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renewable energy
As Another Oil-Fueled War Erupts, Study Reveals Planet Heating at Unprecedented Rate
The findings mean global temperatures are on track to surpass 1.5°C above preindustrial levels before 2030.
Mar 06, 2026
Nearly a week into President Donald Trump's illegal war on Iran that is likely to increase climate-warming emissions, new research has found that the pace of human-caused global heating has accelerated over the past 10 years.
The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters on Friday, concluded that global heating had nearly doubled from a rate of less than 0.2°C a decade from 1970-2015 to 0.35°C between 2015-25. This would put global temperatures on track to surpass 1.5°C above preindustrial levels before 2030.
"Warming proceeding faster is not unexpected by climate models, but it is a cause of concern and shows how insufficient the efforts to slow and eventually stop global warming under the Paris Climate Accord have so far been," study authors Stefan Rahmstorf and G. Foster wrote.
Scientists had long suspected that global warming was speeding up, given that the past three years were the three hottest on record. Yet previous studies had not been able to find statistically significant evidence of acceleration. The new study removed the natural variability from solar variations, volcanic eruptions, and El Niño from the data, which revealed a statistically significant speedup.
“How quickly the Earth continues to warm ultimately depends on how rapidly we reduce global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to zero."
It follows a study from 2025 that found a smaller increase of 0.27°C per decade from 2015-24.
“Either way, this represents a significant increase in the rate of warming,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth and a co-author on the earlier study, told The Guardian. “[This] should be worrying as the world hurtles toward crossing 1.5°C later this decade.”
Whatever the rate of increase, the solution, from a scientific perspective, is clear.
“How quickly the Earth continues to warm ultimately depends on how rapidly we reduce global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to zero,” Rahmstorf, a Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research scientist, told The Guardian.
Yet the findings come at a time when emissions look set only to increase, as the US launches an oil-fueled war on Iran that risks drawing other major military powers into a greater conflict.
"The outbreak of any war is bad news for the climate, just as the election of politicians hostile to climate action is," Mark Hertsgaard, Covering Climate Now executive director and co-founder, and Giles Trendle, former managing director of Al Jazeera English, wrote in a newsletter on Thursday. "The climate implications of this new war are not the center of attention at the moment, but they are essential context for understanding what’s at stake. At a time when civilization is hurtling toward irreversible climate breakdown, to overlook the climate consequences of three of the deadliest militaries on Earth going to war would be journalistic malpractice."
War itself increases greenhouse gas emissions. Studies have found that Russia's invasion of Ukraine emitted as much in its first two years as the annual emissions of the Netherlands, while Israel's genocide in Gaza emitted as much in its first four months as each of the 135 lowest-emitting nations in a year.
The Conflict and Environment Observatory observed 120 incidents of environmental harm during the first three days of the Iran conflict, and noted that attacks on oil and gas infrastructure had global implications:
There are also consequences for the global environment through changes in greenhouse gas emissions. Attacks on oil and gas sites will release methane, carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gasses, but the curtailment of production—as has occurred with Qatari LNG [liquefied natural gas], oil production in Iraqi Kurdistan, and Israeli offshore gas—does not necessarily reduce emissions. Instead energy price signals can lead to short term substitution, as well as more complex downstream energy supply changes over longer timeframes.
Fossil fuels are also required to power the machinery that makes war possible.
"What’s beyond dispute is that this war could not be fought without oil," Hertsgaard and Trendle wrote. "The aircraft carriers, jet planes, and the myriad support systems they require gobble immense quantities of fossil fuels. Which helps explain why the US Department of Defense is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases globally."
There is also the speculation that control of fossil fuels is one motivation for the war itself, given that Iran has the world's third-largest reserve of oil. While Trump has not included oil in his incoherent word salad of war aims, as he did when he kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, climate advocate Bill McKibben pointed out that members of US oil industry have said that they would rather develop Iran's oil than Venezuela's, as its industry is more "structurally sound."
"Europe, Asia, and other regions whose energy costs skyrocket because of this reckless escalation by the Trump administration are reminded, yet again, that fossil fuels are volatile, insecure, and expensive."
"The military attacks on Iran are not about peace and democracy, but rather about sowing fear, bloodshed, and despair as the US attempts to further destabilize the region and secure access to profitable natural resources that it wants to control," the Climate Justice Alliance said in a statement. "This is not surprising given recent foreign policy actions taken by the Trump administration in Venezuela and Cuba, and our ongoing history of engaging in coups, occupations, and endless wars to control resource-rich countries, especially for oil and gas."
Yet, at the same time, the war is already offering an object lesson in the dangers of relying on fossil fuels—for everyone except fossil fuel CEOs. The war could disrupt markets such that profits soar for Big Oil and liquefied natural gas companies while ordinary people suddenly find themselves struggling to pay gas or heating bills.
"Iran is in the middle of one of the world’s most important energy corridors," Lorne Stockman, Oil Change International research director, told Common Dreams. "Roughly 20% of global petroleum flows through the Strait of Hormuz, so when military escalation disrupts that route, global energy markets are immediately impacted."
Stockman continued: "That instability means higher energy bills for people around the world while communities in the region suffer the devastation of war. Europe, Asia, and other regions whose energy costs skyrocket because of this reckless escalation by the Trump administration are reminded, yet again, that fossil fuels are volatile, insecure, and expensive. The only question is whether governments will heed that signal and make a fair fossil fuel phase out a priority.”
Chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Tzeporah Berman made a similar point on social media: "Drones hitting Saudi oil fields, Qatar halting LNG production, Iran putting a squeeze on the Strait of Hormuz, and US attack on Iran’s Kharg Island oil terminals—all of it should be a wake-up call that fossil fuel phaseout is a national and energy security priority."
Yet Berman noted that the energy landscape is different today than it has been during previous periods of war.
"Unlike previous oil wars renewable energy is now available at scale," Berman continued. "It's distributed, diversified, and resilient. Most importantly, solar panels don’t blow up and once they are in place you don’t need ships to constantly feed them to make energy. The sun is looking like a pretty stable energy source right about now."
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Why Pausing the Data Center Buildout Is the (Humanly) Intelligent Choice
We should stop and think before remaking society, not to mention pouring far more carbon into the atmosphere.
Feb 24, 2026
For a variety of reasons, I’ve found the data center debate to be difficult to get a real handle on over the last year. But I think a clearer picture is beginning to emerge, and I will do my best here to share it with you. Remember, I’m just one human brain, and I have not (illegally) digested every single book ever printed; I can’t draw you a picture of a data center licking an ice cream cone; and if you asked me to render this essay in the style of Emily Dickinson I would fail. Still, for what it’s worth:
First source of confusion: How much demand for AI will there actually be?
This depends on how useful it turns out to be, and that is still a very open question. Yes, AI executives are busy insisting it will upend everything and everyone—the AI chief at Microsoft said last week that all white-collar jobs using computers will be wiped out in the next 12 to 18 months—accountants, project managers, marketing staff. But there’s another school of thought—most ably represented by an AI researcher named Gary Marcus—that thinks the hallucination-prone large language models are good at writing certain kinds of code but not getting much better, and in fact may be at about the limit of their abilities.
There’s a second question resting on top of that one: Whatever AI can do, will it make a lot of money doing it, thus justifying the enormous investments currently being made or planned for data centers? The stock market apparently thinks so—AI makes up some stupendous percentage of its gains in recent years—but there are, as you have heard, fears it might be a bubble. The most eloquent—indeed logorrheic—source of those fears is Ed Zitron, a blogger who has followed the various money trails and concluded that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have no real prospect of making back the scads of money that they’ve spent, and that sooner or later the bubble will indeed do the thing bubbles do.
If we reach the point where we decide as a society that we actually want to build out this technology, then BYOG should be replaced by BEYONCE—Bring Your Own New Clean Energy.
These are crucial questions for us because as long as the bubble keeps expanding, there will be insatiable demand for more electricity for more data centers, and if it pops that demand will start to drop dramatically, especially since much of it is still semi-speculative—that is to say, there are far more data centers on the drawing board (to use an old-fashioned image) than under construction.
In fact, it’s been remarkably hard to estimate how much demand for electricity is actually going to go up, precisely because there’s so much speculation here. In an interview that got pretty wonky even for him, the invaluable David Roberts last week talked to Clara Summer, a public advocate at the PJM Interconnection Board, PJM being the the largest regional transmission organization (RTO) in the United States, managing the high-voltage electric grid for 67 million people across 13 states from Delaware to Illinois. Anyway, Summer explained that any given data center might be applying for permits to build in four or five different jurisdictions:
There is a big difference between a data center that has knocked on the door of a utility and said, “I am interested in being in this area,” versus a data center that has entered into a contract with a utility and put down money.
One estimate has that the number of requests for potential data centers to connect to the grid is 5 to 10 times more than the number of actual data centers that will be built.
Obviously, however, there are plenty of data centers going up. Some are truly terrible (consider the joint investigation by Floodlight News and the Guardian of an xAI facility in Mississippi; it has followed the path of Elon Musk’s egregious data center in the poor part of Memphis, both using portable gas turbines that pollute the air, and all in an effort to support an artificial “intelligence” that goes on long happy rants about Hitler; it won’s surprise you that the NAACP was early in expressing concern) and some are less terrible: Google just signed up for two big solar farms in Texas to support its data centers.
The default, sadly, seems to be headed toward the Musk model. With grid providers unable to build generating capacity fast enough to keep up with demand, data center developers are going BYOG—bring your own generation. Here’s a long and detailed new report about how the G generally turns out to also stand for gas, in this case onsite gas turbines, with not much concern for the climate or local air pollution risks. (Or for the amount of water required—here’s a recent account from Brad Reed of a single Pennsylvania data center that will use 40% of the town’s excess water). Here’s a kind of worst-case scenario from John Kostyack, a DC-based consultant:
By the end of this decade, capital spending by tech, real estate, and utility companies will likely represent the largest private-sector infrastructure spending spree in world history. McKinsey, for example, estimates a whopping $6.7 trillion in capital expenditures by 2030.
Although forecasts of the scale of data center buildout vary widely, anything near this projected scale has enormous climate implications. The most obvious concern is the emissions generated in powering the massive hyperscale complexes, which are being designed to consume as much as 2 gigawatts (GWs) of power–roughly 15 times the capacity required by the entire city of Philadelphia during summer peak load. According to energy analyst Rystand’s 2025 review of industry announcements, data centers consuming up to 100 GWs of power could come online in the next 10 years.
Much of this power would come from gas-fired power plants. Researchers at Urgewald estimate that roughly 37% of the gas plant capacity proposed in the last 2 years is linked to data centers and AI infrastructure. Thanks in significant part to data centers, the US has overtaken China as the world’s largest developer of gas plants, with 125 GWs of planned new capacity, up 120% from 2024.
Faced with this level of speculative craziness, local opponents and an increasing number of national groups are calling for a moratorium on the buildout of data centers. As Jenna Ruddock wrote in December:
Confronted with similar stakes, cities and counties across the US are pulling the emergency brake. From Maryland to Missouri, at least 14 states are home to towns or counties that have implemented moratoriums: a complete pause on data center development. In early December, over 200 groups—from faith groups in Florida and Louisiana to physicians in Texas—publicly called for a moratorium on new data center construction nationwide.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) became the highest profile Democrat-aligned politician to join the call for a moratorium, but as Politico reported in January it’s been hard to find others who are quite as outspoken. Most temporized—for instance, Rep Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), running for Senate, said AI “can bring real economic opportunity to Texas,” but “we must demand transparency, accountability, and responsible growth.”
But this is very soft ground for politicians, who haven’t found their footing yet. Late last week Sanders joined California Rep. Ro Khanna for conversations with AI executives; he emerged to tell a Stanford audience:
Congress and the American public have “not a clue” about the scale and speed of the coming AI revolution, pressing for urgent policy action to “slow this thing down” as tech companies race to build ever-more powerful systems.
It seems to me that the call for a moratorium is sound; we should pause before remaking society, not to mention pouring far more carbon into the atmosphere. Whether that’s possible is not clear. The Trump administration, amid its myriad corruptions, is making the case that we must keep ahead of China. What that means is unclear: The Chinese are indeed building AIs of their own, but they seem to be developing architectures that use less energy. And of course they are building out huge amounts of clean electricity, to use for transit and heating and, if they want, artificial intelligence. So far the big difference with the Chinese models is that they’re transparent and open. Which, by the way, complicates the task of American AI entrepreneurs who want to get rich via their proprietary systems.
That getting rich part, of course, now means using AI to try and game our politics, and indeed in recent weeks a new generation of AI-fueled bots seem to be infecting our political system. An AI platform apparently managed to generate 20,000 comments telling California regulators to ignore air quality concerns:
Environmental and public health advocates are calling on California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman to investigate an AI-powered campaign that allegedly submitted public comments attributed to residents without their consent to oppose Southern California clean air standards. The extent of the AI astroturf campaign remains unknown—who funded it, whose identities were used without consent, and whether California law was broken. Watch the press conference recording here.
The call follows a Los Angeles Times investigation exposing how CiviClick, an AI-powered advocacy platform, was used to generate more than 20,000 public comments opposing standards proposed by the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD). When staff at the AQMD followed up with a sample of people to verify comments, at least three said they had not written to the agency or had knowledge of the message.
Even so, the campaign for a data center moratorium seems to be gathering steam—one of the most recent pushes emerged in New York State where Third Act’s organizing director Michael Richardson was among the proponents. He said, quite sensibly I think:
At a time when New York State should be leading the rapid transition to solar and wind energy generation while also ending further buildout of fossil fuel infrastructure, the permitting of data centers with massive energy needs will only feed into the fossil fuel industry’s narrative that to keep this technology running we have to put a pause on dealing with climate change for now. The pause should be the one put on the data centers—not renewable energy projects.”
Indeed, if we reach the point where we decide as a society that we actually want to build out this technology, then BYOG should be replaced by BEYONCE—Bring Your Own New Clean Energy. But in the politically charged year in which we find ourselves, I think intelligence requires us to slow down.
A real shoutout, as I close, to the 86-year-old Pennsylvania farmer who last week turned down a $15 million offer for his land from a data center developer, instead giving it to a land conservancy for $2 million. Let’s give Mervin Raudabaugh the final word:
“It was my life,” Raudabaugh told Fox 43 News of the land he has farmed for 50 years. “I told [the data center company] no, I was not interested in destroying my farms.
“That was really the bottom line,” he continued. “It wasn’t so much the economic end of it. I just didn’t want to see these two farms destroyed.”
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Trump and the Free Fall of the American Empire
With his seemingly bold moves to avert American decline, President Trump is, in fact, adopting ill-considered policies that will, in the end, serve to accelerate that very decline.
Feb 23, 2026
Some tales can cross cultures, continents, and even centuries to arrive in our own era with their timeless truths pretty much intact. That’s particularly so for the immortal story of “an appointment in Samarra.” It first appeared in the fifth century in the Babylonian Talmud, that ancient repository of Jewish rabbinical wisdom. Then it crossed over into Islamic literature for reiterations in a 13th-century Persian version and a 15th-century Egyptian text, before popping up on the London stage in Act III of William Somerset Maugham’s 1933 play Sheppy.
In Maugham’s retelling, the tale is rich in irony. Once long ago, he wrote, there was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to shop in the market. But the servant soon returned home in a panic and told his master about a woman in the crowd there who stared at him angrily. “It was Death that jostled me,” the servant announced, pleading with his master for a horse to flee to the town of Samarra. There, said the servant, “Death will not find me.”
Riding hard and spurring the horse’s flanks, the servant raced across the desert and made it to Samarra by nightfall. That evening, the master himself went to the market and spotted the woman, demanding to know why she had threatened his servant. “That was not a threatening gesture,” said Death. “It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”
More than anything else, that ancient tale testifies to the eternal human folly of trying to outrun fate. And if that’s true for individuals, it’s doubly true for one of their most ancient collective creations, the phenomenon we call “empire.” Ever since Sargon the Great of Assyria founded history’s first trans-regional empire in 2300 BCE, the world has witnessed a succession of some 200 empires, of which 70 were large or lasting. Over the span of those 4,000 years, each empire rose, reached a peak so powerful that it seemed eternal, only to fade and finally fall, giving way to the next imperial reality.
Setting aside President Trump’s celebratory claims of miraculous success, there are ample grounds to argue that each strand of his grand strategy is rapidly accelerating the decline of US global power.
Until January 2025 when President Donald J. Trump took office a second time, the United States seemed to be following that fateful journey. After nearly a century as the largest, most powerful empire in history, the country seemed to be on a gradual downward trajectory from the peak of power it reached around 1991 (when that other imperial power of the time, the Soviet Union, collapsed). But from the first day he took office the second time around in January 2025, President Trump assured us that his bold plans to “Make America Great Again” would save this country from that sad fate. To understand how and why our master, our president, is, in fact, leading America to its own appointment in Samarra at a remarkably rapid pace, we need to understand the way this country has exercised its global power and the dynamics underlying its long-term decline.
The Cold War Legacy
Throughout the 44 long years of the Cold War (1947 to 1991), Washington pursued an effective geopolitical strategy for containing its chief global rival, the Soviet Union, behind an “Iron Curtain” guarded by a chain of US military bases and alliances that stretched for 5,000 miles across the broad Eurasian land mass. Whenever Moscow tried to break out of its geopolitical isolation by arming surrogates in Asia or Africa for war or revolution, Washington, as I explain in my latest book Cold War on Five Continents, sometimes sent troops, as in South Korea in 1950. Usually, however, it dispatched individual CIA officers to organize covert interventions to beat back any Soviet advance, as it did so effectively in Afghanistan in 1980. In the end, exhausted by one foreign adventure too many, Moscow was forced to acquiesce as its satellite states in Eastern Europe broke away and the Soviet Union shattered. By 1991, Washington had won the Cold War, emerging from that monumental conflict as the world’s sole superpower.
At that hour of seemingly ultimate triumph, the signs of America’s military omnipotence and its overweening imperial hubris were both amply evident.
Let’s start with Washington’s imperial hubris. At the close of the Cold War, political scientist Francis Fukuyama published an article that became a veritable manifesto for Washington’s power elites. Not only were we witnessing the end of the Cold War, he argued, but we were also seeing—yes!—“the end of history” through the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Not only was there a “total exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism,” but there was also, he claimed, an “ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture” to the most remote corners of the globe, even into the shopping malls of our former enemies, China and Russia.
And his viewpoint did indeed reflect a certain reality: Our nation’s leaders were fully convinced that their Pax Americana would become the final form of global governance for all of humanity for all time. While that unapologetic imperial hubris may now seem almost quaint, in the aftermath of the Cold War it became gospel. It guided Washington’s leaders who indeed seemed to wield ample enough power, both military and economic, to fulfill that bold vision for remaking the world in America’s image.
Next, as for US military omnipotence, while the Russian military was ravaged by the collapse of the Soviet Union and China still couldn’t project power beyond its own borders, America’s armed forces emerged from the Cold War as a global behemoth. By the mid-1990s, the US had more military forces than all the other major powers combined—with more than 700 overseas bases, an air force of 1,760 jet fighters, more than 1,000 ballistic missiles, and a navy of 600 ships, including 15 nuclear aircraft carrier battle groups—all linked by the world’s only global system of communications satellites.
When Iraq’s military dictator Saddam Hussein occupied the small petro-state of Kuwait in 1990, Washington mobilized a coalition of 42 nations to obliterate the Iraqi army in the Gulf War with a show of overwhelming force evident in that conflict’s glaring disparity in casualties. The US-led coalition killed an estimated 50,000 Iraqi troops and destroyed more than 5,000 of that country’s armored vehicles at a cost of just 292 of their own soldiers.
A few years later, in 2002, imperial historian Paul Kennedy reviewed the relative strength of rival empires over the past 500 years, concluding: “Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing.” Given America’s “mind-boggling” dominance in finance, scientific research, and, above all, military strength, there was, he added, “no point in the Europeans or Chinese wringing their hands about US predominance and wishing it would go away.” In sum, he concluded, any chance for a serious erosion of Washington’s global power “seems a long way off for now.” But to give Professor Kennedy his due, he did warn that China was “perhaps the only country that—should its recent growth rates continue for the next 30 years and internal strife be avoided—might be a serious challenger to US predominance.”
Seeds of Decline
Yet even at a peak of military supremacy not seen since ancient Rome, America’s asymmetric power was already starting to slip silently, slowly, but inexorably away. Part of that power loss was a tribute to the dynamic world order that Washington had created in 1945 at the end of World War II. Under its innovative system of free trade, low-cost development loans, and stable exchange rates (based on the US dollar), the world dug itself out of the rubble of global war and enjoyed a half-century of unprecedented prosperity.
As the rest of the world experienced a rapid economic recovery exemplified by Germany’s solid 6% annual growth rate and Japan’s sizzling 10%, America’s share of the global economy would, in fact, decline steadily from a formidable 50% in 1945 to 40% in 1960 to just 25% in 1995, and there it would essentially remain for several decades. Using an index called PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) that measures the real value of economic output, the International Monetary Fund calculates that, in 2026, China now leads the world with 20% of global economic output, the US comes in second at just 15%, and the European Union places a close third at 14%. In effect, over the past 80 years, the United States has gone from a towering economic Titan, capable of dictating the terms of trade to the rest of the world, to just one among several major players that must bargain with its peer rivals, China and Europe.
As this country’s economic superiority, the foundation for its global hegemony, slowly began to ebb, Washington’s leaders made some dubious decisions about the Middle East and also China that contributed to the erosion of their international influence. In 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, seeking to bring the Pax Americana with its “universalization of Western liberal democracy” to the oil-rich Middle East (and beyond). As President George W. Bush told the nation in 2004: “America is pursuing a forward strategy of freedom in the greater Middle East” through “the development of free elections, and free markets, free press, and free labor unions… in Afghanistan and Iraq, so those nations can light the way for others, and help transform a troubled part of the world.”
If such trends continue, Trump’s strategy could not only reduce the US from a global hegemon to a regional power, but also leave it remarkably isolated diplomatically and otherwise in its own hemisphere.
While the US was pouring its blood and treasure (an estimated $4.7 trillion worth) into those desert sands, China was enjoying a decade of warless economic growth. By June 2014, in fact, it had accumulated $4 trillion in foreign currency reserves—and in a major strategic miscalculation, Washington had even lent a hand. In deciding to admit Beijing into the World Trade Organization in 2001, Washington’s leaders proved bizarrely confident that China, home to a fifth of humanity, would somehow join the world economy without changing the global balance of power in any significant way.
In 2013, as Beijing’s annual exports to the US grew nearly fivefold to $462 billion and its foreign currency reserves approached that $4 trillion mark, President Xi Jinping announced his historic “Belt and Road Initiative.” Thanks to that initiative and the lending of a trillion dollars to developing nations, within a decade China would become the dominant economic player on three continents—Asia, Africa, and, yes, even Latin America.
Trump’s Grand Strategy for Making America Great Again
In 2021, at a delicate juncture in the history of US global power, President Joseph Biden took office with a reasonable strategy for managing Washington’s position in a changing world. Above all, he tried to maintain the longstanding US geopolitical position astride the Eurasian landmass by strengthening the NATO alliance in response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and by expanding the country’s Asia-Pacific alliances to contain China.
To complement that geopolitical strategy, the Biden White House pursued traditional US free-trade policies, while working through the international organizations that were the hallmark of Washington’s world order. In response to the globe’s rapidly accelerating green-energy transformation, the Biden administration also launched a trillion-dollar program to modernize the nation’s electrical grid and support Detroit’s transition to electric vehicles. Had Washington continued such policies long enough to realize their promise, the US might indeed have remained a primus inter pares, a first among relatively equal world powers, while protecting its global economic strength and promoting its international influence.
But in January 2025, Donald J. Trump took office (again!) with a seemingly bold vision for nothing less than a new world order. If you sort through all the static and superficial chaos that emanates from official Washington these days, it’s possible to identify three intertwined strands in Trump’s grand strategy for US foreign relations—a tricontinental division of global power, the continued use of traditional oil-powered energy, and a transactional international trade.
Instead of maintaining alliances like NATO, the foundation of the US position in Eurasia (long the epicenter of global power), President Trump has pursued a tricontinental strategy for a world divided into three great-power blocs—with Russia resurgent in the old Soviet sphere, China ascendant in Asia, and the US dominant in the Western Hemisphere. All of his seemingly erratic statements in his first months back in the White House about claiming Greenland, reclaiming the Panama Canal, and making Canada the 51st state were, in fact, expressions of his underlying geostrategic vision. Indeed, he became so insistent in his attempt to grab Greenland—the sovereign territory of NATO ally Denmark—that it threatened to rupture that alliance, long central to US global power.
Last November, the Trump White House imposed an overarching logic on the president’s seemingly erratic eruptions by releasing its National Security Strategy. Reflecting the president’s longstanding aversion to the NATO alliance, the document predicted that Europe faced a “stark process of civilizational erasure” though a mix of multiracial migration and “cratering birthrates” that raised the question of whether its nations would stay “strong enough to remain reliable allies.”
Instead of relying on an unreliable Europe, that strategy document insisted that Washington must “be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity.” To that end, the US should refocus its “global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere,” while redeploying the US Navy to “control sea lanes” closer to home. By using “tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful tools,” the Western Hemisphere would become, the document claimed, “an increasingly attractive market for American commerce” and that ever-rising power China would be pushed out of the region.
All those puffy abstractions gained a physical reality in January when a US naval armada, amassed off the coast of Venezuela, sent Special Forces shooting their way into its capital, Caracas, seizing President Nicolás Maduro and taking control of his country’s oil reserves, the world’s largest. While the US might have only 4.7% of the globe’s proven oil reserves, by adding Venezuela’s (17.2%) and possibly Canada’s (9.2%), Washington would suddenly control 32% of the planet’s total oil supply—more than enough to fuel Trump’s contrarian vision of America as a petroleum-fueled superpower and defying what he believed was a disastrous global turn toward green energy.
With Caracas now allowing Washington to control access to its oil and billions of dollars of its oil revenues already sequestered in a Persian Gulf bank that would be under his sole control, Trump is well on his way to achieving the second strand in his grand strategy by returning the United States to its traditional full-scale reliance on oil-powered energy. By trying to bar the completion of coastal wind farms, cancelling tax credits for electric vehicle purchases, opening a billion acres of federal lands to oil exploration, and preventing the planned shutdown of aging coal-fired power plants, after just one year in office, Trump has essentially smothered America’s infant green-energy economy in its cradle (and ceded a future green-powered global economy to China).
With his escalating, ever-changing tariffs on imported goods—the third strand in his strategy—the president has roiled the global economy sufficiently to achieve his objective of replacing rules-based free trade with a transactional system that makes access to the US market contingent on his caprice. When he first imposed a roster of high tariffs on what he called “Liberation Day” in April 2025, he claimed that jobs and factories would “come roaring back into our country.” But by zapping allies and enemies alike with his rat-a-tat-tat burst of tariffs, he raised the average US tariff on imports from 2.5% in January 2025 to a hefty 16.6% just six months later, the highest since 1932, while not faintly stopping the ongoing loss of jobs in the manufacturing sector.
That Appointment in Samarra
Setting aside President Trump’s celebratory claims of miraculous success, there are ample grounds to argue that each strand of his grand strategy is rapidly accelerating the decline of US global power.
His ongoing retreat from Europe into the Western Hemisphere—the first strand—is already eroding Washington’s position in Eurasia, the cornerstone of its geopolitical power for nearly 80 years. Such a withdrawal is tantamount to a full-scale surrender in the great-power struggle between Beijing, Moscow, and Washington for Eurasia that scholars have dubbed “the new Cold War.”
Moreover, the president’s heavy-handed policy toward the Americas is already alienating this hemisphere’s major nations—sending Canada’s prime minister to Beijing in search of a major trade deal to offset punitive US tariffs, and prompting Brazil to lead the Mercosur bloc of South American nations in signing a landmark trade pact with the European Union. Over the past 25 years, moreover, Brazil has led its region in making China its top trading partner and a key source of capital for auto manufacturing, major infrastructure building, communications, and computer technology. If such trends continue, Trump’s strategy could not only reduce the US from a global hegemon to a regional power, but also leave it remarkably isolated diplomatically and otherwise in its own hemisphere.
Import duties of 100% might continue to keep Chinese electric cars out of the US, but Detroit’s big three (Ford, GM, and Stellantis) do the bulk of their business overseas where their lack of competitive EV models threatens their profitability and even, ultimately, their survival.
In the second strand of his strategy, Trump’s aggressive anti-climate-change advocacy of fossil fuels is delaying, at an incalculable cost, this country’s participation in the global shift to renewable energy—a change so profound and pervasive that it’s nothing less than a new industrial revolution, one whose leadership the president is handing to China. In less than a decade, solar-powered electrical generation has already cut costs and increased efficiency, becoming 41% less expensive than the cheapest fossil fuels. And engineering innovations in panel design and battery storage are likely to make any future use of carbon-fueled electricity economically infeasible. In 2025, while the US was blocking wind farms and straining its grid by building ever more data centers, China increased its total power generation by 16%, with solar and wind energy now accounting for half of that country’s total installed electrical capacity.
Just as China already produces 80% of the global supply of solar panels and their components, so its recent innovations in electric vehicle design, including five-minute charging for a 320-mile range, have allowed it to capture 70% of global EV production. In the past five years alone, China’s share of worldwide auto manufacturing has surged to 24%, while Detroit’s share fell to only 16%, driven in part by a costly retreat from EV production since Trump took office a second time. Import duties of 100% might continue to keep Chinese electric cars out of the US, but Detroit’s big three (Ford, GM, and Stellantis) do the bulk of their business overseas where their lack of competitive EV models threatens their profitability and even, ultimately, their survival. “I have 10,000 dealers around the world,” said Ford’s CEO Jim Farley recently. “Only 2,800 are in the US. So, you do the math.”
And while Trump’s ambitious tariff policy—the final strand in his grand strategy—is producing some short-term gains in revenue, it carries some serious long-term costs. When the US accounted for 50% of the global economy in the 1940s, Washington could play any tune and the world had to dance. Now, however, with just 15% of global output, Washington might well find itself ever more economically isolated as major players choose other commercial partners. Trade represents about 57% of gross domestic product in countries worldwide, so no nation can long prosper in commercial isolation.
With his seemingly bold moves to avert American decline, President Trump is, in fact, adopting ill-considered policies that will, in the end, serve to accelerate that very decline. Like the merchant in that tale who sent his servant to Samarra to avoid Death, President Trump is sending the United States down a path that is leading to its own appointment in Samarra.
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