Yeesh, Who Would Have Thought That Allies Actually Mattered?
Hi All,
Donald Trump is best understood, in geopolitical terms, as an accelerant of US decline. He is systematically weakening many of the crucial pillars of American national power, from its societal cohesion, to the strength of US political structures and institutions, as well as the ability of the US military to think. As much as any of these, however, he has been accelerating American decline by blasting away at one of the greatest pillars of American world power; the US-led alliance system which has dominated the globe since the end of World War II. This is something he started almost immediately after becoming president again, as I wrote in this piece which was subtitled: Alliances Win Wars, Great Powers Do Not and which was released just after his inauguration. I will take it out of paywall now for people to read.
The crucial nature of alliances to the United States, and all other powers in history it must be said, is something that I have been writing about for years. It figures as one of the key elements in War and Power: Who Wins Wars and Why, which was released last summer but written before Trump was elected again. In the book there are two separate chapters on the importance of alliances, one for understanding how alliances support national power and the other for understanding how wars develop and who wins them from the alliance point of view.
Note: at the end of this piece I will include the start of the chapter on alliances and war from the book, so you can read more about these ideas if you want.
Anyway, only in the last 48 hours, has it finally dawned on the Trump Administration, specifically the President himself, that alliances really do matter and can be enormously helpful. One of the reasons that Trump has accelerated USA decline so much in such a short time is that he has, with malice aforethought, set out to explode a bomb under the existing US alliance structure.
