Let's Be Good Again So We Can Be Great Again
By Tom Kagy | 27 Mar, 2026

Our troubles and deficits stem from leaders who harbor delusions about the true source of our economic and military power.

(Image by Copilot)

The US was never the most powerful country in the world because we could out-muscle everyone else.  Our power derived from a stretch of a century or so when much of the world began to believe we stood for something worth respecting. 

There was a time when the world trusted us, wanted to be on our side.  They built their economies and their security architectures around us — not because we had a gun to their head, but because an American-led order seemed fair and humane. 

It's what won us the Cold War and built a world order dedicated to peace and a global network of free commerce that enriched Americans.

We've forgotten that. And it's destroying our greatness.

A seductive myth for many Americans — including our current foreign policy establishment — is that the US is dominant because we have the biggest economy and the most aircraft carriers, and therefore can impose our will with sanctions, shows of "shock and awe". 

Thanks to the nearly inexplicable (that is, without resort to psychoanalysis) folly of Donald Trump, the majority of Americans are now seeing the destructiveness of such delusions.  

Lest we forget, all we have to do is look back to a quarter century of wasteful wreckage.

Iraq didn't go the way the neocons promised.  Afghanistan ended in a televised humiliation.   

Our sanctions regimes push adversaries closer together instead of breaking them apart.  China, Russia, Iran, and half the Global South are actively building alternative financial infrastructure specifically to route around our economic leverage. The more we lean on raw coercive power, the more we accelerate the unfriendly multipolar world we're supposedly trying to prevent. 

The goodwill the US accumulated after World War II wasn't an accident.  It was the product of real choices — the Marshall Plan, the construction of multilateral institutions, a genuine (if imperfect and often hypocritical) commitment to rules that we also agreed to follow. 

Other countries bought into the American-led order because it offered them access to global markets, security guarantees, a dispute resolution system based on the rule of law. We weren't just powerful.  We were, for the most part, useful, trustworthy and, yes, kind.  That's a completely different kind of power, and it's the kind that actually scales.

Some might dismiss it as soft power.  And it is.  Soft power is what lets you get your preferred outcomes without having to coerce anyone.  It's the kind of power parents use to raise good, well-adjusted and successful kids who instinctively respect others and themselves.  

Our soft power is why South Korea and Japan host US bases voluntarily.  It's the reason the dollar is the world's reserve currency — not because we force people to use it, but because for decades it was the most stable and trustworthy store of value. It's the reason a kid in Chongqing or Mumbai or São Paulo grew up wanting to study in America, watch American movies, wear American brands. That's an enormous strategic asset, and we've been drawing it down at an alarming rate.

When we elected leaders who decided that international institutions were just obstacles to American unilateralism, we didn't liberate ourselves from constraints — we undermined the legitimacy of the order we built through great sacrifice — and from which we are the biggest beneficiaries. 

When we ran up obscene deficits to fund tax cuts and wars while letting our own infrastructure crumble, we didn't project strength — we hollowed ourselves out. When we started treating allies like freeloaders and adversaries like existential threats requiring maximum pressure, we pushed fence-sitters off the fence in the wrong direction.

The delusion at the root of all this is the belief that American power is self-sustaining, that our military and economic dominance is a permanent condition of the universe rather than something that requires constant investment in our fundamental goodness and humanity to maintain.  Hegemony is not a birthright.  It's a performance that has to be renewed, and the audience is the entire world.  

We lose massive amounts of our real power when we bomb a girl's school and kill thousands just for psychological effect on a perceived adversary.

To get back to something resembling real leadership, let's accept some uncomfortable truths.  We can't bully our way back to dominance.  We can't sanction and tariff our way to respect.  We can't win back the Global South with lectures while China provides billions in loans and technical assistance in building infrastructure. 

And we absolutely can't keep pretending the US is the indispensable nation while behaving like a rogue and a bully.

So let's start acting like a country that others would want to follow again. That means honoring our commitments even when it's inconvenient.  It means investing in the institutions we built and stop treating every multilateral agreement like a trap. It means fixing enough of our own domestic dysfunction that we can credibly claim democratic governance still works.  

It means easing out leaders who embody the polar opposite of goodness.

America was great when we understood that our power came from being the gloriously shining city on the hill.  We can get there again.  But not by pretending we're still omnipotent. Only by being, once more, genuinely good.