The 20th century saw the apex of US power. Even during the Cold War with the Soviet Union as a rival nuclear superpower, the US was still dominant. This dominance came with a massive cost for many people in other countries. as we saw the US being behind the murder of millions of people all across Asia, Africa, and Central and South America in its global anti-Communist rampage, that left many countries devastated and reeling and still struggling to recover. The cynical and callous way that the US behaved is something that many Americans do not fully appreciate since the US and other western media have been complicit in hiding the ugly truth from its own people, enabling them to think that the US has largely been a benevolent force in the world.

(For those who think I am exaggerating, I recommend the book The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World by journalist Vincent Bevins that describes in great detail how the US instigated coups and put into power rulers in many countries who carried out large scale massacres of leftists and democracy activists. Starting after World War II, this program saw its fruition in Indonesia and Brazil in the 1960s and that murderous model was later used in dozens of other countries across the world. I will be giving a detailed review of the book in the future.)

But along with this brute force military-based dominance, there was also the concomitant development of soft power.

There have been many articles describing how Trump’s actions seem hell-bent on destroying American power and influence in the world, whether this is his intent or not. Given the hyper-charged political atmosphere that we now live in, it is hard to gauge if these analyses are well-grounded or just hyperbolic reactions to having an unhinged narcissist as president. It is clear that in terms of sheer military power, the US will continue to be a force for some time to come, given the bipartisan willingness of both parties in the US to throw obscene amounts of money at the Pentagon for new weaponry. This has always been essentially a way to subsidize defense-related industries by siphoning money to them under the guise of national security. Even despite all the waste and corruption that went with it, the military superiority was maintained, although now China is closing the gap. Furthermore, the stalemated war with Iran (along with Russia getting bogged down in Ukraine) has shown that having overwhelming superiority in conventional military terms does not translate to victory against a nimble adversary that is countering what it sees as an existential threat.

It is in the region of soft power where we see the most precipitous decline of US power under Trump. Garrett M. Graff does a detailed analysis of this issue, dissecting carefully all the elements that led to the US becoming so powerful in the 20th century and how each of those elements has declined precipitously under Trump.

IMAGINE YOU WERE Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping and you woke up a year ago having magically been given command of puppet strings that control the White House. Your explicit geopolitical goal is to undermine trust in the United States on the world stage. You want to destroy the Western rules-based order that has preserved peace and security for 80 years, which allowed the US to triumph as an economic superpower and beacon of hope and innovation for the world. What exactly would you do differently with your marionette other than enact the ever more reckless agenda that Donald Trump has pursued since he became president last year?

Nothing.
…

FOR THE 80 years since the end of World War II, the US model of innovation, trade, and economic hegemony has been built on a foundation of six seemingly inviolable traditions and policies held steady across both Republican and Democratic administrations: (1) easy access of immigrants to the US, particularly its unparalleled world-class schools and universities; (2) rich and steady government support of higher education, medical research, and laboratories; (3) broad and ever-more-frictionless trade access to US markets and, reciprocally, a flow of US products to the rest of the world; (4) a firm, unyielding, and unquestionable adherence to the rule of law at home that made the US a predictable and safe place to create, build, and do business at home; and (5) a similarly firm, unyielding, and unquestionable network of geopolitical alliances abroad that knitted together a security blanket that stretched around the entire globe, backed up by the most powerful and widest-ranging military ever seen in human history.

All five of those pillars helped firm up and underpin another equally critical pillar: (6) a politically independent and fiscally prudent monetary policy that established the US dollar as the world’s safest reserve currency. This made US Treasury bonds the savings bank for the entire world—for democracies and authoritarian regimes alike!—and made US banking networks and capital markets the place to be for any company looking for access to investors.
…

Pick almost any measure of business success and I can show you how that six-part recipe applied. To choose just one: All four of the world’s $4 trillion companies—Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple—saw immigrants or their children play a key role in their success.

And yet systematically over the last year—in ways that Putin or Xi couldn’t have dreamed we would do to ourselves—Donald Trump has undermined all six pillars. In recent weeks specifically, he has done lasting and irreparable damage to the rule of law, global alliances, and the independence of US monetary policy.

Graff goes through all the things that Trump has done, such as threatening to annex Greenland and Canada, unilaterally imposing tariffs and destroying alliances, severely undermining education, science, and research, undermining the rule of law by weaponizing the justice department and attacking the judiciary, and having masked federal agents roaming the streets acting in ways that mimic the death squads of the authoritarian and fascistic regimes that the US put into power and supported, and trying to undermine the independence of the Federal Reserve.

He concludes:

This is the end of the world as we have known it for 80 years—all for reasons that will confound future political scientists and historians. There is no strategy behind this exercise in superpower suicide other than the president’s own narcissism, greed, and his general frustration at never being respected by the elites whose favor he desires more than anything.

At one level, Trump’s January rampage highlights the collective failure of every institution, safeguard, check, and balance that the United States thought it had in place to limit executive power gone berserk.

Graff says that the leaders of Russia and China would be justified in being incredulous at the self-immolation of their main rival.

Putin and Xi must be astounded at their good fortune; in Davos, China is already pitching itself to Europe and the world beyond to help pick up the pieces of the American century. Putin, who has watched a generation’s blood and treasure ground up in the mud of Ukraine, is getting a reprieve at a moment when he least deserves it. He has spent his own quarter century in office saying that the “democratic West” is just as corrupt as his own authoritarianism—and now, day after day, Donald Trump is furnishing him with plenty of fresh evidence.

Through much of his first presidential term, conspiracy theorists wondered and tweeted that Trump must be a Russian agent; in this second term, we’ve come to an even more horrifying conclusion—one more embarrassing for the American voter and more damning for Trump in history’s final judgment: He’s doing all this by his own volition.
…

Someday, similarly, we will tell our children about the month of January 2026 in world politics, and they will not be able to fathom what we did to ourselves.

For those who cannot access the article, the radio program On the Media had an interview with Graff that is well worth listening to.

The editors of Wired have put out a special issue that lists 23 things that suggest that in many ways we are already living in the Chinese century.

A DECADE AGO, China’s political leaders laid out an ambitious industrial plan: By 2025, they pledged, their country would be a world capital, with the goal of moving from “Chinese speed to Chinese quality, the transformation of Chinese products to Chinese brands.” This is the difference, they wrote, between “Made in China” and “Created in China.”

At WIRED, we never take what the government (ours or anybody else’s) says at face value. Still, as journalists, we respect the ability to hit a deadline. While the president of this country is promising to make America great again as he strips it for parts, Chinese business and political leaders have quietly seized the moment. This is not to say that China’s economy, let alone its repressive totalitarian government, runs perfectly. But today there’s almost no limit to what is created in China, then eagerly consumed by the rest of the world.

WIRED’s reporters have chronicled the transformation in the MADE IN CHINA newsletter—and now we’re bringing you this special issue. Here are 23 ways China is rewiring the future.

Trump has effectively made China great again.