In the shadow of Gorbachev: US elections and global challenges Analysing the American leadership crisis

Last week, American politicians demonstrated their desire to distance themselves from the Russian-Ukrainian war. Now they have no time for it - the presidential election is approaching. US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin publicly demanded that Ukrainians stop attacking Russian oil refineries so that higher petrol prices would not affect the outcome of the election.

And the Republicans in the American parliament continued to block aid to Kyiv, demanding that the goals of the war be specified. Moreover, the elites in Washington feel that situations are much more "fireable" for them in a number of other areas - from the internal political confrontation fraught with an American "Maidan" to the catastrophic situation on the border with Mexico and the crisis in the Red Sea. Ukraine, on the other hand, is only absorbing the melting resources of the global hegemon and its allies. The American position in the world is weakening as a result of many years of mistakes in development strategy and an ideologised foreign policy - examples of which we saw at the recent summit with Pashinyan in Brussels.

Trump is fighting "socialists", "nihilists" and "Jacobins"

The upcoming elections in the United States guarantee the prolongation and deepening of the current crisis situation for the global hegemon. We are looking forward to another year and a half - that is, according to the most minimal estimates - of mess in Washington, in which there will be no clear leadership, no notorious leadership in the United States and in the entire "collective West". Even with the most favourable outcome of the presidential elections in November - a convincing victory of one of the candidates - we should not expect the "crisis of power" in the ocean to end any time soon. Over the past 10-15 years, American politics has degraded greatly, and it will take a very long time to overcome this.

This can be felt in the very election battles in the US, which have fallen to an unprecedentedly low level, already comparable to the world's less developed countries. In the case of Biden, his weakness is so obvious that Trump's supporters openly mock him as an infirm old man, speaking not about the president's position, but about the position of his "handlers". However, doubts arise about the capacity not only of President Biden, but also of Defence Secretary Austin.

But the age of the main contender for the U.S. presidency is a little less than Biden's: Donald Trump will be 78 in June. He, too, sometimes says strange things and, to put it mildly, has not been known for his competence and balanced decisions during his years at the helm of the country. The political movement of Trumpist Republicans is in line with their leader: while denouncing the lies of the Biden-supporting Democrats, they do not give the impression of a reasonable alternative. A striking example of this is the recently published by the opposition American TV channel "FoxNews" text-accusation of the current president - "11 ways Biden and his handlers are destroying America". In it, Victor Davis Hanson, a member of a respectable think tank, accuses Biden of, among other things, considering "Islam similar to or even superior to Christianity", subsidising China and Iran, and antagonising Israel! All of this, according to Hanson, the American president or, rather, his "handlers" are doing because they are either a) "socialists and globalists"; b) "nihilists" who hate America; or c) "Jacobins" intent on destroying the present US in order to build a new state. It looks like the ravings of the tabloid press, but it is the mainstream of the Trumpist movement. Is it worth adding that people with such a mess in their heads are incapable of leading a modern state? We saw how people of this kind took over the USSR during perestroika - a couple of years later, rivers of blood flowed and the state collapsed. The American situation is not identical to Gorbachev's, but it is similar in terms of the disappearance of a reasonable element at the top of power.

Not surprisingly, many Americans are looking around for an alternative - but where will you find one in a country where the weight of candidates in elections has long been calculated in the dollars they raise? In a country where power has been in the hands of two parties since time immemorial, and potential alternatives are trampled down by the efforts of the courts and security services, if not the media and the extremely strange procedure of indirect presidential elections. Nevertheless, people are looking for a way out, and in this election campaign the figure of a third candidate, Robert Kennedy Jr. suddenly appeared. And even CNN was forced to admit that the ratings of this representative of a famous dynasty are already in double digits with minimal promotion. He does not even have a clear programme - but people, desperate to find a meaningful alternative, simply choose him as a descendant of politicians who half a century ago offered their citizens something new and memorable until now.

U.S. minister in Beijing: every day is not Sunday

The current problems in the election race are not some transient aberration, a frenzy of elites against the backdrop of a dynamic country. On the contrary, they reflect the general decline of the American empire in the modern world. Washington manages to create the appearance of maintaining its influence in world politics and economy thanks to structural instruments - international structures, banking institutions, the status of the dollar as a reserve currency, etc. built in the past in the interests of the United States. In addition, there are also tools of force, from sanctions to military force. As Chinese Premier Li Qiang lamented the other day, unable to cope with economic competition, the U.S. authorities and their allies are politicising economic issues and turning them into security issues. There are plenty of examples of this - from banning Chinese electronics and G5 networks in Western countries to successfully convincing Europeans that Russian pipeline gas is dangerous and it is better to buy US LNG at triple the price.

Nevertheless, US hegemony is crumbling. Last Monday, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's four-day visit to China - her second in nine months - came to an end. She was outraged in Beijing at the "overproduction of Chinese goods," especially innovative ones like solar panels, batteries and electric cars. It sounds comical, but it's also sad - Americans are unhappy that the Chinese are destroying the West's hopes of maintaining technological superiority and preventing US firms and their allies from profiting as much as possible from new technologies!

Even more absurd were the US Treasury Department's specific arguments that the Chinese are pulling ahead in world markets unfairly due to "low" household consumption in the PRC and "inflated" capital investment by Chinese companies, particularly through the Chinese government's subsidisation of high-tech manufacturing. Let’s translate: the Chinese are blamed for the fact that their population is not wallowing in reckless consumerism like Western nations, and their firms are investing available money in their sustainable development instead of sawing it off and squandering it. As for subsidies, the West has always been in the business of subsidising, and, for example, the US is now implementing two huge programmes to subsidise high-tech manufacturing that would make European leaders' hair stand on end. We are referring to two scandalous laws that provide large-scale support for American manufacturers in the high-tech and green sectors ("CHIPS and Science Act" and "Inflation Control Act"), which are buying up foreign businesses and persuading them to move to the US.

In short, Washington is dissatisfied not with any particular aspect of Chinese policy, but with the Chinese economic model itself, which has linked business with national interests. But while Americans are furious at the success of China and its economic model, they can't do anything about it, so Yellen has been asking rather than pointing out to the Chinese. This is interesting against the backdrop of the Americans' tough attitude to the same European Union members - they do not give the latter a damn, rigidly refusing to talk, for example, about the American policy of luring European business across the ocean. In general, Yellen was more accommodating with her Chinese colleagues and, on the contrary, at the final press conference emphasised that the US does not want a break with China and is aware of its catastrophic consequences for both countries, while relations between Washington and Beijing have improved over the past year!

While China is developing the latest technology and manufacturing, the West is pumping money into war, which is also an investment - but in a different kind of plan. New estimates of the consequences of increased military spending by world powers indicate that it will either add $10 trillion to the G7 debt over the next ten years or cut remaining social programmes. Most of both military spending and the associated debt would fall on the United States - an additional $3.3 trillion. Of course, Trump supporters point out that current U.S. government policy is already increasing the debt by a trillion dollars every hundred days! Last year, the net cost of servicing the US government debt was 2.4 per cent of GDP, and already this year it will jump to 3.1 per cent of GDP.

There are only two ways to "repay" these debts - one worse than the other. Either de facto not to repay them, at least not in full - to achieve the "burning off" of most of the amount through inflation or "restructuring" of the debt. Or return them at someone else's expense: by achieving a military defeat and further plunder of the opponent - for example, through the mechanism of contributions. Something similar was imposed on Weimar Germany a hundred years ago, with all the known consequences. In fact, while voicing this week the idea of giving Ukraine several tens of billions of euros in loans secured by profits from Russian assets, American officials continued to probe schemes of exactly this kind. The consequences of the implementation of any of the above options guarantee geopolitical cataclysms on a planetary scale.

But there is another nuance that is unpleasant for the current global hegemon: there is no confidence that the West is capable of achieving such a crushing defeat of, say, at least Russia, let alone China. The fact is that decades of supposedly successful operation of the liberal free-market model after the West's victory in the Cold War have led the US to deplorable results. As a result of long-term mistakes of the American government, the country lost many industries, technologies and even scientific potential. The US economy has so far managed to mitigate the problems by sucking the last juices out of the European Union economy - through the unapologetic poaching of production from the EU, to which European politicians do not even dare to respond.

However, the problems are very deep and are linked to qualitative problems in the development of American industry: its technological might is faltering. The latest serial failures are a typical example - starting with the obvious problems of American military equipment failing to cope with a determined enemy either in the Red Sea or in Eastern Europe. The Ukrainian military openly prefers Chinese drones (of mediocre civilian brands like SZ DJI Technology) to American ultra-modern specs. In their defence, American manufacturers complain that sometimes they can't improve the quality of their products.... because of the ban on the use of Chinese components. In other words, the war effort quickly exposed the "pink fog" of Western propaganda about its own military power. Contrasts happen in the most painful ways - for example, the excitement over the U.S. Army's purchase of the first sixth-generation strategic bomber in January faded after the serial crashes of U.S. Boeing airliners became public in the last couple of months.

The ill-conceived expansion has led to a dead-end

The US strategic position has also weakened due to foreign policy miscalculations in countering the rise of its main global competitor, China. The events of the 2010s in Eastern Europe, especially the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war, dealt a crushing blow to America's global strategy. Outwardly, they looked like some kind of successful “policy of values”, a struggle for “democratization” and expansion of the Euro-Atlantic space.

As a result of this “liberal jihad,” the collective West moved east, tightly binding several more structurally weak small countries to itself (Armenia is another example of this). And it would be fine if only they would hang an additional burden on it - but as a result, NATO got stuck in the Eastern European geopolitical swamp and the conflict with the Russian Federation and its allies for many, many years. The alliance is still trying to declare its global ambitions and claims to a role in Asia, but in reality, it can barely cope with a dying and hopelessly stagnant Eastern Europe. Moreover, its confrontation with Russia leads to the fact that the United States cannot only more actively involve its European allies against China, but cannot even play the “Russian card” against China in one form or another.

But Beijing is playing this card against Washington, as evidenced by Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov's trip to Beijing earlier this week. During private talks with him on Monday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi articulated the concept of "dual counteraction [to the West by China and Russia] versus dual deterrence [of Russia and China by the West]".

In addition, Washington has also failed to deal with the expansion of the anti-China AUKUS alliance, which it managed to create in the Far East - this week it became clear that it was not possible to harmonise the interests of the alliance members (the US, Britain, Australia) and potential partners. On Wednesday, the Australian Prime Minister said that he "welcomes" Japan as a partner of the anti-China AUKUS alliance, but opposes its joining the bloc. To recall, AUKUS was created to militarily confront China in the Pacific in September 2021 by the Anglo-Saxon countries. At that time, the Americans kicked the French out of their Australian business, and together with the British began to create an exclusive club - demonstrating how members of the "collective West" do not mind cutting each other's throats under beautiful words about values.

Washington's problems with its allies have become chronic. Within Europe's pro-American NATO alliance, the problems have so far been obscured only thanks to the war, otherwise the struggle between Germany and Poland for the role of the main U.S. ally on the continent, along with the traditional competition between Berlin, Paris and London, would have undermined NATO long ago.

While Washington is wasting time in this infighting between its allies, the clock is ticking in Beijing’s favour—Chinese power is growing, and China’s system of international alliances is growing and strengthening. An example is not only the obvious facts of Beijing’s rapprochement with Moscow or Tehran or Riyadh. A less high-profile example was the creeping process of emerging from the international isolation of a country long considered a Chinese “toxic liability”—North Korea. In recent weeks, it has become clear that the UN sanctions regime against it is weakening, and Pyongyang itself has become a welcome friend of Russian leaders for a couple of years now. The United States has invested heavily in this geopolitical revolution, playing out a strategic combination of dubious integrity in the late 2010s, using its South Korean allies to turn the strategic alignments in Eastern Europe on their heads. Seoul was given carte blanche to supply the Poles with gigantic quantities of the latest weapons. A direct consequence of this geopolitical manipulation has been Russian purchases of North Korean missiles and shells since 2022 for operations against Ukraine, which is moving closer to NATO...

Let’s summarise: while being surprised by the strange steps of the American establishment, one should bear in mind that the USA is not just a state in a state of crisis of power, which will last for a long time and may even worsen. The "Trump factor" does not exist - the problem is different. It is a state whose position on the international stage has weakened, and only former triumphs and some intangible factors (like the role of the global media controlled by the Western establishment) prevent the world from seeing the material reality. Washington politicians are handing out ever more lightweight guarantees, threats and sanctions, and therefore doing so more arbitrarily. By the way, the promises made by the American government to the Armenian leadership in Brussels - strategically adventurous and practically unsupported materially - became an example of this. It is important to understand the extent to which they are actually filled with content and treat them in this way, rather than accepting them as an axiom, believing that the "word of Washington" still has the same weight as the times of another America, which in the last century went from victory to victory.

The views and opinions expressed by guest columnists in their op-eds may differ from and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff.