In the last two weeks, the US has demonstrated its hegemonic control in three continents.
In Latin America, it has taken over the main levers of power in Venezuela, potentially one of the world’s great oil producers. In Europe, it faces only tame resistance from the continent’s two great alliances, the European Union and Nato, to its declared intention to annex Greenland, a semi-autonomous part of Denmark with an area six times the size of Germany.
In Asia, President Donald Trump can claim to have forced Iran by threat of military action to stop shooting or executing protesters, with the Iranian foreign minister taking to Fox News this week to announce that there would be no executions.
Dramatic expansion of power
Trump claims this dramatic expansion of American power in the world to be the result of his drive to Make America Great Again. His willingness to use military force has also escalated markedly since last June, when US B-2 bombers successfully attacked nuclear facilities in Iran without facing much Iranian resistance or negative blowback at home or abroad.
Are we in a new imperial Trumpian world of unopposed American dominance, or something more shaky? Leaders from Caracas to Copenhagen and Brussels to Tehran have responded with passivity or complicity to a new Trump world order, of which they are still struggling to get the measure. Not so long ago respected academics and pundits portrayed the US as a great power in decline in an increasingly multipolar world, yet today Trump seems to call all the shots.
Declinists have a patchy record over the last half century predicting the ebb of US power, because rival countries – notably those in the Soviet Union – turned out to be in even deeper trouble. The rise and fall of great powers is not pre-ordained by long-term trends. They may also be the victim or beneficiary of some calamitous miscalculation by themselves or others, usually involving military action.
Disastrous mistakes
The three most disastrous foreign policy mistakes in the last half-century were the decision of the Argentine junta to invade the Falklands in 1982, Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait in 1990 and President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, 2022. In each case, autocratic leaders persuaded themselves that they would win an easy victory, but instead suffered failure and defeat.
Some might argue that it is wrong to include Russia in this list of failed invaders, as its army is still making small advances in the Donbas. EU and Nato leaders continually ring the alarm bells about the Russian threat to Eastern Europe. In reality, the Russian invasion was a complete and unexpected debacle. The CIA correctly predicted the Russian attack, but were astonished by its total lack of success.
In the space of a few chaotic weeks, Russia ceased to be viewed as a great power capable of standing up to the US, even if it still possessed a nuclear arsenal. Nearly four years on, and over one million dead and wounded Russian soldiers later, Putin’s forces are still fighting a static attritional war in which they are nibbling their way forward but look unlikely to win a decisive victory.
Yet the world has been curiously blind to the Russian failure in Ukraine, crucial though it is to Trump becoming world hegemon. Putin was never going to admit that his “special military operation” had produced a debacle. Western leaders either genuinely believe in an inflated Russian threat or find it convenient to wrap the national flag around themselves. In either case, reliance on US arms and obeisance to Washington becomes inescapable.
Falling like dominoes
As Russia devoted all its resources to the war, its allies have fallen like dominoes. It had been rebuilding its position as a Middle East player, using its airpower to prop up Syrian president Bashar al-Assad when he came under attack in 2015, but, entangled in Ukraine, Putin did nothing to save him in 2024. It likewise did not protect its Iranian ally when it came under attack by Israel and the US in the 12-day war in 2025, or do anything for Venezuela when president Nicolas Maduro was kidnapped on 3 January this year.
All the talk about the US being cut down to size in a multipolar world has become old hat because of Ukraine. Putin was the great blunderer and Trump has been the great gainer. One of the few to recognise this early on in the war was the late Anthony H Cordesman, one of America’s most influential strategic thinkers, at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
In November 2022, he criticised those in the US who ignored “the fact that the war in Ukraine has become the equivalent of a proxy war with Russia, and a war that can be fought without any US military casualties, that unites most of the world’s democracies behind a common cause, that deeply punishes Russia for its act of aggression and strengthens every aspect of deterrence”.
This was true four years ago, and is still true today. But the advantage to the US did not end there. Then-president Joe Biden and the European states had engaged in a strange sort of anti-diplomacy in not talking to Moscow after the invasion, a stance that only made sense if the goal was the decisive military defeat of Russia, never a likely outcome given its superiority in men and resources.
Trump talks to his enemies
One of Trump’s most sensible and productive policies is to talk to his enemies. European leaders and media habitually denounce this as appeasement and then paradoxically have a tantrum when they are not included in negotiations. They deride a supposedly naïve Trump for being suckered by the evil, but wily, Putin into selling out Ukraine. But, though Trump’s mediation has not succeeded, it has placed Trump in the ideal diplomatic position in which both Russia and the European powers pay court to him and dare do nothing to offend him.
Russia has accepted the destruction of its foreign allies almost without a murmur and the great European powers – Germany, France and UK – turn the other cheek in the face of grotesque interference in their domestic affairs. Trump’s plan to annex Greenland has reduced the European members of Nato to paroxysms of double talk in which they send a trip-wire force to Greenland to deter a US land-grab, while pretending that it is there to defend the arctic wasteland from a Russian army that has difficulty creeping forward from one ruined village to another in the Donbas.
Trump poses a far greater danger to Europe than Putin, by which I do not mean to rehabilitate in any way the discredited Russian autocrat. But as a warlord he is of the Inspector Clouseau brand, and the Ukraine war has exposed Russian weakness not its strength.
The threat from Moscow is limited and territorial; the threat from Trump is both territorial and ideological. It is a frightening development when one has to check the caption of a video of armed masked men in paramilitary uniform attacking civilians to see if the incident took place in Minneapolis or Tehran.
As other great powers seek his favour, Trump can run rampant, but his mercurial interventions mean a world engulfed in never-ending crises.
Further thoughts
Defecting Tory Robert Jenrick has been blaming his old party for “breaking Britain” and saying that Reform will put Humpty Dumpty together again. I have an instant suspicion that anybody who speaks of “Broken Britain” is likely to make a bad situation considerably worse.
The phrase sounds like a healthy admission of failure with the implication that something positive is going to be done to put things right. In practice, politicians use the words to conveniently turn fixable failures into systemic failures, so that no chief executive or government ministry can be fairly found to be at fault; instead they can claim to have been yet one more victim of the “Broken Britain” disease.
A further objection to the phrase is that it is a gross exaggeration. It is true that water supply, rail transport, the care system and the NHS do not work as well as they ought, but their patchy performance does not mean that they do not work at all. Waterless people in Kent and Surrey may currently be grinding their teeth and speaking of Britain as a Third World country, but this shows that the complainants have never lived in a really poor country. Experience of national brokenness differs markedly, and often inexplicably, from region to region.
I live in Canterbury, parts of which have recently suffered from a water shortage. But, like the rest of East Kent, the city enjoys an efficient high-speed train service to St Pancras International station in London. Part of the HS1 rail system connecting London to the Channel Tunnel and Kent, it opened in 2007.
Belief in “Broken Britain” stems in some part from misperceptions. People will declaim about the collapse of the NHS, but then add, in some perplexity, that their own treatment as a patient has been beyond criticism. Likewise, some 67 per cent of the public believe that immigration into Britain is rising when in fact it fell by two thirds in the year up to June 2025.
What further muddies the waters is that there really are inexcusable disasters, such as the HS2 railway project. With £40bn already spent out of an estimated final cost of over £100bn, the line will cost more per kilometre than any other high-speed rail project in the world. That includes the Lyon-Turin high-speed railway running through and under the Alps which includes a 57.5 kilometre tunnel, the longest in the world (so much for a single bat tunnel being responsible for the high cost).
Gross blunders include letting the contractors take over much of the planning process, including the award of cost-plus contracts under which going over budget increased profits. Nor did politicians explain why a small country like Britain, with its big cities close together, needed ultra-high speed rail links in the first place.
The fiasco has by now generated a small industry of official reports, books and articles explaining what went wrong. The most lucid I have read recently is in the Financial Times, examining the project and comparing it with Japan’s Chuo-Shinkansen line.
Below the Radar
Up to about 2019, Iran had been largely successful in repelling its enemies in the 40 years since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, but about that time the regime seemed to run out of ideas as to what to do next as its enemies mustered against it.
I was writing in my hotel room in central Baghdad on 1 October, 2019, when I heard the pop-pop of gunfire outside. I was not alarmed because I imagined that somebody must be celebrating a wedding or the result of a football match, but the sound went on and on. I took the lift down to the lobby where a man ran through the doors saying that the security forces had opened fire on a protest march and there were many dead.
The protest was the latest in a series in Baghdad protesting about unemployment, government corruption and the lack of electricity and water. The protesters had previously gained little traction – until the security forces opened fire and started killing people en masse. Instructions to do so were reported to have come from General Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds force commander, who was then a great power through his control of the Hashd al-Shaabi Shia paramilitary units and through Hezbollah in Lebanon.
These were part of Iran’s famous “Axis of Resistance”, though they never did much to resist Israel so far as I could see. Soleimani was assassinated by a US drone on the orders of President Donald Trump on 3 January, 2020. Iran retaliated with feeble missile attacks on US bases in Iraq which only took place after the Americans had been informed that the missiles were coming – showing a caution that probably gave Trump a measure of Iranian military weakness and hesitation.
Cockburn’s Picks
I have always felt that racism in multiple forms – namely anti-immigrant sentiment and opposition to civil rights for black citizens – is at the heart of the appeal of Trumpism in the US.
Trump himself seemed to confirm this in his long and fascinating interviews with the New York Times during which he said that the civil rights movement led to white people being “very badly treated,” something he is keen to counter by “reverse discrimination” targeting African-Americans and the Hispanic population – as well as women – while favouring white males. The presumption is that no non-white or woman would have won high office without unfair bias in their favour by the state.
Your next read
square REBECCA REIDGrandparents who don’t help with childcare are staggeringly selfish
square SARAH BAXTERNeedy, greedy Trump is no longer loved by America – the polls prove it
square ROBERT FOX Are We Ready For War?Drafting in 65-year-olds? The UK’s plan for war is pathetic
square ZOë GRüNEWALDRobert Jenrick has a plan – and it will eat Reform alive
Hence then, the article about putin is not the greatest threat to europe it s trump was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Putin is not the greatest threat to Europe – it’s Trump )
Also on site :