We’ve reached ‘peak America’ – just don’t tell Donald Trump
Story by Nicholas Guyatt
Welcome to Trump’s America, The i Paper’s World Insight series presenting the sharpest, deepest thinking on an era-defining shift in history and politics, investigating how Donald Trump and his administration have changed the US and the world – and where we go from here.
For decades, geologists, environmentalists and energy company spokespeople have debated the concept of “peak oil” – that moment when the global production and consumption of oil would finally begin to decline.
For the American geologist M. King Hubbert, who developed the theory in the 1950s, it was important because both supply and consumption would fall sharply after it reached its peak. We’d keep pumping the stuff at a high rate until it became clear that it was nearly gone, and then we’d have barely any time to adjust to the fact that the global tank was empty.
Is it crazy to wonder if the same logic could apply to countries, as well as resources? Specifically, should we already be talking about peak US?
Since publisher Henry Luce announced the advent of the American century back in 1941, the world has been heavily shaped by assumptions of US power and influence. In an essay for Life magazine, Luce insisted that Americans had a duty and an opportunity as “the most powerful and vital nation in the world…to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence”.
For the next five decades, first against Nazi Germany and Japan, and then against the Soviet Union (USSR), the US expanded its footprint politically, economically and militarily in an attempt to become the world’s undisputed superpower. In the process, it sought to bend the rest of us to its values and interests.
In 1989, the collapse of the USSR seemed to confirm its triumph: the US had become, in the words of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the “indispensable nation”.
The 21st Century, however, has seemed increasingly unfriendly to this vision. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq made the US military an army of occupation rather than liberation, and a forlorn one at that. The 2008 financial crisis dealt the largest blow to its economy since the 1920s – and the society that emerged from the crisis seemed angrier, more poor and less confident in itself.
Meanwhile, nations in the Global South became both more prosperous and more assertive, frequently deviating from the script written in Washington. Membership of the World Trade Organization did not produce a democratic China, and when Russia began invading its neighbours, it cited the US assault on Iraq – which had not been authorised by the United Nations – and insisted that it was just following America’s lead.
While the US continued to spend blood and treasure on military interventions, China has quietly become the world’s manufacturing powerhouse and offers a genuine alternative to the US model of international development. It has invested in countries around the world – especially in the Global South – in an effort to create its own network of partners and dependents.
One way to understand the rise of Donald Trump is as a desperate rejection of both the concept and onset of Peak US. Trump’s signature promise – to Make America Great Again – is both a striking admission of American decline and a promise that the decline can be reversed.
On balance, Trump’s actions as president have hardly reversed the trends. Russia, China and other US rivals have become bolder and stronger, especially in relation to the US, and American economic and military power has been stretched almost to breaking point.
The fact that nearly half of the US stock market’s entire value is in companies either wholly or partly inflated by the AI bubble suggests a dangerous narrowing of American prosperity, as does the continued flamboyance of the billionaire class.
Meanwhile, the sight of Iran and its allies attacking US bases and Saudi pipelines is a shocking reversal of the hyperpower that underpinned the US invasions of Iraq in 1991 and then again in 2003. Even the US military, which has long seemed the last redoubt of American power, seems to be wilting.
This is a dangerous moment for the world. Even those who may celebrate America’s decline have to reckon with two key perils: that the US may not go quietly into the night, and that an alternative global system may be even more problematic than the “rules-based order” that has imperfectly anchored the world since 1945.
There is very little in US history or culture that can reconcile ordinary Americans to a rebalancing of global power, still less to the idea of their decline. During the last major energy crisis in the 1970s, President Jimmy Carter famously encouraged Americans to put on a sweater when heating costs soared – he was promptly dumped by the electorate for Ronald Reagan, who assured voters that it was morning in America again.
What Americans need right now is a politician who can effectively communicate to them the fact that it’s later than they think. However, this would necessitate a shift away from generations of rhetoric that assured the electorate that US power and influence can expand without limits.
It is hard to see Trump being that person, or indeed any of his likely successors.
Then there’s the possibility that the international order messily emerging right now may have at least as many problems as the one engineered under the US.
Authoritarian governments may carve up regions of the world and agree to respect each other’s spheres of influence, no matter what happens to the people living within them. China could invite the world to do business in renminbi rather than dollars, a move which would bring risks for the Communist Party but might also hobble an American government which has long assumed that the world will never stop funding its debt.
The birth pangs of whatever comes next could also produce such resentment and mistrust among nations that they will rush into another world war, with the potential to produce the nuclear apocalypse that the old order has miraculously averted. All of these scenarios are possible, none inevitable.
The best chance for a peaceful and stable world after peak US – whether that has now passed or not – is for Americans themselves to play a key role in rewiring the international system. It’s hard for a powerful nation to cede power, but it’s much easier to secure your own future if that power is given up freely rather than wrested from you.
This would require solidifying old alliances rather than discarding them, as Trump has done. It also requires talking to hostile regimes rather than assuming they can be contained or marginalised. In that sense, the criticism from many Democrats of Trump’s recent hospitality towards China’s Xi Jinping seems profoundly unhelpful. The US doesn’t have to like the regime in Beijing, but it does need to find common ground on the great issues facing our planet, from AI to climate change and the energy transition.
Here, again, the peak oil analogy may give us something to work with. The first wave of peak oil prophets were often seen as Cassandras, solemnly warning the world that it might only discover that its energy reserves were exhausted when it was too late. More recent discussions have invoked the green transition to suggest that we can not only control but benefit hugely from the shift to new sources of energy.
By the same token, it would be far better if we could harness US expertise and goodwill towards a more balanced global system than if the US blew all of its power and influence in a vain attempt to prop up the old order.
But we need a new generation of American leaders to deliver that vision, with a willingness to imagine that the US can still be a great nation without being indispensable.
As the 2028 presidential candidates begin to emerge, it will be fascinating to see if any have the courage to recognise that making America a little less great is in everyone’s best interest – including Americans themselves.