02 March, 2026

The Gulf next door

https://www.semafor.com/article/03/01/2026/view-the-gulf-next-door

Stephen Walt in Foreign Affairs described Trump’s foreign policy as “predatory hegemony”: “The bottom line is that acting as a predatory hegemon will weaken the networks of power and influence on which the United States has long relied and which created the leverage that Trump is now trying to exploit… Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but a backlash could come with surprising swiftness. To quote Ernest Hemingway’s famous line about the onset of bankruptcy, a consistent policy of predatory hegemony could cause US global influence to decline ‘gradually and then suddenly.’”