Robert Kagan’s last book, The World America Made, starts with a hypothetical question about the international system. Referring to Frank Capra’s classic film, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” in which protagonist George Bailey gets a chance to see a world that he was not born into, Kagan asks readers to imagine what the world might look like if America were to decline as many have predicted. Since the use of chemical weapons in Syria on 21 August, this question is no longer hypothetical. We are already experiencing a US decline, in terms of influence and credibility around the globe, by choice.
The position the Obama administration took in the last three weeks surprised and confused even the most ardent followers of US foreign policy. A regime that was considered illegitimate by the US government for the last two years not only killed more than 100,000 people under the watch of the international public, but also broke one of the most significant international norms and a red line drawn by President Obama himself a year ago. Under the protection of Russia and China in the UN Security Council, the same regime was able to avoid comprehensive sanctions and with the recent diplomatic maneuver of the Russian government, might even get away with impunity just by giving up its chemical weapons, all the while continuing to kill its own citizens through conventional means. However each and every “heinous crime” that Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad has committed and each and every attempt of China and Russia to protect his regime, which can be called a soft-balancing, is tarnishing the global image of the US and its super power status. In fact, US inaction in Syria and its reluctance to lead an international effort creates a more serious argument of American decline than the country’s domestic economic and political problems. Furthermore, unlike many declinist scholars have argued, it is not a decline caused by the rise of others but mostly a decline by choice of the US administration. The new image of the US is of a global power that avoids its global responsibilities, looks the other way when an authoritarian regime kills its own people, and then suggests it was due to war fatigue among American citizens, which damages the trust of its allies. This picture provides a world without a major global power. It is not even a world of “uni-multipolarity”; it is a world in transition towards multipolarity.
Since the loss of America’s standing around the world due to the Iraq War and the economic crisis beginning with the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers in 2008, there has been an increasing level of discussion regarding the decline of the United States. Many observers of global politics in the US in one way or another argued that the US was losing its status as the sole global power in world politics. For instance, Fareed Zakaria stated the spread of wealth in different parts of the world was a sign of what he called a “Post-American world,” while another major expert of US foreign policy, Charles Kupchan, mentioned it was the emergence of multiple modernities in different parts of the world that created a new global order we can call “no one’s world.” For most of these works, which now have created a separate literature on American declinism, the decline took place mostly as a result of the rise of “others,” rather than the fall of the US itself. Although authors like Thomas Friedman argued the decline took place because the US ignored its crumbling infrastructure and education, it was emphasized that the US still had a global edge in many significant areas, including military strength, demographic vitality, and research and development potential. However, most of these works about declinism focus on how the US sees and feels about itself, rather than how it is perceived by the world. A nation’s identity and standing are sometimes more significantly shaped and constructed by the perception of other countries and the international public. In that sense, the decline of the US may be more about the perception of the US than its
