Carlos Lozada, The U.S. Is No Longer the Leader of the Free World, New York Times, March 24, 2026.
We had a good run — some eight decades or so — but it is clear by now that the United States has ceased to be the leader of the free world. A successor for that post has not been named, and it appears unlikely that the European Union, or NATO, or whatever constitutes “the West” these days will promote from within. The job might even be eliminated, one more reduction in force courtesy of President Trump.
I suspect, I fear, that this is so. If not yet, that’s certainly the direction in which things are headed, and by the time Trump’s term is over, the transition will be complete; the United States will have ceased being the leader of the free world. That may or may not be a good thing, depending of how the rest of the world is. Ideally, I’d like to see a world where there is no “reader of the Free World” because the world doesn’t need one. I’m pretty sure that’s not how the world will be in 2028. Lozada continues:
Rather than leading the free world, the United States is striding across the globe seemingly free of restraint, forethought or strategy, exerting its power because it can. In a matter of months, the Trump administration has captured Venezuela’s president and tossed him into jail in Brooklyn and has pummeled Iran’s theocratic leadership in a war that is ricocheting across the Middle East and upending the global economy; now the president says he will have “the honor of taking Cuba” next. Trump in his second term is like Michael Corleone in “The Godfather,” settling all the family business.
Nearly two decades ago, Fareed Zakaria, the international affairs columnist, published a best-selling book called “The Post-American World,” which predicted the United States’ relative decline versus other economically ascendant countries, what he called the “rise of the rest.” (Senator Barack Obama was seen carrying the book around during his first presidential campaign, affirming the volume’s elite sway.) The United States would remain militarily and economically pre-eminent, Zakaria argued, but it could take on a new political role, a sort of chairman of the board for the planet, relying on “consultation, cooperation and even compromise.”
Under Trump, the idea of U.S. leadership has indeed been remade — but from authority to domination, from persuasion to bullying, from nurturing alliances to wrecking them.
Later:
This is a historical aberration: a superpower that freely abdicates its leadership role, because it has concluded that leadership is for suckers; one that no longer promotes its values, because it’s decided that those values were fake anyway; one that gives up on the rules and institutions it spent so long building, because it assumes they’re no longer worth the hassle.
If Washington somehow still imagines itself the leader of the free world, that is because it is rethinking who belongs in that world, and because it is defining downward what it means to lead.
The article goes on, and is worth reading (a good deal of history), but I'm going to skip over a lot and come down nearer the end:
There have been plenty of episodes over the past decades that supposedly heralded an end to U.S. primacy. The launch of Sputnik in the late 1950s ushered in early Cold War paranoia that we were falling behind the Soviets. In the 1970s — with Vietnam and Watergate and an oil embargo and stagflation and the hostage crisis in Iran — the country was suffering a “crisis of confidence,” as President Jimmy Carter put it. A decade later, we were told Japan Inc. would overtake us. Then Sept. 11 demolished our sense of physical invulnerability; the Great Recession questioned the premise and the promise of American-style capitalism; and the Capitol riot of Jan. 6 laid bare the fragility of the democratic model we’d long sought to export.
It is possible that the hand-wringing today is just one more Sputnik moment, another instance when pessimists fret that America has lost its way. But it is also possible, as Daniel Drezner, the academic dean of Tufts University’s Fletcher School, has argued, that this is not just “the latest hymn from the Church of Perpetual Worry,” that this time really is different.
In the past, America’s isolationist, interventionist and multilateralist tendencies checked one another over time, thanks to competing visions of national security embedded throughout the American political system. But as foreign-policy powers became concentrated in the executive and Congress shrugged off its role in world affairs, America grew vulnerable to the rise of an impetuous and unconcerned president. “The same steps that empowered the president to create foreign policy,” Drezner said, “have permitted Trump to destroy what his predecessors spent decades preserving.”
Yada, yada:
Whereas U.S. leaders used to stridently deny that their military interventions abroad were motivated by the desire to secure oil supplies, Trump happily admits it. “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” he said after U.S. forces seized Nicolás Maduro, the president of oil-rich Venezuela. And if war is about seizing resources, so is peace: Countries wishing to become permanent members of Trump’s new Board of Peace must cough up $1 billion each.
If Pax Americana meant fostering an enduring American peace, Lax Americana means America getting a piece of the action. The world’s policeman is on the take.
“The American might that upheld the world order of the past 80 years will now be used instead to destroy it,” Kagan warned in January, some 20 years after publishing “Dangerous Nation.” A contemporary equivalent to the multipolar world of the 19th century, he writes, “would be a world in which China, Russia, the United States, Germany, Japan and other large states fought a major war in some combination at least once a decade — redrawing national boundaries, displacing populations, disrupting international commerce and risking global conflict on a devastating scale.” And he wrote that weeks before America and Israel began bombing Iran.
Say what you will about Obama – I thought he was disappointing – America was still leader of the free world when he left office. And he wore his suits well, even the tan one. Trump? His suits, it’s always the same cut, may be expensive; but they’re baggy. And he’s making America over in his own image, toughest thug on the block.
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