Pax Americana: Why the U.S. Must Continue to Be the World's "Last Best Hope"
If we Americans proceed with national seppuku, bid farewell to peace, prosperity and human dignity.
I live not far from Fort Drum, home of the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division, which was heavily involved in the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts. Some 50 miles (80 km) to the northwest as the crow flies is Canadian Forces Base Kingston, ON, home of the 1st Canadian Division, many of whose service members also served in Afghanistan. Both divisions have rich histories, having fought hard and suffered heavy casualties in World War II. I pass by both sprawling bases when I visit the lovely small city of Kingston. I like to think of the shared burden and sacrifices of Canadians and Americans of those divisions, a bond of blood between two friends that will never weaken with time.
But Canadians are deeply worried about their southern neighbor, increasingly consumed by hyper-partisanship, with talk even of civil war increasingly raised. So much so that leading Canadian thinkers are beginning to call for contingency planning to prepare for the potential implosion of the United States.
Canadian writer Stephen Marche, author of The Next Civil War, notes in The Globe and Mail, “The challenge will be to preserve our ideals in the absence of that [U.S.] security. Our national self-interest and our faith in the international rules-based order have been more or less aligned. How will we act when they aren’t?” He recommends that “every political and corporate leader should prepare for American chaos – at the border, in the markets, in international institutions, in the spillover of their toxic political discourse.”
Canadian academic, Thomas Homer-Dixon, a scholar of revolution and failed states, wrote in The Globe and Mail,
The risks to our country…could easily be existential, far greater than any in our federation’s history… The Prime Minister should immediately convene a standing, non-partisan Parliamentary committee…It should receive regular intelligence analyses and briefings by Canadian experts on political and social developments in the United States and their implications for democratic failure there. And it should be charged with providing the federal government with continuing, specific guidance as to how to prepare for and respond to that failure, should it occur.
And it’s not only our Canadian friends who are anxious.
Last September French President Emmanuel Macron urged Europeans to “come out of their naïveté” and assert their independence from the United States. “We as Europeans must take our share of our own protections. It is not an alternative to the alliance with the United States, not a substitution; it is to assume this European pillar within the framework of NATO. We are being asked to take more responsibility for our own protection, I think that is legitimate; so it’s up to us to do it.”
Europeans, particularly the French, have been bandying about this notion of “strategic autonomy” for decades. When I worked at the State Department, we went to lengths to dissuade European governments of such a direction, assuring them the United States will always be there at their side and continue to lead in ensuring our allies’ security. For their part, the Europeans have been more than happy to let us bear most of the military burden and foot most of the collective defense bills. I can’t feel confident in making such reassurances now, with our own house in terrible disorder and amid credible fears the American Experiment may be coming to an end.
We’ve fairly lost the moral high ground in lecturing the rest of the world on freedom, human rights, rule of law and democracy. Were I still in the Foreign Service, I’d be at a loss as to how to explain my country and what it stands for to foreign audiences. I’d likely lose myself in a tray of hors d’oeuvres.
“When you see the absolute essential foundations of the democracy being challenged from within, and where you see a political party, the Republican Party…actually challenging the constitutional institutions,” Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s former prime minister, told Politico at the recent Halifax International Security Forum, “that’s what really undermines public international faith in American democracy.”
“Other nations’ heads of states or ministers of foreign relations often bring up their concerns about the state of our democracy and the impact for them of Jan. 6,” Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) said in an interview at the conference. He said the Jan. 6 attack “emboldened Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, autocrats around the world, those who wish us ill.” To keep them in check, he added, we must “take decisive actions to heal our own democracy.”
A recent Pew Research Center overseas survey shows that most of those polled no longer view the United States as a “good example” of democracy — including only 11 percent of Australians, 18 percent of French and 16 percent of South Koreans.
The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance’s annual report on the Global State of Democracy, for the first time, classifies America as a “backsliding democracy.”
“Significantly, the United States, a bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale,” it says, adding, “The former U.S. President Donald Trump’s baseless allegations during the 2020 U.S. presidential election have had spillover effects, including in Brazil, Mexico, Myanmar and Peru, among others.”
Taken altogether, the surveys, views and prognostications above paint a pretty grim picture of the United States, its role in the world and the viability of Pax Americana — the post-World War II U.S.-led system of political, security and economic stability, with NATO as its linchpin.
What would be the global consequences of an American collapse? If the United States plunges into civil war? Or if, in their infinite wisdom, the American voters put back into office Donald Trump, who would go all-in “America First,” entailing quitting NATO and pulling the country completely into its shell in a delusional and history-disproven isolationism?
Hans Binnendijk, a fellow at the Atlantic Council who previously served on President Clinton’s National Security Council, provides us a glimpse.
“Life without NATO would be more dangerous and less prosperous,” he asserts. “Russia and China would be the big winners at America’s expense.” Key consequences:
Vladimir Putin would feel virtually unconstrained in carrying out aggression against Russia’s neighbors, starting with Ukraine, and intimidating Europeans into accommodating Moscow’s expansionist and anti-democratic ambitions.
America’s strategic reach would be greatly reduced. So, without forward bases in Europe and allies to assist, combating al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups, for example, would become extremely limited.
America’s $1 trillion in annual trade and $3 trillion in direct investment in Europe would be jeopardized along with U.S. prosperity and jobs without the level of security currently provided by NATO.
America’s collapse or withdrawal would spur the E.U. to build a European defense pillar — “strategic autonomy” — to fill the power vacuum. Problem is, the E.U. has little in the way of collective military structure to build on. Moreover, populist trends in Europe could bring on a re-nationalization of European militaries, a dynamic that led to constant wars prior to 1945.
America’s defense commitments with Asian nations would disintegrate, culminating in their knuckling under to an increasingly muscular and aggressive China. Without the U.S. Seventh Fleet and Washington’s sworn commitment, Taiwan would become the next Tibet, a conquered nation under the CCP’s jackboot. The territorial disputes in the South China Sea would be settled once and for all by the PLA.
Finally, America’s collapse would bring about the denouement of the “liberal international order,” i.e., the treaties, alliances, agreements, institutions and behavior largely constructed by the United States to safeguard democracies. “Collapsing this edifice would undercut the multiple structures that have brought seven decades of peace and prosperity.”
As a former diplomat and student of history who has studied and witnessed up close illiberal nations, civil wars, invasion, coups d’état, political oppression and human rights abuses, it scares me to my soul to contemplate the world order without a strong, democratic and cohesive United States as the leading force in defending freedom and opposing aggression. Should a hegemonic transition be made from Pax Americana to, say, Pax Sinica, I fear the oncoming of a new Dark Age marked by wars, oppression and strangling of free thought and expression. Think about this: democracies never war with each other. Autocracies do.
So much is at stake with America’s survival and self-healing.
It was Abraham Lincoln who called America “the last best hope of earth” in his address to Congress in 1862:
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We — even we here — hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free — honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.
This should be required reading for every American politician, not to mention every citizen who genuinely and open-mindedly cares not only about their nation, but also a stable and secure world.
The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.