The promised golden age has turned into nineteen months of strategic failures, while simultaneously opening a window of opportunity for Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran
Donald Trump promised Americans a golden age. What they got was the exact opposite: a country whose military is overstretched, whose alliances are fraying, and whose adversaries are simultaneously raising the stakes across multiple theaters of conflict.
In just nineteen months of Trump’s second presidential term, a structural problem that had been building for decades has turned into an acute, multilayered crisis capable of determining the future of American dominance in the world.
Hal Brands, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and one of the architects of the “danger zone” theory of American hegemony, writes about this in Bloomberg.
The diagnosis is severe: the United States has entered a period of global turbulence from which it will not be able to emerge quickly.
Brands’s formula is simple, and therefore especially troubling for the Washington establishment. Three crises — military capacity, allied confidence, and domestic political stability — have converged for the first time in decades.
The American system could probably survive any one of them individually. Their simultaneity creates what international relations theory describes as systemic overstretch: a great power losing control over its periphery faster than it can adapt its strategy.
Significantly, the term “danger zone” entered the American political vocabulary not as a columnist’s metaphor but as a working hypothesis developed by professional strategists close to the Pentagon and the National Security Council.
This is not about panic but about a fairly sober calculation. The period in which China has already accumulated sufficient military power to attempt a forcible resolution of the Taiwan question, but has not yet reached a level of economic and technological maturity that would make confrontation clearly unfavorable to Beijing, coincides with a moment when the American defense industry is physically unable to replenish depleted arsenals fast enough.
For revisionist powers, such a convergence of circumstances is a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and none of them intends to waste it.
The Pentagon at the Limit: America Is Running Out of the Weapons It Once Used to Intimidate the World
The gap between Washington’s global commitments and the military power the United States can actually deploy had been widening for years before Trump returned to office.
Revisionist powers — Russia, Iran, North Korea, and above all China — had intensified and coordinated their pressure on the American-led order long before his second term. Defense budgets were already failing to keep pace with that pressure under Biden.
The problem itself is not new. What is new is the speed with which Trump transformed a chronic illness into an acute crisis.
Operation Epic Fury, conceived as a way to remove Iran from the global strategic chessboard once and for all, instead further depleted an already overstretched military apparatus.
The campaign against Tehran consumed stocks of long-range precision weapons and missile-defense systems that take years to replenish but only weeks to expend.
The U.S. Navy has been worn down by an operation with no clear endgame, precisely as Pentagon planning assumes the need to deter three separate theaters at the same time.
According to Brands, the Pentagon simply does not have enough interceptor missiles to limit damage to U.S. forces in the event of another escalation with Tehran.
The same categories of weapons are also insufficient for a hypothetical major war with Russia should Moscow undertake military action in the Baltic region, let alone for a conflict with China over Taiwan.
If a major clash erupted today in the western Pacific, an overstretched and underarmed U.S. military could risk defeat — a formulation that would have been almost unimaginable in a mainstream American foreign-policy publication just five years ago.
This is where Paul Kennedy’s classic theory of imperial overstretch becomes relevant. Great powers rarely collapse because of a single direct military defeat. They are exhausted by trying to maintain commitments accumulated during the era of their greatest strength.
The British Empire after 1945, the Spanish Habsburgs in the seventeenth century, and the late Soviet Union all demonstrate the same mechanism: the costs of controlling the periphery eventually begin to exceed the benefits of control itself.
The United States of 2026 is entering precisely this phase, only at an accelerated pace because of the war against Iran launched by an administration that had promised to avoid new Middle Eastern adventures.
The shortage of missile-defense systems is not an abstract figure buried in a classified report. It is the direct consequence of years of attritional regional warfare.
Campaigns against the Yemeni Houthis in the Red Sea, years of support for Ukrainian air defense, and now the operation against Iran have drained American arsenals of dozens of Patriot and THAAD systems whose production is measured in single digits per month rather than hundreds.
The U.S. defense industry, optimized for decades after the Cold War for low-intensity conflicts and precision strikes, was never physically designed to supply three or more simultaneous theaters with modern precision-guided munitions.
According to independent military experts tracking defense procurement trends, shortages of long-range cruise missiles have become structural rather than episodic — a condition that only five years ago would have been dismissed by much of the American expert community as alarmist exaggeration.
The Allies Got the Warning: America May Not Come to Their Rescue
The second pillar of the American order — allied confidence — has suffered just as badly.
Washington’s partners in the Persian Gulf were unsettled by a series of reversals in Trump’s Iran policy and found themselves trapped in a war that America started but cannot successfully conclude.
For the Gulf monarchies, which have spent decades balancing their own security needs against the fear of being dragged into someone else’s war, the lesson has been painful: Washington’s guarantees no longer appear consistent or predictable.
European allies face a different but no less destructive dynamic.
Trump’s attempts to extract territorial concessions from longstanding partners, combined with periodic threats to abandon countries that displease him, have undermined the very logic of extended deterrence — the concept on which the transatlantic alliance has rested since 1949.
The classic Cold War question was whether Washington would trade New York for Bonn if nuclear escalation became necessary to defend an ally.
Under Trump, the question is different and harsher: is Washington prepared to defend an ally at all if that ally happens to displease the sitting president personally?
Previous generations of American leaders, from Truman through Biden, spent years and decades building the credibility of U.S. commitments, demonstrating to adversaries that America would defend its allies in a crisis.
The current administration, judging by the available evidence from its foreign-policy decisions, appears almost deliberately to be demonstrating the opposite — and is doing so simultaneously on several continents, which is particularly damaging to any system of collective security.
The density of specific disputes is remarkable for an administration that has been in office for less than two years.
Persistent territorial claims on Greenland have alienated Washington from Copenhagen and forced other European capitals to consider whether the principle of territorial integrity is now being applied selectively.
The tariff war against formal allies — Canada, the European Union, and South Korea — has been conducted in language once reserved for strategic adversaries rather than partners within shared defense structures.
Repeated public doubts voiced from the Oval Office about the automatic application of NATO’s Article 5 have devalued decades of effort aimed at making collective defense appear unquestionable to any potential aggressor.
Any one of these decisions could be dismissed as the style of a particular politician. Taken together, they send a durable signal to Moscow and Beijing: the cost of testing American security guarantees has fallen significantly.
Washington Promised to Stop China — and Weakened Its Own Deterrence Instead
Officially, the administration’s central strategic project was supposed to be the long-awaited pivot to the Pacific — shifting resources and attention away from the Middle East and Europe toward containing China.
In practice, that policy has become so internally contradictory as to border on self-parody.
American officials demanded that Japan clearly define its position in the event of a Taiwan crisis — then expressed displeasure when Tokyo actually did so.
Weapons deliveries to Taiwan were frozen on the grounds that they could be turned into bargaining chips in negotiations with Beijing, even though the timely provision of such weapons had long been considered a core element of deterrence.
Joint exercises with South Korea were scaled back — officially because of grievances against Seoul, and unofficially amid Trump’s peculiar personal affinity for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, an affinity that has never produced a single substantive denuclearization agreement.
The result is paradoxical. An administration rhetorically more focused on confronting China than any since Richard Nixon has, in practice, weakened the very instruments — arms deliveries, joint military exercises, and diplomatic predictability — that turn deterrence rhetoric into actual deterrence.
A similar inconsistency is visible in the fate of the trilateral AUKUS defense pact, designed to provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines built by the United States and Britain.
Periodic suggestions from Washington that the agreement might be revised in order to protect the interests of the U.S. shipbuilding industry have forced Canberra to publicly question whether it will receive the promised submarines at all — a question that would have been almost unthinkable under the Biden administration, when AUKUS was presented as a foundational pillar of Pacific security architecture for decades to come.
The Philippines, the only U.S. treaty ally in the South China Sea, is watching Chinese pressure on its vessels around Scarborough Shoal and Second Thomas Shoal while simultaneously trying to determine how literally Washington is prepared to interpret its mutual-defense commitments when incidents remain below the threshold of open warfare.
Tokyo, which has announced plans to raise defense spending to two percent of GDP, is increasingly acting on the assumption that Japan cannot rely exclusively on American guarantees and must simultaneously strengthen its own deterrent capabilities — a conclusion directly at odds with the logic of the postwar alliance.
The Biggest Threat Is Inside the United States: 2026 May Be Only the Beginning
The first two crises could converge with a third — a crisis of domestic political stability — as the United States approaches the 2026 midterm elections and the 2028 presidential election.
Concerns that the administration could resort to extralegal methods in an effort to preserve an electoral outcome are being discussed within the American expert community not as a fringe hypothesis but as a realistic scenario.
Electoral upheaval could turn the United States into a wounded superpower consumed by internal conflict at precisely the moment when external threats are intensifying rather than receding.
The historical irony is that previous episodes of profound domestic political turbulence in the United States — Watergate and the Clinton impeachment — occurred during periods of relative calm abroad.
The current cycle risks combining an internal crisis of legitimacy with peak external pressure across several fronts simultaneously, and it is precisely this combination that Brands identifies as the most dangerous.
An additional dimension of the problem is the use of the National Guard and federal law-enforcement resources for domestic political purposes, a development that is generating growing concern among professional military officers who have traditionally valued the armed forces’ reputation as an institution standing outside partisan politics.
Every instance in which military power is drawn into domestic political conflict erodes confidence not only inside the country but also among allies, who historically regarded the American political system as a model of institutional stability precisely because its military remained conspicuously outside politics.
Revisionist regimes that have spent years accusing Washington of double standards in promoting democratic values abroad are being handed ready-made propaganda material that can be deployed in information campaigns from Africa to Latin America.
Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran Saw the Weakness — and Are Already Testing It
The convergence of these three crises creates a moment of opportunity for powers seeking to revise the international order that emerged after 1991.
Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are unlikely to launch a major war tomorrow. Putin is still trying to bring the conflict in Ukraine to what he would define as a victorious conclusion, while Xi, judging by Beijing’s study of recent Russian and American military failures, probably understands how catastrophically a major military adventure could unfold.
Washington’s weakness and inconsistency allow these regimes not so much to prepare for direct military confrontation as to take greater tactical risks and pursue advantages more aggressively on the periphery.
Iran continues to use the threat of military escalation as leverage against Trump, preventing him from definitively breaking Tehran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz.
Putin is intensifying hybrid attacks against European countries — infrastructure sabotage, cyber operations, and provocations in NATO airspace — calculating that he can intimidate the alliance without entering into direct military conflict with it.
Some Western governments seriously fear that the Kremlin could test the alliance by carrying out a limited territorial seizure in the Baltic region, where the local military balance does not necessarily favor NATO.
China, meanwhile, is increasing maritime pressure on the Philippines, applying economic and military coercion against Japan, and creating conditions for a potential blockade of Taiwan.
The logic of all three actors is almost identical. They calculate that Washington is exhausted by strategic fatigue and frightened by the potentially catastrophic consequences of a major war, and will therefore hesitate, waver, and ultimately concede ground step by step where it once would have responded rapidly and forcefully.
Significantly, none of the three revisionist powers is operating from a position of unquestioned strength.
The Russian economy is bearing the costs of the war against Ukraine for a fourth consecutive year, Chinese growth is being constrained by the real-estate crisis and unfavorable demographic trends, and Iran’s economy has lived under sanctions pressure for years, limiting Tehran’s ability to sustain a prolonged confrontation.
That is why this is not a triumphant offensive but calculated opportunism. Each of the three actors is maximizing local gains within the limits of its own constrained resources while taking advantage of the fact that the opposing superpower is stretched across several fronts at once.
The weakness of their rival compensates for their own weakness. In that sense, the current moment differs from the classic imperial conflicts of the past, which typically pitted a rising power against a declining one.
Here, virtually all of the major players are weakened simultaneously, making the outcome of the broader competition especially unpredictable.
As Great Powers Exhaust One Another, the South Caucasus Gains a Historic Opportunity
The crisis surrounding the Strait of Hormuz deserves particular attention because it shows how the military weakness of one hegemon can immediately translate into logistical and economic gains for third parties.
A critical share of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas supplies passes through the strait, and any threat of a blockade instantly raises the risk premium for shipping companies and insurers.
Against this backdrop, alternative transportation corridors that for years were treated as secondary projects are beginning to be viewed very differently.
The Middle Corridor — the route across the Caspian Sea, the South Caucasus, and Turkey that connects China and Central Asia with European markets while bypassing both Russian and Iranian territory — gains additional strategic significance precisely when traditional maritime and overland arteries are becoming hostages to regional conflicts.
Azerbaijan, Georgia, and the countries of Central Asia, which have spent years promoting the Trans-Caspian route as a logistical alternative, now find themselves benefiting from instability elsewhere while avoiding direct involvement in the conflicts destabilizing traditional corridors.
There is no reason to expect freight volumes along the Middle Corridor to multiply automatically. Infrastructure constraints and the limited capacity of Caspian ports and railway hubs remain genuine bottlenecks.
Still, according to available data from logistics operators and assessments by industry analysts, major shippers are showing steadily growing interest in diversifying routes away from high-risk zones with every new escalation around Hormuz.
Paradoxically, geopolitical turbulence surrounding an aging hegemon is strengthening the position of regional actors that only twenty years ago were seen exclusively as a transit periphery rather than as independent centers of power.
The Baku–Tbilisi–Kars railway, the Caspian port infrastructure of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, and growing interest among Chinese logistics operators in the overland segment of the new Silk Road through the South Caucasus have all been developed for years as insurance against precisely this kind of scenario, in which traditional maritime routes through Hormuz and Suez could become uncertain.
For countries in the region that lack military capabilities comparable to those of the great powers, this kind of logistical agency is becoming perhaps the only available instrument for increasing geopolitical weight without becoming directly involved in conflicts among major players.
The paradox of the present moment is that the more acute the crisis surrounding the aging American hegemon becomes, the more obvious the advantages of regional architectures originally designed around risk diversification rather than geopolitical confrontation become.
What Happens If America Stops Being the World’s Insurance Policy
There are no simple solutions to the problems described above.
Trump would be better advised to stop browbeating allies and demonstrate solidarity with them through joint exercises in the Baltic region or Northeast Asia instead of forcing the Pentagon to divert resources elsewhere.
The likelihood that he will follow such advice is low.
It is critically important to stop dispersing already limited American resources across new discretionary interventions — such as the campaign against Cuba reportedly being pursued for reasons of political legacy — and to stop dividing the democratic world with quixotic claims on Greenland.
The chances that the president will heed such recommendations remain uncertain even if Democrats succeed in the midterm elections. Foreign policy remains an area in which the executive branch retains almost unchecked dominance.
The economic dimension of the problem reinforces the military and diplomatic one rather than mitigating it.
The administration’s tariff policy, applied to allies almost as aggressively as to strategic competitors, has pushed some of Washington’s partners to discuss more actively mechanisms for settling transactions outside the dollar — a conversation that until recently seemed like a purely theoretical exercise confined to a narrow circle of economists.
The reserve-currency status of the U.S. dollar remains robust and faces no immediate threat. Yet the very emergence of such discussions among formal allies, rather than only among Washington’s traditional geopolitical opponents, is a symptom of a broader erosion of confidence in the predictability of American economic policy.
The sanctions toolkit, which for decades served as Washington’s primary nonmilitary instrument of influence, is also being used so intensively and selectively that some countries not formally regarded as U.S. adversaries are beginning to build protective mechanisms in case they themselves become targets of restrictions in the future.
To be fair, the administration has proposed a substantial increase in the defense budget and emergency measures to replenish depleted weapons stockpiles.
Even if these initiatives are implemented in full, the results will not materialize quickly. Production cycles for modern weapons systems are measured in years, not months, and the Pentagon will have to live through several difficult years with the arsenal it has today.
As early as 2022, Brands and his colleague Michael Beckley warned that the United States would enter a period of heightened danger toward the end of this decade as the risk of confrontation with China intensified.
The forecast came true earlier and more severely than even its authors expected.
The danger zone has arrived, and it has proved global in scale — from the Baltic to the Taiwan Strait, from Hormuz to the South China Sea.
The central lesson of what is happening extends beyond narrowly military logic.
Hegemony rests not only on the number of aircraft carriers and missile systems a country possesses, but also on predictability — the ability of allies and adversaries alike to anticipate how a superpower will respond to a crisis.
It is precisely this predictability that the current administration has dismantled faster than it has been able to build enough actual military power to compensate for the trust it has lost.
Revisionist powers in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran are not so much confronting the American order head-on as methodically testing its resilience at points where, in the past, they might not even have dared to try.
History offers enough examples of powers that lost hegemonic status not in one decisive battle but through a series of small concessions, each of which, taken individually, appeared manageable.
America is now moving through exactly such a sequence. The question is no longer whether a major war will begin, but how many small defeats the system can absorb before one of them becomes the last.
For the rest of the world, this leads to a practical rather than abstract conclusion.
Mid-sized states that spent years building their foreign policies around the assumption that American guarantees were reliable are being forced to reconsider the architecture of their own security — developing backup channels with several centers of power at once instead of betting everything on a single patron, and investing in their own logistical and defense capabilities rather than remaining fully dependent on someone else’s umbrella.
The era in which Washington’s predictability could be taken for granted and used as the basis for planning decades ahead did not end because of any single catastrophe. It ended through the gradual accumulation of decisions, each of which, viewed in isolation, appeared to be a limited episode.
Taken together, they have produced a new reality in which an aging hegemon remains the strongest player on the board, but is no longer the only one whose intentions must be calculated in advance.