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America’s internal crisis – The dangers of denial and the illusion of tariffs

Ziyad Motala
By Ziyad Motala
15 Apr 2025
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The self-confidence of a functioning American republic has been replaced by the paranoia of a wounded empire. Beneath it all, vast segments of the public grow anxious, disillusioned, and fearful.

There comes a moment in the life of a nation when its gravest danger is no longer external. It is not an adversary overseas, nor a competitor in global trade. It is the nation’s own inability to confront reality, its unwillingness to speak plainly, and its reliance on myths that once inspired confidence but now inhibit adaptation.

The recent return to tariffs by the Trump administration is a symptom of that internal crisis. Framed as policy, these tariffs are little more than political gestures, flailing for effect. They harm allies, strain supply chains, and produce no lasting advantage.

What they offer is theatrical relief. A nation facing decline often prefers performance to reform.

Behind the tariffs lies a deeper problem. A large segment of American political culture has become allergic to introspection. It is easier to blame rivals, to accuse others of unfairness, or to wrap national confusion in the language of patriotism.

It is harder to admit that the engine of American prosperity — fuelled by debt, militarisation, and speculative finance — has reached its limits.

One might have hoped that a constitutional order designed to restrain power and channel ambition would offer resilience. But the past two decades have revealed the opposite. The very framework meant to check dangerous impulses has proved dismayingly brittle.

Authoritarianism


Authoritarianism, long a tool of American foreign policy wielded through regime change, covert operations and economic coercion — now asserts itself at home.

Constitutional safeguards, venerated in civics textbooks, have in practice been too easily bypassed by executive overreach, legislative cowardice, and a partisan Supreme Court increasingly comfortable with centralising authority in the presidency.

Institutions intended to temper the passions of the moment have instead become enablers of them. The collective reflex of big business, prominent law firms, and major media platforms is no longer to resist capricious or irrational authority, but to ingratiate themselves — to flatter power, shield it from scrutiny, and ensure their profit margins remain undisturbed.

The result is not dissent, but deference. Not accountability, but applause.

The consequence is a political system unable to course-correct. Campaigns are fuelled by corporate money. Congress is performative rather than deliberative.

Media platforms, once vital organs of democratic accountability, now amplify outrage and profit over truth. And behind it all is a quiet but unmistakable decay of seriousness. Words like “leadership” and “values” are repeated often, yet float unmoored from fact or principle.

The rot is not contained. Consider US President Donald Trump’s categorically false tweet alleging that the South African government was seizing land from white farmers and murdering them in a campaign of genocide.

“They are taking the land of white farmers, and then killing them and their families,” he wrote, warning against US participation in a G20 summit hosted by South Africa.

None of this is true. There is no genocide. There is no state-sponsored campaign of racial violence or land confiscation. But the point was never truth.





The tweet exemplifies the deliberate manufacture of hysteria, the projection of domestic racial grievance onto a foreign context, and the weaponisation of myth to distract from decay. In the current climate, fantasy is not a political liability — it is a tool of governance.

Yet while the Trump administration peddled a fictional genocide in South Africa to feed the base instincts of a fractured electorate, it, along with the Biden administration, turns a blind eye to a credible, evidence-based allegation of genocide in Gaza.

In this inversion of moral clarity, imaginary atrocities are amplified while real ones are met with silence, obfuscation, or denial. The bipartisan consensus in Washington has become so entrenched, so beholden to powerful interests, that even the most credible findings — whether from UN officials, independent observers, the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court — are dismissed as nuisances to be ignored rather than truths to be confronted.

This refusal to reckon with reality is nowhere more evident than in America’s unconditional support for Israel, even as the world watches the systematic destruction of Gaza and the mass killing of civilians.

Billions in military aid continue to flow with little scrutiny. Strategic interests are distorted. Public sentiment is ignored. The human cost — moral, diplomatic, and financial — is rendered invisible, suppressed by lobbying networks and a political class that fears the consequences of candour.

The outcome is not merely a warped foreign policy. It is the further erosion of democratic legitimacy at home.

And yet, it is not the world that will bear the greatest cost. It is the United States itself. Tariffs may rattle global supply chains, but they will raise prices for Americans. Sanctions and diplomatic isolation may target adversaries, but they leave Washington increasingly alone.

Blind alliances and authoritarian sympathies, pursued with fanatical consistency, deplete domestic resources, embolden extremists, and accelerate national decline. The world is adjusting. It is the United States that cannot adapt.

Unipolar moment


These trends do not exist in isolation. Allies in Europe hedge their bets. The BRICS nations reposition. The unipolar moment is gone, but its illusions endure. What remains is a political class convinced that slogans, sanctions, and spectacle can somehow reverse a structural collapse.

But this is not a crisis that can be fixed with gimmicks. This is not about partisan gridlock or momentary mismanagement. It is structural, psychological, and institutional decay. The kind that accrues quietly. The kind that resists reform the longer it is denied.

The optimism that once animated American governance has curdled into grievance. The self-confidence of a functioning republic has been replaced by the paranoia of a wounded empire. Foreign policy is unprincipled and self-serving. Economic policy is erratic. Political discourse is theatrical. Beneath it all, vast segments of the public grow anxious, disillusioned, and fearful.

This is not a country only at war with the world. It is a country at war with itself. The very tools it once wielded abroad — disinformation, coercion, and economic punishment — are now turned inward. The decline is institutional, and unmistakable.

What we are witnessing is not a temporary disruption or a passing storm. It is the implosion of an empire from within.

No tariff, no tweet, no scapegoat can delay the reckoning that awaits a republic that does not know how to restrain its hubris or govern itself with wisdom. DM

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