The Superpower as Victim
Trump’s Narrative and its Limits
When the United States, under the leadership of Donald Trump, initiated a limited war against Iran on February 28, it quickly became apparent that the U.S. faced not only military challenges but also narrative ones. The U.S. demonstrated its military superiority, yet simultaneously revealed its inability to explain the purpose of the war.
While advanced weapon systems and surface-to-air missiles costing millions are insufficient to combat Iran’s swarms of cheap kamikaze drones, America’s Achilles’ heel is not a lack of military capability. To secure traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, Trump asked allies and other nations dependent on oil transports through the Persian Gulf for assistance in the form of minesweepers and warships to escort tankers. However, the willingness to assist has been weak. The U.S. is struggling to mobilize its allies, a failure largely attributable to an inability to communicate clear and credible motives for the war in Iran.
The absence of a clear American narrative regarding the war created a vacuum, quickly filled by a multitude of competing interpretations. This is not merely a void, however, but a coexistence of several partially contradictory narratives—even within the U.S. administration’s own communications.
In practice, the Trump administration lacks a narrative that can be translated for an international audience. The classic Western narrative of a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism—which the U.S. used to motivate and legitimize military actions to the world as recently as Joe Biden’s presidency—is absent from Trump’s repertoire. Instead, even foreign policy is legitimized almost exclusively to his own electorate. At the same time, the narrative of the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism likely remains strong at an institutional level, particularly within the Pentagon. Even among Trump’s defenders and supporters, it is relatively common to view the war in Iran as a move in a larger geopolitical game.
A struggle between democracy and authoritarianism is not incompatible with the geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and China and the need to secure access to strategic products. On the contrary, it is possible to frame the current global situation as a conflict between two blocs: on one side, a U.S.-led alliance of liberal democracies; on the other, a constellation of authoritarian states, with China occupying a central position. Such a narrative could unite value-based legitimacy with strategic clarity and remains intelligible outside the U.S. This narrative, however, does not seem to suit Trump.
Instead, a narrative that unilaterally targets an American voter base dominates: the notion of the United States as a country exploited by an unfair global order. Within this framing, criticism is directed not only at external actors like China but also largely at domestic elites and globalist structures deemed to have allowed American industrial production to move abroad and China to steal jobs. In this story, China becomes less an independent geopolitical opponent and more a symbol of globalization gone wrong. China is not even the primary enemy; those responsible for the injustices against the American people are found primarily within the Democratic Party. Here, the U.S. allies within NATO are also seen as ungrateful freeloaders, whose help Trump stated in mid-March that the U.S. does not need—despite having explicitly asked for it just days prior. The shortage of ammunition and weapon stockpiles caused by the war in Iran, which is now forcing the Pentagon to ask Congress for emergency funding, has been blamed by Trump on “Sleepy Joe Biden” giving away equipment to Zelenskyy.
This can be described as a form of victim narrative. Trump’s narrative works in a domestic context, where it connects with experiences of unemployment and weak personal finances. But in foreign policy, the victim narrative is problematic. To allies in Europe and elsewhere, the U.S. hardly appears as a victim, but remains a dominant and privileged actor in the global system.
The victim story—that the U.S. has been disadvantaged in a global order where industry moved to China and NATO allies are hitching a free ride—also fails to motivate the war in Iran for a home audience. After all, Trump still wants oil trade to continue in dollars and global trade routes to remain open. Unfortunately, petrodollar warfare rhymes poorly with America First policies and Trump’s victim narrative. The costs of the U.S. war against Iran are rising, and a few weeks after the war began, the Pentagon reportedly requested $200 billion to continue hostilities or at least replenish the stockpiles depleted in the attacks. Having blamed America’s problems on globalists, and with the Pentagon now needing enormous sums to continue the war against Iran, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth cannot suddenly claim it costs money to be the world’s policeman or to defend the petrodollar. Instead, he resorts to a significantly more banal message: “It takes money to kill bad guys.”
During the past year, it has often been noted that the rules-based world order no longer exists—and that it perhaps never truly did, even if governments pretended it did. If not before, the narrative or notion of a rules-based world order has lost much of its credibility during Trump’s second term. This is partly a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine and Trump’s reluctance to support Ukraine, but more generally a result of the Trump administration not bothering to justify its foreign policy with international law. The idea that the U.S. can gain economically by attacking other countries may serve as a frame for the message to a domestic audience, but it naturally fails to legitimize military aggression in the eyes of the international community.
The disintegration of the grand narrative of the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism is accelerated by media portrayals of the U.S. moving in an authoritarian direction, though this primarily concerns the authoritarian leadership style of the sitting president. This also creates openings for external actors. Both Russian and Chinese information operations have aimed to sow doubt regarding the cohesion of the liberal world order to push for a multipolar world. When internal Western narratives reinforce the image of fragmentation and normative uncertainty, these influence operations do not even need to be particularly sophisticated to be effective.
The result is a strange form of hegemonic vulnerability. It is not about a lack of material capacity, but an inability to formulate a narrative that other actors find credible. In a world where geopolitics once again plays a decisive role, it is not enough to control resources and military forces. One must also be able to offer an interpretation of the world that others are willing to accept. When these two dimensions—the material and the narrative—drift apart, America’s perhaps greatest strategic problem arises: being able to act globally without being able to explain why.