After America полностью

I don’t think so. America could join Iran in a nuclear strike on the Zionist Entity, and those numbers wouldn’t shift significantly. Because sometimes who you are is more important than anything you do. America will discover, as Israel did, that a one-way urge for normaliut will lead to a more dangerous world. In the vacuum of U.S. retreat, anti-Americanism will nevertheless metastasize and crowd in from our borders. In 2010 Die Welt reported that, on his recent visit to Teheran, Hugo Chavez had signed an agreement to place Iranian missiles at a jointly operated military base in Venezuela.¹² In the years ahead, distant enemies will seed new proxies in Latin America (as Iran did to Israel with Hamas and Hizb’Allah), and suicide bombers will board our city buses, too.

American isolation is already under way. China is the world’s biggest manufacturer, the world’s biggest exporter, the post-colonial patron of resource-rich Africa, the post-downturn patron of cash-strapped Mediterranean Europe, and the biggest trading partner of India, Brazil, and other emerging powers. Why be surprised that in such a world, getting on with America matters less and less? Sometimes that’s good news: Washington and its geriatric EU allies wanted the bonkers Copenhagen “climate change” deal; Brazil and India joined with China to block it.

Sometimes it’s not so good: the leaders of Brazil (again) and Turkey, two supposed American allies assiduously courted and flattered by Obama during his first year, flew in to high-five Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and subsequently took China’s position on Iranian nukes.¹³ But, either way, second-tier powers around the globe are making their dispositions, and telling us very plainly about what awaits. In 2010, the Royal Australian Navy participated in its first ever naval exercises with Beijing;¹⁴ a few weeks later, Britain and Germany declined to support the U.S. in its efforts to get China to increase the value of the yuan.¹⁵ Even for America’s closest allies, the dominance of both the Pentagon and the almighty dollar is conditional.

The world after America is beginning to take shape, a planet where the loons and the hard men make the running and the rest go along to get along.

Picture the UN a few years down the road: for three of the Security Council’s permanent members (Britain, France, Russia), an accommodation with Islam will be a domestic political imperative, and getting along with China will be the overriding foreign priority. In the practical sense, this will shrink “the West” and destroy the post-war balance of power in which three permanent members from the free world balanced two authoritarian powers.

Nudge things a little further down the road—a fractious planet of hostile forces—Russia, China, a semi-Islamized Europe, the aspiring caliphate, whatever the new Chavismo bequeaths Latin America—all mutually anti-pathetic yet for whom the flailing America remains the biggest and most inviting target. There will be no “new world order,” only a world with no order, in which pipsqueak failed states go nuclear while the planet’s wealthiest nations are unable to defend their borders and are forced to adjust to the post-American era as they can. Yet, in such a geopolitical scene, whatever survives of the United States will still be the most inviting target—first because it’s big; and second because, as Britain knows, the durbar moves on but imperial resentments linger long after imperial grandeur.

Listen to the way Washington’s European “allies” and Sunni Arab “allies” and UN “human rights” bigwigs talk about the Jewish state today. That’s how they’ll be talking about the U.S. tomorrow. In a post-American world, the kind of world Barack Obama is committed to building, America will be surrounded on all sides by hostile forces and more globally demonized than ever. Another half-a-decade on, and there’ll be an informal Islamoveto over European policy. Russia and China have already determined that, whatever their own little local difficulties with Muslims, their long-term strategic interest lies in keeping the jihad as an American problem. The internal logic of the demographic shifts will be to make much of the world figure it makes sense to be on the side America’s not.

They got the post-American world they always dreamed of, and, as they adjust to a poorer and more violent planet, they will blame Washington for the horrors of the new age more furiously than ever. Think of Netanyahu alone at the podium trying to demonstrate objective facts to a roomful of madmen, liars, and appeasers. He’s the warm-up act, and that’s the reception Washington will get in a world after American power.