US global leadership has never been plain sailing

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The writer is FT investment editor and writes the Chartbook newsletter

Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky’s trap at the Oval’s Office was an angry search for historical orientation.

It was obviously more shocking than everything that took place during the first term of Donald Trump. But is it with its consequences than the protection of the World Terrorism War under George W Bush? Worse than Richard Nixon’s failure of the Bretton Woods system. Or America’s furious bombing of Cambodia and Laos. More suddenly on the couple of Cold War or a cruel transaction that took place, which took place behind closed doors during World War II.

We have been more than 100 years more than 100 years, and it has not been a simple cruise. The first shock of the road was catastrophic. In 1919, the Republican Congress refused to ratify the Treaty of Versals and IT President Woodrow Wilson Plan for the League of Nations. “Red Fear”, race riots, Scopes Monkey Trial and Ku Klux Klan, US diplomacy retreated from the world.

In the 1930s, the threat of Japan, Hitler and Imperial Japania, clocked alone on the left side of the right and left side of British and French. They laid their hopes on democratic procedures, long-term social balance, reasonable budgets, managed currencies and new technologies: Maginot line and radar. At the same time, the delay encouraged it to encourage reasonable conservatives in Berlin, Rome and Tokyo to curb men in violence. The United States was ready to help. It wasn’t. The best that Congress is offered is cash and bears. The European strategy that contains Hitler failed and in despair that followed the United States stems to the second hand demolition batch. America’s interest in Greenland is starting this period.

The moment of the US force, which defines what we mean by Global Hegemony today, was actually very short, taking 1941 before the early 1960s. This has been preserved by the external business community of the enlightened technology and the external business community. In Washington, it rested the control of the leadership of the Liberalism and Democratic Party of the Democratic Party to the South Jim Courot. What was blowing was the end of American democracy about the civil rights of 1964. This was alienated the south of the progressive Democrats and sent the white vote to the Republicans sliding.

Trump is a legal legacy of reaction, national-populist strain that grows in US democracy. However, it is also clear that he is the most brutal, self-affected, undiscovered operating operations that have ever played the White House. What’s wrong?

The positive is that elite inspections and remnants have failed within the framework of the Republican Party. And no strong resprots movement movement, the result of elite weakness in the United States is that democracy slides in the direction of CRASS populism. Most US electorate will vote for everyone than a member of the liberal elite. The smaller but still significant, the passage positively adores the trump card. Added dynamism comes from the fact that unlike its first term, Trump opens the door of the new guard of young men, which is presented by JD Vance and Elon Musk.

Anyone who has been back the radicalization of GOP since the 1990s remembers New Jorkhich and Sarah Palin and felt that the fragile handle of the automobile virtue of America can see that it is a disaster.

Some time clearly, the United States needs a new and more restrained foreign policy formula. Bernie Sanders called on the Udiom to leave the United States to end American imperialism. Barack Obama defended restraint, although his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, despite its Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, contributed to a larger line.

Joe Biden overseeing the global leadership of the American requirements. The result was managed by the United States to protect Ukraine, the Israeli escalation supported the Middle East and engaged in Brinkova with China. This was satisfied with Washington’s “blob”, revived the spirits of the Atlantic and performed independence in Europe. But despite the claim of Biden’s administration that the popular support for the middle class, the popular support of its approach was fragile.

Of course, Trump is vandal. But in tearing the status quo, he can no longer confirm the obvious. The elite coalition that contributed to the global US leadership has lost its political handle. If Europe wants something that wants to call it the “rules based on the rules, it will have to make it yourself.”

In any case, it is on the side of the rest of the world, Europe has the means to do so, and the political culture is sufficiently strong enough to maintain it. This week, in Berlin, we finally heard an adequate response, Chancellor-waiting Friedrich Merz agreed with the coalition program to see mass growth of defense expenses. This is not a made deal, and it will not save Ukraine from the terrible elections. But it causes the prospect that Europe can finally go through Russia’s humiliating fear and dependence on dependence on the dependence on America.