Sabotaging the Pax Americana

Trump and Musk are making us distrusted, friendless and weak

Source: World Bank

Elon Musk — with Donald Trump’s acquiescence, but clearly Musk was calling the shots — has effectively destroyed USAID, the aid agency that was, aside from its humanitarian role, a major pillar of US foreign policy. This move was clearly illegal, and a court has already put a hold on some of Musk’s actions.

But it may already be too late. The destruction of USAID is a prime example of what Dan Drezner calls Humpty Dumpty foreign policy, as in, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put him back together again. By furloughing the agency’s employees, ordering those working abroad to come home and canceling crucial programs and grants, the Musk/Trump administration undermined decades’ worth of relationship-building. Even if the courts eventually order everything the wreckers did reversed, it will be hard if not impossible to put the structure back together again.

USAID is just the most extreme example of how the Musk/Trump administration is sabotaging the American Empire. For yes, America is or was an imperial power, although in a different way from most past empires — less reliant on force, more reliant on good will and trust. What Musk and Trump have done is to destroy much of the basis for U.S. influence, leaving America far weaker than it was just a few weeks ago.

America’s imperial era — the Pax Americana — began after World War II. With Europe and Japan in ruins and Britain exhausted, the U.S. had no military or economic peers outside the Soviet bloc. As Phillips O’Brien recently noted, America could easily have gobbled up lots of territory if it had thought in conventional Great Power terms.

But our leaders were more sophisticated than that. I don’t know whether they had read Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion about how conquest no longer made sense, but they certainly understood that America needed prosperous, willing allies, not more territory.

Most famously, America not only departed from the ancient tradition of extracting tribute from vanquished foes, we followed our victory in World War II with the Marshall Plan — a large aid program designed to help both our allies and our former enemies get back on their feet. At its peak in 1949, the U.S. government spent about 17 percent of its budget on foreign aid.

Many Americans believe, by the way, that we still give aid on something like that scale. In reality, these days aid is only around 1 percent of the budget. But humanitarian aid to other nations is still a vital part of U.S. diplomacy, and plays — or played — an important role in supporting America’s moral authority, in maintaining our image as a mostly benevolent power.

Beyond providing aid, America set out to create an international trading system that would foster widespread prosperity. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), signed in 1947, set up rules designed to foster gradual tariff reductions and block any reversion to protectionism. These rules constrained the United States the same way they constrained everyone else — that is, we deliberately chose not to rig the system in our own favor.

And we created a system of military alliances, NATO in particular, that were notable in the formal equality they granted to all their members. Everyone knew that America was the senior partner, but we were careful to avoid any hint that we were treating our allies as subject nations, required to obey U.S. orders.

Above all, America was a nation that honored its agreements. During my year in government, I personally witnessed discussions of trade policy in which someone from the office of the U.S. Trade Representative would shut down another agency’s proposal simply by pointing out that it would violate the GATT.

Were we always the good guys? Of course not. America engineered the overthrow of democratically elected leaders it didn’t like, from Iran’s Mohammed Mosaddegh to Chile’s Salvador Allende. We supported tinpot dictators where that served U.S. interests (or in some cases corporate interests.) We killed huge numbers of civilians in Korea, and then again in Vietnam.

But compare the Pax Americana with any previous hegemony, and we look like a beacon of enlightenment. And our relative decency was rewarded.

Consider the contrast between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Superficially, they might have looked similar: military alliances facing each other across the Elbe, each with a single dominant power.

But NATO members were, and considered themselves, partners, while Warsaw Pact members were, and considered themselves, vassals. Indeed, in Hungary in 1956 and again in Czechoslovakia in 1968 the Soviet Union used military force to reinstall puppet regimes. I don’t think anyone ever imagined that America might send tanks rolling into Belgium or Denmark.

And there’s a real sense in which American decency and restraint explains our victory in the Cold War. Western governments didn’t need the threat of external intervention to stay in power; Eastern European governments did. When the regime in East Germany lost its grip, and Russia was either unable or unwilling to send in the tanks again, Communism quickly collapsed all across Eastern Europe, and eventually in the Soviet Union itself.

Despite the frictions caused by the invasion of Iraq, America retained much of its moral authority and received crucial support from its allies right through the Biden years. For example, there’s a widespread myth on the right that European nations have provided little aid to Ukraine, leaving it up to the U.S. to combat Russian aggression. This is totally false. Europe has given Ukraine substantially more aid than we have, although America has supplied more of the weapons:

Source: Kiel Institute for World Economics

But in less than three weeks Musk, Trump and their minions have taken a wrecking ball to the foundations of the Pax Americana.

As I said, foreign aid is no longer a major part of US spending. But the abrupt demolition of USAID, apparently in response to right-wing conspiracy theories and the claim that the agency was full of “radical-left marxists who hate America,” didn’t just leave millions relying on American aid in the lurch. It said that America doesn’t believe in helping people in need, and considers anyone who does suspicious. So much for moral authority.

At the same time Trump threatened to impose high tariffs on Canada and Mexico, on obviously spurious grounds. Never mind that he blinked, at least so far. (He is, as I write this, saying that he will impose a new set of tariffs on steel and aluminum, which would, if they happen, hit Canada in particular.) We have a trade agreement with our neighbors that specifically rules out unilateral tariff increases and calls on members to go through a dispute settlement process instead. Trump personally signed a minor revision of that deal in 2018.

So now we’re a nation that doesn’t keep its word, that can’t be trusted to honor its agreements.

Finally, Trump’s threat to seize Greenland, a territory belonging to Denmark, a member of NATO, and his talk of annexing Canada show that we no longer consider our erstwhile allies partners worthy of respect.

All of this makes us distrusted and friendless. It also makes us weak, because America needs allies even more now than it did during the Cold War.

Back then the U.S. economy was considerably larger than that of our major rival; it was always a severe strain on the Soviet Union to maintain anything resembling military parity. Now, however, as the chart at the top of this post shows, China’s GDP, adjusted for differences in price levels, is significantly larger than America’s. And that’s the right measure if you’re thinking about raw power. As the chart also shows, however, the world’s democracies as a group still considerably outweigh the major autocratic powers.

So this is a really bad time to be alienating democracies around the world and destroying America’s reputation as a trustworthy partner.

I mean, what we’re seeing is what you’d expect if China and Russia had somehow managed to install people who wanted to sabotage America’s international position at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

MUSICAL CODA

Blown to hell, crash