unchallenged guardian of the oil-rich Middle East. By aiding mujahideen fighters to kick the Soviets out of Afghanistan in 1989, America created the conditions for the collapse of the Soviet Union, exhausted by internal corruption and over-burdened by its wasteful military expenditure.
The Cold War was never an equal contest, with the US having three times the Soviet GDP in 1950, increasing to near seven times of the former Soviet Union by 2003. This winter, as Ukraine faces a Russian assault and Israel fighting not just the Palestinians but also Houthis and Hezbollah, the United States is now confronting four fronts at the same time – Eastern Europe, Middle East, Taiwan Straits and internally fractious politics, united only by bipartisan anger against China. In his masterly treatise, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers”, Yale historian Paul Kennedy saw by 1986 that the United States faced the twin problems of Number One in relative decline: first, the longevity of remaining top dog and second, whether she can retain the economic and technological bases of her power. In short, America must address her strategic overextension or “over-reach” in which resources cannot match the burden of staying as top dog.
America cannot fight forever wars with a military expenditure that is equal to her annual interest burden on her ballooning debt. In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, the premier international relations magazine, CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria weighed the options of the “Self-Doubting Superpower”, that America shouldn’t give up on the world it made. Hoover fellow Philip Zelikow gave a realistic review of how American statecraft has atrophied, particularly in respect of industrial capacity. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman gave the first honest American self-review of how “The American Way of Economic War” was made by overusing its most powerful tool, the US dollar.
Harvard Professor Gordon Hansen reviewed American trade policy by concluding “If Washington continues down the path of trade unilateralism, it will destabilize the global alliances and institutions that it spent seven decades building.” The Ukraine war unveiled all the weaknesses of the neoliberal foundations of free trade, finance, supply chains and international relations, that no country can determine its own fate independent of its history, geography and demography.
The West (United States and Europe) is already over-stretched in defending its allies in Ukraine and Israel in terms of funding and supply of arms and munition. In supporting Israel in its near genocidal destruction of Gaza, the United States has lost all moral credibility with the Global South. If the West wavers in aid to Ukraine, which is currently financially and militarily on life support, then the Rest would know that relying on Western promises can be fatal. In the last three years, President Joe Biden has abandoned Afghanistan, taken on Russia and now faces an impossible task in bringing Israel to heel on cessation of war.
Next year, he faces Trump at the polls. By putting America First, the two Presidents are dismantling the world order that America built because they have weaponized every single foundation of the existing order. The power game is always for the Number One to lose, not necessarily for rivals to take. So far, we don’t even know whether Number One knows what the plot is really all about.
(The writer, a former Central banker, writes on global affairs from an Asian perspective.)