We are in the year 2002. After the invasion of Afghanistan, in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks, the United States plans to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime under the pretext – which will be proven false – that it produces weapons of destruction. massive. Some of its allies do not see it clearly and France will go so far as to veto the UN endorsement in the Security Council. But that does not deter Washington, which in 2003 will launch the invasion. In a conversation with Ron Suskind, a journalist for The New York Times, a senior official in the George W. Bush Administration boastfully states: “We are now an empire, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
Drunk with arrogance after the fall of communism and the dismemberment of the USSR, orphaned by an opponent capable of contesting its world hegemony, the empire was about to give itself a phenomenal chestnut. Afghanistan and Iraq were going to be, in the long run, two fiascos that were going to ruin the international credibility of the US and call into question its role as a universal superpower. Today, emerging countries, led by China, have organized to counter their preeminence and outline a new world order.
American dominance of the last seven decades is the consequence of its unappealable victory in World War II. But also, and above all, a will for supremacy whose strategic lines were defined under the presidency of Harry Truman and have endured to the present day. The bible of this strategy, the document that defined the axes of the new giant's foreign policy, has a code name: NSC-68.
Prepared in 1950 by a team led by the then director of planning of the State Department, Paul Nitze, and titled Objectives and programs of the United States for national security, it is according to the North American foreign service itself “one of the most influential documents written by the US government during the Cold War.” In its 58 pages, the memorandum – declared top secret and not declassified until 1975 – described in dramatic terms the threat from the Soviet Union and raised the need for the United States to address the “rapid construction of political, economic and military strength.” of the free world”, from the conviction that the country had “the responsibility of world leadership.”
Not everyone agreed with this vision, but the invasion of South Korea by the North Korean communists, with Chinese and Soviet support, ended up turning the debate around. As a result, the Truman Administration nearly tripled defense spending between 1950 and 1953 (from 5% to 14.2% of GDP). And it established the doctrinal basis that would lead ten years later to the failed intervention in Vietnam.
“The problem is that the US links (from that moment on) its vital interests with its position of power in the world. As a consequence, military dominance becomes an end in itself,” noted historian Stephen Wertheim (author of the book Tomorrow, the World) in an interview with the Washington Post in 2020.
Political scientist Andrew J. Bacevich, from Boston University, expressed a similar opinion in an article last March in Foreign Affairs, where he stated that, “trapped by false dreams of hegemony,” Washington continued to stubbornly cling to a doctrine that does not work, and called for the development of a new strategic approach to replace “the zombie paradigm of NSC-68.”
Daydreams aside, the truth is that reality is no longer created by the empire. The US remains a political, economic and military superpower. But its supremacy is more contested than ever. The resistance of the countries of the so-called Global South to follow the policy of sanctions against Russia established by Washington in retaliation for the war in Ukraine is an example of their loss of weight.
A new world order is taking shape. And it is not exactly the one that former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown optimistically applauded when, forced by the 2008 financial crisis, the G-20 group was activated, which brings together developed and emerging countries with the aim of coordinating economic and monetary policies. . It seemed that a new stage was opening based on international cooperation and the reinforcement of multilateral bodies. But it hasn't been exactly like that. The G-20 remains a necessary forum, but it has not become the epicenter of that new order. And the conspicuous absence of Chinese President Xi Jinping at the last summit on the 9th and 10th in New Delhi only confirms this.
In the heat of the systemic rivalry between the US and China, a new international actor has emerged with force: it is the BRICS group, whose main vocation is to act as a counterweight to Washington's G-7 and its allies in Europe and Asia. Founded by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the group has recently expanded – in a gesture of strong symbolism – with the incorporation of Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia and Iran, which together bring together 46 % of the population and 30% of the world's GDP.
The BRICS is a heterogeneous group, with disparate political regimes – mostly autocratic –, discordant economic interests and even notorious internal rivalries – between China and India –, which can hardly hope to dislodge the US from its position. But it is beginning to have enough strength to reject the American diktat and establish a new pole of power. The empire is taking its last gasps.
