Asia Without America, Part 1: The Cupboards Are Bare

2025-05-13 08:09:10

(MENAFN- Asia Times) History has multiple equilibria. Seemingly stable arrangements can turn on a dime.“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen,” Vladimir Lenin wrote in 2017, his last year in exile.

Or, as President Xi Jinping said at the door of the Kremlin after a 2023 meeting with Vladimir Putin,“Right now there are changes – the likes of which we haven't seen for 100 years.” Within earshot of the press, President Xi slyly added,“and we are the ones driving these changes together.”

Let us not beat around the bush: We're talking to you, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. The changes that President Xi was referring to are the collapse of America's alliance system and, along with it, the collapse of the rules-based international order.

Every nation should be prepared. The savviest actors will front-run events. When President Xi said“we are the ones driving these changes,” it was an open invitation to bet on and become part of the“we.”

Fast forward to 2025 and trends have only accelerated. President Trump, in his second term, has gratuitously insulted Europe, strong-armed Panama, threatened to annex Greenland and Canada and launched a chaotic trade war on the world.

This is not 4D chess, people. This is President Trump using whatever is left of American power to kick over the chessboard, hoping the scattered pieces magically rearrange themselves in advantageous positions. It is also sheer madness.

US President Franklin D Roosevelt responding to the Pearl Harbor attack. Photo: CBS News

In his book And Tomorrow the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy, Stephen Wertheim tells the story of how, over just a few years preceding Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, institutions such as the Council on Foreign Relations and leaders such as President Franklin Roosevelt maneuvered America's global posture away from wariness over foreign entanglements and towards global primacy.

Of course, none of this could be said out loud. As the new posture developed during and after World War II, it had to be buried in euphemisms like“liberal international order” and administered through neutered institutions including the World Bank/IMF (1944), the United Nations (1945), NATO (1949) and even the US Congress.

The Lansdowne portrait is an iconic life-size portrait of George Washington painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1796. It depicts the 64-year-old president of the United States during his final year in office.

All of this runs counter to the legacy many founding fathers hoped to bequeath the young republic fortunately separated from a fractious Europe by the Atlantic Ocean. In his valedictory address, George Washington famously warned against involvement in foreign wars and entanglements:

According to Wertheim, the thinkers and leaders who planned American primacy were not acting in bad faith; these were not Pentagon paper pushers angling for a retirement gig at Lockheed Martin. These were men genuinely fearful of a world where fascists controlled the Eurasian landmass. Wertheim writes:

After saving Europe and Asia from fascist domination in WWII (or at least joining mop-up operations in act four), the US lost no time declaring itself leader of the free world in the long twilight struggle against the Soviet Union. George Kennan, in his famous long telegram, wrote:

Primacy, it turns out, is a hard drug to quit. After the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union and China voluntarily joining the American led economic system, the US quickly appointed itself permanent world leader under the Wolfowitz doctrine:

Paul Wolfowitz. Photo: Hoover Institution

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