What’s Behind American Decline: Domestic Dysfunction
As the golden light bled from the Los Angeles sky one evening last week, a mariachi band played at a rooftop cocktail party for corporate executives and government officials from a couple dozen countries. They had gathered on the eve of the Summit of the Americas, an every-few-years meeting that would begin in the city the following day. With a flare of trumpets, the band launched into “El Rey,” the Mexican ranchera classic of wounded machismo. “I don’t have a throne or a queen,” the lead mariachi sang, “or anyone who understands me. But I’m still the king.”
Or anyone who understands me. The song could have been the theme to President Joe Biden’s week.
If a group of unusually prescient political scientists had wanted to design a mechanism to measure the decline of U.S. influence and stature, it might have created the Summit of the Americas. First hosted by Bill Clinton in Miami in 1994, that inaugural meeting marked a moment of U.S. ascendancy, as America stood atop a unipolar world after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Latin America was also going through a transformation, no longer a region of military dictatorships: Nearly every country had a democratically elected government, and
