In some deeply ironic ways, the anti-American alliances that are already beginning to form — such as the European Union bolstering and expanding trade agreements with the very partners with whom we’re either severing ties or trying to bully into submission — as well as the defiant resistance on display around the world in opposition to the clumsy dick-wagging of Napoleon Bone-Aspur may actually deliver the anti-globalist, post-colonial far left the very victory they wanted.
I wonder if the far right realizes this?
The sharp reduction of the United States’ sphere of influence, unwinding both the Monroe and Truman Doctrines, and destabilizing the imperial thrall of the United States; giving strategic adversaries like Russia, China, and Iran an opening to deepen their ties and cement their influence globally; not to mention the advantages granted to Latin American economies and India in a realignment of the world order as our historic allies create new trade alliances that exclude the United States, where once the strength of those alliances ensured preferential treatment.
I often wonder if the warhawks who think that no one can overcome us because of our military might realize that you still have to pay for that martial supremacy and that that requires a deft hand at securing all of the economic resources necessary to do so… what happens when the rest of the world decides that they’d much rather share those resources among themselves? This is, in fact, how superpowers rise and fall. 350 million people versus 7,572,000,000 people? What are the odds we bully our ways out of being sidelined as irrelevant?
Americans may yet learn how incredibly expansive their individual affluence really was… and the level of lifestyle contraction, material conservation, environmental despoilation, and brutalizing labor that will be necessary to retain even a sliver of it in the absence of global supremacy.
We could have chosen to do better on our own terms, instead of reacting like petulant children to the slightest increase in the cost of sustaining an unsustainable standard of living. Now, it may just be done to us on someone else’s terms. I suspect that it won’t go over all that well with people who think our postwar ascendancy was merit-based instead of dumb luck and opportunism as the rest of the world lay in shambles rebuilding itself from the ground up, but then they may be backed into a corner of their own making having surrendered the possibility of changing by choice.