mdoering · March 18, 2026 08:42
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  <div class="masthead">
    <span class="pub-name">The Transatlantic Dispatch &nbsp;·&nbsp; Opinion &amp; Analysis</span>
    <span class="pub-name">Vol. XLVII &nbsp;·&nbsp; March 2026</span>
  </div>

  <span class="kicker">Opinion / World Affairs</span>

  <h1>God Bless <em>What,</em> Exactly?</h1>

  <p class="deck">A dispatch from the continent America forgot it wasn't — on empire, impunity, and the exhausting theatrics of the self-appointed leader of the free world.</p>

  <div class="byline-row">
    <span><strong>By Markus</strong></span>
    <span>·</span>
    <span>Odenthal, North Rhine-Westphalia</span>
    <span>·</span>
    <span>~12 min read</span>
  </div>

  <div class="body-text">

    <p>Let's begin with the name. <em>America.</em> Said with that particular swelling of the chest, that misty glaze in the eye, that hand over the heart. It is a continent — two of them, in fact — stretching from the frozen wastes of Nunavut to the storm-battered tip of Tierra del Fuego, inhabited by nearly a billion people who did not consent to having their geography annexed by one country's mythology. And yet there it is, deployed daily as a synonym for the United States of America, as though the other 600 million residents of the Western Hemisphere are merely squatters on the national brand. This is not a small error. It is a worldview compressed into a word.</p>

    <h2><span class="num">I.</span> The Theatre of Greatness</h2>

    <div class="sidebar">
      <h3>By the numbers</h3>
      <ul>
        <li>800+ military bases in over 70 countries</li>
        <li>US per-capita CO₂ emissions: ~14.9 t/year — roughly 3× the EU average</li>
        <li>Has signed but not ratified the Rome Statute of the ICC</li>
        <li>Withdrew from Paris Agreement twice</li>
        <li>Over 50 foreign governments destabilised or overthrown since 1945 (per various historical accounts)</li>
        <li>Tariff announcements in 2025 wiped trillions from global markets within days</li>
      </ul>
    </div>

    <p>Donald Trump did not invent American arrogance — he merely stopped disguising it. For decades, the polite fiction was that American power was reluctant, burden-bearing, sacrificial. It was always, of course, nothing of the sort. But Trump has the reality-TV instinct to play the character straight: the bully who tells you he is a bully, the cheat who is proud of cheating. In a perverse way it is almost refreshing. The mask slipped. What was underneath looked exactly like what critics had been describing for seventy years.</p>

    <p>The arrogance is structural, not personal. It precedes Trump and will outlast him. It lives in the assumption that American preferences are universal values, that American security interests are the world's security interests, that an American death matters more than a foreign one, and that any country which disagrees is either naive, corrupt, or an enemy. It is the arrogance of a nation that has not fought a war on its own soil since 1865 and has therefore never had to reckon with what it actually does to a place.</p>

    <blockquote>
      They do not call it empire. They call it leadership. The distinction, from the receiving end, is difficult to detect.
    </blockquote>

    <h2><span class="num">II.</span> Tariffs as a Weapon of Mass Disruption</h2>

    <p>In 2025, the United States began wielding tariffs with the casual brutality of someone who knows they can afford to break things. Overnight announcements, timed for maximum market shock. Allies treated with the same suspicion as rivals. The WTO framework — painstakingly built over decades — dismissed as an obstacle. Trading partners scrambled to respond while American officials shrugged, smiled, and suggested that disruption was the point.</p>

    <p>What is instructive is not the tariffs themselves — every country uses trade policy — but the <em>tone</em>. The open contempt for reciprocity. The framing of economics as a zero-sum punishment mechanism rather than a system of mutual benefit. The message is clear: the rules apply to you. We make the rules. This is a country that built the postwar international trading order and now treats that order as an inconvenience when it produces outcomes it dislikes.</p>

    <h2><span class="num">III.</span> Oil, Always Oil</h2>

    <p>Drill, baby, drill — a chant so old it has become almost nostalgic. The United States sits on the largest financial and technological infrastructure in human history, capable of accelerating any energy transition it chooses, and it keeps choosing oil. Not because it must. Because the industry funds campaigns, because the cultural identity of large swaths of the country is fused to combustion, and because taking the long view requires a political courage that four-year electoral cycles structurally discourage.</p>

    <p>The consequences are distributed globally and felt most acutely by those least responsible. <span class="fact">US per-capita emissions remain among the highest in the developed world.</span> American withdrawal from the Paris Agreement — twice — sent a signal that went beyond policy: it announced that the US reserves the right to opt out of planetary commitments whenever they become inconvenient. The implicit message to developing nations, who were lectured about clean development, was devastating in its hypocrisy.</p>

    <blockquote>
      They poison the commons, then sell you the filter.
    </blockquote>

    <h2><span class="num">IV.</span> The Hague Problem, or: Laws for Thee</h2>

    <p>The International Criminal Court sits in The Hague, a city of grey skies and high principle, and the United States has done everything in its power to ensure it cannot touch an American. Not merely by refusing to ratify the Rome Statute — which at least has the honesty of abstention — but by actively threatening sanctions against ICC officials who dare investigate American military conduct. The American Service-Members' Protection Act, signed into law in 2002, authorises the use of military force to free any American detained by the court. It is, without irony, nicknamed "The Hague Invasion Act" in diplomatic circles.</p>

    <p>The message could not be clearer: international law is a tool for prosecuting others. American soldiers who committed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan will not stand in a dock at The Hague. The architects of torture programmes will give speeches at think tanks. This is not a failure of the system. It is the system, functioning exactly as American power designed it to function.</p>

    <h2><span class="num">V.</span> A Short History of Helpful Interventions</h2>

    <p>Iran, 1953. Guatemala, 1954. The Congo, 1960. Brazil, 1964. Chile, 1973. Nicaragua throughout the 1980s. The list is long and the euphemisms are consistent: stabilisation, democratisation, protecting American interests, fighting communism, fighting terrorism, fighting drugs. The governments that were overthrown, the leaders who were assassinated, the civil wars that were funded — these are not conspiracy theories. They are documented, declassified, admitted. The CIA's own archives are a remarkable document of systematic destabilisation, available to anyone willing to read them.</p>

    <p>The pattern is one of a power that genuinely cannot conceive that other nations have the right to make choices it disagrees with. Self-determination is a fine principle, in American rhetoric, right up until a country self-determines in a direction that threatens an American corporation or a Cold War positioning advantage. Then it becomes a crisis requiring intervention.</p>

    <h2><span class="num">VI.</span> The Dollar and the Algorithm</h2>

    <p>Financial dominance and digital dominance are the contemporary forms of the same old control. The dollar's status as the world's reserve currency means that American monetary policy sends shockwaves through economies that had no vote in setting it. When the Federal Reserve raises rates to fight domestic inflation, emerging market debt becomes unpayable and currencies collapse — in countries that did not cause American inflation and did not benefit from American stimulus. This is an enormous, invisible tax levied on the entire world, and it is considered so natural as to be barely worth mentioning.</p>

    <p>The digital layer is newer but the logic is identical. American platforms set the terms of global public discourse. American payment infrastructure sits between most of the world's financial transactions. American cloud providers hold the data of governments, hospitals, and citizens worldwide. This is not merely commercial success — it is infrastructure-level dependence, and it carries with it the constant, low-grade vulnerability of knowing that a policy change in Washington or a sanction list update can, effectively, switch you off. Europe discovered this acutely when it tried to enforce its own data privacy standards against companies that had no intention of complying.</p>

    <blockquote>
      "God Bless America" — four words that contain, in miniature, the entire problem: the assumption that God, like the dollar, is headquartered in Washington.
    </blockquote>

    <h2><span class="num">VII.</span> What Is Left to Say</h2>

    <p>None of this is to say that America — the country, not the continent — is without achievement, without beauty, without citizens of radical conscience and extraordinary courage. It has those in abundance. American literature, American music, American science, the American tradition of dissent: these are real and remarkable things. The problem is precisely that the country is capable of so much better than what it consistently chooses to be when power is on the table.</p>

    <p>The exhaustion — and it is exhaustion, not merely anger — comes from the endless repetition. The same exceptionalism. The same withdrawal from accountability. The same insistence that the rules it wrote for others do not apply to itself. The same God Bless, the same Greatest Nation on Earth, the same manifest destiny dressed in fresh clothes for a new century.</p>

    <p>The rest of the world does not hate America. It is tired of it. There is a difference. Hate implies passion and investment. What is spreading, quietly, across Europe, across the Global South, across multilateral institutions and alliance frameworks, is something more deflating than hate: a slow, resigned withdrawal of the benefit of the doubt. A world that is quietly, incrementally, starting to plan around the United States rather than with it.</p>

    <p>That is a loss. For everyone. Including Americans. Though they will be the last to notice.</p>

  </div>

  <div class="article-end">
    — End of article — &nbsp;·&nbsp; The views expressed are the author's own &nbsp;·&nbsp; The Transatlantic Dispatch —
  </div>

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	<div class="masthead">
	<span class="pub-name">The Transatlantic Dispatch  ·  Opinion & Analysis</span>
	<span class="pub-name">Vol. XLVII  ·  March 2026</span>
	</div>

	<span class="kicker">Opinion / World Affairs</span>

	<h1>God Bless <em>What,</em> Exactly?</h1>

	<p class="deck">A dispatch from the continent America forgot it wasn't — on empire, impunity, and the exhausting theatrics of the self-appointed leader of the free world.</p>

	<div class="byline-row">
	<span><strong>By Markus</strong></span>
	<span>·</span>
	<span>Odenthal, North Rhine-Westphalia</span>
	<span>·</span>
	<span>~12 min read</span>
	</div>

	<div class="body-text">

	<p>Let's begin with the name. <em>America.</em> Said with that particular swelling of the chest, that misty glaze in the eye, that hand over the heart. It is a continent — two of them, in fact — stretching from the frozen wastes of Nunavut to the storm-battered tip of Tierra del Fuego, inhabited by nearly a billion people who did not consent to having their geography annexed by one country's mythology. And yet there it is, deployed daily as a synonym for the United States of America, as though the other 600 million residents of the Western Hemisphere are merely squatters on the national brand. This is not a small error. It is a worldview compressed into a word.</p>

	<h2><span class="num">I.</span> The Theatre of Greatness</h2>

	<div class="sidebar">
	<h3>By the numbers</h3>
	<ul>
	<li>800+ military bases in over 70 countries</li>
	<li>US per-capita CO₂ emissions: ~14.9 t/year — roughly 3× the EU average</li>
	<li>Has signed but not ratified the Rome Statute of the ICC</li>
	<li>Withdrew from Paris Agreement twice</li>
	<li>Over 50 foreign governments destabilised or overthrown since 1945 (per various historical accounts)</li>
	<li>Tariff announcements in 2025 wiped trillions from global markets within days</li>
	</ul>
	</div>

	<p>Donald Trump did not invent American arrogance — he merely stopped disguising it. For decades, the polite fiction was that American power was reluctant, burden-bearing, sacrificial. It was always, of course, nothing of the sort. But Trump has the reality-TV instinct to play the character straight: the bully who tells you he is a bully, the cheat who is proud of cheating. In a perverse way it is almost refreshing. The mask slipped. What was underneath looked exactly like what critics had been describing for seventy years.</p>

	<p>The arrogance is structural, not personal. It precedes Trump and will outlast him. It lives in the assumption that American preferences are universal values, that American security interests are the world's security interests, that an American death matters more than a foreign one, and that any country which disagrees is either naive, corrupt, or an enemy. It is the arrogance of a nation that has not fought a war on its own soil since 1865 and has therefore never had to reckon with what it actually does to a place.</p>

	<blockquote>
	They do not call it empire. They call it leadership. The distinction, from the receiving end, is difficult to detect.
	</blockquote>

	<h2><span class="num">II.</span> Tariffs as a Weapon of Mass Disruption</h2>

	<p>In 2025, the United States began wielding tariffs with the casual brutality of someone who knows they can afford to break things. Overnight announcements, timed for maximum market shock. Allies treated with the same suspicion as rivals. The WTO framework — painstakingly built over decades — dismissed as an obstacle. Trading partners scrambled to respond while American officials shrugged, smiled, and suggested that disruption was the point.</p>

	<p>What is instructive is not the tariffs themselves — every country uses trade policy — but the <em>tone</em>. The open contempt for reciprocity. The framing of economics as a zero-sum punishment mechanism rather than a system of mutual benefit. The message is clear: the rules apply to you. We make the rules. This is a country that built the postwar international trading order and now treats that order as an inconvenience when it produces outcomes it dislikes.</p>

	<h2><span class="num">III.</span> Oil, Always Oil</h2>

	<p>Drill, baby, drill — a chant so old it has become almost nostalgic. The United States sits on the largest financial and technological infrastructure in human history, capable of accelerating any energy transition it chooses, and it keeps choosing oil. Not because it must. Because the industry funds campaigns, because the cultural identity of large swaths of the country is fused to combustion, and because taking the long view requires a political courage that four-year electoral cycles structurally discourage.</p>

	<p>The consequences are distributed globally and felt most acutely by those least responsible. <span class="fact">US per-capita emissions remain among the highest in the developed world.</span> American withdrawal from the Paris Agreement — twice — sent a signal that went beyond policy: it announced that the US reserves the right to opt out of planetary commitments whenever they become inconvenient. The implicit message to developing nations, who were lectured about clean development, was devastating in its hypocrisy.</p>

	<blockquote>
	They poison the commons, then sell you the filter.
	</blockquote>

	<h2><span class="num">IV.</span> The Hague Problem, or: Laws for Thee</h2>

	<p>The International Criminal Court sits in The Hague, a city of grey skies and high principle, and the United States has done everything in its power to ensure it cannot touch an American. Not merely by refusing to ratify the Rome Statute — which at least has the honesty of abstention — but by actively threatening sanctions against ICC officials who dare investigate American military conduct. The American Service-Members' Protection Act, signed into law in 2002, authorises the use of military force to free any American detained by the court. It is, without irony, nicknamed "The Hague Invasion Act" in diplomatic circles.</p>

	<p>The message could not be clearer: international law is a tool for prosecuting others. American soldiers who committed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan will not stand in a dock at The Hague. The architects of torture programmes will give speeches at think tanks. This is not a failure of the system. It is the system, functioning exactly as American power designed it to function.</p>

	<h2><span class="num">V.</span> A Short History of Helpful Interventions</h2>

	<p>Iran, 1953. Guatemala, 1954. The Congo, 1960. Brazil, 1964. Chile, 1973. Nicaragua throughout the 1980s. The list is long and the euphemisms are consistent: stabilisation, democratisation, protecting American interests, fighting communism, fighting terrorism, fighting drugs. The governments that were overthrown, the leaders who were assassinated, the civil wars that were funded — these are not conspiracy theories. They are documented, declassified, admitted. The CIA's own archives are a remarkable document of systematic destabilisation, available to anyone willing to read them.</p>

	<p>The pattern is one of a power that genuinely cannot conceive that other nations have the right to make choices it disagrees with. Self-determination is a fine principle, in American rhetoric, right up until a country self-determines in a direction that threatens an American corporation or a Cold War positioning advantage. Then it becomes a crisis requiring intervention.</p>

	<h2><span class="num">VI.</span> The Dollar and the Algorithm</h2>

	<p>Financial dominance and digital dominance are the contemporary forms of the same old control. The dollar's status as the world's reserve currency means that American monetary policy sends shockwaves through economies that had no vote in setting it. When the Federal Reserve raises rates to fight domestic inflation, emerging market debt becomes unpayable and currencies collapse — in countries that did not cause American inflation and did not benefit from American stimulus. This is an enormous, invisible tax levied on the entire world, and it is considered so natural as to be barely worth mentioning.</p>

	<p>The digital layer is newer but the logic is identical. American platforms set the terms of global public discourse. American payment infrastructure sits between most of the world's financial transactions. American cloud providers hold the data of governments, hospitals, and citizens worldwide. This is not merely commercial success — it is infrastructure-level dependence, and it carries with it the constant, low-grade vulnerability of knowing that a policy change in Washington or a sanction list update can, effectively, switch you off. Europe discovered this acutely when it tried to enforce its own data privacy standards against companies that had no intention of complying.</p>

	<blockquote>
	"God Bless America" — four words that contain, in miniature, the entire problem: the assumption that God, like the dollar, is headquartered in Washington.
	</blockquote>

	<h2><span class="num">VII.</span> What Is Left to Say</h2>

	<p>None of this is to say that America — the country, not the continent — is without achievement, without beauty, without citizens of radical conscience and extraordinary courage. It has those in abundance. American literature, American music, American science, the American tradition of dissent: these are real and remarkable things. The problem is precisely that the country is capable of so much better than what it consistently chooses to be when power is on the table.</p>

	<p>The exhaustion — and it is exhaustion, not merely anger — comes from the endless repetition. The same exceptionalism. The same withdrawal from accountability. The same insistence that the rules it wrote for others do not apply to itself. The same God Bless, the same Greatest Nation on Earth, the same manifest destiny dressed in fresh clothes for a new century.</p>

	<p>The rest of the world does not hate America. It is tired of it. There is a difference. Hate implies passion and investment. What is spreading, quietly, across Europe, across the Global South, across multilateral institutions and alliance frameworks, is something more deflating than hate: a slow, resigned withdrawal of the benefit of the doubt. A world that is quietly, incrementally, starting to plan around the United States rather than with it.</p>

	<p>That is a loss. For everyone. Including Americans. Though they will be the last to notice.</p>

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	— End of article —  ·  The views expressed are the author's own  ·  The Transatlantic Dispatch —
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