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Opinion US society

America’s cultural supremacy and geopolitical weakness

The notion of ‘decline’ is too crude to capture what is happening to the US in the 21st century.

https://www.ft.com/content/dce07860-f39e-432b-a0f6-1a2124e4e1a3

The Reader has to wonder at the opening of Mr. Ganesh latest feuilleton!

The Opening Players:

Premier League, Arsenal, Liverpool, AC Milan, Roma, Marseille, Lyon, Chelsea Manchester United, US-owned.

This further elucidates Mr. Ganesh’s point?

The planet’s favourite game is being steered to a considerable extent from American boardrooms.

But quickly Mr. Ganesh reaches into his political repertoire for this paragraph:

Perhaps your test of cultural influence is higher-minded than that. Well, consider that US universities continue to dominate world rankings. Or that America accounts for 45 per cent of art sales by value, according to UBS, which is more than Britain and China, the next two markets, combined. To attend the Venice Biennale now is to enter a new Jazz Age in which experts from all over the world vie to advise American patrons on how to spend the spoils of their economic boom.

Next is this World-Historical/Political Pastiche that almost resembles actual thought?

This is a personal impression, and therefore unquantifiable, but I suggest that America has more cultural reach now than it did in its supposed unipolar moment of the 1990s. The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis three years ago set off protests in London, Paris and beyond. The beating of Rodney King in 1991 had no such international echo. Back then, Britain’s bien pensants didn’t follow US political media as though it were domestic fare, or tell each other to stop “gaslighting” and “do better”, much less couch all this second-hand argot in Upspeak. To adapt what Jefferson said about France, everyone, or at least everyone educated and liberal, seems to have two countries now: their own and America.

Sub-Heading: American Decline’s symptomology, a selection of The Players/Actors:

All the while, the geopolitical clout of the US wanes.

…has also failed to persuade much of the world to participate in sanctions against Russia

…20 years in Afghanistan.

…Bretton Woods institutions are fighting for relevance.

…proliferation of armed conflicts

…International Institute for Strategic Studies

…Pax Americana is giving way, if not to Pax Sinica then to no kind of Pax at all.

…the US struggles to corral the “global south”

…when liberal protocol moves on in all its clockwork fickleness.

Mr. Ganesh attempts to in his way, to appeal to his would-be, and actual Oxbridger readership, with maladroit asides, along with fretting about ‘that blunt word decline’.

What is happening to the US in the 21st century is too complex to be captured in that blunt word “decline”. As the nation’s share of world output has dropped, its influence on world culture — on the tastes, idioms and habits of foreigners — is as vast as ever. Whether your concerns are high brow (where should I do a postgraduate degree?), middling (what show will I stream tonight?) or popular (who owns Declan Rice?), America is inescapable. We are now a couple of decades into its relative loss of ground to China in traditional power terms. The knock-on effect for US prestige in other domains should be registering now. It is staggeringly negligible.

A selection from the two remaining paragraphs. It’s hard to be tolerant of Mr. Ganesh’s self-congratulatory chatter, ending in cynicism!

Is this good for Americans? You can see how it might be.

At the same time, all that cultural lustre blinded the British to the extent of their demotion from the geopolitical high table.

…such as abstention from the embryonic European project.

…the same trouble as Britain in recognising its diminished geopolitical status, and adapting its statecraft to compensate.

The trick is to not fall asleep on it.

Political Reporter