FRANCIS FUKUYAMA ON THE END OF AMERICAN HEGEMONY

Afghanistan does not mark the end of the American era; the challenge to its global standing is political
polarisation at home, says a foreign-policy expert

Aug 18th 2021

This By-invitation commentary is the first in a series by outside contributors on the future of American
power—taking a broad look at the forces shaping the country's global standing in the 20 years since
9/11, from the rise of China to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. More articles will be published shortly
and available here.

THE HORRIFYING images of desperate Afghans trying to get out of Kabul this week after the United
States-backed government collapsed have evoked a major juncture in world history, as America turned
away from the world. The truth of the matter is that the end of the American era had come much
earlier. The long-term sources of American weakness and decline are more domestic than international.
The country will remain a great power for many years, but just how influential it will be depends on its
ability to fix its internal problems, rather than its foreign policy.

The peak period of American hegemony lasted less than 20 years, from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989
to around the financial crisis in 2007-09. The country was dominant in many domains of power back
then—military, economic, political and cultural. The height of American hubris was the invasion of Iraq
in 2003, when it hoped to be able to remake not just Afghanistan (invaded two years before) and Iraq,
but the whole of the Middle East.

The country overestimated the effectiveness of military power to bring about fundamental political
change, even as it under-estimated the impact of its free-market economic model on global finance. The
decade ended with its troops bogged down in two counterinsurgency wars, and an international
financial crisis that accentuated the huge inequalities that American-led globalisation had brought
about.

The degree of unipolarity in this period has been relatively rare in history, and the world has been
reverting to a more normal state of multipolarity ever since, with China, Russia, India, Europe and other
centres gaining power relative to America. Afghanistan’s ultimate effect on geopolitics is likely to be
small. America survived an earlier, humiliating defeat when it withdrew from Vietnam in 1975, but it
quickly regained its dominance within a little more than a decade, and today it works with Vietnam to
curb Chinese expansionism. America still has many economic and cultural advantages that few other
countries can match.

The much bigger challenge to America’s global standing is domestic: American society is deeply
polarised, and has found it difficult to find consensus on virtually anything. This polarisation started over
conventional policy issues like taxes and abortion, but since then has metastasised into a bitter fight
over cultural identity. The demand for recognition on the part of groups that feel they have been
marginalised by elites was something I identified 30 years ago as an Achilles heel of modern democracy.
Normally, a big external threat such as a global pandemic should be the occasion for citizens to rally
around a common response; the covid-19 crisis served rather to deepen America's divisions, with social
distancing, mask-wearing and now vaccinations being seen not as public-health measures but as political
markers.

These conflicts have spread to all aspects of life, from sports to the brands of consumer products that
red and blue Americans buy. The civic identity that took pride in America as a multiracial democracy in
the post-civil rights era has been replaced by warring narratives over 1619 versus 1776—that is, whether
the country is founded on slavery or the fight for freedom. This conflict extends to the separate realities
each side believes it sees, realities in which the election in November 2020 was either one of the fairest
in American history or else a massive fraud leading to an illegitimate presidency.

Throughout the cold war and into the early 2000s, there was a strong elite consensus in America in
favour of maintaining a leadership position in world politics. The grinding and seemingly endless wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq soured many Americans not just on difficult places like the Middle East, but
international involvement generally.

Polarisation has affected foreign policy directly. During the Obama years, Republicans took a hawkish
stance and castigated the Democrats for the Russian “reset” and alleged naïveté regarding President
Putin. Former President Trump turned the tables by openly embracing Mr Putin, and today roughly half
of Republicans believe that the Democrats constitute a bigger threat to the American way of life than
does Russia. A conservative television-news anchor, Tucker Carlson, travelled to Budapest to celebrate
Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orban; “owning the libs” (ie, antagonising the left, a
catch-phrase of the right) was more important than standing up for democratic values.

There is more apparent consensus regarding China: both Republicans and Democrats agree it is a threat
to democratic values. But this only carries America so far. A far greater test for American foreign policy
than Afghanistan will be Taiwan, if it comes under direct Chinese attack. Will the United States be willing
to sacrifice its sons and daughters on behalf of that island’s independence? Or indeed, would the United
States risk military conflict with Russia should the latter invade Ukraine? These are serious questions
with no easy answers, but a reasoned debate about American national interest will probably be
conducted primarily through the lens of how it affects the partisan struggle.

Polarisation has already damaged America’s global influence, well short of future tests like these. That
influence depended on what Joseph Nye, a foreign-policy scholar, labelled “soft power”, that is, the
attractiveness of American institutions and society to people around the world. That appeal has been
greatly diminished: it is hard for anyone to say that American democratic institutions have been working
well in recent years, or that any country should imitate America’s political tribalism and dysfunction. The
hallmark of a mature democracy is the ability to carry out peaceful transfers of power following
elections, a test the country failed spectacularly on January 6th.

The biggest policy debacle by President Joe Biden’s administration in its seven months in office has been
its failure to plan adequately for the rapid collapse of Afghanistan. However unseemly that was, it
doesn’t speak to the wisdom of the underlying decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, which may in the
end prove to be the right one. Mr Biden has suggested that withdrawal was necessary in order to focus
on meeting the bigger challenges from Russia and China down the road. I hope he is serious about this.
Barack Obama was never successful in making a “pivot” to Asia because America remained focused on
counterinsurgency in the Middle East. The current administration needs to redeploy both resources and
the attention of policymakers from elsewhere in order to deter geopolitical rivals and to engage with
allies.

The United States is not likely to regain its earlier hegemonic status, nor should it aspire to. What it can
hope for is to sustain, with like-minded countries, a world order friendly to democratic values. Whether
it can do this will depend not on short-term actions in Kabul, but on recovering a sense of national
identity and purpose at home.

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Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and
Mosbacher Director of its Centre on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.