Robert Kagan: AMERICA VS. THE WORLD

[Nevilledog]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/03/trump-national-security-greenland-spheres-of-interest/685673/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/ptSpa

The trump administration’s National Security Strategy made it official: The American-dominated liberal world order is over. This is not because the United States proved materially incapable of sustaining it. Rather, the American order is over because the United States has decided that it no longer wishes to play its historically unprecedented role of providing global security. The American might that upheld the world order of the past 80 years will now be used instead to destroy it.

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.

Americans are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future. For eight decades, they have inhabited a liberal international order shaped by America’s predominant strength. They have grown accustomed to the world operating in a certain way: Largely agreeable and militarily passive European and Asian allies cooperate with the United States on economic and security issues. Challengers to the order, such as Russia and China, are constrained by the combined wealth and might of the U.S. and its allies. Global trade is generally free and unhampered by geopolitical rivalry, oceans are safe for travel, and nuclear weapons are limited by agreements on their production and use. Americans are so accustomed to this basically peaceful, prosperous, and open world that they tend to think it is the normal state of international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely. They can’t imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.

And who can blame them? According to Francis Fukuyama, history “ended” in 1989 with the triumph of liberalism—­even the primal human instinct toward violence was “fundamentally transformed.” Who needed a powerful America to defend what was destined to prevail anyway? Since the end of the Cold War, influential critics have been telling us that American dominance is superfluous and costly at best, destructive and dangerous at worst.

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[FadedMullet]

1. Good lord. This from one of the notoriously pin-headed, conservative Kagan family.