For 80 years, the United States defied what Robert Kagan calls the closest thing to a law of physics in international relations: the concept of balancing. History's most powerful nation was not contained or resisted - it was welcomed, supported, and legitimized by the very countries it dominated. Those days, Kagan argues, are over.

Writing in The Atlantic, the Brookings Institution senior fellow has set out the case that American conduct in the Iran war has accelerated a transformation that will leave Washington weaker and more isolated than at any time since the 1930s, "Hvylya" reports.

Kagan traced how nations that once bandwagoned with the United States will now remain aloof or align against it. Not because they want to, he argued, but "because the United States leaves them no choice, because it will neither protect them nor refrain from exploiting them." The Iran war, he wrote, was global intervention "America First" style: no public debate, no vote in Congress, no cooperation or even consultation with allies other than Israel.

The Trump administration's new National Security Strategy shifted focus from world order to homeland security and hemispheric hegemony, appropriately downgrading the Middle East, Kagan acknowledged. Yet for reasons known only to the administration, the region suddenly took top priority - "apparently worth any price, including the introduction of ground forces and even the destruction of the American alliance system."

Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the war's most vocal advocates in Congress, captured the administration's attitude toward consequences: "They say if you break it, you own it. I don't buy that." Kagan saw this as the defining ethos of a superpower that no longer feels bound by the norms it once enforced.

Today's world, Kagan warned, looks more like 1934 than the post-Cold War era many imagined. Two expansionist great powers threaten their neighbors. American and European leaders clash not over philosophy but over fundamental security. "Welcome to the era of the rogue American superpower," Kagan concluded. "It will be lonely and dangerous."

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