The Chimera of Globalist Empire (mas preservando a quimera do decoupling) - Andrew A. Michta (The National Review)

 Inacreditável: mesmo quanto um analista reclama da HUBRIS do Império americano, ele ainda acha que os EUA devem fazer o "decoupling" da China, o que exatamente o que o Mentecapto do Trump estava fazendo. Sair da globalização, significa sair das cadeias de valor, e vai prejudicar as empresas e os consumidores americanos.

A visão confrontacionista que mesmo os melhores analistas acadêmicos mantêm sobre a China é absolutamente negativa para o FUTURO dos EUA.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

 

The Chimera of Globalist Empire

For decades, our elites pursued with near-religious zeal the fantasy of a ‘liberal global order,’ at the expense of the homeland. Have they learned anything?

Andrew A. Michta

The National Review, Nova York – 9.3.2021

 

As we struggle through the COVID pandemic and look for a way back into relative “normalcy,” now may not seem the right time to ask bigger questions about America’s political trajectory over the last three post–Cold War decades. But this is precisely the time to take stock and consider why and how we have reached what could reasonably be seen as a point of national crisis. In just one generation, a country that in 1991 stood at the peak of its power and influence has been hobbled by internal spasms and external political pressure that is increasingly testing the extant international order America claims to have put in place. Today the very viability of the United States’ democracy is under strain, and yet we hear that when it comes to our foreign and security policy, “America is back,” presumably signaling the return to the status quo before the Trump administration.

At the root of America’s decline since its victory in the Cold War lies ideological hubris that has defined the path to globalist empire that would manifest fully in the decades of post–Cold War triumphalism. In foreign and security policy for three decades now, our elites have pursued with near-religious zeal the fantasy of a “liberal global order” underwritten, presumably indefinitely, by American military power. Amidst the declarations that “history has ended” and the United States had a duty to seize its “unipolar moment,” few paused to think of the ghastly collectivist nature of the imperial project that was suddenly on offer. As our political establishment’s imperial ambitions grew, its concern over the impact at home largely dissipated, with trillions invested in overseas projects rather than spent on modern infrastructure, education, and the health of American citizens. At that moment of Washington’s triumph over the Soviet Union, the only question asked — now that America’s power was no longer checked by a superpower adversary — was what the United States could do to reshape the world in its image. Not once did it pause to ask if it should do this just because it could.

The triumph of globalist ideology was fueled by the fervent belief among our policy and business elites that America was poised to consummate the final stage in the natural order of societal evolution. Presumably the offshoring of manufacturing and transnational financial flows would lead to a final incarnation of Kantian democratic peace, while also allowing American corporations to leverage labor arbitrage in China as they moved away from the American market and into a global market, in the process shooting the corporate bottom line into the proverbial stratosphere. Meanwhile Washington’s permanent foreign-policy and national-security apparatus readied itself to preside over an unprecedented extension of its power and influence into ever-expanding geographic and political domains.

The post–Cold War American imperial project rested on an initially correct assessment of the relative power distribution worldwide. Indeed, for a fleeting moment in 1991, for the first time since 1945, America was truly paramount on a global scale by all indices of economic and military power. Briefly it seemed to have also gained an undisputed ideological license, for even Russia, its most sworn erstwhile enemy, threw itself headlong into its own democratic capitalist experiment, only to recognize within a decade that culture and deeply ingrained behavioral patterns — buttressed by the unyielding logic of geography — often define what is possible. The reality check and course correction for the Washington consensus should have been the implosion of Yeltsin’s corrupt Russian state, for the 2000 inauguration of Vladimir Putin as the new president was a clear and tangible repudiation of America’s liberal internationalists’ theorizing.

But fate intervened and the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington foreclosed all debate on the validity of the regnant ideology. The purpose of the “liberal international order” thus carried with it the ultimate justification of “securing the world to secure America,” which for the next two decades would form the unquestioned Washington consensus. This ideology would pull the country into a morass of secondary military theaters where U.S. forces were asked not just to defeat and punish the nation’s enemies, but first and foremost to bring about a comprehensive systemic transformation with “democracy building,” “nation-building,” and other breathless semantic curiosa oozing from premier D.C. think tanks into policy. The impulse to build a great American global empire overshadowed in short order rational calculations of state-on-state threats or the nation’s economic interests, fostering a devastating myopia when it came to communist China’s geostrategic ambitions, which only grew with each decade.

The American imperial project compelled fundamental changes in how Americans live at home, with the existence of a permanent surveillance state no longer questioned. The country’s armed forces were remade along the precepts of various and sundry counterinsurgency strategies, with the conflict in Afghanistan morphing into a staccato of 20 (and counting) one-year campaigns, each with the same strategic non-outcome. Over the past three decades, trillions of dollars have been spent on fatuous “regime change” projects aimed at bringing democracy to the Middle East, all while American technology, jobs, and capital have been shipped to Asia at an ever greater rate to fuel the one and only successful case of “nation building” since the end of the Cold War. This is the modernization of communist China, both its economy and its military, but with none of the “democratization” that the proponents of globalization once predicted.

Comparisons between today’s America and the empires of yore are plentiful but ultimately too glib for comfort, as history does not simply repeat itself, even if it rhymes on occasion. Still, the last four years have shown how far the chimera of globalist empire has deconstructed the American nation and how much in denial about this process — or perhaps truly unable to understand it — were our political elites. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a warning shot across the bow of the tensions percolating within the country’s body politic, following decades of internal social engineering, globalist politics, and warfare abroad. The fact that a New York real-estate developer and television celebrity would not only defeat a slew of his party’s candidates in the primaries but then go on to win against arguably the best-funded and best-supported Democratic candidate to date sent shock waves across the American political and media establishment. Nonetheless, instead of forcing a dose of humility and soul-searching to ask the obvious question of what the ruling class had done wrong to suffer such an outright rejection of the status quo, the spin became one of foreign interference as the sole explanation of the Democrats’ loss.

Yet now with the Trump administration gone and the Biden administration just sworn in, have our elites learned anything? It appears not much, if at all, for the business community refuses to decouple from Chinese supply chains, while our foreign-policy elite has once again recommitted the country to a globalist imperial project. Those who govern America seem unwilling or unable to recognize that after three decades of such policies, the nation’s coffers are empty, the nation’s resilience — as the COVID crisis has demonstrated — all but gone, and our international standing increasingly eclipsed by China and Russia, two near-peer military competitors united in their opposition to the United States.

The American nation is in the midst of a profound domestic political crisis that threatens its very integrity to a degree unseen since the Civil War, brought about to a large degree by the country’s overextension abroad. We seem to have lost a sense of the limits on our own ability to bend the world power distribution to our will. Most of all, we seem bereft of the skills needed to work regional power balances in our favor, ever less mindful of the fact that it should always be the security and prosperity of the American people, rather than visions of a brave new global order, that is the sacred trust of every member of Congress and the executive. In an international system marked by the rising power of China and the revisionist power of Russia, our strategy should be one of leveraging regional alliances and partnerships, rather than clinging to the illusion of underwriting an American global hegemony that, in reality, never truly was. The United States still has ample resources, both economic and military, to work with allies who share not just our values but, most importantly, our national-security priorities, and therefore are willing to do their part and shoulder their security burden — at a minimum, close to home. Our core alliances and partnerships should reflect a shared threat assessment and sense of obligation when it comes to national security and defense. This was once the foundational premise of American foreign and security policy, and it should be again today.

Our leaders’ failure to understand the currents of world politics and economics is at the root of our accelerated decline. If not halted forthwith — including the imperative of decoupling our core strategic supply chains from China so that we can guard our intellectual property, compete, and win — the continuation of the globalist imperial path will force us into a binary choice of possible trajectories going forward. One path would be marked by the accelerated fragmentation of the American nation along group lines, with the racialization of our society ending in the final deconstruction of our national identity. The country would gradually lose the ability to set its own course in the international system, with foreign policy eclipsed by growing chaos at home. This would transform the United States into a tributary to the emerging Eurasian system built around Chinese power.

The other possible outcome is a fully imperial end-state, the globalist project subsumes and dominates American domestic institutions, further abridging individual freedom and liberty at home while our elite class governs not on behalf of but over the populace. The triumph of globalism — should it come to that — would mean the end of the American nation and American democracy as we know it, for transnational agendas cannot be squared with the core requirement of sovereign self-government by free people. While the first outcome carries with it the seeds of the United States’ destruction, the second ensures the preservation of the state itself by redefining the social contract and the political rules of the game. Still, either one will mean that the American republic has been fundamentally transformed.

ANDREW A. MICHTA is the dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies. The opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.