"The US-Canada Trainwreck and the Limits of American Power"

Josh Marshall makes a lot of important points:

As Donald Trump not so much dismantles the U.S.-backed global order as dynamites it, that destruction coupled with the rise of a more vocal and electorally prominent U.S. left has renewed the discussion of just what that U.S.-backed global order was. 

This passage and this whole U.S.-Canada breakdown illustrates a lot of it. 

The U.S. has been a great power by various definitions for more than a century. It was one of two for most of the latter half of the 20th century and the sole one starting in the final decade of the 20th century. To understand this now-receding era, we must recognize that U.S. power functioned differently with the relatively wealthy states primarily in the global north and those poorer states mainly in the south. Its power was based largely on two key alliance structures: One based in Europe (NATO) which is really the western fringe of Eurasia and another based on the littoral and island fringe of East Asia — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, et al. It was a book I read by Zbigniew Brzezinski about 20 years ago that really shaped my understanding of how these two alliance structures fit together with global geography. 

The U.S. completely dominates North America by its economic, military and even geographical heft and faces no real strategic competitors in South America. So we’re free of any real foes in our whole hemisphere. 

Meanwhile, these two alliance structures create counterweights to Eurasia’s two great land powers, Russia and China. One of the reasons this has been a sustainable arrangement is that it worked for both sides. The U.S. gets things it wants. For Western Europe and littoral East Asia, it provides a counterweight to the local potential dominator/bully. 

But, critically, that counterweight comes from a partner which isn’t too close at hand. The U.S. is big and powerful. But they are and will always be across the sea, over the horizon. This schema of course leaves out a huge amount of the globe. But it was a stable and mutually beneficial system, and at least until quite recently covered most of the globe’s wealth, as well as real and potential military power. (It’s also no accident that most of the U.S.’s problems, wars and blunders over the last two generations have been in another place that doesn’t fit into this schema geographically, culturally or really any other way: the Greater Middle East.) And the key to its stability is that in those two alliance structures, the U.S. didn’t ask that much. 

No, the U.S. isn’t a global philanthropist bringing peace and prosperity to all. But its terms are fairly generous. In these two theaters, the U.S. has acted not as a dominator but more like a first among equals. Critics of U.S. power have always stumbled on this basic fact. For all the purported similarities between the U.S. and Russian great power models, why are countries in Europe trying to stay in or enter into our imperium rather break free of it? 

Ukraine illustrates all of this. It’s why Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union and its security counterpart, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, have been basically a bust while the EU and NATO have grown. Yes, yes, yes, the CIA and Victoria Nuland are the secret hands and all the rest. The reality is that the proof of the pudding has been in the eating. 

The basic answer on all these fronts is that the U.S. imperium, for those who wish to call it that, is, in these two theaters, a good deal. It doesn’t ask that much. The U.S. has operated as a first among equals, not a mob boss. 

The centerpiece of Trumpism is that it wants to be a dominator, especially in the regions where that’s plausible, the Americas. (It’s no accident that the [Toronto] Star says the Trump wants to make Canada into an American Belarus, a nominally sovereign client state.) 

And in the short term the U.S. has a lot of power to do that, or at least extract big costs from countries which don’t comply. 

But the U.S. was never powerful enough and certainly isn’t powerful enough now to be the dominator of Europe and littoral East Asia, and certainly not the entire globe — not without infinitely larger spending on military power. 

We’re already seeing the de facto limits of U.S. military might with an adversary as comparatively feeble as Iran. 

The simple fact is that for all the other evils of Trumpism, they simply don’t understand the basis of American power, military or economic. That’s the basis of the absurdity of the last decade, in which the U.S. is somehow the defiant rebel against the system it created for its own prosperity and security and which has ensured both for going on a century. 

Listen to their thinking and you see it clearly: We’re the big power. We’re in charge. But we don’t act like we’re in charge. We let ourselves get pushed around. Now we’re going to be in charge. 

They simply don’t understand that to the extent we are “in charge,” the underlying basis of the agreement puts us in charge. It’s the comparatively easy terms of American global power. 

They really do imagine that U.S. allies are something like colonies or Finlandized client states that we’ve just let get over their skis. 

The truth is that this precedes Trumpism. We saw this in that pivotal 18 months or so between the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in early 2003. (I actually wrote about this conversation and the books it spawned in a review essay in The New Yorker at the end of 2003.) It was less impetuous and feral. But the outlines are the same: We’re in charge. But we haven’t been acting like we’re in charge. And it’s that lackadaisical approach to managing the globe that made things like 9/11 possible. So now we’re going to actually be in charge. 

Again, a basic misunderstanding of the basis on which we are “in charge.” In truth, though I’ve been a partisan in these debates for half my life, a lot of this was probably inevitable with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the major counterweight to American power, which shaped the “good” decisions America made to put this whole system in place. 

A different and more fecund line of argument is whether the deal America made with its major allies drove unequal shifts in America’s domestic economy which ended up undermining the American domestic political foundations of these global alliances. That’s a complicated question. But there’s at least a there there. 

I’ve talked a lot here about big think and the nature and limits of American power. I should conclude with what I hope goes without saying but still needs to be said. This breakdown in U.S.-Canada relations isn’t just a misapprehension of the nature of American power. It’s deeply wrong, an unprovoked assault on friendly neighbors and longstanding partners with whom we share so much. As I wrote to a Canadian, discussing this this morning, this whole episode is a source of shame and embarrassment for the United States.