By admin 
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The American age that followed World War II was bound to end eventually. What’s shocking is how suddenly that moment has arrived. In the past six months, America’s power—long exemplified by the world’s best warfighting equipment and most highly trained military personnel, a global network of bases and logistics systems, and military and diplomatic partnerships with all corners of the world—has proved insufficient to defeat Iran, a repressive, economically stagnant regime armed with cheap missiles and drones.
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For years, virtually everyone thought that, in a crisis, Washington could draw on deeper reserves of money, troops, munitions, and diplomatic support than any other nation. Even when U.S. forces faced setbacks in conflicts such as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, a widespread assumption about America’s fundamental strength reassured allies and deterred foes. Yet that assumption also promoted a complacency that has left the U.S. military exposed now that even inexpensive, mass-produced weaponry can be guided with deadly accuracy.
President Trump did not erode U.S. capabilities on his own. But Trump’s war with Iran has revealed just how the underlying dynamics of global power have shifted—and just how much American might has decayed.
Since Britain’s postwar retreat from the Middle East, the United States has been the most important military power in that volatile region. In 1980, the Carter administration asserted that America would guarantee the free flow of oil and other commodities out of the Persian Gulf to the wider world. The success of the Carter doctrine required hostile governments, which then included the Soviet Union as well as the new theocracy in Iran, to believe that the United States could and would take decisive military action against anyone who dared to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s petroleum, and other vital commodities, has long passed.
Until recently, the array of American bases surrounding Iran gave that country’s leaders every reason to fear being overwhelmed militarily if they moved to control the strait. Yet the regime remains intact, even after attacks by the United States and Israel succeeded in killing top Iranian leaders, and its long-range missile and drone attacks managed to elude American air defenses and incapacitated many U.S. facilities. In March, fewer than two weeks into the fighting, The New York Times identified 17 American bases, air-defense installations, and diplomatic facilities that had been hit. Among them were some of the U.S. military’s important staging points: the Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain as well as the Ali Al Salem Air Base, Camp Arifjan, and Camp Buehring in Kuwait.
The effect of these losses on U.S. operations was nearly instantaneous. A key reason the Trump administration did not militarily escalate with Iran over the summer, despite all of its threats to do so, was the loss of the base in Bahrain—which the Navy had relied on for decades to resupply ships in the Middle East. Instead, the so-called logistical tail for U.S. naval operations had to stretch all the way to Diego Garcia, a British-controlled island in the Indian Ocean more than 2,000 miles from the Strait of Hormuz.
Complications to resupply efforts raise costs, reduce operational efficiency, and add to the strain on military personnel. Disrupted logistics contributed to the long deployment of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which led in turn to low morale. According to Stars and Stripes, families of crew members on the Lincoln feared that the many months at sea were causing serious mental-health problems.
For the moment—and likely for longer—the bases taken out of commission by Iranian attacks have been largely abandoned as operational facilities because of the continuing threat to U.S. personnel and equipment. At a recent town-hall meeting, Navy Times has reported, a service member asked Admiral Daryl Caudle about retrieving personal items from the Bahrain base. “We’re not getting back in there anytime soon,” Caudle responded. “I just want to be completely honest with that.”
The vulnerability of U.S facilities near Iran is so great and the prospective cost of repair is so large that, as The Washington Post reported last month, administration officials might not want to rebuild them at all. One way to spin the situation is as a “once-in-a-generation chance for the Pentagon to reconsider its presence” in the Persian Gulf region, as the Post put it. But the basic fact is that defending key facilities against even a less technologically advanced foe such as Iran is not something that the U.S. military can currently do.
The diminution of U.S. strength has a cascading effect. To maintain its military effort against Iran, the United States has had to strip the western Pacific of vital equipment. The Trump administration finally relieved the Abraham Lincoln last month; taking its place in the Arabian Sea was USS George Washington, which is normally based in Japan. Its normal task is to discourage military action by China—a deterrence that is now greatly weakened.
This desperate move only underscores that American military resources, however enormous relative to most other countries’, are not infinite. The war with Iran has depleted stockpiles of some of the Pentagon’s most important and advanced weaponry. By the end of April, cautious studies were estimating that the United States had already run dangerously low in THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) munitions, Patriot interceptors, and Tomahawk cruise missiles. Shortages have worsened since then.
For years, the United States has focused on building so-called exquisite systems—advanced weaponry that is produced in limited quantities at a high per-unit cost. This approach was in part an adaptation to the post-9/11 War on Terror, in which U.S. forces focused on counterinsurgency and fought enemies that lacked the capacity to mount and sustain serious attacks on American logistics. Under those circumstances, the Pentagon built up a broad array of munitions but not deep stockpiles of them. At current production rates, the United States will need several years to build supplies back to where they were when Trump went to war in February—and even those levels in hindsight look far too weak to maintain America’s long-standing global position amid a shift toward mass-produced precision-guided drones.
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The erosion of American manufacturing superiority is an old story, but it is a key element for understanding the end of the American age. The U.S. could once outbuild other powers by tapping into civilian production. During World War II, Americans retooled the automotive industry to build aircraft. Today, relative to the rest of the world, the United States does almost no civilian shipbuilding. China, in comparison, makes about 50 percent of the ships in the world and controls about 80 percent of the world’s drone manufacture. Having built its military to prevail in a burst of high-intensity fighting, the United States simply lacks the equipment, stockpiles, and rested forces to engage China for any extended period of time.
In the past, the United States could rely on allies to amplify its own power. Nations that shared values or at least interests with Washington have hosted bases, provided diplomatic support for American initiatives, shared intelligence, and sent troops and equipment to support American-led military operations. Today, traditional allies have capabilities that the U.S. sorely needs. For example, Japan and South Korea are the second- and third-largest shipbuilding powers in the world.
Rather than recognizing that it needs allies more than ever, the current U.S administration perceives governments that have followed American leadership for decades as free riders, annoyances, even hindrances. Recently, President Trump has been critical of South Korea and praised his supposedly great relationship with North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un. Never mind that South Korea and North Korea are still technically in a state of war, and North Korea has nuclear weapons that could devastate its neighbor to the south and potentially other U.S. allies farther afield.
Meanwhile in Europe, the U.S. government has distanced itself from long-standing democracies and moved closer to the Russian dictatorship of Vladimir Putin. Since returning to the White House, Trump has scaled back the American provision of security to Europe. Earlier this year, the Pentagon announced plans to withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany, and the administration has launched a defense-posture review that heralds further cuts. The U.S. is making no secret of its goal of turning over more and more of the responsibility of defending Europe to the Europeans. Leaders in Europe are taking these moves seriously and are making plans to rely less on the United States. Germany is considering whether to help the U.K. modernize its nuclear weapons so that Europe has a nuclear deterrent if the United States pulls out.
The United States has even begun to alienate Canada. Trump has regularly talked about his desire to incorporate Canada as the 51st state. He has also launched a trade war that, by his own account, will be “devastating” to the Canadian economy. Americans have now twice elected a president who overtly seeks to reframe traditional alliances as zero-sum relationships in which the United States needs to do less and its former partners, more. Leaders and voters in those countries might reasonably conclude that Americans do not know or do not care what they are giving up.
Americans have long benefited from peaceful integration with Canada. The U.S. could go to war with Iran in part because of its large base network in Europe. The disruption of long-standing alliances will be devastating to America’s global position. Other countries are already adjusting to newly revealed American weaknesses. Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia—all long-term U.S. partners—recently signed their own defense pact. Now that Iran is exercising control over the Strait of Hormuz, Oman, on the waterway’s opposite shore, is inching toward closer cooperation with Tehran. Other Gulf States are reaching out to Iran as well. Even Saudi Arabia, which for decades based its security on massive purchases of U.S. weapons and the hosting of U.S. forces, must reassess its choices after Trump told its de facto ruler that the U.S. will not assist the country in its war with the Houthis.
Meanwhile, South Korea is improving relations with China, and European states are thinking more and more of a European-wide defense association. These are all strong signs that the countries around the world are losing confidence in America’s capabilities—and its intent.
Unfortunately for the United States, the administration seems more intent on hiding problems than correcting them. The Defense Department has forced out key staffers at Stars and Stripes and demanded, in an investigation of leaks about munitions shortages and other matters, that certain Pentagon employees take polygraph tests.
Even if the United States tries to revert to more of its earlier way of doing business, recent events suggest that its global reach will decrease. How the rest of the world will adapt to that change is hard to say. The American age may not give way to dominance by China, because that country has problems of its own and other states in Asia, such as India, are growing to balance it. Democratic nations that look after their own defense more diligently, rather than relying on American protection, might conceivably benefit. The world might also experience a very chaotic period of wars and competitions.
All of history’s previous superpowers have eventually declined. The emergence of East Asia as the center of the world’s economic output was always going to reduce American influence. The transition from one global age to the next is seldom evident in the moment. When Russia invaded Ukraine four and a half years ago, the potential of mass-produced drones had not yet become clear. As recently as February, few experts would have predicted that the United States—a global colossus for more than 80 years—would end up so hamstrung by Iran. But the conflict reveals something important: The American age has come to an end. U.S. global dominance cannot continue without the power sources that brought it about.