If there were ever any doubts about whether or not the "Pax Americana" is over, those doubts have evaporated completely in the past year and a half. From Trump alienating our allies to picking unnecessary fights with our adversaries, what was left of it is now gone with the wind. Though, to be fair, it was already slowly but steadily declining well before Trump took over.
The Pax Americana was a period from 1945 until roughly 2025, eight decades of largely unipolar American global hegemony (dominance), and even more so after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Soviet Union, the only real rival superpower at the time, collapsed. The very height of this supposed golden age was thus the 1990s. This apex then came to an abrupt halt on the day of infamy that was September 11, 2001, and by the unnecessary wars of choice that followed under President George W. Bush, and became quagmires. Meanwhile, America itself was being gradually hollowed out by neoliberalism since President Ronald Reagan and literally every single one of his successors (sorry, Clinton, and even Obama, you don't get a pass on this either). And the ascendancy of other future superpowers (China for sure, and then India, Brazil, and possibly other countries too) and former superpowers temporarily experiencing a resurgence (Russia, I'm looking at you!) has made our world increasingly multipolar now. This confluence of factors was already causing the Pax Americana to wane, but truly it was Trump (in both of his terms) that pushed it over the edge into the grave for good.
One could even call it, "The Decline and Fall of the American Empire", if that is a conversation we are ready to have yet.
This is truly the end of an era. What comes next once Trump is out of power is not entirely clear. While the Pax Americana was far from perfect, and was often quite costly and overzealous in terms of interventionism, looking back we can see that it did at least serve its purpose, for better or worse. And the fact that it came to such an ignominious end under a wannabe fascist dictator like Trump, cannot really be a good thing on balance.
