America Is Becoming Something the World Has to Infer

When presidential statements become unreliable and the Pentagon stops explaining the war, allies start watching ships, deployments and markets instead.

Good morning! The way informed observers abroad are describing America’s international position is becoming more and more disquieting.

James O’Brien, the British radio host, spent part of Tuesday searching for a sufficiently useful analytical vocabulary and eventually landed, with characteristic restraint, on “idiot.” More important than the insult was the problem he was trying to describe: how do you conduct conventional political analysis when the president of the United States can threaten to bomb a longstanding strategic partner in Oman while simultaneously reducing military cooperation with South Korea because Seoul declined to help him prosecute an unrelated war against Iran? O’Brien’s conclusion was that the contradictions have become so dense that sensible people increasingly struggle to know what to say about them at all.

Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews, offered a colder diagnosis. The problem, he argued, is no longer merely that the United States cannot be trusted. After years of treating American military power as the great backstop of the international system, countries are watching the Iran war consume munitions, ships and attention while Washington simultaneously asks them to trust commitments elsewhere. His conclusion was blunt: “The United States is not trustworthy now,” and any country basing its future security on a consistently powerful America is taking a serious risk.

Dr. Lynette Nusbacher, a military historian, former British Army intelligence officer, and former UK Cabinet Office strategist, discussed Trump’s threat to bomb Oman. Struggling to explain behavior so strategically bizarre, she floated an explanation that would once have sounded almost unthinkable in serious discussion of an American president: perhaps Trump was confused about whether he was talking about Oman, Iran, or Yemen.

There is no evidence establishing that Trump actually confused those countries, but that is not really the point. An experienced former official from one of America’s closest allies heard the president threaten a strategically important US partner and considered presidential confusion a plausible explanatory variable.

The reputational damage to the United States is no longer confined to allies disliking Washington’s policies. Increasingly, serious observers are asking whether American policy is coherent, whether American commitments are durable, whether American power is sufficient to carry them out and, embarrassingly, whether the president actually understands the situation he is describing.

Oman is not Iran, nor Yemen. It is a longstanding US strategic and security partner, a country that has provided American forces access to military facilities and, perhaps more importantly at this moment, one of the most valuable diplomatic intermediaries between Washington and Tehran.

Nusbacher predicted that the Omanis would essentially smile politely and ignore the threat because they understand who they are dealing with. Oman says negotiations over Hormuz are continuing in earnest — Trump’s contribution to that delicate mediation has been to announce that if Oman obstructs him, the United States will bomb “the shit” out of it. It is actually the second time he has made such a threat.

This increasingly familiar Trump-era diplomatic spectacle, in which Washington simultaneously depends upon a country and menaces it, leaves analysts struggling for a rational explanation. The most charitable is coercive bargaining. The less charitable explanation is that the president approaches international relationships largely as personal transactions in which cooperation demonstrates loyalty and disagreement constitutes betrayal.

Either interpretation creates costs. Diplomacy depends upon relationship capital accumulated slowly across administrations. Oman’s usefulness to Washington rests substantially upon its ability to maintain relationships with actors that do not trust one another. Threatening the mediator because one dislikes the mediation is a splendid way of spending down exactly the asset one needs. Sounds reassuring until you consider the words of the president of the United States are supposed to constitute one of the most powerful signaling mechanisms in international affairs. If sophisticated governments learn that some presidential threats should simply be filtered out as noise, the immediate crisis may become less dangerous. American presidential signaling becomes less potent as well.

The South Korea story makes the pattern harder to dismiss as an isolated eruption. Trump ordered the Pentagon to substantially reduce the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises, explicitly linking the decision in part to Seoul’s refusal to join the Iran war while praising his relationship with Kim Jong Un.

The strategic contradiction is difficult to miss: South Korea declines to help Washington fight Iran, so Washington scales back an exercise designed to deter North Korea, just as Pyongyang is gaining battlefield experience alongside Russia.

Phillips O’Brien’s larger point is that allies will respond by recalibrating. If American security commitments can be affected by unrelated presidential grievances, South Korea, Japan and Europe have to start planning for a world in which Washington is a less dependable constant.

The consequences need not take the form of dramatic declarations that an alliance is dead. Institutional erosion is usually less cinematic. Countries hedge by building more weapons, cultivating relationships with rival powers, and preparing options they once considered unnecessary. Over time, they also become less willing to follow Washington simply because Washington asks.

Eventually, those small adjustments become a different international system.

All of this is unfolding as the Iran war keeps widening. The 60-day diplomatic framework has expired, Trump is demanding a “white flag of surrender” while saying he has no timetable for ending the war, and his claim that the United States controls the Strait of Hormuz sits uneasily beside severely depressed shipping and continuing attacks.

The credibility problem is increasingly visible in real time: analysts are watching what ships do rather than what Washington says.

One participant in James O’Brien’s program, who has been obsessively monitoring maritime movements, said he had largely given up trying to interpret the diplomatic narrative and instead watches transit numbers, shipping companies and insurance markets. He went further: during much of the crisis he said the official sources he had found most consistently useful were the Omani and Pakistani foreign ministries.

Pause over what that means. The United States possesses the world’s most sophisticated intelligence apparatus and an enormous communications machine. Yet an informed observer trying to understand a war involving the United States says he increasingly looks elsewhere for a reliable description of reality.

Washington is not doing much to fill the vacuum. Hegseth and Joint Chiefs chairman Dan Caine have not held a formal Pentagon briefing on the Iran war since May 5. Occasional press availabilities have substituted for sustained questioning even as the conflict has widened, shipping through Hormuz has collapsed and concerns about munitions and naval readiness have grown.

That is reputational decay measurable not in approval ratings but in informational discounting. If markets, governments, and journalists stop assuming presidential statements contain dependable information, and the Pentagon has largely stopped publicly explaining what is happening, they infer American policy from troop movements, shipping activity, satellite imagery, and the behavior of other states.

Phillips O’Brien’s argument contains an especially uncomfortable second half. The Iran war is not merely consuming American resources. In his view, it is revealing the limits of those resources.

American military superiority has always been partly material and partly psychological. An adversary contemplating conflict has to consider not only what forces Washington has deployed today but what enormous additional capacity it might bring tomorrow.

The Iran war is allowing everybody to watch that capacity being tested in public. Munitions expenditure has become a recurring concern. Allies have been warned about delivery delays. A carrier strike group is being pulled from the Pacific toward the Middle East, potentially leaving the Indo-Pacific without a US carrier at precisely the moment Washington is telling Asian allies that deterring China remains its overriding strategic priority.

That is not the same thing as saying the United States is militarily helpless. It plainly is not. But deterrence depends on perceptions of reserves as well as immediate capability. If Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and Pyongyang discover that sustained operations in one theater impose rapid and visible costs elsewhere, that information changes their calculations.

O’Brien’s phrase for this was important: Trump has not simply weakened America, he has exposed weakness.

Whether one agrees with the full severity of that diagnosis or not, the underlying mechanism is real. Wars reveal things. They reveal stockpiles, readiness, logistics, political tolerance, alliance cohesion, and competing priorities.

The Iran war is revealing all of them at once, while the institution best positioned to explain what we are seeing has largely stopped briefing the public.

The formal machinery’s weakening extends beyond public communication. High-stakes American diplomacy is increasingly running through Jared Kushner and the president’s personal network rather than primarily through the career diplomatic corps. Rubio’s 2025 State Department overhaul eliminated 132 offices and ultimately cut nearly 3,000 US-based positions through layoffs and voluntary departures, including hundreds of Foreign Service officers, while the administration dismantled USAID and absorbed a fraction of its surviving functions into State. The administration calls this streamlining. Former diplomats call it the destruction of institutional knowledge. Either way, Washington entered the Iran war with fewer of the career professionals whose job is to preserve relationships, understand regional history and provide continuity when presidents change.

The building remains. The tendon goes.

While America’s allies struggle to determine what Washington means, the government is also weakening some of the systems it uses to understand what is happening at home.

The Guardian reports that hundreds of federal datasets have been deleted, terminated or altered, with health data particularly affected. Some changes reflect policy choices, others staffing cuts or efforts to eliminate duplication, so not every disappearance is ideological vandalism.

But longitudinal data has one unforgiving feature: once continuity is broken, it cannot be recreated later. You cannot decide in 2029 that you would quite like to know what happened in 2027 and send somebody back with a clipboard.

Government statistics are institutional memory. Erode enough of them and the state can keep all its departments, seals and impressive buildings while becoming steadily worse at knowing what is happening inside the country it governs.

There is a temptation to experience each new Trump story as a separate outrage.

Oman today. South Korea tomorrow. Hormuz the next day. A family emissary in Gaza. Another dataset disappears. Another carrier moves. Another presidential declaration is contradicted by observable reality.

Then everyone becomes exhausted and goes to look at the weather.

But taken together, something more consequential is happening. American power has always rested on more than aircraft carriers and GDP. It also rests on an assumption, held by allies and adversaries alike, that Washington’s word means something and that its government understands the world well enough to be trusted on it. Each of those assets is being spent.

The most dangerous moment for a great power is not necessarily when people hate it. It is when they stop organizing their world around the assumption that it knows what it is doing.