America Is Entering a Dangerous New World

An emerging multipolar world

We are heading into a genuinely multipolar world that looks a lot more like the 19th century than anything we've seen before according to historian and writer, Bob Kagan. That's a world in which every nation is basically for itself because nations can no longer rely on the United States to protect them.

Kagan argues that the international order the US helped create after World War II is rapidly unraveling and America is squandering its competitive edge.

Indeed, we're heading into a much more diffuse world where medium powers – not just the US, China, Russia and India – will become important. Iran is about to become a much bigger power in the world and Germany and Japan are going to go on that route too.

Trump's goal is to pull out of Europe. The Europeans were in denial for a long while, but not any more. Germany is not rearming to make Trump happy, but because they face a very serious threat to their east and they know the US is not going to be there for them. Trump still has his eyes on Greenland.

Trump is going to cut Ukraine off entirely including for intelligence sharing at some point. Trump is more interested in stability, even collegiality, with China, than competition with China.

Future international politics will be determined by nations seeking to maintain their sovereignty rather than falling under the sway of greater powers.

America’s identity dilemmas

Kagan sees US foreign policy in the context of two historical vectors.

The first and most important vector is the struggle over American identity. What is the United States? It’s always been a contested issue since the very founding. There was the founders’ vision of a country based on the following universal principle in the US Declaration of Independence – "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

And yet there were millions of Americans who didn't accept the principles of the Declaration. There was a slaveholding part of the country that explicitly rejected the declaration and instead looked at the US as a white Christian country. The US has gone through oscillating periods about that – the Civil War, anti-immigration attitudes of the 1920s and 30s.

Then as a result of the Great Depression and World War II, it moved into a totally liberal phase. But that was temporary, and we are now back to a struggle over our identity. This administration is definitely engaged in the process of turning the US into a white Christian country.

With Trump and MAGA, we are now seeing a movement that is fighting against the gains of the civil rights movement over previous decades because it led to a breakdown of privileges. The Trump movement is much more motivated by cultural issues, which are really more racial, religious issues than economic issues. Trump is doing nothing for these people, but what he's doing for them is hating the right enemies. And the enemies he hates are mostly people of color.

And that's what this immigration thing is all about. It isn't about illegal immigration. It's about changing the complexion of this country and trying to turn it back. The historical roots of this are clear, there have been many periods in American history when fundamentally anti-liberal forces have been in the ascendant, like the 1920s and early 30s when the eugenics movement was the most popular thing in America. A lot of us thought it was over and that we'd gone past all that, but we never really did.

In 2016, Trump ran on one issue, that was Obama is not a real American. The first black president was not a real American and he knew exactly what he was doing. That's how he collected his movement. But in reality there's no white Protestant majority left in America. They're trying to cling to an America that no longer exists. MAGA wouldn't have an opportunity to do that if they didn't have Donald Trump in the White House. So MAGA is a powerful force itself, but it is made more powerful by the personality of Trump. It’s hard to see another American politician who could match Trump.

So that's the threat. Lincoln made the Declaration of Independence the founding document. But many people have not regarded the declaration as the founding document and are trying to overturn a system that was based on it.

America’s oscillating foreign policy

The second vector is the oscillation between periods of high intervention and periods of retrenchment in foreign policy. The 1890s period of high foreign overseas involvement was followed by a period of rejecting that approach. Even when we succeed, as in World War I, we wind up regretting it and then retrenching.

Right now, we're in a double cycle. We've moved into a conservative anti-liberal, anti-declaration period in domestic politics and we've moved into unhappiness with the extent of our global involvement at the same time. Donald Trump is presiding over this but he didn’t cause it. Even before the advent of Trump, the US was already beginning to retreat.

It took a Great Depression and a World War to get the US out of the funk of the 20s and 30s. Is there a way out? It's hard to imagine snapping back short of much worse disasters ahead.

No way back to the good old days

There is no way back to the old system of alliances, where everybody relies on the US for their basic security. We're going to need to learn how to manage a multipolar world where like-minded states can work together and cooperate. The US would still be the strongest of those nations. In the future, if the US were well behaved, some degree of trust and cooperation could be developed. But Kagan would not advise the Europeans to throw in their lot with the United States again. We should not even try to go back to the world that was created in unique circumstances after World War II and look instead for a much more cooperative equal relationship with our partners going forward.

Kagan is not optimistic about a future Democratic president. We're not in the business of electing a Harry Truman in 2028. The Democratic Party has been at least as dubious overall about America's role in the world as as the current Republican party is. A lot of things that Trump has done are going to be hard to reverse. The tariffs alone are an income stream. The Democrats are not exactly averse to some protectionism themselves. Then MAGA is not going away and certainly the sentiments about foreign policy that MAGA has represented are definitely not going away. For a return to the postwar liberal internationalism, a real revolution is necessary, things would have to get a lot worse.

The Iran war does not make any sense in a world where the US has renounced its role of being responsible for maintaining world order. Iran posed no threat to the US. When you attack Iran, it will react like closing the Strait of Hormuz and attacking Gulf allies. And shock/horror, the winner of this war was Iran.

We are now watching an American surrender unfold in slow motion. This is a catastrophe. The US is paying reparations to Iran. It's given Iran more control over the Strait of Hormuz. It's probably emboldened China. It's made the US look weak. It's made Trump look like he's easily manipulated.

Nuclear proliferation

Nuclear proliferation is set to take off. Every nation's number one priority is protecting its own security. For decades, the United States has been protecting nations' security. Now, the United States is not a reliable protector. They have to make the decisions necessary to defend their own countries.

We are also entering a period in which nuclear diplomacy is going to be a much bigger factor and having a nuclear weapon and or weapons is going to be regarded as an essential prerequisite to playing in a game where everybody has to defend themselves because they can't rely on anybody else to defend them. So I think we are going to be living in a world of many more nuclear weapons. John Mearsheimer thinks that's a wonderful thing, but I think it probably greatly increases the likelihood that they will be used at some point.

American myths

The biggest myth that Americans have about themselves is that they're sitting on this continent minding their own business until somebody comes along and does something to them and then they have to respond. This is almost the opposite of what the truth is. The United States has been expanding and acting in the world for over two centuries, including in the pre-revolutionary period – interacting with all kinds of great powers and pushing them off the continent, in some cases quite violently.

One surprising thing about Americans is that they’re constantly shocked when others are reacting to them. For example, the US brought on Pearl Harbor by its embargoes against Japan. It knew that if it embargoed Japan, it was very likely that they would start a war. Americans need to be conscious as they wield power that it is going to have an effect.

The mythology of American isolationism stems from Washington’s Farewell Address, in which allegedly wanted the US to remain separate from the rest of the world. That was taken as gospel and held up as the sort of guiding premise of American foreign policy for at least a century and a half.

In reality, Washington was seeking to respond to more immediate political and strategic concerns that he faced. What he was saying was, at the moment, we are too weak to get into entanglements with what were at the time the two world superpowers, England on one side and France on the other. Definitely they all imagined that the United States would emerge as a great power.

In defence of the US-led order

Kagan has been perceived as notorious for his support of George Bush’s Iraq war. But he believes that military intervention in support of the US-led order is sometimes necessary. The US-led order is better than any alternative the world has ever seen.

The postwar order that the US and its allies established brought incredible prosperity, democracy and great power peace. It was an incredibly successful 80 years of international relations. This period was not perfect, far from it, but just better than anything we'd seen before and certainly what we'd seen before World War II.