Under Trump, America and its allies occupy a position of global preeminence not seen since the end of World War II. By Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness.
With a whimper rather than a bang, the world has become a different place than it was in January 2021, when Donald Trump left office.
Almost everything we are now told [by the media] about the global status quo is mistaken — largely because critics focus only on what Trump says rather than on what he does. …
Summary:
We are not bogged down in a forever war with Iran; we are engaged in over four months of frustrating negotiations with a theocracy that has no intention of giving up its nuclear weapons and ability to bully and undermine most of the Middle East.
Israel is not without friends and is more regionally dominant than at any point in its history. Radical Islam — whether in the form of the Iranian regime, Hezbollah, Hamas, or the Houthis — is at its weakest point in half a century.
China is recalibrating nearly all of the assumptions it has held for the past two decades. Russia is humiliated and hemorrhaging. Latin America is more pro-American than ever before. …
Almost all illegal immigration from Mexico and Latin America has abruptly ceased, for the first time in history. …
Middle East:
The Middle East is now suddenly a different place. Whatever the final denouement with Iran, Tehran has lost a half-century and half-trillion-dollar investment in its military and nuclear industrial complex. The once-feared bully of the Muslim Middle East has been humiliated and exposed as a paper tiger, with its economy, and perhaps its very existence, now dependent on the disposition of the Trump administration. In its sporadic missile launches, Iran often leaves Israel alone because it knows the Jewish state can target any of its unhinged leaders whenever hostilities resume.
In a development that would once have seemed surreal, Israel is providing intelligence and missile defense to the Muslim Gulf states, which are effectively fighting alongside the United States and Israel against a fellow Muslim nation.
Hamas has been crushed. Hezbollah’s once-feared missile arsenal and many of its crazy leaders have been largely eliminated. The Houthis, lacking any credible air defenses, know that every missile they launch at Israel or into the Red Sea could cost them another port facility or power station. Lebanon is reawakening from its 50-year coma.
Russia lost its last client in the Middle East with the fall of the Assad regime. Neither China nor Russia can any longer supply Iran by land, sea, or air. Nor can they either purchase its sanctioned oil. …
Energy:
Soon the Strait of Hormuz — Iran’s supposed trump card — will be nearly as irrelevant to global energy markets as it is already to the United States. Existing pipelines that bypass the Gulf are being expanded. New ones are planned or already under construction to the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Gulf of Oman beyond the Strait. The United States is the largest producer of oil and gas in history and does not need Middle Eastern oil or gas — or, for that matter, much of anything else besides. …
Europe:
Europe publicly despises Trump. Privately, however, many Europeans concede that his antics compelled them to meet their long-neglected 2 percent defense commitments and inspired their new pledges to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense. …
Europe now quietly acknowledges that Trump was right — and just in time to accelerate rearmament as Russia pressed westward. If left unchecked, Europe’s embrace of near-total disarmament, shocking demographic decline, unending hostility toward fossil fuels and nuclear energy, mass illegal immigration from the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere, and steadily expanding socialism will turn the continent into a third world hellhole. …
Russia:
Our rival Russia is now in its weakest political, economic, and military condition since the post-Soviet chaos of the 1990s. Had anyone predicted five years ago that Russia would be importing gasoline or that buildings around the Kremlin would routinely be struck by drones, he would have been dismissed as delusional. Nor could anyone have imagined Russia suffering perhaps well over one million dead, wounded, missing, or captured in a Stalingrad-like slog of its own making in Ukraine — while losing perhaps half its arsenal of ships, tanks, and aircraft.
China:
It is stagnating almost as rapidly as it once rose, burdened by a fertility rate of just 1.0. …
An aging, increasingly isolated, and deeply paranoid leader knows that an invasion of Taiwan could prove as disastrous for China as the wars in Ukraine and Iran have been for Russia and Iran. Meanwhile, a gradually awakening West seems to be finally weary of Chinese mercantilism and is starting to demand reciprocity in trade. …
Military:
Meanwhile, with the departure of the Biden-era DEI apparatus, the U.S. military has exceeded every one of its recruiting targets, all of which had, in recent years, been anemic….
Its weapons procurement system is undergoing revolutionary changes, placing as much emphasis on quantity and affordability as on quality.
Small, high-tech defense start-ups are finally being given the chance to compete with ossified conglomerates that have long relied on lobbyists to preserve their costly monopolies. Even left-leaning Silicon Valley, once largely hostile to the defense industry, is now emulating the World War II-era War Production Board in its eagerness to ensure U.S. global supremacy in next-generation weaponry. …
Tech:
America is pulling ahead in most of the next-generation fields of rocketry, satellite launches, space exploration, artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering, and cryptocurrency. Its stock market is at record highs. …
Conclusion:
America’s allies are growing stronger, while the China–Russia axis grows weaker. …
Add it all up, and the picture is almost surreal: at the very moment the Left insists that the United States has grown weak and isolated, America and its allies occupy a position of global preeminence not seen since the end of World War II.