What will the world be like with a weaker United States?
I believe the world will be much worse off.
However, I freely acknowledge that there is a deep resentment amongst many over America’s assumed responsibility as the ‘world’s policeman’, and many people in the West and outside eagerly await its decline and collapse as the world’s sole superpower. With President Barack Obama at the helm since 2008, the re-emergence of Russia, the rise of China and the other BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India China) this collapse may happen sooner than we think.
It is true that the United States has at times interfered in the domestic affairs of other nations, and has created and exacerbated problems around the world, as well as resolving them. But a world without a superior United States is not going to be a fairer or more equitable world, rather, it will be a world with much greater instability and conflict as nations jostle for power and influence. We are already seeing this – whether it is in the Middle East, Russia and Ukraine, or the tensions heating up in the East China Sea.
The United States’ diplomatic power has contracted significantly in only the last few years, and the superpower is no longer taken as seriously as it once was.
These and other events that have taken place over the last couple of years give us a hint of what will become the new ‘normal’ in world affairs.
The author Mark Steyn wrote in detail in his 2006 book, America Alone, about this very situation we are now facing.
And this new ‘normal’ in world affairs, with a weakened United States, is going to be a lot more unstable, uncertain and potentially much more dangerous for all.
