The Uncertain Republic: A Critique Of Schmemann’s American Futures – OpEd |
The review argues that Schmemann’s October 18 essay frames three futures—American restoration, muddling stagnation, or catastrophic decline—while treating Trump as both symptom and cause and assuming a restorable post-1945 liberal order.
It contends that the scenarios understate structural shifts such as multipolarity, non-Western institutions, technological disruption, and alliance hedging, and that the “unchecked decline” vision relies more on worst-case rhetoric than analysis.
The critic identifies a missing fourth scenario in which distributed regional and multilateral leadership adapts to reduced U.S. centrality without chaos, concluding that Schmemann’s framework is limited by nostalgia for an older order.
Serge Schmemann’s recent New York Times essay (The Old World Order Is Over. This Is What Could Come Next, dated October 18, 2026) offers a sweeping but speculative analysis on America’s global role in the aftermath of the Trump era. He sketches three possible futures for the United States and the world. It is an ambitious piece, drawing on conversations with foreign-policy thinkers and invoking historical analogies to frame the stakes of the present moment. Yet for all its breadth, the article suffers from conceptual imprecision, selective historical memory, and an overreliance on familiar liberal narratives that obscure more than they illuminate. A critical reading reveals an argument that is rhetorically compelling but analytically uneven, and one that ultimately underestimates the structural forces reshaping global politics.
A Framing Built on Nostalgia
Schmemann begins with a stark assertion: America has changed, and Donald Trump is the face of that change. He describes Trump as a president who “demeaned allies and courted autocrats,” and who sought to accumulate powers beyond constitutional limits. This framing is not inaccurate — Trump’s tenure has been marked by norm-breaking and institutional strain — but Schmemann treats Trump as both symptom and cause without clearly distinguishing the two. The article implies that Trump’s rise represents a deviation from an otherwise stable liberal democratic trajectory. Yet the political, economic, and cultural conditions that enabled Trump — polarization, inequality, institutional decay, and distrust of elites — long predate him.
By anchoring his narrative in Trump’s personality, Schmemann inadvertently narrows the scope of his analysis. The question is not whether America can “return” to its role as a global beacon of democracy once Trump is gone. The deeper question is whether the post-1945 liberal order was ever as stable, inclusive, or universally admired as Schmemann suggests. His essay assumes a golden age of American leadership that can be restored through renewed commitment to democratic values. But this assumption........