Empire in Decline: The U.S. Military Retreat From Africa and the Loss of Collective Social Energy
Janus:
– 12 July 2025 –
Janus:
Sometimes nations get collectively energized in a social sense, and they exert that energy outward. Often with this energy and collective will, these nations conquer other nations for the sake of their own interests, forming an empire.
For example, the nations of Iberia that formed Spain and Portugal (Galicia, Leon, Castille, Navarre, Aragon, Catalonia, and, of course, Portugal) spent centuries fighting and pushing the Muslim invaders out of western Europe. When they had completed the task in 1492 with the conquest of Grenada, the Iberian peoples had already begun to direct this collective energy and will into the exploration of the world and the establishment of empires. For a hundred years, Spain and Portugal dominated Europe and extended their power through the rest of the world, particularly in South and Central America. Yet, by the 17th century, this collective energy peaked, and then Spain and Portugal began a slow decline. Gradually, they began to retreat, to the point where they had almost lost the entirety of their empires by the 20th century.
The same thing happened with the United States. As the American colonies and states expanded westward and built up civilization over the course of 300 years, energy and collective will grew along with them. By the time the American West was pacified, roughly in the 1880’s, the Americans looked outward and conquered a world empire that effectively remains in place today.
But empires require constant military exertion to keep them running. When their national energy and will begin to diminish, empires find tricks and excuses to keep hold of their possessions, but at some point they begin to gradually pull back in order to consolidate whatever they can still hold.
Declining empires don’t like to admit this weakness, much as we middle-aged men typically hate to admit that we are slowing down and losing our edge, but imperial adversaries and allies quickly see the decline, and they quickly begin to fill the vacuum.
We are beginning to see this retreat happening with the United States, first under the presidency of Joe Biden and now continuing with Donald Trump.
Via RT (“The Americans are leaving — and the post-colonial world is fine with that” Mustafa Fetouri, 11 July 2025):
A shift appears to be underway in US-Africa relations, judging by the remarks of Vice President J.D. Vance and AFRICOM Commander General Michael Langley. Speaking to new US naval graduates on May 23, Vance talked about re-evaluating the American military role around the world and declared that “The era of uncontested US dominance is over” and that open-ended military engagements “belong to the past.”
Four days later General Langley, while attending an African defense chiefs’ meeting in Gaborone, Botswana, suggested that the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) might be integrated into Central Command (CENTCOM). “If we’re [AFRICOM] that important to (you), you need to communicate that and we’ll see,” Langley said, adding that the US is “reassessing” its military role in the continent. This sends a clear signal that Washington may dismantle or repurpose AFRICOM as part of broader cuts to US global military posture.
The statements, in line with President Donald Trump’s ‘America first’ mantra, reflect Washington’s growing impatience with costly foreign entanglements, while hinting at a fundamental transformation of how the US engages with Africa’s complex security landscape.
The American scramble out of Afghanistan in 2021 was a clear sign that the United States had lost its edge. Even though we had abandoned other failed military projects before, such as our withdrawals from Vietnam or Iraq, the near panicked rush and the utter incompetence of our retreat from Afghanistan sent an unmistakable message to the world: the United States ain’t what it used to be. We’re hollowed out. It’s now just a question of how much, or to what extent, this country has lost its edge.
So the U.S. is clearly abandoning Africa in the military sense, even as the Trump administration seems to have cut off USAID funds to these countries, costing some of them quite a bit of money indeed. For instance, 2.6% of Liberia’s GDP depended on USAID, we are told. Meanwhile President Trump is trying to pivot our African efforts towards trade and economics, trying to compete with China.
Via The New York Times (“Trump Discusses Economic Investment With African Leaders at White House Meeting” 9 July 2025)
After gutting humanitarian assistance for Africa, President Trump told five leaders from the continent at the White House on Wednesday that his administration was recalibrating its policy for the region to focus on trade.
“We’re shifting from A.I.D. to trade,” Mr. Trump told the leaders of Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania and Senegal, adding that his administration had recently closed the United States Agency for International Development. “We’re working tirelessly to forge new economic opportunities involving both the United States and many African nations. There’s great economic potential in Africa, like few other places.”
In many ways, the meeting crystallized the Trump administration’s conflicting approach to the continent. The president has hosted several African dignitaries at the White House in recent weeks as he seeks to strike deals that can expand the United States’ access to critical minerals and to counter China’s influence on the continent.
But Mr. Trump’s dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has also left African countries reeling. U.S. aid to Liberia, for example, amounted to 2.6 percent of the country’s gross national income before it was cut. That was the highest percentage for any nation in the world, according to the Center for Global Development.
Mr. Trump also used the meeting on Wednesday to ask the leaders to help his administration crack down on African immigrants who overstay their visas in the United States. Mr. Trump said he wanted to work with the nations on so-called “safe third-country agreements,” which Mr. Trump aides have described as deals with governments to take in deported migrants who are not citizens of those nations.
U.S. diplomats have for months targeted several countries in Africa and Asia for the deportation deals, including Mauritania and Gabon.
While it’s important to remember that The New York Times or RT are not especially trustworthy with their respective agendas, in this case I have little reason to doubt the overall picture here. We have pulled much of our military out of Africa, cut off significant amounts of aid that we used to socially engineer these countries into the Western sphere, and we are trying to retool our foreign policies in the form of a strategic geopolitical retreat.
If American leaders are wise, they will try to consolidate U.S. power regionally around the North American continent. With Trump’s efforts to install widespread tariffs, drive out illegal aliens, and especially all of his bluster about the Panama Canal, the “51st state” of Canada, and the purchase of Greenland, it seems apparent that Trump himself, or at least thinkers within his administration, have something like this in mind. But how much of this amounts to hot air and bombast only time will tell.
The trouble is, these efforts might be too-little-too-late. The United States may have lost so much of its collective energy and will, along with basic competence and social cohesion, that we might even have trouble staying together as a unified country as the Baby Boomers rapidly die off.
And then there is our “greatest ally” Israel, who would rather use the last fumes of American collective energy for the sake of their interests. Rather than consolidate as a regional hegemon in North America, the United States is far more likely to waste its last hurrah in carving out a greater Israel in the Middle East.
In any case, just like the Ottoman Empire before World War I, the United States is quickly becoming the old, “sick man” of the Americas. Time is not on America’s side!
