As the first quarter of 2018 ends, America under Donald Trump finds itself in an awkward situation reminiscent of the "Suez moment" that confronted the postwar empires of Britain and France more than six decades ago, in the 1956 crisis that saw their former colonies in the Arab Middle East rise up to evict the residual Western European influence in the region: the US today similarly faces a potentially existential crisis for its longstanding statu as supreme arbiter of the affairs of not only this most geopolitically pivotal part of the world - the cradle of civilization - but well beyond.
This weekend, China has basically launched a formal bid to dethrone the US dollar as the undisputed global reserve currency by initiating a long-term switch from greenbacks to its own currency, the yuan or renminbi (RMB), as payment medium for oil imports. If successful - and it is quite likely to be, given sufficient time and a generally contained level of global economic volatility or indeed instability - this will mark a historic shift of economic power from West to East that concludes half a millennium of Western supremacy and primacy.
Indeed, it is the sheer speed and scale of this presently unfolding realignment that underscores its monumental significance: it is quite literally taking place far faster and at a far broader and deeper dimension than virtually the entire Western elite and Western world as a whole is able to grasp or, in the latter's case, even notice.
Back in 1956, when ambitious young Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser declared his intent to nationalize the Suez Canal, the initial reaction from London and Paris reeked of nothing less than racist arrogance founded upon a quite morbid brand of ignorance: for so long, the old-line Western imperialist powers had had their way in the Arab world with their diktats and edicts so seamlessly executed and implemented by their local puppet rulers that they couldn't have conceived of the level of hostility they had stored up for a colonial order they had imposed and even at that point sought to maintain.
Indeed, as the subsequent history of the Middle East conclusively demonstrated, there was still plenty of political leeway in the region for the interests of the traditional European powers: all the post-colonial Arab regimes assiduously cultivated and maintained relations with their former bosses to the extent they deemed practicable and profitable, even as their main patrons and benefactors shifted to the rival pair of the US and USSR in the height of the Cold War; yet the paradigm shift that occurred in 1956 was undeniable and epochal in that, from thenceforth, Old World Europe would once more be a marginal player in the heart of the Islamic world, which it had not been since the onset of the modern era in the late 1700s catapulted it far ahead of its millennial civilizational rival to the southeast.
As such, there is an even greater and more enduring significance to the unfolding decline and oncoming fall of the postwar US empire throughout the vast expanse of Eurasia - a development that the presidency of Donald Trump has first forewarned (with his shock election) and is now actualizing in terms of real political events and trends: this could well be the end of any hard Western influence in the Eastern Hemisphere once and for all - a moment that will be remembered for centuries and even millennia hence.
Ever since Barack Obama's fateful "red line" on the use of chemical weapons against civilians was crossed with little penalty by Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war in the summer of 2013, it has become painfully apparent that the world's so-called "sole superpower" for the entire post-Cold War era was no longer capable of acting with decisive force to create or even duly influence the course of events in the Middle East. In the four to five years since - but most dramatically since the November 2016 election of Trump - it has also been revealed just how deeply this loss of relative military and diplomatic might has been rooted in a more fundamental transfer of economic and commercial strength and vitality away from the long-dominant West.
At heart, this is because the Anglophone-led West has now become an essentially permanently post-industrial economy and even a nascent "post-family" society: its structures of sociopolitical authority and even its more organic basic bonds of communalism and fraternalism have become so dissipated by generation upon generation of growing cultural individualism - fostered by technology-driven consumerism that ever less and less subtly atomizes each and every person into an isolated unit of material expenditure - that the very advancement of socioeconomic "progress" measured by standard indicators of wealth and income is no longer conducive to national strength and expansion, but rather national weakness and even contraction through self-discoordination.
Of course, the Trump presidency is in its very self a backlash against this very real American and Western emasculation - but it is quite naturally a significantly lagging one. Both the "America First" and "Make America Great Again" banners essentially presuppose and assume that what must be recovered is not primarily soft or ideological power, but hard military and economic muscle: in other words, their underlying premise is that America's crisis of identity is caused by its loss of power and influence, not the other way around.
And so, even as Trump drastically scales back reconstruction aid for Syria, he will be loath in the coming days and weeks to actually end the US military presence there altogether, despite his impulsive declaration that with ISIS all but defeated, there's no purpose left for American troops in the country.
Indeed, if the pullout of the British and French from the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s is any guide, some US military and intelligence presence in countries like Syria and Iraq is almost guaranteed to remain - if only because Washington must at least feel it still retains some say or perhaps veto over policies by local actors that are blatantly tailored to harm or reduce American equities in the region.
But even so, by thus speaking his mind unfettered from the US defense and diplomatic communities, Trump has himself acknowledged that America's "Suez moment" has indeed arrived - not just in the Middle East, but more likely throughout the expanse of Eurasia.
"Let other people take care of it" - said of Syria - can just as well be said of the Korean peninsula and the Eastern European periphery of Russia, i.e. other Eurasian regions where American military and economic might are no longer nearly the decisive let alone dominant factors for friend and foe alike as they would've been not that long ago.
Whether Trump yet grasps the magnitude and gravity of what he's openly recognizing with his gut - a development that probably undermines his own platform of renewed American greatness more than the cerebral reasoning of his mind has yet cared to or is perhaps even capable of processing - will only serve to underscore how all new facts and realities, however disruptive to the still enshrined but already in fact crumbling status quo, are simply not incumbent upon anyone actually heeding them to become the inexorable movers of the wheels of history anyway.
