Is US World Order In Decline?

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US-led Western hegemony has peaked in all domains – even in the ideological one.

Written by Uriel Araujo, researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has stated that US-led Western powers today are losing their “political, scientific” and “economic dominance”, and that such is gradually being “transferred” to Asia. He is not a lone voice: on November 5, before midterm, Trump described his country as “in decline”. Biden himself talked about stopping “the destruction” of the country. Rhetoric aside, this expresses real concerns haunting American political elites.

The Heritage Foundation 578-page “2023 Index of U.S. Military Strength” report has unprecedentedly found Washington’s military power is now “weak”, down from “marginal” in last year’s index. It concludes that, militarily, Washington is “at significant risk of not being able to meet the demands of a single major regional conflict while also attending to various presence and engagement activities”.

Considering the very way Washington finds itself overburdened and overextended today, not to mention the crisis in Iraq, the Afghan defeat and the failure of US-led sanctions against Russia, it would be hard to deny the country is in decline as a superpower and global hegemon.

Moreover, the American moral authority is largely based on the democratic credentials of which it has boasted, as a champion of liberties. More than any other Western nation, this is the image it tries to project to the world. Its political system is also in decline, however.

Political scientists Steven Levitsky, and Lucan Way wrote in January that the country should expect a “period of protracted regime instability, marked by repeated constitutional crises, heightened political violence, and possibly, periods of authoritarian rule.”

Political scientist Jenna Bednar and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, have described the US a “fractured superpower”. The very American authority “on the world stage”, they write, is often associated with a federal system in which Washington “is dominant”. Today, however, US states can control “key levers of foreign policy”, especially in times of “partisan gridlock in Washington”. In this scenario, they describe the country as “an archipelago of powerful, competing jurisdictions, with certain shared ties, as well as an array of divergent interests and values.”

There often is a complex interplay of domestic of foreign policy, and recently we have seen how domestic problems in both the US and in the European countries have driven fissures within the transatlantic coalition to support Ukraine.

Internal instabilities aside, some analysts emphasize the US unique soft power, in terms of symbolic and ideological structures of power. Such is, after all, the stuff dreams are made on. Can the so-called American Dream endure? G. John Ikenberry, a Princeton University Professor, seems to think so. He  argues in a Foreign Affairs piece that although many analysts claim so, the US-led order is not in decline. He says that although the US “has at times resembled an old-style empire”, its power draws “not only on brute strength but also on ideas, institutions, and values that are complexly woven into the fabric of modernity.”

Ikenberry seems to be reasoning that the American hegemony lies in the global superstructure, so to speak. But even in this domain there are fissures. The US human rights narrative, for example, is in decline, as its hypocrisy is increasingly exposed.

A September 2021 Bloomberg piece by George Mason University professor of  economics Tylwer Cowen famously argued that “wokeism” was Washington’s great cultural export. Ironically, in February, the same author, writing for Bloomberg again, conceded that, albeit still influential, “wokeism has peaked.” It is increasingly “out of touch with mainstream America”, he argues. It is even more so with masses worldwide and has also become a major source of anti-American feeling.

There is also another counterpoint regarding Ikenberry’s thesis: the foundations of modernity actually lie in European individualism. The roots of it can be traced to a number of factors, depending on which theorist you consult – from Christian doctrines to the Italian Renaissance or the Scottish Enlightenment. In any case, there is not a “thelos” in History that makes the American nation the necessary and inevitable culmination of this great Western project and its unipolar moment must be seen as the very exceptional transition period that it has always been from 1991 to today – with its roots in the aftermath of the Second World War and the also momentary bipolar period of the Cold War.

The point is that a modern world system could very well do away with the Atlantic superpower, which could then pass the torch to a new hegemon or rather to a more multilateral bloc. American exceptionalism is merely a local expression of a larger Western exceptionalism, which has been recently exemplified by EU foreign policy chief Josep Borell’s blunt remarks about Europe being a “garden” – and the rest of the world a “jungle”.

Today the US is still the global hegemon and the main advancer of policies for the world’s westernization, as a vector of its soft power. But underneath it lies a clash of civilizations, in Huntington’s words. Thus, the “appeal of its ideas” is a source of US influence, as Ikenberry puts it, but also its weakness.

To sum it up, as we approach the new Asian Century and multipolarity, American and Western hegemony is increasingly in decline, including in the ideological sphere.

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