The United States once championed democracy. Now it is retreating behind militarism, demagoguery and despotism
In this second instalment of his two-part commentary, John Keane, Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney, explains how the widespread uncertainty and chaos triggered by the Trump administration reveals the dynamics of an empire’s retreat and decline – and why this administration poses a serious threat to democracy both at home and abroad.
There was a time, especially in the years after 1945, when America’s global reputation rode high. The empire had since the 19th century prided itself on its support for “democracy”, but after its World War II victories it had a free hand in playing the role of defender-in-chief of democracy and stoic guardian of the entire “free world”. In practice, it did some impressive things. In Europe, for instance, the Marshall Plan introduced the continent to American ways of life and helped build the foundations of a new middle class. America stood for economic growth and shared prosperity, high-quality roads, education, healthcare and other public services, and a belief in the principle that citizens are entitled to choose their own government. In popular culture, there was the allure of Coca-Cola, Hollywood, jazz, the all-shook-up Elvis Presley, Motown, Marilyn Monroe, Woody Allen, the rebel poetry of Bob Dylan, the melancholy magnetism of blue grass, gospel, soul and country music, the good-times fluff of the Beach Boys and the Monkeys. Even when things weren’t going well, America seemed reformable, capable of doing better.
But the times they are changing, and not for the better. The world is awash with bad news about the United States, its double standards, big-money politics, gun violence, loud-mouthed leadership, second-rate infrastructure and general social decadence. There’s of course Superbowl rap king Kendrick Lamar and the private-jet owning, cash-grabbing, fan-based “my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism like some kind of Congressman” pop-star businesswoman Taylor Swift. And it’s true that in some countries, Poland, Israel, Japan and the Philippines included, a majority of citizens say they hold a “favourable opinion” of the US. Elsewhere, however, research shows that in China, Turkey, Tunisia, Greece, Malaysia, Australia and France, public opinions about the US are split, or potentially hostile. Unsurprisingly, the research also shows that in countries such as Iran, Egypt and Afghanistan and, more generally in the wider Arab and Muslim world, millions of people say they loathe American imperial power and its ways of life. They think of it as a freak show. Mere mention of the US and its “democracy” tempts people to curse and spit.
These research findings are significant because they show that the light of democracy and freedom on America’s hill is fading. On the home front, whatever they say, Donald Trump and his supporters confirm the trend. They care little or nothing for democracy. Despotism is their thing. Constitutional niceties make no sense. Hero worship and demagoguery matter. Its rules are plain. Flood the zone. Strengthen executive power. Cross red lines. Defy existing laws and legal precedents. Bewilder citizens by issuing non-stop executive orders. Abolish guardrails and watchdogs. Arbitrarily dismiss inspectors general, judges and other guardians of public integrity. Reduce the power of legislatures to appropriate tax money and determine its spending. Trample on workers’ rights. End birthright citizenship. Freeze research, educational, social support and foreign aid programmes. Silence dissenters. Expect unquestioning loyalty from civil servants. Denounce journalists and experts who expose misconduct, corruption, and malfeasance as “far left” purveyors of fake news and partisans of the “deep state”.
A Republican supporter holds a “Save America” sign at a Trump rally in 2022. Photo: AP
‘Imperium militare’
Democracy promotion is also near the bottom of the fading empire’s list of global priorities. Treating the so-called rules-based order as a sham and practising bully politics backed by a might-makes-right mentality are the new gold standard. Which is a key reason why America, foolishly, is resorting to military force as a prime solution to its mounting global ills.
In his first novel Amerika (1925), Franz Kafka daringly pictured the Statue of Liberty in a new light, her arm outstretched aloft, wielding a long, sharp sword. He could not have imagined the depth and breadth of the militarisation of the American empire to come. Although it has lost nearly every war since 1945, the US is now permanently at war. It is by far the biggest global arms dealer; its military is the world’s largest global polluter. Currently backed by a network of 800 military bases in at least 75 countries, US military spending is more than three times larger than China’s and higher than 20 other big-spending governments combined.
Since its founding as a republic, the US has invaded other territories nearly 400 times; more than a quarter of these invasions have happened since the collapse of the Soviet Union. There have been untold numbers of engineered coups d’etat, CIA-led assassinations and covert operations although, as might be expected of an empire losing its grip on the world, the rate of military interventions has recently been accelerating. The wise warning of old Montesquieu (in Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur decadence [1734]) that militarism corrupts republics and ruins empires goes unheeded.
The spirit and substance of militarism are even infecting the empire’s heartlands. The imperial presidency has robbed taxpaying and arms-bearing citizens of their say in matters of war. The design and execution of military goals and strategies are high-level imperial secrets. Troops are dispatched to home borders to protect America from the scourge of unwanted immigrants. Undocumented civilians are rounded up in frightened communities, flung into military camps or deported to Guantanamo Bay. The US military sells off, or transfers, its used or surplus weaponry to domestic police agencies. Militarised policing is consequently the new fashion. Officers kitted out in combat gear and armed with stun guns, tear gas cannons, pepper spray, sniper assault rifles, armoured trucks, drones and tanks are the new normal.
Demonstrators protest against Trump during a “March for Democracy” on the National Mall in Washington on March 14. Photo: AFP
The future?
Outperformed by a resilient Chinese empire on multiple fronts, suffering mounting public suspicion and disrespect at various points on our planet, trapped in a deathly spiral of warmongering of its own making, those who run America, whether they admit it or not, are now active contributors to the long history of the decline and collapse of empires.
There are already clear signs of the likely overall pattern: while the US under Trump will do everything it can to trim its global empire on its own rationally calculated “national interest” terms, there will be many cartoonishly crazy happenings. Rather like the Ottoman and British empires, the world is going to witness a string of spits-and-splutters episodes of retreat, regrouping and revenge. The sudden collapse of the US imperium is probably not on the cards; imperial decline may instead happen the Hemingway way, slowly at first, then suddenly. Only one thing’s certain: the coming crackup of the empire will be protracted, disorderly, painful and nasty.
Slowly but surely, announcement by announcement, America’s leaders will learn the arts of pulling back and accepting forced retreat. Symptomatic are those moments of honesty when an incoming secretary of state acknowledges the birth of “a multipolar world”, warns that the rulers of China pose a “grave threat” to American interests then goes on to recommend that “no matter what happens” the US is “going to have to deal with them” because “the history of the 21st century will largely be about what happened between the US and China”.
Although it isn’t clear what “dealing” with China implies, the growth of the new Chinese empire and the shrinkage of the US won’t straightforwardly be a zero-sum dynamic. Whether China’s leaders will eventually choose, or be forced, to play the role of the dominant empire in a chaotic and unruly global order, to operate as the dominant global force in such matters as banking and finance, the brokering of peace deals, and the public management of environmental problems, nobody can yet say. Under Trump, who says many muddled and contradictory things about China, the world will surely witness moments of US-China dialogue, cooperation and heavy bargaining, followed by retaliatory threats and cat-and-mouse acts of revenge. Amid the shenanigans, the writing will stay on America’s walls: in fields as diverse as finance, trade and investment, technological innovation, media entertainment and military hardware, the People’s Republic of China will continue to outpace and outflank the US. China will build windmills. The US will erect tariff barriers and military walls.
It may be that the US, in foolish desperation, or by accident, in accordance with the proverb that two tigers cannot live on the same mountain, launches a full-scale war on China. Vowing to end the “continuing catalogue of catastrophic events abroad”, Trump’s inaugural address was unequivocal: “Our armed forces will be freed to focus on their sole mission: defeating America’s enemies”. China is evidently enemy No 1, but for the US, a Sino-American War would surely result in yet another military and moral stalemate or outright defeat by a much larger, more patient, savvy and well-equipped opponent. Chinese citizens’ support for their regime would be strengthened; American public opinion would be badly divided. Public opinion might not even count: the whole world would suffer the environmental, infrastructural and loss of human life costs of a crazy conflict that would render obsolete the old distinction between “conventional” and “nuclear” war in an unprecedented global catastrophe from which our planet may never recover.
Whether the US exercises military self-restraint in “dealing” with China, or whether our world is rescued by dumb luck, for the foreseeable future war will nevertheless remain on the global agenda of America’s bloated military-industrial-academic complex. Trump says he wants to end forever wars, but there will be yet more complicity in Gaza/West Bank genocidal tragedies. Wars in “shatter zones” will be ignored by the US; other wars will end in stalemate; still others lost outright. In a whole range of matters, America will be forced to eat more servings of humble pie. Trade wars, financial threats and investment reprisals will be commonplace. In those fields, failures and humiliations will multiply, some of them not yet newsworthy, such as the weakening of manufacturing industry by tariff wars, spikes in federal debt (already at US$36 trillion) stoked by tax cuts for the wealthy, and the silent but steady decline of “dollar dominance”, the gradual outflanking of the oversized global role of the US dollar by the rising share of nontraditional reserve currencies, including the Chinese renminbi.
For the first time in human history, imperial demise will get maximum media coverage. Compliments of the US, the gradual reduction of America to a failing and fallen big power will be live-streamed to the world. Audiences will be treated to lots of rough talk, bizarre surprises, episodes of great tension, and a general display of American macho ugliness in world affairs. American bullying will be the flipside of its growing insecurity. Talk of a “rules-based order” will stop; mere mention of the phrase will everywhere spark loud laughter. America’s priority will be to stop tilting at windmills. It will cut its losses, shed unnecessary obligations and hold on to its most valuable power assets for as long as it can.
Donald Trump looks on during a rally at in Texas in 2023. Photo: AFP
Democracy?
America’s democratic “allies” won’t be spared. Yet more Zelensky-style compradors and loyal client states will be caught with their pants down. Most will be treated at best as mere business partners, or as raw material sites or convenient military bases. Ententes favouring American interests will multiply. In support of a walled-in and walled-off America, there will be a token, “do little” or “do nothing” support for Taiwan, unconditional military partnership with Israel, wire-fenced relations with Mexico, and more verbal shells fired northwards, in Canada’s direction. The Kissinger rule shall universally apply: to be the enemy of the US will be dangerous, but to be its friend will be fatal.
The accelerating decline of the US will destroy many illusions about democracy. The old dictum that “a democracy is incapable of governing and managing an empire” (as Thucydides wrote in the History of the Peloponnesian War) is already being turned on its head. In the coming years, the empire will manage without democracy. That’s the ugly rule in the history of empires. As they rise towards their zenith, durable empires try to solve their power problems by granting some of their distant subjects a measure of self-government (as China does in its affirmations of non-intervention in the affairs of other states, as did the Ottomans in their millet system of law courts run by different confessional groups, and as the British did by granting parliamentary rule to their loyal white colonies). When empires are in decline, by contrast, they are bad losers. They grow paranoid, mean-spirited, stingy and bellicose.
In the heartlands of the shrinking and sinking American empire, citizen fightbacks notwithstanding, the drift towards a new kind of despotic rule will quicken. Fuelled by Trump-style talk of the “tremendous fraud, tremendous waste” in government, rule by politically powerful and rich corporate “poligarchs” is bound to flourish. Within the ruling circles, the quintessence of politics will be that the few tell the rest what to do. Friends will be richly rewarded. Enemies will be threatened with sharp-toothed chainsaws, abused, sacked and generally handed rough justice.
Americans were once taught in schools that democracy as a whole way of life requires a vibrant civil society of free and equal citizens, but as the empire shrinks, unless a radically different government committed to the redistribution of wealth comes to power, the old lessons will be forgotten. Social conditions will worsen. Rough justice will flourish. There will be more guns, street shootings, immigrant arrests, misogyny, religious bigotry and media untruths. Middle-class anxiety and the angry underclass conviction that democracy is a mere facade for plutocracy will grow. The number of Americans with little faith in the future will multiply. A sizeable majority of citizens (around six-in-10) already say that life is worse today than it was 50 years ago. Looking to the future, they expect things to grow worse. They say that in 2050 their economy will be weaker, the US will be less important in the world, political divisions will be wider and that there’ll be an even bigger gap between the poor and the rich.
Abroad, in various cross-border settings, the US will carry on openly abandoning the democratic principles of power sharing, public accountability, rule of law and justice for the weak. America will consistently give the moral finger to cross-border institutions and agencies (such as USAID) it dislikes or no longer controls. The executive order to withdraw from the WHO – signed on the first day of the second term of Trump’s presidency – is probably an ominous harbinger of things to come. Efforts to paralyse and dismantle the United Nations will continue. The fierce American logic of withdrawal and regrouping will prove brutal: with apologies to Thrasymachus, injustice will in future be the will of those who were once strong.
But what about America’s obligations to territorial democracies like Canada, South Africa, Chile, India, Australia, New Zealand, or Germany, France and other member states of the European Union? They, too, will be forced to cope as best they can. That they call themselves democracies won’t be of significance or concern to the flailing empire. To use a favourite back-room phrase of American diplomats, their governments can go f*** themselves. They will be forced to face the new reality: don’t naively suppose that America is automatically on your side, pay your debts, honour your commitments, give us your mineral resources, buy our weapons, do what we tell you to do, or we’ll make life difficult for you.
Unless democracy’s friend serendipity steps in, the consequence will be that the democratic world will experience something like a 21st-century repetition of the last century. By 1941, after a half-century of social unrest, economic stagnation, dictatorship, totalitarianism and global war, a year when President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for “bravely shielding the great flame of democracy from the blackout of barbarism”, only 11 parliamentary democracies had managed to preserve their independence. They did so by knuckling down and keeping their distance, as far as they could geographically and emotionally, from the general anti-democratic trends of the age.
Democrats everywhere must realise that this is a moment of opportunity not to be wasted
For democrats and democratically elected governments in cities, civil society organisations, states and cross-border organisations, present-day trends and troubling futures are arguably just as threatening as they were during those dark times. Right-wing parties and governments and the general drift towards despotism will no doubt be emboldened by America’s downfall, but not everything will go the way of the floundering empire. Within the remaining democracies, and in the new democracies to come, it has to be hoped, citizens and their chosen representatives will build democracy hideaways, havens and hermitages. They will use free and fair elections to elect mutinous governments. Elected leaders will speak out against American bullying; the independent monitoring and public restraint of power will continue to reveal things that are not to America’s liking.
Confronted by Russian-style despotism, a rising Chinese empire and an angry America bearishly in retreat, democrats everywhere must realise that this is a moment of opportunity not to be wasted, a tipping point in which the future of democracy no longer depends on the approval and support of the US. Post-imperial democracy will instead depend upon the solidarity of the shaken (Jan Patocka’s famous phrase) and the courage, inventiveness and determination of those who are being sidelined, left behind, bullied and screwed.
So serious are the times that hopefully democrats’ commitment to democracy will toughen their resolve to stand firm while searching at all levels of government and social life for new remedies for the maladies of representative democracy. Democrats of all persuasions will be forced to say again and again: since uncontrolled power is dangerous, and since America on the skids is trying to sow division and disunity to its advantage and can no longer politically be fully trusted or relied upon, democracy, this time for very different reasons than our grandparents supposed, is an indispensable global virtue, a non-negotiable and basic requirement everywhere of a decent and dignified life for creatures large and small on this endangered planet we call home.
Originally Published by South China Morning Post
You can read part one here
