Free Republic

A new Pax Americana is emerging on the world stage, where an assertive, confident America is reshaping the nature of the international order. President Trump has changed the power dynamic with every major global adversary around the world, vastly strengthening America’s position, and decimating the economies and future prospects of our most vociferous global opponents, from Russia, to China, to Iran, to Venezuela, to the eviscerated remnants of ISIS.

President Trump is already turning the world upside down in international diplomatic circles by taking a markedly different approach to global politics than his predecessor. It comes as no surprise that with each new American administration, a diplomatic chain reaction is felt the world over. The Bush years were marked by a heavy-handed, and sometimes ham-handed, forceful approach to American diplomacy. From NATO, to pan-Asia relationships, to the Middle East, Bush dealt from a position of cultural strength and a philosophy firmly rooted in Pax Americana. Was this approach successful? Historians certainly disagree.

THE FALL OF ROME was a culmination of external and internal factors. GREAT WALL OF CHINA By 220AD, the Later Eastern Han Dynasty had extended sections of the Great Wall of China along its Mongolian border. This resulted in the Northern Huns attacking west instead of east. This caused a domino effect of tribes migrating west across Central Asia, and overrunning the Western Roman Empire. OPEN BORDERS Illegal immigrants poured across the Roman borders: Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Franks, Anglos, Saxons, Alemanni, Thuringians, Rugians, Jutes, Picts, Burgundians, Lombards, Alans, Vandals, as well as African Berbers and Arab raiders. Will and Ariel Durant...

The United States will remain the world’s leading power for a long time, Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Friday, but he stressed global affairs should not be dominated by one country. Wang made the remarks during an interview with the Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera, ahead of the seventh ministerial conference of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum in Doha last week, and the transcript of the interview was released on Thursday night. When asked whether China, the world’s second largest economy, had prepared to replace a declining US as global leader, Wang replied “from what we know about the country,...

Donald Trump would consider allowing Japan and South Korea to build their own nuclear arsenals instead of depending on the U.S. for their protection against North Korea and China, he said in an interview with The New York Times published Saturday. “There’ll be a point at which we’re just not going to be able to do it anymore,” Trump said, pointing at what he calls a “severely depleted” military. “We have nuclear arsenals which are in very terrible shape,” he said. “They don’t even know if they work.” “If the United States keeps on its path, its current path of...

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about the fall of the Roman Empire and how it started off as the Roman Republic and how it took a very long time from the fall of the Roman Republic to the fall of the Roman Empire. If a Republic doesn't fall into chaos and collapse, it will eventually de-evole into an "Post-Republic Empire". I think we are already there. I am starting to think that the American Republic is long dead and has long since been dead. Especially in everything I have experienced in the last few presidential elections....

Take a look around the world and it’s hard not to conclude that the United States is a superpower in decline. Whether in Europe, Asia, or the Middle East, aspiring powers are flexing their muscles, ignoring Washington’s dictates, or actively combating them. Russia refuses to curtail its support for armed separatists in Ukraine; China refuses to abandon its base-building endeavors in the South China Sea; Saudi Arabia refuses to endorse the U.S.-brokered nuclear deal with Iran; the Islamic State movement (ISIS) refuses to capitulate in the face of U.S. airpower. What is a declining superpower supposed to do in the...

The public is concerned and frightened because it´s a frightening world. A lot has happened," Vice President Joe Biden told CNN in an interview that aired on Sunday. Biden noted that in every crisis, "there´s all kinds of attention" from Twitter and the news media. But later, "when we put it under control," there´s not much follow-up, Biden complained. So the public shouldn´t be anxious about Ebola and ISIS? the reporter asked him. "I think the public should not be as anxious as they are, but it´s understandable why they are. There is no existential threat to the United States

Thomas Friedman, the respected New York Times columnist, tried to do a beleaguered President Barack Obama a favor by publishing a summary of an extended interview between the two men, which was grandly entitled “Obama on the World.” Friedman tried to present the President in a positive light, by calling his weak responses “feisty.” Yet there is no denying that Obama’s rudderless foreign policy has been a disaster. The international order has rapidly deteriorated since Obama entered the Oval Office. The current situation is so perilous that so long as Obama remains President, the phrase “presidential leadership” will continue to...

Last week a World Bank report that compares something called purchasing power parity claimed that, based on the purchasing power statistics, the Chinese economy has reached a point of rough equality with the United States, or, could actually have moved slightly ahead of the USA, based on the incomplete figures of economic growth over the last three years. This announcement, which confirms the fact of China’s explosive economic development, and the anemic American recovery after the Great Recession of 2008-2010, has caused quite a stir in a number of quarters. The Chinese, usually quick to tout great achievements, have been...

To many around the world, it made little sense: The world’s most powerful government, so mired in dysfunction that it couldn’t operate. The world’s defender of individual freedoms, accused of spying on its citizens and friends. The world’s military giant planning, then balking at, an armed response to the suspected use of deadly chemical weapons. Former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright once dubbed the United States “the indispensable nation.” But as the world watched America shamble through its string of crises in 2013, the notion of the U.S. as an unflappable leader began to seem ever more quaint. Instead,...

Secretary of State John Kerry went to Europe to talk about Mideast peace, Syria and Iran. What he got was an earful of outrage over U.S. snooping abroad. President Barack Obama has defended America’s surveillance dragnet to leaders of Russia, Mexico, Brazil, France and Germany, but the international anger over the disclosures shows no signs of abating in the short run. … Diplomatic relations are built on trust. If America’s credibility is in question, the U.S. will find it harder to maintain alliances, influence world opinion and maybe even close trade deals. …

The United States is at a crossroads, and the American people must consider carefully an issue that has been creeping up on us for two decades. For most of the past 70 years, America enjoyed unquestioned naval global superiority, and we could be confident that the U.S. Navy could establish and sustain maritime dominance wherever and whenever needed. However, since the early 1990s, America’s Navy has been in decline with our fleet shrinking from almost 600 ships to just 283 ships by the end of 2012. Now in 2013, President Obama has announced a new defense strategy for America that...

The most charitable way of explaining the election results of 2012 is that Americans voted for the status quo – for the incumbent President and for a divided Congress. They must enjoy gridlock, partisanship, incompetence, economic stagnation and avoidance of responsibility. And fewer people voted. As I write, with almost all the votes counted, President Obama has won fewer votes than John McCain won in 2008, and more than ten million off his own 2008 total. (Note: this was written the day after the election. The final results indicate that Romney exceeded McCain’s total by less than one million votes,...

The United States can no longer reign supreme as the world’s sole superpower, says Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security adviser and a prolific foreign affairs scholar. “The era of global supremacy by a major power . . . is over,” he tells Yahoo. “The world is now much more diversified. There is now the new East in Asia. There is now a globally, politically awakened population.” But that doesn’t mean the demise of the United States, as long as we’re willing to make some changes, Brzezinski, says. “We have to accustomize ourselves to that world. If we want...

History shows that world orders, including our own, are transient. They rise and fall, and the institutions they erect, the beliefs and "norms" that guide them, the economic systems they support—they rise and fall, too. The downfall of the Roman Empire brought an end not just to Roman rule but to Roman government and law and to an entire economic system stretching from Northern Europe to North Africa. Culture, the arts, even progress in science and technology, were set back for centuries. Modern history has followed a similar pattern. After the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century, British control...

Pat Buchanan regularly serves as Morning Joe's lone conservative in the show's self-described 10:1 ratio of lib to conservative guests. But Buchanan this morning demonstrated that he is anything but a Republican partisan. Sounding more like Barney Frank after a bad night's sleep, Buchanan blasted President George W. Bush, claiming 43 "broke the Republican party and frankly he broke the United States as a superpower." View the video here.

EDITOR'S NOTE — The USS George Washington supercarrier recently deployed off North Korea in a high-profile show of U.S. sea power. AP Tokyo News Editor Eric Talmadge was aboard the carrier, and filed this report. ABOARD THE USS GEORGE WASHINGTON — Nothing projects U.S. global air and sea power more vividly than super carriers. Bristling with fighter jets that can reach deep into even landlocked trouble zones, America's virtually invincible carrier fleet has long enforced its dominance of the high seas. China may soon put an end to that. U.S. naval planners are scrambling to deal with what analysts say...

In the coming decades China will likely surpass United States as the world’s biggest economy. That may seem strange and uncomfortable to many Americans, but it wouldn’t be the first time China dominated the global economy. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Factblog has posted a fascinating set of statistics showing the evolution of the Chinese economy, compiled by economic historian Angus Maddison The chart above shows the percentage of the world’s economy contributed by China during the last two centuries. As you can see, China held a far bigger share of the world’s economy in 1820 than...

For much of the past decade, "declinism"--the notion that America is heading toward a deadly denouement--has largely been a philosophy of the left. But more recently, particularly in the wake of Barack Obama's election, conservatives have begun joining the chorus, albeit singing a somewhat different variation on the same tune. In a recent column in TheWashington Post George Will illustrates this conservative change of heart. Looking over the next few decades Will sees an aging, obsolescent America in retreat to a young and aggressive China. "America's destiny is demographic, and therefore is inexorable and predictable," he suggests, pointing to predictions...