By Atilio Boron

The author is an Argentine Marxist analyst who writes often on international questions. Published in Spanish on Cubadebate March 29 and Lahaine.org. Translation: John Catalinotto

Faced with impending changes since the beginning of the frustrated “new American century,” there have been calls to exercise naked power without any standards or adherence to international legality.

This is impossible for some things, but not for all, of course. The radical return to protectionism is not only possible but necessary for an empire facing an undeniable decline, denounced not only by critical analysts of the empire, but certified by no less than stellar figures of the U.S. establishment. These include the late Zbigniew Brzezinski in a 2012 text and, subsequently, by several documents of the Rand Corporation.

Call it decline or decadence, as you wish. This development came hand in hand with, among other domestic factors, the economy’s slow growth, the loss of competitiveness in global markets and the gigantic indebtedness of the federal government. In 1980, the ratio of government debt to gross domestic product (GDP) was 34.54%. Today it is at an astronomical level: 122.55%.

To this must be added the intractable deficit in the balance of trade, which continues to grow and which in the year 2024 amounted to $1.13 trillion, representing 3.5% of the U.S. GDP. To this constellation of domestic factors of imperial weakening must be added the deterioration of democratic legitimacy and the enormous fault line undermining the political system, of which Trumpism is but one of its manifestations.

To this complex picture must be added the epochal changes in the external environment of the U.S. that have irreversibly modified the shape of the international system. The phenomenal economic growth of China and the significant advances of other countries of the Global South such as Iran, India and several Asian nations constitute objective obstacles to the pretensions of Washington, accustomed to imposing its conditions without encountering too many obstacles.

U.S. omnipotence is over

However much Trump may regret it, that era is already part of the past, because the economic strengthening and the advance of the countries of the Global South in new technologies have created a planetary landscape where the bluster of yesteryear no longer has the same impact. Much less do economic wars, where the aggressor ends up being the victim of its decisions.

As if the above were not enough, we must add the “return” of Russia as a global power, something that took by surprise the ideologized experts of the empire, fervent believers in the exceptionalism of the U.S. as “the indispensable nation” and who thought that after the implosion of the Soviet Union, Russia had been condemned permanently to irrelevance in world affairs.

If we add to this picture the greater military response capacity of these countries — especially Russia — as well as their achievements in the diplomatic field and in the formation of broad alliances — the BRICS [economic coordination] for example — we will understand the reasons why the balance of the world geopolitical chessboard has tipped in a direction contrary to U.S. interests.

It should come as no surprise that, in the face of these threatening changes that have become evident since the beginning of the frustrated “new American century,” some academics and government advisers have made emphatic appeals to the U.S. leadership to exercise naked power, leaving aside all conventionalism or adherence to international legality.

One of them, Robert Kagan, substantiated this policy in a long and highly influential article published the year after the September 11, 2001 events. Unlike Europe, he said, the U.S. leadership must be aware that we live “in an anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might.”

For Kagan, the world’s need for a “global gendarme” was indisputable, and Washington was the only one with the will and ability to fulfill that role. Hence the doctrine of “Preventive War” proclaimed by George W. Bush (Jr.) shortly after 9/11 in 2001, which established that countries or governments that are outside the law — that is, those that do not accept the “world order based on rules,” conceived to favor the U.S. and its vassals — must be neutralized or destroyed.

Kagan rounds off his argument by appealing to the colonialist statement of a British diplomat, Robert Cooper, that in dealing with the world outside Europe, “We need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era-force, preemptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary. … Among ourselves, we keep the law, but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.”

That jungle is obviously all the rest of the planet outside the North Atlantic and most especially the outlying regions of the empire.

Exactly 20 years later, Josep Borrell (Spanish Socialist high cadre), high representative for foreign policy of the unpresentable European Union, made a comment that seems inspired by Cooper’s writing when he compared with unequalled arrogance the “European garden” with the rest of the world, which he characterized as a “jungle” and which, as such, must be treated with the brutal methods of the jungle.

The limits of the lone sheriff

However, a few years before the publication of Kagan’s and Cooper’s texts, a sophisticated exponent of U.S. conservatism, Samuel P. Huntington, warned about the limits of the United States as a “lone sheriff” and, in general, about the sustainability of the unipolarism that some thought would last throughout the 21st century. According to this author, the turbulence of the international situation after the collapse of the Soviet Union forced Washington to exercise international power in a despotic and unconsulted manner, given that in a Hobbesian world, the law of the strongest prevails.

He warned, however, that with the passage of time this behavior was bound to precipitate the formation of a very broad anti-U.S. coalition involving not only Russia and China but also many other countries from what we now call the Global South.

Moreover, to the extent that as the gendarme of world capitalism Washington is obliged, according to Huntington, to “pressure other countries to adopt American values and practices; to prevent third countries from acquiring military capabilities that call into question American military superiority”; or to impose the illegal extraterritoriality of U.S. laws; or to promote U.S. business interests under the “slogans of free trade and open markets and shape IMF [International Monetary Fund] and WB [World Bank] policies to serve those same interests.”

According to Huntington, the U.S. must also categorize certain countries as “state sponsors of terrorism” (as in an infamous gesture recently made against Cuba), “because they refuse to bow to U.S. wishes.” Thus it would only be a matter of time, he warned, before in reaction to these policies a broad front opposed to the U.S. would be formed and the empire would be increasingly challenged by new and very powerful international actors.

Trump mimics the sheriff

In the military field, the “lone sheriff” was slammed in Korea [1950-53], Bay of Pigs [1961], Vietnam [1961-75], Iraq [2003-12] and Afghanistan [2001-21]; it could not overcome Cuba’s heroic resistance to 65 years of aggressions or put an end to the government of Venezuela after more than the last 20 years [of interventions and sanctions]. To make matters worse for Washington, that gendarme is not only weaker but must deal with a much more complicated and intractable international scene than a quarter of a century ago.

In his desperation, Trump is trying to impersonate a sheriff, appeal to brute force and make bullying his main diplomatic argument (“peace by force,” as Marco Rubio put it) to revive the “golden age” of imperialism: gunboat diplomacy and in vain try to resurrect a [cynical] “rules-based world order” that died a few years ago.

Trump is only the undertaker, not the executioner. He is withdrawing from the Paris Climate Change Accords, from the World Health Organization, cutting off funding to the World Trade Organization, which was created under Washington’s leadership, and he is thinking of abandoning the United Nations and multiple other global bodies and definitively scrapping a host of international treaties.

In Trump’s restoration crusade, he is wielding the weapon of the trade war by appealing to customs tariffs, whose boomerang effect has been repeatedly pointed out, and the threat of imposing his will over any opponent, from buying Greenland, annexing Canada as the 51st state of the Union, forcibly recovering the Panama Canal, allegedly “controlled by China” (which is a tremendous lie), to changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, considering the drug cartels as “terrorist organizations,” which according to U.S. laws would empower the U.S. to combat them inside Mexico, and of course, redouble the aggressions against Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

He had promised to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, and two months after his arrival at the White House, his words vanished into thin air because Vladimir Putin is not willing to give away his military victory. And despite his supposedly pacifist pretensions, limited to Ukraine, he continues the policy of his predecessors, both Republicans and Democrats, of financing and validating the genocide that the Israeli terrorist regime is perpetrating in Gaza and now in the West Bank.

So far Trump and his small band of oligarchs who hijacked democracy in the U.S., and the mediocre members of his cabinet, starting with Marco Rubio (who Trump calls “Little Marco”) have limited their restorative pretensions to the level of gestures and words, or to costless initiatives such as, for example, abandoning WHO. But in the battlefield of international relations, where multiple national interests collide, he has achieved little or nothing.

Opposition grows at home

To make matters even worse for Trump, he has a domestic front where a growing number of the population, more than half, already disapproves of the direction he is giving to the economy. We must be very alert, because, as is well known, when things do not go well for Washington in other parts of the world, it withdraws to its strategic rearguard, Latin America and the Caribbean.