In trying to preserve the international order, the US is destroying it

Overstretched by wars, undermined by fractious politics, and with the dollar, its most powerful tool, sorely overused, America is clinging on to a unipolar world order
But in putting America first, its leaders are dismantling the world order that Washington helped to build

Andrew Sheng

Published: 7:30pm, 29 Dec 2023

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Covering the Vietnam war, Associated Press journalist Peter Arnett in 1968 quoted an American major: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” He was referring to the decision to bomb a town regardless of civilian casualties. The same quote could be applied to Israel’s bombing of Gaza and, more generally, the American attitude to the international order it helped to build over the last eight decades.

This international order is an effort to reconstruct peace and avoid a third world war, after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The victorious powers at the end of the second world war decided to divide the world between the American-led free world and the Soviet-led communist world.

By 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States had emerged as the unipolar power. After the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact crumbled, Nato was not dissolved. Instead, the old rivalry was rekindled when Russia felt excluded from Europe and treated as the enemy.

Shocked by the September 11 attack in New York in 2001, the US spent the next two decades fighting in the Middle East. When Donald Trump emerged as president in 2016, neoconservatives in the American military industrial complex identified China as the existential rival, setting the stage for a multi-front confrontation.

By this time, the rise of China as the second largest economy and largest trading nation meant the world had begun to shift to a multipolar order. In this decade, this shift became evident with the rise of India, today the most populous country and fastest-growing major economy.

From the long lens of history, the US had surpassed Britain as the world’s largest economy and industrial power by 1900. Britain was a small island economy that used its maritime power and “divide and rule” political acumen to master colonies comprising one quarter of the global population.

In contrast, the US is a continental giant guarded by two oceans with no credible neighbourhood threats. Once the European powers had exhausted themselves fighting each other in two world wars, the US emerged as the undisputed hegemon. With its superior industrial might and technology, America could fight two fronts with resources to spare.

US President Joe Biden in the White House last year. When asked if the wars in Israel and Ukraine were more than the US could take on at the same time, he replied with confidence: “We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the history – not in the world, in the history of the world.” Photo: AP

In 1956, when president Dwight Eisenhower pressured Britain and France to retreat from their occupation of the Suez Canal, the US became the unchallenged guardian of the oil-rich Middle East. By aiding mujahideen fighters to kick the Soviets out of Afghanistan in 1989, America created the conditions for the collapse of the Soviet Union, exhausted by corruption and military expenditure.

The Cold War was never an equal contest, with the US having three times the Soviet gross domestic product in 1950.

This winter, as Ukraine faces yet another Russian assault and Israel fights not just the Palestinians but also the Houthis and Hezbollah, the US is confronting four fronts at the same time – Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Taiwan Strait and internally fractious politics, united only by bipartisan anger against China.

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In his masterly 1987 treatise, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Yale historian Paul Kennedy saw the US facing a decline. How long it can remain top dog is open to question, as is whether it can retain the economic and technological bases of its power.

In short, the US must address its strategic overextension, in which resources cannot match the burden of staying on top. America cannot fight “forever wars” with a military expenditure equal to the annual interest burden on its ballooning debt.

In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria weighed the options of the “self-doubting superpower”, arguing that “America shouldn’t give up on the world it made”, while Hoover Institution fellow Philip Zelikow gave a realistic review of how American statecraft has atrophied, particularly in respect of industrial capacity.

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Also in the magazine, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman wrote about how “the American way of economic war” was waged by overusing its most powerful tool, the US dollar, while Harvard professor Gordon Hansen reviewed American trade policy, concluding: “If Washington continues down the path of trade unilateralism, it will destabilise the global alliances and institutions that it spent seven decades building.”

The Ukraine war unveiled all the weaknesses of the neoliberal foundations of free trade, finance, supply chains and international relations, showing that no country can determine its fate independent of its history, geography and demography. The West (US and Europe) is overstretched in defending its allies in Ukraine and Israel, in terms of funding and supply of arms.

Can Ukraine rely on the West to supply the arms in a war of attrition?

In supporting Israel in its near-genocidal destruction of Gaza, the US has lost all moral credibility with the Global South. If the West wavers in giving aid to Ukraine, which is financially and militarily on life support, then the Rest would know that relying on Western promises can be fatal.

In the past three years, US President Joe Biden has abandoned Afghanistan, taken on Russia and now faces an impossible task in bringing Israel to heel on war. Next year, he faces Trump at the polls. In putting America first, both men have been dismantling the world order that the US helped to build, by weaponising every single foundation of that order.

The power game is always for the No 1 to lose, though not necessarily for the rivals to take. So far, we don’t even know whether the Biden leadership knows what the plot is really all about.

Andrew Sheng is a former central banker who writes on global issues from an Asian perspective