Normally, a big external threat such as a global pandemic should be the occasion for citizens to rally around a common response the covid-19 crisis served rather to deepen America's divisions, with social distancing, mask-wearing and now vaccinations being seen not as public-health measures but as political markers. The demand for recognition on the part of groups that feel they have been marginalised by elites was something I identified 30 years ago as an Achilles heel of modern democracy. This polarisation started over conventional policy issues like taxes and abortion, but since then has metastasised into a bitter fight over cultural identity. The much bigger challenge to America’s global standing is domestic: American society is deeply polarised, and has found it difficult to find consensus on virtually anything. America still has many economic and cultural advantages that few other countries can match. America survived an earlier, humiliating defeat when it withdrew from Vietnam in 1975, but it quickly regained its dominance within a little more than a decade, and today it works with Vietnam to curb Chinese expansionism. Afghanistan’s ultimate effect on geopolitics is likely to be small. The degree of unipolarity in this period has been relatively rare in history, and the world has been reverting to a more normal state of multipolarity ever since, with China, Russia, India, Europe and other centres gaining power relative to America. The decade ended with its troops bogged down in two counterinsurgency wars, and an international financial crisis that accentuated the huge inequalities that American-led globalisation had brought about. The country overestimated the effectiveness of military power to bring about fundamental political change, even as it under-estimated the impact of its free-market economic model on global finance. The height of American hubris was the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when it hoped to be able to remake not just Afghanistan (invaded two years before) and Iraq, but the whole of the Middle East. The country was dominant in many domains of power back then-military, economic, political and cultural. The peak period of American hegemony lasted less than 20 years, from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to around the financial crisis in 2007-09. The country will remain a great power for many years, but just how influential it will be depends on its ability to fix its internal problems, rather than its foreign policy.

The long-term sources of American weakness and decline are more domestic than international.

The truth of the matter is that the end of the American era had come much earlier. THE HORRIFYING images of desperate Afghans trying to get out of Kabul this week after the United States-backed government collapsed have evoked a major juncture in world history, as America turned away from the world.

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