GLOBAL BALANCE OF POWER SHIFTS AND THE US

 Among the elites and the masses alike, there was so much hope that America would remain on top of the world when the Soviet Bloc disintegrated in 1990-1991 and President George W. Bush announced the US-based unipolar 'NEW WORLD ORDER.' American academics, including Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington became celebrities promoting theoretical models that would have the US remain at the core of the global power structure, recapturing some of the lost glory since Truman promulgated the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.

All of these assumptions were built on the assumption that because the Soviet Bloc had collapsed and China had embraced a mixed economy reintegrating with the capitalist world, America's hegemonic role was guaranteed. Rather than analyzing the merits of the capitalist world economy under the neoliberal model and the place of the US as a core country within that model, carefully examining the economically multipolar power structure, combined with domestic US policies and their impact on the political economy, the focus was on the absence of an enemy as a guarantee that PAX AMERICANA would live forever.

It is indeed unfortunate that the exact same delusional mindset and mental constructs of the 1990s regarding "End of History" vacuous theories continues to persist in the mid-2020s. National mythology is very important to keep the consensus in a nation-state and loyal to the institutional structure. However, it is dangerous because the farther away from empirical reality analysis of institutional structures, the greater the difficulty to solve possible crises. Even more dangerous, the search for enemies to blame for internal decline necessarily reinforces delusions of grandeur and refusal to address systemic domestic problems.

According to the latest Gallup poll, only one-third of Americans have no problem with America's position in the world, down from two-thirds in 2000. This is at a time that US income inequality, poverty and homelessness has been rising while the government is now spending more on defense than the next eleven largest defense spenders combined and there are two major proxy wars - UKRAINE AND ISRAEL - contributing the the $34 trillion public debt that the US hopes China-led BRICS does not undermine because the US has been weaponizing the dollar.

The article below asks whether America's downturn is another dip in a long arc of non-linear, yet essentially upward, progress, or the first phase of steep and irreversible national decline. A bit more research would have shown that the decline actually started in the second Eisenhower administration when the IMF warned the US government that the chronic balance of payments deficits and dwindling gold reserves has resulted in a trend undermining the dollar's stability as a reserve currency. Not inevitable that the decline must follow, current policies make it inevitable.