The Most Triumphalist of USA Ideologue Magazines in Defensive Mode

29.06.2026

The US magazine Foreign Affairs is the quintessential promoter, in the final analysis, of the USA military posture of “full spectrum dominance”. It is the mainstream champion of the US-led “Global Order” and its “Rules-Based Order”. It ranges from neo-conservative Democratic Party hawks through "realists” like John Mearsheimer and also through neo-liberals of all ilk, and on to conservatives that support Trump’s “2026 National Security Strategy”.

Taken together, this magazine represents the “thinking” on foreign policy, inasmuch as it still exists, in the USA and its European ally add-ons.   

But now, the tone of the whole magazine is on the back foot. 

This is a sign of what is happening to the US-led Western empire: it is going through downward rapids, and there is a cliff ahead. (When we say “empire”, we mean the imperialism from Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch colonization and imperialism, through the French and British colonial empires, and all gathered together into the USA-led “western imperialism” that is still dominant. It is still dominant. This “Western imperialism” is USA-led, yes, but with constant pressure from two of its apparently less powerful components, two of the “add-ons” referred to above: Britain’s City of London financial capital with its shameless and criminal history of pillage, and Israel’s shameless military and other criminal history of killing. But the USA-led Empire is not going to be dominant for long.  Let us look at a sure sign.

Friday last, on 26 July, there is the following title, for example, in this magazine Foreign Affairs: “Iran Didn’t Win the War”. 

This title assumes that “everyone” thinks Iran did win. 

This is not an erroneous assumption: For a start, even in the USA’s war-ally Israel, 92% of people, who are after all on the ground, think Iran “won the war”. Less than 16% of Americans think the US and Israel “came out stronger”. And, of course, everyone in the so-called “global south” knows for sure that the USA did not win. The Memorandum of Understanding of 17 June anyway proves it. So, the assumption of the title is correct. 

And in the new edition of Foreign Affairs for July/August 2026 you only have to read the titles of the articles to get an idea of just how on the defensive the USA’s mainstream ideologues are. 

Here is a list of the “titles” of articles, word-for-word as advertised by themselves, in the order they have on their website:

-- “Losing the War of the Future: How New Technologies Threaten America’s Military Advantage”. The title displays a pure defensive mode.

-- “The Mirage of China’s Military Edge: Panic Is Misguided – and Counter Productive”. This seems an instruction to American empire supporters not to panic. It is manipulative-defensive talk. It implies that everyone thinks that China has a military edge, but says this is only a “mirage”. I have no figures to back up what “everyone” actually thinks. But I think the assumption is probably correct that “everyone” thinks China has a military edge. Otherwise the title would not make sense. There is a pay-wall on Foreign Affairs, so you would need to pay to know just how defensive the actual article is. But, the message is clear – DO NOT PANIC, because to panic would be both misguided (no need to panic) and harmful (you are harming the USA by panicking), they say.

-- “The Next Russia Threat: Moscow’s Military Power After Ukraine”. The title is not triumphalist about “Russia’s inevitable defeat at the hands of plucky little Ukraine acting all alone”, but just simply “after Ukraine”. Not clear after what. 

-- “The Middle East Power Paradox: How the Iran War Will Transform America’s Military Role”. This title, too, says that America’s role is caught in a “power paradox”, so it is not pure power. It also says the war will “transform” the role of the US miltiary.

-- “The Strange Defeat of Nuclear Deterrence: And the Coming Crisis in Strategic Stability”. The USA’s nuclear deterrent (as well as other countries’) is defeated. This means “strategic stability” (for the USA) is in crisis.

-- “Broken Nuclear Umbrella: What Comes after Extended Deterrence.”  Similar to the former article.

-- “The Afghanistan Reckoning: Forever Wars and Costs of Collective Foregetting”. This again is about reckoning after yet another defeat in the list of forever war defeats. It is dismal about the high cost of foregetting about these defeats. 

-- “Iran’s New Grand Strategy: How a Remade Islamic Republic Will Reshape the Middle East”. This title gives agency to the USA’s war enemy: Iran. This is a new modesty.

-- “Heartland vs. Rimland: The Battle Lines in the War for the Next Global Order”. This title means the US-led past global order is being superceded already by the “next global order”. True.

-- “The Fault Lines in China’s Power: American Must Build – and Use – Leverage Against Beijing”. This means China has power, but the USA must find the fault-lines in it. This is how people in the global south since the time of Karl Marx’s seminal writings have been seeking fault-lines in western capitalism and its imperialism. 

-- “Why China First Will Fail: The Limits and Lessons of a Transactional Foreign Policy”. This is difficult to analyze without reading the article, because the expression “China First” is an American way of describing Chinese policy, comparing it implicitly to the MAGA “America First” slogan. It probably refers to the advantages China gives to national production, and its national economy. But China does not use this slogan “China first”. China considers its foreign policy to be a co-operative sharing of trade interests, and refers to the “Community of a shared future for mankind” – quite different language. In fact, the slogan of “America First”, or even Make America Great Again, are signs, themselves, of the USA’s economy and general standing having gone down so far that US leaders have to plead weakness, which is Donald Trump’s hallmark plea. “Other countries are taking the USA for a ride” and so on. Sob, sob, “I am just a poor little imperialist”. In that case, we can do the odd tombola and cake sale in the global south to raise pennies for the poor USA empire so that it isn’t “last” anymore. 

-- And the last article on their list is “How to Survive the AI Shock: A Policy Playbook to Avert Political Crisis”. Again this final article is defensive.

Conclusion

This defensiveness, or realization that the end is nigh, has been coming for a long time now. The Foreign Affairs magazine suggests, for example, for reading right now, the following title from a 2024 edition: “The Crumbling Foundations of American Strength”, and another from a 2025 edition, “The Strange Triumph of a Broken America:  Why Power Abroad Comes With Dysfunction at Home”.

All these are signs that the mainstream ideologues of the USA-led Empire are truly realizing the impending doom that faces them politically, unless they act wisely to enable their empire to slide gracefully into the ranks of being ordinary countries rather than continue to head straight on down the rapids for the waterfall the size of the Niagara Falls ahead.