A Failure of American Leadership
By Francis P. Sempa
June 26, 2023
AP
Historians may look back and conclude that the 2020s was the most dangerous decade of the 21st century. Russia’s aggression in Eastern Europe, China’s quest for global leadership, North Korea’s nuclear brinkmanship, and Iran’s growing role in the Middle East have brought geopolitical competition back with a vengeance. And two of our most important global thinkers have recently pronounced U.S. leadership under the Biden administration as wanting.
In truth, geopolitical competition never disappeared, but victory in the Cold War clouded U.S. geopolitical judgment. The American “unipolar moment” was just that--a brief moment. Yet we were told that the era of great power wars was over; that history had ended; that the era of globalization would render geopolitics irrelevant. While China rose economically and militarily and grew closer to a defeated but resurgent Russia, the United States expended blood and treasure in peripheral wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that lasted too long and in the end accomplished little.
Niall Ferguson, Hoover Institution Senior Fellow and prolific historian and commentator on world affairs, writes in Bloomberg that America’s allies are “uneasy” about the lack of American leadership. The question on their minds is: “Where exactly is it that the U.S. would like its allies to follow?” Ferguson believes that globalization has “broken down” and that we are witnessing the emergence of rival “economic and security blocs.” One problem with the U.S.-led security bloc is that America continues to bear a disproportionate share of the costs--whether it be NATO defenses or aid to Ukraine in its current war with Russia. A second problem is that polls show America’s European allies will likely remain neutral in any military conflict between the U.S. and China. Ferguson doubts that the American people will continue to support aid to Ukraine and containment of China under these circumstances. “U.S. leadership,” he writes, “would indeed be a good idea.”
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/06/26/a_failure_of_american_leadership_942967.html
