There are times when Washington still feels like what it used to be—a sleepy little Southern city. Generations of some of the most powerful people on earth have spent their days in DC griping that the city is a backwater. But Washington’s modest position in our constellation of great cities was always part of its charm, well-suited to our sprawling continental republic. American power has no center, or rather, it has centers all over—New York for finance, Houston for energy, the low-slung hubs of Menlo Park and Atherton, California, for tech, all the way back to the elite schools of New England, where our scribes and aristocrats are trained to manage the subsystems that keep the American project functioning. America, as many of the most powerful people in the world now fret, may suddenly feel like the Roman Empire entering its age of chaos and decline. But America has never had a Rome.
The DC area has grown immensely in population, wealth, and importance since the end of the Cold War. Its new status as the capital of a free-spending and unchallenged global hegemon made the region into one of the world’s richest metro areas. Washington now even boasts an infrastructure befitting its position as the administrative center of an empire, as the casual phrasing among policy elites now often puts it—one that depends as much on flows of money and information as it does on raw military force. A cluster of cables and data centers in northern Virginia now funnel a huge majority of global internet traffic through unassuming exurbs like Tyson’s Corner, where communications can be conveniently monitored by the experts at the National Security Administration. But this past July, Washington felt barely prepared to host an event like the 75th-anniversary summit of NATO.
The city was in the grip of two kinds of heat. The first was a dome of breezeless humidity and 100-degree days that made even a short walk torturous. The second was the heat that would soon burst forth to make that month into what may be remembered as the most dramatic and consequential in our contemporary political history. But the news of one president being nearly assassinated and another perhaps withdrawing from the race were just the most visible tremors of a geologic shift that was unsettling a system upheld by “the most successful alliance in history,” as NATO’s trim Norwegian secretary general described it.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, NATO’s leaders stood in almost perfect unison, saying the American-led apparatus that had given Washington its new wealth and importance was facing an existential risk. It was “the great battle for freedom,” President Joe Biden said. “A battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.” The theme of this year’s meeting was unity, in standing up to a challenge to America’s ability to set the rules governing security and stability around the world. But just a short, sweaty walk from the summit, a surreal “DC split screen,” as one Politico reporter described it, was unfolding at the Capital Hilton—where insurgents and critics of this system were speaking at the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon). The foreign policy buzzword was multipolarity—a dry-sounding term, but one that hints at an epochal shift away from a world where America and its allies are able to control practically all financial, military, and technological structures. Policymakers in Washington were looking to China and talking in terms approaching panic about how unprepared America was for a new era of great-power conflict. Ukrainian troops would soon be outnumbered five to one on parts of the Donbas front. As the leaders and delegations of 32 member nations began arriving at Andrews Air Force Base, dread was growing that half of America’s electorate was lining up behind an America-first movement that had embraced this multipolar vision as one that would benefit regular Americans at home, even if it saw us lose our overwhelming power abroad. War was already raging at the periphery of the empire. But the more pressing fear was that America might soon have a government run by people who wanted to unmake it from within. “Unity, resolve, purpose, all that good stuff,” one highly placed European delegate said to me in a private aside. “That’s what the show’s for. But obviously there is this gigantic question mark hanging over the whole thing about what’s going to happen in November.”
The night before the summit began, I had a drink at the Old Ebbitt Grill, in view of the White House, with a friend who works for a defense contractor. “This feels crazy,” she said, meaning the frenzied mood suffusing the town. “Everyone is so keyed up, it feels like they’re going to snap.” But this wasn’t just a vibe. It was a response to a very real chance that a shock could come to the whole world order. “I think people don’t fully appreciate that the institutions literally couldn’t function,” Ben Rhodes, who had been President Barack Obama’s most important adviser on foreign policy, told me later. He said the world is “two thirds of the way to a new world war.” But a shock could come even without that. “The G20, IMF, World Bank, NATO—it’s not that the US is the biggest stakeholder,” he went on. “They’re literally appendages of the United States and our interests and our system. When we act as a disruptor of our own empire, the system gets thrown completely out of whack.”
This is what populism, coming from left or right, really means. It’s when voters get to weigh in on subjects that politicians and policy experts like to keep outside the realm of public debate.
This may sound like simple democracy, but in practice it’s not how democracies within the core of the American system, from France to Japan to our own, actually work. The politicians, business titans, and heads of think tanks who set policies for these democracies tend to fear, with some fairness, that if voters get too much of a say on matters of statecraft, they’ll throw whole societies into chaos.
The first great disruption of this era came in 2016, the year of the Brexit vote, when UK prime minister David Cameron called a referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union, confident that the side representing integration, a global and interconnected future, progress itself, would easily win. He was hoping to settle an internal conflict in his Conservative Party between technocratic liberals like himself and a wing of traditionalist dons and nationalist backbenchers. Instead, he lost and stepped down.