LAST week, I found myself driving through New Mexico and the Texas panhandle — the great American south-west. Well-ploughed fields stretched flat into the horizon, dotted only by bales of hay or impressive tractors.

Some fields had been converted into wind farms, and the multiplicity of slowly turning windmills served as testament to America’s endless appetite for energy. Oil rigs rhythmically dipped below ground, scouring the earth for black gold. Occasionally, sky-high grain silos came into sight as if to reiterate the productivity of the land. This was the US I had read about in novels and travelogues over the years — vast, mechanised, daunting.

But all is rarely what it seems.

Every 30 miles or so, I drove through a small town. In these scattered settlements, poverty was evident: buildings abandoned and the unemployment rate and obesity epidemic both in plain view as too many middle-aged men lingered at barbeque stalls during the workday. They claimed it was no longer viable to be a small-town inhabitant; the only work to be had was with major oil corporations in the big cities. Someone complained about poor governance, someone else decried the state of the education system.

This dwindling, almost defeated version of America is what US President Barack Obama was referring to in his State of the Union address in January this year when he described his country as replete with “shuttered windows” and “vacant storefronts”. It’s an America that I would not have recognised in 2002 when I took my first road trip through the country’s deep south. Almost a decade ago, I traversed a confident, almost arrogant country, where people had no interest in learning about — or no reason to care about — the world beyond their doorstep.

Now, under altered circumstances, I encountered a country where people asked more questions and demonstrated a greater capacity for introspection. As Larry Elliott put it in The Guardian, the US is “an empire at the zenith of its power but with cracks beginning to show”.

The US Treasury Department has estimated that the federal deficit in the 2011 financial year will total a record $1.65tr. Debt, meanwhile, costs the government $14tr, or 62 per cent of the GDP. Experts warn that the soaring deficit could curb economic growth. It doesn’t help that the US is also contending with a tepid housing market, sustained high unemployment, and wars it can hardly afford — the next budget calls for $118bn for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Not surprisingly, the cash-strapped federal government is unable to maintain the country’s infrastructure. One-third of America’s major roads are in poor condition, while one in four US bridges are structurally deficient. When I asked someone why there were so many more wind farms in Texas than in New Mexico, he explained that the latter state doesn’t have the grid capacity to absorb input from the windmills.

The matter of clean energy and climate change was brought up several times, probably since my drive unfolded under the shadow of a raging forest fire in New Mexico. Since May, tornadoes have flattened parts of Missouri and Alabama, the flooding of the Mississippi River has left many Americans homeless, and a drought has ravaged Texas. Despite these obvious indicators of climate change, Obama has not pushed through green legislation; instead, he is promoting coal mining, mountain-top removal and offshore drilling in the name of job creation.

The obsession with jobs is not merely a myopic, vote-getting measure; rather, it reflects an intrinsic, nationwide fear of rising global competition. The administration is aware that it cannot compete with countries such as China and India since education standards across the US are appalling, with almost one quarter of students failing to finish high school. Consequently, the US is bending over backwards to ally with these future competitors.

Nothing reveals the extent of US fragility more than Washington’s tentative approach towards New Delhi. The US has showered India with gifts — the civilian nuclear deal, pressure on Pakistan to rein in Lashkar-i-Taiba, support for a Security Council bid — and has received nothing in return (Delhi recently snubbed Washington by failing to shortlist American F16s or F/A18s during the biggest defence purchase in its history).

Moreover, the US remains unwilling to say anything that might ruffle Indian feathers, for example on the issue of Kashmir. This bilateral dynamic indicates that the days of the American superpower are waning.

In Pakistan, however, there is little recognition of this slow decline. We continue to perceive an instance of unilateralism as greater proof of power than the sum of all the parts. And we continue to ascribe to the US an omnipotence that it perhaps never enjoyed, even in its heyday. If the US fails to do something in the Pakistani interest, it is rarely attributed to a bureaucratic, organisational or budgetary problem. Rather, we coin outlandish theories that predict the US’s ultimate control over our nuclear weapons, the international community and even the weather.

As Pakistan and the US continue to struggle through the bilateral relationship and move towards greater convergence regarding the endgame in Afghanistan, it is important that the two sides approach each other honestly, with a good understanding of the other’s domestic concerns and priorities.

Washington is currently peppered with think-tanks striving to better understand Pakistan. We, in turn, have been consumed by an officially pedalled phantasmagoria of the US that threatens to undermine any chance of a productive alliance. The least we can do before we demonise the US is see it for what it is. ¦ The writer is the Pakistan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington, DC. huma.yusuf@gmail.com