The Felon and the End of the American Age

Throughout history empires have risen and over time eventually faded away only to be replaced by new empires often as financial and military over extension and exhaustion take their toll and one time allies readjust to a changing power dynamic and the need for new alliances.  Today, the USA appears to be yet the latest fading empire and the so-called American age or American century is coming to a close.  Not everything that has hastened this decline is the work of the Felon and his incompetent regime, but his war of choice with Iran and his shredding of past alliances, both military and in terms of trade, have accelerated both the net decline and caused the USA an untrustworthy ally and trading partner.  Ask Canada about its now strong distrust of the USA and its moves to possibly become an "associate member" of the European Union (Australia is rumored to be looking for something similar with the EU) and is busy making new trade alliances with other nations as well.  Meanwhile, the Felon makes more threats against Europe even as he cow tows to Vladimir Putin who must be smiling at the wreckage the Felon has wrought.  A column in The Atlantic looks at where we find ourselves:

The American age that followed World War II was bound to end eventually. What’s shocking is how suddenly that moment has arrived. In the past six months, America’s power—long exemplified by the world’s best warfighting equipment and most highly trained military personnel, a global network of bases and logistics systems, and military and diplomatic partnerships with all corners of the world—has proved insufficient to defeat Iran, a repressive, economically stagnant regime armed with cheap missiles and drones.

For years, virtually everyone thought that, in a crisis, Washington could draw on deeper reserves of money, troops, munitions, and diplomatic support than any other nation. Even when U.S. forces faced setbacks in conflicts such as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, a widespread assumption about America’s fundamental strength reassured allies and deterred foes. Yet that assumption also promoted a complacency that has left the U.S. military exposed now that even inexpensive, mass-produced weaponry can be guided with deadly accuracy.

[The Felon] President Trump did not erode U.S. capabilities on his own. But [the Felon's] Trump’s war with Iran has revealed just how the underlying dynamics of global power have shifted—and just how much American might has decayed.

Since Britain’s postwar retreat from the Middle East, the United States has been the most important military power in that volatile region. . . . Until recently, the array of American bases surrounding Iran gave that country’s leaders every reason to fear being overwhelmed militarily if they moved to control the strait. Yet the regime remains intact, even after attacks by the United States and Israel succeeded in killing top Iranian leaders, and its long-range missile and drone attacks managed to elude American air defenses and incapacitated many U.S. facilities. In March, fewer than two weeks into the fighting, The New York Times identified 17 American bases, air-defense installations, and diplomatic facilities that had been hit. Among them were some of the U.S. military’s important staging points: the Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain as well as the Ali Al Salem Air Base, Camp Arifjan, and Camp Buehring in Kuwait.

The effect of these losses on U.S. operations was nearly instantaneous. A key reason the Trump administration did not militarily escalate with Iran over the summer, despite all of its threats to do so, was the loss of the base in Bahrain—which the Navy had relied on for decades to resupply ships in the Middle East.

For the moment—and likely for longer—the bases taken out of commission by Iranian attacks have been largely abandoned as operational facilities because of the continuing threat to U.S. personnel and equipment. . . . The vulnerability of U.S facilities near Iran is so great and the prospective cost of repair is so large that, as The Washington Post reported last month, administration officials might not want to rebuild them at all. . . . the basic fact is that defending key facilities against even a less technologically advanced foe such as Iran is not something that the U.S. military can currently do.

The diminution of U.S. strength has a cascading effect. To maintain its military effort against Iran, the United States has had to strip the western Pacific of vital equipment. . . . This desperate move only underscores that American military resources, however enormous relative to most other countries’, are not infinite. The war with Iran has depleted stockpiles of some of the Pentagon’s most important and advanced weaponry. . . . For years, the United States has focused on building so-called exquisite systems—advanced weaponry that is produced in limited quantities at a high per-unit cost. This approach was in part an adaptation to the post-9/11 War on Terror, in which U.S. forces focused on counterinsurgency and fought enemies that lacked the capacity to mount and sustain serious attacks on American logistics. Under those circumstances, the Pentagon built up a broad array of munitions but not deep stockpiles of them.

The erosion of American manufacturing superiority is an old story, but it is a key element for understanding the end of the American age. The U.S. could once outbuild other powers by tapping into civilian production. During World War II, Americans retooled the automotive industry to build aircraft. Today, relative to the rest of the world, the United States does almost no civilian shipbuilding. China, in comparison, makes about 50 percent of the ships in the world and controls about 80 percent of the world’s drone manufacture. Having built its military to prevail in a burst of high-intensity fighting, the United States simply lacks the equipment, stockpiles, and rested forces to engage China for any extended period of time.

In the past, the United States could rely on allies to amplify its own power. Nations that shared values or at least interests with Washington have hosted bases, provided diplomatic support for American initiatives, shared intelligence, and sent troops and equipment to support American-led military operations. Today, traditional allies have capabilities that the U.S. sorely needs. For example, Japan and South Korea are the second- and third-largest shipbuilding powers in the world.

Rather than recognizing that it needs allies more than ever, the current U.S administration perceives governments that have followed American leadership for decades as free riders, annoyances, even hindrances. . . . . in Europe, the U.S. government has distanced itself from long-standing democracies and moved closer to the Russian dictatorship of Vladimir Putin. Since returning to the White House, Trump has scaled back the American provision of security to Europe. . . . Leaders in Europe are taking these moves seriously and are making plans to rely less on the United States. Germany is considering whether to help the U.K. modernize its nuclear weapons so that Europe has a nuclear deterrent if the United States pulls out.

The United States has even begun to alienate Canada. Trump has regularly talked about his desire to incorporate Canada as the 51st state. He has also launched a trade war that, by his own account, will be “devastating” to the Canadian economy. Americans have now twice elected a president who overtly seeks to reframe traditional alliances as zero-sum relationships in which the United States needs to do less and its former partners, more. Leaders and voters in those countries might reasonably conclude that Americans do not know or do not care what they are giving up.

Americans have long benefited from peaceful integration with Canada. The U.S. could go to war with Iran in part because of its large base network in Europe. The disruption of long-standing alliances will be devastating to America’s global position. Other countries are already adjusting to newly revealed American weaknesses. Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia—all long-term U.S. partners—recently signed their own defense pact. . . . Even Saudi Arabia, which for decades based its security on massive purchases of U.S. weapons and the hosting of U.S. forces, must reassess its choices after Trump told its de facto ruler that the U.S. will not assist the country in its war with the Houthis.

Meanwhile, South Korea is improving relations with China, and European states are thinking more and more of a European-wide defense association. These are all strong signs that the countries around the world are losing confidence in America’s capabilities—and its intent.

Unfortunately for the United States, the administration seems more intent on hiding problems than correcting them. . . . . Even if the United States tries to revert to more of its earlier way of doing business, recent events suggest that its global reach will decrease. How the rest of the world will adapt to that change is hard to say.

All of history’s previous superpowers have eventually declined. The emergence of East Asia as the center of the world’s economic output was always going to reduce American influence. The transition from one global age to the next is seldom evident in the moment. When Russia invaded Ukraine four and a half years ago, the potential of mass-produced drones had not yet become clear. As recently as February, few experts would have predicted that the United States—a global colossus for more than 80 years—would end up so hamstrung by Iran. But the conflict reveals something important: The American age has come to an end. U.S. global dominance cannot continue without the power sources that brought it about.