When future historians study the arc of American foreign policy, they will probably fold all the major events since 2020 — our pell-mell withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran — into a unified narrative of global conflict.
If we’re fortunate, that will yield academic treatises with titles like “The Empire Tested: America and the World, 2021-2030.” If we’re unlucky — meaning, basically, if the United States and China eventually fall into a ruinous war — then the struggles in Ukraine and the Middle East will be retroactively assigned to histories of World War III.
We are not, as yet, inside that kind of conflagration. But it’s useful for Americans to think about our situation in global terms, with Russia and Iran and China as a revisionist alliance putting our imperial power to the test. And it’s also important to recognize that this kind of conflict is an endurance test, a long and winding road, in which it’s easy to fall prey to mood swings and judge the outcome prematurely.
We’ve had a lot of these swings in the last few years. In 2001 and early 2002, the rout in Afghanistan and our overpromising to a vulnerable Ukraine made America look ineffectual … right up until Vladimir Putin actually invaded his neighbor, at which point his military setbacks and our success in rallying support for the Ukrainians yielded a lot of chest-thumping about the superiority of liberal democracy and the permanence of American hegemony.
That optimistic mood lasted through the failure of Ukraine’s last major counteroffensive and the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, against Israel, at which point there was a swing back toward pessimism. American power was stretched too thin; our Israeli allies were taken unawares by their enemies, the Russians were regaining ground, our arsenal was almost certainly inadequate to protect Ukraine and Israel and defend Taiwan, and all of this under a president debilitated by advancing age, a grim symbol of a crumbling imperium.
This sense of multi-theater crisis helped to restore Donald Trump to power. Then the initial months of his administration inspired fears that he would end the global conflict by effectively surrendering — abandoning allies and making deals with dictators while retreating to a Fortress North America.
Yet right now that’s not how the landscape looks. Trump’s decision to bomb the Iranian nuclear program and the muted Iranian response has capped off a period in which Tehran’s regional power has crumbled under sustained Israeli assault. Meanwhile, our NATO allies are boosting their military spending and Trump is suddenly praising the alliance, while Russia’s gains in Ukraine remain a punishing grind and there’s a possibility that Putin threw away the best deal he was likely to get. Add in the strength of the American economy, even amid the Trumpian trade war, and it seems that maybe we’re winning the world conflict again. “Rah-rah! Pax Americana forever!”
OK, not quite. The damage to Iran’s nuclear program doesn’t mean we’ve eliminated the threat, and Israel’s Gaza war remains a humanitarian crisis without a clear political endgame. Trump’s walk-back of his Department of Defense’s attempt to triage resources by withholding weapons from Ukraine doesn’t change the reality that our weaponry is limited and does require triaging. Putin’s failure to make the most of Trump’s diplomatic outreach doesn’t change the fact that Russia is still slowly gaining ground.
But both the Ukrainian stalemate and the Iranian retreat are clarifying reminders that the ultimate outcome of this conflict depends on the revisionist power, the People’s Republic of China, that hasn’t directly joined the fights. China is at once a much more serious rival to America than either Russia or Iran and also an extremely cautious player, content to watch its tacit allies make their plays without, say, handing Iran a nuclear deterrent or sending the People’s Liberation Army to help Russia take Kyiv.
This cautious distance could reflect a fundamental weakness of the revisionist bloc — that it’s purely an alliance of interest between regimes that don’t trust one another, don’t have as much in common as we still have with our European and East Asian allies and struggle to work effectively in concert.
But it could also reflect a confidence on China’s part that time is on its side, that its investments in technology and energy are going to lap ours soon enough and that all our efforts now reflect a fateful squandering of resources given what Beijing has planned for the later 2020s.
Without certain knowledge of those plans, American foreign policy needs both a better long-term strategy to stay ahead of China and a lot of short-term Trumpian flexibility. Not restraint or hawkishness alone, but both an openness to peace and a capacity for warmaking, matched to the ebb and flow of a global conflict that won’t have any simple end.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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