Morbid Symptoms Abundant: The Demolition of Pax Americana

For all the talk of abundance, what’s really abundant these days are the morbid symptoms of a dying international system. According to Georgetown’s Charles Kupchan, these symptoms include the endless wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Trump’s frenetic demolition-man act, and the rise not just of China but of India and Turkey. As the Pax Americana of the post-World War Two era withers away, the key question is what comes next. “The old is dying and the new cannot be born,” Kupchan quotes the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci. “In this interregnum,” Gramsci explains, “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” But for all the abundance of symptoms, there’s an acute scarcity of cures in our post-Pax Americana world.

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