Twilight of the American Century

By Brian Stewart

Thursday, November 07, 2024

 

In January, historian Niall Ferguson argued that the decision before Americans in the 2024 election was a stark choice between republic and empire. A Trump restoration presented a special menace to the American system at home while the Democrats’ feeble brand of global leadership—for which Harris was a faithful servant and ardent surrogate—would usher in a post-American global order. This was not an especially palatable choice, but if anything, Ferguson’s pessimistic assessment was too sanguine given the converging crises facing the United States and the wider world. Domestic and foreign policy are rarely discrete realms.

 

We will never know how Kamala Harris would have governed had she won—she was careful to keep her plans and ideological commitments (if she has any) concealed during the campaign. But it is unlikely that she would have done much to either reverse the stagnation of American liberalism at home or close the yawning gap between rhetoric and strategy in American statecraft abroad. Donald Trump’s return to the White House, meanwhile, is likely to fundamentally alter American foreign policy as well as America itself. The United States is, and always has been, what Jefferson called “an empire of liberty”—a democratic republic that sought to build a global order conducive to its own interests and ideals. It is hard to imagine the nation shedding either half of that identity while remaining true to its distinctive character and the international order.

 

Trump’s first term ended with the prospect of a full-blown constitutional crisis that was only averted by an improbable show of nerve from his otherwise craven vice president. The scandalous assault on the US Capitol incited by the sitting president was a terrible self-inflicted wound to the country that deliberately aggravated Americans’ faltering trust in their own public institutions. But it also undermined global confidence in America’s abiding purpose, as well as its staying power as a liberal hegemon.

 

Before the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln rose to prominence in Republican politics for his unequivocal condemnation of slavery. Lincoln opposed slavery on moral grounds, but he also noted that it was a grave liability to America’s cause. It “deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world,” he said, and enables “the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites” while causing “the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity.” Worse, it lured many Americans “into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty.” Trump’s undisguised contempt for the Constitution and his refusal to acknowledge—even to this day—that he lost the 2020 election have inevitably diminished America’s moral purpose.

 

On the other side of the ledger, Biden has left the world in acute danger as hungry revisionist powers strive to overthrow the American-led order. A formidable autocratic alliance now vies for dominance in the Middle East, Ukraine, and the South China Sea without robust resistance from Washington. Interest on the national debt, which now outstrips defence spending, will only further impair credible American deterrence. Instead of building military strength and displaying resolve in the face of military aggression, the political class is gripped by a paralysing fear of escalation rather than an appetite for victory.

 

Halfway into its term, the Biden administration failed to deter the Kremlin from launching a full-scale assault on Ukraine. After stubbornly refusing to arm the nascent Ukrainian democracy with a credible arsenal, the US finally delivered lethal assistance to Kyiv just in time to prevent the capital from falling to Putin’s army. But the restrictions it imposed on the battlefield have made the conflict much more costly than it needed to be and Ukraine is currently on course to lose the war.

 

A similar story has been allowed to unfold in the Middle East since Hamas invaded Israel last October. As Hamas intended, Palestinian statelessness is once again a preeminent global issue, and the war has reignited worldwide hostility to Israel, the IDF’s battlefield successes notwithstanding. After the 7 October massacre, the Biden administration deployed carrier groups to the Mediterranean to prevent a wider war, which may have stayed the hand of Iran’s radical theocracy. But even though Biden armed Israel in its multi-front campaign (against Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and other Iranian proxies across the region), he rapidly lost the stomach for a prolonged fight. Instead, he and his vice president have consistently demanded an end to hostilities before Israel had achieved its stated war aims. A Harris presidency would almost certainly have pursued the same policy.

 

The situation in the South China Sea is more worrying still. Not long ago, American advocacy of free trade allowed a duplicitous China to emerge as a hostile superpower. Beijing has no desire to continue living under the current order, and it has fashioned the military capabilities it needs to erect a new one. Chairman Xi has set his sights on Taiwan, which he regards as a breakaway province rather than an independent democracy. As the United States groans under the weight of its overweening debt, inadequate defence spending, and taxing global commitments, China must be tempted to make its move. If it does, Washington will be hard-pressed to defend an island that is the linchpin of the American security architecture in the Indo-Pacific.

 

Even as the world has become increasingly dangerous, American foreign-policy makers have continued to operate as if the “rules-based” order will somehow sustain itself without the scaffolding of America’s national power and global engagement. But world events are driven by interests, backed by power and the will to use it. History will remember Joe Biden as it now remembers Jimmy Carter: as a well-meaning patriot who lost control of world events and left office with the country’s enemies on the march. But at least Carter belatedly recognised reality and raised defence spending on his way out of the White House. It does not seem to have dawned on either Biden or Harris that the unipolar moment inaugurated at the end of the Cold War is over.

 

The Biden administration has become senescent but never managed to outgrow its ideological puerility. A President Harris would have disposed of the former condition without disposing of the latter. The strongest argument against Harris was that she is a weak Californian progressive. During her campaign, she discarded the outlandish and extreme positions she had adopted during the moral panic that afflicted America’s managerial elite in 2020. But she could not or would not explain these reversals. Voters were left to conclude that she is merely a creature of her party. That wouldn’t be such a terrible problem if Democrats were a healthy political party in a nation with a public-spirited elite. Unfortunately, neither of those things is true.

 

Ross Douthat has argued that the Democrats’ implicit pledge to the country since the arrival of Trump has been to “avoid insanity, maintain stability, and display greater intelligence and competence” than the Republican Party. If so, that pledge has been broken repeatedly. The Democrats repudiated policing on “antiracist” grounds after the killing of George Floyd. They denounced those demanding border security and proposed extending healthcare benefits to illegal immigrants instead. They recklessly advocated experimental chemical and surgical treatments for gender-dysphoric youth. They tirelessly sought détente with the predatory Islamic Republic of Iran and justified the abject fiasco of withdrawal from Afghanistan.

 

The bill for all this zealous irresponsibility has now arrived in the shape of a second Trump administration. Will Trump display greater fidelity to the constitutional order this time around now that he is unconstrained by his own party and more familiar with the powers of the presidency? There are few reasons to be hopeful, and a second Trump term may yet further degrade and discredit the prestige and power of the United States.

 

A recent interview with Trump’s former national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien illustrates the problem with the current Republican Party’s foreign policy. It no longer cares about global leadership and foreign alliances in defence of liberty, democracy, and free markets. Trump places a premium on international stability among nations and disdains human rights. O’Brien claims that Trump “doesn’t love the idea of America; he loves the American people.” This is incoherent. As Leon Wieseltier has written, “American ideas are not what we mean by the idea of America. We mean an ideal that, for all its abstraction, is sufficiently true and just to serve as the basis of a permanent allegiance, a profound patriotism.” Trump’s crabbed nationalism is scarcely patriotic and anything but profound.

 

One shudders to think what will become of America and the world order under a second Trump administration. Trump is now 78 and showing signs of cognitive decline—his speech slurs and rambles incoherently, his energy is depleted, and his behaviour has become even more erratic. As his stamina and focus diminish, his vice president J.D. Vance will likely assume control of the policy portfolio. Ukraine, already mauled by a barbaric invasion, will almost certainly be sacrificed to an unsatiated Russian bear. Taiwan—which Trump has compared to a Sharpie next to the Resolute Desk representing China—is now in grave danger. Even Israel—purportedly the only ally still respected by the MAGA movement—is unlikely to prosper in a post-American order. 

 

Character is destiny, and whatever else might be said in his favour, Trump’s character is rotten and there is no reason to think that anything of lasting value could ever spring from that poisoned tree. I mean this analytically more than pejoratively. During the victory celebration at Trump’s headquarters on election night, UFC president Dana White roared that Trump and his family deserve the honour of victory. He failed to mention that the new administration might actually benefit the country it serves because that consideration is not important to leaders of the MAGA movement. This is precisely why the Founders warned against elevating such a person to the nation’s highest office.

 

Over the past decade, Trump has remade the character of the Republican Party in his own image. The principled but pragmatic idealism that dominated Republican politics since World War Two has been usurped by a thoroughgoing cynicism. The Republican old guard committed too many follies to enumerate here, but what was once a party of broadly honest and competent public servants has been reduced to a personality cult of loyalist firebrands and fanatics.

 

“Decline,” Charles Krauthammer warned at the outset of the Obama administration, “is a choice.” Both of America’s political parties now appear to have made it. The people may have spoken, but the options with which they were presented were not befitting of a serious country. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are committed to the defence of civil liberties, economic freedom, limited government, and global leadership anymore. Jefferson’s fragile empire of liberty depended upon thoughtful stewards of liberal and conservative principles and policies for its survival. The United States is now a country without a vessel for either, slouching resentfully towards the end of the American century.