The traditional strengths of America are its values platform, its military power, its pivotal position in the global financial system, and as a technology pioneer. The energetic pro-American lobby in India advocates ever-closer engagement with the United States, rejecting arguments about its diminishing influence.
This is contradicted by authoritative commentators such as Ian Bremmer (“The US is already the world’s most divided and dysfunctional advanced industrial democracy”), Laura Kuenssberg (“Western leaders in 2024 [are] grappling with a world where other dominant countries are less attached to conventional international rules”) and Andrew Whitehead (“America’s democracy seems to have lost the ability to renew itself”) with former U.S. President Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden in the race for a second presidential term.
These experts are supported by Jonathan Freedland (“Not for nothing is there serious concern in the US that January 2025 could open a new chapter of US authoritarianism, even an American dictatorship), Frank Gardner (“The past 12 months have seen a number of setbacks for the US, Europe and other major democracies on the international politics stage…they point to a shifting balance of power away from the US-dominated, Western values that have held sway for years. On many fronts, the wind is blowing in the wrong direction for Western interests”) and Niall Ferguson (“The harsh reality is that the US is no longer very good at getting B to do something that B would not otherwise do”) which is more than evident in Israel’s Gaza war. Ferguson adds that in purchasing power parity, China, in 2023, had an economy that was a fifth larger than that of the U.S. To him American problems were illegal immigration and deficits in the rule of law, secondary education, public health, new technologies, and the national debt rising to $32 trillion.
