Shots Fired: The Slow Decline Of Pax Americana

On 14 July, the man most likely to be the next American president, Donald Trump, survived an assassination attempt by a hairsbreadth.

An historic occurrence, reflecting the state of affairs in the country that claims to be exceptional, indispensable and the paragon of human rights and democratic virtues worldwide.  

On the other hand, after mumbling his way through virtually every public event he graces these days, US President Joe Biden invariably needs someone to guide him off stage. The gent is senile and barely lucid, rarely able to string together two sense-making sentences in sequence. 

There’s nothing exceptional about all this. The world has seen senile leaders in the past. Assassination attempts are a dime a dozen globally. 

What is extraordinary is that Biden is still his party’s chosen candidate for president in the next election this November, when he will turn 82. And Trump, no spring chicken himself at 78, has emerged as the only possible candidate that the Republicans can field with a hope of winning. 

No rational observer will buy the argument that President Biden is, or has been for some time, the one responsible for making decisions, or taking them. Except perhaps in occasional moments of clarity. The question then arises, who is the one (or who are the few) with the power to decide policy or take operational decisions in the US today? 

The frightening part is that no one seems to know. If anyone does, that information is certainly not leaking. How did things come to this pass? 

America in 2024 is not the same country that won the Cold War, let alone the Second World War. This reality is obvious to even a casual observer with limited historical memory. Enough surveys over the last decade show that most Americans think the past was better than the present, and that the future will be worse. 

What happened? It is impossible to pinpoint any single factor. Hubris has certainly played a significant role, although by no means can the current situation be attributed to just that. Whatever is ailing America is far more systemic. Some observations: 

First, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” has always been at the core of being American. Over time, this laudable notion has turned into something like “lifestyle, licence and the pursuit of wealth”. It is not a hard turn to take. Rarely do people take “the road less travelled by” — as their popular poet Robert Frost put it. 

Of course, that makes all the difference, or at least a lot of it. The result is a country that is not quite what the founding fathers anticipated when writing the works that ended up creating the America we knew yesterday. 

A comprehensive corruption of ideals lies at the heart of the present predicament. Electoral dysfunction, spectrum-wide interest-based lobbying, and institutional corruption facilitated by a “revolving door” employment system in the private sector for politicians and bureaucrats are just a few symptoms of a larger disease. 

If one is to assess from mainstream media reportage and social media behaviour, belief in the ability of the democratic system to deliver outcomes — prosperity, stability, moral self-image — on which the country was founded seems to have declined. 

Second, American democracy has been subverted in substance, though the form has been maintained through process. Even the process is now being dismantled via media co-option, lawfare and other mechanisms. 

Trump was removed from social media platforms at a time when he was still in office. He has been sentenced to prison through several precedent setting actions by the government and the judiciary. This comes at a time when polls have consistently shown him leading in the presidential race. 

The steady systemic degradation should be evident to most who have observed the country for some time. There is also unprecedented polarisation in a society that is locked and loaded (more than one gun per American). Talk of civil war in the media is not uncommon. 

All this is part and parcel of a political stand-off drawing upon complaints ranging from unchecked immigration across the southern border to the mainstreaming of fringe lifestyles to the point of reverse discrimination. Browsing the American neighbourhood of X is like watching a society in slow-motion breakdown. 

Remember, this is a country that had more than 5,000 nuclear warheads as of May 2024 (many of these deployed around the world and continuously moving about under the oceans). Potentially catastrophic scenarios can unfold in the unlikely, but clearly no longer impossible, event that the establishment disintegrates along political lines. 

Third, American foreign policy has in many ways been integral to the polarising discourse within the country. Nowhere has the difference between the interests of the American public and the permanent establishment been starker in recent years, nor hubris more visible. 

Certainly, in its dealings with the rest of the world, the now infamous Wolfowitz Doctrine and its implementation appears to have done most of the damage since February 1992. (That was when Wolfowitz’s Defence Planning Guidance document for 1994-1999 was issued — literally a few months after the collapse of the Soviet Union). 

The world we have today is, to a great degree, the consequence of that seed planted by Paul Wolfowitz, then a senior defence department official and perhaps the exemplar for today’s neo-conservatives (neocons). He was not by any means the only one who held such views then. 

In fact, Wolfowitz was playing to a largely applauding gallery. It is no surprise that the era of relative peace in Europe ended less than 10 years later, in 1999, when the US conducted 78 days of non-stop bombing of Serbia, with no UN or any other international resolution to back it. 

In other words, an illegal act of war followed by Iraq (2003), Afghanistan (20-year occupation), Libya and Syria (both regime change objective) to name the most obvious. None of these has resulted in anything that can be regarded as good for the US or the rest of the world. 

The observations above are not lost on the American public, which has been quite relentless in criticising wars launched supposedly to restore or initiate freedom and democracy. To no avail. All presidents since 1999 have engaged in aggressive wars, except Donald Trump. 

The fact that Trump literally dodged a bullet on 14 July, comes therefore in a particular domestic and international context. Had he shifted his head right instead of left, he would have taken the bullet on his face. 

The consequences would have been unthinkable, given what happened in the US capital after he lost the 2020 elections. The political discourse is much worse now than it was then, riven with extreme language and hyperbole. The two sides unable to engage in any way, let alone meaningfully. 

So What Next? 

The prospects are that Trump will win, if he survives the campaign and if the elections are not rigged by the current dispensation. The manner in which the 2020 polls were conducted, and the persisting sense among a large section of the populace about its legitimacy, does not leave much room for confidence. 

The rest of the world can only hope that the American institutions of democracy get their act together. They can. But even if Trump wins, making America great again will require hard-headed steps which the Republican Party may not be able to take. 

One priority should be to extricate itself from the Ukraine war, and to rationalise its posture on the Gaza conflict. Second would be to reassure European allies that a more contrite NATO will be fashioned where they are not going to be led ever again to the mouth of the abyss. Third, outreach to Russia and to China will be required in order to stabilise the global geopolitical situation which is currently in a state of flux that has no precedent in 75 years. 

It is unlikely that any of the above will be fully achieved in Trump’s second term, when the top priorities are most likely to be domestic. There may be some quick actions to give the impression of movement — ceasefires in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, leadership level if not summit meetings with Russia and China, etc. 

But the American establishment is in too much disarray for the problems accumulated over three decades to be sorted out in four years. Its domestic behaviours are no longer predictable, nor can its global actions be considered entirely rational anymore. Unless the intent itself is chaos. 

What we are watching is the, mostly self-imposed, steady reduction of the American Empire after a period of unchallenged unipolarity. What remains to be seen is whether this will continue to happen with containable violence or slide into the all too real prospect of a nuclear Third World War.