Transcription
You write of America in decline. Can you set out for us why this, the start of 2025, is such an important moment in that story?
The United States cannot order events in the world the way it used to. The Middle East was relatively quiet for decades under American tutelage. When there was an Arab-Israeli war, it was the Americans who quickly ended it. Essentially, that's no longer the case. The Americans used to dominate the Asia-Pacific; now China does. America's place in the world is weaker than it used to be. America is poorer than it used to be, and America is more decadent than it used to be.
I think American power, or the exercise of American power, is based on two things. One, which most people grasp but not enough, is that it's based on presidential instinct. The president makes a number of choices a day on issues of great importance, such as war and peace, as well as many issues that the bureaucracy cannot decide upon and gets kicked up to the White House. When the National Security Advisor says, "Mr. President, here we've got like four choices to make on this, and you make it now," that’s a critical moment.
During the Cold War, we had a number of excellent presidents, from Harry Truman to George H.W. Bush. Jimmy Carter, who just died, was actually the weakest of those presidents in terms of presidential instinct on foreign policy, despite all the great things that have been written about him in the past two weeks. Since the end of the Cold War, the quality of the presidency has declined in terms of presidential instinct. We've had Clinton, George W. Bush—who may have been the worst president of the last few decades—Obama, who was a mediocrity, and then there's Trump, who is a world historical figure because he's so different from anyone else.
So, the quality of presidential instinct has gone down significantly. Then there's the other thing that nobody writes about or talks about, which is 80% of foreign policy: the bureaucracy. This includes not just the secretaries of state and defense, but also the deputy secretaries, the undersecretaries, and the assistant secretaries—of which there are many. The deputy assistant secretaries. America has been an empire since 1945, and it's this layered bureaucracy that runs the empire. Under Trump, as I argue in the piece, this bureaucracy went downhill dramatically between 2017 and 2021, and it is set to go down dramatically again because the quality of people that Trump appoints—whatever you may think of the quality under Biden, another mediocrity—was much higher under all the previous presidents, with the exception of Trump.
What's the difference in Trump's second term? I mean, he's already been president for four years. What's different this time around?
Well, he's got some experience. He knows that when he came in the first time, not only did he have no experience with the presidency, but he didn't even know anybody who was in government. Essentially, he had no knowledge. He thought he could press a button and things would happen, and that's not how it works.
What's amazing is how weak the presidency is as a general institution. I mean, it's made for weak managers, not for world historical figures like Roosevelt and Lincoln, who are the exceptions to the rule. Trump didn't know that. This time around, Trump is more experienced; he's more vindictive. He’s got people around him, many of whom have no experience in the bureaucracy and many of whom hate the very bureaucracies they've been empowered to run.
So, we're going to see a decline in American power in the 80% that's run by the bureaucracy. As far as the presidential instinct decisions, those could go either way. Trump is very unpredictable because he has no well-thought-out worldview.
You talk about the political power, but you're also right about the economics in America at the moment and how that's in decline. Tell us about that.
Well, in 1945, when World War II ended, half of the world's manufacturing capacity was in the United States. That lasted for decades. It declined very gradually. One of the reasons why Kissinger and Nixon could do so much is that America was much more powerful then. Now, America accounts for only 16% of the world's manufacturing capacity.
Then there's the debt, which is about $36 trillion and growing dramatically at about a trillion dollars a year. Neither party, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats, has anywhere near the maturity and fiscal discipline to deal with the debt. It's amazing. I mean, when you watch Congress debate the budget, it's like the last days of ancient Rome. There is nobody in the room who's even remotely responsible; they just want to spend and spend and spend—each party on different things. This debt accumulates and takes up more of the budget, leaving less money to spend on defense and social issues.
As I lay out in the piece, this is how empires decline over history. It's not just ancient Rome; most empires throughout history have declined because of economic reasons and reasons related indirectly to economic factors.
If we're talking about an empire falling, you said that the U.S. has been an empire since 1945. Is its decline inevitable? Can it be stopped if someone decided to?
It's absolutely not inevitable. I make two points in the piece: that America definitely is in decline, but I also point out that China is in a steeper decline and that Russia is in an even steeper decline. So, decline is relative. America could decline, and yet its power vis-à-vis Russia and China—even under terrible leadership—could increase because it's all relative. There is no absolute here.
So, we're really facing a world where all the great powers are declining, and that, as I point out at the end of the piece, will lead not to a fairer world, a better world, but to more chaos.
I was interested that you wrote that the U.S. could be left in an era of oil and gas, of print and the typewriter. Are you suggesting that there's sort of a science on fossil fuels, the resources that the U.S. has, that means that they can't get ahead of future manufacturing?
America was a great print-and-typewriter age empire because most of its history was under what I call the greater print-and-typewriter age—from the founding fathers all the way to, take your pick, the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s. Essentially, then something happened: America became a pure democracy. The founding fathers were actually afraid of pure democracy. Madison was against it; he wanted a republic, not a democracy.
What's the difference? The difference is that in a republic, the elites decide, but the people get to change the elites every four years. For decades, the party leaders in so-called smoke-filled rooms behind the scenes decided who would be the candidates for president. Though that was undemocratic and sleazy, it actually worked very well. Had the party leaders still been in power in 2017, in 2016, Trump never would have been the Republican nominee. Jeb Bush would have been the Republican nominee, and he would have gone on to be a very good president, like his father, not like his brother.
Essentially, people forget all of this. Now we have a pure democracy with primaries for each state, which means that the most extreme person wins. Primaries draw out the most extreme voters. Instead of elites deciding the two candidates, we have pure democracy deciding it, and the result has been worse.
We've talked about the decline economically and politically. If we put that together, what does it mean for the U.S.'s place on the world stage? Because China and Russia are also declining, and faster.
I think the U.S.'s place on the world stage will still be very, very significant, but not as significant as it used to be. You can say what you want about great powers; you can hate them all. But a world of great powers is a more stable world than a world where there are no great powers or very weakened great powers.
You'd have more, for instance, without the United States Navy. Over the last few decades, you probably would have had more wars between India and China. With the American Navy in the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific, it essentially stabilized the situation in many ways. A lot of things like this just wouldn't happen. It's not a matter of doing good; it's a matter of preventing worse things from happening.
Let's say there is no other country poised to take over from the U.S., which means that we end up... I mean, is there any chance that you could end up with a more equal world order if there's not one dominant power?
It could be more equal but also more ineffectual. I mean, the UN is equal, and it's totally ineffectual. That's the world, you know. The problem with the UN is not the UN per se; it's the fact that France is a member of the Security Council, and India, which is much more powerful and consequential than France, is not. But you know, equality doesn't lead to capability necessarily.
So, what does a world without one dominant great power look like?
A world of more chaos and anarchy. A world of more wars. Let's look at the Middle East. For the past, even before October 7, 2023, the real problem in the Middle East is the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and there's been no solution found to that collapse. Without any imperial overriding force, the Americans are weaker and less respected in the Middle East. The Russians are weaker than they used to be in the Middle East. China is interested in terms of trade and economics, but so far not in great power military or political means.
The Middle East has been on its own without great powers to oversee the situation, so to speak, and that has led to tremendous warfare. One thing we're going to see, probably—I've been saying this for 20 years now, and everybody's saying it—is that we'll probably see a new regime in Iran, maybe even in 2025, certainly in the next few years.
You talk of a world of more chaos. Is this something that one of our listeners in the UK should be worried about? Should they think about the consequences in the future if the U.S. loses its dominance?
See, chaos or anarchy are words that are overused in the media. If there's a crisis at 10 Downing Street, there's chaos. That's all nonsense; it's utter nonsense. When I mean chaos, I mean driving outside the capital of Kinshasa in the Congo, where there's no government—just militias with guns and roadblocks. I'm talking about the kind of chaos where people don't worry about politics; they just worry about the safety of themselves and their children.
We'll see more of that, I think. There's already a lot of it, but it's not written about because it's beyond the radar screen. Essentially, it's almost a normal way of doing things. Haiti is an extreme example; we read about it, but only occasionally.
What needs to change to avoid that situation? You said that this decline wasn't inevitable, that it could be corrected. Is there something that either the Democrats or the Republicans have any interest in changing?
No, because Washington is in a very decadent state. It's controlled by money. In Trump's second administration, proximity to power, proximity to the president, will determine how much money multi-billionaires make. They won't have to go through the bureaucracy, which is how stable states do it. You have to apply for permits; you know, there's a Security and Exchange Commission.
One of the threats of a second Trump term is that money has taken over the presidency. Look at Elon Musk. I mean, it's not enough that he's worth $50 billion or so, but he has to determine policy as well. That's what I worry about: the effect of money in Congress and in the White House. Ironically, the people who are the most honest, the least wealthy, and the most hardworking are the very deep state that everybody attacks.
The deep state is actually very good. It's made of clean-cut people earning regular salaries, not from wealthy parents, and often has extremely good judgment on the parts of the world that they're experts on. The deep state has been used to define people who nobody knows who they are, who are really running things behind the scenes. That's true because a great power needs a great bureaucracy.
So, what needs to change to avoid that fate that you've laid out, that possibility?
When you get a slide like this, where you can identify the problems but you don't know what to do about it, what needs to change is some radical new leadership. It's possible; I'm not discounting it completely. The upheaval under Trump could give America a new start.
If you look at American history, we had the founders and their sons, who were the first six presidents. Then there was a dramatic change with the seventh president when Andrew Jackson replaced John Quincy Adams. You got all these corrupt characters from the frontier, which was then Tennessee, Kentucky, and places like that. The founders were absolutely shocked, just like the elite today is shocked at Trump.
When they lost control to these ruffian, corrupt people from the Appalachians, it was corrupt and freewheeling, but over time, it led to a more democratic society. Then we had other upheavals that were seen as the end of the world at the time, but in fact, they led to a rebirth of American statehood.
So, I don't discount the possibility that just the very shock of Trumpism could lead to a new birth of American democracy.