As the war against Iran being waged by the United States and Israel approaches its third week, there are far more important things to consider than most of what one can gather by following each day’s headlines.
Vastly more consequential than the status of shipping in the Strait of Hormuz or the fluctuations of oil prices and global stock markets—and more consequential even than the nominal victory, failure, or defeat of the parties at war—is the question of how events a little more than a year into U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term will alter the power and global standing of the United States.
As the war against Iran being waged by the United States and Israel approaches its third week, there are far more important things to consider than most of what one can gather by following each day’s headlines.
Vastly more consequential than the status of shipping in the Strait of Hormuz or the fluctuations of oil prices and global stock markets—and more consequential even than the nominal victory, failure, or defeat of the parties at war—is the question of how events a little more than a year into U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term will alter the power and global standing of the United States.
This is a question that will affect everyone, everywhere, regardless of nation-level sympathies and alliances or how one feels about the United States. Such is the extent of Washington’s centrality to the world order in recent generations.
If the future can never be known, what is clear is that immense and probably irreversible changes to that global order, driven by Trump’s gut-led and impulsive foreign policy—historically unaware, bereft of gravitas, and emptied of the ordinary deliberative process that one associates with serious statecraft—are already well underway.
To understand the bluster and unilateralism of the administration, it must be seen against the backdrop of the recent U.S. past. As a self-assigned custodian of the global order, the United States has a marked predilection for war. There have been few periods since the end of World War II when Washington has not been engaged in some kind of war or military action.
For all of this, earlier this century, the country seemed to be reassessing the ways in which it used its power. A notion took hold in many quarters of the U.S. establishment: In an era when the country’s previously overwhelming economic and military might was waning, prudence and wisdom should incline the United States to be choosier about how it threw its weight around.
Seen this way, Barack Obama’s presidency can be understood as an attempted reprise of the “kinder and gentler” approach announced by President George H. W. Bush but aborted by him and his successors. Obama certainly didn’t eschew military force, but he seemed to prefer consultation, diplomacy, and alliance-building to eager interventionism. Soft power went from being a mere academic concept to a foreign-policy ideal, as Obama charmed foreign audiences, repaired alliances, and even sought ways to reassure China that the United States would accommodate its rise.
Much the same can be said about Obama’s vice president and eventual Democratic successor, President Joe Biden. Although the mechanics were poorly managed, Biden oversaw the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, ending one of the United States’ longest and most costly quagmires. Actions taken by the first Trump administration, including talks with the Taliban coupled with a public announcement that Washington would withdraw its support from its client government in Kabul, had made this outcome practically inevitable.
Like Obama, and perhaps even more so, Biden emphasized the importance of alliances and worked hard at shoring up relationships with medium-sized and even smaller powers in Europe and Asia, in service of the notion that holding the line with Russia and competing with a rising China would be best accomplished—at either end of the Eurasian landmass—through astute balancing, as opposed to go-it-alone-ism. Even better, this would allow the United States to husband its resources for other challenges, such as the looming fiscal needs of an aging population.
But something that too few Democrats had accounted for happened on the way to the circus. After years of muscle-bound preeminence, Americans had become addicted to the prerogatives of unmatched and seemingly unconstrained power. Trump’s winning electoral slogan, “America First”—which few people know dates from much earlier in the country’s history, when its strength was far less challenged—stands as a testament to this.
To the extent that it represents anything coherent at all, “America First” has always been based on wistful and naive nostalgia for simpler times. One hears the echo of this dream in the common, atavistic chant —“USA, USA”—including in the halls of Congress during Trump’s most recent State of the Union address. Life would indeed be marvelously simple if, as those who cry the country’s name seem to believe, self-righteousness and national pride were all that mattered.
I have come to believe something altogether different, though, and an excursion into astronomy will help explain why. Standard theories about stellar evolution hold that stars reach their maximum size not in the prime of their lives but as a harbinger of decline and even eventual collapse. When our own sun reaches that stage, its effects will be so formidable that it will burn the inner planets to a crisp and may even engulf Mars.
What follows, though, is far humbler. Stars like this are on the verge of exhaustion: They soon shrink and dim dramatically. I expect something analogous will be the consequence of Trump’s present, ill-considered overreach.
Washington’s relative weight in the global economy seems set to decline no matter what the occupant of the White House does. That is the natural result not just of the rise of China (which may itself be easing), but also of steady catch-up growth and capacity expansion across a host of other nations—from India, now the heavyweight champion in population, to numerous so-called middle powers, and even countries that Western readers seldom take into account. Consider Nigeria, arguably the most important country in Africa. According to , by the end of this century, it will boast one of the world’s 10 largest economies.
This is not to say that presidencies do not matter. Trump’s actions—military, diplomatic, and economic—seem increasingly certain to weaken the United States over time. “America First,” if anything, is antithetical to an alliance-centric view of the world, and Trump’s behavior has left both Europeans and Asians with little choice but to forge new paths for themselves, leaving behind an arrogant and inwardly looking United States in favor of arrangements with others that promise them safer and more predictable futures.
Trump’s new fondness for hard power—and for action without consultation or restraint—is costly in other ways, too. One of the key lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan is, or should have been, that war is ruinous. The latest conflict in Iran has already been costly; with no clear way to end it, coupled with Israel’s seeming commitment to unending offensives in its neighborhood, the Middle East stands to continue draining vast amounts of U.S. resources.
Economic policy, meanwhile, seems equally self-destructive. While much of the world races to adopt renewable sources of energy and electric vehicles—sectors that China dominates, partly through the United States’ default—the Trump administration has taken crushing actions toward these industries while incoherently seeking to restore oil and coal to the center of the country’s economy.
Finally, with its disregard for international law and diplomacy—as seen in Greenland; Venezuela; Iran; and perhaps next, as it says, Cuba—the Trump administration has moved the planet closer to a kind of jungle state, where only might makes right. Trump articulated this with remarkable nakedness when he recently said that the only limitation on his actions was his own morality.
There was a time not so long ago when one of the things restraining China from seeking to seize control of Taiwan by force was precisely this question of morality. Military costs were not the only fear that Beijing faced. It also had to wonder what price it would pay in global standing and legitimacy if it launched a war of choice, invading the island simply because it had decided to. With the aggressive unilateralism of his second term, though, Trump has done much to erase any such Chinese concern.
It is too early to say what will come after Trump, for the United States and the world. But it is not too early to imagine rougher times ahead. The U.S. past was far too imperfect to justify nostalgia, yet there is something to be said for its quest for order. The United States has abandoned this quest, and devising a new equilibrium—one that can provide peace and prosperity for a greater number of people—promises to be a perilous and monumental task.
