address, John F. Kennedy declared: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” That vision is dead. TO EVALUATE the Wrecking-ball revolution this essay looks at it in three contexts: that of America’s revolt in 1776 and the world it made; of the European revolutions of 1848 and the way they stalled; and of France’s of 1789 and its descent into chaos. The American revolution was both a war of secession from Britain and the genesis of a new sort of society. In the formulation of David Ramsay, who chaired the Continental Congress in 1785-86, it was based on a new social contract which turned subjects into citizens. Instead of being compelled to submit to the will of the Crown, individuals possess within themselves universal rights by which they freely contract to become citizens of a sovereign republic. Even dukes and earls are not so exalted as citizens, Ramsay wrote, because they are just “creatures of kings”. This posed a question. People in other countries were obviously not American citizens. But in the idealised conception of the framers, they were human beings imbued with the exact same natural rights as Americans. The United States should be to them the model of a new and better way of governing—a shining city on a hill. But how should it act when the broad interests of universal freedom and the narrow interests of the republic differ? As its power grew, the question gradually became consequential. Woodrow Wilson’s belief that America’s mission was to spread God’s plan for mankind made him an epitome of the universalist approach. For democracy to be safe from the scourge of militarism and the cynicism of realpolitik, the president said in 1917, “Peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.” In 1945 America made good on that, bringing freedom to the defeated Axis countries and seeking to build a defence against communism on that peaceful foundation and the prosperity it would bring. Today’s revolutionaries have gone the other way. Here is Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, speaking to Jake Tapper, a journalist, on

CNN earlier this year: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power: these are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Coming from Mr Trump’s chief ideologue, that sounds like royalist talk. Or consider how J.D. Vance buried the shining city beneath blood-and-soil rhetoric when he accepted the vice-presidential nomination. He told the Republican convention about the five generations of his forebears lying in the Kentucky earth: “That’s not just an idea, my friends,” he proclaimed. “That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland.” Wilson’s Christian universalism has given way to Christian nationalism. The wrecking-ballistas think their predecessors’ quaint belief in free trade and enlightened self-interest has sapped the warrior spirit America needs to thrive in a nasty, violent world. They want less Adam Smith and more Carl Schmitt. Odd Arne Westad, a Norwegian scholar, doubts that the pendulum is simply swinging between values and realpolitik, as it did after Wilson in the early 20th century and after Barack Obama in the early 21st. He believes that, for the first time in its history, America is thinking like a narrow, self-interested nation. “What you are seeing is an overthrow of the more basic universalist approach to American foreign policy,” he says. “And I don’t think that it’s just a blip.” Michael Beckley of Tufts University expects America to become “more unilateralist, muscular and transactional”. Experts imagine it demanding more and providing less. American bases in Germany, say, will become German bases paid for by Germany—though America would still insist on the right to use them. In exchange for guarantees of help in times of war, America will require economic concessions during peace. It will impose “balanced” trade, enforced by the use of tariffs and quotas designed to favour its own economy. It will require its partner-vassals to sever their ties to China, block inward investment and ban their citizens from owning Chinese assets.

The simple reason why the wrecking-ball revolutionaries believe they will be able to impose all this is that America remains so powerful. And, because of AI, it is about to get more powerful still. Chris McGuire, who worked on technology policy in the National Security Council (NSC) under Joe Biden, says that even those immersed in the technology often fail to grasp the degree to which it is “happening so fast, and is so consequential for US global power”. To succeed in AI requires the mobilisation of capital, infrastructure, computing, models and applications. America is impressively endowed with all five. And it can often exert serious influence on the deployment of those factors overseas. Recent decisions about new models from Anthropic and OpenAI show how the right to use cutting-edge models could one day depend on a nod from the Oval Office. As well as controlling the models, America has perhaps 15 times as much computing power as Europe and much more planned. “I think the Europeans are completely screwed, to be honest,” says Mr McGuire. They will therefore be obliged to stay close to America. “Yes, the US is frustrating and annoying,” he says; “sometimes even a bad actor. But in the scheme of things, it’s a less bad actor than China or Russia by a lot…None of this is going to be based on legitimacy. It is going to be based on power.” Some will ask what’s new. Doubters have always seen America’s rhetoric of liberty as a smokescreen designed to camouflage the imposition of hard power—rather as its talk of universal rights excluded slaves, its new social contract offered no citizenship to native Americans and its equalities excluded women. But that misses the point. All countries are selfish. What is surprising about America is the degree to which it has pursued a universalist agenda alongside—even, sometimes, against—narrower ones. This broader interest led to errors of overreach. Perhaps the worst was to believe freedom could be spread to Iraq, and the Middle East thus stabilised, by force of arms in the face of world opinion. But the reason allies allowed themselves to become over-reliant on America was that they truly, and correctly, believed that America had an interest in the common good and that it understood that interest.

The wrecking-ball crew takes the opposite view. They are offering the world less right offset by more might. This, they imagine, will make America more dominant and prosperous than ever. It will also make it less popular among nations which used to admire it. The more that future presidents extract money and favours with bullying, the more relations with the rest of the world will become resentful and hostile. Kori Schake, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, warns that “a predatory America [is] going to activate antibodies against American power.” ON FEBRUARY 21ST 1848 the French government banned reformists from holding a banquet in honour of George Washington’s birthday. Protesters poured into the alleyways and boulevards of Paris, demanding change. Three days later King Louis-Philippe abdicated; he fled to England as a “Mr Smith”. It was a year of poor harvests and economic doldrums in which liberal revolutions spread rapidly across continental Europe. Their fires were fanned by nationalism and the first sparks of socialism. Kings, princes and dukes buckled in the flames. In Austria and Hungary serfs won their freedom. Presses were spared the censor.

And then the revolutions sputtered out. Nationalism divided the revolutionaries; socialists split from liberals; newly minted governments staggered under the burden of popular expectations. The kings, princes and dukes clawed back power. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, elected president of France in December 1848, had himself proclaimed emperor four years later. The Wrecking-ball revolution, too, could fail to follow through. Most Americans still cling to the idea that their country is the indispensable nation, even if, after $8trn of “forever wars”, many of them have no further interest in supplying the world’s police force. Two-thirds of Americans tell the Pew Research Centre that the United States should weigh other countries’ interests in important foreign-policy decisions. For a long time they also thought that it did so. However, surveyed in late March, a month after the start of the war against Iran, 53% of them said that, in practice, foreign policy now ignores the interests of other countries—the first time a majority had that view since polling on the subject began in 2002. In the same questionnaire, 54% said the war in Ukraine matters to them personally, against 34% who said it does not. In this, as in so much else, the country splits along party lines. Democrats are much more likely to think America ignores the interests of others than Republicans are, and are more worried about it. If Mr Trump’s MAGA faction loses control of the White House in 2028, the relentless aggression towards allies will subside. A new administration will be more likely to listen to America’s allies and talk about values, less likely to throw its weight about. That leads many scholars to doubt the staying power of the narrow and nativist nationalism of Messrs Miller and Vance. To Mr Beckley, America is simply too diverse: “the idea of blood-and-soil nationalism and going pre- 1776: I think it’s just not going to gain much political steam.” Stanford’s Francis Fukuyama agrees: “I’m just not convinced that Americans in general have given up on this liberal project that so many American presidents have supported.” A greater reluctance to bully may be coupled with less scope for doing so. Brad Smith, the vice-chairman of Microsoft, points out that the gains from