In 1967 John Lennon wrote Strawberry Fields Forever where he sings, “Living is easy with eyes closed; Misunderstanding all you see.” As a boy, I didn’t quite understand it. It now seems prophetic.

I have mentioned the term hubris multiple times in my writing. In Greek mythology, the goddess Hubris represents the personification of insolence, reckless pride, arrogance, and outrageous behavior. She’s the perfect foil our Age of Excess it would seem. I have also addressed a post-America world before, but the issue seems to be taking an interesting turn.

The American president’s increasing disconnection from reality is accelerating and as a result more and more pundits are opining on what will happen to America’s place in the international world order. Most cannot believe that the world, which seems to be turning its back on the US, will stay away after this presidency ends. Surely, everyone will sigh and go back to chanting “USA! USA! USA!” Not likely. Obviously, no one can know for certain what will happen, but the whole point of studying the past is that we can look for examples that allow us to gain a sense for what might happen.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), the English poet and philosopher, famously said, “If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.” It’s true, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot learn from history. As I’ve said, it’s why history should be thought of as providing examples rather than lessons.

Back to the opinions I’ve been reading.

Particularly in the American press (not surprisingly), one theme is reoccurring. The theme is that, of course, the world cannot live without America. As I mentioned in Superpower Suicide last week, America is actively diminishing its global influence by implementing ridiculous trade and foreign policies that seem designed to make itself a world pariah. Some of these policies are simple incompetence; some are misunderstanding born of ignorance. But at their core, I believe these attitudes and policies stem from American culture’s ignorance of world history, which has led to its endemic solipsism.

So what?

Increasingly, it seems that we are indeed living through a Zeitenwende (a term I first wrote about in Law of Unintended Consequences (Feb 2022). In that post, I was talking about Putin’s ill-fated invasion. Now, I’m talking about the other Idiot-in-Chief just south of the border. I won’t reiterate any of the policy stupidity. Instead I’d like to focus on how many intelligent and experienced individuals state categorically that the world cannot survive without the US. Recently I saw David Patraeus interviewed and he practically said that verbatim. I shook my head. Here was a highly educated, extremely competent, and successful individual telling his interviewer that of course we would all turn back to the US. How could we not? If he were an outlier, I would ignore him, but he isn’t.

Here is my analysis in a nutshell: Lack of imagination. America has always led the free world. America has the largest economy. America has the best universities. I won’t go on except to say that America only led the world beginning in 1945. China (and India) are poised to surpass the American economy. If American universities are the world’s best, then why do so many of them recruit foreign students who are then taught by professors who speak English with a variety of non-American accents?

I’ll wrap it up. There is certainly a strong argument to be made for Coleridge’s comment above. Personally, I disagree. We humans certainly seem to make related mistakes over and again, but we are making progress — however we define that term. As a percentage of humanity, fewer people die from disease, fewer starve, fewer die in needless wars than at any time in our history, when looked at over the long run. In the short run, there are savage and bleak episodes but each time we recover, we make improvements, but rarely if ever does any particular hegemon get a second bite at the apple.