Axis of Evil 2.0

Observing all of this from afar, the president fired off a “Truth” that sounded a little, well, neoconservative. (Bold is mine.)

Donald Trump doesn’t typically treat Putin and Kim as enemies, let alone co-conspirators in a plot to reduce American influence in the world. He doesn’t even treat Xi as an enemy, despite his pretensions to nationalism and China hawkery. To have him suddenly accuse the three of working against the United States—accurately, of course—felt very “Axis of Evil.” Which, you may recall, is a doctrine that’s associated with a starkly different kind of Republican president and Republican Party.

While it’s nice to see a ray of clarity penetrate his mind, I’m confused by his tone. Don’t he and MAGA want a multipolar world? Reducing American influence abroad is a good thing, isn’t it?

It’s always risky with Trump to attribute to strategy what might properly be explained by narcissism. This is a guy who, as recently as two weeks ago, was still telling other heads of state that he thinks Putin “wants to make a deal for me” on Ukraine. His belief in his ability to charm world leaders into tossing aside their own interests and cooperating with him to earn his friendship is unshakable.

You can read his annoyance with the festivities in Beijing through that lens. Like a child excluded from a classmate’s birthday party, maybe he’s mad that he wasn’t invited. Or maybe he’s jealous at seeing a rival treated to the sort of kowtowing from powerful allies that only he, as emperor of America, deserves. Or maybe he’s miffed about not getting to sit at the “cool kids’ table”: Having observed him as long as you have, do you really think he prefers having Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron on his team rather than the strongmen currently surrounding Xi?

My guess is that Trump’s irritation derives mostly from the fact that he’s gone to unusual lengths to court Putin and Kim and has zippo to show for it.

He was criticized harshly by the American left and parts of the American right for holding summits with both men, convinced as ever that he could leverage his charisma and supposed dealmaking genius to get Putin to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Kim to end North Korea’s nuclear program. What he got instead was bupkis. He promoted himself as a peacemaker, and they made him look like a chump—and now, to add insult to injury, they’re eagerly cuddling up to America’s archenemy in Beijing. No wonder he’s sore.

If you doubt that narcissism influences his policy decisions (and none of us do in 2025, do we?), consider the surprising collapse of his relationship with Modi.

The two are kindred spirits, messianic nationalists with cults of personality powering their support, and they began to build ties with each other during Trump’s first term. For a president who’s keen to contain Chinese influence, there was strategic sense in making an ally of a developing nation on China’s doorstep that prefers Western democracy and boasts a consumer market of more than 1 billion people.

But it started to fall apart in June—over a phone call, according to the New York Times.

Keen as ever to tout his peacemaking credentials, Trump reportedly told Modi that he was proud to have ended the brief hostilities earlier this year between India and Pakistan. He also noted that the Pakistanis intended to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize (an award for which he’s actively lobbying), which was his way of hinting that the Indians would be wise to follow suit.

“The Indian leader bristled,” the Times claims. “He told Mr. Trump that U.S. involvement had nothing to do with the recent ceasefire. It had been settled directly between India and Pakistan.” (Which wasn’t exactly true.) Modi had his own strongman reputation to protect, you see, and couldn’t risk having his supporters believe that he was too weak to bring Pakistan to heel without American help. He wouldn’t give the president credit.

Soon after, the White House slapped India with a 25 percent tariff, a heavy blow for a country that exports more goods to America than to any other country. Trump then turned around and doubled it to 50 percent to punish India for buying Russian oil—even though China, a bigger consumer, hasn’t been similarly sanctioned and Russia itself is subject to a tariff of just 10 percent.

This weekend Britain’s Telegraph reported that Trump has phoned Modi no less than four times recently in hopes of working out a deal, only to have the prime minister decline the call each time. Instead Modi has buddied up to his neighbors Putin and Xi to show Washington that his country doesn’t need the United States after all.

If you can find any strategic logic in carefully cultivating a relationship with India only to blow it up in a matter of months, I’m all ears. Occam’s razor holds that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and the simplest explanation in this case (and for any dispute involving our current government) is that there’s some petty narcissistic grievance at the heart of it.

But the probability that Tuesday night’s “Truth” was motivated by jealousy shouldn’t absolve Trump from answering for its strategic implications. Why should an “America First” president care if Eastern strongmen in China’s “sphere of influence” are scheming with Beijing?

Because I’m a child of the Cold War, I prefer a unipolar world led by America to a multipolar one in which America is one power among several.

Offer me a multipolar order in which all of the poles involve nations governed by different flavors of liberalism and I might revisit that. But give me one where the choice is between a world dominated by America and a world in which half or more of the planet is dominated by totalitarians, which has in fact been the choice for most of my life, and there’s nothing to discuss.

That’s why I’m not a postliberal. Postliberals admire authoritarianism and want it to succeed abroad because they believe its success will make it more appealing in the West. They certainly don’t think the United States should be in the business of actively trying to contain it. “America First” is a reaction to 80 years of Washington striving to do that, sometimes through military force; if isolationism means anything, it means ending that project and allowing a multipolar order to bloom. Let Russia and China dominate in their “spheres of influence” so long as they leave the U.S. to dominate in its own.

I thought that’s what Trump believed, too. We get to meddle in Greenland and bomb Venezuelan narcotics traffickers and Russia and China get to do the same with their weakling neighbors. So what was he doing yesterday spinning whiny theories about Xi, Putin, and Kim “conspiring” against America? Isn’t this week’s Beijing summit a simple matter of major powers in the Eastern “sphere” meeting to sort out how things should run in their backyard?

I suppose it’s possible to be an isolationist who faults foreign powers for their anti-American activity, but that’s a creature rarely seen in nature. A core belief of many “America First”-ers is that we would have fewer enemies abroad if we simply stopped antagonizing people. That’s why every Russia simp on the right from Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon on down has a theory that the West is ultimately to blame for the Ukraine war. NATO encroached on Moscow’s “sphere,” they’d tell you, and so Russia had little choice but to reassert itself.

For postliberals, to complain that authoritarians are conspiring against you is necessarily to ask the question, “What have we done to them to warrant such a conspiracy?” And to necessarily answer, “We trespassed on their interests and should stop doing that.” If postliberal regimes are ill-disposed to us, it’s our own fault and within our power to change it by retreating.

That’s what made Trump’s post last night shocking. Accusing three rivals with whom he’s sought better relations of conspiring against America anyway implied that their anti-Americanism isn’t a pure product of U.S. “aggression,” a point seldom heard on the postliberal right or left. And if that’s true, it might also be true that allowing them to consolidate power in their own “sphere” would be bad for our country long-term—a classic hawkish position and the antithesis of “America First.” When I say that he sounds neoconservative, I’m only half-joking.

What’s even stranger about all this is that the president certainly hasn’t acted like he believes Eastern powers are conspiring against the U.S.

If he were worried about that, he wouldn’t have been so glib thus far about alienating American allies. Poll after poll after poll this year has found views of China growing more favorable internationally as views of America have sunk, which is morally fatuous but understandable given how volatile and strategically irrational the president’s policymaking has been. Trump, not Xi, sowed economic havoc by declaring a trade war on the world, by rapidly dismantling foreign aid programs, by making the U.S. less hospitable to immigrants, by menacing allies Putin-style for territorial concessions, and by winding down the American-led international order that’s kept the world relatively peaceful since 1945.

You can’t end the Pax Americana and then complain when other countries decide it’s time to make friends with China. Or rather, you can—but you’ll sound ridiculous doing so.

If the president were keen to head off an Eastern-led “conspiracy” against the United States, he should have focused on containing China by cultivating alliances, prioritizing stability in economic policy to encourage continued investment from abroad, and generally avoiding anything that would make America look like a third-world basket case relative to Beijing. He … has not done those things.

And so I can’t figure out what he wants. His instinct to dominate rivals, including rivals abroad, has run up against his instinct to separate himself and the country from foreigners as much as possible. Does he want a unipolar world in which America leads and no one dares conspire against it? Or does he want a multipolar one in which America minds its own business and runs the risk of a conspiracy being hatched against it by enemies?

He wants both, of course.

Like most of his constituents, I suspect the president takes American hegemony for granted. It will persist because it must persist, because it’s all most of us have ever known. We can retreat to our own “sphere of influence” and shed the responsibilities of governing a unipolar world without needing to worry much about the threats that a multipolar order might create. Any “conspirators” can and will be dealt with ruthlessly. No one pushes the U.S. around.

Americans have a lot of political beliefs like that. Democracy will continue to function as it always has. Entitlements will endure because they always do. The world’s best talent will continue to flock here, as they’ve always done. We’ll lead in science and technology because that’s the way it is. We landed on the moon, you know.  

If you understand Trump’s movement as a nostalgic fantasy about national greatness, then it makes sense that he and they would believe that all it takes to extend American preeminence into the future is to make America more like it was in the past. You don’t need a specific plan for how that’s going to work, just faith that there’s no problem tomorrow might present that yesterday can’t solve.

I agree with Jonathan Last when he writes that Trump is more a symptom of this foolishness than the cause. “Trump’s second election was confirmation to the world that the American people can no longer be relied upon,” Last argues. “We are too—well, you can fill in your own descriptor. Vapid? Decadent? Unserious? Inconstant? Whatever word you choose, the idea is the same: America as it existed from World War II to 2016 is a spent force. That age is over.” I’ve said as much myself, more than once.

For that reason, the president shouldn’t take it personally when Narendra Modi and other leaders descend on Beijing to kiss Xi Jinping’s ring. They’re not snubbing him, they’re simply shifting their bets on global leadership as a declining America goes about committing national suicide. A figure as infamously transactional as Trump should understand better than most that a “conspiracy” is just another transaction. He—or, rather, his voters—gave China and its allies an opportunity to transact. Why wouldn’t they take it?