Among the hundred countries balloting in 2024, only one is of global importance: the United States, the world’s hegemon. Whether it can keep that status is a vital question for Americans, and although we have no votes, for Europeans too.

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris never ask and answer it. The US emerged as hegemon from the Breton Woods conference of 1944, where it created the present rules-based world order that all are expected to obey, rules it often ignores because it can. Every hegemon is resented by the rest, but its power is the reality they have to accept with reluctance (tune into Russian and Chinese complaints) or do a UK and invent the “special relationship” best described by John F Kenedy as America’s British lieutenant.

Read more

The US President, as head of the hegemon, makes economic, diplomatic, and military policy with international consequences from which none of us escapes, hence the world-wide attention the Harris v Trump contest gets. Although not as powerful now as in the latter half of the 20th century, the USA it is still the superpower: the largest economy, central to the biggest alliance, Nato; it can render the United Nations impotent by its veto; it effectively controls the World Bank and IMF; the USA disliking some WTO decisions deliberately paralysed its Appellate Body. US national interests places its sea-power in our two great oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific; its military sits on 750 bases in 80 countries, and has a military presence in every part of the globe. Japan and South Korea, in the key Asian region, host 120 and 73 bases respectively.

For how long the USA can maintain its outreach and projection of force depends on its ability to fund the costs of its domestic, foreign and military policy. This where that question arises because its public finances are in a calamitous state.

You wouldn’t think so from reading the 91 pages of the Democratic platform, or the Republican’s 21 pages. The crucial links between economy, government policies and public finances - essential components that determine America’s hold on power - gets no serious mention.

The candidates are equally unserious. The day Trump and Harris debated, the Congressional Budget Office reported a one-month government deficit of $381bn, and annual deficit of $2 trillion. Alar- bell-ringing numbers bound to be on their debate agenda? No, never mentioned. For Harris the numbers that mattered were how many people left early from Trump rallies. His concern was the number of immigrants coming to eat Americans’ family pets. The “empty v the awful” as one commentator put it.

So far the election is froth. Greg Ip, economist said: “It is too soon to predict the winner of November’s election, but not the loser: economics. The candidates haven’t just demoted economic principles; they’ve jettisoned them altogether. In each election there’s less detail and less concern about paying for stuff.” Another, Irwin Stelzer, gives them an F in economics, joined in “economic illiteracy.”

Harris is promising $6,000 tax credit for every new-born child, and a $25,000 tax credit for first home buyers, costing $1 trillion over the next ten years. As well as not taxing tips Trump would make all social security payments non-taxable, at a $1.6 trillion cost to the Treasury. Looking at these throw-aways, and others coming by the day, they imply huge budget surpluses from wealth generated by an economy of tremendous strength. That is not the case.

To remain the hegemon, able to bend others to its will, lead its allies, requires the US economy to create the enormous wealth needed to pay for its domestic needs and that worldwide projection of power. Some examples of those costs: Medicare $840bn, Medicaid $620bn, Social Security $1.3trillion, Military $820bn (13.3 per cent of the budget; one aircraft carrier costs $15bn, one F-35 jet fighter $109 million).

The USA economy does not produce that required level of wealth, or anything near it. In 2023, $4.47 trillion came in from taxes, while $6.14 trillion was spent. Income from tax per person was $13,341 while spend per person was $18,404. An enormous deficit has been America’s fiscal story since 2001.

The US spends $820bn a year on its militaryThe US spends $820bn a year on its military (Image: Getty)

Those figures carry consequences. Between its foundation year and 2016, 44 US presidents had accumulated $19 trillion national debt. It will be $36 trillion next year. The cost of serving that debt is $1.2 trillion a year, without as one economist noted “spending a dime” towards paying off the principle.

America does not earn its keep. It relies on others, including China, to lend it money by buying its bonds. This is only possible because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. But the dollar is fiat money, with no intrinsic value, having left the gold standard in 1972. For fiat money to be accepted as holding value, depends solely on people believing it has value. The day that belief goes the currency is worthless.

So far so good for the US dollar ... but for how long? This hegemon now has inbuilt vulnerability, having transformed from the world’s greatest creditor to its greatest debtor with, as this presidential election demonstrates, its elite and citizens seemingly unaware of the danger to its power status from living on a giant international credit card.

Europe has long sheltered under the Nato umbrella, the biggest funder and military contributor being the USA. Like it or not, this hegemon is central to our security. But those debt figures carry a precautionary message. A day of reckoning will come for the USA when the gross imbalance between its tax take, spending and borrowing is no longer sustainable, and that will also be a day of reckoning for Europe when the guardian can no longer deliver.

We in Europe should start planning for that day now. But It will not be easy to build a European alliance when there is no obvious State which could be the undisputed single guiding leader America is in NATO.

Jim Sillars is a former deputy leader of the SNP and a veteran campaigner for Scottish independence. He served as a Labour Party MP for South Ayrshire from 1970 to 1976 and founded and led the pro-Scottish Home Rule Scottish Labour Party in 1976.