As the new year advances, America invades Venezuela and kidnaps its president and first lady to stand trial in the USA for running drug cartels, while just earlier, it pardoned a convicted felon leader of another Central American state, accused of the same crimes, because “convicted felon” holds no gravitas anymore. The world is in shock, and the airwaves are buzzing with outrage. Other countries in the Western Hemisphere, notably Greenland, Cuba, Mexico, and Canada, worry about their fate.
Some are calling it the Donroe Doctrine, a knockoff of the 200-year-old Monroe Doctrine, leaving its present namesake beaming with pride. The Monroe Doctrine was intended to prevent further colonization of the Americas by European nations. Donroe is a stamp of hegemony of the Western Hemisphere with unauthorized access to all resources therein. But both these doctrines pale in the face of Pax Americana or the American Century, which the USA assumed at the end of WWII and has now lost through its recent actions, leaving it to play schoolyard bully in only a section of the global playground, the western end.
Pax Americana saw the creation of global institutions which the USA controlled: The UN and its agencies like the WHO, the World Bank, and little brother IMF; the Bretton Woods system that made the US Dollar the de-facto global currency; NATO; Global Superpower Military Leadership with smaller nations outsourcing defence to their trusted Big Brother; Global Trade Leader (as evinced by how quickly smaller nations caved to US tariffs in 2025); and the ability to implement “regime change” anywhere in the world, not just in the Americas (except Cuba, perhaps—that’s a tough one!). Pax Americana reached its apotheosis when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and the world was ripe for the picking. But something—also referred to as Article 2 (4) of the UN Charter, which outlaws the historical “right of conquest”—held the USA back from exercising further raw power. And they didn’t have to—soft power was good enough to control the world economically, politically, and militarily back in 1991. Even George Bush Sr. stopped short of the full conquest of Iraq that same year, leaving his son to learn the lesson a dozen years later that “Might is not necessarily Right.”
If soft power had continued its slow but relentless march, even China and Russia would have eventually gone the Pax Americana way, after their current crop of Cold War warrior leaders had passed on (after all, the old Soviet Union collapsed, aided in no small part by US foreign policy, aka soft power, at the time). To me, America’s symbolic acts of self-immolation and rejection of its Pax Americana chokehold on the world began when it left the WHO (flawed though that multinational organization is, as any such multinational organization is bound to be), leaving the USA as the only country on the outside, beside tiny Liechtenstein, operating the most exclusionary and expensive healthcare system in the world.
Just as greed is now leading America to not care two hoots for UN Article 2 (4) and grab oil and other resources from neighbours at will, it will be greed that leads to the ultimate undoing of Pax Americana. The rot began when outsourcing for cheaper manufacturing costs went mainstream in the 1990s after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. China and India opened the floodgates, and by the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, the USA (and its Western allies) had created two new superpowers, a billionaire class, and destroyed its wealth and health distribution at home. And they took their eyes off emerging nuclear powers (Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea) and woke up only when Iran wanted to join the club. (Lesson to small nations who have a nuke or two hidden in their arsenal: Don’t give them up – see what happened to Ukraine! And see how that little guy Kim is grinning from ear to ear all the time!)
Now, it’s too late to regain world domination for anyone, with either soft power or raw power. Soft power has vanished due to the loss of trust, and raw power is deadlocked because too many countries have nukes, and many others are rearming. Now, we have landed in the era of “spheres of influence.” Three amigos—Putin, Trump, and Xi—are policing the other kids (and make sure they don’t get fancy nuclear ideas like Iran did!) in their respective corners of the global playground while being careful not to tread on each other’s toes. Their faux-opposition to each other is limited to social media rants. Meanwhile, the “kids” whom they are minding, aka “the middle powers,” are rushing off to make their own arrangements, band together, and take on the bullies, while upholding the rule of law. What a retrenchment, particularly for the once-mighty United States of America, who almost had the world in its grasp!
The mighty bald eagle must be sad, for Pax Americana is in the Intensive Care Unit, and the American Dream is turning into a nightmare for everyone else.
