Perhaps we’re too focused on the excruciating details. But the 10,000-foot view should tell us that we’re in the midst of a fundamental change. Empires crumble. They always have. And the era of the American Empire is rapidly coming to a close.
It’s really not Trump’s fault. He’s just the catalyst. We’re our own undoing You’ve seen that clever signage on the bridge adjacent to the former PRR tracks across the Delaware? “Trenton Makes. The World Takes.” Well, that message is as archaic as the Pennsylvania Railroad itself. America stopped making some time ago, but has continued taking. And the bill is now coming due. We’re living through the end of the American global hegemony that began during WWII. The whole tariff thing is simply a part of the painful changes to come. An America that can elect a crook without principles, a person lacking an iota of decency, and then twiddle its collective thumbs as his puppeteers use him as cover to dismantle our sacred institutions, no longer has a future.
As economist David Autor recently wrote in the NY Times (and outlined on CNN), Chinese research into advanced technologies is far outpacing that of the US. And with the current administration’s war on university research grants and foreign-born brainpower that gap can only widen. It’s just a numbers game. How many hungry entrepreneurs, how many brilliant engineers, how many creative technologists can emerge from a given population. To compete, our 350 million fatted brats have a tough uphill against the 1.4 billion clever Chinese, eager to take our place at the top of the global heap.
Autor tells us that the only way we can compete with this onslaught is to combine with our allies: Europe, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia. Instead of working to increase our ties with these democracies, we’re alienating them with a needless tariff war and an America-first posture. Do you think they still admire us? They see the same decadence we feel and they’re scrambling for the life boats while we arrange the deck chairs. Japan and Germany rapidly emerged from their ruins riding the American coattails. Whose coattails will we be able to ride?
For a while I thought that the language barrier would keep the Chinese at bay, but AI will quickly obviate that impediment to their infusing their influence around the globe. Under normal circumstances, there is no question that the American system of individual freedoms and enterprise, in cooperation with like-minded nations, could compete and prevail. But every step we are now taking in the opposite direction increases, exponentially, the time we’ll need to get back to that place–until that opportunity is completely lost.
Perhaps American exceptionalism was just a transient fantasy and Trumpism is merely restoring the natural order. And maybe it won’t be so bad to take a back seat on the bus of global leadership. Look at Britain, upon whose empire the sun never used to set. In the span of 50 years, it was reduced to a global also-ran. Yet, we all like to watch their TV shows, and to visit that pleasant island. And most everyone there seems to be carrying-on OK. While we have to continue to fight to try to restore the essentials of our own democracy, leaving behind the hubris, and detritus, of global dominance, might just be something to look forward to.
©2025, David B Bucher
SoEast 