Image by Hadija.

For writers, the future has long been a tricky terrain. While the past can prove unsettling and the present uncomfortable, the future seems to free the mind from reality’s restraints and let the imagination soar. Yet it has also proven full of political pitfalls.

Sometimes writers can tweak a trend of their moment to produce a darkly dystopian future, as with George Orwell’s omniscient tyranny in 1984, Margaret Atwood’s institutionalized misogyny in The Handmaid’s Tale, or Ray Bradbury’s book-burning autocracy in Fahrenheit 451. And ever since H.G. Wells’s novel War of the Worlds (about technologically advanced Martians invading this planet) was published in 1898, space has been a particularly fertile frontier for the literary imagination. It has given us Isaac Asimov’s seven-part galactic Foundation fable, Frank Herbert’s ecological drama Dune, and Philip K. Dick’s post-nuclear wasteland in Blade Runner, opening us to possible techno-futures beyond our mud-bound presence on this small planet.

From the time that Henry George published his influential futuristic treatise Progress and Poverty in 1879, inspiring many of the Progressive Era’s key reforms, American writers across the political spectrum have used the future to frame an agenda for present-day political action, sometimes progressive, sometimes violently regressive. Published in 1938, Ayn Rand’s second novel, Anthem, was a futuristic saga whose hero, named “Equality 7-2521,” rejected the socialist society that raised him and struggled to rediscover his inherent individuality, articulating libertarian ideals that would inspire generations of American conservatives. And amid the social turmoil of the 1970s, William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries imagined a future armed revolt against the U.S. government that has provoked violence from generations of White nationalists.

So, with some trepidation, let me venture into the immediate future and imagine what the United States will be like when President Donald J. Trump finally leaves office (if, of course, he does) in January 2029. To keep such projections within the bounds of possibility, let’s clip the wings of our imaginations and hew closely to Trump’s policies and policy statements.

America’s Place in the World of 2029

In just 11 action-packed months since his January inauguration, President Trump has already demolished the fundamental geopolitics that have undergirded U.S. global hegemony for the past 80 years. Even if he simply persists in his policies for another 37 months, his impact on the American version of a world order will undoubtedly prove so profound that it will strain the limits of language.

To grasp something of the scope of his impact, it’s necessary to briefly outline the world order Washington built over those 80 years. After fighting for four years and sacrificing 400,000 lives during World War II, Washington captured vital bastions at both ends of the vast Eurasian land mass and spent the next 40 years of the Cold War ensuring its control of that strategic continent with circles of steel — military alliances like NATO, hundreds of overseas military bases, powerful naval fleets, and a massive armada of nuclear-armed aircraft and missiles. With the Sino-Soviet communist bloc largely trapped behind what came to be known as the Iron Curtain, Washington crushed most of their attempts to break out of geopolitical isolation with deft covert operations. As the communists flailed, the U.S. continued to build a global order, while patiently waiting for those socialist economies to implode.

When the Cold War finally ended in 1991, Washington got busy knitting the world into a unified market through massive capital exports, free-trade agreements, and a grid of global communications, thanks in part to satellites and fiber-optic cables. Beyond its awesome array of raw economic and military power (and the distinctly less than successful wars that it fought), Washington prettied-up its intrusions into sovereign societies worldwide through its advocacy of universal human rights, its commitment to the rule of law (unless it got in the way of American interests), and its support for international institutions like the United Nations that assured inviolable sovereignty for even the smallest of countries. Thanks to a delicate balance of force, beneficence, and self-interest, the United States would enjoy both great national wealth and historically unprecedented global dominance.

Washington’s world order, like any complex global system, was distinctly flawed and its failings were (to say the least) legion, but its achievements weren’t inconsequential either. After two world wars that left 100 million dead, there has not been a major global conflagration for 80 years (though from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, there were all too many disastrous American-inspired local or regional wars). The share of the world’s population living on less than $3 a day dropped markedly from 43% in 1990 to just 11% in 2020. Reflecting those improved conditions, average life expectancy worldwide rose sharply for the first time in several centuries, from 46 years in 1950 to 72 years in 2020. Similarly, the world literacy rate climbed from 66% in 1976 to 87% in 2020. Whether from choice or necessity, we humans have enjoyed increasing freedom of movement, with the number of migrants globally reaching a record 304 million in 2024, representing nearly 4% of the total global population.

Not only did the U.S. have the largest economy and military budget, but until recently, it was the world’s leading donor for public health and poverty eradication, sparing many millions of the world’s poor from the worst kinds of hunger and disease. All of those significant improvements in the human condition had complex causes, but the fundamental fact remains that they were products, direct or indirect, of Washington’s world order.

Then came President Donald Trump. From the first day of his second term in office in January 2025, he set out to tear down the U.S. global order and transform America’s place in the world. With billionaire Elon Musk serving as his in-house wrecking ball, he quickly demolished the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), slashing more than 80% of American nutritional and medical aid in ways expected, by 2030, to lead to a staggering

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