The End of Assumption:
America, Trust, and the Price of Narcissism - Part II of III
Power is often mistaken for dominance. In reality, power is only durable when it is trusted. Once trust erodes, power does not disappear — it becomes expensive to use, difficult to sustain, and increasingly ineffective at shaping outcomes.
This distinction matters, because what is unfolding now is not a sudden collapse of American capability, but a quiet withdrawal of reliance on American reliability. The consequences of that withdrawal are neither dramatic nor immediate. They are incremental, structural, and largely invisible to those who still assume the system functions as it always has.
For decades, the global order rested on a set of assumptions so deeply embedded they became almost unconscious. The United States would act in broadly predictable ways. Commitments, once made, would be honoured. Alliances would outlast administrations. Rules might bend, but they would not evaporate overnight. Disagreements would be noisy, but bounded.
Those assumptions were not moral judgements. They were operational facts — the background conditions that allowed trade, finance, security, and diplomacy to function at scale.
They no longer hold.
Trust as hidden infrastructure
Trust is not sentiment. It is infrastructure.
It underpins supply chains, credit markets, military alliances, currency regimes, and institutional cooperation. Like all infrastructure, it attracts attention only when it begins to fail. And when it fails, the damage is rarely headline-grabbing. It shows up instead as friction: delays, hedges, redundancies, diversification, insurance against volatility that did not previously need to be insured against.
This is how systems adapt when confidence drains away.
Trade partners begin to shorten horizons. Allies invest in autonomy. Financial actors price in political risk where none was previously assumed. Diplomatic language grows cautious, non-committal, procedural. None of this signals hostility. It signals recalibration.
What makes trust different from other forms of capital is its asymmetry. It takes time to build, but can be depleted quickly. More importantly, it cannot be commanded. Once withdrawn, it cannot simply be reasserted by declaration, election, or rhetoric.
Systems remember.
Misallocation as a symptom, not a cause
Much attention has been paid to visible distortions in the American economy: speculative excess, technology overinvestment, financial exuberance detached from underlying productivity. These are often framed as cyclical phenomena, destined to correct themselves through markets or policy.
But viewed through the lens of trust, they look less like causes and more like symptoms.
Economists such as Paul Krugman have warned that large portions of recent capital allocation — particularly in advanced technology sectors — are driven more by narrative momentum than by sustainable return. Whether one accepts his conclusions or not, the structural insight is difficult to dismiss: when confidence becomes performative, capital follows stories rather than signals.
This is not an argument against innovation. It is an argument about incentives. In an environment where institutional credibility is unstable, speed is rewarded over durability, scale over resilience, and attention over integration. Systems optimise for what is visible, not for what lasts.
The result is fragility masked as dynamism.
The alliance problem no one announces
From within the United States, alliances are often discussed in terms of loyalty, contribution, and burden-sharing. From outside, they are increasingly assessed in terms of continuity and risk.
This difference in framing is crucial.
Alliances are not expressions of affection. They are long-term coordination mechanisms designed to reduce uncertainty. When commitments appear contingent on personality, electoral cycles, or transactional recalculation, alliances do not rupture — they hedge.
This hedging is already evident. Defence planning incorporates greater redundancy. Strategic autonomy becomes a priority rather than a slogan. Bilateral arrangements quietly supplement multilateral ones. None of this is confrontational. It is prudent.
The cost is cumulative. Influence diminishes not because it is rejected, but because it is no longer the default. Consultation replaces coordination. Assurances require verification. Leadership becomes negotiation.
Power still exists. Legitimacy does not.
External perception, internal belief
Perhaps the most destabilising aspect of this transition is the divergence between how the United States sees itself and how it is now perceived.
Internally, political conflict has intensified belief. Competing narratives struggle not merely over policy, but over reality itself. Confidence becomes identity. Correction becomes betrayal. Stability is equated with winning rather than functioning.
Externally, the tone is markedly different. Coverage by institutions such as the BBC increasingly treats American policy not as controversial, but as unpredictable — a subtle linguistic shift with profound implications. Unpredictability is not feared because it is aggressive, but because it is unreliable. It complicates planning. It introduces noise into systems designed to manage risk.
This divergence matters because empires do not weaken when others stop believing in them. They weaken when belief replaces self-correction.
Why the clock cannot be turned back
There is a persistent hope that trust, once strained, can be restored quickly — by a change in leadership, a recalibrated strategy, or a return to familiar rhetoric. This hope misunderstands the nature of systemic memory.
Trust withdrawal triggers adaptation elsewhere. Once those adaptations are made, reversal becomes costly. Supply chains rebuilt for resilience do not snap back for convenience. Strategic autonomy, once funded, is not easily abandoned. Financial diversification, once executed, is rarely undone.
The system moves on, not out of spite, but out of necessity.
This is why the damage is broader than any single administration, and deeper than any single policy cycle. The effects are path-dependent. They accumulate quietly. They reshape expectations.
The United States does not lose relevance in this process. But it does lose centrality.
And centrality, once gone, is not reclaimed by assertion.
The price of narcissism at scale
Narcissism, when it becomes systemic, does not manifest primarily as cruelty or incompetence. It manifests as substitution: attention for accountability, performance for legitimacy, confidence for coherence.
At the level of a global system, this substitution is expensive.
Trust, once treated as optional, demands insurance. Alliances, once taken for granted, require renegotiation. Markets, once stabilised by credibility, price in volatility. Institutions, once relied upon, are bypassed.
The price is not collapse. It is friction. And friction, applied across a global system, slows everything.
This is the end of assumption — not the assumption of American power, but the assumption of American reliability as the organising principle of the system itself.
What follows is not chaos. It is fragmentation.