Demolition Man
How Trump's paranoid, hidebound vision of America's place in the world amounts to geopolitical self-harm on a world-historical scale
Nine months into his second term, President Trump’s dark, small-minded vision of America in the world has come into sharper focus—and its pernicious consequences have become equally clear.
There’s the general desire to repeal the twentieth century at home and abroad, of course, an impossible effort to turn back the clock to the mythical golden age that supposedly existed before the advent of the income tax, social insurance programs, and alliances overseas. But there’s more to it than that: irrational and incoherent as their underlying impulses may be, Trump’s words and actions have made clear that he sees America not as a superpower possessing worldwide interests, global influence, and international responsibilities but as a deeply insecure regional power and armed-to-the-teeth garrison state that seeks to do little more than bully its immediate neighbors as it obsessively pursues delusions of autarky.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because Trump’s jaundiced worldview resembles nothing so much as his idol Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy—in practice if not in Putin’s demented ambition to rebuild a defunct empire. Unlike Soviet Russia, however, the United States hasn’t been bested in a decades-long twilight struggle with an ideological rival that sapped our economic strength and called attention to fatal flaws in our political system. Nor have we been forced to give up suzerainty over satellite nations or let go of our imperial periphery in the same way the Soviet Union did after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and its own collapse in 1991.
No, America has chosen to commit geopolitical suicide for no apparent reason whatsoever other than to indulge the paranoid, irrational fantasies of a vain, cruel old man and his crew of myopic sycophants.
Take the reported contents of the National Defense Strategy. With its apparently monomaniacal focus on “the homeland” and its demotion of threats posed by Russia and China in Europe and the Pacific, this Pentagon document seems like it could’ve been written by Charles Lindbergh and the original America First Committee. It’s as if the global balance of power doesn’t exist or that we can pretend it doesn’t really affect us. We can afford hoard arms and ammunition all for ourselves while leaving our allies overseas in the lurch because, as President Trump himself put it, what happens in places like Ukraine “doesn’t affect us because, like, we have a big ocean in between.”
We’ve already seen what this morally and strategically perverse approach looks like in practice: pointless active-duty military deployments to the border with Mexico, the use of the National Guard to backstop immigration raids and intimidate residents in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and other cities, and an absurd military build-up in the Caribbean that includes a dozen or so F-35 stealth fighters, a Marine expeditionary unit, a destroyer flotilla, and a nuclear-powered attack submarine. It’s unclear what, exactly, these forces are meant to do in the Caribbean; Trump ordered a trio of futile, immoral, and likely illegal strikes against random boats his administration asserted—but didn’t even attempt to prove—were running drugs while lobbing bizarre threats at Venezuela on his own social media platform. None of this makes much sense, but then again we shouldn’t expect much of what this president and his administration does to make much sense.
Then there’s Golden Dome, the still ill-defined and highly expensive missile defense shield pushed by President Trump. What matters about Golden Dome here isn’t its exorbitant cost or its impossible physics or its potential to transform space into an overt theater of war—it’s the mentality the dogged pursuit of perfect protection reveals. In short, Golden Dome represents a tangible manifestation of the fantasy that America can seal itself off from the world and return to the prelapsarian state of Trump’s 1890s golden age. It’s nothing less than isolationism incarnate.
On top of that, there’s the never-ending gallimaufry of national security absurdities that range from the merely stupid to the outright dangerous. The clownish rebranding of the Department of Defense as the Department of War, for instance, falls into the former category, as does the frequent evocation of meaningless buzzwords like “lethality” and “warfighter.” But the rolling purge of military officers and intelligence officials undertaken by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for what can only be considered political reasons leaves America and its allies vulnerable in ways difficult to fully enumerate. Suffice it to say that firing competent military and intelligence professionals never ends well, even when they’re not replaced with pliant yes-men who tell their political superiors exactly what they want to hear.
Making matters somehow even worse, Trump has gone out of his way to alienate America’s allies and appease its adversaries. The appalling and degrading spectacle of Trump fawning over Vladimir Putin in Alaska, the constant White House parroting of Putin’s geopolitical line, and the Trump administration’s general diplomatic impotence—always giving the Kremlin a few weeks to make some sort of minimal concession before ignoring his own deadline as Putin escalates his attacks on Ukraine—are just the tip of an enormous iceberg. In addition, Trump has erratically levied non-sensical and illegal tariffs Trump against American allies in Europe and Asia in pursuit of his quixotic drive for autarky, for instance, as well as the still-open threats to the sovereignty of our Canadian and Danish allies.
But the recent immigration raid and deportation of South Korean workers in the United States to help start up a Hyundai battery plant in Georgia may be the best case-in-point for the self-harm Trump has inflicted on American national security and prosperity—and all done in the name of his administration’s ideological fixations and fetishes. The raid itself and the inhumane conditions faced by Korean workers while detained by ICE have already deeply alienated an otherwise close American ally, delayed the opening of the battery plant for months, and given foreign investors a stark warning to about the acute political risks they now face doing business in the United States. Already, Korean workers at a separate battery manufacturing plant under construction in Tennessee fled the United States over concerns about their own safety.
This particular example of national self-sabotage, in turn, leads to the long-term damage done by the Trump administration’s savage cuts to America’s scientific research and technological development funding. The National Science Foundation, for instance, awarded grants at a slower pace in Trump’s first few months back in office than at any point in 35 years. Worse still, Trump’s first proposed budget slashes overall federal science funding by a fifth and basic research by a third, leaving agencies like NASA funded at their lowest levels in decades, forcing them to cancel dozens of missions already in progress, and fostering an exodus of thousands of highly-skilled scientists, engineers, and other employees whose expertise will prove difficult to replace. To put it another way, the Trump administration has taken a jackhammer to the foundations of America’s national security and prosperity in the long run.
And that’s not even mentioning the other ways the Trump White House has eviscerated America’s ability to act in the world, most notably the wanton destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development at the hands of Elon Musk and his DOGElings.
All in all, Trump’s first nine months in office amount to a wholesale demolition job on American national security, one driven at its core by a cramped and impoverished vision of the United States and its proper place in the world. This nightmarish way of looking at the world has already done untold damage to the United States, its interests overseas, and its own future, to say nothing of the fate of freedom around the world. America as a hemispheric garrison state, bullying its neighbors, and trying to lock itself behind illusory walls to keep out the rest of the world? Charles Lindbergh would be proud.
If there’s one silver lining to these dark and ominous clouds, it’s that this approach to the world will inevitably fail due to its own flaws and contradictions. But Trump’s gangster-style politics and foreign policy will keep doing damage to America and the world so long as he remains in office, weakening the United States at home and making the world a much more dangerous place. We shouldn’t expect a hidebound, weak-minded old man to change course given his well-established hatred for foreigners, a pathology reflected in his ingrained antipathies toward immigration and immigrants, the very notion of trade itself, and America’s long-standing allies and alliances.
Trump, in other words, will do his best to try and impose his autarkic fantasies on the world, and we’ll all be worse off for it. In the end, the objective reality of a world permanently transformed by the scientific, technological, and industrial revolutions of the past century and a half—as well America’s overseas interests in that world—will reassert itself. Until it does, however, the damage will have been done: America will be weaker, more vulnerable, and more isolated thanks to Trump, while adversaries like China and Russia will have assumed stronger and far more favorable positions in the world.
And the worst part? We will have done it to ourselves.
Great summary of the current situation but I am also concerned about the bipartisan support of Israel and its genocide. Israel is the Achilles heel of the US.