America, the deeply troubled superpower

In less than two months from now, Americans will vote in presidential elections considered by many as a Hobson’s choice.

Donald Trump, the erratic and abrasive incumbent President from the ruling Republican Party (the Grand Old Party, GOP) will come up against former Vice President Joe Biden the avuncular, everyone’s favourite joke figure of the American political establishment, representing the opposition Democratic Party.

It is a Hobson’s choice because while many Americans, including even those who voted enthusiastically for President Trump four years ago want to see him walk the plank, there are however deep seated misgivings about how America will fare under a Joe Biden presidency. President Trump has proven to be a divisive figure to the mosaic of races, cultures and interests that make up America. And to many around the world, he sums up the perfect picture of the central character in the novel “The Ugly American” by Graham Greene. Trump’s brash ways (some would say unpresidential ways) in pursuit of America’s international interests against both America’s allies and opponents alike has resulted in a growing negative perception of the country in the world.

But in Joe Biden and his unserious, gaffe-prone ways, discerning Americans do not see him as the perfect fit to help redirect America from the looming abyss of potential self-destruction internally, and continuing loss of influence externally.

This existential leadership crisis could not have come at a most inopportune time for America. As the country faces unrelenting challenges to its global leadership position by emerging powers like China, Russia, Turkey, North Korea and Iran, there is to be seen a corresponding widening in the existential fault lines of the American society.

In the International scene, President Trump’s response to this is to ramp up America’s China containment policy by deploying aggressive economic, commercial, military and strategic measures calculated to remind China that America will not accept being knocked off its perch as the preeminent global power.

A similar message is being sent across to Russia although Trump probably careful of his alleged untoward connections to Russia has prudently allowed the phalanx of Generals and apparatchiks in the Pentagon, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and NATO to take the lead in this regard.

Internally under President Trump, the response to the challenge to America’s global pre-eminence is to pander to the viewpoint of extreme groups and forces that attribute the country’s problems to the non-white racial groups whose very image and values they consider as anathema to the foundational values of America.

As so happens when America faces existential challenges from abroad, the resort to look for scapegoats internally kicks in. In the Trump era, it is the African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans prominently and other non-white Americans who are racially profiled and targeted by extremist white groups. Encouraged by President Trump’s tendentious statements about people of colour these groups, who style themselves the defenders of the moral values of America, take it upon themselves to perpetrate these actions. This is a throwback to the days of the so called “Red scare’’ in the early 1940s when America faced with a communist challenge, began to look for communists everywhere leading to the arrest, imprisonment and sentencing to death of prominent Americans suspected in this regard. There was even a committee of so called “UnAmerican activities’’ in the US Senate headed by Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin which was detailed to handle what came later to be admitted as unfair witch hunt of fellow Americans driven mainly by vindictiveness.

Essentially, America faces these existential contradictions principally because from its beginnings, America has held itself to the world as an ideal and last frontier of freedom and equality of man. But even with these ringing proclamations at its foundation America was unabashedly a republic govern by consideration of the racial and cultural origins of its population. Among the white population of America, pride of place went to those who traced their origins to northern Europe with Protestantism as their faith. The Irish who are Catholics in the main, Italians who are both Catholic and of southern European origin like Greeks, Spanish, Portuguese, Poles and other people of East European origins, were all discriminated against and considered not American enough to deserve the full graces of the new republic of freedom and equality.

In a number of ways this has persisted to this day. During the presidential campaigns between the senior George Bush and Governor Michael Dukakis, there were adverts alluding to the fact that being of Greek origin, the highly cerebral Dukakis less deserved to be President than George Bush whose forebears were from England and Netherlands.

As for Africans who were slaves then working in various plantations across America, there was a debate as to whether they were even deserving of being considered and accorded the right to be called humans.

Since its founding to date, America has been facing the contradiction between the ideal it set itself out to be and its existential reality. Being an intrinsically embedded feature in its DNA, I do not think America will ever be able to overcome its racialist contradictions. Racism is more American than apple pie and just as it played a prominent part in the formation and sustenance of America over the years, it is also one of the factors that will eventually and inevitably see to the collapse of America.

On the global scene, it is clear that American policy planners did not consider the script on the rise and fall of empires when America emerged as the global superpower after the Second World War. If they did, they would have realised that America as global superpower was not going to last ad infinitum. Even when the Soviet Empire its competitor for global influence collapsed as a result of internal and external contradictions in late 1980s, the lessons were lost on American policy planners. On that occasion, Henry Kissinger and Francis Fukuyama, in a moment of unrestrained exultation declared that the end result of all struggles of mankind from evolution to our contemporary world had ended in favour of America which should be seen as the pinnacle of political, social and economic attainment of mankind.

The rise of new global powers and the corresponding decline in American global influence brings home the lessons of the rise and fall of empires and America is bound to follow suit eventually. Neither Trump nor Biden as president can stop that.