The Fraying Empire: How America's Declining Hegemony Fuels Global Upheaval
From the ashes of America's fading imperial dominance rises a new multipolar world order, its brush fires of resistance signaling the birth pangs of a pluralistic global rebirth.
By Karim Bettache
In the wake of the Trump administration's erratic tenure and botched COVID response, American power appeared strained but still intact as President Biden took office. Yet through a combination of overreach and misguided belligerence towards rising powers, the precarious threads holding the US imperial order together are unraveling at an alarming rate.
The unipolar ambitions that drove the reckless invasion of Iraq in 2003 have given way to intensifying multipolar friction. At the heart of this lies the Ukraine conflagration – what was intended as a mere punitive strike to grievously weaken Russia has morphed into a historical pivot exposing the very limits of US hegemony.
Despite NATO countries conducting their largest war games along Russia's border since the Cold War, Moscow has not wavered, confounding Washington's assumptions of Western military dominance. Having fruitlessly attempted to bludgeon Russia into submission through draconian sanctions, the US is now pressing its NATO vassals to escalate further, including outrageous proposals for the deployment of European troops to Ukraine published in Foreign Affairs magazine.
Meanwhile, the bid to trap China into supporting US sanctions on Russia spectacularly backfired during Secretary of State Blinken's tours of Beijing and Shanghai. China bluntly rebuffed the American emissary, having already diagnosed Washington's stratagem – to dismantle China's defensive firewall as a prelude to fomenting regime change in Beijing itself. As a State Department spokesman admitted, the US is now "incredibly concerned" over deepening cooperation between China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
Indeed, recent events confirm the futility of trying to sustain US unipolar hegemony through economic strangulation and militarized intimidation of a multipolar world taking shape. A high-level North Korean delegation, led by the country's internet trade minister, has just concluded a rare visit to Iran – two key nodes in the Eurasian integration vehemently opposed to American supremacy.
Preceding this, China dispatched a high-level Communist Party delegation to Pyongyang, signaling its strategic alignment with North Korea – a defiant counterweight to the US's revitalized military alliance with right-wing South Korean President Yoon (The US loves right-wingers). Biden's overtures to cozy up to Japan have accelerated North Korea's rejection of even the pretense of reunification with the South.
With Russia and China now jointly chairing the Russia-India-China triangle, their leverage is poised to outmatch the Americans in shaping the orientation of an increasingly multi-aligned India that refuses to be conscripted into any unipolar orbit.
The highly symbolic Eurasia-centric restructuring plays out even in the realms of academia and international parliamentary bodies. At Columbia University, protests erupted over the appointment of a biological anthropologist accused of racism and xenophobia. The United Auto Workers union, which wields enormous influence in Congress, issued a resolution demanding an end to Israel's bombardment of Gaza – a major rebuke of Israel's eternal impunity and Washington's acquiescence to war crimes against Palestinians.
Cumulatively, this centrifugal rage manifests the last radical kicks of a dying horse – the American imperial order. After decades of waging military interventions under the pretexts of democracy and human rights, the world has witnessed only human misery and wreckage radiating from Washington's hubristic pursuit of global domination. From the ruins of Operation Iraqi Freedom to the decimated wastelands of Libya, Afghanistan and Yemen, legions of disenfranchised and disillusioned peoples have lost faith in America's moral vocation.
The Death of Empire
As the eschatological undercurrents of this discontent swell across the global South particularly, a growing consensus hardens – that imperialism's twilight is once more upon us. But this transition is markedly distinct from past epochal realignments in two fundamental aspects.
Firstly, unlike the crumbling of Europe's colonial order following World War II, the US imperium possesses no metropole from which its contraction emanates. The American engine of capital accumulation is a delirious array of extractive outposts interconnected through a globalized production chain. Lacking a geographic locus encompassing both its core productive apparatuses and corresponding legal-political infrastructure, the US regime relies overwhelmingly on projecting hard power to sustain its diffusion. Hence, its decline is exponentially disorderly, with its far-flung military footprints unravelling in spasms as its coercive deterrence capacities sharply diminish.
Secondly, the unipolar mythology that cloaked America's bid for global domination has been irreversibly shattered – no amount of propaganda can masquerade the undulations of US decline. Where European empires exerted tutelage over formal colonial dominions, the American stratagem was predicated on instilling subservience within sovereign nation-states coerced into accommodating US economic primacy through captive markets. That ideological foundation is now ablating rapidly.
No amount of economic weaponry deployed by Washington can resuscitate its hegemony at this point. The seizure of $300 billion in Russian assets across the EU only invited further backlash, with the European Central Bank's Christine Lagarde warning of potential retaliation and asset flight from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's direct market interventions to halt Chinese exports smack of desperation belying the free market gospels preached with evangelical zeal merely decades ago.
China's inexorable rise, however, represents not merely the ascendency of another empire but a Civilizational re-awakening. Driven by its internal productive capacity and defiant rejection of US diktats, China's Belt and Road Initiative crystallizes a vision of globalization rooted in non-hierarchical integration under a multipolar lodestar focused on infrastructure investment and sustainable development.
The universalist spirit animating this intercontinental renaissance has already magnetized the BRICS nations, from Russia's defiance of Western sanctions to India's studied neutrality, as well as the dormant potentials of Latin America and Africa. The choice for most Global South nations transcends both subordinate complicity in America's waning imperium or futile confrontation against it. Rather, it is to participate in patient construction of a new international equilibrium – one neither unipolar nor bipolar but decidedly pluralistic and rooted in cooperative coexistence.
Iran's stance captures this ethos - a proclaimed opponent of American regional meddling but without the hubris of contesting geopolitical centrality itself. By fortifying its strategic position through deepening ties with relevant powers like North Korea and Russia's advanced S-400 anti-aircraft systems, Iran signals a posture neither of supine acquiescence nor zero-sum domination.
As the US retreats from overextended military commitments, assailed at home by domestic decay and institutional erosion, a Rubicon of truly historic proportions is being crossed. Tethered to imperial archetypes of militarized zealotry and racial-cultural chauvinism, Washington's universe still narrates global events from the solipsistic premise of manifest (white) supremacy.
A New World System
The tragedy is that, beyond diplomatic and think-tank echo chambers, international society at large - in the wake of US-ignited cataclysms across so many regions over decades - no longer credits this American myth of redemptive global enforcement. What paralyzed US policymakers perceive as rogue defiance is better understood as an asymmetric frontline arising to displace the American legatee in favor of a truly multipolar world order.
This is neither a decisive clash of Westphalian sovereignties nor even merely a transition of hegemonic centers. Rather, it is the emergent threshold of a new world system premised upon resurgent Civilizational recompositions consenting upon the profound incoherence of any unitary imperium. To many across the developing world, the promise is for cultural and political pluralities to sustainably coexist, cooperate and compete in the gyre of mutual dignity – as opposed to being circumscribed within an arrogant imperial architecture rigged for the prosperity of only its privileged metropolitan havens.
In this cosmic rekindling, the question is not whether American power can persist indefinitely but whether an empire birthed through contradictions of indigenous genocide, racial slavery and Islamophobia can reform itself into a responsible stakeholder nation. To revive, America must slough off its carceral militarism, abandon its civilizational supremacism and truly implement the democratic values it says it stands for yet are stained by its imperialist legacy.
A first step would be to halt its serial projections of force abroad that only immiserate subject populations while squandering resources so desperately needed at home. Another pivotal undertaking would be to dismantle the very archipelago of overseas military outposts designed to enforce global compliance with Wall Street's diktats rather than any common vision of human emancipation. Above all, America must reject its exceptionalist ideology and recognize its inherent placement within the pluriverse of human civilizational experiences all equally entitled to self-determination.
Whether these undertakings are within the realm of American national-cultural possibilities, given its deep-rooted ideological investments in empire, remains to be seen. What is certain is that the existing order premised upon American universalism through force, upheld by mythologies of chosenness, has entered its terminal phase. A world where many worlds coexist, without unipolarity or peripheries, is now unfolding. For better or worse, we are all being reborn.