The World is Done Waiting For America to Return
American voters are gearing up to decide whether they want more of the same or a change in direction. The rest of the world has already decided to move on.
By Ryan McGreal.
812 words. Approximately a 2 to 5 minute read.
Posted September 19, 2026 in Blog.
We find ourselves today in a world that is highly volatile and dangerous, fraught with intersecting perils that desperately require imagination and dexterity to manage.
We have multiple regional wars raging, all of them at serious risk of escalating into wider, more devastating conflicts.
We have burgeoning technologies whose own inventors are begging governments for sensible regulation in order to mitigate the risk that they could escape control and wreak havoc on our systems of survival.
We inhabit a global climate that has been destabilized by decades of uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions, and is producing devastating extreme weather events of ever-growing frequency, intensity and scale.
In the years after the pandemic, we lost many of the early warning systems that guard against the next pandemic, even as the transmission vectors for disease proliferation continue to expand and public health authorities struggle with a loss of public trust.
These are all thorny collective action problems that require careful coordination to align the interests of parties with divergent and often competing agendas.
One lesson I learned from the pandemic was that extraordinary circumstances don’t always inspire better leadership. Sufficiently reckless leaders can turn a crisis into a catastrophe - and the worse the outcomes, the more aggressively they double down on blaming everyone and everything but themselves.
Worst of all, I learned that there are far too many citizens, even in mature liberal democracies, who are willing to look the other way, accept the blame-shifting excuses, or actually welcome the devastation.
The former US president who oversaw just about the worst pandemic response of any developed country, and who helped normalize within his political movement a profound distrust of empirical sources of knowledge, is once again the president.
He incited a violent assault on the peaceful transfer of power when he lost his election in 2020 and refused to accept the results. His army of dedicated followers stood with him and the broader leadership of his party failed to hold him to any kind of account.
He emerged stronger, angrier, and more determined than ever to transform the office of the presidency into his own personal engine of vengeance and self-enrichment.
Elections have consequences. 77.3 million American voters decided in November 2024 to re-elect him, despite everything he had done up to that point.
In his second term, he has launched a war with Iran and has pursued an erratic, haphazard and shamelessly transactional approach to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
He calls the risks posed by misaligned artificial intelligence a “hoax” and refuses to consider meaningful regulation, even as some of the industry’s own leading figures warn that increasingly capable AI systems require independent oversight.
He withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Agreement and ripped apart the ambitious domestic policy framework that was finally starting to bend the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions, fateful decisions that have made any hope of international cooperation more difficult.
He has defunded, dismantled or weakened core elements of American and global public-health infrastructure, withdrawn the United States from the World Health Organization, cut public-health funding, and installed a health secretary who is truly breathtaking in his depravity and unfitness.
The defining challenges of our age cannot be solved by any nation acting alone. They require institutions, alliances, expertise - and above all, trust and sustained cooperation between countries. Instead, we have a president who has made it his mission to undermine institutions and alliances, denigrate expertise and violate trust.
The best case scenario the world can hope for, over the next two years and four months, is that the institutions and practices of American democracy and the rule of law muster the resilience to act as a check on his malicious impulses.
That is not a comforting place for the world to be. However, the upcoming midterm elections are an opportunity for the American people to take stock of the past 20 months and decide whether they want more of the same or a change in direction.
The world is watching. But we’re no longer waiting passively for a few tens of thousands of American swing voters to save us.
As the US continues to undermine the foundations of the postwar international order it built and sustained for decades, an order that benefited the US itself more than any other country, the other liberal democracies of the world are stepping into the void, laying the foundations of a new system that is more genuinely multilateral, more resilient, and less dependent on any one country to be the sponsor and guarantor of everyone’s security.
For the first time in the postwar era, countries that were deeply invested in the US-led international system are increasingly treating the United States not as the pillar of that system, but as a source of political and strategic risk that they need to hedge against.
A fundamental shift has been set in motion, and its consequences will play out over the coming decades.