Synopsis: The Democratic sweep in the US mid-term elections is being widely read as a rebuke to one president. Beneath it, a slower erosion has set in: of the bipartisan faith in American exceptionalism, the deeply held conviction that US supremacy is natural, and of the money and habits that kept that faith beyond question.
Somewhere between the Texas count and the Kansas count on Tuesday night, the Vice President of the United States did something unusual for a man in his position. He pointed at the war. Watching Republicans lose Senate seats in states that hadn’t sent a Democrat to Washington in generations, JD Vance blamed the rout on the conflict with Iran his own administration began. It was a candid admission. It was also a revealing one, in what it left out. A single bad decision can be pinned on a single administration. The assumptions that made the decision feel ordinary belong to both parties. They have for most of a century.
For decades, Democrats and Republicans have offered Americans different domestic choices while sharing a strikingly similar conception of America’s place in the world. They have quarrelled over taxation, healthcare, immigration and social policy, yet largely agreed that the United States should retain overwhelming military superiority, maintain a network of strategic dependencies, intervene in other countries’ affairs when its interests demanded it, and reserve for itself an outsized influence over the international order.
While the language and emphasis shifted over the years, the underlying assumptions haven’t. Democratic administrations have spoken of human rights and a rules-based order. Republican administrations have preferred military strength and American exceptionalism. Both have tended to arrive at the same place: a world in which American power remains the final arbiter of security, legitimacy and acceptable political behaviour.
That accord is getting harder to defend, and the difficulty runs deeper than Trump. Part of the appeal for those that voted for him lay in seeing what much of Washington had chosen to ignore: a great many working Americans were tired of wars abroad and of the expectation that their country should police the planet. His promise to end foreign conflicts struck a chord, especially among the young, because it spoke to a growing disillusion with what global hegemony costs the people asked to pay for it, particularly when they are rewarded not by gratitude but resentment.
Yet the gap between that promise and what followed, above all the war with Iran, exposes a problem that’s ingrained into the American psyche. A new occupant in the White House doesn’t necessarily bring fresh assumptions into the Oval office. The apparatus of intervention has a way of outliving whoever inherits it, and its vocabulary of national security and strategic necessity is available to anyone, whatever they promised voters and whatever they might personally believe.
This is why America’s political crisis can’t be read as a contest between Trumpism and liberalism. Either can become the expression of a political culture that struggles to imagine security without supremacy.
Something similar is happening around AIPAC. An organisation that once saw almost every endorsed candidate win has spent this year losing contests it would once have taken for granted, sometimes after pouring tens of millions into a single state. Questioning that influence is a question about money and democratic consent, with no quarrel against Jewish people or Israel’s right to security. What’s being tested is whether organised money can keep protecting a consensus that a growing share of voters no longer hold.
For decades, support for Israel enjoyed unusually broad bipartisan protection in Washington, and questioning it could end a career. Yet the devastation in Gaza, and the American weapons and diplomatic cover that accompanied it, have made that protection much harder to sustain. Candidates are challenging it even when the money lines up against them. The ingrained position has begun to cost more than it pays. Money can buy access and amplify a message. It can’t indefinitely manufacture public conviction. That lesson reaches well beyond Israel.
The rules that apply only to other people
Another contradiction has become even harder to conceal. American administrations have repeatedly presented themselves as guardians of international law while reserving ample latitude to disregard it whenever strategic interests intrude. The failing belongs to neither party alone. The Biden administration displayed it in its approach to Israel, just as earlier Republican administrations displayed it in other theatres of war.
International law can’t function as a credible framework if its application depends on the identity of the country being judged. Nor can an order command respect when its most powerful advocates treat their own obligations as negotiable. The damage is cumulative. Every exception made for an ally, every intervention justified by convenience, weakens the authority of the whole system. Eventually other countries begin to ask why they should accept rules the most powerful decline to observe.
The rest of the world isn’t waiting for permission
The most consequential shift may be occurring beyond America’s borders. Across Asia, Africa, Latin America and much of the Middle East, governments are less and less willing to organise their foreign policies around Washington’s strategic preferences. They haven’t abandoned their own rivalries or ambitions. Nor should China, Russia or any other rising power be mistaken for an alternative moral authority.
What’s changing runs more deeply. The world is less willing to accept that international legitimacy must be conferred by a Western power, that security requires alignment with Washington or Brussels, or that economic development must come with political obedience.
For much of the Global South, the aspiration is the freedom to make choices without being made to pick a side. Swapping American dominance for Chinese dominance holds little appeal. That distinction matters enormously.
The strategic encirclement of China, the militarisation of relationships with Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines and Australia, and the spreading web of security arrangements across the Indo-Pacific all betray an anxiety about the shifting distribution of global power. But a country doesn’t become a threat simply because another is becoming less dominant. Whether China’s rise stays peaceful is a fair question, and even its own neighbours are asking it. Treating China’s rise itself as an offence against the international order is the surest way to bring about the answer nobody wants.
The more obvious danger is that a declining capacity to command compliance gets mistaken for a need to exercise even greater coercion.
After the arbiter
A fading order doesn’t bequeath peace along with the rest of its estate. Its erosion can breed instability and dangerous competition, and the powers that rise are seldom wiser than those they replace. Still, there’s an opening here that shouldn’t be squandered.
The world doesn’t need another superpower to take charge of organising everyone else’s affairs. It needs international arrangements for wellbeing and shared prosperity that recognise the legitimacy of different civilisations and development paths, without requiring them to submit to a single centre of authority.
That would demand a profound reconsideration of what we mean by security, sovereignty and international responsibility. It would also require Western democracies to face an uncomfortable prospect: their waning influence may owe less to the schemes of their rivals than to the accumulated consequences of their own behaviour. When a country becomes preoccupied with defending its position instead of examining the assumptions that produced it, it risks confusing the preservation of power with the preservation of order.
America still commands formidable military, financial, technological and cultural resources, and its capacity to shape events will likely remain substantial for decades. But influence and legitimacy are not interchangeable. Military superiority doesn’t confer moral authority. More often these days it breeds bitterness. Neither does economic might create an entitlement to obedience, and the ability to intervene says nothing about the wisdom of doing so.
America is losing its grip on the world, slowly, unevenly and inevitably. Historians will argue over the pace for decades. Less visible is a shift among those held in that grip, Americans among them: more of them have begun asking why any country should hold the world so tightly at all.
The new majority takes its seats in January. Within months someone will brief it on a threat, a carrier group will change course, and the old vocabulary of credibility and resolve will be offered up as though nothing had happened. Those who voted on Tuesday against a war will then discover whether they voted against a president or against a habit of mind, and whether the people they elected can discern the difference.