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Seventy years ago, Britain and France, partners in decline, tried to take the Suez Canal by force. The odd thing is that neither country was led by an obvious jingo. Anthony Eden, a scholar of Arabic and Persian, stands out as the most cultivated occupant of 10 Downing Street in the postwar era. It is just that status anxiety makes sensible people do rash things. France would fight a hopeless war in Algeria and Britain would stay out of a euro-federalist project that it thought had no future: misjudgments that affect both nations even now.
America’s decline is not as sharp as theirs back then, of course. It remains the strongest country on Earth, if by a reduced margin. But in another sense American decline is worse. Britain could always console itself that it was handing over to a democratic, anglophone and mostly white superpower. In contrast, the US has lost ground to China, with which it shares none of those characteristics. And so the deterioration of its status, though objectively much less steep than Britain’s, might be subjectively more harrowing. It rather matters which country you are declining against.
Throw into this equation someone of Donald Trump’s obsession with rank — his almost geological sense of strata — and you get the mistreatment of Greenland, the gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean and other Suez-style attempts to recover lost prestige. (Only more successful, perhaps.)
But even under a normal president, the US might be behaving badly around about now. Status-anxious countries have to puff themselves up. It is a rare superpower that takes decline well.
For proof that more is going on here than Trump, remember that America under George W Bush was already chafing at the “rules-based liberal order”, as almost no one called it at the time. Even aside from the Iraq invasion, Bush held the International Criminal Court in extreme disregard. This isn’t a complaint against him. There was and is a lot of global flummery that is more leftwing than strictly liberal. Bush, who was pro-western to his core, was right to mistrust some of it. The larger point is that America’s disaffection with the legalistic world order predates Trump. There must be something structural going on that has been nagging the US, and that thing might be decline.
Because the performance of the US this century has been so awesome in absolute terms — economically, technologically — the nation’s relative decline can be hard to visualise. But it is there, in the limited effectiveness of US sanctions over recent years, in the struggle to stay ahead on artificial intelligence, and in the strategic assets that China dares to own in the western hemisphere. The military gap over China is not what it was at the turn of the millennium. Even a garden variety Republican president would be lashing out in these circumstances, if not quite as recklessly as Trump.
Always beware the downwardly mobile. Those of us who live a better life than we were born into cannot begin to understand the trauma of going in the opposite direction. A small drop in status can unhinge people, even if their absolute position remains good. It was the Weimar middle class, inflated out of their savings during the slump, who turned to the National Socialists in elections, not necessarily the worst-off. In geopolitics, the same process plays out on the largest scale. What is Russia’s war in Ukraine if not a protest at its reduced status since the Soviet collapse?
The individual matters, no doubt. In fact, Trump has won me over to the Great Man theory of history. But some patterns seem to hold across time, person and place. If there has ever been a declining power that did not behave erratically as it settled into its new status, I don’t know it. Trump’s behaviour is an extreme version of something that might be happening anyway, has happened in the recent past and is liable to happen after him.
The line from Thucydides, “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”, is getting quite the airing of late. You are meant to nod gravely along to it, as though it expresses a bitter but universal truth about international relations.
Does it, though? The phrase implies that a country becomes more aggressive as it grows more powerful. Well, the US was never mightier than it was around the time of Trump’s birth in 1946, when it made half of the manufactured goods in the world and had a nuclear monopoly too. With all this power, the US didn’t “do what it could” to the weak. Instead, it set up the Marshall Plan and Nato, those masterpieces of enlightened self-interest. It rebuilt Japan and Germany as pacifist democracies. The belligerent turn in American behaviour has in fact come during its relative decline.
Leadership explains some of this, in that Harry Truman was “better” than Trump, but only some. The rest is structural. It is easier for a nation to be magnanimous from a great height. Paranoia and aggression set in when that position slips. As such, we should expect a volatile US until it gets used to the role of being a, not the, superpower. Britain and France got there in the end, despite having to fall much further.
No one ever quotes the other bit of the famous Dylan Thomas poem about decline. After nagging the reader to “rage against the dying of the light”, he concedes that giving up makes more sense: “wise men at their end know dark is right.”
Trump prefers the rage, but then so would other leaders in his place.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
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