America will never recover its authority Trump has passed the point of no return

Armageddon has been diverted, at least for another fortnight. Yet 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 underwrote American leadership. In the same way that, once you say certain things to your spouse, there’s no going back, once your country goes from world policeman to the equivalent of the crazy person at the bar threatening to shoot anyone who looks at him funny, there’s really no going back.

As Thomas Kuhn reminds us, paradigm shifts are a funny thing. The transition from one to the next is a topsy-turvy affair. Often, it’s unclear for decades or even centuries what the new paradigm will look like. It’ll likely take years for that reality to fully set in for Western allies. But when the German government starts requiring all men under 45 to notify authorities for even three-month stays abroad — in case they’re needed for emergency military service — something big is afoot. You could say the same about how the British government had to release statements saying it wouldn’t let the US — its colonial kin and closest ally — use its bases for anything other than “defensive” bombings.

These are not isolated incidents, but clear indicators that America’s allies are beginning to hedge against it. Regardless of whether President Trump fully backs down from the ledge, or ultimately makes good on his threats to unleash “hell” upon the Islamic Republic of Iran, confidence in US legitimacy cannot recover when the leader of the supposed “free world” enters into yet another war of choice, then openly threatens that “a civilization will die tonight.” All of which occurred less than 24 hours after the country’s democratically elected chief executive released an expletive-filled social media post mocking the Islamic faith and childishly toying with the idea of a holy war between Christianity and Islam. What could go wrong? 

It’s true that the sensitivity movement is full of word-mongering ninnies, but words, especially from world leaders, still matter. Not since 1945 has a Western head of state been so reckless in his public rhetoric regarding matters of war — nor so rash in his threats of mass death of civilian populations. Regardless of the ultimate outcome of Trump’s outlandish behavior, America and Israel’s war of choice has become a peace of necessity for others, not only for the US’s Gulf allies but the entire global economy. 

Others now have no choice but to fix what Washington has broken. After all, the world remains totally dependent on a steady stream of not just fossil fuels, but also the pretense that its North American hegemon deserves to lead for one simple reason: it, more than any other global empire before, has pursued the interests of “peace,” “democracy,” and “self-government.” So much for that fable.

One great irony of Trump and his MAGA movement is that they worship institutions and US-centric economic dynamics they don’t remotely understand — and therefore smash at will. MAGA worships American supremacy but operates with only a comic-book understanding of its origin 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 utterly indifferent to how their country projects strength in the real world. 

More than that, they don’t seem to grasp that American hard power has always been shadowed by soft. It’s certainly true that the US has always pursued its self-interest above all else. But it also put forward things like the Marshall Plan, greatly aiding the recovery of Western allies in their time of need. For his part, Franklin Roosevelt famously barred bankers from participating in the Bretton Woods negotiations, establishing the financial system that not only guaranteed American financial hegemony — but also secured middle-class prosperity not just in America but across much of the Western world. Fast forward and the NGOs that Trump, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel all loathe actually play a key role in securing American interests abroad. Say what you like about the Clintons, Obamas, and Blairs of the world. At least they understood how the global liberal order worked and were responsible enough stewards not to risk its annihilation merely to protect their egos. 

If, however, you’re a billionaire and all your friends are billionaires who see the world as a plaything, full of pawns who owe you merely for gracing the world with your one-of-a-kind contribution, then what’s come before doesn’t seem like anything more than a workaround, and which a dozen Stanford grads can fix in a few days. That system, though, was not built on raw force alone, but on the classical liberal values of the balance of power, restraint, and civic legitimacy. These are the very elements Trump and his cronies now set aside with ease. 

For this crowd, though, society, let alone the carefully constructed global economic order, are things you can tweak in your spare time, between sending rockets to Mars or playing 18 holes at Mar-a-Lago. That position, it hardly needs saying, is anything but conservative. As Joseph De Maistre argued, a nation is something “no more of its own creation than a language.” This collectivist vision of nationalism couldn’t be further from Trump’s. The President’s view is that of a man who believes “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Or else there’s Pete Hegseth, Trump’s “Secretary of War”, who openly boasts that the US is ready to “negotiate with bombs” until Iran makes the deal the White House wants. 

There’s no coming back from this; there will be no Obama redux. We’re living through the greatest military predicament and civilizational-level turning point since at least the Cuban Missile Crisis. A zero hour that, no matter what, will not end well for either the United States or the liberal economic order as a whole. I don’t just mean reputationally. Grown fat off the US providing their military security for some eight decades, Europe and the EU are not remotely ready to take up the mantle of Western leadership in America’s stead. They’re still coming to grips with the reality that their entire social democratic structure has been funded in large part by the US providing free military protection. What comes next will be messy, and no one in the West is ready to manage it.

In tangible terms, it turns out that pretending to care is indeed a form of caring. One can recognize that “international law” is indeed mostly fiction. But it — like the country’s immaculately conceived constitution — is a mythological fiction that allows the liberal order to exist. Trump, though, does not understand this kind of nuance, seeing all constraints on American supremacy as unnecessary liberal niceties. In truth, though, these aren’t merely the pretenses of liberalism, or even progressive neoliberalism, but rather the entire pretense of the American liberal-democratic order — including the “conservative” ancien régime of William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt that Trump apes for cheap plaudits from his MAGA devotees.

That brings me to another great irony. Trump was elected to stop China — and yet he has delivered the perfect situation for Beijing to prove the superiority of its governance model. As opposed to its so-called liberal, so-called free market opponents, poised to crumble in a matter of weeks without a constant supply of cheap oil, China’s mercantilist synthesis has proved incredibly robust. Despite pundits proclaiming for 20 years that China will soon turn the corner and their model will collapse, the complete opposite has proven true. 

China appears to be the only major world power equipped to handle an economic storm like the one caused by Iran capturing the Strait of Hormuz. This war also illustrates that the CCP, not the US, is at the forefront of military strength, which it correctly anticipated would be defined not by $15-million interceptor missiles and $14-billion aircraft carriers, but by $20,000 drones, which China just so happens to specialize in.

As we transition to the Chinese century, Beijing also will not have to live with the shame of having a crazed chief executive bomb civilian electrical plants, water facilities, bridges, and train tracks. As Michael Lind recently argued in these pages, both long and medium term, this war only plays directly into China’s hands. Trump, though, has done it — he’s killed the neoliberal globalism just as his base wanted. The collateral damage is only beginning to reveal itself. 

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