Tuesday | September 22, 2026
The planet’s two major wars, in Iran and Ukraine, are no longer contained within the borders where they began. The conflict involving Iran has spread instability across the Middle East and disrupted energy markets, while Russia’s war against Ukraine continues to generate consequences far beyond Eastern Europe. At the same time, the war in Yemen and attacks by the Houthis have added another layer of danger to already vulnerable shipping and energy routes. The result is a world in which conflicts that once appeared geographically separate are increasingly connected through oil, trade, weapons, migration and great-power competition.
The dangers do not stop with conventional warfare. Experts and technology leaders are increasingly debating the possibility that artificial intelligence could introduce risks on a scale unlike anything previous generations have confronted. The rapid development of increasingly capable AI systems is generating both enormous economic expectations and fears about security, autonomy and human control. Governments are struggling to establish common rules at a time when technological competition between the United States and China is itself becoming a central component of global power.
Soaring energy prices are meanwhile putting additional pressure on industrialized economies already struggling with inequality and political discontent. Higher costs for crude oil, gasoline and diesel quickly feed into transportation, food production and household expenses. For poorer countries, the consequences can be even more severe because governments have fewer resources with which to cushion consumers from sudden price shocks.
And the climate crisis is becoming increasingly difficult to separate from everyday political and economic life. Floods, wildfires, droughts and blistering heat are affecting communities across continents, while governments confront the increasingly expensive task of protecting infrastructure and responding to disasters. Climate change is not producing a single global catastrophe but a succession of overlapping emergencies that compound existing economic and political weaknesses.
Meanwhile, the global institutions that helped bankroll and preserve relative stability for much of the postwar era are themselves under enormous strain. The United Nations, where world leaders are gathering this week, is struggling to demonstrate that diplomacy can still restrain powerful states when the basic rules of international relations are being challenged. Nearly 130 heads of state and government and other senior representatives are expected at this year’s gathering, but the mood surrounding the institution is one of anxiety rather than triumph.
The UN’s difficulties reflect a wider problem. Its authority ultimately depends on powerful countries being willing to cooperate, accept compromises and respect international rules. When major powers reject those constraints, the institution has limited tools with which to force compliance. The result is an uncomfortable paradox: the world may need international cooperation more than ever at precisely the moment when cooperation is becoming harder to achieve.
At any other time over the last 80 years, the United States would normally be expected to play a central role in restoring stability. American military power, economic strength, alliances and diplomatic reach have traditionally made Washington the indispensable actor in many international crises.
But remarkably, the West’s superpower is now itself at the center of arguments about global volatility.
Step forward, Mr. President.
Donald Trump’s annual address to the UN General Assembly comes at an extraordinarily difficult moment. He is entering the international spotlight with domestic political pressures mounting and his approval ratings weakened, while the war with Iran has lasted far longer than the administration initially anticipated. Reuters reported that Trump’s approval rating had fallen to 32% in a September Reuters/Ipsos poll, while the Iran conflict has contributed to rising fuel prices and political pressure at home.
Yet Trump is expected to present a dramatically different interpretation of events.
His administration portrays the United States as stronger, more assertive and more respected than it was under previous presidents. Trump has repeatedly argued that his willingness to use economic pressure, military force and personal diplomacy has forced other governments to take Washington more seriously. He has also claimed that his approach has succeeded where conventional diplomacy failed.
“Our country is respected again. We’re respected like never before. I go to meetings and everyone stands up,” Trump said earlier this month.
That vision of American power, however, is contested by many foreign governments and analysts.
Traditional allies are increasingly preparing for a world in which Washington may no longer be as predictable as it once was. Canada, European countries and other middle powers are strengthening relationships with one another and diversifying their economic and security options. A recent report by The Atlantic described allies as increasingly concluding that they can no longer simply wait for a change in the White House to restore previous assumptions about US foreign policy.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has become one of the most prominent voices arguing that middle powers must prepare for this changing environment.
“America has changed,” Carney said. “We cannot control the storm blowing in from Washington.”
Canada and other US partners are therefore facing a strategic dilemma. They remain economically and militarily connected to the United States, but they are also attempting to build alternatives so that their security and prosperity are not completely dependent on decisions made in Washington.
This does not necessarily mean that America’s allies have abandoned the United States or embraced China. Rather, it represents a form of hedging. Governments that once assumed Washington would reliably remain the center of the Western system are increasingly preparing for multiple possible futures.
Trump’s second-term worldview is built around the belief that American power gives him extraordinary leverage. His approach is transactional: economic access, military protection, trade and diplomacy are treated as bargaining instruments that Washington can deploy to obtain concrete concessions.
That philosophy has dramatically changed the character of US foreign policy.
Washington’s foreign policy is now closely associated with the personality of the commander in chief, including threats, pressure and the willingness to contemplate military action in pursuit of American objectives. Trump has repeatedly spoken in unusually stark terms about America’s enemies and has demonstrated a willingness to consider options that previous presidents might have regarded as politically or strategically unacceptable.
But the central contradiction of Trump’s approach is becoming increasingly visible.
He portrays the United States as overwhelmingly powerful, yet some of the conflicts of his second term have demonstrated how difficult it can be for even the world’s strongest military power to impose its preferred outcome.
The survival of Iran’s leadership despite months of military pressure complicates the administration’s narrative of overwhelming dominance. The war has demonstrated that military superiority does not automatically translate into political control. Missile defenses can be exhausted, military equipment can wear down and enormous destructive capacity does not necessarily produce surrender.
The same basic lesson has emerged from Ukraine.
Russia possesses one of the world’s largest militaries and enormous nuclear capabilities, yet its invasion has not produced the rapid political victory Moscow originally anticipated. Ukraine, despite its vastly smaller resources, has demonstrated how drones, precision weapons, intelligence networks and dispersed military operations can impose substantial costs on a much larger adversary.
Iran has provided another illustration of this transformation in modern warfare. Cheap drones, missiles, electronic warfare and decentralized military capabilities can allow a state or armed group to threaten sophisticated militaries at a fraction of the cost of traditional weapons systems.
That reality complicates the traditional American assumption that overwhelming technological superiority will guarantee quick victories.
Trump also encountered another lesson in the new geopolitics of economic interdependence during his confrontation with China.
The United States remains a technological and financial superpower, but China controls or dominates important parts of several strategic supply chains. Rare earth minerals are among the most important examples. They are essential to numerous high-tech industries, defense applications and advanced manufacturing.
Beijing’s ability to restrict access to strategically important materials demonstrated that economic power can be weaponized just as effectively as military power.
This is one of the defining characteristics of 21st-century geopolitics: no major power possesses complete control.
The United States has the world’s most powerful military and enormous financial influence. China has vast manufacturing capacity and critical mineral resources. Russia remains a major nuclear and energy power. Europe possesses enormous economic and regulatory influence. Middle powers increasingly recognize that they can exploit competition among larger powers to protect their own interests.
A traditional American president might respond to these challenges by building broader coalitions.
Trump’s approach has instead frequently placed pressure on the very alliances that Washington once regarded as its greatest strategic advantage.
Tariffs, disputes over defense spending, threats involving sovereignty and repeated criticism of allied governments have generated what Carney has described as a rupture in the assumptions underpinning traditional alliance systems.
The consequences are particularly visible in Europe.
European governments have been forced to reconsider how much responsibility they should assume for their own defense. Ironically, one consequence of Trump’s pressure may therefore be a Europe that spends more on its military and becomes less dependent on Washington.
That could eventually strengthen European strategic capacity.
But there is a difference between encouraging allies to contribute more and convincing them that they cannot depend on the United States.
The latter can permanently alter the political psychology of an alliance.
Trump completes the transformation
Trump’s belief that America has become more respected globally clashes with evidence of growing distrust in some allied capitals.
That does not mean every foreign government opposes his policies, nor does it mean that American influence has disappeared. The United States remains an extraordinarily powerful country, with unmatched military reach, enormous financial resources, world-leading technology companies and a network of formal alliances that no rival has replicated.
The question is therefore not whether America remains powerful.
It does.
The deeper question is how that power is being used — and whether Washington’s current approach is increasing or diminishing its ability to persuade other countries to act alongside it.
This distinction matters because American power has historically depended on more than aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons and economic sanctions.
It has also depended on consent.
Countries cooperate with Washington partly because they believe that doing so serves their interests, but also because they have historically viewed the United States as a relatively predictable anchor of the international system. If that perception changes, America’s formal power may remain enormous while its practical influence becomes harder to exercise.
The Greenland dispute offers a revealing example.
Trump has long argued that Greenland has strategic importance because of its location in the Arctic and the growing geopolitical significance of the region as polar ice melts. From Washington’s perspective, greater American access to Greenland can be justified on security grounds.
But threatening the sovereignty of Denmark, a NATO ally, created a completely different political problem.
The same objective might have been pursued through negotiation and alliance diplomacy. Instead, the confrontation contributed to doubts about whether the United States would respect the sovereignty of even its closest partners.
Greenlandic politician Tillie Martinussen captured the emotional dimension of that distrust when she compared America to a powerful sled dog that turns around and bites its owner.
The analogy points to a broader strategic problem. Once an ally begins to view its protector as a potential source of danger, rebuilding trust can take far longer than creating the original alliance.
Yet Trump did not create all of America’s current problems.
His rise was itself partly a consequence of the failures and frustrations of the previous era.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq consumed trillions of dollars, cost thousands of American lives and produced political exhaustion. Those conflicts demonstrated the limits of military power and helped undermine the post-Cold War belief that the United States could reshape foreign societies through overwhelming force.
The financial crisis, rising inequality, globalization and the erosion of industrial employment also weakened faith in the political establishment.
Trump emerged from that environment rather than creating it from nothing.
Likewise, the rise of China predates Trump. So does Russia’s confrontation with the West. So does climate change. So does the extraordinary development of artificial intelligence.
The deeper transformation of the international system has been underway for decades.
What Trump has done is accelerate and institutionalize parts of that transformation.
In his first address to the UN General Assembly in 2017, Trump declared that the United States would put “America First,” arguing that every country had the right and responsibility to put its own interests ahead of others.
That philosophy was already a departure from the internationalist tradition that had dominated Washington for generations.
In his second term, however, the principle has become much more consequential.
America First is no longer simply a campaign slogan. It increasingly represents a different conception of America’s relationship with the rest of the world.
The United States is less interested in maintaining an international system for its own sake and more interested in determining what the system can deliver directly for American interests.
That change is visible even in Trump’s relationship with China.
The president who once built his political identity around confronting Beijing is preparing to host Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House this week. Xi’s state visit is scheduled for September 23-25, with Trump due to greet him at Joint Base Andrews before a formal White House ceremony. Trade, rare earths, artificial intelligence and other strategic issues are expected to feature prominently in the discussions.
The symbolism is striking.
Trump can simultaneously confront China, negotiate with China and publicly embrace its leader because his foreign policy is less about maintaining a fixed ideological hierarchy and more about transactional leverage.
That can create diplomatic flexibility.
But it can also make America’s long-term intentions harder for allies and adversaries to predict.
‘You can never trust that dog again’
The fracturing of American alliances might once have been difficult to imagine.
Now it is becoming a strategic consideration for governments that spent generations assuming that the United States would remain the central pillar of the Western order.
European governments are increasing defense spending. Canada is diversifying trade relationships. Middle powers are forming new diplomatic groupings. Asian governments are strengthening relationships with both Washington and Beijing rather than choosing exclusively between them.
The emerging system is therefore unlikely to be a simple replacement of American dominance by Chinese dominance.
It may instead be more fragmented.
Countries will seek multiple partners. Supply chains will become more diversified. Military relationships will overlap. Regional powers will exercise greater autonomy. And international institutions will increasingly struggle to impose rules on countries powerful enough to ignore them.
The Atlantic’s recent reporting captures the growing belief among some American allies that this is not merely a temporary interruption. Some governments are preparing for the possibility that greater US protectionism and strategic unpredictability could persist beyond Trump’s presidency.
That is potentially the most consequential legacy of Trump’s second term.
A future Democratic or Republican president could restore conventional alliances and attempt to rebuild confidence in Washington. But restoring trust is not the same as restoring a policy.
Once governments have spent years developing alternative trade routes, defense capabilities and diplomatic partnerships, they have less incentive to return completely to the old system.
The international order may therefore change even if American domestic politics changes again.
This is why the questions surrounding Trump’s presidency extend far beyond his personal popularity.
What is the true state of American power?
Are Trump’s policies accelerating the erosion of a system that benefited the United States for decades?
Or is he simply responding to a transformation that would have happened regardless of who occupied the White House?
There is evidence for both interpretations.
Trump is not responsible for the extraordinary evolution of artificial intelligence or for China’s rise as an economic and technological competitor. The roots of Russia’s confrontation with the West stretch back decades. Climate change began transforming the global environment long before Trump returned to office.
America’s previous wars also weakened confidence in the traditional model of intervention.
And the post-1945 generation that built the institutions of the modern international order has largely disappeared from political life.
The world that produced the United Nations, NATO, the Bretton Woods institutions and the modern system of American alliances was shaped by the experience of the Second World War.
That historical memory is fading.
The governments now confronting global instability do not necessarily share the same assumptions about why those institutions were created or why they should continue to function in the same way.
Trump is therefore both a cause and a symptom of the transformation.
His willingness to discard established diplomatic conventions has accelerated the fragmentation of the old order. But his political success was itself produced by dissatisfaction with that order.
The danger is that these forces could reinforce one another.
Global instability creates demand for strong leaders. Strong leaders challenge international institutions. Institutional weakness creates more instability. Economic shocks fuel nationalism and protectionism. Protectionism damages cooperation. Reduced cooperation makes global crises harder to manage.
That cycle can become self-sustaining.
And the United States remains at its center.
At the United Nations this week, Trump will present his vision of an America that is stronger because it has abandoned many of the restraints imposed by the old international system. Other leaders will be listening not only to what he says about American power, but also to what his presidency tells them about America’s future reliability.
The paradox is that the United States may remain the world’s most powerful country while becoming less able to organize the world around itself.
That distinction could define the next era of global politics.
The question facing Washington is therefore not simply whether America can still dominate.
It is whether American power can still persuade.
Because military strength can compel an adversary for a time. Economic pressure can force a concession. Tariffs can change calculations. Alliances can be renegotiated.
But a durable international order requires something harder to manufacture: confidence that tomorrow’s United States will remain committed to the relationships and rules that today’s United States asks other countries to trust.
That confidence is now being tested.
And as wars spread, energy markets shake, artificial intelligence accelerates, climate disasters intensify and old institutions struggle to respond, the consequences of that loss of certainty could extend well beyond Trump’s presidency.
