What comes after America’s retreat?

Note: I’m posting an article of mine ‘What comes after America’s retreat?’ published in The Spectator. This argues that the bombing of Iran is inconsistent with the stated aims of the Trump administration.

You may have noticed that three men have been arrested in the UK ‘on suspicion of assisting a foreign intelligence service contrary to Section 3 of the National Security Act’. In plain English on suspicion of spying for China within the British Parliament. One of them has been identified as the husband of a Labour MP, the other two have not yet been identified, and the nature of what they are suspected of doing has not been revealed. This incident seems to be a likely candidate for Paranoid Corner, but we have to wait for further information.

I.

What is happening to the ‘rules-based international order’ despairingly invoked by bewildered European leaders? The broad answer is that we are living through the retreat of American hegemony, masked by bluster and marked by contradictions. The retreat has two aspects, economic and geopolitical. Economists talk about Trump’s tariffs breaking up the free-trade order; geopoliticians about the Trump Corollary breaking up the NATO system. These are part of a single, reasonably coherent story. But the retreat is not as straightforward as it sounds. How does the bombing of Iran fit into it?

II.

What do people mean when they talk about a global ‘rules-based order’? The starting point must be the UN Charter, signed in San Francisco in 1945, and in theory binding on all the UN’s 193 member states. The Charter enjoins sovereign legal equality (Article 2.1), peaceful settlement of disputes (Article 2.3), and prohibition of the threat or use of force (Article 2.4), unless for self-defence (Article 51) or when authorized by the Security Council (Chapter VII). Security on land, sea, and in the air is the source from which flows all the other treaties and conventions which make up our ‘rules-based’ world.

But all international agreements, however solemn, share one defect: there is no world government to enforce them. So how has our ‘rules-based order’ worked in practice?

There are two answers. Charters, treaties, and conventions do have some binding force on those who sign up to them, just as the rule of law within nations does not wholly depend on the exertions of police forces. Nations make treaty commitments which it is in their interest to honour, since they make their relations more stable and predictable.

But, as I have argued previously (Mark Carney and the Fate of Liberal Economies,The Wire, 11 February 2026), the international rule of law depends crucially on the existence of a leading power, able and willing to underwrite the rules and enforce them as required. The United States took over this hegemonic role from Great Britain after 1945; the ‘rules-based order’, whose passing is so much lamented, was in essence an Anglo-American creation. In the Cold War era, it was never truly global, rather a superpower duopoly. But for a decade or so after the collapse of Communism in 1990, the global role of the United States was unchallenged. We now refer to this short time as the ‘unipolar moment’.

There is a further fact which deserves emphasis: while the rule of law was enjoined on all nations, the hegemon retained discretion to break the law when it suited it, since there was no external constraint on its actions. It alone was truly sovereign in a world of supposedly equal sovereigns, and therefore in practice unaccountable.

But no single power can sustain such a role indefinitely. Commitments outstrip resources, the hegemon sloughs off its responsibilities, and the ‘world order’ which it guarantees falls apart. We are told that the hegemonic torch passed seamlessly from Britain to the United States. We forget the two world wars, which fatally weakened British power. Now it is the United States which is repudiating the responsibilities it inherited from Britain. There is no obvious successor. The choice humanity faces is between Lenin’s ‘wars for the division and redivision of the world’ and a new global compact to secure the safety and prosperity of the planet.

The US withdrawal has two aspects: Trump’s tariffs and Trump’s Corollary.

Trump’s Tariffs

The rationale for Trump’s tariffs has been succinctly stated in The President’s 2025 Trade Policy Agenda of 3 March 2025. The persistent US trade deficit was destroying American manufacturing. The culprits were the ‘globalist elites’ who, by exporting production, had enriched themselves at the expense of working Americans. Tariff protection would replace the ideology of the globalists with a productivist philosophy.

“Americans are more than just what they consume,” the Agenda proclaimed. “The American economy is more than one which ‘just moves money around’.”

Running through the trade agenda was a repudiation of the hegemonic role of the dollar. The United States has run a trade deficit since 1975—for 50 years. America’s trading partners have been willing to finance America’s import surplus in return for the services the US provides them—call it a voluntary tax. By providing the world with a secure currency reserve, the US could pay most of the costs of the NATO alliance and, by its prodigious consumption, keep the world economy booming. But the price has been the progressive overvaluation of the dollar, which has eroded America’s industrial economy and created a massively over-borrowed global financial system. Faced with a choice between a hegemonic dollar and a strong economy, the Trump Agenda has opted for the latter.

Much the same happened in the 1930s. Britain abandoned a century of free trade in 1932 to set up the Imperial Preference System. With the United States also retreating into protection with the Smoot–Hawley Tariff of 1930, the world split up into economic blocs—actual for Britain, the US, and France; aspirational for Germany, Japan, and Italy—with the Second World War as the outcome. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Trump’s Corollary

The National Security Strategy of the Trump administration, dated 4 December 2025, is the geopolitical counterpart to the trade agenda. It opens with an explicit endorsement of the Monroe Doctrine. One reads that:

“On December 2, 1823, the doctrine of American sovereignty was immortalized in prose when President James Monroe declared before the Nation a simple truth that has echoed throughout the ages: The United States will never waver in defense of our homeland, our interests, or the well-being of our citizens. Today, my Administration proudly reaffirms this promise under a new ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine: That the American people—not foreign nations nor globalist institutions—will always control their own destiny in our hemisphere.”

There follows a great deal of rhetoric about how the United States had guarded the American continent against ‘communism, fascism and foreign involvement’, and about how Trump would ‘aggressively’ pursue an ‘America First policy of peace through strength’.

What all this covered up was a retreat from US world leadership. The Security Strategy repudiated the very ‘globalist institutions’ which the United States (with Britain’s help) had set up after the Second World War as channels for the exercise of its hegemony: the United Nations and its agencies, and the Bretton Woods institutions. Especially important in geopolitical terms was the Strategy’s reframing of US military commitments: European security was no longer the US’s top priority; the US would no longer underwrite Europe’s conventional defence. Russia is mentioned only in the context of Europe, China is said to pose an economic but not a strategic challenge, to be met by trade deals.

The focus of the Trump document is overwhelmingly hemispheric:

“My Administration is also halting the flow of deadly drugs flowing through Mexico, ending the invasion of illegal aliens along our southern border, and dismantling narco-terrorist networks all across the Western Hemisphere.”

Both the Trade Policy Agenda and the National Security Strategy set a course for a retreat by America from world hegemony exercised through ‘globalist institutions’ to regional imperialism maintained by American power.

What about the Middle East? How does the bombing of Iran fit into the Trump Corollary? It fits the pattern of discretionary displays of US power globally, but as president-elect in 2016, Trump had said: “We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with.” (Guardian, 2 March 2026).

So what is the United States doing in the Middle East? In the Cold War era, the Middle East was an arena of US -Soviet competition. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has hardly been a strategic adversary in the Muslim world. In the 1970s the USA depended on Middle East oil. But since the shale revolution of 2008-9, and particularly since 2019, the USA has been self-sufficient in oil and natural gas. The answer is Israel. Why is Israel part of the ‘defence of our homeland’?

The explanation, as one would expect, is highly complicated. It includes the evangelical Protestantism of Trump’s core support, linked to Christian Zionism and prophetic belief; America’s long-standing special military and intelligence relationship with Israel, and close personal links between American and Israeli elites; and the strength of the Jewish lobby in US politics. The point to make here is that, whereas in other respects Trump is repudiating the ‘globalist’ policies of his predecessors, in this respect he is simply following them. In committing itself to Israel’s survival, the USA is doing for Israel what it has said it would no longer do for its NATO allies. That this is bound to involve the US in ‘toppling foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved in’ is the central contradiction in the Trump Corollary.

III.

So what follows? The standard argument is that the rules-based global order ideally requires a world government. This is impossible to achieve in a world of nation-states, all of whom claim sovereignty. Post-war institutions like the UN Security Council, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organisation were conceived as quasi-governmental structures which might bind their members to good behaviour, but they had no effective coercive power, especially over the great beasts in the jungle.

So in practice, it fell to the leading great power to supply sufficient carrots and sticks to ensure that nations followed the rules. Apart from the leading power claiming discretion to break the rules whenever it suited it, the problem was that such an order is necessarily self-liquidating over time by draining the leader of the resources needed to sustain it. So the system is bound to collapse in disarray, and most likely war, until a new world leader emerges.

The urgent task of our time is to get beyond a narrative which threatens to destroy the world. We must start thinking seriously about how the job of constructing, underwriting, and enforcing the rules of the international road can be transferred from a declining hegemon to a concert of leading powers. Humanity has approached such an ideal from time to time, only to fall back into war. And this is partly because of the Kant Corollary: that perpetual peace presupposes universal republican government. But the pursuit of this ideal leads to its own negation: perpetual wars stoked by moral fervour to secure the regime changes necessary for perpetual peace.

In fact, history shows that there are many different roads to a reasonably durable peace. In the Cold War, the USA and the Soviet Union agreed rules of coexistence. The balance of power system worked like clockwork in Europe for most of the nineteenth century. Diplomacy underpinned the Concert of Europe. These peacekeeping mechanisms have fallen into disrepair.

In his Christmas message, Pope Leo XIV called on the parties fighting in the Middle East and elsewhere to “find the courage to practice dialogue, peace and reconciliation for the common good.” At the very least, this means reopening the blocked channels of diplomacy. To practice dialogue with the ‘other’, our leaders must venture beyond the kind of information suitable for drone assassinations. They must learn the languages, study the histories, travel in the territories, and respect the customs of those they now view as malign. This is the promise opened up by the retreat from hegemony. The alternative is too bleak to contemplate.