[Peace-discuss] Covid has exposed America as a failed state

[David Green]

Very interesting, referred by Michael Tracey (https://twitter.com/mtracey),
whom I've followed as of late:

https://unherd.com/2020/06/covid-has-exposed-america-as-a-failed-state/

Covid has exposed America as a failed state
It's hard to view the US at this point as anything other than a cautionary
tale
BY ARIS ROUSSINOS

June 1, 2020

It is remarkable how the effects of Covid on the international system
mirrors its impact on individuals. Its lethality, in the acute phase, may
be lower than we feared, yet there is a risk of sudden catastrophic relapse
after a seeming period of recovery, and the long-term effects are of a
gravity we can only dread.

Within states and in the relations between them, as in individuals, the
coronavirus searches out and exacerbates the underlying morbidities,
exaggerating them until total system failure. When the international system
collapses, it will be with Covid, and not of it.

The greatest morbidity the virus has latched onto in the global order is
the rivalry between the United States and China. This contest is not new —
International Relations scholars have long debated the ‘Thucydides Trap,’
named after the agonising and destructive struggle between Athens and
Sparta chronicled by the Greek historian, wherein a rising power is
inexorably drawn into conflict with the hegemon it displaces.

When Germany challenged British hegemony at the beginning of the last
century, the first wave of globalisation ended in global conflict and then
a pandemic; we must hope that this current pandemic, rapidly bringing about
the end of the second wave of globalisation, will not similarly end in
confrontation between the two great powers.

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.

Trump’s much-touted withdrawal from the Middle East has likewise seen the
US bolster its forces in the region with tens of thousands more troops than
his term began with, and allowed his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to
pursue a burning fixation with regime change in Iran that is unlikely to
end in America’s favour.

America has frittered away 5 trillion dollars on its Middle Eastern
adventures, indebting itself to China in the process, and burned its
domestic and international political capital to an unimaginable degree
—with nothing at all to show for it. Now that the architects of this
self-inflicted catastrophe wish us to join them in their next global
adventure, we must think carefully.

Let’s remember how we got here. Only a couple of months ago, warning about
dependence on China and the fragility of our supply chains, and urging
decoupling from the aspiring hegemon, was viewed as the preserve of cranks
of Right and Left, considered romantic at best and xenophobic at worst.

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.

The result is the total discrediting of the US-led order, an order of which
China’s rise is as much a direct product as it is a challenge.

The truth is that globalisation, the central political dream of Clinton and
Blair, Obama and Cameron, was never real. It was a process by which
advanced Western economies unilaterally surrendered their manufacturing
capacity to a rival, growing power, China, which instead of reciprocating
according to the Panglossian calculations of the neoliberal theorists,
practiced a traditional and ruthless mercantilism in pursuit of its own
interests. As the American political theorist Michael Lind recently wrote
in Tablet:

“Politicians pushing globalization like Clinton may have told the public
that the purpose of NAFTA and of China’s admission to the World Trade
Organization (WTO) was to open the closed markets of Mexico and China to
‘American products made on American soil, everything from corn to chemicals
to computers.’ But U.S. multinationals and their lobbyists 20 years ago
knew that was not true. Their goal from the beginning was to transfer the
production of many products from American soil to Mexican soil or Chinese
soil, to take advantage of foreign low-wage, nonunion labor, and in some
cases foreign government subsidies and other favors.”

The idea that a global liberal order could, like an iPhone, be designed in
America and made in China was the product, where it was sincerely held, of
pure ideological delusion. In its entire 5,000 year history, China has not
spent one single day as a liberal democracy. The belief that a repressive
autocratic regime would suddenly transform into a liberal democracy by
being handed more wealth and power was patently absurd. Yet it is the
people who held and promoted this claim for decades who intend to lead the
world into a great power confrontation — against the China for whose rise
they are directly responsible.

Globalisation was always the grand illusion of naive liberalism, taken
advantage of by illiberal and non-liberal actors to pursue their own ends.
It is the liberals, the TINA bluechecks, who are the artless rubes in this
story. Indeed, it is they who deserve much of the blame now being directed
at China. In Lind’s words:

“The United States has not been the naive victim of cunning Chinese
masterminds. On the contrary, in the last generation many members of
America’s elite have sought to get rich personally by selling or renting
out America’s crown jewels—intellectual property, manufacturing capacity,
high-end real estate, even university resources—to the elite of another
country. When asked whether the rapid dismantling, in a few decades, of
much of an industrial base built up painstakingly over two centuries has
been bad for the United States, the typical reply by members of the U.S.
establishment is an incoherent word salad of messianic liberal ideology and
neoclassical economics. We are fighting global poverty by employing Chinese
factory workers for a pittance! Don’t you understand Ricardo’s theory of
comparative advantage?”

For a brief few decades, the shift in production to China made a handful of
Western individuals unimaginably rich, while lowering the living standards
of the middle and working class. It began to turn the First World into a
Third World society of stratified, vastly uneven wealth even as it raised
China into a First World superpower. For the benefit of a few billionaires,
Western societies have immiserated their voter base, dramatically weakened
themselves, and helped shorten the lives of hundreds of thousands of their
own people.

These events didn’t just happen. Factories didn’t just uproot themselves
and migrate to China like flocks of concrete geese. These were conscious,
willed acts presented to us as faits accomplis — which we must now
consciously and painfully undo, in full historical awareness of how this
all took place.

It was in winning the first Cold War that the United States set the stage
for its own eclipse, though our own entanglement in this mess is the
product of the Second World War. In 1945, the United States found itself
the victor through its possession of a vast industrial base, sheltered by
geography from the destruction we European powers had wrought upon
ourselves. The Soviet Union could not keep up with America’s industrial
power, able to churn out both weapons and consumer goods with dizzying
speed and sophistication.

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.

Drunk on victory, and searching for a new project, American policymakers
decided to remake the world in their own image. In 1993, the National
Security Strategy of US National Security Adviser Anthony Lake and
Secretary of State Warren Christopher melded the doctrine of imperial
hegemony with the free market orthodoxies that had taken root in the Reagan
era. As the realist International Relations scholar Patrick Porter notes:

“Christopher’s version assumed that the United States ‘must maintain its
military strength’, ‘stem the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction’, and ‘knock down barriers to global trade’. Lake’s premise was
that ‘America’s power, authority, and example provide unparalleled
opportunities to lead,’ that its security rested on the rise of market
democracy abroad.”

Our present moment, in all its dangers, results from this fusion of the two
strands of liberalism at the very apogee of American power: the belief that
the unfettered free movement of goods, capital, services and people would
raise global living standards to endless new heights, and that it was
America’s manifest destiny to oversee a worldwide liberal order of free
trade and unchallenged US hegemony.

Distractedly giving away the industrial base that won them the first Cold
War to their rival in the second, American administrations of both parties
plunged headfirst into the post-historical future. It took less than a
decade for reality to crash into the World Trade Center, but by then it was
too late. America’s policymakers had been captured by their grand delusion,
and they refused to let it go even as the empire found itself over-extended
in war after war, entered into with noble liberal aims utterly divorced
from reality, and from which it was unable to extricate itself.

Just one decade after 9/11, despite America’s mauling in Iraq, pious
liberals saw in the Arab Spring a chance to spread their creed to oppressed
masses crying out for liberal democracy, and watched with confused horror
as the armed factions of the Middle East turned instead to the older and
more powerful forces of religious fervour, ethnic conflict and sectarian
hatred. Lost in a fantasy world of their own imagining, Americans could not
begin to understand the world they dreamed of changing.

America’s rapid rise to global hegemony and equally rapid decline is a
grand historical tragedy of the highest order, and as in classical tragedy,
the root cause is the protagonist’s central character flaw. Born of
18th-century liberal ideals, and centred on a sacred set of texts, a
constitution and declaration of independence debated with rabbinical
exactitude and religious fervour, for the United States, that flaw is its
civic religion of liberalism.

While we at least, like our neighbours in Europe, have older traditions on
which to draw, and with which we can temper liberalism’s zealous
certainties, America was liberal from the start and will remain so until
the end; with no countervailing influence, in America liberalism mutated
into a fundamentalist religion. It is only through this zealot’s devotion
to liberalism that American policymakers sincerely believed they could bomb
Afghan shepherds and bribe the Chinese politburo into becoming fellow
acolytes.

Their certainty in liberalism’s manifest destiny to spread itself over
every corner of the earth goes beyond reasonable analysis: it is a purely
religious faith. Despite the failure of its devotees to achieve success
wherever they have tried it, they will not stop, and cannot. It is a
compulsion, a religious duty impossible for them to abandon, shared by both
factions.

America’s crusading zeal is not just for export: through some magical
process, all manner of political thought is in the United States transmuted
into religion. Trump’s opponents on the liberal and radical left have
mangled French postmodernist theory into a dour and millenarian Calvinism.
On the populist right, the QAnon conspiracy theory is rapidly evolving into
a widespread religious cult, a Manichaen heresy with Trump as its central
vengeful deity.

Now the two opposing sects of American liberalism, conventionally
characterised as political parties, are at war with each other, in a so far
relatively bloodless battle for the nation’s soul. What the Reformation did
tragically for Christianity in Europe, America’s political culture war is
repeating farcically with liberalism.

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.

The image of the Surgeon General of the richest and most powerful empire
that has ever existed instructing Americans in a Twitter video how to
improvise a mask out of a T-shirt — a T-shirt prominently advertising an
opioid overdose antidote — is a potent symbol of deep and existential rot.

It is a country embroiled in political conflict over even the basic facts
of science, from biology to medicine: because the American President
promoted one potential Covid cure, half the country became devoted to its
efficacy, and the other to its harmfulness. Had Trump condemned
hydroxychloroquine, no doubt the same war would have taken place in
reverse, with liberal commentators ostentatiously guzzling the drug on
video to widespread approval.

Trump is a morbid symptom of this chaos, rather than its cause. The
forthcoming election, which pits two gerontocrats of dubious mental acuity
against each other, resembles the late Soviet era, before the regime
collapsed under its own absurdities. America indeed represents a strange
inversion of the Soviet collapse: the economy dwarfs that of any other
nation, save China; its empire is still intact, and its military spans the
globe more powerfully than any single challenger.

Yet at its centre the US echoes post-Soviet Russia in its epidemics of
death by drug overdose, in its collapsing middle class, its worsening
health outcomes and declining life expectancies, the capture of the state
and economy by rapacious oligarchs, and in the occasional bouts of
interethnic violence leading to demonstrations, riots and broader political
dysfunction.

As the veteran American diplomat Richard Haass sadly observes: “Long before
COVID-19 ravaged the earth, there had already been a precipitous decline in
the appeal of the American model. Thanks to persistent political gridlock,
gun violence, the mismanagement that led to the 2008 global financial
crisis, the opioid epidemic, and more, what America represented grew
increasingly unattractive to many. The federal government’s slow,
incoherent, and all too often ineffective response to the pandemic will
reinforce the already widespread view that the United States has lost its
way.”

What, then, is the appeal of this model to wavering allies in a new Cold
War? The idea it can be considered a viable model of governance to follow
is now patently absurd. As I sit typing this, troops are deployed on the
streets of cities across the country, their Humvees still painted desert
tan, as looters smash and burn and ransack shops, and protestors march
against rubber bullets and tear gas; the tools of imperial policing are now
brought to bear on the metropole.

It is surely impossible to view the US at this point as anything other than
a cautionary tale, a burning city on a hill, which evokes only the desire
for our own society to avoid its fate. In his Tablet essay, Lind glumly
muses about a near-future United States withering into a “deindustrialized,
English-speaking version of a Latin American republic, specializing in
commodities, real estate, tourism, and perhaps transnational tax evasion,
with decayed factories scattered across the continent and a nepotistic
rentier oligarchy clustered in a few big coastal cities”.

While an America in decline may throw up a more competent caudillo than
Trump in time, it is difficult to reasonably conclude that it possesses the
societal solidarity to wage a decades-long, global struggle against a
near-competitor. It is hard to imagine an American governing class
scandalised at calling Covid a Chinese virus waging an existential conflict
against China to a successful conclusion.

The country’s politics were torn apart, for four years, by a handful of
Russian Facebook posts promoting Trump; how then will it cope with China’s
far greater penetration of social media, of American commerce and industry,
of universities and politics, of all the institutions of 21st century
American life? We do not know, yet, who will win this year’s election, nor
whether the losing party, will, as in the previous election, attempt to
overturn the result and further delegitimise the entire political process.

Perhaps the era of losing parties accepting election results has gone for
good in America, now both sides view their opponents as a Schmittian enemy
to be vanquished for eternity. America is too lost in its own internal
conflict to contemplate a grander, global struggle with any confidence.

In any case, America’s foreign policy is disastrous in its own terms, even
before Covid started coursing through its system. As the International
Relations scholar Philip Cunliffe observes, America is that curious
paradox, a revisionist hegemon, restlessly driven by ideology to overturn
the very global order it charges itself with maintaining, producing what he
terms a “cosmopolitan dystopia” that undermines America’s own position.

American attempts to overturn regimes which offend its liberal values have
produced overwhelmingly negative results for the global system, spreading
chaos and enhancing the reach and power of its geopolitical rivals.
America’s record in these endless wars has not been one of success.
Defeated, outflanked by Iran in Iraq, and clutching defeat from the jaws of
victory in eastern Syria, America’s hegemonic military power and tactical
skill has been relentlessly undermined by the total detachment from reality
displayed by the Washington blob which determines the goals and course of
the nation’s wars.

In a manner we can safely assume is not replicated in China, the architects
of America’s endless policy failures, like the Iraq War, are not punished
by the system, but awarded further sinecures and promotions by an
establishment which rewards failure and hobbles success. Defeat is baked in
from the outset: the rot is now so widespread it will likely become
terminal.

American decline is starkly measurable in outcomes, even as its ballooning
defence budgets sap the country’s economy. The United States can no longer
keep its client states from each other’s throats, causing wars to break out
even within the US alliance system: Qatar and Turkey’s attempts to
establish Muslim Brotherhood governance projects across the Middle East and
North Africa are directly challenged by the UAE, Egypt and Saudi Arabia’s
support for notionally secular strongmen, in a proxy conflict dragging in
France and Russia and threatening Europe’s security.

Even a recent coup attempt in a bankrupt and unstable South American
country failed despite Pompeo’s loudly-voiced support, which should have
been America playing in easy mode. As in any horror movie, the threat’s
coming from inside the building: all America’s rivals need do, like Russia
in Syria, is exploit the contradictions and weaknesses of US policy, and
turn the superpower’s weight and power against it at minimal cost and risk
to themselves.

Unlike Iraq, or the Taliban emirate, however, there is fortunately little
prospect of the United States engaging in open conflict with China. As
Pentagon planners warn, it is unlikely that America will win even a limited
naval engagement in China’s Pacific sphere of influence, let alone attempt
a ground war against a billion-strong nuclear power.

Instead, we can expect a hybrid war that stops short of open confrontation,
involving information warfare on social media, the hacking and sabotage of
key infrastructure, the economic blackmail and extortion of allies through
sanctions and tariffs and a dangerous jockeying for position as Covid
accelerates the collapse of weak states across the ME and Africa, already
teetering on the edge of failure.

The internet will surely emerge as a central battleground, and one which
poses a far greater risk to America’s open, divided, and already-penetrated
system than to China’s hermetically-sealed national internet: indeed, it is
doubtful the worldwide web as we currently understand it will long survive
a great power confrontation.

As hacked power grids and water treatment plants fail, and passenger planes
mysteriously fall out of the sky, and top secret documents are released on
social media, the rest of the world will find itself in the uncomfortable
position of deciding which side presents the safest bet: and Covid has
begun this process sooner than anyone expected.

Born in 1945, the American Empire was the global boomer, sitting astride
the earth like it was a ride-on lawnmower, frittering away his children’s
inheritance on cheap Chinese gewgaws and blaming everyone else for his poor
decisions and for the decline of his powers. It is natural then, that it
will be laid low by what is cruelly termed the Boomer plague, and we will
do well to escape the hardship and bloodshed that attends the collapse of
empires with as little harm to ourselves as possible.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20200602/b283472b/attachment-0001.htm>