There is a Japanese proverb: Tsuki to suppon (The Moon and the Turtle). Both are round, but one illuminates the world while the other crawls in the mud. The proverb warns against the laziness of false equivalence and of confusing superficial resemblance with substantive likeness. It is a warning that the democratic middle powers — Japan, Canada, Australia and the nations of Western Europe — urgently need to hear.

The United States of America is a deeply flawed country. This is not a controversial claim; it is a historical and empirical observation. The nation was built on the original sin of slavery and its legacy of systemic racism continues to shape outcomes in housing, policing and incarceration. American capitalism, unleashed and often unregulated, has produced staggering inequality. Gun violence claims roughly 45,000 American lives annually. The fentanyl crisis has killed more Americans in five years than died in the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. U.S. foreign policy is littered with catastrophic misjudgments — Vietnam, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the 20-year quagmire in Afghanistan and now the military campaign against Iran, which has further strained alliances and international law. Washington preaches the rules-based order while selectively exempting itself from its constraints. The hypocrisy is real and it is not trivial.

No one articulated the case for American self-destruction more presciently than Wang Huning, the Chinese Communist Party's chief ideologist, who in 1991 published the book “America Against America” after a six-month tour of the United States. Wang observed a society of extraordinary material abundance hollowed out by what he called a “spiritual crisis,” arguing that America's radical individualism and internal contradictions would generate centrifugal forces that “would eventually shake the very foundation of the nation.”

Wang saw a country at war with itself — its freedoms producing fragmentation, its pluralism breeding paralysis, its materialism corroding community. Three decades later, with U.S. politics and society highly polarized in ways Wang predicted, his thesis has become required reading in Beijing and a source of quiet confidence that the American century has truly come to an........

© The Japan Times