The concept of a “post-American world” is no longer a clever moniker or a provocative book title — it is fast becoming a lived global reality. From wars Washington cannot decisively win to alliances it can no longer easily marshal, the once-unipolar world is giving way to fragmentation, recalibration, and the steady erosion of American primacy. Jeffrey D. Sachs, leading economist and professor at Columbia University, characterizes this transformation as the outcome of “strategic overreach and structural blindness” — a pattern he has documented extensively. His argument is simple yet powerful: American power faltered not only because rivals rose, but because Washington misunderstood the limits of its own leadership.
John J. Mearsheimer, Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, reaches a strikingly similar conclusion from within the realist tradition. For him, the tragedy of US strategy lies in attempting to preserve unipolar dominance during an era when structural forces were inevitably pushing the world back toward multipolarity. When political structure shifts, he argues, no amount of idealism or coercive power can secure what the system will not sustain.
Though Sachs and Mearsheimer emerge from different intellectual universes — one grounded in development economics, the other in structural realism — together they produce a contrapuntal reading of American decline. Sachs foregrounds economic mismanagement, costly wars, and diplomatic hubris; Mearsheimer stresses the unyielding constraints of an anarchic international system. Their diagnoses converge: the United States is losing not only its material advantage but the coherence of purpose and clarity of judgment that once anchored its leadership.
To fully grasp the depth of this crisis, Noam Chomsky must enter the conversation. For decades, Chomsky — linguist, political dissident, and perhaps the most influential critic of US foreign policy — has documented the contradiction between America’s democratic rhetoric and its long record of supporting coups, authoritarian allies, and interventions abroad. His landmark work Deterring Democracy lays out this inconsistency with chilling detail. Chomsky shows how elite consensus, institutional narratives, and media systems “manufacture consent” by framing coercive policies as a benevolent necessity. This dynamic, he argues, produced a gap between image and reality that steadily undermined moral legitimacy.
Sachs extends this critique by showing how, after the Cold War, Washington squandered an extraordinary opportunity to build a cooperative global order. Instead of integrating Russia into a new security architecture, the US expanded NATO despite repeated warnings. George Kennan famously called NATO expansion a “fateful error,” predicting it would provoke Russian insecurity rather than partnership. Former US ambassador Jack Matlock made similar warnings, arguing that the policy would be perceived in Moscow as strategic encirclement, not cooperation.
The United States then compounded this strategic error with the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, the destabilization of Libya, and an expansion of drone warfare that blurred moral and legal boundaries. It weaponized the dollar through sanctions regimes that alienated much of the Global South. These were not isolated misjudgments but expressions of what Sachs calls an inability to imagine leadership without domination.
These external failures mirrored internal decay. Political polarization calcified into legislative paralysis; inequality soared to levels incompatible with democratic stability; infrastructure aged; and the social contract frayed. A state increasingly unable to solve its own domestic problems found it ever harder to persuade others of its global authority. Here, Chomsky’s analysis of narrative control — how media systems mediate consent — becomes all the more prescient. The American public was often asked to accept contradictions between democratic ideals and coercive practices that, over time, eroded both legitimacy and clarity of purpose.
Mearsheimer, however, sees the problem less as a moral contradiction and more as a structural inevitability. For him, unipolarity was always destined to end. China’s rise — enabled by economic modernization, long-term planning, and strategic discipline — was predictable. Yet Washington assumed economic integration would liberalize China or blunt its ambitions. When the United States finally attempted containment, China had already reached near-peer status. This structural logic also frames Mearsheimer’s interpretation of the Ukraine crisis. NATO’s eastward expansion and informal suggestions of the future Ukrainian membership created a classic security dilemma, he argues, pushing Russia toward a response the US should have foreseen. Sachs also reaches a similar conclusion through a different intellectual pathway: the crisis was avoidable had the US embraced a cooperative security framework rather than a sphere-of-influence mindset.
To understand the deeper rupture — the loss of America’s epistemic footing — we must turn to Michel Foucault. In The Archaeology of Knowledge and in his genealogical writings, Foucault explains how discourses establish the very conditions for authority, legitimacy, and truth. For decades, the American narrative of a liberal international order—democracy promotion, free markets, and human rights — functioned as a powerful discursive formation reproduced through think tanks, universities, media, and diplomacy.
But discourses collapse when their contradictions become too visible. Iraq, Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis, global supply chain failures, and the rise of non-Western institutions all exposed cracks in the American epistemic universe. As the paradigms unraveled, so too did the policies they once supported. The world did not simply reject American power — it began to reject the categories through which American power once made sense.
Meanwhile, the Global South has already recalibrated. Countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America are embracing strategic autonomy. Institutions such as the BRICS New Development Bank offer alternatives to Western-dominated Bretton Woods systems. Power is no longer interpreted through American epistemology alone; multiple frameworks now shape global governance. American influence remains significant but increasingly performative, projecting authority without commanding consensus.
Amidst the scenario, for the United States, navigating this new world requires more than tactical recalibration. Most importantly, it requires rethinking the knowledge frameworks through which America has long interpreted both itself and the world. But it also demands humility, recognition of structural limits, genuine engagement with the Global South (not as dependents to be managed), and domestic renewal — from political reform to economic justice.
Meaningful adaptation in a post-American world also requires actionable strategies: strengthening multilateral institutions to ensure global governance is more representative and accountable, particularly across the UN, IMF, and World Bank; managing global commons by treating climate, health, and financial stability as shared responsibilities rather than competitive arenas; fostering inclusive economies through fair trade, debt relief, and accessible development financing to restore shared prosperity; prioritizing diplomacy and conflict prevention by investing in cooperative security architectures to reduce crises and great-power tensions; and embracing knowledge pluralism by incorporating diverse intellectual, scientific, and local knowledge into global policymaking to bridge widening epistemic gaps.
The post-American world is not merely a shift in geopolitics — it is a test of collective imagination, ethical responsibility, and intellectual adaptability. Meaningful restoration requires institutions, nations, and citizens to act not from nostalgia or dominance, but from a grounded, cooperative, and inclusive vision — a reinvention of E Pluribus Unum for an interconnected, post-hegemonic era.
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