On none of these matters have Trump’s tactics worked. The US trade deficit is unchanged. Greenland has not been sold. Ukraine has not been forced to agree a peace deal with Russia. Iran’s nuclear capability remains. The current conflict with Iran, which began after Boys’s book was completed, is the clearest evidence yet that other states have seen through Trump’s bluster and faux belligerence. Despite numerous threats of armageddon, the Iranians have not backed down, and they called Trump’s bluff because he appeared unwilling to accept the economic consequences of escalation. China has taken a similar approach to managing trade wars, forcing concessions on the export of chips while finding ways to circumvent tariffs.
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The so-called realists have been bolstered in recent decades by the failure of more ambitious American strategies. Russia, China and other autocracies have not been converted to liberal democracy via capitalism, as many hoped in the years following the Cold War. The post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are now acknowledged by almost everyone to have been disasters on a historic scale, undermining the US’s moral and military authority at enormous expense in terms of lives and cash. The US’s humanitarian interventions have a chequered record: they stopped Slobodan Milošević from massacring Kosovar Albanians, but failed in Somalia and Libya. The realists also argue that the conflict in Ukraine is a direct result of overreach in the 1990s and 2000s, as the US and western allies unnecessarily provoked Russia by interfering in its “sphere of interest” – though others would note that Vladimir Putin’s own imperial fantasies might have more to do with it.
I’m not a great fan of Freedman but his analysis is sometimes interesting.
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