The World America Built Is Coming Apart
Trump didn’t create the forces pulling at it. But he is accelerating the unraveling.
There is a sentence that American diplomats have been able to say, in one form or another, for eighty years. It goes something like this: whatever our differences, the United States can be counted on. Counted on to honor its commitments. To show up when partners needed reassurance. To treat allies as something more than convenient instruments. To distinguish, publicly and consistently, between the countries that share our values and the ones that don’t.
That sentence is no longer reliably true. And the consequences of its unraveling are playing out simultaneously across four continents — in the Taiwan Strait, in the ruins of the Iran ceasefire, in the frozen battlefield in Ukraine, and in the trade offices of capitals that have quietly begun building arrangements that route around the United States entirely.
I served in the Air Force and in Congress. I have spent most of my adult life inside the institutions that project American power, and I have seen how they work when they are used well and when they are not. What I am watching now is is a structural dismantling of the infrastructure that made American leadership possible — and it is happening fast enough that the damage may outlast this presidency by a generation.
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The story of American diplomacy since 1945 is, at its core, a story about the power of reliability. The United States won the Cold War not primarily through military superiority — the Soviet Union had plenty of hardware — but through the patient construction of a web of relationships, institutions, and commitments that made the American-led order a better bet than the alternative. NATO. The institutions of global trade. The security guarantees that allowed Germany, Japan, and South Korea to rebuild and prosper without becoming nuclear powers. The Taiwan Relations Act, which for 47 years has kept a small democracy of 24 million people alive and free by making clear that American promises mean something.
None of this was inevitable or accidental. It was built, deal by deal and decade by decade, by presidents of both parties who understood that American power without American credibility is just muscle — and that muscle alone has never been sufficient to lead the world. Eisenhower understood this. So did Nixon, Reagan, both Bushes, Clinton, and Obama, whatever their disagreements on other matters.
Donald Trump does not understand it. That is not a partisan observation. It is a structural one. Trump approaches foreign policy the way he approaches real estate: as a series of individual transactions, each assessed on its own terms, with no particular concern for what the deal signals to everyone watching. The problem with that approach in diplomacy is that everyone is always watching. When the President of the United States tells a reporter that Taiwan’s security is “a very good negotiating chip,” he is not just making a comment about Taiwan. He is telling every country that has staked its security on an American commitment that those commitments are conditional — and that the conditions can change based on what America needs from someone else on a given week.
Trump is uniquely reckless — but he is not the first president to make damaging foreign policy decisions. But the specific pattern of decisions he has made, across Taiwan and Iran and Ukraine and the global trading system, is systematically dismantling the infrastructure of American influence that took generations to build. And that the cost of rebuilding it, when it finally becomes unavoidable, will be paid not by the people making these decisions but by the Americans who come after them.
Xi Maintains the Upper Hand
When Trump wrapped up his trip to Beijing last week and told reporters that Taiwan’s security represents “a very good negotiating chip,” the remark was treated by much of the American media as an off-hand blunder. It was not a blunder. It was a window into how Trump actually thinks about the relationship — and why Xi Jinping left the summit having received almost everything he wanted while Trump flew home with a tentative Boeing order that has yet to be confirmed.
Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te responded with the careful, measured language of a leader who cannot afford to publicly rebuke his country’s primary protector. He called U.S. arms “the most important deterrent” to Chinese aggression across the Indo-Pacific. That’s diplomatic language for: please do not trade us away. Taiwan is the world’s fourth-largest buyer of American weapons, the dominant global manufacturer of advanced semiconductors, and for 47 years has stood as the most tangible proof that a Chinese-speaking democracy can thrive in the shadow of an authoritarian giant. Treating it as a bargaining chip — even rhetorically, even casually — tells Beijing something it has been waiting to hear: that the American commitment has a price.
Former Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns watched the summit and concluded that the Chinese “heard Trump’s praise and think of him as a supplicant and therefore in a weakened position.” Xi never reciprocated Trump’s effusive compliments. He stayed on his agenda, made no major concessions on Iran, Taiwan, or the trade imbalance, and offered nothing concrete on reopening the Strait of Hormuz — which China has an obvious interest in keeping closed as long as Iranian oil keeps flowing cheaply to Chinese refineries. The Boeing deal Trump presented as a win has not been confirmed by Chinese airlines and is dwarfed by Chinese carriers’ recent purchase of more than 300 aircraft from Airbus.
Iran Has Trumped Trump
The Iran war was supposed to last four to five weeks. We are now more than three months in. The United States has spent more than $30 billion, burned through a significant portion of its long-range missile stockpile, stripped Patriot batteries from the THAAD system in South Korea, and redeployed a carrier group from the Pacific. A classified CIA assessment delivered to the White House this month found that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz and retains roughly 70 percent of its prewar weapons stockpile.
Iran is demanding that the U.S. lift all sanctions, end the naval blockade, release frozen assets, pay reparations, and recognize Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. It has refused Trump’s central demand — abandonment of its nuclear program — and shows no signs of changing that position. Sixty-four percent of Americans now say the decision to attack was wrong, including 73 percent of independents.
How did we get here? Partly through a failure of the kind of diplomatic groundwork that previous administrations invested in before any military action. The conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and Libya — whatever their individual merits — were all conducted with coalitions that shared the burden and provided legitimacy. Trump attacked Iran without consulting NATO, without meaningful allied support, and after two years of behavior that had alienated the very countries whose help he would need. When the German chancellor said Trump had been “humiliated” by the Iranians, it was not a diplomatic slight. It was a diagnosis.
Trump’s response — withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany — illustrated the core problem with his approach to alliances. He treats them as bilateral transactions rather than as a system. Punishing Germany for one chancellor’s comment does not simply damage one bilateral relationship. It signals to every NATO member that alliance membership is conditional on personal loyalty to the current American president. And it does so at precisely the moment when American credibility is already under maximum scrutiny.
Ukraine, Abandoned
The most revealing data point in Trump’s foreign policy record is Ukraine, because it shows what happens when American reliability fails gradually rather than all at once.
Trump entered office promising he would end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. Sixteen months later, the fighting continues, the front lines are barely different from where they were, and the administration has quietly closed the subject of new military aid. Vice President Vance confirmed in April that ending U.S. funding to Ukraine would be a “major accomplishment” for the administration. Trump’s designated peace negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, have made no visible diplomatic effort for months. Zelenskyy, according to people who deal with his government regularly, has largely given up on America.
The geopolitical consequence of that abandonment is not simply that Ukraine may lose a war. It is that every country watching draws a conclusion about what American commitments are worth. Taiwan drew that conclusion last week. The Baltic states have drawn it, which is why they are accelerating their own defense investments. South Korea has drawn it, which is why conversations about nuclear deterrence that would have been unthinkable five years ago are now happening in Seoul.
There is also a specific military cost that has received insufficient attention. Ukraine has conducted the most sophisticated drone war in history — developing tactics, systems, and operational doctrines that represent the clearest picture we have of how future asymmetric conflicts will be fought. America learned the hard way in Iran what happens when you fight that kind of war with last century’s weapons. We have an enormous interest in joint development with Ukraine in this domain. Kyiv is working with Germany instead. This is a strategic failure that will compound over time.
The Trade System, Abandoned
The same pattern plays out in trade. Trump announced sweeping tariffs on April 2, 2025 — “Liberation Day” — imposing a 10 percent across-the-board levy on all imports, with steeper rates for dozens of countries he accused of cheating the system. The goals were to boost American manufacturing, reduce the trade deficit, and fill the Treasury with revenue. He predicted it would produce “the golden age of America.”
None of it worked. Inflation climbed as import prices rose. The trade deficit increased. Manufacturing jobs declined as orders for American goods fell and global supply chains reorganized around domestic producers. Allies retaliated, then began building new trading relationships that bypassed the United States. Chinese goods flooded markets in South America and Africa. In February of this year, the Supreme Court struck down the entire tariff regime as unconstitutional. The administration is now refunding $166 billion in tariffs paid by American companies.
The deeper damage is not the refund. It is what the episode communicated to the world about American economic leadership. The free trading system the United States spent sixty years building — through the GATT, the WTO, and dozens of bilateral agreements — rested on the assumption that America would be a predictable, rules-based actor. Trump’s tariff regime demonstrated, at enormous cost, that American economic commitments are as contingent as its military ones. Countries that spent decades building supply chains around access to the American market are now hedging. That reorientation, once begun, does not reverse quickly or cheaply.
What We Are Losing
American diplomacy at its best has never been about making the United States liked. It has been about building a system of relationships and institutions that serves American interests while also serving global stability — and that functions even when the personalities involved do not get along. The Nixon-era relationship with China was not warm. Reagan and Thatcher had real disagreements. The diplomacy held because both sides understood that the relationship was about more than the individuals involved, and that it would outlast any single administration.
Trump does not operate in that framework. For him, relationships are personal and therefore transactional. This is why he called Xi “a great leader, straight out of central casting” and then expressed surprise when Xi declined to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Personal warmth is not a substitute for structural alignment of interests. Xi’s interests and America’s interests in Iran are not aligned, regardless of how Trump feels about Xi personally. That is a basic diplomatic reality that a well-staffed State Department would have surfaced before Air Force One landed in Beijing.
The State Department that Trump has systematically hollowed out — through firings, budget cuts, and the exclusion of career professionals from policy processes — exists precisely to navigate the gap between personal relationships and structural interests. It knows things no president can learn from briefings alone: the domestic pressures shaping foreign leaders’ decisions, the historical grievances that create immovable red lines, the off-ramps that are available if you know where to look. When you bypass that expertise, you do not get more efficient diplomacy. You get a summit full of compliments and empty of results.
I want to be clear about what I am arguing and what I am not. I am not arguing that American foreign policy was perfect before Trump or that every diplomatic norm deserves preservation. But there is a difference between challenging norms from a position of strategic clarity — knowing what you are trying to achieve and what you are willing to give up to get there — and abandoning them impulsively, transactionally, and without apparent awareness of what the abandonment signals to the countries watching.
The world that American diplomacy built over eighty years is not going to disappear overnight. The institutions are still there, damaged but standing. The relationships are still recoverable, if someone is willing to do the work. The expertise is still there, waiting to be used. But every year that the United States spends signaling that its commitments have expiration dates and its alliances are transactions, the harder that recovery becomes.
The question I keep coming back to is not whether Trump’s approach is working — it clearly is not. It is whether the Republican Party that shaped my understanding of American leadership in the world is willing to say so. The party of Reagan believed that American engagement was not charity or naivety — it was the most effective strategy ever devised for protecting American interests and American security. That belief built the world we inherited. Abandoning it is not strength. It is a bet that the next generation will not need what we are spending down.
America can be better than this. We have been better than this, within living memory, under presidents of both parties. The question is whether enough people who know that are willing to say so loudly enough and consistently enough to matter.
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