Washington’s global supremacy has become its own tar pit
The United States is caught in a trap of its own making. It wants to preserve its unique position in world politics, while at the same time freeing itself from the growing burden that this position imposes. Yet Washington hasn’t found any way to do so except by insisting, ever more loudly, on its own superiority so the result is that America clings more tightly to the very role it should have consciously begun to abandon long ago.
There’s an old story from ‘Uncle Remus’s Tales’, the famous collection by the American writer Joel Chandler Harris, in which Br’er Fox sets a black doll made of tar and turpentine by the roadside to trap Br’er Rabbit. The rabbit greets the doll, mistakes its silence for rudeness, grows angry and strikes it. His paw sticks so he strikes again, and the other paw sticks and the more furiously he fights, the more completely he is trapped.
This is increasingly what American policy looks like in its struggle to preserve hegemony. The US has become stuck to its own global role. It wants to escape the costs of maintaining that role, but every attempt to do so only entangles it further. In trying to defend the “tar baby” of global primacy, Washington is forced into ventures that are costly militarily and for its reputation.
The latest example is the unprovoked attack by the US and Israel on Iran. Washington would clearly prefer not to be dragged into a wider Middle Eastern crisis, yet it has once again acted in a way that makes such entanglement more likely. It wants the privileges of hegemony without the liabilities, but the two cannot be separated.
In its struggle with this tar-covered scarecrow, the US damages not only its obvious rivals, Russia and China, but the wider international order. At the center of that order stands the UN system and the institutions built after the Second World War. These structures have long served Western interests, but they also provided a degree of predictability. Now they are being undermined by the very power that once claimed to defend them.
Russia, China and many other states view this process with mixed feelings. None has an interest in a sudden collapse of American power, still less in the collapse of the American state itself because for a century, the United States has been a central factor in global development and the great diplomatic game. Its abrupt disappearance would create not freedom, but rather chaos.
At the same time, it’s obvious that America’s struggle to preserve hegemony is weakening it but this process can’t simply be reversed. The United States is trying to reformat its global presence because it no longer has the resources to sustain the model of engagement that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Its economic model shows little sign of being capable of the transformation needed to restore the “golden years” of global leadership. Appeals to modern technology, however loudly advertised, look more like temporary devices to avoid deeper change than a serious renewal of American power.
Russia, China and many others therefore watch America’s internal difficulties with a certain satisfaction. They expect that the gradual weakening of the US position will eventually make it possible to speak with Washington on more equal terms and to formalize a fairer world order.
China expresses this position most clearly and compared with Russia, Beijing is in a more comfortable position. The US remains deeply connected to China economically and is therefore cautious about taking genuinely hostile action and East Asia also lacks Europe’s peculiar problem: there are no American allies there quite as eager as certain European states to escalate tensions for their own political purposes.
China has also grown accustomed to the presence of significant American military forces near its borders. Even Taiwan, though politically sensitive, is not viewed in Beijing as an insoluble military problem because Chinese leaders appear confident that, if necessary, they could resolve the matter by force. For now, their strategy is restraint and to watch the US exhaust its resources, avoid unnecessary confrontation and achieve victory without battle.
This approach is reflected in China’s language of “core interests.” Beijing signals that it will respond seriously only when crises touch its immediate strategic environment. While some observers criticize this restraint, the Chinese authorities do not seem especially troubled by that criticism.
But China’s long game is not without danger and the greatest risk is that Japan and South Korea may eventually seek their own nuclear deterrents if American power continues to weaken. Should that happen, China would face a strategic problem far greater than Taiwan. Beijing is also vulnerable to the damage caused by America’s erratic behavior in the global economy because China’s internal stability rests on the rising prosperity of its population, and that prosperity depends heavily on external trade and industrial links. The more Washington destabilizes the world economy, the greater the direct and indirect costs for China.
For Russia, too, American behavior brings both strategic opportunities and serious risks. The weakening of US control over Europe could, paradoxically, make Western Europe more dangerous as its elites, deprived of clear American discipline, may be tempted into an even more reckless confrontation with Moscow. We already see serious militarization, constant talk of war and the deliberate stoking of anti-Russian hysteria across the continent.
One cannot rule out that a further decline in American influence over its allies could become the trigger for a dangerous escalation in Europe. This is especially true because Americans themselves increasingly say they do not intend to bear full responsibility for the security of their traditionally reckless partners.
The economic consequences are also painful. US pressure on the global economy, together with the many sanctions imposed on Russia, has had a negative effect, though not nearly as severe as Washington expected. Russia has adapted, but the costs remain real.
Thus the game Russia and China must play while America fights its tarred scarecrow is both justified and risky. The weakening of US hegemony opens the way to a more balanced international order. But the scale of America’s presence in world affairs means that the transition cannot be simple or painless.
Changing that reality will require discipline and extraordinary diplomatic patience.
This article was first published by the Valdai Club and edited by the RT team.
