Why Discordia Americana Is a Poor Replacement for Pax Americana
Steve Charnovitz
3 February 2025
Over the past 75 years, the US role in Inter-American and world affairs has been largely beneficent and has contributed to a great deal of global peace and prosperity. With a handful of very painful exceptions, the US has used its military strength in a fruitful way. Through its various treaty alliances and support for multilateral organizations, the US has exercised its leadership in a manner to make US prosperity and global economic development go hand in hand.
Unfortunately, in recent years, US foreign policy has become less generous, less cooperative, less effective, less imaginative, and less predictable. The resources and goodwill toward the US have sometimes been squandered and many opportunities to prevent and solve conflicts have been missed. Important global goals, such as communicable disease control and environmental protection, have been stymied by lack of US leadership and resources.
Modern Pax Americana promoted a relatively open US economy to allow the US and other countries to benefit from trade and trade rules. Trade has always been good for the US, but the failures in US adjustment policies have left many US workers and communities as victims of imports, their voices seemingly not listened to.
President Trump has just imposed trade sanctions in the form of tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China. Such economic warfare is Discordia Americana because it undermines the US reputation as a dependable, fair-minded, and law-abiding partner. (Some commentators might not view China as a partner, but that is narrowminded since successful cooperation with China is important for achieving just about every US global goal.) Because of the disproportionately large size of the US economy, the threat and imposition of tariffs on other countries may succeed in bullying those countries to adopt, in the short run, particular policy changes demanded by the US. But such transactional victories will be ineffectual in the long run because victim countries may adapt through both government policies and market changes to counteract the US leverage.
Discordia Americana has two prominent features of exporting disruption to other countries and doing so through internal US processes that lack the rule of law. Although ambitious Executive Action by a newly elected US President is hardly anti-democratic, when President Trump takes actions that violate the US Constitution and US laws, that becomes anti-democratic and will make the US government seem more like the maligned dictatorships around the world.
