Never in my life did I believe I'd live to see Pax Americana collapse due to the cupidity, vanity, and racial animus of a few, buoyed by the spinelessness, cowardice, and full-throated ignorance of so very many.
2026 is one week old, and in those seven days, our lawless regime has illegally seized control of a sovereign nation with no apparent long-term plan, with callous disregard for the civilian and diplomatic consequences. They have rattled sabers at our allies such that a century-long era of unprecedented peace and prosperity teeters on the brink. They have denied the facts that we see and hear with our own eyes and ears to obscure the wanton murders and mistreatment of both citizens and immigrants, and to bury the shame of their insurrection. And we now stand alone as the only country in the world to openly deny science by withdrawing from the UN's leading scientific institutions and the Convention on Climate Change. But as much as I mourn what we've lost, I fear what we've become:
Our stated foreign policy is now to employ the tactics of the 1930s to secure the resources of the last century by military force; our scientific policy is to deny facts and shun expertise, and presumably hope that our children will make up in belligerence what they lack in competence; our economic policy is openly cribbed from the least prosperous eras in American history and burns our soft power for a shortsighted and ineffectual cash grab.
An America directed by rapacity and ignorance in equal measure; an America that sells out the public good at every turn; an America whose leaders are so openly enthralled by the weak and flailing tactics of post-Soviet Russia that we seem eager to join them as a failed empire in history books.
The ledger is already red. Lives have already been lost that can never be restored, among our citizenry and especially abroad; still we play with fire that could upend a century of freedom from territorial aggression and gunboat diplomacy. It will already take us a generation to rebuild our credibility, let alone to recover from the setbacks to our sciences, industry, and prosperity; sooner or later, it may be impossible to do so.
Either way, the shame of all this should haunt us for generations.