Donald Trump Gives Decline New Meaning

Three Great Powers Rising and Falling on a Planet Itself Distinctly in Decline

[Yes, it’s set in colonial Manila in 1923 when a young prostitute is murdered at a high-class hotel and the son of Major General Leonard Wood, the U.S. Governor-General of the Philippines, may (or may not) be responsible. And that’s just the beginning of Andrew Bacevich’s gripping new novel Murder in Manila, an author I’ve always admired and whose nonfiction books I edited and published once upon a time. Do check it out. Tom]

It wasn’t so very long ago that there were three great powers reasonably ascendant on planet Earth. I’m thinking, of course, about the greatest power of that moment, the United States, but also Russia (in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse), and a distinctly rising China. In the future, there may only be one -- at the moment, the quietest and least aggressive of them -- China.

Let’s start with the obvious: Vladimir Putin’s Russia is on the downhill slope. In February 2022, the Russian leader made the grim mistake of invading Ukraine, a far smaller officially unaligned nation that his country bordered and a seemingly obvious target at a moment when NATO appeared to be spreading its wings in Russia’s direction. (In 2014, of course, Russia had already seized the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine.)

Almost four and a half years later, however, what a disaster it’s proven to be for Putin who, despite taking some Ukrainian territory, still can’t seem to imagine making peace. And all of this at a moment when the spread of artificial intelligence and drones (and the increasing Ukrainian skill in producing ever greater numbers and more devastating versions of them) are changing the very nature of war -- and not in Russia’s favor either. Only recently, Ukrainian drones even struck that nation’s capital, Moscow.

By now, though Putin has refused to negotiate a peace, his country has had an estimated 450,000 of its troops killed (more, according to the New York Times, “than U.S. fatalities in all wars combined since World War II”) and perhaps nearly a million more wounded in its war with Ukraine. In addition, significant parts of Russia, including Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and especially the power grid in Crimea, have been clobbered by those Ukrainian drones, which, among other things, have been going after the country’s energy infrastructure.

Someday, it will undoubtedly be all too clear that the invasion of Ukraine was the moment when Russia relegated itself to a distinctly less than great-power status on this planet.

The Rise and Fall of Donald Trump’s America

As for the United States, from the moment in 1945 when it emerged totally victorious from World War II as the only nuclear-armed nation on the planet, in the (all too literal) wake of the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for endless decades it would be the greatest of all powers ever. And it would, in the end, also prove to be an imperial force unlike any other in history in the fully globalized nature of its power and its alliances across significant parts of the planet from NATO in Europe to SEATO in Southeast Asia. Over the years, it would only emphasize its imperial stature by establishing a staggering 800 or more military bases in countries around much of the planet. And yet strangely enough, from the Korean War in the early 1950s on, it proved incapable of imposing its will militarily on country after country from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan, Iraq, and today Iran, despite its staggering military power, the stunning amounts of money it poured into that military, and its powerful weaponization.

Even at this very moment, its military budget remains almost three times that of the next most powerful country on the planet (China) and five times Russia’s. And mind you, that was before President Donald Trump called on Congress to raise the nearly trillion-dollar Pentagon budget by another half-trillion dollars a year (yes, a year!). And yet we’re also talking about the country whose people, as if intent on making a point about how their country had entered an era of decline, did indeed elect Donald Trump (yes, Donald Trump!) twice as president of the -- as of now -- anything but United States of America.

Can there be any question that he gives the very image of decline new meaning? After all, it’s hard historically to find examples of great powers, even in full-scale decline, putting a figure quite like him in the position of ultimate authority. And it certainly tells you something that, as the New York Times reported recently, the man who “presided over the largest business empire of any president in modern U.S. history” in his first term in office (with revenue of $594 million in 2017 alone) has now left that record in the dust of history by helping his revenue to surge to $2.24 billion in the second year of his second term in office. His financial rise, of course, should also be considered the definition of American imperial decline.

And strikingly enough, every step he takes and every act he engages in seems to involve (or do I mean devolve?) further decline nationally and globally. To put all of that in context, just imagine such an imperial head of state refusing to even acknowledge, no less take into account the fact -- and it is a fact -- that this planet, thanks to the pouring of fossil fuels into the atmosphere and the stunning nature of the phenomenon known as climate change, is itself going down (at least as a habitable place for humanity) at a reasonably rapid pace. In fact, he’s done everything he can to intensify that phenomenon -- and it certainly is intensifying.

Only recently, for instance, literally hundreds of thousands of people in Spain and France had to be evacuated from their homes due to a summer of record-breaking heat and wildfires, while in the United States, the third “heat dome” in a single month only recently hit with temperatures in the desert Southwest expected to reach an unprecedented 120 degrees.

In short, Donald Trump’s America is undoubtedly going to give imperial decline new meaning, while just one major power seems to be on top (so to speak) of the situation in any way whatsoever. And that power is, of course, China.

The Rise and Fall of Planet Earth

Now, just to keep things in perspective, note that no country on earth pours fossil fuels into the atmosphere the way China has in its rise to preeminence on this planet. Still, as what might indeed now be considered the singular rising power on planet Earth, it also seems to be blazing a distinctly new imperial path on a changing planet. As a start, with the exception of some skirmishes with India in 2020 and 2021, it has so far proven historically unique among imperial powers in not going to war during its rise (not even as yet trying to take Taiwan, despite its repeated claims to that island). And wars in our age are distinctly dangerous not just for all the obvious reasons but for the way they pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Admittedly, in that same rise, while China has indeed put more fossil fuels into the atmosphere than any other country (35% of the global total in 2023 alone), it has also finally begun leveling off its use of fossil fuels, while taking control of the global production and sale of green energy equipment in a remarkable fashion. As of this moment, in fact, it produces the vast majority of all the solar panels, batteries, and wind turbine equipment on this planet and has led the way in a nearly monopolistic fashion in the production and sale of electric vehicles globally, accounting for more than 70% of them.

And in a world that itself is changing in a striking fashion (and at a remarkable speed), China has risen to a kind of quiet global preeminence in a uniquely peaceable fashion (if you leave aside how it has treated some of its ethnic minorities) by becoming economically and climatically, not militarily, a one-of-a-kind country. And that should be considered no small thing on a planet where any kind of military activity pours greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in a genuinely unnerving fashion.

With wars from Ukraine to the Middle East to Africa still raging and putting ever more fossil fuels into the atmosphere, however, it remains a distinctly open question whether humanity can stop itself from essentially making full-scale war on Planet Earth and so, in a deeply unnerving fashion, on ourselves. If we can’t, then count on this: the rise and fall of great powers could indeed be superseded by the distinct fall of this very world of ours in a fashion and ways that we probably can’t yet truly imagine.