America may be in decay - but it can still lead the West

Soil erosion, Christianity, public baths: in all, the scholar Alexander Demandt counted 210 theories for the collapse of the Roman empire. Edward Gibbon devoted six volumes of prose and much of his romantically arid life to his. The bagginess of the historiography around the fall of Rome is daunting, but then the subject itself took two or three centuries to play out. From the anarchy that began in 235 to the toppling of the last western emperor, about as much time passed as between the French Revolution and now.

There is comfort here for the US, that second Rome. Or at least for those countries that look to it for their protection. Since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last month, Europe in particular has wondered how much longer such a fractious nation can underwrite the security of the West. As a reading of America itself, this isn’t alarmist. Its civic decay really is as bad as all that. But the inference – that domestic chaos must lead to external weakness – should not be so automatic.

Great powers can die very, very hard. They can fall into turmoil and division at home while continuing to assert themselves abroad. An unsustainable situation can last an eternity. “Can”, I keep saying, as though a living example were not in front of us today. The US, decades into its political polarisation, leads the western response to the Ukraine crisis. Germany, perhaps the most cohesive of the major democracies, doesn’t.

Exactly how the American empire manages to survive the problems at home is hard to pinpoint. It helps that voters are so indifferent to foreign affairs, a subject that almost never decides federal elections. This lack of interest is too often assumed to be a drag on US power. In fact, it liberates the nation’s (geo) political class to operate in relative calm. On healthcare and crime, politicians must pander to their half of a riven electorate. On foreign matters, there is nothing like the same passion to satiate or exploit. Reinforcing this barrier between “high” and “low” politics is a constitution that cloisters foreign policy from the domestic. Even a president who cannot get a bill through Congress has wide latitude as commander-in-chief of history’s mightiest armed forces.

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The result is a highly “sticky” empire. Except through the pressure of bankruptcy – see postwar Britain – it is extraordinarily hard to pare back a global web of military bases and security guarantees, once it is woven. Bureaucratic inertia, logistical nuisance, vested interests and national ego make sure of that. Donald Trump, who never saw a foreign commitment he didn’t begrudge, achieved no meaningful cut in America’s global presence in four years as president.

Some of those who frustrated his efforts to that end were his own people. And here is another reason to suspect that America can continue to decay at home without losing much of its foreign role. The US right has taken a feral turn over the past decade. But it is not, for the most part, isolationist. To the extent that Republicans on Capitol Hill scold President Joe Biden over Ukraine, it is for not doing more, earlier. In London last month, Nikki Haley, Trump’s former UN representative, classed Russia alongside China and Iran as a bloc of existential enemies. Rash, yes. Wasteful of the chance to prise the first two of those countries apart over time, certainly. But hardly the manifesto of a bring-the-boys-home quietist. Even Trump himself is more fairly accused of chauvinism and unilateralism than isolationism.

The West, no doubt, would be safer with a harmonious US. And a hegemon can only buck its domestic problems for so long. The question is what “so long” means. France kept up an empire through a revolution, a Terror, a monarchical restoration, the Dreyfus affair and at least four republics. Pax Britannica carried on as arguments over free trade, Irish Home Rule and the extension of the franchise split the UK. As for the post-1945 “rules-based order”, as no one called it at the time: the US built and upheld it during Jim Crow, deadly urban riots, several political assassinations, a presidential resignation, a presidential impeachment and a fiasco in Vietnam.

What more often does for a superpower is not domestic rancour, then, but the sheer cost of the enterprise. With the world’s largest economy, and its foremost currency, the US has no immediate worry on that score. In a sense, the news here is better for foreigners than for Americans. Fears for the cohesion of the republic are well-founded. But its external potency will be the last thing to go. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2022