While Washington defended its European axial point through NATO, its position in the east was secured by four mutual defense pacts running down the Pacific littoral from Japan and South Korea through the Philippines to Australia. All of this was, in turn, tied together by successive arcs of steel that ringed the vast Eurasian continent -- strategic bombers, ballistic missiles, and massive naval fleets in the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and the Pacific. In the latest addition to this apparatus, the U.S. has built a string of 60 drone bases around the Eurasian landmass from Sicily to Guam.
The Dynamics of Decline
In the decade before Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, there were already signs that this awesome apparatus was on a long-term trajectory of decline, even if the key figures in a Washington shrouded in imperial hubris preferred to ignore that reality. Not only has the new president's maladroit diplomacy accelerated this trend, but it has illuminated it in striking ways.
Over the past half-century, the American share of the global economy has, for instance, fallen from 40% in 1960 to 22% in 2014 to just 15% in 2017 (as measured by the realistic index of purchasing power parity). Many experts now agree that China will surpass the U.S., in absolute terms, as the world's number one economy within a decade.
As its global economic dominance fades, its clandestine instruments of power have been visibly weakening as well. The NSA's worldwide surveillance of a remarkable array of foreign leaders, as well as millions of the inhabitants of their countries, was once a relatively cost-effective instrument for the exercise of global power. Now, thanks in part to Edward Snowden's revelations about the agency's snooping and the anger of targeted allies, the political costs have risen sharply. Similarly, during the Cold War, the CIA manipulated dozens of major elections worldwide. Now, the situation has been reversed with Russia using its sophisticated cyberwarfare capabilities to interfere in the 2016 American presidential campaign -- a clear sign of Washington's waning global power.
Most striking of all, Washington now faces the first sustained challenge to its geopolitical position in Eurasia. By opting to begin constructing a "new silk road," a trillion-dollar infrastructure of railroads and oil pipelines across that vast continent, and preparing to build naval bases in the Arabian and South China seas, Beijing is mounting a sustained campaign to undercut Washington's long dominance over Eurasia.
Fortress America
During just 12 months in office, Donald Trump has accelerated this decline by damaging almost all the key components in the intricate architecture of American global power.
If all great empires require skilled leadership at their epicenter to maintain what is always a fragile global equilibrium, then the Trump administration has failed spectacularly. As the State Department is eviscerated and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson discredited, Trump has -- uniquely for an American president -- taken sole control of foreign policy (with the generals he appointed to key civilian posts in tow).
How, then, do those who have been in close contact with him in this period assess his intellectual ability to adapt to such a daunting role?
Although since his election campaign Trump has repeatedly bragged about his excellent education at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School as a qualification for office, he started there in the late 1960s thinking he already knew everything about business, prompting his marketing professor, who taught for more than 30 years, to brand him "the dumbest goddam student I ever had." That brash unwillingness to learn carried into the presidential campaign. As political consultant Sam Nunberg, sent to tutor the candidate on the Constitution, reported, "I got as far as the Fourth Amendment before... his eyes are rolling back in his head."
As Michael Wolff has recounted in his bestselling new book on the Trump White House, Fire and Fury, a few months later, at the close of a phone conversation with the president-elect about the complexities of the H-1B visa program for skilled immigrants, media mogul Rupert Murdoch hung up and said, "What a f*cking idiot." And last July, as no one is likely to forget, after a top-secret Pentagon briefing for the White House principals on worldwide military operations, Secretary of State Tillerson seconded that view by privately labeling the president a "f*cking moron."
"It's worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns," one White House aide wrote in an email, according to Wolff. "Trump won't read anything; not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up half-way through meetings with world leaders because he is bored." White House Deputy Chief of Staff Katie Walsh claimed that dealing with the president was "like trying to figure out what a child wants."
Those qualities of mind are amply evident in the administration's recent National Security Strategy report, a vacuous document that wavers between the misguided and the delusional. "When I came into office," Trump (or at least whoever was impersonating him) writes darkly in a personal preface, "rogue regimes were developing nuclear weapons... to threaten the entire planet. Radical Islamist terror groups were flourishing... Rival powers were aggressively undermining American interests around the globe... Unfair burden-sharing with our allies and inadequate investment in our own defense had invited danger."
In just 12 short months, however, the president -- so "his" preface indicates -- had singlehandedly saved the country from almost certain destruction. "We are rallying the world against the rogue regime in North Korea and... the dictatorship in Iran, which those determined to pursue a flawed nuclear deal had neglected," that preface continues in a typically Trumpian celebration of self. "We have renewed our friendships in the Middle East... to help drive out terrorists and extremists... America's allies are now contributing more to our common defense, strengthening even our strongest alliances... We are making historic investments in the United States military."
Reflecting his administration's well-documented difficulties with the truth, almost every one of those statements is either inaccurate, incomplete, or irrelevant. Setting aside such details, the document itself reflects the way the president (and his generals) have abandoned decades of confident leadership of the international community and are now trying to retreat from "an extraordinarily dangerous world" into a veritable Festung America behind concrete walls and tariff barriers -- in some eerie way conceptually reminiscent of the Atlantic Wall of beachfront bunkers Hitler's Third Reich constructed for its failed Festung Europa (Fortress Europe). But beyond such an obviously myopic foreign policy agenda, there are vast areas, largely overlooked in Trump's strategy, that remain critical for the overall maintenance of American global power.
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