Is Pax Americana coming to an end?

Kaleidoscope
By Perry Diaz

For two centuries, the British Empire was the most powerful empire in the world. She had dominion that stretched all over the world. As someone once said, “The sun never set on the British Empire.” At the height of her colonial power, the British Empire comprised of 57 colonies, dominions, territories and protectorates, from Australia, Canada and India to Fiji, Western Samoa and Tonga. She ruled about 20% of the world’s population and about 25% of the world’s landmass. It was the era of Pax Britannica.

But after World War II, the British Empire began to lose her imperial might. She started losing her territories due in large part to the “independence fever” that had been spreading all over the world. Today, except for 14 scattered islands across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, the once powerful British Empire is now known as the United Kingdom, a union between England and Scotland that has endured for 311 years.

Worldwide nationalism surged beginning with the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, a loss that reduced the British Empire’s colonial foothold. Financially drained by the two world wars, she could no longer afford to wage regional wars during the Cold War.

East of Suez

Suez Canal.

In July 1956, the British left the Suez Canal. Within weeks, Egyptian strongman Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser abruptly nationalized the Suez Canal Company. In October, after a series of negotiations with the British Empire failed, British, French, and Israeli troops invaded the Canal Zone, purportedly to protect the freedom of navigation on the canal. U.S. President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower was enraged for not being consulted. He asked the U.N. to impose a ceasefire.

The United Kingdom suffered a financial setback in the aftermath of the Suez Canal crisis. She asked the U.S. for financial support amounting to $1 billion. Ike’s answer was: No ceasefire, no loan. The invaders left and the U.N. sent a peacekeeping force.

In 1968, the U.K. decided to close a string of military bases in the Persian Gulf, which served as the linchpin of the British Empire for more than a century. By 1971, she withdrew from Southeast Asia including the major bases in Malaysia and Singapore, which were the largest and most expensive component of the country’s world‐wide role. That ended the British Empire.

Pax Americana

Pax Americana

The U.S. immediately replaced the U.K. as the main stabilizing power in the West. The free world turned to the U.S. as their “protector” against the Soviet Union’s aggressive advances.

The Cold War that began in the 1950s went on for three decades until 1989 when the Soviet Empire began to crack. Another round of “independence fever” spread, this time throughout the Soviet Empire. One by one, the Eastern Europeans under the aegis of the Soviet Empire declared their independence and overthrew their communist dictators.

On December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. Mikhail Gorbachev resigned his post as president of the Soviet Union. Fifteen republics within the Soviet Union declared their independence as well and ousted their communist rulers.

With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Cold War ended. America became the sole superpower of the world. Peace at last. Thus, began Pax Americana – the American Peace. As a result, the U.S. became the world’s policeman. Except for some regional and scattered civil wars, peace was maintained throughout the world under the leadership of the U.S.

The rise of Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his generals.

In May 2000, former KGB officer Vladimir Putin became President of the Russian Federation that was born from the ashes of the Soviet Union. In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia, one of the republics within the former Soviet Union that declared her independence in 1991 as the Soviet Union began to fall apart. The Russo-Georgian War lasted five days after the European Union brokered a ceasefire. But Russia didn’t leave Georgia. Instead she illegally occupied two regions of Georgia in violation of the ceasefire agreement. She is still there today.

In the aftermath of the Ukrainian revolution in 2014 that toppled the pro-Russian government, Russia sent troops with no insignias to help the pro-Russian Eastern Ukrainian rebels who wouldn’t accept the outcome of the revolution. They wanted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia. A civil war ensued. Russia then intervened in Crimea by sending troops with no insignias to foment divisions. Crimea, upon the insistence of Russia, then held a questionable referendum to decide whether to secede from Ukraine and join Russia. The result of the referendum favored the secessionists. Eventually, Russia annexed Crimea. Russia also threatened to invade Eastern Europe to bring back her lost republics, the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The problem is: the Baltic States are now members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which made Putin think twice.

The rise of Trump

U.S. President Donald Trump.

Then came Donald Trump. Without any political experience, Trump ran for U.S. president in 2016. He won the election; thus, began one of the most – if not the most – tumultuous presidencies in the history of the U.S. Besieged with scandals and allegations of colluding with Russia to win the election, Trump’s controversial leadership style and policies cost him 40 Republican congressional seats in the 2018 midterm elections. And impeachment looms in the incoming Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. He is also besieged with 17 investigations into his personal businesses and allegations of collusion with Russia, corruption, and other wrongdoings.

Last December, a series of unexpected events threw the Trump administration into chaos. First, the stock markets plunged. The DOW Jones plummeted 1,000 in one day, the worst since the Great Depression. Secondly, Defense Secretary James Mattis abruptly resigned over Trump’s hasty decision to withdraw troops from Syria. Trump was also considering withdrawing half of the troops in Afghanistan. And thirdly, Trump shut down the government over Congress’s refusal to give him the $5 billion he demanded to build a wall along the US-Mexico border.

While America’s allies were critical over Trump’s Syria withdrawal, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Iranian leadership were supportive of the withdrawal of the 2,600 American troops in Syria. “Donald’s right, and I agree with him,” Putin said, adding that Trump had made the correct decision to pull U.S. troops from the war-torn Middle Eastern country because the Syrian government never invited them to be there.

Déjà vu all over again

Foreign Ministers Zarif of Iran, Lavrov of Russia, and Cavusoglu of turkey.

What’s happening in Syria has an eerie resemblance to what happened after the Suez Canal crisis in 1956 when the British moved out of “East of Suez.” It signaled the end of the British Empire and the emergence of America as a superpower. Indeed, it’s déjà vu all over again — America withdrawing from Syria and Russia moving in to fill the power vacuum.

In a surprise trip the day after Christmas, Trump visited U.S. troops at the Al Asad airbase in Iraq. Upon arrival, Trump made some remarks to reporters. He defended his decision to withdraw American forces from Syria that was part of an international coalition fighting the Islamic State (IS) terrorists. “The United States cannot continue to be the policeman of the world,” Trump said. “We’ve knocked them [IS] out. We’ve knocked them silly.” But that’s farthest from the truth. According to military sources, there are at least 30,000 IS fighters in Syria that are expected to grow once the U.S. moved out of Syria. Why leave now when the IS are almost wiped out?

No sooner had Trump left Iraq for home than Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Reuters that he would probably meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the U.S. withdrawal from Syria. That’s interesting because it was Erdogan who encouraged Trump in a telephone conversation to withdraw from Syria and leave everything to him to “deal a harsh blow against the IS.”

Prior to Trump’s withdrawal announcement, Russia, Turkey, and Iran had appointed themselves as “guarantors of the Syrian peace process,” which makes one wonder: Was Trump aware of what these three powerful countries were up to? Why was the U.S. excluded from this group of self-appointing guarantors? And did Turkish President Erdogan trick Trump into agreeing in their telephone conversation to withdraw from Syria?

When Trump was in Iraq, he told the troops: “We’re not the suckers of the world, folks.” I believe that the U.S. wouldn’t have become the sole superpower without mutually benefitting from one another with her allies, which begs the question: Doesn’t Trump realize that the leaders of Russia, Turkey, and Iran might have been playing him for a sucker?

At the end of the day, one wonders: Is Pax Americana coming to an end?

(PerryDiaz@gmail.com)