In 2009, the late political columnist Charles Krauthammer penned an essay of prophetic clarity titled “Decline is a Choice.”
With characteristic incisiveness, he argued that the United States’ global preeminence was not succumbing to some inexorable historical entropy but was being eroded by deliberate policy decisions — chiefly those of former President Barack Obama. Decline, Krauthammer insisted, was not fate; it was a choice.
Today, that path has been reaffirmed with a fervor and recklessness that the political pundit could scarcely have envisaged. President Donald Trump’s second term hasn’t merely perpetuated America’s retreat from global leadership, it has hastened its atrophy with chaotic zeal, cloaked in a rhetoric that mistakes bombast for strength.
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