Moscow (Prensa Latina) Disputes and discussions about the perspectives of the US leadership currently occupy a prominent place in the discourse of Western experts. The line of the current US administration is aimed at interaction with allies, multilateralism and the active participation of partners in global governance.
At the same time, there is clearly enough division and polarization in American society that it may well affect the Joe Biden administration’s ability to achieve global dominance. And is the White House in a position to offer an updated version of liberal internationalism?
We believe that further trends will determine the shape of US foreign and domestic policy for the next 10 to 15 years: rising social inequality; monopolization of the US media landscape; greater political-partisan division; an increase in the costs of addressing the issues on the climate agenda; the crisis of the world dominance of the dollar; falling US production growth rates; intensifying rivalry with China; increased pressure on Russia and especially in the post-Soviet space.
All of these above trends are interconnected and reinforce each other. Bipartisanship as a basic principle of the American political system is experiencing a series of crisis phenomena (this reduces its effectiveness), which leads to a further deepening of political polarization. The very design of the American political system prevents mitigating social inequality, allowing the current status quo to be maintained.
The current restrictive US policy (blockade of Russian assets, attempts to seize and confiscate assets, new sanctions lists, etc.) undermines confidence in the US dollar, forcing the use of other currencies in payments and threatens in the future to completely destroy and abandon the Bretton Woods system, which has served Washington for so long and so successfully.
The slowdown in US manufacturing growth is linked to a long-standing tendency to rely on the service sector, which in turn is driving the process of deindustrialization.
Even under the administration of Donald Trump, attempts have been made to change the existing industrial policy, but without success. Joe Biden is trying to reverse this trend and create more than five million new jobs under the banner “Made in all America”, but unfortunately, there are no special results yet.
Income inequality is causing the erosion of the middle class, the level of vocational education is steadily falling, and there has long been a crisis with highly paid staff to work in the industrial sector.
We are forced to express doubts about the prospects for implementing plans to strengthen the US manufacturing sector both under the Biden administration and in subsequent years.
Politically and socially, the country has become more fragmented than during the Trump presidency. This is also due to restrictions in the field of fiscal policy. The state budget deficit and the volume of public debt will continue to grow.
Coping with the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic will also require massive government spending, which will have a serious impact on the stability of American society.
The ambitious climate agenda is also dividing the American establishment: representatives of the conservative camp continue to challenge high spending on man-made climate change. Representatives of the latter are trying to form an appropriate agenda in the media space to strengthen their own positions.
The strengthening of internal structural problems leads to a limitation of the opportunities of the US on the world stage. In particular, the polarization of the party system is reflected in foreign and security policy, since the coherence, consistency and continuity of the relevant decisions of Washington are reduced.
The United States continues to actively participate in international conflicts through military and non-military means. However, fatigue has been seen in US security policy over the past decade. There is no trace of the old image of the “world policeman”.
At the same time, relations between the United States and Russia remain tense and the situation may worsen further. Now the main place of conflict of interests has become Ukraine, which is actively receiving lethal weapons and is ready to fight “until the last Ukrainian.” The collective West intends to further inflame the conflict between Russia and Ukraine: it does not skimp on various promises that only lead to the destruction of cities, new human victims and a humanitarian catastrophe in a country of many millions.
Russia and China have blurred the once undeniable US dominance. The United States no longer has the astronomical sums necessary to guarantee the security and participation of Washington in various conflicts. We believe that from now on Americans will be forced to behave more selectively in terms of participating in military adventures.
The Biden team continues to take a hard line on China and is trying to make this work systemic and comprehensive. Unlike Trump, the current administration believes that the United States will need to learn to coexist with the Celestial Empire in strategic competition.
Based on the analysis, we conclude that internal problems call into question the leadership of the United States in the international arena. And this is a fact. The world of tomorrow is a world with new centers of power based on multipolar and more equitable development, taking into account the interests of all participating states.
May the world of the future be better.
*Oleg Karpovich and MG Troyansky, Vice Chancellors of the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.