Instead of judiciously adapting to America’s relative decline by carving out a new place for itself in the emerging multipolar world, U.S. leaders have pursued the fantasy of endless dominance, write Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies.
The U.N.’s Allée des Nations in Geneva, with the flags of the member countries. (Amin/ Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies
Z Network
Not a day goes by without a new shock to Americans and our neighbors around the world from the Trump administration.
On April 22, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) downgraded its forecasts for global growth in 2025 from 3.3 percent to 2.8 percent and warned that no country will feel the pain more than the United States. Trump’s policies are expected to drag U.S. growth down from 2.7 percent to 1.8 percent.
It’s now clear to the whole world that China is the main target of Trump’s trade wars. The U.S. has slapped massive tariffs — up to 245 percent — on Chinese goods. China hit back with 125 percent tariffs of its own and refuses even to negotiate until U.S. tariffs are lifted.
Ever since President Barack Obama announced a U.S. “pivot to Asia” in 2011, both U.S. political parties have seen China as the main global competitor, or even as a target for U.S. military force.
China is now encircled by a staggering 100,000 U.S. military personnel in Japan, South Korea and Guam (plus 73,000 in Hawaii and 415,000 on the U.S. West coast) and enough nuclear and conventional weapons to completely destroy China, and the rest of us along with it.
To put the trade war between the U.S. and China in context, we need to take a step back and look at their relative economic strength and international trading relations with other countries.
There are two ways to measure a country’s economy: nominal GDP (based only on currency exchange rates) and “purchasing power parity” (PPP), which adjusts for the real cost of goods and services. PPP is now the preferred method for economists at the IMF and OECD.
Measured by PPP, China overtook the U.S. as the largest economy in the world in 2016. Today, its economy is 33 percent larger than America’s — $40.7 trillion compared to $30.5 trillion.
And China isn’t alone. The U.S. is just 14.7 percent of the world economy, while China is 19.7 percent.
The EU makes up another 14.1 percent, while India, Russia, Brazil, Japan, and the rest of the world account for the other 51.5 percent.
The world is now multipolar, whether Washington likes it or not.
So when Malaysia’s trade minister Tengku Zafrul Aziz was asked whether he’d side with China or the U.S., his answer was clear: “We can’t choose — and we won’t.”
Trump would like to adopt President George W. Bush’s “You’re either with us or with the terrorists” posture, but that makes no sense when China and the U.S. together account for only 34 percent of the global economy.
China saw this coming. As a result of Trump’s trade war with China during his first term in office, it turned to new markets across Asia, Africa, and Latin America through its Belt and Road Initiative.
Southeast Asia is now China’s biggest export market. It no longer depends on American soybeans — it grows more of its own and buys most of the rest from Brazil, cutting the U.S. share of that market by half.
Meanwhile, many Americans cling to the idea that military power makes up for shrinking economic clout. Yes, the U.S. outspends the next ten militaries combined — but it hasn’t won a major war since 1945.
From Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan, the U.S. has spent trillions, killed millions, and suffered humiliating defeats.
Today in Ukraine, Russia is grinding down U.S.-backed forces in a brutal war of attrition, producing more shells than the U.S. and its allies can at a fraction of the West’s cost.
The U.S.’s bloated, for-profit arms industry can’t keep up, and the U.S. trillion dollar military budget is crowding out new investments in education, healthcare and civilian infrastructure on which America’s economic future depends.
None of this should be a surprise. Historian Paul Kennedy saw it coming in his 1987 classic The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Every dominant empire, from Spain to Britain to Russia, eventually confronted relative decline as the tides of economic history moved on and it had to find a new place in a world it no longer dominated. Military overextension and overspending always accelerated the fall.
Kennedy wrote:
“It has been a common dilemma facing previous ‘number one’ countries that even as their relative economic strength is ebbing, the growing foreign challenges to their position have compelled them to allocate more and more of their resources into the military sector, which in turn squeezes out productive investment…”
He found that no society remains permanently ahead of all others, but that the loss of empire is not the end of the road for former great powers, who can often find new, prosperous positions in a world they no longer dominate.
Even the total destruction suffered by Germany and Japan in the Second World War, which ended their imperial ambitions, was also a new beginning, as they turned their considerable skills and resources from weapons development to peaceful civilian production, and soon produced the best cars and consumer electronics in the world.
Paul Kennedy reminded Americans that the decline in U.S. leadership “is relative not absolute, and is therefore perfectly natural; and that the only serious threat to the real interests of the United States can come from a failure to adjust sensibly to the newer world order…”
And that is exactly how our leaders have failed the American people. Instead of judiciously adapting to America’s relative decline and carving out a new place for the United States in the emerging multipolar world, they doubled down — on wars, on threats, on the fantasy of endless dominance.
Under the influence of the neocons, Democrats and Republicans alike have marched America into one disaster after another, in a vain effort to defy the economic tides by which all great powers rise and fall.
Since 1987, against all the historical evidence, seven U.S. presidents, Democrats and Republicans, have blindly subscribed to the simplistic notion peddled by the neocons that the United States can halt or reverse the tides of economic history by the threat and use of military force.
Trump and his team are no exception. They know the old policies have failed. They know radically different policies are needed. Yet they keep playing from the same broken record — economic coercion, threats, wars, proxy wars and now genocide — violating international law and exhausting the goodwill of our friends and neighbors around the world.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. It took the two most deadly and destructive wars in human history to put an end to the British Empire and the age of European colonialism.
In a nuclear-armed world, another great-power war wouldn’t just be catastrophic — it would very likely be final. If the U.S. keeps trying to bully its way back to the top, humanity could lose everything.
The future instead demands a peaceful transition to international cooperation in a multipolar world. This is not a question of politics, right or left, or of being pro- or anti-American. It’s about whether humanity has any future at all.
Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books, with an updated edition due out this summer.
Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of CODEPINK: Women for Peace and the author of numerous books including Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the US-Saudi Connection and Inside Iran: the Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK, and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
This article is from Z Network.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
If We The People do NOT revolt, it’s game over as the wealth class will never give up their power willingly. Indeed, they will lay nuclear waste to our world, to our children, my granddaughters because they believe they will survive: HARDLY! Haven’t read the article yet, but, here’s what the Tech billionaires wish to achieve by Ben Norton: ‘As US military prepares for war on China, Silicon Valley tech oligarchs are profiting The US military is preparing for war on China. It has missile systems in the Philippines. Defense Secretary Hegseth says Japan is “war-fighting headquarters”. Silicon Valley oligarchs are profiting.’
I believe that the writers are wrong about where Trump stands on either there being a unipolar world or a multipolar one.
After WW2 the USA in the following decades saw ever-more ways to exert what it felt was theirs after the war–a dominant and privileged global standing. Thus its push for being an example of “inclusiveness” (that led to interesting absurdities), that created what was a globalist unipolar world “protected” by USA military presences almost everywhere.
Trump has now been identifying with those who push for a multipolar world where all countries respect all other’s rights (at least that is what they say they are doing, and they don’t like the USA have global force presence and influence.
His trade p0licy may turn out to be one aimed at correcting past ways to maintain its unipolar dominance. But that is yet to be made clear.
A small correction to the blurb … replace “leaders” with “voters”. This would make the blurb read … “Instead of judiciously adapting to America’s relative decline by carving out a new place for itself in the emerging multipolar world, U.S. voters have pursued the fantasy of endless dominance.”
This path has been accepted by voters in election after election, and any who tried to talk about a peaceful path to a multipolar world were rejected by Americans as ‘weak’ and struggled to get even a tiny 1% of the vote. This has been incredibly popular with American voters from Reagan to today. This is a fully bi-partisan position, and one repeatedly given strong mandates by American voters.
Americans have the leaders they voted for, and the leaders they deserve.
Dr. King tried to offer a different path, saying America needed a revolution of values for America not to be on the wrong side of history. America put a bullet into his brain, put Dr. King on a postage stamp, and proceeded to party on from the vast profits of overseas investments. America is on the path it chose, America has the leaders it chose.
Blaming the “leaders” for the bad choices made by Americans is very typically American however.
“True, That” > “Trade Wars: The Decline of America.” ‘Democrats & Republicans alike have marched America into one disaster after another.” TY, Medea Benjamin/Nicolas J.S. Davies.
… “The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.” Milton Friedman
Hence, Medea Benjamin’s & Nicolas J.S. Davies’ foundation is “Humanity,” i.e., “Drop Food, NOT Bombs!” Benevolence is the fruit; BUT, “Awh, Mon, the Fruit, Is Rotten!!! Never, forget: “Benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes. In this way, even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.” John W. Whitehead @ *“Rule By Fiat.”
…… *“Trump is not the first president to weaken the system of checks and balances, sidestep the rule of law, and expand the power of the president. He is just the most recent.” John W. Whitehead
……. *“We have seen this come to pass under past presidents” [42-47] “with their use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives & legislative signing statements;” John W. Whitehead
……. How did “Bidenomics” work out?” “NOT Good! Buhlieve, Me. NOT, Good.” A “benevolent” American culture,” GONE!!!
Imo, US Presidents 42-47 are Party to all Wars. The DNC’s, Project Biden-Harris-Walz (+) a Herd Mentality = $core! At least 95% of Democrats partnering w/Senility’s cold war mentality dropped US in the driver’s $eat in all of the USG’s Four plus (4+) Years of f/WARS!!! War on Trade. War in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Lebanon, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, the USG/NATO v. Russia, ground war, in Ukraine, the USG & Israel “from the river to the sea,” Israel’s violent, lethal occupation of the Palestinians land is “Live-Streamed!” Genocide. Gentrify. De-Humanize. Hate & War is the currency!!!
…… The owl asks, “WHO, can Stop the Mutually Agreed Deception, Destruction, Death-Ness, MADness, in GAZA? In Ukraine? In the Divided $tates of Corporate America?” The bird tweets, “In a heartbeat, the USG!” ‘Imagine,” the USG practicing “Peace.” What we get is the flip side, the “Gemini” aka the “American Eagle,” #47, flips the Universe “the Bird!”
Concluding, “we,” the people, know, “Accomplishment of purpose is better than making a profit;” AND, that’s NOT how the USG, NATO, Ukraine, roll.
IMO, “Make America Great Again,” is all about “One Nation,” of Divided States in Corporate America, under the influence of *“Corporate Canines. One is the fox. The other is the wolf. No matter what, they’ll both eat you.”
The take-away, *“It’s the American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.” John W. Whitehead
…Questions: 1) “All these people that Medea Benjamin & Nicolas J. S. Davies, mention, “Yes. We know them. They’re quite lame (Say Their Names); 2) What are the chances of TAG, The National Lawyers Guild International Committee, The International Association of Democratic Lawyers, The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom–U.S. Section, CODEPINK, Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace, & Roots Action, touring the Nation w/a “FIGHT IMPUNITY,” Tour? *“Taking a stand for lack of punishment for wrongdoing and/or the failure to enforce laws.”
3) “Orange you glad,” Comma La “Working ‘Tirelessly’ For A Cease-Fire,“ Harris, the DNC, & the Democrats’ are Out of Power? Done & Dusted!!!
TY, Everyone! Onward & Upwards! Ciao
Reliable Sources:
*hxxps://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/rule_by_fiat_national_crises_fake_emergencies_and_other_dangerous_presidential_powers
* hxxps://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/rule-by-fiat-when-the-government-does-whatever-it-wants/
* Malcolm X
* hxxps://consortiumnews.com/2025/04/16/us-taxpayers-appalled-at-funding-genocide-turn-to-un/
The current tariff wars are a symptom of something that Barak Obama and perhaps even Bill Clinton started long ago and that Biden accelerated. Mr. Trump merely brings related issues clearly out in the open as he too continues on the path his predecessors sowed. If only the corporate media made this clear, American voters could make informed decisions on relevant issues when they vote and perhaps even consider candidates other than those proffered by the Democratic and Republican Parties, candidates who rather than seek adversaries and conflict would join with the rest of the world to make it a better place for us all.
A very bitter pill for the US to swallow: no longer numero uno!!! As Chinese Chairman Mao is to have stated…the East wind will will prevail over the West…Will it ever.
Trump is not the leader to turn “things” around for we Americans…
But he will ontinue the neocon waste of Americans money until there is no more…
We must unite and end these senseless wars which are pointing straight to the END of the American dream…!
We have a sense of religious superiority that continues to be represented by NATO as the combined self fulfilled masters of the universe versus barbarians. Instead in this age we are the barbarians and rogue states living in mythological fantasy. First as a cold war against godlessness and then under Reagan using it to rebel against the progressive era of the 60’s in radical denial of reality,
“This is not a question of politics, right or left, or of being pro- or anti-American. It’s about whether humanity has any future at all.”
The funny thing is that, if one looks at the original concepts of the founders of a republic that would conduct itself peacefully and trade with all and not have favorites and carry a small standing military force, etc. the peaceful and multipolar world envisioned would be a restoration of America, a pro-American goal! But for citizens raised in Imperial national security state America, the concept is strange.
Not to be missed is the Israeli Zionist lobby (Ilan Pappe,
Lobbying for Zionism: on both sides of the Atlantic), those
“neo conservatives” using American militarism to further
Israel’s expanding occupation keeping American interests
tied to genocide and Israel’s national defense.
Great reference to the now-classic: Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Paul Kennedy, 1989)
I mostly agree, but I always have to quibble with the use of “neocon” (so-called neo-conservative). The founders of PNAC were followers of Leo Strauss, and founders of the modern “neoconservative” movement. Nowadays, the term has been reduced to a synonym of warmongering imperialists. I agree, they have greatly influenced US foreign policy in recent decades, and have a slightly different angle on warmongering and imperialism and neo-cololinialism.
However, the old Realist School of International Relations (Kennan, Morgenthau, Kissinger, Zbig B., et al.) were also warmongering imperialists. The main difference is that the two groups have different interpretations of the “national interest” and different approaches to the pursuit of power abroad. But the end of the day, they are all different flavors of warmongering imperialists.
To be crude: The DT2 regime is expediting the asset-stripping, privatization and the private monopoly extortion – a “smash and grab” operation, on the domestic front. On the international front, they are in a desperate and ham-fisted attempt to exact more tribute from vassals and trade partners. But of course this is backfiring and the US will suffer more than China, for reasons already spoken about (also profs Richard Wolff, Michael Hudson and others have also spelled this out) This looks like textbook late-stage imperial hubris.
In short, the DT2 regime is expediting the Decline and Fall of the US as The Great Power.
I find that in general, “neo-conservative” is used by liberal writers as it fits their general theme of being against conservatives.
I find that in general, “neo-liberal” is used by conservative writers as it fits their general theme of being against liberals.
I find that I can find no actual difference between neo-conservatives, neo-liberals, conservatives, or liberals.
They all want war. They all want me to slave away my life working on Maggie’s Farm. They would all be happy to see me dead if they could find a nickle in it for themselves.
“Neo-liberal” is an economic and not a political term standing for a limited or no role for government in the economy. It is an update of the phrase laissez-faire. Both Republicans and Democrats, political liberals, conservatives and libertarians support neo-liberal economic policies.
Thank you for this report. The United States is kicking, screaming and throwing a tantrum because it is being told its time is over. Unfortunately, that tantrum is killing people. The U.S. doesn’t build anything but weapons any more. It knows only how to destroy. China, on the other hand, knows how to build. I know which I prefer.