30 September 2024

Lebanon and the crumbling of American power

By trying to sustain its control of the Middle East, the United States will only hasten its decline.

When disaster and misfortune strike an empire, they tend to do so in droves. This is even more true if the empire is suffering from military overstretch, financial crisis, or a social and political crisis, and right now America is in the middle of all three at once. And when a previously dominant empire weakens in such an obvious way, the various enemies of that empire generally pick up on the message. This is particularly true if they have formed a balancing coalition where they coordinate with each other. In 2024, America’s most fearsome allies – China, Russia, Iran, North Korea – are tied together by a mix of formal and informal alliance structures, which makes any strategy of divide and conquer impossible. That makes the current conflagration between Israel and Lebanon just the latest and most urgent among America’s various bleeding wounds.

Events there are already slipping from Washington’s grasp. Like the rest of us, they are reduced to a spectator, watching on as Israel assassinates the leadership of Hezbollah and bombs Beirut, inevitably inviting some sort of retaliation from Iran. America’s ability to intervene directly is quite limited, not least because, thanks to its commitments across the Pacific and Gulf, the US Navy is currently suffering from a massive crisis of readiness and would struggle to supply the carriers necessary. The enemy itself does not really fit the American way of war, either. With around a hundred thousand fighters, many of whom have gained serious combat experience over the last decade fighting against Isis, Hezbollah is no mere militia or disorganised terror group. Having prepared for almost two decades for a conflict with Israel (and by extension the United States, as both countries rely heavily on airpower), Hezbollah now commands the most formidable network of air defence tunnels in the world. Even if the United States wanted to pick a fight in southern Lebanon today, this number of enemy combatants, fighting from prepared positions in familiar terrain, probably makes a decisive military solution to the situation nearly impossible.

But the United States most certainly doesn’t want this fight. The American position since 7 October has officially urged a return to a Middle Eastern status quo that doesn’t involve the risk of a massive region-wide conflagration. The region is refusing to obey. In the scenario unfolding instead, the US can only stand to lose.

America has thus far had very little luck restraining Israel or convincing it to agree to a ceasefire. It’s clear that this is at least in part due to the obvious weakness being displayed at the top of the American political system, with a lame-duck president that struggles to even chair cabinet meetings. As the proximity between America and its enemies grows, and the risk of escalated conflict intensifies, the demands on the United States by its allies keep growing in scope and urgency. America is now directly on the hook for not one but two wars, one in Europe, one in the Middle East. Neither Ukraine nor Israel have the economic or military capacity to survive without America’s direct and indirect support. In the case of Ukraine, America’s financial and military aid to that country is roughly on par with the value of America’s lend-lease program to the Soviet Union during the Second World War, once dollar inflation is taken into account. Even with this massive deluge of American aid, Ukraine is now in a very dire situation on the battlefield, suffering from large shortfalls of both men, money, and ammunition with which to continue the war. In the case of Israel, the country is simply far too small to sustain its oversized military without outside support, and the United States is now using much of its strategic airlift to constantly fly in new shipments of bombs and spare parts. This will only be exacerbated further by conflict in Lebanon, which will make incredible new demands of the IDF in terms of personnel and materiel.

The United States today therefore finds itself in a very dangerous situation indeed. Less than ten years ago, talk about American decline was confined to a small, Tea Party-esque fringe. Problems with the military were widely known (especially after the failed War on Terror), the fiscal situation was growing increasingly unsustainable, and the political system was becoming more and more unstable in the wake of the great 2008 financial crisis. But talk of outright decline was generally seen as way too alarmist. These days, there’s precious little left of that kind of optimism. Politically, America is more divided than at any point in the last 50 or 60 years; economically, the government debt is now growing at an exponential rate. Interest payments consume a larger part of the federal budget than the entirety of the US military. With continuing record-level deficits, this is a problem that will only get worse. It is only a matter of time before the bond markets and Wall Street respond to what is clearly an intractable situation.

This is all to say that American decline is now no longer controversial; if anything, it is becoming a daily fact of global life. When the Ukraine war started, almost everyone in the West assumed that the sheer imbalances in GDP figures would make any real Russian headway impossible. Theirs was an economy smaller than that of Italy, up against the collective might of the entire free world. Two and a half years into that conflict, however, it turns out that GDP figures don’t count for as much as they used to, and neither the collective West nor America itself is even capable of producing enough ammunition to supply the Ukrainian side. Artillery shells, tanks, rockets, air defence missiles – in area after area, the Western arsenal is now increasingly bare, and it seems doubtful that we will be able to afford to replace the weapons that have been lost.

In both the case of Israel and Ukraine today, we also see a very dangerous ratchet effect brought on by American decline. In both conflicts, America’s clients now clearly seem intent on constant escalation in order to draw America further into war. The Ukrainians are running out of their own resources, and the weapon shipments from the West are starting to slow down. Their only real hope for victory might be to involve America directly in the war, transferring much the costs of this conflict onto their imperial patron. Needless to say, there is very little appetite for this from a Washington already suffering from Zelensky fatigure. The Israelis, for their part, are no doubt aware of two basic facts: the United States is getting weaker over time, and Israel’s enemies are slowly getting stronger. The longer they wait, the more unfavourable their situation will become. Today, an outright war against Iran or Lebanon may be winnable, if the Americans could be made to shoulder much of the burden. Ten years from now, America might be too weak to offer much help even if it wanted to.

Without really noticing it, America has gotten caught up in a vortex created by its own various allies and clients, a vortex that is now rapidly sapping it of money, weapons, and energy. In a recent video conference call Jake Sullivan, national security advisor to Joe Biden, candidly admitted that he had arranged for Ukraine to receive all of the patriot missiles that were supposed to go to other countries this year. In other words, in order to help Ukraine, the US is effectively willing to suspend arms delivery contracts to dozens of other allies, who in some cases – like Saudi Arabia or Japan – have a very practical need for interceptors themselves. But of course, whether America is seen as an unreliable partner for arms contracts isn’t Ukraine’s priority in its fight against Russia. Similarly, America is borrowing billions of dollars to support Israel. The fact that this extra borrowing is only hastening a day of economic reckoning for the US is not really Israel’s first concern either. This unhappy dynamic that has trapped the US is quite hard to escape from. It is a true dilemma: the very act of trying to banish the perception that the American empire is on its way out is ironically just hastening the decline.

A large war in the Middle East looks increasingly likely at this point, with the current conflict between Lebanon and Israel possibly just a secondary or even tertiary front in that war. America has spent more than half a year trying to prevent things from getting to this point. But this is often the fate that awaits ailing empires at the end of their rope. The most important domestic question that remains is this: what will happen when a large enough slice of the American citizenry decide they want out? Neither Kamala Harris nor even Donald Trump seriously promise to put an end to foreign entanglements. American body politic is already close to falling apart as its citizenry lose complete faith in their state and their political elites. As America’s allies continue to expect the US to do everything, be everywhere, and pay for everyone, this basic rot at the heart of the American republic will only continue to spread.