Ending the American Century: From World War II to World War Trump — Part 1
Most empires eventually fall to foreign invaders, this one has decided to extinguish itself
“The American Century” was a term introduced by Henry Luce, the founder of Life and Time magazines, in a Life editorial in February 1941. The purpose of Luce’s essay was to encourage Americans to end their isolationism and enter the war against Germany in Europe. That goal was achieved 10 months later with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Luce’s description of “the American Century” stuck, and became a convenient catch phrase for representing America’s mercurial rise as the preeminent postwar power.
The American Century — also sometimes called the American Empire or Pax Americana — usually described as some combination of the following features:
- An explosion of economic growth and technological innovation, fueled by the adoption of oil as the world’s primary energy source.
- A strong commitment to internationalism, creating and funding numerous rules-based international institutions like the UN, NATO, the OECD, the World Trade Association, and the World Bank.
- American military dominance based on anti-communism, anti-terrorism, and a thriving military-industrial complex.
- American monetary dominance based on the US dollar as the default currency for global trade.
- American cultural dominance based on American movies, media, and fashion setting the cultural tone for the rest of the western world.
The American Century was as much a mood as a political and economic reality. It represented both the confidence and the vitality of the only major power to emerge from World War II without suffering homeland damage. It was a time of rising abundance (at least for white Americans) as well as a time of declining inequality, as many Americans were able to join a growing middle class. For the first time, more (if not all) Americans were able to share in the prosperity that American dominance provided.
Pundits regularly mused about the end of the American Century. Who could dethrone us? During the Cold War, we feared the Soviets, so spent copiously to avoid that outcome. In the 1980s, the threat appeared to be Japan, the rising global superpower. More recently, China has become the most likely candidate to knock the United States off its throne.
But … I think its fair to say nobody ever imagined that the American people would voluntarily end the American Century on their own, deliberately and despite ample warning. But that is exactly what has happened.
At this moment in time, we do not know how the Trump 2.0 experiment in national self-immolation is going to end. What we do know is that on several fronts the damage currently being inflicted will not be repairable anytime soon. That longer-term damage will include: derailing America’s leadership in science and innovation, defunding and corrupting American public education, threatening and alienating global allies, wrecking global economic growth with tariffs and trade wars, making healthcare unaffordable or unattainable for many Americans, undermining the rule of law and the Constitution, and perhaps most significantly, denying the reality of climate change while abandoning any efforts to limit global temperatures to levels human beings might actually be able to tolerate.
Navigating our current moment: who wants what and how do they intend to get it?
It is challenging, to say the least, to find intentionality in the fire hose of chaos and cruelty currently gushing out of our federal government. One way to begin making sense of it is to ask an age-old question: cui bono … who benefits?
This is not an easy assignment, primarily because there are so many pigs at the trough, so many agendas at play, and so many conflicts to keep track of. But if we take a step back, we can see that the Trump 2.0 Administration is engaging simultaneously in five animating agendas.
If we wanted to be colorful about it, we could call these “five arrows through the heart of the American Century”.
In rough order of priority in the Big Guy’s mind, here they are:
#1 The Retaliation Agenda (aka Trump’s personal agenda)
This is the only agenda that boasts Trump himself at its center. He is the driver and his motivation is simple: an unrelenting need to satisfy his malignant narcissism and desire for vengeance. So far, many of the Administration’s most performative gestures have been in support of this Retaliation Agenda: his corruption of the DOJ and FBI, his dismantling of federal agencies, his attacks on universities, law firms, and media companies, his selling out of longstanding International allies. All of these “enemies” committed the sin, at some point in time, of not showing Trump the deference or respect he believed he deserved, so he now wants to make them suffer.
I would classify Trump’s obsession with tariffs as mostly serving this agenda. Why? Because they make no sense from any other perspective, especially economic. As one prominent economist has described the April 2 tariff announcements:
“The key point is that Trump isn’t really trying to accomplish economic goals. This should all be seen as a dominance display, intended to shock and awe people and make them grovel, rather than policy in the normal sense.” (Paul Krugman)
Trump believes he can use tariffs to force the rest of the world to bend a knee to American power and dominance. The fact that America is not nearly as powerful as he imagines (more on this in Part 2) is something his narcissism will not allow him to see. As a result, when the world retaliates with equally disruptive tariffs and the global economy slips into recession and probably depression, he will be surprised. But not deterred, because he is a mentally unstable man who cannot be reasoned with nor persuaded to change his mind.
Only one other agenda appears compatible with Trump’s Retaliation Agenda and that is #2, the Russian Alliance Agenda. It is no coincidence that the only prominent country left off Trump’s April 2 tariff list is Russia. As Trump weakens American power and essentially withdraws the United States from the world stage, Russia benefits from the surrender of its greatest adversary, all thanks to Donald Trump’s Retaliation Agenda.
#2 The Russian Alliance Agenda (aka the treason agenda)
Trump insists on elevating and embracing the geopolitical ambitions of Vladimir Putin. The reasons why have never been fully revealed, but a substantial trail of evidence points to the likelihood that the current occupant of the Oval Office has been an asset of the KGB since at least the mid-1980s, when he started making “business trips” to Moscow (possibly providing the KGB with useful kompromat along the way) and Russian organized crime began using his real estate holdings to launder money (for receipts see e.g., source).
Trump’s affinity for the murderous Russian dictator became an issue in his first term when he declared he trusted Putin more than America’s own intelligence agencies (source). That bias has carried over into his second term, where it appears to be the impetus behind a number of otherwise perplexing decisions: firing thousands of intelligence agency personnel, ending intelligence gathering on Russia and China, scaling back intelligence sharing with “Five Eyes” allies and, most obviously, selecting Russian apologist Tulsi Gabbard as his Director of National Intelligence.
Today, the Russian Alliance Agenda is playing out most prominently in the Administration’s efforts to bring the Ukraine War to an end on terms favorable to Russia and at the expense of the Ukrainian democracy. So far, that effort has produced minimal results, but apparently has led to some fraying of the Trump-Putin friendship, as Trump has become impatient with Putin’s failure to support a Trump-backed ceasefire in Ukraine (source).
#3 The New Confederacy Agenda (aka the Project 2025 agenda)
This is the far-right social and economic agenda previewed in Project 2025. Its key drivers are an odd mixture of tax avoidance, techno/crypto-fascism, and racism. Supporters of this agenda tend to be wealthy capitalists whose objectives are not much different from those that animated the rich plantation owners who funded the Confederacy. It is no coincidence that the Confederate flag is the most enduring symbol of the MAGA movement, that today’s most radical red states are all former members of the Confederacy, or that today’s war on DEI is essentially a modernized version of Confederate rationalizations for slavery and patriarchy, i.e., white male supremacy.
If that sounds hyperbolic, I suggest reading this eye-opening description of the ideology and values of the Confederacy by historian Stephanie McCurry in The Atlantic, “The Confederacy Was an Antidemocratic, Centralized State”. The centrality of racism and the “othering” of non-white minorities and immigrants in this New Confederacy Agenda cannot be overemphasized. Just like the old Confederates, these racists are convinced the rights and privileges of citizenship should be reserved for white men only. And if that sounds hyperbolic, here is how one organizational sponsor of Project 2025 says the quiet part out loud in 2021:
“Let’s be blunt. The United States has become two nations occupying the same country. When pressed, or in private, many would now agree. Fewer are willing to take the next step and accept that most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.”
Today, the Trump 2.0 Administration is actively pursuing that next step.
#4 The Oil Industry Agenda (aka the anti-renewables agenda)
In April 2024, Donald Trump met with oil industry executives at a private dinner and told them he would support their Oil Industry Agenda if they donated $1 billion to his campaign (source). If and how the bribe was actually paid is not known, but Trump has remained an enthusiastic supporter of the oil and gas industry and, much more troubling, a fierce and angry opponent of any efforts to recognize and respond to the existential threat of climate change, which he continues to deny and deride as a “Chinese hoax” (source).
Trump calls his energy policy “drill, baby, drill”. It is high enough on his list of priorities that he declared a “national energy emergency” on the first day of his new Administration. Soon after, he withdrew from the UN’s Paris Climate Agreement (for the second time). The Administration’s “Unleashing American Energy” Executive Order describes an energy policy through which America leverages its “vast” fossil fuel holdings to become the world’s leading supplier of fossil fuels while, incidentally, resisting and vanquishing any investments in renewables and clean energy technologies.
That this agenda is profoundly evil goes without saying. But it is also unlikely to achieve its goals because it is based on beliefs that contradict both physics and geology. Yes, there is a lot of oil and gas under the ground in America, but whether and how it can be extracted is not a question of volumes, it is a question of profitability, which in turn is dependent on something called EROI, or Energy Return on Investment (see, e.g., source). When the cost of producing a barrel of oil exceeds the price consumers are able to pay, that’s when the oil stops flowing. And that, not the glories of “drill, baby, drill”, is what is keeping oil industry executives up at night. Both physics and geology tell us, America’s current oil and gas “dominance” will be short-lived (see e.g., source, source).
The oil industry’s sensitivity to price is a longstanding issue. Unlike most commodities, the price of oil is less responsive to supply and demand fluctuations than geopolitical shocks (source). The industry knows that volatility in international politics leads to volatility in oil prices, and these fluctuations can only be partially dampened by adjusting supply. Right now, the biggest geopolitical shock the oil industry is facing is Donald Trump’s tariffs. As one industry executive explained at a recent private event:
“The threat of $50 oil prices by the administration has caused our firm to reduce its 2025 and 2026 capital expenditures. ‘Drill, baby, drill’ does not work with $50 per barrel oil. Rigs will get dropped, employment in the oil industry will decrease, and U.S. oil production will decline as it did during COVID-19.” (source)
Following Trump’s April 2 tariffs announcement and the two days of stock market collapse that resulted, the price of oil suffered its biggest decline since 2021, dipping to $60 per barrel on April 4 (source). And the trade wars have just begun.
#5 The Christian Nationalist Agenda (aka the theocratic agenda)
Finally, we come to the agenda that seeks to transform the United States into a Christian Nationalist theocracy. This imagined theocracy, it is worth noting, intends to nullify the Constitutional separation of church and state and codify into law the particular religious beliefs of a relatively small (and shrinking) minority of Americans. According to a recent PRRI survey, only about 10% of American adults qualify as “adherents” to this agenda, while about 20% more might be classified as “sympathizers”. Not surprisingly, residents of red states are significantly more likely to hold Christian nationalist beliefs than residents of blue states.
The main drivers of this agenda are religious extremism, racism, and misogyny. There is a significant crossover between this agenda and the New Confederacy Agenda, as many of the authors of Project 2025 share these religious aspirations for merging church and state. Russell Vought, a Project 2025 co-author and now Trump’s Director of OMB, has a favorite biblical quote (source) that seems eerily suggestive of how he might be thinking about the divine mission of Trump’s second term:
“He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to the officers and to his servants … He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day, you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves.” (1 Samuel 8:14–18)
There is also a significant strain of religiosity among our Supreme Court Justices, who have invoked religious reasoning in a number of cases (source), not least of which was the Dobbs decision in June 2022 which overturned 50 years of “settled law” protecting women’s right to abortion. That ruling sent decisions about women’s bodily autonomy back to the states, where red state legislators have passed numerous draconian measures, harshly criminalizing women’s right to choose, even in cases of incest or rape, but also threatening many other aspects of women’s healthcare and family planning, such as contraception and IVF. The results, as expected, have been disastrous (source).
Interestingly, Donald Trump seems to be less personally invested in this agenda, which might explain why it has remained on the back burner during these first few months. But given the Christian nationalist ambitions of many of the Project 2025 loyalists embedded in the Administration, we can expect to start hearing much more about this agenda soon. Also, we know that Trump has a special hostility toward women, particularly women of color, and this is likely a major source of his support for this agenda (source).
Each of these agendas is seen by its advocates as having a constructive part (what it’s supposed to accomplish) and a destructive part (what it has to destroy first). In every case, the Administration has underestimated the damage of the destructive part and overestimated (or simply made up) the benefits of the constructive part. And it’s looking more and more like the constructive parts of all these agendas are never going to happen because the destructive parts are just too destructive.
In summary, our 47th President is being pulled in multiple, often incompatible directions: Putin has a piece of him, the techno/crypto fascists have a piece of him, the oil industry has a piece of him, the religious zealots have a piece of him, and his own narcissistic fixations have the biggest piece of him of all. Can all these interests be satisfied and reconciled at the same time, or will their inherent contradictions and incoherence drive this Administration into chaos and this country into a decline that is likely to last for decades? I think the answer is becoming clear.
There will be no “coming back” from the deeper damage being inflicted by the end of the American Century
America’s democratic roots are deep. We are not a newbie democracy whose institutions can be easily overrun, although we have discovered in the face of Trump 2.0 that some of our institutions — specifically, some universities, some law firms, and some media companies — are much weaker in the face of authoritarian bullying than we might have expected. But others are fighting back, the Trump coalition is starting to crack under the weight of its many factional differences (see above), and the public seems to finally be sensing that something is seriously wrong in Washington DC. Whether the cruelty and blind incompetence of this Administration will eventually cause the Republican Party to rethink its subservience to Trump and roll back his illegal actions remains to be seen.
So America may be able to retrieve its democracy, or some version of it, as it has in the past when our democratic form of government has been threatened. But there is much more damage being inflicted today than just an attempted overthrow of the Constitution. Even if we were able to root out the MAGA insurrectionists tomorrow, we would still fail to recover the trust of our international allies and our leadership position in the world. America in its current incarnation has shown itself to be capricious, unstable, unserious, and existentially dangerous. If we can do this to ourselves once — voluntarily — then how can the world ever trust us to not do it again? Trump 2.0 has ensured that even if American democracy is recovered, the American Century is over.
Trump 2.0 is the fire sale at the end of the American Century.
On to Part 2.
