This Is the End
Putinism abroad always morphs into Putinism at home. And we chose this path. Why? Because something-something the price of eggs.
One year ago today Donald Trump was sworn in as president and the American-led global order that had structured world affairs since 1945 ended. The world did not realize this reality at the time.
Europeans thought they could bargain with Trump to maintain the status quo.
Russia thought it could manipulate Trump to get Ukraine.
China thought it could use Trump’s weakness to finally grasp Taiwan.
None of these power centers appreciated that Trump, the Republican party, and the American people were about to demolish the entire geo-strategic balance in an unprecedented act of national self-mutilation.
We don’t need to recapitulate the events of the last year. We’ve all seen them. Instead, let’s talk about the new world that is forming, today, as we speak.
1) Abdication
We are witness to something rare in human history: Abdication by the leader of the global order.
We have seen empires fall and civilizations crumble. But we’ve almost never seen a people renounce their leadership of the world—all at once, in full public view.1 That is what has happened in the 365 days since January 20, 2025.
Here’s what comes next.
The blinding of Five Eyes. The UKUSA intelligence sharing agreement—informally known as Five Eyes—has been in danger since Tulsi Gabbard was appointed director of national intelligence. But we’ve gone further than the possibility of having a Russia sympathizer atop the U.S. intelligence community: America’s allies now understand that we are—at best—a strategic competitor to Canada and the United Kingdom and at worst a threat to the other English-speaking countries. The days of intelligence sharing between America and our former allies are drawing to a close.
The death of NATO. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was conceived as a way to tame Europe. By establishing the United States as the strategic counterweight to the continent, NATO (a) held the Soviets in check but also (b) removed the need for Germany to re-arm at a scale sufficient to tip the local military balance and menace its neighbors.
NATO is now a zombie organization. America has progressed from unreliable ally to overt threat to European sovereignty. Europe will re-arm. There is no longer any question on this point.
The new nuclear age begins. The world’s three largest nuclear powers are now expansionist predator states. This leaves the lesser nuclear powers no choice but to create their own umbrellas while buying time for smaller allies to join the nuclear club. Germany, Poland, and Canada will acquire nuclear weapons. So will Japan. Sweden, Australia, and South Korea may develop nuclear capabilities as well.
Europe + China. The Chinese communist regime is authoritarian. It does not adhere to the rule of law in any meaningful way. But while it is ambitious, it is stable, and it understands that stability is its biggest advantage. China does not threaten Europe as acutely as Russia and the United States do, and Europe needs some stability undergirding the next world order. Europe will draw closer to China and supplant the United States as China’s main trading partner.
Ukraine will join Europe. As Europe rearms it will need Ukraine’s defense industrial base; therefore it will draw Ukraine into its collective security arrangement (the EU’s, not NATO’s) once the Russo-Ukraine war draws to a close.
Greenland will become disputed territory. Greenland is about to become, like Crimea or Kashmir or the little islands in the South China Sea, disputed territory. The Republican party has made an unmistakable, irrevocable territorial claim on Greenland. There are only two possible ways to resolve this question.
The first would be for the United States to pass some form of binding legislation renouncing the claim and prohibiting annexation of Greenland. But even that might not be enough of a guarantee, since the rule of law is teetering in America.
The second solution would be for America to give up Pituffik Space Base and withdraw its military presence from the island.
Absent those actions, Europe must consider any pause in America’s attempt to annex Greenland as temporary and subject to renewal whenever 40,000 Wisconsinites are aggrieved about the price of eggs.
2. This Is Who We Are
Another prediction: We are about to see the free world stop referring to the great unraveling as a Trump problem. They will soon understand that it is an America problem.
Many people comfort themselves by saying some version of “Donald Trump is an aberration” or “This isn’t who we are.”
Both of those sentiments are incorrect.
If Trump was an aberration and his actions did not have sufficient public support, then he would be removed from office. There are two mechanisms for doing so—impeachment and the 25th Amendment.
Trump will not be removed from office; which allows one of two conclusions. Either:
Trump’s policies are supported by a sufficient percentage of Americans to be viable; or
America’s constitutional order is so ossified that it no longer functions to safeguard the will of the people.2
Neither of these is an alibi; either one supports the conclusion that the problem is not Trump. It is America and Americans. This is who we are. Like it or not.
Not all of us. Some of us are trying to push back. If you want to be part of that effort here at The Bulwark, this is the time. Because shit is getting realer than real.
All of which leaves three questions3 that will dictate our lived reality in the coming years.
(1) When will the first U.S. Treasury auction fail? America finances its debt by issuing bonds. These bonds are sold at auction. When demand for Treasury bonds is low, the government must offer higher yield rates in order to induce people to buy them. The higher the yield rate, the more expensive it is for the government to borrow money.
One of the nightmare scenarios for the American economy is that the Treasury conducts an auction and there are no buyers.4
What would this look like? Here’s a helpful explainer from Brookings.
The first signal would be that a spread opens up between the price of bonds at-issue and then at time of auction. The second would be a declining bid-to-cover ratio during the auction. The third would be seen in the makeup of who the Treasury buyers are—if the ratio of primary buyers increases during the auction, it signals that demand for Treasuries outside of the buyers-of-last-resort is low.
Why would a Treasury auction fail? Lots of reasons. But the most obvious is that foreign governments could decide that it is not in their interest to subsidize the debt of a strategic rival.
It is possible that a coordinated action by the EU, Japan, and/or China could derail an auction and destabilize the American bond market. Which brings us to the next question.
(2) How long will the dollar remain the world’s reserve currency? The advantages America reaps from the rest of the world using the dollar as the global reserve currency has been discussed frequently.
The de-dollarization trend was already moving before America renounced its commitments. If American debt is no longer attractive and the American central bank is no longer independent, then markets will look elsewhere for a global reserve currency and will settle on either the euro or, if China makes some changes, the yuan.5
(3) Will Putinism take over American domestic politics, too?
Donald Trump and Republicans talk about Greenland the way Vladimir Putin has long talked about Ukraine. Both insist that:
The target is not a real nation.
That it has autonomy only as a historical accident.
That its possession is required for purposes of the hegemon’s national security.
That NATO is treating it unfairly by interfering with the hegemon’s legitimate claims.
America has adopted Putinism as its modus operandi for foreign affairs.
So tell me: Why would America not also adopt Putinism in its domestic affairs? Why would the American regime tolerate free and fair elections or the transfer of power to an opposition party?
Are there examples of expansionist, rogue regimes which ignored international law and attempted to subjugate free people abroad, but respected liberal democratic outcomes that terminated their possession of power at home?
I look forward to your answers, and thoughts, in the comments.
3. Who We Are
Robert Kagan says hello to the bad guy.
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. . . .
Some pundits who welcome a post-American world and the return of multipolarity suggest that most of the benefits of the American order for the U.S. can be retained. America just needs to learn to restrain itself, give up utopian efforts to shape the world, and accommodate “the reality” that other countries “seek to establish their own international orders governed by their own rules,” as Harvard’s Graham Allison put it. Indeed, Allison and others argue, Americans’ insistence on predominance had caused most conflicts with Russia and China. Americans should embrace multipolarity as more peaceful and less burdensome. Recently, Trump’s boosters among the foreign-policy elite have even started pointing to the early-19th-century Concert of Europe as a model for the future, suggesting that skillful diplomacy among the great powers can preserve peace more effectively than the U.S.-led system did in the unipolar world.
As a purely historical matter, this is delusional. Even the most well-managed multipolar orders were significantly more brutal and prone to war than the world that Americans have known these past 80 years. To take one example, during what some call the “long peace” in Europe, from 1815 to 1914, the great powers (including Russia and the Ottoman empire) fought dozens of wars with one another and with smaller states to defend or acquire strategic advantage, resources, and spheres of interest. These were not skirmishes but full-scale conflicts, usually costing tens—sometimes hundreds—of thousands of lives. Roughly half a million people died in the Crimean War (1853–56); the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) resulted in about 180,000 military and up to 250,000 civilian deaths in less than a year of fighting. Almost every decade from 1815 to 1914 included at least one war involving two or more great powers. . . .
Precisely to escape this cycle of conflict, the generations of Americans who lived through two world wars laid the foundations of the American-led liberal world order. They were the true realists, because they had no illusions about multipolarity. They had lived their entire lives with its horrific consequences.
You could make the argument that Britain did this right after World War II when they begged the United States to oppose communist encroachment in Greece and Turkey, but even then they had a convivial power to which to hand the baton. The United States does not.
Which, if you extrapolate, means that America’s constitutional order is, itself, a zombie approaching systemic failure.
There’s a fourth question: How long will it be until we see a Chinese aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic performing joint exercises with our erstwhile NATO allies?
My guess is 2040. Once China has a nuclear-powered carrier group it will be in the power-projection business.
Not literally zero buyers: What I mean here is the demand for Treasuries collapses suddenly and in an unanticipated manner.
If the Chinese unpegged the yuan and allowed freer capital flows, that would be a sign that the CCP was aiming to supplant the dollar.
I read the whole thing. I can't argue against any of it. I am literally grieving for the lives we once had and the futures our children will not have.
i've said it here before, but it's worth repeating: lord knows the era of american hegemony from 1945-2025 had its flaws, but the era that is going to replace it is going to be markedly worse.
meanwhile, the davos elite will party like it's 1999.