America, God's Geopolitical Servant?

Watching the course of history over these last few years, and reading about the underlying forces, has left me with the impression that history is now under America's control. Not ultimately, of course, but temporally. This might be more obvious to those of us who live outside America in regions traditionally hostile to American hegemony. I currently live in China, and this country is deeply obsessed with America. Seven years ago, America was viewed as the center of civilization, the world's capital city. Today, the adoration is gone, but what's replaced it is an obsession with alleged American conspiracies, chaotic paranoia, and non-stop hostility and vilification. Whether positively or negatively, the world is obsessed with America because it remains the center of the world.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is part of an attempt to change the world order and establish an alternative bloc to rival American globalism. The war appears to have completely failed. The damage to Russia is mounting every week. The military damage, demographic damage, infrastructural damage, economic damage, and cultural damage are already deep and spreading fast. Likewise, the Chinese attempt to replace America as the global center also appears to have failed. China's weird, almost adolescent, nationalism has isolated it from all of the world's developed economies. Zero-Covid's never ending abuses have traumatized an entire generation of Chinese youth, and the sputtering economy, so strong in very recent memory, has declined into stagnation. The Chinese population is set to collapse by 50% over the next forty years as the country has suffered an unprecedented fertility decline.

I thought about these facts while reading the book of Jeremiah this week. In chapter 27, Jeremiah told the people of Judah to accept Babylonian leadership because king Nebuchadnezzar was God's chosen servant, and any nation who opposed his rule would be crushed by God:

"It is I who by my great power and my outstretched arm have made the earth, with the men and animals that are on the earth, and I give it to whomever it seems right to me. Now I have given all these lands into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, my servant, and I have given him also the beasts of the field to serve him. All the nations shall serve him and his son and his grandson, until the time of his own land comes. Then many nations and great kings shall make him their slave. But if any nation or kingdom will not serve this Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and put its neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon, I will punish that nation with the sword, with famine, and with pestilence, declares the Lord, until I have consumed it by his hand. So do not listen to your prophets, your diviners, your dreamers, your fortune-tellers, or your sorcerers, who are saying to you, 'You shall not serve the king of Babylon.' For it is a lie that they are prophesying to you, with the result that you will be removed far from your land, and I will drive you out, and you will perish. But any nation that will bring its neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon and serve him, I will leave on its own land, to work it and dwell there, declares the Lord."

One clear modern historical trend is that nations who've voluntarily subjected themselves to American leadership, even defeated nations like Japan, have prospered. Taiwan, for example, a long time American protectorate, is incredibly wealthy in comparison to neighboring China. South Korea, another American protectorate, is a leading exporter of high tech goods while its neighbor to the north suffers famine and subsistence level desperation. China prospered incredibly while it was more aligned with America in the decades after 1979, but the country began declining as its hostility to the American led order grew.

I'm not arguing for the special holiness of America, few would argue Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon was more holy than the people of Judah, but if we look at geopolitics, the holiness gap does not appear to have stopped God from choosing Babylon over Judah. The time may come when America needs to submit to another, as counterintuitive and impossible as it now seems to most freedom loving Americans. Freedom is a product of virtue, and if America loses virtue then slavery becomes a very real possibility. However, the contemporary historical situation seems to suggest that America is now God's geopolitical servant.