While this year saw the demise of the USA as a global leader, next year may reveal its successors, as Alan Austin reports.
WHEN HISTORIANS look back on 2025, this will likely be regarded as the year when America’s national leaders finally gave up any pretence to statesmanship. Their capitulation to President Donald Trump’s greed for personal enrichment, intentional violence and undisguised malevolence has been on display all year.
Critical foreign policy decision
Seared in the memory of all students of foreign policy, amateur and professional, is Thursday 20 November 2025. That was when we saw Trump’s long-awaited peace plan for Ukraine, the developing nation which Russian forces have brutalised since February 2022.
The document was a complete capitulation to all of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demands, including that Russia keep all the land it had stolen since 2022, plus extra territory in the Donetsk Oblast that Ukraine still controlled.
Concessions were offered to the USA for Donald Trump’s heroic role in formulating the “deal”, but no enforceable security guarantees were offered to Ukraine or anyone else.
Why this document is significant is that no one in the Pentagon, Congress or the Republican establishment opposed this craven sell-out of a long-term ally and the NATO alliance.
The powers that once saw their sacred role as shaping the destiny of the Free World, with the USA as its military and ideological leader, had all caved in to the greedy tin-pot tyrants.
The era when the USA was a leader of the free world, under Presidents Reagan, Clinton, George WH Bush and Obama, is now gone forever.
Comprehensive abandonment of values
The collapse of the American experiment can be seen in failures across all aspects of life — economic, spiritual and moral, as well as military and strategic.
Since Trump announced his destructive tariffs last February, the U.S. economy has deteriorated on virtually every measurable outcome. The results are now so bad that Trump has banned publishing the latest numbers for employment, inflation and economic growth.
U.S. debt to the penny is still published daily, although it may not be accurate. This shows debt clicked over US$38.4 trillion (AU$57.7 trillion) last week, bringing the total federal debt Trump has added in his two terms above ten trillion dollars, thus dooming all U.S. taxpayers to paying excessive interest for decades to come.
Tawdry corruption now normal
Considerable dismay was expressed last May when Qatar, an autocracy that harbours both the Taliban and Hamas, gifted Donald Trump a luxury jetliner. This was, of course, in blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause and should have been rejected instantly. Trump grabbed the gift and has since allowed Qatar the lowest tariff rate, and is planning to build a Trump tourism complex in Qatar.
Such episodes no longer surprise, but are the established pattern. Foreign governments and multinational corporations troop into the White House and lavish personal gifts on the President, who then changes government policy in their favour and, where possible, negotiates lucrative contracts for his family.
After Trump imposed 46 per cent tariffs on Vietnam in April, he negotiated approval to develop a luxury golf course in Vietnam and a skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City. The tariffs were then reduced to 20 per cent.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos visited Trump at the White House to offer Melania Trump US$40 million (AU$60 million)for a documentary about her, the highest licensing fee ever. Apple CEO Tim Cook called on Trump in August and gave him a bar of solid gold. Both companies then parleyed favourable tariff deals.
Earlier this month, FIFA suddenly awarded Trump a previously non-existent peace prize, in a move observers believe aims to scuttle any inconvenient investigations into FIFA’s dodgy U.S. operations ahead of next year’s World Cup.
That this award was made the same week as human rights and peace activists condemned the Trump Administration for its deadly Caribbean airstrikes, its support for Israel's atrocities in Gaza and violent domestic immigration policies underscores FIFA’s hypocrisy.
Trump now routinely dispenses criminal pardons, apparently via negotiations with his sons, who appear to divide the penalties that should go to victims of the crimes between the criminal and the Trump family. One estimate suggests the Trumps have now deprived victims of US$1.3 billion (AU$1.9 billion) in compensation awarded by the courts.
On 21 October, Trump demanded the Justice Department pay him US$230 million (AU$345.7 million) as compensation for investigations he faced in his first term in office and during the Biden Administration. Those investigations found him guilty of 34 criminal counts relating to business fraud and electoral manipulation, although no penalties were ever applied.
Safeguarding institutions AWOL
The inspectors general who would once have prevented such a grift have now been sacked, so there is no way to know whether Trump received that payment.
Trump has frequently claimed that he refuses to accept his $400,000-per-year presidential salary. Still, analysis of his tax returns, when they were eventually filed, shows that Trump has not given away his salary every year.
The Supreme Court has bowed down before Donald Trump, although this is not yet the case with many lower courts.
The military has acquiesced in committing war crimes at the insistence of Trump’s corrupt new Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth.
Congress has shown no appetite for fulfilling its role as a coequal branch of government, but now acquiesces to virtually every Trump whim. So America’s surrender is now virtually total.
Hope in emerging leadership
The saddest aspect of this collapse is that it was achieved not by an inspiring man with soaring ambition. Trump is no Napoleon. His vision for a brighter future extends no further than Diet Coke on tap, gold-trimmed bathrooms and shower nozzles for large bodies.
Elected leaders with integrity now emerging include those from Canada, Mexico, Finland and Australia.
One great intrigue in 2026 will be to see who emerges as the next global leaders.
Alan Austin is an Independent Australia columnist and freelance journalist. You can follow him on Twitter @alanaustin001.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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