When imperial rulers sound a strategic retreat, their authority tends to crumble faster than they could have imagined — or feared. The lot of the Soviet Union and apartheid South Africa springs to mind. Their last leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and FW de Klerk championed reform of their ossified systems confident they would stay in control of the process — only to be swept aside by the forces they had unleashed.
Something similarly convulsive is happening now as America abandons its supervisory role of recent decades. This is of course a deliberate rather than enforced withdrawal; Donald Trump is not facing Gorbachev’s or de Klerk’s fate of being overtaken by events and bundled from office. But there is nonetheless a parallel in the breakneck collapse of a long-standing hegemon, in this case over the swaths of the world where the US has long been the dominant superpower.
On paper this is the coming of age moment for the “middle powers”, in particular the powerhouses of the global south who have long been willing on America’s fall from its preachy pedestal. There are indeed new opportunities, particularly for the unscrupulous.