The Weekly Sift

Why this lost war is different from the others.

In the current Atlantic, Phillips O’Brien announces the end of the “American age”. (The link is a gift from O’Brien and should work even if you don’t subscribe to Atlantic.) By the American age, I think he means an era when the financial and technological dominance of the United States has allowed it to project power all over the world, and has allowed allies as far afield as Saudi Arabia and South Korea to rely on that power.

Our failure in the Iran War heralds the end of that age, not just because we are losing to a regional power, but because we are losing in a way that undermines our whole theory of power projection. We are losing because we cannot defend our own bases in the region from Iran’s missile attacks, and cannot defend our regional allies.

That makes this defeat different from, say, our loss in Vietnam. There, we were unable to achieve a result we wanted at a cost the American public was willing to pay. But North Vietnam wasn’t able to strike at our bases in Thailand, the Philippines, and Guam. The Japanese and Australians did not have to worry about our ability to protect them. Walking away from Vietnam wounded our pride, but left the rest of our world power structure largely unaffected.

Not so this time. The much-publicized travails of the USS Abraham Lincoln, for example, arose because the Iranians destroyed our logistics base in Bahrain, and so the Lincoln had to be supplied from Diego Garcia thousands of miles away. And the Bahrain base is not just temporarily out of commission. O’Brien notes:

At a recent town-hall meeting, Navy Times has reported, a service member asked Admiral Daryl Caudle about retrieving personal items from the Bahrain base. “We’re not getting back in there anytime soon,” Caudle responded. “I just want to be completely honest with that.”

Our era of dominance was bound to end eventually, O’Brien says, but Trump has made it come about sooner by starting a foolish shooting war against Iran and foolish trade wars with our former allies. Around the world, countries are concluding that neither our power nor our word can be trusted, and are beginning to make post-American arrangements.

Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia—all long-term U.S. partners—recently signed their own defense pact. Now that Iran is exercising control over the Strait of Hormuz, Oman, on the waterway’s opposite shore, is inching toward closer cooperation with Tehran. Other Gulf States are reaching out to Iran as well. Even Saudi Arabia, which for decades based its security on massive purchases of U.S. weapons and the hosting of U.S. forces, must reassess its choices after Trump told its de facto ruler that the U.S. will not assist the country in its war with the Houthis. Meanwhile, South Korea is improving relations with China, and European states are thinking more and more of a European-wide defense association.

It is quite ironic that this end of American greatness happens under a regime that promised to “Make America Great Again”. What makes O’Brien’s article important — I suspect it will be referenced decades from now, the way George Kennan’s anonymous 1947 “X article“, the one that promoted a policy of “containment” against the Soviet Union, has been — is that the American public has not gotten this message yet. The Trump regime still trumpets its “victory” in Iran, and hubristically compares an ally like Canada to “a little yippy dog“.

The bulk of Trump voters, the ones who live in the MAGA echo chamber, are beginning to become uneasy about the war dragging on, and are tired of paying higher war-induced gas and diesel prices. But they do not yet understand that we have lost, much less what we have lost.

The rest of the public is not far ahead of the MAGA base. Most Americans are coming to understand that Trump has no plans that will lead to victory, so we will at some point have to simply drop the war — probably ending up in a situation far worse than Obama achieved by negotiating with Iran. But even they are imagining a loss like Vietnam or Afghanistan, where we feel embarrassed, but turn the page and go on as before.

What the end of the Pax Americana will mean is still a mystery, even to foreign-policy experts. The last time a world power passed from the scene was over a hundred years ago, with the decline of the British Empire. As Kipling wrote in 1897:

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

But even then, Britain could pass the torch to a like-minded ally in the United States. In some sense, what is ending now is an Anglo-American period of dominance that goes back at least to the Napoleonic wars. Today, China is the only power comparable to the United States, and it is neither like-minded nor ready to define a world order.

We are likely to be entering a period of instability around the world. Probably the worst thing we can do is to refuse to recognize it, and to escape into nostalgia for our past greatness. We could go ever-deeper into debt by increasing our military budget, maybe rebuilding bases we still cannot defend, and buying nostalgia-inducing weapons like the Trump-class battleships.

Or we could rethink America’s role in the world. We are a strong nation with outstanding technology and world leadership in many areas. Much can be still be done with that, if we come to a new understanding of both our strengths and our limitations.