Trump hastens imperial decline

We're having gale force winds and intermittent outages this morning, so I am not going to try to write anything that requires coherent attention. Here I share a piece to ponder for the new year.

Author Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who specializes in Southeast Asia. Juan Cole passed this along by way of TomDispatch.

The End of the American Century

... let’s face it, Donald Trump’s second term is likely to mark the end of America’s near-century as the world’s preeminent superpower. After 80 years of near-global hegemony, there are arguably five crucial elements necessary for the preservation of U.S. world leadership: robust military alliances in Asia and Europe, healthy capital markets, the dollar’s role as the globe’s reserve currency, a competitive energy infrastructure, and an agile national security apparatus.

 However, surrounded by sycophants and suffering the cognitive decline that accompanies aging, Trump seems determined to exercise his untrammeled will above all else. That, in turn, essentially guarantees the infliction of damage in each of those areas, even if in different ways and to varying degrees.

America’s unipolar power at the end of the Cold War era has, of course, already given way to a multipolar world. Previous administrations carefully tended the NATO alliance in Europe, as well as six overlapping bilateral and multilateral defense pacts in the sprawling Indo-Pacific region. With his vocal hostility toward NATO, particularly its crucial mutual-defense clause, Trump is likely to leave that alliance significantly damaged, if not eviscerated.

In Asia, he prefers to cozy up to autocrats like China’s Xi or North Korea’s Kim Jong-un instead of cultivating democratic allies like Australia or South Korea. Add to that his conviction that such allies are freeloaders who need to pay up and America’s crucial Indo-Pacific alliances are unlikely to prosper, possibly prompting South Korea and Japan to leave the U.S. nuclear umbrella and become thoroughly independent powers.

Convinced above all else of his own “genius,” Trump seems destined to damage the key economic components of U.S. global power. With his inclination to play favorites with tariff exemptions and corporate regulation, his second term could give the term “crony capitalism” new meaning, while degrading capital markets. His planned tax cuts will add significantly to the federal deficit and national debt, while degrading the dollar’s global clout, which has already dropped significantly in the past four years.

In defiance of reality, he remains wedded to those legacy energy sources, coal, oil, and natural gas. In recent years, however, the cost of electricity from solar and wind power has dropped to half that of fossil fuels and is still falling. For the past 500 years, global power has been synonymous with energy efficiency. As Trump tries to stall America’s transition to green energy, he’ll cripple the country’s competitiveness in countless ways, while doing ever more damage to the planet.

Nor do his choices for key national security posts bode well for U.S. global power. If confirmed as defense secretary, Peter Hegseth, a Fox News commentator with a track record of maladministration, lacks the experience to begin to manage the massive Pentagon budget. Similarly, Trump’s choice for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has no experience in that highly technical field and seems prone to the sort of conspiracy theories that will cloud her judgment when it comes to accurate intelligence assessments.

Finally, the nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, is already promising to punish the president’s domestic critics rather than pursue foreign agents through counterintelligence, the bureau’s critical responsibility.

By the time Trump retires (undoubtedly to accolades from his devoted followers), he will have compressed two decades of slow imperial decline into a single presidential term, effectively ending Washington’s world leadership significantly before its time.

If US imperial decline would be good for most Americans or most other peoples, one could applaud. But that's hard for me to believe, even though I've spent a life fighting American imperial impositions on the rest of the world. The imperial ambitions of the Russia, China, North Korea and Iran axis don't look benign. Hard times ahead and Mr. Trump is a fire accelerator.