For most of the postwar period, American power rested on a paradox: the United States was strongest when it did not need to prove it. Credibility was built through restraint, predictability, and the slow accumulation of trust among allies who believed that, however imperfectly, Washington understood the difference between leverage and legitimacy. Force mattered, but reliability mattered more. The world learned to take American commitments seriously, not because they were loud, but because they were boring in their consistency.

That architecture is now being dismantled in public.

🎧 Listen to the narrated version of World Stage, MAGA Script: Coercion Without Credibility (8 minutes, 47 seconds).

At the Munich Security Conference, European leaders spoke with a candor that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. The conversation was no longer about how to align with the United States, but how to “de-risk” from it—how to plan for a future in which American policy is no longer a stable variable but a volatility to be hedged against. This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a strategic adaptation. When allies begin to plan around your unpredictability, your influence does not collapse; it thins. Importance erodes without a single treaty being torn up.

The administration’s response to this unease has been to provide reassurance while practicing disruption. Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in Munich to offer continuity and calm. The president, from afar, continued to traffic in threats, ultimatums, and conditionality. The result is not balanced; it is a contradiction. Mixed signals are not a sign of pluralism in foreign policy. They are evidence that the system no longer speaks with one voice. Allies do not average your messages. They discount them.

This pattern is not confined to Europe. In parallel, the United States has reopened talks with Iran while simultaneously amplifying the threat of military action. Trump’s posture is meant to convey strength: negotiate now, or face consequences later. In domestic politics, this might read as leverage. In international diplomacy, it reads as instability. Threats untethered from credible process do not compel cooperation; they invite delay. They reward hardliners within adversarial regimes who thrive on proving that American commitments are theatrical and transient.

Here is the deeper problem: the administration governs foreign policy as if coercion were a substitute for credibility. It is not. Coercion without credibility produces compliance only when the other party believes the threat is embedded in a stable system of consequence. When the system itself is volatile—when treaties are discarded as trophies of previous administrations, when alliances are treated as optional subscriptions, when diplomacy is conducted through performative escalation—the threat loses its architecture. It becomes noise.

The recent Munich moment matters because it revealed how that noise is now being received. European leaders are not simply offended by American unpredictability; they are reorganizing around it. Defense planning, supply-chain resilience, and diplomatic coordination are being recalibrated to reduce exposure to American swings. This is what “de-risking” means in practice: building redundancy against a partner who no longer feels reliable. While the United States remains powerful, it is becoming less indispensable under Trump’s regime. That distinction is fatal to long-term influence.

One might argue that allies have always hedged. True. The difference now is the direction of the hedge. Historically, European hedging sought to supplement American leadership, not to insulate against it. The current shift is defensive: how to prepare for a United States that might withdraw, escalate unpredictably, or reframe commitments as transactional bargaining chips. That is not normal alliance management. It is contingency planning against the alliance’s previously recognized leader.

This erosion of importance does not occur because allies suddenly doubt American capacity. They doubt American continuity. Power that cannot be counted on becomes a risk factor. Over time, systems adapt to minimize risk. Institutions are built to route around volatility. Once those systems exist, they do not dissolve simply because a different administration comes into power. Credibility, unlike force, is path dependent. It takes years to build and moments to downgrade. Once downgraded, it takes years to restore.

The Trump administration’s defenders insist that this is simply “realism”—that allies must learn to carry more of their own burden, that adversaries must be confronted with strength rather than sentimentality. There is truth in the premise and error in the method. Burden-sharing achieved through humiliation breeds resentment, not partnership. Deterrence achieved through spectacle breeds miscalculation, not stability. Realism is not the abandonment of norms; it is the disciplined use of power within a predictable framework of consequence. What we are witnessing is not realism but improvisation masquerading as toughness.

The danger of improvisational statecraft is not only that it produces mistakes. It is that it teaches others to stop believing you when you are right. When every moment is framed as existential, no moment is decisive. When threats are routine, they lose their meaning. When alliances are treated as leverage points rather than as security architectures, partners begin to construct architectures that exclude you.

This is where the warning offered by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at Munich deserves to be taken seriously, regardless of partisan reflex. Her invocation of an “age of authoritarians” is not merely a moral critique; it is a structural observation. Authoritarian leaders benefit when democratic alliances fragment. They thrive in environments where commitments are fluid, norms are negotiable, and power is performed rather than anchored. The erosion of U.S. credibility does not occur in a vacuum. It occurs in a competitive ecosystem where others are eager to fill the void with alternative guarantees, alternative financing, and alternative security arrangements.

None of this requires formal rupture. That is the quiet danger. Alliances do not fail only when treaties are abrogated. They fail when partners stop treating them as primary. Influence wanes not when you are denounced, but when you are bypassed. The United States can remain militarily dominant and still find itself increasingly peripheral to the planning architectures of those it once led.

There is a final irony here. The administration’s rhetoric of strength is premised on the idea that credibility flows from dominance—that allies will follow because the United States is powerful, that adversaries will yield because American threats are loud. The historical record suggests the opposite. Credibility flows from reliability. Dominance without reliability produces fear, not trust. Fear compels compliance only in the short term. Trust enables cooperation over time. A foreign policy that privileges spectacle over structure burns credibility faster than it earns leverage.

The question, then, is not whether the United States can still coerce. It can. The question is whether coercion, absent credibility, can sustain an international order. The evidence accumulating from Munich to Tehran suggests it cannot. What is being constructed in real time is a world in which American power is still formidable but increasingly solitary—feared by adversaries, hedged against by allies, and routable within emerging networks of cooperation that no longer assume U.S. centrality.

Empires do not fall when they are defeated in battle. They decline when others stop organizing their future around them.

The tragedy of this moment is not that American power is insufficient. It is that American power is being misused in ways that teach the world to live without it.

~ Dunneagin

Civics Unhinged: Dispatches from Terumpistan

For most of the postwar period, American power rested on a paradox: the United States was strongest when it did not need to prove it. Credibility was built through restraint, predictability, and the slow accumulation of trust among allies who believed that, however imperfectly, Washington understood the difference between leverage and legitimacy. Force mattered, but reliability mattered more. The world learned to take American commitments seriously, not because they were loud, but because they were boring in their consistency.

That architecture is now being dismantled in public.

🎧 Listen to the narrated version of World Stage, MAGA Script: Coercion Without Credibility (8 minutes, 47 seconds).

At the Munich Security Conference, European leaders spoke with a candor that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. The conversation was no longer about how to align with the United States, but how to “de-risk” from it—how to plan for a future in which American policy is no longer a stable variable but a volatility to be hedged against. This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a strategic adaptation. When allies begin to plan around your unpredictability, your influence does not collapse; it thins. Importance erodes without a single treaty being torn up.

The administration’s response to this unease has been to provide reassurance while practicing disruption. Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in Munich to offer continuity and calm. The president, from afar, continued to traffic in threats, ultimatums, and conditionality. The result is not balanced; it is a contradiction. Mixed signals are not a sign of pluralism in foreign policy. They are evidence that the system no longer speaks with one voice. Allies do not average your messages. They discount them.

This pattern is not confined to Europe. In parallel, the United States has reopened talks with Iran while simultaneously amplifying the threat of military action. Trump’s posture is meant to convey strength: negotiate now, or face consequences later. In domestic politics, this might read as leverage. In international diplomacy, it reads as instability. Threats untethered from credible process do not compel cooperation; they invite delay. They reward hardliners within adversarial regimes who thrive on proving that American commitments are theatrical and transient.

Here is the deeper problem: the administration governs foreign policy as if coercion were a substitute for credibility. It is not. Coercion without credibility produces compliance only when the other party believes the threat is embedded in a stable system of consequence. When the system itself is volatile—when treaties are discarded as trophies of previous administrations, when alliances are treated as optional subscriptions, when diplomacy is conducted through performative escalation—the threat loses its architecture. It becomes noise.

The recent Munich moment matters because it revealed how that noise is now being received. European leaders are not simply offended by American unpredictability; they are reorganizing around it. Defense planning, supply-chain resilience, and diplomatic coordination are being recalibrated to reduce exposure to American swings. This is what “de-risking” means in practice: building redundancy against a partner who no longer feels reliable. While the United States remains powerful, it is becoming less indispensable under Trump’s regime. That distinction is fatal to long-term influence.

One might argue that allies have always hedged. True. The difference now is the direction of the hedge. Historically, European hedging sought to supplement American leadership, not to insulate against it. The current shift is defensive: how to prepare for a United States that might withdraw, escalate unpredictably, or reframe commitments as transactional bargaining chips. That is not normal alliance management. It is contingency planning against the alliance’s previously recognized leader.

This erosion of importance does not occur because allies suddenly doubt American capacity. They doubt American continuity. Power that cannot be counted on becomes a risk factor. Over time, systems adapt to minimize risk. Institutions are built to route around volatility. Once those systems exist, they do not dissolve simply because a different administration comes into power. Credibility, unlike force, is path dependent. It takes years to build and moments to downgrade. Once downgraded, it takes years to restore.

The Trump administration’s defenders insist that this is simply “realism”—that allies must learn to carry more of their own burden, that adversaries must be confronted with strength rather than sentimentality. There is truth in the premise and error in the method. Burden-sharing achieved through humiliation breeds resentment, not partnership. Deterrence achieved through spectacle breeds miscalculation, not stability. Realism is not the abandonment of norms; it is the disciplined use of power within a predictable framework of consequence. What we are witnessing is not realism but improvisation masquerading as toughness.

The danger of improvisational statecraft is not only that it produces mistakes. It is that it teaches others to stop believing you when you are right. When every moment is framed as existential, no moment is decisive. When threats are routine, they lose their meaning. When alliances are treated as leverage points rather than as security architectures, partners begin to construct architectures that exclude you.

This is where the warning offered by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at Munich deserves to be taken seriously, regardless of partisan reflex. Her invocation of an “age of authoritarians” is not merely a moral critique; it is a structural observation. Authoritarian leaders benefit when democratic alliances fragment. They thrive in environments where commitments are fluid, norms are negotiable, and power is performed rather than anchored. The erosion of U.S. credibility does not occur in a vacuum. It occurs in a competitive ecosystem where others are eager to fill the void with alternative guarantees, alternative financing, and alternative security arrangements.

None of this requires formal rupture. That is the quiet danger. Alliances do not fail only when treaties are abrogated. They fail when partners stop treating them as primary. Influence wanes not when you are denounced, but when you are bypassed. The United States can remain militarily dominant and still find itself increasingly peripheral to the planning architectures of those it once led.

There is a final irony here. The administration’s rhetoric of strength is premised on the idea that credibility flows from dominance—that allies will follow because the United States is powerful, that adversaries will yield because American threats are loud. The historical record suggests the opposite. Credibility flows from reliability. Dominance without reliability produces fear, not trust. Fear compels compliance only in the short term. Trust enables cooperation over time. A foreign policy that privileges spectacle over structure burns credibility faster than it earns leverage.

The question, then, is not whether the United States can still coerce. It can. The question is whether coercion, absent credibility, can sustain an international order. The evidence accumulating from Munich to Tehran suggests it cannot. What is being constructed in real time is a world in which American power is still formidable but increasingly solitary—feared by adversaries, hedged against by allies, and routable within emerging networks of cooperation that no longer assume U.S. centrality.

Empires do not fall when they are defeated in battle. They decline when others stop organizing their future around them.

The tragedy of this moment is not that American power is insufficient. It is that American power is being misused in ways that teach the world to live without it.

~ Dunneagin

Civics Unhinged: Dispatches from Terumpistan