While the Global Briefing is on hiatus for the week, we're breaking in to alert our readers to Fareed's new piece in Foreign Affairs, "The Self-Destruction of American Power." You can read the full essay, without a subscription, for the time being.
We also wanted to let you know that Fareed will interview House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, at a Friday event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations; the conversation will air on GPS this Sunday, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN.
"Sometime in the last two years, American hegemony died. The age of US dominance was a brief, heady era, about three decades marked by two moments, each a breakdown of sorts. It was born amid the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. The end, or really the beginning of the end, was another collapse, that of Iraq in 2003, and the slow unraveling since. But was the death of the United States' extraordinary status a result of external causes, or did Washington accelerate its own demise through bad habits and bad behavior? That is a question that will be debated by historians for years to come. But at this point, we have enough time and perspective to make some preliminary observations," Fareed writes in Foreign Affairs.
"As with most deaths, many factors contributed to this one. There were deep structural forces in the international system that inexorably worked against any one nation that accumulated so much power. In the American case, however, one is struck by the ways in which Washington—from an unprecedented position—mishandled its hegemony and abused its power, losing allies and emboldening enemies. And now, under the Trump administration, the United States seems to have lost interest, indeed lost faith, in the ideas and purpose that animated its international presence for three-quarters of a century." | |
