Trump won latest US election. Increasing numbers of Americans polled today say they prefer a dictator who can make America great again.
How America’s pursuit of global primacy undermines democracy at home and international law abroad
THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda | I argued in this column last week that America’s pursuit of global primacy (hegemony) is increasingly becoming a liability to Europe’s security and economic prosperity. Germany is the biggest loser in Europe’s increasingly non-strategic and self-defeating subservience to American leadership. True, Western Europe (since the end of the Second World War) and Eastern Europe (since the end of the Cold War, the First Cold War) enjoyed security and unprecedented economic prosperity under American guardianship. However, as the US suffers relative decline yet clinging to the pursuit of global primacy, Europe is now beginning to lose both.
The same is happening to America. The pursuit of global primacy is economically damaging to most Americans and undermines their democracy. Of course, there are powerful interests within the US polity who profit from Washington’s pursuit of primacy. The military-industrial complex makes money by promoting America’s endless foreign wars. These wars are intellectually justified by a large army of self-interested intellectuals posing as neutral analysts from think tanks and academia. They are aided by a compliant media backed by hawkish foreign policy elites. Some of these elites are democracy and human rights mujahedeen; others, hawks consumed by oversized ambitions for global dominance.
American soldiers who die in these forever wars come from the bottom 90% of the income ladder. The country squanders huge sums of money on these wars. The people who suffer the resultant economic loses are ordinary Americans. Today, America is a heavily indebted country, income inequality is widening, its infrastructure is crumbling, its schools (for most citizens) are decaying, life expectancy is falling and living standards for most Americans are deteriorating at a catastrophic rate. These are costs of a relentless pursuit of global primacy, poisoning that country’s society and politics.
This has led many Americans to turn to populist demagogues who rely on identity to rally support. They manufacture enemies, promise strong leadership and disregard liberal democratic principles. This is largely because many Americans feel their democracy has been turned into an oligarchy of the rich. Donald Trump is the product. Increasing numbers of Americans polled today say they prefer a dictator who can make America great again.
I criticize America out of love, and, to pay the intellectual and political debt I owe that country. It has been very kind and generous to me. I went to its best schools (Stanford and Yale). Been hosted by many of its intellectual institutions many times. My intellectual development has been greatly shaped by American (and Western) ideals. I seek to speak truth to power because America taught me its importance. America’s pursuit of primacy goes against the founding ideals of the American republic.
To avoid tyranny, America’s founding fathers dispersed power across three institutions: the executive, the legislature and the judiciary in such a way that no one center could dominate – each checking and balancing the other. In global politics, especially under the Westphalian system, the Balance of Power principle is the equivalent of checks and balances in USA’s domestic politics. This principle requires that no one nation becomes overwhelmingly powerful to subdue all potential rivals. This is because power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Therefore, global power must be dispersed among different big powers in the international system who are then able to check and balance each other. This helps avoid one bully on the global scene who can act as a bull in a china shop and cannot be restrained by any state or alliance of states.
America’s pursuit of global primacy contradicts this principle of checks and balances in international politics. America and her vassal states in Europe argue that because they are democracies at home, they should impose their “values” on other societies and states. They do this using ideological suasion (funding NGOs and the mass media in other states), economic bribes and blackmail and in extreme cases through war as we have seen in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. The collective West say that because they are democracies at home, they are entitled to act as benevolent dictators abroad.
Yet other societies and states should be entitled to also have a say on rules and values of the international system. America and her Western vassal states constitute about 11% of the global population. How do they claim to represent everyone? It is using old-style colonial justifications. Colonialism invaded, conquered and dominated other nations claiming to be on a civilizing mission. America’s (and her vassals’) interventions, military and otherwise in the affairs of other states are presented as altruistic missions of the noble West to emancipate the barbarians.
America and her satellites disregard international law using terms like “rules based international order” which deny the equality of states. They have created a hierarchy of superior and inferior nations – the former dictating to the latter how they should govern themselves. This is the reason America is unwilling to accommodate a rising China and/or Russia in a multipolar world order. Instead, it seeks to impose its values on them failure of which it must weaken both. NATO is America’s instrument for weakening Russia; Taiwan, for weakening China.
NATO expansion has made Europe insecure. Attempts to contain China are doing the same in Asia. America has military bases surrounding China thereby forcing Beijing into militarization of the South China Sea. This pursuit of global dominance has been successful in America precisely because of the failure of America’s democracy. The media, the academia, think tanks etc. that are involved in the production and dissemination of knowledge and information are owned or have been coopted by large corporations. The emergence of big tech has led to the centralization of communication, leading to greater manipulation of information.
The consequences of these on America’s domestic politics, society and economy are catastrophic: a massive debt, collapsing infrastructure, widening inequality, declining mortality, leading to widespread social discontent. American society is highly polarized, and some polls show that the country is on the verge of civil war. Americans have lost faith in their political and democratic process and are now open to having a tyrant rule them.
So deeply polarized is the country that in 2016, Democrats refused to accept the election of Trump and invented Russiagate to undermine his presidency. In 2020, Trump and his supporters refused to accept the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s elections and took to protest. These are inevitable costs of empire, the relentless pursuit of global dominance. America’s efforts to dominate the world and contain emerging powers are instead accelerating its own demise.
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amwenda@ugindependent.co.ug
