Decline and Fall of the American Empire

Liberals are currently decrying Trump’s destruction of a Western alliance that stood for freedom and democracy.

It’s tempting to sneer. The US-led postwar order has meant a reign of terror; from Latin American coups to the Indonesian genocide, from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, and through economic immiseration imposed on noncompliant countries via  structural adjustment.

But the United States’ strategy, based on a moral claim to universal values, a military claim to apocalyptic power, and an economic claim to the capacity and will to underwrite global capitalism, required persuasion, too, not only force.

Washington traded on its ability to offer security for allies, act as lender of last resort, disburse aid, help maintain international institutions, and sell a vision that could compete with either a Communist world order or a Hobbesian world of all-against-all.

Trumpism reflects the maturation of a shift away from this worldview. A decade ago, as the insurgent right moved to co-opt anger about socioeconomic injustice, it also moved to exploit Barack Obama’s betrayal of his pledge to end the forever wars.

A basket of politically disparate concerns — American foreign policy failures, security services overreach, industrial decline, immigration, and equalities legislation — were smashed together in a critique of a “globalist” or “woke” liberal agenda.

Vance has become the point man for this line of attack — an insurgent voice that says the American empire may sustain the fantasies of Beltway think-tankers but does little for Appalachian hillbillies.

The liberals played their part too, dressing the American war machine in progressive language, with 2022 polling revealing a dramatic reversal in partisan attitudes toward the security services.

But if the politics has shifted, it’s downstream of a shift in strategic reality.

China has already clipped the United States’ wings in multiple dimensions. Threats to dollar dominance are sometimes overwrought, but real. The free-trading Washington Consensus is in tatters. So, too, is Washington’s project to kneecap and contain post-Soviet Russia.

And despite an absurdly bloated military budget, the United States struggles to achieve military victories or project power as it once did.

Joe Biden’s administration had already inched toward a less expansive approach — what was called a “foreign policy for the (American) middle class.”

Biden drew down in Afghanistan. Like Trump, he proposed US access to Ukraine’s critical minerals in return for security support. He developed industrial policy that sidelined European interests. And he shifted away from neoliberal free trade toward “friendshoring” supply chains in order to undermine China.

This relatively cautious approach to reorientation has, however, been blown out of the water by Trump.

The new administration represents competing factions. There are the foreign policy critics like Vance and Tulsi Gabbard. There are more classical neoconservative hawks remaining, though fewer than in Trump’s first term.

And then there is Elon Musk, whose opposition to American militarism seems to be rooted in a desire to gut the state’s relationship with big arms companies and replace it with Silicon Valley.

The emerging compromise appears to be a withdrawal from global power projection along multiple axes, to focus on a few core areas of interest.Thus, ruthless support for Israel remains, while the other interests of EU allies are sacrificed. In a reverse of Nixonian appeals to China, Beijing is replacing Moscow as the main pole of American antagonism, as Elbridge Colby — Trump’s most serious foreign policy thinker — has long advocated for.

For a new multipolar world, the global neoliberal order is out and a narrower and more transactional Weltpolitik is in.

European Response

Washington refuses to defend us, so now we must defend ourselves, goes the argument in Brussels. European leaders, even formerly peace-loving Greens, are talking grand plans for remilitarization.

There is an arms race to be more extreme — proposals for 3 percent of GDP to be devoted to war spending are met with counterproposals for 5 percent. From a European Union version of the CIA to a “Euronuke” rotating between EU capitals, no idea seems too absurd.

The European Commission has now unveiled a plan it claims will mobilize €800 billion in military spending across the bloc.

This has been a long time coming. When the UK left the EU, Euromilitarists saw the removal of one of the most significant blockages to European military integration and began taking their chances.

EU military commitments crept up, from the Sahel to Mozambique, where troops arrived to help the army combat insurgents (read: secure European energy interests.)

EU border force Frontex — “civilian troops wearing a European uniform” in the words of its disgraced ex-director — provided a valuable precedent for later militarization.

But since Russia invaded Ukraine, proposals have gone stratospheric.

Initially, Europe bet the house on victory in Ukraine. Now its rhetoric is pivoting sharply away from framing Russia as easily defeatable to on the brink of overrunning Europe.

But quite what the billions in new EU and member-state defense spending is actually supposed to do is less clear.

Zelensky’s partial capitulation to Trump reflects the hard limits of continuing the war without US materiel, from air defense to standoff fires. The United States has contributed, for instance, three million 155m artillery rounds to the EU’s one million, with Russia firing rounds at a 5:1 ratio as of last year.

And this is just Ukraine. Europe’s hawks are ambitious about becoming a peer power to Russia, China, or the United States. But in some ways they are not ambitious enough; such aims would require centralization and mobilization on a scale not being discussed, because few would find it palatable.

One influential Brussels think tank argued 300,000 new troops would be needed. Where the manpower can be found is unclear.

Watching Brussels talk war is somewhat akin to watching a local official with a clipboard attempting to wield a machine gun. The enthusiasm is high, but the quantity of rational discussion is low.

And for all the talk of an EU military-industrial complex, US industry will continue to both create and service Europe’s military demands.

Trump’s insistence that Europe must “pay its fair share” for NATO, and anti-Trump EU leaders’ insistence on independent defense end up in the same place — American manufacturers’ coffers.

The deeper problem is revealed in the question asked by Vance at Munich: You can talk about defense, but what are you defending?

The EU’s court history is of a union built on the recognition that the horrors of World War II could never happen again. Its answer was the gradual expansion of markets and movement governed by common rules and underpinned by common values — rules and values that supposedly differentiated Europe from both authoritarians to its east and buccaneers to its west.

At its height, in areas like climate policy and consumer rights, it represented some genuinely progressive advances.

But as the crises of the post-crash years began to bite, it became something different. The dark side of Europeanism emerged first in the brutal disciplining of Southern Europe during the financial crisis, then the quiet abandonment of much of its human rights standards in order to slam the door on refugees.

Its foreign policy is now mostly transactional; seeking alliances with authoritarians in exchange for energy security, military cooperation, and migration control.

While Trump built a wall in Mexico, EU-supplied vehicles patrolled a longer one to keep Syrians from crossing into Turkey.

Any moral leadership that the EU may have retained — not least in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — is sundered by its continued embrace of Israel, over a year and a half into its genocidal Gaza campaign.

As accession processes from candidate countries stall, as schisms between countries deepen, and as the populist right, which the EU was meant to be a bulwark against, amasses more power than ever in Brussels, it is unclear what political basis the European project can stand on either.

European leaders may present themselves as a “Coalition of the Willing,” but their interests are far from unified.

As the “rules-based order” breaks down, Europe could have chosen to play the card it held well, becoming a global beacon for the rule of law, peaceful economic cooperation, and human rights.

Instead, it is trying to play a card it does not have; that of a heavyweight military power.

Its approach to power has become more illiberal and more narrow — much like that of its bête noire, Donald Trump.

Austerity or Militarism?

It was a bruising two days for the UK’s Keir Starmer.

Plaudits for his embrace of Trump swiftly melted away in the wake of the Zelensky–Oval Office row, leaving him to host European leaders in London as they questioned which side of the Atlantic his loyalties lay on.

Together with Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, he talked up his ability to provide a strategic bridge between the EU and United States.

This is always the role that Britain has tried to play in the Western alliance, recognizing its post-imperial position but still attempting to maintain outsize influence.

A Labour government had a key role in the development of NATO. And a career British officer and child of imperial India, Lord Hastings Ismay, was the alliance’s first secretary-general.

In 2020, Britain developed its newest strategy for neo-imperial power projection under Boris Johnson.

It was short-lived, but now Britain is also leading the shift away from liberal geopolitics. At the end of February, international development minister Anneliese Dodds stood down in protests against Starmer’s decision to slash the overseas aid budget to spend on weapons.

From the proposal to set up a British “DOGE” (the United States’ new Department of Government Efficiency) to livestreaming mass deportations, the British government seems keen to follow wherever Washington leads.

Other countries — France, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Germany — are also paring back foreign aid to find headroom for military spending.

The difficulty of agreeing on even a piecemeal target for climate finance at Baku in November gives another indication of where priorities are.

The symbolic focus on cutting aid is probably to avoid too much discussion of where the bulk of the weapons money will actually be coming from: already strained social-welfare budgets.

Germany’s outgoing defense minister — in a government that was fiscally hawkish to the point of self-sabotage — is demanding double the NATO target for military spending.

The EU meanwhile pledges to loosen harsh fiscal rules, but only for defense, in spite of collapsing living standards, sluggish economies, and the yawning shortfall in the finance needed to tackle the climate crisis. Apparently the only choices are austerity or war.

Almost every Western leader currently in office came to power based on pledges to tackle the crippling cost-of-living crisis. Instead, they are hawking the false promise that some form of military Keynesianism can revive flagging economies.

Whether the United States and the EU can repair the schism that Trump has created in the Western alliance is difficult to predict.

But on both sides of the Atlantic, the new West is already here: stripped of its vestigial liberalism, obsessed with “guns over butter,” building walls both physical and metaphorical, and narrower in its approach to the world.

The days of unipolar American hegemony or the Cold War duopoly are over. One would probably have to look back to the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe and its interlocking but rivalrous imperial monarchies to find any kind of analogue for this moment of intense competition alongside ultraconcentrated wealth and power.

Global neoliberalism is on life support, but its militarized replacement is no less profit-seeking and transactional, and no more aligned with any attempt to solve the real emergencies we face.