When Hegemons Backslide

Trump has been [cough] gunning for the US international order since long before he was inaugurated.

The reasons why are important. He has a zero sum game approach to everything, and so treats alliances and all soft power as rip-offs. That resentment, at the core of Trump’s personality, is one of many things Vladimir Putin exploited to make Trump hate his military alliances. And as the US legal system had the audacity to subject him to it, Trump developed a need to destroy rule of law. That he can restore his self-illusion of business prowess by extorting bribes on an industrial scale is just gravy.

And so he came into power with the intent of destroying several — but not all — prongs to US hegemony, the prongs that lowered the cost of sustaining America’s dominant role in the world even as China threatens it: US alliances, US soft power, and a claim to US exceptionalism.

He’s still got the unsurpassed military. America’s tech platforms remain the dominant communications network of the world and, with that, its attendant ease of spying. For the moment — but possibly only for the moment — the dollar remains the world’s reserve currency, which permits the US to fund everything else and coerce compliance in more subtle ways.

But, partly out of psychological fragility, Trump has chosen to destroy several key tools that made exercising US power easier and cheaper. He has forgone hegemony in the search of dominance. Trump’s military parade failed to give him the psychological fulfillment he sought, and so Bibi Netanyahu was able to sell him on an illegal invasion of Iran that would fill that need.

Yesterday’s strike on Iran dealt at least the symbolic death blow to the Western world order put into place after World War II to prevent follow-on catastrophes. Trump already launched a structural attack on the institution that would hold him accountable alongside Putin and Bibi Netanyahu for war crimes; the NYT finally matched Quinn’s post on the attack on the ICC yesterday (using both the digital hegemony the US still maintains but also the financial hegemony is may piss away). Trump intends to do the same to much of the UN as well.

By refusing to alert Democratic lawmakers of the attack — by violating not just the War Powers Act (which has become a three decade habit) but also the National Security Act — Trump launched this war as an attack on democracy, both on the Democratic Party as the legitimate opposition but also on Congress as a coequal brach of power, as much as on Iran.

While I haven’t read it all, what I have read makes me think the academic and popular literature on democratic backsliding never considers for what happens when a significant power, much less a hegemon, backslides. Two models we’ve adopted to measure Trump’s rush to eliminate American democracy — Orbán’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia — both bear important lessons (not least because Orbán and Putin have both facilitated Trump’s return and instructed his policy approach). But both men exploited a moment of weakness in their country, whereas Trump is in the process of deliberately pissing away much of America’s strength to carry out his goals, many of which are personal glorification as much as successful authoritarianism.

Trump cares more about the feeling of domination than he does about success for anyone but himself and loyal allies, much less than the country as a whole. And that psychological craving for the feeling of domination is what Bibi played to — in the wake of Trump’s flaccid military parade and the contrasting joy of the No Kings protests — to get him to join a war of choice against Iran. Trump was manipulated to use dominance rather than hegemony against Iran in part because his other efforts to obtain full capitulation — from law firms, from Harvard, from California, from China — have failed.

Stephen Miller, too, seems to know how to trigger Trump’s psychological need for domination, even while Miller’s administrative ineptitude creates surface area for attack in the larger effort to pursue authoritarianism.

Partly as a result, that craving for domination has led Trump to fuck the US economy: with Miller’s gulag, with his own trade war, with his attacks on US scientific and medical dominance. And this is where the backsliding analysis misses, in my opinion.

We have no idea what will come from Trump’s stupid and illegal decision to join Bibi’s attack on Iran. This is not Iraq 2.0 for a bunch of reasons, starting with the fact that Bush and Cheney attempted to limit civilian casualties whereas Bibi, with Trump’s blessing, is already pursuing the annihilation of Palestinians, and so we must consider whether similar annihilation is in the works in Iran.

This is not Iraq 2.0 because, even though Bush 2 was unable to match the diplomatic commitment to an Iraq War that Bush 1 achieved, W was still able to persuade allies to join the effort. While it seems exceedingly likely that some European allies will join or at least tacitly sanction this invasion, they’ll do so knowing their relationship has become one of coercion. They’ll know that Trump will sell out any contribution like he and JD Vance and Pete Hegseth love to attack the Danes for their sacrifices in the Afghan war.

This is not Iraq 2.0 because, whereas Cheney used that war to expand and perfect US surveillance, Trump is largely ignoring external surveillance, relying instead on lies from Bibi, preparing instead to vastly expand its focus internally.

This is not Iraq 2.0 because during Iraq 1.0 the US was a largely uncontested hegemon, whereas Trump has not only destroyed the tools by which the US persuades rather than coerces cooperation, he has a psychological need to seek only coerced capitulation. Absent that — in the face of pushback on Ukraine, on his trade war, and on democracy itself — he became and becomes vulnerable to cooptation by people like Bibi. Trump left a G-7 that refused to capitulate to him and sprinted headlong into Bibi’s warm embrace.

We don’t know how Trump’s attack on Iran will affect efforts to combat his authoritarianism internally. He will definitely use it as a justification to increase crackdowns on dissent, but he’s already deploying emergencies to do that, and given the many ways Trump violated the law to launch this attack, it’s unclear how much more amenable courts will be to treat this one as real. Before the attack, key factions of his base — including true opponents of war, Russian useful idiots, unconstrained antisemites, and what few real libertarians are left in the US — spoke out against the operation. Many are already falling into line, but it’s unclear whether that will last if things go badly from here. And those outside Trump’s base and outside the Fox News bubble at least thus far oppose this intervention. Trump will be attempting to sell this war without laying any groundwork for it, even as the things that were making him increasingly unpopular — the ICE raids — will not go away or grow less visible.

But what we do know is the international order has just been dismantled and whatever advantages the US military and dragnet give it, Trump is limiting the value of those advantages by weakening the US economy and possibly US financial hegemony even as China will want to respond to this attack.

Attacking Iran will exacerbate the effect of Trump’s attacks on the US economy, domestically. And it will therefore increase China’s leverage over us — and increase the import of the leverage over rare metals in this confrontation. And that’s before China uses this opportunity to extend its own hegemony, which it was already doing.

At every stage, Trump and Miller have pursued things that an aspiring dictator in a declining state might do to stave off further decline. But those very same acts from a country with what had been the best economy in the world, currency hegemony, and unsurpassed scientific know-how have the opposite effect. They make the aspiring dictator weaker, first externally and then, as a result, internally.

Which is to say that Trump’s choice to swap global hegemony for attempted dominance may undermine his pursuit of dominance both at home and abroad.