American global leadership is ending. Not because of “American decline,” or the emergence of a multipolar world, or the actions of U.S. adversaries. It’s ending because President Donald Trump wants to end it.

Just about all of Trump’s policies, both at home and abroad, are rapidly destroying the foundation of American power. The main beneficiary will be the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who has been planning for the moment when Washington stumbles and allows China to replace the United States as the world’s superpower. That Trump is willing to hand the world over to Xi—or doesn’t even realize that’s what he’s doing—shows that his myopic worldview, admiration for autocrats, and self-obsession are combining to threaten international security and, with it, America’s future.

Trump is choosing to retreat even though the U.S. has its adversaries on the back foot. President Joe Biden’s foreign policy was working. By supporting Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion, Biden weakened Moscow so severely that President Vladimir Putin had to turn to North Korea for help. His backing of Israel in its war with Hamas in Gaza undercut Iran’s influence in the Middle East. And Biden’s strengthening of the U.S. global-alliance system pressured and unnerved China as the world’s advanced democracies banded together against Xi and his plans to upset the world order.

[David Frum: How Trump lost his trade war]

Now Trump is voluntarily throwing away this hard-won leverage. The supposed master negotiator is signaling his willingness to sacrifice Ukraine to Russia before formal negotiations even start. Last week, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called a restoration of Ukraine to its borders before Russia snatched Crimea in 2014 an “unrealistic objective,” indicating that the administration would accept a peace deal that allows Putin to keep part of the independent nation he invaded. Hegseth also rejected NATO membership for Ukraine—the possibility of which was Putin’s pretext for invading in the first place. That wouldn’t be a bad outcome for Putin after starting a brutal war and effectively losing it.

But the big winner from such a settlement will be China. Because China is Russia’s most important partner, any gains that Putin can salvage from his disastrous war forwards the two dictators’ global agenda. That’s why Xi is egging Trump on. Beijing has reportedly proposed holding a summit between Trump and Putin to resolve the Ukraine war. Then Chinese construction companies would try to swoop in and earn a fortune rebuilding a shattered Ukraine, which Xi helped Putin destroy by supporting Russia’s sanctions-plagued economy.

More than that, Xi certainly realizes that Trump’s pandering to Putin offers Xi a chance to break up the Atlantic alliance and entrench Chinese influence in Europe. Vice President J. D. Vance blasted European allies at last week’s Munich Security Conference for marginalizing extremist right-wing political parties, and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi took the opportunity to present Xi as the anti-Trump. “China will surely be a factor of certainty in this multipolar system and strive to be a steadfast constructive force in a changing world,” he told the attendees.

European leaders are not likely to have forgotten that Xi enabled Putin’s war in Ukraine. But if Trump won’t guarantee European security, Xi may well seize the opportunity to expand Chinese power by offering to step into the breach. Xi could make the case that he is able to rein in Putin, protect Ukraine, and preserve stability in Europe. That promise could well be an empty one; Xi may not be willing or even able to restrain an emboldened Putin. Still, abandoned by Washington, European leaders may hold their collective noses and look to Xi to keep the peace.

China “would start replacing the U.S. in the role of keeping Russia out of the Eastern Flank,” Gabrielius Landsbergis, the former Lithuanian foreign minister, recently posted on X. European Union members “in the East would be dependent on China’s protection and the racketeering would spread West.”

Trump is handing Xi other opportunities, too. By withdrawing from the World Health Organization and the United Nations Human Rights Council, the U.S. is clearing the field for China to make the UN system an instrument of its global power. Dismantling USAID makes China all the more indispensable to the developing world. Trump’s bizarre plan to deport Palestinians from Gaza will be a boon to Xi in the Middle East, a region China considers vital to its interests. Even the U.S. suspension of federal financial support for electric vehicles helps Xi by hampering American automakers in a sector Beijing seeks to dominate. China may see American retrenchment as an invitation to take more aggressive actions in pursuit of its interests—in Taiwan, but also toward other U.S. allies in Asia, including Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines.

Trump apparently assumes that he can keep Xi in check with tariffs. He imposed new duties on Chinese imports earlier this month. But Xi doesn’t seem particularly bothered. Beijing retaliated, but with little more than a face-saving gesture. The reciprocal tariffs covered a mere tenth of U.S. imports. Why fuss about a few shipments of stuffed toys when you can take over the world?

The damage to American global standing could be irreparable. The hope now is that the major democracies of Europe and Asia—France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom—will stop up the power vacuum Trump is creating and keep China out of it. European leaders do not have to abide by whatever deal Trump cooks up with Putin for Ukraine. They could hold firm, continue the war, and wait for a new administration in Washington to reaffirm U.S. security commitments. But the course is risky, because erstwhile U.S. allies can’t assume that Washington will ever reestablish global leadership, or that if it does, the promises of future presidents will endure. That uncertainty may compel the allied democracies to make accommodations with China as best they can.

[Quico Toro: Trump’s Colombia spat is a gift to China]

Trump’s administration may be seeking to settle matters with Putin in order then to concentrate limited U.S. resources on confronting China. But this course may succeed only in making China more difficult to contend with, because America will be forced to do so without its traditional allies by its side.

Trust, once lost, is difficult to restore. Trump’s premise seems to be that what happens in Europe and Asia is of little consequence to the United States. Vance invoked Catholic theology (erroneously, according to Pope Francis) to justify a hierarchy of concern that places caring for U.S. citizens ahead of the rest of the world. But what, exactly, is best for Americans?

Trump may be right that other powers should do more to take care of their own affairs. But Americans know as well as anyone that what happens in the far-flung corners of the world—whether in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s or in Afghanistan at the turn of the 21st century—can and often does affect them, even dragging them into conflicts they do not want to fight. That doesn’t mean Washington must police every dispute. But by ceding global leadership to authoritarian China, Trump is creating a world that will almost certainly be hostile to the United States, its prosperity, and its people.

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Last week, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called the national debt “one of the biggest betrayals against the American people,” suggesting that Americans’ anger about debt “gave birth to the concept of DOGE.” The idea that Elon Musk and his band of government-efficiency crusaders can bring down the debt is a tidy one. But DOGE’s current plans would hardly put a dent in the deficit.

Musk has lamented that America is “drowning” in debt, which has indeed ballooned over the past decade: As of this month, the federal debt is $36 trillion, about $13 trillion higher than it was five years ago. Debt has not been a priority of either major political party for some time, my colleague Annie Lowrey, who covers economics, told me. And despite Taylor Greene’s claims about American anger over the debt, it’s not a top-of-mind issue for people at the polls, either, Annie argued.

If Musk’s team were serious about reducing the deficit, it could explore some unpopular but effective options: reduce spending for the military and the entitlement programs that make up the bulk of the federal budget—Medicare and Social Security—or simply raise taxes, Annie suggested. Instead, what Musk and DOGE have done thus far is ravage government agencies and departments (USAID, for example, which makes up a tiny portion of the budget, and the destruction of which won’t lead to major savings). They’ve also focused on slashing the federal workforce by offering buyouts to 2 million federal workers (and, over the weekend, axing thousands more federal-agency employees); so far, salaries for the workers who have accepted the buyout offer make up a minuscule portion of the national budget in total.

Musk, Trump, and their allies have also turned to a bit of magical thinking, claiming that rooting out fraud in the government is the key to saving money. In a meandering address from the Oval Office last week, Musk claimed without evidence that USAID workers were raking in millions in kickbacks, and that people as old as 150 were claiming Social Security benefits. He wrote on X last week that “at this point, I am 100% certain that the magnitude of the fraud in federal entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Disability, etc) exceeds the combined sum of every private scam you’ve ever heard by FAR.”

Stumbling upon, and reclaiming, trillions of fraudulently spent funds would be rather convenient, and crying “fraud” is a useful way for Musk and his defenders to cast DOGE’s actions as in service of the American people. Trump has touted this same shaky logic, asserting that uncovering a bunch of fraud could mean America has less debt than previously thought. Fraud does exist in parts of the government: Some people intend to defraud government programs; others accidentally sign up for benefits they’re not actually eligible for. And the government does sometimes make payment errors—federal agencies estimated that more than $200 billion was lost in fiscal year 2023 because of such mistakes, and in past years fraud losses accounted for 3 to 7 percent of the budget. But there is no evidence that lowering the deficit is as simple as tamping down on fraud—or that fraud exists to the extent Musk claims.

Plus, by whacking the bureaucracy, Musk and his team are weakening programs that are already working to tamp down fraud. All federal programs have fraud-detection mandates. The Treasury, for example, announced in October that it had recovered or prevented $4 billion in fraud losses in the prior fiscal year, in part from employing AI machine-learning. And as he rails against what he calls fraud, Musk and his associates have effectively shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose mandate is to crack down on fraud in businesses (and which might have regulated Musk’s own companies).

The rhetorical trick of politicians referring to unpopular or disliked government spending as fraud isn’t new. But in an era of rampant scamming, claiming that the American government is swindling its own people hits on a salient national fear. Musk’s first few weeks running DOGE don’t bode well for his ability to solve the debt crisis. He may succeed, however, in further eroding trust in government, which could give him and his team even more leeway in their attempts to dismantle it.

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The hidden costs of Musk’s Washington misadventure The government’s computing experts say they are terrified.

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Fifty years is a long time. But you wouldn’t necessarily know that from large portions of SNL50: The Anniversary Special, the much-hyped celebration of the long-running sketch show that aired in prime time last night. SNL50 was meant to commemorate the program, created and executive-produced by Lorne Michaels, for achieving five decades of cultural relevance. But the evening’s rundown suffered from a severe case of recency bias, with sketches that were more inclined to play it safe than honor the show’s extensive, complicated, and fascinating history.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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