America Will Never Regain Its Authority
Trump has passed the point of no return.
Armageddon has been averted, at least for another two weeks. But even if Iran’s civilian infrastructure remains intact, the American postwar order will never recover. The damage is not primarily military, but reputational—a collapse of the legitimacy that once supported American leadership. In the same way that once you say certain things to your spouse, there is no turning back, there is also no turning back once your country transforms from a global police officer into the equivalent of the insane person at the bar who threatens to shoot anyone who looks at him strangely.
As Thomas Kuhn reminds us, paradigm shifts are a strange phenomenon. The transition from one to the other is a chaotic affair. Often, it remains unclear for decades or even centuries what the new paradigm will look like. It will likely take years for that reality to fully sink in with the Western allies. But when the German government begins to demand that all men under 45 notify the authorities of even stays of three months abroad — in case they are needed for emergency military service — then something big is about to happen. You can say the same about the fact that the British government had to issue statements declaring that it would not allow the US — its colonial relative and closest ally — to use its bases for anything other than ‘defensive’ bombing, writes B. Duncan Moench .
These are not isolated incidents, but clear indications that America’s allies are beginning to hedge against the country. Regardless of whether President Trump fully backs down or ultimately carries out his threat to unleash ‘hell’ on the Islamic Republic of Iran, confidence in the legitimacy of the US cannot be restored when the leader of the so-called ‘free world’ starts another war of choice and then openly threatens that ‘a civilization will die tonight’. All this happened less than 24 hours after the country’s democratically elected head of state posted a swear word-filled social media message ridiculing the Islamic faith and childishly toying with the idea of a holy war between Christianity and Islam. What could possibly go wrong?
It is true that the sensitivity movement is full of word-obsessed whiners, but words, especially those of world leaders, still matter. Since 1945, no Western head of state has been so reckless in his public rhetoric about war — nor so impulsive in his threats of mass mortality among civilian populations. Regardless of the ultimate outcome of Trump’s bizarre behavior, the war of choice between America and Israel has become a necessity for peace for others, not only for the US Gulf allies, but for the entire global economy.
Others now have no choice but to repair what Washington has broken. After all, the world remains entirely dependent on a constant flow of not only fossil fuels, but also on the pretext that its North American hegemon deserves to lead for one simple reason: it has, more than any other empire before it, pursued the interests of ‘peace’, ‘democracy’, and ‘self-rule’. So much for that fable.
A major irony of Trump and his MAGA movement is that they venerate institutions and US-centric economic dynamics that they do not understand at all — and therefore destroy at will. MAGA worships American supremacy, but operates with only a comic-book-like understanding of its origins and function. They know the American myths, but from the IMF to the World Bank to the dollar-backed power of Wall Street, they seem totally indifferent to how their country projects power in the real world.
Moreover, they do not seem to understand that American hard power was always accompanied by soft power. It is certainly true that the US has always pursued its own interests above all else. But it also produced initiatives such as the Marshall Plan, which greatly aided the recovery of Western allies in their time of need. Franklin Roosevelt famously enough banned bankers from participating in the Bretton Woods negotiations, thereby creating the financial system that not only guaranteed American financial hegemony—but also secured prosperity for the middle class, not only in America but in a large part of the Western world.
However, if you are a billionaire and all your friends are billionaires who view the world as toys, full of pawns who owe you something simply because you have honored the world with your unique contribution, then everything that preceded it seems like nothing more than a temporary solution that a dozen Stanford graduates could fix in a few days. That system, however, was built not only on brute force, but on the classical liberal values of the balance of power, restraint, and civic legitimacy. These are precisely the elements that Trump and his henchmen are now effortlessly casting aside.
Having grown bloated because the US provided their military security for approximately eight decades, Europe and the EU are completely unprepared to take over America’s role of Western leadership.
For this group, society, let alone the carefully constructed global economic order, are things you can tinker with in your spare time, between sending rockets to Mars or playing 18 holes at Mar-a-Lago. That viewpoint is, needless to say, anything but conservative. As Joseph De Maistre stated, a nation is something “that is no more its own creation than a language.” This collectivist view of nationalism could hardly be further removed from that of Trump.
There is no turning back from this; there will be no repeat of Obama. We are living through the greatest military dilemma and turning point on a civilizational level since at least the Cuban Missile Crisis. A zero point that, whatever happens, will not end well for the United States or the liberal economic order as a whole. Europe and the EU are still in the process of realizing that their entire social democratic structure was largely funded by the US providing free military protection. What comes next will be chaotic, and no one in the West is ready to manage it.
In tangible terms, it turns out that pretending to give is indeed a form of giving. One can acknowledge that ‘international law’ is largely fiction. But it is—just like the country’s flawlessly conceived constitution—a mythological fiction that makes the liberal order possible. Trump, however, does not understand this kind of nuance and views all limitations on American supremacy as unnecessary liberal courtesies.
That brings me to another great irony. Trump was elected to stop China — and yet he has created precisely the perfect situation for Beijing to prove the superiority of its governance model. Unlike his so-called liberal, so-called free-market opponents, who would collapse within weeks without a constant supply of cheap oil, China’s mercantilist synthesis has proven incredibly robust.
China appears to be the only major global power equipped to withstand an economic storm such as the one caused by Iran occupying the Strait of Hormuz. This war also shows that the CCP, not the US, leads the way in military strength, which rightly predicted that this would not be determined by $15 million interceptor missiles and $14 billion aircraft carriers, but by $20,000 drones, in which China happens to specialize.
As we transition into the Chinese century, Beijing will also not have to live with the shame of a deranged government leader bombing civilian power plants, water facilities, bridges, and railway lines. As Michael Lind recently argued, in the medium and long term, this war plays directly into China’s hands. Trump, however, did it—he killed neoliberal globalism, exactly as his base wanted. The collateral damage is only just beginning to manifest.