Is the U.S. Moving from Superpower to Superfluous Power?*
Countries spend a combined $2.88 trillion on military defense. The United States’ $1 trillion military budget is larger than that of the next six countries combined, at more than one-third of worldwide defense spending. If Trump and Hegseth get their bloated $1.5 trillion pentagon budget, the U.S. will spend almost as much as the rest of the world currently spends on defense. See, e.g., The $1 Trillion Black Box, Jesse Coburn and Ruth Talbot, ProPublica (August 19, 2026). As military hawk Max Boot said:
“[E]arlier this year . . . military officers were scrambling to figure out how to spend an extra $500 billion. Hegseth seems to have picked $1.5 trillion as the ‘top line’ arbitrarily, rather than conducting a rigorous bottom-up analysis of what the military needs. . . .
“A far greater Republican president — Dwight D. Eisenhower — recognized that the nation must provide for its defense today without ‘plundering … the precious resources of tomorrow.’ ‘We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage,’ Ike said in his 1961 farewell address warning of the dangers of an unchecked ‘military-industrial complex.’ Those perils are particularly acute today, to the detriment of the nation’s future security.”
Sorry, Max, but that future is now. The United States is more than $40 trillion in debt and pays over $1 trillion in annual interest. Maybe if we had wise leadership who didn’t behave like schoolyard bullies, threatening and alienating trading partners and military allies and undermining treaties, we wouldn’t have to go it so alone.
Indeed, with annual budgets at well below $1 trillion (adjusted), the U.S. has military bases, assets, and presence in more than 80 countries, with concentrations in East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, which are supported by naval strike groups. The United States became a member of formal multilateral and bilateral treaties and pacts at times when America had credibility as an economic and military superpower that could be trusted to keep its word.
Countries are now turning away from the United States and to each other in their own economic and military alliances because Trump and his administration are arbitrary, reckless, and unreliable. They cannot be trusted. Fareed Zakaria describes this monumental shift in his recent opinion, The Iran war is a master class in squandering a superpower’s credibility. Under Trump, who is demolishing military and economic alliances and took a DOGE chainsaw to America’s soft power, the U.S., to many countries, is on its way to becoming unnecessary, an afterthought.
Even without a bloated budget that includes golden fleets and golden domes, the U.S. military’s Goliath-like strength and power are without equal. That strength and power and those military assets and alliances may be for naught, however, with a Goliath whose IQ is in the range of 45 or 47. Trump has mocked, derided, and demeaned allies and other countries, including Iran for its weakness and religious extremism and intransigence. Turning a biblical story on its head, Iran slung a stone (or flew a drone, as the case may be) into Trump’s and Netanyahu’s foreheads, defeating the military giants, saving itself, and shifting power dynamics in the Middle East in its favor. I suspect they are parading Trump and Netanyahu effigies, with their heads on pikes, through the streets of Tehran.
Before a military superpower’s leader makes claims or threats, especially when following through would put service members in harm’s way and the superpower’s credibility on the line, one would expect intense war planning by experts with deep institutional knowledge and expertise, outlining detailed, objective, verifiable strategies, both primary and contingent, with high operational certainty for success. For any country wanting to maintain status as a credible military superpower, its leaders must be certain it can accomplish what it threatens and, if necessary, undertakes. And no competent leader would make threats he is unwilling to carry out if the conditions were not met. His enemies might start disbelieving him.
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When a country threatens, refuses to follow through on the threats or follows through but fails, as Trump has repeatedly done, the unknown becomes known, weaknesses appear, and leverage disappears. That’s precisely where America is, and the world is watching.
We must commend, reward, and properly care for United States sailors, soldiers, aviators, marines, and their families for their service, dedication, professionalism, skill, and immense sacrifice. They deserve our full support and respect. Of course that includes our veterans.
Rank and file service members are following orders from their chain of command. That chain, as the saying goes, is only as strong as its weakest link.
Take your pick.
Dunning-Krugers Trump and Hegseth have disrupted military leadership by firing dozens of top generals and admirals, making steep structural cuts, and sidelining key advisers, which has created widespread vacancies and internal friction that undermines competency, credibility, and operational stability. The weak links’ ineptitude has unnecessarily placed United States service members in harm’s way, unreasonably subjected them and their families to mental and emotional harm, pointlessly caused death and injury to our service members, and tragically killed thousands of innocent Iranians, including children at school. Due to failed planning and lack of insight and foresight, they have wasted expensive military assets that reduce the country’s readiness and capabilities, exposing those vulnerabilities to the world. Combined, these unforced errors accelerate the country’s steep dive into massive debt.
Starting a war with Iran may top the list as the most dangerous — and stupidest — decision any U.S. president has ever made. My guess is, and by all appearances, Trump agreed with Netanyahu to join forces in a bombing campaign against Iran, and the new chain of yes-men, including Hegseth, told Trump what he wanted to hear: bombing the shit out of Iran and threatening war crimes will bring the country to its knees, the Ayatollah will beg for it to stop, and Iran will hand over every last gram of refined uranium along with its centrifuges. Who needs a plan B or C? Trump’s decision to join Netanyahu in starting a war with Iran (again, by all appearances) had no clear strategy or goal — other than purporting to display U.S. military lethality and dominance by bombing until Iran submitted to unclear and changing demands. Except, as Max Boot said, “You would think that $1 trillion would buy enough missiles to fight China or Russia, but it turns out that we don’t even have enough to fight Iran.”
If there was a plan, it did not include what Thomas L. Friedman described in his opinion The New Physics of Power, appreciating “the small can now act really big, really accurately and really inexpensively. And while the big can also act really small, really accurately, it is far more expensive for them to do that while bearing the burden of vast legacy arms systems.”
If there was a plan, it did not include attempting to recruit allies and coordinate with them and their regional assets before starting the bombing campaign, properly comprehending the region’s complexities, or foreseeing with any measure of clarity the obvious consequences of attacking a Middle East country that controls the flow of 20% of the world’s oil and whose fundamentalist leaders see the conflict as Islamic jihad.
Nor did any plan adequately contemplate Iran’s inexpensive, regional defensive and offensive capabilities. It most certainly did not anticipate that Iran’s “inferior” military would so blatantly expose Trump’s lies about U.S. success in the war, shut down supply chains to support U.S. armadas in the region, eliminate U.S. leverage, give Iran the upper hand, undermine U.S. credibility as a superpower, and turn Trump and Hegseth into worldwide laughingstocks and American embarrassments.
*Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, the talented fiction writer and novelist, is my brother. He deserves considerable credit for offering substantive and technical suggestions to my blog. His second novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a Mormon community. It is a literary masterpiece.
