The Decline Of US Imperialism Is a STRUCTURAL Inevitability | Dr. Warwick Powell

## US Foreign Policy: Global Primacy vs. Hemispheric Focus? The conversation makes clear that American strategy is not uniformly retreating into isolation; rather, it is undergoing a structural recalibration that reflects both ambition and constraint. The pattern is familiar: the United States still aspires to global primacy—an ability to be present everywhere, deter rivals, and, in the old formulation, fight multiple wars if necessary. Yet this aspiration collides with the changing realities of the twenty-first century: fiscal limits, strategic competition from other great powers, and an international environment where peers are less deferential. The result is an American posture that rhetorically oscillates between defending the homeland and projecting power abroad, even as the means for doing the latter are fraying. This tension produces a distinctive diagnosis: Washington’s ends remain largely constant, but its means are in flux. The U.S. leadership frames homeland defense as best achieved through outward projection—but the capacity to project unilaterally, at scale, is diminishing. The conversation highlights how this paradox generates policy ambiguities. On the one hand, the U.S. intervenes in multiple theaters—Ukraine, the Middle East, Latin America—and asserts influence from Caracas to Taipei. On the other, there are repeated domestic calls to refocus on the Western Hemisphere. That duality is not mere incoherence; it is a reflection of strategy under pressure—an attempt to preserve primacy while conserving scarce resources. Crucially, the interview points out that the interpretation of America’s moment depends on one’s temporality. Some observers see a slow, managed decline; others perceive a strategic pivot. Either way, what is decisive is the realization that other actors are now large enough and confident enough to respond, resist, or fill vacuums. The moment is one of transition, and in such moments old institutional commitments—alliances, bases, and commercial ties—face both tests and opportunities. ## US Strategy: Continuity of Agenda & Division of Labor A core insight from the exchange is that the agenda of U.S. foreign policy has shown remarkable continuity even as its operational logic evolves. The United States continues to aim for influence and deterrence at a global scale. The difference today lies in the operationalization of those aims—what the conversation calls a new division of labor. Rather than bearing the full burden of forward defense, the U.S. increasingly urges partners to shoulder more of the fiscal costs and operational risks. This “burden-shifting” takes multiple forms. One is explicit defense spending targets: allies are asked to lift defense budgets and buy U.S. systems. Another is the cultivation of minilateral architectures—like regional security groupings or enhanced trilaterals—that distribute responsibility without dissolving U.S. leadership. A third, more subtle instrument, is the use of non-state networks—NGOs, political foundations, and civic actors—that can influence political outcomes abroad without overt military footprints. The net effect is paradoxical. By empowering partners, the U.S. extends its reach at lower cost; but by empowering them, it also creates the seeds of greater autonomy. Japan’s recent defense build-up illustrates this ambivalence. For some in Tokyo, higher spending signals deeper alignment with Washington; for others, it is an insurance policy against American unreliability. Similarly, South Korean debates around nuclear deterrence reflect eroding confidence in extended deterrence and hint at the very problem that burden-sharing is meant to solve: partners may grow more capable—and more independent—precisely because they can no longer assume absolute U.S. backing. Dr. Warwick Powell frames this as more than transactional politics. It is a structural dynamic: the decoupling of ends and means creates space where allies and adversaries alike reassess their strategies. This rebalancing can be stabilizing if it produces interoperable, cooperative defense architectures. It can be destabilizing if empowered regional actors pursue divergent, incompatible security strategies. The future will hinge on whether these actors build institutions that lock in cooperation or simply accumulate rival capabilities. ## The Decline of US Soft Power & Rise of Cultural Plurality Soft power once functioned as the West’s grease—easing the acceptance of American-led norms, markets, and institutions. Over recent decades, however, the conversation observes a diffusion of cultural and normative attraction. Younger generations across Asia, Africa, and Latin America are less inclined to model themselves on an American template; instead they draw on local, regional, and alternative global cultures. The rise of Korean cinema and music, China’s confident cultural outreach, and a renewed pride in indigenous traditions mean that cultural hegemony is fragmenting into cultural plurality. This shift matters because soft power is an amplifier of strategic influence. When American values, lifestyles, and narratives are widely admired, foreign publics are more likely to accept policy choices aligned with U.S. interests. As that admiration wanes—or becomes one option among many—the political cost of pressing hard on allies and partners rises. In practical terms, persuasion through culture is being replaced by a marketplace of values and identities, where U.S. messages compete with others on more equal terms. Powell draws attention to an important generational dynamic: people born into post-war or post-reform eras carry memories and identities different from those shaped by an era of unipolar dominance. This new generation’s confidence in local accomplishment—economic, cultural, historical—empowers national narratives that are less deferential to Washington. The result is “Globalization 2.0,” where connectivity does not equate to homogenization. Cultural exchange still flourishes, but it does so on terms that make American primacy less automatic and harder to weaponize through soft influence alone. ## The Dangers of Pluralism & Toxic Nationalism Plurality brings opportunities for richer cross-cultural engagement, but the conversation does not shy away from the darker counterpoint: plurality can fracture. The collapse of multiethnic polities in recent history—Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union’s violent disintegration, and other episodes—reminds us that cultural difference can be mobilized into exclusionary and destructive forms. Powell warns that multipolarity is ambivalent: it can yield cooperation or catalyze conflict. One risk identified is the internal politicization of plural identities. In the United States, for example, the domestic debates over multiculturalism have been reframed by some as existential threats to national cohesion. If such discourses harden elsewhere, they can become instruments of internal repression or external aggression. On the international plane, nationalist revivals can create contestatory politics that are zero-sum rather than cooperative. The geopolitical corollary is equally stark. If states prize short-term advantage or prestige over collective stability, the transition from unipolarity to plurality could produce competitive spirals—arms buildups, security dilemmas, and proxy conflicts. The interview underscores that such outcomes are not inevitable. Institutions, norms, and patient diplomacy—exemplified in Southeast Asia by ASEAN’s slow but steady practices of accommodation—offer models for managing difference without descending into hostility. Powell’s prescription is characteristically institutional and normative: prioritize peace, stability, and prosperity as the metrics against which foreign policy choices are judged. That requires restraint, long-term thinking, and mechanisms for confidence-building among states with overlapping interests and fears. The alternative is a rev

The Decline Of US Imperialism Is a STRUCTURAL Inevitability Today I’m talking again to Dr. Warwick Powell, an Adjunct Professor at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. In this part 2 of the conversation with Warwick Powell, we explore the complexities of US foreign policy. We question whether the US is in retreat or simply adapting its strategy to maintain primacy by pushing risk onto its allies. We discuss how this impacts nations like Japan and South Korea, who are beginning to forge more autonomous paths. Finally, we examine the decline of US soft power and the rise of global plurality, weighing the promise of a more cooperative, multipolar world against the dangers of it fracturing into conflict. Timestamps: 00:00:00 US Foreign Policy: Global Primacy vs. Hemispheric Focus? 00:06:26 US Strategy: Continuity of Agenda & Division of Labor 00:16:13 The Decline of US Soft Power & Rise of Cultural Plurality 00:22: 04 The Dangers of Pluralism & Toxic Nationalism 00:27:52 Where to Find Warwick Powell #Pascal So this is actually a good segue to shift gears a little bit and focus more on the United States, because some people are talking about the U.S. being in retreat. And you just explained what the probable intentions of the United States are—not being a balancer, but being a primate power, being present everywhere. But it's kind of a strange moment, because we see how the U.S. has a Ukraine policy, a Middle East and West Asia, Gaza genocide policy, and it inserts itself everywhere. Now, the newest one is that it's inserting itself in Venezuela, even more than before. And it's openly threatening military intervention. I mean, it's already sunk four ships, right? And we all, living in East Asia and the Pacific, are aware that the talk about weaponizing states over here in order to fight China in an open war is still present. At the same time, though, it seems that the rhetoric from Washington is, “We want to focus more on our hemisphere.” How do you make sense of this? #Warwick Powell Look, I think there are three parts to this question. One is the American diagnostics—how America diagnoses the state of the world and its position in it today. The other part that follows from that is the means-end relationship: what are its objectives, and what are the means by which it pursues those objectives? The diagnostics, I think, are in flux. Clearly, the experiences of the last ten years have produced a world in which American unipolarity is nearing its end—it's in the rearview mirror, something like that. The debate, of course, is about exactly where we are in that timeframe, which then shapes views about what the U.S. can or can’t do. -- 1 of 8 -- So it depends on your diagnostics as to what your objectives are. But the macro objectives of American primacy globally—being everywhere, being able to fight two wars at the same time, and arguably with ambitions to fight three peer wars at once—have remained unchanged. There is talk, of course, about a draft defense strategy that emphasizes the defense of the homeland. But this raises the question not just of the ends—because that, in a sense, describes the ends—but of what its means are. And the U.S. framing of its means is that the best defense of the homeland is actually to project outwards. So simply talking about the primacy of protecting the homeland doesn’t necessarily mean it has changed its broad strategic sense, which is to project outward. Having said that, it’s also confronting material constraints. It might still have an objective of dominance in the name of protecting the homeland. It might still have a strategic ambition to do that by projecting outward, but it can’t do it the way it used to, because it doesn’t have the means to do so itself, and it’s operating in an environment where the others it views as peers are much stronger than they used to be. So what is America doing? It seems to me that the United States has not given up on the idea of being, at worst, the leader among equals, right? So even if it concedes that there are peers, it certainly doesn’t see itself as one among equals. It sees itself as… above that. Some are always more equal than others. And in that sense, the United States is Orwell’s Napoleon. In saying that, it means it’s recalibrating its resources. It’s doing that by pushing out responsibility to partners around the world—pushing out resourcing responsibility to partners around the world—and ultimately, in doing so, pushing out risk to its partners around the world. It does that under the banner of “so-and-so needs to do more for its own defense.” They need to spend more. So wherever the United States has gone, it’s been pushing its allies to increase defense spending as a percentage of GDP, and at the same time, in doing so, to purchase more military hardware from the United States. So the U.S. is more or less saying, “You take on the load of being the front line.” We’ve seen an example of that, of course—tragically—over the last three years in Ukraine. And interestingly, I think that in Southeast Asia, and East Asia generally, that experience is leading to quite a lot of soul-searching, particularly among people who live on Taiwan. Again, these are unresolved questions, but there’s clearly a shift in a lot of public attitudes, and even in elite discourse, about the future of America’s defense of Taiwan and what the Ukraine experience tells us. And there are emerging voices who are more or less saying, “We don’t want to be led up the primrose path of Asia, to essentially be the dispensable other for American ambitions.” As I said, these are unresolved discussions, but they weren’t particularly prominent four years ago. #Pascal Yeah, yeah. And, you know, in our sphere here—in our corner of the internet, as I sometimes say— we have analysis about what's happening in these East and Southeast Asian states, in regard to how -- 2 of 8 -- subservient certain states are to U.S. interests or not. Brian Berletic very importantly made this argument: look, what’s happening currently—what happened in Nepal, the protests in the Philippines, and the protests in Indonesia—are extensions of the United States again meddling in internal affairs through these NGO networks, the way we’ve seen before also in Europe. In Georgia, which kind of fended it off; in Moldova, which couldn’t; and in Ukraine, which couldn’t, right? How far do you think his analysis of continuity of agenda and—no, not burden sharing, what’s the... Division of Labor, yes, Division of Labor—these two concepts, how far do you think they still describe current U.S. foreign policy? #Warwick Powell Look, my instinct is that continuity of agenda is right. There hasn’t really been a fundamental change in the agenda. The division of labor question, as I tried to get to earlier, is a concept that I think needs a bit more teasing out, because this division of labor is taking on very particular forms—either by pushing resource responsibilities and risks to partners or, of course, by mobilizing the NGO networks as part of the ways in which America can use the resources it has available to it, in the name of either destabilizing the regions of its adversaries to buy time, or what have you. But what’s interesting, I think, about these moves is that they aren’t consequence-free. As the United States pushes responsibility onto partners or insists that partners take on greater resources, responsibilities, and risks, it also opens up a space in which some partners or allies will see both risk and opportunity. So I think of Japan, for example, which has, I think, seen this recalibration as a small window of opportunity to perhaps reassert, to some extent, a certain level of Japanese autonomy. Now, there are constraints to all of this. So the issue here is understanding the nuance of what's going on, because the United States still occupies Japan militarily and has other sinews that spread through the Japanese body politic. But at the same time, I think it's really clear that over the last ten years the Japanese political elite have sought to carve out a little bit more elbow room, shall we say. And as America, in a sense, pushes responsibility to others, that's also an invitation for others to take more of the space that the United States once occupied. So there are some potential downsides, so to speak, for American hegemony over time, because the more you empower partners to do things, at some point they need you much less. #Pascal Yeah, it's quite funny. You know, it happened in 2023, right? Japan said, “OK, we're going to increase our defense spending from one to two percent, and we're going to develop indigenous capabilities,” and so on. That was universally celebrated in the United States as, finally, Japan is transforming from being the shield to becoming the spear—a better ally and all that. And I just -- 3 of 8 -- thought to myself, you guys are kind of misreading this, because inside Japan you basically have two groups: one that says we need more military spending to support the United States more, and another that says we need more spending because we can’t trust the United States anymore. They're not a reliable partner. Both of them converge on saying, “Okay, we need a bit more indigenous capability.” So they develop that. Which of those two routes it will go is anyone’s guess. But one thing is clear: Japan has its own real national priorities. And one of them is, for instance, not having a war in or over Taiwan, because that’s a worst-case scenario for Tokyo. So they’ll actually push against this—something they’re already doing through their foreign policy, trying at least to maintain interactions with the Chinese Ministry of Defense and so on, and keeping a working-level relationship that’s actually doing fairly well. #Warwick Powell Yeah, and look, I think if we throw the Republic of Korea into the mix, we also have a population on the Korean Peninsula that’s now highly doubtful about America’s willingness to come to the Republic of Korea’s defense, push come to shove. So much so that, of course, in South Korea there are substantial voices clamoring for the nuclearization of Korea. And I’m also aware that in Japan, of course, there are some voices along those lines as well. Obviously, in Japan’s case, that issue has its own sensitivities—very much so. But clearly, there’s a doubt about the dependability of the United States that has opened up a space you can’t close down that easily anymore. So even though there’s continuity of agenda, the fact that the United States doesn’t quite have the means to prosecute that agenda in the way it once did has meant that its means–end couple has decoupled. And by having to create these other things—whether it’s the Quad, or the Philippines, Japan, and the United States—these minilaterals form a network that actually speaks to a kind of fragility in America’ s projection into the region, and an opening up of spaces in which countries feel doubtful and concerned. But it’s also a space where they can explore ways to address their own needs. Now, the consequence of that is entirely open-ended. There’s no deterministic outcome here. But Japan, the two Koreas, China, and of course Russia—in that northeast Asian part of the world—all have very good reasons to find ways of crafting a meaningful security outcome, recognizing that of those five countries, three are nuclear-enabled, and the other two are dependent on another nuclear power a long way away. And the credibility of that deterrence is a big question mark. So I think that over the next 10 to 15 years—provided we survive that long—we’re going to see a lot more discussion about what Northeast Asian security begins to look like in a post-American world. And these pressures can lead in all sorts of directions. Will it provoke the United States to try to put its foot down and reassert its position, say, in Japan? Or is the United States, through pro