The End of American Hegemony

Internal conflicts with American hegemony

This post is a response to a recent post by Noah Smith made in response to the Hamas attack on Israel, which has led to war between Israel and Hamas-controlled Gaza. Smith describes the attack as a “demonstration of America’s decreasing ability to deter conflict throughout the world.” I concur. There are two ways to frame this declining ability. One uses the idea I discussed in my previous post, in which I suggested that the US is returning to a situation in which it will no longer act as if it had a singular national interest in what happens overseas. My argument was America is democratic republic with a government that represents the interests of a heterogeneous ruling class with contradictory interests. Elites with compatible politics form coalitions represented by either Democrats or Republicans. It is therefore natural for a country like the US whose elites face no direct security threats from foreign actors to show an inconsistent foreign policy that shifts erratically depending on which party is on power. For over a half century after WW II the US acted as if it had a coherent foreign policy for reasons I discussed in the post, but those days have ended.

I previously discussed the second framework, Modelski and Thompson’s Leadership Cycle, which is a four-phase cycle in which a hegemonic power provides order over the first three phases with a new hegemon emerging in the fourth phase, Global War. The average length of this cycle has been 105 years. Adding this length to the 1914 start of the last Global War, or half of it to the 1973 midpoint of the current cycle, yields a projected start of 2019-2026 for the start io the next Global War phase. Presumably, this struggle would be between the US and its allies against what Smith calls a “New Axis” consisting of China, Russia, and their allies.

Combining these two frameworks suggests that a potential future Global War would involve a coalition of Great Powers led by autocrats expressing a personal will against one consisting of a collection of democratic Great Powers that do not possess any definable interest beyond self-defense. The lynchpin of this second group is the United State for which the issue of defense is largely irrelevant, unless one of the opposing powers directly attacks the US, as Japan did last time. Such an attack could provide a pretext for American factions to unite and act as a single American interest. To avoid this, the challengers will leave to up to the US to choose whether or not it gets involved. The divergent interests among America’s rulers will certainly complicate an effective American response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, just as it is already doing in Ukraine.

This raises the possibility that the US may surrender hegemony without putting up much of a fight because not enough of America’s elites see a sufficient benefit from the struggle to warrant the cost.  As I noted previously, Great Power war “will necessarily mean the diversion of profits from stock buybacks to real investment to build the necessary productive capacity, which would mean a falling stock market and the end of inflation control via financial flows, requiring imposition of high taxes on wealthy Americans.” I cannot conceive of any situation, short of a direct threat to their physical safety, which would convince Republicans to support a policy requiring tax increases on wealthy Americans.

America’s worsening polarization is a beneficial trend for challengers to the American order. Waiting for it to get worse can increase the likelihood that America sits on the sidelines as revisionist powers create a new international order more suited to their leader’s interests. On the other hand, birth trends in China imply that military manpower in 20 years may be half what it is now, providing an incentive to act now rather than later.

President Biden has declared on more than one occasion that he would act militarily should China invade Taiwan. It is entirely possible that the US would lose such a war, unless the poor performance of the Russian military in Ukraine is also true of the Chinese military. China imports about 10 mbd of crude oil, half of it from the Persian Gulf. A seemingly potent weapon might be interdiction these oil imports. Perusal of a few articles on this topic disabused me of this notion. A war with China over Taiwan would be a bloody affair resulting in massive casualties and substantial loss of naval assets. The ability of the US to conduct full scale war for any length of time is questionable given that US capabilities for production of war materiel such as artillery shells are greatly attenuated from the levels at the end of the Cold War.

1992 election candidate Ross Perot had made deficit reduction and getting the economy going again his core message. He obtained 20% of the vote and may have enabled Clinton to win. Clinton, for his part, had made the economy the centerpiece of his campaign. His economists advised that strong growth could be achieved through lower interest rates, which Fed chairman Allen Greenspan insisted must be associated with deficit reduction. This had to be achieved entirely by spending reductions as the 1994 election of a Republican Congress had made tax increases impossible. Military power was the easiest target for cuts.

Similarly, President Bush sought to cut taxes impacting high income individuals, which promised to eliminate the budget surplus achieved by his predecessor, which was not a particularly good look. In the wake of 911 and cognizant of fiscal optics, the Bush Administration undertook two wars with inadequate force levels, while Defense Secretary Rumsfeld sought “to fundamentally transform the nation's military into something leaner, more agile and thoroughly modern.”

Both of these are examples of consensus on foreign policy beginning to fray before collapsing under President Trump. That Chinese GDP was rising at a rapid rate and would overtake the US in the 2020s, was apparent to me by the mid 2000’s, and, presumably, to the nation’s rulers. Unlike the situation in the early 1960’s, when US gold reserves were sacrificed on the altar of hegemony and the New Deal Order put at risk by Democratic policymakers, post-1992 administrations have chosen their domestic agenda over maintenance of hegemony.

Why did America purse hegemony in the first place?

I see the period of American hegemony as anomalous, caused by the overwhelming dominance the Democratic order created under FDR’s New Deal. By the time Republicans came back to power in 1953, about 60% of the GDP has been created under New Deal economic policy. A new generation of business executives had grown whose way of doing things, their culture, had been shaped by the New Deal environment. The political culture had also been shaped by the Democratic dispensation (political order) established under Roosevelt. President Eisenhower, like President Clinton, was of the articulative type, according to Stephen Skowronek’s Political Time model. This means they generally accept the opposition party’s dispensation. This tendency was reinforced by a Congress controlled by the opposition for six of their eight years in office.

This means that when Republicans returned to power in 1953, they did not try to return to their pre-New Deal isolationist foreign policy, but rather doubled-down on US hegemony, building a Republican-aligned military-industrial complex and national security apparatus. Conservative Republicans now favored big spending on national defense and defined themselves as staunch anti-Communists. Ronald Reagan was one such Republican and so when he became the next Reconstructive president and established a new Republican dispensation, the need for America to lead the world with a powerful military was retained as part of that dispensation. Reagan himself maintained that supporters of American hegemony was one of the core constituencies in the Republican party. Military adventurism was now a Republican thing. The most recent US wars (Gulf, Afghan and Iraq) have been Republican projects while the four before that (WW I, WW II, Korea and Vietnam) had been undertaken by Democratic administrations.

Declining support for hegemony among American elites

Clinton and Obama continued to support American hegemony in a small way by conducting military operations similar in scale to those undertaken by Republicans before the Depression. President Trump was the first president to question the value of American hegemony and her retinue of dependent allies. The result has been a Republican base increasingly hostile to the Western alliance structure. Conservatives now argue that the US has no business getting involved in a European war (in Ukraine) much as they did in the early stages of the two world wars.

President Biden is trying to assert that the US is still willing to act as hegemon, but his failure to deter Russian president Putin from invading Ukraine and his early insistence that US troops in Ukraine were off the table belie this. Considering that NATO is more powerful than Russia there were actions Biden could have done to signal that the US strongly objected to the Russian invasion such as “war games” with Ukrainian and American forces during the time Russian forces were massing on the border. The situation reminds me of the lead up to the Gulf War, when the US informed the Iraq dictator that it had no opinion of its policy with respect to Kuwait, only to change its mind after Iraq invaded. Even after the invasion had begun there were actions the US could have, but did not, take such as supplying more and better weapons such as ATACMS missiles in 2022 before Russia had a chance to consolidate their recent gains. This lack of aggressive response is reminiscent of the choice to use inadequate force at the outset of the Afghan and Iraq wars, suggesting that the Ukraine war may already have been lost in its first year, as were these other wars.

The present challenge and what might be done.

Losing every war in which one engages is not a good look for a hegemon. And now the Israeli-Gaza war provides another opportunity for the US to react, express its concerns, and show it can play no constructive role in this dispute. I doubt anyone can, which is probably why it has gone on for so long. The issue is simple. The UN created a Western-style republic populated by a largely European Jewish people in the middle of a region populated by mostly Arab Muslim people living in autocracies. Cultures evolve in order to adapt to the environment in which they exist. Israel was not well-adapted to its environment and has gradually evolved over the past seventy years to become more like its surroundings. Initially its neighbors were a mix of monarchies and nationalist, military autocracies. Beset by enemies (three Arab-Israeli wars between 1947 and 1973) Israel developed a strong sense of nationalism and a capable military.

As conservative forms of religion became more prevalent in the period since the Iranian revolution, a similar thing has happened to the Israelis and Palestinians. As the nationalist Palestinian Fateh moderated, they and Israeli liberals sought to find a two-state solution to the problem. Israeli conservative parties opposed this project, favoring continuation of the status quo. The religious parties in both Israel (e.g. Religious Zionist) and Palestine (Hamas) are deeply antagonistic towards each other. A coalition of conservative and religious parties has controlled the Israeli government for many years now, while Palestinian religious zealots control Gaza; no prospect for peace exists. The Israeli Prime Minister is a corrupt figure who is trying to thwart democratic checks on his power, making him increasingly like the corrupt rulers of the rest of the Middle East. As the years go by, Israel is becoming less Western and more Middle Eastern, at least in terms of its politics, and there is decreasing political affinity between them and democratic America.

The Israeli-Palestinian issue and Persian Gulf oil were the two major reasons why the US has been involved in the Middle East for my entire lifetime. The development of US shale oil and the shift away from fossil fuels necessitated by global warming have rendered the latter moot. Since the US cannot really play any effective role in resolving the Israeli-Gaza conflict, it makes sense to express American disapproval of the heavy-handed Israeli response that is sure to come by withdrawing entirely from the region, ending all aid to Muslim and Jew alike and withdrawing all military assets.

With the rise of China and the tacit alliance they have with a revisionist Russia, what Smith calls the New Axis, the United States can no longer act as an unchallenged global hegemon. The war in Ukraine can be construed as such a challenge; I believe this is how Russia sees it. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be another. It is hard to see the US prevailing in either. Rather than going down fighting, it might be better to exit the hegemonic business on our own terms, rather than be forced out. At the end of my previous post, I suggested a deal the US might make with Russia in which Ukraine got all of their territory back and Russia achieved their core objective of removal of the US from Europe. This and a US withdrawal from the Middle East would end the hegemonic role America has played in Western Eurasia since the end of WW II.

Another possibility along these lines might be to make a deal with the North Koreans and their Chinese patrons for elimination of North Korean nuclear weapons and acceptance of intrusive UN inspections to verify this fact in exchange for a peace treaty, preventing the US from providing nuclear weapons to South Korea, and US troop withdrawal. It would be very much in China’s interest for there to be no nuclear weapons in either Korea, while both North Korea and China would very much like the US to be out of Korea. So, it is possible the US could finally end the Korean War in a positive way.

What I have suggested so far are fairly obvious gains for the US. There is no benefit to the US to continue to be involved in the Middle East and no moral reason to make common cause with any of the countries there. Europe easily has the resources to defend itself, it doesn’t need us, and by being there we have sapped their will to defend themselves, so we should leave. This is both beneficial to the US and the right thing to do. The Korean policy is different. It is an acknowledgment that if China wanted North Korea to conquer the South, the US could not stop them without resorting to nuclear weapons. China has nothing to gain from doing so. It seems clear a prosperous South Korean trading partner is preferential to an enlarged North Korean economic basket case. One without the Americans present is even better. What I am proposing is for the US to employ its remaining hegemonic power to accomplish some good things before leaving the scene in selected areas. To relinquish our hegemony, rather than wait until it is torn away from us.