In this coming struggle, America is starting with a great and self-inflicted handicap. Obama’s attempts to reposition US foreign policy away from its destructive and self-defeating entanglement in the Islamic world and towards the coming confrontation with China failed, distracted by the bloody chaos brought about by the Arab Spring and by the Washington foreign policy “blob’s” unwillingness to wean itself off wars it cannot win. [...]
When Trump urged the same thing for the United States, China’s autocrat Xi was treated to a standing ovation at Davos, and hailed as the new champion of the global liberal order. But now Larry Summers, the high priest of globalisation and of America’s offshoring to China, is warning us against fragile supply chains and the urgency of decoupling with no reference at all his long and glittering career midwifing this catastrophe. Here is the global system, finally stripped of all illusions. [...]
Yet when the rival superpower collapsed, exhausted, the United States took the wrong lessons from the fall of communism. American policymakers convinced themselves their global dominance was due to the success of their liberal ideology rather than of their industrial might, and that the sudden, unexpected disintegration of the Soviet Union was due to the vindication of liberalism rather than of the awakened nationalism of Russia’s subject peoples. [...]
If we observe the American war on Covid, we see it is America’s Chernobyl moment as much as China’s. The United States is by far the world’s worst-affected country in terms of total numbers, and its outbreak is still far from over. The symbolism of American states forming regional blocs to counteract the incompetence and total incapacity of its central government to save lives or arrest the virus’s progress lends weight to The Atlantic’s charge that the US now resembles a failed state.
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