Donald Trump accelerates global chaos as traditional American alliances fracture

President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement in the Oval Office on September 18. Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The world feels like it is spinning out of control. The planet's two major wars, in Iran and Ukraine, are no longer contained. Experts warn of doomsday scenarios in which AI could wipe out humanity, while soaring energy prices rock industrialized economies blighted by inequality. Floods, fires, and blistering heat are turning the climate crisis biblical.

Meanwhile, global institutions that bankrolled relative stability are crumbling. The United Nations, where world leaders gather this week, looks inept as strongmen spurn its core values of democracy, human rights, and international aid. At any other time over the last 80 years, the US would serve to restore stability. But remarkably, the West's superpower is now an agent of global volatility.

Step forward, Mr. President. Donald Trump's annual address to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday comes with his popularity plunging ahead of critical midterm elections and as he is stuck in the kind of war he vowed never to fight. Yet Trump is expected to argue that the US has never been as mighty or esteemed. Officials say he will boast of spreading global peace and tackling crises his predecessors ducked.

“Our country is respected again. We're respected like never before. I go to meetings and everyone stands up. They didn't stand up for our last president; they didn't care about him,” Trump said earlier this month. Much of the world disagrees.

Scorned allies like Canada and in Europe are racing to unify to protect themselves from their former security guarantor, the US. Trust in the increasingly feral US is disappearing.

“America has changed,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, the self-styled leader of “middle powers” mobilizing for the post-American era, said last month. “We cannot control the storm blowing in from Washington.”

Trump's second-term rationale is that the US is playing with a stacked deck and other powers have no cards. Washington's foreign policy is now an extension of the commander in chief's personality, marked by the use of threats and leveraging force in pursuit of material gains.

While Trump envisages the US as supreme, its power looks newly brittle. The survival of the Iranian regime mocks his narrative of dominance. Depleted US missile interceptors and the rusted hull of a long-deployed aircraft carrier symbolize a war Trump said would end in weeks but is exposing limits to American power on the threshold of its eighth month.

In his first address to the UNGA in 2017, Trump unveiled a foreign policy that would shake the West to its foundations. In his second term, he has completed the transformation, attacking allies and befriending tyrants like China's leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump 2.0 has revived imperialism, especially in the Western Hemisphere. Venezuela's oil is set to fill US reserves in a 100-year concession following Trump's toppling of dictator Nicolás Maduro and embrace of regime figurehead Delcy Rodríguez. However, the flush of success in Venezuela bred hubris that convinced Trump he could similarly destroy an anti-US regime in Iran, leaving him mired in a Middle East war he can't win or leave.

The fracturing of American alliances might have been unthinkable before Trump, but angering allies is viewed as a win for a MAGA movement that chafed at allies building expensive welfare states under America's defensive shield. Still, his aggressive attitude and volatile temperament are fueling long-building questions about the sustainability of American power and whether old patterns and institutions will ever return.