Twilight of the Empire

Express Tribune

a day ago

US President Donald Trump gestures, as he departs for Pennsylvania, on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, U.S., May 30, 2025. Photo: Reuters
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As a series of trends and shocks cumulatively strain the old order, US President Donald Trump, even his critics must admit, possesses the fatal gift of locating the aching pulse of the nation, only to inflame it further with self-destructive measures while eroding Washington's global credibility.
He sees the symptoms of American decline clearly: deindustrialisation, a brittle middle class, bloated trade deficits, and the political cost of endless wars. But he metabolises crisis into spectacle, grievance into doctrine, and interdependence into betrayal.
For decades, the US has functioned as the imperial core of a global capital-recycling apparatus. The system has depended on the continuous inflow of surplus capital from export-heavy economies, including China and Germany, to America's debt-saturated financial architecture.
The US trade deficit reached an eye-watering $1.1 trillion in 2023, a figure that dwarfs those of other peripheral or semi-peripheral economies like India.
In this light, Trump's populist howl against the 'indignity' of the American people, dispossessed in the very belly of global wealth, is not entirely misplaced.
His instinct that endless wars serve as spectacles to obscure the real mechanism of American hegemony – the global dollar-debt regime – is accurate in a crude, pre-theoretical sense. Since the late 1960s, when America ceased being a surplus nation, its geopolitical muscle has rested not on production but on its control of the dollar as the global reserve currency. The military-industrial complex is merely the theatrical wing of a deeper financial imperialism.
However, Trump is radically mistaken in his belief that punitive tariffs and protectionist swagger will resurrect 'Middle America.' Tariffs, in the late neoliberal stage, cannot revive industrial capacity gutted by decades of offshoring and rentier capitalism.
Instead, they risk destabilising the very mechanism whereby America's status as a debtor empire is transformed into an asset: the recycling of dollar-denominated debt into US capital markets. If that circuit is broken, the paper wealth of Wall Street and the speculative empires of Trump's own class will collapse.
To materially uplift the working and lower-middle classes that fuelled his electoral resurgence, Trump would have to declare war not on China or Brussels, but on Manhattan and Malibu, hedge funds, private equity, and speculative real estate.
'Asymmetric interdependence'
For much of the post-World War II period, what was marketed as 'globalisation' was, in fact, an imperial project cloaked in liberal universals. It was the projection of American state-capitalist hegemony through a scaffold of multilateral institutions – the IMF, World Bank, WTO, NATO – and the sacrosanct status of the dollar as the planetary currency-signifier.
These were not neutral frameworks but instruments of asymmetric interdependence: the United States exported capital, debt, and ideology, while importing dependence, discipline, and surplus labour from the periphery and semi-periphery. The so-called "Washington Consensus" was never a consensus but a diktat.
The system also functioned through a deeper ideological fantasy that free markets and global rule-based order were apolitical, universal, and benign. However, even most liberal-internationalist critiques warn the fantasy is fraying. The very interdependence that sustained US primacy is in retreat.
Firms and governments worldwide need American consumers, capital markets, and alliances, giving Washington soft coercive power. Trump's tactics have upended that balance. By 'assailing interdependence,' the administration is chipping away at the very basis of American advantage.
Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye argue that order depends on stable power balances, shared norms, and sustaining institutions. Trump has shaken all three. What follows is a deeper drift into disorder, one that won't resolve until Washington either reorients itself or is overtaken by a new dispensation. The plunge may already be underway.
'In his erratic and misguided effort to make the United States even more powerful, Trump may bring its period of dominance—what the American publisher Henry Luce first called 'the American century'—to an unceremonious end,' they write in a Foreign Affairs essay.
The weaponisation of the global economy hollows out the very symbolic order the US once used to legitimate its rule. By shrinking its adversaries' strategic space, Washington also corrodes the interconnected lattice that once lent credibility and allure to its empire.
A tariff here, a blacklist there, and the freezing of foreign bank reserves – each may win tactical advantage, but at the cost of eroding the trust that underpinned the liberal international order. After all, what merchant or government would dare anchor long-term plans to a system where every node can be severed by a presidential signature?
Trump's disruption is risky for the US precisely because new economic blocs are emerging from the wreckage of Western hegemony. Many leaders of the Global South remember colonialism and feel the 21st century liberates them from Western diktats. Where the US once posed as the sole path to progress, China's tech power and Russia's security reach now appear less like threats and more like counterweights.
On soft power's front, when natural disasters strike or epidemics spread, Western-style NGOs and media have lost some of their framing power, as Chinese and Russian aid convoys now appear on television alongside those from the Red Cross.
The velvet-glove diplomacy of the Cold War years – teddy bears over bombers – has been largely replaced by quarantine diplomacy, vaccine pledges, and once-dominant American development agencies playing second fiddle to Belt-and-Road contracts.
In May, a major Democracy Perception Index reported that majorities of people worldwide now see the US negatively. The pollster noted that after Trump's return to the White House, America's reputation 'took a particularly massive hit in EU countries' and fell sharply everywhere.
Even NATO founder Anders Fogh Rasmussen sighed that the US' standing was 'unloved' across most of the world. By contrast, China's image is improving globally, even overtaking the US in overall favourability in most regions.
At home, the US is cannibalising its future. Budget cuts to core research agencies like the NSF and NIH are hollowing out the very ecosystem that once drove American innovation. Labs shrink, fellowships vanish, and global talent turns to Beijing, Singapore, or the UAE – where funding flows and visas follow.
Meanwhile, China invests aggressively in semiconductors, AI, and green tech, eroding the US edge.
As Oxford's Carl Benedikt Frey puts it, Trump's agenda risks dismantling the pillars of US innovation. Technological leadership is not a birthright but is built. And Washington is letting it rot.
Trump's move to turn tariff-penalties and export bans into blunt instruments has worried many that he was abandoning existing rules and undermining the soft power that Washington has spent decades building.
Analysts argue that American power rests on a blend of hard force and attraction, even though this very soft power has enabled hard power interventions. Interdependence with trading partners and multilateral institutions generates US leverage, while global admiration for 'American culture and ideals' makes allies pliant, they argue.
Trump's assault on trade pacts and international agencies undercuts the foundation of American power and accelerates the erosion of the postwar order.
In principle, if American power were absolute, it could force partners into line indefinitely. In practice, aggressive trade measures are sowing resentments. Many countries have been party to US-led trade deals expecting mutual benefit – now they wonder if Washington will simply upend their exports to punish political stances.
The WTO and other legal venues, for a long time arenas where small states could begrudge larger ones, are being largely sidelined. Without clear enforcement, the most vulnerable economies will look for alternative blocs or simply bribe each other to stay out of the US orbit.
The cruellest irony is that by inflicting pain on others – or threatening to – the US is undermining the very goodwill and partnerships that underpinned its postwar hegemony.
The writer is a Lahore-based senior journalist