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The Urgent Search for an Alternative World Order

The horrors of Trump’s unchecked global aggression call for a truly visionary foreign policy—not a return to the failed status quo.

Before dawn on February 28, the United States and Israel launched what Donald Trump hailed as “major combat operations in Iran” but was, in fact, an undeclared, unauthorized, and unconstitutional regime-change war. As the bombs rained down on at least 14 cities, the death toll included Iran’s 86-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and at least 165 people—most of them young girls—at a primary school. The president said the mission was “eliminating imminent threats.” In reality, it killed children, provoked counterstrikes across the Middle East, and threatened the region with another of the “forever wars” that Trump once campaigned against.

The attack on Iran represents the latest manifestation of an increasingly belligerent foreign policy that has seen US military interventions topple two government leaders in two months. The president who in 2024 declared, “I’m not going to start wars,” is now starting wars of aggression, threatening invasions, abandoning treaties, and creating chaos with such abandon that, in the words of former Obama administration adviser Ben Rhodes, “Trump’s second term has been the worst-case scenario.”

The Nation opposes Trump’s latest war, as do most Americans. But we are concerned that the response of many commentators to the Trump catastrophe is to hope for a return to a failed old order—a system of “rules” and strategies so unpopular that voters have already rejected them. That naïve longing ignores the need for this country to take a new look at its place in the world.

This issue of The Nation takes that new look from a perspective rooted in our values, experience, and history. If there is a through line in The Nation’s 160 years, it is that building a healthy and secure democracy is incompatible with an endless quest for global dominance. We know that Trump is reckless and wrong, but there’s more to our crisis than the mad ranting of an aging autocrat.

US foreign policy is adrift between an old order that is rapidly dying and a new one that is yet to be born. Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, his reelection in 2024, and the robust debates between centrists and progressives within the Democratic Party tell us that the........

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