The “unipolar moment” is over, and rising challengers now prevent American primacy. Facing this new reality, Washington must kick the habit of military intervention and practice a foreign policy of pure restraint. President Donald Trump’s bellicosity abroad isn’t realpolitik but machtpolitik, defined by a love for violence and vengeance and power for its own sake.

Or so we are told.

Or rather, so you are told—by me! Well, I haven’t made the point about machtpolitik, but I have advocated restraint. And I’ve done so on grounds that America’s military interventions don’t seem to go very well, and that its global primacy looks unsustainable as China and Russia enter the arena of great power politics and as middle powers, on the margins, exert their might. 

But one year into Trump 2.0, that assessment should be reconsidered. 

Indeed, for all the voguish talk of “America’s relative decline,” a strong case can be made that Trump is reasserting U.S. primacy on the world stage. Robert O’Brien, a former Trump national security advisor, told me that Trump’s “peace through strength” foreign policy involves “targeted ops against bad actors” and the “relentless pursuit of American military and economic strength.” O’Brien says this hard-nosed foreign policy has protected the homeland and deterred adversaries. 

I’ve come to believe that antiwar, pro-restraint conservatives should reflect with an open mind on the kind of views expressed by O’Brien, if only to refine their own arguments. To see why, consider recent geopolitical happenings.

The lesser members of the anti-Western “axis of autocracies” aren’t doing too well, you may have noticed. Venezuela’s socialist strongman, Nicolas Maduro, recently got snatched during a U.S. raid that apparently featured a nosebleed-inducing sonic superweapon. The new acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, has been inclined to play ball with the White House to avoid her predecessor’s fate. 

In the Middle East, the government of Iran seems weaker than it has in a long time. The country has been rocked by mass protests, sparked by poor economic conditions that Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions have worsened. Its nuclear program, a source of prestige and leverage, was set back last June by a U.S. attack. Trump is again considering an attack on Iran but evidently has yet to see a proposed strike package that passes the risk-reward calculus.

How about the big dogs, then? Russia has shown itself to be not a rising but a revanchist great power, and one that overestimated the extent of its sphere of influence. After four years of full-scale attritional war and a million casualties, Vladimir Putin’s forces still haven’t fully captured the pro-Russian provinces in eastern Ukraine. Had Trump “walked away” from Ukraine early last year, as some antiwar conservatives advised, Russia likely would have overrun the country, wrecking if not subduing a buffer state between itself and the West.

Of course, the biggest challenger to America is China, its only peer competitor. The Middle Kingdom is in better shape than Russia, though its decades-long stupendous economic growth hit a roadblock during the Covid pandemic and still hasn’t fully recovered. The U.S. cannot dominate China in Asia any longer, but in the view of the geopolitical analyst John Hulsman, that’s not Trump’s goal anyway. “Trump wants the U.S. to be chairman of the board” of great powers, Hulsman told me, not to remain an uncontested global hegemon.

Relative to Trump’s first term, the president has modulated his hostile rhetoric against China and maintained communication with its leader Xi Jinping. After Joe Biden on four occasions pledged to fight China over Taiwan if needed, Trump has restored strategic ambiguity, the longstanding U.S. policy of not revealing whether Washington would defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion. Trump’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) says the U.S. aims to deny Chinese aggression but drops the Biden administration’s focus on advancing human rights and democracy, which Beijing views as interference in its domestic affairs.

At the same time, Trump has taken tough actions to contain China within its neighborhood and limit its force projection abroad. He’s turning Taiwan into a very prickly porcupine, announcing last month the sale of $11 billion in munitions needed to deter Beijing, the largest-ever arms package for the island nation. And while the NSS tactfully didn’t name China in the section on defending the Western Hemisphere—referring instead to “non-Hemispheric competitors”—the capture of Maduro uprooted an aspirational Chinese client from America’s backyard.

In addition to these geopolitical developments, macroeconomic figures also suggest the U.S. has arrested its decline relative to other great powers. Twenty years ago, its share of global GDP was falling, the U.S. trailed Europe by that metric, and China was catching up rapidly. But since then, Europe’s economy has stagnated as America’s took the lead. And in Covid’s wake, the U.S. has widened the gap with China. 

The U.S. economy has heated up in Trump’s second term; the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta projects an impressive 5.3 percent growth in the fourth quarter of 2025. Meanwhile, the trade deficit plummeted to the lowest levels since 2009, suggesting Trump’s tariffs have rebalanced global trade without accelerating inflation or, evidently, slowing America’s GDP growth. That will help diversify the economy, which already boasts serious competitive advantages: The U.S. has been a net energy exporter since 2019—thanks in part to Trump’s “drill baby drill” approach—even as it has taken the lead in the newest cutting-edge technology, artificial intelligence.

Evidently, Americans have good reason to be optimistic, yet few will celebrate these developments. Liberals despise Trump and are loath to concede that his brash and seemingly haphazard approach to governance yields positive results. Antiwar conservatives are fed up with Trump’s many military interventions. Conversely, regime-change-supporting neoconservatives are dissatisfied with the limited character of those interventions. And relative to previous military campaigns in the Middle East and Latin America, Trump’s actions are indeed restrained, though not enough for the purist restrainers, said Daniel McCarthy, a board member of The American Conservative, in an email.

Of course, downsides do exist. As political commentator Fareed Zakaria has observed, Trump’s norm-eroding belligerence is turning America into a country that other nations fear, not admire, raising risks of historic allies balancing against Washington. The best example is Trump’s threat to take over Greenland, which is owned by Denmark, one of America’s most reliable NATO partners. European diplomats I talk to are freaked out by this fixation, and Trump should find ways to work with Denmark and Europe to achieve U.S. interests in Greenland, rather than jeopardizing the Western alliance.

Moreover, the full ramifications of Trump’s military interventions have yet to be seen. Venezuela could go sideways fast if Rodriguez loses the trust of other elites and the resulting power vacuum is filled by paramilitary groups. And the Maduro sting is hardly a reliable paradigm of American power; replicating its success in countries that aren’t total basket cases seems nigh impossible.

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And while Trump’s one-night bombing raid in Iran degraded Tehran’s nuclear capabilities without significant apparent costs, the administration is now mulling further, much riskier strikes to overthrow the regime. To this columnist, that seems a likely disastrous course of action that doesn’t serve American interests. The U.S. has an interest in preventing Iran from building the bomb, not turning it into a chaotic failed state.

Political, not just geopolitical, risks abound. Poll numbers indicate Americans don’t support Trump’s intervention in Venezuela or his energetic foreign policy generally. And the utter dominance of foreign policy issues in Trump’s second term has created the impression of skewed priorities.

Still, foreign policy is of vital importance. Great power politics is a very ugly business, and Trump the businessman may be navigating it better than many restrainers realize.