Robert Kagan, historian and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, author of The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900–1941.
The Iran War Didn't Start America's Retreat. It Floored the Gas.
Robert Kagan on the moment the world stopped asking whether we'd show up and started asking whether we could.
The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,038: Monday, September 28th, 2026
Let me tell you about the most dangerous sentence in American politics.
It goes like this: “Just wait two years.”
You’ve heard it. I’ve said it. Every nervous diplomat in Brussels, every Gulf prince, every defense planner in Tokyo has muttered some version of it over a stiff drink. Ride it out. Keep your head down. The storm passes.
Robert Kagan thinks that sentence could get a lot of people killed. After listening to him lay out his case recently, I’m not sure I can argue with him.
Kagan isn’t some cable-news hothead. He’s spent decades writing the history of American foreign policy…one heavy volume at a time. When a guy like that starts comparing the present to 1914…you put down your coffee.
Here’s what he said, and here’s what I think you should do with it.
Point #1: The Iran War Didn’t Start the Decline. It Hit the Gas.
Kagan calls what’s happening a “slow motion American retreat.”
In his telling, the Iran war is where the world stopped wondering whether America would show up and started wondering whether it could.
His evidence? When the Saudis asked for help against serious Houthi attacks, Washington said no.
Think about how that sounds in Riyadh. Or in Seoul, which gets its oil through those same waters.
Here’s my take…and it’s a lesson every salesman learns the hard way: a guarantee is only worth what the customer believes it’s worth. For 80 years, the American security guarantee was the best-backed promise on the planet. Nobody read the fine print because nobody had to.
Now everybody’s reading the fine print. And…they don’t like what it says.
Point #2: Welcome Back to the Old World
What replaces the American order?
Kagan’s answer is blunt. Go look at the 150 years before 1945: multiple great powers, no real rules, everybody armed to the teeth.
He expects Germany and Japan to become great military powers again…and he expects their neighbors to get very nervous about it.
He’s skeptical of the fashionable idea that “middle powers” will band together and sort things out…because Europe’s track record without America is…to put it gently…not great.
My thought: people talk about “multipolarity” like it’s a shiny new app. Sleek. Balanced. Decentralized.
It isn’t. It’s the factory default setting of human history. And…the default setting came with a lot of cemeteries.
Point #3: You Can’t Flatter a Predator
This is where Kagan gets sharp.
He thinks Europe…led by NATO chief Mark Rutte… has built its whole Trump strategy on a bad assumption: that if you stroke the ego and hand over a win…you buy peace.
Take Greenland. Everybody’s calling the new deal a clever way to hand Trump a trophy that costs nothing. Kagan’s not buying it. That negotiation…he points out…opened with the threat of force. He also reminds us that America didn’t grab Hawaii in one bite. First came the revolution…then the annexation.
His word for who Europe is dealing with is a “predator.” And….the rules are different with predators.
Here’s what I’d add. Anybody who’s sold anything knows the difference between a customer and a mark. Give a customer a concession and you build a relationship. Give a mark a concession…and you’ve just taught him the price of your fear.
Europe keeps thinking it’s negotiating with a customer.
Point #4: “Two Years” Is a Fantasy
Back to that dangerous sentence.
Kagan’s rebuttal is the part spurred me to write this. Even if Democrats win Congress…a president who loses power at home still has foreign policy…the one arena where Congress can barely touch him.
A wounded president with a free hand abroad isn’t a lame duck. He’s a loose cannon.
And look at the tape. Kagan notes the world has already turned upside down in the last two years.
Now…imagine two more.
Point #5: Stop Assuming Trump Sees Russia and China as Enemies
This is the one most people will resist, and it’s probably the most important.
Kagan argues we keep being shocked by Trump’s softness toward Moscow and Beijing…because we assume he shares the traditional American worldview.
You need a liberal worldview to see autocracies as the enemy, Kagan says…and there’s no evidence Trump has one. What drives him…is ego and money.
His receipts: a red-carpet welcome for Xi Jinping despite what Kagan describes as Chinese targeting help to Iran against American forces…and envoys pitching business deals to Russia…before Moscow has given an inch on Ukraine.
My take: stop grading the man on a test he never agreed to take. You can’t predict a player if you insist on reading him…from the wrong playbook.
Point #6: Lift the Rocks, See What Crawls Out
This is my favorite image from the whole conversation.
Kagan says American dominance “put a lot of rocks on a lot of things.” The Houthis, frozen conflicts…nationalist movements were all held down by the weight of assumed American power.
Now…the rocks are coming off.
He’s especially worried about Europe. He wants liberal leaders there to grab the nationalism card before the far right does…so that what rises is “a more civilized nationalism.”
Reader Q&A: What Kagan’s Warning Means for You
Q: Isn’t this just another expert crying wolf? We’ve heard “the end of the American order” for decades.
Fair question. Here’s the difference. The old warnings were about slow decline: other countries catching up while America coasted.
Kagan is describing something else, a choice to walk away from the system, combined with evidence from the Iran war that we may not be able to hold it together even if we wanted to. When the Saudis ask for help and hear “no,” that isn’t a forecast anymore. It’s a receipt.
Q: Why should I care what happens in the Gulf or Greenland? I live in California, not Riyadh.
Because the American order was never charity. It was the best deal we ever made. We kept the sea lanes open…and in return…the world ran on our rules…our dollar and our markets.
Kagan’s point is that when allies can’t count on us…they start making their own arrangements…and those arrangements won’t be built around American interests. You’ll feel it in prices…in markets…and possibly in the draft notices your grandkids get.
Q: Didn’t Europe win on Greenland? Trump didn’t get everything he wanted.
That’s the conventional read…and Kagan thinks it’s dangerously naive. The talks began with the threat of force…and the people who want to profit from Greenland’s minerals haven’t gone anywhere.
His Hawaii comparison is the key: these things happen in stages. A deal made under pressure doesn’t end the pressure. It just tells the other side what pressure is worth.
Q: What’s wrong with a multipolar world? Maybe America shouldn’t be the world’s cop.
Kagan would say “multipolar” sounds a lot nicer than it has ever been in practice. The last long stretch of great-power competition without a dominant referee gave us the Napoleonic Wars, 1914 and 1939.
He isn’t claiming America did everything right. He’s claiming the alternative has a track record..and the track record is written in cemeteries. You can reasonably disagree…but…you should know which history you’re betting against.
Q: If Democrats take Congress, doesn’t that put a check on all this?
On domestic policy…maybe. On foreign policy…Kagan says, barely at all. Congress has few tools to stop a president abroad…and a president who has lost ground at home often turns to the one arena where he still has a free hand. That’s why “just wait two years” concerns me more than almost anything else in this conversation.
Q: So is there any good news?
Some. Kagan points out that pieces of the old order still stand. Allies are still trying to act like allies…because their alternatives to America are mostly terrible. He also reminds us that Americans have reversed course before…dramatically and fast.
The catch is that it usually takes a disaster to make it happen. The best-case scenario is that we wake up before the disaster instead of after it. That’s the whole reason I wrote this.
The Part Nobody Wants to Hear
Can America just switch it all back on?
Kagan’s honest answer: not easily. Rebuilding would take a serious jump in defense spending…and he doesn’t see either party lining up for that. The Iran war, stacked on top of Iraq and Afghanistan…is breeding isolationism.
Yes, Americans have reversed themselves before. In 1938…they were dead certain they’d never fight in Europe. Then France fell. But that’s exactly the point. It took a catastrophe.
And…even then, Kagan doesn’t want the old hegemony back. Having proven itself unreliable, he says…America would have to earn its way into a more equal partnership with countries that share its values.
So here’s my bottom line, and then I’ll let you go.
Every human being in business knows the most expensive words in business are “we’ll deal with it later.” Later is when the bill comes due, with interest.
Kagan is telling us, as plainly as a scholar can, that the bill is already in the mailbox.
You can open it now. Or…you can wait two years.
Just don’t pretend you didn’t see it.
#HoldFast
Back soon.
-Jack
Jack Hopkins
P.S. If you remember one thing from this piece, make it this: the danger isn’t that our allies are angry with us. Angry allies stick around. The danger is that they’re quietly making other plans.
Every deal the Gulf states cut with Iran…every new German tank and every Japanese defense budget increase is a vote of no confidence in the American guarantee. Once those votes are cast, you don’t get them back with a speech.
P.P.S. If this made you uncomfortable, good. That was the point. Now do me a favor: forward it to the one person you know who’s still saying “just wait two years.”
Then hit subscribe, because I’ll be tracking every one of Kagan’s warnings as they play out, and I’ll tell you straight whether he was right. No spin and no filler, just the invoice as it arrives.
Once again Jack you lay it out with no sugar coating. I just feel like too many people are not paying enough attention and are going to have a rude awakening when the shit hits the fan. And the shit will hit the fan because too many people thought that this POS in the White House was the answer! He could care less about any of us!
This is so worrying…. there are so many theories on t and his actions. This one is very good and makes complete sense.
T has been weakening us in every single way since he descended the escalator. He’s, for all intents and purposes, pretty well decimated our soft power. Internally, we are suffering from a myriad of issues including rising prices on everything, food insecurity for many and on and on. The latest on the student loans really gets a rise out of me.
I read an article (on substack) yesterday that really stopped me cold. I didn’t pass it on because there were no real receipts. I thought I bookmarked it and now cannot, for the life of me, find it…. grrrr. It talked about Putin and his leverage over t. The article basically stated that P has kompromat on T to get him to do what he wants. Supposedly the file contains videos, interviews, witnesses and the like of many of T’s misadventures (likely some of which are contained in the Epstein files if you follow)….. The article, combined with reports of how the US delegation was sheet white coming out of the Alaska mtg, has me curious on just how much it might be accurate.
In any event, Kagan’s work is scary enough…. without adding more…
Thank you for this, Jack! Staying accurately informed is getting harder by the day. Appreciate you and your work!