{"id":522,"date":"2026-06-21T11:11:52","date_gmt":"2026-06-21T11:11:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/relocationacrossamerica.com\/?p=522"},"modified":"2026-06-21T11:11:52","modified_gmt":"2026-06-21T11:11:52","slug":"america-abdicates-as-global-superpower-and-its-about-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/relocationacrossamerica.com\/?p=522","title":{"rendered":"America abdicates as global superpower \u2014 and it\u2019s about time"},"content":{"rendered":"<section>\n<p>On a sweltering summer night in Cleveland 10 years ago, I witnessed Donald Trump\u2019s acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican convention \u2014 the \u201cI alone can fix it\u201d speech \u2014 and realized for the first time that he was likely to be elected president. Like many people in this business, I have too much ego invested in not being surprised by anything that happens, no matter how dire or ridiculous. But that was without a doubt one of the most traumatic experiences of my career: As I wrote at the time, it hit 7.5 on the Nuremberg scale.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/relocationacrossamerica.com\/?p=520\">With Roku, Fox just won the streaming wars for the right<\/a><\/p>\n<p>I also began to understand Trump\u2019s rise as something more than an aberration or a flukish detour from the normal back and forth of regular-order democracy. (It has taken the Democratic Party until approximately right now to figure that out, if it has.) It was more like a dark epiphany, a moment of revelation in which unsavory but unavoidable truths about America were laid bare before America itself and the wider world. It might be the most American thing ever that we needed to experience the epiphany twice \u2014 with equal doses of tragedy and farce on both occasions \u2014 before we began to grasp its message.<\/p>\n<p>If I and many others assumed that the primary lesson of the Trump years concerned the decadent and corrupt condition of American democracy \u2014 which straight-up barely deserves that term these days \u2014 a decade onward it seems more far-reaching. Trump vowed to restore American \u201cgreatness,\u201d without ever defining that in a way that didn\u2019t sound both sinister and ludicrous. He has now destroyed the illusion that America was either great or good, and has entirely abandoned the nation\u2019s role as self-appointed leader of the so-called free world. The way that happened has been enormously damaging \u2014 but, honestly, it was about time.<\/p>\n<p>To a significant degree, this change is about Americans waking up to facts that were painfully obvious to nearly everyone else. Only Americans view American politics in isolation, as if we were special children on a magic island and the rest of the world still had dial-up internet and village dances. Trump became a potent global symbol of the systemic crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of an authoritarian alternative, but those things were emerging all over the place. He didn\u2019t invent them and surely didn\u2019t understand them.<\/p>\n<p>Trump returned to the White House last year determined to wreak revenge on a long list of real or imagined enemies and to leave his mark on the world. He has undeniably done both, and has caused almost unimaginable damage in many directions. It seemed implausible (and still does) that such a small-minded, ignorant and incurious person could become a world-historical figure, but at least in that respect we have misjudged him. He has changed the world, but done so in exactly the opposite direction from his expressed intentions.<\/p>\n<p>This administration\u2019s incoherent and chaotic blend of expansionist, isolationist and protectionist policies \u2014 a wannabe late-medieval fortress-state that expels \u201coutsiders,\u201d but also a military superpower that imposes its will anywhere and everywhere \u2014 has culminated, at least for now, in humiliation and surrender on multiple fronts. Allowing Benjamin Netanyahu to lure or goad the U.S. into an unprovoked war with Iran may end up among the most disastrous foreign-policy mistakes in American history, which is really saying something.<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>The Trump administration\u2019s incoherent blend of expansionist, isolationist and protectionist policies \u2014 a wannabe late-medieval fortress-state that expels \u201coutsiders,\u201d but also a military superpower that imposes its will anywhere and everywhere \u2014 has culminated in humiliation and surrender on multiple fronts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>That\u2019s true not just because the war itself has ended, however conditionally, in a full-scale U.S. retreat and a \u201cmemorandum of understanding\u201d that accomplishes none of the stated Israeli or American objectives and offers Iran an enormous material and propaganda victory. (Yes, it\u2019s plausible that the ceasefire deal will be used to torpedo JD Vance\u2019s presidential hopes, but that\u2019s more like the result of a game of 52 pick-up than ingenious 4-D chess strategy.)<\/p>\n<p>That tentative conclusion follows a conflict that had already become a massive embarrassment for the U.S., in ways most Americans did their best to ignore. On the global stage, the war was mostly conducted by Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon in the bro-tastic style of a mixed martial-arts podcaster, promising grandiose acts of violence and destruction and histrionically imploring Jesus Christ for his guidance and support. I was reminded far too often of Jean Baudrillard\u2019s 1991 essay collection \u201cThe Gulf War Did Not Take Place,\u201d which captured the way war is now consumed as a mediated theatrical spectacle, far away from the physical suffering and destruction. Of course this war \u201ctook place\u201d for the people of Iran, Lebanon and various other places; for Americans, it was more like a third-rate alternate-history streaming series that was rapidly canceled.<\/p>\n<p>As left-leaning Israeli journalist Joshua Leifer writes in a Foreign Policy essay, Netanyahu must have believed he had fulfilled his longstanding dream of joint Israeli-American military action to topple the Iranian regime and install Israel as the Middle East\u2019s unchallenged hegemonic power: \u201cU.S. and Israeli fighter jets flying tandem over Tehran, Israeli officers ensconced in U.S. Central Command\u2019s Florida headquarters.\u201d But to put it mildly, the timing was off, and the blowback from that hubris may have ripple effects decades into the future.<\/p>\n<p>The Tehran regime survived that onslaught, installed new hard-line leaders and now looks stronger than before. (Despite the long list of American \u201cmoderates\u201d who once again fell, Charlie Brown style, for the promise of painless \u201cregime change.\u201d) To the surprise of literally no one, Trump bailed out when the war began to look like an unwinnable slog and even his own slavish followers grew restless. The U.S.-Israel relationship, already poisoned by the Gaza war and dramatic shifts in American public opinion, has now \u201centered a period of terminal decline,\u201d Leifer writes.<\/p>\n<p>Of course that didn\u2019t happen overnight. Even 15 years ago, there was \u201cnear-unanimous support for Israel\u201d across both American political parties, as Leifer puts it. Pro-Palestinian voices were largely exiled to the far-left margins, and any criticism of the growing political power of the pro-Israel lobby was dismissed as crackpot antisemitism. But with Trump\u2019s emergence, the \u201cIsrael-advocacy complex\u201d ditched any pretense of bipartisanship, and in Trump\u2019s first term he embraced a \u201chawkish pro-Israel line\u201d far to the right of any previous president. Donald Trump, Leifer concludes, has \u201cdone more to push rank-and-file Democrats away from Israel than any pro-Palestinian activist.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/relocationacrossamerica.com\/?p=518\">People keep voting for scandal-plagued candidates because they don\u2019t want the other party to win<\/a><\/p>\n<p>So the war with Iran was a failure in its own terms and may have caused a permanent (and arguably overdue) rupture in the U.S. relationship with Israel, which is already treated as a pariah state by much of the world. But wait, there\u2019s more: At least potentially, the most consequential U.S. surrender here was both moral and economic. Trump\u2019s war drove crude oil prices into the stratosphere at precisely the moment when capital markets began to realize that renewable energy wasn\u2019t simply a better long-term alternative to fossil fuels but also more affordable and more efficient.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s hard to outdo the first sentence of China analyst Ryan Hass\u2019 essay for Brookings: \u201cThe United States and Israel fought Iran, and China won.\u201d In his analysis, the U.S. once again squandered its resources and its global credibility in a counterproductive and pointless struggle for military hegemony, while the Chinese remained focused on this century\u2019s \u201cdefining geopolitical contest: the battle for technological leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Trump\u2019s war drove crude oil prices into the stratosphere at precisely the moment when capital markets began to realize that renewable energy wasn\u2019t simply a better long-term alternative to fossil fuels but also more affordable and more efficient.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Whether or not the Iran war was a net positive in terms of the global energy transition \u2014 the one that should have happened 10 or 15 years ago \u2014 is a complicated question. In the short term, it will probably drive some countries back to burning coal and accelerate oil drilling in the Western Hemisphere. But as Patricia Cohen of the New York Times reports, \u201cover the longer term, this energy shock,\u201d hard on the heels of the one caused by Vladimir Putin\u2019s Ukraine invasion in 2022, \u201cis likely to accelerate a transition to renewables like solar and wind as well as nuclear power.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Electric batteries have become far more efficient over the last several years, and electric cars are more affordable than ever. In April, wind and solar power produced more electricity globally than natural gas, for the first time. From the Chinese point of view, the timing is exquisite. Under Trump, the U.S. has gone all-in on fossil fuels and actively worked to crush renewable technologies, whether out of pure corruption and cronyism, macho ideology or misguided mid-century nostalgia. (Spoiler alert: It\u2019s all three.)<\/p>\n<p>China already dominates the global market, as Cohen writes, in \u201cwind turbines, high-voltage cables, transformers, solar panels, batteries, software to manage energy flows and more.\u201d Furthermore, Chinese industrial strategy has dictated producing that stuff well beyond the level of domestic demand, in order to flood overseas markets at low prices and take advantage of a moment exactly like this one. If you\u2019ve been to Europe recently, you\u2019ve seen the increasingly popular Chinese-made BYD hatchbacks and SUVs, often with starting prices below $30,000. (While not technically banned in the U.S., these cars are subject to a 100% tariff.)<\/p>\n<p>You could call that ruthless economic warfare, or you could call it capitalist competition, an arena where the Chinese have excelled. But the Trumpian decision to retreat to the 1970s on energy policy is more than a strategic miscalculation; it\u2019s a symptom of America\u2019s near-psychotic disassociation from the rest of the world across a whole range of policies and attitudes. As Hass delicately puts it, \u201cThe open divergences between Washington and its partners over the war\u2019s legitimacy, execution, and fallout have exposed fissures that risk metastasizing to other issue areas over time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>No doubt European political elites still feel some residual loyalty to the transatlantic alliance; in a more perfect world, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz and Keir Starmer would prefer to partner with American democracy than with an authoritarian Chinese regime whose global agenda remains murky. But there\u2019s no perfect world, and not much American democracy. Those guys face critical problems at home, and they\u2019ve had about enough of the punitive tariffs, the lectures about immigration and energy, the support for neofascist parties, the arbitrary overseas interventions and (lest we forget!) the threats to invade Greenland, which keep recurring like a bad dream.<\/p>\n<p>It may be too early to say that we\u2019ve arrived at a clear moment of transition in America\u2019s role in the world. We\u2019ll have a new president in a few years (at least hypothetically), and it\u2019s not like the greatest military and economic power in history will just shrivel up and blow away. But for most people in most of the world, as I\u2019ve written previously, it\u2019s time to move on from eight tormented decades of an increasingly fraught love-hate relationship with America.<\/p>\n<p>When the Chinese tell small nations in Asia, as Hass puts it, that if the U.S. couldn\u2019t handle a \u201csecond-rate regional military power like Iran\u201d it is no longer a guarantor of global military stability, there is no obvious counterargument. More important still is what he calls the \u201cnarrative contrast\u201d: China presents itself as a straightforward business partner and \u201creliable steward of the international order,\u201d while America is \u201ca violent and reckless pursuer of its own interests.\u201d Or someone\u2019s interests, anyway. Definitely not yours or mine.<\/p>\n<p><em>This column will go on a three-week hiatus while I take a badly needed vacation, in hopes of experiencing the world rather than just writing about it. I\u2019ll be back in mid-July. Thanks so much for reading.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/relocationacrossamerica.com\/?p=516\">\u201cA heartbreaking tragedy\u201d rehashes calls for NYC carriage ban<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Trump&#8217;s foreign policy has been a disaster. There could be an upside: A more realistic role for US in the world<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":521,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[741,4,5,798,799,344,273,732,105,800],"class_list":["post-522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting","tag-china","tag-commentary","tag-donald-trump","tag-energy","tag-energy-transition","tag-europe","tag-foreign-policy","tag-g7","tag-iran-war","tag-renewable-energy"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>America abdicates as global superpower \u2014 and it\u2019s about time - Relocation Across America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/relocationacrossamerica.com\/?p=522\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"America abdicates as global superpower \u2014 and it\u2019s about time - Relocation Across America\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Trump&#039;s foreign policy has been a disaster. 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