The United States of 2026 maintains a military, economic, and technological superiority unmatched in human history: eleven nuclear aircraft carriers patrolling every ocean, defence spending greater than the next ten nations combined, a technology industry that defines the cognitive infrastructure of the planet.

Yet, just as this power machine reaches its apex, its projection in the world has never been so illusory, so dramatically lacking in strategic direction. Today’s America is powerful and omnipresent, yet fragile, and the contradiction between these two adjectives is the key to understanding the current global disorder.

The internal collapse of the American democratic process

This weakness does not stem from a shortage of military resources nor from a lethal external threat to its survival. Rather, it stems from an internal structural collapse, from a short-circuiting of the democratic process that has progressively eroded the distinction between what is necessary for the world and what is useful for winning the next election. The planet’s greatest superpower ends up negotiating only with itself and its own electoral moods, trapped in a self-referential loop that condemns the international system to a chronic absence of solutions, to a perpetual wait for decisions that never arrive because they are continually postponed to the domestic political calendar.
The heart of this paralysis lies in the total domestication of American foreign policy, a process that has accelerated in recent decades to become the defining characteristic of the international action of the second Trump administration and of governing Trumpism.

Historically, although conditioned by elections and public mood cycles, US international action retained its own autonomy, a core of strategic rationality that pursued the long-term national interest beyond party contingencies. There was a recognisable difference between what a candidate said on the campaign trail and what he did once he took office in the Oval Office, a distinction that allowed allies to have confidence in the continuity of American commitments.

Foreign policy as an extension of domestic policy

Today, that boundary has disappeared completely: foreign policy has become a mere subsystem of the American culture war, an extension of the same fractures that divide the electorate on issues such as abortion, immigration or civil rights. Complex crisis theatres such as Ukraine, Iran, the confrontation with China in the South China Sea or the future of Taiwan are no longer addressed for their intrinsic strategic value, for their impact on the global balance of power, to be downgraded to rhetorical pawns to be wielded at political rallies to prove to one’s base that one is strong or cautious depending on what the poll of the week dictates.

This dynamic transforms diplomacy into a theatrical performance designed solely for domestic consumption, into a spectacle where the substance of decisions counts for less than the applause meter. The Trump administration’s most disruptive geopolitical moves no longer serve to shape the international order, contain adversaries or reassure allies, but to win infighting against the US Congress, to assert a specific interpretation of executive power that has little to do with foreign policy and much to do with constitutional politics.

In this ruthless political and constitutional clash, fought with the tools of global power projection, the security of Europe and the architecture of NATO are reduced to mere pawns in the war to redefine American domestic powers. Worse still, they become a useful punching-ball to be hit to demonstrate to one’s electoral base that America is being put back first.

US actions have become unpredictable, which is not good

The result of this posture is structural uncertainty, an uncertainty that is not an unwanted side-effect but the deliberate product of a decision-making system that has lost all criteria of predictability. The United States speaks, threatens, reassures and promises through a multiplicity of channels – official communiqués, presidential tweets, spokesperson statements, television interviews – but each of their words is potentially revocable by the next social media post, the next executive tantrum, the sudden need to galvanise a key demographic segment in a new swing state. This radical volatility produces a paradoxical effect: a hegemony that only acts in the world to secure domestic political victory is, in fact, isolationist in substance even when it is interventionist in form.

It does not offer stability, it does not build order, it does not guarantee predictability – the three fundamental functions of any hegemonic power. On the contrary, it projects outwards its convulsions, its hysterical cycles, its identity crises, leaving allies and enemies alike in the most radical uncertainty as to what will remain true the next day, what commitments will survive the next election cycle, what security guarantees will not be withdrawn with the stroke of a pen.
Everything is suspended, everything is frozen, waiting for the American mid-term elections, because no rational actor – ally or adversary – can afford to make irreversible strategic decisions when the main interlocutor could completely change orientation in a matter of months. The European nations, in particular, find themselves in a tragically impotent position: prisoners of alliances emptied of meaning by a partner that has withdrawn without declaring it, bound to commitments of Atlantic solidarity that depend on the mood variable of an unpredictable White House, forced to navigate by sight while awaiting directives from a partner that no longer produces strategy but only unpredictable immobility, alternating with periodic bursts of scenic activism.

The world has now learnt to read Trump

While the West waits, paralysed by this dependence on a hegemon that has turned into a random variable, systemic adversaries do not just wait: they adapt, learn, and systematically profit from this fragility. Vladimir Putin, in particular, has shown that he has perfectly understood the nature of the new American decision-maker. Aware that Washington’s priority in Ukraine is no longer a sustainable peace, not the construction of a stable European security framework, but a quick electoral trophy to show off to its domestic audience as proof of peace achieved, the Kremlin is constantly organising diplomatic and transactional traps.

Putin knows that an America worn out by its own electoral moods, obsessed by the need to show immediate results, might be willing to sacrifice fundamental principles such as Ukrainian territorial integrity, the sovereignty of attacked nations, the credibility of security guarantees, in the name of a peace announcement for the use of its own voters. This is not cynicism: it is the lucid reading of an adversary who has realised that the hegemon’s Achilles’ heel is not military but procedural, lies not in its ability to project force but in its inability to sustain a coherent strategy for more than one election cycle.

The end of American hegemony?

We are perhaps facing the end of Washington’s historical role, the conclusion of that long cycle that began with the Second World War in which American power acted as architect and guarantor of the international order. This is not a catastrophic end, a spectacular collapse: it is rather a slow implosion, a gradual emptying out of meaning of hegemonic action. When a power uses the rest of the planet solely as a surface on which to project its domestic demons, as a screen on which to fight internal identity wars, its real ability to influence history crumbles from within, even if the material indicators of power remain impressive.

The America of 2026 has become exactly that: an immense but blind force, endowed with extraordinary muscles but lacking a central nervous system, capable of destroying but not building, of shaking the world but not leading it. It is a power trapped in an eternal, deafening monologue, which no longer listens to anyone because it is too busy listening to itself, and which is dragging the entire international system – allies, institutions, security regimes, shared norms – into a limbo without solutions, into an interminable wait for a leader who no longer speaks to the world but only to his inner demons