I have been writing about the decline of the USA and related issue for a few years, now, without resorting schadenfreude or dancing on the grave of that country. (See here, here and here) That would be silly. My approach has not been “anti-American”. It has always had to do with at least two things, both of which are historical and philosophical. The perception of anti-Americanism has to do with my criticisms of excessive individualism tied to the culture of consumer capitalism, which, as it goes, is much more powerful and pervasive in Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Singapore.
My approach to the decline of the USA is, in short, an understanding that great powers rise and fall across time, and the ideas, beliefs and values that prop them up have almost always proven themselves to be weak, limited in time and place – especially when they have been put in place, and held in place by force. In this sense, “the decline of the USA” is not surprising.
I do think, nonetheless, that it is unlikely to happen any time soon. If and when it does, it may not collapse suddenly, and whatever the pace of the fall may be, it will, almost definitely, follow conflict, a hot war with information and communications technologies being applied widely, which would make hard and soft infrastructure ready targets.
In the meantime, there are claims and assertions, powerful opinions and commentaries, which point, among other, to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump as a sign of “a further descent into the darkness,” and that more than a third of people in the USA believe that a civil war in their lifetime was likely, in their lifetime, with further 13% opting thinking it “very likely”.
I usually stay away from firm predictions, so I should turn to Thomas Homer-Dixon a North American professor who uses “complexity science to examine threats to global security – especially economic instability, environmental stress, ideological polarisation, and mass violence” who has suggested that “by 2025 “American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship”.
Homer-Dixon comes out on the side of “leading American academics” who have been actively addressing “the prospect of a fatal weakening of US democracy” and who concluded that “this is a moment of ‘great peril and risk,’ and that ‘Time is ticking away, and midnight is approaching’.”
Edward Luce, the Financial Times correspondent in the USA who wrote the book, The Retreat of Western Liberalism, has suggested that this year’s presidential election in the USA was “existential [and] now considerably more fraught than before. Violence was already implicit in much of the [previous] rhetoric. Now it is explicit. It is always tempting to point out that guns and political murder are a staple of the US republic. That is true compared with other democracies. But the conditions in 2024 are unique.… A spirit of vengeance is haunting America”.
All of the above may be true, but should return to my historical/philosophical position, that the putative decline is bigger than the USA. It may be another sign that the post-war liberal international order is coming apart. That is fairly evident in Luce’s book, at least in the title, that Western Liberalism is in retreat. It has a lot to do with the enormous success of Asian countries that lifted millions of people out of poverty, without western liberal capitalism. A topic for another discussion.