It is not these midterm elections that will go down in history. Far beyond their importance for the immediate future of the five continents, this autumn will be remembered as the one that marked the end of the American century, which Woodrow Wilson opened when he broke with his country’s isolationism by intervening in 1917 in a Europe torn apart.
Since then, the United States had never ceased to steer the world, defeating Nazism, containing Sovietism until its fall, rebuilding the European democracies or lending a hand to the most appalling Latin American dictatorships.
The dollar and the CIA, the White House and the State Department: for better and all too often for worse, Washington will have been the headquarters of these past hundred and ten years, but the hour of a change of era has struck in these very last days.
First, on Monday 26 October, representatives of Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia arrived in Tehran to discuss possible reconfigurations of the Middle East, even though Iranians and Saudis are in open conflict.
Iran bombed Saudi Arabia during the second Israeli-American war. Today it has it bombed by its Houthi allies in Yemen. It has been working to overthrow the Saudi monarchy since the fall of the Shah, yet on that day the strongholds of Sunnism and Shiism had forgotten even the centuries-old rivalry between the two branches of Islam and, more spectacular still, the Saudis had also forgotten the Quincy Pact.
Aboard that warship anchored in the Suez Canal, Abdulaziz ibn Saud and Franklin Roosevelt had concluded in February 1945 an oral agreement under which Saudi Arabia was assured of American protection in exchange for its oil. This pact had largely shaped the post-war world, but having become self-sufficient, Donald Trump’s United States refused to support the kingdom against Houthi attacks. It has quite simply dropped Saudi Arabia, which is therefore moving closer to Turkey, the second-largest army in the Atlantic Alliance, and to Pakistan, the only nuclear power in the Muslim world.
It is without the United States that the Saudi monarchy is seeking to ensure its security, and a few days before this meeting, the same three countries had consulted in Istanbul with Egypt, France, Germany and Britain.
Against a United States it no longer regards as reliable in any way, Saudi Arabia wants to set other alliances, notably with France, because American protection has failed it. This will weigh heavily on Donald Trump’s record, and nothing different is happening between the White House, Europe and Canada.
With the exception of France, all of Europe had been content since Yalta to have accepted its vassalisation in exchange for the American umbrella. On the sole condition that the European members of the Atlantic Alliance agreed to fund NATO better, this could have gone on for a long time yet, but Donald Trump had another dream: to come to terms with Vladimir Putin at the expense of Ukraine and the Europeans.
The results of this betrayal are hardly convincing, but they already outline a new democratic alliance. Showered with insults and economically shaken by a tariff war that has also weighed on Donald Trump’s popularity by pushing up prices in American supermarkets, Canada and the Europeans have drawn closer together, just as the Saudis, Turks and Pakistanis have. In Montreal they sealed an “Alliance for the Future”, open to all other democracies that no longer want to put all their eggs in the Washington basket either.
What is coming apart here is the Western alliance of the American era, just as the White House is shaking America’s Asian alliances by casting uncertainty over the defence of Taiwan.
Trump will pass, but nothing will ever give back to the United States the reliability it has lost. Its century is over.
