The Great Superpower Unraveling

 

Over the course of history, powerful nations with vast military resources, have been undone, fading into history books with abstract modern lessons, devoid of the pain of those who lived through those transitional years. Ancient Egypt. Sparta and Athens. Alexander the Great. Rome. Carthage. Persia. Byzantine empire. Ottoman Empire. European colonial powers (Britain, France, Spain, Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium and Germany). Numerous Chinese dynasties. Napoleonic conquests. The Austro-Hungarian Empire. Prussia/Germany. Russia. The British Empire upon which the sun never set. Japan. The Soviet Union.

Today, it’s the People’s Republic of China, Russia and the United States that may bristle with state-of-the-art massive militaries facing internal struggles that suggest an end-game clock is nearing zero hour. Each is strong enough to mount global destruction but strong not enough to bind their nations into sustainable integral states. It is an unraveling born at the beginning of the 21st century and further chiseled away by a pandemic, climate change and a mounting trend towards autocracy dependent on the strategy of a single narcissistic strongman, who appears to be wrong in each of these powerhouses.

Even strategic alliances are fraying at the edges, none more obvious than the United States and its trade and defense treaties. As pointed out by the February 11th NPR covering a February 10th Trump campaign rally in South Carolina: “If we don't pay [e.g., maintain a full NATO military commitment] and we're attacked by Russia, will you protect us?," Trump recalled another country's leader asking while him while he was president. "No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want."

The current session of Congress provides mathematical evidence that our nation just may have become completely ungovernable. Not only are GOP Senators – who were involved in architecting a bi-partisan border immigration reform bill combined with a military aid package to Israel and Ukraine – reversing themselves at the behest of their 91 count criminally indicted likely presidential nominee, but the GOP-dominated House of Representatives has ground legislation to virtual halt. Implemented by their revolving door of Speakers, the GOP led House has led a congressional track record that has produced a mere 10% of the legislation produced, on average, by any recent Congress.

Driven by conspiracy theories and even a sizeable constituency of evangelical supporters who believe that Donald Trump has been ordained by God to rule the United States with an iron fist, the nation faces an existential threat to its democratic form of governance in the upcoming election. No matter the result, America is a hopelessly divided red/blue morass of mutual hatred. See my recent Overlap – Two Nations Occupying the Same Space blog for a more detailed review of this horrific reality. Our European allies are aghast. Israel’s Prime Minister is counting on a dysfunctional US Congress to support his monstrous retaliation in Gaza without meaningful objection… and replace an “elderly” Joe Biden with a “poor memory” (as described by a Trump-appointed federal prosecutor reviewing misplaced top-secret documents) with Netanyahu’s brother in arms, Donald Trump.

Russia’s debacle with its war in Ukraine is self-evident, even as Vladimir Putin expects Trump to be elected and ensure that US support for Kyiv is ended for good… and NATO neutralized. His economy is in shambles, Russia needs weapons supplied by others, unable to manufacture enough locally, and Putin only maintains power with severe and brutal repression. The masses of returning body bags of Russian troops are finally being noticed across all of Russia. Russia is no longer the powerhouse it was just a few years ago. But it is Russian ally China that experiencing what was never expected… a collapse of the centrally directed economy.

While China is experiencing some success in unexpected ways – its transition to wind and solar power is significantly ahead of schedule – her economy is teetering. Foreign investment is fleeing in droves as Xi’s mismanagement of his economy has seen the local stock market lose an estimated $7 trillion. Xi’s “zero tolerance” policy during the pandemic, and even thereafter, shut down the China machine. Over-construction of residential real estate, companies now foundering with missing leadership and a serious banking debt problem trashed the PRC’s economic miracle. Millions of young workers, many college graduates, are either unemployed or seriously underemployed. Xi’s micromanaged economic dream is trembling with issues. That only ramped up Xi’s efforts to distract his people by reciting global threats and promising the taking of Taiwan (which the PRC always claimed), violently if needed, as part of the “one-China” policy that even the US accepted.

Living in the here and now, it’s hard to assess the aggregate impact of these macro-social and economic variables. People are being slaughtered in conflicts funded by the superpowers, who are themselves threatened by the rise of Islamist states. Destabilization among superpowers with no clear positive solutions apparent anywhere will continue to create death and suffering across a most volatile planet, as climate change continues to slam into the seeming collective denial that has slowed a meaningful response. Are we just another era of historical transition, a time not unlike the pain Rome suffered in 476 AD as barbarians ended the empire, or is this a massively worse time in history given available weapons and the involvement of every nation on earth?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I suspect we finally understand why history has recorded so much ruin; self-destruction just may be a rule among human beings.