In the last two weeks, the US has demonstrated its hegemonic control in three continents.

In Latin America, it has taken over the main levers of power in Venezuela, potentially one of the world’s great oil producers. In Europe, it faces only tame resistance from the continent’s two great alliances, the European Union and Nato, to its declared intention to annex Greenland, a semi-autonomous part of Denmark with an area six times the size of Germany.

In Asia, President Donald Trump can claim to have forced Iran by threat of military action to stop shooting or executing protesters, with the Iranian foreign minister taking to Fox News this week to announce that there would be no executions.

Trump claims this dramatic expansion of American power in the world to be the result of his drive to Make America Great Again. His willingness to use military force has also escalated markedly since last June, when US B-2 bombers successfully attacked nuclear facilities in Iran without facing much Iranian resistance or negative blowback at home or abroad.

Are we in a new imperial Trumpian world of unopposed American dominance, or something more shaky? Leaders from Caracas to Copenhagen and Brussels to Tehran have responded with passivity or complicity to a new Trump world order, of which they are still struggling to get the measure. Not so long ago respected academics and pundits portrayed the US as a great power in decline in an increasingly multipolar world, yet today Trump seems to call all the shots.

Declinists have a patchy record over the last half century predicting the ebb of US power, because rival countries – notably those in the Soviet Union – turned out to be in even deeper trouble. The rise and fall of great powers is not pre-ordained by long-term trends. They may also be the victim or beneficiary of some calamitous miscalculation by themselves or others, usually involving military action.

The three most disastrous foreign policy mistakes in the last half-century were the decision of the Argentine junta to invade the Falklands in 1982, Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait in 1990 and President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, 2022. In each case, autocratic leaders persuaded themselves that they would win an easy victory, but instead suffered failure and defeat.

Some might argue that it is wrong to include Russia in this list of failed invaders, as its army is still making small advances in the Donbas. EU and Nato leaders continually ring the alarm bells about the Russian threat to Eastern Europe. In reality, the Russian invasion was a complete and unexpected debacle. The CIA correctly predicted the Russian attack, but were astonished by its total lack of success.

In the space of a few chaotic weeks,........

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