USA dreams in the world, after American Primacy

Nov 15, 2024

Article voiceover

1×

0:00

-31:52

Donald Trump’s election does not signal the end of the American-led post-war world order. That fiction faded long ago. His comeback invites the world to let go of a deadly American dream about its role in world history since 1945. Before that dream turns sour.

That dream is that American Primacy or American Greatness (two rhetorical variations on the same theme) brought peace, prosperity and democracy to the world after the “inflection point”, to use the Biden Presidency’s favoured term, of World War Two. The simplified history of that dream was narrated by Jake Sullivan, Biden’s National Security Adviser,

After World War Two, we built an international economic order in the context of a divided world, an order that helped free nations recover and avoid a return to the protectionist and nationalist mistakes of the 1930s, an order that also advanced American economic and geopolitical power. In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we took that order global, embracing the old Eastern bloc, China, India, and many developing countries.1

What happens next gets murkier in the story, but even Biden’s National Security Strategy acknowledged “the post-Cold War era is definitively over”.2 The theme of that National Security Strategy was that the world was again at an “inflection point,” as it was in 1945. Biden’s rhetoric echoed Trump’s slogan to Make America Great Again, but preferred to rally allies under the banner of American global leadership. The USA was again in a “contest for the future of our world.” President Biden’s foreword said:

Around the world, the need for American leadership is as great as it has ever been. We are in the midst of a strategic competition to shape the future of the international order. There is nothing beyond our capacity. We can do this—for our future and for the world.

Such a claim reflects interests, fixed ideas of American hegemony, and emotional drives to fulfil America’s manifest destiny. It is rooted in narratives of world history since 1945 that shape the projects that American leaders across the political spectrum pursue in the world. That assumed history of how America became great and made the free world in its own image conditions the responses of the American elite, regardless of their domestic political loyalties.

American elites have become addicted to stories of America’s unique role in the world, and to servicing the status of being the global hegemon. Like fading athletic champions, they cannot accept the inevitability of losing races as their powers fade and other athletes emerge. They struggle to find a dignified role in the world that is not defined by dominance. They risk their health and integrity by pumping themselves up with performance-enhancing drugs to keep the American Dream of Greatness alive.

There are but few signs yet that Americans are prepared to let go of Primacy. The ‘realist’ international relations scholar, Stephen Walt, has written, following the reelection of Donald Trump, that:

there is little to fear if America’s relative power declines somewhat, provided US leaders accept this development and adjust their policies accordingly. On the contrary, a more even distribution of power might be beneficial for the United States and for many others around the world. The United States does not need a position of unchallenged primacy to be secure or prosperous, and a somewhat more even distribution of power would force Washington to eschew the dangerous combination of counterproductive unilateralism and liberal hubris that has roiled world politics in recent decades.3

Walt is as yet the exception, and he coats his bitter pill with the sugar of American flattery. Walt argues the USA retains “enormous advantages relative to all other powers” and will long remain “the most powerful state in the world.” He seems to believe the USA should simply be a more modest, demure hegemon.

By contrast, Adam Tooze, the British-German-American economic historian, challenges the hegemony project at its core. He correctly observes that the role of “hegemon”, so entrenched in the thinking of US-based international relations scholars and geopolitics analysts, has only ever operated at a global scale in the case of the USA in the twentieth century. He argues, echoing the histories of John Darwin, that the USA has devised, improvised and renewed this hegemony project since 1916. He documented the early history of this hegemony project in The Deluge. He analysed its late history in Crashed. (My summary of Tooze’s histories is here)

The conventional narrative of the post-war world order is history written by the victors of this hegemony project. It does not observe the world as it is or the past as it was. The very idea of global hegemony and “offshore balancing” to prevent a regional hegemon in Eurasia, are fables of American exceptionalism that mislead about the history of the world since 1945.

Tooze argues, moreover, that the American elite’s emotional obsession with primacy is dangerous.

“This line of thinking is not just simplistic. In the current moment it is dangerously so. To the drama of America’s evidently waning hegemony it adds the intensity of the follow-on question: who comes next? This question - far from necessary - is framed by the assumption of historical repetition - hegemon-interregnum-hegemony. In the current moment there can only be one possible answer: CCP-led China. That in turns eggs the flailing American elite on to a more intense rearguard action. But why assume that in the 21st century there will be a successor to America’s 20th century power?"4

Is that not what we have seen both under the Biden Presidency and in the initial appointments and rhetoric of the re-elected Trump Presidency? The targets might differ. The emotions aroused by the speeches might shift. The oligarchs backing the policies might change. But the same narrative about history and America’s role in the world drives American elites to reassert American Primacy, rather than join the world as equal partners.

The world outside America is responding differently, if still nervously and without full clarity. There have been many highly emotional or reflexive reactions to Donald Trump’s election. I discussed some of the absurd invocations of the historical myth of the post-war Pax Americana in my post, Will Trump end the post-war world order? It will take some time before the realities of the new USA administration are clear, and before the responses of other world powers are known. I will look in more detail at responses across the other principal poles of power in today’s world - China, Russia, India, and Europe - over the coming weeks.

It may be that Donald Trump’s election is a breaking point in the cultural and diplomatic power of the USA. The distinguished and dissident British diplomat, Alistair Crooke, has written that many were disappointed in the cautious progress of the BRICS Summit in Kazan,

But a “week is a long time in politics.” And one week later, the western intellectual paradigm was upended. The Shibboleths of the last fifty years were rejected across the board in the US by voters. The ideology of “undoing” the cultural past; the casting aside the lessons of history (for, it is claimed, “wrongful” perspectives) and the rejection of systems of ethics reflected in the myths and stories of a community, have themselves been rejected! It is ok again to be a “civilisational state.” The radical doubting and cynicism of the Anglosphere is reduced to one perspective amongst many. And no longer can be the universal narrative.5

I agree that “the West” is losing its dominant place as the cultural reference standard for the world, but do believe it is a slower, longer term process than Alistair Crooke states here. However, America’s descent into a storm of self-glorification, self-loathing and self-harm over the next four years may well precipitate a faster, wider shift in global cultural norms.

However, I have noticed some subtle signs that influential voices around the world are letting go of the dangerous dream of American Primacy. For example, Adam Tooze had an intriguing discussion with the President and CEO of the Asia Society, Dr. Kyung-wha Kang, who was the Foreign Minister of South Korea between 2017 and 2021.

Both Tooze and Kang observed that states around the world are stepping back from the USA after Trump’s victory. Tooze argued that while Trump is likely to pursue crude transactional foreign policies, the influence of the dream of American Primacy will persist. He commented that this dream is bipartisan. Likely Trump appointee, Elbridge Colby shares Jake Sullivan’s view that it is the historic role of America to stand up for the historical project of freedom and democracy. These beliefs drive America to challenge any contenders for hegemony, principally China, even to the point of damaging the interests of its allies, especially in Europe. Tooze encourages detachment from Atlanticism, and notes the major European states are quietly exploring alternatives in the shadows of Trump’s triumph.

Dr Kang noted shrewdly that the response of the American elite comes from a sense of a loss of control. She said in conversation

“the political mindset as indicated by Mr Sullivan and the political leadership also indicates a sense of a loss of control, a loss of dominance, and I don't think that's a healthy way to drive policy because the emotional content blurs the real national interest at stake here.”

She adds that a calm assessment reveals America’s impossible demands.

“if you want America to say, ‘we want to withdraw, we don't want to take care of Europe anymore.,’ And you do it. You can't square that with this idea, ‘But we still want to dominate’.6

In other words, the spell of American Primacy is broken. America is withdrawing from the world, while seeking to dominate and to punish the world for displacing America. It is withdrawing into its grandiose preoccupation with greatness while revealing its deep divisions and ferocious fantasies. But the world is stepping back. It is thinking about the world as it is. It is letting go of the stories of how America, not the world, shaped the world.

The USA needs a new historical myth about its role in the world. Its leaders and its people need to revise its history of how the world changed since 1945. They need to rethink the contribution of the USA to both order and disorder in that world since 1945. They need to face the facts that the USA today is a bare seventh of the world economy (in purchasing power terms), equivalent to Europe and much less than China. Its people need to act with the modesty that befits one in twenty-five of the world’s population. Its culture needs to stop shouting about itself at the world, and learn from the narrative diversity of that world.

The American story of post-war history is that it led the free world in a righteous struggle between 1945 and 1989, unilaterally shaped the global rules-based world order after 1989, and then, after some undated years of lassitude, began to fight back in the “contest for the future of the world” (in Biden’s version) or to make America Great Again (in Trump’s version). This plot is a Marvel franchise movie, not the real history of the world since 1945.

A better version of that real history can be read in John Darwin, After Tamerlane: the Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000. Over the next five weeks on the Burning Archive, I am taking a deep dive into this post-1945 world, guided by John Darwin’s authoritative account.

In my latest audio-mini, I read key excerpts from chapter eight, “Empire Denied” which traces how the USA emerged from the “bombed-out city” of the 1945 world to become the “Unlimited Empire” of the unipolar moment, which both Joe Biden and Donald Trump remain nostalgic for.

On 20 November, I will examine how from 1949 to 1989 the USA did not lead the free world in a righteous struggle for democracy. It rather established American power at both ends of the Eurasian Continent, but at the tragic cost of partitions and “frozen conflicts” that remain with us today.

On 27 November, I will examine the major story of Decolonisation that the myth of the American Century neglects. I will highlight how John Darwin emphasises the central role of decolonization in post-war history, and explain how the conflicted processes of decolonization still cast a long shadow on the world of liberal democracies.

On 2 December, I will explore the astonishing development of the American post-1945 empire. By 1955 the USA had established over 400 military bases around the world. I will show how it collaborated with the European empires to maintain their power over Asia and Africa, including through the NATO alliance that it celebrates today as the greatest military alliance in world history.

On 9 December, I will examine the paradox of the “Unlimited Empire”, during the American Unipolar Moment after 1991. It was in this era that the American hegemony project threw off all restraints, and openly espoused full-spectrum dominance and never-ending American Primacy. That dangerous dream of the real neo-conservatives from the 1990s, such as Paul Wolfowitz, still haunts America’s history of its role in the world.

When John Darwin published After Tamerlane in 2007, it was far from clear that the era of the Unlimited Empire, his term for America’s Unipolar Moment, would end. Darwin assessed the reasons why social, political, cultural and economic forces across the world would “correct the imbalance of a unipolar world.”7 On balance, he was prudently sceptical that the limits of American power would be breached by its rivals or domestic weaknesses.

One reason he gave for thinking unipolarity would fade was that “the American taxpayer might come to resent the burden of empire and lose heart in the effort to preserve American power in its lonely pre-eminence.” However, this result depended on the balance of costs and benefits. A decade before Trump, Darwin observed, “The chances of a domestic revolt against America’s imperial burden will depend very heavily on the costs it imposes.”8 While many interpreted Trump’s victory in 2016 as precisely that revolt, the outlook in 2024 is different. Both the 2016 and 2024 elections, and even indeed the Biden Presidency, look like riots to restore the Unlimited American Empire. As Warwick Powell observed, they are outbursts of nostalgia.

America was reimagined as the victim par excellence. American generosity had been taken advantage of - by a cultural elite that had lost touch with the earthiness of America, by hordes of illegitimate foreigners, and by ungrateful nations around the world. Not only was America a victim of globalist abandonment from within its own ranks, it also was a victim of an unholy sabotage orchestrated by a Godless China that defied Washington, and an ungrateful Europe that refused to carry its weight and pay its way.
The nostalgic reflex conjured up an imaginary image of an unblemished, virtuous and strong America. It paints a picture of redemptive possibilities, in which those with a legitimate claim on the bounty of a redeemed nation are mobilised to channel their energies against the illegitimate. The stains of a fallen American could thus be washed away.9

This nostalgia does not weigh the costs of the American imperial burden. It does not reckon with the flaws of American stories about its role in the world, and all the domination, war, destruction and suffering it has brought to the world. It flees from history.

But that is about to change. The American dream is about to crash against the realities of world history. The USA is about to inflict enormous damage to its economy with tariffs. It is about to strip its already anaemic state capacity further by indulging the 1980s retro-dreams of “dismantling the administrative state’. Turning the American state into a sandbox for oligarchs and MAGA crazy braves will not help fix the USA’s failed health, social security, justice, education, or infrastructure. It will not help manage the social strains inflicted by mass deportations, and the disappointments of renewing the forever wars against a newly under-estimated target. The USA is about to suffer the catastrophic self-defeat that Emmanuel Todd predicted in La Défaite de l’Occident. Not nostalgia, not dreams of American Primacy, not bizarre Christian nationalist or extreme liberal fantasies, not shoddy histories of the post-war world order, not hegemonic projects, none will save America. America has lost impunity for its mistakes.

In 2007 John Darwin was sceptical that history would overwhelm the unbalanced unipolar world. But he did warn of the hubris of the ‘hegemon’. There were limits to American power, even if it transcended the limits of empire seen since 1400. But no single empire in Darwin’s history prevailed against the diversity of the world. He wrote:

“Those writers who have likened America’s hegemonic status to that of Victorian Britain betray a staggering ignorance of the history of both. Whether this power will be used to make the world safer, or to sharpen its conflicts by ill-managed interventions, is a different question entirely.”

Seventeen years later, in the wake of Iraq, Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, Ukraine, Niger and Gaza, and in the shadow of looming conflicts with Iran and China, Stephen Walt gave his verdict:

The foreign policy community’s faith in US leadership assumed that the United States would almost always use its power wisely, but the past thirty years has cast considerable doubt on that assumption.
The recent histories of Argentina, Venezuela, and Great Britain remind us that bad government can do enormous damage even to countries with many advantages, and Americans may be about to experience something similar.10

There is no real prospect that my words will change the course in domestic and foreign policy that the USA has set. The minds of many more people than Donald Trump will need to change over the next four years. But that change needs to be more profound than favouring one faction in politics. The calculations of the costs and benefits of pursuing American Primacy will need to change. The story of how America shaped the world will need to give way to many histories of how the world shapes America.

But there is a great benefit to Americans if they do not dominate the world as they imagine it. They can listen to the words that Narendra Modi, the world’s largest democracy, chose to be the theme of India’s Presidency of the G20 in 2023: Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (“One Earth, One Family, One Future”). Taken from the Maha Upanishad, these words offer the USA a path to walk with all the other nations of the world as equals, rather than petulantly insist upon its evergreen greatness.

If the USA adopted this philosophy of power, and of history, then, by relinquishing American Primacy, it might truly bring peace, prosperity and harmony to the world.

In early 2025, I will be writing a series of posts reimagining America’s role in the world through reflecting on different perspectives on its history. As I prepare those posts, I would love to hear from you about your response to the ideas I have shared in this post.

Please join me as a paid subscriber and leave me a comment on how you see America’s role in world history.

Burning Archive

USA dreams in the world, after American Primacy

Discussion about this post