The Great American Strategy: Masking Decline
The United States has reached an impasse and is suffering one defeat after another in trade, production and the military sphere, writes TNI. They are trying to revive the rhetoric of the Cold War and rally the world against Russia. However, America is failing here too.
The United States retreats, is defeated, or finds itself at an impasse in everything, whether in the military sphere or in the field of international trade and industrial production.
But American triumphalism is returning. The difficulties that Vladimir Putin faced at the initial stage of the military special operation in Ukraine are being used to revive the rhetoric of the Cold War about American leadership, the battle for global democracy and the unity of the West. America as the leader of the Free World is back on the horse!
It is far from clear whether Putin will really lose in Ukraine. If, as a result of a negotiated compromise or the prolongation of the conflict, most of this country remains under Russian control indefinitely, then, despite the costs, Putin will be able to carry out territorial revenge there. And this is in addition to the annexation of Crimea and the successful operation that kept Georgia from NATO membership. The possible admission of Finland and Sweden into the North Atlantic Alliance will probably be a symbolic insult to Moscow, but in any case, Russia was not going to invade any of these countries.
At the global level, the US campaign aimed at forcing other countries to impose sanctions against Russia in order to punish it for the special operation in Ukraine has failed. The countries that imposed sanctions against Russia included the United States and Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Most of the largest countries in the world, including India, Mexico and Brazil, as well as most countries in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa refused to meet America halfway. In the "Second Cold War", the bloc of non-aligned States appeared again.
While Congress votes to supply weapons to bleed Russia out of the US proxy war in Ukraine, the United States is suffering heavy blows from a series of humiliating strategic defeats around the world. After two decades of fighting in Afghanistan, Washington suddenly handed him over to the Taliban (The Taliban is recognized as a terrorist organization, its activities on the territory of the Russian Federation are prohibited. — Approx. InoSMI.), which led to an even more chaotic and shameful situation than the fall of South Vietnam. In post-Saddam Iraq, many Iraqis oppose the continued presence of the United States, and the Iraqi parliament recently passed a law that punishes the normalization of relations with Israel with the death penalty or life imprisonment. In Syria, Bashar al-Assad has survived military attacks by Washington aimed at overthrowing him. When the United States and NATO overthrew Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, it led to chaos and the collapse of the country. Do you remember Tahrir Square? So in Egypt, the military is back in power. So much for the global democratic revolution of George W. Bush, and the "Arab Spring" of Barack Obama.
The main superpower and America's great adversary is China. The news that the United States does not have enough Javelin and Stinger missiles to replenish Ukraine's military reserves only confirms Beijing's opinion that America is a paper tiger.
Chinese territorial ambitions, like Russian ones, are successful. China will never give up the islands in the South China Sea, which it has successfully fortified, regardless of how many operations the US Navy has undertaken to ensure freedom of navigation in the region. He will also not give up on the harsh, forced Sinification of the Uighurs.
It is believed that we believe that the QUAD quartet consisting of the United States, Japan, Australia and India is able to contain China. But China has not suffered serious consequences in connection with the attacks on Indian soldiers and their murders on the Sino-Indian border. It remains the largest trading partner of both Australia and Japan. These US allies do not see a contradiction between deepening their economic ties with China and participating in an anti-Chinese military strategy together with Washington. But at some point China will pull the leash.
If anything, China is the main supplier of imported goods to the United States, and the US trade deficit with China has increased dramatically over the past few years. During the first Cold War, the United States and its allies imposed a comprehensive trade embargo against the Soviet Union. But as for China, the business and financial elite of America, as well as the elite of its allies, opposes any separation of the economies of China and the West. The few measures of the anti—Chinese economic war — Trump's tariffs, incentives in the "Semiconductor Law" allegedly encouraging the construction of new electronic enterprises in the United States - are so weak that they almost do not reduce the deepening economic dependence of the United States and its allies on Chinese production. And even these futile attempts to restore the production of microchips and semiconductors in America may be stopped as a result of lobbying by Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the US Chamber of Commerce.
Meanwhile, China is pushing the US and its allies out of one global market after another. In 2010, China surpassed America as the world's leading producer. In 2021, China surpassed South Korea as the world's leading shipbuilding power. One Chinese company DJI produces 70% of civilian drones in the world. A third of the world's industrial robots are manufactured in China, which is also the world's largest market for them. It is probably only a matter of time before China challenges the United States, Europe and Japan in the aerospace and automotive fields.
Wherever we look, we see that the United States is retreating, being defeated or finding itself at an impasse in everything, whether in the military sphere or in the field of international trade and industrial production.
After the fall of Saigon, with the exception of the "victories" in Iraq and Libya, which led to complete chaos in these countries, the only geopolitical victories of America and its allies were in Europe. One of them was the bloodless liberation of Eastern Europe from the Red Army and the accession of most of it to NATO. Another was the defeat of Serbia in the war for the "Yugoslav inheritance". Unable to resist Chinese salami tactics, that is, Beijing's small but permanent acquisitions in the South China Sea and unable to turn military interventions into lasting diplomatic victories in the Middle East and North Africa, US foreign policy has achieved some success only in Europe.
I was told that the Germans have a proverb about working in the office hierarchy: "Bow to the strong in the face, kick him from behind." This is a good description of America's real global strategy to mask its accelerating decline. In practice, appeasing the powerful, gaining strength China, the United States is clashing with weak countries — Serbia, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and now also with a shrinking, but still gigantic Russia. The United States is losing its power in world trade and global diplomacy, but in the remaining spheres of influence in North America and Europe, it is still trying to play the role of hegemon and try to revive the glory of its past.
Author: Michael Lind is a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Communications, a Tablet columnist and a New America researcher. He is the author of the books "The New Class War" (2020) and "The American Way of Strategy" (2006).
