We Are Witnessing the Self-Immolation of a Superpower

But it’s the international friendships where one can most clearly see the costs mounting in real time. Just look at the statements coming from that mountain redoubt of global capitalism at Davos: Canadian prime minister Mark Carney—the leader of our closest ally and largest trading partner, whose military is now modeling doing battle with the US across what has long been the world’s longest unguarded border—got a standing ovation for a speech in which he proclaimed, “Let me be clear: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” Or take European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, who essentially called for independence from the United States.

This is the end of the world as we have known it for 80 years—all for reasons that will confound future political scientists and historians. There is no strategy behind this exercise in superpower suicide other than the president’s own narcissism, greed, and his general frustration at never being respected by the elites whose favor he desires more than anything.

At one level, Trump’s January rampage highlights the collective failure of every institution, safeguard, check, and balance that the United States thought it had in place to limit executive power gone berserk. But chief among these institutional collapses is the sheer cowardice of that narrow Republican Congress, which has failed the founders’ fundamental belief and trust that the legislative branch would protect its own powers and authorities from the executive branch and would act first to follow their oath of office to the Constitution and not as members of a president’s own party.

Putin and Xi must be astounded at their good fortune; in Davos, China is already pitching itself to Europe and the world beyond to help pick up the pieces of the American century. Putin, who has watched a generation’s blood and treasure ground up in the mud of Ukraine, is getting a reprieve at a moment when he least deserves it. He has spent his own quarter century in office saying that the “democratic West” is just as corrupt as his own authoritarianism—and now, day after day, Donald Trump is furnishing him with plenty of fresh evidence.

Through much of his first presidential term, conspiracy theorists wondered and tweeted that Trump must be a Russian agent; in this second term, we’ve come to an even more horrifying conclusion—one more embarrassing for the American voter and more damning for Trump in history’s final judgment: He’s doing all this by his own volition.

Historian Barbara Tuchman once famously pointed to the May 1910 grand funeral of England’s Edward VII—a fabulously colorful parade of mourning that brought together nine kings, seven queens, and 40 more imperial and royal highnesses—as the high point and last gasp of that grand era of wealth and geopolitical dominance that had been 19-th century Europe, before it destroyed itself in the First World War and ceded control of the world to that upstart America across the pond.

Someday, similarly, we will tell our children about the month of January 2026 in world politics, and they will not be able to fathom what we did to ourselves. Nor will they ever be able to contemplate what the United States once meant to the world beyond.

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