In the final weeks of 2024 several major events have taken place that make the danger of a global conflagration involving the United States greater than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. The Soviets’ attempt to install medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba 62 years ago was a real and present threat to America’s key strategic interests. It demanded a resolute response, and it was handled fairly competently by the Kennedy administration.

Today’s risk of war is unrelated to any overt menace to America itself, however, or to its rationally defined interests overseas. The decision by the outgoing Biden administration on Nov. 17 to authorize Ukraine to use the U.S.-supplied Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMs) to attack targets deep inside Russia was reckless. It is additionally risky considering the fact that real-time U.S. intelligence will be needed to provide coordinates for the missiles.

On Dec. 10, the United States Department of the Treasury announced the disbursement of $20 billion “for the benefit of Ukraine,” as part of the $50 billion G7 Loans Initiative. These funds, according to Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, will be “paid for by the windfall proceeds earned from Russia’s own immobilized assets,” to provide Ukraine with “a critical infusion of support as it defends its country against an unprovoked war of aggression.”

This was the first time the U.S.-led “collective West” has acted effectively to sequester Russian funds frozen after the beginning of the war in early 2022. That those “windfall proceeds” will never be refunded to Russia is obvious. When the “immobilized assets” themselves will be used to provide Ukraine with a further “critical infusion of support” now seems only a matter of time.

Coupled with Russia’s humiliating loss of face in Syria—which used to be a rare example of Russia’s ability to project its power outside the former USSR—such challenges may place Vladimir Putin under severe pressure to start responding resolutely. He will sooner or later have to draw a line and stand by it or else risk collapse of his credibility at home. This could take us on a path of escalation unseen since the coldest days of the Cold War.

An optimist may say that Donald Trump will return to the White House soon and that he will bring a modicum of realism back into American foreign policy. After all, the 2024 election results gave him a clear mandate for a host of new policies, both at home and abroad. In world affairs, he now has a free hand to pursue a new geostrategic course based on the American interest pragmatically defined, and to end the quest for global hegemony which is incompatible with the interests of ordinary Americans.

“No more wars, I will stop the wars,” Trump promised voters in his first post-election speech. It was in line with the slogan “America First,” eagerly embraced by millions of voters. It promised the long-overdue abandonment of the U.S. policy of global “primacy.” It entailed questioning the very purpose and mission of NATO, ending foreign interventions, seeking better relations with Russia, and returning to the principle of traditional interests as the guiding light of foreign policy-making.

Unfortunately, this will not happen, judging by Trump’s appointment of no fewer than six neoconservative warmongers, fierce Russophobes, and advocates of conflict with China and Iran to key foreign policy and national security positions. They are Sen. Marco Rubio (secretary of state), Rep. Mike Waltz (national security advisor), Pete Hegseth (secretary of defense), Rep. Elise Stefanik (UN ambassador), Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg (special envoy for Ukraine and Russia), and Dr. Sebastian Gorka (director of counterterrorism).

One of the pillars of Trump’s campaign was the promise that he would end the war between Russia and Ukraine “in one day.” His newly appointed team, we can now confidently say, will do their best to prolong that war indefinitely. It reminds us of Trump’s first term, when he faced obstacles from supporters of the old bipartisan consensus within his team (Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and a host of others).

“Let’s hope he has learned from his mistakes,” I wrote in Chronicles the day after the election, “and that he will not bring any new Trojan horses to high positions.” That hope is now gone. Even his vague plan of negotiating a swift end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict is already burdened by so many provisos that it would be hard to imagine that Moscow will be tempted into some form of Minsk 3 agreement.

At the same time, Trump’s team is already considering airstrikes to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. The Wall Street Journal reported on Dec. 13 that “the military-strike option against nuclear facilities is now under more serious review by some members of his transition team.” A day earlier, in an interview with Time magazine, Trump himself refused to rule out the possibility of war with Iran, saying, “Anything can happen.” 

Trump’s statements on trade are equally bellicose. “The idea that the BRICS countries are trying to move away from the dollar while we stand by and watch is OVER,” he posted on Truth Social. “We require a commitment from these Countries that they will neither create a new BRICS Currency, nor back any other Currency to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar or, they will face 100% Tariffs, and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful U.S. Economy.”

Bearing in mind that BRICS includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, and Egypt and that over 30 other countries have expressed interest in joining the bloc, Trump’s threat could lead to an all-out trade war. Using BRICS currencies and banking networks outside the dollar-denominated system in members’ mutual trade is already commonplace. Even if the creation of a common currency is not on the cards for the time being, Trump’s demand that nations of China’s rank make a commitment not to “back any other currency to replace the mighty U.S. dollar” is indeed remarkable. 

If Trump follows through on his demand, the likely consequence will be further determination of the misnamed “global South” to challenge the United States’ global leadership and to promote de-dollarization. During the BRICS summit last October, Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping actively projected the message that the West stands increasingly isolated in the world.

With the neoconservative takeover of the transition team, it is becoming somewhat clearer why Trump was allowed to win and Kamala Harris was not allowed to cheat this time (like the Biden team did in 2020), why there were no Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots in the streets after his victory, and why the media machine is notably less hysterical
about Trump than at any point in the past nine years. The thought arises that this time Trump has made some kind of deal with the permanent apparatus of U.S. power, also known as the “deep state” and the “swamp.” The appointments of the top officials in the sphere of foreign and security policy so far indicate the existence of such a deal.

The contours seem clear: Trump has given in to the deep state on foreign policy strategy and he will accept the narrowest possible range of global options prepared for him. In return, he will receive some room for maneuver on the domestic sphere, specifically to fight for control of the southern border and stopping the migrant tsunami, to impose tariffs on imports from China and elsewhere for the recovery of domestic industry, to reduce taxes, to cut the enormous budget deficit according to Elon Musk’s plan, as well as to fight against the destructive woke ideology in schools and universities. For him, the domestic agenda has always been incomparably more important than the foreign one.

Something similar was already done by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni at the end of 2022. She won the election and created a coalition of supporters of immigration control and defenders of natural families, devoted to the preservation of Italy’s cultural identity. In return, she had to declare herself a consistent Atlanticist and a supporter of NATO’s action in Ukraine. If she had not done so, the European branch of the deep state would have made her political survival impossible.

If my assessment of the situation is accurate, America will continue for the next four years to conduct military interventions around the world, to impose faits accomplis, and to change regimes in distant countries. For his part, Trump may be allowed to focus on the task of healing a divided, culturally degraded society, protecting its identity from further migrant invasion, and rebuilding the dilapidated infrastructure of the United States. These tasks represent a huge challenge, and he will present their fulfillment as a prerequisite for preserving America’s leading position on the world stage. It is highly doubtful he will be able to effect mass deportations, however.

Europe should not be considered an autonomous actor on the world stage. The EU has abdicated such a role without much grumbling. The example of the sabotage of Nord Stream 2—the worst act of economic terrorism in history—indicates that Germany is to this day a state with limited sovereignty, in the same relationship to the U.S. as Honecker’s GDR was to the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev. It is evidently on the path to economic collapse and political instability.

Elsewhere in Europe, Brussels is a hotbed of corruption and oligarchic arrogance, embodied in Ursula von der Leyen. The belligerent swashbuckling of Macron’s France is comical. No one takes the phrases about European unity seriously anymore. There will be no enlargement of the EU, probably ever, and especially not in these times of crisis when the political will in Berlin, Paris, Rome, Madrid—not to mention Benelux and Scandinavia—to admit some of the Western Balkans into the gloomy Brussels club is at its lowest point.

On the other side of the ocean, most Americans reject their leaders’ vision of a global empire, but in the end, they have no fundamental decision-making power. Of course, for the rest of the world, it would be more than desirable for America to come home, for the United States to become one of the nations in a multipolar system of sovereign nations—powerful and secure, and putting its own interests first to be sure, but cured of the psychotic ideas of exceptionalism, messianism, and the global-hegemonic “primacy” obsessions of its ruling class. We know now that this will not happen anytime soon, certainly not in the next four years.

Hegemonic overexertion will sooner or later lead to the American system bursting at the seams. It is to be feared that the result of this crisis will be a catastrophic war. Great powers in decline are prone to making hasty and risky moves, like Spain under Philip II, or Austria-Hungary in the summer of 1914. The U.S. foreign policy elite has a much shorter fuse than those august powers of yore and is weaker in intellectual, moral, and every other quality.

There is a gaping chasm between the aspirations of the Washington elite to control the world order on the one hand and the decline in America’s relative economic strength, the attractiveness of its cultural models, soft power, and global political influence. Appointments to the Trump cabinet indicate that this chasm will not be bridged in the period ahead. Continuity is imminent, with ominous consequences for stability and peace in the world.

It did not have to be this way. Had Trump at least appointed Rand Paul to the Secretary of State role—instead of Rubio, whom Paul has criticized as a neoconservative for his positions on Syria, Libya and Iraq—and had he sent Col. Douglas Macgregor to the Pentagon, there would have been some balance in the team. We would have voices inside the cabinet promoting some of the positions that Chronicles’ writers and editors have advocated for many years. 

The argument that Bill Clinton’s Balkan wars and America’s subsequent support for the rogue Albanian state in Kosovo were harmful to American interests, immoral, and illogical would be supported by Macgregor. He was one of the planners of the U.S. intervention, yet declared 10 years ago that the results of that intervention was to “put, essentially, a Muslim drug mafia in charge of that country.”

Macgregor’s 2016 prediction that “old alliances like NATO may vanish” and his argument that it is time to reexamine U.S. investment in Europe since the “Cold War ended 27 years ago” would be entirely in line with this author’s warning (“Pulling the Plug on NATO,” March 2024 Chronicles) that the Western alliance today is an anachronism, a chronic threat to peace, and the iron fist of American wokedom.

“It is almost embarrassing to say that we are right on foreign affairs because we are right on everything else,” I wrote in these pages exactly a quarter century ago, in January 2000. “We are right on foreign affairs,” I argued, because the behavior of our rulers abroad is a logical and inevitable extension of their behavior at home:

Having correctly diagnosed them as a cabal of Gnostic ideologues hell-bent on destroying all real communities in America, on eradicating the remnants of its faith, tradition, and culture in the name of abstract concepts invoked to justify totalitarian control, of course we know what they are up to beyond these shores.. Those who deny any substance to this nation – outside the realm of abstract “isms,” that is – will naturally seek to undermine and destroy all other real nations, which are but “artificial and temporary social arrangements,” according to Strobe Talbott. Spontaneously, organically evolved communities—with their shared memories and ancestors, beliefs and songs—are verboten at home; likewise they have to be replaced with some monstrous mini-proposition abroad, such as Dayton-Bosnia.

Exactly 25 years later, Chronicles’ foreign policy diagnosis stands. We now are even better acquainted with the cost of tyranny at home, and of the price of the empire abroad. The pursuit of global power for its own sake is the denial of America’s original principles and a cruel travesty of its authentic political culture. It is also the path of ruin that winds from the Persian King of Kings to Napoleon and Hitler; the U.S. will be just as surely destroyed if its rulers carry on like this. For the time being, unfortunately, the world remains unsafe from America, and America from itself.