As America retreats, By Uddin Ifeanyi

From listening to the ideologues of the Trump administration go on about how unfair America’s place in the world is today, you would be forgiven for thinking up an image of a United States of America that is plagued on all sides by those who would do it in. An economy: so previously poorly run that it is now the butt of all who would take advantage of it – and from which sorry fate only Donald Trump’s genius may save it; engaged in endless wars in which the absence of purpose has given way to drift and creep; whose civilisational purpose is dangerously threatened by a mongrel horde gathered at its frontiers, etc.

In truth, this grim picture is best painted on a canvas belonging to Russia. A country that has transmogrified from one half of the bipolar world that defined the 70 years following the last world war, to an Argentine-sized economy bristling with nuclear weapons. Russia, or better still the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) that it is heir to, was contained by a post-World War II global social, political, and economic arrangement (the United Nations and its many agencies, the World Bank, and the IMF, etc.) constructed by the US to promote the freedoms, grounded on the primacy of individual rights, necessary to contain the spread of socialist ideas.

If a defanged USSR was a desirable outcome of the post-World War II (WW II) order, how did communist China slip through the containment brackets? Evidently, not because the containment vessels weakened. China, instead, failed as a communist construct, morphing from a socialist democracy into a state capitalist autocracy. In this sense, the revolution begun by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s resulted in the chimera that got through the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in December 2001.

If America is not weaker today than it was in 1945, what is it? It remains the world’s dominant economic power even as its share of global trade is smaller today than it was a few years ago. The greenback may occupy far less space in the reserve portfolios of global central banks than it is familiar with, nonetheless, it still confers on its economy what Valéry Giscard d’Estaing described as an “exorbitant privilege”. Because of the strength of the US dollar, the American government’s fiscal capacity is not a let to its financial flexibility, allowing it to sell its debt at higher prices and to borrow at costs so low that it is the envy of managers of other countries’ treasuries.

Several things it may not be, but the United States of America, is, alas, obviously tired. As are the global institutions with which it has organised the world until recently. The case for the renewal of the international governance architecture has been made repeatedly. This need reflects ongoing changes across the world. The world has changed. But not because of the diversity of its people, or their increasing mingling. Economic interdependence – businesses set up supply chains to leverage cost and market access advantages – falling fertility rates in the West, and technology’s democratisation of the employment market. All these have pressured economies around the world.

In Europe, one consequence of the post-WW II order and its emphasis on freedoms and the inviolability of the human person is evident in multicultural societies whose “native” populations now imagine themselves besieged by immigrants whose alien values are sapping the life force of their respective economies. In result, populist nationalist parties now threaten established parties as the continent fumbles for solutions to these problems. In the US, the insurgencies that have fractured politics in Europe have happened within the two dominant parties, and especially so within the Republican Party.

In spite of all these, the world is cooperating more as the US retrenches. It just needs to put more of its money where its mouth is. This is just as it should be. Once again, the US leads the world in the development of the newest cutting-edge technology. And we have seen it struggling to restrict global access to its fancier designs. But its new pivot creates new vacuums. The pains from the rupture in the chain of global supply that has fed its growth until recently will take some time to crystallise. But because technology benefits those who are better able to deploy it, a world more reliant on itself than it was once on the US stands a better chance of earning rich rewards from the US’ technological advances.

And the US? The Yorùbá believe that when a battling ram steps back, it is to reinforce. The Trump administration has wrought as much damage on global institutions as it has on domestic ones. Indeed, you could argue that the US is more wearied today on account of Mr Trump’s machinations than it would ordinarily have been. Its retreat will, thus, be that more difficult. But both possible and necessary.

Uddin Ifeanyi, a journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.