America’s Changing Identity Is Key To Understanding U.S. Geopolitics

Go back to 2015. In the politically placid Obama years, the trends seemed logical, forwarding-looking, and strategic. America was pivoting to Asia, for China’s rise was clearly a much greater threat to U.S. power than whatever might happen in the Middle East. It was signing a nuclear deal with Iran, for to have balance in the Middle East meant America could not ignore one of the region’s most powerful states. It was pulling its European allies together against Russia, who dared threaten the post-war order, while embracing as many states as possible in a globalized, broadly neo-liberal hug that would establish a permanent world order.

While many geopolitical analysts saw a competition between China and America, few foresaw the trade war; many forecasters could not imagine an America so strategically incoherent as to pull out of both the nuclear deal with Iran and then the Syrian battlespace that let its troops confront Tehran; and how the alarms did howl when Trump questioned NATO, as tariffs returned as part of state policy, as NAFTA came under attack, as neo-liberalism came under withering criticism from both American Left and American Right.

Why so many blown calls? Well, mainly because the professionals, myself included, thought American policy would be controlled by technocrats, professional…