America the Fearful | Foreign Affairs

Shortly after U.S. special forces raided Caracas and captured the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in early January, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, offered a blunt justification for the Trump administration’s actions. “You can talk all you want about international niceties,” he said, “but we live in a world, in the real world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Miller’s comments painted the United States as a strong country, anxious about threats in a disordered world, acting aggressively and preemptively to ensure its own security.

This ethos increasingly appears to characterize President Donald Trump’s broader foreign policy, which threatens or even employs force wherever and whenever the president, unconstrained by norms or alliances, so chooses. Moved by the news of protesters being killed in Iran, Trump threatened military strikes in the country. Seized by a desire to possess the Danish territory of Greenland, he brandished the possibility of tariffs and military force again, but this time made NATO allies the targets of his threats. On the surface, the United States under Trump seems the very picture of a confident and capricious hegemon, tapping its unrivaled power to deter and coerce.

But the president’s second-term military adventures pose two questions whose answers belie that superficial image: Why these places, and why now? The U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear facilities in June was perhaps predictable, given Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapon, and Trump’s hostility toward Tehran today is nothing new. But U.S. actions toward Venezuela and Greenland—and the administration’s inconsistent explanations for them—have left many around the world alarmed and bewildered. Rather than aim his coercion at great-power peers, Trump has targeted weak adversaries and even allies. His motive for doing so lies neither in an overweening confidence nor in canny strategy. It comes instead from fear: of a loss of status on the world stage and of the decline of American power relative to that possessed by other states.

There are reasons to worry that the United States is falling behind in key measures of power. But many of the concerning trends remain reversible. With policies that enlarge and transform the U.S. military, tap into alliances to amplify U.S. power, and address Washington’s budgetary woes, the United States can continue to be the world’s most powerful and influential state. By continuing to expend American power in peripheral or unnecessary conflicts, however, the Trump administration will only accelerate the country’s relative decline.

JUMPING THE GUN

In his first term, Trump’s leading foreign policy innovation was to focus more on strategic competition with China and security in the Indo-Pacific and less on what he regarded as pointless interventions in regions and countries without much bearing on U.S. security. It is difficult, however, to square the Trump administration’s second-term interventions with that philosophy of disciplined prioritization. Some analysts have argued that there is no contradiction, portraying these military adventures as part of the larger contest between the United States and its peer adversaries, China and Russia. Yet this contention is undermined by the Trump administration’s own National Defense Strategy, which characterizes the U.S. rivalry with China as limited and restricted to the Indo-Pacific—not as a new Cold War that is global in scope—and downplays Russia as a threat to an even greater extent.

Arguments that the interventions serve U.S. goals within a larger strategic competition are also belied by the choice of targets. Although Venezuela is economically dependent on China, the reverse is not true—China will not suffer significantly if cut off from Caracas. Besides, Trump has not even insisted that China be excluded from Venezuela’s oil sector. And after the U.S. conducted strikes in Iran last June, Trump even stated explicitly that China could continue to purchase Iranian oil. As for Greenland, Trump’s drive to possess the island appeared to promise no new military or economic benefits to the United States but did place the integrity of the NATO alliance at risk. Meanwhile, Arctic security experts have noted that a greater threat to U.S. national security lies in the Bering Strait, where Russian naval forces range near U.S. territory (Alaska) and conduct joint exercises with the Chinese navy, whereas the seas around Greenland are comparatively quiet. Russia, tellingly, applauded Washington’s gambit.

Trump has been remarkably consistent in his public worries about U.S. prestige.

Trump’s characterization of the threats from China and Russia has been inconsistent, but his worries about American status and prestige date back decades. In 1987, he sponsored full-page advertisements in several major newspapers asserting that the world was “taking advantage” of the United States. “The world is laughing at America’s politicians,” it read, “as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.” In 2023, Trump complained that the Biden administration was “begging” Venezuela for oil, even though U.S. domestic oil production at the time was at a historic high. In 2024, he characterized the United States as “a failing nation” and “a nation in decline” in a campaign speech, and he asserted in a presidential debate, “Throughout the entire world, we’re no longer respected as a country. They don’t respect our leadership, they don’t respect the United States anymore. We’re like a third-world nation.”

Although some might dismiss Trump’s words as mere political rhetoric, he has been remarkably consistent in his public worries about U.S. prestige across a host of issues, and his top-down approach to policymaking gives even seemingly off-the-cuff comments real weight. During the postwar era, U.S. foreign policy has been built through collaboration among government agencies, which sent recommendations up the bureaucratic ladder before arriving on the president’s desk for decision. Today, policy appears to begin with a presidential decision or utterance that the bureaucracy then seeks to transform into concrete action.

As the political scientist Jeffrey Taliaferro has argued, it is not unusual for great powers afraid of decline to engage in risky interventions in peripheral regions, motivated far more by worries about losing prestige or status than by any prospect of gain. The U.S. intervention in Korea in 1950, for instance, was arguably motivated in part by American concerns about a shifting global balance of power, following the first Soviet nuclear test and the triumph of communism in China. The United Kingdom’s predatory efforts to cling to power and resources in Egypt and Iran—countries where it had exercised considerable influence—in the 1950s were born of similar fears. The British historian John Robert Seeley famously noted in 1890 that Britain had acquired its empire not intentionally but “in a fit of absence of mind.” Yet when faced with the prospect of losing pieces of that empire in the mid-twentieth century, London took risks to protect it that were either out of proportion to any foreseeable benefit or had no realistic chance of achieving that goal. Trump has been more explicit than most about his motives, describing ownership of Greenland as “psychologically important for success,” but his thinking in such terms is hardly uncommon.

WHICH WAY IS UP?

Trump is far from alone in his worries about American power. Recent polls suggest that they are shared widely among Americans, with pessimism about the United States’ prospects seeming even stronger among its youth. In a November 2025 survey conducted by YouGov and designed by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, for example, 54 percent of respondents agreed that “the United States is becoming less powerful in the world,” while 75 percent of respondents agreed that it was very or somewhat important “that America has power and influence around the globe.” These numbers, however, differ notably among age groups; whereas about 80 percent of respondents 45 and older believed it to be very or somewhat important “to [them] and [their] future that America has power and influence around the globe,” only around 70 percent of Millennial and Gen-Z respondents agreed.

Whether the United States is actually in decline, however, is another matter. In relative terms, the gap between American power and that wielded by other states has shrunk considerably. This is true both of partners, such as India and countries in Europe and much of East Asia, and of rivals, especially China—the closest thing the United States has had to a peer competitor since the end of the Cold War. But this phenomenon is less evidence of American decline than the result of the long peace over which Washington has prevailed. Just as the Germanic tribes that eventually overthrew the western Roman Empire owed their success in large part to the Pax Romana and to their service in Rome’s wars, the United States’ friends and rivals thrived amid the order and progress that Washington made possible.

Despite certain highlight-reel successes, the U.S. military is not as dominant as it used to be.

Despite this shrinking gap, American power, in absolute terms, is by many measures as healthy as ever. The U.S. economy is almost as large as those of the world’s next four largest combined. The United States’ population growth rate, although slowing, far exceeds China’s and Russia’s, which are both negative. The United States holds a commanding lead in investment in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies and remains the world’s leading innovator in technology despite China’s ability to churn out vast quantities of research papers and graduates in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. The U.S. technological edge has translated directly to foreign policy gains, including in the Middle East, where leading states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are increasingly willing to curtail tech cooperation with China in order to cooperate more with the United States.

Yet not all is well. Despite highlight-reel successes against the less capable foes Iran and Venezuela, the U.S. military is not as dominant as it used to be. The United States has fewer navy ships and fewer active-duty soldiers than China does, and roughly the same number of fighter jets. Washington possesses an aging nuclear arsenal that Russia already surpasses and that China is rapidly working to catch up to: estimates from the Pentagon suggest that Beijing will have 1,000 operational nuclear warheads by 2030—more than three times as many as it had in 2020. Although the U.S. defense budget has drifted upward in recent years, it reached nearly $1 trillion in 2026 only because Congress added to the budget requested by the White House. And in any event, in real terms the budget reached that level 20 years ago, before dropping slightly in the early 2010s, according to data collected by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments—implying net zero growth over the past two decades. That the United States would struggle to prevail in a war with China—or prevent China from taking Taiwan—has been well established in numerous war games and has been acknowledged by senior U.S. defense officials. As Elbridge Colby, the current undersecretary of defense for policy, wrote in 2019, “The era of untrammeled U.S. military superiority is over. If the United States delays implementing a new approach, it risks losing a war to China or Russia—or backing down in a crisis because it fears it would—with devastating consequences for America’s interests.”

Other warning signs abound. The Government Accountability Office, which audits federal programs and spending, indicated in a 2024 report that U.S. debt will reach 200 percent of GDP by 2050 in the absence of changes in budget policy. Government spending on debt service roughly equals that on defense. Defense spending declined by a factor of three as a percentage of GDP between 1962 and 2022, whereas entitlement spending in that same period grew by a factor of three, according to the Cato Institute. The United States’ lead in advanced technologies such as AI is threatened by, among other things, its decision to export advanced chips to China, which appears to place short-term trade gains over long-term national security interests.

Perhaps most concerning, the United States is likely experiencing an erosion in “power conversion,” or the ability to transform latent power into usable strength. The decline of American manufacturing, especially in dual-use sectors, which produce goods that may serve both military and civilian purposes, such as shipbuilding, is long-standing and well known. So, too, are the struggles of successive administrations to integrate advanced technologies into military platforms and to move away from an outdated focus on large, vulnerable platforms and toward cheaper, more expendable ones that would be of greater utility in a war with an advanced foe.

There is also reason to believe that this power-conversion problem has only increased during Trump’s second term. Corruption and cronyism, which risk diverting government resources and energies from national interests to parochial or pecuniary ones, appear rife. The U.S. government has stripped itself of veteran expertise across multiple national security agencies and reduced the circle of policymakers to a small handful around the president. There is something to be said for streamlining bloated bureaucracies and speeding up decision-making. Yet doing so puts at risk two key advantages of American policymaking that have long protected American power: a wealth of specialized knowledge to bring to bear on devising and executing policies and a system that encourages participants to freely voice their opinions and challenge one another. The outcome Trump appears close to achieving on Greenland—slightly firmer guarantees from Denmark and Greenland regarding preferential American military and economic access to the island—could likely have been reached through quiet, expert-led diplomacy among allies. Instead, Trump leaned on his own instinctive and increasingly predictable coercive negotiating tactics, and his gains came at the cost of lost trust and credibility with NATO allies.

There is a path, albeit a narrow one, to reverse this decline of American military strength. Increasing the U.S. defense budget to $1.5 trillion in 2027, as the Trump administration has proposed, would be a good step. But it is not enough by itself. Defense spending must be tied not only to sound defense strategy but also to a capable bureaucracy and alliance system that can use the deterrent effect of American hard power to advance real-world diplomatic and military outcomes. Likewise, large increases in defense spending will be sustainable only if the United States confronts the even more rapid increases in what it spends on debt service and entitlements. Because it cannot simply spend its way to security, the United States will inevitably need to boost, rather than curtail, its cooperation with partners to address the full array of threats posed by today’s world and fend off advances by revisionist and rogue states. Going it alone is too expensive and as sure a recipe for accelerating decline as any.

AFRAID OF YOUR OWN SHADOW

The risk of policymakers becoming preoccupied with fears of decline—even fears partially grounded in fact—is that such a scenario becomes self-fulfilling. The first year of the second Trump administration has provided a preview of this dangerous direction. If U.S. policymakers were truly confident in American power, for example, they would not fight European allies over Greenland but would instead task them with patrolling the waters around the island to free up scarce U.S. military resources for the higher-priority Indo-Pacific theater. By trying to assert dominance over its allies, however, Washington has alienated the very partners whose support augments American strength.

As Kori Schake has noted in Foreign Affairs, the United States has been able to amass power and influence in the postwar era in large part because it expended a portion of its wealth and power to build a cooperative international order. That cooperation has been increasingly taken for granted and even resented by U.S. policymakers because its costs are transparent while its benefits—such as the primacy of the U.S. dollar and the preeminence of the U.S. arms industry—are less visible. But hidden benefits are no less real, and the maintenance of the international order has not been a one-way street. The cooperation of allies and partners has helped stave off the decline of American power that so worries policymakers and has even helped it grow. Trump has been plenty willing to wield the power of his office. But wielding power judiciously, using it to build coalitions rather than lashing out unilaterally, is the true mark of a self-assured leader—and is the only way a superpower remains one.

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