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Could Trump 2.0 End the American Century?
Trump’s second term will almost certainly be one of imperial decline, increasing internal chaos, and a further loss of global leadership.
Nov 20, 2024
Some 15 years ago, on December 5, 2010, a historian writing for TomDispatch made a prediction that may yet prove prescient. Rejecting the consensus of that moment that U.S. global hegemony would persist to 2040 or 2050, he argued that “the demise of the United States as the global superpower could come... in 2025, just 15 years from now.”
To make that forecast, the historian conducted what he called “a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends.” Starting with the global context, he argued that, “faced with a fading superpower,” China, India, Iran, and Russia would all start to “provocatively challenge U.S. dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace.” At home in the United States, domestic divisions would “widen into violent clashes and divisive debates… Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal.” But, that historian concluded, “the world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.”
Now that a “far-right patriot,” one Donald J. Trump, has indeed captured (or rather recaptured) the presidency “with thundering rhetoric,” let’s explore the likelihood that a second Trump term in office, starting in the fateful year 2025, might actually bring a hasty end, silent or otherwise, to an “American Century” of global dominion.
Making the Original Prediction
Let’s begin by examining the reasoning underlying my original prediction. (Yes, of course, that historian was me.) Back in 2010, when I picked a specific date for a rising tide of American decline, this country looked unassailably strong both at home and abroad. The presidency of Barack Obama was producing a “post-racial” society. After recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. was on track for a decade of dynamic growth—the auto industry saved, oil and gas production booming, the tech sector thriving, the stock market soaring, and employment solid. Internationally, Washington was the world’s preeminent leader, with an unchallenged military, formidable diplomatic clout, unchecked economic globalization, and its democratic governance still the global norm.
Looking forward, leading historians of empire agreed that America would remain the world’s sole superpower for the foreseeable future. Writing in the Financial Times in 2002, for instance, Yale professor Paul Kennedy, author of a widely read book on imperial decline, argued that “America’s array of force is staggering,” with a mix of economic, diplomatic, and technological dominance that made it the globe’s “single superpower” without peer in the entire history of the world. Russia’s defense budget had “collapsed” and its economy was “less than that of the Netherlands.” Should China’s high growth rates continue for another 30 years, it “might be a serious challenger to U.S. predominance”—but that wouldn’t be true until 2032, if then. While America’s “unipolar moment” would surely not “continue for centuries,” its end, he predicted, “seems a long way off for now.”
Writing in a similar vein in The New York Times in February 2010, Piers Brendon, a historian of Britain’s imperial decline, dismissed the “doom mongers” who “conjure with Roman and British analogies in order to trace the decay of American hegemony.” While Rome was riven by “internecine strife” and Britain ran its empire on a shoestring budget, the U.S. was “constitutionally stable” with “an enormous industrial base.” Taking a few “relatively simple steps,” he concluded, Washington should be able to overcome current budgetary problems and perpetuate its global power indefinitely.
After the steady erosion of its global power for several decades, America is no longer the—or perhaps even an—“exceptional” nation floating above the deep global currents that shape the politics of most countries.
When I made my very different prediction nine months later, I was coordinating a network of 140 historians from universities on three continents who were studying the decline of earlier empires, particularly those of Britain, France, and Spain. Beneath the surface of this country’s seeming strength, we could already see the telltale signs of decline that had led to the collapse of those earlier empires.
By 2010, economic globalization was cutting good-paying factory jobs here, income inequality was widening, and corporate bailouts were booming—all essential ingredients for rising working-class resentment and deepening domestic divisions. Foolhardy military misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, pushed by Washington elites trying to deny any sense of decline, stoked simmering anger among ordinary Americans, slowly discrediting the very idea of international commitments. And the erosion of America’s relative economic strength from half the world’s output in 1950 to a quarter in 2010 meant the wherewithal for its unipolar power was fading fast.
Only a “near-peer” competitor was needed to turn that attenuating U.S. global hegemony into accelerating imperial decline. With rapid economic growth, a vast population, and the world’s longest imperial tradition, China seemed primed to become just such a country. But back then, Washington’s foreign policy elites thought not and even admitted China to the World Trade Organization (WTO), fully confident, according to two Beltway insiders, that “U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States’ liking.”
Our group of historians, mindful of the frequent imperial wars fought when near-peer competitors finally confronted the reigning hegemon of their moment—think Germany versus Great Britain in World War I—fully expected China’s challenge would not be long in coming. Indeed, in 2012, just two years after my prediction, the U.S. National Intelligence Council warned that “China alone will probably have the largest economy, surpassing that of the United States a few years before 2030” and this country would no longer be “a hegemonic power.”
Just a year after that, China’s president, Xi Jinping, drawing on a massive $4 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves accumulated in the decade after joining the WTO, announced his bid for global power through what he called “the Belt and Road Initiative,” history’s largest development program. It was designed to make Beijing the center of the global economy.
In the following decade, the U.S.-China rivalry would become so intense that, last September, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall warned: “I’ve been closely watching the evolution of [China’s] military for 15 years. China is not a future threat; China is a threat today.”
The Global Rise of the Strongman
Another major setback for Washington’s world order, long legitimated by its promotion of democracy (whatever its own dominating tendencies), came from the rise of populist strongmen worldwide. Consider them part of a nationalist reaction to the West’s aggressive economic globalization.
At the close of the Cold War in 1991, Washington became the planet’s sole superpower, using its hegemony to forcefully promote a wide-open global economy—forming the World Trade Organization in 1995, pressing open-market “reforms” on developing economies, and knocking down tariff barriers worldwide. It also built a global communications grid by laying 700,000 miles of fiber-optic submarine cables and then launching 1,300 satellites (now 4,700).
By exploiting that very globalized economy, however, China’s industrial output soared to $3.2 trillion by 2016, surpassing both the U.S. and Japan, while simultaneously eliminating 2.4 million American jobs between 1999 and 2011, ensuring the closure of factories in countless towns across the South and Midwest. By fraying social safety nets while eroding protection for labor unions and local businesses in both the U.S. and Europe, globalization reduced the quality of life for many, while creating inequality on a staggering scale and stoking a working-class reaction that would crest in a global wave of angry populism.
Riding that wave, right-wing populists have been winning a steady succession of elections—in Russia (2000), Israel (2009), Hungary (2010), China (2012), Turkey (2014), the Philippines (2016), the U.S. (2016), Brazil (2018), Italy (2022), the Netherlands (2023), Indonesia (2024), and the U.S. again (2024).
Set aside their incendiary us-versus-them rhetoric, however, and look at their actual achievements and those right-wing demagogues turn out to have a record that can only be described as dismal. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro ravaged the vast Amazon rainforest and left office amid an abortive coup. In Russia, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, sacrificing his country’s economy to capture some more land (which it hardly lacked). In Turkey, Recep Erdogan caused a crippling debt crisis, while jailing 50,000 suspected opponents. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte murdered 30,000 suspected drug users and courted China by giving up his country’s claims in the resource-rich South China Sea. In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has wreaked havoc on Gaza and neighboring lands, in part to stay in office and stay out of prison.
Prospects for Donald Trump’s Second Term
After the steady erosion of its global power for several decades, America is no longer the—or perhaps even an—“exceptional” nation floating above the deep global currents that shape the politics of most countries. And as it has become more of an ordinary country, it has also felt the full force of the worldwide move toward strongman rule. Not only does that global trend help explain Trump’s election and his recent reelection, but it provides some clues as to what he’s likely to do with that office the second time around.
In the globalized world America made, there is now an intimate interaction between domestic and international policy. That will soon be apparent in a second Trump administration whose policies are likely to simultaneously damage the country’s economy and further degrade Washington’s world leadership.
As the world shifts to renewable energy and all-electric vehicles, Trump’s policies will undoubtedly do lasting damage to the American economy.
Let’s start with the clearest of his commitments: environmental policy. During the recent election campaign, Trump called climate change “a scam” and his transition team has already drawn up executive orders to exit from the Paris climate accords. By quitting that agreement, the U.S. will abdicate any leadership role when it comes to the most consequential issue facing the international community while reducing pressure on China to curb its greenhouse gas emissions. Since these two countries now account for nearly half (45%) of global carbon emissions, such a move will ensure that the world blows past the target of keeping this planet’s temperature rise to 1.5°C until the end of the century. Instead, on a planet that’s already had 12 recent months of just such a temperature rise, that mark is expected to be permanently reached by perhaps 2029, the year Trump finishes his second term.
On the domestic side of climate policy, Trump promised last September that he would “terminate the Green New Deal, which I call the Green New Scam, and rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.” On the day after his election, he committed himself to increasing the country’s oil and gas production, telling a celebratory crowd, “We have more liquid gold than any country in the world.” He will undoubtedly also block wind farm leases on Federal lands and cancel the $7,500 tax credit for purchasing an electrical vehicle.
As the world shifts to renewable energy and all-electric vehicles, Trump’s policies will undoubtedly do lasting damage to the American economy. In 2023, the International Renewable Energy Agency reported that, amid continuing price decreases, wind and solar power now generate electricity for less than half the cost of fossil fuels. Any attempt to slow the conversion of this country’s utilities to the most cost-effective form of energy runs a serious risk of ensuring that American-made products will be ever less competitive.
To put it bluntly, he seems to be proposing that electricity users here should pay twice as much for their power as those in other advanced nations. Similarly, as relentless engineering innovation makes electric vehicles cheaper and more reliable than petrol-powered ones, attempting to slow such an energy transition is likely to make the U.S. auto industry uncompetitive, at home and abroad.
Calling tariffs “the greatest thing ever invented,” Trump has proposed slapping a 20% duty on all foreign goods and 60% on those from China. In another instance of domestic-foreign synergy, such duties will undoubtedly end up crippling American farm exports, thanks to retaliatory overseas tariffs, while dramatically raising the cost of consumer goods for Americans, stoking inflation, and slowing consumer spending.
Reflecting his aversion to alliances and military commitments, Trump’s first foreign policy initiative will likely be an attempt to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. During a CNN town hall in May 2023, he claimed he could stop the fighting “in 24 hours.” Last July, he added: “I would tell [Ukraine’s president] Zelenskyy, no more. You got to make a deal.”
Just two days after the November election, according toThe Washington Post, Trump reputedly told Russian President Vladimir Putin in a telephone call, “not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe.” Drawing on sources inside the Trump transition team, The Wall Street Journalreported that the new administration is considering “cementing Russia’s seizure of 20% of Ukraine” and forcing Kyiv to forego its bid to join NATO, perhaps for as long as 20 years.
With Russia drained of manpower and its economy pummeled by three years of bloody warfare, a competent negotiator (should Trump actually appoint one) might indeed be able to bring a tenuous peace to a ravaged Ukraine. Since it has been Europe’s frontline of defense against a revanchist Russia, the continent’s major powers would be expected to play a significant role. But Germany’s coalition government has just collapsed; French president Emmanuel Macron is crippled by recent electoral reverses; and the NATO alliance, after three years of a shared commitment to Ukraine, faces real uncertainty with the advent of a Trump presidency.
America’s Allies
Those impending negotiations over Ukraine highlight the paramount importance of alliances for U.S. global power. For 80 years, from World War II through the Cold War and beyond, Washington relied on bilateral and multilateral alliances as a critical force multiplier. With China and Russia both rearmed and increasingly closely aligned, reliable allies have become even more important to maintaining Washington’s global presence. With 32 member nations representing a billion people and a commitment to mutual defense that has lasted 75 years, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is arguably the most powerful military alliance in all of modern history.
Yet Trump has long been sharply critical of it. As a candidate in 2016, he called the alliance “obsolete.” As president, he mocked the treaty’s mutual-defense clause, claiming even “tiny” Montenegro could drag the U.S. into war. While campaigning last February, he announced that he would tell Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that didn’t pay what he considered its fair share.
Right after Trump’s election, caught between what one analyst called “an aggressively advancing Russia and an aggressively withdrawing America,” French President Macron insisted that the continent needed to be a “more united, stronger, more sovereign Europe in this new context.” Even if the new administration doesn’t formally withdraw from NATO, Trump’s repeated hostility, particularly toward its crucial mutual-defense clause, may yet serve to eviscerate the alliance.
In the Asia-Pacific region, the American presence rests on three sets of overlapping alliances: the AUKUS entente with Australia and Britain, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (with Australia, India, and Japan), and a chain of bilateral defense pacts stretching along the Pacific littoral from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines. Via careful diplomacy, the Biden administration strengthened those alliances, bringing two wayward allies, Australia and the Philippines that had drifted Beijing-wards, back into the Western fold. Trump’s penchant for abusing allies and, as in his first term, withdrawing from multilateral pacts is likely to weaken such ties and so American power in the region.
Although his first administration famously waged a trade war with Beijing, Trump’s attitude toward the island of Taiwan is bluntly transactional. “I think, Taiwan should pay us for defense,” he said last June, adding: “You know, we’re no different than an insurance company. Taiwan doesn’t give us anything.” In October, he toldThe Wall Street Journal that he would not have to use military force to defend Taiwan because China’s President Xi “respects me and he knows I’m f—— crazy.” Bluster aside, Trump, unlike his predecessor Joe Biden, has never committed himself to defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack.
Should Beijing indeed attack Taiwan outright or, as appears more likely, impose a crippling economic blockade on the island, Trump seems unlikely to risk a war with China. The loss of Taiwan would break the U.S. position along the Pacific littoral, for 80 years the fulcrum of its global imperial posture, pushing its naval forces back to a “second island chain” running from Japan to Guam. Such a retreat would represent a major blow to America’s imperial role in the Pacific, potentially making it no longer a significant player in the security of its Asia-Pacific allies.
A Silent U.S. Recessional
Adding up the likely impact of Donald Trump’s policies in this country, Asia, Europe, and the international community generally, his second term will almost certainly be one of imperial decline, increasing internal chaos, and a further loss of global leadership. As “respect for American authority” fades, Trump may yet resort to “threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal.” But as I predicted back in 2010, it seems quite likely that “the world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.”
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8 Reasons Why Marco Rubio Would Be a Disastrous Secretary of State
In most hot spots around the world, Rubio is likely to make conflicts even hotter, or start new ones.
Nov 18, 2024
Of all U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s choices for his foreign policy team, Marco Rubio is the least controversial to the neoconservative foreign policy establishment in Washington, and the most certain to provide continuity with all that is wrong with U.S. foreign policy, from Cuba to the Middle East to China.
The only area where there might be some hope for ending a war is Ukraine, where Rubio has come close to Trump’s position, praising Ukraine for standing up to Russia, but recognizing that the U.S. is funding a deadly “stalemate war” that needs to be “brought to a conclusion.”
But in all the other hot spots around the world, Rubio is likely to make conflicts even hotter, or start new ones.
1. His Obsession With Regime Change in Cuba Will Sink any Chance of Better Relations With the Island
Like other Cuban-American politicians, Marco Rubio has built his career on vilifying the Cuban Revolution and trying to economically strangle and starve into submission the people of his parents’ homeland.
It is ironic, therefore, that his parents left Cuba before the revolution, during the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, whose executioners, secret police, and death squads killed an estimated 20,000 people, according to the CIA, leading to a wildly popular revolution in 1959.
While Rubio’s virulent anti-leftist stands have served him well in climbing to senior positions in the U.S. government, and now into Trump’s inner circle, his disdain for Latin American sovereignty bodes ill for U.S. relations with the region.
When former President Barack Obama began to restore relations with Cuba in 2014, Rubio swore to do “everything possible” to obstruct and reverse that policy. In May 2024, Rubio reiterated his zero tolerance for any kind of social or economic contacts between the U.S. and Cuba, claiming that any easing of the U.S. blockade will only “strengthen the oppressive regime and undermine the opposition... Until there is freedom in Cuba, the United States must maintain a firm stance.”
In 2024 Rubio also introduced legislation to ensure that Cuba would remain on the U.S. “State Sponsor of Terrorism List,” imposing sanctions that cut Cuba off from the U.S.-dominated Western banking system.
These measures to destroy the Cuban economy have led to a massive wave of migration in the past two years. But when the U.S. Coast Guard tried to coordinate with their Cuban counterparts, Rubio introduced legislation to prohibit such interaction. While Trump has vowed to stem immigration, his secretary of state wants to crush Cuba’s economy, forcing people to abandon the island and set sail for the United States.
2. Applying His Anti-Cuba Template to the Rest of Latin America Will Make Enemies of More of Our Neighbors
Rubio’s disdain for his ancestral home in Cuba has served him so well as an American politician that he has extended it to the rest of Latin America. He has sided with extreme right-wing politicians like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Javier Milei in Argentina, and rails against progressive ones, from Brazil’s Ignacio Lula da Silva to Mexico’s popular former President Lopez Obrador, whom he called “an apologist for tyranny” for supporting other leftist governments.
In Venezuela, he has promoted brutal sanctions and regime change plots to topple the government of Nicolas Maduro. In 2019 he was one of the architects of Trump’s failed policy of recognizing opposition figure Juan Guaido as president. He has also advocated for sanctions and regime change in Nicaragua.
In March 2023, Rubio urged President Joe Biden to impose sanctions on Bolivia for prosecuting leaders of a 2019 U.S.-backed coup that led to massacres that killed at least 21 people.
Rubio also condemned the government of Honduras for withdrawing from an extradition treaty with the United States this past August, in response to decades of U.S. interference that had turned Honduras into a narco-state riven by poverty, gang violence, and mass emigration, until the election of democratic socialist President Xiomara Castro in 2022.
Rubio’s major concern about Latin America now seems to be the influence of China, which has become the leading trade partner of most Latin American countries. Unlike the U.S., China focuses on economic benefits and not internal politics, while American politicians like Marco Rubio still see Latin America as the U.S. “backyard.”
While Rubio’s virulent anti-leftist stands have served him well in climbing to senior positions in the U.S. government, and now into Trump’s inner circle, his disdain for Latin American sovereignty bodes ill for U.S. relations with the region.
3. He Believes the U.S. and Israel Can Do No Wrong, and That God Has Given Palestine to Israel
Despite the massive death toll in Gaza and global condemnation of Israel’s genocide, Rubio still perpetuates the myth that “Israel takes extraordinary steps to avoid civilian losses” and that innocent people die in Gaza because Hamas has deliberated placed them in the way and used them as human shields. The problem, he says, is “an enemy that doesn’t value human life.”
When asked by CODEPINK in November 2024 if he would support a cease-fire, Rubio replied, “On the contrary. I want them to destroy every element of Hamas they can get their hands on. These people are vicious animals.”
There are few times in this past year that the Biden administration has tried to restrain Israel, but when Biden begged Israel not to send troops into the southern city of Rafah, Rubio said that was like telling the Allied forces in World War II not to attack Berlin to get Hitler.
Marco Rubio expects Americans to believe that it is not genocide itself, but protests against genocide, that are a complete breakdown of law and order.
In a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken in August 2024, Rubio criticized the Biden administration’s decision to sanction Israeli settlers linked to anti-Palestinian violence in the occupied West Bank.
“Israel has consistently sought peace with the Palestinians. It is unfortunate that the Palestinians, whether it be the Palestinian Authority or FTOs [Foreign Terrorist Organisations] such as Hamas, have rejected such overtures,” Rubio wrote. “Israelis rightfully living in their historic homeland are not the impediment to peace; the Palestinians are,” he added.
No country besides Israel subscribes to the idea that its borders should be based on 2,000-year-old religious scriptures, and that it has a God-given right to displace or exterminate people who have lived there since then to reconquer its ancient homeland. The United States will find itself extraordinarily isolated from the rest of the world if Rubio tries to assert that as a matter of U.S. policy.
4. His Deep-Seated Enmity Toward Iran Will Fuel Israel’s War on Its Neighbors, and May Lead to a U.S. War With Iran
Rubio is obsessed with Iran. He claims that the central cause of violence and suffering in the Middle East is not Israeli policy but “Iran’s ambition to be a regional hegemonic power.” He says that Iran’s goal in the Middle East is to “seek to drive America out of the region and then destroy Israel.”
He has been a proponent of maximum pressure on Iran, including a call for more and more sanctions. He believes the U.S. should not reenter the Iran nuclear deal, saying: “We must not trade away U.S. and Israeli security for vague commitments from a terrorist-sponsoring regime that has killed Americans and threatens to annihilate Israel.”
Rubio calls Lebanon’s Hezbollah a “full-blown agent of Iran right on Israel’s border” and that wiping out Hezbollah’s leadership, along with entire neighborhoods full of civilians, is a “service to humanity.” He alleges that Iran has control over Iraq, Syria, the Houthis in Yemen, and is a threat to Jordan. He claims that “Iran has put a noose around Israel,” and says that the goal of U.S. policy should be regime change in Iran, which would set the stage for war.
While there will hopefully be leaders in the Pentagon who will caution Donald Trump about the perils of a war with Iran, Rubio will not be a voice of reason.
5. He Is Beholden to Big Money, From the Weapons Industry to the Israel Lobby
Open Secrets reports that Rubio has received over a million dollars in campaign contributions from pro-Israel groups during his career. The Pro-Israel America PAC was his single largest campaign contributor over the last five years. When he last ran for reelection in 2022, he was the third largest recipient of funding by pro-Israel groups in the Senate, taking in $367,000 from them for that campaign.
Rubio was also the fourth largest recipient of funding from the “defense” industry in the Senate for the 2022 cycle, receiving $196,000. Altogether, the weapons industry has invested $663,000 in his congressional career.
Rubio is clearly beholden to the U.S. arms industry, and even more so to the Israel lobby, which has been one of his largest sources of campaign funding. This has placed him in the vanguard of Congress’s blind, unconditional support for Israel and subservience to Israeli narratives and propaganda, making it unlikely that he will ever challenge the ongoing extermination of the Palestinian people or their expulsion from their homeland.
6. He’s so Antagonistic Toward China That China Has Sanctioned Him—Twice!
Speaking at the Heritage Foundation in 2022, Rubio said: “The gravest threat facing America today, the challenge that will define this century and every generation represented here, is not climate change, the pandemic, or the left's version of social justice. The threat that will define this century is China."
It will be hard for our nation’s “top diplomat” to ease tensions with a country he has so maligned. He antagonized China by co-sponsoring the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which allows the U.S. to bar Chinese imports over alleged Uyghur rights abuses, abuses that China denies and independent researchers question. In fact, Rubio has gone so far as to accuse China of a “grotesque campaign of genocide” against the Uyghurs.
His underlying attitude to foreign relations is, like Trump’s, that the United States must get its way or else, and that other countries who won’t submit must be coerced, threatened, couped, bombed, or invaded.
On Taiwan, he has not only introduced legislation to increase military aid to the island, but actually supports Taiwanese independence—a dangerous deviation from the U.S. government's long-standing One China approach.
The Chinese responded to Rubio by sanctioning him, not once but twice—once regarding the Uyghurs and once for his support of Hong Kong protests. Unless China lifts the sanctions, he would be the first U.S. secretary of state to be banned from even visiting China.
Analysts expect China to try to sidestep Rubio and engage directly with Trump and other senior officials. Steve Tsang, the director of the China Institute at the U.K.’s School of Oriental and African Studies, told Reuters, “If that doesn't work, then I think we're going to get into a much more regular escalation of a bad relationship.”
7. Rubio Knows Sanctions Are a Trap, But He Doesn’t Know How to Escape
Rubio is a leading advocate of unilateral economic sanctions, which are illegal under international law, and which the United Nations and other countries refer to as “unilateral economic coercive measures.”
The United States has used these measures so widely and wildly that they now impact a third of the world’s population. U.S. officials, from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to Rubio himself, have warned that using the U.S. financial system and the dollar’s reserve currency status as weapons against other countries is driving the rest of the world to conduct trade in other currencies and develop alternative financial systems.
In March 2023, Rubio complained on Fox News, “We won’t have to talk sanctions in five years, because there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar, that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.”
And yet Rubio has continued to be a leading sponsor of sanctions bills in the Senate, including new sanctions on Iran in January 2024 and a bill in July to sanction foreign banks that participate in alternative financial systems.
So, while other countries develop new financial and trading systems to escape abusive, illegal U.S. sanctions, the nominee for secretary of state remains caught in the same sanctions trap that he complained about on Fox.
8. He Wants to Crack Down on U.S. Free Speech
Rubio wants to curtail the right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In May, he described campus protests against Israel as a “complete breakdown of law and order.”
Rubio claimed to be speaking up for other students at American universities. “[They] paid a lot of money to go to these schools, [but are being disrupted by] a few thousand antisemitic zombies who have been brainwashed by two decades of indoctrination in the belief that the world is divided between victimizers and victims, and that the victimizers in this particular case, the ones that are oppressing people, are Jews in Israel,” said Rubio.
The Florida senator has said he supports Trump’s plan to deport foreign students who engage in pro-Palestinian campus protests. In April, he called for punishing supporters of the Israel boycott movement as part of efforts to counter antisemitism, falsely equating any attempt to respond to Israel’s international crimes with antisemitism.
And what about those crimes, which the students are protesting? After visiting Israel in May, Rubio wrote an article for National Review, in which he never mentioned the thousands of civilians Israel has killed, and instead blamed Iran, Biden, and “morally corrupt international institutions” for the crisis.
Marco Rubio expects Americans to believe that it is not genocide itself, but protests against genocide, that are a complete breakdown of law and order. He couldn’t be more wrong if he tried.
Students are not Rubio’s only target. In August 2023, he alleged that certain “far-left and antisemitic entities” may have violated the Foreign Assistance Registration Act by their ties to China. He called for a Justice Department investigation into 18 groups, starting with CODEPINK. These unfounded claims of China connections are only meant to intimidate legitimate groups that are exercising their free speech rights.
Conclusion
On each of these issues, Rubio has shown no sign of understanding the difference between domestic politics and diplomacy. Whether he’s talking about Cuba, Palestine, Iran, or China, or even about CODEPINK, all his supposedly tough positions are based on cynically mischaracterizing the actions and motivations of his enemies and then attacking the “straw man” he has falsely set up.
Unscrupulous politicians often get away with that, and Rubio has made it his signature tactic because it works so well for him in American politics. But that will not work if and when he sits down to negotiate with other world leaders as U.S. secretary of state.
His underlying attitude to foreign relations is, like Trump’s, that the United States must get its way or else, and that other countries who won’t submit must be coerced, threatened, couped, bombed, or invaded. This makes Rubio just as ill-equipped as Antony Blinken to conduct diplomacy, improve U.S. relations with other countries, or resolve disputes and conflicts peacefully, as the U.N. Charter requires.
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Biden Bolstered the US Empire Only to Hand it Off to a Fascist
Rather than considering what it would mean for Trump to take control of the most powerful empire in the world, the Biden administration has spent more time considering how to ensure the empire’s survival.
Nov 15, 2024
One of the lasting legacies of U.S. President Joe Biden will be that he reinvigorated the American empire despite the risk of an increasingly authoritarian Donald Trump returning to lead it.
Over the past four years, President Biden has continually ignored criticisms of U.S. empire and the dangers it poses to the world to direct the empire’s expansion. He has overseen the enlargement of NATO, the exploitation of Ukraine to weaken Russia, a military buildup in the Indo-Pacific to encircle China, and the backing of Israel’s military assaults across the Middle East.
The Biden administration spent the past four years rebooting the American empire, bolstering U.S. imperial power while making some its most brazen moves in Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East.
To this day, the Biden administration boasts about its imperial maneuvers, even with the knowledge that a far more dangerous Trump administration will soon be in a position to exploit U.S. imperial power for its own purposes.
“I think we’ve done remarkable things,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin marveled on November 7, two days after the election. “We were able to manage challenges and resources—and I think that put us in a pretty good place.”
Rebooting the Empire
When President Biden first entered office in January 2021, one of his top priorities was to restore the global American empire from the chaos of the first Trump administration. Seizing upon the imperial trope of the United States as an organizer of the international system, Biden spoke about the need for the United States to restore order to a chaotic world.
“We are the organizing principle for the rest of the world,” Biden said in 2022.
Despite some initial failures, including the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan, the Biden administration achieved many of its imperial goals, such as the revitalization of U.S. alliances, a major strategic advantage of the United States over its rivals.
Trump has repeatedly asserted that the United States is a nation in decline, seizing upon President Biden’s cognitive decline and some of his imperial failures to insist that the United States is no longer respected. Soon, however, he will find himself in a position to lead a resurgent empire.
After all, the Biden administration spent the past four years rebooting the American empire, bolstering U.S. imperial power while making some its most brazen moves in Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East.
The Transatlantic System
The Biden administration has significantly reinforced U.S. power in Europe. Although Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has posed a major challenge to the U.S.-led transatlantic system, the Biden administration has turned the situation to its advantage.
Since the start of the Russian invasion, the Biden administration has worked to enlarge and empower NATO, bringing more countries into the alliance while increasing its spending on military operations. There are now more than 100,000 U.S. soldiers stationed across Europe, the largest number since the mid-2000s.
The Biden administration has also taken advantage of the war to weaken Russia. By arming the Ukrainian resistance and imposing powerful sanctions on the Russian economy, the United States has led a concerted effort to entangle Russia in a quagmire. The administration’s basic approach has been to provide Ukraine with enough military assistance to hold its positions against Russia but not enough to push Russia out of the country. According to Austin, the primary reason why Ukrainian soldiers have been able to keep fighting is “because we have provided them the security assistance to be able to do it.”
Despite the approximately 1 million casualties on both sides, administration officials have insisted upon maintaining their approach, prioritizing their goal of making the war into a strategic failure for Russia over the ideal of safeguarding the security and sovereignty of Ukraine.
“What we’ve witnessed and I think what the world has witnessed is a declining superpower in Russia making one of its last-ditch unlawful efforts to go in and seize territory,” State Department official Richard Verma said in September. “This is really a declining power in so many ways and frankly not a very effective military power.”
The Transpacific System
While the Biden administration has strengthened the U.S. position in Europe, it has also reinforced the U.S. position in the Indo-Pacific. Even as China has pushed back against the U.S.-led transpacific system, especially in the South China Sea, the United States has strengthened many of its advantages over China.
One of the Biden administration’s major moves has been to build out the U.S. hub-and-spoke model, the U.S.-led imperial structure that keeps the United States positioned as the dominant hub of the Pacific. Not only has the administration fortified the spokes, or the U.S. allies and partners that encircle China, but it has facilitated multilateral cooperation among the spokes, mainly by working through the Quad and other regional groupings.
In a related move, the Biden administration has intensified U.S. military operations across the region. An estimated 375,000 U.S. soldiers and civilian personnel now operate across the Indo-Pacific, forming the highest concentration of U.S. military service members in a region that extends beyond the United States.
President Biden’s legacy will be the handover of a resurgent American empire to “the most dangerous person” in America.
“In the Indo-Pacific, I think we are seeing a resurgent United States,” Defense Department official Ely Ratner commented last year.
Complementing its military moves, the Biden administration has bolstered U.S. economic power. As it has worked to decouple China from multiple sectors of the U.S. economy, it has spearheaded the formation of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, which reinforces the U.S. position as the center of economic power in the Pacific.
“Contrary to the predictions that the PRC would overtake the United States in GDP either in this decade or the next, since President Biden took office, the United States has more than doubled our lead,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan boasted in October.
The Middle East
Of all the signs of a resurgent American empire, however, perhaps none is more telling than U.S. action in the Middle East. Over the past year, the Biden administration has made it clear that the United States is more capable than ever to spread havoc and destruction across the region.
Since Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack against Israel, the Biden administration has openly backed Israel’s military assaults across the Middle East, all with little consequence for the United States. The Arab states in the region may have once countered Israel by going to war or organizing oil embargoes against the United States, but they have done little to deter the United States from backing Israel’s military operations. In fact, the Arab states are now more likely to come to Israel’s defense, just as they did when they helped Israel counter Iran’s missile attacks in April and October.
The Biden administration may sometimes criticize Israel for how it has conducted its military operations, especially given the fact that Israel has laid waste to Gaza, but through it all, administration officials have been quietly satisfied with how they have enabled Israel to conduct military operations without facing any major retaliation. The Biden administration’s imperial management of the region demonstrates that the United States is now so powerful that it can unleash its strategic asset on the Middle East without having to engage in a wider war.
“I think we’ve done a magnificent job there,” Austin mused earlier this month, taking pride in U.S. imperial achievements while displaying little concern for the people of Gaza or the Israeli hostages who are still being held by Hamas.
The Future Under Trump
As the Biden administration has recharged the American empire, it has never stopped to question its actions. Not even internal dissent within the State Department and other federal agencies over the administration’s complicity in the destruction of Gaza has led to any kind of reckoning over the manner in which it has employed imperial violence around the world.
Perhaps most telling has been the Biden administration’s response to charges that Trump is a fascist. Top administration officials have agreed with the assessments, some made by leading scholars of fascism and others issued by former high-level officials in the first Trump administration. But leaders in the Biden administration have never questioned their belief that they must do everything they can to strengthen the U.S. empire.
Rather than considering what it would mean for a fascist to take control of the most powerful empire in the world, the Biden administration has spent more time considering how to ensure the empire’s survival. In recent months, one of its top priorities has been to “Trump-proof” the empire, meaning that administration officials are searching for ways to ensure that U.S. imperial structures survive the chaos of a second Trump presidency.
Now that Trump’s reelection is here, however, the Biden administration is facing a far more disturbing reality. President Biden’s legacy will be the handover of a resurgent American empire to “the most dangerous person” in America, all with dire implications not just for the people who are targets of Trump’s wrath but for the many people around the world who are victims of U.S. imperial practices.
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