Friedman The End of America?

A Guide to the New World Disorder
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78590-962-7
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

America was the shining city on a hill. It was the country at the forefront of the world democratic order, the global policeman, the might of its military matched only by the depth of its financial reserves. America was the one the world listened to, whether it wanted to or not. So, what happened? Well, a lot of things. In this searing account, Alan Friedman shows how, from the disastrous Vietnam War to Barack Obama's bungled response to the Arab Spring, American intervention has ceased to be the decisive action it once was. And now, with the rise of China and Russia, coupled with America's prostration of itself following the election of Donald Trump, the decline of its authority is only hastening. We move now, Friedman argues, into the New World Disorder. In this dangerous and unstable world, the Washington-enforced liberal order is receding, and a new set of alliances and anxieties are in ascendence. What is America's place in this? Which powers are going to emerge as the leaders? Will the European Union count at all? One thing is for sure: the effects of the New World Disorder will challenge our Western values to breaking point.

Alan Friedman is a journalist, bestselling author and documentary producer who has been an award-winning foreign correspondent and commentator with the Financial Times of London, the International Herald Tribune/New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He has also been a prominent talk-show host on Italian television, developing and anchoring primetime shows for Rai 2 and Rai 3, Sky and La7. He is presently an opinion columnist for Italy's La Stampa newspaper.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Friedman, Alan

Leseproben

Prologue

I remember listening to Gore Vidal talking passionately about the similarities between America today and the declining days of the Roman Empire. It was a humid summer evening in Rome, July 1998, and we were at a cocktail party and dinner reception for the former US presidential candidate George McGovern. Vidal was clearly delighted to see McGovern, the man who lost the election to Richard Nixon back in 1972 and a fellow former critic of the Vietnam War. McGovern was enjoying his role as the guest of honour, and he was being fawned over by the smart set in Rome. Then aged seventy-six, McGovern had just been appointed by President Bill Clinton as the new American ambassador to the Rome-based UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Vidal held aloft a glass of chilled Vermentino as he stood on the terrace of Rome’s most aristocratic club, the Circolo della Caccia, and spoke scornfully of America. The main difference between Imperial Rome and twentieth-century America, he snarled, was the extraordinary brevity of the American empire, which had gone  from global hegemony to decadence in less than half a century. Vidal’s vision was that of a fairly rapid trajectory for an empire that had reached its pinnacle of strength and global power in the decades after the Second World War.

There was no greater champion of Washington’s imperial destiny than Henry Luce, the media mogul who in 1941 published a famous editorial in Life magazine. Luce proclaimed the dawning of ‘The American Century’ and emphasised the idea that in the twentieth century, the United States was poised to play a pivotal role in shaping the political, economic and cultural landscape of the world. He believed that American values and influence would guide the course of history and would ultimately ‘make the world safe for democracy’.* Vidal was famously pessimistic about America, as were other critics of so-called American imperialism, such as left-wing intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson. Yet one need not employ an ideological framework of the left in order to understand the parabola of American power. It is the story of the rise and fall of a great power. Empires come and go; just look at world history. And some, like Rome, eventually collapse or implode because of poor leadership, mismanagement or strained resources and imperial overreach. Other downfalls include assassinations, insurrections, civil wars and other internal divisions. These are, by the way, the kind of divisions and existential challenges that were prevalent during 2024. At the time of writing, America is in the wake of a turbulent presidential election season. With Donald Trump back in the White House, the future is more uncertain than ever. Washington is in upheaval, autocrats everywhere are encouraged and America’s traditional allies wait anxiously to see the mercurial tycoon’s next move. But the trajectory of America’s decline will not change; it may even be accelerated.

Ultimately Gore Vidal got it right: there are few periods of imperial predominance that have been as short-lived as the parabola of US leadership between the 1940s and the 2020s. At the end of the Second World War, America was not prepared to step into the role of global policeman. Yet the United States would take up the mantle anyway, and it would do so with a mixture of altruistic-sounding rhetoric, naive and self-righteous promises of freedom and democracy on the one hand and cynical self-interest on the other. This contrast between utopian and moralistic US rhetoric, proclamations about the right of all peoples to self-determination and a post-war period filled with CIA machinations and regime change policies remains the greatest paradox in American foreign policy. In a rapidly changing world, American exceptionalism is no longer defensible.

It never was. Indeed, the very system of Western liberal democracy that America designed is currently under attack, with a motley crew of autocrats, terrorists, authoritarian and illiberal elected leaders on the one hand and the Global South plus the BRICS crowd on the other, all proposing an alternative vision of how to manage the world.†

We have kept the flag flying for nearly eighty years now, but the current phase is one of visible decline in American influence and the emergence of alliances that break with the old norms and practices of the post-war period. This is the price of the globalisation that created greater income inequalities, the effect of Putin’s war in the Ukraine, of the pandemic, of the disruption of supply chains, of the rise of China, and it is also the result of deep fissures in US society. America, sadly, is broken. As the rockstar hedge fund manager Ray Dalio will tell you, every big cycle has a phase when you are on the way up and a phase when you are on the way down.‡ This book is the chronicle of the slippery slide down the big cycle and of how we are now living in a period of upheaval and realignment. America is weakened and distracted by an existential battle that is raging within its own borders. This is the story of the failure of American leadership at key moments in post-war history, both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and a glimpse at the increasingly dangerous and uncertain world that is now taking shape. There is no Big Bang moment in which America’s influence comes to an abrupt end. It is more a question of the long arc of history, the inexorable and multiple forces that together are like kryptonite for the unruly giant. After a relatively brief period of Pax Americana, less than a full century, we now are entering a phase that future historians may one day call ‘the New World Disorder’. In this period of history, early 21st-century America is on the defensive, riven by deep internal conflict and steadily ceding influence to China and other rivals. Trump is the ultimate manifestation of a full-blown societal crisis in America, and his xenophobia and isolationism appear to accurately mirror his nation’s mood.

Gore Vidal would not be surprised. The truth is that we Americans have never been very good at managing empire. It is not really one of our skillsets. Most Americans would probably say the term should be applied only to the Roman Empire, or the British Empire, or to the empires of France or Spain and other European colonising nations. But not to America. We are not an empire! Perish the thought. After all, we were once a colony. We rebelled and secured our independence from the British Empire. We were told by Benjamin Franklin that we had created a republic, if we could keep it. We are not an imperial power. We have always seen ourselves as the Good Guys. We are idealists. We are America. We are that city upon a hill. We are the defenders of democracy. That is who we are. At least, that is what we were taught in school for the past century.

History, of course, is generally written by the winners, or by their acolytes; so many of America’s history texts were written, until quite recently, by middle-aged white male historians. The telling of American history has been left largely in the hands of men who came of age in the past century, who learned the Pledge of Allegiance at school, whose Weltanschauung was formed by the Cold War. Fashions change, in history as in real life. These historians have tended to skip over some of the more awkward issues, like nearly 300 years of slave labour and a century of recurring genocide against indigenous peoples. Instead, we Americans have told ourselves a far more heroic story about ‘manifest destiny’ and the frontier crucible.§ It is the Disney version of American history. We have pretty much convinced ourselves that we Americans have never had anything to do with imperialism or with imperialist behaviour.

‘America has never been an empire,’ George W. Bush proclaimed with vigour, and typically exaggerated swagger, during the 2000 presidential campaign. ‘We may be the only great power in history that had the chance and refused, preferring greatness to power and justice to glory.’¶ The reality is that we have been in collective denial for a very long time. We have also been the victims of selective storytelling. We have deluded ourselves into thinking that nothing would ever change, that America and the American way of life would reign supreme until the end of time. Today, with the known American-led world order disintegrating, and with at least half of America retreating into a primordial isolationism, it is time to look at how we got here, and why America’s de facto global empire is being displaced by the uncertainty of a New World Disorder. In order to understand why the Pax Americana is entering a twilight period and what may come next, we need first to examine the illusions and fairy tales we have lived with for such a very long time. What began as the colonisation of America’s eastern seaboard by settlers and religious refugees from the Dutch and British Empires in the early 1600s, and then morphed into a republic by the late 1700s, would soon be transformed into a United States of America that for more than a century would press forth with a huge and unprecedented territorial expansion, a massive continental land grab, through petition, purchase, treaty, war, invasion and annexation. The phenomenon would continue throughout the 1800s and well into the 1900s....