Trying to make sense of the whirlwind of activity that has characterized the last two weeks is not easy. Trying to find any sense or pattern in Trump’s actions that are not due to revenge or self-interest or sheer vindictiveness may be an exercise in futility. But Ryan Grim writes that a French writer Arnaud Bertrand has gained a following by arguing that what we are seeing is a retreat by the US from its global hegemonic ambitions to accepting its status as that of a regional power.
Here is how Bertrand puts it:
Hegemony was going to end sooner or later, and now the U.S. is basically choosing to end it on its own terms. It is the post-American world order – brought to you by America itself. Even the tariffs on allies, viewed under this angle, make sense, as it redefines the concept of ‘allies’: they don’t want—or maybe rather can’t afford—vassals anymore, but rather relationships that evolve based on current interests. You can either view it as decline – because it does unquestionably look like the end of the American empire – or as avoiding further decline: controlled withdrawal from imperial commitments in order to focus resources on core national interests rather than being forced into an even messier retreat at a later stage. In any case it is the end of an era.
Seen in a context of strategic retreat, Trump’s belligerence toward Greenland and Canada, for example, appears more like an empire stepping back from the world stage and building trenches closer to home.
Putting an exclamation mark on Bertrand’s assertion was this morning’s news that Trump is naming Darren Beattie to oversee public diplomacy at the State Department. It’s hard to overstate what a significant signal his appointment is. Beattie—a former speechwriter who Semafor described as a “MAGA intellectual”—is an outspoken critic of the warhawk wing of the GOP and his ascension has sent shockwaves through Washington’s neocon think-tank universe. Our Pakistani readers may already know Beattie from the work he’s done at Revolver News exposing the Biden administration’s moves against Imran Khan.
His appointment is as radical as a Democratic president sending Noam Chomsky to run the CIA, though let’s be clear, we are not witnessing a revival of a new socialist international. Trump’s realists are rooted firmly in a right-wing tradition. Beattie, who was fired from the first administration for speaking at a conference alongside white nationalists, sad as recently as October 2024, “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”
That such a remark can be made by a man who may be Pakistan’s best hope for a restoration of dignity and democracy underscores how disorienting all this is. Beattie has also been an outspoken—and often on point—critic of USAID, exposing its role in destabilizing foreign countries.
The attack on USAID—led first by Elon Musk and belatedly blessed by Trump—fits into the frame of strategic retreat as well. Musk, who has said he spent the weekend “feeding it to the woodchipper,” has been framing the fight against USAID in as many different ways as he can think of. Some of it has been done in truly moronic fashion, with Musk calling it “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” The media has also been spinning it, most often describing it as an “humanitarian agency.” In reality USAID, along with its pass-through entity the National Endowment for Democracy, is an omnipresent tool of American soft power. Read Alexander Zaitchik’s piece for Drop Site from just last week on its role in annulling a democratic election in Romania.
…There’s no room for confusion here: Whatever else he is saying, Musk and company are clearly targeting USAID specifically because of the role it plays in advancing an aggressive American foreign policy that he and his allies want to roll back.
Even Marco Rubio seems along for the ride. In a recent interview, Secretary of State Rubio suggested that the era of American hegemony was a fluke that was now coming to an end. “It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was an anomaly, it was a product of the end of the Cold War,” he said. “But eventually you were going to return back to having a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China, and to some extent Russia.”
This is not the old Rubio whose early approach to foreign policy was indistinguishable from neocon warmongering.
…But before we get too carried away, let’s consider some additional context. In 2019, amid a U.S.-backed coup in Bolivia, a nation rich in lithium and other resources needed for the energy transition, Musk infamously posted on Twitter, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” That doesn’t sound like a man deeply invested in the sovereignty of each nation. So is Musk just hoping to shut down the government element of U.S. intervention and privatize it instead, putting it directly in the hands of oligarchs (or one oligarch)?
Musk sending minions with fake lanyards into the bowels of the Treasury Department and then to try to get into classified rooms inside USAID indicates he’s a man bent more on conquest than liberation. We all remember Gramsci’s famous quote at moments like this: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.” But we often forget that he immediately added, “Now is the time of monsters.”
As Bertrand concluded, “This is not to say that the U.S. won’t continue to wreak havoc on the world, and in fact we might be seeing it become even more aggressive than before. Because when it previously was (badly, and very hypocritically) trying to maintain some semblance of self-proclaimed ‘rules-based order’, it now doesn’t even have to pretend it is under any constraint, not even the constraint of playing nice with allies. It’s the end of the U.S. empire, but definitely not the end of the U.S. as a major disruptive force in world affairs.”
What shape will the US monster that is being born take?
Evidently, a clear-eyed and sober decision made by an informed USA.
Still, an interesting journalistic take.
“Is Trump staging a retreat from US empire?” No.
I think the author of the article is trying to suggest Trump and his advisors are playing 3-D chess and are acting on a completely different plan than what they are saying in public. Trump and Co. are not looking to the future, they are hardly even looking to the present. They want unrestrained power; the power to cheat,lie, distort facts in order to make money and the power to tell other people what is acceptable/moral, and enforce it. They want no one to have the power to tell them they are wrong and no one to tell them they can’t do something. If the USA has to be dismantled to get it, they will dismantle the USA. The side effects on the rest of the world, or the country, are not something they are concerned with.
Trump and Co. have told us what they want to do, believe them.
It seems unlikely the Tr*mp has a planning horizon beyond a few months, maybe a year at most. Shorter term, he is motivated by petty urges, revenge, a desire for attention, a total disregard for consequences. A cruder, dumber Boris Johnson, sans the alcoholism.
Any longer-term planning may be the input from his flunkies who hope to use him as a tool.
Trump leans isolationist and in that sense Bertrand is right. This isn’t a coherent policy, rather it is that Trump has a much smaller conceptual area that he cares about. Trump mostly cares about things that effect Trump, concepts like global order or trying to help others on principle mean nothing to Trump.
The second Trump administration is a collection of people acting on their own goals and manipulating Trump. In the first Trump administration USAid never came up. In the second it’s suddenly a huge issue, not because Trump cares but because Elon Musk cares. Musk has convinced Trump that USAid has to go. Trump thinks it’s Trump giving orders to Musk when it’s really Musk manipulating Trump. A lot of what is happening in Trump’s second administration work that way. This means the administration has no coherent policy at all, it’s people seizing as much power as they can.
Since Trump admires late 19th century economics, restoring the Monroe Doctrine is only logical.
I’ve been hearing this for my whole Boomer life.
It’s never been true.
.1. We’ve never even had all that much in the way of world leadership or dominance, which is what hegemony means.
And much of our dominance is soft power meaning such things as widespread use of English, the role of the dollar in world trade, our cultural dominance from Hollywood and the internet, US universities, US science, etc..
Our big problem isn’t that the rest of the world wants us to go away.
Out big problem is that much of the rest of the world wants to move to the USA, whether we like it or not. Which is how we end up with 11 million undocumented immigrants and people try running our borders every day.
(This may be Trump’s accidental one accomplishment. Making the USA such a miserable place that no one wants to live here any more.)
.2 The big mistake these analysts are making is assuming the Trump administration has any thing resembling a coherent plan for anything.
We’ve already had those magic 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico which lasted a whole one day before being suspended.
The plan is to wreck the US government any way they can. While the oligarchies loot the USA and the US government any way they can to increase their money and power.
Grim cites …USAID, … its role in annulling a democratic election in Romania.
Yet the linked report, even if taken at face value, mentions USAID only once:
That does not establish a “role in annulling a democratic election” with any solidity.
The report itself does provide interesting info about Romania’s politics, but not enough for me to feel reading it gives me a grasp of same. (Apparently both major Romanian political parties subsidized minor parties to undercut their opponents, using social media -- mostly TikTok -- and paid “influencers”.) Acknowledging “Russia has a well-known interest in influencing the politics of the region”, it says little about what Russia may or may not have done, just that the parts of the Romanian intelligencies’ report released by the top court does not provide evidence for such influencing.
Zaitchik, described as a freelance reporter, does his own credibility little good by writing --
-- a helluva leap between those two sentences. If you used MS Excel to analyze some numbers, and it turns out the CIA also uses Excel, does that make you a CIA asset?
Nor, looking at the larger issues in this post, does it seem Arnaud Bertrand makes his case for the US doing a strategic hegemonic withdrawal under Trump. While such a move might make geopolitical sense, all Trump’s appointments and initiatives so far point in the opposite direction.
I’m with flex on this one. That article is just a longer, more thought out version of your basic “Trump is playing 4d chess!” statement.
I think a different model explains it all rather well. I think of it as ticks on a dog.
Every useless rich person who inherited wealth and has been coddled their whole life thinks they’re owed not just an incredibly privileged life, but also a marked increase over what they started with. This doesn’t and mostly can’t come about through normal means so many of them find that damaging the country is profitable.
And like ticks swarming a dog, they all think they’re feeding on something so massive that nothing they could possibly do will ever really hurt it. But if there are enough of them the dog gets sick. And worse, not all of them are ticks. Some of them are much larger and consume a lot more of the dog’s resources. These are perhaps more like vampire bats.
While all of them have convinced themselves that nothing bad can happen, the dog’s resources are finite. Take too much and it will sicken and eventually die. The damage is piling up and it’s clear we were well into the stage where the dog sickens by the time of the 2007-2008 crash. A deliberately planned economic catastrophe where normal people paid to bail out the rich, who then ignored the plight of ordinary people and used this to instead enrich themselves even further.
I think all these people are just looking to suck as much life blood as they can. They’re not playing 4d chess, they’re ticks on a dog.
Now that so much time has passed (checks watch), this question just looks hilarious.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/05/donald-trump-gaza-strip-plan-take-over-move-palestinians-ownership
Hmm…. Well, on the one hand, he’s consistently expressed open territorial ambitions in a way and to an extent that no other US president really ever has so far as I can see, while on the other, some people around him have said one or things in one or two venues which might kinda-sorta look vaguely like some other things that people who oppose US imperialism have said in the past, while continuing to say other completely different and contradictory things in other venues and to other audiences.
I mean, are we seriously arguing that the president who has expressed a desire to take control of Greenland and Panama, possibly though the use of military force, is “staging a retreat from US empire”? Have I woken up in Bizarro World, where everything is the exact opposite of what it is in the normal world?
I think we can probably file this under “Betteridge’s Law of Headlines Strikes Again”… But let’s look a bit more at the detail here, shall we?
Well, firstly, there obviously is room for confusion, since the quoted article itself goes on to say:
Secondly, and rather more importantly, the entire argument depends on taking some things Musk has said at face value, while disregarding other things he has said at different time and to different audiences. And the choice as to which things we are supposed to believe and which we are to disregard seems to depend entirely on whether or not they advance the argument being made.
There is a really critical point to be made here, which almost all commentators seem to miss, and it’s this: very rich and powerful people lie all the fucking time. They do not say the things they say because they believe them, but merely use words as tools to advance their agendas. They will say anything to anybody. They will say entirely contradictory things depending on whatever they think will serve their interests at the time, possibly even within the same speech. It’s all just moves in a game.
When Musk says something negative about how USAID has been used to promote American hegemony, that no more indicates that he’s actually opposed using USAID to promote American hegemony than a chess player advancing his king pawn indicates that they are deeply, personally committed to the advancement of that particular pawn and its individual journey towards promotion. The idea is absurd. They are committed to winning the game, and if that requires advancing a pawn only to sacrifice it on the next move, that is exactly what they will do.
Gary Stevenson recently made this point very clearly, and with copious examples from his personal experience, over on his YouTube channel: The games and strategy of rich people. What I learnt at Citibank.
You cannot divine what these people believe from what they say.
Aside from sonofrojblake’s point@9 (regarding which I’m expecting the “it’s just for show/a negotiating position/a distraction from [whatever]” responses along any time), it’s worth asking how many US bases around the world have been slated for closure. AFAIK, it’s approximately 0.