America Commits Hegemonic Suicide

On the right rail of the home page of “Notes from the Middleground,” you’ll find a list of my Most Popular posts. In the current #2 slot is something I published just under a year ago, on August 29, 2025. The title—“Decline Is a Choice America Keeps Making”—referred back to a lecture written by the late neocon pundit Charles Krauthammer during the early days of the Obama administration. Krauthammer’s title—“Decline Is a Choice”—conveyed his outlook and message. Here’s how I summarized it—and my response to it in 2009 and last summer—in my August 2025 post:

In Krauthammer’s view, the newly elected president Barack Obama was uncomfortable exercising power, was suspicious of American motives, and preferred to let other countries take the lead. But this was an act of irresponsibility that would issue in a diminishment of American power rather than its preservation or enhancement. We would become weaker, initiating our own decline as a global hegemon, and we needed to understand that this was a function of our own decisions. We were choosing decline when we could, and should, choose the opposite.

It was a powerful argument cogently made, though I recall thinking it was quite unfair to Obama, whose Niebuhrian awareness of tragic ironies at play in America’s actions on the world stage was far closer to my own outlook on the world than Krauthammer’s variation on the Green Lantern theory of geopolitics. (Yes, Virginia, sometimes decline happens for structural reasons that aren’t at bottom a function of specific choices at all.) And anyway, wasn’t the previous president’s decision to topple a foreign government on the basis of faulty intelligence and without a plan to secure the post-invasion peace also a choice that contributed in real ways to the decline of America’s stature in the world?

My point in rehearsing all of this last August was to draw attention to all the ways—foreign and domestic—the second Trump administration appeared eager “to hasten America’s decline.” In comparison to that argument, the related one I advance in today’s post is narrower in scope and focused exclusively on foreign policy, and specifically on the hapless Iran War and how Donald Trump’s conduct of it has shred U.S. credibility and exposed the hollowness of American military power. I don’t think Trump intended to faceplant on the world stage, but that’s nonetheless what he’s done. I’m convinced that consoling ourselves with the knowledge that Trump’s imbecilic ineptitude has contributed to his sinking approval as we head toward the midterm elections is an evasion of the far more significant geopolitical reality that we are living through: an extraordinary (and rare) act of hegemonic suicide.