By admin 
Events of the past weekend, in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, provided a bleak portrait of the United States under President Donald Trump as an increasingly irrelevant power.
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On Sunday, Iran fired ballistic missiles at Israel, ignoring Trump’s warnings to observe a ceasefire or face consequences. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired back, defying a personal phone call from Trump ordering him not to retaliate. More embarrassing still, Trump made public his call to Netanyahu, telling a Financial Times journalist, “I call the shots. I call all the shots. He doesn’t call the shots.”
On Monday morning, Iran and Israel both announced they would refrain from attacking each other, perhaps in response to more pleas from Trump by phone and social media. But Netanyahu’s pledge of restraint did not apply to Lebanon. An Israeli strike on Hezbollah targets in that country is what prompted the Iranians to launch missiles at Israel on Sunday, making clear that they regarded the wars on Hezbollah and Iran as two parts of the same conflict. The Iranians vowed to resume attacking Israel even more intensively if Israel resumed attacking Lebanon, so Trump’s belated success at public pressure may be short-lived.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky sent a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin suggesting that the two hold peace talks through “direct engagement” between the two of them, without the involvement of Americans, who were too distracted in Iran. The broader implication was that Washington—once the presumptive mediator in all matters of European security—had proved useless in its efforts to negotiate a peace and played a less than vital role in Ukraine’s recent military successes. In fact, Ukraine has been advising U.S. commanders in anti-drone tactics and technology—not the other way around. (Putin dismissed Zelensky’s letter, but Russian officials have grown frustrated with the waste-of-time visits from Trump’s shallow emissaries, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and fellow real-estate magnate Steve Witkoff.)
By most measures, the United States still hoists plenty of power on the global stage. It possesses the most lethal and far-flung military; it controls the leading currency; its leaders’ words and deeds are more closely observed and analyzed than those of any other leaders.
But Trump has proved remarkably inept at brandishing this power. He seems to believe that he can rule the world through crude threats and assertions of unilateral dominance, that (to use Mao Zedong’s phrase) power grows out of the barrel of a gun. And so when this formula fails—when he backpedals from his threats, when his bark carries no bite, when relentless volleys of firepower destroy targets but fall short of accomplishing political aims (because he mistakenly thinks that the former automatically yields the latter)—then the rest of the world, friends and foes, start to take his (and, therefore, America’s) threats and assurances less seriously. They start going their own way, and try setting security arrangements and supply chains that avoid U.S. control.
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In other words, Trump’s misunderstandings and abuses of power in the short run are sparking a recalculation of power balances in the long run.
This shift was first, or at least most eloquently, articulated this past January in a speech by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, calling on “middle-sized powers” to form their own alliances, breaking away from the destructive dominance of great powers. Some of his words are worth recalling:
Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination. … Our view is, the middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.
Carney took care not to mention Trump by name; nor, even implicitly, did he blame him exclusively for these developments, noting that “a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics” had “laid bare the risks of extreme global integration” “over the past two decades.”
However, these trends have accelerated, and the resulting crises have intensified, in just the past year or so—and Trump has been the main source of exacerbation. We are now seeing some of the consequences. He sends warships to distant waters—the intended object of the message shrugs. He drops thousands of bombs with great power and meticulous accuracy—to no effect. He yells at a foreign leader, “Jump!”—and the leader ignores him rather than asking “How high?”
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