Theology encyclopedias define fulfillment of a prophecy as God bestowing His blessings on predictions, estimations, and even guesses. There are Biblical examples of this, but they have a tint of “good news” about His Kingdom. What about not-so-good news that would foretell some future developments? Not in the sense of fortune-telling, but still about the future?

Case in point: the thesis about the coming of an institutional and socioeconomic cycle that would end American Hegemony, voiced and penned with varying emphasis on its conditions and ramifications by several geopolitical analysts, e.g., George Friedman, Peter Zeihan, John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs and several others.

As an unintended consequence of his Making America Great Again, President Donald Trump is about to bestow his blessings on this prediction by implementing his tumultuous MAGA policies. As if he knew what was coming as the “Crises of the 2020s,” founder of Geopolitical Futures, George Friedman, titled his book “The Storm Before the Calm.” The international arena will probably be calm and quiet in post-Trump America.

Can expansion save U.S.?

Trump told Americans exactly how he would fulfill those doomsday prophecies: when necessary, he would use military force to make Greenland and the Panama Canal part of America. He would fire thousands of federal employees and expect thousands of others to resign, taking the offer of financial incentives – judges temporarily blocked that offer and fired workers of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). His “America First” attitude will take America out of its “systems-maintaining role” that has been constructed for the last seven decades.

Since the 19th century, the U.S. has attempted to acquire Greenland from Denmark. In 1867, 1910, 1946 and 1955, American Secretaries of State William H. Seward and James F. Byrnes and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller advocated the acquisition of the island. In his first term, Trump declared that the island was vital for the defense of the U.S. and offered to buy it from the Danish government. But then there was such a thing as “the axis of adults” at the White House; when the Danes said “No!” it was the end of the discussion.

For those “elders,” the U.S. was part and parcel of the rules-based international order; a modern nation would obey the treaties, rules and laws. As former U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder puts it in her Politico column, “Like it or not, the rules-based order is no more.” If Denmark and others, Panama, for instance, want to get their way, she says, “They’ll have to speak the language of power.” Ivo Daalder, who is now CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, warns that the Greenland and Panama disputes are not trivial political shows: “Trump is serious, and he’s no longer surrounded by his former aides whose job was to steer him away from crazy ideas.”

Wielding big stick

As he proved in his tariffs and export controls salvo, Trump also wants to shape the European Union so that Europeans pay their dues to NATO. The simple question any European citizen would now ask is why we need a stronger NATO when it continues to be a good internationally stabilizing bloc. Had the U.S. not afflicted Europe with an unnecessary (and unwinnable) war in Ukraine, the EU would have better credibility and better bargaining power vis-à-vis Russia.

Without those comparatively wiser men at the White House, Trump is not a simple president but the dictator he had said he’d like to be “if only one day.” Believing that America has given him an unprecedented and powerful mandate, Trump already fired thousands of career public servants; he signed a flood of executive orders in his first two weeks, which practically capsized the core constitutional principles and violated the traditional basis of U.S. citizenship. He is trying to smother those federal departments that Congress created. But no problem: he is not only the Chief Executive but also the Chief Legislator!

Trump’s illusion that he now has an “unprecedented and powerful mandate” also creates unprecedented infights among those who enjoy that powerful mandate, like their own wish lists. Hal Brands, a professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), lists at least five different (and warring) world views.

You can add your favorite Trumpists to professor Brands’ groups: The global hawks, Asia Firsters, the “Come Home, America” cohort, the economic nationalists and the Congress-raiding MAGA hard-liners. I guess the Tech Billionaires should be among them, as well as NeoCons, who had already snuck into the Deep State. As professor Brand says, the next four years will see a running battle for Trump’s approval for their own view of shaping the U.S. and the larger world.

Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), working on axing seemingly the whole of the federal government, are capable of ending the idea of “U.S. primacy.” Musk single-handedly ruined the U.S.-funded nongovernmental organization (NGO) and media network by obtaining and leaking the USAID aid packages distributed all over the world to maintain that supremacy.

Trump himself is also working hard to ruin the credibility of the U.S. as the guard of the rules-based international order. As he pushes a new plan to take control of Gaza and clear out an area that is home to an estimated 2 million residents, he is advocating bringing the U.S. much more deeply into a region where his family has a growing collection of real estate and business interests. Even the usual “U.S. friendly Jewish columnists are asking the question whether Trump is an angel or a devil.” The U.S. administration officials kept calling the world leaders to ensure that Trump had not committed to using U.S. troops and that any relocation of Palestinians would be temporary.

But one thing has already been etched in the collective international memory: Trump is not going to keep his word on ending all wars; quite contrary, the idea of the U.S. seizing the territory, at this day and age, could be real any moment. You should mark as the beginning of the end of Pax Americana the moment Trump pushes that button to have his secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, send the first American soldier to any foreign land. Secretary Hegseth warned the Department of Defense (DOD) personnel that to revive the warrior ethos and restore trust in the military, he and Trump are “going to move fast, think outside the box and be disruptive on purpose.”

These are the exact prescriptions of what must be done to “restore America” as outlined in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s political initiative to remove checks on executive power in favor of right-wing policies. Trump disowns it, but according to Politico magazine, 37 items from that 900-page road map have already found their way in Trump’s executive orders.

Restoration or ruination

The end of Pax Americana will not come by “isolationist” policies as pundits stipulated for almost a year reading and listening to Trump’s nonsensically absurd apophases. Trumpisms come as insults directed at his critics, labeling them “dogs,” “losers” and “enemies of the people.” But he doesn’t allude to isolationism with those insults. The American Right has, in general, a tendency for isolationism, but Trump is not your run-of-the-mill right-wing politician. His complaints that America is a victim of its generosity and candor should not be interpreted as isolationism; they are about “sovereignty,” which Trump is about to implement for the next four years if his life lasts long enough!

“Trump is a “sovereigntist,” says Jennifer Mittelstadt, a professor of U.S. history at Rutgers University. She points out that Project 2025 seeks “International organizations and agreements erode our Constitution. It recommends that “the rule of law or popular sovereignty should not be reformed,” but “the international organizations and agreements should be abandoned.”

I am sure that most of my fellow Americans did not vote for this adventurism. An America pushed around economically and politically might have increased national feelings, especially during the terms of former U.S. presidents Clinton, Obama and Biden. But Americans do not want to be enveloped in sovereignty politics that would create reciprocally similar responses around the world. Almost in all European countries, right-wing parties are waiting to follow in Trump’s footsteps with similar sovereigntist policies that will first abolish the EU.

If that happens, goodbye to U.S. hegemony and hello to “The Storm,” which Mr. Freidman prophesized and fulfilled with Mr. Trump’s blessings. But please do not laugh, for we all are going to be on that ship.