Dynamics of America’s decline

Also published in Daily Trust

The just concluded and hotly contested presidential election in the United States attracted unprecedented global attention, which wasn’t unusual as the country remains the world’s largest economic and military power and where almost every country today has strategic interests to pursue and/or defend.

Since the end of the Second World War, the United States and its then archenemy, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) had been engaged in a tense struggle for global dominance in what was known as Cold War, until the fall of the USSR in 1991, and ever since then the United States has been the sole global superpower, a privilege it has largely abused.

However, the current steady but persistent decline of its global influence gradually ushers in a new world order where its global dominance will be a thing of the past, and indeed where there would be no sole global superpower anymore. After all, throughout history there have been incidents of rise and fall of empires, which simply means that the US and indeed any other global dominant power in the future will not be an exception. Besides, analysts around the world have been commenting on the dynamics of the looming eclipse of the US current global dominance, and speculating on its aftermath and the possible ensuing world order scenarios.

The current America’s decline probably began during former President George W. Bush administration from 2001 to 2009, as a result of his particularly inconsiderate foreign policy approach, military intelligence blunders and reckless defence strategies, which began to seriously question America’s moral eligibility to continue playing the role of the world’s sole superpower, and indeed began to undermine what remains of its credibility on the global stage. 

For instance, the yet unanswered questions and credible suspicions raised by several unbiased American and non-American experts in security strategies, intelligence and other relevant technical, scientific and engineering aspects of the independent probes they conducted on the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks in New York and Washington DC, which the US official narratives about the incident failed to address, have greatly eroded the supposed integrity of the country’s political establishment as a whole, and indeed discredited its claim to the moral high ground to push for global peace and security. Also, its subsequent unjustified military invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq respectively, its other military adventures around the world and their far-reaching destructive impacts on global peace cost it a great deal of its supposed credibility in the eyes of the international community.

Likewise, the 2008 global financial crisis, which was one of the worst global financial crises, was triggered by the particularly materialistic policies of American capitalist institutions, and the persistent disastrous economic impacts of the crisis on the global economy have ever since then continued to expose the underlying vulnerability and inefficiency of the US capitalism and questioned its reliability as the basis of the global economy. That, by implication, cast serious doubts on America’s ability to continue steering the trend of the world economic system.

Furthermore, though under the outgoing President Barack Obama, the US economy has moderately improved, he failed to restore America’s hitherto unrivalled economic glory as the Chinese economy is now increasingly projected to overtake it as the world’s largest economy. Besides, President Obama’s apparent timidity and inconsistency in his foreign policy approach   has further shrunk US influence on the world stage, and indeed rendered it effectively irrelevant in many important global issues to the extent of jeopardizing its own strategic interests.

Now, to cap it all, a politically inexperienced, reckless, unremorseful bigot and unrepentant racist i.e. Donald Trump is taking over the presidency of the already declining United States of America, following his recent election victory, which further confirmed the decline of America’s democracy; a decline that had already manifested itself when he emerged as the Republican presidential candidate in the first place.

Interestingly, though the United States maintains strong constitutional institutions under its three branches of government, i.e. executive, legislature and judiciary, and through which policies are made, sanctioned and implemented, the range of executive powers assigned to the President by the same constitution enables him to significantly influence government policies, as he also obviously enjoys unrivalled advantage to successfully lobby Congress for his agenda.

Therefore, now that Donald Trump’s Republican party maintains control of both Chambers of the US Congress, and with the world’s strongest military under his command, which is also armed with the most advanced lethal weapons that include the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, as well as the world’s largest reservoir of financial resources at his disposal, the US foreign and strategic defence policy is likely to get extremely inconsiderate and reckless, which would accelerate the country’s decline and indeed cost it its appropriate relevance in global, socio-political and economic equation. After all, many ambitious governments around the world are increasingly capitalizing on its decline to secure as much influence as possible in the imminent post-American world. Likewise, even its traditional allies who had apparently taken its global dominance for granted hence counted on it blindly, have now woken up to this reality and are now strategizing to meet the challenges of this looming eventuality.

Meanwhile, the Donald Trump phenomenon has further stirred up socio-racial and class-based prejudices among Americans, which further undermines the country’s social stability, and which, if left unchecked, may escalate to threaten the country’s social peace and political stability. In fact, there have been pockets of potentially serious protests in some cities in the country against Trump’s incoming administration.