Who Can Halt the 'America First' Ambition Rolling Across the Globe? — China can.

Alastair Crooke, 18 February 2026

We now can see more clearly the Trump Administration’s chosen path: In the wake of Davos and Munich, we have some light, both on Trump’s towering ambitions, and the means by which he hopes to achieve them. It may nonetheless be too late. Past policies shackle America’s future. Russia acting alone may not be able to burst Trump’s bubble, but China, Russia and Iran together can — and might.

At Munich, Marco Rubio laid out the context to an unashamedly brash ambition: His premise is grounded on the view that decolonisation was effectively a sinister communist plot that destroyed 500 years of Western empires:

“For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe”.

“But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come”.

His gist is that such anticipated decline was a choice, and it is a choice Trump refuses to make:

“This is what we [the US and Europe] did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the United States want to do again now, together with you [Europe] … We do not want to be shacked by guilt or to be the caretakers of managed decline … Instead, we want an alliance that boldly races into the future. And the only fear we have is the fear of the shame of not leaving our nations prouder, stronger, and wealthier for our children”.

There it is plainly set out: The US is intent on restoring western Dominance. That past age can be recovered, Rubio insisted.

“We did together once before … We defended a great civilisation … We can do [it] again now, together with you”. Or we can do it alone. The choice is Europe’s to make.

All the actions that the imperial powers once did in the past, Trump plans to revive, in a jarring ‘might makes right’ nihilism. Ben Shapiro and Stephen Miller both echo the ‘vibe’:

“There is no such thing as international law. It is nonsense. You know what international law really is? Law of the jungle”.

What could put a halt to this ambitious Trumpian enterprise of upending law, asking no one’s permission to act? Lacking any other measure beyond cultivating a Nietzsche-esque Will to Power. What might stand in its way?