A Chronology of the US Retreat in the Global Order

Podcast here; https://soundcloud.com/user-280580802/208-a-chronology-of-the-us-retreat-in-the-global-order

The US has been a hegemonic power to the present day, but it is weakening and this retreat results in a more chaotic global political order with a higher degree of political and military conflicts. US foreign policy can be divided in different time periods. The first two centuries from 1776 to 1945 may be characterized as building up US power. The thirteen colonies gradually expanded to cover much of North America. US discourse uses the label “isolationism”, which supposedly characterized parts of its history, but that term referred to non-intervention in European affairs, which was much more brazen in its colonial conquest, largely as a result of inter-state competition.

As for the US it was everything but isolationist. It has had an imperialist outlook from the beginning, because of the expansion from the original 13 colonies and later US states. To ensure this expansion, the US purchased land from Napoleonic France that was too busy fighting wars with Britain in other fronts. It further plundered Native American land, forcing them to migrate west and ultimately into US government-designated reservations. Finally, the US waged a war with Mexico from 1846 to 1848, which removed Mexico’s control north of the Rio Grande. Once conquest on the US mainland (Lower 48) was completed further territorial acquisitions came from purchasing Alaska from Russia (1867), the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom (1893), victory in the Spanish-American War resulting in control over Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam (1898). In addition to territorial conquest, the US asserted its power early on via the Monroe Doctrine (1823), where the US declared Latin America to be part of its sphere of influence, opposing any European interference in that region, while the US retained its liberty to overthrow Latin American regimes it didn’t like. US-hostile regimes tend to be communist or nationalist, and want to restrain or remove the power of US corporations that dominate national industries. The US organized regime change coups in Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973, El Salvador in 1979, Haiti in 1994. Not all coups worked, e.g. Cuban communists are still in power today. US influence extended beyond the American hemisphere, e.g. its setting up of trading ports in Japan (1854) resulting in the Meiji Restoration and the US participated in crushing the Chinese Boxer rebellion (1901).

The rise of the US as a world power was inevitable: its economic might was undergirded by capitalist norms and legal institutions inherited from the British, natural resource wealth unrivaled by Europeans, the adoption of industrial agriculture and manufacturing, the continuous immigration of the European and Asian “surplus” population. Its external security was guaranteed by two weak neighbors (Canada, Mexico) and two giant oceans (Pacific, Atlantic). The biggest military threat to the US was itself: the American civil war was about whether the future direction of the country involved slavery. But as long as the European powers held a stranglehold over their overseas possessions (especially the British, French and Germans), they would retain an advantage over the US. This changed with the two world wars, each of which caused by the geopolitical rivalry among the major European powers and in each case initiated by the late-colonizer Germany. Germany had long failed to participate in colonial conquest because they were divided in many states prior to the creation of the German Empire in 1871.

The conclusion of World War I opened an outsize influence to the US in shaping the affairs of the post-war order in Europe. President Woodrow Wilson formulated his Wilsonian principles involving national self-determination, the promotion of democracy and capitalism, collective security, and freedom of navigation/ seas. These were, indeed, quite radical proposals, because the Europeans would never have promoted these goals on their own account. The principle of national self-determination sounds good, but is not practicable as most people were either living in multiethnic European countries, the multiethnic colonies of European powers, or in tribal communities with an undeveloped sense of nationhood. Furthermore, drawing territorial boundaries divides multiethnic communities that have customarily lived side by side. This creates tensions where none existed before. Ethnic Hungarians find themselves in Romania, Ukraine or Slovakia. In order to live safely and speak their own language they either have to move to Hungary or they have to insist on minority rights in their newly formed nation-state and that becomes very contentious, as the majority population forms the government and does not want to recognize these minority rights. This creates later political conflicts if there is no generally recognized leadership, e.g. the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s after the death of Tito.

The first attempt by Wilson at creating US hegemony was blocked by a Republican opposition in Congress that wanted to return to isolationism. The Great Depression that started in the US further strengthened the calls for political isolationism and the erection of tariff barriers that reduced trade and made the economic downturn more severe. The Great Depression created political rifts in Japan and Germany that generated fascism and World War II. The Allied forces consisted of Britain, Soviet Union and Nationalist China. The US backed the Allied forces via the Lend-Lease Act, which also helped American industries revive from the Depression. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt had found his casus belli to enter the war, and Hitler’s Germany then declared war on the US. The Allies were in the defensive against the Axis powers, but when the US formally entered the war the industrial balance shifted strongly in favor of the Allies. Even Josef Stalin admitted after the end of the war that the Soviets could not have beaten Germany without Lend-Lease support. To be clear, the Soviets made the biggest sacrifice regarding human life and the devastation of the economy through the rampaging Wehrmacht in their own territory. In contrast, US industrial capacity and infrastructure was unharmed by the war, such that by 1945, half of the global economic activity was generated in the US. At the end of World War II, the US reached its hegemonic zenith.

As the Cold War ramped up, the US and the Soviets took the leading role in the bipolar geopolitical competition. The threat by the Soviet Union produced a permanent military-industrial complex, which demanded permanent funding regardless of the actual geopolitical need. At the same time, the proliferation of nuclear weapons made it impossible for the US to fight open wars with the Soviet Union and from the 1960s onward with China. It was in this context that both the Americans and the Soviets were supporting numerous proxy wars. The notable cases were Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan.

The US fought the Vietnam War, operating under the assumption of the domino theory. If one country became communist, all the other countries in the region would also join the Soviet sphere of influence and thereby would be lost to the US. The war lasted 10 years, and despite superior firepower, the Vietcong, fighting what they thought to be a righteous anti-imperialist war against American occupation and a highly corrupt South Vietnamese regime, prevailed. The Vietcong fought an asymmetric war, hiding whenever the Americans struck, and striking back when the American soldiers let their guard down in their search-and-destroy missions. The mounting human and economic cost of the war generated significant pushback at home, and it was the first time in US history that mass domestic opposition resulted in the US decision to depart from Vietnam. Without US firepower, the South Vietnamese regime fell in 1975. The images of desperate South Vietnamese collaborators hanging onto the departing US helicopters is seared into the memory of US foreign policymakers who were brought down from their imperial hubris.

The loss in the Vietnam War was the first sign that the US was not a universally loved foreign power that spreads democratic civilization to the world. Democracy promotion is to some extent a red herring. The US occupation “success” cases are old democracies that were resurrected after World War II, especially Japan and West Germany. South Korea and Taiwan are more significant success cases, but they developed indigenous democratic forces in the 1980s long after the start of the US occupation (in South Korea) and tutelage (in Taiwan). These were all countries that became highly developed, surely taking advantage of access to the big US consumer market. This generated a middle class that wanted democracy. But many other occupied countries in the Middle East had made no such democratic transition despite US occupation, e.g. Afghanistan and Iraq. Big US allies like Iran under the Shah or Egypt and Saudi Arabia were/ are full-on autocracies that happen to sell their oil to America cheaply.

But for America wars have “only” been costly economically and psychologically given the domestic opposition to these wars. For the Soviets, it became fatal. The biggest US strike against the Soviets occurred in the late-1970s, when the US funded the Taliban and the Islamists, who fought against the pro-communist regime that was propped up by the Soviets. The Soviets fell for the trap and sent their own military forces into Afghanistan which started a 10-year long costly military intervention that brought about the fall of the Soviet Union by the late-1980s. It is quite striking that the US would fall for the same Afghanistan trap only a decade later.

It was in the context of the communist collapse in Eastern Europe that Francis Fukuyama discovered the Hegelian dialectical moment in world history, where liberal democracy led by the United States would reshape the world and bring an end to alternative political ideologies. The 1990s were marked by the growth in the number of democracies, especially after integrating the former Warsaw Pact countries in central and eastern Europe into the EU and NATO. The EU itself became the successor organization to the European Community, vowing an ever closer political union. South Korea and Taiwan consolidated as political democracies as well. Free trade agreements were becoming more popular, as NAFTA was agreed on in 1992. During this period, only the US was able to fight wars without external constraints, which was a harsh lesson to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who was immediately punished by the US-led coalition when he invaded Kuwait. The Clinton administration freely carried out military interventions in Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo. While the Rwandan and Bosnian genocide was occurring, American human rights scholars formulated the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, where the US should be able to stop human rights violations via military interventions. This doctrine was clearly selectively applied because when the Palestinians yearn for the recognition of their state or end Israeli collective punishment following Hamas terrorist attacks, the US would always side with the Israeli occupiers who block the path to statehood and any sanctions on Israel.

Liberal interventionism was merely another flavor of the aggressive US military doctrine that competes with neoconservatism. The neocons argued that US invasions were justified to advance democracy and punish regimes hostile to the US. These would include the Taliban in Afghanistan, who were accused of harboring Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, which orchestrated the 9/11 bombings, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, who refused to hand the Iraqi oil rights to American oil companies and chose to trade his oil in euros. No wonder the French and Germans opposed the Iraq War. The neocons took a solid hold during the Bush jr. administration by hoodwinking the American public to invade Iraq and Afghanistan that was terrified and angered by the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York. Bush’s “axis of evil” also included Iran and North Korea. The only thing that deterred the Americans from further invasions was that Iraq and Afghanistan wars were extremely expensive, tied up significant military resources and nation-building was not working.

The honeymoon of US hegemony came to an end by the late-2000s. I argue that the last 15 years are about the unraveling of the US-led international order. The following chronology of events points to important episodes of this momentous global political realignment.

2008: Russia invades Georgia. The Bush administration indicated support for accepting Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, but this did not happen, mainly due to French and German opposition. These countries feared provoking Russian aggression. The US did not react to Russia’s invasion. Russia successfully reasserted its regional hegemonic status in the domain of the former Soviet Union that was and is controlled from the Kremlin.

2008-9: US financial crisis emanates from excessive mortgage lending and financial deregulation resulting in a global financial crisis. The US economy recovered fast after 2010, but unemployment remained elevated for a few years longer. The Obama administration disappointed the public with bank bailouts and no protection for homeowners who couldn’t pay their mortgages. Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party became political phenomena, each of them focused on grievances against the political order that are rigged for the well-off. Bernie Sanders, a left-wing populist, received the second largest vote share in the Democratic Party in 2016 and 2020 but is held down by conservative Democratic party insiders and donors. Donald Trump, a narcissist reality TV star and real estate tycoon, won the Republican primary and general election in 2016, vowing to shut down the border to new immigrants, cancel free trade agreements and put “America first”, thus chucking out the neoconservative (wars of foreign aggression) and neoliberal (pro-trade, internationalist) playbook of the Republican Party. Unresolved internal tensions (too much inequality, weak social safety net) make the public turn inward and less interested in running the hegemonic order.

2011: Obama administration announced the end of combat operations in Iraq. A smaller troop contingent of 2,500 US soldiers remain until today. Obama did not believe that Iraq was the right war to fight and opposed the neocon nation-building project. Democratic elections brought the pro-Iranian faction to power, which actively competed with the US for influence in Iraq. Obama thought that Afghanistan was the “just” war, because the Taliban backed Al-Qaeda. Obama’s proudest foreign policy accomplishment was the assassination of Osama bin Laden via a Navy SEAL raid in Pakistan, a US ally. Bin Laden had retreated from Afghanistan after the US invasion in 2001. Obama ordered a US troop increase in Afghanistan in 2009, but announced a steep drawdown of troops at the end of his first term. He, ultimately, wanted to end the Middle East wars and focus more on countering Chinese influence in the Far East. His two successors, Trump and Biden, were similarly skeptical about continuing the US occupation in Afghanistan. Obama’s foreign policy doctrine was to not fight “stupid” wars, and that meant not meddling too much in the Middle East. The flipside is that the disorder in the Middle East does not decline with the US retreat.

2013: Xi Jinping ascends to the presidency in China. Since the US financial crisis in 2008, China became the global growth engine, responding to the weaker US economy by launching a massive infrastructure package and launching the Belt-Road initiative that creates infrastructure in Global South countries. The US trade volume with Africa has been sinking, while the Chinese one increased after 2008. With the increasing wealth and US technology sanctions, China is increasingly investing in its own semiconductor industry and spends more on the military. It has set up a military base in Djibouti near the Red Sea and several bases in the South Chinese Sea. China has benefited from the US Navy securing the freedom of navigation (e.g. suppressing pirates) given China’s dependence on sea routes for international trade, but it wants to set up its own military regime given their suspicions about the US. Xi’s speeches emphasize that China is a “rejuvenating” global power that is overcoming the mistreatment suffered in the Qing and early Republican era when the western powers carved out Chinese ports and imposed a series of unequal treaties on China. In his retelling of history, the CCP’s historic mission is to restore China’s global power status which was last experienced during the Ming dynasty about 500 years ago. These political pronouncements contravene Deng Xiaoping’s political self-restraint. In the late-1970s, China was poor and suffered from decades of communist mismanagement under Mao. But this self-restraint is no longer needed. The US still has some leverage to restrain China, which was exemplified in the 2020 passage of the Phase One trade agreement and the 2023 agreement in APEC on restoring military communication. These were just small moves and future escalation in bilateral relations is still more than likely.

2013: Obama does not enforce the “red line” on chemical attacks against the Bashar Assad regime in Syria. The US had threatened to intervene militarily to interdict Assad’s use of chemical weapons against the opposition that was fighting Assad in the civil war. Assad had previously promised to destroy its chemical weapons. Assad used the chemical weapons anyway, killing 1,400 people. Obama waffled and asked Congress for permission to carry out air strikes, but Congress voted down the resolution. Assad remained in power. The US intervention in Syria would be limited to the northeast that was controlled by the Kurds. Obama would still order airstrikes in Syria but not for regime change. Two years after the chemical attacks, Russia decided to back Assad by deploying its air force. Iran is also supporting the Assad regime. For neocons like John Bolton or Hillary Clinton, Obama’s own secretary of state, this was a sign of US weakness. The neocons believe that America should have toppled Assad and thereby scare off the other powers like Iran, Turkey or Russia from intervening. But Obama did not believe that the US population had any more appetite for foreign wars, so Syria was ultimately cut up between various foreign powers jostling for regional influence. Its economy remains in shambles and the best talent has fled to the west.

2014: Following the Maidan coup in Ukraine, which toppled the pro-Russian regime, Russia invades Crimea and supports separatists in the Donbas to undermine Ukraine’s new pro-western regime. The Obama administration formally condemned the Russian invasion and along with the European allies imposed financial sanctions on Russia, but these were fairly mild and posed no deterrence to further Russian aggression. The Minsk accord in 2015 implemented a ceasefire, which was frequently broken by both sides. Ukraine needed to build up its corrupt and weak military and Russia wanted to arm further to effect regime change in Kyiv. To the chagrin of Vladimir Putin, Obama had called Russia a weak regional power, but he implicitly accepted Ukraine as part of the Russian sphere of influence by refusing to consider Ukraine’s NATO admission and to supply any arms to Ukraine. The no-arms policy was loosened under Trump. Obama also wanted to focus US resources on domestic problems and Asia-Pacific, e.g. the promotion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. By refusing to stand up to Putin, further Russian aggression became possible in a later period.

2017: Donald Trump becomes US president questioning long-running US alliances, prompting German chancellor Angela Merkel to state that it is necessary to have a more independent European foreign policy. “America first” is about making the US a transactional player on the global stage making decisions in the narrow national interest rather than make decisions that would advance the broader interest within a liberal international order. Russia, China and Iran welcome the global anarchy, but the US allies are losing their confidence in the US continuing as the captain of their ship.

2017: Trump administration ended the US participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Obama had promoted US membership, allowing it to write the rules of the game, i.e. not leave the Pacific states up to the whims of China, which was not a member of TPP. Trump argued that trade agreements would sacrifice US jobs by shifting US corporate investments into other jurisdictions. TPP fell through without US support and was replaced by the smaller CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership), which has 12 signatories. CPTPP has expanded to include the UK. China, Taiwan, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Uruguay and Ukraine have submitted an application to join. Thus, China could potentially join the very organization that the US had hoped would exclude China. However, the US could force the CPTPP members Mexico and Canada to veto Chinese accession, and Japan raised objections regarding Chinese regulatory standards for e-commerce, intellectual property and state-owned enterprises. This would prevent China’s fast accession into the trade bloc. Trump only concluded the USMCA (US, Mexico, Canada) trade agreement to replace NAFTA. The key provision was to increase the North American and the high-wage ($16+) content requirement. This would presumably increase US jobs. The US is currently gaining manufacturing jobs, although it is hard to trace it to USMCA as the pandemic recovery implied a major labor shortage across many economic sectors. USMCA has improved the labor bargaining conditions for Mexican workers who can demand the higher wages to be eligible for tariff-free trade with North America (Wiseman et al. 2023).

2018: Trump administration quits the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) with Iran, stipulating an end to sanctions on Iran in exchange for ending their nuclear weapons program. The agreement was negotiated by the Obama administration, as he hoped to balance the region, which would presumably pacify the Middle East and free up US resources for the Asia-Pacific. The other signatories (EU, Russia, China) stick with the terms of JCPOA, though Iran cites the US departure from the agreement as excuse to continue to accumulate uranium. Biden announced his interest to return to the deal, but changed his mind as Iran supports Russia in the war in Ukraine and Hamas in Israel. The US released the $6 billion frozen assets that Iran had acquired in South Korea and are held in Qatar, but then re-froze those assets. Regarding the withdrawal from JCPOA, the US is the rogue state by renouncing a multilateral agreement and implicitly backing Saudi and Israeli hostility against Iran. Saudis and Iranians have announced normalizing their relations under Chinese auspices, which is another strike against US power.

2019: Trump administration withdrew US military units from Kurdish-controlled parts of Syria. The Syrian Kurds regarded the US withdrawal as a betrayal, and it opened the door for the neighboring Turks to smash the Syrian Kurds, whom they accuse of harboring Turkish Kurds who harbor separatist sentiments in Turkey. Trump sends another signal that allies cannot rely on the ironclad support of the US. They will have to diversify their external alliances to ensure their own security.

2020: Trump administration formally completes the withdrawal from the international Paris climate agreement. The Paris Accord contains non-binding agreements to phase out carbon emissions to stick with the goal to limit global warming to 1.5C rise from the preindustrial average. The Biden administration rejoined the Paris Accord a few months later, but the signal to the world was that there are no binding international agreements for America. It wants to claim moral authority on a rules-based international order while violating such rules with impunity.

2020: Trump administration signs the Doha agreement with the Taliban stipulating the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, precipitating the takeover of the Taliban a year later. The Biden administration stuck to the terms of the Doha agreement, although the US intelligence agencies falsely reported that the Taliban would take many more months to take Kabul, resulting in a hasty unorganized withdrawal of NATO troops and Afghan collaborators. While bringing to an end the shameful US foreign policy debacle similar to the Vietnam War, Russia took the cue that the US was weak enough and it could go on the offensive.

2022: Russia invades Ukraine. Biden administration reacts by passing economic sanctions and ramping up military aid to Ukraine, but provided no deterrence such as including Ukraine in the NATO alliance. Biden feared a nuclear escalation between US and Russia. It is not clear what the outcome of the war will be, although neither the Ukrainians nor the Russians are backing down, so the high-intensity conflict is going to continue for a while. Russia is backed by Iran, North Korea and, increasingly, China.

2023: Hamas commits a terrorist attack in Israel on October 7 killing 1,400 and taking several hundred hostages, resulting in Israeli retaliation in the Gaza Strip. Israel vows to eliminate Hamas, and has so far flattened northern Gaza forcing these internal refugees to flee to southern Gaza. Now Israel announced its plan to expand its bombing campaign in southern Gaza. Over 10,000 Gazans have already died. Iran and Hezbollah have threatened to intervene, while the US has deployed two aircraft carriers to back Israel. A broader regional Middle East war has been averted thus far, but the risk of one is still high if the Gaza conflict continues. There are no immediate prospects of resolution given that Hamas demands the destruction of Israel, while Israel continues settlement expansion in the West Bank and creates havoc in Gaza. The US unilaterally backs Israel and prevents any international condemnation of Israeli actions, thus ensuring an endless Palestinian struggle for survival and statehood and the future threat of terrorism. Furthermore, the US now is devoting more military resources to back Israel, while further military allocations to Ukraine are slowed down. Russia is the evident beneficiary of Hamas and their Iranian backers having opened up a new front for the US in the global power struggle.

2023: Venezuela announces a referendum to annex Essequibo in neighboring Guyana, as Guyana has substantial oil deposits that are controlled by the American oil company Exxon Mobile. Venezuela has its own substantial oil deposits but wants even more oil. It has faced American sanctions and mismanaged its oil resources by losing western engineers and handing over the oil company to incompetent managers. Recently, the Biden administration has become friendlier to the Maduro regime by releasing some sanctions in exchange for allowing democratic elections. It is questionable whether these elections will be held given that the main opposition candidate, Maria Machado, was not permitted by pro-Maduro courts to stand in the election. The US wanted Venezuelan oil to freely enter the oil market to make up for the rising prices from Russian energy sanctions. Now, the US would have to make an about-face if Venezuela does decide to invade Guyana by restoring the Venezuela sanctions, sending US troops and encouraging Brazil to carry out the fighting. Brazil has increased its military forces at the border to Guyana and Venezuela. The International Court of Justice is siding with Guyana and prohibits Venezuela to seize Essequibo but ICJ has no army and cannot enforce this order. If the US decided to fight an open war with Venezuela to protect its oil corporation, it would be the third major foreign war (next to Ukraine and Israel) it would be funding. The US military industrial complex is benefiting for sure, but where is the breaking point?

In the final analysis, the question is whether the US can restore its global hegemony and whether that is desirable. The answer is it probably can’t restore this power and it is problematic for global peace, even though it still has many advantages (magnet for global migrants, free market capitalism, global reserve currency, strong military) to remain a powerful country. A hegemonic power-led world is more stable and less violent, which does not mean that there is no violence or that the US would do good all the time. The US is a selfish power, as most others are, but it does have a universal political framework centered on the rules-based international order (while at times bending those rules to its liking) that works better than the anarchic alternative. As the hegemon is relinquishing power, the world is becoming more disorderly. Conflicts and wars and the threats thereof will increase, which increases global military expenditure and potentially reduces people’s standard of living and sense of safety.