FA: Dispensable nation – America in a Post-American World

Pic.: ‘Foreign Affairs’

In the Trump era, many have speculated about whether or to what degree the United States will withdraw from its leading role in the world. But a more pressing question might be, what if the rest of the world beats Washington to the punch, withdrawing from the cooperative U.S.-led order that has been the bedrock of American power? – ‘Foreign Affairs’ puts a question.

Some may counter that even if U.S. allies and neutral countries don’t like the way Trump exercises American power, they have little choice but to go along with it now and will accommodate themselves to it in the longer term, placating the United States as much as possible and hedging only when absolutely necessary. After all, they might come to loathe and distrust the United States, but not as much as they already loathe and distrust China, Russia, and other American rivals. In this view, the United States that Trump wants to create would be the worst possible hegemon — except for all the other possible candidates. Besides, even if other countries wanted to opt out of the U.S.-led order or work around Washington, they don’t have the ability to do so, individually or collectively. They might yearn for the days when a more internationalist, open, cooperative United States shaped the world order. But they’ll learn to live with a more nationalist, closed, and demanding United States.

The Trump team has instead taken an approach predicated on a pair of faulty assumptions: that other countries, international organizations, businesses, and civil society organizations have no alternative to capitulation in the face of U.S. demands and that even if alternatives emerged, the United States could remain predominant without its allies. This is solipsism masquerading as strategy. Instead of producing a less constraining order in which American power will flourish, it will instead yield a more hostile order in which American power will fade.

The United States’ dense web of alliances and partnerships also enables the “extended deterrence” that protects Washington’s friends from their enemies. But Trump has already weakened that pillar of the post-Cold War order.

The Trump administration seems to believe that if Washington forces its allies to stand on their own, they will make choices that would benefit the United States. That is unlikely to be true.

The Trump administration may be relying on the antipathy that U.S. allies feel toward the ideologies that guide American rivals such as China, Iran, North Korea and Russia. In this view, even if U.S. partners don’t like certain things Washington does, they’re ultimately going to stick with the United States out of a sense of democratic solidarity. But U.S. allies easily overcame whatever ideological objections they may have had and continued trading with Russia after the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, and with China despite its repression of Uyghurs and its crackdown in Hong Kong in recent years. Besides, the Trump administration itself hardly considers ideological differences to be an obstacle to cooperation. A mismatch between American and Russian values has not prevented Trump from taking Moscow’s side in the Ukraine war. Under his administration, Washington won’t be “giving you lectures on how to live or how to govern your own affairs,” Trump assured a gathering of investors and Saudi leaders in May. If Washington doesn’t act as if ideology matters, it shouldn’t expect that others will.

Trump and his team may also believe that the convergence of Chinese, Iranian, North Korean and Russian power is of such magnitude that European resistance would prove futile without American heft. Better, in this view, to revive the nineteenth-century practice of the great powers dividing up the world. Doing so, however, would concede Europe to Russia and Asia to China, which would constitute a colossal loss. Moreover, there is no reason to assume that such concessions would slake Chinese and Russian ambitions: consider, for example, what Beijing’s massive investments in Latin America...

According to this logic, winning in those dimensions will draw global support because people like to be on the side of a winner. But that won’t be the case if others don’t have access to the American market or if they consider American technology dangerous to them or believe the U.S. military offers them no genuine protection. The United States should, of course, strengthen itself. But when it does so without benefiting others, they will try to shield themselves and limit their exposure to American power.

Trump and his team are destroying everything that makes the United States an attractive partner because they fail to imagine just how bad an order antagonistic to American interests would be. The United States’ indispensability was not inevitable. In the post-Cold War world, the country became indispensable by taking responsibility for the security and prosperity of countries that agreed to play by rules that Washington established and enforced. If the United States itself abandons those rules and the system they created, it will become wholly expendable.

The self-destruction of American power in the Trump years is likely to puzzle future historians. During the post-Cold War era, the United States achieved unprecedented dominance, and maintaining it was relatively easy and inexpensive. All of Trump’s predecessors in that period made errors, some of which significantly reduced U.S. influence, aided the country’s adversaries, and limited Washington’s ability to induce cooperation or compliance on the part of other countries. But none of those predecessors intended such outcomes. Trump, on the other hand, wants a world in which the United States, although still rich and powerful, no longer actively shapes the global order to its advantage. He would prefer to lead a country that is feared rather than loved. But his approach is unlikely to foster either emotion. If it stays on the path Trump has started down, the United States risks becoming too brutal to love but too irrelevant to fear.

In the years to come, the alliances it took decades to foster will begin to wither, and U.S. rivals will waste no time in leaping to exploit the resulting vacuum. Some of Washington’s partners may wait for a while, hoping that their American friends will come to their senses and try to reestablish something akin to the traditional U.S. leadership role. But there is no going all the way back; their faith and trust have been irreparably damaged. And they won’t wait long, even for an American return to form that would amount to less than a full restoration. Soon, they will move on — and so will the rest of the world.

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