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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
When the top two teams in the Premier League go at each other this weekend, America can’t lose. Arsenal and Liverpool, like AC Milan, Roma, Marseille, Lyon, Chelsea and (for now) Manchester United, are both US-owned. In 1994, when the nation last hosted the World Cup, it didn’t even have a domestic league. When it next does so in 2026, it should have a major proprietorial role in at least three European ones. The planet’s favourite game is being steered to a considerable extent from American boardrooms.
Perhaps your test of cultural influence is higher-minded than that. Well, consider that US universities continue to dominate world rankings. Or that America accounts for 45 per cent of art sales by value, according to UBS, which is more than Britain and China, the next two markets, combined. To attend the Venice Biennale now is to enter a new Jazz Age in which experts from all over the world vie to advise American patrons on how to spend the spoils of their economic boom.
Even this doesn’t quite capture America’s ongoing grip on the global imagination, which shows up most in the culture wars. Although some of the root philosophical ideas are French, the movement known as “woke” was a gift from the US to other advanced democracies. (With, dismayingly, no receipt included.)
This is a personal impression, and therefore unquantifiable, but I suggest that America has more cultural reach now than it did in its supposed unipolar moment of the 1990s. The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis three years ago set off protests in London, Paris and beyond. The beating of Rodney King in 1991 had no such international echo. Back then, Britain’s bien pensants didn’t follow US political media as though it were domestic fare, or tell each other to stop “gaslighting” and “do better”, much less couch all this second-hand argot in Upspeak. To adapt what Jefferson said about France, everyone, or at least everyone educated and liberal, seems to have two countries now: their own and America.
All the while, the geopolitical clout of the US wanes. Recent months have been a tutorial in Washington’s limited purchase on the Middle East. The once-uncontested superpower has also failed to persuade much of the world to participate in sanctions against Russia. It has little to show for 20 years in Afghanistan. The Bretton Woods institutions are fighting for relevance. The proliferation of armed conflicts, set out in a recent report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, suggests that Pax Americana is giving way, if not to Pax Sinica then to no kind of Pax at all. As during the cold war, the US struggles to corral the “global south”, which was called the “third world” at the time, and will be called something else soon, when liberal protocol moves on in all its clockwork fickleness.
What is happening to the US in the 21st century is too complex to be captured in that blunt word “decline”. As the nation’s share of world output has dropped, its influence on world culture — on the tastes, idioms and habits of foreigners — is as vast as ever. Whether your concerns are high brow (where should I do a postgraduate degree?), middling (what show will I stream tonight?) or popular (who owns Declan Rice?), America is inescapable. We are now a couple of decades into its relative loss of ground to China in traditional power terms. The knock-on effect for US prestige in other domains should be registering now. It is staggeringly negligible.
Is this good for Americans? You can see how it might be. One thing that helped postwar Britain absorb the loss of empire was the knowledge that its language was ascendant in the world, its pop music all-conquering and its national broadcaster a universal reference point. (Another was the pig-ignorant but soothing belief that the usurper, America, was composed of ethnic “cousins”.) No other decolonising European state was cushioned like this.
At the same time, all that cultural lustre blinded the British to the extent of their demotion from the geopolitical high table. There were some dire miscalculations as a result, such as abstention from the embryonic European project. Comparisons between British and American decline are mostly useless. For one thing, with 330mn people, the US can’t fall as low. But I wonder if it will have the same trouble as Britain in recognising its diminished geopolitical status, and adapting its statecraft to compensate. To retain immense cultural reach is a wonderful cushion for a post-peak superpower. The trick is to not fall asleep on it.