(2021-04-19) Hughes The End Of The American Century

Sean Patrick Hughes: The End of the American Century. The invasion of Iraq is now near universally condemned. The war in Afghanistan, which is now on its fourth administration, is a punch line. America came as close to not having a peaceful transfer of power as it’s come since the Civil War. Blood and soil nationalism, “the drink of political losers” is alive and well in America in a way it’s never been in my lifetime. Our citizens stormed the Capitol (2021 Storming of the US Capitol) in hopes that a revolution would follow. The fall is upon us.

The fall, of course, is only as real as the notional pedestal anything so large and systemic as a country can be set upon. Which is to say not real at all.

It’s also possible to think about this differently. And not so pessimistically as my lead in implies. America did win the Cold War. We had a global adversary. And they collapsed. And we didn’t.

We’ll never know how much impact our past foreign policy of containment might have had on the Soviet Union. It’s a sort of religion to argue about it. Another perspective is simply that the U.S. model of liberal democracy open markets and free trade was simply more viable in a future of globalization and technologically advanced global supply chains.

The world was moving towards one of integrated competition. And a communist empire that could only integrate by annexing territory directly had no future. A liberal economic power that adapts to dominate global supply chains, that’s the one that had a chance. And that was us. Post 1978, it was also China.

there was no Clinton doctrine. There was barely a Bill Clinton foreign policy, other than the president’s boundless confidence in globalization.

Into the gap we stumbled. A gap that would be filled with wars against non-state actors, economic crisis and irrefutable truth that nation building by force was a losing strategy. And then the eventual reckoning that none of the American people would wake up to the belief that the government of the United States of America or its foreign or domestic policy weren’t capable of doing anything to forward the interests of Americans. And then the Pandemic (COVID-19) ended the gap.

America affirmed it was a delusional place, incapable of absorbing any reality that could allow it to establish any sort of technocratic bureaucracy to adhere to a national pandemic response without lighting itself on fire. But it could still do that thing that it could always do; ship product. And we’re alive again.

The American Century has ended. Long live the American Century.