Yes, in our world, MAGA (Make America Great Again) and Donald Trump are distinctly one and the same. They fused so long ago that no one ever really thinks much about that "again" anymore. And yet, it might be Donald Trump's greatest confession (as well as an explanation for how he came to power). As a phrase, MAGA was first put into American politics by Ronald Reagan in his successful 1980 run for president. Trump first picked it up in -- yes, again! -- 2011 and, of course, he was still using it in the 2024 election campaign. So, if he isn't the MAGA man, who is?
But the truth is that, in terms of our all-American reality these days, he certainly picked the wrong acronym. After all, almost a decade after he first won the presidency in November 2016, and now in his second term in the White House, that "again" is the central reality of all our lives, although he really should be known as the MALA man (for Make America Less Again). In fact, it seems strange indeed to me that no one has ever suggested that before.
After all, as TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, author most recently of the must-read history book Cold War on Five Continents, makes clear today, by now Donald Trump and decline have (or at least should have) become literal synonyms in his increasingly nightmarish second term (yes, again!) in the Oval Office. In almost every imaginable way, he now seems intent on taking this country down with him and, in his "drill, baby, drill" second presidency, he seems no less intent on trying to take the planet down with him as well. And with that in mind, let McCoy take you to Samarra and consider our potentially all too grim fate. Tom
America's Date With Destiny
An Appointment in Samarra
By Alfred McCoy
Some tales can cross cultures, continents, and even centuries to arrive in our own era with their timeless truths pretty much intact. That's particularly so for the immortal story of "an appointment in Samarra." It first appeared in the fifth century in the Babylonian Talmud, that ancient repository of Jewish rabbinical wisdom. Then it crossed over into Islamic literature for reiterations in a thirteenth-century Persian version and a fifteenth-century Egyptian text, before popping up on the London stage in Act III of William Somerset Maugham's 1933 play Sheppy.
In Maugham's retelling, the tale is rich in irony. Once long ago, he wrote, there was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to shop in the market. But the servant soon returned home in a panic and told his master about a woman in the crowd there who stared at him angrily. "It was Death that jostled me," the servant announced, pleading with his master for a horse to flee to the town of Samarra. There, said the servant, "Death will not find me."
Riding hard and spurring the horse's flanks, the servant raced across the desert and made it to Samarra by nightfall. That evening, the master himself went to the market and spotted the woman, demanding to know why she had threatened his servant. "That was not a threatening gesture," said Death. "It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."
More than anything else, that ancient tale testifies to the eternal human folly of trying to outrun fate. And if that's true for individuals, it's doubly true for one of their most ancient collective creations, the phenomenon we call "empire." Ever since Sargon the Great of Assyria founded history's first trans-regional empire in 2300 BCE, the world has witnessed a succession of some 200 empires, of which 70 were large or lasting. Over the span of those 4,000 years, each empire rose, reached a peak so powerful that it seemed eternal, only to fade and finally fall, giving way to the next imperial reality.
Until January 2025 when President Donald J. Trump took office a second time, the United States seemed to be following that fateful journey. After nearly a century as the largest, most powerful empire in history, the country seemed to be on a gradual downward trajectory from the peak of power it reached around 1991 (when that other imperial power of the time, the Soviet Union, collapsed). But from the first day he took office the second time around in January 2025, President Trump assured us that his bold plans to "Make America Great Again" would save this country from that sad fate. To understand how and why our master, our president, is, in fact, leading America to its own appointment in Samarra at a remarkably rapid pace, we need to understand the way this country has exercised its global power and the dynamics underlying its long-term decline.
The Cold War Legacy
Throughout the 44 long years of the Cold War (1947 to 1991), Washington pursued an effective geopolitical strategy for containing its chief global rival, the Soviet Union, behind an "Iron Curtain" guarded by a chain of U.S. military bases and alliances that stretched for 5,000 miles across the broad Eurasian land mass. Whenever Moscow tried to break out of its geopolitical isolation by arming surrogates in Asia or Africa for war or revolution, Washington, as I explain in my latest book Cold War on Five Continents, sometimes sent troops, as in South Korea in 1950. Usually, however, it dispatched individual CIA officers to organize covert interventions to beat back any Soviet advance, as it did so effectively in Afghanistan in 1980. In the end, exhausted by one foreign adventure too many, Moscow was forced to acquiesce as its satellite states in Eastern Europe broke away and the Soviet Union shattered. By 1991, Washington had won the Cold War, emerging from that monumental conflict as the world's sole superpower.
At that hour of seemingly ultimate triumph, the signs of America's military omnipotence and its overweening imperial hubris were both amply evident.
Let's start with Washington's imperial hubris. At the close of the Cold War, political scientist Francis Fukuyama published an article that became a veritable manifesto for Washington's power elites. Not only were we witnessing the end of the Cold War, he argued, but we were also seeing -- yes! -- "the end of history" through the "universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." Not only was there a "total exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism," but there was also, he claimed, an "ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture" to the most remote corners of the globe, even into the shopping malls of our former enemies, China and Russia.
And his viewpoint did indeed reflect a certain reality: Our nation's leaders were fully convinced that their Pax Americana would become the final form of global governance for all of humanity for all time. While that unapologetic imperial hubris may now seem almost quaint, in the aftermath of the Cold War it became gospel. It guided Washington's leaders who indeed seemed to wield ample enough power, both military and economic, to fulfill that bold vision for remaking the world in America's image.
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