SNA (Tokyo) — Kurt Campbell, the Biden administration’s National Security Council Coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, is the “brain” behind much of what the Pentagon and US State Department are doing in East Asia today, but his policy approaches do not correspond with the realities of a global US empire now in rapid decline.

The US global position today is a far cry from what it was at the end of World War II. At that time, it accounted for about half of all the world’s manufacturing capability and was in sole possession of nuclear weapons.

By 2020, if measured by purchasing power parity, the US accounted for less than 16% of the world economy, is heading lower with each passing year, and was surpassed by China in 2017.

Moreover, the wear-and-tear of almost eighty years of performing as a global empire with military forces engaged in ceaseless violence has clearly degraded the health of American democracy and society. More than four decades of growing economic inequality within the United States is both a consequence and a reflection of a nation in crisis.

The presidency of Donald Trump (2017-2021) represented many swirling social forces, but prominent among them was a rebellion against a Washington elite that has forfeited the trust of the working class. While Trump himself is a dubious leader for this movement, much of his success arises from tapping into discontent with elite enrichment and the sacrifices of an endless parade of foreign wars.

Even if they disagree on the origins and causes of the problem, most Americans sense that something is deeply amiss with their country and its leadership.

A Quinnipiac University National Poll published last month found that when they were asked if “the nation’s democracy is in danger of collapse,” Americans agreed by a 58%-37% margin that their 240-year-old democratic system is indeed in peril.

When asked if “the bigger danger” came from “other countries” or “political instability within the United States,” the poll found that Americans overwhelming fear their own countrymen by a 76%-19% margin.

How does Kurt Campbell and the US establishment foreign policy community grapple with these stark realities? For the most part, by either trying to bottle up the growing pressures or by dismissing them.

In Campbell’s own telling, “one of the interesting things about the United States is our ability to rise up again, almost like a phoenix from the ashes.” He adds that an effort to “dispel concerns about American decline” is one of the main tasks of Biden Era diplomacy.

Rather than recognizing that the United States needs to gracefully retreat from the serial overseas military adventures that are breaking the back of the American polity and to rebalance toward a more consensual, broad-based world order centering on a reinvigorated United Nations, Campbell and his colleagues insist on making yet another push to assert US imperial primacy around the globe, with the US military forming the central role in these efforts.

Their focal point, of course, is China. Campbell says that the era of “engagement” has now passed, and that looking forward “the dominant paradigm is going to be competition.”

There is a persistent unwillingness in Washington to acknowledge what the China challenge is and what it isn’t.

It is certainly true that Beijing’s rise will inevitably entail some negative consequences. Generally speaking, feelings of pride and nationalism are running rampant in Chinese society. After their “century of humiliation,” Chinese will demand to be treated as the great power they have now become.

Hong Kong has already felt the brunt of it and a future conflict with Taiwan—which possesses a unique and particularly difficult set of legal and historical circumstances—is unfortunately quite plausible.

But Beijing’s determination to “unify” the Chinese people (whose scattering they reasonably regard to be a legacy of modern European and Japanese imperialism) is a far cry from believing, as some do, that unless US troops are deployed throughout East Asia to deter it, there will be an inevitable Chinese military conquest of Seoul, Tokyo, and Manila. The economic realities of this century alone should put paid to such paranoid nonsense.

While Beijing is not a “global threat,” it is a great power that will demand a degree of deference in its neighborhood, just as great powers have always done. In this sense, Campbell is correct when he says that “China is determined to play a more assertive role.”

Ultimately, however, it is a question of where deterrence ends and where provocation begins.

When Campbell speaks of “forward deployed engagements to preserve peace and stability,” he refuses to acknowledge that such attempts to brandish the stick of US military force in China’s face will not, in the long run, produce the deterrent effect he suggests.

Campbell’s project to encircle China with pro-US alliances such as The Quad, AUKUS, etc., will make a future military clash more likely, not less likely.

As its own economic and military power grows, Beijing will obviously become increasingly impatient with a fading US power and its provocative efforts to encourage its neighbors to form an anti-China network.

US efforts aimed at convincing Taiwan to act more independently will be especially corrosive to the prospects for peaceful resolutions.

There are, of course, perfectly valid moral reasons why people of conscience should want very much to protect vibrant, democratic Taiwan from the clutches of the one-party dictatorship that rules over the mainland. But those calculations start to change their complexion if—like Hong Kong—the United States is, in fact, unable to support Taipei even while encouraging the island’s leaders to antagonize Beijing.

The current Ukraine crisis raises a related matter: the US global empire has an attention deficit disorder.

One reason why the Biden administration was willing to face political embarrassment by withdrawing from the Afghanistan War was to better realize the “Pivot to the Pacific,” which is one Campbell’s signature concerns—or as Campbell himself puts it, “the lion’s share of the history of the 21st century is going to be written in Asia.”

In spite of this strategic decision, mere months later the US has maneuvered itself to the verge of a possible war in Europe over territories that have been part of the Russian heartland since the time a political entity called “Russia” first came into existence.

This hardly seems like the last time that the US establishment will lose its focus on China in order to go chasing after some real or imagined crisis in another part of the world. Washington’s addiction to military responses—should it continue on this unwise path—will clearly come back to bite one day.

Meanwhile, Beijing will not be so easily distracted from the Asia-Pacific. If Chinese leaders do choose to take military action against Taiwan or in relation to some other dispute, all they need do is to wait for the United States to get bogged down somewhere else and to trip over its own heels.

However, Kurt Campbell’s single biggest miscalculation as he surveys the grand chessboard of alliances in the Indo-Pacific is that the threat at home will predictably send all his kings, queens, and rooks flying to the floor before too much longer—the US public itself is poised to rebel against the global empire that he is striving to maintain beyond their endurance.

The political bill is coming due for the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, and a thousand other imperial US crimes and blunders since the 1945 “rise to globalism.”

It would be nice to say that this disruption will emerge from the triumph of Bernie Sanders-style US progressives who will take a moral, anti-militarist stand—people who will reaffirm the better angels of human nature with a deep commitment to the reinvigoration of US democracy.

Unfortunately, this generation of US progressive leaders has demonstrated amply that they are not sufficiently serious about taking power. They have already been effectively coopted or contained by the Washington establishment.

This means that the US imperial collapse will almost certainly come, not from progressives, but from the isolationist right—or, in other words, from the return of Donald Trump or another rightwing leader who appeals to the same working class constituency.

During the last administration, Campbell and his establishment colleagues were, of course, horrified by Trump’s transactional treatment of allies, which was nearly the opposite of their own insufferable fake moralism about “shared values,” “upholding the rule of law,” and all the rest of it.

They treated the four years of the Trump presidency as an aberration and a mistake that they could and would correct. In Campbell’s words, “One of the biggest challenges for the Biden administration is to try to underscore and reassure allies and friends that our stabilizing role, our more traditional approach, we are going to try to continue.”

But he would be better advised to see the 2017-2021 not as an aberration but as a foreshock of a much greater political earthquake to come. He should be conducting US diplomacy accordingly, recognizing that an orderly and dignified retreat from a badly overstretched position is far preferable to a future chaotic collapse.

Again, the Quinnipiac poll cited above shows clearly that most ordinary Americans feel in their bones that something big and bad is about to break in their society. It shouldn’t be too much to ask that highly educated and experienced people like Kurt Campbell possess the same common sense as the average person on the street.

They are, after all, supposed to be the clever and far-sighted ones.

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