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There is a great deal of interest in this short essay by Christopher Caldwell that pertains to history and geo-strategic politics. Indeed, much of what transpires currently in the sphere of global politics is conducted on the basis of this kind of reasoning.

Nonetheless, it is worthwhile pointing out that the frame of this discourse is constructed around zero-sum thinking. Different nations trying to exert their dominance over others or trying to maneuver themselves into advantageous positions. Absent from this mode of thinking are notions of cooperation and mutual advantage, or an understanding of the idea of win-win. I'm not suggesting that this is absent from the real world, but that the paradigm as articulated here largely omits it.

In the aftermath of the World Wars the hope was that multilateral institutions such as the UN, the Breton Woods Institutions, and NATO would provide a framework for a more cooperative and less coercively competitive relationship amongst nations. Many of the successes of the past 75 years have been attributable to this. But there have also been many failures, such as the Iran debacle described in this article.

My view is that, in the light of the climate crisis - which affects everyone and the solution to which involves every nation - and the resurgence of tyranny, indeed neofascisim - in countries such as Russia, the US, and Israel, we need to change the paradigm. To double-down on the frameworks and institutions of cooperation, consensus, and conciliation. The Santa Marta Conference represents one such initiative. May it flourish and may there be many more like it. - Christopher Majka

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"AN EMPIRE IN DECLINE"

"The American-Israeli attack on Iran was more than a bad idea; it has turned into a watershed in the decline of the American empire. Some might prefer the word “hegemony” to describe the world order the United States leads, since its flag does not generally fly over the lands it protects or exploits. But the rules are the same: Imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends. And with the Iran war, President Trump has overextended the empire dangerously.

A Middle Eastern military misadventure is one of the last ways a casual observer would have expected Mr. Trump’s presidency to go wrong. The problems he alluded to in all three of his presidential campaigns had mostly resulted from our leaders’ governing beyond their means. At home, proponents of wokeness underestimated the costs and difficulties of micromanaging interactions between groups. Abroad, the mighty American armed forces proved to have no particular talent for democracy promotion, and there was the recent debacle in Iraq to prove it. Overextension was a danger that President Joe Biden contemptuously dismissed. “We’re the United States of America,” he used to say, “and there’s nothing we can’t do.”

Mr. Trump, people thought, would be different. For all the grandiosity of the expression “Make America great again,” Trump voters did not expect him to take on new problems. The greatness would be mostly atmospheric — braggadocio, not adventurism. The United States could become greater even if it withdrew to a less expansive sphere of influence. When he proclaimed an updated Monroe Doctrine, refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere, retrenchment was what most people thought they were getting. In last November’s National Security Strategy, he added, “The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.”

This was a logical, even an admirable, foreign policy plan. Just as important, history showed it to be workable. Britain had to surrender its far-flung system of colonies and protectorates after World War II. Letting go was often awkward and sometimes left violence in its wake. But except for its ill-fated attempt to join France and Israel in seizing the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, Britain did not try to hold territories it could no longer afford. It wound up on reasonably good terms with its former colonial possessions. Its disengagement was a success, though this can be hard to see because what was being managed was decline. Mr. Trump had a chance of pulling off something similar.

The assumption in Washington over the past decade has been that the world is engaged in a game of geostrategic musical chairs and the music is about to stop. China may soon overmatch us not just in military-industrial capacity but also in information technology. The world will harden into a new, less favorable geostrategic configuration. This is the last moment to reshape it in America’s favor.

At first, Mr. Trump moved to oust China from its strongholds in the Western Hemisphere. Almost as soon as he returned to office, the United States pressured CK Hutchison, a Hong Kong-based multinational conglomerate with connections to China, to sell two ports in the Panama Canal Zone. Venezuela, dependent on China as a market for 80 percent of its oil exports, saw American troops abduct its leader Nicolás Maduro last winter. And Mr. Trump has warned that Cuba, a destination for Chinese investment, “is next.” It will also be better, the thinking goes, if the United States has a more secure foothold near the North Pole (a foothold such as Greenland) when the time comes to divvy up the energy and mineral resources that global warming unlocks there. Whether or not this hemispheric policy is defensible, there is a coherence to it.

The attack on Iran was different. It was not a defensive consolidation; it was the assumption of a dangerous, open-ended responsibility. Yes, it might be better if the mullahs fell. But for the United States, an energy-independent country withdrawing to its own hemisphere, this is not a vital interest. War with Iran was not on the radar screen of anyone in the administration just a few months ago.

That is because the United States lacks the military means to impose its will on Iran in a long conflict. In 1991 a million soldiers from more than 40 countries were needed to reverse the invasion of Kuwait carried out by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a country less sophisticated than Iran and a fraction of its size. When Iran and Iraq fought each other to a standstill in the 1980s, deaths ran into the hundreds of thousands on each side. The United States would have to send a significant portion of its armed forces — which total only 1.3 million troops — to stand a chance of subduing Iran, and that force, if successful, would have to stay for a long time.

The argument can be made that the United States no longer depends on mustering huge armies: It has sophisticated missiles and other standoff weapons. But those weapons are needed to defend allies and interests in other theaters, and the United States is depleting them. According to reporting in The Times, it has already used 1,100 of its long-range stealth cruise missiles, earmarked for potential conflicts in Asia, leaving just 1,500 in the stockpile, and fired an additional 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, about 10 times as many as the military buys in an average year. American leaders have been scolding their European allies for years about the inadequacy of their fighting forces. But if one measures America’s military might against our pretensions rather than our G.D.P., it is just as inadequate.

It would be wrong to say the United States is trapped in the war it started. It has options. But it is now going to pay a very steep price, no matter which of them it chooses. It can desist in Iran — having demonstrated, for no good reason, that its military is far less dominant than the world had assumed. Or it can draw resources from theaters that are of vital national interest, such as Europe and East Asia, to fund what the president refers to as his Iranian “excursion.” Or it can resort to the extreme military options Mr. Trump darkly alluded to in social media posts starting in early April, which will redound to the everlasting shame of the country he leads. The United States stands to lose its reputation, its friends or its soul.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel urged this war on Mr. Trump because he, too, recognized the musical-chairs logic of the moment. Once the music stops, the United States may lack the firepower to protect Israel from its neighbors in the traditional manner and will probably lack the inclination. Ironically, the war’s catastrophic outcome shows Mr. Netanyahu’s basic understanding to have been sound: Israel’s prospects for enlisting the United States in such anachronistic adventures were dwindling. Mr. Trump’s gullibility provided Mr. Netanyahu with a last chance.

It is tempting to ask where in the process of imperial decline the United States now finds itself. It certainly has elements in common with Britain a century ago: deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent. On the eve of World War I, Britain was dependent on Germany for industrial and even military technology — and unwilling to re-examine the free-trade system on which German supremacy had been built. By the eve of World War II, Britain was essentially bankrupt. There are parallels in America’s dependence on China today.

The skepticism about American hegemony that led Americans to turn to Mr. Trump was a healthy one. If a globalist system built on free trade, democracy promotion and mass migration is so great, Trump voters asked, then why have we had to borrow $35 trillion since we took it up? That’s a genuinely good question. Mr. Trump was the perfect candidate for Americans who suspected something had gone wrong with their elites. His argument, basically, was that American-led globalism was so beneficial to politicians that once in power, they would defend it even against their voters, no matter what they said while campaigning. Events, alas, have proved him right."

- Christopher Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times and a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books. He is the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West” and “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”

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Prospect (2018) – Christopher Caldwell, Zeek Earl

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The order to shut off federal grants reveals a vision of the presidency at odds with basic democratic principles.

Late on Monday night, the Trump administration sent out a stunning memo suspending all federal grants. Chaos followed, with everything from veteran’s charities facing financial ruin to reports of Medicaid portals shutting down across the country.

It was so bad, that on Tuesday, the administration released a second piece of guidance attempting to clarify the initial memo’s scope. At the end of the work day, a federal court issued a “brief administrative stay” while litigation on its overall legality plays out.

It appears quite plausible that courts strike down the order permanently. Existing law, including both Supreme Court rulings and federal legislation, have found that the president cannot “impound” (meaning unilaterally stop) funds that Congress has authorized to be spent. Expert legal opinion on how this applies to the memo is divided: Some believe Trump’s order is obviously unlawful in its entirety, while others think it’s possible he could get away with a truly limited pause of some spending.

But regardless of how the legal wrangling works it out, the ideology behind this order is clear: a deep sense on the modern right that winning elections grants them a democratic mandate to ignore any constraints on their power.

Article I of the Constitution gives exclusive powers of the purse to Congress in order to ensure that it can actually make laws and force the president to follow them. Impoundment basically neuters Congress’s lawmaking powers, as it would allow the president could simply refuse to spend whatever money they allocate for it.

Matt Glassman, a political scientist at Georgetown University who studies Congress, posted on X that “accepting inherent presidential authority to impound is akin to shifting the balance of power between legislature and executive to something that resembles 16th century England.”

Yet that’s exactly what Trump wants. In a June 2023 campaign video, he asserted (falsely) that the president had “undisputed” impoundment power prior to the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 — which he vowed to overturn. “When I return to the White House,” he said, “I will do everything I can to challenge the Impoundment Control Act in court.” This reflects both his view and that of his pick for OMB director, Russ Vought, who also wrote a slew of secret memos and guidances for the Trump administration as part of his work for Project 2025.

While some of the memo’s specific provisions could be read narrowly, it seems to be an attempt to assert impoundment powers. It claims, for example, that “career and political appointees in the executive branch have a duty to align Federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through federal priorities.” This, in plain English, is an assertion that the president has the power to order executive branch staff to reassign federal funding as he pleases.

The memo thus asserts a degree of presidential authority so sweeping that it would wreck one of the core principles of separation of powers. If the Supreme Court lets Trump get away with impoundments — and it’s a fairly large “if” — the presidency would become something worryingly similar to an elected dictatorship.

CAN AUTHORITARIAN MOVES BE “DEMOCRATIC”?

The counterargument to this critique is straightforward: Trump is doing what he promised. Voters elected him after he promised to claim impoundment powers, and he has a popular mandate to deliver.

“Amidst the liberal outrage, it’s important to remember that this was all spelled out by Trump long in advance,” Politico’s Jack Blanchard wrote in Tuesday’s edition of the influential Playbook newsletter. “Those accusing Trump of being anti-democratic might note that this is largely democracy in action.”

There are vanishingly few voters who cast their ballot based on a principled support for impoundment powers. And even if there were, democracy does not just mean that elected officials can do whatever they want.

Democracy depends on the rule of law — government officials’ deference to written and duly authorized constitutional and statutory principles. Winning an election doesn’t give you a mandate to rule unfettered, but rather to act as a representative of the people within a broader constitutional order in which written law reigns supreme. That’s the point of a constitution — to set the rules of the democratic game under which parties compete to change policy.

That means that, absent truly exceptional circumstances like a civil war, illegal actions should not be considered democratically authorized. Nor should actions that concentrate so much power in the president’s hands that it threatens the health of the democratic order going forward.

Yet this vision of democracy where majority power trumps all is increasingly popular on the right.

Prior to Trump’s November victory, I wrote a piece analyzing six thinkers whose ideas would shape a second Trump term. One of them, Christopher Caldwell, is an advocate for untrammeled majoritarianism.

Writing favorably about foreign right-wing leaders with authoritarian inclinations, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or India’s Narendra Modi, Caldwell repeatedly argued that these leaders were the true voice of their respective peoples — and that their attacks on legal protections for ethno-religious minorities, in particular, were actually expressions of the popular will.

“We … like to pretend that protecting minorities always means protecting them against abuse and persecution by majorities. Sometimes it does. But just as often it means claiming prerogatives for minorities against the innocent preferences of democratic majorities,” he writes in his essay on Modi.

While Caldwell’s writing has a particular focus on vindicating ethnic majorities — he recently praised Trump’s moves against DEI and affirmative action as “the most significant policy change of the century” — the basic logical structure underpins power grabs the world over.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to impose political controls on the judiciary in 2023, his argument was that Israeli courts were unfairly restricting the powers of elected majorities — and that, because his coalition had won the 2022 election, they were justified in eliminating the only remaining real check on their authority.

It’s worth noting Trump and his allies don’t apply similar logic to Democratic executive actions. When Biden used executive authority to forgive student loans, a questionable but far less egregious assertion of power than Tuesday’s executive order, he and many on the right called it illegal even though it was an explicit Biden campaign promise.

This is because much of the sense of democratic legitimacy, as Caldwell’s work suggests, flows from a sense of speaking for the “true” or “authentic” people — “real America,” as Sarah Palin famously put it. Democratic victories are fraudulent, powered by cheating and undocumented immigrants brought in to “replace” American voters. Trump’s victory is proof that he has a mandate from the heartland to remake the federal government in his image.

Indeed, the impoundment order is explicit on this point, arguing that Trump has a democratic mandate to remake the government along the cultural lines preferred by so-called real Americans.

“The American people elected Donald J. Trump to be President of the United States and gave him a mandate to increase the impact of every federal taxpayer dollar” it argues, adding that “the use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.”

This controversy, in short, is not merely about one unlawful order. It is about a broader theory of democratic legitimacy — one in which a Republican president, once elected, has free rein to ignore the rules that would have bound his power in the past.