The Strange Decline of the Pax Americana
The Strange Decline of the Pax Americana
The problem isn’t weakness at the top. It’s the enemy within.
...Yet it seems safe to say that the world no longer trusts U.S. promises, and perhaps no longer fears U.S. threats, the way it used to. The problem, however, isn’t Biden; it’s the party that reflexively attacks him for anything that goes wrong.
Right now America is a superpower without a fully functioning government. Specifically, the House of Representatives has no speaker, so it can’t pass legislation, including bills funding the government and providing aid to U.S. allies. The House is paralyzed because Republican extremists, who have refused to acknowledge Biden’s legitimacy and promoted chaos rather than participating in governance, have turned these tactics on their own party. At this point it’s hard to see how anyone can become speaker without Democratic votes — but even less extreme Republicans refuse to reach across the aisle.
And even if Republicans do somehow manage to elect a speaker, it seems all too likely that whoever gets the job will have to promise the hard right that he will betray Ukraine.
Given this political reality, how much can any nation trust U.S. assurances of support? How can we expect foreign enemies of democracy to fear America when they know that there are powerful forces here that share their disdain?
To be fair, a lot of countries started scrutinizing the US after the Bush election in 2000.
The Iraq war, intelligence about Guantanamo, the whole thing with PRISM and Snowden, and the entire Trump administration has made the US look increasingly unstable internationally.
53The Iraq war, intelligence about Guantanamo, the whole thing with PRISM and Snowden, and the entire Trump administration has made the US look increasingly unstable internationally.
It looks that way because that's what we've become. The question is how much damage are we going to do to ourselves and the rest of the world as we scrabble to keep the influence that we're losing.
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Hmm, I wonder why the world is feeling worse and worse about an American-controlled world where the powers that be in America have a history of reaching across oceans to assassinate democratically elected politicians, install fascist governments friendly to American business interests, make life worse off for people in developing nations, and allow foreign governments to reign untold destruction onto innocent civilians with American-made weapons without recourse. What a fucking mystery.
33I think the mystery is, what took them so long to notice?
2I don't think the problem is noticing. People all over have hated this USA influence for ages. The thing is: who could do something about it? It took decades for China's economy to get where it is today. People aren't dumb. The skinny kid will usually not get into a fight with the buffed bully if there is not much chance of winning. With the US tripping itself more and more lately, it's just opportunity presenting itself.
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Pax Americana is such an absurd concept. We JUST got out of a pair of twenty year wars. What fucking pax? This is just nonsense
15Pax [Latinized empire name] doesn’t mean there’s no wars. It just means there’s no wars that [Latinized empire name] doesn’t want.
16A good example of this is that the Crimean war happened right in the middle of what is generally considered the Pax Britannica
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The term was around before this war, and doesn't even refer to peace as much as it refers to protected trade routes, with America doing the protecting. The idea is that America enables global trade by ensuring that trade isn't plundered or threatened by neighboring countries, unstable regimes, or pirates by patrolling those trade routes with massive aircraft carriers to make sure everyone's following international rules. It also sometimes refers to trade effectively being brokered globally through American channels (effectively the case regardless of agreement so long as the American dollar is also the exchange currency, as it used to be the near-exclusive reserve currency for the IMF), which massively, disproportionately benefits America, but also benefits global trade. Before the Pax Americana was the Pax Brittanica, largely in the same way and for the same reasons. The original term (what the Pax Brittanica referred to, before the sun started setting on the British Empire) was the Pax Romana.
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From a British perspective I know there was always a huge political obsession with maintaining the 'Special Relationship' with the US up until Trump came in and Brexit happened basically simultaneously making us more irrelevant.
It's still there in a half hearted transactional way when it comes to intelligence sharing, day to day stuff etc. But in terms of the PM sucking up to the President photo opportunities to get some media attention - that aspect seems to have died pretty quickly.
It strikes me there are a lot of similarities with our politics right now though - lack of faith from the voters, rampant cronyism, lawbreaking heads of state FFS, culture war obsessions dominating the discourse when the average person is more worried about affording their rent/mortgage at the end of the month. I'd say our government is dysfunctional on the same level but the difference is we stopped being a superpower way back when.
I'm rambling way off topic, sorry. Reading that just reminded me of when our politicians used to be all over the American ones as being the glamorous ones to suck up to (whether the public agreed or not) but things have definitely changed.
8There is the chaos that Republicans are causing in Congress, but potentially the revelation that Russia isn't quite the threat the world thought they were and the emergence of China and others as world powers have probably helped to blunt our influence somewhat too. It's not really a bipolar world anymore, there's a range of players on the field now, moreso than during most of the latter 20th century. But given how effective our weapons have been in Ukraine, shows that we at least have our massive military budget going for us. We're not dependable, but if push comes to shove , we've got a big stick we can walk in with... assuming our hyper-short attention span can maintain focus long enough.
7Russia has switched tactics though. They are buying foreign politicians and using hybrid cyber warfare now, quit successfully too, at least until 2021.
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There was no "Pax" in Pax Americana. There were continuous wars: Korean War, Vietnam War, various drug wars in South America, Israel-Arab wars, Gulf War I, Gulf War 2 Boogaloo, Ukraine. It is more accurate to call it Pax Nucleai.
7US proved to destabilizing democracy for a long time now, see Wikipedia on Iran and south America, and not respecting sovereignity of Cuba. No trust there.
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it’s the party that reflexively attacks him for anything that goes wrong.
No it isn't, atleast not the root problem. Root problem is the core rules etc of USA democracy and governing, which allows such dysfunctional situation to arise in the first place. The two party system, the bicameral setup leading to endless feuds and inability to pass legislation, the weird rules accepted in existence by internal procedural rules like the filibuster.
For that both parties are guilty, since I have heard neither of them go "we have a constitutional ruleset problem, we should update the constitution. The rules might have been good for 1700s and much smaller USA. This is 2000s and way bigger and different USA".
one doesn't get to claim "I'm surprised the the Leopard ate my face", if one has been feeding and raising a leopard cub for decades and hasn't decided "maybe we should send the Leopard to a zoo, maybe we should make a rule private home is not right place for Leopard to live in".
Neither party wants to change the system, since it keeps them as number 1 or number 2. You don't get to claim "we have nothing to do with the systemic dysfunctions", if one keeps propping up a dysfunctional system. Doesn't matter who specifically manifests the symptoms. Systemic dysfunctions is systemic.
4Political parties are not mentioned in the constitution.
That document does need an amendment however.
The issue comes from First Past the Post voting.
There's math that shows that over a series of elections, FPtP naturally forces the creation of a two party system.
Every ordinal voting system falls prey to this issue to a greater or lesser extent, but there are cardinal voting systems that are completely immune.
My current favorite is STAR, it's dead simple. You rate each candidate on a scale of zero to five stars. Zero being the worst, five being the best.
To count the votes, you just add up the star count for each candidate. You don't need to average the count, but I'm sure that news media would.
The spectate is you take the two candidates with the highest star count and put them into an automatic runoff. You look at each ballot cast, and if either of the two candidates is preferred on that ballot (higher star rating) then the ballot goes to them. If there is no preference between the two, the vote is counted as No Preference and reported in the final tally.
2Doesn't matter that parties aren't mentioned. Political parties are inevitable predictable outcome of the ruleset.
Also actually one of the biggest fixes USA could have is getting rid of single winner elections districts. Well President has to be single winner (though again why the heck electors should be single winner or even better why have electors in first place). However there is no reason to have single winner legislative body elections, since there is large number of members anyway. Only reason it is that way is, because Congress decided to make law about it.
Since one key truth is: there is only so much one can do with the ruleset to make things fairer while having just single winner. All the other votes get wasted by default, except the winner. The only amount of power one can win is 100% or 0%.
To have better proportionality one has to use multiple winners (or mixed member proportional, which is still multiple winners just indirectly via the party quotients). Since it allows dividing political power in more granular amounts than 0% and 100%. Like say 33%, 25% or 20%.
After that one can start talking, we'll how should we allocate the winner of each for example 25% share of power in the district.
This would also increase political activity, since previously apathetic voters would know "my candidate doesn't have to carry the whole district, we are just aiming to get 1 of the 5 seats. That is much more achievable. Yeah the big two probably grab say 2 each, but hey with good luck there is realistic change we get that 1/5".
Where as there was snowballs chance smaller player could take a single winner district as whole.
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Root problem is the core rules etc of USA democracy and governing, which allows such dysfunctional situation to arise in the first place. The two party system, the bicameral setup leading to endless feuds and inability to pass legislation, the weird rules accepted in existence by internal procedural rules like the filibuster.
The dysfunction of our the current political system is certainly to blame for a lot of the trust that America has lost. Regarding the two party system, I'm a big advocate for supporting the Forward party as a potential way out of our mess. One of its main policy positions is pushing ranked choice voting. This hopefully allows people to break out of the myth that any vote not for a major party is a wasted vote.
They are starting by focusing locally on the state level as that is where the election laws are decided. It's certainly not a perfect organization but it makes more sense than expecting the parties to fix the flawed system they benefit from.
2Fun fact, under First Past the Post voting, supporting a third party is the absolute worst thing you can do.
It's called the spoiler effect, and it often results in the absolute worst candidate winning an election.
If you support a third party that is loosely aligned with one of the major parties, you can end up in a situation where candidate A gets 40%, and your third party candidate, whose platform is closest to A, gets an astounding 15%, and they both lose to Candidate B, the most hated of both A voters and Third Party voters because B got 45%.
The classic example is the 1992 presidential election, where Clinton won with 43% of the vote.
The 2000 election is another example where Bush won* with 307 votes, far less than the 97488 votes that Ralph Nader got,
*the recount was stopped early so that Bush would win.
The point being, you cannot have a third party until you change the voting system to actually support third parties. And that means a cardinal voting system, such as STAR (my current favorite)
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I honestly look at parliamentary systems and don't see them doing much better. Their coalitions are becoming increasingly fragile as everyone seems to become more polarized and less accepting of democracy and compromise.
I think the only workable option is sortition.
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it’s the party that reflexively attacks him for anything that goes wrong.
personally it's the fuckload of tremendous bullshit usa still tries to shove down people throats. I could be wrong though, eh
3Nah, you right.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
You might be tempted to engage in economic determinism, saying that the United States has lost influence because it doesn’t dominate the world economy the way it once did.
Indeed, our strong recovery from the Covid recession, combined with the stumbles of some geopolitical rivals, makes U.S. economic dominance look more durable than it has for a long time.
In the latest crisis, Israelis, including Benjamin Netanyahu, have praised Biden for his prompt support, which probably explains why Trump has lashed out at a former political ally.
Where Trump huffed and puffed ineffectually against Chinese trade surpluses (which were never the problem), Biden has imposed sanctions that the Center for Strategic and International Studies calls a “policy of actively strangling large segments of the Chinese technology industry — strangling with an intent to kill.”
Specifically, the House of Representatives has no speaker, so it can’t pass legislation, including bills funding the government and providing aid to U.S. allies.
The House is paralyzed because Republican extremists, who have refused to acknowledge Biden’s legitimacy and promoted chaos rather than participating in governance, have turned these tactics on their own party.
The original article contains 865 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
3An opinion article which lambasts a party while pretending another is pristine? Surely there's no agenda to such balanced persuasion...
-8Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with Krugman knows he's never going to describe the Democrats as anything like "pristine." But pretending "both sides are the same" is insanely dishonest.
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