Imperial Folly

The problem of simultaneity.

US President Donald Trump sits with Vice President JD Vance as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivers remarks during the National Memorial Day Observance at the Memorial Amphitheater in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, on May 25, 2026. (Kent Nishimura / AFP via Getty Images)

Under Donald Trump, the United States is, as policy analyst Karim Sadjapour suggested , the “attention deficit superpower.” On the campaign trail, Trump railed against the failed wars of the establishment. Once in office, he campaigned for the Nobel Peace Prize, while bombing seven countries plus fishing boats in the Caribbean, decapitating Venezuela, embracing Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, lacerating our allies, threatening to send troops into Greenland, Canada, Mexico, Ecuador, and Columbia, and launching an aggressive war on Iran, with Cuba soon to follow.

Is there any coherent explanation—or even plausible excuse –for the past months, other than reasonable doubts about the mad king’s sanity? In the Financial Times , contributing editor Patrick Foulis suggests there is. Trump and his strategists, he argues, are addressing the “problem of simultaneity,” the threat that haunts global empires: a possibility of concurrent attacks by multiple adversaries across the world that could overwhelm the empire’s capacities.

The Pentagon once aspired to be ready to fight two major wars simultaneously, but that nightmare was abandoned with the end of the Cold War when, as Bush’s secretary of state, Colin Powell, put it , “We are running out of enemies. We are down to Fidel Castro and Kim Il Sung.”

Now, with the rise of China and Russia’s recovery, concern about simultaneous threats has revived. The hawks surrounding Joe Biden sought to respond by rousing the allies to help bear the burden from the Baltics to the South China Sea.

Trump, of course, scorns all things Biden and so launched a different course. Flagellate the allies into action, placate China and Russia for the time being, while “sequencing” preemptive wars to degrade our enemies, and buy time to build up America’s military. Take out the “rogue” leadership in Venezuela. Then attack Iran. Cuba soon to come. The conflicts, according to Trump’s defense strategist Elbridge Colby, are “ designed precisely ” to avoid concurrent wars—not counting the bombing of several countries in the War on Terror.

And demand a staggering $1.5 trillion annual military budget —a $500 billion, a nearly 50 percent increase in one year that standing alone is more than any other country spends on its military. And that, of course, doesn’t include the cost of the Iran War or the rebuilding that will take place if it ever ends. The US will soon consume about 45 percent of the world’s military budget.

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Put aside concerns about international law—dismissed as “international niceties” by the Stephen Miller, Trump’s rabid White House deputy—it sounds like a plan.

But a ruinous one. The flaws are clear and already obvious. One is that wars don’t go as planned—particularly imperial ventures in distant lands. In case we forgot about our misadventures in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, we now have the fiasco in Iran to remind us.

Second is that the United States can’t really control the timing or location of conflicts. We have alliances with more than 50 countries, with another dozen quasi-allies like Israel. When they feel secure, free riding on US military protection is a sensible course. But they also have their own interests and enemies—as Israel has demonstrated—and will work to drag the US into wars not in the time or place of our choosing.

Third, preemptive wars—even if precisely sequenced—don’t address our pressing real security threats. After suffering over 1 million deaths from Covid, building global capacity to deal with pandemics would be an obvious priority. As climate change unleashes cascading catastrophes and uproots ever more people, accelerating global cooperation to address it is essential. Pandemics and climate change pose a greater real and present threat of a “simultaneity attack” than any of our supposed adversaries.

As the saying goes, however, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The United States now has more military outposts abroad than embassies. The US military has some 750 bases, in more than 80 countries , while Trump has left 100 embassies without an ambassador , dismantled USAID, withdrawn from the WHO, the Paris Climate Accords and other international institutions, and seeks to cut the State Department budget by roughly 30 percent .

The third problem is that imperial power rests on far more than military force. Abroad, it depends significantly on legitimacy: other countries embracing or accepting their place. Constant, even strategically “sequenced” wars erode legitimacy. The United States begins to be seen not as the protector of order but as a disruptive rogue power. The price of policing t…