by Stu Cvrk
Since Jimmy Carter, the Democrat Party’s foreign and domestic brief has converged on one operating premise: American decline is inevitable, and the Party’s claim to power is that it will manage that decline more gracefully than its rivals. Each Democrat administration from Carter through Biden has added policies that, taken together, shrank American hard power, ceded industrial ground to China, loosened control of the border, and turned federal institutions inward against domestic opponents while exacerbating political and cultural divisions among Americans.
The Trump administration’s second-term program, a hemispheric “Fortress America” strategy, is best understood as a deliberate reversal of that brief.
Let us examine the premise.
ORIGINS: CARTER AND THE JAPAN PANIC
The template was set in Carter’s first years. At Notre Dame in May 1977, he told graduates Americans were “now free of that inordinate fear of communism” that had led the country to embrace any dictator who shared it. Policy followed rhetoric: the B-1 bomber was canceled, the neutron bomb deferred, and a withdrawal of U.S. ground forces from Korea was announced.
The bill came due in 1979. The Shah fell, American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran, and the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, all within eleven months. Carter’s July 1979 “crisis of confidence” speech (better known as the “malaise” address) located the problem not in policy but in the American people themselves. That speech became the founding text of managed decline: weakness reframed as maturity.
The 1980s supplied the intellectual framework for the Democrats. Paul Kennedy’s “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” (1987) popularized “imperial overstretch” and cast the U.S. as the next Habsburg Spain.
The Japan panic followed. In his 1992 primary campaign, Democrat Paul Tsongas declared that “the Cold War is over, and Japan and Germany have won.” Within a decade Japan entered its lost decades, and the Soviet Union was gone. The decline thesis was wrong on the facts, but it was never abandoned as a governing outlook by the Democrat Party.
CLINTON: THE PEACE DIVIDEND AND CHINA’S ENTRY
Victory in the Cold War should have been the moment to lock in unipolar advantage for the U.S. Instead, the Clinton years converted it into a “peace dividend.” Active duty military strength fell from about 2.1 million in 1989 to roughly 1.4 million by 2000, and defense spending dropped from about 6 percent of GDP in the mid-1980s to about 3 percent. Army divisions went from 18 to 10. The procurement “holiday” of the 1990s is why the services entered the 2020s flying airframes designed in the 1970s.
The larger strategic error was China. Clinton delinked China’s trade status from its human rights record in 1994, then pushed Permanent Normal Trade Relations through Congress in 2000, clearing Beijing’s accession to the World Trade Organization in December 2001. The promise was that trade would liberalize the Chinese Communist Party. The result was the “China Shock.” Economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, along with Daron Acemoglu and colleagues, estimated that Chinese import competition cost roughly 2 to 2.4 million American jobs between 1999 and 2011, concentrated in manufacturing towns across Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Beijing banked the dividends and built the world’s largest navy by hull count. Thanks to largely bad Democrat policies, America financed the rise of its principal adversary while hollowing out its own industrial heartland.
OBAMA: DECLINE AS DOCTRINE
After 2008, the posture hardened from instinct into doctrine. Charles Krauthammer named it in October 2009: the Obama agenda, at home and abroad, was “declinism,” and “decline is a choice.”
The administration’s own officials supplied the evidence. An Obama adviser told The New Yorker in 2011 that the Libya intervention was “leading from behind,” premised on the belief that “the relative power of the U.S. is declining.” Libya collapsed into a failed state. In August 2012, Obama declared Syrian chemical weapons use a “red line.” When Syrian President Bashar al-Assad crossed it a year later, he deferred to Congress and accepted a Russian-brokered deal that put Moscow back into the Middle East.
Meanwhile, the “pivot to Asia” was announced in 2011 but never resourced while Beijing built and militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea. The sequestration in the Budget Control Act of 2011 cut roughly $500 billion from planned defense spending over a decade, and service chiefs testified to readiness crises.
At home, the federal apparatus turned toward the president’s opponents. The Treasury Inspector General confirmed in May 2013 that the IRS had singled out Tea Party and conservative groups for extra scrutiny of their tax-exempt applications. The Durham report (2023) later found the FBI opened its Trump-Russia investigation on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence.”
Foreshadowing the divisiveness later implemented through Biden’s federal DEI policies, Obama made several high-profile statements that framed local incidents through a racial lens and were widely criticized as polarizing, including his 2009 remark that Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in the Henry Louis Gates arrest and his 2012 comments that “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon” Martin. His administration’s emphasis on systemic racial disparities in policing and criminal justice—through comments on Ferguson and Baltimore, support for initiatives like My Brother’s Keeper, and broader identity-focused rhetoric—coincided with a sharp decline in public assessments of race relations, with Gallup finding in 2016 that 46 percent of Americans said relations had worsened under Obama (versus 29 percent who said they improved).
The pattern of a bureaucracy policing domestic dissent while American power receded abroad is the core of the charge of managed decline. Obama’s companion focus on dividing Americans throughout his presidency helped accelerate that decline.
BIDEN: THE BRIEF COMPLETED
Biden’s term executed the full program at once. Even a sympathetic observer, the Financial Times’ Janan Ganesh, argued in August 2024 that every recent president’s real brief had been to manage decline, and that Biden did it best. The concession that managed decline was the assignment is the point.
Borders and Sovereignty. On day one, Biden halted border wall construction and began dismantling the Remain in Mexico policy. U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded more than 10 million nationwide encounters across fiscal years 2021 through 2024, plus roughly 2 million known “got-aways” at the southwest border. Large-scale parole programs admitted migrants outside the normal visa system. Whether the aim was cultural transformation or electoral advantage (probably both), the effect was a border policy that treated sovereignty as negotiable.
Division as policy. Executive Order 13985 made “equity” a whole-of-government mandate, and Executive Order 14035 institutionalized DEI across the federal workforce. The military absorbed the same agenda while the Army, Navy, and Air Force all missed recruiting goals in fiscal 2023.
Energy and the economy. Biden revoked the Keystone XL permit on his first day and paused new LNG export approvals in January 2024. Deficit spending, including the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, pushed CPI inflation to 9.1 percent in June 2022, a 40-year high, and federal debt rose from about $27.8 trillion to more than $36 trillion. Fraud ran through the pandemic programs; the GAO estimated $100 to $135 billion in unemployment insurance fraud, and the SBA Inspector General flagged more than $200 billion in potentially fraudulent PPP and disaster loans. DOGE’s 2025 audits extended the case to improper payments across the federal government during the Biden years.
Retreat abroad. The August 2021 Afghanistan collapse left 13 service members dead at Abbey Gate and billions in equipment to the Taliban. Within six months, Russia invaded Ukraine without the slightest hint of Biden administration pressure on Moscow beforehand.
THE TRUMP RESPONSE: FORTRESS AMERICA
The second Trump administration rejects the premise outright. Its strategy is hemispheric: secure the Western Hemisphere’s energy, choke points, and approaches, expel Chinese influence from them, and rebuild the military that guards them. The strategy prioritizes securing the Western Hemisphere as a self-reliant strategic base through the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine by tightening border and migration control, countering cartels and non-hemispheric rivals, reshoring critical supply chains and energy production, and hardening military infrastructure for resilience against disruption—as outlined in the 2025 National Security Strategy and related initiatives like Shield of the Americas and the Pentagon’s Fortress America program.
Energy supremacy. Executive Orders 14154 and 14156 declared a national energy emergency, lifted Biden’s LNG pause, and reopened federal lands and waters to production. Then came Venezuela. On January 3 of this year, U.S. forces captured Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, opening the world’s largest proven oil reserves to a post-Chávista recovery that analysts project could lift output from about 800,000 to 1.7 million barrels per day by 2028.
Choke points. Under U.S. pressure, Panama left China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2025. In January 2026, Panama’s Supreme Court voided Chinese-owned CK Hutchison’s concession at the Balboa and Cristobal terminals, and on February 23 the government took control of both, ending Chinese operation of the canal’s two entrances. When Iran blockaded the Strait of Hormuz during the 2026 war, the U.S. military launched an operation on May 5 to reopen it, largely returning crude oil exports through the Strait to prewar levels and demonstrating that freedom of navigation through the Gulf rests on American power. The same logic extends to Bab el-Mandeb and the Malacca Strait, the latter action bolstered by a new Major Defense Cooperation Partnership with Indonesia aimed at sharing surveillance and denial capabilities around the Strait.
Greenland. On September 22, the U.S., Denmark, and Greenland signed an open-ended Arctic security agreement. It expands Pituffik Space Base, adds defense areas at Narsarsuaq and Mestersvig, authorizes Golden Dome missile defense use, and bars non-NATO powers from any persistent military presence without the signatories’ consent. That last clause is aimed squarely at Beijing.
China out of the hemisphere. The ChiComs are out in Venezuela and Panama, but Canada is the laggard. For example, in January 2026, Ottawa cut tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles under a quota deal with Beijing and continues to be a third-party conduit for Chinese products into the U.S. President Trump’s tariffs aimed at Canada are intended to help modify that behavior.
DEI out, modernization in. Executive Orders 14151 and 14173 terminated Biden’s federal DEI programs and revoked the affirmative-action mandate for contractors, and the Pentagon followed with a return to merit. Modernization centers on the Golden Dome homeland missile shield, the F-47 sixth-generation fighter, and the new 4-star Autonomous Warfare Command for drones and AI.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
President Trump has shown that decline is clearly a choice. From Carter’s “inordinate fear” to Ganesh’s verdict that Biden managed decline best, the Democrat policy brief has been consistent: accept relative decline, share it out to allies and rivals, and govern the domestic fallout through regulation, bureaucracy, and identity politics. Krauthammer’s rejoinder remains the governing alternative, and President Trump’s Fortress America program treats decline as a policy outcome, not a law of history. Its early returns in Caracas, Panama, and Hormuz suggest that the outcome was always reversible—and consistent with the inherent American spirit and ingenuity that has solved difficult problems throughout the last 250 years.
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Stu Cvrk retired as a captain after serving 30 years in the U.S. Navy in a variety of active and reserve capacities, with considerable operational experience in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he received a classical liberal education that serves as the key foundation for his geopolitical commentary.
