Last week, this column described the revolutionary fervor shaking U.S. domestic politics and transforming its political system in the most dramatic way in nearly two and a half centuries. Major changes are also underway in Washington’s foreign policy. They are already having implications for the global political and economic system the United States has built since World War II.
During the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire was the “sick man of Europe.” Last week, Donald J. Trump’s second foray abroad – he went to East Asia this time – confirmed that in the 21st century the “sick man” is likely to be Uncle Sam. From now on, Russia, China, India and other states – as well as various nonstate actors such as the international class of the super-rich and global corporations – will be fighting over parts of its carcass. It is not going to be a pretty sight.
In 1801, the Ottoman Empire, albeit reduced from its 17th-century peak, still dominated the Balkans and controlled much of the Black Sea coast and the southern shore of the Mediterranean, while the Red Sea was its private lake. For the next 100 years it kept disintegrating, losing territories to European colonial powers as well as to newly formed nation-states. France and England fought over the spoils, but joined forces to fight Russia in the Crimean War. In 1878 they again stood in its way when Russia tried to capture Constantinople. World War I grew out of the Ottoman collapse, too, and before it started Balkan states had fought two bitter wars in 1912-13. Even as late as the 1990s, the echoes of the Ottoman Empire were heard in the civil war in former Yugoslavia.
It took a couple of centuries for the Ottoman Empire to disappear. The fall of the American Empire will probably take less time, since it is an economic and political system which nations join voluntarily, and not an amalgamation of overseas territories held together by administrative institutions and military force. In fact, it is remarkable how much it has loosened up in just one year. Appropriately enough, Trump marked the first anniversary of his election with a tour of Asia, as if symbolically passing the baton of world leadership to that dynamic – and newly powerful – region.
On his trip to Asia Trump was like the Emperor from Hans Christian Andersen’s famous tale, parading stark naked through regional capitals, bathing in foreign leaders’ praise for his new suit of clothes – and being oblivious to America’s enemies smirking behind his back and rubbing their hands in anticipation.
The American international decline has entered a rapid stage, but the destruction of the American Empire began well before Trump. There have been two harebrained, lost, yet impossible-to-end wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, inability to deal with the civil war in Syria, Russia’s forced redrawing of European borders and aggression in Eastern Ukraine and, most recently, Brexit.
The latter, Brexit, occurred during Trump’s election campaign and, naturally, Trump was a supporter of Brexit while Nigel Farage, the leader of UKIP and an architect of the Leave campaign, became a Trump surrogate.
Failures abroad had their roots at home. They go back to 1980, when the American people began to dismantle their government and get rid of its competent, highly efficient bureaucracy while starving the state of tax money. As Grover Norquist, a right-wing activist and the founder of the rabidly anti-tax Americans for Tax Reform, declared, the government should be shrunk “to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
The pseudo-libertarian anti-government ideology has hollowed America out from the inside. The gun control debate is the best illustration of what the nation has turned into. As mass killings become almost a daily occurrence – with people dying at workplace, in churches and at concerts and kids being hunted down in elementary schools – the country’s political leaders are proposing to give all citizens even more guns so that they – and not the state – could defend themselves from mass murderers. The great political thinkers of the Enlightenment – including America’s Founding Fathers – would have been appalled by this voluntary rejection of civilized society and return to the state of nature.
Over the past four decades, the government’s regulatory functions have been greatly weakened, Regulations, which are now seen as a plague impeding economic growth, in reality create the infrastructure for sustainable development by promoting social peace and economic stability, protecting the environment, curbing predatory practices and providing a safety net to the young, the old and the infirm. The regulatory function was weakened in some parts and strengthened in others, those that protect the rich and the big corporations.
The government has been starved of resources, as public debt rocketed from around 30% of GDP in 1980 to over 100% today. Meanwhile, a class of the super-rich has emerged and after-tax corporate profits have reached record levels as percentage of gross domestic product. Top 2,000 US corporations hold a massive $2 trillion cash hoard.
It is therefore hardly a surprise that special interests dominate the government and define its policies, and that public servants regard their government careers as a kind of apprenticeship for much more lucrative careers as lobbyists. Or that the government is completely dysfunctional, unable even to deal with an unpopular, feeble-minded, thoroughly corrupt and quite possibly treasonous president and his entourage of kleptocrats and Russian agents.
The Trump Administration has been systematically dismantling the government, starting with vital agencies such as the State Department – which is supposed to maintain the global system that constitutes the American Empire. The tax bill that the lower house of Congress passed last week will deal a further blow to the US government while rewarding corporations and one-percenters. The battle for the carcass of the United States of America has been joined.
Trump’s first trip abroad was like a visit by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He went to the Middle East, and the moment he left the Saudis moved against Qatar and then created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in Yemen and effected a domestic purge. A Israeli-Saudi alliance against Iran is now in the works, which will draw the Jewish State into a sectarian conflict in the Muslim world. Trump’s trip to Poland and his support for its nationalist government has now been followed by a 60,000-strong neo-nazi march.
It would be interesting to see what happens in Asia after Trump’s trip to the region. So far, eleven original countries moved to revive the Trans-Pacific Partnership. They fear China’s domination of the regional economy and want to band together to counteract Beijing’s influence. But without the United States, after Trump has withdrawn from the TPP, this partnership is won’t be able to play the original role intended for it by the Obama Administration. The next move in this game will be China’s – and it will be the first salvo in the protracted post-American division of spoils in the Asia-Pacific region.
