Power, Arrogance, and the End of an Era?
Don Kenobi reflects on how leadership, institutions, and political choices may have accelerated the changing balance of global power.
Power Is Also Theatre
Referring to the visit by America's president to China a few months ago, photographs from the first day showed the two leaders standing as equals.
By the following day, however, one seemed to have grown overnight.
Appearances can be deceptive. But in geopolitics, they are rarely accidental.
Fast forward to August 2026: China imposing sanctions on the United States ahead of its own president's visit was more than an economic measure. It was a continuation of that same theatre.
It is a geopolitical signal: an assertion not merely of sovereignty, but of growing economic and strategic dominance.
Symbolism matters.
Timing matters.
States communicate not only through speeches and treaties, but through carefully calculated actions.
The Assumptions Behind the Forecasts
In the 1990s, many Western economists predicted that China would surpass the United States around 2050.
Implicit in those projections, I suspect, was the assumption that both countries would continue selecting capable leaders and preserving the institutions that had made them successful.
For decades, both largely did.
The United States produced leaders such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
China, despite its very different political system, produced leaders who sustained a long-term national strategy, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping.
In many ways, China kept to its plan.
America simply did not.
Donald Trump may have shortened that original timetable by at least twenty-five years.
Whether one agrees with either country's political model is beside the point. Leadership matters. Institutions matter. Long-term strategy matters.
Recent events suggest that the original timetable may have been optimistic from an American perspective. Political polarization, institutional erosion, and increasingly unpredictable policymaking appear to have accelerated China's relative rise while weakening confidence in American strategic consistency.
When Democracies Choose Poorly
There is an old saying:
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
But what if it happens three times? Four times? A hundred times? What if it happens every blessed day?
At some point, the responsibility shifts.
Applied to nations, the lesson is similar. Democracies cannot repeatedly reward conduct that weakens the very institutions on which their prosperity and influence depend without eventually paying a price.
American predominance after the Second World War was, on balance, a stabilizing force for much of the international system.
It rested not only on economic and military strength, but also on the perception that the United States was fundamentally a nation governed by law, supported open markets, and upheld a rules-based international order, however imperfectly.
The durability of that leadership ultimately depends on those same foundations.
Leadership Versus Dominance
American predominance was arguably a good thing for as long as the United States remained, above all, a nation governed by the rule of law.
But a nation that begins to treat:
- Arrogance as its sole prerogative,
- Arbitrariness as foreign policy,
- Racialised politics as domestic policy,
- Propaganda as a governing tool, and the
- Coveting of other nations and their resources as a birthright...
Allies once firmly within its orbit become increasingly indifferent.
Some become openly dismissive. Others quietly prepare for conflict.
If, on top of that, it wraps itself in the language of Christianity, it invites ridicule.
Leadership earns trust.
Achieving global predominance for more than a century is no small feat. But America's influence rested on far more than its military or economic power. It rested on leadership. On trust. On the strength of its institutions. Above all, it rested on soft power.
It has often been said that The Cosby Show, Coca-Cola and McDonald's did as much to win the Cold War as the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. Whether or not that is literally true, the point is clear: admiration can achieve what intimidation never will.
Leadership earns trust.
Dominance demands submission.
History suggests that nations which forget the difference seldom retain either for long.
History's Unchanging Warning
History offers a recurring warning: When citizens or nations tolerate injustice because it is directed at someone else, they often discover that the precedents they helped normalize eventually reach them as well.
The first victim is rarely the last.
Obi Akaraiwe | Don Kenobi
#CultureNotStructure
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