With a socio-economic analysis, the following article from the American magazine Foreign Affairs explores a non-liberal future for the United States.
There are two main factors that will shape this future: the accelerated automation of jobs and the security and military sectors within the United States, and the increasing aging of segments of the population outside it in regions such as China, Europe and Russia.
Automation in the United States will lead to the creation of flexible parallel supply chains within new alliances that are permanently isolated from the Asian market, including the alliance with Canada and Latin America, an agenda of alliances already articulated by US President-elect Joe Biden, while the increasing aging in Europe will lead to the collapse of the European Union And NATO in the long run.
As for Asia and Russia, it will weaken the military forces that depend on young forces in their ranks.
US President Donald Trump assumed the presidency promising reforms in US foreign policy, and since then he has insulted allies, breaks US commitment to international agreements, and imposes tariffs on enemies and allies alike.
Many experts lament the damage the "America First" policy has inflicted on the so-called liberal international order, hoping that the United States will regain its role in pioneering the free world as soon as Trump leaves the Oval Office.
But we should not place too much hope on this matter, as the era of liberal hegemony of the United States is only one of the immediate consequences of the Cold War, and on the contrary, Trump's approach to reciprocity in foreign policy has been a norm prevailing over most periods of American history, which means that Trump's imprint will last long after his departure.
Trump's approach is accepted by many Americans today, and this acceptance will grow in the coming years as two of the global trends accelerate;
Population aging, and the rise of automation, which will recreate global power dynamics in ways that are in the interest of the United States.
By the year 2040, the United States will be the only country with a huge and growing market and financial capacity that enables it to maintain a global military presence.
During this period, new technologies will reduce the United States' dependence on foreign labor and resources and provide the US military with new tools to contain the territorial expansion of the rival great powers.
Unless the United States dispels these preferences, it will remain a dominant military economic power.
Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has seen itself as the main defender of the democratic capitalist way of life and a supporter of an organized international system based on liberal values.
Washington has provided dozens of countries with military protection, and has secured shipping crossings, and easy passage to US dollars and markets alike.
In return, these countries made loyalty offerings and in some cases proceeded to liberalize their economies and governments.
In the coming decades, however, the rapid aging of the population and the rise of automation will destabilize faith in capitalist democracy and crack the so-called free world from its core.
The burdens of caring for the aging population and the loss of jobs caused by new technologies will fuel competition for resources and markets, and expose the flaws of international institutions that governments depend on in order to address common problems, thus pushing Americans to feel less need to rely on external partners than they have for generations.
In response, the United States could become a rogue superpower.
As happened in the twentieth century, the twenty-first century will be dominated by the United States as well, but if the previous “American century” was based on a liberal vision of the role of the United States in the world, then what we may witness today is a non-liberal American dawn.
The roots of Trump's "America first" approach to American foreign policy are steeped in history.
Before 1945, the United States used to define its interests within a narrow scope, especially with regard to cash and material security, and it sought them with force and little regard for their effects on the rest of the world.
It is true that it adopted liberal values such as freedom and liberation, but it applied them selectively, both at home and abroad, and did not form alliances other than the alliance that it established with France during the revolutionary war.
Its customs tariffs were ranked among the highest in the world, and they shunned international institutions.
We are not saying that the United States was an isolationist country, and in fact its increased territorial expansion aroused the envy of Adolf Hitler, but it was often conservative.
By the eighties of the nineteenth century, the United States was the richest country in the world, it had the largest consumer market in it, and it was at the forefront of industrializing and producing countries of energy, along with a wide network of natural resources without any major threats it faced.
As things settled inside the country, the United States was not very interested in establishing foreign alliances.
The situation changed during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union occupied large areas of Eurasia and communism began to attract hundreds of millions of followers around the world, and the United States needed strong partners to contain these threats, so it funded one of the alliances and provided dozens of countries with security guarantees and easy access to markets American.
But with the end of the Cold War, Americans gradually stopped seeing a benefit in global leadership, and became more sleepy about foreign relations.
In the following decades, US presidents were dominated by the pledge to reduce efforts abroad and increase them at home.
Despite these promises, the post-Cold War era witnessed the launch of many military interventions by Washington (in the Balkans and Afghanistan, then Iraq and Libya), and that era witnessed a greater expansion of the liberal order led by the United States, and with China's accession to the World Trade Organization, the union's cohesion increased. The European Union, the expansion of NATO, and the global economy began to depend on the institutions of the United States more than before.
US military forces in Afghanistan
This trend is one of the reasons why so many American elites were traumatized by the election of Trump on the "America First" agenda.
When polls ask Americans about which foreign policy priorities should be, few refer to the promotion of democracy, trade and human rights, and all three are activities that are at the core of liberal international leadership.
Instead, they are referring to preventing terrorist attacks, protecting American jobs, and curbing illegal immigration.
About half of those respondents say they oppose sending US forces to defend allies under attack, and about 80% prefer to use tariffs to prevent job losses due to trade.
Trump's approach is not an anomaly. Rather, it falls under a trend that has always pervaded the culture of American politics.
In the coming years, US support for the liberal order may decline further than before, thanks to demographic and technological changes that will increase the United States ’economic and military leadership and make the country less dependent on others.
And the United States is less dependent on foreign trade and investment than any other country.
As the other great economies contract, the United States will become more central to global growth, less dependent on international trade, and less need for loyal allies since accelerated aging will impede the military expansion of the superpowers.
By the year 2050, Russia's spending on pensions and medical care for the elderly will increase by about 50% as a percentage of its GDP, compared to what it is now, and the proportion of China will triple, while the spending of the United States in these areas will increase by 35%.
Russia and China will be faced with sharp choices between buying weapons for their armies and buying crutches for a population that is aging on a large scale, and history says that the second will be a priority in order to prevent internal unrest.
Even if Russia and China do not reduce their military spending, they will face difficulties in modernizing the army due to the increasing aging of the military forces.
The military forces already consume 46% of the Russian military budget (compared to 25% of what we see in the US military budget), and it is likely that they will exceed 50% during the current decade in light of a wave of retirement for older forces and the infusion of pensions.
Chinese official figures say that the expenditures of the military forces account for 31% of its military budget, but independent estimates indicate that it consumes about half of China's defense spending and that the number will rise in the coming years.
Increasing aging around the world will accelerate America's economic and military leadership in the great-power struggle, and it will occur in conjunction with an equally favorable trend of increasing automation.
Machines are getting faster, smaller, more expensive, and most importantly, they develop the ability to adapt to new information.
In a process called "machine learning", which is a type of artificial intelligence.
As a result, new machines will combine the ability of computers to parse numbers with the brute power of industrial machines and some of the intuition, situational awareness, and cleverness that were once a relic of humankind.
Thanks to these innovations, about half of the jobs in today's economy could be automated by the decade 2030.
As with global aging, the widespread adoption of smart machines will reduce the United States' dependence on other countries.
The United States already has a significant lead in industries that are at the forefront of automation trends.
For example, it has five times more artificial intelligence companies and its experts than China, the country that comes second, and its share of artificial intelligence software and devices in the global market is many times greater than the share of China.
US companies can leverage this technology leadership by using advanced automation to replace the stretching global supply chains with integrated factories from the ground up in the United States.
The service sector industries will follow suit as artificial intelligence takes over more tasks.
For example, telecenters began to return from foreign countries to the United States.
For decades, the United States has been chasing cheap labor and resources abroad, but those days are numbered now, as automation allows the United States to increase its self-reliance.
Then, the rise of smart machines will help Washington contain the rise of its opponents.
Rather than waiting for a crisis to erupt, the United States will be able to anticipate the deployment of unmanned aerial fighters and missile launchers to potential conflict areas.
These fighters and missiles will act as smart minefields, which will be able to exterminate the invading forces of the enemy.
Also, eliminating them is difficult, and their purchasing cost is affordable.
For example, for the price of one aircraft carrier, the United States can purchase 6,500 XQ-58A stealth drones or 8,500 lingering cruise missiles.
By deploying weapons of this kind, the states will benefit from a fundamental disparity in war aims.
While US adversaries such as China and Russia seize territories such as Taiwan and the Baltic to achieve regional hegemony, the United States will only have to deny them control to achieve this, a task the smart drones and missile network is designed to do best.
Probably aging and automation will give strength to the United States, but it is unlikely for them to impose the same force on the liberal order led by the United States.
In liberal democracies around the world, public support for that regime has always been based on the rising incomes of the working class, which in turn has been the result of an expanding population and job-generating technologies.
The postwar baby boom produced huge numbers of young workers and consumers for whom the commodity assembly line provided stable jobs.
But across the democratic world, segments of the population are aging and shrinking, and machines are removing jobs.
The quid pro quo has broken down the basis that hard work, support for the liberal order, and trust will constitute a rising economic tide that lifts all boats, and nationalist fanaticism and xenophobia fill the void.
The scene is much darker than many people realize.
Over the next 30 years, the population segments of the working age groups of the United States' allies in democracies will shrink by 12% on average, making sustainable economic growth impossible.
Meanwhile, the elderly population in these countries will expand by 57% at the rate they are now, at a time when these countries' spending on pensions and health care will double as a percentage of GDP.
These countries will not be able to find their way out of the financial chaos resulting from the matter, because they carry in advance debt equivalent to 270% of their gross domestic product before the pandemic pushes their official budget to the brink of the abyss.
Instead, these countries will be forced to reduce the privileges of the elderly, cut social spending on young people, raise taxes or increase immigration, all of which are likely to lead to political clashes.
The accelerated automation will exacerbate the economic crisis.
History has shown that technological revolutions create prosperity in the long run, but they refer some working groups to jobs with lower incomes or unemployment in the short term, and this short term can last for generations.
During the first 70 years of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, between 1770-1840, wage rates stagnated and living standards declined, even though the output provided by one worker increased by about 50%.
Gains in the overall mechanization of the workplace during this period were diagnosed by the large merchants whose profit rates increased.
Across the developed world today, machines are removing jobs again at a faster rate than the rates of employee training for new jobs, wages for workers are low and medium-skilled again, and millions of people - especially men without a college degree - are leaving the workforce.
Many economists expect these trends to continue for a few decades with the adoption of new technologies instead of labor on a large scale, such as cars, stores, stores and all self-catering kitchens.
Slow growth, ballooning debt, stagnant wages, chronic unemployment, and excessive inequality are expected to lead to nationalism and extremism.
In the 1930s, economic frustrations led many people to reject democracy and international cooperation and embrace fascism or communism.
Today, nationalist extremists are on the rise across the democratic world, and not just in the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe.
For example, the "Alternative for Germany" party, a right-wing nationalist party, has the third largest seats in the German parliament, and the incidence of neo-Nazism in the army and police has doubled alarmingly.
The US’s task of leading the liberal world will become more difficult than before as nationalists seize power, increase tariffs, close borders, and abandon international institutions.
In the face of confused allies and divided masses who are indifferent to others, the United States may begin to act less as the head of a huge coalition and more as a rogue superpower, that is, as an economic and military giant with no moral obligations, neither isolation nor open to the world, but aggressively armed aggression. He pursues completely his interest.
In fact, under Trump, things seemed to be heading in that direction.
During Trump's presidency, some American security guarantees began to look like royalties in exchange for protection, and the Trump administration began imposing tariffs on commercial deals rather than operating through the World Trade Organization.
The US military is also changing, and increasingly, it is a force prepared to inflict sanctions rather than protection.
The Trump administration has reduced the permanent military deployment on Allied territory and replaced it with mobile intervention units that can penetrate abroad and destroy targets so that they disappear again into the horizon.
Many of Trump's critics deplore these changes, saying that they are not only reckless but in some ways anti-American.
But Trump's approach is applauded by many Americans today and aligns with their preferences regarding the US role in the world.
And if these conditions persist, the best possible scenarios for the American leadership will include Washington adopting a more national version of international liberalism, whereby the United States can preserve its allies, but in exchange for paying more money for protection.
It can sign trade agreements, but only if those countries adopt the regulatory standards of the United States, can they participate in international institutions, but threaten to leave them when they act against the interests of the United States, and the promotion of democracy and human rights while paralyzing the capabilities of opponents throughout the geopolitics.
Alternatively, the United States may exit the world order system altogether.
Instead of trying to reassure weaker states by supporting international rules and institutions, the United States will use every tool in its coercive arsenal - tariffs, financial sanctions, visa restrictions, cyber espionage, and drone strikes - to extract the best possible deal from allies and adversaries to the same degree.
There will not be lasting partnerships based on shared values, only transactions.
United States leaders will judge other countries not by their willingness to help solve global problems or by their democracy or authoritarianism, but only by their ability to create American jobs or eliminate threats to the American homeland.
According to these criteria, most countries will be irrelevant.
US trade could go directly to the Western Hemisphere and especially to North America, which already accounts for a third of US trade and a third of global GDP.
While other regions face setbacks due to population aging and increased automation, North America is the only region that contains all the ingredients for sustainable economic growth: a huge and growing market of affluent consumers, an abundance of raw materials, a mixture of high-skill, low-cost labor, and technology. Advanced and peaceful international relations.
Beyond these partnerships, all of Washington's alliances and relationships - including NATO and its relationships with long-standing allies such as South Korea - would be negotiable.
The United States no longer wooing states to participate in multilateral alliances.
Instead, other countries will have to bargain on two cards: protecting the United States and accessing its markets.
Countries that do not have much to offer will have to find new partners or fend for themselves.
What would happen to the world if the United States fully embraced this kind of "America first" vision?
Some analysts paint disastrous pictures. Robert Kagan predicts the return of tyranny, protectionism and conflict in the 1930s, with China and Russia returning to play the role of imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, while Peter Zeehan expects a violent struggle over security and resources, as Russia invades its neighbors and East Asia descends into a naval war.
These expectations may be extreme, but they reflect a basic truth: the post-war regime, although flawed and incomplete in many respects, has enhanced the most peaceful and prosperous periods in human history, and its absence will make the world a more dangerous place than before.
Thanks to the decades-old US-led regime most countries in the world did not have to fight to gain access to markets, protect their supply chains, or even seriously defend their borders.
The US Navy has kept international waterways open, the US market has made strong offers to consumers and capital to dozens of countries, and US security guarantees covered nearly 70 countries.
Everyone benefited from such reassurances, not only Washington's allies and partners, but also its opponents.
US security guarantees neutralized Germany and Japan, the main regional rivals of Russia and China, respectively.
In contrast, Moscow and Beijing could focus on establishing relationships with the rest of the world rather than fighting their historical enemies.
Without the care and protection of the United States, countries will have to return to the realm of securing themselves and their economic lifelines.
As great powers compete for economic spheres, global governance will erode.
A geopolitical conflict would cripple the United Nations as it did during the Cold War.
NATO may end up as a partner preferred by the United States, and the collapse of the US security cover over Europe could also mean the end of the European Union, which is already suffering from deep divisions.
The few arms control treaties still in force today may fall as countries arm themselves to defend themselves.
Efforts to combat cross-border problems - such as climate change, financial crises, or pandemics - may emulate the world's shameful response to "Covid-19", when countries hoarded supplies, the World Health Organization rejected accusations of Chinese disinformation, and the United States closed in on itself.
The resulting disruption would jeopardize the survival of some nations.
Since 1945, the number of countries in the world has tripled from 46 to about 200. However, most of these new states are weak and lack energy, resources, food, domestic markets, advanced technology, military strength, or defensible borders.
According to research by political scientist Arjun Chowdhury, two-thirds of countries today cannot provide basic services to their people without international assistance.
In short, most nations depend critically on the postwar order that has provided historically unprecedented access to international aid, markets, shipping and protection.
Without this support, some countries would collapse and be occupied.
Fragile states that depend on aid such as Afghanistan, Haiti and Liberia are just some of the most visible high-risk cases.
The less visible countries have the potential, but depend on trade, such as Saudi Arabia, Singapore and South Korea, whose economies will struggle to operate in a world of closed markets and militarized sea lanes.
None of these horrific outcomes are inevitable, and in the long run, an aging population and automation can make the world more peaceful and prosperous than it has ever been.
Ultimately, older societies tend to be less aggressive than younger societies, and technological revolutions usually boost productivity and free workers from toil.
But the road to an older, more automated future will be turbulent.
To maintain the current liberal order united, the United States will need to take an extraordinarily generous view of its interests, it will need to rein in the pursuit of wealth and national power for the common aspiration of the international order, and it will also need to redistribute wealth domestically to maintain political support for the liberal leadership in the outside.
As the world enters a period of demographic and technological turmoil, it will become more and more difficult to follow this path.
As a result, there may be little hope that the United States will protect its partners, patrol the sea lanes, or promote democracy and free trade and ask for little in return.
The national mood has dominated the United States, and for the foreseeable future it will be the form that future matters take.
It is not an anomaly produced by the Trump administration, but rather a deeply rooted trend that threatens the rebirth of an old approach to US foreign policy, one that has prevailed during the darkest decades of the past century.
The best hope for a liberal world order is that future American administrations will find ways to direct growing nationalist impulses in international directions.
The United States occasionally carried out liberal campaigns for selfish reasons. For example, it happened to partially oppose European colonialism to open markets for American goods, and sponsored and protected a mass of capitalist democracies to crush Soviet communism and prove its global hegemony.
These campaigns received public support because they linked liberal ideals to vital interests of the United States, and a similar approach can take place today.
Americans may not want to fight and die to defend their countries' remote allies, but they do want to prevent authoritarian powers, such as China and Russia, from gaining regional hegemony.
So the United States could replace some of its most vulnerable bases on Allied territory with a pervasive network of missile launchers and drones, thus containing the Chinese and Russian expansion while reducing the number of American lives on the line.
Americans will also advocate for protecting American workers and companies.
Although the American public opposes trade deals that stimulate outsourcing, there is strong support for deals that create a level playing field for US companies.
So the United States can use its tremendous economic leverage to force trading partners to adopt American standards on labor, the environment, and intellectual property protection.
Americans are not enthusiastic about promoting democracy abroad, but they are willing to partner with allies to defend American institutions from foreign interference.
Thus, the United States could form a coalition of democracies to coordinate collective punishments against foreign powers that interfere in democratic elections.
Ultimately, the alliance could become a liberal bloc that excludes countries that do not respect open trade and freedom of expression and navigation.
Compared to leading a global liberal order, this more nationalistic version of US involvement may seem stingy and uninspiring, but it will be more realistic, and ultimately more effective in preserving the cohesion of the free world during a period of unprecedented demographic and technological change.
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This article is translated from Foreign Affairs and does not necessarily feature Maidan.