Amerika

MAGA, China, Imperial Decline, Democracy

There is an old Chinese saying that when the winds of change blow some people build walls while others build windmills. The old proverb has a fresh pertinence for our world is living through stormy times marked by a strange subdivision: the emergence of a powerful new Chinese empire of a kind unknown in previous world history and the walled withdrawal and retreat of the global empire of the United States.

Getting the measure of these world-shaping dynamics should be a priority for every thinking person, but the task is hampered by much bluff and bluster, propaganda and disinformation and – strangely – by widespread support for the view that President Trump’s preachings on America’s renewal and greatness are basically correct. It’s true that both the supporters and observers of Donald Trump’s vision of America’s embattled global role are predicting a rough ride for the world. But even when they are doubtful or outright hostile to the new president’s mutterings, including his bizarre executive order against ‘windmills’, they tacitly or explicitly indulge his conviction that the United States, despite its recent decline, is still the dominant global power and will remain so indefinitely, thanks to the gutsy leadership of the new Trump administration. Presented as breaking news interpretations for audiences hungry to make sense of a moment of great drama, Trump’s recent victory is interpreted as he would like it to be understood, as the triumph of the zeal to fix American decline, as the beginning (as he crowed at his 2025 inauguration) of a splendrous new ‘golden age’ in which the United States, standing on the verge of the ‘four greatest years in American history’, proves that it’s the ‘most powerful, most respected’ country on our planet.

One trouble with this way of thinking is its blindness to the ways the United States squandered its global supremacy and bankrolled the rise of its principal rival during the past four decades. American decline is not recent. Never mind the latter-day pandering to Putin’s Russia. Think of the disastrous military interventions, the wars lost, the botched Blinken-style diplomacy and lies told, the cynical violations of the so-called ‘rules-based order’, and the widespread derision and laughter nowadays generated by a ‘backsliding’ US-style liberal democracy. Then think of the huge historical irony: the way the diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China and the subsequent material contributions of the United States to its sweeping reforms co-produced the return of China, after two centuries of subjugation, to a position of global prominence. The consequence? Thanks to the United States, technically speaking, China is no longer merely a ‘country’ or a ‘big power’. It is an empire on the rise. If by empire we mean a super-sized polity whose economic, governmental, diplomatic, cultural and military power spills over and spreads far beyond its borders, then the undeniable fact, as I explain at length in China’s Galaxy Empire (2024), is that China is rapidly becoming an empire with a global reach. Not only is this fledgling empire a formidable challenge to American global hegemony and a far more robust and determined rival to the American empire than was the Soviet Union. The new Chinese empire is in fact the most serious geopolitical threat the United States has faced since its foundation as a republic in the late 18^th century.

A New Empire

The spinning shadows of Chinese windmills are everywhere on America’s walls, but you wouldn’t know it from the derogatory statements and bleak forecasts made by MAGA believers. Orientalist ignorance and denial of China’s imperial ambitions are the underbelly of their belief in US superiority, so let’s consider some of the most important evidence.

Measured by total assets, the four biggest banks in the world are Chinese. China has outflanked bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to become the largest global creditor backed by its own financial services institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). China is spearheading the global rebellion against a world financial system defined by the US dollar and its rentier finance capitalist economy; in mid-2023, for the first time, the RMB topped the US dollar in China’s cross-border transactions. With a nearly US$1 trillion surplus in 2024 - the United States hasn’t enjoyed a trade surplus since 1975 - China is the largest trading country and owner of half the world’s patents.

Despite US-led efforts to ‘decouple’ from China by applying tariff penalties, boycotting its products and services, and banning the sale and import of new communications equipment from Huawei, ZTE and other Chinese companies, China’s economy - unlike the former Soviet Union - is an open political economy shaped by big business entangled with big government. It is a new species of state capitalism which attracts substantial upstream investment from major foreign companies such as Airbus SE, Samsung, Toyota, German chemicals giant BASF and Singapore’s OCBC bank and lithium-ion battery manufacturer Durapower Holdings. China meanwhile produces a third of the world’s manufactured goods, more than the United States, Japan, Germany, South Korea and Britain combined. China is the EU’s and India’s main trading partners in goods. It is the principal investor and trader in the world’s most sizeable free trade zone in Africa; and in Latin America, for the first time in two centuries of independence from the Spanish empire and de facto economic and military dependence upon the United States, countries such as Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Uruguay and Colombia are actively drawing closer to China.

Huawei’s new 2,600 acre R&D centre in Shanghai, designed to accomodate

over 35,000 scientists and engineers

Globally significant shifts are also happening in China in matters of everyday life. After experiencing low levels of life expectancy like those in the West a century ago, life expectancy (78.6 years in 2022 compared with 51 in 1962, according to World Bank data) has surged beyond levels in the United States, where healthy life expectancy at birth has been declining. Life expectancy is even higher among China's 400-million strong middle classes. Beneficiaries of the domestic push towards a ‘moderately prosperous society’, global expansion has for them become a way of life. Loyal to the system, guided by dreams of house, car and money, frequenters of shopping malls, practised at the art of keeping their heads down - follow the Party, but listen to your wife, runs a common joke - the social significance of the new middle classes has been boosted by overseas studying and by massive state investments in higher education – a nearly 10-fold increase during the past two decades. China now produces more STEM graduates than India, the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, the UK and Canada combined.

Not to be overlooked is a fact of sobering importance: the People’s Liberation Army and its strategy of militarised peace. The PLA is now the globe’s largest standing army, with two million troops backed by an expanding nuclear arsenal, more submarines than any other power, and sophisticated military hardware. The PLA is heavily involved in UN peacekeeping operations. In Libya, Yemen and the Sudan, the PLA has already practised the difficult military arts of evacuating its citizens from conflict zones. Its hand has been strengthened by China’s internal colonisation of Tibet and Xinjiang and by its settlement of disputes with neighbouring states, including India. The PLA militarised peace strategy is backed by a huge military-industrial-aerospace complex featuring mega-companies sporting trade names such as China North Industries Group Corporation (NORINCO) and the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC). It is reinforced by space power aspirations, a heavy reliance on smart diplomacy, and a commitment to a new and formidable model of warfare that presupposes, runs the Chinese saying, that melons forced from the vine don’t taste sweet. Success in war, runs this PLA way of thinking, demands self-control, forbearance, and the ability and willingness to wait (wuwei: non-action). Only fools rush into war. Wars are won, or avoided, by outfoxing opponents, wearing down or frightening enemies without firing a single shot.

Imperial Resilience

The evidence of strengthening Chinese global power is unmistakably clear. So are its unusual sources of resilience.

At home, the governing system of the fledgling empire is not a crude and unstable form of ‘autocracy’ or ‘authoritarianism’ or ‘totalitarianism’, as MAGA enthusiasts and analysts usually claim. The CCP rulers have long been nurturing clever, shock-absorbing methods of governance and what they term a ‘democracy that works’. In the heartlands of the empire, government takes the form of a one-party ‘phantom democracy’ with Chinese characteristics. It’s a political system of centralised control mixed with anti-corruption procedures, local popular courts, early warning detectors and governmental accountability experiments. Abroad, backed by corporate telecommunications giants such as Tencent and Huawei, the new Chinese empire has post-territorial qualities. The first global empire to be born of the age of digital networked communications, China does not succumb to the hubris and make the mistake of early modern European empires, which brazenly grabbed land and sea routes, violently herded millions of people of different languages and cultures into bounded territorial states, and functionally depended upon capital cities at home, and in their colonies. China expands differently. Its state-owned corporations and governing institutions instead prefer unbounded flows, corridor opportunities, open borders and long-distance transactions. Beyond its borders, China’s rulers foster the rapid and unrestricted movement of capital, goods, and services along with the defence of UN institutions and the building of new cross-border institutions such as BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

The point is China is neither an old-fashioned land empire nor a land-hungry maritime empire. It’s an empire preoccupied with flows of capital, the spread of new information technologies, and global markets for its competitively priced goods and services. It connects cities and hinterlands with high-speed railways, airports, and shipping lanes. It is building global networks of logistics hubs designed to link together airports, rail and road routes, cargo ports using information and robotics technologies to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of parcel delivery systems and boosting cold chain capacity for delivering foods, medicines, and vaccines worldwide. Buoyed by its deep dependence on webbed networks of digital communications, fluid mobility - not territorial occupation - is the currency of the new Chinese empire.

A Peaking Power?

MAGA supporters and more than a few Western politicians, diplomats and journalists ignore these manifold sources of resilience. They instead think wishfully and scoff in clichéd generalities about the coming crack-up of the new China. Trump’s supporters make especially loud noises about the ‘rise’ and ‘expansion’ of China and its role as an ‘existential threat’ to the West. In the next breath, they hurl predictions of the imminent crumbling of the new Chinese empire under the combined weight of forces such as declining birth rates, rising life expectancy, real estate sector troubles, youth unemployment, exports dependency, ecological damage and political corruption.

Some MAGA enthusiasts and observers combine the contradictory thoughts by describing China as a ‘peaking power’. The idea is that China is a ‘risen’ power, and that’s why it’s dangerous, both at home and abroad. Domestic repression of citizens is backed by resource grabbing, economic sanctions, military interventions, and other acts of foreign aggression. The remedy? Outside powers led by the United States must strengthen their military capabilities, rattle sabres, talk rough and tough, bargain hard, all the while glaring at their Chinese opponent, without blinking. As China struggles, the United States, our planet’s Number One Force for Good, should press hard its own advantages and resources of greatness. Vainglory will prove victorious.

Post-Imperial Denial

It may indeed come to pass that the young and resilient Chinese empire unwittingly falls victim to surprise setbacks and unforeseen shocks. If that were to happen, its stillbirth would undoubtedly cast a curse upon the whole world, the United States included. Global supply chains would snap. UN peacekeeping missions would falter; the whole UN system, to which China is now the largest funder, would grind to a halt. A catastrophic uncivil war in China’s heartlands might result. In search of safety, tens of millions of refugees would pour across its borders into neighbouring territories, with regionally destabilising effects.

Nobody can yet say whether such outcomes are likely, or what the collapse of a too-big-to-fail China would practically bring to the world. For the moment, what instead must be noted is the flipside of this scenario and the most consequential blind spot within the MAGA mindset: its neurotic refusal to admit that the American empire is itself entrapped in the dynamics of long-term decline that favours an unusually resilient Chinese global empire.

What are the symptoms of protracted American decline? Most obviously, there are the economic challenges to US supremacy. China’s rising leadership in matters such as global investment and trade, manufacturing and AI and digital technologies is undeniable. An equally formidable threat to American economic power is China’s drive to break the dollar system by globalising the RMB through its own state-owned banks, currency swap measures, gold holdings, a new cross-border payments systems (CIPS), and a state-regulated e-currency.

MAGA enthusiasts and American officials should be worried by these economic trends, but there are equally formidable challenges confronting the American empire. Consider the matter of legitimacy. Historians teach us that durable empires always try to camouflage their own immodesty by convincing both their heartlands and their clients and subjects abroad that their power is a force for good. Empires aim to get under the skin of the people whose lives they shape at a distance.

China’s CCP leaders know this. Telling the China story well is for them of exceptional strategic importance. What’s significant is the way the young Chinese empire isn’t framed by a single dominant ideology. The symbols deployed by party officials, diplomats, and journalists to justify the worldly spread of Chinese power have a kaleidoscopic ‘yin-yáng’ quality. There’s plenty of pragmatic, business-like patter about stability and development, GDP, making money, growing rich, and ‘prosperity’. But CCP leaders also spout articles of faith such as ‘harmonious society’, ‘Confucian principles’, ‘rule of law’, the ‘democratisation of international relations’, ‘ecological civilization’ and ‘ancient Chinese civilization’. Other standard phrases include ‘territorial sovereignty’ and ‘national dignity’. ‘Peace”, ‘anti-imperialism’ and ‘protection from foreign enemies’ are also favourite words in their semantic arsenal. And there’s abundant talk of ‘socialism’ mixed with dollops of ‘Marxism’.

Whatever is thought of the consistency or veracity of this rainbow vocabulary, China's leaders and their media publicists are acutely aware of the reputational dangers of ideological rigidity. Knowing that those who sow thorns reap wounds, they want to be seen as strong but flexible, benevolently tough servants of ‘the people’, strong-willed champions of planetary peace, wealth creation, good governance, and environmental resilience. The intentional ambiguity and cloudy vagueness enable China’s leaders to sail with the political winds and bamboozle their foes. In turn, their bamboozling - as the Chinese expression has it - enables them to shift a thousand pounds with four ounces. Reputational ambiguity grants them political strength.

By contrast, global questioning of the legitimacy of the American empire is rising fast. There was a time, especially in the years after 1945, when America’s reputation rode high. The empire had since the 19^th century prided itself on its support for ‘democracy’, but after its World War II victories it had a free hand in playing the role of defender-in-chief of democracy and stoic guardian of the entire ‘free world’. In practice, it did some impressive things. In Europe, for instance, the Marshall Plan introduced the continent to American ways of life and helped build the foundations of a new middle class. America stood for economic growth and shared prosperity, high quality roads, education, health care and other public services, and belief in the principle that citizens are entitled to choose their own government. In popular culture, there was the allure of Coca-Cola, Hollywood, jazz, the all-shook-up Elvis Presley, Motown, Marilyn Monroe, Woody Allen, the rebel poetry of Bob Dylan, the melancholy magnetism of blue grass, gospel, soul and country music, the good-times fluff of the Beach Boys and the Monkeys. Even when things weren’t going well, America seemed reformable, capable of doing better.

But the times they are changing, and not for the better. The world is awash with bad news about the United States, its double standards, big-money politics, gun violence, loud-mouthed leadership, second-rate infrastructure and general social decadence. There’s of course Superbowl rap king Kendrick Lamar and the private-jet, cash-grabbing, fan-based ‘my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism like some kind of Congressman’ pop star businesswoman Taylor Swift. And it’s true that in some countries, Poland, Israel, Japan and the Philippines included, a majority of citizens say they hold a ‘favourable opinion’ of the United States. Elsewhere, however, research shows that in China, Turkey, Tunisia, Greece, Malaysia, Australia and France, public opinions about the United States are split, or potentially hostile. Unsurprisingly, the research also shows that in countries such as Iran, Egypt and Afghanistan and, more generally, in the wider Arab and Muslim regions, millions of people say they loathe American imperial power and its ways of life. They think of it as a freak show. Mere mention of the United States and its ‘democracy’ tempts people to curse and spit.

These research findings are significant because they show that the light of democracy and freedom on America’s hill is fading. On the home front, whatever they say, Trump and his supporters confirm the trend. They care little or nothing for democracy. Despotism is their thing. Constitutional niceties make no sense. Hero worship and demagoguery matter. Its rules are plain. Flood the zone. Strengthen executive power. Cross red lines. Defy existing laws and legal precedents. Bewilder citizens by issuing non-stop executive orders. Abolish guardrails and watchdogs. Arbitrarily dismiss inspectors general, judges and other guardians of public integrity. Reduce the power of legislatures to appropriate tax money and determine its spending. Trample on workers’ rights. End birthright citizenship. Freeze research, educational, social support and foreign aid programmes. Silence dissenters. Expect unquestioning loyalty from civil servants. Denounce journalists and experts who expose misconduct, corruption, and malfeasance as ‘far left’ purveyors of fake news and partisans of the ‘deep state’.

Imperium militare

Democracy promotion is also near the bottom of the fading empire’s list of global priorities. Treating the so-called rules-based order as a sham and practising bully politics backed by a might-makes-right mentality are the new gold standard. Which is a key reason why America, foolishly, is resorting to military force as a prime solution to its mounting global ills.

In his first novel Amerika (1925), Franz Kafka daringly pictured the Statue of Liberty in a new light, her arm outstretched aloft, wielding a long, sharp sword. He couldn’t have imagined the depth and breadth of the militarisation of the American empire to come. Although it has lost nearly every war since 1945, the US is now permanently at war. It is by far the biggest global arms dealer; its military is the world’s largest global polluter. Currently backed by a network of 800 military bases in at least 75 countries, US military spending is more than three times larger than China’s and higher than 20 other big-spending governments combined.

Since its founding as a republic, the United States has invaded other territories nearly 400 times; more than a quarter of these invasions have happened since the collapse of the Soviet Union. There have been untold numbers of engineered coups d’états, CIA-led assassinations and covert operations although, as might be expected of an empire losing its grip on the world, the rate of military interventions has recently been accelerating. The wise warning of old Montesquieu in his Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734) that militarism corrupts republics and ruins empires goes unheeded.

The spirit and substance of militarism are even infecting the empire’s heartlands. The imperial presidency has robbed taxpaying and arms-bearing citizens of their say in matters of war. The design and execution of military goals and strategies are high-level imperial secrets. Troops are despatched to home borders to protect America from the scourge of unwanted immigrants. Undocumented civilians are rounded up in frightened communities, flung into military camps or deported to Guantánamo Bay. The US military sells off or transfers its used or surplus weaponry to domestic police agencies. Militarised policing is consequently the new fashion. Officers kitted out in combat gear and armed with stun guns, tear gas cannon, pepper spray, sniper assault rifles, armoured trucks, drones, and tanks are the new normal.

The Future?

Outperformed by a resilient Chinese empire on multiple fronts, suffering mounting public suspicion and disrespect at various points on our planet, trapped in a deathly spiral of war mongering of its own making, those who run America, whether they admit it or not, are now active contributors to the long history of the decline and collapse of empires.

There are already clear signs of the likely overall pattern: while the United States under Trump will do everything it can to trim its global empire on its own rationally calculated ‘national interest’ terms, there’ll be many cartoonishly crazy happenings. Rather like the Ottoman and British empires, the world is going to witness a string of spits-and-splutters episodes of retreat, regrouping and revenge. The sudden collapse of the United States imperium is probably not on the cards; imperial decline may instead happen the Hemingway way, slowly at first, then suddenly. Only one thing’s certain: the coming crack-up of the empire will be protracted, disorderly, painful and nasty.

Slowly but surely, announcement by announcement, America’s leaders will learn the arts of pulling back and accepting forced retreat. Symptomatic are those moments of honesty when an incoming Secretary of State acknowledges the birth of ‘a multipolar world’, warns that the rulers of China pose a ‘grave threat’ to American interests then goes on to recommend that ‘no matter what happens’ the United States is ‘going to have to deal with them’ because ‘the history of the 21st century will largely be about what happened between the U.S. and China’.

Although it isn’t clear what ‘dealing’ with China implies, the growth of the new Chinese empire and the shrinkage of the United States won’t straightforwardly be a zero-sum dynamic. Whether China’s leaders will eventually choose, or be forced, to play the role of the dominant empire in a chaotic and unruly global order, to operate as the dominant global force in such matters as banking and finance, the brokering of peace deals, and the public management of environmental problems, nobody can yet say. Under Trump, who says many muddled and contradictory things about China, the world will surely witness moments of US-China dialogue, cooperation, heavy bargaining, followed by retaliatory threats and cat-and-mouse acts of revenge. Amidst the shenanigans, the writing will stay on America’s walls: in fields as diverse as finance, trade and investment, technological innovation, media entertainment and military hardware, the People's Republic of China will continue to outpace and outflank the United States. China will build windmills. The United States will erect tariff barriers and military walls.

It may be that the United States, in foolish desperation, or by accident, in accordance with the proverb that two tigers cannot live on the same mountain, launches a full-scale war on China. Vowing to end the ‘continuing catalogue of catastrophic events abroad’, Trump’s inaugural address was unequivocal: ‘Our armed forces will be freed to focus on their sole mission: defeating America’s enemies.’ China is evidently enemy number one, but for the United States, a Sino-American War would surely result in yet another military and moral stalemate or outright defeat by a much larger, more patient, savvy and well-equipped PLA opponent. Chinese citizens’ support for their regime would be strengthened; American public opinion would be badly divided. Public opinion might not even count: the whole world would suffer the environmental, infrastructural and loss of human life costs of a crazy conflict which renders obsolete the old distinction between ‘conventional’ and ‘nuclear’ war in an unprecedented global catastrophe from which our planet may never recover.

Whether or not the United States exercises military self-restraint in ‘dealing’ with China, or whether our world is rescued by dumb luck, for the foreseeable future war will nevertheless remain on the global agenda of America’s bloated military-industrial-academic complex. Trump says he wants to end forever wars, but there will be yet more complicity in Gaza/West Bank genocidal tragedies. Wars in ‘shatter zones’ will be ignored by the United States; other wars will end in stalemate; still others lost outright. In a whole range of matters, America will be forced to eat more servings of humble pie. Trade wars, financial threats and investment reprisals will be commonplace. In those fields, failures and humiliations will multiply, some of them not yet newsworthy, such as the weakening of manufacturing industry by tariff wars, spikes in federal debt (already at $36 trillion) stoked by tax cuts for the wealthy, and the silent but steady decline of ‘dollar dominance’, the gradual outflanking of the oversized global role of the greenback by the rising share of nontraditional reserve currencies, including the Chinese renminbi.

For the first time in human history, imperial demise will get maximum media coverage. Compliments of the United States, the gradual reduction of America to a failing and fallen big power will be livestreamed to the world. Audiences will be treated with lots of rough talk, bizarre surprises, episodes of great tension, and a general display of American macho ugliness in world affairs. American bullying will be the flipside of its growing insecurity. Talk of a ‘rules-based order’ will stop; mere mention of the phrase will everywhere spark loud laughter. America’s priority will be to stop tilting at windmills. It will cut its losses, shed unnecessary obligations, hold on to its most valuable power assets for as long as it can.

Democracy?

America’s democratic ‘allies’ won’t be spared. Yet more Zelensky-style compradors and loyal client states will be caught with their pants down. Most will be treated at best as mere business partners, or as raw material sites or convenient military bases. Ententes favouring American interests will multiply. In support of a walled-in and walled-off America, there’ll be a token, ‘do little’ or ‘do nothing’ support for Taiwan, unconditional military partnership with Israel, wire-fenced relations with Mexico, and more verbal shells fired northwards, in Canada’s direction. The Kissinger rule shall universally apply: to be the enemy of the United States will be dangerous, but to be its friend will be fatal.

The accelerating decline of the United States will destroy many illusions about democracy. The old dictum that ‘a democracy is incapable of governing and managing an empire’ (as Thucydides wrote in the History of the Peloponnesian War) is already being turned on its head. In the coming years, the empire will manage without democracy. That’s the ugly rule in the history of empires. As they rise towards their zenith, durable empires try to solve their power problems by granting some of their distant subjects a measure of self-government (as China does in its affirmations of non-intervention in the affairs of other states, as did the Ottomans in their millet system of law courts run by different confessional groups, and as the British did by granting parliamentary rule to their loyal white colonies). When empires are in decline, by contrast, they are bad losers. They grow paranoid, mean-spirited, stingy, and bellicose.

In the heartlands of the shrinking and sinking American empire, citizen fightbacks notwithstanding, the drift towards a new kind of despotic rule will quicken. Fuelled by Trump-style talk of the “tremendous fraud, tremendous waste” in government, rule by politically powerful and rich corporate ‘poligarchs’ is bound to flourish. Within the ruling circles, the quintessence of politics will be that the few tell the rest what to do. Friends will be richly rewarded. Enemies will be threatened with sharp-toothed chainsaws, abused, sacked and generally handed rough justice.

Americans were once taught in schools that democracy as a whole way of life requires a vibrant civil society of free and equal citizens, but as the empire shrinks, unless a radically different government committed to the redistribution of wealth comes to power, the old lessons will be forgotten. Social conditions will worsen. Rough justice will flourish. There will be more guns, street shootings, immigrant arrests, misogyny, religious bigotry and media untruths. Middle class anxiety and the angry underclass conviction that democracy is a mere façade for plutocracy will grow. The number of Americans with little faith in the future will multiply. A sizable majority of citizens (around six-in-ten) already say that life is worse today than it was 50 years ago. Looking to the future, they expect things to grow worse. They say that in 2050 their economy will be weaker, the United States will be less important in the world, political divisions will be wider and that there’ll be an even bigger gap between the poor and the rich.

Abroad, in various cross-border settings, the United States will carry on openly abandoning the democratic principles of power sharing, public accountability, rule of law and justice for the weak. America will consistently give the moral finger to cross-border institutions and agencies (such as USAID) it dislikes or no longer controls. The executive order to withdraw from the WHO – signed on the first day of the second term of Trump’s presidency - is probably an ominous harbinger of things to come. Efforts to paralyse and dismantle the UN will continue. The fierce American logic of withdrawal and regrouping will prove brutal: with apologies to Thrasymachus, injustice will in future be the will of those who were once strong.

But what about America’s obligations to territorial democracies like Canada, South Africa, Chile, India, Australia, New Zealand, or Germany, France and other member states of the EU? They, too, will be forced to cope as best they can. That they call themselves democracies won’t be of significance or concern to the flailing empire. To use a favourite backroom phrase of American diplomats, their governments can go fuck themselves. They will be forced to face up to the new reality: don’t naïvely suppose that America is automatically on your side, pay your debts, honour your commitments, buy our weapons, do what we tell you to do, or we’ll make life difficult for you.

Unless democracy’s friend serendipity steps in, the consequence will be that the democratic world will experience something like a 21^st-century repetition of the last century. By 1941, after a half-century of social unrest, economic stagnation, dictatorship, totalitarianism and global war, a year when President Roosevelt called for ‘bravely shielding the great flame of democracy from the blackout of barbarism’, only eleven parliamentary democracies had managed to preserve their independence. They did so by knuckling down and keeping their distance, as far as they could geographically and emotionally, from the general anti-democratic trends of the age.

For democrats and democratically elected governments in cities, civil society organisations, states and cross-border organisations, present-day trends and troubling futures are arguably just as threatening as they were during those dark times. Right-wing parties and governments and the general drift towards despotism will no doubt be emboldened by America’s downfall, but not everything will go the way of the floundering empire. Within the remaining democracies, and in the new democracies to come, it’s to be hoped, citizens and their chosen representatives will build democracy hideaways, havens and hermitages. They will use free and fair elections to elect mutinous governments. Elected leaders will speak out against American bullying; the independent monitoring and public restraint of power will continue to reveal things that are not to America’s liking.

Confronted by Russian-style despotisms, a rising Chinese empire and an angry America bearishly in retreat, democrats everywhere must realise that this is a moment of opportunity not to be wasted, a tipping point in which the future of democracy no longer depends on the approval and support of the United States. Post-imperial democracy will instead depend upon the solidarity of the shaken (Jan Patočka’s famous phrase) and the courage, inventiveness and determination of those who are being sidelined, left behind, bullied and screwed.

So serious are the times that hopefully democrats’ commitment to democracy will toughen their resolve to stand firm while searching at all levels of government and social life for new remedies for the maladies of representative democracy. Democrats of all persuasions will be forced to say again and again: since uncontrolled power is dangerous, and since America on the skids is trying to sow division and disunity to its advantage and can no longer politically be fully trusted or relied upon, democracy, this time for very different reasons than our grandparents supposed, is an indispensable global virtue, a non-negotiable and basic requirement everywhere of a decent and dignified life for creatures large and small on an endangered planet we call home.

This essay is an edited version of my contribution to a session of the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference, March 2025. In slightly revised form, it first appeared as a two-part essay in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. Translations have since been published in Spanish, Dutch and Arabic.