Why American Power Looks Weaker Than It Is
When the final U.S. aircraft departed Kabul in August 2021, the moment registered less as a tactical failure than as a strategic rupture. The withdrawal exposed confusion, poor coordination, and an absence of narrative control that extended well beyond Afghanistan itself. For many Americans and allies, it raised an uncomfortable question: was U.S. foreign policy still anchored to a coherent sense of purpose?
That question has lingered. It has been reinforced by polarization at home and uncertainty abroad, and by a growing belief that American influence is in structural decline. The concern is not simply about individual decisions, but about whether the United States still retains the capacity to shape events rather than merely respond to them.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sharpened those doubts. The war tested Washington’s willingness to sustain a long conflict against a determined adversary without committing its own forces directly. The American response has been uneven and politically contested. Yet it would be a mistake to interpret that complexity as strategic collapse.
This argument is not partisan. Both major political coalitions in the United States share a core assumption, even if they articulate it differently: the twenty-first century should not default to authoritarian dominance. Whether that ambition can be fully realized is uncertain. What matters is that the contest has not been abandoned.
Russia today is locked into a war that increasingly resembles a strategic dead end. Its military has adapted tactically, but at an extraordinary cost in personnel and matériel. Conservative estimates place Russian casualties in Ukraine in the hundreds of thousands, with some assessments pushing far higher. Even allowing for uncertainty, the scale is historically severe. Russia has expended a generation of men and equipment to gain incremental territorial advances.
The domestic consequences are mounting. Russia now survives on a war economy that diverts resources from civilian development and long-term growth. Tens of thousands of educated professionals have left the country since 2022, settling in Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. This matters because Russia entered the war already facing demographic decline. The invasion did not create that crisis. It deepened it. A state that consumes its working-age population cannot indefinitely project power abroad.
Russian backing has also failed its clients. In the Middle East, the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria stripped Moscow of its most important regional foothold. Years of military intervention, advisory support, and arms transfers did not produce a durable outcome. For other regimes, the lesson was clear: Russian patronage offers symbolism, not security.
Iran now faces a similar reckoning. Sustained domestic unrest has exposed the fragility of the regime’s internal legitimacy, but recent military developments are more revealing. U.S. and Israeli operations demonstrated that Iranian airspace can be penetrated with limited resistance, and that hardened facilities, including those linked to the Fordow nuclear complex, remain vulnerable to modern strike capabilities. This failure matters not only for Iran, but for Moscow. Years of Russian training, coordination, and air defense cooperation did not yield systems capable of denying access to advanced Western aircraft and munitions.
The implication extends further. Iranian reliance on proxy forces in Syria and Lebanon has been weakened in part because those networks depend on the same Russian-designed air defense architecture now shown to be inadequate. Deterrence built on layered defenses and regional depth has proven thinner than advertised.
A similar pattern is visible in Latin America. The U.S. operation targeting Nicolás Maduro did not topple the continuity regime in Venezuela, nor was it intended to. Its significance lay elsewhere. Despite years of Russian diplomatic backing, arms sales, and security cooperation, Venezuelan defenses failed to insulate the regime from U.S. reach. Russian support did not alter the underlying balance of power.
China remains the central long-term challenge, but even here the picture is more constrained than it appears. Pressure from Japan has intensified quietly but steadily. The United States and its partners are hardening supply chains around advanced semiconductors, a cornerstone of modern military and economic power, while restricting China’s access to the most sensitive technologies. Beijing’s ambitions are substantial, but its margin for error is narrowing.
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None of this suggests inevitability. Progress is fragile, and missteps remain possible. One of the most serious risks is the deterioration of U.S.–European relations. Rhetoric that frames Europe as a dependent or a rival is strategically self-defeating. Europe is not a competing civilization. It is the one that produced the United States. Any durable effort to balance China will require Washington and the European Union acting in concert. That requires restraint, not nostalgia or moral posturing.
So where does this leave us?
American power today is less theatrical than it once was, and less reliant on spectacle or occupation. It operates through pressure, endurance, and coalition management rather than decisive campaigns. Adversaries are absorbing costs, burning time, and exhausting themselves in ways that favor patience over panic. The danger is not imminent collapse. It is complacency and strategic drift.
The American century was never going to proceed uncontested. The question now is whether the United States recognizes that power in this era is exercised less through conquest than through sustained pressure and disciplined alliances. On that front, the story is unfinished, and it is far from lost.
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