But the agency is not just a faucet of humanitarian money, distributing $40 billion in global aid, supporting soup kitchens and lead abatement and vaccination programs and saving millions of lives. It has also always been one face of American empire. Established during the Cold War to counter Soviet influence, the agency has funded health and development, but it has also supported business-friendly politics and what are often called democratic reforms to draw more of the world's poor countries into the sphere of American influence.
And so the sprint to "delete" U.S.A.I.D. on grounds of waste and ideological bias also sent its own bigger message: that soft power, properly understood, is not really power at all, only a shackle restricting the exercise of the harder and more old-fashioned kind.
During his last time in office, Trump was pictured with a hurricane map marked up with black Sharpie ink so that the potential path of the storm matched his own ignorant projection. This time, he's marking up some notional maps of American empire, which he says he would like to see stretching north through Canada and Greenland, south through the "Gulf of America" to the Panama Canal and across to the decimated rubble of the Gaza Strip, which he has taken to calling the "Riviera of the Middle East."
It's not clear, of course, that any of this will (or even could) happen — Francis Fukuyama described the Gaza plan as a "nonstarter" in an essay announcing both "the new American imperialism" and a return to the world of the 19th century. But each declaration of imperial desire is that mercurial kind of Trumpist speech act, in which a given utterance can be both meaningless and full of portent at the same time, self-disavowing even as it also demonstrates the president's world-shaping power. Foreign leaders including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and Denmark's foreign minister Lars Rasmussen have warned that Trump's acquisitiveness is deadly serious. And whatever comes of Trump's retrograde dreams of manifest destiny, the implicit challenge to the legacy geopolitical order is just as striking: If we want these things and these places, who is going to stop us?
Among Trump's Day 1 executive orders were withdrawals from the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization, which led some to describe the new president's emergent foreign policy as a kind of strategic retreat, even an effort to "unwind" or "reorient" American power abroad, as Ryan Grim put it. But another first-day order designated Mexican drug cartels as terrorist groups, and as he assumed office, the new secretary of defense affirmed that when it came to military action in Mexico, "all options will be on the table." The national security adviser has suggested the United States must recoup the money it has sent to Ukraine by plundering the country's natural resources, and the president has threatened harsh tariffs on Denmark over Greenland, too. In addition to China, the first round of Trump tariffs targeted allies, with longstanding trade deals in place renegotiated not that long ago by Trump himself — and although the tariffs were withdrawn quickly in response to trivial concessions, you couldn't help feeling it wasn't safe to assume any existing arrangement would last for very long, with Trump likely to stress-test many aspects of the world order, country by country.
The new secretary of state began his stint as America's top diplomat by effectively disavowing diplomacy, at least as we've known it for decades. "The postwar global order is not just obsolete," Marco Rubio declared in his January Senate committee hearing. "It is now a weapon being used against us." Last week, Rubio announced that the United States wouldn't be attending the G20 in Johannesburg, explaining that "my job is to advance America's national interests, not waste taxpayer money or coddle anti-Americanism."
In Trump world, Rubio counts as an unusually clear spokesman, and these two statements together form a lucid if bracing declaration of intent: that a system built over decades largely by and for American power is now being discarded largely for inhibiting or even acting against American power. The country has long been a bully on the world stage, but one which at least pretended to play nice, even as its full command over the globe has seemed recently to shrink. "Hegemony was going to end sooner or later, and now the U.S. is basically choosing to end it on its own terms," the French observer Arnaud Bertrand wrote. "It is the post-American world order — brought to you by America itself."
What comes next? New paradigms rarely arise fully formed. But if we spent the last four years watching Joe Biden's ineffectual attempt to revive some rickety version of the moralistic postwar order, it is supremely clear what Donald Trump would like to replace that pretense with: the principle that global chaos opens up opportunity for great powers long hemmed in by convention and deference. You've probably heard of the madman approach to diplomacy; this is the mad world approach.
Over the last decade, as China dropped its show of geopolitical obeisance and began to perform similar games of dominance — telling the 10 nations of the ASEAN regional alliance, for instance, China is a big country, and you are small countries, and that is a fact — it inspired a new foreign-policy term: wolf-warrior diplomacy. This scandalized the foreign policy institutionalists of the West, including Biden, who in juggling not just China but Russia and Israel dedicated much of the second half of his presidency to a nostalgic diplomatic restoration project. The MAGA riposte is, Let's not be naïve and let's not be suckers: We are all wolves on the world stage, and the game begins when we show our teeth.
When Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire just before Inauguration Day, it seemed to many like a credit to Trump, whose emissaries had, on one exceptional Sabbath, apparently bullied Benjamin Netanyahu into accepting a deal that had been available for many months — and perhaps a sign that those who voted for the once and future president imagining he was the candidate of peace were not entirely deluded. But just a few weeks later, it seems clear that he regards demolition and mass displacement of millions as a straightforward matter of eminent domain. The ultimate acquisition of Gaza would be a simple "real estate transaction," he said last week, and it wouldn't even be Israel but the United States presiding over the closing. "We're going to take it, we're going to hold it, we're going to cherish it," he said on Tuesday — "Mar-a-Gaza," somehave called it.
None of this was exactly unforeseen. The American-led international order has long been criticized as a cover story for the exercise of U.S. power, especially on the left, with critics on the right more likely to see it as an anti-nationalist plot to bring about global government. And though the United States remains a central global power, we are now well past what was once called the unipolar moment and perhaps nearly as far from the time when Madeleine Albright or Barack Obama could refer to the country as the world's "indispensable nation." ("Hegemonic decline is a done deal," the historian Adam Tooze remarked recently. "It's over.")
And yet Trump's second term "marks a symbolic end to global neoliberalism," the economist Branko Milanovic wrote last month, a sharper break than his first term — in part, Milanovic later added, because in the meantime so many impulses that once seemed outlandish (on China, on trade, on industrial policy) had quietly hardened into elite conventional wisdom.
The difference is also marked abroad, with far fewer global leaders falling into alignment against Trump — even if a few seem to enjoy mixing it up with him personally — and acknowledging that the basic terms of engagement have changed. The office of the Russian foreign minister has publicly applauded the assault on U.S.A.I.D., as has Viktor Orban of Hungary's political director. China seems happy to watch America detonate large parts of its infrastructure of global power. In Europe, the European Commission's Josep Borrell got into trouble a few years ago when he described the continent as an orderly and peaceful "garden," surrounded by the "jungle" of the rest of the world. Now the president of the commission, Ursula von der Leyen, is striking a very similar tone — calling it a "hotheaded world" and an "era of hypercompetitive and hypertransactional geopolitics."
In other words: It's a jungle out there.
Army of God
American Christians are embracing
a charismatic movement known as
THE NEW APOSTOLIC REFORMATION
which seeks to destroy the secular
state. Now their war begins
PART FOUR
By Stephanie McCrumment
the Atlantic
By last year, 42 percent of American Christians agreed with the statement "God wants Christians to stand atop the '7 Mountains of Society,' " according to Paul Djupe, a Denison University political scientist who has been developing new surveys to capture what he and others describe as a "fundamental shift" in American Christianity. Roughly 61 percent agreed with the statement that "there are modern-day apostles and prophets." Roughly half agreed that "there are demonic 'principalities' and 'powers' who control physical territory," and that the Church should "organize campaigns of spiritual warfare and prayer to displace high-level demons."
Overall, Djupe told me, the nation continues to become more secular. In 1991, only 6 percent of Americans identifed as nonreligious, a figure that is now about 30 percent. But the Christians who remain are becoming more radical. They are taking on these extreme beliefs that give them a sense of power—they believe they have the power to change the nature of the Earth," Djupe said. " The adoption of these sort of beliefs is happening incredibly fast."
The ideas have seeped into Trumpworld, influencing the agenda known as Project 2025, as well as proposals set forth by the America First Policy Institute. A new book called Unhumans, co-authored by the far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and endorsed by J. D. Vance, describes political opponents as "unhumans" who want to "undo civilization itself" and who currently "run operations in media, government, education, economy, family, religion, and arts and entertainment"— the seven mountains. e book argues that these "unhumans" must be "crushed."
"Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the un-humans," the authors write. "It is time to stop playing by rules they won't."
My own frame of reference for what evangelical Christianity looked like was wooden pews, the ladies' handbell choir, and chicken casseroles for the homebound. e Southern Baptists of my childhood had no immediate reason to behave like insurgents. They had dominated Alabama for decades, mostly blessing the status quo. When I got an assignment a few years ago to write about why evangelicals were still backing Trump, I mistakenly thought that the Baptists were where the action was on the Christian right. I was working for e Washington Post then, and like many journalists, commentators, and researchers who study religion, I was far behind.
Where I ended up one Sunday in 2021 was a church in Fort Worth, Texas, called Mercy Culture. Roughly 1,500 people were streaming through the doors for one of four weekend services, one of which was in Spanish. Ushers offered earplugs. A store carried books about spiritual warfare. Inside the sanctuary, the people filling the seats were white, Black, and brown; they were working-class and professionals and unemployed; they were former drug addicts and porn addicts and socialmedia addicts; they were young men and women who believed their homosexual tendencies to be the work of Satan. I met a young woman who told me she was going to Montana to "prophesy over the land." I met a young man contemplating a future as a missionary, who told me, "If I have any choice, I want to die like the disciples." They had the drifty air of hippies, but their counterculture was pure Kingdom.
They faced a huge video screen showing swirling stars, crashing waves, and apocalyptic images, including a mushroom cloud. A digital clock was counting down, and when it hit zero, a band—keyboard, guitars, drums—began blasting music that reminded you of some pop song you couldn't quite place, from some world you'd left behind when you came through the doors. Lights ¨ flashed. Machine-made fog drifted through the crowd. People waved colored ¨ flags, calling the Holy Spirit in for a landing. Cameras swooped around, zooming in on a grown man crying and a woman lying prostrate, praying. Eventually, the pastor, a young man in skinny jeans, came onstage and demon-mapped the whole city of Fort Worth. The west side was controlled by the principality of Greed, the north by the demonic spirit of Rebellion; the south belonged to Lust . He spoke of surrendering to God's laws. And at one point, he endorsed a Church elder running for mayor, describing the campaign as "the beginning of a righteous movement."
(continued tomorrow in part five)
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