I am not a historian. I am a journalist and political strategist, and I deal with data and information. So, permit me some leeway if I do not get some historical analyses right. But the topic of how empires decline and ultimately fall is a valid one to discuss in 2024, especially with the return of Donald Trump to the White House. In fact, the recently concluded United States presidential elections helped to shed light on what many are calling the "end of Pax Americana" - the end of the American century. The American Empire, constructed upon the decay, debris and fall of the British Empire (and Europe) at the end of World War II has lasted for about 80 years. And while the empire is certainly alive today and may go on living for decades to come, the fact is that imperial decline is a well-established gradual process. Empires no not decline overnight.
Let me begin with when this weakening of the American Empire started - in 2010. That year economic globalization of the American-led world order was cutting good-paying factory jobs here, income inequality was rising, deepening and widening, and capitalism's failures in the form of corporate bailouts were booming -- all essential ingredients for rising working-class anger and resentment as well as deepening domestic divisions.
Coupled with these early warning signs were ill-advised U.S. (and its European poodle states) military misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, concocted and promoted by Washington elites trying to deny any semblance of socio-economic decline, stoked anger among ordinary Americans, and gradually discredited the very notion of international commitments. This was accompanied by the erosion of America's relative economic strength from half the world's output back in 1950 to about 25% in 2010 meant the wherewithal for its unipolar power was fading fast.
Historians long ago coined the phrase The Thucydides Trap to describe an apparent tendency towards war when an emerging power threatens to displace an existing great power as a regional or international hegemon. China was that "emerging power," a "near-peer" competitor that was needed to turn that attenuating U.S. global hegemony into accelerating imperial decline. With rapid economic growth, a vast population, and the world's longest imperial tradition, China was primed to become just such an emerging power.
However, back in 2010 even as China pulled over 600 million of its people out of poverty - an incredible feat accomplished in less than 40 years - Washington's foreign policy elites thought little of China's rise and even admitted the country to the World Trade Organization (WTO) confident that U.S. power and global hegemony could readily mold and make China to the United States' particular liking. But two years later, in 2012, the United States political scientists finally woke up and concluded that "China alone will probably have the largest economy, surpassing that of the United States a few years before 2030," and the U.S. would no longer be "a hegemonic power."
To make matters worse, one year later in 2013, China launched its massive $4 trillion "Belt and Road Initiative" catching the United States and its European allies flat-footed, by surprise, which forced them to try and play catch up ever since. The BRI is today history's largest development program that spans the globe opening up new markets for Chinese goods and services, and bringing hundreds of countries into China's column. All of this has forced Washington to finally conclude that China - not Russia - is America's biggest military AND economic threat today in 2024.
By exploiting the very globalized economy, China's manufacturing and industrial output soared to a staggering $3.2 trillion by 2016, surpassing both the U.S. and Japan, while simultaneously eliminating, killing a whopping 2.4 million American jobs between 1999 and 2011. This caused the closure of factories in countless towns across the U.S. South and Midwest. By fraying social safety nets while eroding protections for labor unions and local businesses in both the U.S. and Europe, globalization reduced the quality of life for hundreds of millions, while creating mounting inequality on a truly humongous scale, and stoking a working-class reaction that would crest in a global wave of angry populism.
As the United States (and Europe) weakened and with the growing assertiveness of the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and new-found enthusiasm by some African countries to kick out its old colonial masters (France in Niger, for example), the world witnessed the rise of the political populist strongman as a consequence of working-class anger and distrust of the elites and oligarchs of moribund liberal democracies. Riding that wave, right-wing populists have won a steady stream of elections -- in Russia (2000), Israel (2009), Hungary (2010), China (2012), Turkey (2014), the Philippines (2016), the U.S. (2016), Brazil (2018), Italy (2022), the Netherlands (2023), Indonesia (2024), and the U.S. again (2024).
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