From Donald Trump’s first days in office, news of the damage to America’s international stature has come hard and fast. As if guided by some malign design, the new president seemed to identify the key pillars that have supported US global power for the past 70 years and set out to topple each of them in turn. By degrading NATO, alienating Asian allies, cancelling trade treaties and slashing critical scientific research, the Trump White House is already in the process of demolishing the delicately balanced architecture that has sustained Washington’s world leadership since the end of World War II. However unwittingly, Trump is ensuring the accelerated collapse of American global hegemony.

Stunned by Donald Trump’s foreign policy blunders, commentators have raised their voices in a veritable chorus of criticism. A Los Angeles Times editorial called him “so unpredictable, so reckless, so petulant, so full of blind self-regard, so untethered to reality” that he threatened to “weaken this country’s moral standing in the world” and “imperil the planet” through his “appalling” policy choices. The international press has been no less harsh. Reeling from Trump’s denunciation of South Korea’s free-trade agreement as “horrible” and his bizarre claim that the country had once been “a part of China,” Seoul’s leading newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, expressed the “shock, betrayal and anger.” Assessing his first 100 days in office, Britain’s Observer commented: “Trump’s crudely intimidatory, violent, know-nothing approach to sensitive international issues has encircled the globe from Moscow to the Middle East to Beijing, plunging foes and allies alike into a dark vortex of expanding strategic instability.”

For an American president to virtually walk out of his grand inaugural celebrations into such a hailstorm of criticism is beyond extraordinary. Having more or less exhausted their lexicon of condemnatory rhetoric, the usual crew of commentators is now struggling to understand how an American president could be quite so wilfully self-destructive.

Britain’s Suez Crisis

In the early 1950s, Britain’s international position had many parallels with America’s today. After a difficult postwar recovery, that country was enjoying robust employment, lucrative international investments and the prestige of the pound sterling’s stature as the world’s reserve currency. On balance, Britain seemed poised for many more years of world leadership.

Then came the Suez crisis.

The stress of imperial retreat culminated into a disastrous military intervention to reclaim Egypt’s Suez Canal. It was a clear instance of “micro-militarism” – a bold military strike designed to recover fading imperial influence – when Britain joined France and Israel in a misbegotten military invasion of Egypt.

British conservatives treasured the Suez Canal as a vital lifeline that tied their small island to its sprawling empire in Asia and Africa. A few years after the Canal’s grand opening in 1869, London did the deal of the century, scooping up Egypt’s shares in it for a bargain basement price of £4 million. Then, in 1882, Britain consolidated its control over the Canal through a military occupation of Egypt, reducing that ancient land to little more than an informal colony.

After British troops withdrew from Suez in 1955, the nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser asserted Egypt’s neutrality in the Cold War by purchasing Soviet bloc arms. In July 1956, after Eisenhower administration reneged on its promise to finance construction of the Aswan High Dam on the Upper Nile, Nasser sought alternative financing by nationalizing the Suez Canal.

Britain’s conservative leadership reacted with irrational outrage. The British foreign secretary met secretly with the prime ministers of France and Israel to work out a two-stage invasion of Egypt. Its aim, of course, was to secure the Canal.

On October 29, 1956, the Israeli army led by General Moshe Dayan swept across the Sinai Peninsula, destroying Egyptian tanks and bringing his troops to within 10 miles of the Canal. Anglo-French amphibious and airborne forces quickly joined the attack, backed by a devastating bombardment from six aircraft carriers that destroyed the Egyptian air force, including over a hundred of its new MiG jet fighters. Nasser, in response, scuttled dozens of rusting cargo ships filled with rocks and concrete at the entrance to the Suez Canal. In this way, he closed Europe’s oil lifeline to the Persian Gulf.

Simultaneously, UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, backed by Washington, imposed a ceasefire after just nine days of war. President Eisenhower’s blunt refusal to back his allies and the threat of condemnation before the UN soon forced Britain into a humiliating withdrawal.

The author of this extraordinary debacle was Sir Anthony Eden, a problematic prime minister whose career offers some striking parallels with Donald Trump’s. After inheriting a substantial fortune from his father, Eden entered politics as a conservative, using his political connections to dabble in finance. Chafing under Winston Churchill’s postwar leadership of the Conservative Party, Eden pushed the great man aside and became prime minister in 1955.

When Nasser nationalized the Canal, Eden erupted with bluster and outrage. “What’s all this nonsense about isolating Nasser,” Eden berated his foreign affairs minister. “I want him destroyed, can’t you understand? I want him murdered.” As his bold intervention plunged toward diplomatic disaster, the prime minister became focused on manipulating the British media, in the process confusing favourable domestic coverage with international support.

When Washington demanded a ceasefire as the price of a billion-dollar bailout for a British economy, Eden’s bluster quickly crumbled and he denied his troops a certain victory, arousing a storm of protest in Parliament. Humiliated by the forced withdrawal, Eden ordered MI-6 to launch a second assassination attempt on Nasser.

Confronted with a barrage of angry questions in Parliament about his collusion with the Israelis, Eden lied repeatedly, swearing that there was no “foreknowledge that Israel would attack Egypt.” Eden was later forced to resign after only 21 months in office. Led into this unimaginably misbegotten operation by his delusions of omnipotence, he left the once-mighty British lion a toothless circus animal that would henceforth roll over whenever Washington cracked the whip.

Trump’s Demolition Job

Despite the obvious differences in their economic circumstances, there remain some telling resonances between Britain’s postwar politics and America’s troubles today. Both of these fading global hegemons suffered a slow erosion of economic power in a fast-changing world, producing severe social tensions and stunted political leaders. Britain’s Conservative Party leadership had declined from the skilled diplomacy of Disraeli, Salisbury and Churchill to Eden’s bluster and blunder. Similarly, the Republican Party has descended from the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush to a field of 17 primary candidates in 2016 who promised to resolve the complex crisis in the Middle East through a set of incendiary policies. The voters of both countries supported appealing – but unstable – leaders whose delusions of omnipotence inclined them to military misadventures.

Like British citizens of the 1950s, most Americans today do not fully grasp the fragility of their status as “the leader of the free world.” Indeed, Washington has been standing astride the globe as a superpower for so long that most of its leaders have almost no understanding of the delicate design of their country’s global power built so carefully by two post-World War II presidents.

Under Democratic President Harry Truman, Congress created the key instruments for Washington’s emerging national security state and its future global dominion by passing the National Security Act of 1947 that established the Air Force, the CIA and two new executive agencies, the Defense Department and the National Security Council. To rebuild a devastated, war-torn Europe, Washington launched the Marshall Plan and then turned such thinking into a worldwide aid programme through the US Agency for International Development (USAID) meant to embed American power globally and support pro-America elites across the planet. Under Truman as well, US diplomats forged the NATO alliance (which Washington would dominate until the Trump moment), advanced European unity and signed a parallel string of mutual-defence treaties with key Asian allies along the Pacific littoral, making Washington the first power in two millennia to control both “axial ends” of the strategic Eurasian continent.

During the 1950s, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower deployed this national security apparatus to secure Washington’s global dominion with a nuclear triad (bombers, ballistic missiles and submarines), a chain of military bases that ringed Eurasia and a staggering number of highly-militarized covert operations to assure the ascent of loyal allies worldwide. Above all, he oversaw the integration of the latest in scientific and technological research into the Pentagon’s weapons procurement system. All this, in turn, fostered an aura of American power so formidable that Washington could re-order significant parts of the world at will, enforcing peace, setting the international agenda and toppling governments on four continents.

While it’s reasonable to argue that Washington had, by then, become history’s greatest global power, its hegemony, like that of all the world empires that preceded it, remained surprisingly fragile. Skilled leadership was required to maintain the system’s balance of diplomacy, military power, economic strength and technological innovation.

By the time President Trump took his oath of office, negative, long-term trends had already started to limit the influence of any American leader on the world stage. In just a few months, the Trump White House has done a remarkable job of demolishing the very pillars of US global power. During his first overseas trip in May 2017, President Trump chastised stone-faced NATO leaders for failure to pay their “fair share” into the military part of the alliance and refused to affirm its core principle of collective defence. He then forfeited America’s historic diplomatic leadership by announcing Washington’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord.

Along the strategic Pacific littoral, Trump cancelled the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact and gratuitously alienated allies by cutting short a courtesy phone call to Australia’s prime minister and insulting South Korea to the point where its new president won office, in part, on a platform of “say no to America.”

Just days after Trump dismissed President Moon Jae-in’s suggestion that the two countries engage in actual diplomatic negotiations with Pyongyang, North Korea test-fired a ballistic missile potentially capable of reaching Alaska or possibly Hawaii with a nuclear warhead. It was an act that made those same negotiations Washington’s only viable option.

In other words, after 70 years of global dominion, America’s geo-political command of the axial ends of Eurasia – the central pillars of its world power – seems to be crumbling.

While China is ramping up its scientific research across the board, Trump has proposed what the American Association for Advancement of Science called “deep cuts to numerous research agencies” that will mean the eventual loss of the country’s technological edge. In the emerging field of artificial intelligence that will soon drive space warfare and cyber-warfare, the White House wants to reduce the 2018 budget for this critical research at the National Science Foundation to a paltry $175 million, even as Beijing is launching “a new multi-billion-dollar initiative” linked to building “military robots.”

A Future Debacle in the Greater Middle East

With a president who shares Sir Anthony Eden’s penchant for bravura, self-delusion and impulsiveness, the US seems primed for a twenty-first-century Suez of its own, a debacle in the Greater Middle East (or possibly elsewhere). From the disastrous expedition that ancient Athens sent to Sicily in 413 BCE to Britain’s invasion of Suez in 1956, embattled empires throughout the ages have often suffered an arrogance that drives them to plunge ever deeper into military misadventures until defeat becomes debacle. With the hubris that has marked empires over the millennia, the Trump administration is now committed to extending indefinitely Washington’s failing war of pacification in Afghanistan with a new mini-surge of US troops (and air power) in that classic “graveyard of empires.”

Here is just one possible scenario for a future Trumpian military misadventure in the Greater Middle East.

It’s the late spring of 2020, the start of the traditional Afghan fighting season, and a US garrison in Kandahar is overrun by an alliance of Taliban and Islamic State guerrillas. The militants summarily execute their American captives, filming the gruesome event for immediate upload on the Internet. President Trump thunders against “disgusting Muslim murderers” and swears he will “make the desert sands run red with their blood.” In fulfilment of that promise, an angry American theatre commander sends B-1 bombers and F-35 fighters to demolish whole neighbourhoods of Kandahar. In an aerial coup de grâce, AC-130-U “Spooky” gunships then rake the rubble with devastating cannon fire.

Soon, mullahs are preaching jihad from mosques across Afghanistan and far beyond. Afghan Army units begin to desert en masse. In isolated posts across the country, clusters of Afghan soldiers open fire on their American advisers. Meanwhile, Taliban fighters launch a series of assaults on scattered US garrisons elsewhere in the country. In scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975, US helicopters rescue American soldiers and civilians from rooftops.

Meanwhile, angry over the massive civilian casualties in Afghanistan, the anti-Muslim diatribes tweeted almost daily from the Oval Office and years of depressed energy prices, OPEC’s leaders impose a harsh new oil embargo aimed at the United States and its allies. With refineries running dry in Europe and Asia, the world economy trembling at the brink of recession, and gas prices soaring, Washington flails about for a solution. The first call is to NATO, but the alliance is near collapse after four years of Trump’s erratic behaviour.

Facing an uncertain re-election in November 2020, the Trump White House makes its move, sending Marines and Special Operations forces to seize oil ports in the Persian Gulf. Flying from the Fifth Fleet’s base in Bahrain, Navy Seals and Army Rangers occupy the Ras Tanura refinery in Saudi Arabia, the ninth largest in the world; Kuwait’s main oil port at Shuaiba; and Iraq’s at Um Qasr.

Simultaneously, the light carrier USS Iwo Jima steams south at the head of a task force that launches helicopters carrying 6,000 Special Operations forces tasked with seizing the al-Ruwais refinery in Abu Dhabi, the world’s fourth largest, and the megaport at Jebel Ali in Dubai. When Tehran vehemently protests the US escalation in the Persian Gulf and hints at retaliation, Defense Secretary James Mattis orders preemptive Tomahawk missile strikes on Iran’s flagship oil refinery at Abadan.

Three days later, as the USS Gerald Ford approaches an Iranian island, more than 100 speedboats suddenly appear, swarming the carrier in a practiced pattern of high-speed crisscrosses. Every time lethal bursts from the carrier’s MK-38 chain guns rip through the lead boats, others emerge from the flames coming closer and closer. Concealed by clouds of smoke, one finally reaches an undefended spot beneath the conning tower near enough for a Revolutionary guardsman to attach a magnetic charge to the hull with a fateful click. There is a deafening roar and a gaping hole erupts at the waterline of the first aircraft carrier to be crippled in battle since World War II. As things go from bad to worse, the Pentagon is finally forced to withdraw its capital ships from the Persian Gulf.

As black clouds billow skyward from the Gulf’s oil ports and diplomats rise at the UN to bitterly denounce American actions, commentators worldwide reach back to the 1956 debacle that marked the end of imperial Britain to brand this “America’s Suez.” The empire has been trumped.

Highlights

1. Trump White House is already in the process of demolishing the delicately balanced architecture that has sustained Washington’s world leadership since the end of World War II.
2. A few years after the Suez Canal’s grand opening in 1869, London did the deal of the century, scooping up Egypt’s shares in it for a bargain basement price of £4 million.
3. On October 29, 1956, the Israeli army led by General Moshe Dayan swept across the Sinai Peninsula.
4. Gamal Abdel Nasser, in response, scuttled dozens of rusting cargo ships filled with rocks and concrete at the entrance to the Suez Canal.
5. Humiliated by the forced withdrawal, Eden ordered MI-6 to launch a second assassination attempt on Nasser.
6. In just a few months, the Trump White House has done a remarkable job of demolishing the very pillars of US global power.
7. While China is ramping up its scientific research across the board, Trump has proposed “deep cuts to numerous research agencies”.