We had a good run — some eight decades or so — but it is clear by now that the United States has ceased to be the leader of the free world. A successor for that post has not been named, and it appears unlikely that the European Union, or NATO, or whatever constitutes “the West” these days, will promote from within. The job might even be eliminated, one more reduction in force courtesy of President Trump.
Rather than leading the free world, the United States is striding across the globe seemingly free of restraint, forethought, or strategy, exerting its power because it can.
In a matter of months, the Trump administration has captured Venezuela’s president and tossed him into jail in Brooklyn and has pummeled
Iran’s theocratic leadership is in a war that is ricocheting across the Middle East and upending the global economy; now the president says he will have “the honor of taking Cuba” next. Trump, in his second term, is like Michael Corleone in “The Godfather,” settling all the family business.
Nearly two decades ago, Fareed Zakaria, the international affairs columnist, published a best-selling book called “The Post-American World,” which predicted the United States’ relative decline versus other economically ascendant countries, what he called the “rise of the rest.”
The United States would remain militarily and economically pre-eminent, Zakaria argued, but it could take on a new political role, a sort of chairman of the board for the planet, relying on “consultation, cooperation and even compromise.”
Under Trump, the idea of U.S. leadership has indeed been remade — but from authority to domination, from persuasion to bullying, from nurturing alliances to wrecking them. (Consultation, cooperation, and compromise have yet to join the MAGA coalition.)
“We don’t need anybody,” a peeved Trump said last week when European leaders initially declined to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. “We’re the strongest nation in the world. We have the strongest military by far in the world. We don’t need them.”
Launching a war with only one ally and then expecting everyone else to fall in line is a perfect example of the tensions inherent in America’s new approach. The United States wants the benefits of hegemony, but without accepting the responsibilities — ensuring collective security, promoting economic openness, nurturing vital alliances — that come with it.
Trump doesn’t care to be a superpower; he just likes to wield superpowers. He wants to operate in the world constrained only by “my own morality” and “my own mind,” as he told The Times recently.
What does that mean for America’s role and purpose in a world that has been too long defined by what it is not (the post-Cold War era)? It means that what we once called Pax Americana, that U.S.-led system of alliances and institutions that promoted American interests and values and helped avoid major conflicts in the decades after World War II, is gone, and irretrievably so.
In place of the Pax Americana, we are seeing a sort of Lax Americana, a world in which a careless, uninhibited, and incurious U.S. superpower struts across the chessboard, threatening old friends and enabling old rivals, seeking short-term gains, heedless of the dangers it is creating for itself and for the world.
This is a historical aberration: a superpower that freely abdicates its leadership role, because it has concluded that leadership is for suckers; one that no longer promotes its values, because it’s decided that those values were fake anyway; one that gives up on the rules and institutions it spent so long building, because it assumes they’re no longer worth the hassle.
If Washington somehow still imagines itself as the leader of the free world, that is because it is rethinking who belongs in that world and defining downward what it means to lead.
To better understand how this new America is operating, I went back to the last major transition — when we were shifting from a Cold War stalemate to a period of unrivaled U.S. primacy — and revisited some of the influential books and essays that tried to glimpse what was coming.
Prominent among these is “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” by Paul Kennedy, the Yale historian, published in 1987 and quickly becoming one of the sacred texts of American decline.
Through the normal run of history, Kennedy wrote, great powers typically relinquish global leadership unwillingly — whether losing a major conflict against an upstart rival, missing out on some transformative technological innovation, often in the military realm, or eroding economically to the point that the burdens of hegemony become too much to bear.
Kennedy warned of what he called “imperial overstretch,” and argued that “the sum total of the United States’ global interests and obligations is nowadays far larger than the country’s power to defend them all simultaneously.”
A superpower, if it wishes to retain its status, usually needs to accomplish three hard things, Kennedy said, and it must do them all at once. First, provide and pay for military security for itself and its allies; second, satisfy the economic needs of its population, not to mention its desires; and third, ensure sufficient long-term economic growth to keep stockpiling guns and churning butter.
“Achieving all three of those feats over a sustained period of time will be a very difficult task,” Kennedy argued. “Yet achieving the first two feats — or either one of them — without the third will inevitably lead to relative eclipse over the longer term.”
That has been the fate of past great powers, such as imperial Spain, Napoleonic France, and the British Empire, when it gave way to the United States after World War II.
An American president who both boasts that his military assault on Iran can go on “forever” and tells his nation’s children to settle for “two dolls instead of 30 dolls” is exemplifying Kennedy’s argument.
“Uneven rates of economic growth would, sooner or later, lead to shifts in the world’s political and military balances,” Kennedy wrote. Put simply, superpowers don’t last on the cheap.
In this light, Trump’s fixation on how America is getting “ripped off” by the rest of the world — whether through trade deficits, the loss of manufacturing plants, or insufficient military spending by NATO members — is not just the mantra of a real-estate guy obsessed with negotiating a better deal.
It is also the resentment that dominant powers always have toward weaker ones, as Robert Gilpin, an international relations theorist, explained in “War and Change in World Politics,” his classic 1981 study of what makes hegemons come and go.
The Athenians wanted their allies to provide more resources in defense against the Persians; the British wanted their rambunctious American colonists to pony up for the fights against the Indians and the French (though excessive taxes on the colonies eventually backfired on the British Empire); and both the Soviet Union and the United States wanted their respective client states to share the costs of the Cold War standoff.
“Because the dominant power will defend the status quo in its own interest,” Gilpin wrote, “lesser states have little incentive to pay their ‘fair’ share of these protection costs.”
By Carlos Lozada
