Things are spinning out of control. Wars that were supposed to be contained are expanding across borders, drawing new powers into conflicts they cannot easily control.
Russia’s “total war” against Ukraine is spilling beyond the battlefield, with covert
attacks targeting Kyiv’s European allies and even the United States. In the Middle East, the war American leaders imagined would be a short, sharp campaign to topple Iran’s regime has become a conflict without an exit, destabilizing the region, disrupting global energy markets, and pulling Iran’s allies in Yemen and Iraq into confrontation with Saudi Arabia, while China provides Tehran with weapons and intelligence.
We have entered the Great Interregnum — the gap between the reign of rulers, on a global scale.
This is the liminal space between the American Century and whatever comes next. We cannot say with certainty what guiding power or idea will order the world over the next century. But we can be certain that chaos will precede it.
MAGA set out to dismantle the postwar order because it believed that order had weakened America. Americans were told that “America First” would make the country stronger by rejecting constraints and treating American power as something to be used without apology. Instead, the retreat from global leadership is creating a vacuum that other powers are filling — making the world less stable and America less secure.
Adversaries like Russia and China are becoming more aggressive, not just toward their neighbors, but toward the United States itself. They sense weakness as America abandons its alliances, as it declares hazy concepts like human rights and the laws of war obsolete, and as it commits to costly unilateral military action around the globe.
Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, describes insecurity as a state that results from having “no common Power to fear.” There has never been a world government, no matter what you think about the United Nations. But since 1945, the international system has had something resembling order — and the threat of nuclear armageddon prevented a global conflagration.
The great powers are already fighting now, just not directly with each other — and the shadow of a world war looms ever larger.
For more than eight decades, if a crisis threatened the international system you could count on America to show up. Washington deployed carrier battle groups, created aid programs, conducted covert action, and preached the virtues of a rules-based order. Sometimes that leadership was noble, sometimes disastrous. But the underlying premise was that American power could create stability — and that stability served American interests.
That is no longer true.
Under President Donald Trump, no one knows if or when America will show up. Washington’s guarantees are conditional, its promises meaningless, its motivations vulgar.
Some see this as a return to realism: States have no friends, only interests. Perhaps. It was never realistic to expect the United States to dominate a unipolar world indefinitely. Presidents of both parties understood the limits of American power.
“America cannot — and will not — conceive all the plans, design all the programs, execute all the decisions and undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world,” President Richard Nixon said in 1969. Thirty years later, President Bill Clinton said: “America cannot solve every problem and must not become the world’s policeman.”
But neither Nixon nor Clinton argued that recognizing those limits required abandoning American leadership.
Even after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when the country’s political establishment was overwhelmed with panic, sorrow, and fury, few seriously considered looking inward and going it alone. President George W. Bush sought international support for the invasion of Afghanistan, and he got it. He even sought UN approval for the invasion of Iraq, for all the difference it made.
It is difficult to understand the MAGA revolt without what came next: Two decades of war, thousands of casualties, enormous expenditures, a half-baked withdrawal from Iraq that helped give rise to the Islamic State — and eventually, America’s ignominious withdrawal from Kabul.
As the wars dragged on, the diagnosis hardened: America was failing not because of the enormous complexity and nebulousness of the task it had set out to achieve, but because its leaders had misunderstood the enemy. That logic produced a simpler enemy. Trump’s 2015 campaign hit its stride when a man in New Hampshire told him, “We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims,” and asked, “When can we get rid of them?” George W. had declared that Islam was a religion of peace. Many Americans didn’t buy it.
The post-9/11 foreign-policy establishment promised victory and delivered defeat. The elite who built that system proved unable to explain why American power had failed.
Rather than questioning the flawed assumptions behind the War on Terror, MAGA increasingly blamed the “globalists” who had built the system for holding back American might. If America could spend twenty years fighting abroad and still lose, perhaps the alliances, institutions, and international commitments themselves were the problem.
The attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 reinforced the idea that America was locked in a clash of civilizations, if not with Islam, then with some greater threat than random terrorists. When Trump returned to office, the old War on Terror logic sought a new target, and returned to an old favorite: Iran.
So here we are, and it’s not going great.
Unfortunately, it no longer really matters why Trump went to war with Iran. The U.S. cannot execute any meaningful strategy. It is left responding to events. The president’s only plan is to hope the Iranian regime falls apart before the global economy does.
The secret has left the room, the war with Iran has exposed the truth: America’s global network of military facilities, built at great expense over decades in order to project American might, is no longer a strategic advantage — it’s a liability. Many forward bases strewn across the Middle East are now smoldering ruins. The new strategic reality is that cheap tech — drones, missiles, AI, and sensors — threatens even the most advanced militaries. The playing field has been leveled.
Meanwhile, America’s re-evaluation of alliances is not creating “peace through retrenchment.” Instead, the world is rearming at a record pace. Global military spending hit $2.9 trillion last year, global arms sales increased nearly 10 percent outside the U.S. in 2025. European spending was up 14 percent, as the continent awakened to the realization that America will not be there to keep the peace.
MAGA looks toward an imaginary past of unfettered American might and declares that the world their country built from 1945 onward is a mistake. There’s no doubt the postwar system really does need reform. But reforming an existing order is fundamentally different from abandoning it.
Americans have long been convinced theirs is a story of eternal progress. From the City Upon a Hill to Silicon Valley, Americans tread the world with optimism in hand. Always looking forward, Americans aren’t good at reconstruction or reform, because for them “ancient history” is 20 years ago.
In most of the world, the relics of the past are everywhere — scratch the dirt, and you can find signs of greatness long forgotten. But there’s only a handful of places in North America where you can look upon the remains of vanished civilizations.
This is, perhaps, why Americans find it difficult to contemplate that they may forfeit the wealth and greatness their ancestors created. They rarely have to look upon the ruins of the past and think upon the fleetingness of worldly power.
In June 1947, while receiving an honorary degree from Harvard, then-Secretary of State George Marshall announced a plan to rebuild Europe in the wake of World War II.
Unlike the Soviet Union, America did not assert ownership over the lands it was rebuilding. Marshall’s generation understood that instability abroad would eventually reach American shores, while secure societies created prosperity. That was the insight behind America’s vision for a postwar world order: It was never about domination and control, it was about peace and stability.
It is one thing to reform an existing order. It is another to destroy it, hoping that something better will appear.
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