Superpower Suicide
The University of Toronto held an event on behalf of the Council on Foreign Relations and Timothy Snyder was there was the keynote speaker to provide his views on why he believed that America was committing superpower suicide, and the actions that have or have not been taken by the United States since Donald J. Trump became President, that made America’s suicide the ongoing reality that it is.
He makes an immediate distinction from that which is prevalent in the media, from a family of kleptocrats and their sycophants who attempt, first to deny responsibility for ‘their’ choices and actions, and in turn place that responsibility externally on their (what can only now be called) former allies, neighbours or friends.
And I say once, because at this very moment, they are exactly that. Canada, the EU, the U.K. specifically have chosen to not accept the United States’ ethical and strategic choices it is making. But it is much more than that. In every domain, long term or short term America is being not just self-destructive, it is being suicidal. From the domains of education, research, economics, at every turn, America is undermining the ‘state’ that underpins what constitutes the United States.
The lack of commonality in America, between government and the private sector, is gone. The ‘state’ of America has no power in its present form.
Snyder states; “You can’t be a power without being a state. And we’re not being run as a state. We’re being run by people who don’t see the United States of America as a state. They see it as a kind of, you know, money-making or prestige-making or something-making enterprise for a small group of people, many of whom are not Americans. But even the ones who are Americans you can count their numbers on, you know, one hand, or maybe both hands and, you know, both feet. But it’s not very many of them, right? And that’s not a state. We’re being run in a way which is not – having state power. We have a lot of residual good stuff. But we’re not being run as a state and there’s no ideology of the American state present now.”
Snyder hits the nail with a massive hammer in the following statement which I too have found more than troublesome, although may I say, I am not committed to finding a means or mechanism to stop the impending suicide by America.
He further states; “But if you follow — if you try to track the White House, in what sense are they talking about the United States of America? What is their ideology? What is their notion of the future? I think there isn’t any, and that’s a bad sign. Or consider the elemental problem of statehood, which is succession. So how do you get from having one ruler to the next ruler?”
Without having the succession problem solved, America is no different than Russia, or China. Between the lack of a plan for fundamental succession, and that of the second problem, now evident, is the significance of not having Allies or belonging to global networks.
As Snyder suggests, the choices, and they are America’s own choices can’t be ignored. Snyder suggests that the metaphor of American suicide is something Americans voted for, — hence the suicide metaphor.
America’s Oligarchy
America’s international oligarchic choices, such as supporting Orban in Hungary or the lack of ethical rationality in not becoming incensed at a statement like “we are going to destroy an entire civilization”, clearly illustrates that without having ‘an ethical response to these moments, that these obvious signs that things are going wrong, — then it’s hard to have the practical response. And I think—I mean, I don’t want to sound too pessimistic because there are a lot of wonderful people doing a lot of wonderful things, including ‘New America’. America is not triggered the right way by these kinds of ethical prompts that the President sees fit to give us.”
Ethics and Values in National Strategy
Two things have to be brought together, rights and freedom and democracy. Values matter. Snyder states; “To say that values don’t matter in politics is de facto to endorse the latest outrage, because you don’t have any language to criticize it. You’ve gotten out of the habit of using the words that you would need, like “evil”. (Such as advocating for the destruction of a whole civilization.) As soon as you abnegate that, then you have—you’ve given the terrain over to people who everyday do something slightly worse. So values are very important for that reason too, not just to imagine a future but also to critique everyday politics. You can’t do it without it.”
America Is Destroying Its Own Reason for Superpower Status
America built the system, the institutions, the order, and then, because the rules, the one’s America made essentially don’t suit a new reality, you break them all. “By breaking the rules and upsetting the order, we (America) are losing power. We are hugely losing power. We’re bleeding power every day because we chose the game and then we chose not to play it, right? So we built — like, generations of American legal, political, — economic effort went into building the system that put America at the center of the world order and this is why — this is — hence the suicide metaphor, and now we’re choosing to break it on the logic that somehow it favours other people, right, — which is simply not true. So this debate, like, should we be a nation state that just pursues its own interests or should we follow these annoying rules, that’s the wrong way to set up the debate. We made the rules and they’re much more annoying for other people, and there’s a reason for that and that’s that we made them, right?
My Own Thoughts, Which for the Most Part Parallel those of Timothy Snyder
What it now boils down to is that while the whole issue is complex in its totality, the solution is simple. America made the rules that have existed for 80 years and now it doesn’t like the fact that other nations, other powers or power blocs, are fed up with the fact that those rules were designed to favour the hegemony, which they were, and have.
Mark Carney alluded to them specifically as such at Davos.
And under the current American Presidency, throwing out the rules entirely and simply stating, we don’t care about the ‘values or ethics’ that underpinned them. We have the might, so we’ll make the rules as we see fit.
You can accept that or not, but should you choose not to, we’ll (America) sanction you in ways that will ultimately either undermine your economies or coerce you to accept less than an optimal situation in response.
The world does not accept that, period.
And it has learned something else, of even more importance. Together, the aggregate of these nations have equal power, in fact, they have the leverage if they so choose to cause the old hegemony to fail, to fall, to collapse.
In fact, the world’s democracies that do believe in freedom, the rule of law, the right to self-determination, etc., etc., have decided, to do the rational thing. And that is to go their own way, and to band together inside new institutions, including economic, trade, military and in respect to foreign relations, international order and international law, to exclude the now suicidal hegemonic power from entry or inclusion.
Rather than listen to a bully who now demands instead of collaborates, threatens instead of cooperates, even when the rules still favour the bully, the ‘others’ are now choosing to ostracize the bully and to devise rules that are fair and proportional to the interests of all those inside this new collaborative organizational structure that encompasses trade, economics and a return to the values that the ‘group’ holds as truths.
As for the bully?
He will find that without friends and allies, and without ethics values or truth, no one, no organization, no state, no military, in fact no organization of any kind can allow itself the inclusion of a country whose leadership and people cannot be trusted to adhere to the rule of law, human rights, free speech, truth, ethics or morality.
Watching the suicide of a superpower, while painful to the past, is also a window to the future. One consisting of those values that constrain evil acts, greed, hate, self-interest and self-indulgence.
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