America vs.The World

[hedda_foil]

The Atlantic (paywalled)
https://archive.ph/QjJw5
[snip]
Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II, one that will make the Cold War look like child’s play and the post–Cold War world like paradise. In fact, this new world will look a lot like the world prior to 1945, with multiple great powers and metastasizing competition and conflict. The U.S. will have no reliable friends or allies and will have to depend entirely on its own strength to survive and prosper. This will require more military spending, not less, because the open access to overseas resources, markets, and strategic bases that Americans have enjoyed will no longer come as a benefit of the country’s alliances. Instead, they will have to be contested and defended against other great powers.
[snip]
No country had ever before played the role that the traditionally aloof United States took on after 1945. That is partly because no other power had enjoyed America’s unique circumstances—¬largely in¬vulnerable to foreign invasion, because of its strength and its distance from the other great powers, and thus able to deploy force thousands of miles from home without leaving itself at risk. This combination of geography and reach allowed the United States after World War II to bring peace and security to Europe and East Asia. Nations scarred by war poured their energies into becoming economic powerhouses. That made global prosperity and international cooperation possible.
[snip]
All of that is now ending. Trump has openly celebrated the end of the grand bargain. His administration has told Europeans to be ready to take over their own defense by 2027 and suggested that allies and strategic partners, including Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, should pay the United States for protection. Trump has launched aggressive tariff wars against virtually all of America’s allies. He has waged ideological and political warfare against European governments and explicitly threatened territorial aggression against two NATO allies, Canada and Denmark.
[snip]
The consequence of a newly unreliable and even hostile United States, therefore, will likely be significant military buildups by former allies. This will not mean sharing the burden of collective security, because these rearmed nations will no longer be American allies. They will be independent great powers pursuing their own strategic interests in a multi¬polar world. They will owe nothing to the United States; on the contrary, they will view it with the same antagonism and fear that they direct toward Russia and China. Indeed, having been strategically abandoned by the U.S. while suffering from American economic predation and possibly territorial aggression, they are likely to become hotbeds of anti-¬Americanism. At the very least, they will not be the same countries Americans know today.
[more}
The Atlantic (paywalled)
https://archive.ph/QjJw5