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Finally, in terms of defense, the U.S. was faced with a 1930s-like acceptance that the world was becoming a dangerous place and that we would have to either withdraw or accept the new norms.
What were the new norms? Iran would inevitably become nuclear, enjoying an inevitable hegemonic crescent stretching from Tehran to the Israeli border.
Turkey assumed that it enjoyed a new autocratic Ottoman hegemony, beyond criticism given its geographical value and NATO membership.
Reset with Russia had failed in a humiliating fashion, and we were reduced to lecturing Putin on his illiberality while inviting him into the Middle East and conceding American curtailment of European missile defense.
China would re-create its own updated version of the Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. North Korea would be permanently able to target U.S. cities, and we would learn to live with it as we did with nuclear Pakistan.
Radical Islam would again be mostly a law-enforcement problem. The solutions to it were euphemisms such as “overseas contingency operations,” “workplace violence,” jihad as a journey of “personal discovery,” and “man-caused disasters,” as we also explored our own likely culpability for creating the conditions that empowered the monsters of Fort Hood, Boston, San Bernardino, or Orlando.
The military was no longer seen as primarily a deterrent force reliant on overwhelming military strength to ensure the peace. It was more valued as a tool of social justice to ensure race and gender equities through fiat rather than prolonged legislative debate, and to recalibrate power with allies and rivals.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/trump-disrupted-american-transformation-into-lead-from-behind-nation/
Read the whole damn thing.