We had a good run — some eight decades or so — but it is clear by now that the United States has ceased to be the leader of the free world. A successor for that post has not been named, and it appears unlikely that the European Union, or NATO, or whatever constitutes “the West” these days will promote from within. The job might even be eliminated, one more reduction in force courtesy of President Trump.
Rather than leading the free world, the United States is striding across the globe seemingly free of restraint, forethought or strategy, exerting its power because it can. In a matter of months, the Trump administration has captured Venezuela’s president and tossed him into jail in Brooklyn and has pummeled Iran’s theocratic leadership in a war that is ricocheting across the Middle East and upending the global economy; now the president says he will have “the honor of taking Cuba” next. Trump in his second term is like Michael Corleone in “The Godfather,” settling all the family business.
Nearly two decades ago, Fareed Zakaria, the international affairs columnist, published a best-selling book called “The Post-American World,” which predicted the United States’ relative decline versus other economically ascendant countries, what he called the “rise of the rest.” (Senator Barack Obama was seen carrying the book around during his first presidential campaign, affirming the volume’s elite sway.) The United States would remain militarily and economically pre-eminent, Zakaria argued, but it could take on a new political role, a sort of chairman of the board for the planet, relying on “consultation, cooperation and even compromise.”
Under Trump, the idea of U.S. leadership has indeed been remade — but from authority to domination, from persuasion to bullying, from nurturing alliances to wrecking them. (Consultation, cooperation and compromise have yet to join the MAGA coalition.) “We don’t need anybody,” a peeved Trump said last week when European leaders initially declined to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. “We’re the strongest nation in the world. We have the strongest military by far in the world. We don’t need them.”
Launching a war with only one ally and then expecting everyone else to fall in line is a perfect example of the tensions inherent in America’s new approach. The United States wants the benefits of hegemony, but without accepting the responsibilities — ensuring collective security, promoting economic openness, nurturing vital alliances — that come with it. Trump doesn’t care to be a superpower; he just likes to wield superpowers. He wants to operate in the world constrained only by “my own morality” and “my own mind,” as he told The Times recently.
What does that mean for America’s role and purpose in a world that has been too long defined by what it is not (the post-Cold War era)? It means that what we once called Pax Americana, that U.S.-led system of alliances and institutions that promoted American interests and values and helped avoid major conflicts in the decades after World War II, is gone, and irretrievably so. In place of the Pax Americana we are seeing a sort of Lax Americana, a world in which a careless and uninhibited and incurious U.S. superpower struts across the chess board, threatening old friends and enabling old rivals, seeking short-term gains, heedless of the dangers it is creating for itself and for the world.
This is a historical aberration: a superpower that freely abdicates its leadership role, because it has concluded that leadership is for suckers; one that no longer promotes its values, because it’s decided that those values were fake anyway; one that gives up on the rules and institutions it spent so long building, because it assumes they’re no longer worth the hassle.
If Washington somehow still imagines itself the leader of the free world, that is because it is rethinking who belongs in that world, and because it is defining downward what it means to lead.
To better understand how this new America is operating , I went back to the last major transition — when we were shifting from a Cold War stalemate to a period of unrivaled U.S. primacy — and revisited some of the influential books and essays that tried to glimpse what was coming. Prominent among these is the “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” by Paul Kennedy, the Yale historian, which was published in 1987 and quickly became one of the sacred texts of American decline.
Through the normal run of history, Kennedy wrote, great powers typically relinquish global leadership unwillingly — whether losing a major conflict against an upstart rival, missing out on some transformative technological innovation, often in the military realm, or eroding economically to the point that the burdens of hegemony become too much to bear. Kennedy warned of what he called “imperial overstretch,” and argued that “the sum total of the United States’ global interests and obligations is nowadays far larger than the country’s power to defend them all simultaneously.”
A superpower, if it wishes to retain its status, usually needs to accomplish three hard things, Kennedy said, and it must do them all at once. First, provide and pay for military security, both for itself and its allies; second, satisfy the economic needs of its population, not to mention its desires; and third, ensure enough long-term economic growth that it can keep stockpiling guns and churning butter.
“Achieving all three of those feats over a sustained period of time will be a very difficult task,” Kennedy argued. “Yet achieving the first two feats — or either one of them — without the third will inevitably lead to relative eclipse over the longer term.” That has been the fate of past great powers, such as imperial Spain, Napoleonic France, and the British Empire when it gave way to the United States after World War II.
An American president who both boasts that his military assault on Iran can go on “forever” and tells his nation’s children to settle for “two dolls instead of 30 dolls” is exemplifying Kennedy’s argument. “Uneven rates of economic growth would, sooner or later, lead to shifts in the world’s political and military balances,” Kennedy wrote. Put simply, superpowers don’t last on the cheap.
In this light, Trump’s fixation on how America is getting “ripped off” by the rest of the world — whether through trade deficits, the loss of manufacturing plants, or insufficient military spending by NATO members — is not just the mantra of a real-estate guy obsessed with negotiating a better deal. It is also the resentment that dominant powers always have toward weaker ones, as Robert Gilpin, an international relations theorist, explained in “War and Change in World Politics,” his classic 1981 study of what makes hegemons come and go.
The Athenians wanted their allies to provide more resources in defense against the Persians; the British wanted their rambunctious American colonists to pony up for the fights against the Indians and the French (though excessive taxes on the colonies eventually backfired on the British Empire); and both the Soviet Union and the United States wanted their respective client states to share the costs of the Cold War standoff. “Because the dominant power will defend the status quo in its own interest,” Gilpin wrote, “lesser states have little incentive to pay their ‘fair’ share of these protection costs.”
For Trump, the problem with leading the free world is that the free world gets a free ride.
By the 1980s, both Kennedy and Gilpin were already warning of America’s relative decline — and coming after the various crises of the 1970s, who can blame them? — but then Washington got a reprieve, a big one. “History is on our side,” Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, had once affirmed. “We will bury you!” But now, just a few years after Ronald Reagan declared morning in America, it was the U.S.S.R. that was buried. History seemed on America’s side; for some, it had even ended.
In the 19th and early 20th century, many great powers had fought it out; during the second half of the 20th, it was just two powers peering at each other from behind their warheads. Now, in place of the East-West rivalry, commentators imagined a “unipolar moment” of U.S. supremacy. George H.W. Bush declared a “new world order” of markets and democracy; Bill Clinton pictured a “bridge to the 21st century.”
But others saw a darker turn ahead. Samuel Huntington, a pitiless political scientist, envisioned a “clash of civilizations” based on culture and faith. In “The Coming Anarchy,” Robert Kaplan, a foreign correspondent, foresaw environmental catastrophes and battles over race and tribe. He was particularly prescient about the United States, predicting polarization, fragmentation and political dysfunction; an electronic media that would “adopt the aspirations of the mob”; and a military-technology complex that could prove as dangerous as its military-industrial predecessor.
“There is no final triumph of reason,” Kaplan wrote ominously.
Instead, he worried that in this environment, “shallow leaders and advisers would, by the very virtue of their lack of wisdom and experience, eventually commit the kind of ghastly miscalculation that would lead to a general war.” Just as European leaders “who lacked a tragic sense of the past” had blundered into the first world war, so could the United States embark on its own modern-day fiascos.
The tragedy of Sept. 11, and the hubristic American response, appeared to vindicate the purveyors of these darker visions. After the terrorist attacks, Washington blundered into Iraq, as it now may be doing with its “excursion,” as the president calls it, in Iran. You don’t have to think 2026 will unfold exactly like 2003 — or that Trump’s “I think the war is complete, pretty much” is a garbled version of Bush’s “mission accomplished” banner — to comprehend the dangers of not thinking things through, of not asking simple yet crucial questions like “what if” and “what next.”
In “The End of the American Era,” published during George W. Bush’s first term, Charles Kupchan lamented that the United States, flush with end-of-history triumphalism, had failed to rethink its purpose and the means to pursue it — its “grand strategy,” in wonk parlance — in the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the destruction of the World Trade Center. America was “a great power adrift,” oblivious to the growing influence of the European Union, indifferent to Russia’s fury over NATO expansion, torn over how to accommodate China’s coming rise.
Kupchan, a Georgetown professor who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, argued that the Bush administration, by elevating pre-emption as a guiding principle after 9/11, overestimated the enduring terrorist threat versus the “more dangerous challenge that lies ahead: the return of the rivalry among the world’s main centers of power.”
The Trump administration appears aware of this renewed rivalry, and it seems to have made its peace with it. What is the “Donroe Doctrine,” after all, if not an affirmation of great-power spheres of influence, if not a tacit admission to Beijing and Moscow that, if we can do our thing in the Western Hemisphere, they are free to do the same in their respective regions?
Much has been made of the apparent contradiction between Trump’s interventionist tendencies — so evident in this second term — and his campaign promises to avoid foreign wars. After all, embarking upon regime change in the Middle East, if that’s what we’re doing, does not feel quite “America First.” This tension poses electoral risks for the president’s party, and, strategically, it is muddled: Seeking to overthrow a regime may only make its leaders even more dedicated to pursuing nuclear weapons as a means of security and survival. (It also signals to other nuke-hungry leaders that acquiring such weapons is the best way to ensure their own political longevity.)
But in terms of attitude, there is much consistency in Trump’s twists. “Isolationism and macho militarism are on the surface quite different,” Immanuel Wallerstein wrote in “The Decline of American Power,” published in 2003. “But they share the same fundamental attitude towards the rest of the world, the ‘others’: fear and disdain, combined with the assumption that our way of life is pure and should not be defiled by involvement in the miserable quarrels of others, unless we are in a position to impose on them our way of life.” It’s not hard, he suggests, for nationalistic leaders to weave back and forth between isolationist and interventionist impulses.
Wallerstein, who was a sociologist and critic of global capitalism, was writing about the George W. Bush administration, but his analysis fits the Trump team quite nicely. If you want to see “macho militarism” in human form, just look at Pete Hegseth, the unlikeliest secretary of defense.
In his 2024 book “The War on Warriors,” Hegseth complains that an “unholy alliance of political ideologues and Pentagon pussies has left our warriors without real defenders in Washington,” and his cultural references jump from “Top Gun” to “Die Hard” to “Team America: World Police.” And in television appearances — Hegseth’s preferred medium — he promises “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” mocks “stupid rules of engagement,” pledges “no quarter, no mercy” for the “rats” of the Iranian regime, boasts of the U.S. military’s “brutal efficiency” in raining “death and destruction from the sky all day long,” and laments the lack of a truly “patriotic press” in America, to which he dictates alternative headlines.
There is no triumph of reason here, only the reasoning of triumphalism.
The thing about being “the leader of the free world” is that the nature of the job depends on how you conceive of leadership and how you delineate that world. As is often the case, the Trump administration is redefining terms as it jettisons principles.
When NATO was established in 1949, the treaty affirmed that its members would “safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.” Speaking last month at the Munich Security Conference, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, likewise invoked the common “heritage” of the Western world, but he based it explicitly on Christian faith, culture, language and ancestry. “We are part of one civilization — Western civilization,” he said, specifying that Washington prefers “allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization.”
This is the “civilizational West” rather than the “geopolitical West,” as Stewart Patrick, who served in the State Department under George W. Bush, wrote last year. “The liberal notions that underpinned the geopolitical West were fundamentally universal; the nationalist ones that raise up the civilizational West are instead fixated on the defense of borders and fear of others.”
In this context, the United States might remain the leader of the free world — but only if that free world is recast as a cultural realm, even a hereditary one, rather than one based on adherence to political principles, or “abstractions,” as Rubio and Vice President JD Vance often dismiss them.
After the multipolar world of the 19th century, the bipolar 20th century, and the unipolar world of the post-Cold War era, what comes next? Will it be a civilizational clash, the return of multiple great powers, a one-on-one standoff with China — or will the American century hang on?
It’s hard to predict, but the dead giveaway of a superpower struggling to maintain its perch is that you start hearing much talk of “renewal.” In “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” Kennedy wryly points out that pessimists speak of decline, whereas patriots pine for renewal. In his speech in Munich, Rubio declared that the Trump administration will “take on the task of renewal and restoration.” He said that America did not want to break with Europe, but rather to “revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history,” one that is beset by “a malaise of hopelessness and complacency.”
But you need to renew something — whether a subscription or a society — only when it is at risk of running its course. Civilizational renewal is not the concern of a confident and thriving superpower.
Trump, of course, first came to office nearly a decade ago declaring that America was already in decline, pointing to trade imbalances, porous borders, a weakened industrial base and endless foreign wars. He was not wrong that the old order was in disarray, that the benefits of globalization had been vastly oversold, that Americans’ unease with high immigration was real and politically potent. But Trump’s second turn in the White House produced ruinous tariffs, a net loss of manufacturing jobs last year, tighter border controls at the cost of fatally overzealous immigration enforcement, and now, risky military interventions on two continents.
The irony is that the path to renewal and revitalization may be the very path that this administration is forswearing — not in Tehran or Caracas, but at home. In “The Post-American World,” Zakaria hailed the United States as “the first universal nation,” a country where people from all over the world can “share in a common dream and a common destiny.” He called immigration America’s “secret weapon,” because it gives us a hunger and energy rare for a mature, wealthy country. Higher education is the nation’s “best industry,” he added, attracting the brightest minds to our schools and our shores, helping the United States remain “at the forefront of the next revolutions in science, technology and industry.”
Staying at that forefront is precisely what America must do to fulfill the superpower survival imperatives that Kennedy laid out in “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” — producing enough long-term economic growth to sustain our military might and meet the people’s growing needs. But immigration, scientific research and higher education have all come under assault in Trump’s second term. Vance warned the Munich conference last year that the continent’s most serious challenge is “the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.” Much the same could be said of the United States today.
There have been plenty of episodes over the past decades that supposedly heralded an end to U.S. primacy. The launch of Sputnik in the late 1950s ushered in early Cold War paranoia that we were falling behind the Soviets. In the 1970s — with Vietnam and Watergate and an oil embargo and stagflation and the hostage crisis in Iran — the country was suffering a “crisis of confidence,” as President Jimmy Carter put it. A decade later, we were told Japan Inc. would overtake us. Then Sept. 11 demolished our sense of physical invulnerability; the Great Recession questioned the premise and the promise of American-style capitalism; and the Capitol riot of Jan. 6 laid bare the fragility of the democratic model we’d long sought to export.
It is possible that the hand-wringing today is just one more Sputnik moment, another instance when pessimists fret that America has lost its way. But it is also possible, as Daniel Drezner, the academic dean of Tufts University’s Fletcher School, has argued, that this is not just “the latest hymn from the Church of Perpetual Worry,” that this time really is different.
In the past, America’s isolationist, interventionist and multilateralist tendencies checked one another over time, thanks to competing visions of national security embedded throughout the American political system. But as foreign-policy powers became concentrated in the executive and Congress shrugged off its role in world affairs, America grew vulnerable to the rise of an impetuous and unconcerned president. “The same steps that empowered the president to create foreign policy,” Drezner said, “have permitted Trump to destroy what his predecessors spent decades preserving.”
Part of what they spent decades trying to preserve was an essential resource: international legitimacy. In “The End of the American Era,” Kupchan called it America’s “most precious asset,” and warned that the Bush administration was misspending it in Iraq, vastly overestimating “the autonomy that comes with military supremacy.” It is an appropriate warning for our time, when the Trump administration is likewise squandering America’s legitimacy, and misjudging the freedom of action that comes with having the strongest military and, as Trump brags, the “best equipment.”
That legitimacy is part of what made Pax Americana possible. Lax Americana, by contrast, doesn’t just waste the nation’s legitimacy; it hardly recognizes its value.
When Joe Biden became president, he relished telling the world that America was back, ready to lead and work with its allies once again. But a recurring concern was, “For how long?” That mistrust in America’s staying power has been vindicated with Trump’s return to the White House. Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, said in Davos this year that the longtime U.S.-led, rules-based system was rupturing, and that middle powers like Canada had to diversify their partnerships if they hoped to survive. “The old order is not coming back,” he stated. “We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”
For longtime allies, the evolving new order is high on American whim and unpredictability. Trump’s fixation on acquiring Greenland, for instance, while the subject of late-night comedy in the United States, was regarded seriously enough in Europe that Denmark prepared military plans in case of a U.S. invasion. Even now, as Western allies seemed to come around in offering help to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, their joint statement last week stressed adherence to international law, not support for Washington. As Boris Pistorius, the German defense minister, put it when the United States first called on allies for naval support: “This is not our war; we have not started it.”
This is what happens when you govern as if global support and democratic approval are afterthoughts. The Trump administration failed to make the case for war in Iran — not just to Congress, and not just to foreign allies, but to its own citizens. This universal indifference is, in fact, a natural outgrowth of American domestic politics: If the administration feels no need to explain itself to a reliably subservient Congress, and if the president assumes that whatever he does in office enjoys legal sanction and limited oversight, what need will he feel to explain himself to the American people, let alone to people beyond our borders? Politics at home is enabling, rather than constraining, adventurism abroad.
The United States is once again becoming a “dangerous nation,” as in the title of Robert Kagan’s 2006 history of U.S. foreign policy from colonial times through the nineteenth century. Kagan, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, was describing a young, emerging power, driven by expansionist impulses and revolutionary ideas into interventions and occupations. His description of America as dangerous was in part admiring. But today’s dangerous America is an aging superpower driven by disdain for the established global order — an order Washington helped create — and a purely transactional approach to the world.
Whereas U.S. leaders used to stridently deny that their military interventions abroad were motivated by the desire to secure oil supplies, Trump happily admits it. “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” he said after U.S. forces seized Nicolás Maduro, the president of oil-rich Venezuela. And if war is about seizing resources, so is peace: Countries wishing to become permanent members of Trump’s new Board of Peace must cough up $1 billion each.
If Pax Americana meant fostering an enduring American peace, Lax Americana means America getting a piece of the action. The world’s policeman is on the take.
“The American might that upheld the world order of the past 80 years will now be used instead to destroy it,” Kagan warned in January, some 20 years after publishing “Dangerous Nation.” A contemporary equivalent to the multipolar world of the 19th century, he writes, “would be a world in which China, Russia, the United States, Germany, Japan and other large states fought a major war in some combination at least once a decade — redrawing national boundaries, displacing populations, disrupting international commerce and risking global conflict on a devastating scale.” And he wrote that weeks before America and Israel began bombing Iran.
We are not entering a post-American world, one in which the United States recedes from the stage or stops wielding its military might. Far from it. But we may be entering a post-America world, one in which the meaning of America, the principles and values the country has long stood for — sometimes in reality, sometimes in aspiration — are fading. And the loss of that America may prove just as damaging, and far more lasting, than any harm Donald Trump’s excursions can inflict.
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