{"id":173,"date":"2026-06-08T20:09:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T20:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=173"},"modified":"2026-06-08T20:09:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T20:09:08","slug":"trump-is-making-the-u-s-an-increasingly-irrelevant-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=173","title":{"rendered":"Trump Is Making the U.S. an Increasingly Irrelevant Power"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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.<\/p>\n

Read more Will Graham Platner Make It to November?<\/a><\/p>\n

On Sunday, Iran fired ballistic missiles at Israel, ignoring Trump\u2019s 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, \u201cI call the shots. I call all the shots. He doesn\u2019t call the shots.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s belated success at public pressure may be short-lived.<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky sent a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin suggesting that the two hold peace talks through \u201cdirect engagement\u201d between the two of them, without the involvement of Americans, who were too distracted in Iran. The broader implication was that Washington\u2014once the presumptive mediator in all matters of European security\u2014had proved useless in its efforts to negotiate a peace and played a less than vital role in Ukraine\u2019s recent military successes. In fact, Ukraine has been advising U.S. commanders in anti-drone tactics and technology\u2014not the other way around. (Putin dismissed Zelensky\u2019s letter, but Russian officials have grown frustrated with the waste-of-time visits from Trump\u2019s shallow emissaries, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and fellow real-estate magnate Steve Witkoff.)<\/p>\n

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\u2019 words and deeds are more closely observed and analyzed than those of any other leaders.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s phrase) power grows out of the barrel of a gun. And so when this formula fails\u2014when 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)\u2014then the rest of the world, friends and foes, start to take his (and, therefore, America\u2019s) threats and assurances less seriously. They start going their own way, and try setting security arrangements and supply chains that avoid U.S. control.<\/p>\n

Read more What the Latest Judicial Sex Scandal Tells Us About a Broken System<\/a><\/p>\n

In other words, Trump\u2019s misunderstandings and abuses of power in the short run are sparking a recalculation of power balances in the long run.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cmiddle-sized powers\u201d to form their own alliances, breaking away from the destructive dominance of great powers. Some of his words are worth recalling:<\/p>\n

\n
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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. \u2026 Our view is, the middle powers must act together, because if we\u2019re not at the table, we\u2019re on the menu.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Carney took care not to mention Trump by name; nor, even implicitly, did he blame him exclusively for these developments, noting that \u201ca series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics\u201d had \u201claid bare the risks of extreme global integration\u201d \u201cover the past two decades.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, these trends have accelerated, and the resulting crises have intensified, in just the past year or so\u2014and Trump has been the main source of exacerbation. We are now seeing some of the consequences. He sends warships to distant waters\u2014the intended object of the message shrugs. He drops thousands of bombs with great power and meticulous accuracy\u2014to no effect. He yells at a foreign leader, \u201cJump!\u201d\u2014and the leader ignores him rather than asking \u201cHow high?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more One of the Supreme Court\u2019s Worst Decisions Is About to Turn 50. It\u2019s Past Time to Reverse It.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trump\u2019s misunderstandings and abuses of power are sparking a recalculation of power balances.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":172,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[10,38,39,136,41,55],"class_list":["post-173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-war-stories","tag-donald-trump","tag-foreign-policy","tag-iran","tag-israel","tag-ukraine","tag-war"],"yoast_head":"\nTrump Is Making the U.S. an Increasingly Irrelevant Power - Home Move Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=173\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trump Is Making the U.S. an Increasingly Irrelevant Power - 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