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Here's one obvious point that isn't made often enough: American taxpayers are now spending close to a trillion dollars a year on what's still called "national security," but should really be called "national insecurity." Think about it for a moment. Since World War II, the U.S. has invested almost unimaginable sums of money in creating a global imperial structure underpinned by staggering hundreds of military bases around the world. And since the triumph of 1991 -- the collapse of that other great imperial power, the Soviet Union -- the result has been a series of remarkably disastrous death-dealing conflicts and wars of every sort. In this century, the American global "rules-based order" meant to underpin the ascendancy of the planet's only "indispensable nation" has proven something of a rule-less catastrophe. Interventions of all sorts have resulted in repeated disasters of death and destruction led by a military that hasn't come close to winning a war in decades.
Now, an administration still entrenched in Cold War-style thinking is edging ever closer to yet another genuine horror show in an all-too-explosive Middle East in the wake of Israel's brutal and catastrophic response to Hamas's October 7th assault on its borderlands.
Under the circumstances, in 2025, it's just conceivable that a rules-less fellow like Donald Trump could indeed find himself back in the White House. While much attention has been paid to what he might do, all too disastrously, in this country (and on its southern border), little, if any, time has been spent on what a Trumpian planet might look like the second time around. Today, TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, author of that classic book on empires from the sixteenth century to late last night, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, wonders just how The Donald might indeed take a second shot (and shot it undoubtedly would be) at power relations on this all-too-chaotic globe of ours. He suggests that it's not hard to imagine Trump's presidency as a kind of grim goodbye to all that. Tom
Trump the Terminator?
How His Second Presidency Could Signal the End of American Global Power
By Alfred McCoy
With recent polls giving Donald Trump a reasonable chance of defeating President Biden in the November elections, commentators have begun predicting what his second presidency might mean for domestic politics. In a dismally detailed Washington Post analysis, historian Robert Kagan argued that a second Trump term would feature his "deep thirst for vengeance" against what the ex-president has called the "radical Left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country," thereby launching what Kagan calls "a regime of political persecution" leading to "an irreversible descent into dictatorship."
So far, however, Trump and the media that follow his every word have been largely silent about what his reelection would mean for U.S. foreign policy. Citing his recent promise of "a four-year plan to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods," the New York Times did recently conclude that a renewed trade war with China "would significantly disrupt the U.S. economy," leading to a loss of 744,000 jobs and $1.6 trillion in gross domestic product. Economic relations with China are, however, but one piece of a far larger puzzle when it comes to future American global power, a subject on which media reporting and commentary have been surprisingly reticent.
So let me take the plunge by starting with a prediction I made in a December 2010 TomDispatch piece that "the demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines." I added then that a "realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could be all over except for the shouting."
I also offered a scenario hinged on -- yes! -- next November's elections. "Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair," I wrote then, "a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence."
Back then, of course, 2025 was so far off that any prediction should have been a safe bet. After all, 15 years ago, I was already in my mid-60s, which should have given me a "get-out-of-jail-free" card -- that is, a reasonable chance of dying before I could be held accountable. But with 2025 now less than a year away, I'm still here (unlike all too many of my old friends) and still responsible for that prediction.
So, let's imagine that "a far-right patriot," one Donald Trump, does indeed "capture the presidency with thundering rhetoric" next November. Let me then don the seven-league boots of the historical imagination and, drawing on Trump's previous presidential record, offer some thoughts about how his second shot at an America-first foreign policy -- one based on "demanding respect for American authority" -- might affect this country's global power, already distinctly on the decline.
As our Lonely Planet Guide to a country called the future, let's take along a classic study former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in retirement in 1997. Drawing on his view that Eurasia remained the "central basis for global primacy," he argued that Washington had to do just three things to maintain world leadership: first, preserve its position in Western Europe through the NATO alliance; second, maintain its military bases along the Pacific littoral to check China; and finally, prevent any "assertive single entity" like China or Russia from controlling the critical "middle space" of Central Asia and the Middle East. Given his past record and current statements, it seems all too likely that Trump will indeed badly damage, if not destroy, those very pillars of American global power.
Wrecking the NATO Alliance
Trump's hostility to alliances in general and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in particular is a matter of historical record. His hostility to NATO's crucial mutual-defense clause (Article 5) -- requiring all signatories to respond if one were attacked -- could prove fatal. Just days after his 2018 sycophantic summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked Trump, "Why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack?"
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