Beyond the American century

6 July 2023

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Winston Churchill famously asserted that the US had become the ‘leader of the free world’. As many people believe this era is ending, what should we want to replace it?

Countless commentators have criticised a long litany of US foreign policy decisions. Yet such cataloguing can’t reliably gauge performance. Just consider how the most successful investors routinely make bad decisions.

Investment managers can be assessed quarterly using market prices to quantify their overall rate of return relative to indexes. Judging foreign policy goals and decisions is largely subjective and it can take decades.

Safe for democracy

Over a century ago, then-president Woodrow Wilson centred US foreign policy around "making the world safe for democracy." His successors have mostly supported this objective. President Joe Biden repeatedly speaks of a contest between democracies and autocracies. Many Republicans echo such sentiments.

BRICS leaders and others of the “Global South” recite various objectives such as economic growth and development, peace through dialogue, and anti-imperialism. While they claim to want to reform global governance by making it more equitable, spreading democracy rarely features among their stated priorities.

The BRICS club is dominated by the China-Russia duo which has initiated a new cold war, seemingly to make the world safer for autocrats. Their presidents seem determined to die in office while leaving war-induced legacies which will long commemorate their imperial ambitions.

Aligning with China and Russia makes a mockery of the principles our ruling elites purport to uphold. Perhaps the ANC leadership is absurdly naive. Alternatively, they may have already accepted that their party’s electoral competitiveness will expire before 2029. If so, to avoid numerous corruption trials they can align with autocrats and then erode the constitutional structures which support legitimate elections.

Nearly a hundred

The era of US leadership has coincided with the number of democratic countries expanding from roughly two dozen to nearly a hundred. Meanwhile, the number of people not living in extreme poverty increased from roughly a billion to more than seven billion. Neither development seemed remotely achievable when the Second World War ended.

The post-war era unwound colonialism while advancing accountable governance and cross border trading. Today’s leaders of China and Russia offer narrowing growth paths and they constrain basic freedoms. This appeals to national leaders who rely on patronage networks and commodity exports.

China has lent aggressively to such countries and it is now finding that leaders who aren’t held accountable by their people are often bad credit risks. Last month China agreed to restructure its loans to Zambia. Many more such restructurings are expected.

Could better serve

China is the world’s largest importer of commodities and, by far, the largest centrally managed economy. If it wants to improve on the so-called “Washington consensus,” it could, at little or no real cost to itself, greatly benefit low-income, commodity exporting nations by sharing more of the commodity price risks which make their economies brittle.

Instead, the Chinese have encouraged diversification from the dollar - which is neither riskless nor cost free. This reflects hurried reactions to the sanctions Russia provoked by invading Ukraine.

The dollar is part of a US-centric ecosystem somewhat akin to Apple’s ecosystem. Apple recently became the world’s first three trillion dollar market-value company in large part because so many customers find that placing reliance on numerous Apple products provides a high payoff.

Being denied full access to the US and western controlled SWIFT payment system is a threat to rogue national leaders. But it is the related ability to integrate into global supply chains serving affluent western customers which offers the most powerful of upliftment paths to emerging countries.

We have the world’s most severe youth unemployment crisis and the ANC has no plan to fix it. We can confidently presume that the situation will be no better in five years. The US has long been importing many value-added goods from - and therefore exporting jobs to - developing nations. China is, at best, many decades away from being able to play a similar role.

Biden against Trump

We should focus less on the US’s past leadership and more on its leadership prospects. The US’s presidential election next year seems likely to again pit Biden against Trump. Those who are viscerally critical of either, or both, squander much-needed objectivity.

It isn’t possible to fairly assess Biden’s handling of the war in Ukraine without knowing the inner workings of his strategy toward China. Very few people could credibly claim to have such knowledge.

Biden should not, however, have publicly labelled Putin a war criminal. This is doubly true given Biden’s decision to run for re-election. It greatly hampers his ability to help negotiate a sufficient loosening of sanctions to provide an environment conducive to Ukraine and Russia agreeing to end the war. Nor is it prudent to place one's hopes on Putin being displaced.

I’ve had a negative opinion of Trump for over forty years yet I accept that he is well positioned to persuade Putin to prioritise Russia’s relations with the West while distancing his country from China. While such a best-case outcome is unlikely, Biden’s shaming Putin has made it unnecessarily difficult for him to strategically lever a reduction of sanctions.

Trump provides abundant reasons to dislike him and this makes it easy for his many detractors to discredit both him and his supporters. This points toward the primary reason to be leary of future US leadership: the country’s capacity for constructive political discourse has been damaged.

Worldview … Rush to judge

Few people are ever sufficiently motivated to achieve a well-informed worldview. It used to be that religious beliefs, survival pressures and nationalism combined to define people’s views. Those influences had long been fading when the internet transformed news reporting. As attracting and retaining an audience now requires an entertainment-like payoff, offering the emotional satisfaction of judging has become routine whether the platform is traditional or social media.

Being constantly encouraged to click “like” icons is different from focusing on reading for meaning. A rush to judge precludes the patience and understanding that complex solutions require. Biden’s preference to judge, rather than negotiate with, a potentially cornered leader of a nuclear superpower is a stark example.

The US’s political system is quite unusual in that its primary system disadvantages centrist candidates. This was initially offset by powerful party bosses but their influence has been systematically diluted over many decades. Now, increasingly partisan news reporting and the US’s primary elections format both favour extreme candidates. Once in office, about 98% of US congressmen running for re-election succeed.

Once-oppressed always-oppressed

Progressives in the US, and elsewhere, routinely seek to frame issues within an oppressed-versus-oppressor narrative. This inflames identity politics and partisanship by depicting nearly all non-white male groups as being oppressed. Meanwhile, as historical examples of oppression are often so grim, once-oppressed always-oppressed narratives are stoked.

While social cohesion requires overcoming various forms of discrimination, workplace discrimination can be particularly detrimental. For this reason, those wanting to move beyond the form of leadership the US has long aspired to offer should consider how post-1994 SA has balanced its growth-versus-redistribution tradeoffs.

Rather than focusing adequately on growth - and therefore accept the need to truly integrate into the global economy - the ANC chose to exploit past injustices to justify an “affirmative” form of workplace discrimination and other forms of redistribution. This triggered politically corrosive patronage which has entrenched the world’s most severe youth unemployment crisis. The majority of our teenagers and young adults will never know real freedom as their prospects for becoming productive members of society have been squandered by greedy ruling elites.

Criticising US leadership does not constitute an alternative. A solution focus would prioritise making democracies more robust - and more numerous.