September 5, 2024
Nasser Kandil
Former American President and Presidential Candidate Donald Trump’s discourse cannot claim to have the keys to arrest the persistent political, economic, and military decline America has been living, and during his term in office, was unable to prove his ability to change such course. Neither can the Vice-President and Democratic Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris claim that such American persistent decline politically, economically and militarily is situational and possible to control. Observation of the international scene in terms of American impotence to manage crises of the magnitude of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, inability to help the ally in winning the war, and from the West’s perspective and the perspective of the region directly involved in the war, the inability to come up with a settlement, and the American retreat from the Ukraine war and military retreat from the Red Sea, are sufficient to discern the limits of American military ability to change the course of wars, and the erosion in American deterrence capability. It suffices to take a good look at the collapse in stocks which has been shaking Wall Street to realize the magnitude of structural challenges which politics has no ability to rapidly influence, be it Trump’s or Harris’.
The Ukraine war has changed, and what is taking place under the headline of Ukrainian counter attacks has become a war of attrition which Russia has the ability to manage, tolerate its consequences, and contain its repercussions, because this war is consuming Ukrainian human resources and displaying the limited impact of American and Western military supplies in effecting any change in the course of the war. Bit by bit, NATO, and in its back America, are finding themselves increasingly involved in the war, with the failure becoming clearer, against a backing away in all the West, and especially Washington, from the negotiation option until it becomes the only exit from the dilemma. Negotiations, however, will not only be over the Ukraine. In parallel, the war in Gaza is becoming a war of political and military attrition revealing the limitations of the American role against the barbarism of the Israeli military machine which has lost all support worldwide, while the American military support to the occupying entity has not been enough to help it regain the initiative, but sufficient to continue killing women and children and using their killing as a tool for exerting pressure in the negotiations, with matters reaching to the extent of the American Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, calling on Hamas to accept an American proposal adoptive of Benyamin Netanyahu’s vision under the slogan of the only way to stop the killing and allow aid to come in, literally embodying International Law definitions of terrorism, since his call exposes civilians to danger for the realization of political goals.
Trump’s bravado-based discourse such as stating that if he had been President, neither the war in the Ukariane nor in Gaza would have broken out, is unconvincing, especially that Americans saw him being impotent in doing anything about the loss of the war in Syria, and the challenges which emerged in the Gulf with Iran downing the giant American espionage plane, and Ansar Allah’s attacks on Aramco. Kamala Harris does not dare to talk about the Afghanistan model, where running away from confrontation becomes the only way of ending a war, as a methodology that can be generalized. In both cases America becomes a paralyzed great power, because what military and political war maneuvers require are small forces, like the naval maneuvers between the speed boats and the huge aircraft carriers.
The American regression is on an ascending graph line which will not be stopped by the policies Trump and Harris spar on. What the stock market has witnessed is a good response about the level of the market’s confidence in politics. However, when such decline is paired with political dumbness and impotence in choosing realistic options which acknowledge at an early stage the magnitude of changes resulting from the rise of new world powers, and on the existence of crises impossible to solve by betting on acting smart and muscle display, and the adoption of barbarism, aggression, and criminality, as is the case of American dealing with the Palestinian matter, the result becomes the world entering in long wars of attrition, where ending the wars and imposing new realities becomes subject to the willingness of the population masses exploited by Washington in its international games, to become defiant and exit the playground. This is what gives political value to the scenes from the Ukraine about cases of defiance against the draft, and to the demonstrations by crowds filling the streets in occupied Jerusalem and other occupied Palestinian towns in refusal of paying the bill of the war which Netnayahu persists in escalating. But what this also does is place on those who are confronting the responsibility of added resilience and resistance, and engaging in the war intelligently to avoid inflaming it to reach a large-scale war that will repress and extinguish voices of dissent, and not de-escalate the war to a degree where the pressure on bringing this dissent out in the open ceases.
It has become clear that the risk of victory by the forces supported by Washington is not on the agenda, and that inflicting defeat on this endeavor is not far in coming, because the American decline is not situational or limited in scope and direction. Furthermore, the decline and collapse of the great empire will not necessarily by resounding.
