This Sunday, we’re featuring a 2019 essay by the journalist Fareed Zakaria on “the slow unraveling” of the United States’ post–Cold War dominance. Sometime during the first Trump administration, “American hegemony died,” Zakaria wrote. But was that death “a result of external causes, or did Washington accelerate its own demise through bad habits and bad behavior?”
His answer was a bit of both. “The rise of new challengers,” especially China, certainly played a part. So did the United States’ own “imperial overreach,” most notably in Iraq. But the biggest mistake Washington made during this time “was to simply stop paying attention,” Zakaria contended. Just when the United States’ long-standing goal “to transform the world” became “more possible than ever before,” Americans balked at the commitment that true transformation would require. Washington often acted as “a distant well-wisher, not an engaged superpower.”
Had the United States “acted more consistently in the pursuit of broader interests and ideas, it could have continued its influence for decades (albeit in a different form),” Zakaria argued. But today it is too late to restore U.S. dominance to what it once was. “The question now is whether, as American power wanes, the international system it sponsored—the rules, norms, and values—will survive,” Zakaria wrote. “Or will America also watch the decline of its empire of ideas?”
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