With a whimper rather than a bang, the world has become a different place than it was in January 2021, when Donald Trump left office. Almost everything we are now told about the global status quo is mistaken — largely because critics focus only on what Trump says rather than on what he does.
Rather, the left — and some on the right — are furious whenever Trump tweets, says or does something that offends their delicate sense of taste, tradition and decorum. Their outrage leads them to ignore whether this “Art of the Deal” theater ultimately leaves the United States stronger. More often than not, it does.
We are not bogged down in a forever war with Iran; we are engaged in over four months of frustrating negotiations with a theocracy that has no intention of giving up its nuclear weapons and ability to bully and undermine most of the Middle East.
Israel is not without friends and is more regionally dominant than at any point in its history. Radical Islam — whether in the form of the Iranian regime, Hezbollah, Hamas or the Houthis — is at its weakest point in half a century.
China is recalibrating nearly all of the assumptions it has held for the past two decades. Russia is humiliated and hemorrhaging. Latin America is more pro-American than ever before.
So let’s start with Latin America.
In 2013, John Kerry boasted to the Organization of American States that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.”
He may not have anticipated how naturally his declaration would be interpreted throughout the Americas: that the Obama administration would no longer act unilaterally to prevent distant, hostile regimes from establishing spheres of influence in the Western Hemisphere. And indeed, Latin America subsequently witnessed a wave of left-wing — and sometimes overtly communist — governments emerging during the Obama and later Biden administrations. But that left-wing wave is over.
Instead, here is where things stand as of July: Latin America has swung decisively away from communism and toward Washington over the past few years. Broadly speaking, the governing pro-American or right-leaning administrations include Argentina (Javier Milei), Chile (Jose Antonio Kast), Bolivia (Rodrigo Paz Pereira), Paraguay (Santiago Pena), Ecuador (Daniel Noboa), Panama (Jose Raul Mulino), Honduras (Nasry Asfura), Costa Rica (Laura Fernandez) and El Salvador (Nayib Bukele).
China is now backing away from its efforts to control the Panama Canal in the face of U.S. pressure. Venezuela is no longer a Stalinist bully exporting death and destruction to its neighbors. Almost all illegal immigration from Mexico and Latin America has abruptly ceased, for the first time in history.
The quagmire of the Middle East?
The Middle East is now a different place. Whatever the final denouement with Iran, Tehran has lost a half-century and half-trillion-dollar investment in its military and nuclear industrial complex. The once-feared bully of the Muslim Middle East has been exposed as a paper tiger, with its economy, and perhaps its very existence, now dependent on the disposition of the Trump administration. In its sporadic missile launches, Iran often leaves Israel alone because it knows the Jewish state can target any of its unhinged leaders whenever hostilities resume.
In a development that would once have seemed surreal, Israel is providing intelligence and missile defense to the Muslim Gulf states, which are effectively fighting alongside the United States and Israel against a fellow Muslim nation.
Hamas has been crushed. Hezbollah’s once-feared missile arsenal and many of its crazy leaders have been largely eliminated. Lebanon is reawakening from its 50-year coma.
Soon the Strait of Hormuz — Iran’s supposed trump card — will be nearly as irrelevant to global energy markets as it is already to the United States. Existing pipelines that bypass the Gulf are being expanded. New ones are planned or already under construction to the Red Sea, the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Oman beyond the strait. The United States is the largest producer of oil and gas in history and does not need Middle Eastern oil or gas — or, for that matter, much of anything else besides.
And then there are our European allies.
Europe publicly despises Trump. Privately, however, many Europeans concede that his antics compelled them to meet their long-neglected 2 percent defense commitments and inspired their new pledges to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense. Although the medicine initially seemed worse than the disease, Europe now quietly acknowledges that Trump was right — and just in time to accelerate rearmament as Russia pressed westward.
If left unchecked, Europe’s embrace of near-total disarmament, shocking demographic decline, unending hostility toward fossil fuels and nuclear energy, mass illegal immigration from the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere, and steadily expanding socialism will turn the continent into a Third World hellhole.
In any case, our rival Russia is now in its weakest political, economic and military condition since the post-Soviet chaos of the 1990s. Had anyone predicted five years ago that Russia would be importing gasoline or that buildings around the Kremlin would routinely be struck by drones, he would have been dismissed as delusional. Nor could anyone have imagined Russia suffering perhaps well more than 1 million dead, wounded, missing or captured in a Stalingrad-like slog of its own making in Ukraine.
And China?
It is stagnating almost as rapidly as it once rose, burdened by a fertility rate of just 1.0 while importing 75 percent of its daily oil consumption, 42 percent of its natural gas and 30 percent of its daily food. Its weapons exports are proving no match for Western arms.
Meanwhile, a gradually awakening West seems to be finally weary of Chinese mercantilism and is starting to demand reciprocity in trade.
The booming U.S. economy now produces $31 trillion in goods and services, roughly one-third more than either the more populous European Union or China. America is pulling ahead in most of the next-generation fields of rocketry, satellite launches, space exploration, artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering and cryptocurrency. Its stock market is at record highs.
Add it all up, and the picture is almost surreal: At the very moment the left insists that the United States has grown weak and isolated, America and its allies occupy a position of global pre-eminence not seen since the end of World War II.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact him at authorvdh@gmail.com.
