I’m going to publish this after the elections are over so no idiot can call me interfering in the elections, even if I don’t argue in favour of either candidate or political system reform. This post is simply summing up the frustrations about the mismatch of how the country views and positions itself against what it really is.
First of all, the title is about USA slipping out of relevance and not e.g. about me emigrating from the country (I’ve never been to it and it’s highly unlikely I’ll ever go there) nor about USA stopping to exist in the near future. My point of view is that while USA has done to undermine its own position, it has built enough inertia to keep going for a while—like large baobabs that can’t physically fall down and simply rot away standing.
The upcoming downfall does not make me happy as I realise how bad it will be for the whole civilised world (remember 2008? ever heard of Black Tuesday?). So consider it as an extremely late (a decade or two late) and useless warning. In theory some things still can be done to rectify the situation but does anybody believe anything substantial will be done?
Below I’ll try to present my thoughts in a logical form: what made USA great in the first place, what it did wrong in last decades (and why it hurts USA), and how it will likely to end.
What made USA a global superpower?
Let’s start with the foundation on which USian power was built. Without defining it it’s impossible to argue what actions undermine that foundation.
My short list would look like this:
- having one of the largest pieces of land stolen from others (rivalled only by China and russia); and if you wonder why I haven’t included Canada to the list—with those countries land was not merely something seized from uncivilised tribes (which may be unthinkable now but was though more as a God-given right back then) but from other countries as well (ever heard of internationally recognised Hawaiian Kingdom and how it ended being a state of USA? do you want to visit United States (of Mexico) and tell them how Texas and California have always been a part of USA?);
- that land being suitable for agriculture and being rich in natural resources (russia has been always complaining about the quality of its lands—even after large oil reserves were discovered; from what I heard China also complains about its territory being mostly mountains);
- people willing to work and the state not hindering them (you won’t believe how many russian proverbs are there about the futility of working; also back in the day russia and Austro-Hungary were two empires stifling technical progress in fear of losing power—you can guess how it helped them during World War I);
- being isolated by oceans from most other countries and not experiencing a full-scale war at its own territory in XX century—sure, USA was involved in wars but it was mostly sending troops overseas instead of, say, Japanese troops occupying half of Oregon or German bombers levelling down Bridgeport, Philadelphia and Jacksonville. If you manage to have your civil population safe, industry and economics mostly intact and working, not needing money for post-war reconstruction—that definitely gives you an edge against the countries devastated by war;
- even more, you can help other countries in time of need tying them to you economically;
- as the result you can play Switzerland and organise things to go by your rules that will benefit all the players involved (like free trade, technological co-operation, unified defence and so on);
- and finally, you can build large and good equipped military force that helps keeping the rules.
And thus, by the end of XX century USA had:
- a powerful economy;
- the standard currency for international trade (surviving even de-pegging from the gold standard in 1971);
- well-developed industry and financial sector;
- being a leader in scientific research and hi-tech developments;
- leading the most powerful military alliance, with its main antagonist temporarily withdrawing from the playing-field.
In theory every thing on that list should only ensure that other things keep getting better, so what went wrong?
Losing advantages
In one word—idiocy. In more words—greed, short-sightedness and idiocy. Almost every advantage USA had was lost either via uncontrollable greed, decisions that prioritised short-term gains over long-term consequences, and refusal to see something that does not fit your comfortable image of the world. Let’s see how each and every strong point got undermined.
A powerful economy. I’d point at 2008 financial crisis as the best demonstration of what went wrong. The financial market became so strong and successful that it managed to shatter the bonds of reality and as the result it could build something imaginary—a derivative paper on derivative paper that tries to hide a risk of suspicious credit (or mortgage of dubious value). And the total amount of CDSes issued was comparable to the whole world economy of the day (Wikipedia quotes the number of over $62 trillion of CDS amount by the end of 2007 and about $109 trillion for estimated size of world economy in 2024). You should be able to guess what reasons were at play here. I’d also add that dealing with it demonstrated short-sightedness as it seems nobody serious was punished (because they all are Too Big To Fail) which incentivises others to keeps such dangerous games—after all, you get your bonus now and the government will bail you out later if needed. And such hiccup in the economy lowered the trust in its robustness abroad.
The standard currency. While US dollar is still the main international trade currency, both the behaviour of US government and the way it imposed sanctions made other countries search a way to avoid relying on it too much. Terrorist states (like russia) do it to ensure they can function even under sanctions cutting off access to the international banking and payment processing, states supporting terrorism (like China) take preventive measures against possible sanctions, and even the EU wants to ensure it’ll manage to function no matter what ham-fisted decisions US government will make (in recent news there was a bit about EU startup backed by a lot of large European banks trying to provide an independent payment system).
Well-developed industry. (no reason to discuss financial sector again) Guess what is losing its reputation rather fast. For example, I still remember the days when Boeing was a company producing quality air planes, Intel making cutting-edge CPUs and Google search returning relevant results. Nowadays Boeing is known for its faulty planes, Intel for failing to keep with the progress and the overall state of Internet search has degraded. Why? I’d blame two main things: having duopoly (or monopoly) which makes you care less about the innovations (after all, what alternatives do your customers have?) and the usual prioritisation of showing current growth over long-term improvements (Intel is the most apparent case of not trying to invest money into semiconductor fabrication research and losing, in other cases it’s more like small cuts that result in a company not caring about the quality of its products). I’d argue this is also a consequence of companies becoming too large and divorced from reality (especially when managed by those with MBS degree instead of people who at least have an idea what the company should make and how). After all, investors mostly care about the current price of their stocks. And offloading production to China also lowers perception of USian goods being high-quality—after all, most of them are not made in the USA (and quite often, not even designed there either).
Scientific research and hi-tech developments. Those seem to have suffered in two ways: first, from the companies spending less on the research (because not all companies do production themselves anymore and thus don’t care about improving e.g. production processes—they can simply move to the lowest bidder in China instead); second, the unhealthy atmosphere in academia. I’m not going to claim knowledge what exactly is wrong with it, but from an outsider point of view there are two main problems: degree inflation (so that everybody and their dog tries to get a degree even if it’s mostly good for whining about a student debt later let alone the pressure succinctly put in formula “publish or perish” resulting in a large amount of low-quality papers) and abusing ethical and moral principles in the best Soviet traditions (I’m not going to discuss if there’s anything wrong with those principles, I would simply like to point out that there are people abusing those principles either to get rid of successful competition or merely secure a place for themselves so you can’t kick them out as it would be treated as an offence even if there’s no merit to keep them at that position in the first place). And in both those aspects you can’t compete with China which has larger population and thus can engage more students producing ideologically correct papers.
Leading the most powerful military alliance. The recent events demonstrated the lack of leadership there. In the first days of 24 February there was a joke that if russia would invade Poland, Poland would be kicked out from NATO. Now it seems more like Poland would be kept in NATO but it would be forbidden for it to retaliate—after all russian invasion would pose no threat to the alliance and retaliating means escalation of the conflict. The current war (essentially resulting from the Budapest Memorandum that USA pressured Ukraine to sign—with no guarantees in return) demonstrated that USA is unreliable partner. Even worse, recent events show that USA has OSCE-grade of blindness. I need to elaborate this a bit.
There was a joke in Ukrainian emigrant magazine of 1948—”USA will send $100 million relief funds to European countries, one half immediately, for the second half they’ll have to wait too.” This applies to the way USA provided its military help as well. And it not only delayed its own help, it sabotaged attempts of other countries by e.g. not giving a permission to train Ukrainian pilots on F-16 planes in other countries. And of course that help was so limited that it reminds me somebody taking an antibiotic to combat the disease in such half-hearted way that it mostly helps breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria than actually curing a patient. If you don’t see a similarity—thanks to the weapons being limited in at least two senses (range and amount) russia has learned how to deal with them (same with economic sanctions). And as a cherry on top, you should remember USian officials asking Ukraine not to hit russian refineries—because they value oil prices as a more important thing than safety. And unless you’re a USian official you should know that at least one common feature among China, Iran, North Korea and russia is that they all regard USA as their number one enemy and would gladly hit it if the occasion presents itself. Another fun fact: while Ukraine managed to damage or destroy several russian strategic objects used in their nuclear defence without any retaliation (despite russian doctrine claiming that such actions would cause an immediate nuclear strike on the offender), USA is still afraid of that paper bear.
Speaking of which, you might’ve wondered what “OSCE-grade blindness” expression means. You can read more about the organisation in Wikipedia but suffice to say that after the russian invasion in Ukraine in 2014 it proved itself to be worse than useless—it completely ignored russian war crimes and, as Ukrainian soldiers wrote, after OSCE inspector visits they had to relocate the forces because russian shells would start hitting the place they visited. And now we have USA reacting to the reality of one terrorist state sending military help to the other terrorist state:
- Those are just the rumours.
- Okay, maybe not the rumours but still there’s no reason to do anything yet.
- We’ll consider our actions when it comes to the direct engagement.
- Ukraine has the right to defend itself against Koreans (why, thank you very much!).
- We’ll go as far as not forbidding Ukraine to use our weapons against them.
- …
I believe this post was not far from the truth (translated for those who don’t understand Ukrainian):
Bloomberg writes that potential NATO answers to the DPRK actions are limited, yet they may include:
- concern
- deep concern
- playing dumb
- making a busy appearance
- shaking head in disbelief
- saying “tsk-tsk” with a sad expression
- giving russians some Patriot systems to protect their oil refineries
And while various experts and “experts” say it’s a desperate step for russia, they forget to mention that desperate buyer pays any price—and Iran and DPRK both would gladly wrestle some technologies from it so they can nuke USA (or at least Israel) later. Of course USA sees no threat in that.
As the result, other NATO members (as well as other countries currently depending on USian help) see this inaction and finally prepare to be able to defend themselves even without USA. The claims of one candidate about leaving NATO (as well as hindering the trade with other countries) if he wins—which he may or may not follow—do not help with trusting USA either.
Overall, it seems like the advantages USA had were so successful that they went out of control and started to hurt themselves. To give an example, in ancient times stock prices were determined a lot by dividends they paid, nowadays dividends are treated as something archaic and it’s presumed that stock owners should get wealth from the increase of stock prices—which are determined by a metric “how much a lot of suckers would agree to pay” (and not some silly things as assets and profits). Similarly the companies are run by professional managers that care mostly about their bonuses—which usually means implementing short-term measures like sacking fifth of staff right before the financial report, so savings can be shown as profits, growth (and bonus for the successful manager). And if somebody is not like this—where to find enough people with a similar mindset to run a large corporation? Hubris and monopoly may make you think that it’ll last forever—but then the conditions change and your position is not so sure anymore (you might’ve heard about gas guzzlers and Detroit being the industrial heart of USA—before oil prices soared and USians started to buy Japanese cars instead).
There were many attempts to undermine Pax Americana but this time it seems USA is helping in doing that itself.
What’s next?
Nobody knows. IMO the most realistic scenario is that USA will wither while pretending that everything is nice and Enron-y—and it may work for them until the reality hits.
There are countries that attempted to concentrate on ideological issues instead of more practical ones, usually building communism (socialism, or Islam revolution). This ended badly for the population of those countries even if they must feel happy living in such moral place (or face consequences of wanting more bread instead of high moral ground).
There are two countries known for going into isolation and having extremely limited trade with the outside world—China and Japan. In case of Japan most countries politely avoided interacting with it until some rude USians came uninvited on their black warships and said “let’s trade!” In case of China it ended with a period they proudly call “century of humiliation”. You know, when the country that was proud to have most population and the most advanced industry (for some time) lost couple of wars to small groups of foreign barbarians, having to open trade, paying tribute and ceding territories. I guess that’s the future some want for USA.
If somebody thinks that voting for a right candidate will solve everything, I advise you to watch South Park episode about choosing a school mascot. I’d compare the current alternatives as Boeing and The-Company-Formerly-Known-as-Twitter: in one case you have a respectable outlook that hides degradation of the things—until the planes start to crash or self-disassemble in the air; in another case you have a company managed by a chaotic personality that manages to lose half of the users and advertisers while severing ties with the other half itself. IMO the main problem comes from most people being functionally idiots i.e. having a working brain but refusing to use it (thinking is hard after all—and there are too many helpful people around offering to think for you).
I don’t have much hope in other countries either—many things I’ve written above apply to the EU as well (but I’d argue it’s more about bureaucracy and having too many parties to come to unanimous decisions). Even China while being effectively a dictatorship (and thus lacking several of the problems) seems to experience problems (because dictators don’t always make good decisions and there’s nobody to stop them) and it is not clear if it will survive the downfall of USA (though it would welcome such event regardless).
Welcome to the shitty world, finding new ways to get worse since 2020. Enjoy it while there’s still something left to enjoy.
