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We’ve lifted the paywall. Foreign Policy’s coverage of the Iran war is free to read for a limited time.

As the war against Iran being waged by the United States and Israel approaches its third week, there are far more important things to consider than most of what one can gather by following each day’s headlines.

Vastly more consequential than the status of shipping in the Strait of Hormuz or the fluctuations of oil prices and global stock markets—and more consequential even than the nominal victory, failure, or defeat of the parties at war—is the question of how events a little more than a year into U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term will alter the power and global standing of the United States.

As the war against Iran being waged by the United States and Israel approaches its third week, there are far more important things to consider than most of what one can gather by following each day’s headlines.

Vastly more consequential than the status of shipping in the Strait of Hormuz or the fluctuations of oil prices and global stock markets—and more consequential even than the nominal victory, failure, or defeat of the parties at war—is the question of how events a little more than a year into U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term will alter the power and global standing of the United States.

This is a question that will affect everyone, everywhere, regardless of nation-level sympathies and alliances or how one feels about the United States. Such is the extent of Washington’s centrality to the world order in recent generations.

If the future can never be known, what is clear is that immense and probably irreversible changes to that global order, driven by Trump’s gut-led and impulsive foreign policy—historically unaware, bereft of gravitas, and emptied of the ordinary deliberative process that one associates with serious statecraft—are already well underway.

To understand the bluster and unilateralism of the administration, it must be seen against the backdrop of the recent U.S. past. As a self-assigned custodian of the global order, the United States has a marked predilection for war. There have been few periods since the end of World War II........

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