The American empire is drowning
Clinging to the excesses of an arrogant foreign policy won't halt the water's rise
American foreign policy analysts are wringing their hands over a number of recent developments that threaten to bring down the US empire more quickly than once thought possible. There’s been talk about this for years, but now things are starting to happen fast that will put a serious dent in America’s ability to throw its weight around in the world and get what it wants. That poses an existential threat to the “international rules-based order” that American diplomats like to tout, which is a nice-sounding phrase that really just means American global domination.
China’s Xi Jinping traveled to meet Vladimir Putin on a state visit to Russia last month. It’s unclear what concrete agreements came out of it, but the fact that it happened at all was troublesome enough for Western commentators. Xi apparently didn’t use the occasion to force Putin to surrender and quit Ukraine as those who formerly invaded Iraq told him to do. Instead, Xi positioned China as a potential neutral arbiter of peace — a country, they like to point out, that hasn’t been taking sides and flooding the battlefield with weapons, unlike some others.
In the Middle East, America’s longtime ally Saudi Arabia, one of the most brutal and totalitarian regimes in the world, began to do the unthinkable. Apparently abandoning decades of antagonism toward their common arch-enemy with the US — Iran — the Saudis invited the Iranian president to visit Riyadh, an invitation that was accepted. American officials admit they were blindsided by this, but they shouldn’t have been. Months earlier when the Biden Administration was flailing due to gas-price inflation the Saudis flat-out rejected American calls to increase oil production. The American government was left with no option but to make massive draws from the country’s strategic petroleum reserve.
At the same time Saudi Arabia has brought Syria’s Bashar Assad in from the cold, rehabilitating him in the eyes of the Gulf Arab States that schemed with the US for a decade to overthrow him, leveraging ISIS and local al-Qaeda militias in the effort. This comes as Assad’s government continues to support and encourage an Iranian presence in his country that threatens the illegal American occupation there and has caused Israel to conduct intermittent airstrikes inside the country. Clearly, alliances are shifting in the cradle of civilization.
But what should worry armchair warriors in American government offices and think tanks the most is the increasingly rapid pace at which the world is abandoning the US dollar in global affairs in favor of local currencies, including China’s yuan. Since the 1940s the dollar has been the bedrock of the global financial and trading systems. In addition to being the preeminent currency in which governments have invested their wealth, the dollar has been at the center of international settlements for trade. Rather than just exchanging local currencies of one of the two parties, most international transactions, even those that don’t otherwise involve the US in any way, have involved the dollar, either as the sole currency of exchange or as an intermediary one.
But that arrangement depended on trust in the dollar. That trust has been eroded by successive American governments taking advantage of the dollar’s preeminence and using it as a political weapon, punishing countries that didn’t do what America wanted them to do in global affairs. From financial sanctions against governments and individuals around the world to removing countries’ access to international, US-dominated payment systems, many countries have found themselves at odds with American foreign policy and have been punished, and in the process have lost faith in the dependability of the dollar for their countries’ needs.
And this is a bigger problem for America than it is for those countries. They increasingly have alternatives that, when implemented, will make them far safer from future American financial sanctions and other forms of coercion. That’s what Russia, Iran, China, and now Brazil are trying to do. But for the US, when the global demand for dollars shrinks, those dollars will come flooding back into America’s domestic economy and ignite future inflation that could prove to be devastating.
That’s because America has long been able to print virtually limitless amounts of its currency while exporting the inflation that inevitably follows from that act to the rest of the world. Other countries haven’t been able do that. If they spent too much, and printed too much to cover the spending, they would pay for it, at least eventually, with inflation. That’s because they didn’t have the world’s reserve currency and global medium of exchange. That’s what the US will face when the dollar reaches some unknown tipping point of declining demand.
We’ve been able to live beyond our means for more than half a century owing to our preeminent place in the world, and now the bill is about to come due. When that happens, whatever is left of America’s squandered influence will evaporate until we fully and painfully liquidate debt and “build back better”, to borrow a phrase from the globalists, unleashing domestic potential from the base of a lower standard of living.
In addition to America’s use of its currency as a weapon, three great events seem to have been the primary catalysts for this negative shift in America’s standing: the disastrous 2003 war in Iraq, the chaotic manner of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, and America’s complete inability to stop Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or meaningfully punish them for it.
It was twenty years ago last month that pre-dawn explosions in the ancient city of Baghdad signaled the start of a war that would prove one of the most disastrous American foreign policy adventures in its history. When it finally ground to a halt more than eight and a half years later, half a million people were dead, trillions of dollars had been wasted, and America’s reputation had been trashed.
The war had been sold to the world on a bed of lies about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and baseless allegations of al-Qaeda collaboration — lies spouted by people of power like George W. Bush, Colin Powell, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. Afterward, American war profiteers descended and plundered the country of its wealth. In exchange, Iraqis eventually gained a semblance of democracy, but it was so feeble that Iraqi demands for America to remove its remaining forces from the country have been repeatedly rebuffed.
And few knew at the time, but a group of Iraqis radicalized in American wartime prison camps had formed a new terror group the world would come to know as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). This mirrored the formation of al-Qaeda fifteen years earlier by disaffected Islamic mujahideen fighters that were funded by the Americans to make life hell for the Soviet Union in their 1980s war in Afghanistan.
These and other repeated instances of blowback from American Middle East policies, each time creating the conditions for the next failed intervention, have taken a toll on America’s reputation.
After its own war in Afghanistan, the US stayed far too long, if it ever should have been there at all. Unbeknownst to most, the Taliban didn’t attack America on 9/11. What they were accused of was harboring al-Qaeda terrorists like Osama bin Laden who were accused of the attack. For their part, the Taliban said they weren’t convinced of their guilt and demanded proof, which wasn’t forthcoming. Regardless, any justification America might have had for remaining in Afghanistan vanished when bin Laden was supposedly captured and killed over a decade ago. One can argue the time for leaving was even earlier since it was known bin Laden and his supporters had fled to Pakistan long before.
After 20 years of war and occupation, America’s withdrawal was always going to be a chaotic affair, even if it was right thing to do, as it certainly was. There was no avoiding chaos from a failed two-decade war. But it doesn’t seem inevitable that the chaos had to include the stranding of so many vulnerable people and the abandonment of billions of dollars worth of equipment. Was the military intelligence capability of the most powerful country on Earth really so bad that it couldn’t anticipate the advance of Taliban forces in time to effect a more deliberate and coordinated exit?
In Ukraine, history will record America’s meddling there since at least 2014, including NATO’s proxy war against Russia following that country’s 2022 invasion, as another key factor in the decline of its global hegemony.
After a US-sponsored coup d’etat in Kiev in 2014 forced the overthrow of Russia-friendly Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian Donbas and Crimea regions in the east and south of the country rebelled. Most of them had voted for Yanukovych in the previous elections in 2010 and weren’t about to accept the successor America had hand-picked to take over. In fact, if you look at a color-coded map of the 2010 electoral results in Ukraine, it’s remarkable how closely the pro-Yanukovych areas line up with the areas that Russia has occupied and in which they enjoy the support of a large segment of the population against the pro-US regime in Kiev.
When the armchair warriors in the Obama Administration planned the 2014 coup it’s doubtful they expected the outcome to be that Ukraine would be fighting a losing battle with Russia for significant amounts of lost territory in 2023. Joe Biden was a key driver of that policy at the top of the Obama Administration. In many ways, he’s now reaping what he sowed.
They had a chance to avoid all this. In late 2021, before the war began, Russia presented a written security plan to the US, Europe, and NATO that was intended to take both sides’ legitimate security concerns into account. Part of that plan would have involved guarantees that Ukraine would never be allowed to join NATO or host offensive weapons pointed at Russia. In addition, they would have to finally implement the agreement they had made years earlier but never implemented to grant Donbas a degree of autonomy within the Ukrainian state. The West arrogantly dismissed the Russian proposals. Months later, the invasion began.
America’s threats to bring Russia to its knees for having the temerity to force the issue have been in vain to this point. By objective measures, Russia appears to be weathering the storm while strengthening its political and economic ties with China, Iran, and India, among others. This is despite an unprecedented campaign of economic sanctions, freezing of assets, and flooding of the war zone with Western-made weapons and more money than Russia’s entire annual military budget.
And so the evidence of decline continues to build. Other countries are starting to take notice of the reemergence of a multipolar world and are beginning to act accordingly. This will only accelerate as America and its European allies learn no lessons and continue to try, through sheer force of will using yesterday’s tools, to remake a world they’ve already lost rather than accommodate themselves to the one in which they now find themselves. And all the while, the deep red bells peal from the east, threatening yet another war, and perhaps a final reckoning.
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.