US Decline: Moving towards a multipolar world by DR: Ahmad Rasem Alnafis
US Decline: Moving towards a multipolar world
DR: Ahmad Rasem Alnafis
Even before Covid19 pandemic, and even before the ascend of Trump many analysts were expecting that the United States is losing its hegemony on the world order.
According to Gordon Adams, 26 June 2018:
Even before Trump’s belligerent foreign policy positions, America had been gradually losing its dominant role in world affairs. A power shift among the nations of the world began at the end of the Cold War and has been accelerating this century[1].
The question is, how to asses or to measure weather America has begun losing power or not?.
Before answering this question we must mention some elements that form components of state power?.
According to (David Axe)[2]:
Some experts weigh national power by comparing gross domestic product. In absolute GDP terms, the United States with its $22-trillion economy still by far is the world’s most powerful country. Number-two China commands a $15-trillion economy. Both the U.S. and Chinese economies are growing at roughly similar rates, making it unlikely that China any time soon will overtake America in unadjusted GDP.
But there’s another way of calculating GDP, which is to adjust it for the strength of a country’s currency inside its own borders, also known as “purchasing price parity” or PPP. ‘Whether you use nominal or PPP gives a rather different picture of the largest players in the global economy,” Nexon explained.
With its lower standard of living and cheap labor, PPP adjustments for China yield a $29-trillion economy, which is $7 trillion more than America’s own PPP-adjusted GDP. But PPP adjustments are deceiving, in particular for countries that import costly goods. China still relies on imports of machinery, engines, vehicles, aircraft and oil — things for which it cannot pay domestic rates.
“GDP is an imperfect proxy for global economic power,” Nexon wrote. “Global economic influence depends not simply on how rich a country is, but many other factors, including the value of its consumer market, how much money its government has to ‘throw around’ in international affairs.”
There are other ways of calculating national power, Nexon explained. But “military spending is, if anything, a more problematic proxy,” he added. “Military spending is, in some ways, less transparent. It is also a pretty indirect measure of the strength of the military instruments that a state has at its potential. The technological characteristics of those instruments, the combat readiness of military forces, how specific portfolios of capabilities interact, logistics and a host of other factors shape military power. Military power also has a symbolic dimension – which matters, given that a lot of the power-political ‘work’ done by military instruments has little to do with actual combat operations.” [3]
In June 2018 professor Gordon Adams, made it clear that a (new world is dawning, and the US will no longer lead it) putting blame on the impulsive actions of Donald Trump, assuring that even if there will be (a different president in Washington, D.C., he will not be able to restore the “rules-based” international order. The underlying changes in global power relations have already undermined that order. A neo-conservative foreign policy, featuring unilateral American military intervention, as favored by John Bolton, will only accelerate the global shift. Liberal internationalists like Hillary Clinton would fail as well, because the rest of the world rejects the assumption that the U.S. is “indispensable” and “exceptional.” Barack Obama appeared to recognize the changing reality, but continued to argue that only the U.S. could lead the international system. America will need to learn new rules and play differently in the new balance-of-power world, where others have assets and policies the U.S. does not and cannot control).
Professor Gordon Adams refers to the old statement of Madelein Albright ‘We are the indispensable nation’, replying we are no longer the “indispensable” nation celebrated by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at the end of the last century.
He points the fact that not only China and Russia are competing with the U.S. but there are several other emerging powers in this world that actually made a power shift.
In the Middle East, the U.S. hoped for decades to isolate Iran as a pariah and weaken the regime until it fell.
Today, that goal is unimaginable, though national security adviser John Bolton continues to imagine it.
Iran is and will remain an increasingly assertive and influential power in the region, defending and promoting its interests and competing with the Saudi regime.
The Russians are in the Middle East region for good, building on their long-standing relationship with the family of Syria’s dictator.
Turkey, a rising regional power, acts increasingly independent of the preferences of the U.S., its NATO ally, playing its own hand in the regional power game.
The U.S. helped unleash these trends with the strategically fatal invasion of Iraq in 2003 – fatal, because it permanently removed a regional leader who balanced the power of Iran. The failure to create a stable Iraq stimulated regional religious and political conflicts and rendered ineffective subsequent U.S. efforts to influence current trends in the region, as the continually ineffective policies in Syria show[4].
America and the moral leadership:
Needless to say that the U.S. and the west in general, are suffering from a moral crisis, and they lost moral supremacy that was claimed by them.
The clearest example is the policies of Donald Trump and his principle: America is first.
America invaded Iraq 17 years ago claiming that they want to spread democracy and deprive Saddam Hussain from his weapons of mass destruction before it proved to big lie!!.
In May 1996 Madeleine Albright, who was then the U.S. ambassador to the UN, was asked by 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, in reference to years of U.S.-led economic sanctions against Iraq, We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?
Ambassador Albright responded, I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it[5].
It is well known that this war was launched depending on a very big lie that Iraq owns weapons of mass destruction, before declaring that they did not find such things!!.
In this sense we understand what (America is indispensible) means , and also we understand how the U.S. practices its hegemony on countries who cannot defend itself.
Never mind that half a million Iraqi children died of hunger. Never mind those died of depleted uranium, all this for the sake of Israel’s security and expansion.
United States returned its forces to Iraq in 2014 to (help fighting ISIS) after its withdrawal in 2011, whilst Trump accused Obama and Clinton of making them!!.
In 2018 Trump announced American withdrawal out of the (nuclear deal with Iran 5+1), directing a serious blow towards any kind of trust in commitments or treaties signed with the (greatest power in the world!!).
It was a serious blow not for U.S. or Iran but to the whole world order built on obedience to agreements even spoken not written!!.
The same lie was repeated in Syria where Americans planned to topple Syrian regime by supporting Wahabbism like what they did in Afghanistan, inducing collapse of the Soviet Union.
This does not mean that the U.S. is the only immoral empire in the history, but definitely means that they cannot claim the moral leadership in the world.
In May 25- 2020, the killing of black man George Floyd, in Minneapolis in a brutal manner by the American police and the widely spread riots that followed, revealed the truth about sectarian and religious divisions are deeply present and cannot be ignored and that the American community was at stake of civil war.
After almost four years of the Trump presidency, European diplomats, officials, and politicians are to varying degrees shocked, appalled, and scared. They have been locked in what one described as a “Trump-induced coma,” unable to soften the president’s instincts and with little by way of strategy other than signaling aversion to his leadership. They have also been unable to offer an alternative to American power and leadership, nor much of a response to some of the fundamental complaints consistent to both Trump and his Democratic challenger for the presidency, Joe Biden: European free riding, the strategic threat from China, and the need to tackle Iranian aggression. What has united almost all of them is the sense that America’s place and prestige in the world are now coming under direct attack by this sudden coming together of domestic, epidemiological, economic, and political forces.
Michel Duclos, a former French ambassador to Syria who served at the United Nations during the Iraq War, and who now works as a special adviser to the Paris-based think tank Institut Montaigne, said the nadir of American prestige has, until now, been the revelations of torture and abuse inside the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad in 2004. “Today, it is much worse,” he said. What makes things different now, according to Duclos, is the extent of division within the United States and the lack of leadership in the White House. “We live with the idea that the U.S. has an ability to rebound that is almost unlimited,” Duclos said. “For the first time, I’m starting to have some doubts.”[6]
That is to say; America is not in a position to give other countries lessons in ethics and human rights.
Also they are not qualified for spiritual leadership, something we believe is restricted for our awaited 12th imam AlMahdi AlMontazar.
We believe that the decline of America became now inevitable event.
At the same time we do not need America to be ruins, all we need is to practice our sovereignty, to make decisions of our own and at the same time preserving our Islamic values not the American values.
More important, we are looking up to the rise of the Islamic world to play its role in promoting and practicing justice between nations and to establish a new world order based on equality not slavery.
DR Ahmad Rasem Alnafis
Mansoura University Egypt
9/13/2020
[1] https://theconversation.com/a-new-world-is-dawning-and-the-us-will-no-longer-lead-it-98362
[2] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/superpower-or-not-america-decline-heres-what-expert-told-us-115451
[3] Dan Nexon, (Exit from Hagemony: the unraveling of the American Global order) Oxfotd University press 2020.
[4] https://theconversation.com/a-new-world-is-dawning-and-the-us-will-no-longer-lead-it-98362
[5] https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/170-sanctions/41952.html
[6] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/06/america-image-power-trump/613228/
