The Tribune

with CHARLIE HARPER

THERE has been a slight uptick in recent days and weeks of a kind of doomsday inevitability surrounding the growing feeling that we are all living through the end of an American-influenced and even dominated era in the history of our world. Some of it is fed by the behaviour of the US president.

Does this make sense?

In recent days, Trump has reinforced the impression that he is almost always able to top any previous outrageous antics with something new and even more startling.

Late last week, during a visit to the White House by Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, the first woman ever to hold that job, there were high expectations in Tokyo that the meeting  would offer her a chance to influence Trump before his much-anticipated summit meeting with Chinese Prime Minister Xi Jinping. China’s relations with Japan have soured recently, and Takaichi reportedly aimed to remind Trump of the importance of the US-Japan alliance and the need for both to push back against any aggressive Chinese measures.

Trump’s summit with Xi has since been postponed.

Since the US and Japan have been trans-Pacific allies for nearly 80 years, senior US and Japanese officials have tended to avoid anything but very careful public comments about Japan’s December 1941 sneak attack on American forces at Pearl Harbor that essentially forced the US to enter World War II.

Naturally, there was confusion and unease on Saturday in Japan after Trump, with Takaichi sitting right next to him, casually used the World War II attack to justify his secrecy before launching the war against Iran.

When he was asked by a Japanese reporter why he didn’t give American allies in Europe and Asia advance notice about the US attack on Iran, Trump cited the Pearl Harbor raid to defend his decision. He said, as cameras rolled and microphones recorded, “Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor, OK?”

Another uniquely Trump moment. In response, and in the finest traditions of Asian inscrutability, the Japanese prime minister’s face remained steadfastly immobile. But the president’s remark hit all the news shows and swamped the internet.

Another Trump remark made waves on Saturday, after the president learned of the death of former FBI director Robert Mueller, a towering Washington figure for decades who served both Republican and Democratic presidents, but who also led the investigation during Trump’s first term of alleged Russian influence in tipping the balance of the close 2016 presidential election toward Trump.

Trump was seemingly unable to feel any forgiveness for Mueller’s investigation even after Mueller’s death. On Saturday, the president posted on Truth Social: “Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”

You can chuckle at Trump’s unhesitating impulsivity, or you can decry his behaviour as a supreme embarrassment to the US and eraser of American goodwill accumulated ever since the US worked hard to restore a democratic balance in world politics after World War II. But some pundits, in increasing numbers, are seeing the fact that American voters returned Trump to office even after already experiencing him for four years as a tell-tale sign of US decline.

In a recent opinion piece, a New York Times columnist started a lengthy report on American decline. “We had a good run — some eight decades or so — but it is clear by now that the United States has ceased to be the leader of the free world. A successor for that post has not been named, and it appears unlikely that the European Union, or NATO, or whatever constitutes ‘the West’ these days will promote from within. The job might even be eliminated as one more reduction in force courtesy of President Trump.”

Columnist Carlos Lozada cites many recent best-selling reference books to buttress his point. Nearly two decades ago, for example, Fareed Zakaria, the CNN commentator and Washington Post columnist, published a best-selling book called “The Post-American World,” which predicted the United States’ relative decline versus other economically strong countries.

The US would remain militarily and economically pre-eminent, Zakaria argued, but it might take on a new political role, relying on “consultation, cooperation and compromise.”

Under Trump, Lozada says, the idea of US leadership has indeed been remade, “but from authority to domination, from persuasion to bullying, from nurturing alliances to wrecking them.”

Trump’s steady drumbeat of caustic criticism of NATO in particular seemed to have faced consequences last week when European leaders initially refused his request to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. “We don’t need anybody,” Trump said in response. “We’re the strongest nation in the world. We have the strongest military by far in the world. We don’t need them.”

In a comment echoing recent widely publicised remarks in Europe by the political leaders of both Germany and Canada, the columnist adds that “this means that what we once called “Pax Americana,” that US-led system of alliances and institutions that promoted American interests and values and helped avoid major conflicts in the decades after World War II, is gone, and irretrievably so.”

The Times columnist then cites The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, by historian Paul Kennedy, which was published 30 years ago and quickly became one of the ‘sacred texts’ of American decline.

Kennedy warned of what he called “imperial overstretch,” and argued that “the sum total of the United States’ global interests and obligations is nowadays far larger than the country’s power to defend them all simultaneously.” The historian was writing before the fall of the Soviet Union that ushered in a pivotal decade during which the US arguably squandered a historically unique opportunity to invest in and perhaps socialise to a more Western-influenced style of popular participatory-style government in Russia.

Now, of course, Vladimir Putin has returned the world’s largest country to its familiar government of strongly repressive, unrepresentative centralised autocracy.

Paul Kennedy wrote that a superpower, in order to maintain its status, usually needs to accomplish three hard things all at once. First, provide and pay for military security, both for itself and its allies. Second, satisfy the economic needs and desires of its population. Third, ensure enough long-term economic growth to sustain military and economic superiority.

“Achieving all three of those feats over a sustained period of time will be a very difficult task,” Kennedy wrote. “Yet achieving the first two feats — or either one of them — without the third will inevitably lead to relative eclipse over the longer term. That has been the fate of past great powers, such as imperial Spain, Napoleonic France, and the British Empire when it gave way to the United States after World War II.”

In The End of the American Era, published twenty years ago, Georgetown University professor Charles Kupchan wrote that the US had failed to rethink its grand strategy in the 11 years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the destruction of the World Trade Center.

“America was a great power adrift, oblivious to the growing influence of the European Union, indifferent to Russia’s fury over NATO expansion, torn over how to accommodate China’s coming rise.”

There’s more. In 1994, foreign correspondent Robert Kaplan wrote an article in The Atlantic magazine entitled ‘The Coming Anarchy.” In forecasting about the United States, he predicted “polarisation, fragmentation and political dysfunction; an electronic media that would adopt the aspirations of the mob, and a military-technology complex that could prove as dangerous as its military-industrial predecessor.” The article was later expanded to become a popular book of the same name.

Kaplan wrote that “shallow leaders and advisers would, by the very virtue of their lack of wisdom and experience, eventually commit the kind of ghastly miscalculation that would lead to a general war -- just as European leaders who lacked a tragic sense of the past had blundered into World War I.”

It’s easy for Times columnist Lozada to write today about all the academic predictions that the current American administration has seemed to fulfil. But in fairness, we might give the last word to current US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth complained that an “unholy alliance of political ideologues and Pentagon p---ies has left our warriors without real defenders in Washington.”