Is the American era over?” That was the big question that launched a lengthy analysis by veteran international affairs reporter James Kitfield in the influential ‘National Journal’ last May. Significantly, the article — which featured interviews with an all-star cast of former top United Statespolicy-makers — was titled “The Decline Begins.”

Nine months later, the notion that Washington has entered a “New American Century” — a phrase used by the nationalist and neo-conservative unilateralists who championed the Iraq war —in which the United States can do whatever it wants, where it wants, and when it wants, without consulting anyone else, seems largely to have gone the way of the dodo bird. “We are in a multi-polar world,” Defence Secretary Robert Gates told a Washington Post columnist recently in what has to be considered the ultimate heresy to pro-war hawks led by the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney and Gates’ predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld.

Indeed, last month’s image of President Bush imploring King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to increase oil production to boost the battered US economy helped bring home the notion that the commander-in-chief’s word no longer serves as an imperial command.

The last time that policy circles buzzed about Washington’s “decline” came during the waning years of the Cold War, when Yale Professor Paul Kennedy published ‘The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers’. The study argued that the US was falling into a familiar historical pattern where the combination of huge military budgets and ever-larger deficits led inevitably to the kind of “imperial overstretch” that transformed once-mighty empires into shadows of their former selves. At the time, Kennedy himself suggested that Washington may have somehow escaped the laws of history, noting that the sheer size of the US economy, its technological prowess, and military dominance were unprecedented.

What a difference five years and an invasion and bungled occupation of Iraq make! References to the Roman Empire at this point are more likely to refer to its decline than to its power - an observation confirmed even by Donald Kagan, a dean of neo-conservatism and Kennedy’s colleague at Yale, whose sons, Robert and Frederick, have been champions of the Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War.

“I’ve argued that not since the Roman Empire has anyone had such extraordinary power as the United States after the Cold War,” Kagan told Kitfield. “But all of the elements of our strength are now being challenged, and it’s perfectly possible that we are seeing a relative decline in US power that will prove lasting.”

Indeed, that possibility has been transformed into a probability, if not a certainty, by a growing number of policy analysts who see major structural shifts in the distribution of global power — both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ — none of which are likely to lead to the maintenance, let alone the enhancement of Washington’s post-Cold War dominance.

Not only have both Iraq and Afghanistan shown the world the limits of US military power, but they are also exacting an increasingly fearsome toll on Washington’s ability to wage war.Despite gains in the security situation in Iraq over the past year, top Pentagon brass and independent experts are warning that the current pace of deployments is creating a ‘hollow force’ both in terms of personnel and equipment.

The results of the evolving global geo-economy include a much-weakened dollar and increased reliance by both the US government and US business on foreign creditors. Among these creditors are state-controlled agencies (or sovereign wealth funds) some of which — notably those of China, Russia, and oil-exporting Gulf states — are not enthralled,

to say the least, with Krauthammer’s unipolar vision.

If, for commercial or political reasons, any of these creditors decided to dump their hundreds of billions of dollars of dollar-denominated assets — or in the case of key energy exporters, for example, to price their commodities in a currency other than the dollar — the economic impact would be ‘grave’, according to Charles Freeman, retired US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

“A community of largely non-democratic manufacturing powers and energy exporters is already laying the groundwork for real strategic collaboration, aimed at limiting America’s ability to carry out hegemonic agendas,” Leverett, who served in the National Security Council under Bill Clinton and Bush, wrote recently in the ‘National Interest’ journal published by the Nixon Centre. As a result, the degree to which Washington can slow its decline and preserve its primacy will depend increasingly on its willingness to suppress its unilateralist reflexes and “to take account of the perceptions and interests of others in its foreign-policy decision-making,” according to Leverett. — IPS