THE MOST DANGEROUS MOMENT
THE SELF-INFLICTED WEAKENING OF THE US
“Hi, Jack, what are you doing here, at the cafe? I feel thrilled. Amid the flood of ominous news and comments, I read an essay that left me carefully optimistic.”
“Oh, you read it in the Trumpian press!”
“No. I read it in Foreign Affairs.”
“Optimistic? Pass it to me! I want to read it."
“Yes, of course. I passed it to Nicco and he is coming. Maybe you want to stay.”
“I am already here.”
“I called him even though he gives me the creeps, Jack. He is so cold! No, I don’t mean cool, which I cannot deny he is, but that coldness that surrounds him is so weird!”
“You know it is only natural.”
Right then, Niccolò traversed the door and sat close to Jack. Pere felt a coldness going down his spine.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Nicco,” said Pere, sure Nicco had heard what he said. He reached for his sweater. “I didn’t know you were here already...”
“I am always around,” said Nicco, making a cold gesture. “Regarding what you sent me, I confirmed my pessimism.”
“Could you please tell me what this article is?” asked Jack.
Pere responded,
“It’s called Rogue Superpower: ‘Why This Could be an Illiberal American Century.’ it says that for many reasons, especially its demographic growth in a world where all other countries except the African ones are experiencing population decline; its technological advance, superior to that of the rest of the world, which would allow it to compensate for the lower rate of its population; and the overall decline of everybody else except the United States. Even if the author doesn’t use that word, he thinks the country will become full of hubris, and will use its power to exploit the rest of the world. I’ll read you two key paragraphs:
<”Remaining the most powerful country, however, is not the same thing as remaining the guarantor of a liberal international order. Somewhat paradoxically, the same trends that will reinforce U.S. economic and military might will also make it harder to play that role—and make Trump’s approach more attractive. Since the end of World War II, the United States has seen itself as the chief defender of a democratic capitalist way of life and the champion of a rules-based international system built on liberal values. Washington has provided dozens of countries with military protection, secure shipping routes, and easy access to U.S. dollars and markets. In exchange, those countries have offered their loyalty and, in many cases, have liberalized their own economies and governments.
<”In the coming decades, however, rapid population aging and the rise of automation will dampen faith in democratic capitalism and fracture the so- called free world at its core. The burdens of caring for older populations and the job losses resulting from new technologies will spur competition for resources and markets. Aging and automation will also lay bare the flaws of the international institutions that governments rely on to tackle common problems, and Americans will feel less dependent on foreign partners than they have in generations. In response, the United States might become a rogue superpower. Like the twentieth century, the twenty-first century will be dominated by the United States. But whereas the previous “American century” was built on a liberal vision of the U.S. role in the world, what we might be witnessing today is the dawn of an illiberal American century.”>[1]
“It doesn’t sound promising as a source of optimism,” said Jack.
“Well, no,” said Pere. I thought that if we could be a rogue power, we could also be a principled power. We will have the choice. Yet, in all cases, we would be the most powerful country in the world during this century. This is what will give us the choice.”
Nicco spoke.
“I found the argument weak. As you can see in the paragraphs you quoted, the author assumes that the dampening faith in democratic capitalism would weaken the rest of the world but strengthen the United States, that aging and automation would be carriers of decay for other countries but not for the United States, that the job losses resulting from new technologies and the competition for resources and markets would not affect your country, and so on. He assumes without justification that the negative processes that could hinder the enemies would be positive for the United States. You can invert this assumption, equally without any justification, and conclude that the United States would be the weakest country in the century, and (reversing the assumed relationship between having power and becoming rogue), it would also be piously principled. Worse still, the author does not consider that Donald Trump, the Prince in the novel you are writing, is doing everything possible to destroy any advantage that the United States has now or could have in the future. This can be excused because the article is dated in 2020, so the author had not seen the suicidal actions taken by The Prince lately in his second period—though some signs were visible during his first administration.
THE HEN OF THE GOLDEN EGGS
Nicco continued.
“Let’s look at the competitive advantages of the United States at this moment.
“The United States has the most competitive economy in the world. It is leading the technological revolution that is creating the knowledge economy and is acquiring significant economic advantages as a result. For reasons I will detail later, its economy is growing faster than the European Union’s and is more solid than the Chinese one.
“The strongest and broadest alliance ever formed. As I described in a recent article,[2] the network of alliances the United States has woven around the three potential enemies in a war is formidable. To a large extent, the country achieved this feat by turning enemies into friends at the end of World War II. Germany, Italy, and Japan are bulwarks in this network of alliances that cover the entire Eurasia, from Spain to Korea, Japan, and Oceania. These are powerful alliances, proven through coordinated actions for decades.
“The flexibility and creativity of a working liberal democracy. In a world of drastic and continuous change, flexibility and creativity are essential to creating innovations and rapidly leveraging them to overcome transformation challenges. Liberal democracy has proven to be the most flexible and creative political system.
“Thus, the hen of the golden eggs is the unique approach the United States took to organize the post-war world. It combines domestic liberal democracy with an international system based on the rule of law and the close collaboration of developed countries, all of which own a similar domestic liberal democracy and share in the global rule of law. Fundamental in this approach was the successful effort to turn enemies into friends.”
“Critics, like The Prince, get into a serious contradiction when they say that this overall model worked against the United States while filling themselves with hubris when talking about the country’s enormous power. Nobody can seriously deny that leveraging the country’s power with the cooperation of many allies worldwide was highly successful, not just for the world but also significantly for the United States.
KILLING THE HEN
Nicco was not in the mood to stop.
“Besides me, few people suspected that The Prince would work to systematically demolish all the advantages attained by the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. That someone with the personal characteristics of The Prince would quickly put himself in the position of doing this should be no surprise for anybody. What is surprising is that, knowing what he would do (like many other similar individuals, he did not hide what he would do in his second campaign for the presidency), people elected him president and kept on supporting him in large numbers.
“Regarding the Economy. A system based on private initiative is at the core of the economy that produces this dynamism. The importance of this point was underlined in a recent report produced by Mario Draghi for the European Union, which emphasized the liberalization of the Europan economies to close the 20% gap that appeared in the last twenty years between the United States and the EU in terms of growth and productivity. Thus, one would expect Americans to double down in this strategy. Wrong. They, led by a Republican who daily pledges his faith in equal measures to Christianity and liberal capitalism, are turning toward centralizing economic power in the presidency, which is the opposite of what he pretends to believe, along with giving tremendous power to bureaucrats managing a complex system of tariffs that will weaken the United States directly and through an incoming chaos.
“One example will illustrate this. According to The Times,
<”Only Donald Trump announces policy like this. On a plane to the Super Bowl last night, the president nonchalantly said “we’ll also be announcing steel tariffs on Monday... tomorrow... any steel coming into the United States is going to have a 25 per cent tariff”. A taken aback reporter followed up: “What about aluminium?” He replied: “Aluminium too.” Right.”>
“Steel is an intermediate material thousands of industries use to produce innumerable products. Everybody knows that increasing the costs of intermediate materials is terrible for industries, which is what Trump has said he wants to promote to go back to the great times of the 1950s, the early 1900s with William McKinley, or the old nineteenth century of territorial expansion.
“As everybody knows, taxing an activity reduces its supply. If you tax steel, demand for it will fall for one or both reasons: either the overall industrial production of things using steel as an intermediate input declines, or the producers of these things substitute other materials for steel. In both cases, the output of steel for domestic use is reduced. And you can guess what potential international steel buyers will say if American firms try to sell their steel to them. I don’t want to speculate why The Prince does these things. What is his ultimate objective? He does this because he doesn’t understand or wants to do it. This reasoning is straightforward, and he says he is smart.
“As I have insisted in these pages, when you organize the economy around tariffs, the government becomes the affixer of profits. Thus, The Prince is creating a new Deep State to replace the one he assures exists today, created by the Democrats. You can doubt the existence of this old Deep State, but this one you are seeing in the moment of its creation. It is a sign of our times and the cowardly nature of the right, who cannot pronounce two words without saying economic freedom, that it is an extreme rightist who is creating the basis of a centralized economy.
Regarding Diplomacy. No one of the great powers—the United States, Russia, and China—could singlehandedly win a war with the other two, so the obvious strategy in case of conflict must be to strengthen alliances with the countries on your side and to cause the debilitation of the partnerships of your enemies. But The Prince is doing the opposite. In the few days after his inauguration, he attacked in words and deeds the closest allies of the United States, with actions and words aiming at causing pain and anger—as if to ensure that hatred against his country would set in in a way that would be impossible to eradicate for many years. He spread this hatred all over North America, Latin America, and Europe. What is the purpose of such hatred? Who will win from it?
“Regarding local American democracy. The Prince is attacking the American liberal democracy with a thousand cuts, some of them very profound—destroying institutions, using the power of the state to take personal revenge, and turning the majesty of the American state into the chaos of a circus. It is doing things so they don’t trigger the checks and balances, at least not in the massive way they should be reacting to vast conflicts of interest and abuses of power.
“Population. There are other areas where The Prince is destroying any hope that the country will keep its global power, including his immigration policy. According to the article on the rogue United States,
<“The outlook is more dire than many people realize. Over the next 30 years, the working-age populations of the United States’ democratic allies will shrink by 12 percent, on average, making sustained economic growth almost impossible.”>
“The United States presented a better demographic profile than its friends and foes. Before January 20, 2025, its population would have kept growing until the end of this century, from an estimated 338 million in 2025 to 369 million in 2080.[3] Yet, this was estimated considering net immigration, both legal and illegal. Without such immigration, the population would start diminishing in 2033, so the dire projections used in the article against the United States’ friend would also apply to the United States itself.
THE PARADOX
Then, Nicco decided to finish his presentation portraying a paradoxical situation.
“I should add something. The problem is that when an authoritarian has captured power, people start feeling the advantages of authoritarianism but not its disadvantages. A new dynamic overtakes society as some people feel pleased that the leader is mistreating their enemies, some others think that having an authoritarian does not affect their lives as severely as they had imagined, and only one part of the population feels the hits. Within a short time, the proportions of people in each group change in favor of the supporters. People feel proud whenever the leader insults foreigners and shows the country’s power.
“While the article's argument is exaggerated, it is reasonable to believe that the United States will be more resilient in the long term than China and Russia. In the absence of its nuclear weapons, Russia is not in the same league as the United States, China, or the EU. But the Russian nuclear weapons exist, and Russia is a present threat to the West. China is another story but still has two terrible Damocles’ Swords hanging on it.
“Population. China had 563 million inhabitants in 1950 and 1,421 million in 2018. Then it will fall to 663 million in 2100. So, the population in 2100 will be close to the one it had in 1950. This will be catastrophic and most likely eliminate China from the great powers.
“Economically. The demographic fall will be catastrophic for the economy. A worse catastrophe will come from two self-inflicted wounds. First, China wants to go back to communism and impose a might-is-right regime in the world order. Second, as a manifestation of this, it wants to conquer Taiwan as a manifestation of national pride. Both desires are self-destructive.
“Thus, by the end of the century, there will be two great superpowers, the United States and Europe—if only they do not commit suicide like the one The Prince is attempting to carry out. There is no reason to believe that gaining global hegemony for a second time—as it happened in the twentieth century—will turn them into rogue powers. The experience is on the contrary, and it will happen again if only these countries do not abandon the values that created the Western world order at the end of World War II. Thus, looking long brings about hope. The idea that the future must be the domain of The Princes, so convenient for The Prince, must be discarded by the population.
“Before you relax, however, you must realize that for the likes of Putin and Xi Jinping, the trends now prefiguring the end of the century pose a sense of urgency in achieving their purposes: it is now or never.
“Seen from this perspective, what you see a moment, a window of perhaps ten or twenty years, in which Russia and China will still be strong enough to win a war against the United States and the West. So, the next twenty years are the years of danger. This makes crucial the need for checks and balances to work in the United States to stop self-destruction. If the extreme right succeeds in debilitating the country, God help us.”
Nicco stood up and walked toward the door. Before going through it, he turned around and said,
“This is a subject we should discuss further. Like Rome in the years preceding Caesar Augustus’ accession, the United States will not collapse as a society, but democracy may end.”
…..
Manuel Hinds is a Fellow at The Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University. He shared the Manhattan Institute's 2010 Hayek Prize. He has worked in 35 countries as a division chief and then as a consultant to the World Bank. He was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His website is manuelhinds.com
[1] Michael Beckley, Rogue Superpower: Why This Could be an Illiberal American Century, Foreign Affairs, November / December 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-10-06/illiberal-american-century-rogue-superpower?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=backstory&utm_campaign=summer_reads_to_backstory_2023_prospects&utm_content=20250209&utm_term=fa-backstory-2019
[2] Manuel Hinds, The Northern Glare of WWIII: The Center of the World, Substack, https://manuelhinds.substack.com/p/the-northern-glare-of-wwiii
[3] United States Census Bureau, International Database, https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/idb/#/dashboard?dashboard_page=country&COUNTRY_YR_ANIM=2025&CCODE_SINGLE=US&subnat_map_admin=ADM1&CCODE=US