One of the ways in which Donald Trump’s regime obscures and distracts is by drawing our eyes constantly to the US – its raw power to intimidate and bully other nations, and its vast financial heft in wielding soft power through organisations such as USAid.

But at the same time as Trump projects his agenda on to the world stage, he is withdrawing the US from the world and reducing its role to its bare bones – an imperial power that blatantly picks and chooses how to engage based on its alliances and interests. American taxpayer money is ever so precious on the one hand, but on the other can be profligately spent on proposals to take over an entire territory in Gaza and send billions in aid to Israel. This is not isolationism, it is unilateralism.

In doing so, the US, despite its domination of the headlines, is withdrawing from a world from which it has been receding for a long time as a moral, military and economic force into selective engagement. The arc of that recession is wide. It was “the end of history” in the early 90s, when the end of the cold war was predicted to herald a new world in which liberal capitalist values dominated under globalisation and free trade, and democracy flourished as the Soviet Union and its autocracies across eastern Europe collapsed. But in the three decades since, the US expanded then caved in on itself.

The country kicked off that period with several active military deployments and campaigns across the Middle East and south Asia under the guise of establishing security and democratic rights, as well as a robust system of broadly observed sanctions on deviant parties. It ended it with a hasty retreat from Afghanistan with zero of its objectives met, a drawdown of troops in Iraq and a host of empty ambassadorships across the world. On 7 October 2023, the US had no ambassadors in Israel,........

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