This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
In case you hadn't noticed " and if you're part of the Biden administration foreign-policy team, you probably haven't " this country is in decline, globally as well as domestically, and increasingly pugnacious about it. If you want evidence of that reality (and it is a reality), all you have to do is check out You Know Who and the crazed Trumpublican Party he's helped bring into being. As I wrote during the 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump was always the symptom rather than the disease. At the time, I compared him to the Zika mosquito, not the virus it carried, adding that "our increasingly unnerved and disturbed world is his circus right now." I also put him, all too accurately, in the same camp with that Hungarian autocrat-in-the-making Viktor Orba'n long before Tucker Carlson and crew began to broadcast his glories.
Such decline was felt at the most visceral level throughout the American heartland in a country in which inequality had already reached unparalleled levels (and has since only grown worse). A rising sense that this country needed something radically different led significant numbers of Americans, often on the skids themselves, to put The Donald in the White House " and yes, it should have been (but wasn't) an irony that they turned to a billionaire grifter for relief.
Such all-American decline was anything but new, as scholar Chalmers Johnson, author of the classic book Blowback, would have told you long ago. In fact, think of Donald Trump as, from moment one, President Blowback. He would have been inconceivable if the post-Cold War world hadn't already become a monstrous tale of all-American f__k up, chaos, and decline. (What else would you call the disastrous Global War on Terror and the nightmarish conflicts that went with it?)
Who today can even recall the world after the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, when the U.S. was left as the "sole superpower" of Planet Earth? Honestly, it's hard to believe that happened barely more than 30 years ago. There's certainly all too much that's bare about our American world now, and let's not forget that this country's imperial decline has taken place on a planet that " thank you, fossil fuels! " is itself visibly in decline.
The question is: Will such decline continue to be a disaster of the first order at home and abroad or could it possibly be turned into something more positive? Today, let TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, author of To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, a classic history of empires gone astray, suggest what a United States that remains a significant regional power might do in its own hemisphere to come to grips with the decline of our own country, of the hemisphere, and of the planet as a whole. Tom
An American New Deal for An Entire Continent?
The Fading of Washington's Global Dreams and the Coming of a New World
By Alfred McCoy
A few recent headlines reveal the painfully inhumane, dangerously volatile state of U.S. relations with its own home region, the continent of North America. A record-breaking 2.76 million border crossings from Mexico filled homeless shelters to the bursting point in cities nationwide in 2022. This year, the possible cessation of Covid restrictions could allow tens of thousands more migrants, now huddling in the cold of northern Mexico, to surge across the border, as some are already able to do. Most of those refugees are Central Americans, fleeing cities ravaged by gang warfare and farms devastated by climate change. The inept U.S. response to such a disturbing world ranges from the Biden administration's nervously biding its time without a plan in sight to Arizona Governor Doug Ducey's cutting an ugly scar through a pristine national forest by building a four-mile border "wall" out of rusted shipping containers (which he now has to dismantle).
Meanwhile, miserable millions in Haiti's capital of Port-au-Prince are struggling to survive in the world's worst slums, ravaged by recent earthquakes and roiled by endemic gang violence. While the U.N. Security Council debated launching an international military intervention to address what its secretary-general called "an absolutely nightmarish situation," the U.S. expelled another 26,000 Haitian asylum seekers without hearings in 2022. The harshness of that was caught in September 2021 when Border Patrol horsemen used "unnecessary force" to herd Haitians back across the Rio Grande. Elsewhere in the Caribbean, Washington's recent economic sanctions on communist Cuba " imposed by Trump and maintained by Biden " have sparked the flight to the U.S. of 250,000 refugees last year, more than 2% of the island's population.
Farther south, after years of U.S.-led economic blockades and at least one Washington-sponsored coup, Venezuela has hemorrhaged 6.8 million of its citizens in what the U.N. called "the largest refugee and migrant crisis worldwide." In 2018, only 100 Venezuelans crossed the southern U.S. border. In 2022, that number was an unprecedented 188,000. And keep in mind that all of this is likely to seem but a trickle in the years to come when, as the World Bank warned recently, a human flood may head north as the devastation of climate change uproots as many as four million people annually from Mexico and Central America.
The Fundamentals of Geopolitical Change
As bad as this might seem, there are some faint signs that, however fitfully, the U.S. could at least be moving toward a more positive relationship with its home continent of North America " which includes Canada, Mexico, Central America, and the island nations of the Caribbean. And it can't happen soon enough since, within a decade, the growth of a multipolar world will slowly replace Washington's dreams of global hegemony with multinational alliances like the European Union or rising regional powers like Brazil, India, Nigeria, and Turkey.
At the broadest level, geopolitical change is eroding the capacity of any would-be hegemon, China included, to dominate much of the globe the way Washington did for the past 75 years. As the U.S. share of the global economy declined from a whopping 50% in 1950 to just 13% in 2021, its world leadership followed a similar downward trajectory, a process not unlike what Great Britain experienced in the decades before World War I. This relative economic and imperial decline is now undercutting Washington's long-sought goal of maintaining its dominance over Eurasia, the epicenter of global power. It did so for decades via a tripartite geopolitical strategy " controlling the continent's western end thanks to NATO and its east via a vast chain of military bases along the Pacific littoral, while working assiduously to block either China or Russia from achieving any sort of full-scale dominance in Central Asia.
Dream on, as they say. In this century, with its disastrous wars, Washington has already lost much of its influence in both the Greater Middle East and Central Asia, as once-close allies (Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey) go their own ways. Meanwhile, China has gained significant control over Central Asia, while its recent ad-hoc alliance with an ever-more-battered Russia only fortifies its growing geopolitical power on the Eurasian continent.
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