On Inauguration Day, many felt real euphoria at the prospect of a wholesale renovation of America’s institutions. And, as I’ve argued often, our constitutional democracy does need renovation—the various elites are disconnected from the people, bureaucracy afflicts everyone, and many of us find it impossible to hold our elected officials accountable. Yet I fear that the renovations we’re about to get will take us in the wrong direction.

Americans have been yielding sovereignty to tech magnates and their money for years. The milestones are sometimes startling, even if one has long been aware of where things are heading. I was astonished and alarmed when I learned, in the summer of 2023, that Elon Musk had, within a span of five years, built an orbital network comprising more than half of the world’s active satellites. His share has now risen to more than 60 percent. Already in 2023, he controlled battlefield communications infrastructure used in the war between Ukraine and Russia. Musk is currently the head of Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, which is taking over the U.S. Digital Service. At the same time, he may be making a bid for TikTok’s American platform. Ownership of TikTok brings immense power. In December, the Romanian elections were canceled in the middle of voting because of fears that propaganda from Russia, by means of TikTok, was driving the election results.

Musk is well on his way to controlling the world’s communications infrastructure. This is not by accident. He swims in an intellectual universe, alongside his PayPal associates Peter Thiel (who funded J. D. Vance’s Senate campaign) and David Sacks (now Trump’s AI and crypto czar), whose writers advocate for replacing democratic leadership with a CEO-monarch, and argue that higher-IQ “sovereign individuals” should rule over people with lower IQs. Musk, Sacks, and Thiel all spent formative boyhood years in South Africa. As the historian Jill Lepore noted in The New Yorker, Musk’s grandfather took the family to South Africa for the sake of apartheid, having left Canada after being jailed for his leadership activities in the Technocracy movement, “whose proponents believed that scientists and engineers, rather than the people, should rule.” Thiel has made “freedom” his life’s pursuit. Since 2009, he has argued that freedom is incompatible with democracy, and that “the fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”

[Brooke Harrington: The broligarchs are trying to have their way]

Two original MAGA leaders, Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer, have railed against this “techno-feudalism.” That is what they see Musk and his allies trying to bring about, whether in collaboration with Trump or by using him as their puppet. For the first time ever, I find myself agreeing with Bannon and Loomer.

The whole situation went from concerning to surreal when, two days before his inauguration, Trump issued a meme crypto coin, known as $TRUMP. A memecoin is a form of cryptocurrency that has no value-creating function in the crypto ecosystem. Instead, it references some popular phenomenon and gains its value only because of people’s interest in that popular phenomenon. Typically, memecoins also lack the security that could render them a stable part of the crypto financial infrastructure.

The fully diluted value (or market cap when the full supply is circulating) of  $TRUMP, 80 percent of which is owned by entities that the Trump family controls, shot up within 24 hours of its release to more than $70 billion. It is now bouncing around between $20 billion and $30 billion—meaning the president now holds something like 75 to 80 percent of his wealth in crypto. That goes well beyond monetizing the Trump brand through T-shirts, gold sneakers, and steaks. This time, Trump has auctioned himself. Leaving aside the technical substrate, there is arguably little difference between $TRUMP and the president posting a deposit-only Swiss-bank-account number online, into which people can deposit funds and privately show him the receipts for their deposits. His personal wealth now depends on these depositors. He has turned himself—and therefore his office—into a for-profit joint-share stock corporation. People with $TRUMP in their crypto wallets are the shareholders.

[Read: The crypto world is already mad at Trump]

Who knows if the president intended this outcome, but leaders in the crypto space have long hoped for the replacement of nation-states with “network states” encompassing communities that come together on the blockchain. They are celebrating $TRUMP as the first crypto community to have gained control of a nation-state’s powers by capturing the president’s attention through control of his digital wallet. If what Trump has done is upheld as legal or becomes a norm, other global leaders have every incentive to do what he did, turning democratic governance into corporate governance. Melania Trump, for one, has already followed suit; her coin was issued a few days after Trump’s.

Last week, the DOGE homepage displayed the icon for Dogecoin, which Musk has declared to be his favorite coin, and which he holds. (He has faced litigation as a result of accusations that he sought to pump it up; the lawsuit was dismissed.) The icon appeared in vibrant color against a black background. It was removed within 24 hours.

Two features of the $TRUMP memecoin are especially troubling. First, there is the question of who owns the coin. Initial activity for sales of $TRUMP—and, therefore, its financial backing—came from buyers on the platforms Gate and Binance, which are restricted in the United States. Although it will take years of analysis to determine who the eventual beneficial owners are, the reliance on Gate and Binance suggests that early uptake occurred abroad, and particularly in markets controlled by U.S. adversaries—China, Iran, North Korea, Russia. As of 2023, according to a Wall Street Journal report, U.S. trading volume on Binance was very low. Users in China provided Binance with its greatest market share, at 20 percent of trading volume, and about 10 percent of Chinese customers were at the time identified as “politically exposed persons”—that is, according to the Journal report, “government officials, their relatives or close associates who require greater scrutiny due to their greater risk of involvement in bribery, corruption or money laundering.” Because memecoins depend on a collective belief in their value, investors (other than the issuer) who buy the coins are the people who hold up that value. Those early movers on the Gate and Binance platforms can be meaningfully understood to have handed Trump billions, at least on paper. (Steve Gregory, the Gate CEO, was invited to the inauguration.) They also hold power over that wealth. If they withdraw confidence and dump their assets, the value of the coin would trend toward zero. So Trump now appears to owe most of his new wealth to crypto investors in adversary states who are quite possibly closely connected to governments themselves—investors whom the rest of us are not able to identify, but who can identify themselves to him by proudly waving their $TRUMP-filled digital wallets.

[Read: Hawk Tuah wasn’t what it seemed]

Second, there is the question of what it means to convert political office into something that is subject not merely to the general pressure of financial influence but to the power of shareholders over an officeholder’s immediate personal wealth. This is of course why other presidents and senior executive-branch officials have sold off their investments or placed them in blind trusts for the duration of their terms. The neo-reactionary voices in the tech space—the NRx crowd, as they call themselves—have for some time wanted to take the powers of governance over territory out of the hands of nation-states and place them into the hands of platform-based collectives committed to capitalism first and foremost. For years we’ve watched the problem of money in politics get worse and worse, but the Trump coin takes the matter to another level. It provides the technical means for enabling the vision of total capture of governance institutions by tech communities.

What speculative futures are now possible? The president could easily organize a one-token, one-vote referendum—as many coins and decentralized autonomous organizations, which are built out of blockchain communities, already do—among asset holders on major U.S. public-policy issues. Think of it as a corporation giving shareholders their one vote per share. Yes, a corporation has to please its customers—in this analogy, American voters—but it really needs to please the shareholders who help sustain the share price. If $TRUMP were to introduce a voting mechanism for asset holders in this way, it would immediately implement the long-held anarcho-capitalist dream of converting global governance regimes into for-profit joint-stock corporations—minus any Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure requirements, which the president has hinted about relaxing. If other leaders do what Trump has done, then we would see global governance structures generally privatized—and political leaders provided with great incentives to collude with the common interest of capital holders, rather than governing for a true cross-class common good.

Where would that leave voters? In a position somewhat akin to fans at WWE wrestling matches. Politicians, all beholden to a community of shareholders separate from their voters, would collude in steering toward benefits for those shareholders, while pretending to fight one another in public. Imagining such a possibility would seem crazy if people in the tech world hadn’t been writing so much about just this kind of governance structure—and if the technical pieces weren’t now all falling neatly into place.

Trump promised back in 2016 to “drain the swamp,” and he was correct, as I’ve written before, about the need to restore experts to their rightful place as servants of the people rather than quasi-autonomous technocrats who order the world as they think best. But instead of draining the swamp, Trump appears simply to be importing even larger crocodiles from Silicon Valley: multimillionaires and billionaires who mostly couldn’t give a fig for self-government of, by, and for the people. The man who vowed to slay the old “deep state” appears ready to accept a new, more totally controlling, one.

[Read: The Trump sons really love crypto]

Speaking recently on NPR, Bannon used the term techno-feudalism again and went on to explain: “These oligarchs in Silicon Valley, they have a very different view of how people should govern themselves … They don’t believe in the underlying tenets of self-governance.” This seems right. In his inaugural address, Trump echoed Lincoln, promising a new birth of freedom, but just a few rows behind him, among other tech luminaries, was Musk, nearly levitating with joy when Trump promised territorial expansion both on this planet and in space and cheered for DOGE—Musk’s agency and his favorite memecoin.

The principles of popular sovereignty were hard-won—principles that vest the ownership of government in we, the people, not they, the owners of memecoins. When early Americans before, during, and after the Revolution sought to make self-government durable, they circulated pamphlets that articulated the values and tools necessary for successful self-governance. The renovations we need will similarly depend on real understanding of self-government. I’ve been a civic educator my whole life, but now I see an even more urgent need to pick up the pace at which we spread the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers, as well as works that have updated those texts, to sharpen our collective understanding of what popular sovereignty requires.

After the British government first allowed the East India Company, traffickers in tea, to rule India, and then fell into a full fiscal entanglement with the company, Americans dumped the company’s tea in Boston Harbor. Maybe it’s time to dump Dogecoin.

North Korea's Kim Jong-un inspects nuclear facility, increasing pressure on US and South Korea

During his first term in office, Trump met with Kim on three occasions between 2018 and 2019.

The Capitol One Arena is rather dreary. The 27-year-old venue was considered so outdated—and the neighborhood around it so drab—that last year the owner of the Washington Capitals and Wizards threatened to move the teams to Virginia.

But today, the arena will be the unlikely venue where Donald Trump’s political powers and showman’s instincts will be placed on full display.

A tiny desk, affixed with the presidential seal and bathed in red, white, and blue lights, has been placed on a stage built in the center of the arena where—in lieu of a traditional inaugural parade—Trump will hold a rally this afternoon. That is where he is expected to sit and sign a slew of executive orders. His efforts to reshape national policy and presidential power will come not in a quiet Oval Office but in front of a raucous crowd of supporters.

Trump officially completed his stunning comeback by taking the oath of office just after noon today in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. But his second term, in many ways, will truly begin a few hours later in that packed arena about a mile away. An executive producer at heart, Trump has always leaned on the power of imagery in cultivating political force. And in his inaugural address, he was stage-managing his sequel, a presidential spectacle that offered a preview of his plans for his second act.

There were few notes of unity.

“My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal,” Trump said, “and all these many betrayals that have taken place, and give people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and indeed their freedom. From this moment on, America’s decline is over.”

The frigid temperatures gave Trump an excuse to move the inauguration inside, much as Ronald Reagan did in 1985, and they provided him with further control of the pageantry. By not braving the cold—and, to be clear, several inaugurations have been colder—Trump also dispensed with any focus on the size of his crowd, something that upset him deeply eight years ago.

Moreover, he was able to mark his return to power in the very space where a violent mob of his supporters tried to overturn an election to keep him in power. Four years ago, a crowd radicalized by lies of a stolen election stormed the U.S. Capitol and desecrated its Rotunda, committing acts of violence in Trump’s name. Today, official Washington used that same historic hall to welcome him back to power.

If Trump had delivered his speech in its customary outdoor location on the Capitol’s west front, the cheers from the crowd down on the mall below would have been distant. But the indoor setting invoked a State of the Union address, held annually just down the hall in the House of Representatives chamber. And Trump furthered that feeling with a partisan speech, pushing a litany of policy proposals. Reactions split along party lines, with Republicans repeatedly leaping to their feet to applaud and Democrats, including outgoing President Joe Biden, sitting silently.

Trump leaned into the visual messaging of the Capitol ceremony. For most people, seating charts are mundane, tiresome organizational tools. But they are prized in Washington for clues as to who’s up and who’s down, offering a literal map of proximity to power. The signals sent by Trump were clear: GOP donors and friends such as Miriam Adelson and Dana White were seated right behind the row for former presidents. His new tech-billionaire friends—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—got prime seats inside the Rotunda, in front of the incoming Cabinet, while a number of Republican governors, including Ron DeSantis of Florida, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, and Brian Kemp of Georgia, were shoved to the overflow room.

Inauguration Day was designed to showcase democracy’s strength. Instead, the events of the day showed its inherent fragility. Biden provided Trump what Trump did not give him—a peaceful transfer of power with all the niceties of ceremony—but the outgoing president was so concerned about his successor exacting revenge that he issued extraordinary preemptive pardons to some government officials and members of his own family, which cut sharply against his pledge to restore democratic norms.

As his motorcade wound its way through Washington, Trump was surrounded by his own image. Many of those thronging the nation’s capital—even those shut out of the events by the weather-related scheduling changes—sported shirts and sweatshirts emblazoned with Trump’s mugshot taken at Fulton County Jail, in Atlanta, when he was charged in August 2023 with racketeering. At the time, that case in Georgia was just one of four criminal cases that imperiled Trump, though it was the only one that produced a booking photo quickly disseminated around the globe.

Many Democrats hoped it would doom Trump’s chances, undermining a campaign that was about retribution, yes, but also about keeping the candidate out of prison. But three of the cases fell by the wayside, derailed by stalling tactics, prosecutorial blunders, and a helpful Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity. And the one case that did move forward—the hush-money trial in New York—ended with a conviction that will be recorded in the history books but meant little else.

Trump has mused that the legal proceedings created images that reinforced his claim to be a victim of a government overreach, the subject of a witch hunt, a martyr taking arrows for his supporters. Throughout the race, he used those visuals to recast political vulnerabilities as visceral symbols of toughness and power. Day after day, the Republicans flocked to the courthouse—sometimes in matching red ties—to demonstrate their fealty. And many in the GOP saw his mugshot not as a sign of wrongdoing or guilt, but as an image of strength and defiance. He used it for countless fundraising appeals and merchandising opportunities.

That wasn’t an accident. In the weeks before Trump’s own arraignment, he saw the case’s other defendants pose for unflattering booking photos that looked washed-out and weak. So Trump practiced various facial expressions, one of his advisers told me on condition of anonymity to discuss private moments. He eventually settled on a scowl, matching his first instinct. And then in the booking room, Trump told confidants later, he saw where the light was coming from and positioned his face, frowning and leaning forward, half in the shadows and half in the full glare.

Trump loved the result. And when it came time to pose for photos for the official inaugural program, he re-created it, his adviser told me. Vice President J. D. Vance’s portrait looks like most official portraits: a pleasant closed-mouth smile, plenty of light illuminating his face. Trump instead asked for an extreme close-up, like his booking photo, with his face somewhat in shadow, glaring at the audience. The photo shaved years off his 78-year-old face and projected a strongman’s toughness.

The other image that defined the 2024 campaign was captured moments after an assassin’s bullet grazed Trump’s ear during a campaign stop in Butler County, Pennsylvania. With blood from his wounded ear streaking across his face, Trump had the showman’s presence of mind to stop the Secret Service agents trying to hustle him to safety. He stood tall, pumped his fist at the roaring crowd, and yelled, “Fight, fight, fight!” It was moment of inspiration—captured in a series of instantly famous photographs—and, for Trump loyalists, perfectly showcased a political survivor.

John F. Kennedy was considered the originator of modern presidential iconography, while Reagan enhanced it. But even more than his glamorous predecessors, Trump knows that the pictures matter far more than the substance. His whole political career has been built around imagery. It was launched on the back of The Apprentice, the highly stylized version of his business career that exaggerated his success and made him America’s CEO.

After he was elected, I saw his skill at stagecraft firsthand while covering his White House. Some images he created were meant for the history books, such as when he left those of us in the press pool behind to step over the border at the DMZ and into North Korea, becoming the first U.S. president to set foot in the hermit-like nation. Others were more mundane: During an Oval Office interview ahead of the 2018 midterms, Trump stopped the questions to make sure the photographer had the most flattering lighting. He held up his hand, and issued instructions.

“Let’s make sure this looks the way it should,” Trump said, unsmiling, while directing the angle and illumination of the photos.

That same attention to the power of political imagery was on display again in Washington today, from the Capitol Rotunda to the Capitol One Arena. Moments after completing his inaugural address, Trump spoke to the overflow room and began by praising the stagecraft of the ceremony.

“It was so beautiful in there today that maybe we should do it every four years,” said Trump, who added that the Rotunda featured “the best acoustics I’ve ever heard in a room.”

He smiled at the camera.

Japan opens independent mission to NATO as tensions with Russia, North Korea rise

When Donald Trump completes his once-unthinkable return to the White House, he’ll face a world far more violent and unsettled than when he unwillingly gave up power four years ago.

And his very presence behind the Resolute desk feels destined to destabilize it further.

Trump has offered mysterious plans to bring quick ends to the wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East. He has antagonized allies and mused about a return to an age of American imperialism, when the United States could simply seize the territory it wanted. He and his advisers have threatened trade wars and allied themselves with movements that have eroded democracies and supported rising authoritarians.

And Trump is again poised to push an “America First” foreign policy—inward-looking and transactional—at a moment when a lack of superpower leadership could embolden China to move on Taiwan or lead to renewed conflict in the Middle East, just as the region seems on the doorstep of its biggest transformation in generations.

“Trump is less of a surprise this time but will be a test. The international system has baked in that Trump is not an instinctive supporter of alliances, that he will be inconsistent,” James Stavridis, a former supreme allied commander of NATO, told me. “Allies and adversaries alike are going to know that nothing is free; everything is a negotiation.”

[Read: How ‘America first’ became America alone]

Trump, Biden officials ruefully note in private, will inherit a strong hand. He will take the helm of a healthy economy and will become the first U.S. president in decades to assume office without a large-scale military deployment in an overseas war zone. And the grueling conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza—which Trump has demanded end immediately—both appear to be at inflection points, with war-weary sides showing a willingness to talk.

The president-elect has said there will be “hell to pay in the Middle East” if Hamas hasn’t released the hostages seized on October 7, 2023, by the time he is inaugurated. After months of negotiations by President Joe Biden’s team, a breakthrough appears at hand to pause fighting and release some hostages.

The moment has come during the incumbent’s final days in office, yet Trump has been quick to take credit—the deal was made with input from his Middle East envoy—even as a permanent resolution to the conflict remains uncertain. And his intervention does seem to have played a key role in achieving a breakthrough. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, appeared eager to start Trump’s second term on the incoming president-elect’s good side while Hamas may have been spooked by his bombast. But as the cease-fire slowly unfurls in the weeks ahead, Trump’s tempestuousness could just as easily endanger the fragile deal.

During his reelection campaign, Trump repeatedly proclaimed that he would end the war between Russia and Ukraine “within 24 hours,” a claim he has since softened. Indeed, nowhere will his swearing-in be more nervously watched than in Kyiv. Trump, of course, has long derided NATO, the alliance that has propped up Ukraine. Moscow has made some halting advances, despite a last-ditch surge of aid to Ukraine from the Biden administration. And the president-elect’s desire for a quick, negotiated end to the conflict seems likely to ratify some of Russia’s territorial gains.

Trump’s White House and the MAGA-ified House of Representatives have shown no appetite to send substantial aid or military equipment to the front, and although Europe will gamely try to pick up the slack, Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself will suffer without American support. Russia’s advantage in manpower—bolstered by the North Korean troops it is using as cannon fodder—will only expand, and Russian President Vladimir Putin may grow more confident that he can simply win a war of attrition.

[Read: Trump is facing a catastrophic defeat in Ukraine]

One senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the incoming administration, identified Trump’s long-standing deference to Putin as a grave concern, particularly if Russia’s aggression sets off NATO’s mutual-defense pact. “If Trump gives in to Putin an inch, he’ll take a mile,” the official told me. “If he turns his back completely and encourages him to move beyond Ukraine, think how much more costly it will be if Article 5 gets triggered. Then we have American skin in the game.”

Divisions are already emerging in Trump’s orbit as to the best approach to Ukraine and beyond. Steve Bannon, the right-wing provocateur and first-term Trump aide, has argued against globalism. Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who has become Trump’s most influential informal adviser, has used his fortune and social-media reach to prop up right-wingers in the U.K. and Germany who are eager to walk away from Kyiv. That echoes the approach of the incoming vice president, J. D. Vance.

But not all of Trump’s team is in lockstep. The secretary-of-state nominee, Marco Rubio, has been a NATO defender, and Mike Waltz, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, has argued forcefully in favor of tougher sanctions on Moscow’s energy sector to strangle Putin’s government economically.

Those divisions feel familiar. Trump’s first-term diplomatic and national-security teams—initially stocked with Republican stalwarts whose views were far closer to GOP orthodoxy than those embraced by MAGA—often found themselves feuding among themselves. Both camps were frequently frustrated by a president who had few consistent desires other than a need for flattery.

The result was a haphazard foreign policy. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un started out on the receiving end of “fire and fury,” only to later receive what Trump called “beautiful letters.” China went from foe to friend and then back again. And even as his administration levied tough sanctions against Russia, Trump continually cozied up to Putin, siding with the dictator over his own U.S. intelligence agencies in Helsinki.

[Read: No more Mr. Tough Guy on China]

That unpredictability, although it brought chaos before, could work to Trump’s advantage on the world stage this time around, his new crop of advisers believes. Would any foreign adversary dare test Trump if they can’t anticipate his response? Trump himself leaned into the idea in October, when he told The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board that he would not have to use military force to prevent Beijing from blockading Taiwan, because Chinese President Xi Jinping “respects me and he knows I’m fucking crazy.”

It’s far less calculated than Richard Nixon’s “madman” theory of the case—far more born of Trump’s own whims and ego—but the end result, his advisers argue, could be the same.

And that, to put it mildly, was on full display during the transition.

Maps showing the familiar view of the Western Hemisphere, but with the U.S. borders cartoonishly expanded, have become popular right-wing memes. Suddenly, Greenland is part of the United States. Upon closer examination, so is the Panama Canal. And Canada—our friendly, polite neighbor to the north—is now the 51st state.

There are debates even in Trump World as to how serious any of these efforts at territorial expansion might be, and all agree that a healthy dose of trolling was involved in Trump dispatching Donald Trump Jr. to Greenland or calling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “governor.” But foreign capitals have long learned to take the elder Trump both literally and seriously.

Trump’s desire for Greenland—based on its strategic location and abundant resources—has rattled not only Denmark, which governs the island, but also other NATO members, which are aghast at the incoming American president’s refusal to rule out using military force to seize the island. Similarly, Trump’s threats toward Panama and his bullying of Canada—including warnings of sweeping tariffs—have again sent a clear message to the world: Under its 47th president, the United States cannot be counted on to enforce the rules-based order that has defined the postwar era.

[Read: The intellectual rationalization for annexing Greenland]

A Trump-transition spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In the Middle East, Israel’s response to October 7 created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza but also decimated the Iranian proxies that have served as buffers for Tehran for decades, leaving the regime newly vulnerable.

“Iran is now at the weakest point since 1979,” Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s national security adviser, said on Monday. “There is a cease-fire in Lebanon and the possibility of a new political future with a new president. Russia and Iran’s lackey in Syria, [Bashar al-Assad], is gone.”

In his first term, Trump withdrew the United States from a nuclear deal with Iran, implemented a “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign, and brokered the Abraham Accords, which further isolated Tehran. He authorized the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the general who directed Iran’s militias and proxy forces around the Middle East. He’s now filled his Cabinet with Iran hawks, including Waltz—which could put him at odds with Gulf allies who seem more inclined to try for a détente with Tehran.

The only certainty is more uncertainty. And the president-elect was quick to embrace the chaos when asked by a reporter at a news conference last month about his plans for Iran.

“How could I tell you a thing like that now? It’s just … you don’t talk about that before something may or may not happen,” Trump said. “I don’t want to insult you. I just think it’s just not something that I would ever answer having to do with there or any other place in the world.”

The Iranian presidency seems to be a cursed position. Of the eight men who have held it before the current president, five eventually found themselves politically marginalized after their term finished. Two others fell to violent deaths in office (a bomb attack in 1981, a helicopter crash in 2024). The only exception is Ali Khamenei, who went on to become the supreme leader.

Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s centrist president from 2013 to 2021, could be poised to break the spell and stage a political comeback.

The prospect seemed far-fetched until recently. Pressed on one side by hard-liners and on the other by opponents of the Islamic Republic, the regime’s centrists and reformists had become political nonentities. In the last years of his rule, Rouhani was among the most hated men in Iran. His landmark achievement, the 2015 nuclear deal with the Obama administration and five other powerful countries, was destroyed when President Donald Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. Iran’s security forces, which are not controlled by the president, killed hundreds of protesters in 2017 and 2019 while he looked on. He was followed as president by the hard-line Ebrahim Raisi, picked in 2021 in an uncompetitive election. With Khamenei’s backing, the hard-liners went on to capture most of the available instruments of power in Tehran. Last January, Rouhani was even denied a run for the seat he had held since 2000 in the Assembly of Experts, a body tasked with appointing the supreme leader.

But the events of 2024 shifted the balance of power in the Middle East—and inside Iran. Israel’s battering of Hamas and Hezbollah greatly weakened Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance. The fall of the Assad regime in Syria last month was the final nail in the axis’s coffin. Khamenei’s foreign policy now lies in ruins. Last year, for the first time in their history, Iran and Israel exchanged missile and drone attacks on each other’s territory. Following Raisi’s death in a helicopter crash in May, Khamenei allowed a reformist, Masoud Pezeshkian, to run for and win the presidency—a significant concession, as reformists have been effectively sidelined, if not barred, from national politics for nearly two decades. Now Rouhani’s star foreign minister, Javad Zarif, is back as Pezeshkian’s vice president for strategic affairs. Both Rouhani and Zarif campaigned for Pezeshkian and have found themselves on the winning team.

[Read: RIP, the Axis of Resistance]

Having brought international isolation, domestic repression, and economic ruin to the country, hard-liners find themselves red-faced. Although the almost 86-year-old Khamenei is still fully in charge, he has lost much respect, not only among the people but also among the elites, and the battle to succeed him is already under way. Recently, Khamenei has signaled his possible openness to abiding by the anti-money-laundering conditions set by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force. If Iran is to have any hope of solving its economic problems, it has no other choice: The country is currently one of only three (the other two are North Korea and Myanmar) on the FATF’s blacklist. But the issue has long been a touchy one for hard-liners, who see cooperating with the FATF as capitulation to the West and fear that it will force Iran to curtail its support for terror groups.

An emboldened Rouhani is back in the spotlight, giving speeches and defending his time in office. In the past few months, he has repeatedly complained that his administration could have engaged Trump directly but was stopped from doing so. (This is an implied dig at Khamenei who, in 2019, publicly rejected a message that then–Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe brought to Tehran from Trump.) Rouhani has called for “constructive interaction with the world,” which is regime-speak for negotiations with the United States in the interest of sanctions relief. None of Iran’s problems can be solved without addressing sanctions, he recently said. He has also called for “listening to the will of the majority of people” and freer elections. These statements have made him the target of renewed attacks by hard-liners, such as Saeed Jalili, who lost the election to Pezeshkian last year.

What may look like factional bickering is significant in this case. Rouhani speaks for part of the Iranian establishment that rejects Khamenei’s saber-rattling against the U.S. and Israel on pragmatic grounds. He is in many ways the political heir to Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a once-powerful former president who eventually ran afoul of Khamenei and died in 2017. Rafsanjani and Rouhani are often compared to the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. They sought to transform Iran from an ideologically anti-Western state to a technocratic one, with a pragmatic, even West-facing, foreign policy. During his presidency, Rouhani made state visits to France and Italy and was accused of neglecting Iran’s ties with China and Venezuela. His cabinet included many American-educated technocrats, and his administration tried to purchase American-made Boeing planes.

[Read: The collapse of the Khamenei doctrine]

Iran’s centrists are less interested than the reformists in democratization, and more focused on fostering economic development and good governance. This emphasis allows them to extend a broad umbrella. Rouhani’s agenda of pragmatic developmentalism is shared to varying degrees not just by reformists, but by many powerful conservatives, including the Larijani brothers (a wealthy clerical clan that includes several former top officials), former Speaker of Parliament Ali Akbar Nateq Nuri, former Interior Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi, and even the current speaker of parliament, Mohammad-Bagher Qalibaf (who was for years a top commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps).

Iran’s current weakness and desperation offer Rouhani and his allies an opportunity to wrest back power. Doing so could put them in a favorable spot for that inevitable moment when Khamenei dies, and the next supreme leader must be chosen. Rouhani has some qualities that will serve him well in this internal power struggle. Unlike the soft-spoken reformist clerics, such as former President Mohammad Khatami, he is a wily player who spent decades in top security positions before becoming president. (Khatami had been Iran’s chief librarian and culture minister; Rouhani was the national security adviser.) During his two-term presidency, Rouhani confronted rival power centers, such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, without fear. His experience negotiating with the West goes back well before the Obama era. In early 2000s, he led Iran’s first nuclear negotiating team, earning the moniker “the diplomatic sheikh.” In the mid-1980s, Rouhani led the negotiation team that met with President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, Robert McFarlane, in the arms-for-hostages deal known in the U.S. as Iran-Contra. In 1986, Rouhani even met with a top Israeli security official, Amiram Nir (who was posing as an American), to ask for help in countering Iranian hard-liners.

But does Rouhani have any reasonable chance of returning to power? As always, Tehran is full of discordant voices. According to one conservative former official who spoke with me on the phone from Tehran, Rouhani is a major candidate for succeeding Khamenei as supreme leader. The official asked to be anonymous, given that “we have been ordered not to discuss the succession.” A high-ranking cleric and a former reformist MP cited the same gag order, but observed that Rouhani’s fortunes were rising; they declined to predict whether he could become supreme leader.  

Mohammad Taqi Fazel Meybodi, a reformist cleric, is not so hopeful. “I don’t believe folks like Rouhani can do much,” he told me by phone from his house in Qom. “They don’t hold power, and hard-liners oppose them. These hard-liners continue to oppose the U.S. and have an ideological worldview. They control the parliament and many other bodies.”

Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, a former reformist MP who is now an activist based in Boston, believes that the regime will seek a deal with the U.S. regardless of who is in power. “There have long been two views in the regime,” she told me: “a developmentalist one and one that wants to export the Islamic Revolution. But the project of the latter now remains defeated. Iran has no way but to go back to development.” Even in what many consider a worst-case scenario—if Mojtaba Khamenei, the leader’s son known for his ties to the security establishment, succeeds his father—he, too, will be forced to adopt the developmentalist line, Haghighatjooo says.

[Read: Iranian dissidents don’t want war with Israel—but they can’t stop it]

Haghighatjoo is even hopeful that the new Trump administration, with its willingness to break with past norms, will provide an opportunity for normalization between Iran and the U.S. Such an approach would “give strength to the developmentalists, especially now that the Axis is weakened,” she said.

Khamenei continues to resist such notions. In a defiant speech on January 8, he lambasted the U.S. as an imperialist power and pledged that Iran would continue to “back the resistance in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Yemen.” He criticized “those who want us to negotiate with the U.S. … and have their embassy in Iran.”

But Iran is in dire straits, and the supreme leader can ignore the facts for only so long. In many ways, he resembles his predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolutionary leader who, in 1988, likened his acceptance of a cease-fire with Iraq to “drinking a chalice of poison.” Having promised for years that Iran would continue to fight until it overthrew Saddam Hussein, Khomeini’s volte-face came out of desperation—and at the urging of Rafsanjani and Rouhani (a young Zarif, then a diplomat at Iran’s UN mission, helped write Iran’s letter to the UN Security Council, officially accepting the cease-fire).

Many analysts now loudly wonder whether Khamenei, too, will drink his chalice of poison. He might have no other choice. The old ayatollah’s project has evidently run aground—and Iran’s pragmatists have fresh wind in their sails.  

South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said the missiles travelled up to 250km (155 miles) before landing in the sea.

Donald Trump, for reasons no one fully apprehends, is preparing for his looming second term by talking like a 19th-century imperialist. At a press conference this week, he pointedly declined to rule out the use of military force to acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal, while insisting on renaming the Gulf of Mexico. He also has repeatedly alluded to a takeover of Canada, including using his social-media platform to share an imagined map of the United States consuming its neighbor to the north.

Rationalizing these statements in either moral or strategic terms is challenging. But the conservative columnist Dan McLaughlin is up to the task. “In fact, Trump is sending a message to the world and America’s enemies: We’re serious about protecting the Western Hemisphere—again,” he writes. Trump, he explains, is shrewdly analyzing the strategic importance of the Panama Canal and Greenland and seeking to ward off Chinese influence, and is belittling the sovereign rights of American neighbors in order to scare them into cooperation. It’s all quite strategic. If Metternich had had a social-media account, he probably would have been binge-posting fake images of a European map with a gigantic Austrian empire.

This is a now-familiar ritual in the Trump era. First, Trump says or does something so outrageous that any critic who dreamed it up beforehand would have been mocked as suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Then his defenders either pretend it didn’t happen, accuse the Democrats of having done the same thing, or reimagine Trump’s position as something defensible.

Trump’s cascade of threats has been too loud and insistent for No. 1. Even the most strained historical reading yields little suitable material for a whataboutist defense, making No. 2 a heavy lift. (Joe Biden’s litany of gaffes lacks any military threats against American allies.) This leaves conservatives with no choice but door No. 3: casting Trump’s trolling as a clever geopolitical stratagem.

Trump “starts a negotiation on his terms, starting with the most outlandish demands but with designs on a deal,” McLaughlin writes admiringly. During the first Trump term, some conservatives likewise insisted that his threats to obliterate North Korea were the prelude to some tough dealmaking. The deal turned out to be that North Korea was permitted to continue developing its missile program, but Trump got a prized collection of flattering personalized letters from Kim Jong Un.

[Jonathan Chait: The political logic of Trump’s international threats]

McLaughlin is a longtime hawk, so his current stance is unsurprising. More remarkable is the support that Trump’s bout of unprovoked threats has gained from conservative thinkers who otherwise cast themselves as anti-interventionist. Michael Brendan Dougherty, who has written extensively about the failures of the Republican Party’s hawkish faction, notes that the case for invading Greenland is not “sufficient” to outweigh its moral and diplomatic costs. Still, he can’t quite bring himself to reject the notion. “I’m not a war-hawk expansionist,” he said recently on a National Review podcast. “But I don’t think it’s a totally insane idea.” Yes, he granted, “it would be an unjust, aggressive war.” However, “it would be far less costly or dangerous than regime-changing Iran.”

This is an interesting method for evaluating policy ideas: think of a much worse policy idea that is not an alternative, and ask whether it would be worse than that. Repealing the First Amendment might sound risky, but in comparison with, say, blowing up the moon, it seems downright prudent. (You may also recognize this form of reasoning from the periodic conservative argument that “Trump is less dangerous than Hitler.”)

The journal Compact is one of those magazines that have popped up during the Trump era with an apparent, if unstated, mission of reverse-engineering an intellectual superstructure for his populist impulses. Compact’s proprietary formula combines statist left-wing economic policy with social conservatism. And, although its authors don’t agree on everything, it has been fairly insistent about noninterventionism as a foundational principle. The bread and butter of Compact’s foreign-policy line is articles with headlines such as “No to Neoconservatism” and lamenting that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine gave new life to American foreign-policy hawks. (You knew there had to be a downside somewhere.) Matthew Schmitz, one of the magazine’s editors, has called for social conservatives to “cast off the ideology” of interventionism.

And yet, yesterday Compact published an essay celebrating Trump’s imperialist ideology. (Headline: “The Future Belongs to America. So Should Greenland.”) “Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again begins with making America America again,” Chris Cutrone writes. “Making Greenland and Canada American is part of this initiative.” Greenland, he explains, is strategically valuable, so we should take it. Canada is “the most European part of the Western Hemisphere,” and therefore deserving of geopolitical annihilation. The essay ends on this rousing note: “Approaching the quarter-millennium of the American Revolution, perhaps the borders of the Empire of Liberty are set to be revised again.”

It seems paradoxical that anti-interventionist conservatives (and horseshoe-theory Marxists, in Cutrone’s case) would be enthusiastic about naked imperialism, while even ultra-hawks such as John Bolton consider it bellicose and irresponsible. (“It shows Trump, again, not understanding the broader context that his remarks are made in, and the harmful consequences that this is having all across NATO right now,” he told CNN.) The ideological through line appears to be that intervention is wrong when it’s done to spread democracy (Iraq) or protect a democracy (Ukraine), but launching a war against a peaceful democratic ally is somehow reasonable.

The more likely explanation for this paradox is simply that the neoconservatives are the least loyal to Trump of all the conservative factions, and the anti-interventionists the most. And so if loyalty to Trump means developing reasons to favor threats against Mexico, Canada, Panama, and Greenland—none of which poses the slightest danger or was considered even vaguely hostile by Trump’s allies until Trump thought to target them—then, by jingo, reasons will be found.

As he sat in prison in 1930, at the opening of a fateful decade, the Italian anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

The world is now in a Gramscian interregnum. The old order—Pax Americana—is breaking down. Electorates across the West are in revolt as the industrial era’s social contract has given way to the socioeconomic insecurity of the digital age. Waves of immigration have sparked an angry ethno-nationalism that advantages ideological extremes. Power in the international system is shifting from West to East and North to South, undermining a global order that rested on the West’s material and ideological primacy. Russia and China are pushing back against a liberal order that they see as a mask for U.S. hegemony. Many in the global South have grown impatient with an international system they see as exploitative, inequitable, and unjust.

Pax Americana is past its expiration date, but the United States won’t let go. Instead of beginning the hard work of figuring out what comes next, the Biden administration spent its four years defending the “liberal rules-based order” that emerged after World War II and seeking to turn back any and all challenges to it. The results are telling: disaffection at home and disorder abroad. The old is dying, the new cannot be born, and a great variety of morbid symptoms has appeared.

[Read: Foreign leaders face the Trump test]

In this context, Donald Trump could be a necessary agent of change. His “America First” brand of statecraft—transactional, neo-isolationist, unilateralist, and protectionist—breaks decisively from the liberal internationalist mold that has shaped the grand strategy of successive administrations since World War II. But though that mold may well need to be shattered, it will also need to be replaced. And Trump is more demolition man than architect. Instead of helping build a new and better international order, he may well bring down the old one and simply leave the United States and the rest of the world standing in the rubble.

Trump will nevertheless be the president of the world’s most powerful country for the next four years. Americans will have to make the best of his efforts to revamp U.S. foreign policy. That means welcoming Trump’s recognition that the country needs a new grand strategy—then pushing him to pursue change that is radical but responsible, and to reform the world that America made rather than merely destroying it.

Pax Americana was born during the 1940s. World War II and the onset of the Cold War whetted the country’s appetite for an expansive internationalism. Democrats and Republicans both rallied behind a grand strategy that secured geopolitical stability and prosperity by projecting U.S. power globally and establishing an open, multilateral order among like-minded democracies.

Today, that internationalist consensus has shattered. Deindustrialization and the hollowing out of the middle class, decades of strategic overreach and hyperglobalization, and an influx of immigrants that has contributed to rapid shifts in the country’s demographic makeup have all sapped political support for liberal internationalism. Enter Trump and his politics of grievance. “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,” he pledged in his inaugural address in 2017. “From this moment on, it’s going to be America First. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families.”

Trump in his first term failed to get “forgotten” Americans back up on their feet. This is one of the reasons he lost his bid for reelection to Joe Biden. Biden then oversaw a “restoration” presidency, reinstating liberal internationalism and standing firmly behind Pax Americana. But the foreign policy he pursued was better matched to the world that was. Biden consolidated traditional American alliances in Europe and Asia and took the lead in helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression. But he leaves office amid deepening global disorder, and without having even tried to negotiate an end to a war that Ukraine cannot win. Biden pledged to pursue a “foreign policy for the middle class,” but during his presidency, the electorate remained polarized, and blue-collar voters further gravitated toward Trump.

Now Trump has a chance to try again. His “America First” agenda tends to make the foreign-policy establishment recoil, but it offers distinct advantages. Trump’s transactional and pragmatic engagement with adversaries may do more to tame geopolitical rivalry than Biden’s view of a globe defined by a clash between democracy and autocracy. Trump’s readiness to negotiate with Russia, China, and Iran is exactly what’s needed.

Preparing a diplomatic push to end Russia’s war against Ukraine is pragmatism, not capitulation; the death and destruction need to stop. Trump was smart to invite Xi Jinping to his inauguration; if he can eventually sit down with Xi, cut a trade deal, and ease rising geopolitical tensions, more power to him. Elon Musk, one of Trump’s confidants, has already met with Iran’s UN ambassador; now that Israel has weakened Tehran and pummeled its proxies in the Middle East, a diplomatic breakthrough may be achievable. Should Trump succeed in lowering the temperature with adversaries, he will make the world a safer place while scaling back the nation’s onerous commitments abroad, thereby easing the chronic strategic overreach that has led Americans to turn inward.

Trump also understands that globalization has left many workers behind and that open trade has benefited far too few Americans; he is appropriately looking to level the commercial playing field. He is heading in the right direction by seeking a solution to illegal immigration, responding to the clamor of an electorate that knows full well that the country lacks a functioning immigration system. And Trump will be doing the nation a service if he can downsize the federal government, make it more efficient, and help reduce the national debt.

[Read: The political logic of Trump’s international threats]

More pragmatism and less ideology, more restraint and fewer wars, more focus on solving problems at home and less on defending democracy abroad, more government efficiency and less waste—these strategic shifts should serve the United States well is it seeks to manage a world of growing disarray, diffusing power, and stark political diversity. Trump’s statecraft is in these respects not the impulse of a misguided and capricious demagogue but an appropriate response to a changing world and a changing America.

Yet even if Trump’s “America First” foreign policy has considerable promise, it is also fraught with risk. His transactional approach to diplomacy could morph into a stiff-necked unilateralism that undermines collective efforts where they are needed. His effort to limit U.S. entanglements abroad could lead to U.S. underreach, leaving dangerous vacuums of power. His reluctance to promote democracy overseas could shade into disregard for democratic norms at home, potentially resulting in irreversible damage to the nation’s representative institutions. And in his determination to shake up the political establishment, Trump could break the U.S. government rather than reform it. A broken federal government will be in no shape to fix a broken America or a broken world.

Trump’s strategy could easily descend into excess and incoherence. The work ahead will be to encourage Trump’s better instincts, counter his more malign ones, and channel both into something resembling a coherent and constructive grand strategy.

For the past four years, the Biden administration has tightened relations with allies but neglected diplomacy where it was most needed, with Russia and China. Trump’s readiness to engage adversaries could be a welcome shift. But now the hazard will lie on the other side—that Trump will embrace a self-defeating unilateralism and shun alliances and other collective efforts; “America First” would then become “America Alone.”

During his first term, for instance, Trump pulled out of the Paris climate agreement, the World Health Organization, and other multilateral arrangements. He still expresses an aversion to “international unions that tie us up and bring America down.” He has a history of demeaning allies and viewing alliances as encumbrances; he just might act on his threat to withdraw from NATO. And Trump’s unilateralist threats to use economic coercion to annex Canada and military coercion to take control of the Panama Canal and Greenland are simply off the wall.

Unilateralism won’t work in today’s world; no nation can opt out of a globe that has grown irreversibly interdependent. Countering aggression, managing international commerce, arresting global warming, preventing nuclear proliferation, regulating the development and deployment of AI—these are only a few of the shared challenges that necessitate international teamwork. If the United States walks away from collective effort, others will do the same. And allies don’t diminish U.S. power; they augment it. Having fellow democracies by Washington’s side will only increase Trump’s leverage as he negotiates with Russia, China, and other adversaries. In contrast, if Trump gives allies cause to question America’s commitment to collective defense, they will pursue other options, leaving the United States isolated and vulnerable. That’s not putting America first.

Trump’s enthusiasm for tariffs is another worrying plank of his unilateralist agenda. Modest and selective tariffs could do some good, protecting sensitive technological sectors, bringing home a few manufacturing jobs, and pressuring foreign governments to provide U.S. goods with better market access. But Trump has more ambitious plans. He’s eyeing 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico and has hinted that he could impose levies as high as 60 percent on imports from China.

If Trump puts up these tariff walls, he could well spark a trade war that wreaks havoc on international trade and global prosperity. Tariff barriers would also hurt, not help, America’s working families by increasing the cost of consumer goods while failing to turn the United States back into the “manufacturing powerhouse” that Trump has promised. Largely as a consequence of automation, some 80 percent of the U.S. workforce is already employed in the service sector; those workers are not returning to the production line. A trade war with allies and adversaries would also inflame geopolitical tensions, confronting the United States with the prospect of strategic isolation amid growing global disarray.

Trump is right that the United States tends to overreach abroad; “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan are a case in point. But Trump will need to seek a middle ground between doing too much and doing too little.

Ukraine will be an early test. Trump is right to try to end the conflict; a war that drags on indefinitely could eventually turn Ukraine into a failed state. But even though he has made clear his discontent with the costly provision of assistance to Kyiv, Trump cannot simply cut off the flow of U.S. aid, which would only encourage Vladimir Putin to keep up his quest to subjugate Ukraine. Trump also needs to hold out for a good deal, not just any deal that ends the war. Russia will almost certainly retain the 20 percent of Ukraine it now occupies. But Washington must ensure that the other 80 percent is sovereign and secure. To do otherwise would leave Ukraine permanently subject to Moscow’s predation and coercion—and hand a victory not only to Russia but to China, Iran, and North Korea, all of which are backing Russian aggression.

[Robert Kagan: Trump is facing a catastrophic defeat in Ukraine]

The role for the U.S. in the Middle East is similar: Stepping back is good policy, but stepping away would be folly. The United States certainly erred in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, effectively turning all three into failed states. But disengagement, which is what Trump seems to have in mind, goes too far in the other direction. When the regime of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad collapsed last month, Trump posted, “Syria is a mess . . . . THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” Yet the United States can’t really steer clear of Syria, which hosts a sizable contingent of American troops; is home to extremist groups, such as the Islamic State; and borders three U.S. allies—Turkey, Jordan, and Israel. Especially at a time of widespread upheaval in the Middle East, U.S. engagement is needed to guide the region to a stable peace.

Trump appears likely to either overdo or underdo China. He’s a hawk when it comes to trade but could well balk at the risks of a military dustup with Beijing over Taiwan. In the past he has demanded that Taiwan pay for U.S. “protection,” claimed that it had “stolen” America’s semiconductor industry, and equivocated about defending the island. Trump’s larger China policy could ultimately determine which way he goes on Taiwan. A trade war could lead him to ratchet up geopolitical rivalry and double down on defending Taipei, risking an irreparable rupture with China. Conversely, he might sell out Taiwan as part of a grand bargain with Beijing that he could tout as the consummate deal, leaving China unchecked and allies everywhere unsettled. The more responsible path is to undertake cautious but constructive engagement, aiming to rebalance trade, ratchet down geopolitical tension, and carve out a working relationship on issues such as technological competition and global health—all while preserving a stable status quo on Taiwan.

Ideological hubris has often pushed U.S. statecraft off course, and Trump exhibits due caution toward the overzealous promotion of democracy abroad. He has correctly traced American overreach in the Middle East to the “dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western democracy.” And he is right to reassure foreign nations that “we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone.”

Yet Trump could well end up pairing this tolerance of political diversity abroad with efforts to compromise liberal democracy at home. Indeed, he has already shown a worrying disdain for democratic norms. He still claims spuriously to have won the 2020 election, threatens to pursue vendettas against political opponents, pledges to punish media outlets and companies that criticize him, and plans to disregard the Constitution by denying birthright citizenship.

Decency is at stake as well as democracy. Trump is a convicted felon, and a good number of his appointees are of dubious character. Tycoons such as Musk, whom he has tapped to help improve government efficiency, will beset the administration with conflicts of interest, as Trump’s globe-spanning family businesses already do. Immigration-policy reform is overdue, but forcibly deporting millions of undocumented migrants would be both indecent and inhumane. So much for the United States leading through the power of its example.

Democracy is in recession in all quarters of the globe, including in the West, where political centrism has been steadily losing ground to illiberal populism. If that trend is to be reversed, the United States needs to get its own house in order and demonstrate to the rest of the world that democratic governments can indeed deliver for their citizens and outperform the autocratic competition. At this historic inflection point, the trajectory of American democracy may well determine the trajectory of democracy around the world.

If Trump contravenes the laws, norms, and practices that anchor republican government, he could do irreparable harm to the cause of democracy not just in the United States but globally. The legislature, the courts, the media, and the American people will bear the responsibility for stopping him.

Trump has a mandate to take on the political establishment and upend its conventional wisdom. New faces and a measure of unpredictability in Washington are not all bad; they can produce fresh ideas and keep adversaries guessing and off-balance.

[Read: What Trump got right about national security]

But many of the outsiders and iconoclasts Trump has nominated for top posts have questionable qualifications, and his pledge to purge the civil service and military in order to feather both with loyalists who will do his bidding goes too far. Trump has mused about dismantling the Department of Education at a time when the nation’s public schools desperately need more federal funding and guidance. And if his first term is any indication, Trump’s erratic management is likely to produce a ballooning national debt and policy incoherence, not a lean and coordinated government.

The status quo certainly deserves shaking up, yet Trump will need a functioning executive branch to make and implement policy. Cabinet officials can be iconoclasts, but they must have the managerial experience needed to run large organizations. Substantive experts and diplomats are not subversive agents of the “deep state”; they are vital to making and executing effective policy and staffing the nation’s outposts abroad. Trump simply cannot afford to bring down the house—and must be stopped from doing so.

The task facing Americans, allies, and even foreign adversaries is to ensure that the promise of Trump’s second term prevails over its peril. America and the world need Trump to be a disrupter and reformer, not merely a destroyer. Americans and foreigners can and should work with Trump the disrupter and reformer. But if he becomes the destroyer, then checks and balances at home and abroad must shut Trump down.