Foreign Affairs published this essay by Michael Beckley of Tufts University and the Foreign Policy Research Institute:

The Strange Triumph of a Broken America

Why Power Abroad Comes With Dysfunction at Home

Beckley says the U.S. has an aggressive foreign policy but it often loses wars because it doesn’t spend enough on the military to make an effective force. He writes: “In 2008, the United States suggested that Georgia and Ukraine might eventually join the alliance but offered no concrete path to membership, thus provoking Russia without effectively deterring it.” Of course, my response is: stop having such an aggressive foreign policy that provokes wars!

Beckley is careful not to describe the extent of U.S. provocations in Ukraine (e.g., engineering the 2014 coup and the arming of far-right militias).

I don’t agree with Beckley’s conclusion that the U.S. needs to spend more on its military and that it should continue dominating the world, but he’s informative about

• the relation between domestic and foreign affairs
• huge debt in the U.S. and in other countries
• the dynamism of the U.S. economy and political system. He says China’s economy isn’t as strong as advertised and has weaknesses (e.g., debt, an aging population, inefficiency, and an over-reliance on government subsidies). “The uncanny resilience of U.S. power lies in its structural strengths.” And “The United States remains an economic powerhouse, accounting for 26 percent of global GDP, the same as during the “unipolar moment” of the early 1990s. In 2008, the economies of the United States and the eurozone were nearly equal in size, but today, the American economy is twice as large.” Maybe the size of the U.S. economy is distorted by over-financialization, dollar hegemony, and debt.
• the inability of the U.S. military to recruit sufficiently skilled soldiers: “A military recruitment crisis compounds the shortfall, with 77 percent of young Americans ineligible for service because of obesity, drug use, or health issues and just nine percent expressing an interest in enlisting. In a potential conflict with China, U.S. forces would blow through their munitions inventory in a matter of weeks, and it would take years for the U.S. defense industrial base to produce replacements. Rising personnel costs, along with an endless array of peacetime missions, are stretching U.S. forces thin.”
• the dangers of political and cultural divisions inside the U.S. (such as the division between rural and urban, and highly educated and uneducated groups, among ethnic groups, and Ds and Rs). Rural areas are economically depressed, fostering discontent, maliase, and poor health; high tech growth happens in urban areas. Republicans benefit.
• the fact that the U.S. exports more oil and gas than Saudi Arabia or China
• the alleged decline of China, including the aging of its population and even larger debt than the U.S. as a percentage of GDP. He thinks that China and Russia are dying empires more than the U.S. is.
• the rise of Trump, who won a majority of Hispanic male votes
• the dangers of MAGA tariffs, isolationism, and opposition to immigration
• historical analogs to the current situation