The Houthi Red Sea attacks on international sea lanes, Venezuelan preparations to annex most of Guyana, and human shields in Gaza are incidents that suggest "international law" is dying. The old rules are increasingly ignored, not just by great powers like Russia, which invaded Ukraine, or China advancing in the South China Sea, but even by relative second-raters, the Houthis in Yemen, a bankrupt socialist regime in Caracas, and a terror group in the Middle East. America, that linchpin of the Pax Americana, seems to have vanished.
Joe Biden entered office promising to make everything like it used to be. As the New York Times put it after his nomination: "When Joe Biden ... is selling a promise: Soon President Trump will be gone and the United States can return to the normalcy of pre-Trump life, slightly improved. This is as true of foreign policy as of anything else." Three years later the same New York Times would publish an opinion piece titled "The Strange Decline of the Pax Americana." While Paul Krugman remains certain that things would have been much worse under Trump, "[t]hat said, even serious students of international affairs are noting that the world seems to be becoming more dangerous, with many local cold wars turning hot, and suggesting that we may be witnessing the end of the Pax Americana, the long era in which U.S. economic and military dominance limited the potential for wars of conquest. But why is the Pax Americana in decline?"
Why is everything like it never was before? Krugman argues that America's relative economic and technological advantages, owing to its rivals' missteps, remain greater than ever. And "yet it seems safe to say that the world no longer trusts U.S. promises, and perhaps no longer fears U.S. threats, the way it used to." The reason for the world's troubles, he thinks, is the memory of populism and Donald Trump. "Right now America is a superpower without a fully functioning government. Specifically, the House of Representatives has no speaker, so it can’t pass legislation, including bills funding the government and providing aid to U.S. allies. The House is paralyzed because Republican extremists, who have refused to acknowledge Biden’s legitimacy and promoted chaos rather than participating in governance."
So Krugman's theory is it's Trump's fault for driving America out of paradise. The problem with this argument is that if Biden, after three years, cannot find his way back to Eden, if he can't even come closer to it, then some other factor must be at play. The alternative to Krugman's hypothesis is that the growing weakness of America's position is caused by Washington itself; by the bureaucracy's increasing inability to govern in the national interest, acting instead on factional agenda at the prodding of powerful lobbying. Perhaps nothing illustrates this more clearly than Biden's attempts to build an international naval coalition to protect Red Sea lanes against the same Houthi organization he took off the terror list.
The Houthis of Yemen misgovern horribly & launch anti-ship & ballistic missiles for their Tehran paymasters. When the Biden Administration came into office it took the Houthis of the terror list (!) as part of its reversion to Obama's soft Iran policy. But Houthis are terrorists
— Edward N Luttwak (@ELuttwak) December 4, 2023
There is a direct clash between the longtime American interest in freedom of navigation and the pro-Iran policy of Biden's predecessor, Barack Obama. Perhaps even more glaring is the open division between liberal Democratic Jews, the majority of whom support Israel's war against Hamas, and the powerful anti-colonial, anti-settler Woke ideology of the rest of Biden's political coalition that supports Hamas. As with the Red Sea maritime situation, the split is driving Washington's incoherent response, with America arming Israel on the one hand while calling for a ceasefire on the other. The split is everywhere. Should Venezuela invade Guyana for oil, the Democratic party will again find itself divided between the reflexively left wing supporters of Maduro and the backers of "people of color" whom the Guyanese more nearly resemble. All up and down the line, the governing Woke ideology is trapped in unresolvable contradictions. If America is now a superpower without a fully functioning government, it is at least partly because its ruling elite is divided against itself.
The DEI program, fed into the Washington bureaucracy, is causing it to print: "It does not compute!! It does not compute!!"
Unsurprisingly, Biden seems to have vanished as a factor in this morass, with a headless Washington fighting on routine remembered muscle memory. His strong suit was always delivering to the party's interest groups, but with his base turning their wheels in opposite directions, he cannot please one faction without offending another and has consequently faded and keeps fading from the scene. But the one consideration in Washington's frantic jumping from pillar to post even more invisible than Biden's thought processes is what used to be termed the national interest. It is now a distant second to climate change, gender equity or combating settler-colonialism. No wonder "international law" is dying. Who would govern the world that cannot even govern itself?
