There is a particular quality to the diplomacy of our age that would have troubled the old seekers of wisdom—not its brutality, for power has always been brutal, but its peculiar emptiness, its capacity to perform the gestures of statesmanship while hollowing out every principle that once gave those gestures meaning.
One watches the movements of American foreign policy in early 2026 as one might watch a man crossing a frozen river: each step placed with apparent deliberation, yet beneath the surface the current pulls in directions that have nothing to do with the path the walker claims to be following. The question that presses itself upon any honest observer is no longer whether the United States has a coherent foreign policy, but whether coherence itself has been abandoned in favor of something older, darker, and infinitely more personal.
Consider the scene at Munich. On February 14, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood before the Munich Security Conference and delivered an address that was, by the standards of this administration, almost gentle. Where Vice President J.D. Vance had lectured these same Europeans a year earlier—warning that the greatest danger to their continent came not from Russian tanks but from their own tolerance—Rubio chose the language of kinship. America, he declared, was a “child of Europe,” bound by “centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, and heritage.” He spoke of civilization. He received a standing ovation. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen pronounced herself “very much reassured.” And for a moment, the old transatlantic architecture seemed to hold.
But diplomacy is revealed not in the speech but in the itinerary. What the speaker says matters less than where he goes next. Within hours of his ovation, America’s chief diplomat was on a plane—not to Berlin or Paris, where NATO’s institutional sinews are thickest, but to Bratislava to sit with Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, and then to Budapest to embrace Viktor Orbán. These are, by the reckoning of every serious European analyst, the two EU leaders most closely aligned with Vladimir Putin’s vision of a fractured West. In Budapest, Rubio did not merely meet Orbán. He delivered a message carrying the unmistakable weight of presidential endorsement: “President Trump is deeply committed to your success, because your success is our success.” This was not diplomatic courtesy. It was political intervention—an American secretary of state effectively campaigning for a foreign leader whose Fidesz party trails in the polls ahead of April elections. As Eurasia Group’s Mujtaba Rahman observed, the decision to visit “the two most pro-Putin, anti-Brussels, and Trump-loving leaders in the EU” immediately after delivering what he called “oily flattery” in Munich laid bare the true geometry of American priorities. “By their friends shall you know them.”
What kind of foreign policy is this? Not realist, for realism demands the cold assessment of national interest, and it is difficult to see how bolstering Orbán’s electoral fortunes advances American security. Not idealist, for idealism requires at minimum the pretense of principle, and there is nothing principled in endorsing a government that has banned Pride celebrations, deployed facial recognition against its own citizens, and systematically eroded judicial independence. What remains is something that resembles neither strategy nor conviction but affinity—a gravitational pull toward leaders who share not America’s interests but its current president’s temperament. Orbán’s hostility to immigration, his contempt for multilateral institutions, and his transactional relationship with Moscow—these are not policies that serve American power. They are mirrors in which a particular kind of American leader recognizes his own reflection.
The same disquieting pattern repeats itself with eerie precision in the administration’s approach to Iran, where the stakes are immeasurably higher and the human cost already catastrophic. When protests erupted across Iran in late December 2025, swiftly becoming a nationwide uprising against the clerical regime, the Trump administration positioned itself as a champion of the Iranian people. The president urged protesters to continue, promising that “help is on the way.” The rhetoric was stirring. It was also, in the cruellest sense, effective—for it encouraged hundreds of thousands to remain in the streets while the regime unleashed one of the most savage crackdowns in modern Middle Eastern history. At least 7,000 people have been killed, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency. Tens of thousands more have been detained. An internet blackout lasting weeks sealed the country in informational darkness.
And what has America done? The Pentagon has assembled an enormous military theater—two carrier strike groups, the USS Abraham Lincoln and the USS Gerald R. Ford, circling the Persian Gulf with dozens of fighter jets and guided-missile destroyers. F-15E fighters have been repositioned to Jordan. The display of force is colossal, and it is precisely that—a display. For alongside this military posture, the administration has dispatched as its negotiators not seasoned diplomats but Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner—New York real estate developers whose primary qualifications for Middle Eastern diplomacy appear to be their property portfolios and, in Kushner’s case, a two-billion-dollar investment from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. Indirect talks in Muscat produced nothing of substance. Iran’s foreign minister has arrived in Geneva declaring, "What is not on the table: submission before threats.” The regime, like Putin in Ukraine, has recognized that this administration’s appetite for spectacle far exceeds its appetite for sustained confrontation.
One cannot examine these negotiations without confronting the deeper question that haunts every dimension of this administration’s foreign engagements: whose interests are being served? In Gaza, Kushner has unveiled a “master plan” of gleaming waterfront towers and luxury developments that he presented at Davos with the confidence of a man pitching a real estate prospectus rather than rebuilding a territory where more than 71,000 people have died. “Amazing investment opportunities,” he told assembled billionaires, displaying AI-generated renderings of a “New Rafah” bearing no relationship to the rubble and grief of those who actually live there. No Palestinians were consulted. The twenty-five billion dollars required would be raised from Gulf sovereign wealth funds—the same funds already invested in Kushner’s own firm, Affinity Partners. The man negotiating peace is simultaneously the man whose personal fortune is entangled with the investors who stand to profit from the reconstruction he is designing.
There is an old recognition in the literature of civilizational decline that the corruption of great powers proceeds not through dramatic collapse but through a slow replacement of purpose with appetite. What we witness in February 2026 is precisely this conversion. In Munich, the language of alliance is deployed to reassure while the secretary of state flies to Budapest to endorse an autocrat. In the Persian Gulf, the machinery of war is assembled while the negotiators are property developers whose financial interests are woven into the conflicts they are tasked with resolving. In Gaza, the language of reconstruction repackages displacement as urban planning and catastrophe as investment opportunity. The coherence observers seek is not absent—it is simply misidentified. There is a consistent thread, but it is not national security, nor democratic values, nor even imperial ambition. It is a transaction. And the Iranian people, who took to the streets believing the leader of the free world meant what he said, are learning what the Ukrainian people learned before them: that the words of this administration are not commitments but positions in a negotiation, to be abandoned as personal calculations demand. Seven thousand dead. Tens of thousands imprisoned. A nation sealed in darkness. And the carriers circle, and the envoys shuttle between luxury hotels, and the cost, as always, is borne by those who believed the words.