The True Sources Of American Power

Strategy involves tradeoffs, something the present crop of leaders in Washington, D.C. apparently refuse to accept - the lasting detriment of US national security.

This is a post where I go a tad esoteric in the interest of trying to inject a shred of scientific sanity into the ongoing debate about how the USA can best play a role in the world.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan recently published an essay in Foreign Affairs that exemplifies all the manifold failings of American strategy over the past thirty years. Titled The Sources of American Power, it’s more or less a partisan laundry list of Biden Administration accomplishments reminiscent of a professors CV.

If you haven’t ever seen one of these, unlike a standard resume an academic’s Curriculum Vitae can run to several dozen pages long. It looks impressive, but this is deceptive because professors put nearly everything they ever write, present, chair, or otherwise participate in onto their CV.

Talk about an ongoing project at a conference? Put a line on that CV! Get something published in the journal a couple friends in your field happen to edit? Add another! Slightly revise a lecture you’ve given a hundred times and perform it for members of the local community? One more line!

I am unaware of literally any other profession on the planet where it is standard to pretend that the normal activities of your employment are noteworthy. Imagine a resume that includes every major presentation, report, or business travel a job seeker was ever even slightly involved in and you get the idea of how ridiculous this is.

Why are CVs like that? Mostly because it entrenches a particular form of elitism that gives anyone who has been able to play the game long enough a leg up on their competition. And when lifetime employment or a big NSF grant is on the line, you had better believe that this matters.

This box-checking, resume-padding behavior is ubiquitous among the Ivy League educated set, where the main goal of attending a particular institution is making lifelong friends who will hire you and boost your work - ideally wealthy ones. That ethic came to dominate American academia for most of the Postwar period because of the rapid expansion of higher education and government involvement in scientific research in the early Cold War and the fact that seventy years ago the US economy was still concentrated in the northeast and Great Lakes regions.

But it also predominates in the hiring processes in many circles of the American federal government, especially foreign policy. Folks like Sullivan - in his mid 40s, he’s just a few years older than myself - rise through the ranks in this kind of system by carefully cultivating alliances with powerful people and adding the right types of lines to their CV. These function as signaling devices meant to assure anyone a person who might hire Sullivan that he’ll play the game the way they like.

Naturally, the quality of a person’s intellect takes a back seat to the ability to get along with the leaders of some clique. This always leads to groupthink, the tendency for a group of people to simply decide how they’d like reality to be then bully anyone in their ranks who dares to contravene the conventional wisdom.

The result? Disaster, sooner or later. This was the vital lesson drawn by Irving Janis in his classic study of the Kennedy Administration’s gross negligence during the Bay of Pigs invasion of Castro’s Cuba and its far better performance in the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis.

A recent puff piece by The New Yorker about Jake Sullivan shared some starkly revealing facts about the kind of mind the dude possesses. It is highly telling that one of the most common descriptions of the guy is that he’s a “master debater.”

Setting aside the possibility this was meant as a clever insult - say those two words together fast and you have the source of many a schoolyard joke where I grew up - it ought to alarm the heck out of Americans that someone with such a key role in setting policy is most renowned for his ability to spin a lot of details into a convincing narrative.

A lot of people like to imagine that debate is a process designed to reveal truth, but that’s just not the case in the real world. Most public debates are about trying to associate your opponent with something the audience dislikes while making yourself look attractive. People hold truths, these have no independent life of their own, and it is always easier to make someone empathize on a personal level than change their mind with cited facts.

It is culturally inconvenient to admit this out loud, because a lot of powerful people rely on presenting themselves as experts with authority that grants them the right to tell other people what is true. But this sort of claim is only viable if people don’t oppose it. And telling them that their facts are incorrect only terminates debate without a resolution, it doesn’t prove them wrong or guarantee that they will be willing to behave as one desires.

Scientific debates are utterly boring and devoid of feeling because they almost always hinge on assumptions made at the start of the study or the selection of appropriate methodology to address the question of interest. Only when someone attempts to overthrow an established paradigm that lots of scientists accept as established fact do sparks fly, because that’s when people’s legacies are on the line.

Sullivan’s piece in Foreign Affairs is devoid of science as well as strategy: it’s a debate piece intended to give partisan loyalists talking points. The goal is to have other partisans repeat these talking points without critical thought in order to sustain the illusion that Biden is a competent leader who is doing amazing things to save democracy around the world.

If this were the case, then wars wouldn’t be breaking out everywhere and dragging on longer than strictly necessary, as in Ukraine. The USA would not be so uncritically supportive of Israel’s way of waging war either, no matter how brutal Hamas’ murderous assault on civilians absolutely was.

Look, it says pretty much all that anyone needs to know about Sullivan that he, Secretary of State Blinken, CIA Director Burns, Sullivan’s brother, and his own wife are all old hands among the Clinton-Obama-Biden insiders. They go to the same weddings, know the same people, and I absolutely guarantee that they have fully culturally assimilated with the Northeast Yankee utopian social order that sees itself as America’s natural elite.

Unfortunately, you have to in order to have a voice in American foreign policy. The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about is ultimately rooted not in pure capitalist greed, but the belief of folks like these that they inherited the right to run the world because America is special. They go to the same Ivy League universities, spout the same rhetoric, and embrace the same deluded worldview that pretends the clock has been stuck at about 1965 for the past six decades.

I’m going to bold the following sentence out, because it’s that important. Effective strategy always boils down to an understanding that you have limited resources and must to be cautious in where you invest them.

The core reason why systems theory and science are such powerful tools is that they can be used to describe how the world structures itself in a way that looks deeply strategic on the surface but is in fact just a product of a bunch of self-absorbed agents trying to increase their personal power. Every person around the world is bound together in a world system defined by a number of powerful entities seeking to pursue whatever they see as their interests.

This might sound bleak, but in fact isn’t, thanks to the incredible diversity of human communities. Systems approaches are focused on characterizing and helping manage complexity, and they are why management of systems as diverse as the macroeconomy and landscapes are informed by the same underlying principles.

Ecosystems are incredibly complex yet also very simple on longer timescales - so much that people who posit an intelligent designer can be forgiven the inherent difficulties of this concept. Fortunately, no active intervention by a divine force is required to understand how systems function, because no matter how big or unique all organisms require energy to survive.

The food web, an idea most people are familiar with thee days, is ultimately a diagram of how energy flows through individuals and populations over time. Creatures live in total interdependence yet perceive themselves and exist as independent agents focused on survival.

A simple food web and, oddly, decent metaphor for the USA’s strategic dilemma. It can’t be everything. Diagram by Thompsma from Wiki Commons. Not shown is how decomposed animals from millions of years ago were compressed by geological forces to become oil and natural gas, burning of which releases carbon that ultimately alters the other loops.

Despite all the manifest possibility visible in nature across the planet, however, many patterns are common in all regions and biomes. Herbivores consume plants, carnivores require meat, with the movement of energy between individuals and populations possible to express in terms of calories. Australia is full of marsupials, a family tree distinct from those dominant in other parts of the world, but its animals and their interactions still bear strong resemblances to those far away.

In a sense, carnivore and herbivore are simply different strategies for survival in a resource-limited world. Evolution might have made the choice for the organism, but in the end the agent has to cope with the environment it inherited - none can fill every niche, not even Humans.

There is no species that can do all the things. Even humans are only an apex predator in the aggregate; few could successfully fight off a deer during rut much less a bear or tiger or pack of wolves - and there are prey that even the most powerful predators will try to avoid unless desperate for food. Every form of life is a compromise between different forces of nature, different kinds evolving as those with certain genetic traits fail to reproduce as often as others.

Countries are no different. They have limited resources, no matter how powerful, and bigger ones tend also to incur a lot of upkeep costs. They are prone to overstretch, which makes them brittle and vulnerable, hollowing out from the inside until leaders come along who push it past the breaking point. It’s what happened to the USSR, Britain, and all the other European colonial empires, of which the USA has managed to become a vital member from the perspective of billions of people around the world.

For far too long American foreign policy “experts” have been promoted based on their ability to insist that the USA is capable of defying the laws of gravity indefinitely. Though there are always dissenters, in general you cannot be taken seriously in American foreign policy circles if you do not loudly proclaim America to be special, blessed, and the rightful leader of the free world.

All the Biden Administration’s stale rhetoric about “inflection points” is just an attempt to sound like it has a grasp on the systemic nature of the challenges it keeps bungling. Oh sure, it pays lip service to the idea that the USA must adapt, but it very obviously lacks any coherent vision of why or how because leaders like Jake Sullivan refuse to say what it cannot achieve, where it will have to make sacrifices.

Worse, Sullivan - like most debaters ever eager to latch onto a word that sounds nice but has ambiguous meaning - in his piece dares to latch onto the essential concept of adaptability when talking about American power without ever defining crucial questions like to what? and especially not for what purpose?

It’s worth focusing on a few specific passages that stand out at this point. In reading it, you can see at work the mind of a person who paid close attention to what their professors wanted them to say in college essays and learned to cater to multiple interests in the same piece.

Being one of those fortunate students who was rather good at this in my undergraduate days - finals week as a political science major was rarely stressful thanks to most essays being a matter of stringing key words together while imitating the style of an established writer - I know well the signs of make-work and shamming.

The very first paragraph starts off the way banal political statements coming out of the USA, China, or nearly anywhere else generally do. It describes some generic principles that sound nice, but mean little, such as: “Nothing in world politics is inevitable. The underlying elements of national power, such as demography, geography, and natural resources, matter, but history shows that these are not enough to determine which countries will shape the future.”

Like, duh Jake - pardon my West Coast slang. This is the equivalent of starting off a student essay with “Since the dawn of mankind… ”

You know, the first thing they teach you in a college writing class not to do, because it makes you sound like a little kid trying to act like a sage scholar.

After, Sullivan’s piece goes on to pretend to accept exactly the point I’m making here - that the foreign policy of today was constructed in a different age and things have to change. This is a standard rhetorical device employed by functionaries’ whose true aim is to make sure nothing ever does.

A recitation of the conventional wisdom about how America got to this difficult place follows, naturally lamenting the US being distracted by the War on Terror and Trump being himself. Never is there a single mention of the fact that Biden and most of his present team were right there in the mix the whole time at one level or another - Biden as a senator voted for Bush to go into Iraq back in 2003.

With most casual readers safely tuning out at this point, Sullivan lays on the nonsense.

“The country’s future will be determined by two things: whether it can sustain its core advantages in geopolitical competition and whether it can rally the world to address transnational challenges from climate change and global health to food security and inclusive economic growth.”

Ah, isn’t it grand to see mission creep in action? Of course a bureaucrat would want to present a world where every issue is security related where the US is required to lead. The consultant speak goes on:

We realized that the United States is stronger when its partners are, too, and so we are committed to delivering a better value proposition globally to help countries solve pressing problems that no one country can solve on its own.

More banal rhetoric with no meaning. Just an argument for the US being in charge because that makes American leaders feel good about themselves.

After this sad lead-in follows the standard boilerplate mythic history that is being shoved down Americans’ throats now about the world: that decades of free trade has enriched the massive multinational companies (that Biden and his clique serve, though they pretend otherwise), allowing China to steal all the jobs. Now, the argument goes, the US needs to subsidize less competitive companies in politically important states to reclaim its industrial prowess while throwing even more money at the Pentagon without any real idea of what will get the most bang for the buck in a future showdown with China - or anyone.

This silly narrative holds that it’s solely China’s fault that people are poor in the midwest and the US economy has been so financialized that if Wall Street sneezes regular folks lose their jobs in droves. It’s a convenient mythos spread by partisans on both sides who know that it’s easy and popular to blame anyone but themselves.

Truth is that US manufacturing supremacy in the early Cold War was an illusion caused by everyone else’s factories being destroyed in World War Two. It was the restoration of Europe’s economy in the 1960s and 1970s with higher-tech factories than US companies were willing to invest in that started shifting the global balance of trade. China for decades specialized in low-cost manufacturing the US abandoned in the early twentieth century when workers started asking for stuff like safety protocols and hazard insurance, driving up the cost of labor.

Today you don’t produce much stuff at scale in the USA because labor costs are so high. In parts of the USA that are far less wealthy than the West Coast and Northeast people still pay the same prices for most most goods imported from abroad, meaning that sharing the same currency and federal government winds up eating away what income gains they are able to secure. This has slowly torn apart the fabric of American society, exacerbating its already overwhelming geographic challenges.

Small wonder people in rural areas and poorer states rebel against government regulations, even well-meaning ones intended to keep the environment clean and people able to go to the hospital for care! They can’t afford anything better. Inequality is a deadly self-reinforcing feedback loop.

Now, the very same companies and rich tycoons who didn’t invest in the USA want to see tariffs and trade barriers go up to protect the capital they deign to bring back to the country. The jobs that are created won’t replace the ones lost, or employ the children of unemployed factory workers because they were long ago forced to move to more economically vibrant areas - hence the high cost of housing in coastal cities.

The long term effect of the return to tariffs and protectionism will be higher prices for everybody - this is basic economics. Had the US bothered to make sure that the gains of free trade and the strong dollar were spread around equitably, the country wouldn’t be in such dire shape.

So how twisted it is that Sullivan dares to invoke former president and Supreme commander of Allied Forces in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, when more or less calling for the military-industrial complex to expand forever to deal with big, scary China. After all, if every issue around the world affects US national security in some way, then how can anyone question infinitely rising Pentagon budgets no matter the financial situation in the rest of the country?

Nobody has ever tried that before. Nope, the USSR was completely different in every possible respect. If you label one system capitalism and the other socialism, that automatically leads to different outcomes regardless of hard evidence! There’s the difference between political and scientific debate in a nutshell.

Sullivan’s piece then moves on to the new idiotic Bidenworld line that all international conflicts are one and the same. This is now the crux of the entire Biden Administration’s posture towards the rest of the world: our democracy at home is in peril because of MAGA and Trump so everyone else’s must be too and for the same reasons.

A drowning man is dangerous to help because desperation can and will make him do something self-defeating like cling so tight to his rescuer that both go under. That’s the brutal honest truth about the USA’s political leaders these days.

It’s highly notable that Sullivan totally ignores any and all criticisms about the Biden Administration’s performance in Afghanistan, Ukraine, or Israel. Abandoning the first was necessary and went as well as could be expected. In Ukraine Biden single-handedly saved NATO and Europe and defeated Putin’s empire. And as far as Israel goes, of course Biden would very much prefer that fewer Palestinians die but won’t lift a finger to do anything that makes Israel curtail or even focus its operations.

I particularly like this inane hypothetical:

“If the United States were still fighting in Afghanistan, it is highly likely that Russia would be doing everything it could right now to help the Taliban pin Washington down there, preventing it from focusing its attention on helping Ukraine.”

I mean, Biden is doing a fine enough of a job of pinning down the US and diverting attention from Ukraine by embracing the utterly compromised Netanyahu in Israel and proclaiming himself a Zionist. And the key issue with Biden’s abandonment of Afghanistan was the total failure to deploy sufficient forces in time to hold Kabul long enough for everyone who wanted to evacuate to go without having to cling to transport planes trying to take off. That and effectively grounding Afghanistan’s air force by pulling contractor support while the Taliban was on the march, having already openly violated the peace treaty Biden then cited as an excuse to not intervene.

Classic American bureaucrat tactics: deflect from a far more useful hypothetical with a broken one. As if American personnel sitting in Iraq and Syria in case ISIS comes back aren’t brutally vulnerable to whatever Iran or an allied militia tries to throw at them at Putin or Iran’s instigation! Kind of cute to cite one convenient what-if while ignoring the fact that the situation you are so proud to have avoided is happening somewhere else!

But that’s the mentality of a master debater - where a scientist wants to derive the most reliable facts, a debater seeks to neutralize any ideas that pose a threat. Note how Sullivan also tries to make the association between Putin and the Taliban, just to remind everyone of all the bad things out there Americans ought to be grateful to Jake and Joe for staving off.

Sullivan gives away his underlying partisan political motivation for publishing this essay way too obvious in attempting to invoke Trump as the source of all the Biden Administration’s troubles without dropping his name at every turn. In reality, this policy statement is all part of the coming electoral campaign. Sullivan is reminding Biden’s neoliberal and neoconservative backers that he can be relied on to toe the line on the use of American power abroad. The core objective is to make everyone afraid of how bad things will be if Trump reclaims the White House.

Most of Sullivan’s text is standard boilerplate with precious little hard content, much of it maintaining the strange argument that the USA being buddies with vicious authoritarian regimes in places like Saudi Arabia is somehow compatible with the mantle of global champion of democracy. Frankly, it’s clear that Sullivan is quite self aware and knows this paper will impact his future career options. Whether he aims to lead the CIA or go all the way to Secretary of State, (or President, mayhap? Every little Ivy League boy secretly dreams of sitting in the big chair, after all) being able to rattle off lots of impressive stuff he was associated with will be handy when the time comes for Congressional confirmation hearings.

But the ultimate futility of his strategic approach, if not entire worldview, is summed up well by this paragraph towards the end:

We are pushing back hard on aggression, coercion, and intimidation and standing up for the basic rules of the road, such as freedom of navigation in the sea. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it in a speech in September, “America’s enlightened self-interest in preserving and strengthening this order has never been greater.” We also understand that the United States’ competitors, particularly China, have a fundamentally different vision.

No, they don’t. No it isn’t. And no you aren’t, Jakey boy.

If the USA cared one whit for the universal principle of freedom of navigation it would long ago have stationed ships in the Black Sea to protect civilian cargo ships from Moscow. If the USA truly gave a damn about aggression, coercion, and intimidation then it would do something effective to make Israel to kill fewer civilians while it strikes Hamas.

No country has anything resembling “enlightened self interest” any more than a bank does when issuing a mortgage. Sure, your goals and the bank’s go the same way provided you make your monthly payments, but it will happily foreclose on you and cite the harsh laws of the market as justification if you fall behind. That’s why it takes care to check the value of the property before loaning you the money to make the purchase.

China follows the exact same conception of power as the USA, because power is power. Its government takes what it can, acting as if it’s in its full rights and serving the good of its people while taking care to make sure that certain citizens are better looked after than others. Realists in international relations got that much right: the world of geopolitics is all about pure material interest. How a given country perceives this is the big question you have to answer to understand how it may use its power.

The trouble with China is that nobody can say for sure whether Xi won’t go full Putin and order his forces into Taiwan, stupid and catastrophic as that would be. Beijing’s one-party system lacks the safeguards present in most democracies that at least give warning of hostile intent if they can’t tamp it down outright.

That uncertainty about what Beijing might choose to do with its inherent power requires that countries be ready for any effort to seize Taiwan by force. If successful in the attempt it probably won’t stop there, so everyone else in the neighborhood is forced to hedge accordingly.

This doesn’t mean running around proclaiming China to be a nefarious evil power bent on world domination or lumping it in with Putin and Hamas. Americans do this because Northeast culture sees itself as being the defender of so-called “Western Civilization,” forever locked in mortal combat with the inherently unknowable and unconquerable East. It’s a pure morality play and a recipe for disaster, the reason why any so-called Thucydides trap that might in fact exist is nothing more than a self-fulfilling apocalyptic prophecy.

For anyone who likes long-winded epic fiction, I wrote and published a six-book series titled Bringing Ragnarok that, deep down, is all about this dynamic. As it happens, ancestors who passed down the traditions of multiple mythological traditions were sustaining an ancient warning about how humans are prone to blindly destroying their own world.

All countries look after their own interests. Solid alliances require working with partners who share both interests and a common view of how to pursue them - they’re not any different than a business in that regard.

I’ve spent so much time on this because I feel it important to point out how leaders like Sullivan and Biden are absolutely marching the USA over a cliff in exactly the same arrogant way as the administration that preceded him. They are out of ideas, so they pump out tired rhetoric and hope no one notices just like a tired student working through the final questions in a long exam with time running short.

Their incredible lack of competence is exemplified by the fact that the Ukrainians keep on having to fight for their country’s existence with inadequate levels of support. And why? Because their American partners keep acting as if this is a game of Command & Conquer where Kyiv only gets the really cool weapons once it beats a certain level.

Meanwhile Israel gets whatever it needs to carry out its wars, even when their character runs dangerous close to outright ethnic cleansing. Saudi Arabia gets fancy US weapons whenever it wants to waste some more money giving them to soldiers who can’t beat the Houthi movement that controls most of Yemen despite years of blockade and brutal fighting.

American leaders these days are perpetually trying to roll all Official Bad Things together into one convenient bundle, just like Bush administration officials in the wake of the September 2001 attacks. That’s not leadership or strategy.

Sullivan can talk a big game about the sources of American power, but it’s obvious that he has no clue what they are. Whatever suits his hackery at the time will suffice, because in partisan America it doesn’t matter whether you are competent, just who you know.

The Truth About American Power

Power is a much abused concept. In a strictly scientific sense, power is the ability to induce action in some domain - it represents embodied energy ultimately derived from the Sun or the Earth, though it is always transformed and concentrated into something directly usable, like blood sugar or electricity.

The world system is filled with human organizations all trying to survive as best they can. Countries are the largest and most coherent of these, each a complex adaptive system filled with domestic agents who themselves are all pursuing survival in the same way, just at a more local level.

A country as a power system is more easily understood when decomposed into three linked subordinate systems: the social, political, and economic domains. The country itself is an emergent entity arising from the interactions of agents who act across multiple domains according to their capabilities.

Society is where people work out whose ideas about the world compel behavior. Economy describes the material exchanges of valuable items, often ones vital to survival. Politics covers formal rules and structures of authority that make and enforce them.

Power takes a unique form in each domain. In the social domain it expresses as prestige, the quality of having people want to imitate behaviors and beliefs that are seen as high status. Celebrities and other “notable” personalities as well as brands emerge from here. Economic power is simple wealth, the ability to create and control markets that alter the flow of resources. And political power, as you might expect, is control of formal institutions that give the holder special rights, including the use of violence to compel action in certain circumstances.

Within each country groups of people who come to hold disproportionate amounts of power compete across one or more domains to maintain and expand it. People seek power because it gives them the ability to improve their survival odds - in a psychological sense it derives mainly from anxiety about the future. This creates a need felt on a deep physiological level, and requires that a country develop balancing mechanisms to prevent elite cliques from forming who have the power to distort the function of systems everyone depends on.

Countries that become globally prominent, whether you refer to them as great powers, superpowers, empires, or another synonym, always spawn a power elite dedicated to preserving and expanding their country’s power in order to secure their own. This ruling elite is locked in a two-front battle against its fellow residents as well as similar cliques abroad.

That’s what produces the familiar cycles of rise and fall in powerful countries across history. The intensity of these tracks almost perfectly with the level of inequality that arises - a key finding of much of Daron Acemoglu’s work in political economy over the years.

Now, while all countries pursue power across these domains as they are able, naturally their native resources limit what they can accomplish. They are forced to engage in strategy, the purposeful allocation of scarce resources - which done right is a science rooted in making forecasts using limited data then updating assumptions and practices as evidence from the real world emerges in an eternal iterative loop.

Countries exist in a world of total interdependence, with any and all order that emerges from their interactions a product of negotiation - sometimes, unfortunately, violent. This does not mean that violent conflict is inevitable, however, or even that the state of open hostilities between countries called “war” is inherently destructive. Escalation to organized violence - as distinguished from something spontaneous and unplanned - is a deliberate choice made because someone thought it would benefit them and no sense of consequences in terms of their other relationships stayed their hand.

In an interdependent world, making sacrifices is necessary. No one can have everything they want. All actors, no matter how dominant they feel themselves to be, can do everything, be everywhere, or have total control over anything. Indeed, the more power one accumulates the less control over it they tend to have because of the compromises the powerful have to make to secure their position in the first place. It’s part of why they are generally predictable - from mid 2021 it was clear that Putin was determined to invade Ukraine, the question was only how far he planned to go.

The fact that he went for an all-out victory and tried to march straight into Kyiv is a stark indictment of any effort to pretend that the world can go back to the way it was. The Postwar Order is over, crashed and broken like all order eventually is. Trying to roll back the clock is what creates a rigidity trap, a metabolic crisis where the country affected refuses to perceive its own limits and runs itself into the ground - literally.

I consider it a scientific fact that this process is well underway right now in the USA. The classic signs are elites engaging in ever more magical thinking while attempting to make linear responses to an exponentially escalating crisis. By failing to address the cancer that as been eating away at the foundations of American for decades, Biden, Sullivan, Trump, and all the other American leaders of the past generation are guilty of gross negligence rising to the level of effective treason.

The sources of American power were always threefold:

1. Massive economy rooted in a generally stable dollar serving as the world’s reserve currency and ever freer trade, which allowed American productivity and innovation to spark economic growth abroad that subsidized costs of living and high government spending levels at home without the US taking on massive debt loads.

2. Stable democratic political system where the partisan wings were balanced out by the presence of a large uncommitted center and most fundamental policy was driven by compromise, typically set up to allow states the latitude to innovate custom approaches to problems that quite often generated truly bipartisan solutions.

3. Widespread perception of a meritocratic society where anyone could work hard and build a life for themselves, letting the US attract new generations of immigrants that kept wages under control and boosted productivity thanks to the fact getting to it at all generally requires enough pre-existing wealth in their home country that the US hoovered up the best global talent.

Since the 1950s inequality in the social, economic, and political systems mostly driven by the dominance of Ivy League types who don’t understand the limits of their own utopian worldview or the fact that liberalism is just a secular expression of Christianity with the same philosophical limitations. Indeed, across the past eight decades of American foreign policy all there seem to be are constant misadventures driven by a total inability to identify and embrace sound strategy.

American strategy nearly always degenerates to do all the things in large part because of partisan politics. Real democratic accountability is sorely lacking, but the expert classes in the country appear to want even less of it on certain vital matters like war and peace. The fact that precious few of them are veterans or would allow their own children to fight the forever war that they appear to be contemplating with China is likely a reason why they lack certain essential skills of statecraft.

The US economy is weaker than it should be in large part because federal spending on national infrastructure is always diverted by partisan interests in a pernicious form of effective corruption. Military programs survive if they become too big to fail by spreading contracts across enough states, which has led to such consolidation in the American defense industry that prices for everything defense related can only rise. The US national debt load has jumped to around 150% of GDP, where 100% is considered the international danger threshold unless you’re Japan, because your own people buy most of your debt, which skews normal macroeconomic assumptions. The cost of covering the interest on the national debt looks set to double by 2024 relative to just three years prior because of higher interest rates, which means that annual increase in the debt will become that much faster.

At the same time the US dollar is skyrocketing in value, which sounds great until you remember that it is a stable greenback that underpins the US economy’s global competitiveness. There is an incredible amount of baked-in economic privilege that comes with controlling the world’s default currency, and with the US economy’s size relative to the rest of the world steadily shrinking as it recovers from the Second World War and European colonialism its ability to convince other countries to tolerate dollar privilege is declining fast. Its steep rise will quite likely be followed by a swift fall at some point which will have a destabilizing effect on an economy already beset by inflation and other shocks. The rest of the world is now more than capable of filling in the gap left by declining American innovative prowess, something being much accelerated as partisanship becomes more extreme.

American democracy, once the envy of the world, is very clearly not in a good way. Biden and Trump remain tied in polls where the former led by at least 5-6 points back in 2020. The upcoming election is almost certain to be a rematch most Americans don’t want to see. Both major parties insist that they are defending democracy and that this election is the most important since 1860 - the year before the Civil War - raising the question of what the losing side does in early 2025. The parties have gerrymandered the House of Representatives to the point that only 20% of seats are now competitive. The same proportion of states now never switch between parties during elections, meaning that the Senate is similarly frozen.

Both parties’ partisan loyalists now uncritically accept any statement by a member of their own team as truth - meanwhile these diverge more than at any point in modern US history. It is extremely difficult to see where compromise can be found on any issue when the incentives that drive political behavior - the need to secure donations at any cost - are only growing stronger. The recent defiance of eight hardline Republicans against their own leadership can only be explained by the fact they fear their party leadership’s efforts to discipline them less than upsetting their donors. Partisans are self-righteously colonizing the Constitution to say it means whatever they want it to.

With the US economic system in a dangerous place and the political domain crashing and burning thanks to partisans acting in their own rational self-interest, it shouldn’t be too surprising that the social world is crumbling too. Setting aside the fact that Americans have been sorting themselves ideologically by flocking to certain regions for decades, this country has always been defined by a diversity of regional cultures as a function of being colonized in stages. The Northeast is the oldest and still wealthiest, and the social elite that emerged there two hundred years ago continues to mistake its worldview for that of all Americans.

Like all class-based societies, the Puritan Northeast does everything it can to deny the existence of the social pyramid scheme they dominate. India, Britain - wherever you have an upper crust of any sort its first rule is that one must not openly admit that such a thing exists. But the recent obsession with identity - with the more nuanced intersectional conception of the thing swiftly forgotten - has only made clear to Americans and people around the world just how much like a pyramid scheme American society resembles. Certain groups are temporarily elevated, cast as deserving victims, but which particular identity is in the hot seat soon shifts, public attention moving on and little material changing in anyone’s condition - except those already in possession of power.

Any of the last few paragraphs sound remotely like the USA people around the globe have been taught to believe in for several generations? The fact that the gap between the ideal and reality of America is so stark for everyone here and abroad is a core driver of its ongoing fall.

America’s own leaders have blindly burned away all the real power it once had. What stands now is a tottering tower relying on foundations that have long since rotted away. All it will take is a shock of the right magnitude at the correct time to send the thing toppling over.

And if you don’t think that Beijing and Moscow recognize this is the case, your name just might be Jake Sullivan. Or Joe Biden, the person Jake is really trying to impress with his college paper.

So what is to be done if America’s power is as fragile as I say? Simple: apply strategy. Prioritize.

American leaders have to level with the public and the world about what the country can and can’t do. They need to initiate major structural reforms of the federal government. Making it clear what the USA will and will not fight for is a prerequisite to developing plans for working in conjunction with allies to retrench and rebuild.

The USA must emphasize working with democracies, namely Ukraine and Taiwan. For it to rebuild its social power abroad and at home necessitates hewing to a strict moral ethic about the kinds of regimes America will do business with.

Ukraine must be given all it needs to expel Putin’s forces from its territory by the end of next year. It’s time to stop leaving thousands of pieces of hardware sitting in warehouses or equipping US Army brigades that US leaders are now too fearful of deploying into harm’s way anymore anyway. Ukraine needs a no-holds-barred effort to train and equip its forces properly, not the half-measures approved so far. Moscow’s red lines are clearly a bunch of lies until proven otherwise, so there’s no reason not to give Ukraine everything it can possibly use.

On Taiwan, the US must make it clear that we will fight China if it attempts to take the island by force. To make this credible requires building up a military force capable of breaking any blockade of Taiwan, which is a prerequisite for Beijing standing any chance of success in seizing the island unless Taipei rolls over. Other theaters of potential conflict with China, including the South China Sea and India, are irrelevant - only Taiwan matters, not containing China or any intangible nonsense of that nature.

By demonstrating the will and ability to back Taiwan and Ukraine the US will solidify its alliances with critical democracies in Asia and Europe. The Middle East needs to be abandoned completely - Israel included. Nothing good can come from being directly engaged there, and if the US fears the loss of influence over the oil and natural gas reserves in the area it can finally push green energy technologies, including next-generation biofuels and hydrogen power, to the degree it should be doing anyway.

Energy is life, for organisms of natural or human origin. Those entities that are better able to manage their energy reserves and improve their quality tend to survive and thrive.

The US attachment to Israel and the Middle East is too morally compromising to continue. Israel’s democracy hung by a narrow threat before the Hamas assault, and its future is highly uncertain even if it has a lot of combat power to throw around. Israel can and must take care of itself from now on.

What America’s leaders always seem to forget about the USA is that people around the world judge it by its actions, not its words. Once America was seen as a force for good around the world, but after Vietnam and the War on Terror and now the USA’s hypocritical silence when Israel kills Palestinian civilians but demands global solidarity when Ukrainians die have left this idea in tatters.

It was the sense that the USA wasn’t like other powerful countries, that it was far enough away and genuinely democratic enough to trust with a portion of your sovereignty. For all the Pentagon’s massive budget, it is only having access to bases on allied territory abroad that enables the USA to play the role it does across the globe. The tyranny of geography means that only a third of the military can be deployed abroad consistently at any one time, and the USA will always have commitments to allies all over the world.

America’s shattered image abroad as a result of generations of hypocritical actions unworthy of democracy’s champion has badly undermined its power. It will take a generation of acting differently to change the emerging global view of the USA. Even that might be too little, too late, because reputation once tarnished is twice as hard to repair.

The first step is making the hard choices about where to invest its power. That involves deciding what to sacrifice and where to take risks. Managing a country in the modern world is like tending to an ecosystem - balance and integrity are key, as well as not running out of reserves in any domain of power.

But something tells me that Jake Sullivan never took much ecology at Yale. Most lawyers don’t, after all.

But then, why is a trained lawyer the USA’s national security adviser anyway? Oh wait - nepotism! An old American classic, that.

And so history appears set to repeat. Let’s hope this time around we’ve moved past tragedy and straight on to farce. Casualty rates tend to be lower in comedies. Usually.

Who knows - with clowns for leaders already, the US might actually be prepared for that world. Particularly if someone replaces Jake Sullivan sooner rather than later.