PB February-March 2026
February-March 2026 77
By Michael Smith
PEAK TRUMP
INTERNATIONAL
Confi dence trickster losing
confi dence
By February 2026, the idea that Donald Trump
represents an endlessly renewable force of
disruption moved from hard to stomach to
hard to sustain. This is not just because he
seems old and Epstein may yet drag him
down. What has changed more fundamentally
is that the returns on escalation are falling,
that he his backing down in ways that torpedo
his machismo with his base and any residual
respect from outsiders.
Failures of substance and
Trump’s lies about them are
catching up on him
Trump insists that the economy proves his
success. He points to markets, jobs numbers,
and headline GDP. But beneath those
indicators, the economy tells a di erent story.
Living standards have stagnated once housing,
healthcare, insurance and debt servicing are
accounted for. Employment growth has tilted
toward insecure and multiple-job work rather
than stable, high-productivity employment.
Household debt is rising faster than productive
investment. A poll from The New York Times
and Siena University in January found that
54 percent of voters oppose Trump’s tari s,
and 51 percent said the president’s policies
had made life less a ordable for them. Long-
term investment confi dence is being crowded
out by policy volatility and permanent crisis.
The US is not an improving economy. It is an
economy being kept upright by momentum
and leverage — and therefore increasingly
vulnerable.
The same emptiness marks Trump’s claims
on foreign policy. By February 2026, the tally
is simple. He has resolved NO wars. Ukraine
remains at war, with Russia diplomatically
indulged rather than constrained. Gaza
remains devastated, the confl ict widened
rather than settled, and American backing has
isolated Washington rather than stabilised the
region. Trump’s claim to unique deal-making
prowess collapses when measured against
outcomes rather than rhetoric.
Trump’s shock tactics are
too well known, and can be
countered
Trump’s hegemony, leadership over others,
depends on isolating opponents and
confronting them one by one — worthy
institutions, governors, judges, migrants,
allies — in a rolling sequence of spectacles
designed to shock all, to exhaust opponents
and exhilarate his faithful. That model worked
when adversaries were surprised, divided, or
still awestruck by the performance. It works far
less well when they have learned the pattern.
According to Jamelle Bouie writing in the
New York Times on 31 January: “The shock
value has decayed. The White House is caught
in a spiral of its own making. The more it tries
to repress and dominate its opponents, the
more it loses ground with the public, and the
more it loses ground, the more it leans on force
and threats of force to save face. Eventually,
the president and his allies will fi nd that few
people fear either his bark or his bite. Even
supporters have doubts, particularly about his
lying. Opponents have adapted. The strategy
has become circular, transparent and — most
importantly — counter-adaptive. Trump has
lost credibility as his blu has been called,
most visibly on immigration enforcement in
Minnesota and on adventurism in Greenland”.
Shock tactics are beginning to fail. Once the
method becomes visible, it invites calculation
rather than submission.
Minnesota and Greenland
were symbolic climbdowns
emboldening Trump’s
antagonists
Greenland mattered.
Trump demanded “right, title and
ownership”, threatened tari s, rattled NATO,
and framed the episode as existential. Then
he retreated, expressly saying he wouldn’t use
military means. The episode exposed Trump’s
method: escalate, personalise, retreat when
costs appear, then redeploy elsewhere, in this
case with the fug around a dozen controversies
and an armada to Iran. Once recognised, the
method ceases to intimidate.
Minnesota revealed the same ceiling
domestically. Federal immigration operations
were justifi ed as targeting dangerous illegal
migrants and terrorists. In practice, reporting
Village_FebMarch26.indb 77Village_FebMarch26.indb 77 03/02/2026 08:2503/02/2026 08:25
78 February-March 2026
February-March 2026 PB
showed that a substantial proportion of those
stopped or harmed were American citizens or
legal residents. The most visible victim, Alex
Pretti, was a citizen, a legal gun owner, and a
nurse.
In February Kurt Streeter reported that
“Renee Good’s death was tragic. Alex Pretti’s
is a trend”. Video evidence collapsed the
administration’s narrative. What followed
was decisive: gun-rights organisations turned
against the White House, Republican senators
demanded investigations, and enforcement
operations were curtailed. Escalation no
longer isolated opposition. It co-ordinated it.
According to Jamelle Bouie writing in the
New York Times on 31 January: “Surveying the
wreckage of Operation Metro Surge — of this
reactionary administration’s crushing defeat
at the hands of another band of tenacious
Northerners — it does look to me like MAGA’s
Gettysburg”.
Trump’s popularity is waning
and he sees it
Hegemony requires that others are led, and
nearly everyone, bar his core 33%, is fed up.
A recent poll found that only 18 percent of
Germans consider the US a dependable ally.
According to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of
history at New York University: “Mr. Trump’s
behavior during a recent address to the
nation suggests he is aware of cooling public
sentiment. He shouted at times, as though
he felt fewer people were listening… The
rules of autocratic backfire are clear. Even if
a struggling strongman manages to stay in
power, once his carefully crafted image is
tarnished, a collective reckoning can begin
with the costs of his corruption and lying”.
The fragile advantages of
hegemony have been abused
Maths favours the hegemon: taken on one
by one, the hegemon can defeat each of its
enemies and — if it weirdly wishes — friends,
and win serially, forever.
So Europe is not actually weak, but it is
divided and dependent on the US. If France
is mean; ONE HUNDRED PERCENT TARIFFS.
Europe’s modern digital infrastructure is
dominated by American platforms which
Trump and his mates could simply turn o; its
energy crisis exposed its lack of resilience and
new dependence on US LNG; and its industrial
model remains tied to global supply chains
Washington increasingly jealously controls.
More, while Village feels no need to
accord Trump the credit of any great strategic
intelligence, it is remarkable how he has
used the position of global hegemon to
outmanoeuvre the US’s chief Cold War enemy.
He has sidelined Russia, which wants his
imprimatur to sterilise Ukraine, into allowing
But hegemonic abuse is even bad
Thucydides.
Thucydides’ actual message
There’s a problem. Thucydides well knew
that the year after Athens delivers that
famous ultimatum and brutalised Melos, it
launched the Sicilian Expedition. Its alliance
began to fracture as subject states, tired of
Athenian arrogance sensed weakness and
revolted. Within a decade, Athens lost the
Peloponnesian war and its empire dissolved.
The same hubris that led Athens to dismiss
diplomacy as irrelevant to the strong is what
duped it to believe it could conquer Sicily.
It all sounds like Trump.
Trump meeting significant
forces countering his
pantomime of hegemony
In ‘The Strong Will Suer What They Must:
Vaclav’s Grocer and American Hubris’, Seva
Gunitsky argues that “Power that rests on the
performed compliance of others is more fragile
than it looks. The strong do what they can,
until the moment they discover that ‘what they
can’ was always bounded by what others were
willing to tolerate”.
My thesis is that the moment has arrived.
Carney has suggested the globe’s “middle
powers” mobilise. The “Eurasia bloc” has a
population of nearly 900 million, GDP of $39.5
trillion, outranking America’s population (338
million) and GDP ($31 trillion) with roughly
similar defence spending.
He actually wants to “build a bridge
between the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the
European Union, …which would create a new
trading bloc of 1.5 billion people”.
Britain, which Trump says should watch
itself, is doing trade deals with China; the EU
with India and five South American countries,
Canada is doing limited trade partnerships
with China and Qatar. In response, Trump
threatened Canada with 100 percent taris;
he’s the only leader allowed to do a trade deal
with Beijing.
Lack of respect
Trump, the abuser, never deserved the respect
he got from Maga supporters who actually
didn’t care that their hegemon was malign.
But in Greenland the hegemon has shown
himself to be mad. Slowly, reluctantly since
leaders are not strong — the world is realising
what the schoolyard bully most dreads:
that once collective tolerance is withdrawn,
hegemonic authority collapses not because
of moral failure but because its consent-based
structure no longer holds. In stronger hands
and in the medium term it may ultimately
occasion a backlash.
Trump will go no higher.
him carte blanche to zap, or threaten to zap, all
of his other enemies from Caracas to Havana
to Tehran to Sokoto to Nuuk/Copenhagen. [His
Russia policy, laughed at as weak, has actually
given him enormous strength elsewhere.
Hegemony in Athens
Because of this maths, as Thucydides
declaimed, “The strong do what they can, and
the weak suer what they must”.
Mark Carney’s surprise manifesto at Davos
got a lot of attention for presenting — more
than his usual centrist Daddism — an analysis
of the world, but also Thucydides and Václav
Havel in the same speech.
Hegemony as vehicle for
anticipatory compliance of
enemies and now friends
Hegemonic Stability Theory, which dates from
the 1970s, translated Thucydides — along
with Hobbes and Machiavelli — into the
vocabulary of modern political science. Robert
Gilpin contended that the hegemon sets the
governing norms of the system itself; and
Stephen Krasner showed that international
regimes reflect the interests of the dominant
state far more than the consensual rhetoric
surrounding them admits.
Subordinate states, out of prudence,
internalise the hegemon’s chosen structure for
them. American grand strategy is self-fulfilling
for the little countries in its sights: announce
decline loudly enough, and your interlocutors,
especially your allies, begin to behave as
though they are finished. The nonsense of
Europe’s “civilisational erasure” develops a
sort of Trumpian truthiness.
Trump channels Thucydides
and the rest
Sages invoke Thucydides/Carney as timeless
wisdom about power politics and a corrective
to liberal delusions. “We live in a world, in the
real world, Jake, that is governed by strength,
that is governed by force, that is governed by
power”, Stephen Miller, who appears to come
from Mars, said in a recent CNN interview.
“These are the iron laws of the world since the
beginning of time”.
This is the beautiful governing philosophy of
Trump’s second term — and it is also exactly
what brings down hegemons.
Hegemony rather than alliance
is often bad strategy
Trump claims credit for higher European
defence spending. But future presidents may
not be happy with the result: if US allies are less
dependent on America for trade and security,
they will become much harder to boss around
and less likely to do business with America. Its
overseas bases that it uses to project power
might be re-appropriated.
Village_FebMarch26.indb 78Village_FebMarch26.indb 78 03/02/2026 08:2503/02/2026 08:25
