In 2021 I wrote a piece for Quillette arguing that the decline of American power in the world could usefully be analysed in terms of the Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle, the process by which individuals deal with tragedy, bereavement, and the dawning knowledge of imminent demise. The five stages are famously Denial, Anger, Negotiation, Depression, and Acceptance.

The Decline of American Empire: A Kübler-Ross Cycle Analysis

How will the United States react domestically should she be dislodged from her role of global top-dog power by China? As well as the obvious economic and strategic ramifications of an end to American imperium, there will be profound emotional and psychological effects on a society that has taken its

QuilletteAndrew Roberts

I concluded four years ago that the United States was still in the Anger stage, something that the re-election of Donald Trump has since underlined, Yet since his ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs announcements, America has now moved on from Anger into the Negotiation stage of the Cycle. As with terminal illness and bereavement, it is not a good a place to be.

It is historically very rare for a disruptor power to deliberately disrupt the very system that it created for itself, but that is what the Trump Administration has effectively done. President Harry S. Truman’s liberal international order was created in the late 1940s to make the world safe for American commerce and enterprise, which he correctly recognised would be good for the rest of the world too, as the huge numbers that have been raised out of absolute poverty over the past three-quarters of a century eloquently testify.

In taking an axe to Dumbarton Oaks and a chainsaw to Bretton Woods—the founding agreements of the global postwar economic order—President Trump has also started sawing off the branch on which the American economy was sitting. (Any article on Trump and tariffs has to be date-stamped, as the percentages he is charging seem to be changing hourly: this was written on 12 April at the end of a traumatic week for all the key indicators, especially the S&P 500 and the US dollar.)

The last few months have been a difficult time for Yankeephiles like me. An Englishman, I’ve been sticking up for America all my life, from when Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada, a Commonwealth country, while I was at school, through to George W. Bush’s War against Terror, which I am still convinced was entirely justified, if sometimes imperfectly executed. Yet even for a convinced pro-American, I can understand why the world is reacting in the way it is to the sheer xenophobia emanating from the White House.

To treat friends exactly the same as foes—insofar as Russia, Belarus, and North Korea can still be called America’s foes, considering that the US voted with them in the United Nations not to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—is a sure sign of chronic xenophobia. To say that the whole world has been ‘raping and pillaging’ the United States through unfair trade, when it is only currency-manipulating, IP-thieving China, and arguably also the protectionist European Union, that do so, is insulting to the rest of us, especially the English-speaking peoples. (Britain in particular has been a most inefficient raper and pillager, as she has a trade deficit with the US.)

Trump’s remarks about Greenland, Panama, and sovereign Canada, a member of the Commonwealth, are simply insulting, and as we know through Atlantic Magazine’s eavesdropping on his senior advisors on the Signal groupchat, his Administration is even ruder in private about their allies than they are in public. 

Similarly, J.D. Vance’s speech to the Munich Security conference stating that the threats to free speech were more dangerous to Europe than the military ones posed by China and Russia shows how badly the Administration underestimates the ill-will and ambitions of the Coalition of the Malevolent. The so-called threat to free speech in Britain posed by a law that silences anti-abortionists outside clinics simply cannot be equated to China building an extra four aircraft carriers, or Vladimir Putin’s murderous behaviour in Ukraine.

With Trump seemingly distancing himself from Article VII of the NATO treaty, every country nominally allied to America needs to recognise that his purely transactional view of alliances might herald a sudden unpredictable pivot away from collective security. Put bluntly, if he deals out punishment beatings to friend and foe alike, where is the upside in being a friend? More immediately, how long will it be before American products start to be boycotted, even in the hitherto more pro-American countries in the West? Anti-Americanism is a disease that is constantly metastasising, and President Trump has turbocharged it globally, just as he says he wants allies in what he correctly diagnoses is a world-historical struggle against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The sheer brazenness in employing an algorithm that ignored whether a country was on America’s side in its great struggle against the CCP was another tell-tale sign of Oval Office xenophobia. Australia has suffered discrimination from China for her principled stand over China’s responsibility for COVID, but has been treated by America just the same as those countries that sidle up to China and flutter their eyelids, as France seems to be doing. (Again, check the date stamp, as Emmanuel Macron is almost as mercurial as Trump.)

The present crisis ought to be a spur to the English-speaking countries of CANZUK (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom) to bind themselves closer in every area of commerce and culture and intelligence-gathering and friendship, having the same language, law, monarch, and history of sacrifice. This will be all the more important if—as Tim Kaine, the Democratic Senator for Virginia, has intimated—Trump’s steel and aluminium tariffs and other depredations make the AUKUS nuclear submarines even more expensive for Australia than they are already.

Another sign that the United States has slipped ineluctably from the Anger to the Negotiation stage of its decline cycle is the Trump Administration’s keenness on ending the Russo-Ukrainian War on Russian terms, because it equates that conflict with Afghanistan and Iraq as a ‘forever war,’ even though it has only gone on for three years, unlike Afghanistan (2001–21) or Iraq (2003–11). 

For perspective, consider what would have happened if the Americans had pulled the plug on other wars after only three years fighting. The country itself would not have come into existence, since there were six years between the first shots being fired in the American War of Independence in April 1775 and General Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown in October 1781. Similarly, the South would have won the American Civil War if Abraham Lincoln had caved in after only three years of fighting, in April 1864, and after the successes of D-Day and the liberation of Paris, President Roosevelt would have had to announce America’s withdrawal from the war in December 1944, days before the opening salvos of the Battle of the Bulge. 

Today we have Trump’s advisor General Keith Kellogg putting forward a Berlin 1945-style concept for Ukraine, with different zones being controlled by Ukraine, by Russia, and by a Ukrainian-Franco-British coalition. The obvious problem is that there is nothing to prevent Russia from crossing the demilitarised zone and attacking the Ukrainian zone, which includes Kyiv and Kharkiv but not the Franco-British forces in the west. In 1945 no part of Berlin was not controlled by one of the wartime Allies. By total contrast, under Kellogg’s scheme, there is an open invitation for Putin to attack the rump of self-governing Ukraine.  

“The strong do what they have to do,” wrote Thucydides, the historian of 5th-century BC Aegean geopolitics, “and the weak accept what they have to accept.” (Unsurprisingly, he was a hero of Nietzsche’s.) In his book on The Thucydidean Trap, Graham Allison writes that “When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, the resulting structural stress makes a violent clash the rule, not the exception.” It is essential that the United States should stop declining vis à vis China, otherwise the whole world could be caught in the crossfire of a conflict between two heavily nuclear-armed powers, possibly over the future of Taiwan.  

Yet with his threats of massive tariffs against precisely those Southeast Asian countries, such as Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, that will form the future battleground states, Trump is putting the anti-American case far more eloquently than President Xi does there. 

The sharp decline of the US dollar as a reserve currency—from seventy percent of global reserves in 2000 to less than sixty percent even before the present crisis—as well as the precipitous slide in the US treasury bond market last week, will probably play a more important part in the eclipse of the American imperium than the tariffs imbroglio or a clash in the Straits of Taiwan. Nothing saps national confidence faster than fears for the currency, and the United States is this year spending more on servicing its debt than on defence, which Sir Niall Ferguson’s ‘Ferguson’s Law’—named after the 18th-century Scottish Adam Ferguson—proves is the tipping point for Earth’s proud empires to start to fall.

Perhaps all President Trump has achieved for America’s Kübler-Ross Cycle is to speed up the whole process, which might otherwise have taken decades. The stage after Negotiation is Depression, after all, and in economic terms that is the natural corollary of a race-to-the-bottom trade war. In psychological terms for America, however, it could be even more serious than that.