America abdicates as global superpower — and it’s about time

On a sweltering summer night in Cleveland 10 years ago, I witnessed Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican convention — the “I alone can fix it” speech — and realized for the first time that he was likely to be elected president. Like many people in this business, I have too much ego invested in not being surprised by anything that happens, no matter how dire or ridiculous. But that was without a doubt one of the most traumatic experiences of my career: As I wrote at the time, it hit 7.5 on the Nuremberg scale.

I also began to understand Trump’s rise as something more than an aberration or a flukish detour from the normal back and forth of regular-order democracy. (It has taken the Democratic Party until approximately right now to figure that out, if it has.) It was more like a dark epiphany, a moment of revelation in which unsavory but unavoidable truths about America were laid bare before America itself and the wider world. It might be the most American thing ever that we needed to experience the epiphany twice — with equal doses of tragedy and farce on both occasions — before we began to grasp its message.

If I and many others assumed that the primary lesson of the Trump years concerned the decadent and corrupt condition of American democracy — which straight-up barely deserves that term these days — a decade onward it seems more far-reaching. Trump vowed to restore American “greatness,” without ever defining that in a way that didn’t sound both sinister and ludicrous. He has now destroyed the illusion that America was either great or good, and has entirely abandoned the nation’s role as self-appointed leader of the so-called free world. The way that happened has been enormously damaging — but, honestly, it was about time.

To a significant degree, this change is about Americans waking up to facts that were painfully obvious to nearly everyone else. Only Americans view American politics in isolation, as if we were special children on a magic island and the rest of the world still had dial-up internet and village dances. Trump became a potent global symbol of the systemic crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of an authoritarian alternative, but those things were emerging all over the place. He didn’t invent them and surely didn’t understand them.

Trump returned to the White House last year determined to wreak revenge on a long list of real or imagined enemies and to leave his mark on the world. He has undeniably done both, and has caused almost unimaginable damage in many directions. It seemed implausible (and still does) that such a small-minded, ignorant and incurious person could become a world-historical figure, but at least in that respect we have misjudged him. He has changed the world, but done so in exactly the opposite direction from his expressed intentions.

This administration’s incoherent and chaotic blend of expansionist, isolationist and protectionist policies — a wannabe late-medieval fortress-state that expels “outsiders,” but also a military superpower that imposes its will anywhere and everywhere — has culminated, at least for now, in humiliation and surrender on multiple fronts. Allowing Benjamin Netanyahu to lure or goad the U.S. into an unprovoked war with Iran may end up among the most disastrous foreign-policy mistakes in American history, which is really saying something.

That’s true not just because the war itself has ended, however conditionally, in a full-scale U.S. retreat and a “memorandum of understanding” that accomplishes none of the stated Israeli or American objectives and offers Iran an enormous material and propaganda victory. (Yes, it’s plausible that the ceasefire deal will be used to torpedo JD Vance’s presidential hopes, but that’s more like the result of a game of 52 pick-up than ingenious 4-D chess strategy.)

That tentative conclusion follows a conflict that had already become a massive embarrassment for the U.S., in ways most Americans did their best to ignore. On the global stage, the war was mostly conducted by Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon in the bro-tastic style of a mixed martial-arts podcaster, promising grandiose acts of violence and destruction and histrionically imploring Jesus Christ for his guidance and support. I was reminded far too often of Jean Baudrillard’s 1991 essay collection “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” which captured the way war is now consumed as a mediated theatrical spectacle, far away from the physical suffering and destruction. Of course this war “took place” for the people of Iran, Lebanon and various other places; for Americans, it was more like a third-rate alternate-history streaming series that was rapidly canceled.

As left-leaning Israeli journalist Joshua Leifer writes in a Foreign Policy essay, Netanyahu must have believed he had fulfilled his longstanding dream of joint Israeli-American military action to topple the Iranian regime and install Israel as the Middle East’s unchallenged hegemonic power: “U.S. and Israeli fighter jets flying tandem over Tehran, Israeli officers ensconced in U.S. Central Command’s Florida headquarters.” But to put it mildly, the timing was off, and the blowback from that hubris may have ripple effects decades into the future.

The Tehran regime survived that onslaught, installed new hard-line leaders and now looks stronger than before. (Despite the long list of American “moderates” who once again fell, Charlie Brown style, for the promise of painless “regime change.”) To the surprise of literally no one, Trump bailed out when the war began to look like an unwinnable slog and even his own slavish followers grew restless. The U.S.-Israel relationship, already poisoned by the Gaza war and dramatic shifts in American public opinion, has now “entered a period of terminal decline,” Leifer writes.

Of course that didn’t happen overnight. Even 15 years ago, there was “near-unanimous support for Israel” across both American political parties, as Leifer puts it. Pro-Palestinian voices were largely exiled to the far-left margins, and any criticism of the growing political power of the pro-Israel lobby was dismissed as crackpot antisemitism. But with Trump’s emergence, the “Israel-advocacy complex” ditched any pretense of bipartisanship, and in Trump’s first term he embraced a “hawkish pro-Israel line” far to the right of any previous president. Donald Trump, Leifer concludes, has “done more to push rank-and-file Democrats away from Israel than any pro-Palestinian activist.”

So the war with Iran was a failure in its own terms and may have caused a permanent (and arguably overdue) rupture in the U.S. relationship with Israel, which is already treated as a pariah state by much of the world. But wait, there’s more: At least potentially, the most consequential U.S. surrender here was both moral and economic. Trump’s war drove crude oil prices into the stratosphere at precisely the moment when capital markets began to realize that renewable energy wasn’t simply a better long-term alternative to fossil fuels but also more affordable and more efficient.

It’s hard to outdo the first sentence of China analyst Ryan Hass’ essay for Brookings: “The United States and Israel fought Iran, and China won.” In his analysis, the U.S. once again squandered its resources and its global credibility in a counterproductive and pointless struggle for military hegemony, while the Chinese remained focused on this century’s “defining geopolitical contest: the battle for technological leadership.”

Whether or not the Iran war was a net positive in terms of the global energy transition — the one that should have happened 10 or 15 years ago — is a complicated question. In the short term, it will probably drive some countries back to burning coal and accelerate oil drilling in the Western Hemisphere. But as Patricia Cohen of the New York Times reports, “over the longer term, this energy shock,” hard on the heels of the one caused by Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion in 2022, “is likely to accelerate a transition to renewables like solar and wind as well as nuclear power.”

Electric batteries have become far more efficient over the last several years, and electric cars are more affordable than ever. In April, wind and solar power produced more electricity globally than natural gas, for the first time. From the Chinese point of view, the timing is exquisite. Under Trump, the U.S. has gone all-in on fossil fuels and actively worked to crush renewable technologies, whether out of pure corruption and cronyism, macho ideology or misguided mid-century nostalgia. (Spoiler alert: It’s all three.)

China already dominates the global market, as Cohen writes, in “wind turbines, high-voltage cables, transformers, solar panels, batteries, software to manage energy flows and more.” Furthermore, Chinese industrial strategy has dictated producing that stuff well beyond the level of domestic demand, in order to flood overseas markets at low prices and take advantage of a moment exactly like this one. If you’ve been to Europe recently, you’ve seen the increasingly popular Chinese-made BYD hatchbacks and SUVs, often with starting prices below $30,000. (While not technically banned in the U.S., these cars are subject to a 100% tariff.)

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You could call that ruthless economic warfare, or you could call it capitalist competition, an arena where the Chinese have excelled. But the Trumpian decision to retreat to the 1970s on energy policy is more than a strategic miscalculation; it’s a symptom of America’s near-psychotic disassociation from the rest of the world across a whole range of policies and attitudes. As Hass delicately puts it, “The open divergences between Washington and its partners over the war’s legitimacy, execution, and fallout have exposed fissures that risk metastasizing to other issue areas over time.”

No doubt European political elites still feel some residual loyalty to the transatlantic alliance; in a more perfect world, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz and Keir Starmer would prefer to partner with American democracy than with an authoritarian Chinese regime whose global agenda remains murky. But there’s no perfect world, and not much American democracy. Those guys face critical problems at home, and they’ve had about enough of the punitive tariffs, the lectures about immigration and energy, the support for neofascist parties, the arbitrary overseas interventions and (lest we forget!) the threats to invade Greenland, which keep recurring like a bad dream.

It may be too early to say that we’ve arrived at a clear moment of transition in America’s role in the world. We’ll have a new president in a few years (at least hypothetically), and it’s not like the greatest military and economic power in history will just shrivel up and blow away. But for most people in most of the world, as I’ve written previously, it’s time to move on from eight tormented decades of an increasingly fraught love-hate relationship with America.

When the Chinese tell small nations in Asia, as Hass puts it, that if the U.S. couldn’t handle a “second-rate regional military power like Iran” it is no longer a guarantor of global military stability, there is no obvious counterargument. More important still is what he calls the “narrative contrast”: China presents itself as a straightforward business partner and “reliable steward of the international order,” while America is “a violent and reckless pursuer of its own interests.” Or someone’s interests, anyway. Definitely not yours or mine.

This column will go on a three-week hiatus while I take a badly needed vacation, in hopes of experiencing the world rather than just writing about it. I’ll be back in mid-July. Thanks so much for reading.