Welcome to the Lax Americana

When a lazy, incurious administration starts doing things with a deconstructed state.

Photo by Jas Min on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is taking a brief sojourn to Columbus, Ohio for the tail end of the International Studies Association annual meeting. Wait, check that — I’ll be taking a brief sojourn there assuming I can navigate my way past long TSA lines and my plane takes off and lands safely. Unfortunately, these are not sure things at the moment.

I’m not sure I’m looking forward to attending a conference on international affairs that will likely have a dramatically reduced number of international attendees because they do not want to come to the United States. My point is, however, that posting will be a bit light for the next few days.

Meanwhile, the current administration is lurching from half-baked ideas culled from social media to articulating their postwar Iran hopes with the same vibe as a Pinterest vision board. To try to maintain the economic fallout from the war with Iran — which has received intelligence support from Russia — the United States has lifted oil sanctions on… Russia and Iran. The largest, most expensive aircraft carrier in the U.S. Navy has been knocked out of commission — and out of the Middle East theater — because of an out-of-control laundry fire. That’s right, I said laundry fire.

One gets the sense that things are starting to fall apart. Earlier this month Phillips Payson O’Brien made this point in the Atlantic:

When a complex system starts to decay, the first signs are usually subtle. In the third century, after the Roman empire had reached its geographic maximum, literacy began to decline across Roman society. Education levels fell not only among soldiers, but among officers, aristocrats, and even emperors. The Roman army still looked formidable for years afterward. It had good equipment and could march well. Yet it was no longer as advanced relative to Rome’s enemies as it had once been. It fought as hard as ever, but less effectively.

The capabilities of the U.S. military are still far superior to Iran’s. Yet certain developments in the American bombing campaign against Iran—a country seemingly rendered almost helpless after Israel destroyed most of its air defenses last year—are revealing what look like signs of strain….

Just as the Roman empire survived for two more centuries after it started to decline, the United States isn’t in danger of imminent collapse. But Trump’s rejection of planning, expertise, and diplomacy is beginning to have real-world consequences.

Here’s the thing about the Trump administration: it’s not just that their policies do not make a ton of sense or that they failed to do any strategic planning. It’s that they don’t care that they haven’t put in the work.¹ This comes through most clearly in hearing Trump zigzag his way through various frustrations and policy reversals:

Trump asked NATO to send ships to help secure the Strait of Hormuz. Every. single. ally. refused. Trump called them “cowards” and said NATO has a “very bad future”. He then announced that the United States doesn’t actually need the Strait of Hormuz. He then said countries that do need it should police it themselves. He then told China to police it. He then sent 5,000 Marines toward it.

This sequence of statements was delivered, as far as the public record shows, by the same person, using the same mouth, within roughly 24 hours. The allies are cowards for not helping with the thing he doesn’t need, which is why he’s sending Marines to die for it, unless the countries that do need it do it themselves, which they won’t, because they’re cowards.

Trump told reporters the strait could be opened with a “simple military maneuver” that is “relatively safe” but requires “a lot of help”. Help. From the cowards. Who he doesn’t need. For the strait. That he also doesn’t need.

Instead of caring about, you know, implementing competing policies, Trump administration officials seem more keen to cash in on their official connections or their insider information, secure in the knowledge that they will not be prosecuted for any corrupt act.

So as I depart for ISA, please to read Carlos Lozada’s latest New York Times column,² which coined the term that best describes the current situation in international relations:

We had a good run — some eight decades or so — but it is clear by now that the United States has ceased to be the leader of the free world. A successor for that post has not been named, and it appears unlikely that the European Union, or NATO, or whatever constitutes “the West” these days will promote from within. The job might even be eliminated, one more reduction in force courtesy of President Trump.

Rather than leading the free world, the United States is striding across the globe seemingly free of restraint, forethought or strategy, exerting its power because it can….

Launching a war with only one ally and then expecting everyone else to fall in line is a perfect example of the tensions inherent in America’s new approach. The United States wants the benefits of hegemony, but without accepting the responsibilities — ensuring collective security, promoting economic openness, nurturing vital alliances — that come with it. Trump doesn’t care to be a superpower; he just likes to wield superpowers. He wants to operate in the world constrained only by “my own morality” and “my own mind,” as he told The Times recently….

What does that mean for America’s role and purpose in a world that has been too long defined by what it is not (the post-Cold War era)? It means that what we once called Pax Americana, that U.S.-led system of alliances and institutions that promoted American interests and values and helped avoid major conflicts in the decades after World War II, is gone, and irretrievably so. In place of the Pax Americana we are seeing a sort of Lax Americana, a world in which a careless and uninhibited and incurious U.S. superpower struts across the chess board, threatening old friends and enabling old rivals, seeking short-term gains, heedless of the dangers it is creating for itself and for the world.

This is a historical aberration: a superpower that freely abdicates its leadership role, because it has concluded that leadership is for suckers; one that no longer promotes its values, because it’s decided that those values were fake anyway; one that gives up on the rules and institutions it spent so long building, because it assumes they’re no longer worth the hassle.

So… yeah. Read the whole thing.

1. They certainly do not seem to care a whit about the international externalities of Gulf War Three.

2. Thanks to Carlos for citing my own work later on in the column.