At 8:03 a.m. on Easter Sunday, Trump posted this to True Social. Tuesday will be power plant day and bridge day all wrapped up in one in Iran. There'll be nothing like it. Open the straight, you crazy bastards. You'll be living in hell. Just watch. Praise be to Allah. President Donald J. Trump. That is even crazier when you read it aloud. But Trump followed it up with another post on Tuesday that began, "A whole civilization will die tonight. Never to be brought back again." I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. It didn't happen. Trump backed down, agreeing to a twoe ceasefire with Iran. This is not the art of the deal. This is behavior that should trigger a wellness check. Here's Tucker Carlson. It is vile on every level. It begins with a promise to use the US military, our military, to destroy civilian infrastructure in another country, which is to say to commit a war crime, a moral crime against the people of the country. What Carlson correctly centered is something Trump forgot or didn't care about as soon as it was convenient. Iranians are human beings. To annihilate them, to salvage a war you started is a crime against humanity. It is the act of a war criminal. It is the act of a monster.

I was horrified, but it goes beyond that. It felt like that tweet was the culmination of something that had been going on for a while, which was that the president of the United States was simply abandoning the entire moral weight that the United States had brought to its world role ever since World War II. After 1945, it said we're not going to be another imperial hegeimon. We're actually going to try and build them and we're going to give them foreign aid. We invented the idea of foreign aid. Trump is more like a rapacious 18th century European imperialist. It was all a kind of self-interested short-term extractive game. The foreign policy scholar Steven Walt had an essay recently where he described what America is becoming or attempting to be as a predatory hegeimon. We have benefited enormously from being the at the center of this world. But so we're getting these short-term gains at enormous long-term loss to our position, our status, our influence, our power.

So let's just evaluate it on the merits in the sense of if the genius negotiating strategy what we have ended up with is in a situation where we began the war with a country whose nuclear program had been completely and totally obliterated. What we have ended up with is a war in which Iran has lost its military and its navy. What it has gained is realized and shown the world that it can destroy the global economy that it can block the straight of hormones. It now seems poised to monetize that, presumably giving it $90 billion of revenue every year. It has weakened the dollar because these payments are now being made in crypto or in yuan. It has strengthened Russia. It has almost wrecked the Western Alliance. Why the hell didn't we negotiate on this basis 2 months ago? We could have easily negotiated with no war.

Has this war been good for Israel? BB Netanyahu's legacy was to split apart the alliance between the United States and Israel. He began by politicizing it in a poisonous way when Obama was president. Israel is the superpower of the Middle East. Israel is currently occupying 10% of Lebanon. It has displaced 1 million people. Is the price that now a majority of Americans have an unfavorable view of Israel? In Germany, the young are being increasingly alienated by what they see. BB Netanyahu has found a way to push back against a lot of Israel's enemies, but Ben-Gurion said Israel should be a light unto nations. I think for most people in the world today that is not the way they look at Israel and that is a huge moral loss.

Liberalism begins with profoundly ambitious moral ideas. Over time, it encodes those ideas and ideals into institutions, laws, rules. And then it becomes the philosophy of the people who staff and lead those institutions. And institutions fail. The problem liberalism has right now is that what we are left offending are institutions that don't really work as opposed to values that really do. The world has watched this display and said, "Oh, America can be just another imperial rapacious power and we need to start protecting ourselves." The one thing that the US had going for it was this agenda setting power and that's gone. The US is viewed as off on its own weird track. A world without American power will be a worse world, but it's not going to magically reconstitute itself around a Chinese hedgeimon. Reputation takes a lifetime to build and it's very easy to destroy.