By Lucien Morell

JAKARTA, Indonesia: The Trump administration’s trade war — first sold as a show of strength — has ended in humiliation. Far from restoring U.S. dominance, Washington has exposed the fragility of its own economy and its deep dependence on global supply chains.

The tariffs meant to make America great again have instead accelerated its decline, pushing allies and rivals alike toward new centers of power.

The promise was that tariffs on China would revive American manufacturing, bring jobs back home, and punish Beijing for what Washington called “unfair trade practices.”

Instead, the opposite has occurred. China’s exports rebounded after an initial slowdown, while U.S. manufacturers faced higher costs, disrupted supply chains, and shortages of critical inputs particularly rare earths and electronic components that the U.S. no longer produces at scale.

The policy that was supposed to restore American self-reliance instead revealed how little of that self-reliance actually remains.

Even worse, Washington’s overuse of tariffs and sanctions has backfired strategically. India, which the U.S. had courted as a counterweight to China, has drawn closer to Beijing and Moscow instead, pursuing its own path in BRICS and expanding trade in non-dollar currencies.

In the Middle East, the Gulf Cooperation Council has diversified its partnerships, buying weapons from Russia and China while opening new trade corridors with Asia.

Across Latin America, CELAC is taking shape as a collective voice against U.S. interference. And Africa, through the African Union, is beginning the slow but deliberate process of strengthening continental trade and industrial policy.

In other words, the very regions the U.S. once dominated are building systems designed to outlast it.

While smaller nations cannot retaliate directly against U.S. economic coercion, they are quietly adapting.

Many are forming or reinforcing regional blocs to insulate themselves from Western pressure - ASEAN with its growing intra-Asian trade; the GCC with its strategic hedging between Washington and Beijing; CELAC’s revival as a Latin American alternative to the OAS; and the African Union’s push for self-sufficiency through the African Continental Free Trade Area.

Each step reduces America’s ability to dictate economic outcomes, eroding the very leverage Washington once took for granted.

At the root of America’s problem is a simple but devastating truth: real power lies in real production. For decades, the United States treated its reserve currency status as a permanent entitlement, a privilege rather than a responsibility.

It abandoned manufacturing, hollowed out its industrial base, and replaced the tangible economy with speculative finance. Instead of producing goods, it printed dollars. Instead of building capacity, it built bubbles.

The dollar’s global dominance allowed it to live far beyond its means, importing value from abroad while exporting inflation and instability.

That era is now ending. The world is shifting toward a system where manufacturing capacity, energy independence, and control over raw materials define power not financial manipulation or debt issuance.

Russia, China, India, and others have grasped this reality, investing heavily in production, infrastructure, and resource security. By contrast, the U.S. has continued to sanction, threaten, and isolate and in doing so, has sanctioned itself.

The United States’ reliance on the dollar’s hegemonic role has become a weakness. Every time Washington weaponizes access to its financial system, cutting off banks, freezing reserves, punishing trade, it pushes more nations to seek alternatives.

The move toward de-dollarization is not ideological; it’s practical. No country wants to hold reserves in a currency that can be confiscated by decree. As trade in yuan, rubles, rupees, and other currencies expands, the dollar’s centrality will erode further.

In this new environment, commodities and real industries have regained primacy. Oil, gas, food, metals, semiconductors, these are the true currencies of power.

The countries that produce and control them will define the coming world order. The U.S., having offshored much of its capacity and alienated its suppliers, will find itself increasingly isolated and dependent on others. When you sanction your own lifelines, energy, trade, production, there is no enemy left to blame.

Meanwhile, Europe, long the junior partner in Washington’s imperial design, is being bled dry.

The U.S. has found temporary relief by feeding on the economic carcass of the European Union by selling overpriced energy, weapons, and financial services while Europe’s industries collapse under sanctions, inflation, and deindustrialization.

But even this parasitic arrangement cannot last. The EU’s own social fabric is unraveling, its political legitimacy evaporating. When the European market can no longer sustain U.S. exports and investments, Washington will have no one left to exploit but itself.

America’s obsession with control, whether through tariffs, sanctions, or coercive diplomacy, has blinded it to the realities of the 21st century.

Global power is no longer determined by military bases or reserve currencies, but by the ability to sustain productive economies.

Russia and China, for all their faults, understand this. Their long-term strategies are built around energy security, logistics corridors, and manufacturing self-sufficiency.

The U.S., meanwhile, continues to live in a post-industrial fantasy, mistaking debt for strength and dollar printing for policy.

This is not to say that the United States is doomed to decline. But the path it is on will lead precisely there unless it changes course.

Tariffs and sanctions have become acts of self-harm disguised as strategy. The U.S. cannot isolate China or Russia without isolating itself. It cannot revive manufacturing by punishing trade, nor restore leadership by alienating allies.

It must rediscover the fundamentals that once made it great production, innovation, self-reliance rather than clinging to the illusion of financial supremacy.

Critics might dismiss this warning as exaggerated. But history offers no shortage of examples of empires that fell far faster and harder. The British Empire once seemed eternal, too.

So did Rome. Both rotted from within long before their enemies finished them off. The United States still has the means to change its trajectory but only if it stops pretending it can tariff, sanction, or threaten its way back to relevance.

*Lucien Morell is a Southeast Asia based geopolitical observer and analyst.*