Every two years, the American electorate participates in our time-honored tradition of throwing the incumbent rascals out in favor of the previous rascals, and every two years, the rest of the planet watches in sheer terror. Following Tuesday’s sweeping Democratic midterm victories, diplomats from Kyiv to Moscow and Tehran to Tel Aviv have spent the week parsing congressional seat margins like Roman augurs reading chicken entrails. It must be utterly exhausting to live abroad and realize your national security or economic survival hinges on how a handful of voters in suburban Phoenix feel about grocery prices.
Yet here we are again. The American state is the geopolitical equivalent of an eccentric, heavily indebted uncle whose erratic mood swings dictate the family dinner. If he takes his blue pills, foreign aid flows freely through bloated multilateral institutions, wrapped in thousands of pages of ESG compliance mandates. If he takes his red pills, he slaps tariffs on his allies, threatens to shutter overseas bases, and demands protection money. In neither scenario does Uncle Sam ever consider the revolutionary act of simply minding his own business, putting away his checkbook, and letting the adults at the table pay for their own meals.
The breathless anxiety vibrating out of foreign capitals tells you everything you need to know about the modern imperial apparatus. What NPR politely describes as foreign powers weighing their international relations is actually something far more mercenary: a frantic scramble to figure out which spigots of American taxpayer money will open, which will shut, and how many federal compliance officers will be attached to each transaction. When Congress flips, the regulatory and spending machinery does not slow down; it merely changes operators.
The Democrats’ return to congressional power will inevitably be heralded by polite society as a restoration of order and a return to international norms. But in the administrative state, international norms are just code for an expanded roster of federal bureaus, subsidized defense pacts, and sprawling aid programs that create long-term dependency while achieving very little practical peace. F.A. Hayek famously observed in The Counter-Revolution of Science that the fatal conceit of central planners lies in their conviction that they can deliberately design the complex, spontaneous interactions of millions of people. If that conceit is a dangerous farce when applied to the domestic egg market, imagine the hubris of believing a committee of Capitol Hill lawyers can centrally plan the geopolitical balance of the Middle East and Eastern Europe through appropriations riders.
Our foreign policy is essentially domestic industrial policy with an aircraft carrier attached. A newly empowered progressive majority in Congress means the defense-industrial complex will simply repaint its lobbying efforts. Out goes the rhetoric of unilateral deterrence; in comes the rhetoric of democratic resilience and coalition-building. The checks, however, will still clear, and they will still be signed by a Treasury Department running historic trillion-dollar deficits funded by citizens who can scarcely afford their own auto insurance.
You can hardly blame foreign leaders for their obsession with the ballot count. When your nation’s border defense or energy grid has been effectively outsourced to the whims of the House Appropriations Committee, American elections are not just distant theater—they are your budgetary reality. But this global dependency is the direct consequence of decades of Washington insisting on acting as the world’s self-appointed central planning committee. By substituting free trade and spontaneous diplomacy with subsidized defense umbrellas and sanctions-heavy bureaucracy, the American government has built a global order as fragile and distortion-prone as a centrally planned Soviet tractor factory.
As the dust settles on this electoral realignment, the newly minted committee chairs will waste no time convening hearings, summoning cabinet secretaries, and redrafting foreign assistance packages to reflect their preferred regulatory dogmas. The foreign dignitaries will adjust their talking points, hire the correct K Street lobbying firms, and feign deep concern for whatever bureaucratic metrics Washington currently prioritizes.
The tragedy, of course, is that nothing fundamentally changes about the Leviathan. The party colors switch, the administrative priorities invert, and the federal debt clock keeps ticking relentlessly toward catastrophe. The rest of the world will continue to watch Washington with white knuckles, held hostage by the erratic spending habits of an empire that cannot balance its own household accounts, let alone govern the globe.