However, a better assessment would have understood the Ankara summit as Nato returning to its roots. In recent months, the theme of Nato reverting to its original Cold War purpose — European deterrence and defense — has been advanced by the Trump administration. The idea was rolled out in February as “Nato 3.0” and is the brainchild of Undersecretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby, a restrainer who advocates for limiting military interventionism and who has therefore been maligned by the liberal Atlanticist set and reportedly spied on by Israel. As Colby describes it, Nato 3.0 is not an abandonment of Nato but rather “a return to and validation of its foundational purpose”. In other words, “make Nato great again” by ensuring Europeans pour billions into defense industrial production and technological innovation so they can take care of their own conventional (non-nuclear) defense. 

At this year’s summit, I witnessed the transition to Nato 3.0 in real time. The Trump administration surely regards Europe’s acceptance of its shift in policy and philosophy as a major foreign policy “win”. Multiple senior Nato officials spoke of the need to build “a stronger Europe in a stronger Nato”, and repeatedly recited figures testifying to leaps in European defense spending in accordance with Trumpian demands. One senior Nato official spoke of the “simultaneity problem” — the Trump administration’s concern about a scenario in which the US military would be forced to fight multiple major conflicts at once, which he described as the reason “why Europeans are stepping up and taking more responsibility for their own defense”. Whatever their distaste for Trump’s bullying rhetoric, it was clear that Nato officials and allies are now taking the Trump administration’s words very seriously.

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A few weeks ahead of the summit, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth echoed Colby at the Nato defense ministerial meeting in Brussels, tying Nato 3.0 to Washington’s demands that allies raise defense spending. “That’s what defense spending commitments are all about,” he said, “transforming Nato into a real military alliance that’s focused on hard power and real deterrence, a Nato 3.0 modeled on the Nato 1.0 that won the Cold War.” During the same meeting, Hegseth gave trans-Atlantic allies an ultimatum. Going forward, he said, American Nato dues would be contingent on allies meeting their own defense spending targets. “Where other allies do not spend with urgency, our dues contributions will go down,” he warned. He also told allies to expect a review of their progress in six months. If insufficient strides had been made by then, the US would spend less on Nato. This threat contributed to a sense of elevated fear in Ankara. It wasn’t an entirely irrational one either: the Trump administration is dramatically scaling back its involvement in other multilateral institutions. In January, the United States withdrew from 31 UN entities and is currently withholding around $4 billion in mandatory UN dues.

To understand “Nato 3.0”, it’s essential to understand the alliance’s evolution. Nato’s founding was rooted in Cold War ideological and military competition with the Soviet Union. As such, Nato 1.0 was a firmly Right-wing organization, one interested above all in strengthening American dominion over Europe and confronting the Soviet threat. But it also had several other functions, among them spreading the gospel of free markets and crushing internal Left-wing subversion. The North Atlantic Treaty signed in April 1949 established the military alliance and outlined Nato “values”; the pact promised “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law”. From the very beginning, not all members lived up to the pompous rhetoric. Founding member state Portugal was then ruled by dictator Antonio Salazar, whose one-party regime Estado Novo, or New State, employed a menacing secret police and outlawed all opposition parties; the dictatorship’s “new” name was an irony, as according to Tom Gallagher, the puritanical Salazar “manifested the true reactionary’s horror of change”. 

The United States was often the alliance’s biggest proponent of working with unsavory regimes, pushing for Franco’s Spain to become a member of Nato with overwhelming support in Congress and the Senate. The US saw Francoist Spain as an ideal ally owing to its “strategic location and furiously anti-communist sentiment”. When some European member states objected to admitting Franco’s regime into the alliance, the United States signed the Pact of Madrid with Spain in 1953, furnishing the dictatorship with aid and allowing the US to build military bases on Spanish soil. French colonial Algeria was also an original part of Nato, with Article 5 extending to the colonized country where systematic torture and concentration camps were used to subdue the population. Meanwhile some former Nazis from West Germany’s supposedly “clean Wehrmacht” — the alliance shamelessly propagated the myth that Wehrmacht officers fought honorably during the Second World War — were also integrated into the pact, with some rising to Nato’s senior leadership. In the face of the Soviet threat, there could be no enemies to the Right.

Nato 2.0 covered a period we might describe as the “long Nineties” and was characterized by End-of-History hubris and excess: rapacious eastward expansion, self-aggrandizing rhetoric about liberal values, and zealous out-of-area operations. Nato’s “out-of-area” actions — operations undertaken beyond the territorial limits of member states — undermined its claim to be a “purely defensive alliance”. As “humanitarian” operations, their results ranged from mixed to disastrous. While the 1999 Nato bombing of Yugoslavia forced Serbian security forces from Kosovo, it did not bring down President Slobodan Milošević; he wouldn’t fall until a contested election several months later. Indeed, Milošević’s own Minister of Information during the bombing, Aleksandar Vučić, has been leader of Serbia in some form for 14 years, and his regime employs Serbian nationalist rhetoric barely distinguishable from that of his former boss. In 2011, Nato intervened in Libya with even more catastrophic results: though sold to the public as a “humanitarian intervention” to protect civilians, the real goal was regime change, with the removal of leader Muammar al-Gaddafi judged a strategic imperative worth many Libyan lives. In the end, a report from Harvard’s Belfer Center determined that “Nato’s action magnified the conflict’s duration about sixfold and its death toll at least sevenfold”. Nato 2.0 also included the Great War on Terror, which meant the emergence of non-state actors as a new threat; costly cross-border operations and occupations ensued. If Nato 1.0’s main purpose was containing the Soviet Union in Europe, then Nato 2.0 represented the mother of all mission creep.

The summit in Ankara was the alliance’s response to Trumpian demands for a Nato 3.0: a scaled back, “Europe-led” pact that doesn’t rely on the United States as the guarantor of Europe’s conventional defense. As such, the summit kicked off with a grandiose Defense Industry Forum, where Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte repeatedly invoked the term “defense industrial revolution”. The event was an opportunity for Turkey to hawk its indigenous defense industry wares, but it was also an opportunity for Europe. As one official from a European defense ministry wryly put it to me, the forum allowed allies to make a big show of complying with Trumpian dictates to spend more on their defense.

Just to drive the point home, President Zelensky gave a speech at the event likening the current revolution in drone technology to the invention of missiles. He described Ukraine as a reluctant defense industrial powerhouse forged in war and asserted that it should therefore be admitted to Nato. In other characteristically immoderate statements, the Defense Industry Forum was widely touted as a success. A Nato official confirmed that “at least” $50 billion in new defense deals were announced at the forum; among them were $40 billion worth of investment in counter-drone capabilities and multi-country initiatives for the continued militarization of space. The pivot to Nato 3.0 would appear to be well underway.

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Turkey is perhaps the model Nato 3.0 ally, which makes its hosting of the first summit of this new chapter richly appropriate. Though Turkey has contributed to Nato 2.0 peacekeeping missions and interventions in places like Kosovo and Bosnia, Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, like Trump, has no time for liberal internationalist pieties. Like Trump, he would like to see Nato stripped bare to its raw essentials of defense and security, ditching democracy promotion and the dissemination of “Western values”. Turkey has the second largest army in Nato and a burgeoning defense industrial base: Turkish defense and aviation exports broke records last year, exceeding $10 billion. All of this has won admiration from Trump. Throughout the summit, Trump repeatedly praised Erdoğan, calling him “really a great man”, “a great leader”, and “a strong person”. Trump’s affinity with Erdoğan suggests that what is most valued in Nato 3.0 is a capacity for deterrence and defense; democratic deficiencies are of little concern in an ally that is seen to be pulling its weight.  

Despite the notable absence of liberal rhetoric in Ankara, elements of Nato 2.0 remain for now, including the tradition of the annual summit. During the Cold War, Nato held just 10 summits. Today, it holds a wildly expensive summit every year. Last year’s one in The Hague reportedly cost about €1 million per minute, with some media reporting that it was the most expensive meeting in the alliance’s history. Preparations for this year’s summit reportedly cost €235 million. In addition to being expensive, international relations scholar Patrick Porter believes that annual summits present risks. “The curse of regular summitry…wasn’t a feature of Cold War Nato,” he tells me. “There are these relentless opportunities for trouble and mischief and misunderstanding.” It’s a critique now shared by some other allies. While Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte told journalists in Ankara that the next summit will be in Albania, he would not confirm that it would happen next year.

Whatever the similarities between Nato 3.0 and Nato 1.0, there are also a few striking differences. Nato once justified itself with the Cold War platitudes of prosperity and liberty. This was propaganda to be sure, but it was still integral to winning an ideological battle that once divided the world. Now, the rhetoric of prosperity and freedom has been replaced with the cold, uninspiring promise of “security” — a nebulous, constantly expanding concept emblematic of an ideology that has lost the ability to excite or be believed, and must now rely on coercion, censorship and repression to get its way. While Nato holds a lavish summit each year and member states ramp up spending for a “defense industrial revolution”, people living in allied countries are being told they must endure brutal cuts to health care, education, and social welfare to pay for it all. Alliance boosters like to boast that Nato “protects one billion people”. If it does, it does so at a steep cost.

For all the genuine and awe-inspiring might of America’s war machine, geography has given Iran an advantage in the Strait of Hormuz to which there is no obvious military solution. It is difficult to imagine what the Marine Expeditionary Unit, currently steaming toward the Gulf from the Pacific where it had been deployed to deter China, can do to unblock the Strait. Even if the 2,500 deployable Marines seize Qeshm island, on the Iranian side of the strait, they and the shipping they are being sent to guard will still be within range of weapons systems located within the mainland city of Bandar Abbas — and among its half-million population — and in the craggy and desolate mountain ranges behind. Senator Lindsay Graham’s proposal of seizing Kharg island, more than 300 miles away at the other end of the Persian Gulf, would still require the taskforce to sail through the very same strait from which, fearful of losses, the US Navy chooses to steer well clear.

It is all very well for Trump to demand that European, or even Chinese, warships escort oil tankers through the narrow waterway, but there is a reason that the US Navy has refused the same task. What America cannot do without bearing politically unsustainable risk, and very little prospect of success, Britain certainly cannot, and it is petulant and ultimately risible of Trump to demand we try. As Germany’s defense minister Boris Pistorius rightly observed this week, “What does Donald Trump expect from a handful or two handfuls of European frigates to achieve there in the Strait of Hormuz, which the powerful American Navy cannot manage alone?”

In these inauspicious circumstances, the idea that Britain should be doing more to help does not seem compelling, whatever confused and rambling outbursts emanate from the imperial center. The single drone that hit the American hangar in RAF Akrotiri may have been an embarrassment for Whitehall, but it was hardly a catastrophe. The seeming absence of a ground-based air defense system may be a mysterious oversight, but as Israel and the Gulf kingdoms show, even the most modern and extensive GBAD installation does not provide total defense. The carrier that many Fleet Street hawks demanded should immediately sail for Cyprus is already busy in the High North. Indeed, its current deployment, announced last month, came after Trump’s own declarations that Europeans were paying such insufficient attention to Arctic security that America has the right to seize Greenland, and perhaps Canada too. It is not Britain’s responsibility to chase after every military whim, reasonable or otherwise, of our imperial patron. In any case, the whole purpose of Britain’s Sovereign Base Areas is to act as our unsinkable carrier in the Levant: in Cyprus, and in the skies over Jordan, Iraq and the Gulf states, the RAF is already active shooting down missile threats to regional allies, and there is no obvious logic in seeking to do more.

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Macron’s European flotilla, led by France, and assembling in the Eastern Mediterranean, displays more than a touch of overkill: for the level of threat it faces, Cyprus must now be the best-defended country in the world. It is certainly an impressive sight, and a galling one for British observers of our own naval decline — yet competing with France is not in itself a vital national interest. Rather than being driven by strict military necessity, this is an act of political theater in which European leaders can signal both their capacity to act decisively in concert when one of their number is threatened, and their willingness to maintain a certain distance from the United States in doing so. Dismissively quashing Trumpian suggestions that it might sail eastwards to the arena of America’s muddled war, Macron’s government clearly sees the deployment, coming so soon after the announcement that France will expand the defensive umbrella of its independent nuclear deterrent across vast swathes of Europe, as tangible proof of the latent power that a French-led Europe, independent of Nato, can muster in defense of its own interests. We are less weak than we tell ourselves, the flotilla says, and our erratic overlord less strong.

Politically, the implications of all this for Britain are unclear. Starmer’s government has, correctly, chosen not to commit itself to this war, which is unfortunately not quite the same thing as remaining entirely detached from it. There is not, after all, much difference between Britain’s Sovereign Base Areas in Cyprus, unwillingly hosted by Cypriots for use in wars of no interest to them, and the notional RAF bases here in Britain from which American long-range bombers set off to and return from their missions over Iran. For the Greens and Scottish Nationalists to condemn the use of these bases is entirely expected. Yet when we see the keen populist bellwether of liberal centrist opinion Ed Davey demand a fully independent British nuclear deterrent, something has surely changed. It is hard, now, not to palpably feel the tide of empire retreating, though this time round with us as the natives observing, with mixed feelings, the crumbling power of their imperial master. Living through a time of historic changes is a more disorienting and ambiguous experience than the confident hindsight of historians later pretends: we can expect our politicians to struggle with the new realities struggling to be born.

It is reassuring then, at a moment in which Britain’s Right-wing parties have not covered themselves in glory, that Reform’s initial gung-ho enthusiasm for America and Israel’s war was so swiftly backtracked by Robert Jenrick, a long-standing skeptic of foreign entanglements. If his colleague Andrea Jenkyns remains keen to commit British boots on the ground, this is at least beyond the power of the Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire to effect. Yet the spectacle of Reform’s headlong advance to war, and the party’s hurried retreat when faced with polling data, has perhaps obscured the Conservative Party’s own, and perhaps worse, stance on Iran, a position seemingly derived equally from recklessness and a shaky grasp of detail.

Badenoch’s insistence, perhaps extrapolating from her experience of World of Warcraft, that Britain should  “stop the archer” by joining in strikes on Iranian underground missile bases, rather than merely “catching the arrows”, would seem an odd and escalatory response to a UAV launched from Lebanon. Bombing an entirely different weapon system in an entirely different country would not prevent any recurrence of such attacks, presumably undertaken by Hezbollah, unless Badenoch also intends to bomb Lebanon. Yet doing so would require deconflicting and therefore coordinating with the Israelis in a bombing campaign that even the United States is steering clear of, against UAVs launched from mobile and most likely civilian vehicles, in the wooded and heavily-populated landscape of southern Lebanon. The moral, legal, and political risks of accidentally killing civilians, in an aerial campaign that has already killed hundreds, would be unacceptably high for little obvious gain, the product of a soundbite in search of a strategy.

In its latest and even more confusing iteration, published in the Daily Mail, Badenoch’s stance on the American-Israeli campaign is that she is “clear that Britain shouldn’t have joined in – I remain concerned that there isn’t a clear plan behind the strikes – but Britain should also not be neutral” and should “strike the missile and drone sites at source”. The Conservative Party’s apparent position on this urgent question of national security is that Britain should conduct its own entirely independent retaliatory bombing campaign, in the same airspace as American and Israeli jets and against much the same targets. Given the American aircraft losses already to friendly fire, we must presume that Badenoch intends the RAF to coordinate and deconflict with its American and Israeli counterparts, as well as, given Britain’s military shortcomings, leaning upon their support for surveillance and targeting data. How this is considered “not joining in” is hard to discern: the advantage for the nation, even harder.

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It seems unnervingly clear that, rather than starting “from first principles,” according to her characteristically high estimation of her own intellectual rigor,  Badenoch had settled on a political strategy of marketing herself as stronger on defense than Starmer, in which the outbreak of war initially seemed a useful backdrop. That the war she initially chose to back proved both chaotically mismanaged and domestically unpopular has now led her to defend, alone, this tenuous and isolated political outpost. On a matter of the utmost gravity, the only principles apparent seem to be feeding the needs of the Westminster media grid, and a desire to cosplay the Iron Lady for her dwindling audience.

If we are to truly start from first principles, they must be that Britain has its own interests, distinct from those of our allies in Europe and the United States, and it is only to those interests British leaders should attend. If the Iran War is an American party to which we have been invited but do not wish to attend, so is it the case that the European effort is something Starmer may wish to join, but to which we have not been invited. Greece did not send its jets and frigates to Cyprus to defend Britain’s SBAs, as British commentators affected to believe, but to reassure and protect its ethnic kin, maximizing the country’s political influence. In the same way, the broader, European effort has its own French political rationale, of advancing a Macronian vision of strategic autonomy, in which Britain serves little if any role. Rather than joining the war at arm’s length, as Badenoch may wish, our current refusal to take part is itself carried out with a certain insular detachment.

Yet the European consensus on this war’s regretful pointlessness, now uniting even the most Trumpian of continental governments, like those of Italy and Hungary, with the liberal center, provides Starmer with the political cover to stay out. At the beginning of this conflict, it was a contrarian position in the British press to unequivocally state that joining the fight is not in our interests: now it is, correctly, the mainstream political opinion in Westminster as across Europe as a whole. What a few weeks ago appeared an unusually bold stance from Starmer now seems boringly, obviously sensible: Trump’s increasingly erratic jibes to the contrary now inspire pity rather than deference. There may well be a case, when the shooting stops, for taking part in convoy escort and minesweeping duties in the Strait of Hormuz, but we and other Europeans should demand a reasonable price from this most transactional of American administrations. Above all, surely, we should require that Trump firmly and publicly commit himself to the territorial integrity and self-determination of both Greenland and Canada, the New World extensions of our European civilization: he may be a boomer, but Trump has no right to consume our rightful patrimony.

At this moment of historic American weakness, so swiftly following Trump’s intimidation of our home continent, we Europeans must be a little more ambitious in renegotiating the terms of our relationship. Yet instead, the Conservative and Reform politicians who would have blindly leapt into war now tie themselves in knots justifying arcane and incoherent positions, isolating themselves from both domestic opinion and the broader European Right. That they find themselves in this position seems almost more pathetic than lamentable, so devoid is it of any political or strategic sense. Like parents, all empires age, wither and then eventually die. Filial loyalty does not generally extend to jumping into the grave alongside them.

And yet, according to reports leaked from Labour’s National Security Council (NSC) this week, Miliband was crucial in preventing Keir Starmer from deeper embroilment in Trump’s Iran war. Far from appealing to an idealized, imagined Britain, one full of Ottolenghi-loving Fabian podcasters and policy wonks, that position leaves him closer to the public than most of the British Right. Both Reform and the Tories have either sycophantically embraced MAGA militarism, as an American client faction attached to the body politic, or else indulged in forlorn nostalgia for a prelapsarian imperial age.

Conservative commentators and politicians bemoan our inability to project power and state capacities on the world stage, demanding a reassertion of military prowess even as industry, services and the social fabric continues its inexorable decline at home. They live in a parallel dream world; the idea that there exists any latent jingoistic desire among Britons to sacrifice limited butter for inconsequential guns is as delusional as any ivory tower Left-liberalism.

Apparently Miliband’s cabinet interventions on Iran were “petulant, pacifist, legalistic and very political” — strongly reminiscent of his attitude in 2013, when he urged parliament to block UK military action against then Syrian President, Bashar al Assad. To which the only rational response can be: thank God. The Americans may not be happy (“This is not Winston Churchill we’re dealing with,” an irritated Trump told the White House press corps). But, thanks to the insistence of Red Ed, history may yet absolve the prime minister in what proves to be his finest hour, particularly in the not-unlikely scenarios that the Islamic Republic endures, re-radicalizes, or else descends into anarchy — with all the stagflationary pressures and refugee flows that implies.

To be sure, Starmer’s characteristically stiff reaction to the violence seems perfectly calibrated to alienate all sides. His sclerotic legalism has put off advocates of intervention who decry the Government’s initial hesitance in allowing US use of British bases, while opponents baulk at the subsequent U-turn giving the green light for operations to defend Gulf states from Iranian missiles. But the outcome of the NSC meeting shows where the Labour leader is politically: in his post-McSweeney and post-Gorton era, with the pivot-to-Reform strategy roundly discredited, he is a puppet of the party’s resurgent progressive forces.

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There’s little doubt that Miliband is enjoying an extended second wind in his political life. Milibandism 1.0 was an amorphous thing, bound by the residues of New Labour and the orthodoxies of the period. Post-financial crisis populism was still in its infancy, the Overton window was narrower, and any antagonism towards the post-Thatcherite settlement had to be couched in conciliatory language. A Labour figure once remarked that the Corbynite 2017 manifesto was “basically the programme Miliband would have loved to have presented” to the country — with all its paeans to nationalization, regional investment banks and the recreation of postwar social democracy updated for the 21st century.

In the end, though, Miliband was bound by Brownite instincts and the curse of his insiderism, unable to see the appeal of promises of totalizing, systemic change. Perhaps that’s why he was always something proto-Starmerite in his awkward adoption of the rhetoric of faith, family, flag. In the wake of Emily Thornberry’s St George’s Cross furore, the Labour leader told us he felt “respect” when he saw a white van. The problem wasn’t so much the odd phrasing or sentiment, but rather the dissonance between Miliband’s words and his party’s palpable disdain for overt displays of plebeian nationalism in the provinces. The issue typified his and his party’s estrangement from what might have once been their natural base of lower-paid, non-university-educated voters.

Yet Miliband’s stint as leader of the opposition also included heavy flirtations with Blue Labour: it was Miliband who ennobled Maurice Glasman, and appointed another of its thinkers, Jon Cruddas, as policy co-ordinator; it was Ed again who earned the ire of the activistocracy by stamping “controls on immigration” onto a campaign mug.

For all its faults, then, Milibandism 1.0 at least attempted to shore up the marriage between the Hampstead intellectuals and the working class that constituted the unsteady coalition of the post-Blair Labour party. It’s only in its later guise that Milibandism has become so unabashedly associated with Labour’s soft Left — the woolly, liminal space between the ultra-Atlanticist and pro-American Blairite Right, and the niche “anti-imperialist” causes and foreign guerrilla fetishism of the Corbynites. But as the cabinet doyen of that loose band, Miliband may this week have acted as the country’s foremost Left sovereigntist, a “Britain First” Left patriot, as uninterested in dissolving the country’s capabilities into the arsenal of a mercurial Washington hegemon as he was back in 2013.

Of course, it is his departmental role, rather than his non-interventionist foreign policy, that has defined Milibandism 2.0, with a more self-confident, assured performer emerging from his 2015 election loss. His name has become synonymous with the Government’s mission to decarbonize the energy grid by 2030, and as a result Miliband himself has become the whipping boy for a Right which has broken with the once-tight net zero consensus. Preventing new drilling and exploration on British territory, even as we continue to depend on volatile imports from abroad, is pure magical thinking, sacrificing pragmatism in the interests of His Majesty’s Treasury and the British balance of payments for the kind of idealistic virtue signaling so familiar to Milibandism’s core milieu.

But, he would respond, in pushing the transition to renewables so mercilessly, Miliband is in fact attempting to assert “energy independence” with “home grown” clean energy — reducing our reliance on unreliable and expensive imported sources. This isn’t a position shared by many energy economists, and it does little to assuage fears that our green transition is coinciding with the decimation of heavy industry and a rise in industrial energy costs, while new grid technology and infrastructure are sourced largely from China and Denmark. Yet whatever the problems of actually-existing Milibandism, he at least remains one of the cabinet’s few doers: his project may be incongruent with our new age of Great Power resource competition, but it is being pursued consistently, and with more alacrity than any other of the Government’s scattergun agendas.

So even if they disagree with him — whether on Iran or North Sea oil — the Right would do well to take Miliband seriously. After all, there is surely space in British politics for a sovereigntist, anti-globalist conservatism. Post-Brexit, in a deglobalizing world, that would entail the pursuit of an independent foreign policy, and a relentless focus on domestic British interests, transforming our cumbersome state into an agile, interventionist market-shaper, rebuilding industry and state capacity towards creating a more cohesive, resilient and national economy. An appetite for foreign adventurism would give way to the hard-headed realism necessitated by our status as a middle power with limited resources. The desperate maintenance of an illusory “special relationship” would give way to genuine self-reliance, and a fluid engagement with a changing world in our own interests. High welfare and high migration would be eschewed for high investment and renewed national infrastructure.

It appeared, for a moment, that this kind of Anglo-Gaullism might be the future of Reform, with its nods towards industrial policy and a renaissance of manufacturing capital. But, instead, the kneejerk Americanization of Right politics continues apace, sticking to a capricious White House like a limpet. Today, it is the Right that wishes to govern a country that doesn’t exist. And, in this context, it will be for flawed but ascendant Milibandism to reassert some shaky version of national sovereignty.

Most observers understand that Trump will never be truly beloved — not in a national way as, say, Bill Clinton once was (warts and all). America in 2026 is too polarized, and Trump is too polarizing. But history proves Trump can at least be palatable, and that’s where this second presidency is flagging. It’s why the president is taking a major risk by insisting that a “transformation” has been achieved when, on his own terms, it plainly hasn’t. Not yet, anyway. 

The president made big promises ahead of this second term: about bringing about a new “golden age.” For many voters — especially the working- and lower-middle-class Americans who twice sent him to the Oval Office — renewal is about the kitchen table and internal reconsolidation: a focus on repairing the domestic hearth and on helping an asset-poor majority buffeted by decades of economic insecurity (even as China and Wall Street went from strength to strength).

As one GOP strategist told me ahead of Tuesday’s address, “It will be a great speech if Wednesday morning headlines read: Trump delivered a State of the Economy address.” Trump partially delivered that. Yet his boasting was out of step with what voters are telling pollsters about how they feel — a jarring callback to the themes of stability and reconsolidation that were supposed to define the second term but were somehow forgotten along the way. Then, too, the speech highlighted the ways in which a hyperactive foreign policy is swallowing what was supposed to have been a domestic-focused populist movement.

Even under the best conditions in the past, Trump has at times managed to preside over a relatively strong economy — and still not achieved public support greater than about 50% approval, owing to the confluence of a fractured media environment and a fractured electorate. Yet the polling numbers right now are damning evidence he’s hemorrhaged much more public support than usual.

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Trump entered office last winter with his highest ever approval rating, 50.4%. According to the RealClearPolitics average, his job-approval average was six points above water days after he was sworn back into the White House and stayed that way until about mid-March. By contrast, Trump enjoyed only a 0.1-point bump — a blip, really — as he took the oath in 2017, which quickly dipped to six-points underwater by late February of the same year. In other words, the second time around, he really came in about as popular with the national electorate as a figure like Trump could ever be.

So what happened? Why is it that today, supermajorities of Americans disapprove of his handling of most issues? Why is it that, according to the pollster Nate Silver, the president is underwater by double digits on all immigration, the economy, inflation, and trade? 

Trump is always the same person. At no point in the last 11 years has he stopped posting crazy messages on social media, hiring weirdos, or holding wild news conferences. Yet despite these antics, there have been times when half of the public has been willing to get behind him as a norm-busting, Right-wing polemicist who is under a constant barrage from the entire political establishment. 

Put another way: it was possible for Trump to have avoided his current approval hemorrhage. The very fact that Trump entered office last year with political and cultural momentum after running a hard-core populist campaign the legacy media detested is proof of this. So is Trump’s problem an excess of populism or its absence?

Trump argued in the speech that his administration is creating a world “where government answers to the people, not the powerful” and “where the interests of hard-working American citizens are always our first and ultimate concern.” He accused Democrats of “corruption that is plundering America,” adding: “From trade to health care, from energy to immigration, everything was stolen and rigged in order to drain the wealth out of the productive, hard-working people who make our country run.” 

The speech was clearly designed to highlight populist policy priorities like banning “large Wall Street investment firms” from buying single-family homes, bringing back manufacturing jobs, protection from energy rate hikes caused by new data centers, banning congressional stock trading, closing the border, and deflating prescription drug prices. This was the Trump who won in 2024. But where was he for the past year or so?

A glance back at Trump’s Second Inaugural Address recalls just how intentional he was about promising strength and stability. He cast elites as destabilizing, making the argument that “a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair.” 

That is a very particular criticism of the political class which paints it not merely as corrupt but also as chaotic. “Our sovereignty will be reclaimed. Our safety will be restored.  The scales of justice will be rebalanced,” said Trump last year.

But this is not, in fact, how many voters have experienced his second presidency. Some economic metrics are moving in the right direction for him, to be sure, but voters remain unimpressed with his stewardship of the economy and trade policy. As the Supreme Court demonstrated last week, it’s the uncertainty that may be what’s harming Trump, who promised to restore stability. 

The Dow is up, the Consumer Price Index is down, and tax cuts are coming. Reuters described the January jobs report as “unexpectedly strong.” But consumer confidence is now at a 12-year low. It shot up after Trump took office, then plunged to roughly the same level. The index shows confidence has declined sharply among Independents but is down even among Republicans. People report disapproval of Trump’s work on inflation and tariffs in particular. 

Prices are still rising — in part due to tariffs — and every day brings a new apocalyptic warning from experts about an impending mass deletion of jobs at the hands of artificial intelligence. (Trump, meanwhile, is lavishing artificial intelligence oligarchs in praise and political favor and enriching himself and his family with laughably corrupt cryptocurrency schemes.)

The public’s dissatisfaction with Trump’s economic and tariff policies makes more sense against this backdrop. He made big promises. So if you’re a 26-year-old who heard the president on Lex Fridman’s podcast but don’t feel like he cares that you still can’t buy a home, your patience is wearing thin. 

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What might snap your patience altogether is Trump’s heavy focus on foreign policy, from the Iran war buildup (despite his assurances that last summer’s intervention in Israel’s 12-Day War had “obliterated” the nuclear program); to the Venezuelan regime-swap operation’ to capricious threats against Greenland and the war continuing to rage in Ukraine to, despite a promise to end it rapidly. There’s also the matter of the Epstein Files, which again featured a high-profile promise of disclosure that Trump had to be dragged kicking and screaming into making good on. 

At least some of Trump’s low marks are coming from disappointed Republicans. According to Politico, new polls have picked up this trend: “In [a] CNN survey, 82% of Republicans approved of the job he was doing, down eight points from a year ago. And the Washington Post survey found that 48% of Republicans ‘approve strongly’ of his performance, down from 63% a year ago.”

Tuesday proved Trump is not throwing in the towel on populism — at least, not rhetorically — but to a lot of ordinary people, it looks chaotic and muddled, when the president promised strength and calm. 

Trump now has only three years left in office so he’s likely more interested in long-term legacy building than day-to-day approval ratings. That means he’s also more willing to take risks with the hope they pay off down the road even if they feel shaky in the moment. His heavy emphasis on foreign reflects this. And in fairness, that in part explains the heavy focus on foreign policy — the domain in which most second-term presidents try to cement their legacy (it’s much easier to strike foreign agreements or start foreign wars than to deal with a recalcitrant Congress).

Still, populism has to deliver, and if you promise strength and stability, you can’t also remain popular if you’re seen as an unpredictable agent of chaos.

Perhaps that explains Trump’s repeated invocation of “1776” on Tuesday. He is, of course, pleased to be the president during the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. But nobody looks back on 1776 as a moment of calm and stability. It’s remembered as a time of enormous difficulty and uncertainty. This indeed may be Trump’s best argument, but it won’t exactly put the country at ease. 

If sovereignty was the backbone of the mainstream campaign for Brexit, independence was the cry of its populist tribune. Acknowledging his triumph on the night of the vote, Nigel Farage declared that 23 June would go down in history as “our independence day”. The constitutionalism of Gove and Johnson recalled Dicey and Bagehot, while the then Ukip leader came closer to Tom Paine or John Wilkes — the 18th-century rabble-rouser and MP. More than a restoration, Brexit was something radical. The country was unshackled and free. 

The allure of such lofty rhetoric is understandable, particularly for a country that had so recently turned much of the globe pink. And even as the empire crumbled, Britain was a serious player. In 1951, when the European Coal and Steel Treaty, the predecessor body to the EEC, was signed, Britain exported more cars than any other nation. If the country had done extraordinary things before submitting to the Continent, the thinking went, it could accomplish great things after. In contrast to such rarefied ambition, the Remain camp’s arguments felt insular and bloodless. In the 21st century, they intoned, sovereignty was pooled, furnishing the country with more, not less, agency to act in an unpredictable world. 

This may have been intellectually coherent, and potentially even right, but it had the drawback of sounding like a footnote in a legal textbook. As is so often the case, progressives brought a knife to a gun fight; facts to combat vision. Nor is any of this just history. Ten years after the referendum, these debates around sovereignty, independence and self-government feel more relevant than at any point since the end of the Cold War. Such matters are no longer the province of political theory, or electioneering, but integral to the life and death of nations. 

So what is sovereignty in our own time? Beyond a monopoly on the legitimate use of force at home, it includes the capacity to defend one’s borders against military threat. Syria is not, therefore, a properly sovereign state. Nor is Venezuela, Lebanon or Georgia. Qatar’s sovereignty is certainly in doubt given it was bombed by two countries that were previously bombing each other: Israel and Iran. Particularly noteworthy about the Qatari example is that Washington seemingly permitted a strike against a country under its suzerainty. Precisely what that counts for with the Trump presidency is less clear by the day, as Denmark is now discovering. Despite spilling blood in the “liberation” of Iraq, and recently spending treasure to purchase 41 F-35s (total cost: $4.5 billion), the White House is openly talking about acquiring Greenland from Copenhagen — by force if necessary. 

Given the increasingly ad hoc nature of the US umbrella, it feels like the basis of real sovereignty, in this new world, is nuclear weapons. When I spoke to Ukrainian historian, Serhei Plokhy, late last year, his sense was that nuclear proliferation was close to inevitable over the decades ahead. If the United States couldn’t guarantee the safety of Japan, for instance, or sought to depose a government in Brazil or Mexico, perhaps these countries might look to acquire the bomb. Two nations in particular underscore this point: Ukraine and North Korea. For a brief moment in the early Nineties, the former possessed the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, something it renounced in exchange for security guarantees from Moscow. North Korea, meanwhile, developed an impressive nuclear and ballistic missile program, and is yet to receive the same treatment meted out on Syria, Iran, Libya, and now Venezuela. 

Besides nuclear weapons, there are other markers of sovereignty as we enter 2026. Technological autonomy is one. In 1994, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei told Jiang Zemin, then the CCP’s General Secretary, that “a country without its own program-controlled switches is like one without an army”. In other words, national independence was impossible without an advanced industrial base. Zhenfei’s reported words were oddly reminiscent of Charles De Gaulle, who wrote in his memoir that, “there is no independence without power, and no power without modern means”. Rather than being divided by ideology, then, perhaps we should look at both men as economic nationalists forged by struggle and misfortune. De Gaulle, after all, led a government in exile, while Zhengfei cut his teeth as an engineer building jets on the Vietnamese border to support the war effort in the Sixties.

If there is one great or middle power which has not acted according to such principles in recent decades — perhaps because it has been spared such calamities — it is Britain. Think, for one thing, about technology. Far from seeing high-tech autonomy as key to the country’s status, successive governments have claimed that greater globalization was the yardstick they wished to be judged by. “Globalization is not something you can hold back,” Tony Blair informed the Labour Party Conference back in 2000. “It is driven by technology and communications and it is the key to future prosperity.” 

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Five years later, as BT sought to spend £10 billion to refit the country’s digital networks, eight companies were selected for the job: and not a single one was British. “No other advanced country would allow such a strategic investment decision affecting its national infrastructure,” lamented Peter Skyte, an officer for the union Amicus. By the standards of Blair, and much of the country’s political and media class, those were the complaints of a throwback failing to keep up. Later that year Marconi, one of the British firms that had failed to win a contract, and whose history stretched right back to 1897, was snatched up by Ericsson. Today, Britain has no domestic companies capable of building 5G infrastructure. To paraphrase Zhengfei, how powerful is an army without the technology suppliers to match? Britain may have F35s, but it can’t make microprocessors. Meanwhile Algeria and Kazakhstan produce more steel, and Tajikistan and Bosnia more aluminum. When it comes to machine-tool production we lag behind Switzerland and the Czech Republic, let alone Germany. France, meanwhile, has a lead in cutting-edge fields from sovereign cloud to first stage rockets.

It’s a similar story with our nuclear deterrent. For De Gaulle, it was pivotal that his republic maintain its own capability. “France must possess the means to defend itself by itself,” he said in 1959. Britain, meanwhile, was moving in the other direction, signing up for the American Polaris system in 1963. Rather than admit a new-found dependence on Washington, Whitehall heralded the shift as a tribute to the “‘Special Relationship”. We no longer have the Polaris system — it was replaced by Trident in the Eighties — but this most critical of technologies remains “interdependent”: while Britain builds its nuclear submarines, and fabricates its own warheads, the missiles are leased from a “shared pool” held by the Americans. Let’s not forget those missiles can only be serviced on the other side of the Atlantic, 3,000 miles away in Georgia. 

Economically, too, Britain increasingly resembles a vassal state. Heritage brands such as Boots, Clarks Weetabix and Cadbury all have American owners. If you fancy a coffee you’ll likely plump for one of Costa, Starbucks or Cafe Nero. While it may not be obvious, all three have American ownership. Indeed, US corporations employ more people in Britain than in Germany, France, Italy, Portugal and Sweden combined. But it’s at the level of basic infrastructure that things become especially pernicious. Most Government departments, and even our security services, rely on Amazon Web Services for their internet servers. In extreme circumstances, there is no guarantee that US pressure — political or legal — won’t affect the access and oversight of London. Is that really “taking back control”?

As our Government struggled to respond to Trump’s attack on Venezuela, perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that political clarity came from a politician with whom I agree on very little: Marine Le Pen. “There is one fundamental reason to oppose the regime change that the United States has just brought about in Venezuela”, she wrote on X the day of Maduro’s capture. “The sovereignty of states is never negotiable, regardless of their size, their power, or their continent. It is inviolable and sacred.” Today it might be Venezuela, Le Pen pronounced, tomorrow it could be a little closer to home. Whatever else, she heralds from a political-historical tradition in French politics that extends beyond Left and Right, and which stands for domestic sovereignty. Compared with Britain’s “podcast Right”, which unthinkingly cheers on everything the White House does, this intellectual heritage at least has the advantage of being coherent. 

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With America’s potential withdrawal from Europe, and the collapse of NATO now possible, it is ever more apparent that France’s post-war approach was the pragmatic one and Britain’s which was driven by ideology. Rolling over for the global hegemon and presuming we’ll forever dine at the top table feels presumptuous, now more than ever. Ironically, some of the most vociferous champions of British sovereignty over the Brexit years suddenly appear indifferent on the matter — with “global Britain” backers, like Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell, to name but two, seeming to aspire to little more than subordinate status to Washington. 

This is an attitude which, ironically, reflects the reasoning of many pro-Europeans before 2016. They wanted issues such as trade and migration to remain at Brussels, not because they necessarily believed in such a settlement, but because it made domestic politics far easier. After four decades, Westminster had lost the muscle memory to conduct trade deals — as we have since discovered. Returning such competences to Britain was always the difficult choice — which is why much of the establishment resisted it. The same is arguably true here. Surely it’s easier, as a patriotic Right-winger, to simply talk about Britain’s leading role in world affairs rather than trying to achieve its material reality.

Britain might yet enlarge its scope for sovereignty. If we truly wanted to take back control, we could, for instance, end our reliance on the US for the country’s nuclear deterrent, and return to the status quo ante before Polaris. We could develop a domestic space actor similar to Ariane, a pan-European organization that is, nevertheless, majority owned by the French government. We certainly need to produce at least some microprocessors for domestic consumption. And we need a strategy for meaningful energy security. 

Because of the strategic importance of such shifts, the state should hold at least some equity in these enterprises — in a manner similar to France’s APE (Agence des participations de l’État). Not as excessive as it sounds, it simply means reversing the more egregious mistakes of the Thatcher and Blair years. If uncorrected, these errors — such as discarding the importance of industry — will only create an increasing national vulnerability as the old order fragments,

Taking back control can’t just be rhetoric. To mean anything, those words can’t be constrained to borders, money or laws — they must encompass vital strategic industry. Otherwise, Britain will remain the least sovereign middle power of all. We may have left the clutches of Brussels a decade ago, but in a perverse inversion of the Boston Tea Party, we now risk becoming the 51st State of America — just without the voting rights. 

Conspicuously absent, however, was any response from the EU’s institutional leadership. The same Brussels officials who routinely issue dire warnings about the alleged Russian threat to Europe declined to comment on an explicit US threat against European territory. And only hours earlier, most European leaders had offered either tepid or implicitly supportive responses to Trump’s unambiguous aggression against Venezuela. If there was a logic, it was to avoid confrontation with Washington at all costs. And yet ironically those same leaders quickly found themselves facing the prospect of similar US action directed against a European country.

A direct US military seizure of Greenland remains unlikely, though not unthinkable. A more probable scenario is an “association agreement” modeled on Washington’s arrangements with Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau. Under these agreements, the US exercises sweeping authority over defense and security in exchange for financial assistance. The states involved remain formally sovereign, but in practice are tightly bound to US strategic priorities. An analogous arrangement with Greenland would offer Washington the advantage of consolidating control while formally respecting Greenlandic self-rule, all while weakening Denmark’s position. A 1951 agreement already allows the US to station unlimited numbers of troops on the island; today, only one active base remains, but the legal framework for expansion is firmly in place.

The ambiguity is intentional. Earlier this week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that the use of the US military was “always an option” as Trump and his advisers reviewed different annexation scenarios. Whatever path the administration chooses, it is determined to resolve the matter swiftly. And European leaders, judging by their response so far, are likely to acquiesce. How can one account for the seemingly irrational, and indeed outright suicidal, posture of Europe’s political leadership? By acknowledging a simple fact: European elites are deeply embedded in the transatlantic system from which they derive their power and legitimacy. They perceive that system as under threat and are prepared to defend it at almost any cost, even if that cost includes European sovereignty or territory.

After all, Europe has already sacrificed its core economic and security interests to US imperial diktats. It has joined a proxy war against Russia that has devastated Ukraine and hollowed out European industrial competitiveness. It has imposed sanctions that inflicted far greater damage on European economies than on Russia. It has remained conspicuously silent following the destruction of Nord Stream, a critical piece of European energy infrastructure — an act probably carried out with at least indirect US involvement and likely foreknowledge by some European governments themselves. If European leaders were willing to accept all of this, acquiescing to US control over Greenland — whether through military pressure or pseudo-legal arrangements — would not represent a radical departure.

So much for Europe’s much-vaunted “strategic autonomy”. The reality is that beneath the rhetoric of independence, European governments have systematically appeased Trump — from increased Nato military spending, much of which will flow directly into US defense contractors, to punitive trade conditions to accepting financial responsibility for sustaining the war in Ukraine.

From the perspective of Europe’s governing classes, Nato and the proxy war in Ukraine are less about security or prosperity than about preserving an imperial architecture in which they can play a subordinate but privileged role. This is why Nato would likely survive even a US move against Greenland, albeit stripped of any remaining illusions of sovereign equality among its members.

This dynamic also helps explain a seeming paradox. Globalist European leaders openly despised by Trump — figures such as Emmanuel Macron or Friedrich Merz — have been more supportive of US aggression against Venezuela than Right-populist forces openly favored by Trump, such as Marine Le Pen or Viktor Orbán, who have adopted more cautious or critical positions. EU institutions, in particular, have been notably supportive of Washington’s actions — the bloc is not a counterweight to US power, rather one of its central pillars.

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It is therefore plausible that elements of the EU establishment are coordinating closely with factions of the US national security apparatus — or even with the Trump administration itself. After all, while it is true that Trump has abandoned any pretense of transatlantic unity and increasingly treats Europe in openly transactional, even neo-colonial terms, Europe’s political class has demonstrated its willingness to comply. Once one understands that Europe’s current leaders long ago ceased to think in terms of national or even “European” interests, and have instead become beholden to a single objective — the preservation of a dying system of Western hegemony, or the so-called “rules-based order”, and the benefits they derive from it in their sub-imperial role — their seemingly irrational behavior begins to make sense.

What should alarm Europeans is not the prospect of US “abandonment” or Nato’s collapse — developments that could, in principle, create space for genuine autonomy. In fact, it’s the opposite: the likelihood that Europe remains locked into a subordinate role precisely as Washington adopts an increasingly aggressive and lawless posture.

This is the broader context in which Trump’s attack on Venezuela and threats against Greenland must be understood. The events are revealing about the evolving nature of US foreign policy. While some analysts interpreted the latest National Security Strategy (NSS), along with Trump’s attempts to negotiate a settlement in Ukraine and his calls to scale down commitments in Europe, as evidence of a sober acceptance of multipolarity, Venezuela suggests a very different conclusion. Far from abandoning hegemony, the US is attempting to preserve it through new means, by globalizing a proxy-war strategy that targets weaker links in the rival system. While avoiding direct military containment of China or Russia, confrontation is displaced onto peripheral theaters and sustained through permanent destabilization. In this model, even the most elementary rules of international coexistence are discarded.

This shift is a reaction to a deep crisis of US hegemony. Its economic dimensions are well known: ballooning public debt, unsustainable private leverage, a financial system increasingly detached from productive activity, extensive deindustrialization and the gradual erosion, however partial, of the dollar-centric system. In short, this is a specific crisis of both US capitalism and the broader post-1945 imperial order.

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The US response to this is not to accept Washington’s role within a new global arrangement — one in which America could continue to prosper as a powerful but “normal” state — but to aggressively reassert its dominance. This reassertion increasingly takes the form of naked imperialism or neo-colonialism: not merely economic coercion, but the direct seizure of resources, the control of shipping lanes and supply chains, and even the open claim to foreign territory. Trump’s declaration that Venezuela will be “run” by the United States, coupled with the threat of further “kinetic” action should a future government resist, is thus emblematic.

This orientation is stated openly in the National Security Strategy. The document declares that the US will deny non-hemispheric competitors control over strategically vital assets, condition aid and trade on political alignment, discourage governments from cooperating with rival powers such as China or Russia, and use financial, technological and security — including military — means to ensure compliance. In practice, this strategy is already being implemented, well beyond the Western Hemisphere. Over the past year, the US has conducted bombing operations in seven countries — as varied as Iran, Nigeria and Somalia — none authorized by the UN Security Council and none credibly justified as acts of self-defense under the UN Charter. In parallel, Trump has issued direct threats against a growing list of other states.

In purely empirical terms, there is nothing new about the US resorting to violence to defend its economic and strategic interests; this has been a constant feature of US policy, even and especially under the so-called rules-based order. Across Latin America in particular, Washington has repeatedly intervened, covertly and overtly, whenever governments pursued land reform, resource nationalism or independent development paths that challenged US interests. What is new is the abandonment of even the pretense of legality or humanitarian concern. This is what domination looks like without hegemony: power exercised openly and coercively.

And it is precisely this nakedness that makes the current moment so dangerous. By signaling that no rules remain, not even rhetorically — Washington is effectively legitimizing a world of unrestrained power politics — one that is arguably already a reality, but which the West, until recently, at least claimed to oppose. This is particularly destabilizing given that US actions against Venezuela and Greenland should not be understood solely in economic terms; they are also strategic moves directed against China, and to a lesser extent Russia. Contrary to the idea that Washington is willing to divide the world into stable spheres of influence, the goal appears instead to create platforms from which US power can be projected more aggressively, ultimately to confront China before the balance of technological and economic power shifts irreversibly.

This is a gamble rooted in the assumption that sustained military and economic attrition can at least delay a tectonic shift in the global order. It is a position inherited from an older colonial worldview which saw non-Western development itself as an existential threat. In this sense, as one commentator insightfully put it, time itself is being weaponized. American elites are engaged in what might be called governance by delay: prolonging conflict and maintaining instability in the hope that some external shock — let’s say a technological breakthrough, an internal crisis among rivals — will restore lost leverage.

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The irony is that this strategy is profoundly self-defeating. The more openly coercive US behavior becomes, the faster it erodes the very structures that once underpinned American hegemony. After 1945, US dominance was not built through territorial annexation, or pure military power, but through administrative architecture: a dense web of alliances; the dollar-backed financial system; global trade regimes; standards bodies; technological ecosystems. This networked hegemony made integration with US-led systems the path of least resistance for most states — though, of course, the threat of violent reprisal was always there and often used.

Instead, when a hegemon instead behaves like a caricature of imperial power, it encourages states to seek alternatives — which now, unlike even just a decade ago, actually exist. To rephrase, Trump is incentivizing other nations to further diversify reserves, reduce dollar exposure, explore new payment systems and forge new security partnerships. Indeed, many countries, from South Africa to Brazil to India, are already pushing back against Trump’s bullish tactics. Thus, the primary beneficiaries of Trumpian aggression are precisely those Washington seeks to contain. China, and Russia too, have spent years advocating for an alternative framework for global cooperation based on sovereign equality and multipolarity. Each act of US lawlessness strengthens their appeal. After the illegal assault on Venezuela, expect the queue of countries seeking closer association with BRICS (and similar groupings) to grow longer, even as the US responds by escalating threats against those who do.

Europe, meanwhile, risks guaranteeing its own decline. By clinging to a subordinate role in America’s fraying imperial system, European elites are sacrificing the continent’s long-term autonomy for the prospect of their continued access to power. Yet this also means aligning themselves with a hegemon that governs through naked violence and coercion, at precisely the moment when adaptability and restraint are most needed. In doing so, they expose their own societies to escalating risks — economic, political and military — without any increase in security or influence. While the future of the global order remains uncertain, Europe’s own fate seems sealed.

Despite Donald Trump’s provocative assertion that the United States is going to “run” Venezuela and manage its transition for the foreseeable future, Washington has so far avoided the far costlier path of outright occupation. Trump has openly dismissed US-backed opposition figure María Corina Machado as lacking the domestic “support and respect” necessary to lead the country, while signaling that his administration is instead liaising with Venezuela’s vice president (and, tellingly, its oil and finance minister) Delcy Rodríguez, whom he described as “willing to do what we think is necessary.” 

With Rodríguez named interim president by Venezuela’s Supreme Court (presumably with American approval), and no indication that Washington is prepared to deploy the hundreds of thousands of troops required to govern the country directly, Trump appears intent on “running” Venezuela indirectly — through the existing state apparatus and the military — while using sanctions, naval embargoes, and the credible threat of renewed force as an albatross around the neck of the Venezuelan leadership. 

The objective, in short, is not regime change in the conventional War on Terror sense, but instead managed continuity: preventing immediate collapse, securing oil infrastructure, and coercing compliance without assuming responsibility for the country’s political and social wreckage. If true, this raises the likelihood that the entire episode has been a US-backed military coup that will ironically preserve Chavismo and Bolivarian politics in Venezuela in a new US-dealing, “business-first” garb: simply without Maduro himself.

Such an outcome would suggest that the Trump administration resisted the temptation of full-scale ideological regime change and remains pragmatic enough to avoid a prolonged ground invasion of Venezuela. The fallout — refugee crisis, internal unrest, and elite fragmentation — remains to be seen. Yet history offers little comfort that Maduro’s removal will lead to stability, let alone liberal democracy. If past US interventions are any guide, the long-term effect is more likely to be the further militarization of Venezuelan politics, with nationalism and social order emerging as the primary glue of regime solidarity. 

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Indeed, despite widespread discontent with Maduro’s rule, pro-government crowds have already gathered in Caracas to protest his overnight ouster by a foreign power. Chavismo, long sustained by anti-imperialist rhetoric, may now find renewed legitimacy precisely because Maduro was removed not by Venezuelans themselves, but by Washington and the CIA.

Beyond Venezuela itself, the broader message of the operation is unmistakable. The United States has forcefully communicated to the nations of the Western Hemisphere that it will justify its military interventions by claiming the right to enforce US law internationally — at least in the Americas — regardless of sovereignty, regional instability, or political blowback. Coming on the heels of the National Security Strategy’s call to reassert an updated, neo-mercantilist version of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the strike represents an ultimatum: Washington will act as the hemisphere’s police, enforcing its economic sphere of influence by force if necessary.

Washington’s actions in Venezuela reflect a Trump doctrine that views the world less as an ideological battlefield of liberals and autocrats than as an arena of zero-sum economic competition among great powers. In this framing, the Western Hemisphere is not merely a security perimeter, as in Roosevelt’s doctrine, but a commercial hinterland whose resources, markets, and supply chains must remain firmly under American control. Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, critical minerals, and strategic location for maritime trade therefore loom far larger in Washington’s calculus than any abstract concern with democracy, international law, or human rights.

Ideology, again, is secondary here. What matters is deal-making, playing ball, and cooperating with US commercial interests. This helps explain Washington’s readiness to work with figures drawn from the core of the Chavista state rather than the long-favored exile opposition. Loyalty is transactional, not doctrinal; legitimacy flows not from ballots or values, but from compliance with the imperial center.

This also explains why the attack on Venezuela appears unprovoked when assessed through traditional security frameworks. Caracas posed no credible military threat to the United States, nor was the country on the brink of imminent collapse, something that might have triggered intervention on classical Rooseveltian grounds. The intervention’s triggers were economic; its legalistic framing as countering narco-terrorism or drug-trafficking is nothing but window dressing. The goal was to secure US leverage over Venezuelan resources while decisively excluding non-hemispheric competitors — above all China and Russia — from consolidating their economic footholds in the Americas.

The unresolved question is whether this “Trump Corollary” is geographically bounded. Does it, to put it bluntly, actually put America First? Will the military interventions stop in the Americas, or does it foreshadow a broader claim that the entire world constitutes a legitimate US sphere of interest — continuing the decades-long tradition of transforming the American military into a global police force?

Only time will tell. But if the “American-Sphere” logic that undergirds the Trump doctrine loses its geographic grip and sense of limits to bleed into outright globalism, promoting US corporatism worldwide down the barrel of a gun, then the Trump administration has learned the wrong lesson from America’s postwar misadventures. While the more macho America Firsters might try to justify military interventions in the hemisphere on realpolitik and geoeconomic grounds, such militarism will be exceedingly difficult to explain, and indeed execute, across far-flung Eurasia: where other regional powers will inevitably exercise their own claims to sphere of influence. 

Ultimately, unrestrained militarism is not only expensive and inflationary, but risky and escalatory. If Trump loses touch with basic tenets of Washingtonian realism, and refuses to adapt to the more regionalist and civilizational world that is emerging, then his checkmating of Maduro will be remembered as a pyrrhic victory that reenergized military interventionism, emboldened the globalists, and precipitated America’s decline as a great power.

Regardless, the approach lays bare the fiction that Trump’s foreign policy is isolationist. It is not. The Trump Doctrine may be skeptical of nation-building, regime change, and Middle-East-style forever wars, but it has no aversion to unilateral, willful, and even unprovoked use of force. On the contrary, it will resort to military action whenever and wherever it perceives American economic dominance to be challenged.

This exposes the central contradiction at the heart of Trumpian realism. While the National Security Strategy speaks the language of sovereignty, national interest, and restraint, it simultaneously treats the sovereignty of adversarial states as conditional and expendable. The logic is blunt and unapologetic: power decides. Unless adversaries are sufficiently strong to deter American action, they can be intimidated, coerced, or even removed.

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By framing a cross-border military strike and the forcible abduction of a sitting head of state as an extension of domestic criminal process, Washington has effectively asserted a doctrine of extraterritorial police power backed by overwhelming force to use as cover for economic conquest. If national sovereignty can be nullified by indictment from a foreign, extra-judicial court, then no state outside the protective umbrella of US power can consider itself secure. Today it is Venezuela; tomorrow it could just as easily be Iran — or any other regime that can be rhetorically and legalistically reframed as “criminal” rather than simply a political, ideological, or strategic rival.

There is an uncomfortable irony at play here. In removing the head of a sovereign country through a swift “special military operation”, Donald Trump accomplished precisely what Vladimir Putin attempted — and failed — to achieve in Ukraine. He excised an intractable thorn on his side in hopes of reestablishing America’s sphere of influence over a country in its near-abroad. The difference lies not in principle, but in capability. The operation showcased the overwhelming superiority of US military power while signaling Washington’s renewed willingness to enforce its hemispheric dominance. After all, preventing Western encroachment in Ukraine is far more existential for Russia than Venezuela is for the US. 

Trump will undoubtedly tout this as a decisive victory. He outmaneuvered Maduro, avoided US casualties — at least for now — and demonstrated American primacy and resolve to the region. Yet the more difficult task lies ahead. Whether Washington can compel Maduro’s successor — be it Vice President Rodríguez or Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López — to subordinate Venezuelan sovereignty to American economic and strategic interests remains far from certain. The assumption that, through US military coercion or its “Big Stick”, Venezuela will simply offer up its oil and mineral wealth to US companies reflects a deep imperial hubris that harkens to the 19th century and is at odds with the post-unipolar reality of our time.

In the end, US machismo may have bested Chavismo tactically. Strategically, however, it risks entrenching the very dynamics it claims to oppose: hardened nationalism, militarized politics, and a regional order defined less by stability and mutual recognition than by fear and intimidation. It also does little to address the fentanyl crisis in the United States, which has nothing to do with Venezuela being a cocaine transit hub. 

Still, the precedent has been set for new waves of US military interventions abroad — and in a multinodal world increasingly resistant to American primacy, the costs of enforcing an economic empire through global policing may yet exceed the benefits.

The 2002 National Security Strategy was one such moment. Clocking in at more than 12,000 words, only 12 of them really counted, as they articulated a dramatic new doctrine of preventive war. Preventive war is often casually conflated with preemption — striking first at an adversary that is about to attack — but it is something very different, and, as American practice, was radical and unprecedented: “America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.” The 2002 strategy was written as window dressing for the soon-to-be-unleashed Iraq War — and it was an invitation to disaster. As I wrote at the time, the so-called Bush Doctrine “will backfire” and “transform world politics in a way that diminishes U.S. power and influence”.

The 2025 US National Security Strategy is another exception to the rule of the disposable démarche. Aside from a shared, counterproductive longing for intimate relationships with Persian Gulf oil sheiks, the two documents reflect markedly disparate dispositions. Yet the 2025 strategy will prove similarly consequential — and once again, it is a harbinger of ruin. The new missive accurately describes the United States as it now appears on the world stage: nakedly extractive, dismissive of friends, appeasing of adversaries, cozy with autocrats, profit seeking (with the ruling clan in on the action), and animated by a rancid, eugenicist-inflected, white-nationalist crusade.

As an articulation of strategy, however, it is less than coherent. The logic behind its fixation on two regions in particular, the Middle East and the Western Hemisphere, is opaque at best, and the document more generally is often inconsistent, commonly expressing contradictory notions within the same paragraph. It is, above all else, preening — a boatload of boasting buttressed by vague platitudes — although the emphasis on unchecked American unilateralism is a sustained theme.

Lurking behind all the bravado is something more disturbing. This administration’s release is reminiscent of another missive that came wrapped in an American flag: Sly and the Family Stone’s cry-for-help of an album There’s A Riot Goin’ On (1971), which was well described by one critic as “numbing” and “darkly self-referential” and by another as “an album made by a disillusioned, drug-addicted multimillionaire rock star going slowly mad in a mansion”. Unlike Riot, however, the 2025 National Security Strategy is so simplistic and puerile it is hard not to laugh at it — until you realize that it must be taken both literally and seriously.

As if written by a narcissist untutored in the most basic understanding of international relations, the document reveals a naive unawareness that international relations are recursive — actions lead to reactions, and thus understanding and anticipating those responses should inform strategy. Yet it begins with a dozen paragraphs that start with the phrase “we want” — sounding, fittingly, like a spoiled child pounding its highchair. These wants are expressed primarily via vacuous trash talk, which for the most part doesn’t much engage with actual foreign policy. There is a notable exception, the spit-take inducing “We want to maintain the United States’ unrivaled ‘soft power’ through which we exercise positive influence throughout the world that furthers our interests”, which is a more-than-curious aspiration for an administration that has seemed determined to insult and alienate its traditional allies and friends, starting with neighboring Canada, with which, until recently, the US enjoyed the extraordinary luxury of uncommonly close and warm relations.

A second set of petulant “we wants” define the administration’s “core foreign policy interests”, as well such a statement should. However, as noted, the logic behind these key choices is somewhat hard to fathom. The strategy emphasizes, and gives the lion’s share of its attention to, the importance of Latin America. It pronounces a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, although it is not clear what that actually means as practical policy, beyond the President’s fetish for welding his name onto things — even institutions declared unnecessary, such as, recently, the US Institute of Peace, which his agents had previously raided, gutted and shuttered. But the world will take note of one important, declarative passage: the plan for “a readjustment of our global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere”. Prioritizing one thing requires reduced emphasis on others.

Indeed, an American retreat to the safe harbors of the Western Hemisphere is clearly afoot. This 19th-century instinct, however, faces a number of 21st-century challenges. Even if the US could somehow command the destiny of Latin America, it is an odd place on the table for a great power to place all of its chips. As the document itself notes, “the Indo-Pacific is already the source of almost half the world’s GDP”. The European Union (about two-thirds the size of the enormous US economy), accounts for another 15%. Whereas South America weighs in with about 4%.

Moreover, and ironically, the administration’s elbow throwing in its asserted backyard is more likely to reduce rather than enhance its political influence even on what it imagines to be its home turf, a region with deeply felt and long-standing sensitivities to US aggrandizement. And to the extent that the “Trump Corollary” is motivated by anxiety about the increasing economic influence of China in the region, it is distinctly ill-suited to push back against that tide. China is an enormously important export market for all the major South American economies — Brazil, Chile and Peru each export more than twice as much to China as they do to the US. Add to this the fact that the Trump Administration sees trade in zero-sum terms (at best), has been busy haphazardly slapping tariffs on countries all over the world, and views imports with a visceral hostility, and it becomes hard to imagine South American states lining up to undermine their trading relationships with the People’s Republic.

The new US doctrine will also have pernicious consequences for the rest of the world, encouraging what can be called “the dictator’s takeaway”. By announcing unquestionable geopolitical primacy over its near abroad and declaring repeatedly that the US will never allow itself to be constrained by international norms, laws and institutions, combined with its recent willingness to use force with impunity (and even criminally) as it sees fit, it invites other powers to do the same. Resetting the standards of what is understood to be legitimate behavior will have widespread consequences — even (or perhaps especially) when undertaken by a great power that sneers at the very notion of legitimacy that is not defined by the barrel of a gun. The lesson is clear, and will not go unnoticed by militarized powers who would seek to dominate their own neighborhoods, and, just as important, by smaller players who might face intimidation. From a US perspective, local spheres of influence are to be expected — and respected.

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America's new doctrine of Empire

By Aris Roussinos

The thinking behind the administration’s second geopolitical priority, the Middle East, is even harder to grasp at face value, and the National Security Strategy itself struggles to strike a consistent tone in this regard. It touts America’s vast energy production, independence, and even “American energy dominance”, and notes, correctly, that US military commitments to ensure the flow of Persian Gulf oil might have made sense decades ago, but no longer do so today. Surely if there was a place to scale back US commitments in a changing geopolitical environment, this would be it. Yet instead it recites stale platitudes about (unspecified) threats by outsiders to dominate the region, and it is pleased to celebrate “President Trump’s successful revitalization of our alliances in the Gulf”, which involves the handing out of security guarantees like candy to local potentates.

This analytical knot is untied by the humbling realization that US foreign policy cannot currently be understood in terms of a state pursuing the National Interest (as realists like myself tend to imagine), but as a personalist regime motivated by private advantage. This is the most nakedly corrupt Executive Branch in American history, with policies for sale to the highest bidder, motivated to provide enrichment opportunities for the presidential family and its coterie of affiliates. Elites in the Middle East have been swift to both recognize this and provide the necessary largesse. This, along with the influence of powerful domestic constituencies (especially evangelical Christians), also likely explains why the security of Israel is defined as a “core” national security interest of the United States, despite acknowledging, with uncharacteristic understatement, that “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains thorny”.

If anything, beyond its two pet projects, the definition of US interests is even more inscrutable. It is one thing to abandon the idea of democracy promotion, an approach that always had its serious and thoughtful detractors, and which was practiced with more than a modicum of hypocrisy, as the US routinely sidled up to some unsavory regimes (at times gratuitously so — here’s looking at you, Dr Kissinger). But it is very much another to renounce the laudable values that the US has always espoused, and instead rearticulate the American disposition as one designed to make the world safe for autocracy.

This well describes the bizarre policy articulated with regard to Russia, which is: settle Putin’s war of aggression on the terms he lays out, and call it peace. Indeed, another “core interest” is defined as “an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine”, with the goal of reestablishing “strategic stability with Russia” (a phrase used twice in two pages). The eager, unconditional embrace of Russia is another would-be puzzle, but the logic of which falls into place in the context of the President’s unabashed admiration for personalist authoritarians; what falls under the category of legitimate international behavior; and, surely, some salivating at the perceived business opportunities that might lie on the horizon. Not since Neville Chamberlain has a world leader been so eager to “cut a deal” without interest in or regard for the implications and viability of its terms.

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How Trump conquered Europe

By Wolfgang Munchau

And if the rest of Europe is left less secure by a one-sided resolution that rewards Russian aggression, that would not ruffle the new American worldview. The Trump administration postures as one that will not lecture other states about their domestic affairs, which it renounces as “America’s misguided experiment with hectoring these nations—especially the Gulf monarchies—into abandoning their traditions” (like murdering journalists). There is one exception to this new hands-off tolerance, however — Europe. The administration can merrily break bread with the worst of the worst when it comes to human rights abusers, but the “elite driven” policies found in the liberal democracies of Western Europe it simply cannot stomach. And under the banner of “Restoring European Greatness” (nation rebuilding?), the US will do much more than simply hector. Rather, it demands — and its foreign policy will be designed to bring about — basic changes in how European countries choose to govern themselves. In particular, they must bend their regulatory structures to meet America’s needs (or at least the demands of US-based tech behemoths), take immediate and urgent measures to increase their whiteness (“we want Europe to remain European”), and, as JD Vance had previously lectured, to be nicer to the extreme far-Right populists in their midst.

As the US, following its new National Security Strategy, retreats to “its” hemisphere, counts the Middle East as a core interest, is increasingly protectionist and admiring of autocrats, and models the behavior that great powers should be unconstrained in dominating their neighborhoods by any means, the news for America’s traditional friends and allies in Asia cannot be good. They must contemplate the possibility that if a war breaks out, the Americans will not attend. Bullies tend to cower when confronted with an adversary that might be able to punch back.

Ultimately, the 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States reads like a living will. Its beneficiaries are Russia, China, and the Gulf States. As for America’s (former) friends, the message could not be clearer: we no longer stand behind you. We will, however, at times stand in front of you, menacingly, and inquire about your lunch money. Adam Smith quipped “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation”. Years from now, this may be seen as the moment when America finally exhausted its supply.

I can say safely that nobody understands the economic and political consequences of Donald Trump. I am not likening his policies to one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time. But what the two have in common is radical unpredictability. In quantum mechanics, unpredictability arises at the time of measurement. Economists have the same problem with Trump. We cannot look at the current slew of economic data to see where this is going. If you are an anti-Trump economic evangelist, you are very likely to get things wrong, just as economists did with Brexit or Trump’s first term.

I expect that the US economy will probably be fine. Before you jump to the conclusion that I am a Trump supporter, I can assure you that I am not. Nor was I a Brexit supporter, though I was critical of the self-defeating arguments of the Remain campaign. I see similar dynamics at work in the US right now. Trump’s critics, both in the US and Europe, keep on underestimating him with predictions of imminent gloom.

They predicted that his tariffs would raise inflation. So far that has not happened. I don’t think it will. Some also predicted that the US stock market would soon crash. In fact, Europeans celebrated the collapse in the S&P 500 that followed the Liberation Day tariffs. They erroneously relied on the markets as a corrective mechanism to frustrate Trump’s tariffs. That did not happen. The markets recovered and never looked back. The overall level of tariffs today is at least as high as those announced by Trump on 2 April. They are bound to get higher still, now that he has slapped a 100% tariff on branded pharmaceutical products and a 50% tariff on Ikea furniture.

It does not look like the stock market will do us the favor of crashing during the Trump presidency. It is quite possible that the S&P 500 will rise from its current level of around 6,400 to 10,000. Market valuations could rise from the stratospheric to the mesospheric to the exospheric. Prices will crash eventually. But that might not happen until the next Democratic president.

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Trump’s monumentalist aesthetic

By Adam Ellwanger and John J. Waters

The economic success I expect to see is that of a last hurrah of a declining power. It will be a hell of a party, with the fake glitter of a Mar-a-Lago ballroom: lights, music and attention-deflecting smoke and mirrors.

John Maynard Keynes once said all politicians were under the influence of long-defunct economists. We can safely say that Trump is not. The Left hates him, of course. But so does the old Right. Monetarists would have been aghast at his assault on the independence of the Federal Reserve. Virtually every school of conservative economic thought, from the ancient to modern, would have rejected his tariffs. Or his unfunded tax cuts. Or the stablecoins through which he wants to attract investment in the US debt markets. You can’t even caricature his policies as “businessman economics” either. Businesspeople tend to be fiscally conservative.

The reason I chose not to underestimate him is that his big tax cuts, extreme deregulation and tariffs will turn the US into a super-competitive economy at the expense of other Western countries. We Europeans still live in the technological Stone Age, but at least we used to have competitive industries. We are now being squeezed by the US and China both in innovation and competitiveness.

China’s economic policies could not more different than Trump’s, but they share one important trait: they both ignore the advice of mainstream macroeconomics. President Xi Jinping is an old-fashioned mercantilist. He maximizes exports and minimizes imports. He does not care what this does to the rest of the world. China has not freed up its capital markets. The Chinese renminbi is locked in a semi-fixed exchange rate against the dollar. China unashamedly picks winners. Were we not told that government should never, ever do this? China’s central planners picked the electric car, the entire battery supply chain behind it, and solar panels. The problem with picking winners is not the act of picking. It is about what you pick. We Westerners should perhaps not pick winners. China did better.

Trump is picking fossil fuels. If your time horizon is four years, this is going to be fine. Cheap oil and gas fuel the fire of American entrepreneurialism. But China’s energy policy is much more sophisticated. They still burn coal, but they invest into renewable energies like nobody else. One of the water dams being planned will have a capacity as large as the entire energy consumption of countries such as Greece.

To use Trump’s own words: China has all the cards. It has more people; it has a work ethic that has been lost in the West; it has industrial supply chains; and it is willing to shift resources from one part to another in our economy with a ruthlessness that our democracies cannot replicate. I would rather live in Europe or the US than in China. But I am not optimistic about the long-term prospects of the West.

I have no doubt that Trump’s economics will fail in the end. It will not become the foundation of a new economic era; he will not match Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in influencing economic policy in the West for decades after they left the stage. They both failed before they succeeded. With Trump, it is more likely to be the other way round.

What I am sure of, however, that he will fail in his foreign policies even in the short run. The reason is a complete lack of interest in strategic alliances, and in strategic action in general. The only chance the democratic West has against the rise of China and its global partners-in-crime is as a well-managed team.

I am not just talking about his delusional announcements: that it would take him 24 hours to cut a peace in deal in Ukraine. Or his claim at the end of last week that we are about to have a peace deal in Gaza. He claims to have ended seven wars. He has not. Nor has he saved millions of lives. His “America First” agenda is by definition not one of foreign policy. His only foreign policy objective is to get the Nobel Peace Prize.

Trump’s delusions are easy to dismiss, but they have will have serious effects. The first casualty of Trump’s foreign policy is Europe. Europe must be very careful about Trump’s latest policy u-turn on Ukraine. This looks like a setup to me. Don’t fall for the “Ukraine is winning” narrative that has recently popped up out of nowhere. Nothing substantive has changed on the ground. I think Trump is setting Europe up for failure by insisting that Ukraine can win the war, and that Europe should pay for it. If it fails, as I believe it will, he can blame Europe.

There is no way that Europe can make itself independent of Russian oil with the speed that Trump demands. He knows that, of course. Europe is financially too weak and politically too divided to be able to fund the Ukraine war on its own. This is still true if the EU commission ends up sequestering €200 billion in Russian reserve assets currently frozen in EU bank accounts. I concluded a long time ago that, because they all think in national terms, European political elites are incapable of strategic geopolitical thought. A Franco-German fighter project is on the rocks right now, because the two countries cannot agree on the work share. Pettiness has a habit of intruding all the time in European politics, even during emergencies.

Japan is as weak as Europe. It too has an outdated industrial base and a declining population. Under Trump, the West will fragment into a disparate collection of failed states. An inward-looking US will remain its most formidable power, but not a leader. The US will look like the Norma Desmond character from Sunset Boulevard, who thought that she was still big, and that it was the movies that got smaller.

Movie directors know about turning points — the peripeteia in classical Greek drama — where events shift, either in the positive or the negative direction. To his supporters, Trump may well the person who arrests the decline of civilization. They will end up disappointed. So may his detractors who see his presidency as a phase of comic relief, a moment that will eventually pass before the final happy ending sets in.

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Europe’s reckless warmongering

By Wolfgang Münchau

My guess is that America will not be great at the end of the MAGA episode. But America will be OK, if not great, whereas Europe will be neither. What we would really need is a reboot, but we are afraid. There was a tradition in European intellectual thought that started with the acknowledgment that you don’t know. Scio nescio, Plato wrote. Feynman’s comment about quantum mechanics is in that spirit too. That state of mind is a precondition for success. You start at zero. It is where the Age of Enlightenment began. It is where China started too.

Trump is the very opposite of this. The real tragedy is that his detractors, are too.

Now, though, the unipolar moment that began in 1989 is over. Yet what we see today is not fragmentation or chaos — but a return to normalcy. The international system is reverting to its natural condition: a post-hegemonic, multi-nodal, and regionalized world where sovereign, civilizational powers coexist and balance one another within their historical spheres of interest. Elsewhere, I have called this process the Great Transition, one which emphasizes the re-emergence of geopolitical plurality and cultural multiplicity after a brief, artificial experiment in universalism.

If there is any coherence to a Trump doctrine, it is in recognizing this reality. And in this context, the Pentagon’s new “National Defense Strategy” (NDS) offers a much-welcome shift. Accepting the return of history and geopolitics, the proposed draft affirms the need to adapt to the changing international environment. It prioritizes defending the homeland and the contested boundaries of “American Sphere” from extra-regional interference — over the global military containment of China or Russia. Yet many in Washington, and even some Trump appointees, will abhor this shift.

From the moment he came down that golden escalator, Trump declared war on the foreign policy blob — the bipartisan consensus that treated America as a sucker, paying for others’ security, underwriting institutions that constrained us, and intervening in conflicts that made us less secure. Whatever one thinks of his style or execution, his insistence on “America First” was a necessary corrective, a reminder that the first duty of American statecraft is to its own people.

Still, these welcome bouts of realism are not only bound to be interrupted by the expected fervors of moralism and tired shibboleths about US global leadership, but also by a deeper, more entrenched force: globalism. This globalism is less about free trade or international cooperation and more reflects a broad cognitive bias. It is not a coherent ideology but an ideational reflex so deeply institutionalized that it pervades our foreign policy establishment, our universities, and even some among the MAGA counter-establishment. It is not a cabal to be purged but a mentality that saturates the very air of Washington.

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Trump can forge a new Middle East

By Arta Moeini

This mindset itself manifests in two forms. The first is the liberal universalism of the Clintons, Bushes, and Obamas, who sought to expand alliances, international institutions, human rights organizations, and liberal democracy: all at gunpoint and in pursuit of a cosmopolitan dream of global homogeneity. In the post-Trump era, however, its more enduring variant is the militarized globalism of figures like John Bolton. This latter group insists on permanent unipolarity and American unilateralism, achieved via the primacy of the US military.

The Boltonians — and their acolytes in Jerusalem — weaponize a cartoonish idea of “Western civilization” in a Manichaean struggle against a caricatured notion of global barbarism and international terrorism. The liberal internationalists Trump deposed championed the universalism of US values and yearned for the “woke imperium”; for the Boltonians and closeted Neocons who successfully infiltrated the MAGA-verse, the universalism of imperial force reigns supreme. Nevertheless, both groups are globalist, both are dogmatic defenders of US global hegemony, and both find common cause in mortgaging American sovereignty at the altar of ideology.

Consider Ukraine. Nato expansion — promoted as the defense of liberal order — has in fact destabilized Europe and entangled America in an attritional war with no clear endgame. By offering promises America was neither willing nor able to fulfill, Washington walked Ukraine down a primrose path that left it devastated, Russia emboldened, and Europe vassalized. Instead of securing stability, then, Nato expansion has deepened insecurity and forced America into another open-ended commitment very far from its vital interests.

Or take the Middle East, where the Boltonians have hoisted their flag most strongly. Just weeks ago, the United States found itself dragged into the Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran. Despite the IDF’s heavy bombardment of Iranian military targets and nuclear enrichment facilities, shadowed by America’s own strikes, the war demonstrated once again that force cannot destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity, technological know-how, or its will to rebuild. Iran emerged bloodied but resilient, its nationalism hardened. Yet Washington reflexively positioned itself as a co-belligerent — risking escalation, draining munitions, and distracting from higher priorities.

Besides the fact that both Europe and the Middle East are peripheral to America’s main strategic interests in the Western Hemisphere, as noted in the NDS, perhaps the highest priority for the savvy American strategist is ensuring US competitiveness in the 21st century through a project of national renewal. To remain a great power, Washington must urgently upgrade its infrastructure and manufacturing capacity, while creating regionally integrated supply chains for essential items like semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and microchips.

Instead, by remaining enmeshed in endless conflicts abroad, America has accumulated $37.5 trillion in debt, devastating communities and harming the middle class. For most Americans, bombing the Houthis — whom they have never even met in real life — to protect maritime trade to Europe could never justify the costs. Additionally, rampant US intervention has serious military consequences, compounding their societal and economic impacts. In June, over less than two weeks, the US spent billions to defend Israel, depleting its global stockpiles of advanced missile interceptors like THAAD, even as it exposed serious vulnerabilities in its munitions procurement and overall military readiness. All this, it goes without saying, makes America less secure.

In any case, these examples reveal the deeper truth. Universalism in all its forms — whether liberal or militarized — erodes sovereignty, global cultural pluralism, and the righteous spirit that undergirds anti-hegemonic movements like America First. It collapses the diversity of civilizations into a single template, one to be imposed by force and maintained by empire. It multiplies and extends permanent commitments that serve the imperium and its managerial class, along the way betraying the republic’s founding principles.

Even strands of neorealism, such as John Mearsheimer’s brand of offensive realism, fall prey to this globalist bias: by globalizing great-power competition and advocating for China’s military containment, they portray international relations as nothing more than a mechanistic, Hobbesian race for hegemony, everywhere and forever. But this, too, is not realism; it is rationalized universalism. And it has led Washington, like Athens in Thucydides’ history, towards imperial overstretch and decay.

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Trump’s strategy of peace

By George Beebe

Ultimately, a state can be a conservative commonwealth serving its people, or an empire enriching its special interests, war oligarchs, and security-rentier class. But it cannot be both. Yet for decades, America, corrupted by its globalist reflex, has chosen empire. In fact, our “bipartisan” foreign policy consensus has corrupted and redefined the “national interest” itself, turning it into a justification for permanent war.

The danger today is that the globalist bias — be it liberal or realist, Neocon or Boltonian — will keep us chained to the illusions of unipolarity, luring us with enchanting calls to hegemony like the sirens of Greek mythology. Fixating our gaze on the 20th century, and the postwar status quo, they reduce the world to a zero-sum battlespace between perpetual black and white blocs — encouraging endless military intervention while resurrecting old dogmas to justify them. In short, the globalist cognitive bias prevents us from conceiving a cohesive grand strategy for the post-hegemonic era that has now arrived, keeping us vulnerable and hastening our decline.

What the country needs now, instead, is something I’d call sovereign realism: a radical foreign policy unburdened by ideology, freed from the conceits of universalism, and grounded in the conservation of American strength. That means privileging sovereignty over universalist crusades, regional balances of power over global policing, selective protection over blanket primacy, and renewal at home as the foundation of strength abroad. It means diplomacy without illusions: talking to adversaries and allies alike based on reciprocity and strategic empathy, not sanctimony or moralism.

Above all, it means adopting a new approach that shapes itself to the polycentric world at hand, rather than resisting it with futile bids for unipolarity. The Great Transition is not a threat to be conquered, then, but a reality to be navigated. For, in the end, the postwar “international community” was little more than a projection, international law a polite fiction, and globalization artificial and contrived. What lies ahead is not disorder but the world as it truly is — a concert of civilizational powers insisting, as America itself does, on their own sovereignty and resisting a managerial empire: whether run from Washington or Beijing.

That might sound like an odd thing to say about a country with, indisputably, the mightiest military machine on the planet, one that currently allocates about a trillion dollars a year on defense spending, which is more than the next seven biggest spenders combined. But such figures can be deceptive. Material capabilities are at least crudely measurable — you can count tanks, ships, soldiers and planes, among other things — but our understanding of how those assets translate into international political power remains extremely shallow. In 1985, the Soviet Union loomed as a fearsome military titan. In 1992, the Soviet Union did not exist.

The US is not much like the USSR. But it is, discomfortingly, a lot like interwar France: a great power with a glass jaw. Scholars still debate the sources of France’s military collapse in the Second World War, but its internal atrophy (which also contributed to the ease with which it descended into docile, humiliating collaboration), was well understood, then and now. William Shirer, an eyewitness to the catastrophe, shared the widely held view that in 1925 France was “the greatest power on the continent”. Yet, as others would subsequently observe, it would take “just ten years for the leading country in Europe to become a helpless victim”. And though it is exceedingly unlikely that the US will suffer France’s particular fate, the collapse of its international political influence will probably be as sudden, and as wrenchingly consequential.

There is a yawning gap between apparent military capabilities and the ability to apply that power to well-articulated ends. And there are also limits to what the use of force can achieve. Very often, force fails to deliver the political goods. At the turn of this century, the mighty US could not, despite marshalling overwhelming military force, impose its will or secure its desired outcomes in long wars against two very weak states, Afghanistan and Iraq. More generally, the limits to the exercise of military power also include unintended political consequences. Russia’s war on Ukraine (which also exposed a very large gap between Russia’s material military capabilities on paper and its actual prowess), was disastrous for some of its most closely held international political objectives — witness, for example, the ascension of Sweden and Finland to the NATO alliance. This isn’t to suggest that the use of military force can never achieve political objectives; it is simply to observe that a massive military machine may be a necessary component of what makes a great power, but it is scarcely sufficient.

Against whom is the US likely to use its military might, and to achieve what? It may be that America will unleash its air force against Iran. If so, it will have been dragged into that conflict, over its previously stated reluctance to do so, by another country, and with uncertain and cascading long-term implications. Such stumbling circumstances are hardly the hallmarks of a great power commanding the grand chessboard of world politics. Moreover, beyond Iran, it is hard to imagine the country against which the US will deploy its vast military power, to bend that adversary to its will. That essential, sobering thought experiment serves as a reminder that political influence is the day-to-day currency of international power — and that the exercise of power, in any form, is only successful if it advances a country’s goals on the world stage. We are, by that metric, witnessing measures in contemporary American foreign policy that are nothing short of geopolitical suicide. And as a result, despite its new obsession with posturing masculinity, the US will be increasingly impotent as a world power, often flexing its large, impressive, and well-oiled muscles — but rarely, if ever, achieving its objectives.

The collapse of American power is due to two interrelated factors that will be difficult to repair. The US is a broken society, riddled with domestic political dysfunction. And those pathologies have led to the election (and, ruinously, the reelection) of a singularly unsuited steward of its foreign policy. Again, though the US is in little danger of foreign conquest, in its domestic political disarray it does eerily resemble interwar France — a troubled and deeply divided society characterized by what one historian described as “the embrace of unreason”. As Raymond Aron recalled in his memoirs, “basically, France didn’t exist any longer.” Instead, “it existed only in the hatred of the French for each other.” Shirer saw a country whose strength was “gradually sapped by dissention and division”, as well as “the ineptness of its leaders, the corruption of its press, and a feeling of growing confusion, hopelessness, and cynicism… of its people”.

America’s political disarray and paralyzing polarization is partially organic (over many issues, it is a sharply divided society), but that polarization has also been exacerbated by its instrumental manipulation. As Martin Wolf argues in his recent book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, soaring inequality and massive concentrations of wealth at the very top presented a political challenge to the Republican Party: “How, after all, does a political party dedicated to the material interests of the top 0.1% of the income distribution win and hold power in a universal suffrage democracy? The answer is pluto-populism.” That is, of plutocrats masquerading as populists, “a specific elite political strategy” that involves the purposeful inflaming of cultural issues to divert attention from their economic plundering. One consequence of this strategy is that it heightens, intensifies and even radicalizes existing domestic divisions.

America’s disfigured political landscape has led its electoral system to produce what would have previously been unthinkable — a personalist autocrat with an utter disdain for the Republic’s core ideals. Where does support for such a figure come from?

As Hans Kohn observed in Revolutions and Dictatorships (1939), “No nation is necessarily Fascist; no nation is entirely immune against Fascism.” In interwar Europe, fascism emerged from disorder, where it found the support of many who craved the restoration of their understanding of “order” — including, crucially, “certain conservative forces” who believed they could harness its power to crush their domestic adversaries, naively thinking they could “control fascism once they had helped it into power”. Or as the filmmaker Paul Schrader succinctly put it a few months ago, “When you vote for a strongman, your assumption is that he’ll ‘take care’ of those other people, and that his strength will benefit you in some way. But you’re just gonna end up on a list. Everyone does.”

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Iran’s rebels have lost their nerve

By Christopher de Bellaigue

The collateral damage of all this is the end of American power. One part of the broader Trump-tastrophe is that fundamental foreign policy questions no longer have obvious answers. What is the purpose of contemporary American power? Can we still speak of something as general as the American national interest? Personalist regimes tend not to pursue national interest, but the interests of the ruling clan and its intimate affiliates. Worse still, in the case of the Trump administration, is the pursuit of foolish, impulsive, and incoherent policies, which leave in their wake the wreckage of shattered international political partnerships that will create opportunities for others to exploit.

Trump’s most astonishing foreign policy blunder has taken place closest to home. One of the unique advantages that America has long enjoyed as a great power — it is hard to think of another example in history — is its uncommonly warm relations with its nearest neighbors. Yet Trump has managed to sabotage US relations with Canada, an act of geopolitical self-immolation that is largely without precedent. It is a blunder on the order of Japan’s decision to attack Pearl Harbor, but at least that howler followed an identifiable deductive logic: since rapacious Japanese militarists aspired to take over half the world, they calculated that at some point the effort would finally bring them into conflict with the sluggish, isolationist US, so perhaps it was best to try to seize the initiative with a devastating preventive surprise attack. That turned out to be a very bad bet, but at least its rationale had a sliver of logical plausibility, which is more than can be said for America’s current behavior towards Canada.

Burning bridges with Canada has turned out to be the template, not the exception, of the Trump administration’s foreign policy. It has alienated allies in Europe with the barely contained glee of a child playing with matches. In Asia, where, in theory, the US would be well served to try to limit China’s growing political reach, its trade policies have left natural allies, such as Japan, South Korea and Vietnam, injured by, and necessarily on guard against, American behavior. When it comes to South America, which some would see as falling under the purview of a US “sphere of influence”, Trump’s self-defeating economic policies have once again invited political inroads by others, especially China and the European Union. And beyond a curious concern for a handful of white South Africans, Team Trump recoils from Africa to such an extent that it has withdrawn life-saving humanitarian assistance, achieving little more than sullying the American image.

Ultimately, the only countries in the world that have reason to feel confident in the stability of their ties to the US are the Gulf States, because their relationships are not a function of the American national interest, but rather a reflection of the business interests of the presidential family and their affiliates. (Indeed, any sober assessment of US security guarantees in the region would conclude that, although they may have made sense in the Seventies, they are plainly anachronistic today.)

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Trump’s torching of American power extends to many of his domestic policies as well. His war on America’s elite academic institutions, which are the envy of the world, will eventually come at the cost of US innovation in science and technology, undermining almost every aspect of its domestic economy — as well as jeopardizing future military innovations. There is an auditorium full of foreign-born Nobel Prize winners who eagerly, often desperately, made their way to the US over the years. One shudders to think what would have been if Trumpism had been embraced earlier. That auditorium would be empty. The next auditorium will be empty. This is to the detriment not only of America’s soft power — its global appeal to the best and the brightest — but also its hard power, as crucial scientific breakthroughs increasingly take place beyond the gated community of this xenophobic kingdom.

Students of international relations are properly trained to recite that in world politics, the future is unwritten, and anything is possible. In an anarchic world, countries must ultimately be prepared for the unexpected, and for the worst. But with the second coming of Trump, the US is stretching that wise admonition beyond the breaking point. American foreign policy is now directed by a wildly mercurial and bracingly untutored would-be despot. Worse still, and in contrast to season one of the Trump show, the president is surrounded by sycophants (some of whom actually know better, but, shamelessly lusting for proximity to power, have renounced their own beliefs), unchecked by timid legislators submissively clinging to their seats, and abetted by a monied class seemingly determined to prove that no value is more important than insatiable chase of still more wealth.

The world no longer has the comforting luxury of pretending that Trump 1.0 was some freak aberration. And the world has surely observed that Trump 2.0 — which must be understood as representing what “America” now is — is a much more radical, and dangerous, and unpredictable enterprise. Such a country simply cannot be counted on by others. Its word is meaningless, its values absent, and its interests, beyond enriching the royal family, are indecipherable. Who is the US rooting for in the Russia-Ukraine war? Would the US come to the defense of its NATO allies in Europe? Would the US really care if China comes to dominate all of East Asia? Not so long ago, it would have been absurd to even ask such questions. Now, who knows?

All of this will matter, and it will matter in ways that will undermine American power by the most narrow calculus of its interest: its ability to get what it wants in the international arena. President Trump is known for his reverence of an early mentor, Roy Cohn, the notorious hatchet man for Joseph McCarthy, and one suspects that Hans Morgenthau would describe American foreign policy today as he did McCarthyism: “a fraudulent, stupid and dangerous farce.” It will not be long before the rest of the world reaches that conclusion.

Some $36 trillion in debt underscores the wide gap between America’s expansive international objectives and its limited capacity to attain them — a condition famously described by the New Deal journalist Walter Lippmann as foreign-policy “insolvency.” Continuing the hubristic course we have followed since the Nineties would be disastrous.

Trump gets all this. Which is why he is aiming to lower the temperature across various international theaters, counterbalance the power of rival states, and reset America’s global engagement. His own shorthand, Reagan-borrowed description of the strategy — peace through strength — is apt. His ability to deliver on this vision is still an open question, however. To a large degree, it depends on the people he taps to carry it out.

Richard Nixon faced a somewhat similar situation at the start of his presidency. America was overextended abroad in an unwinnable Vietnam War that bore little connection to the nation’s vital security interests. An increasingly confident Soviet Union was flexing its muscles in Czechoslovakia and Egypt and threatening to race past parity into superiority over the US nuclear arsenal. Economically, an overvalued dollar was crippling exports and rendering the United States highly vulnerable to a foreign-induced financial crisis. At home, the country was riven by violent clashes over Vietnam and racial injustice.

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Nixon’s signature foreign-policy actions — making peace in Vietnam, pursuing détente and arms control with the Kremlin, opening diplomatic talks with China, stabilizing the Arab-Israeli conflict, and ending the gold standard — were aimed at aligning America’s goals and means abroad. At home, Nixon sought a breathing spell in which the United States could heal its internal wounds. By and large, it worked.

Although the particulars differ, Trump appears to be pursuing a similar vision of settling regional conflicts, stabilizing great-power relations, rebalancing American foreign trade, and buying time to mend internal rifts. He clearly recognizes that the so-called unipolar moment — the period when US power so greatly outmatched that of any other nation that the world had little choice but to bend to Washington’s will — has long been over.

As his secretary of state and interim national-security adviser, Marco Rubio, has concisely put it, “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power… It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world. You have multiple countries now who have the capability to end life on Earth. And so we need to really work hard to avoid armed conflict as much as possible, but never at the expense of our national interest.”

Trump drove these points home last week in a seminal speech he delivered in Saudi Arabia. “We were the only power in the world,” he said, “and so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem. In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use US policy to dispense justice for their sins.”

The proponents of this model, he continued, “wrecked far more nations than they built and the [interventionists] were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.” The contrast with President George W. Bush, Trump’s most recent GOP predecessor, couldn’t be more stark. In his Second Inaugural Address, remember, Bush called on Washington to “seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

Can Trump realize his more realistic vision?

The early signals from abroad give reason for hope. The interim tariff-reduction arrangement struck by US and Chinese negotiators last week is a sign that a compromise trade deal is realistic. Iran has cautiously indicated an openness to a pragmatic nuclear deal, while key Arab states are increasingly attracted to Trump’s vision of a modernized Middle East no longer riven by conflict and dependent on oil and gas exports.

Meanwhile, Moscow’s initial skepticism over Trump’s intentions has given way to growing optimism that he seeks not just an end to the war in Ukraine, but genuine rapprochement. Europe, too, is beginning to adjust to the reality that it can no longer simply outsource its security to the American hegemon, albeit with a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Team Trump’s success last week in defusing a looming nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan demonstrated impressive diplomatic skill.

Success requires much more than winning over foreign leaders, however. To implement deals, his administration must also engage effectively with the many moving parts at lower levels in foreign governments and manage those broader relationships. For this, Trump must bring Washington into line — and here, the early signs are more sobering.

Part of his challenge is institutional: the US government spent much of the past three decades building policy bureaucracies devoted to transforming foreign societies, and these groups have a clear self-interest in resisting Trump’s vision. The period of unipolarity also encouraged bad habits in the parts of the government supposedly designed to conduct and support diplomacy, because America’s coercive capabilities made the traditional arts of balancing the power and interests of foreign competitors seem unnecessary.

Part of the challenge is personal and political. There is a good deal of truth in the old Washington adage that personnel is policy. Finding staff that has the requisite combination of talent, experience, and loyalty is no simple matter, particularly when large parts of the GOP, and nearly all mainstream media, remain convinced that diplomatic engagement with adversaries constitutes appeasement and is therefore counterproductive.

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Trump’s painful first-term experiences with opposition within his own administration have made him unusually sensitive to this problem. Still, there is no easy solution. Few of the officials who have been overseeing America’s long string of fruitless wars and failed democratization campaigns favor a new approach. And many of those calling for change lack the diplomatic polish and administrative dexterity born of experience. The large number of unfilled foreign-policy slots in the administration and the recent controversies over appointments at the Pentagon and on the National Security Council staff underscore just how difficult solving this issue is proving to be.

So while there is cause for optimism, the reality is that the much-needed change Trump is seeking in American foreign policy will be agonizingly difficult to achieve. It will certainly not come quickly. For Nixon, finalizing a peace accord in Vietnam took years. Full diplomatic relations with China were not established until well into the Carter administration. If Trump achieves even half of what he envisions during the next four years, he will have made remarkable progress. But his legacy will be that much more enduring and important if he manages to select and build a new cadre of able experts that share his foreign-policy ideas and carry his work forward.

Correction: Due to an editorial oversight, an earlier version of this essay misstated the size of the US debt.

But the Viet Cong and the People’s Army of Vietnam just couldn’t be licked. Their tenacity was an insult to America’s national pride. And, if you believed US policymakers, an existential threat too. If the communists won in Vietnam, they would take over other Asian countries. They wouldn’t stop there, though. Commies never do. They wouldn’t rest until they dominated the whole wide world. This was known as the domino theory. “If we quit Vietnam tomorrow we’ll be fighting in Hawaii, and next week, we’ll have to be fighting in San Francisco,” President Lyndon B. Johnson said.

Young men like Trump were cannon fodder in the showdown against the red threat. Every week, his peers were drafted into the military and dropped in Vietnam’s muggy jungles. They fought and bled and returned home in body bags. Between 1964 and 1967, nearly one million Americans were conscripted; in 1968, an additional 300,000 were.

Trump was supposed to be one of them. Until May 1968, he had been a university student, which ensured him automatic draft deferments. But after graduating, he no longer had a reason to dodge his patriotic duty. The time had come for him to put America first.

There was no way he was going to do that. “You think I’m stupid, I wasn’t going to Vietnam,” Trump reportedly told his lawyer years later. And he didn’t. He avoided the draft thanks to a medical exemption. In the autumn of 1968, as others his age were shipped off to Saigon, Trump went to see a podiatrist in Queens. Miraculously, the foot doctor found that he suffered from heel spurs — bony growths on both his heels. And just like that, ’Nam was null.

It was all a little too convenient. A New York Times investigation suggests that the diagnosis was fake. It had apparently been given as a “favor” to Trump’s father. The podiatrist, it turned out, was one of his tenants.

Just because Trump didn’t go to Vietnam doesn’t mean it left no mark on him. The war, which ended 50 years ago today with the victory of the Vietnamese communists, was the defining event of his generation. It traumatized Americans, leaving scars on the national psyche like napalm on human flesh. The casualties were huge: nearly 60,000 US soldiers and as many as three million Vietnamese. That it ended in ignominy for America only added to the trauma.

The conflict tore America apart, dividing families, triggering mass protests, and polarizing politics. At the time, it really did feel like the apocalypse was now. Trump couldn’t help but soak up the vibes. And those vibes stayed with him, shaping his view of America’s role in the world. Half a century on, the Vietnam War can help us understand Trump’s seemingly erratic foreign policy.

As historians Charlie Laderman and Brendan Simms have shown, the President has held a consistent worldview since the Seventies. To him, the US is a sucker, spending tons of money underwriting the security of other countries; in some cases, like in Vietnam, it even sends soldiers to fight and die for them. The outcome is always the same: America loses bigly.

For the President, the Vietnam War was a turning point. Before Vietnam, America was great. After Vietnam, it was in decline. “Prior to Vietnam, we never lost a war, right?” he said in 2015. “Vietnam was a loss. Nothing else you can call it. And then after that… we don’t even think about winning.”

Trump appears to have learned two lessons from America’s defeat at the hands of Vietnamese communists. The first: don’t wage war in faraway lands for spurious ideals like freedom and democracy. “I thought [Vietnam] was a terrible war,” Trump said in 2019. “I thought it was very far away. At that time, nobody had ever heard of the country.”

Of course, that wasn’t true. By 1965, when US troops were sent to Vietnam, the country had been the focus of relentless press coverage for two decades. Vietnam was initially a French colony. In 1941, communist leader Ho Chi Minh formed the Viet Minh to achieve independence. But France wasn’t on board with Vietnamese self-determination, and the Indochina War broke out in 1946.

The US didn’t sit on the sidelines. A new cadre of policymakers in Washington believed that Vietnamese communists couldn’t be allowed to win. The Cold War was underway, and the free world needed every inch of land it could get. America backed the French, supplying them with weapons and treasure. It made little difference. France lost anyway, and in 1954 Vietnamese communists established their own state in North Vietnam.

South Vietnam, however, fell under the protection of the US. For the North, an American puppet state on Vietnamese soil was intolerable. And so they fought for reunification. At first, America sent only military advisers. Their role: to train and mentor the South Vietnamese army. But that didn’t move the needle. Eventually, the US sent its own soldiers to do the fighting.

Despite the hyperbole, Trump’s point stands. Vietnam meant little to Americans. And it turned out that a poor country in Asia turning communist didn’t endanger US national security. The proof is that Vietnam did become a communist state after 1975. Needless to say, San Francisco didn’t become the battleground of World War Three.

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It would, however, be a mistake to conclude that Vietnam turned Trump into a peacenik non-interventionist. In fact, the very opposite happened. The second lesson Trump learned from the war is that losing is unacceptable. If America does fight, it must win by any means necessary. Failure is not an option. “I guess if you do it, you have to go to win. We didn’t go to win [in Vietnam],” he lamented in 1999.

These two lessons are now guiding Trump’s actions on the world stage. Since returning to office, he has been reducing US support for Ukraine. He looks hellbent on forcing some sort of peace settlement, even if it ends up rewarding Russia for its aggression and destabilizing Europe. At this moment, Vietnam is surely in the back of his mind: Trump believes that if the Ukraine war drags on, the US will eventually get sucked in. Steve Bannon, the godfather of the MAGA movement, has said as much. “If we aren’t careful, it will turn into Trump’s Vietnam,” he told Politico in January.

It’s a glib historical parallel. For one thing, the Vietnamese were fighting each other; the Ukrainians are fighting an imperialist invader. For another, there’s little risk that American troops would end up in Ukraine. If any countries were to put boots on the ground, it would most probably be European ones.

Another reason Trump is disengaging from Ukraine is to redeploy US power to the Indo-Pacific. The President has long believed that China threatens America. In 2000, he warned that the country was “our biggest long-term challenge”. Ten years later, he said, “I don’t see greatness [for America] unless we do something about China.” Unsurprisingly, he has surrounded himself with China hawks.

Yet the Trump administration will struggle to contain an assertive China. Far from being a genius geopolitical move, abandoning Ukraine signals that the US is no longer willing to stand by its democratic allies. That makes it more likely that China will invade Taiwan in the near future. And this, in turn, could result in a showdown between the US and China. Ironically, in trying to avoid another Vietnam, Trump may well be precipitating a massive conflict in Asia.

As former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd argued in his 2022 book The Avoidable War, the risk of “armed conflict between the US and China… has become a real possibility”. Beyond a potential war over Taiwan, Rudd points to one in the South China Sea, where China is sabre-rattling: “Perhaps one of the most likely — albeit unintentional — scenarios would arise from a collision between Chinese and American vessels.” It’s not difficult to imagine how a larger US presence in the Indo-Pacific could trigger exactly that kind of scenario.

In recent weeks, Trump’s tariffs on China have been another source of friction. In response, China has hinted at a possible fight with the US. “If war is what the US wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war, or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end,” the Chinese government said.

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There are signs that the American mindset is similar. In a secret memo leaked last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the Pentagon to prepare for war with China. “China is the Department’s sole pacing threat,” Hegseth wrote, “and denial of a Chinese fait accompli seizure of Taiwan — while simultaneously defending the US homeland is the Department’s sole pacing scenario.”

Trump is probably well aware of these risks. He may even be at peace with the prospect of facing China. After all, the second lesson he took from Vietnam is that if America goes to war, it has to win. Make no mistake, though: a conflict with China would be unwinnable.

For starters, nuclear weapons could come into play. If that happened, to borrow a line from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the living would envy the dead. The devastation on both sides would be total. “The United States would suffer unimaginable levels of death and destruction,” says defense analyst Alex Alfirraz Scheers, who modeled an America-China nuclear war in his paper “The Illogic of Strategic Superiority”.

But even if it didn’t involve nuclear weapons, the war would not go well for America. The fighting would occur mainly in the seas and skies of the Western Pacific. “It would be a strategic quagmire,” warns Scheers. China makes for a formidable enemy: it has the largest military in the world, with more than two million active personnel, and a navy that now outshines the US.

The Vietnam War would look like a mere skirmish by comparison. And this time, the stakes would be of another order of magnitude. After all, America was able to walk away from Vietnam. The war broke its confidence, yes, but it didn’t destroy its status as a superpower. Even after the humiliation of Vietnam, the United States remained the global hegemon. The American century marched on.

A war with China could bring the American century to an end. What a legacy that would be for a president obsessed with big, beautiful wins.

But Hegseth’s message extended beyond Ukraine. “Stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe,” he continued, stating that European forces should assume responsibility for providing post-war security guarantees for Ukraine, explicitly ruling out US troop involvement. This aligns with Trump’s broader push for NATO allies to increase their defense spending. He clarified that these troops would not be part of a NATO-led mission and would not be covered under the alliance’s Article 5 guarantee, underscoring America’s disengagement from European security affairs.

While these statements didn’t come as much of a surprise to European leaders, given Trump’s previous rhetoric, they did reinforce a fundamental shift in US Ukraine policy, one which prioritizes diplomacy over continued military engagement. While this represents a welcome departure from Biden’s more confrontational stance, the path to peace remains fraught with obstacles.

Hegseth did not outline specifics for a possible peace deal between Ukraine and Russia. But, according to a leaked version of Trump’s proposed peace plan, reported by Ukrainian media, the territories seized by Russia would be ceded in exchange for security guarantees. Kyiv would be expected to renounce military and diplomatic efforts to reclaim lost land and officially recognize Russian sovereignty over these regions.

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Regardless of this plan’s veracity, it is clear that it reflects Russia’s main condition for peace — something of which Trump is fully aware. His administration’s recognition of this geopolitical reality, coupled with the improbability of Ukraine regaining those territories, signals an important shift toward realistic diplomacy. Further reinforcing this new diplomatic approach, Trump announced on Truth Social that he had held a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s nations… We will begin by calling President Zelensky, of Ukraine, to inform him of the conversation, something which I will be doing right now”.

Re-establishing direct dialogue between Washington and Moscow is undoubtedly a positive development. However, the biggest near-term risk is that Trump may attempt to pressure Putin into a ceasefire without a fully developed peace framework. This is bound to fail.

For Moscow, we know, will not compromise on its key demands, which include the complete withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from four Russian-occupied regions. We know from Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov that any ultimatums from the US would be ineffective and that any negotiations must recognize the “reality on the ground”.

A major problem here is the proposal to have European-led peacekeeping forces in Ukraine, which is almost certain to face strong resistance from Moscow. Regardless of whether they are NATO-affiliated or not, Russia would see them as a NATO proxy force — an unacceptable scenario. As Anatol Lieven put it: “This is just as unacceptable to the Russian government and establishment as NATO membership for Ukraine itself. Indeed, the Russians see no essential difference between the two”.

Another complicating factor is that America’s security decoupling from Europe — the Europeanization of NATO — also risks becoming an obstacle to peace, insofar as it is, paradoxically, emboldening a more hawkish stance from key European leaders.

Within the European Union, an influential pro-war coalition has emerged, primarily driven by Poland, Estonia, and Lithuania. The new European Commission has placed these countries in key foreign policy and defense roles, further solidifying their influence. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, in his inaugural address as European Council President, stated: “If Europe is to survive, it must be armed”.

Similarly, Kaja Kallas, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, has insisted that Europe must significantly increase its defense spending in response to the US disengagement, while maintaining the position that Russia must be defeated at all costs. Meanwhile, Andrius Kubilius, the new European Commissioner for Defense, has called for a “Big Bang approach” to ramp up European defense production.

Beyond the EU, the UK is equally belligerent and is doubling down on its military support for Ukraine. On January 16, Starmer signed a bilateral defense partnership in Kyiv, pledging an additional £3 billion in annual military aid, on top of the £12.8 billion already provided. The deal also reaffirms Britain’s backing for Ukraine’s NATO membership. 

NATO Secretary-General, Mark Rutte, echoed these sentiments on Wednesday, stating that he “agrees” with Trump on the need to “equalize security assistance to Ukraine” but warned that “to truly change the course of the conflict, we must do even more”. His remarks follow recent statements advocating for NATO to “adopt a wartime mindset”.

Underlying this growing military buildup is the belief that Russia poses an existential threat to Europe, despite Moscow lacking both the capability and intent to attack NATO. What might be dismissed as European posturing in response to US disengagement actually represents a significant obstacle to peace. As long as European leaders continue to escalate militarily, the chances of a diplomatic resolution to the Ukraine war diminish.

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The real danger is that by persistently predicting an inevitable war with Russia, and preparing for it, Europe may ultimately bring that very war into reality. Faced with a rapidly growing European arms buildup and entrenched anti-Russian sentiment, Moscow may conclude that waiting is no longer an option. If European NATO members continue escalating tensions, Russia could decide to strike preemptively rather than risk allowing NATO’s military capabilities to reach a critical threshold. Even in a less extreme scenario, Europe’s increasingly aggressive posture is fundamentally incompatible with a lasting peace in Ukraine. 

In other words, while the Trump administration’s pivot away from Europe and push for diplomacy may appear to be a step toward de-escalation, it risks unintentionally achieving the opposite. Rather than restraining Europe’s military ambitions, US disengagement is emboldening key EU and NATO actors — particularly in Eastern Europe — to pursue an increasingly confrontational stance toward Russia.

The Europeanization of NATO, framed as a necessity following US withdrawal, has accelerated the continent’s militarization and its leaders’ demonization of Russia, perpetuating the very conditions that caused the conflict in Ukraine in the first place. Instead of using this moment to engage in diplomacy, European leaders view the US retreat as a reason to escalate militarily. In this sense, Washington’s decoupling from Europe is at odds with Trump’s stated aim of achieving peace in Ukraine.

Unless European leadership acknowledges Russia’s security concerns, the prospects for a long-term settlement will remain bleak — and the risk of a larger war will continue to loom over the continent. Ironically, the US’s attempt to distance itself from European security affairs may ultimately pull it back into an even larger conflict — one that it will have far less control over.

It is admittedly hard not to enjoy the spectacle. Whether Trump is humiliating the Canadian or Danish governments, the EU or Lord Peter Mandelson, he is forcing through the end of global technocracy. Yet while there are plenty of Western leaders cheering this, as evident in the delight of Right-wingers such as Nigel Farage and Giorgia Meloni in being invited to Trump’s inauguration, the fact that they’re happy to be pulled along by Trump’s coattails suggests that they, too, are still thinking in globalist rather than national terms.

The fact, moreover, that these populists assume Trump’s victory is their victory too tells us that their political calculations are cast in terms of the ebb and flow of global culture wars, rather than the progress of their own countries. The national interest is, by definition, a national affair, not a matter of narrowly partisan politics. That so many on the Right are thrilled by the new President reveals a mentality still trapped in the bygone era of the first Cold War, in which the success of one’s politics was measured in terms of the strength of one’s international alliances and ideological devotion to a foreign superpower.

This struggle to articulate or defend national interests is not just a matter of the age of the populist leaders, or folk memories of global ideological rivalries. It also reflects the political structure of populism, and how much it remains defined by its opponent: globalist liberalism. Ultimately, both sides represent two sides of the same coin: the absence of institutionalized representation and legitimate mass parties that once comprised the substance of national political life.

The populist shuns representative institutions because it undercuts his efforts to rule directly through personal charisma and connection with the people; the technocrat, for his part, despises representation because it gets in the way of rule by experts. Both share hostility to party-political representation. Yet without it, there can be no means for the nation to imprint its demands on the state. The national interest remains to be served.

Britain, at least, should be in a better position to carve out its own position in this new world order. This is not only because, by Trump’s reckoning, the UK has a trade deficit with the US and is thus less likely to be subject to tariffs — for now. More important is the fact that Britain is in a stronger position because it was among the first to make a lasting break with globalism with the Brexit in 2016. It also has a long, if buried, history of non-alignment and independence as seen in the era of “splendid isolation” that ruled British foreign policy across most of the 19th century. These are deep resources to draw on in a new era of national interest politics.

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Belatedly, even some mainstream politicians are now realizing this. In a sharp denunciation of wars of intervention and neo-conservative regime change, shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick concluded that Britain should adopt a Palmerstonian foreign policy, ruthlessly focused on self-interest. Jenrick was name-checking Henry John Temple (1784-1865), the Viscount Palmerston, the Victorian-era statesman most widely remembered for his famous dictum that Britain has no eternal allies or enemies, only eternal interests. In his study of dissent over British foreign policy, AJP Taylor recounts that the famous phrase was delivered “to a thin house” in 1848 and deployed to defend Palmerston’s record against one of his most determined and maniacal opponents, the cranky Tory aristocrat David Urquhart, who was convinced Palmerston was a Russian agent.

While the same smears of being in the pay of Moscow still meet any criticisms of intervention or British expression of national interest today, our circumstances are otherwise greatly changed. The policy of splendid isolation — itself a retrospective label — was improvised after Britain’s withdrawal in 1822 from the Congress system, the global policing regime established in 1815 by the victors of the Napoleonic Wars. Following this early Brexit from a precocious effort at global governance, Britain sought to avoid entangling alliances with continental powers while maintaining her international naval supremacy.

Today, however, Britain’s policy is almost exactly the reverse across every register. That’s clear from our obsession with strengthening global governance, to our hopeless preoccupation with the so-called Special Relationship. Both Tory and Labour governments have pursued the redoubling of commitments to the UN and NATO as a means to mitigate the risks to national independence that came with the Brexit vote.

We seem, in short, to have plenty of permanent friends — yet no permanent interests. Our naval power, it goes without saying, is not only reduced in material terms, but also built around our allies rather than British strength. We rename attack submarines to avoid offending our allies, while the nuclear warheads carried by our ballistic missile submarines are dependent on US technology and support to function.

What would a Palmerstonian foreign policy mean in such a context? In the first place, it would require a lucid reckoning with change. Rather than serving the national interest, the cost of protecting global sea lanes by maintaining British naval power on a world scale today would be an act of national self-sacrifice, or even self-annihilation. Whatever we might seek to achieve with naval power today would necessarily have to be in coalition. In light of even America’s inability to stamp out threats to global trade such as the Houthi chokehold on the Red Sea, the diminished utility of global naval power combined with the fact Britain is an island would have to be offset by greater economic self-sufficiency as opposed to free trade liberalism.

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Although Britain will always be a trading nation — not least by virtue of being an island — plenty could be done to enhance our self-sufficiency. Restoring control over Britain’s borders would be a vital step not only in strengthening security but also forcing business to cultivate a skilled national labor force. Rebuilding industry, reshoring critical supply chains, building new nuclear power stations and expanding fossil fuel production in the North Sea would all be good starts. With this groundwork in place, Britain could then start reestablishing permanent interests — rather than cultivating reliance on permanent friends. As these interests will be dictated in part both by geography and history, they will be significant continuities in British foreign policy. But maintaining friendly relations with our neighbors need not mean tying ourselves up in the entangling alliances that Palmerston sought to avoid.

None of this will be easy. Time and again, British leaders have shown themselves unable to think independently. Battered by catastrophic unpopularity so early in his premiership, many in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party clearly hope that crawling back to Brussels will make up for his domestic weakness. At the same time, Starmer is under fire from Trump, who has said the UK is “out of line” but can be managed without the need for punitive tariffs. At any rate, Starmer’s opponents should resist the urge to cheer Trump on: to do so would be to accept Trump’s humiliating designation of the UK as a vassal state that can be easily wrangled. There would be little point in ending a permanent friendship with Brussels, only to cling more tightly to another with Washington.

Britain’s post-war policy of seeking to be the trans-Atlantic bridge between Europe and the US has unsurprisingly resulted only in Europe and the US trampling all over British interests as they cross the bridge. Britain should be thinking more in terms of balancing between the two, carefully maintaining ties with both while seizing advantage wherever it presents itself, whether in trade or security – including pursuing connections with more distant powers such as China if need be.

It goes without saying, of course, that if there is to be a new age of Palmerstonian foreign policy, it will require more than simply repeating the cliches of a dead prime minister’s speeches, owning the libs and hoping foreign leaders will humiliate your domestic opponents. It will require brave and vigorous national leadership, willing to pursue the kind of disruption that Trump is enacting in US foreign policy. For 30 years, if not longer, our foreign policy has been dedicated to globalist ends — solving climate change, global poverty, human rights. It is time to make foreign policy serve national needs, and in the context of Britain today this would mean in service of the pursuit of national renewal.

For now, however, Britain’s permanent interests are buried beneath the rubble of our permanent friendships. If we are to excavate those interests, it will require a willingness to cast aside the debris of Cold War-era alliances and membership of crumbling 20^th-century organizations. If we are to have a new Palmerstonian foreign policy, we must be willing to endure the risks that will come with an exhilarating new era of splendid isolation.

Especially in the conduct of foreign policy, Trump 1.0 was happy to hire respected officials suggested by the establishment — but who nonetheless turned out to be totally wrong for him. One was General Mattis, his first Secretary of Defence. Mattis was a true warrior who in 1991 led the Marines to Baghdad in record time. But he also happened to be a Democrat, who fiercely resisted all of Trump’s policies and even tried to appoint Hillary’s candidate for the Pentagon as his own deputy. Trump had to replace him, at great political cost.

Another mistaken appointment was Rex Tillerson. Trump’s first Secretary of State, he came recommended by such establishment luminaries as Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates. Tillerson had spent his life in the tough and supremely realistic oil business. But as soon as he moved into his seventh floor office, he became enslaved by State Department dogma. One was that the US needed French and German approval for any plan to rebuild Nato, already depleted after years of under-funding. That inevitably ensured that nothing would be done: Berlin did not want to spend anything and Paris had nothing to spend.

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The end result was Trump’s highly publicised quarrel with Angela Merkel, who patiently pointed out that war was utterly improbable in Europe, so that buying guns and ammunition would just be a waste of money. It goes without saying that elite opinion on both sides of the Atlantic backed the learned chancellor’s flawless logic, as against Trump’s boorish ranting. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we all now know that the President was right — and the policy elite wrong. A better Secretary of State could have advanced Trump’s policy much more effectively by activating Germany’s own military experts, bitterly aware of the sad state of their country’s military. They might also have lobbied the German press, setting the stage for a very different meeting with Merkel.

Beyond the question of appointments, the foreign policy challenges of his first term should have taught him two things. One: present the Europeans with ultimatums rather than just requests. Two: ignore State Department dogma on anything important. That second point is obvious enough after Trump’s first presidency. Consider, for instance, the plan Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner came up with to bring peace to the Middle East. Their idea was simple: they would ask their friends in Bahrain, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to open diplomatic relations with Israel.

Coming from a young businessman with no Middle East policy credentials, Kushner’s proposals were immediately dismissed as childish by Tillerson and his minders at the State Department. As they patiently explained, no Arab state could possibly agree to open diplomatic relations with Israel until the Palestine problem was solved, and any attempt to pursue such an absurd project could only end in refusals that were humiliating both for Trump and his country. But in the end, almost all accepted Kushner’s proposal. Only Saudi Arabia delayed, and even Riyadh immediately allowed Israeli airliners headed east to overfly its vast territories, at huge savings in time and fuel.

Given all this, Trump 2.0 will undoubtedly be guided in his foreign policy by his own closest supporters — rather than by any specious bureaucratic dogmas. That certainly applies to the Ukraine war, which cannot end unless Putin agrees to end it. Diplomatically, Trump will start with a significant advantage: unlike Biden, he never insulted Putin, and this would allow Putin to accept a compromise peace without being criticised as weak. I expect intense action soon after Trump’s inauguration.

Not that conciliation can work with Iran. Knowing that his own Democratic party had a long tradition of military interventions, from Truman in Korea to LBJ in Vietnam, President Obama was determined to prevent war with Iran. His method was to embrace the Ayatollah’s regime, by offering it economic favours that greatly increased Tehran’s oil revenues. And this policy persisted even after it became obvious that the money was not being spent on the needs of Iran’s population, but was instead being funnelled to its nuclear programme and to proxy militias across the region.

When Trump assumed office in 2016, strict controls on Iran’s oil revenues sharply reduced the regime’s military expansion. But when Biden replaced Trump, Obama’s Iran policy was resumed; his exceptionally conciliatory Iran coordinator was back in action; and Tehran’s greatly increased oil revenues funded the multi-front war currently underway across the Middle East.

As it happens, one of Biden’s last moves was to send B-52 heavy bombers to the Middle East, in an attempt to deter any more Iranian ballistic missile attacks, fearing that Israel would react by destroying Iran’s export terminal on Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf. Though Trump will certainly act immediately to squeeze Iranian revenues, if that is not enough those B-52s might well come in handy, notwithstanding the fact that Trump is an instinctive anti-interventionist.

Nor has Trump only learned foreign policy lessons since leaving the White House in 2021. He is also much better prepared to deal with his own party. Never a Republican until he ran for president, Trump now appreciates that today’s GOP is very different from the old cliche of country clubs, free trade and low taxes. Apart from anything else, the Republican establishment has stopped resisting state power across the economy and society. By 2023, after all, there were some 22 million civil servants at all levels of government, and even that understates the number of Americans who now live off the state, funded by grants from all manner of NGOs.

Whenever the Democratic Party controls a bureaucracy — from counties to the federal government — it expands it by granting public money to “nonprofits” that promise to improve public education, promote renewable energy or help the poor, among other good things — while being Democratic Party operatives. These NGOs also pay generous salaries to their executives: long before Michelle Obama became a “centimillionaire” after her eight White House years, she received a handsome paycheck from a hospital nonprofit in Chicago.

That’s how the Democratic Party pays for its manpower. Under Trump 2.0, the President’s officials will work hard to ensure that the Republicans in the House and Senate are rigorous in their scrutiny of every part of the federal budget, resisting the temptation to swap favours with the Democrats at the taxpayer’s expense.

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No less important, this second Trump presidency will finally grapple with the question of domestic manufacturing. Under Trump 1.0, after all, the Republicans continued to demand free trade with China, which Trump opposed, and now opposes even more, because it enriches America’s chief geopolitical antagonist. Combined with the likely slashing of red tape — a phenomenon that afflicts every industry from Hawaii to Maine — this could yet spark a domestic manufacturing boom. That is surely needed: while the Japanese are able to build cheap and attractive kei cars with engines under 660cc, US manufacturers are forced to sell cars that can safely be driven at high speeds, even to customers who simply want to go shopping nearby. Not that deregulation will be limited to the American automotive sector. The oil and gas industry will doubtless benefit even more, while the aviation sector urgently needs aggressive anti-monopoly action to break up the somnolent Boeing and uncreative Lockheed.

In the end, though, Americans ultimately elected Trump to stop illegal migration. I am therefore confident that, by inauguration day in January, the administration will have presented a robust plan for the border. For starters, the right of asylum will be limited to those who really need protection from political or racial persecution, and who account for less than 1% of those who entered the US under Biden. The practice of airlifting thousands of monocultural illegal immigrants to small towns — notably the 1,500 Mauritanians who abruptly arrived in Lockland, Ohio — will end immediately. Why? Because illegal immigrants will immediately be sent back across the border as soon as they arrive. This was done effectively enough under Trump 1.0, and much has been learned since.

Beyond the policy arena, meanwhile, many Americans might plausibly suggest that no amount of legislation can capture the real meaning of Trump’s victory: the country’s verdict on everything from political prosecutions and critical race theory to its biased media and the unashamed moral bankruptcy of its entertainment industry. What’s clear enough, at any rate, is that Americans crave something different, and as he enters the White House for the second time, Donald Trump can offer just that.

The trouble is that “America First” might be an appealing sales pitch, but Trump does not have a coherent foreign policy vision. Instead, the former president has consistent (and concerning) foreign policy dispositions: wariness of allies, admiration for authoritarians, and deep-seated protectionist instincts. Moreover, he is untutored in (and incurious about) most foreign policy questions, is often impulsive, and easily swayed by flattery — attributes that matter because, in contrast to the first Trump Administration which was largely staffed by experienced professionals, the second would likely be populated by sycophants and yes-men.

The fact is, America First is disingenuous, tissue-thin rhetoric. No administration in modern US history did not think it was prioritising the American national interest. Certainly, different presidents had distinct visions regarding how those interests might best be advanced, but none of them — none — however profoundly misguided their actions might appear in retrospect, ever pursued a foreign policy course that they did not think would be the best choice for the country.

What is distinct about America First is its tactics and vision. It is short-sighted and transactional, viewing every interaction with other countries, friends and foes alike, as a zero-sum confrontation in which the objective is to extract the largest possible share of the perceived visible gains. This is to be achieved by uninhibited, sharp-elbowed diplomacy, with little regard for historical legacies or long-run implications. In this vision, alliances are viewed with scepticism, representing an albatross of unnecessary obligations, which, like a protection racket or a mercenary force, only makes sense if they turn a monetary profit.

Some advocates of America First will call this Realism. It is not. The realist approach to international relations emphasises the consequences of anarchy: that international relations are commonly characterised by clashes of interest, and in that context actors in world politics may resort to the use of force to get what they want — and there are no guarantees the behaviour of those others will not descend into horrifying barbarism. Thus states must be prepared to defend themselves and look out for their own interests.

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This is admittedly a gloomy perspective, but there is nothing in Realism that implies what America First suggests. If anything, the opposite is true: it is a rare realist indeed who imagines that the path to geopolitical paradise is paved by short-sighted, nakedly selfish measures. Indeed the US tried this approach once before, after the First World War, and it was a catastrophic failure. After victory, an America First disposition led the US to pursue obtusely myopic demands for repayment of the debts incurred by its wartime allies, whose exhausted economies lay in ruins. A young John Foster Dulles urged the US to forgive those obligations, not because he placed priority on the interests of others, but because it was in America’s own best interest to do so. As he argued cogently, pursuing the apparent immediate interest — which the US had every right to do — was foolish, unrealistic, and would undermine “the big objective” of global “political and financial stability”.

Similarly, as the economic going got tough, the US also turned to an America First trade strategy, most famously with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. More than 1,000 economists urged President Hoover to veto that tariff bill, again, not because they were looking out for the interests of other countries, but because they thought it would be bad for America. They were right. Imports to America fell dramatically — but America’s exports fell even more, as the legislation engendered retaliation and contributed to the collapse of world trade and the deepening of the global Great Depression.

And, of course, there was the signature foreign policy of America First, isolationism. It is possible that by withdrawing from Europe and acting timidly in Asia, the US naively thought that the world’s problems would somehow not encroach upon its shores. However, as Jacob Heilbrunn details in America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators, many of the prominent proponents of isolationism were also, at best, authoritarian curious, and, at worst, rooting for the wrong team. “America First” now, in both its politics and its economics, is a direct descendant of America First then.

Neither incarnation is well described as Realism. Indeed, after the Second World War, the US learned the lessons of its previous, self-mutilating policy choices and chose instead to embrace a more far-sighted foreign policy vision. In pursuit of what classical realist Arnold Wolfers would describe as “milieu goals”, it sought, often at some cost, to shape the international political environment in ways that would be conducive to the long-run American national interest. With the generosity of the Marshall Plan and the cultivation of alliances , America’s postwar grand strategy, measured, as Raymond Aron would insist, against the only metric that matters — what otherwise might have been — could not have been more successful.

Of course, all things must pass, and America now is not America then. Its foreign policy disposition should, and must, adjust to present realities. It is not just wise, but essential, to take stock of the National Interest and assess how best it might be advanced. A survey of contemporary world politics suggests that America First, take two, will be as disastrous for the US as it was the last time around.

Nowhere is the folly of American First redux more plainly visible than with regard to the Russia-Ukraine war. Reputable scholars can debate the long-run underlying causes of Russia’s invasion; also up for legitimate discussion is how deeply the US ought to be (indirectly) engaged in that conflict, and whether some of its policies might invite unintended and dangerous risks. There is no doubt, however, that the murderous authoritarian Vladimir Putin initiated this war of conquest, and that it is in the strong interest of the West for the lesson of the war to be that “wars of conquest by Russia do not pay”. Yet team Trump is eager to see this conflict end on exactly Russia’s terms, likely due not to reasoned geostrategic analysis, but the former president’s personal pique at Ukraine’s leadership, and his bizarre admiration for ruthless dictators.

More generally, it is hard to imagine US membership in Nato surviving a second Trump term. Once again, the former president’s analysis is curious, imagining the alliance as a dues-paying organisation in which the Europeans are not adequately kicking back to their American protectors. In his mind, the US would save money by pulling out. The first argument is fatuous, the second somewhat far-fetched, as the US is almost certain to increase rather than decrease its defence spending, regardless of its Nato membership.

Here at least the argument against Nato can be expressed in a more sophisticated way: should the US leave the alliance, some smart scholars argue, its European members would (finally) increase their own defence spending. That is a deductively sound argument, although not necessarily an experiment that most realists, whose watchwords are politics and prudence, would want to run. A post-Nato Europe might emerge as a more coherent and capable force, or the withdrawal of American participation might expose and invite political rifts across the continent; in either event it would surely reduce US political influence there. Given that Europe is one of the world’s political and economic epicentres, those are not risks to be embraced casually.

In marked contrast, the one region of the world where the isolationist instincts and alliance wariness of America First make the most sense is the Middle East. US security commitments in the Persian Gulf might have had an underlying logic to them in the Seventies, but they are plainly anachronistic today, given basic changes to world energy markets, the nature of security threats to the region, and limits of American power. In addition, if Israel explicitly renounces any commitment to a two-state solution, or devolves into its own version of a radical theocracy, it becomes increasingly hard to understand how that special relationship would continue to reflect the American national interest.

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Here the experiment of withdrawing American power and risking what might follow makes much more sense. Unfortunately, and uncharacteristically in US history, Trump’s foreign policy instincts are more similar to those of a personalist authoritarian than the temporary steward of democratic state. Thus for reasons of family business (Saudi Arabia has a multi-billion-dollar investment in his son-in-law, for example) and domestic politics (for the crucial conservative Christian base of his support, an unconditional US commitment to Israel is an inviolable act of faith, not the cool calculation of strategic interest), even under Trump the US might remain deeply enmeshed in the region, preventing the often-strained logic of America First from prevailing in the one part of the world where it might actually well apply.

Setting aside the prospect that a second-term President Trump — now unrestrained by anything remotely resembling “adults in the room” — might do something impetuous and outlandish (such as bombing Mexico), a proper reckoning of the consequences of America First must look to Asia. Here again the prospects are less than heartening. Trump talks forcefully about confronting China, and on this one issue, there does seem to be a general bipartisan consensus in the US. The barriers to success of an America First approach in this new epicentre of the world’s geopolitical chessboard, however, are formidable. Rhetoric, swagger, and more militarised confrontations are ill-suited to the challenge at hand. As American diplomat George F. Kennan emphasised during the Cold War, the problem — and the prize — are political. The danger is not that China will serially invade its neighbours, in a foolish and self-defeating bid for regional hegemony; the danger is that China might come to dominate the Asia-Pacific politically.

But America First is not very good at politics. A sound China policy will require close political partnerships with key countries throughout the region. And here is where Trump’s hatred of allies (or freeloaders, as he imagines them) might prove most catastrophic. The former president previously made noises about abandoning Korea, and his foreign policy instincts cannot but raise concerns in Japan. Moreover, if the US indeed undermines Nato, actors in Asia might further question whether the US would stay committed to the region. Whereas China is going to stay in the region, indefinitely, for obvious reasons of geography. Thus the risk is that US heavy-handedness with allies, alongside assessments of its reduced reliability more generally, might lead some states to “bandwagon” with China — that is, reach some political accommodation with Beijing that cedes to its preferences on major international issues. Such an outcome would not be in the US national interest, no matter how narrowly defined.

Compounding all of this, enormously, will be the Trump Tariffs, a centrepiece (indeed obsession) of both his domestic and foreign policy vision. There are precious few consistencies across Trump’s political thinking over the decades, but he has always been a passionate protectionist. And, as noted, if Trump is re-elected, it would be shocking if we did not witness what will surely be celebrated as Huge Tariffs. Again, one can responsibly debate the fine grained tactics of trade policy. The protectionism-as-panacea fantasy, however, will swiftly prove to be a nightmare. It will be both very bad for the US economy, and very bad for the world economy — miseries likely to be compounded by retaliatory tariffs imposed by others, which will likely not bring out the best in an administration that prides itself on “toughness”.

Worst of all, perhaps, is that the enormous economic distress caused by Trump Tariffs, among otherwise friendly states in Europe and Asia, will further undermine the broader goals of US foreign policy, and likely spark a growth inhibiting trade war that will contribute to a panoply of geopolitical stressors globally. In sum, America First will likely lead to America Alone, getting less of what it wants, in a more dangerous world, populated by players increasingly disposed to find distance from the madness of its king.

Henry Kissinger, the late sage of power, offered the best explanation for why, in politics, instincts matter more than policy. In most democratic societies, he observed, power is little more than the obligation to make decisions that are deemed too important or finely balanced to be taken by anyone else. Easy or unimportant decisions do not reach the prime minister, because they have already been taken further down the chain of command. Only the most difficult ones — those where the evidence is inconclusive and the consequences profound — land at the leader’s desk.

When such verdicts are required, a leader often does not have the luxury of time to wait before making the call. The decision needs to be taken in an instant: to shoot down a plane, respond to a provocation, stop a war, ban arms exports before the arms are used. Instead, leaders must rely on judgement, a quality defined less by intelligence than character — that great mishmash of moral assumptions, prejudices and instincts formed in early life. Margaret Thatcher was driven by the patriotic, self-reliant methodism of her father. For Tony Blair, it was the missionary zeal of the Christian progressivism he found at university. But what is it for Starmer?

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I was recently told by someone close to the Prime Minister that he is hard to read, but at heart is just a simple social democrat. But something about this doesn’t ring quite true. Starmer is not driven by the kind of deep commitment to socialism that fueled the post-war Labour giants from Clement Attlee to Harold Wilson. That much is clear from his time as leader of the opposition. Rather, at the heart of Starmer’s deepest instincts and assumptions is something more banal: “Left-legal liberalism,” as another senior figure put it to me with obvious disappointment. “That’s the instinct — and I’m not sure he even knows it.”

In the absence of god and socialism, Left-legal liberalism is the Starmerite code. Faced with a choice to withdraw export licences to Israel at the risk of undermining Britain’s diplomatic standing or to maintain them but potentially be forced to revoke them later by the courts, Starmer chose to follow the legalistic process. He hoped it would signal a compromise, both maintaining Britain’s legal obligations and its diplomatic standing, by removing only a small percentage of the overall number of export licences already in place. This was not driven by morality or realpolitik, but legalism. The risk, though, is that it is a compromise which does the exact opposite of what it was intended, annoying everyone and assuaging no-one.

This is the danger Starmer faces on all fronts. If Left-legal liberalism is the Starmerite code, it is one that seems uniquely ill-suited to our world in which the mythical “rules-based order” of old has been replaced by the hard realities of power politics: a world in which Houthi rebels control the Red Sea, the United States has all but abandoned the pretence of global free trade, Vladimir Putin mockingly dismisses the international warrant that has been issued for his arrest, and China continues to do everything in its power to extend its global influence. Even the US’s prospective prosecutor-in-general Kamala Harris, who on the face of it shares many of Starmer’s Left-legal instincts, will be forced to act with far more hard-nosed realism if she wins the presidency.

A little over a year into Donald Trump’s first term, Kissinger speculated that “Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences”. Not that Trump was necessarily aware of this. But is Starmer?

In a post-Trump world buffeted by the power politics playing out between Russia, Iran, China and the US, where Europe is scrabbling around to defend itself and its energy needs, in what way can Left-legalism any longer be said to be suitable? Would such instincts have dared to negotiate with Australia and America, and bypass France, to produce the Aukus agreement now at the heart of British foreign policy?

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The Starmerite instinct also has potentially troublesome domestic policy implications. At the heart of Morgan McSweeney’s project for government is a distinctly conservative vision of social democracy, whereby an active state meets the demands of Labour’s traditional voters by improving public services, defending the national interest, reducing immigration and generally, as Starmer once put it, “treading lighter on people’s lives”. In McSweeney’s words, the Labour Party must meet the voters where they are. And yet, in the early months of his premiership, all the notable announcements have been in the opposite direction: towards the kinds of paternalistic interventionism of the “preventative state” from banning smoking outdoors to imposing weight tests at work or mandatory tooth-brushing at school.

The instincts of other modern prime ministers were clear from their early decisions: Margaret Thatcher to remove capital controls in 1979; John Major to negotiate the opt out of the single currency in 1991; Tony Blair to accept Gordon Brown’s decision to not join the single currency; and Gordon Brown’s failure to call a snap election in 2007.

Only in hindsight can we appreciate the importance of such moments, but in each case these early decisions were among the most important of their entire time in office, binding them into political straitjackets they did not realise at the time. The same could be said of David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, each of whom made early decisions which revealed the characters which would destroy their premierships: from breezy overconfidence to indecisiveness, unseriousness, arrogance and eventually political naivety.

Here lies the danger for Keir Starmer: the instincts nurtured over a lifetime of success which could suffocate his premiership before it has even began. The nature of power is to expose these instincts to the judgement of events and is why it is often described as “lonely” — it’s a game of chance that all eventually lose. Keir Starmer will be no different.

While the two candidates’ respective vice-presidential selections signal a divergence between the parties on domestic policy, the foreign policy distinctions are more opaque. Democrats maintain that a second Trump presidency would shepherd in an era of American isolationism, leading to anarchy around the globe. Trump and company have fired back with claims that “there will be no future under Comrade Kamala Harris, because she will take us into a Nuclear World War III”.

Trump’s rhetoric here is relatively straightforward: a Harris presidency would be “something straight out of Venezuela or the Soviet Union”, a claim he illustrated by sharing an AI-generated image of Kamala Harris speaking at a Soviet-style assembly. As political aesthetics go, invoking America’s Cold War anxiety may seem mildly entertaining. But as Trump could soon find out, the political advantages end there.

Trump’s new messaging marks an interesting role reversal for the two campaigns. Joe Biden, before his retreat from the contest, had repeatedly characterised Trump as a dictator-in-waiting. Democracy, he warned, was on the ballot. The Republicans, meanwhile, focused on more accessible matters, in particular the rising prices in Joe Biden’s America. Yet now, the script is flipped: Trump is the one peddling apocalyptic visions of dictatorship, while the Harris campaign has dropped the fascism rhetoric in favour of the more meme-friendly allegations of “weirdness”.

At its heart, this resurrection of the red-scare boogeyman augurs a departure from the populist principles that guided Trump to victory in 2016. For someone who won an election on the catchphrase of “drain the swamp” and the promise of pragmatic dealings abroad, Trump’s new McCarthyist message — combined with his disavowal of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and embrace of Elon Musk — is a step backwards towards Manichean neoconservatism. In other words, his populist instincts have been smothered by a red menace — and this will be a losing strategy.

Most American voters do not believe that their government will fall to communism anytime soon, and the few who do can hardly be considered swing voters. More than three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, red-scare rhetoric does not hold the existential resonance that it had at the peak of the Cold War. While the Chinese Communist Party acts as the greatest international rival to American supremacy, modern China is incomparable to the Soviet Union on multiple dimensions. Most obviously, the US is not drafting soldiers to fight against the forward march of communism, and 100,000 Americans have not died in a 21st-century Korea or Vietnam. We are not teaching school children to duck and cover under their desks in fear of imminent nuclear strikes. The CCP, at this time, is not advocating for a global socialist revolution.

This is not to say that the rise of an authoritarian adversary poses no threat to American interests, nor to argue that the threat of these events is impossible after the fall of Soviet communism. It is clear, however, that Americans are not experiencing such existential fears in their everyday lives.

In 2016, Trump seemed to have distinct strategies for addressing the rise of China and the deeply entrenched liberal establishment. Ordinary Americans were not voting based on their allegiance to market capitalism. China was not an ideological rival, but an economic one. In response, faced with the deindustrialisation of the American heartland, Trump managed to channel the frustration of the working class into a straightforward message: the US was getting cheated, and American jobs were being replaced with foreign workers. With the establishment of both parties maintaining their commitment to free trade, Trump’s promise to get a “better deal” for American industry resonated with those who felt abandoned by elites. And crucially, when Trump did attack the “Radical Left Agenda”, it was on those issues that affected voters’ daily lives: immigration, crime, and threats to free speech. Now that populism appears to have been lost, and recent polls reflect Trump’s failure to connect with the interests of ordinary Americans.

But, you might say, talk is cheap. Does this apparent shift in campaign strategy to an apocalyptic narrative say anything about the policies of a potential second Trump administration? Yes and no.

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As we saw following his election in 2016, the shapeshifting nature of Trump’s rhetoric allowed his supporters to project their desired foreign policies onto him, giving him appeal to hawks and restrainers alike. In the same vein, the personnel of the first Trump administration experienced chaotic turnover as the president attempted to purge the disloyal. This instability led to different factions within the administration gaining influence over policy, only for their desired policies to be discarded the next week. Even if Trump had a grand strategy, then, internal dysfunction would have likely prevented its implementation.

However, this does not mean the foreign policy of a second Trump term will emerge at random. While figures advocating for a “realist” reappraisal of American interests abroad had gained a foothold in the previous Republican administration, Trump’s recent rhetoric is illustrative of the people he has surrounded himself with. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has remained in Trump’s good graces, has consistently called for escalation in Ukraine. Likewise, former national security advisor Robert O’Brien recently wrote promised in Foreign Affairs that a second Trump term will “thwart and deter the new Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis” and that “doing so will also require strong alliances among the free countries of the world”. O’Brien went on to claim that “a second Trump term would see stepped-up presidential-level attention to dissidents and political forces that can challenge U.S. adversaries”, making an exception for “open and liberal” Arab monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, with whom O’Brien would continue to engage.

This strategy of “conservative primacy” espoused by Trump’s presumptive cabinet selections portends a dangerous and disappointing return to interventionist conventions. O’Brien’s suggestion that China, Russia, and Iran have formed an axis of evil which must be opposed by a united “free world” exemplifies the simplistic Cold Warrior talking points that now flow from Trump’s mouth. If anything, a second Trump administration appears to be trending towards a return to form for the Republican Party, threatening more crusading abroad against the phantom threat of all-or-nothing ideological conflict. Rather than draining the swamp, Trump is being consumed by it.

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What, then, is the alternative? More of the same, it seems. At the recent Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Kamala Harris’s speech was preceded by a surprise appearance by former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the Democratic darling of Bush-era neocons. And when the vice president did finally speak, she promised to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”, before adding that her administration would “strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership”. While Harris herself has yet to articulate any specific proposals on foreign policy, she affirmed the ongoing support for both Ukraine and Israel. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ 2020 vow to “end forever wars” has seemingly been erased from its national platform.

For many, this was only a matter of time. Much has been written about the vice president’s current national security advisor, Phil Gordon, who is likely to be central to a future Harris administration. Having served in the Obama administration — first as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and then as the White House’s point man on the Syrian Civil War — Gordon is frequently described as an “Atlanticist” or “Europeanist”. And indeed, American and European statesmen alike laud his prioritisation of Europe. While Gordon has been occasionally characterised as being a “restrainer” due to his reluctance to deploy military force, he appears to share very little with the actual grand strategy of restraint, as articulated by academic realists. Instead, he seems to endorse continuing or even increasing support to Europe, and has affirmed Harris’s opposition to an arms embargo on Israel, while saying little about China.

The candidates of both major parties, then, appear to have similar visions for America’s role in the world. Although a Trump presidency may lean more hawkish on China and a Harris administration might be more committed to Ukraine, both seem committed to continued military engagement around the world without any plans to substantially change American grand strategy.

Of course, of the two, this is least surprising with the Democrats, whose fondness for foreign intervention in recent decades has filled entire books. But the turn of the Republicans is more pronounced. After a brief flirtation, the party appears to have been recaptured by its neoconservative core, with foreign policy reverting to its post-Cold War monoculture. The red menace has returned, and nothing good can come from it. Expect continued engagement overseas for years to come.

During his visit this week, the Israeli prime minister could meet with Kamala Harris — but to what purpose? Even if she had the bandwidth to focus on the Middle East, she would be best advised to avoid any kind of substantive utterance. In an election that is likely to be close, “niche voters” matter greatly, particularly those who care about Israel and Gaza. And based on her time in office, we know how Harris handles difficult challenges: through evasion, inaction, and lots of beaming smiles. Indeed, she has already implemented that approach vis-à-vis Netanyahu. In a move that will be welcomed by the anti-Israel contingent, she has “declined” to attend his address to Congress; and in a nod to the pro-Israel lobby, she also stated that she will meet with him privately.

As Netanyahu negotiates Washington’s corridors and backrooms, he will no doubt be hoping for hints of how the two possible next administrations are likely to deal with him and with Israel. Trump, who last night announced his plans to meet with Netanyahu, can be expected to be blunt. But it will be more difficult for him to glean what a Harris administration would mean for him, as well as his rivals abroad. So, in honour of his visit-in-vain, let us speculate.

In her first speech as Biden’s designated successor, Harris went full-on fulsome: he has achieved more in his one term than other American presidents managed in two; his legacy is unmatched; yadda yadda. Since she has no policy profile of her own after four years of unmatched invisibility, we can only take her at her word — and project onto her the basis of Biden’s policies, plus what we know of her personality.

If we take a good long look at Biden’s presidency, one theme emerges with startling clarity: indecisiveness. This was a man who was uncomfortable with leadership and instead was constantly scanning for approbation. As a result, some initially sound policies failed, some good ideas died on the vine, and the riderless horses of ideology and emotion were given their head.

In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attack, for instance, Biden expressed strong solidarity with Israel. But then pro-Palestinian factions (and even some pro-Hamas voices) on American campuses and in portions of the Arab-American electorate erupted in protest. What was “Genocide Joe” to do? Biden’s formula was something for everyone, and nothing for all — except a big bill.

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Weapons and aid to Israel continued, accompanied by preachy admonitions to exercise restraint. The humanitarian concerns for Palestinian civilians were assuaged by his Potemkin Pier: a floating piece of expensive engineering nonsense that promptly failed and had to be expensively dismantled, as all the technical experts warned from the start. The proposed peace plan — a permanent ceasefire that any Israeli interested in survival could hardly agree to — was already floundering. The months just before a US presidential election, let alone one of such exceptional volatility, are unlikely to produce a breakthrough.

A similar picture emerges in relation to Ukraine. True, Biden has been steadfast in his support for Kyiv — steadfast, but indecisive. From the day Russia invaded, the Ukrainians and Zelensky knew exactly what weapons and support they needed to protect their population and their infrastructure. Biden gave it to them — but in staggered deliveries, dribbling it out across the terrible months, wasting the momentum of the early counteroffensive and contributing to the grinding, bloody and no longer hopeful slog this has become. A negotiated settlement that includes territorial losses for Ukraine seems inevitable. Can anyone picture Harris as a tough negotiator against Putin?

Next stop: Afghanistan. By the time Biden became president, this conflict was sucking up far too many resources. Kudos to him for recognising that and continuing with the troop withdrawal that had been initiated by Trump, instead of seeing it as a partisan issue. But a troop withdrawal of that magnitude has to be properly prepared and executed. You don’t start by shutting down your defensive capabilities while relying on a civilian airport in the middle of a city full of desperate people. Even then, a prompt reaction could have saved the day. When the Afghan public started mobbing the airport, flights should have ceased immediately and the airport shut down until a process was in place. The Taliban were cooperating at that point, happy to see us leave and willing to facilitate our departure.

But with the US media slamming Biden for “abandoning” our Afghan allies, his response was to ramp up the speed of the evacuations, which, predictably, caused a stampede. The chaos was an open invitation to Isis, who promptly attacked, killing 13 American soldiers who had been given the hopeless task of guarding Abbey Gate, plus 170 in the roiling Afghan crowd. Those were the only US casualties during the entire two years of withdrawal negotiations and implementation, and they were completely avoidable.

The list goes on. Essentially, Biden “gave” Iraq to Iran, by abandoning his own initial assessment of the situation. The result was exactly what he had feared: sectarian conflict, Shi’a dominance, and an Iranian influence verging on total control of the Baghdad government. Biden even sold out the one little piece of his plan that was working: the semi-autonomous Kurdish region. There, an enthusiastically pro-American population, plus a Christian minority that the Kurds had generously integrated, were repeatedly ignored, rebuffed and denied support by the Biden administration. By way of appreciation, Baghdad is now preparing to ignominiously evict our remaining troops.

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As our final example, we must cite his choice of VP. Even if Biden deluded himself that he was up to a second term, and that the voters would agree, he knew that at some point his vice president would become his party’s candidate for the highest office. Yet by what measure of merit could he possibly have thought that Harris is the one? When he chose her, her popularity was so low and her fundraising appeal so non-existent that she had dropped out of the 2020 election months before the Democratic caucus. Observers decried her propensity to randomly change position on key issues. She had, and still has, no foreign policy experience, and did not use her time as vice president to develop a discernible identity beyond what is now being celebrated by some: her race and gender.

Faced with negotiating with such a figure, let alone Biden himself, Netanyahu may be wishing that he, too, had Covid and could go into isolation. Angry Israeli protesters sent him on his way at Ben Gurion, and even angrier American protesters are besieging the Watergate Hotel, where he is staying. Huge demonstrations are expected outside of Congress, with the demand that he be arrested. His hope, in the considerably different circumstances of just a few weeks ago, had been for a statesmanlike reception and substantive talks about a hostage release and ceasefire with an option to continue the degradation of Hamas’s power.

Biden may want one final accomplishment, some kind of Middle East deal. But can a lame duck and an ICC-wanted leader unpopular at home pull off a win? Don’t hold your breath.

Until then, Biden’s legendary resilience seemed unbreakable. This was, after all, a quality he acquired at the price of intense suffering. By the time Biden appeared as a newly elected senator on the Washington scene in 1973, he had already suffered two life-altering tragedies. First, the rapid downfall of his businessman father from affluence to poverty when Biden was seven years old; and second, the more terrible blow of the accidental death of his wife and one-year-old daughter some 40 days after he was first elected.

Yet still Biden marched on, winning re-election to the Senate every six years until 2008, when he was concurrently elected Vice President with Barack Obama. It was, more than anything, proof of his mastery of “retail politics”, which allowed him to keep different clusters of voters happy. In Biden’s mini-state of Delaware — whose population in 1974 was just over 600,000 when New York State already had close to 20 million — it was not hard for him to win voters one by one, especially since he chose to live in Wilmington, commuting by train to Washington each day. When I first met Biden during his first senatorial term, the legendary political guru and speaker of the house Tip O’Neill was already saying that he would be a Washington personality for decades.

Many things about Biden’s life are well-known, but only future biographers will reveal what he himself rigorously kept secret from the world: that during his eight years as VP, Obama systematically ignored his excellent advice on foreign affairs. Captive to the latest policy clichés of the NGO world, he ignored Biden’s decades of experience as a very active member and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which had heard from and interrogated hundreds of expert witnesses, many of them with valuable, first-hand experience in the world beyond Washington.

On Iraq and Afghanistan, by far the most important foreign-policy issues during his eight vice-presidential years, Biden radically disagreed with the strategy that Obama inherited and continued to pursue. Biden insisted that Iran would control Iraq unless its influence was drastically limited by US support for a Sunni regional government in addition to the Kurdish regional government, thereby confining Iran’s influence to a third, Shi’a, regional government.

But Obama preferred the advice of Dr Susan Rice, his national security advisor, Dr Samantha Powers, his ambassador to the UN, and Dr General Petraeus, whose stock of fashionable academic phrases about the world’s conflicts could never compete with the real-world knowledge that Biden had accumulated. As a result, Iran did what it wanted in Iraq. And it still does, largely because a central proponent of Obama’s deluded appeasement policy outlived his presidency: his personal friend Roger Malley, who was foisted on Biden and kept in the White House, until he was finally brought down by a security breach.

It was much the same in Afghanistan. Had Obama followed Biden’s advice, instead of listening to the telegenic PhD-general Petraeus, the US could have saved trillions of dollars and many American lives by abandoning the quixotic attempt to train and equip the Afghan army. From the start, Biden insisted that the military body was a total fraud — not just because Afghanistan’s so-called officers bought their promotions with bribes, but because the entire concept was rooted in a fantasy. Biden knew that Tajiks would only fight for other Tajiks, Uzbeks for Uzbeks, Hazaras for Hazaras, and so on — and that none of them would fight for the abstraction called Afghanistan.

Indeed, he needed tremendous self-discipline not to react when he saw his superficial boss being endlessly applauded at elite policy gatherings in Washington and Aspen, while he himself was ridiculed at Georgetown dinner parties. And it was a most bitter irony that it was Biden, as the newly installed president, who was universally blamed for America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan a few months after his inauguration, following the mass surrender of the Afghan army without a fight.

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Now, as he exits the stage, Biden has decided to offer another hostage to fortune, by nominating Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate ahead of the Chicago convention next month. That Harris is a remarkably strategic politician shouldn’t be overlooked: she started her pursuit of high office before she was 18 by choosing the modest education of Howard University over Stanford — where her father would teach — because of Howard’s politically powerful Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. But this cannot do more than mitigate her tremendous shortcomings as a candidate.

As VP, she was given one task: to stop the politically disastrous flood of millions of illegal immigrants walking across the border from Mexico. In June 2021, she made a very brief and futile visit to the border instead of staying in Washington to identify and activate effective border-control measures, which did exist and were only activated by Biden himself as the election approached. When given her only opportunity to display a capacity to govern, Harris failed.

For this and many other reasons, it seems improbable that Harris would fare well in a campaign against Trump, unless her running mate can do even more for her than the sharply intelligent Vance can do for Trump. But looking at the array of figures now trying to win her favour, one must be sceptical. As someone who was befriended by Biden decades ago, I do not derive any pleasure in anticipating that his anointed successor will be removed by the Democratic Convention — or else lead her party into a November debacle.

In one sense, it is dispiritingly obvious why Cameron is now being seen in such a positive light: the calibre of those around him. In comparison with much of the rest of the Cabinet, yes, Cameron does suddenly appear bigger. Here is a man able to walk and talk fluently into a camera saying reasonable-sounding things with confidence. And with it comes the swooning from those who wished he had never left in the first place.

What is undoubtedly true is that Cameron has succeeded in his time as Foreign Secretary, shifting Britain’s tone on the war in Gaza, almost immediately upon appointment in November 2023, from that of unconditional ally to increasingly-concerned critic. In doing so, according to his supporters at least, he has played a significant role clearing a path for the United States under Anthony Blinken to follow. Domestically, his positioning has also had the effect of making Keir Starmer seem shifty and slow — which is more than any other Cabinet minister has achieved.

Yet, let us step back for a second. This time last year, Cameron was in the United Arab Emirates teaching a course on “Practising Politics and Government in the Age of Disruption” at New York University Abu Dhabi. The idea of the programme, it seems, was how to take “long term” decisions when the world is in tumult. “One of the questions in my course,” Cameron wrote in the country’s state-owned paper, The National, was “whether states and governments are capable of long-term thinking and delivering major projects that can transform their nation’s prospects”. On this score, his host country stood out. “There is little doubt that when it comes to the UAE, the answer is a solid ‘yes’,” Cameron added glowingly. Eeesh.

This was Mr Cameron, a mere private citizen, before returning via the House of Lords for a final flourish at the top table of British politics. But this does give us the perfect opportunity to judge him by his own standards. Is his appointment evidence of the kind of “long-term thinking” that might transform a nation’s prospects, or, alternatively, exactly the kind of short-termism that marked the age of disruption?

Surely, it makes no sense that James Cleverly, who was doing a perfectly good job in the Foreign Office, was shunted over to the Home Office to learn yet another brief with almost no time to implement it. Cleverly, unlike Cameron, has a future in democratic politics and so has at least some marginal incentive to think of the long-term good of the country. Cameron’s incentives, in contrast, are entirely short term. As Foreign Secretary, he has a year — at most — to make as significant an impact as possible. Then he will be gone, almost certain never to return to frontline politics.

Cameron is running what is in effect a one-year foreign office. His policy, as such, has been to set down markers with eye-catching interventions that will shape events and, as a bonus, create a legacy for himself. Is this a foreign policy for the long term, advancing Britain’s core strategic interests? Take, for example, his warning, last month, to Republicans in Washington not to “appease” Russia. It certainly caught people’s attention: “Cameron drops all diplomatic niceties,” read one headline in the American press, later posted out by the British Embassy in Washington. “He’s getting a lot done,” ran a rather prosaic headline in The Guardian, reflecting on his first 100 days.

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But while such an intervention might have nicely burnished the Foreign Secretary’s personal creds, it did little for British influence in Washington. And that’s because Cameron does not have to think about a future relationship with Donald Trump or a majority Republican Senate. He can just say what he thinks is right for now.

As a result, there is, I am told, frustration with Cameron among some foreign embassies. Only interested in the here and now, he isn’t inclined to dedicate time to the issues which will be around long after he’s gone. We shouldn’t really be surprised. Cameron is only doing in the Foreign Office what he has always done, appealing to the blob of moderate conservative and liberal opinion in a way that looks and sounds reasonable but dissolves under the glare of long-term scrutiny.

As Prime Minister, Cameron was also fond of “candid” foreign-policy declarations that rarely lasted. On his first big trip after winning power, Cameron lambasted the EU for blocking Turkish membership. “When I think about what Turkey has done to defend Europe as a Nato ally,” Cameron declared, “it makes me angry that your progress towards EU membership can be frustrated in the way it has been.” Six years later, attempting to dismiss concerns about future Turkish immigration, Cameron said the country would not become a member “until the year 3000”.

But then, Cameron’s entire premiership was littered with foreign policy catastrophes caused by muddled strategic thinking and short-term calculations, from the disaster of Libya to the failure of Syria and, of course, the abject refusal to prepare for the prospect of defeat in the Brexit referendum.

One government minister told me the problem today wasn’t necessarily that he was wrong to change the British government’s tone on Gaza or the substance of what he said to American Senators on Ukraine, but that his conduct suited his interests far more than Britain’s. “He is pursuing standard Foreign Office policy,” the minister said. “That doesn’t mean he’s wrong. But we have to see this for what it is — a vanity trip.”

Even the former PM’s closest supporters admit that Cameron’s return to government came with an eye on his reputation which had been dragged through the mud by Brexit and the Greensill affair. As one friend put it to me, the very fact that he was seen to be having a successful time as Foreign Secretary meant he was less likely to have to return to the UAE for the big money because now he could expect more traditional opportunities to open up in big British or American firms.

Others argue that Cameron has made decisions that will stand the test of time, creating a diplomatic space from which a future Labour government will benefit, particularly over Gaza. And perhaps from his seat in the Lords, Cameron will use his rehabilitation for political gain, rather than financial, in the inevitable fight for control of the Conservative Party that will follow the next election. But should we count on that? “It’s about rehabilitating his reputation,” as one Cabinet critic put it to me. “It’s about him and his future, not ours.”

The irony is surely not lost on any of us that — at least in Cameron’s telling — the UAE has such transformative rulers committed to the long-term interests of their country, while here in Britain we have the Lord of Chipping Norton.

We drove up, parked a way off, and had a look. The uniformed men had the surly arrogance of most border officials but overlaid with an air of proximate violence. I could understand Mohammed’s reservations.

Rafah is a metaphor cast in concrete and steel for Egypt’s fraught role in the decades-long conflict between Israel and Palestine. Egypt, the only other state apart from Israel that borders Gaza, has had an uneasy peace with Jerusalem since 1979. And as the most populous Arab state in the world (Sudan is second with less than half its numbers), its leaders know well that most of their citizens loathe Israel. Whoever rules Cairo is always juggling several flaming torches at once.

Officially, Egypt is, like all Arab states, a proud and steadfast supporter of the Palestinian cause. Just over a week after the October 7 massacre, president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi declared that “the Palestinian cause is the mother of all causes and has a significant impact on stability and security”.

But in terms of its Gaza policy, Cairo is aligned with the United States. It wants Fatah, which governs the West Bank, to take over the strip as a precursor to Palestinian-Israeli negotiations and an end to the violence. At the end of last year, Arab media was filled with reports that Egypt and the US wanted former Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to run Gaza. Cairo was seeking a “government of technocrats” and Fayyad, with his extensive connections in Washington and close relationship with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, was seen as the perfect candidate.

Egypt’s plan was fleshed out on Christmas Day: following a ceasefire, officials explained, Cairo would lead talks to bring together Hamas and the PA, after the latter was driven out of Gaza following its 2007 elections. The two groups would then create a joint “government of experts” to run the West Bank and Gaza ahead of future elections. “We are ready for this [Palestinian] state to be demilitarised, and there can also be a guarantee of forces,” Sisi outlined a month earlier.

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Yet beneath the rhetoric is a more complex reality. First, there are the practical considerations. Gaza was in Cairo’s hands from the 1948 Israeli War of Independence until Israel’s conquest of the strip in the Six Day War of 1967. During those two decades, it made no attempt to found a Palestinian state, nor did it want Gaza to become a part of Egypt, let alone allow many Gazans into the country. Gaza is a problem that Egypt simply doesn’t want.

And since October 7, that has not changed. Soon after Israel began its offensive, Sisi warned that any “displacement [of Gazans] to Sinai means transferring the attacks against Israel to Egyptian territories, which threatens the peace between Israel and a country of 105 million people”. Egyptian officials worry that if refugees flow in and camps spring up, they would become recruiting grounds for extremist groups, particularly the various malign Islamic State offshoots marauding around Sinai. This is largely why, in November last year, the Egyptians met with CIA Director William Burns and flat-out refused to manage Gaza even temporarily. Nor did Egypt get involved with counterinsurgency operations, or take any responsibility for post-war security in Gaza — something it obviously has a vested interest in.

Second, of course, is the inescapable matter of ideology. If the Egyptians dislike Israel, then its leaders detest the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian pan-Islamic Islamist group whose professed aim is to set up a Caliphate ruled by Sharia law. Indeed, Sisi got his job via what they call a “military-led takeover” in 2013 against the former president and Muslim Brother, Mohammad Morsi. In other words, he really despises the Brotherhood — and Hamas, after all, emerged from Mujama’ al-Islami (“Islamic Centre”), an Islamic charity founded by one of the Brotherhood’s leaders in Gaza.

Egypt targets the Brothers with unyielding ferocity. In 2015, Morsi was sentenced to death for conspiring with foreign organisations including Hamas (he died four years later of a reported heart attack after collapsing in court). The following year, Egypt’s interior minister accused Hamas of assassinating a public prosecutor, leading one prominent talk show host to call for an Arab military offensive against Hamas. “I ask to strike the terrorist camps inside Gaza because terrorism always comes from within it, and the Arab countries must take action to reject the Hamas movement,” he said. But this isn’t a mere war of words. Cairo has also taken action on the ground, with the Egyptian military destroying 1,370 Hamas tunnels under Rafah in 2014; the following year, it used sea water to flood yet more tunnels.

Even so, there has been some cooperation between Cairo and Hamas when interests converge, notably in early 2020 when Hamas arrested an Islamic State member after Egyptian intelligence handed it audio recordings. The two sides also collaborated on the construction of a border wall in Sinai as part of their wider anti-Islamic State efforts, which also saw Rawhi Mushtaha, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, travel to Cairo to discuss security co-operation.

But like shrubs in the Sinai, these instances go against the norm. Hatred and fear of Hamas runs deep in Egypt’s rulers — which makes growing public support for the former’s war against Israel an increasing cause for concern. Recent polling conducted by the Washington Institute, for instance, found that 97% of people agreed that Arab states must “immediately sever all diplomatic, political, economic, and any other contacts with Israel in protest against its military action in Gaza”. Moreover, 96% agreed that Egypt should provide more humanitarian aid to Palestinians.

These are troubling figures. And not least because neither Sisi nor any of those around him will ever forget that Morsi was legitimately elected by a majority of Egyptians (though he then proceeded to blow that legitimacy by trying to change the constitution to effectively make him a modern-day pharaoh). The Brothers took power once, and they can do so again. But all Sisi can do is sit in his palace and watch on as the nation his people most despise tries to do the thing he most desires: destroy Hamas.

As each day goes by, Hamas in Gaza grows weaker, but the Brothers in Egypt grow stronger. It does not help that the country is also in the grip of a financial crisis of almost existential proportions. When people talk about the wider consequences of the Gaza war, it is normally about the possibility of the Middle East exploding. But lost amid this is the prospect of something just as bad: the very real possibility that the world’s most populous Arab state might implode first.

Such proxies are far cheaper than Iran’s own conventional military, and more useful in the region’s many conflicts. They are also less politically divisive. Iran’s foreign wars aren’t popular among the young, who have already destabilised the theocracy through mass protests. And this is especially difficult given that Iran relies on conscription to fill at least half the ranks of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Long-term foreign deployments of resentful draftees would be a risky strategy.

But proxy warfare is not only good politics — it is also essential to upholding Iran’s theocracy. As their religious and political legitimacy has collapsed at home, the ruling elite has sought it abroad. Iran’s clerics were ecstatic when allied militias defeated both the Sunni Arab jihadists and the United States in Iraq, and relieved when they helped to save the dictatorship in Syria in 2012. If the Assad dynasty had fallen, it could have triggered the collapse of Tehran’s entire anti-American, anti-Zionist, enfeeble-the-Sunnis strategy, which it had been cultivating since the Islamic revolution in 1979.

More recently, October 7 and the Gaza War have served as an unparalleled frisson to the antisemitic Iranian political elite, and a seductive clarion call to others in the region who thought they couldn’t make the Jews bleed. The war, with its growing Palestinian civilian death toll and the vast destruction in the Gaza Strip, may have given the clerical regime, and its overwhelmingly Shiite “axis of resistance”, a means of restoring its standing with faithful and secular Sunnis alike. Relations have been tense since the Syrian civil war, when Iran helped to slaughter tens of thousands of Sunni Arabs.

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If Israel fails to destroy Hamas, if the outfit rises like a phoenix from the Gazan rubble after an Israeli withdrawal, then Iran will take credit for successfully resisting Zion and America. And a prolonged Hamas insurgency — a definite possibility if Israel reoccupies Gaza — will offer Tehran an inspirational theatre of operations. Trouble in the Gaza Strip could embolden Tehran to encourage its proxies to wound Israel and America further. The death of three US soldiers in Jordan in a drone attack last week may be just the start of it.

Yet America is unlikely to seek vengeance. Clerical meddling has so far failed to provoke Israeli and US retaliatory strikes against Iran; at the most, it has led to attacks on Iran’s Arab partners. That’s because Washington and Jerusalem dread escalation — the former, out of fear of another Middle Eastern “forever war”; the latter, because it doubts its missile defence and air power are capable of defending Tel Aviv from Hizbollah and Iran. Indeed, Tehran’s supply of missiles to its friends in Lebanon may have deterred Israel from mounting another ground invasion to secure its northern border. And the feebleness of the US and Israeli response may well have emboldened Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, knows now that the power lies in his hands.

Historically, there are no Islamic parallels to what the clerical regime has pulled off. Shiism, unlike Sunnism, is a charismatic path, which lends itself more easily to revolution. Its leaders have occasionally appealed to heterodox Muslims who combined Sunni and Shiite sympathies. On conquering Iran, Ismail I (1487-1524), the first shah of the vast Safavid empire, forcibly converted his realm to Shiism. He managed for a time to win the hearts of heterodox Sufi orders in the rival Ottoman empire — that is, until defeat in war shattered his religious allure.

Today, Iran’s proxies are less ecumenical: hardcore Sunnis and Shiites feature in the “axis of resistance”. The clerical regime has developed a powerful pan-Islamic call, promising to drive the US from the Middle East, destroy Israel, humble the wealthy Western-backed Sunni Gulf Arab monarchs, and create a new Islamic culture that can withstand Westernisation. This has considerable appeal among many Arabs, as well as Shiite Afghans and Pakistanis. Such anti-American, anti-Zionist and antisemitic messaging has great sway among many young Muslim men.

But Iran doesn’t just rely on ideology. It also rewards loyalty. The idea of taking back “stolen” property has always proved alluring: just consider the first Islamic conquests, which promised booty as well as paradise, or the Crusades. The French Marxist description of Israel as a “colonial-settler state” has been fully absorbed into the Islamic lexicon. And Iran’s hope that Zion can actually be defeated in a long, bloody struggle by the faithful helps to strengthen the Islamic Republic’s credibility in the region.

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The Houthis, Shiites who are doctrinally close to Sunnis and were once spurned by Iran’s clerics, have signed up to this fight. And now they’re giving the US, Israel and their European allies a hard time in the Red Sea. Even though Tehran probably fears escalation more than anyone else, neither Washington nor Jerusalem have been willing to play on these fears by striking Iran directly. The occasional assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists and senior Revolutionary Guard officers, including the dark lord, Qasem Soleimani, doesn’t really count. Nor has Washington shown any desire to hit the Islamic Republic where it’s still likely the weakest: Syria. The Revolutionary Guard general, Hossein Hamedani, who died in the battle for Aleppo in 2015, wasn’t exaggerating when he said that “to protect the accomplishments of the Islamic revolution, we had to intervene” in Syria and Iraq.

Even so, neither America nor Israel seems willing to rearm the Syrian Sunnis. A return of the Syrian civil war is just too ugly to contemplate: the refugee crisis it sparked empowered Right-wing populist parties across Europe and gave Turkey’s president, the philo-Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, extraordinary leverage within the European Union. Syrian Sunni militancy, an unavoidable by-product of a Sunni Arab rebellion, also strengthened Sunni jihadists.

But the slow-motion implosion of the Middle East dates back even further, to the aftermath of the Second World War. Since then, military autocracies have gutted traditional mores, basic decency and functioning economies. The Great Arab Revolt further shattered the region. This has left militias practically invincible since Western powers, now allergic to ground campaigns, can’t effectively use air power to extirpate them.

It is, however, still possible to shut down Iran’s proxies, but it would require significant military commitments. It’s hard to imagine any scenario — apart from a direct attack on Iran — in which the clerical regime ceases and desists. And any assault would need to be highly destructive, as a direct Western strike that leaves Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme unscathed doesn’t make much sense.

Jerusalem appears willing to pay a high price in Gaza. But given that the Gaza operation may permanently tank Israel’s reputation among Western Leftist political parties, Jerusalem may not wish to take on the even more arduous task of neutering the Lebanese Hizbollah. The group’s massive stockpile of Iranian-supplied missiles could pin-cushion Tel Aviv no matter how quickly Israel’s air force and anti-missile batteries reacted. The Hizbollah is the only Iranian proxy force whose demolition would grievously wound, perhaps cripple, the clerical regime’s ambitions in the Middle East.

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America is unlikely to lend a hand — despite the most recent deadly provocation in Jordan. The White House’s truly muddled response to this surely reflects the continuing intellectual confusion of the Biden administration about Iran since Khamenei rejected another nuclear deal last summer. “We are not looking for a war with Iran,” US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Monday. “We’ll keep looking at the options… We want these attacks to stop.”

But these attacks won’t stop. They’re too much fun. And they’re strategically effective: the Islamic Republic has become the dominant power in the Middle East. To give Khamenei the credit that he deserves, he has taken a weak hand and played it brilliantly. Even with Russian and Chinese patronage, the Islamic Republic doesn’t possess a lot of hard power in the face of the US and Israel. But even the greatest of the Safavid shahs, Abbas I, who defeated the Ottomans in Mesopotamia, didn’t have the influence that Khamenei now has through a motley collection of poorly-educated, young Arab men who have probably never set foot in Iran and may not have even met a Persian.

Tehran will surely keep pushing the envelope unless the United States or Israel pushes back far harder. The clerical regime may pause its operations or claim that proxies are beyond its control — but success breeds aggression. So does the regime’s conception of itself as an Islamist paladin battling American and Zionist imperialism. To paraphrase Major General Hossein Salami, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the clerical regime isn’t “looking for a war” that it will lose.

As a result, if Washington responds to the attack in Jordan with just another air strike against Iranian-supported militias, or even Iranian deployments in Syria, this likely won’t alter Khamenei’s calculations. Only something shockingly different — US attacks against Revolutionary Guard targets inside Iran, and the openly declared threat of insurmountable American escalation — has a decent chance of convincing the clerics that the past is no longer prologue.

Though troubling, this assault on free expression is far from an isolated incident. Over the past year, anti-terror police have arrested, charged and harassed a number of British volunteers who joined the Kurdish-led, UK-backed fight against Isis, along with their relatives. I have been detained and questioned for hours by anti-terror police on the UK border due to my reporting on the Kurdish issue. The Kurdish community faces regular police harassment and home raids.

“It’s a freedom of expression issue,” says Mark Campbell, a photojournalist and one of the activists on trial for holding a flag associated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK, at a demonstration in London. “But it’s also a highly political issue — because that flag represents Kurdish peoples’ struggle for basic human and political rights in Turkey.”

Beritan, another Kurdish activist, will join Campbell in the dock. “Why should the British government be afraid of me, or of Kurds?” she asks. “Our flag is the symbol of a peaceful Kurdish nation, and a [political] programme of education, equality and democracy for all. Is this a danger to Britain?”

Given that the West relied on the armed Kurdish movement, spearheaded by the PKK, to lead the ground campaign against Isis, the Kurds might be forgiven for expecting a fair hearing. The British authorities had no complaints when more than 10,000 Kurdish fighters gave their lives to rid the world of the Isis caliphate. Or when, backed by US airstrikes, they saved the Yazidi minority from genocide. But Western policy-makers have short memories — and the Kurds have been all too often betrayed by their nominal Western allies. Today, the UK Kurdish community remains criminalised and subjected to what its representatives describe as discriminatory, illiberal treatment in order to appease Turkey’s increasingly autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who views them as a political threat.

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Will Campbell and Beritan be let off the hook? The UK’s Supreme Court has previously ruled against protestors who displayed a PKK flag, arguing that the infringement of the right to freedom of expression was outweighed by the need to deny the Kurdish movement “a projected air of legitimacy“. But a number of other high-profile anti-Kurdish trials have collapsed, including those targeting UK volunteers in the fight against Isis. In one case, UK police sentenced former soldier Dan Burke with terror offences for supporting the Kurdish-led, US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in their fight. Both the father and 19-year-old brother of another volunteer, Dan Newey, were also charged with terror offences after the father sent Newey £150.

“The British state has repeatedly contradicted its own foreign policy,” Newey tells me. “While simultaneously funding, arming, training and working alongside the [Kurdish-led] Syrian Democratic Forces, the UK government charged internationalist volunteers [in the SDF] with ridiculous terror offences in order to appease Turkey.”

Burke spent 10 months on remand in jail without ever going to trial to clear his name. He suffered the humiliation of being labelled “Jihadi Dan” despite devoting his life to the struggle against radical Islam. Meanwhile, Newey’s family suffered irrevocable harm, losing work as a result of the police harassment. Burke would later be killed fighting in Ukraine, where he travelled in 2022 to join the struggle against Russia’s invasion. Yet even after his body was repatriated to the UK, his funeral was staked out by UK police. Prosecutors failed in both cases to present evidence against Burke or the Neweys, while other similar trials have also collapsed.

These trials are part of a broader pattern of harassment and intimidation. Last month, the Kurdish community in London announced that it is bringing a lawsuit against the police over a violent, disproportionate raid on their community centre in Haringey. They also highlight how its representatives are regularly detained at the UK border under a controversial power: Schedule 7 of the Terror Act, one of the most invasive of its kind in Western Europe, which enables police to interrogate people without any right to silence, and to demand phone and laptop passwords. One Kurdish politician recently won a ruling suggesting the power was being used in a discriminatory fashion against the Kurds, but Kurdish figures such as the former mayor of London’s Haringey borough, Ali Gul Ozbek, are still detained every time they fly.

Last September, I got a taste of this myself, when I was detained under Schedule 7 for the second time and interrogated extensively on my work and reporting in and around Kurdistan, my views on the Turkish government, and British foreign policy in the Middle East. A middle-aged Welsh woman who held a poetry reading with Kurdish music and a member of a delegation observing the Turkish elections were among many others targeted by the same power last year.

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And yet, there seems to be little public interest in these costly and aggressive police assaults on Kurdish people who stand for self-determination, women’s rights and democracy — values shared by many Britons. Rather, incidents of repression tend to take place around the time of high-profile meetings between UK and Turkish officials. The community centre, for instance, was raided just days after Defence Minister Grant Shapps secured an arms deal with his Turkish counterpart, while Burke was arrested in the days after President Erdoğan visited London.

The extent of Turkish-UK security cooperation remains unclear. Yet these trials and arrests suggest significant Turkish influence over UK security and foreign policy. “As a Nato ally and a key trading partner, the Turkish state holds considerable sway in its relationship with the UK: the military and intelligence collaboration between the two states has a decades-long history,” says Iida Käyhkö, a security studies researcher at London’s Royal Holloway University, who focuses on the criminalisation of the Kurds.

Elsewhere in Europe, Turkey has been seeking extraordinary concessions in return for dropping its opposition to Sweden and Finland joining Nato. Erdoğan’s list of demands has included more raids on the Kurdish community, the removal of Kurdish flags, and the detention and deportation of scores of Kurdish exiles, including an Iranian Kurdish member of Sweden’s Parliament with no administrative or legal links to Turkey whatsoever. He also wants upgrades to its F-16 fighter jets and permission for a fresh ground assault against Kurdish-led regions in northern Syria. It appears he is willing to imperil Nato in pursuit of his anti-Kurdish agenda.

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From Turkey’s perspective, the PKK and the UK’s Syrian Kurdish allies are one and the same: separatist terrorists. But while the PKK has long been included on UK and EU terror lists, no EU or international court has found that the PKK meets this definition. When a test case was brought in Belgium, the country’s highest court found that the Kurdish movement could not be considered a terrorist organisation, but instead a legitimate party to an ongoing civil conflict. “There is no doubt that PKK meets all the criteria that allow it to be considered as a political-military organisation, which carries out an armed struggle against Turkish security services, army and authorities, towards the realisation of the right to self-determination of the Kurdish people,” a lawyer involved in the case told me at the time.

Kurdish representatives argue that delisting the PKK from terror lists would enable both Turkey and the PKK to be held to higher legal standards — especially given that some of the crimes which Turkey imputed to the PKK in the Belgian case were found to have been committed by the Turkish forces themselves. Delisting would also pave the way toward re-opened peace negotiations and a diplomatic, negotiated settlement. Käyhkö argues: “The consistent pattern of repression targeted at Kurdish democratic political activity undermines not only the reputation of the British state, but broader prospects for peace, stability and democracy in the region.”

But as Campbell correctly observes: “The UK is politicising law in favour of one of the world’s worst rights abusers.” The Belgian government ignored its own court’s ruling so as to keep Turkey sweet. And the UK’s latest anti-Kurdish trial will probably demonstrate once again the way in which Erdoğan’s virulent anti-Kurdish agenda is allowed to undermine the best interests and judgement of Western states.

Today, as the dust settles, the global community cannot afford to let this threat escalate. The Houthi attacks, combined with the worsening Israel-Iran confrontation, have raised oil prices and forced 20% of the world’s container ships to avoid the Red Sea — instead taking the far longer route around the southern tip of Africa. Increased insurance rates and freight charges will soon be passed on to consumers. There is a clear need for international action to restore freedom of navigation — yet the West finds itself with few good options.

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But before we go to war with the Houthis, or launch further strikes, it is probably a good idea to understand exactly who they are. “Houthi” is a derogatory name for Yemen’s Ansar Allah or Supporters of God movement, which was founded in the Nineties by Hussein al-Houthi and, since his death in 2004, led by his brother, Abdul Malik al-Houthi. Hussein was a gifted orator whose message found many listeners in Yemen’s neglected and impoverished northern Sa’dah province, where most inhabitants belong to the Zaydi branch of Shia Islam. The Houthi brothers called for a Zaydi religious revival, opposition to Yemen’s central government, and hatred of Israel. Their signature chant remains “Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, God is Great”.

In 2011, when Arab Spring protests brought Yemen’s government down, the Houthis seized control of Sa’dah province. Then, in 2014, they joined forces with the deposed dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh to overthrow the internationally recognised transition government of Abdu Rabbu Hadi. With Saleh’s help, they advanced from their homeland in the north all the way to Aden in southern Yemen in just two months. Then the Houthis turned on Saleh and killed him. The United Nations condemned the Houthi’s coup and human rights violations, while also authorising the inspection of vessels bound for Yemen in order to confiscate weapons.

Today, the Houthis nominally control most of Yemen, where they have imposed a vicious police state — although much of the country is in fact ruled by local tribes and war lords. The multinational naval blockade has caused great suffering in a nation that imports most of its food, fuel and medicine, and rampant corruption in Houthi-controlled ports has made delivering foreign assistance difficult. Thousands of Yemenis have died from fighting, disease and malnutrition; millions have been made homeless and unemployed. The Yemeni people are not looking for another war.

Iran did not create the Houthis but, recognising them as fellow Shia Muslims, it has long provided the movement with funds, arms, training and advice. And for more than a decade, Iran has aggressively used the Houthis — along with other paramilitary proxy militias, including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon — as a vehicle to expand its influence in the Arabian Peninsula and undermine its traditional rival Saudi Arabia.

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Yet Washington also bears some responsibility for today’s Houthi crisis due to its failure to maintain its longstanding security partnership with Saudi Arabia. In 2015, the Saudis tried to prevent the Houthi takeover of Yemen. They had numerous reasons for doing so: they wanted to limit the smuggling of weapons, drugs and people across their southern border; they did not want al-Qaeda terrorists fleeing from Saudi Arabia to find a haven in Yemen; and they did not share the Houthi’s view that much of southern Saudi Arabia should belong to Yemen. Above all, the Saudis did not want Iran to expand its influence in Yemen.

The Saudi effort was largely confined to an air campaign which at various times relied on American weapons, refuelling and intelligence. Like all bombing campaigns, this resulted in civilian casualties — remember that more French civilians died on D-Day as a result of the pre-invasion allied bombardment than allied troops died on the Normandy beaches. While it seems unlikely that the Saudis spent expensive munitions deliberately targeting school buses, such incidents prompted harsh criticism of Riyadh, the termination of some US military assistance, and eventually the effective end to their campaign.

Washington’s tepid support for the Saudi-led coalition against the Houthis caused the Saudis to doubt the credibility of US security commitments, especially when threats to cut off arms sales became almost routine. And American hesitancy to supply the Saudis with drone technology forced them to turn to Italy and China. When the Biden administration removed the Houthis from the list of designated terrorist groups and withdrew Patriot air defence systems from Saudi Arabia, the Saudis had even more reason to doubt America.

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The Saudis soon found themselves in a difficult situation, wishing to devote financial resources to economic development rather than an endless war in Yemen. With Washington appearing to ignore their security concerns and facing persistent Houthi missile attacks, the Saudis changed course. In 2023, Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, renewed diplomatic relations with Iran, reopened his country’s Embassy in Tehran after seven years and welcomed a series of high-level Iranian officials to Riyadh. The reconciliation between Tehran and Riyadh was brokered by Beijing, not Washington. Part of this process involved a ceasefire in Yemen which continues today.

It would have been much wiser for America to have supported Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates when they were willing to commit their own troops to defeat the Houthis. Now, these two states benefit from a fragile peace with Iran and are not interested in a renewed confrontation with Iran’s proxies in Yemen. As a result, although the Saudis and Emiratis have a long history of cooperation with the US Navy, they have politely declined to join Operation Prosperity Guardian, the US-led attempt to protect Red Sea shipping. They are even less likely to participate in any offensive actions against the Houthis.

The broader problem is the emergence of a multipolar global order in which the United States is no longer the controlling superpower. In 1990, when America successfully led an international coalition to liberate Kuwait from Iraq’s invasion, Russia supported Operation Desert Storm, China remained neutral, Saudi Arabia underwrote the costs and Israel stayed on the sidelines. None of that is likely to happen today if the United States goes to war against the Houthis. Indeed, both Russia and China abstained from voting for Wednesday’s UN resolution demanding a ceasefire.

America’s hands have been also tied by the war in Gaza. By claiming that their attacks are made in support of the Palestinians, the Houthis have transformed themselves from pirates into resistance fighters. Much of the world agrees with them that Israel should withdraw its forces from Gaza, which has made forming a multinational coalition against them difficult: not wishing to be accused of supporting Netanyahu, the rest are happy to free ride.

Meanwhile, Tehran’s quest for regional hegemony is also influencing events in the Red Sea. Without Iranian missiles and drones, the Houthis’ attacks would be much less effective. However, dealing with Iran is a long-term problem. The immediate issue for the West is protecting commercial shipping in the Red Sea. There are no good solutions: doing nothing poses serious risks for global trade; taking offensive action against the Houthis risks igniting a larger war that could jeopardise Middle East oil production.

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Most probably, the war in Gaza will end, and when it does, the Houthis’ justification for their attacks will evaporate. If they continue after the war is over, most nations will regard them as dangerous terrorists. Yet, once started, a war with the Houthis may not end quickly or easily. Before beginning another “as long as it takes” conflict, Washington should consider less risky options: expanding a formal convoy system such as the one used to protect Kuwaiti tankers during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) appears to be the least bad option, at least initially.

And with this, there is no reason why protecting freedom of navigation in the Red Sea should be the sole responsibility of the United States, Britain and a few willing partners. Most of the cargoes transiting the Suez Canal are bound for Europe and Asia, not the United States or Great Britain. Many nations, including China, Japan, Korea and Germany, do not want their trade disrupted by Houthi attacks on commercial shipping. Nor do they want their energy supplies disrupted by a large-scale war to eliminate the Houthis. They have very tangible interests in finding a peaceful solution to the Houthi problem.

Transforming Prosperity Guardian into a truly multinational operation would increase its effectiveness, reduce its costs for each participant and isolate the Houthis. Perhaps more important, it would demonstrate clearly that all options short of war had been tried and thus help to justify any offensive military action in the eyes of global public opinion.

But creating a more multinational operation is a political and economic problem, not a military one. Finding a solution is a job for creative diplomats, not admirals. Support for a more multinational operation need not involve sending ships: statements of public support condemning maritime terrorism would help, so would financial contributions and logistical support. The justification to emphasise is that the war in Gaza and piracy in the Red Sea are two different issues and that secure global trade is in everyone’s interest. Before we enter yet another easily expandable armed conflict, we should use diplomacy to convince the rest of the world of this.

President Roosevelt told King Abdulaziz how the Jews of Europe had suffered indescribable horrors at the hands of the Nazis: eviction from their homes, destruction of their property, torture of their families, and mass murder. Could the king help with their resettlement?

The king replied that the Jews and their descendants should be given the best “lands, flocks and wells” of the Germans who had oppressed them. When the President said that the Jews did not trust the Germans and had no desire to stay in Germany, Abdulaziz replied that if the Allies did not think they could control the Germans, then why had they fought such a costly war? Certainly, he would never leave a defeated enemy in a position to strike back in the future.

When the President tried again, he received a similar reply: “Amends should be made by the criminal, not by the innocent bystander. What injury have the Arabs done to the Jews of Europe? It is the Christian Germans who stole their homes and lives. Let the Germans pay.” Had Roosevelt not dropped the issue, the meeting might well have ended acrimoniously.

Today, the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the Jewish people has once again come under scrutiny. A historic peace deal between Saudi and Israel has been put on hold since the outbreak of war in Gaza. And the week before last, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) called for an “immediate halt to Israeli military operations in Gaza”.

Yet Saudi leaders have always been pragmatists. Two years after the meeting on the USS Quincy, King Abdulaziz’s son, the future King Faisal, led the Saudi delegation to the United Nations, where he tried to prevent the partition of Palestine. He failed, and the United States successfully mobilised support for partition. But although King Abdulaziz was angry and disappointed by Washington’s recognition of Israel, he never threatened the American air base or oil concessions in Saudi Arabia. He placed too great a value on promoting regional stability and maintaining strong relations with the US to risk a diplomatic confrontation.

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For most of the last 75 years, Saudi Arabia has tried to stay out of Arab-Israeli wars and promote reconciliation. In 1948, the Saudis contributed two companies of infantry, which fought under Egyptian command. In the Six-Day War of 1967, a Saudi brigade moved slowly towards Jordan, arriving only when a ceasefire was about to be declared. And during the 1973 Arab-Israel War, Saudi Arabia sent one brigade to join the Arab Foreign Legion with strict instructions not to become involved in the fighting. By the time it reached Damascus, the hostilities were over.

King Abdulaziz (1875-1953) was always more worried about his Hashemite rivals in Jordan and Iraq than about Israel. His son, King Faisal (1906-1975), regarded Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, not the Jewish state, as the greatest threat to his kingdom. And today, Saudis are far more concerned with threats from Iran and it proxies in Yemen and Iraq than they are with Israel.

After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Arab leaders met in Khartoum, where they adopted their reflexive “Three Noes” with regard to Israel. “No recognition, No negotiation and No reconciliation.” With the exception of Egypt, this remained their unanimous, unwavering and unhelpful position for the next 15 years. Only in 1981 did the then Saudi Crown Prince Fahd (1921-2005) put forth a fresh proposal by which “all states in the region should be able to live in peace”. Fahd’s plan did not explicitly recognise Israel, but it implied that this was possible after the creation of a Palestinian state and a return to Israel’s 1967 borders.

That was a radical proposal 42 years ago. A watered-down version of Fahd’s plan was adopted in 1982 by Arab leaders meeting in Morocco. Known as the Fez Plan, it remains the Arab League’s policy to this day. President Ronald Reagan called it “the single largest step towards peace on which the Arab World has been able to agree”.

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In 2002, then Crown Prince Abdullah (1924-2015) repeated the Saudi offer to Israel to the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman: “full withdrawal from all the occupied territories, in accord with UN resolutions, including Jerusalem, for full normalisation of relations.” The following month Abdullah presented his plan to the Arab Summit in Beirut, where a modified version was unanimously adopted. The Beirut Plan differed from the Fez Plan in that it explicitly stated the conditions under which the Arabs would “consider the Arab-Israeli conflict over and sign a peace agreement with Israel”.

At both Fez and Beirut, the Saudi proposals were more forward-leaning than the eventual Arab consensus. In both instances, however, the Saudis led the effort by taking political risks and spending financial capital to convince other Arab leaders to go as far as they did. Neither proposal was fully acceptable to Israel or the United States. However, they remain the most constructive plans put forward by the Arabs to date. King Salman has reaffirmed them more than once.

On top of its own initiatives, Saudi Arabia has almost always supported American efforts to negotiate an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The only notable exception was its breaking off of diplomatic relations with Egypt in 1979 after President Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David Accords with Israel. Yet even when Riyadh followed the Arab consensus in severing ties with Cairo, the Saudis did not completely cut off financial aid to Egypt, or expel thousands of Egyptian guest workers from their country.

In 2020, the Trump Administration orchestrated the Abraham Accords, through which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco all normalised relations with Israel. Riyadh implicitly supported the deal by allowing Saudi journalists to write op-eds praising it. It is unlikely it would have materialised had the Saudis strongly objected and Riyadh implicitly supported the settlement by allowing Saudi journalists to praise it.

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In recent years, the benefits for Saudi of making peace with Israel have significantly increased, while the costs have appeared to decline. The latter were largely political: older Saudis who grew up with Nasser’s Arab Nationalism continue to regard unwavering support for Palestine as an essential part of their Arab identity. As the guardians of Mecca, the Saudis cannot ignore widespread sympathy for Palestine in the Muslim world. Nor can they remain indifferent to the status of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem.

Yet peace with Israel would be a massive boost to Saudi Arabia’s national security. It would improve Saudi Arabia’s relations with its most important security partner, the United States — and reduce opposition to those relations among the Saudi public. What’s more, peace would strengthen Saudi Arabia’s hand against Iran, which since the 1979 Iranian Revolution has challenged Saudi leadership in the Muslim World and sought to extend its influence in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Despite the recent Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, Saudi and Israeli leaders still share many reasons to resist Iran’s pursuit of regional hegemony and nuclear weapons.

Saudi Arabia and Israel have another goal in common: suppressing radical Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda, Isis, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Like the Shi’a revolutionary government in Tehran, many radical Sunni Islamist groups seek to destroy both Israel and the Arab monarchies. Having suffered from numerous al-Qaeda attacks themselves, the Saudis understand the threat of jihadist militants. They have a long-strained relationship with Iranian-backed Hamas, as well as its junior partner, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Saudi authorities have arrested or deported Hamas supporters in Saudi Arabia and would quietly welcome the organisation’s demise. This gives Saudi Arabia and Israel further grounds for cooperation.

The two nations also have economic interests in common. MBS has staked his political future on the success of Vision 2030, an ambitious development programme that aims to diversify his economy away from oil. But his reforms won’t succeed if the Middle East is consumed by a major war, and therefore it is in his interests to promote lasting peace with Israel.

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Furthermore, to succeed, Vision 2030 will require foreign direct investment, technology transfer, increased non-oil trade, and even more tourists — all of which Israel has in abundance. Another goal of Vision 2030 is the creation of a local defence industry. Saudi Arabia has a defence budget larger than Britain or Germany, but today nearly all its weapons and military equipment are imported. The new General Authority for Military Industries wants to change that — and Israel, with its sophisticated defence industry, is well-placed to help.

Ironically, the terrorist attacks of October 7 have made a Saudi-Israeli peace deal both more desirable — and even more difficult. Those who thought that regional peace could be established without addressing the plight of the Palestinians have been proven wrong. Instead, pro-Palestinian sympathies have been reignited across the Muslim world. It is now unthinkable for any Saudi leader to embrace peace with Israel before meaningful progress is made towards establishing a Palestinian state.

With the terrorist attacks of October 7, Hamas has managed to derail efforts to establish Saudi-Israeli peace. And yet, Saudi Arabia and Israel remain united in their desire to avoid a larger regional conflict, eliminate terrorism, and reinvigorate that peace process.  The case for rapprochement remains compelling and their leaders remain interested in it. But in an increasingly multipolar world, it will require a determined, coordinated, multinational effort to comfort the injured, reassure the fearful, calm the angry and remove the remaining political obstacles to peace.

When we spoke earlier this week, he set out a radically different focus for the American military — away from Ukraine, and towards a conflict with China that he believes could come as soon as 2027. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.

FS: You’re neither a full isolationist, nor a full maximalist — what’s your vision for American strategy?

EC: My perspective is that the right equilibrium for America, but certainly for a Right-of-centre political movement, is to ask what is in the American people’s concrete interest.

If you look at the voting bloc of the Republican Party — not to say that foreign policy should only serve them — but it’s made up of working- and middle-class Americans. I don’t think our foreign policy has served them. We’ve had this maximalist foreign policy that has proved disastrous. Americans are really tired of the “forever wars”. If you watch Fox News over the course of the day, the ad that leaves the most impressions, though maybe not the most common, is the one that’s for wounded warriors, people who were horribly wounded during Iraq or Afghanistan, or were killed in 9/11, or their widows. That is the mindset of a lot of Republican voters. I think there’s a real distrust and discontent about that foreign policy establishment, which is often the same people making the same arguments that got us into Iraq and the long war in Afghanistan. So what I’m saying is: let’s be unashamed in asking, “What’s in Americans’ interests?”

FS: And what is in their interests — let’s start by asking if America is too committed to the defence of Ukraine.

EC: The way you frame it is exactly the problem — we should be starting with China. It’s very revealing because a lot of not only the Biden administration but many Republicans of that above-the-waterline iceberg agree with you. I think that is the problem, because China is clearly by far the most significant challenge to the concrete, regular American interest. It’s far more formidable economically, but now also militarily.

The way I look at Ukraine is not in a vacuum or separate from China, but precisely through the lens of China, and through the lens of the recognition that we are neglecting the scale of the challenge posed by China. Through the defence strategy that I worked on, and other efforts, we have become more attuned to China, but it’s not a self-referential exercise. It’s more like a business. If you’re GM in the Seventies and you’re changing to adapt to Toyota, but you don’t do enough, you’re going to go out of business — or IBM vis-à-vis Microsoft.

In that context, I would say, yes, we are focusing way too much on Ukraine. I’m not in favour of just simply cutting the Ukrainians off. I think what Russia did and is doing is evil. That’s not the issue. But if our foreign policy is about Americans’ concrete interests, then we’re doing too much. We’ve already spent over $100 billion. We’ve sent equipment, which is not easily replaceable, which is relevant to the potential fight over Taiwan, and certainly the implications as it reverberates through our defence industrial base is very relevant. This stuff sounds arcane, but it’s not. For want of a shoe, the kingdom can be lost. Why are we taking risks on the most significant challenge to the US position in the world and our interest in the world in 150 years? We were a much larger economy than the Soviet Union. We alone were larger than the three Axis Powers, let alone with the British Empire and the Soviet Union. That’s the right way to look at this.

FS: But what does that mean, practically? If you were Senior Advisor to the President right now, what would you tell him to do?

EC: I would say, “I don’t want to talk about Ukraine right now. We’re going to talk about Taiwan and China and Asia first, and once we fix that problem to a satisfactory degree, we’ll spend time and political capital and resources on Ukraine.” I think we should put a lot more pressure and encouragement on Europe to step up and take the primary role. Why is the United States providing the vast majority of military and financial support to Ukraine — certainly in the military context, but also in the civilian area? That makes no sense. Europe is a vastly larger economic area than Russia. It has enormous latent military advantages vis-à-vis Russia. A lot of people have been celebrating US policy saying “American leadership is back” — I actually think this is bad. This is a failure, because if anything, it’s suffocated any effort by Europeans to stand up and say, “We’re going to take leading responsibility.” My basic attitude would be that Americans need to focus on China. We’re not just going to cut the Ukrainians off, but we are going to get the Europeans to do what we’ve been trying to get the Europeans to do since Dwight Eisenhower.

FS: But European countries have stepped up — Germany famously has torn up its postwar neutral position.

EC: No, the Germans haven’t, sorry.

FS: They are committing to vast amounts of increased expenditure on arms. Even if they were committing as much as you want, it’s going to take years or even decades for them to get the kind of military that you would need. You need American power there anyway, don’t you?

EC: Let’s get to the nub of the matter, which is: we don’t have time. It’s the assessment of the US intelligence community that Xi Jinping has ordered the Chinese military to be ready for a successful attack on Taiwan by 2027. It’s not a prediction, but that’s about as much warning as you can expect in the tough world of international politics. So we don’t have time. That’s four years away — in defence planning terms, that’s yesterday. We actually have very limited things that we can do.

The Germans deconstructed their military, not as a result of World War Two, but as a result of the end of history and the peace dividend. They had a very large and impressive military when the Federal Republic was seeking to defend itself against the Soviets and the Eastern Bloc. This has been a matter of policy, particularly under former chancellor Merkel — whose legacy will be ashes in her mouth. But the question is: can Germany do it? They’re not stepping up. Their military budget is going to be way below 2% of GDP again this year. The country that deserves applause, in this respect, is Poland, which is committed to almost 5%, and is actually putting its money where its mouth is.

FS: What about the UK?

EC: I give it a lot of credit for its ambition. Under Boris Johnson, it almost committed to 3% but I think that figure has been knocked down over time. My view is it’s great that Britain is more engaged on the continent, precisely because we are going to have to shift to Asia and the UK has very limited ability to project serious military power. if we’re looking at it from the enlightened, self-interested point of view invented in the United Kingdom, then we can’t get China and Asia wrong.

If China takes over Asia, in a hegemonic situation, which I think is its goal, our interests are going to suffer far more than they would suffer because Asia is a much, much larger economic area than Europe. China is a much larger and more formidable power than Russia is. So the question is, who’s going to bear the cost?

If Europe presents a future administration with “we just can’t do it, it’s going to take us too much time”, then, I’m sorry, you have to bear the consequence of that decision and inability. If you want to change that, we will help you, but we, the American people, are not going to allow China to take over Asia because you won’t take the steps needed to be able to defend yourselves. I think this administration is — and this is the point I made in UnHerd last year — actually not helping Europeans by providing a false sense of assurance about what the United States can and will offer in the future.

FS: Does that mean that attempting to keep back the Russian line in Ukraine or even push it further east is a dead project?

EC: I don’t think that’s true. Obviously, you can do things at the same time. The point is that at the political level, we need to make sure that everything that is even remotely needed for a Taiwan fight is allocated — that the resources go there. We gave a bunch of Abrams tanks to Ukraine — it is pretty hard to imagine Abrams tanks being useful in a fight with China. F16s and F35s are going to have trouble against the Chinese. So I don’t see why we couldn’t give F16s potentially to the Ukrainians. But also the Russians are having real trouble. They’re not ten-feet tall; this is not the Red Army of 1945. The notion that they’re just going to roll over the Ukrainians — you don’t have to accept that, Europe. You’re a huge economic area. The problem is that Europe is not stepping up.

FS: Where does Nato stand in this new world?

EC: During the Cold War, the relative balance of expenditures on defence between America and Europe was closer to 50%. I think we should go back to basics, which is: it’s not about the United States. And this is where that establishment and Europe’s interests do align, because the establishment in Washington loves to be the global leader — the Madeleine Albrights, George W. Bushes. “We stand taller; we’re the indispensable nation.” That’s great for that Washington establishment, but that is not what serves the people who are watching the wounded warriors. Why are the American people spending 3.5% of their GDP? It’s really insane when you think about it, that the Americans in Duluth, or Dubuque, or Denver are spending 3.5% while the Germans — who have more responsibility to provide for collective defence than anybody by orders of magnitude — spend 1.5%. And people say: “Germans don’t feel threatened.” Do you think Americans do? The only way to make this sustainable is to have a more balanced approach. I’m not advocating that the United States get out of Nato — to the contrary. I think the treaty is great. But if you go back and look at the ratification in 1949, this was not supposed to be the outcome — in fact, this was the concern.

FS: The treaty holds that “an attack on one is an attack on all”. That, if Russia invades Poland or Lithuania, it should be treated by America as an attack on America, and therefore would call on all of its defence capabilities.

EC: That’s not actually what the treaty says. And, of course, we would not treat an attack on a European ally the same way as an attack on the United States itself. The whole Nato strategy during the Cold War was explicitly about not doing that. That was why we developed flexible response, because there was a difference between an attack on Western Europe and an attack on the American homeland. Obviously there’s a rhetorical level at which that happens. The good thing is the Russians are not sufficiently threatening to make that a problem, because they can’t threaten European Nato, given the attrition that they’ve had in Ukraine, at least for some time.

That is a problem, much more of a problem, with China, which is, in a sense, the new Soviet Union. The point about Nato is that it’s got this post-Cold War model. We need to go back to something closer to the Cold War model, not the post-Cold War model, which is, basically, America takes care of everything. That benefited the Washington old guard, and benefited a lot of Europeans who could disarm. That doesn’t benefit the regular American people. If Nato continues in this direction, it risks breaking. My approach is designed to sustain Nato over the long term.

FS: What makes you so sure that China is actually planning some kind of attack on Taiwan?

EC: I don’t think it’s much of a debate anymore. The leader of the most unified Chinese government since Mao Zedong has explicitly given instructions to the party-army to be ready to attack Taiwan by 2027. And the Chinese pretty much assume that the Americans would come to Taiwan’s defence. That would mean war. That’s not a prediction, but if you go back to some old British wisdom represented in the Crowe Memorandum before World War One, usually aggressive powers won’t give you a precise date and time on which they’re going to move. And Xi Jinping has actually given us that. So we can never say we haven’t been warned.

The other thing is: it ain’t just rhetoric. Look at the military they’re building: it is obviously designed to take on, not just Taiwan, but the United States, Japan. They’re clearly developing a global military that looks like the American military: aircraft carriers, space satellites, nuclear powered submarines. Their basing architecture: Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Cambodia, Pakistan, Equatorial Guinea, which is on the Atlantic coast of Africa. This is the future. I don’t make any predictions; I have no idea what Xi Jinping is going to decide to do. But if it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and swims like a duck, maybe it’s a duck.

FS: Do you think it would actually be an attack rather than just a blockade?

EC: One of the lessons of Ukraine is: don’t screw around; don’t pussyfoot around. If you’re going to do something, do it right. If you’re going to send two missiles, send six. I think the Chinese are clearly developing the capability to do just that. Yes — it’s difficult to mount and sustain an amphibious and air invasion across the strait, 100 miles. It’s not impossible. We’ve been able to do it over the last 75 years. With the exception of the Persian Gulf War, we haven’t, but everybody knew that we could drop marines pretty much where we wanted in large parts of the world, and that nobody could do anything about it. That’s one thing we have in our favour, the difficulties of such an operation.

To go back historically: the Wehrmacht was much more powerful than the remaining British Army after Dunkirk, but the Germans couldn’t find a way to get across the Channel and sustain it. That’s the model to think about. But the reason I think they’re not going to do a blockade — which I think they could, it’s not impossible, and that could succeed — is that it would leave a lot to chance. It leaves a lot in the hands of the Taiwanese; it leaves a lot in the hands of the Americans. It cedes the initiative, it cedes the element of surprise, and I just don’t think the Chinese are likely to do that. I think they’re at least as smart as we are — probably smarter given our foreign policy over the last 25 years — and so I would expect them to take the most advantageous approach: something that would move below the threshold of our response.

FS: But China is actually quite a cautious state. Why risk plunging the whole world into war?

EC: I don’t know how the Chinese have gotten this reputation. They won the Civil War through the most brutal means possible. Then they seized Tibet through invasion. They invaded Hainan Island as part of the conclusion of the Civil War, and they were planning on invading Formosa before they directly intervened in the Korean War with huge amounts of troops and fought the Americans and the British to a standstill. They also directly attacked Vietnam in 1979 — their ambitions were to go a lot further.

Why would they do it now? I think they actually feel that they need to. Xi Jinping is saying that the United States is trying to strangle China. You see what he’s doing with Vladimir Putin and Russia — they regard us as being in an almost existential struggle, which is very dangerous. The reason they would use military force is to secure their place as the world’s top economy, and a large guaranteed geo-economic sphere, because they can see what’s happening with things like Aukus and so forth. There’s a lot of balancing behaviour to check China’s overweening ambitions, and if they want to get out from under that, they have a strong incentive to use military force, and they’re preparing to do so.

FS: Let’s say that attack does happen. What do you want the American response to be?

EC: This is a situation where being “half-pregnant” is almost the worst approach. My preferred policy — which is, of course, designed to deter and avoid a war, rather than get into it — is for the United States to act decisively and expeditiously to defeat a Chinese invasion, which would involve anti-ship, anti-air, attacking Chinese ground forces that land on the islands. It almost certainly would involve selective attacks on the Chinese mainland that would be constrained to try to help manage escalation, which would be an uncertain endeavour. The best thing in this situation is to be as prepared as humanly possible, and not to get close to the marginal edge of a conventional fight — and that’s what we’re not doing right now. I think the problem is that if we half-bake it, we could get a situation in which the Chinese do it, and we offer an unsatisfactory or unavailing response, which means we’re at war with China, but we’ve lost. That’s the worst outcome, and that’s actually going to be worse for Europe, because in that situation, there’s going to be a giant sucking sound of every US resource going to the primary theatre.

FS: And that means greater investment in military hardware and deterrence around the South China Sea?

EC: No, actually the reverse. I’m in the “speak softly and carry a big stick” department. I think we are peacocking right now, and probably with the strength of a peacock. It’s mostly for show. Forgive the analogy: if you remember the movie Rocky 4, but Dolph Lundgren is the Soviet boxing star who was all business and quiet, and then you have Apollo Creed in the American flag dancing around, then Dolph Lundgren kills him in the ring. That’s my fear of the situation that we’re heading into.

I actually want us to really focus on sharpening that stick, making it a bigger stick, if you will, and doing less in the way of publicity. All these people are on the island and making all these statements about Taiwan — “the CCP is evil” and all this stuff. Sure, the CCP is evil. I sympathise with Taiwan’s freedom. But we are in a super dangerous situation and should focus on hitting the gym. In Europe — I’m not picking on Ukraine — we’re not anywhere near as disciplined as we want. There’s waste in the defence budget. There are difficulties in resuscitating the defence-industrial base. But that’s the world we have to live in. We have to live in the world of now. By the way, the American people are not showing a lot of interest in dramatic increases in defence spending. This is not 1980.

FS: Isn’t that a problem? If the American people aren’t interested and regard this as another “forever war”, they may not be with you on Taiwan.

EC: That’s exactly the problem and that’s one of the reasons I’m so worried about Ukraine. People say we can walk and chew gum — no, we should be husbanding the voters’ resolve. We should be very careful with their money. I think we can do it. We’re already spending almost a trillion dollars on the defence budget. But then, if we’re going to do that, we can’t think we can fight a proxy war with Russia indefinitely. I’m acutely conscious of whether the American people will support a defensive Taiwan. And the Taiwanese are not helping the cause by spending less per capita on defence than the American people do, which is insane. We are really on a knife edge.

FS: And you don’t buy the reverse argument that weakness on Ukraine would signal weakness on Taiwan?

EC: It’s such a tendentious argument. There’s a group now, particularly more on the Left, of people who are Ukraine hawks, who are starting to call for détente with China. I actually appreciate that, because at least we’re seeing a choice. You find this particularly among hawks, who say, “We’re going to do Ukraine, and it’s going to show China and then we’re going to pivot.” It’s a “we’re going to win the lottery” sort of strategy.

Obviously China is looking to some extent, but China’s main calculation is going to be the balance of military forces vis-à-vis Taiwan, and how resolute the American government and the American people are vis-à-vis this specific conflict. It’s the same argument that defenders of the Vietnam War used: that, if we don’t win in the rice paddies of Vietnam, we’re not going to win in Europe. Europeans at the time were saying: “We actually think this is a waste; we think you’re eroding American people’s support.” And in the wake of Vietnam, initiatives like the Mansfield Amendment tried to pull US forces back from Europe. You have the Robert Kagans of the world, who just constantly harangue the American people to “fight the jungle”, and about “global liberal hegemony”. And they’re tuned out. Of course they’re not going to do that kind of thing. So what we really need to do is be much more careful and respectful and husbanding of the American people’s resolve.

FS: Is there a chance you could make conflict more likely by anticipating it?

EC: It’s a very serious worry. We are now in a situation, because of our neglect of Taiwan, where the Chinese clearly want to subordinate Taiwan. That is not the issue — we are not going to catalyse something that they did not already want. They’ve been working, since the Third Taiwan Straits Crisis, assiduously and carefully and ruthlessly to develop a military to do this. By neglecting our defences there, we’ve now brought it into the realm of the possible. So now we’re in the situation, frankly, that Britain faced in the late Thirties, where you’re understrength in the primary theatre. Your choices are: to be weak and essentially ensure failure — you might avoid the war, but at the cost of all your important interests. Or you can arm — but then you might precipitate, at more of an operational and tactical level, a Chinese response to get out from under this. This is a problem I take very seriously.

FS: The alternative historical analogy is the First World War, which some historians would say that we would have been better off not having and was the worst case for everybody.

EC: The worst case was what happened. The second-worst case would have been German dominance of Europe, which would clearly have turned against British interests very quickly. The best case, and it is directly analogous, is that Britain — and I think Britain actually behaved really admirably from a strategic perspective — reoriented its whole military and strategic policy. The historic enmity with France — it settled that issue. It settled the enmity with Russia; it cut deals with the Japanese. It cut deals with the Americans, who — for all this Special Relationship stuff — saw Great Britain as our primary opponent in the 19th century. Britain settled that as well and focused on Germany.

The problem is it didn’t go far enough. In the decisive moment in the July Crisis, instead of Britain saying clearly it was committed to the alliance with France, it equivocated and hedged. And, more than that, if the British had the military forces already generated and ideally deployed on the continent — that’s the lesson Nato learned in the Cold War — I think the Germans could have been dissuaded. The lesson here is that getting 90% of the way there, or 85% of the way there, is not the same as getting 100% of the way there. You have to get 100% of the way there.

FS: How would you position the two leading Republican candidates — Trump and DeSantis — on these foreign policy questions?

EC: Both Governor DeSantis and Trump are with strategic reality, and where the voters are, far away from that traditional blob, that traditional foreign policy establishment. You have other candidates, like former ambassador and governor Nikki Haley, who are clearly running in that lane. Of course, President Trump was the first not to just talk about China, but really do something about it. Governor DeSantis has been very clear on the primacy of the China threat. I think that that’s very telling.

FS: Is there a difference between them?

EC: I’m not going to characterise their positions. You can go ask them. What I will say is, if you look at what they’ve said, for instance in response to the Tucker Carlson questionnaire, I think they’re both focused on China and they’re both concerned about overexposure in the Ukraine context.

I think that the strategy that I’m advocating for is the natural one for a future Republican administration, hopefully one that would win in 2024. Bear this in mind: the next presidential term is going to include the year 2027. So if you are the president, then you are going to really face the issue: am I going to be the first president to lose a major-power war? The United States withdrew from Vietnam or withdrew from Afghanistan, but we have never lost a major-power war. That is going to be a very sobering bucket of cold water to pour on the presidential administration as they transition, or if it’s a continuation of this administration or another Democrat.

In that context, you need to be super-real, super-practical, because you can’t do the walk and chew gum. But you also can’t take the Rand Paul approach, because then China’s going to take over Asia. That’s clearly going to be bad. So my argument is not going to catch fire in the US Senate necessarily. But what you are going to see is, I think, a future administration saying:  “We’re living in a really tough world and we can’t afford the old shibboleths, the old religion.”

FS: Would you work for either Trump or DeSantis?

EC: At the end of the day, anybody who’s working in a presidential administration is a servant of the people, but, of course, is working as staff to the person who has been elected. But if somebody wanted to put something like the approach that I’m advocating for, I would be honoured to work for them. If they’re not, then I think it’s pretty clear, I’m probably not the right guy.

John McCain used to say that we were living in the most dangerous time, and that was in 2006. And I used to think to myself, actually, that’s probably about the safest time we’ve had since before World War One. I think today is genuinely a really, really dangerous time. Look at what Xi Jinping was caught saying to Vladimir Putin on video: that changes are coming which have not been seen in 100 years. I don’t question this man’s resolve, his seriousness, his ruthless brutality. And I think that’s the kind of attitude that we need to take — obviously not the same attitude or same approach — but that level of sobriety and seriousness is what we need as we move further into this century.

Today, around 50 defence ministers from around the world are meeting at the US air base in Ramstein, not far from Frankfurt, to again discuss western military support for Ukraine. Naturally, Germany will be in the spotlight. The US and other allies are counting on Scholz to take on more responsibility, to assume more leadership in Europe’s greatest security crisis in decades. And Scholz has been making the noises that Germany’s allies have hoped to hear: in a recent article in Foreign Affairs he writes: “Germans are intent on becoming the guarantor of European security that our allies expect us to be.” This echoes Scholz’s stated aim of making Germany a Führungsmacht, a leading power. But how close is he to achieving it? Very, very far.

The visiting defence ministers will encounter a Germany riddled with problems. For one, Monday saw the resignation of the incompetent defence minister, Christine Lambrecht. By Tuesday a new one, Boris Pistorius, had been named. He’s in for a baptism of fire. Germany has been under enormous pressure to supply the Leopard 2 battle tanks that Ukraine has been requesting for months — or at least to green light the re-export of the German-made fighting vehicles from countries like Poland and Finland. And that pressure was ramped up a notch this week by Britain’s decision to provide Challenger tanks.

In truth, there’s little willingness in Germany to spare any of the 340-odd Leopard 2s in use by the nation’s army. The government, on this front, has been dithering and stalling — or at least is that how it comes across publicly. Back in October, Scholz’ spin doctor Wolfgang Schmidt had all sorts of strange excuses not to provide the tanks. The Ukrainians wouldn’t be capable of maintaining the sophisticated German machines. Or, even weirder, the iron cross on the tanks would indicate to the Russians that the Germans were an active participant in the war. At which Ukrainians tweeted: “Don’t worry, we have paint.”

As with every German weapons delivery, making it happen would take a solid kick up the arse from President Joe Biden. Perhaps one was delivered in the phone call between the two men on Tuesday. But at the Davos summit the next day, Scholz’s communication on Ukraine was still vague and non-committal. When asked about the Leopards, he dodged the question and rattled off a list of armaments that Germany has delivered so far. It’s true that these armaments have not been insignificant. They have included howitzers, mobile anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missile systems. This month, the German government pledged 40 Marder infantry fighting vehicles — but only after dragging its feet for months.

Why isn’t the Zeitenwende happening a little quicker? Partly because Germany’s military structures are sclerotic. Modernising them must be the eternal quest of the nation’s defence minister. Especially bureaucratic is the procurement of weapons and gear. A small example: a pedantic military official once noticed, while purchasing tanks, that they didn’t have mirrors that conformed to the German highway code — so he or she absolutely insisted on getting them installed, complicating and slowing down the acquisition.

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Ursula von der Leyen, while serving as Angela Merkel’s defence minister, hired McKinsey to sort out the Bundeswehr’s crusty organisational structures. A consulting budget of €2.5 million ballooned into €100 million, in what was known as the “consultant affair”. Relevant data requested by a parliamentary enquiry vanished under von der Leyen’s watch — but none of the allegations stuck. And although she massively boosted defence spending, the operational problems persisted.

Even more useless was Lambrecht, who took the reins of the defence ministry in December 2021, when Olaf Scholz’s coalition assumed power. In response to the Russian invasion a few months later, she dispatched 5,000 helmets to Ukraine, earning her ridicule. But her true talent was social media blunders, which included a post of her son riding in a military helicopter, and a New Year’s Eve video message with a backdrop of exploding pyrotechnics that sounded a lot like artillery fire. Empathy wasn’t her strength. Neither was running the military. She achieved practically nothing with a budget of €100 billion. Last month, all 18 Puma armed personnel carriers participating in an exercise broke down, coming to symbolise how ill-prepared the German army is for combat.

Lambrecht’s replacement, Boris Pistorius, is said to be a tough-talking, no-nonsense kind of guy. His appointment has upset the gender parity of the Scholz cabinet, attracting criticism from the Left. But hiring a capable minister should probably take precedent at this point. There’s a war out there — and the double challenge of getting Ukraine what it needs and turning the German army into an effective defence force once more is enormous to say the least.

But it’s not just practical challenges slowing down the tectonic shift. Equally complex are the beliefs that inform the German approach to Ukraine. Pro-Russian and anti-American impulses are common on the political fringes, among both the far-Right AfD and far-Left Die Linke, but also among mainstream politicians, including Michael Kretschmer, the premier of the eastern state of Saxony. This is the same Michael Kretschmer who called for the repair of the Nord Stream 1 undersea pipeline that was attacked in September. We’ll need that cheap Russian gas after the war, Kretschmer said. Granted, his state has close business links to Russia, but isn’t it a little early to start cozying up to the aggressor?

As I’ve written for UnHerd, many East Germans feel less connected to “The West” as an idea. It’s common in this region to reject military support for Ukraine and believe in a negotiated peace with Putin. Which is confounding when you remember that East Germans staged a peaceful revolution to free themselves from the Soviet bloc. That Ukrainians were also part of that bloc doesn’t seem to make East Germans more sympathetic to their resistance.

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How influenced is Scholz by such sentiments? None of the parties in his coalition are anti-western, per se. But last summer, Scholz’ foreign policy adviser Jens Plötner snapped dismissively: “You can fill many newspaper pages with 20 Marders [the fighting vehicles Germany would pledge to Ukraine], but larger articles about our future relationship with Russia are less frequent. That question is at least as exciting and relevant.” Plötner has, for years, played a key role in Germany’s appeasement of Russia. His comments came not long after the discovery of mass graves in Bucha.

It’s not so much what Germany does as how, according to Benjamin Tallis, senior fellow at the German Council for Foreign Relations, and author of the new book To Ukraine with love: Essays on Russia’s war and Europe’s future. For him, Germany is “moving at the speed of shame. It’s been pressured into taking every one of its steps to support Ukraine. Its leadership, particularly in the chancellery, has seemed extremely reluctant to take each one of those steps, or even providing weapons at all. Now we see it again on the Leopards, the main battle tanks that would really be a game changer.”

To Tallis, the German approach is “a nostalgic politics for the recent past”, when Germany outsourced “its energy needs to Russia, its security needs to the US and its trade to China”. Since the defeat of Nazi Germany, West Germany has taken an ever more pacifist approach to foreign policy. In the late Sixties there was Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, which allowed the Federal Republic to begin importing natural gas from the Soviet Union. And then came 1989.

As Thomas Bagger, currently Germany’s ambassador to Poland, articulates in his 2019 essay “The world according to Germany: Reassessing 1989”, in the decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany — more than any other country — took Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” to heart. Or, at least, an oversimplified version of Fukuyama’s thesis. Liberal democracy embedded in a rules-based international order was, in Germany, the only model with any future. Authoritarian powers like Russia and China could be turned into friendly, liberal partners if only you did enough business with them.

“Even long after it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, they continued to pursue this,” says Tallis. “It was remarkably comfortable, remarkably easy. You got to pretend you were doing good by doing well.” And all the while you whittle down your armed forces from nearly 500,000 troops in the Eighties to 180,000 today (a mere 24,000 of them combat-ready soldiers). You retire most of your military hardware, kick back and enjoy the peace dividend, under the umbrella of continued American protection.

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The chickens have come home to roost, thanks to the war. Or, as Tallis puts it: “The hypocrisy of Germany’s position is coming out now.” Its recent history shaped by the idea that “Germans, having atoned for their past, had moved beyond these very 20^th century vices of war, violence and power politics”, the nation has fallen foul of a “head-in-the-sand approach: We can get away with this while others sully their hands.”

One German commentator describes the lingering recalcitrance this way: “It sometimes seems like there’s been an accident, someone is injured, and there’s a bunch of people standing around. And Germany thinks, hopefully someone knows what they’re doing and takes decisive action to help the person, otherwise they might die. There’s a war in Europe, it would be good if someone did something. But Zeitenwende means we’re the ones who have to do something.”

Germany is doing something. The question is: is it enough? Despite the words coming out of Scholz’s mouth, it still feels as though the nation is in denial about the fact that there’s a devastating war raging just two countries away. Or it is, at least, in denial about the nature of that war — and the huge geopolitical shift it represents. Perhaps today, faced with so many of the world’s defence ministers, the nation will pull its head out the sand.