The World Made Anew

America's allies are stronger, its rivals weaker, and the global balance has shifted.

FLASHBACK: In light of Trump’s speech on Chinese election interference, DON’T MISS Rod on the CCP’s voting machine hacking and fake ballots, one year ago.

Rod on Capitol Report: The CCP's 2020 U.S. Election Interference Exposed

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by Victor Davis Hanson
July 17, 2026

With a whimper rather than a bang, the world has become a different place than it was in January 2021, when Donald Trump left office. Almost everything we are now told about the global status quo is mistaken — largely because critics focus only on what Trump says rather than on what he does.

Rather, the Left — and some on the Right — are furious whenever Trump tweets, says, or does something that offends their delicate sense of taste, tradition, and decorum. Their outrage leads them to ignore whether this “Art of the Deal” theater ultimately leaves the United States stronger. More often than not, it does.

Israel is not without friends and is more regionally dominant than at any point in its history. Radical Islam — whether in the form of the Iranian regime, Hezbollah, Hamas, or the Houthis — is at its weakest point in half a century.

China is recalibrating nearly all of the assumptions it has held for the past two decades. Russia is humiliated and hemorrhaging. Latin America is more pro-American than ever before.

So let’s start with Latin America.

In 2013, John Kerry boasted to the Organization of American States that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.”

He may not have anticipated how naturally his declaration would be interpreted throughout the Americas: that the Obama administration would no longer act unilaterally to prevent distant, hostile regimes from establishing spheres of influence in the Western Hemisphere. And indeed, Latin America subsequently witnessed a wave of left-wing — and sometimes overtly communist — governments emerging during the Obama and later Biden administrations. But that left-wing wave is over.

Instead, here is where things stand as of July 2026: Latin America has swung decisively away from communism and toward Washington over the last few years. Broadly speaking, the governing pro-American or right-leaning administrations include Argentina (Javier Milei), Chile (José Antonio Kast), Bolivia (Rodrigo Paz Pereira), Paraguay (Santiago Peña), Ecuador (Daniel Noboa), Panama (José Raúl Mulino), Honduras (Nasry Asfura), Costa Rica (Laura Fernández), and El Salvador (Nayib Bukele).

Guatemala and the Dominican Republic are both pro-U.S., and new conservative governments will soon take power in Colombia and Peru. Only Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Uruguay remain governed by hard-left administrations that are either openly anti-American or friendlier to the China-Iran-Russia axis than to the United States.

Why these dramatic changes? There are many reasons, but one stands out: the United States now helps its friends and harms its enemies.

China is now backing away from its efforts to control the Panama Canal in the face of U.S. pressure. Venezuela is no longer a Stalinist bully exporting death and destruction to its neighbors. Instead, Trump captured and jailed its thuggish Chavista president, Nicolás Maduro. China once bought sanctioned Venezuelan oil on the cheap — but no longer. Almost all illegal immigration from Mexico and Latin America has abruptly ceased, for the first time in history.

Panamanian Supreme Court Boots China From the Canal

How about our North American neighbors?

The Carney government in Canada is finally rethinking its pro-Chinese, Europhilic, anti-Americanism — after welching on its 2 percent defense commitment, running up a $50 billion trade surplus with the United States, and loosening security along its side of the border. Now a new Canadian–American relationship is emerging. Canada is finally working to meet its defense commitments. All trade issues are on the table. And the shared border is more securely patrolled.

Trump has enormous leverage over an often-duplicitous Mexico.

That country’s anti-American posture is hardly surprising, given the concessions the United States has long extended to it. Mexico receives some $65 billion annually in remittances, much of it sent by illegal aliens who are often subsidized through American entitlement programs. Most had their entry into the United States effectively greenlighted by Mexico City.

Mexico has run up a $200 billion trade surplus under the guise of “free trade.” And its drug-exporting cartels have killed thousands of Americans while pouring billions of dollars in drug profits into the Mexican economy. Trump, however, can sharply tax remittances, reduce Mexico’s trade surpluses, halt all illegal and much legal immigration, and end cartel infiltration — realities that Mexico apparently still has not fully grasped.

The quagmire of the Middle East?

The Middle East is now suddenly a different place. Whatever the final denouement with Iran, Tehran has lost a half-century and half-trillion-dollar investment in its military and nuclear industrial complex. The once-feared bully of the Muslim Middle East has been humiliated and exposed as a paper tiger, with its economy, and perhaps its very existence, now dependent on the disposition of the Trump administration. In its sporadic missile launches, Iran often leaves Israel alone because it knows the Jewish state can target any of its unhinged leaders whenever hostilities resume.

In a development that would once have seemed surreal, Israel is providing intelligence and missile defense to the Muslim Gulf states, which are effectively fighting alongside the United States and Israel against a fellow Muslim nation.

The U.S.–Israel Alliance Is a Strategic Bargain

Hamas has been crushed. Hezbollah’s once-feared missile arsenal and many of its crazy leaders have been largely eliminated. The Houthis, lacking any credible air defenses, know that every missile they launch at Israel or into the Red Sea could cost them another port facility or power station. Lebanon is reawakening from its 50-year coma.

Russia lost its last client in the Middle East with the fall of the Assad regime. Neither China nor Russia can any longer supply Iran by land, sea, or air. Nor can they purchase its sanctioned oil. America’s allies are growing stronger, while the China–Russia axis grows weaker.

Soon the Strait of Hormuz — Iran’s supposed trump card — will be nearly as irrelevant to global energy markets as it is already to the United States. Existing pipelines that bypass the Gulf are being expanded. New ones are planned or already under construction to the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Gulf of Oman beyond the Strait. The United States is the largest producer of oil and gas in history and does not need Middle Eastern oil or gas — or, for that matter, much of anything else besides.

Syria: “Unexpected Winner” of Hormuz Blockade

And then there are our European allies.

Europe publicly despises Trump. Privately, however, many Europeans concede that his antics compelled them to meet their long-neglected 2 percent defense commitments and inspired their new pledges to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense. Although the medicine initially seemed worse than the disease, Europe now quietly, and sometimes openly, acknowledges that Trump was right — and just in time to accelerate rearmament as Russia pressed westward. If left unchecked, Europe’s embrace of near-total disarmament, shocking demographic decline, unending hostility toward fossil fuels and nuclear energy, mass illegal immigration from the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere, and steadily expanding socialism will turn the continent into a third world hellhole.

The United States is allowing Ukraine both to manufacture Patriot missiles and to strike targets anywhere inside Russia. Yet Trump remains almost alone among Western leaders in describing the war as a tragic waste of hundreds of thousands of human lives that must end. At the same time, he has given President Zelensky greater targeting leeway and access to more controversial weapons than any previous president.

In any case, our rival Russia is now in its weakest political, economic, and military condition since the post-Soviet chaos of the 1990s. Had anyone predicted five years ago that Russia would be importing gasoline or that buildings around the Kremlin would routinely be struck by drones, he would have been dismissed as delusional. Nor could anyone have imagined Russia suffering perhaps well over one million dead, wounded, missing, or captured in a Stalingrad-like slog of its own making in Ukraine — while losing perhaps half its arsenal of ships, tanks, and aircraft.

Trump’s Russia Trap Is Snapping Shut

And China?

It is stagnating almost as rapidly as it once rose, burdened by a fertility rate of just 0.92 while importing 75 percent of its daily oil consumption, 42 percent of its natural gas, and 30 percent of its daily food. Its weapons exports are proving no match for Western arms.

An aging, increasingly isolated, and deeply paranoid leader knows that an invasion of Taiwan could prove as disastrous for China as the wars in Ukraine and Iran have been for Russia and Iran. Meanwhile, a gradually awakening West seems to be finally weary of Chinese mercantilism and is starting to demand reciprocity in trade.

An anti-bloc of Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan is rearming as never before. These nations are also integrating more closely with American forces in response to the common existential threat posed by China.

The Map Is Closing Around China

Meanwhile, with the departure of the Biden-era DEI apparatus, the U.S. military has exceeded every one of its recruiting targets, all of which had, in recent years, been anemic. The Pentagon will soon oversee a defense budget approaching 5 percent of GDP, the highest since the Iraq and Afghanistan buildup in 2008–11. Its weapons procurement system is undergoing revolutionary changes, placing as much emphasis on quantity and affordability as on quality.

Small, high-tech defense start-ups are finally being given the chance to compete with ossified conglomerates that have long relied on lobbyists to preserve their costly monopolies. Even left-leaning Silicon Valley, once largely hostile to the defense industry, is now emulating the World War II-era War Production Board in its eagerness to ensure U.S. global supremacy in next-generation weaponry.

The booming U.S. economy now produces $31 trillion in goods and services, roughly one-third more than either the more populous European Union or China. America is pulling ahead in most of the next-generation fields of rocketry, satellite launches, space exploration, artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering, and cryptocurrency. Its stock market is at record highs.

Add it all up, and the picture is almost surreal: at the very moment the Left insists that the United States has grown weak and isolated, America and its allies occupy a position of global preeminence not seen since the end of World War II.

— Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and a scholar of ancient warfare. He is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. This essay originally appeared at American Greatness.

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