Hey, folks, no post this week as my work schedule has been pretty heavily disrupted and other tasks had to come first.
Patrons will already know this background, but over the summer, we had a water leak issue in our basement (where my home office is), which wasn’t too bad but required pulling up a bunch of flooring and we are now at long last at the point of being able to put down new flooring. But that means I have had to essentially move everything in my office space and a ton of other things (our basement is about a third of our house’s square footage), including around 1,500 books – which both ate up a lot of time but also has made it harder to do a lot of things (given that my books are not on shelves but in alphabetized boxes).
Fortunately, the bulk of the work should be done this week, so I expect to be back on schedule next week with the next part of the Hearts of Iron series. In the meantime, there is a new Pasts Imperfect to read if you are anxious for something ancient-history to read.
And, as recompense for the missed post, here is a bonus cat picture, with both cats (who are also annoyed that they cannot hang out in the office).
The basement that has to be refloored makes up something close to a third of our total square footage, so you may well imagine that clearing it for that process has meant the entire rest of the house is, as you see here, buried in boxes.
Started to read the linked Pasts Imperfect and only a few paragraphs in:
Fascinating – and for me at least, another reminder of how Kieran Coghlan had improbably managed to use the structure of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks to create an interactive narrative set in that brief interregnum between the execution of Christ and the aforementioned war.
https://ffproject.com/word.htm
In particular, at the start you choose to be either a Sadducee, a Pharisee, and a Zealot and this alters the brief prologue and some other scenes (i.e. a Roman patrol would recognize a Zealot player and be hostile immediately, which is not the case for the other two backgrounds). More importantly, it also affects which of the three possible paths you can take to fulfill your ultimate goal – to assassinate Saul of Tarsus (better-known nowadays as St. Paul) for being a heretic to Judaism, in the last-ditch attempt to strangle Christianity in its crib. One path is always available to every character, but a Sadducee will immediately be killed if he attempts to approach an assassin in a port city (who is even more of a Zealot than the player character of that background), whereas Zealot’s conviction eliminates the choice to be conciliatory where it would save other player characters’ life (under the circumstances I would rather not spoil).
In all, while perhaps not his best work altogether, as he himself admits, (a later-written, more traditionally fantasy A Princess of Zamarra had been his magnum opus to date, with incredible amount of choices and is just really fun to experience), it’s a remarkable experiment.
P.S. WordPress finally implemented in-built text styling in the comments! Yay!
My take on the arch is that fundamentally I think America should not have monuments uncritically celebrating military glory as this supposedly is, much less a President building a monument to his own ego while in office as this actually is. So I would want this one torn down even if it’s not an ugly, tasteless monstrosity as it will be.
I go to the Mall for the cherry blossom festival, and I think the war memorials we have are the right way for a democracy to honor its military; an understated, somber reflection of the price paid for victory. I consider the Lincoln Memorial a de facto Civil War memorial and it’s in the same spirit even with a big statue.
And generally I like US government architecture to be well-done but relatively plain, mostly stone either polished smooth or painted white, very little gold.
Very cute cat pics!
I wanted to comment – a while ago you talked about the tone historians needed when speaking to the general public, I think it was an earnest, enthusiastic tone. And, a bit more recently you linked on bluesky to an article aimed at the general public about the fall of Rome. Except the article kept referring to the ‘fall’ of Rome.
I thought it striking that I shortly gave up reading the article because of that use of distance quotes. Not that I object to distance quotes normally, I sometimes use them myself. But the repeated use was like being pricked repeatedly by a pin. I was like WTF, if you don’t want to call it the fall of Rome, for heaven sakes put on your big girl panties and use your own word.
Did anyone else have a similar reaction?
I would probably also find that annoying and would have advised using the quotes once, explain the article’s theory of how it isn’t a “fall” and then probably either just use fall without quotes or reference the date at which the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist.
I am not sure there’s a good replacement if arguing that Medieval Europe was a non-catastrophic transition but then again I don’t buy that argument so I haven’t looked for a term for it. I do consider the Byzantine Empire a real continuation of Rome and officially the Western Roman Emperor title got recombined and Justinian retook most of Italy.
The classic issue is that determining when Rome “falls” is very tricky. Even the fall of the Western Roman Empire is a bit trickier than it sounds. There’s a decent argument for the Roman empire finally ending in 1921, though there’s *also* an argument that it’s still around in the Pope…. But even those extended issues, the fall of the western roman empire isn’t that easy to pinpoint either. Traditionall the deposition of Romulus Augustulus is used but then again there’s Julius Nepos and so on and so forth. And of course the eastern Roman empire continued to 1453… Or do you count Trebizond so it’s 1461? Etc. etc.
“Fall of the Roman Empire” is a convenient shorthand but should be noted that it’s more complicated hence the quotation marks.
I usually see 476 as the number used and consider it the date people obviously mean when discussing the fall of the Roman Empire, although I use the qualifier “in the West” myself. The Eastern Roman Empire does continue but there is a clear break in its control of Italy and it only temporary retook the heartland of Italy. I do not consider the Pope to be Roman Emperor or have the power of the Roman Emperor.
So to me the Western Roman Empire is dead at that point.
If you don’t want to call it a fall, then that’s fine by me. Just, if so, come up with some other name you *do* want to call it, don’t keep putting scare quotes around the poor innocent word fall.
As I said, it felt like being pricked by a pin time after time.
It’s not so simple!
You can’t compress a topic of scholarship on which entire books have been written, into a single word. Any word you choose will be terribly inaccurate simply because the English language (any language really) hasn’t developed in a direction that’d conveniently provide a word accurately describing the politics of 5th century Roman Empire. It’s not like the fall of the 3rd Reich or the previous state of Afghanistan where the capital falls as the culmination of a state’s conquest and a change that’s rapid and roughly uniform. However, it’s colloquially known as the fall of Rome. Might as well use that word + briefly mark its inaccuracy.
Language sometimes requires putting your personal preferences aside for the sake of being understood. I’ve faced this painful dilemma many times.
Then you have the other side: uncritically going with “Rome fell in 476 like you learned in school” should be replaced by “you know, the thing you learned in school, though it’s a massive oversimplification if you’d like to know more about why”. A learning hook. It’s so common for people to treat history as a set of (event, year, effect) facts. I’m not talking just about general public, once I had an argument with someone who straight up said “I have a history degree and learned that the Roman Empire ended in 476 therefore that’s what happened” and I told him if that’s all the nuance he has then his degree’s fucking worthless. There’s not enough space to explain everything all the time but at least directing people helps.
Well, there is a simple, obvious, solution: just call it with its proper English name, the Autumn of Rome
(sorry, not sorry)
Uh-huh. Basic issue though is that I didn’t understand the article because I stopped reading it because of those bloody quote marks.
I think it was a flow issue. Because quote marks like that can have multiple meanings (unlike dialogue quotes) each use meant a small cognitive load of “what does this mean?” which distracted from comprehending the overall sentence. And of course each phrasing resulted in the same interpretation – the author doesn’t believe in the idea of the fall. So no cognitive reward to pay for the load.
@Arilou,
I like 486 AD for the fall of Rome personally, since that’s when the Domain of Soissons fell to the Franks. Although I guess there is debate among historians as to what the Domain of Soissons actually was and what its relationship was to the Western Roman Empire.
If we’re not using 476 then I think Michele Renee Salzman makes an excellent case for the 600s when the roman senate ceases to exist. roman institutions in italy seem to persist (high diminished to be sure) until the gothic war really trashes the place and the post-gothic war revival proves hollow. Plus, the state was the senate and people of rome, so the demise of the senate seems a fitting button on the whole thing. You even get a nice symbolic end in the conversion of the senate building into a church in the 620s.
I feel like 476 has the winning argument for fall of the Western
*Western Roman Empire on account of it’s the end of the line of government continuity in which someone is generally acknowledged to be Emperor of Western Rome. I only know Sossions from a CK2 mod in which it’s difficult but possible to become recognized as Roman Emperor of Gaul and or Britain (Italy is offmap) from their starting position but my impression is that I’d describe them as a successor state like post-Alexander Egypt. If you choose to trace through Byzantium legal continuity is to 1453 at least. If you go by institutions there’s a colorable argument the Pope is still a continuation today
It’s not well-attested in the written record but some of the independent Welsh polities cited Roman figures as allegedly-mythical founders, and Wales was never really disestablished so much as usurped by the Anglo-Normans. By this you could propose that the Roman Empire has not yet completely fallen.
In addition, the Ottomans maintained the title of Caesar after conquering Constantinople (as Michael Palaiologos did) and thereby changed the religion of the Caesar (as Constantine did). By this you could propose that the Roman Empire was ended by the efforts of US negotiators in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
As had been the case with a surprising extent of questions, Spencer McDaniel had already gone through a number of arguments (including “the title of Kayser-i Rûm made Ottoman Sultans Roman Emperors” one) some seven years ago.
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2019/07/02/who-was-the-last-roman-emperor-a-harder-question-than-you-might-think/
@YARD,
I’m not familar w/ Spencer McDaniel, but that piece was quite interesting.
The whole discussion about whether a “restored” Roman Empire is, well, the Roman Empire, and whether a population of Germans or Turks gets to meaningfully call themselves “Roman”, is fascinating. It does make me wonder: if the Romanovs in 1878, or the Bulgarians in 1913, or the Greeks in 1920, had succeeded in capturing and holding Constantinople/Istanbul, would they have started claiming that they were the new “Roman Empire”, and would others have taken the claim seriously?
Also I guess at some level, it’s less important when 20th/21st c historians and internet commentators think the Western Roman Empire ended, and more important when the actual people on the ground, living in the territories involved, stopped thnking of themselves as “The Western Roman Empire”. I do wonder what the answer to that question is- when did people living in the modern territories of say France, or England, or Spain or Italy or Switzerland, stop thinking of *themselves* as members of a distinct Western Roman Empire?
@Hector While not quite the same thing as you’re asking, but the Wikipedia article Problem of Two Emperors is an interesting alternative perspective on the whole issue of perception of the Roman Empire in the medieval period (although of course still elite-focused).
Which adds even more possible break points concerning the end of the Roman Empire, in the form of answers to the question “At what point became the Roman titulary (Emperor, Augustus, Caesar, Basileus etc) detached from the concept of restoring the Roman Empire?”, with the answers being 927 in the East, when Peter I was allowed to declare himself “Emperor of the Bulgarians” and 1804 in the West, when Napoleon crowned himself “Emperor of the French”
The underlying issue, IMO, is that people are very bad at separating substantive issues from semantic ones there are really two different things to discuss:
(1) [Substantive] What was the fall of the Western Roman Empire as a state-entity like?
(2) [Semantic] Which entity(ies) do we mean exactly when we say “Western Roman Empire”? Is “Fall” a good word to describe the events it underwent?
The two should involve very different types of evidence and reasoning. The problem of course is that you have to answer (1) before you can tackle (2), but to answer (1) you need to have same language to address the topic, which means implicitly answering (2) in some way or other first. But most discussions don’t even try to separate those two points or address them independently, leading to very garbled arguments.
Cutting my mouth from the side here but, while i agree with you, it feels like there’s a third question being sidestepped here: assuming that the term “fall of Rome” is the least wrong term we have and using other terms would be worse, _should_ you keep writing it as “the ‘fall’ of Rome”, char-quotes and all, or is it just being annoying to be obnoxiously correct?
W found it interesting that she stopped reading a BSky tweet _because of_ that, and noted this antecdote in the context of Mr Devereaux’s call fot Historians to use the right tone when reaching the public. BSky is banned here so I can’t corroborate but if it’s as I imagined then yeah it would be annoying, and would rather it be done like guyaccount suggested. Putting charquotes on every instance felt like conspiracists, catholics or buzzers putting random words in all capitals for overemphasizingitation and looking down on You.
I stopped reading the article linked to in Bret’s tweet. I suppose it would be possible to misuse distance quotes so terribly that I’d stop reading even a tweet, but that would be an impressive accomplishment.
I’ve also read the article in question, and to me it was an exercise in making a case badly. It was basically a word choice nitpick because they implicitly insisted that “Fall” refers to some singular event but never made an argument that anyone of the other historians using it were using it in that way. They just dumped a pile of evidence how it was a gradual process that took place over quite some time, as if it was a debate about the underlying facts.
It is important to acknowledge popular frames in public communication, but it is also important to avoid adopting those frames when they are untrue. Dropping the quote marks would be conceding to a petitio principii and no one sincere in their beliefs should do that.
Synesthesia is real and there are plenty of contexts in which yours should be accommodated, for public-facing publication the accommodation should not be at the author-level unless the author has a way to do that which doesn’t interfere with the meaning of their work, like a tag system or content warnings. I can take your circumstances into account when composing a message directed at you (and I have tried to here), but overall you would be better served by installing a text-swapping browser extension if you are going to surf the web.
Why would I want to install such an extension? I don’t object to scare quotes per se, I use them myself sometimes and I’m well aware they often add meaning to text.
Plus the back button was right there.
I do not have such a reaction.
The concept of the fall of Rome has a long, long, long literary history and has come to encompass a huge body of literature, including multiple arguments, some current, some not. By putting the quotes around the word “fall” Bret is able to both use the standard terminology and indicate his stance on it, thus avoiding confusion. In other words, over the past several hundred years the term “fall of Rome” has evolved past the strict, literal meaning.
Coming up with his own word would divorce his arguments from that body of literature, and would lead not no end of confusion among his readers. Instead of “Why use a term you don’t like?” you’d be commenting “Why are you making up nonsense instead of using the standard terms?” I’ve seen both plenty of times (turns out taxonomy gets really heated really fast).
Using the term once and then explaining himself obviously doesn’t work. I say “obviously” because there are entire series of essays on this site explaining his position, and since those weren’t considered sufficient no summary will be. There’s actually a discussion on another website I follow about this–how much meta-knowledge is good in literature? The question is an interesting one in this case: Does an essay have to be stand-alone, or can it build on other essays? In a series obviously they will build on each other, but how much can a new essay assume you’ve read? It’s a question without a real answer, and the interesting part is your way of thinking about it, not necessarily the answer you come up with.
Ultimately the purpose of the words is to convey an idea. English isn’t a great language to have serious discussions in–too much poetry, too many allusions and approximates, ironically not enough emotional terminology–so you end up with some clunky verbiage from time to time. The proper thing to do, at least as far as I’m concerned, is to occasionally laugh at how silly our hybrid amalgamation of a language is, but generally make an effort to understand what the author is trying to say. Rejecting an argument because you don’t like how someone used quotation marks is like rejecting a birthday gift because you don’t like the ribbon tying it together, or rejecting a meal because you dislike the design on the fork (people with hypersensitivity, such as autistic folks, excepted, of course).
I generally agree with your sentiment here, but you’ve misunderstood. This isn’t about Bret’s writing, it’s about this article here: Link
Which does not need anyone rushing to its defense. If I’m allowed to be satirical for a moment, it’s rhetoric basically reads like this:
Fair enough, but this doesn’t really invalidate my point.
In fact, the author specifically does what Tracy W wants. They explain their reasoning here:
We have decided to step back and examine the ‘Fall’ not as an event, or even as a process, but as an epistemological crux at the heart of much recent scholarship.
This line is specifically intended to differentiate between Fall and ‘Fall’ as two distinct terms. ‘Fall’ means, not the actual events in Rome, but a concept studied by researchers.
Makes sense that the new term is very similar to the old one, because the new term is referencing that centuries-old debate. Coming up with a completely novel term divorces the discussion from that longer debate. And since Tracy W finds the new term inadequate, I feel fairly confident that some pedantic sods will find ANY term inadequate. It’s a Catch 22–use the standard terminology and folks will think you side with Gibbon, use a new term and folks will complain that you’re making up terms for no reason, use something that tries to walk between the two extremes and people make what are at bottom purely aesthetical objections.
This is why I don’t consider such objections to be substantive. It’s impossible to make everyone happy, so you pick what option works best and move on with your argument.
Basically it was like rejecting a meal because the fork gives mini electric shocks every few seconds.
The criticism about the author is fair enough, though again it changes nothing about the substantive parts of my argument.
The objection to the style is mostly what I’m objecting to. As I point out above, you have failed to provide a meaningful alternative–you don’t say what the author should have used instead–which tends to indicate (at least to me) that you don’t have one. And as I argue above, if the author did find some term that you’d find acceptable, others would object equally strongly.
So it’s like sushi with wasabi. My wife likes it; I can’t stand it. Getting random stabs of pain when I eat isn’t fun to me, and my anosmia means I can’t detect the pleasant parts that everyone assures me are there. The chef isn’t wrong to add the wasabi, though–if they altered their menu to please me, they’d upset other people. Since the chef by definition can’t please all of us his job isn’t to find the least bad option, but to figure out which people he can afford to drive away.
I hope it’s clear that I get where you’re coming from. I’m in your shoes in the example above! My objection isn’t to you being annoyed, merely to the “should” in your argument. And it’s not personal. Since anything the author does will annoy someone such annoyance simply isn’t useful information; it provides no guidance on the best course of action, since the outcome is substantively the same regardless of the final choice.
I already have to mentally check out of reading america’s retvrn; the progression to a new New Order over here was _already_ stressful enough.
Instead, I’ll ask, how do you usually organize 1,5k physical books? I only have at most 30 and they’re all over the place right now.
also oh god it’s now wordpress turn to needlessly reinvent commenting.
Well he’s an academic, this many books are sort of a given. I’d guess we have that around 1000 if you include my daughter’s, and I’m not especially sentimental about keeping books I know I won’t re-read. Now mind you a not insignificant portion of my books are Patrick O’Brian and CS Forester, and most of my daughter’s are fantasy series. But we’re readers
“Autobiographically“
Usually,
Usually, we organize them in a very big bookcase. I’m not sure how many paper books I own as they’re dispersed in three different homes (and the total would be considerably higher if I included those owned not by me specifically but by my family in general), but ten years ago or so I switched to digital editions for lack of physical space; by a quick count my pc has around 40’000 files between books and articles. Guess a grim future of only war awaits me…
Oh don’t get me started on my digital collection. I’ll admit I’m a bit of a digital hoarder (link rot is my big fear) but just by pdf count on my Linguistics textbooks and articles alone might outrank the physical books on the topic in the library back at uni. And that’s but one of my special interests.
Now if I have the time to _actually_ read them all (and being able to focus on them instead of the ratrace-instilled fear of “im actively putting my future worse not doing something else”)…
if I have the time to actually read them all
Oh, I’d like to have the time too.
Seems more like a grim future of only books.
Also known as Library of Babylon.
Nah, that wouldn’t be so grim after all.
Lovely void beasts.
Another remarkable part of the linked Pasts Imperfect, which no-one on here had commented on yet (admittedly, it’s a little outside of the blog’s usual scope):
Being able to mix a poison in the exact proportion where it’s no longer deadly, but still potent enough to dull the pain is an undeniably impressive medical advance – especially for that period. Moreover, the photographed tools look remarkably close to modern ones. In all, really reminds me of the time Simon Kuestenmacher (German geographer and demographer who lives in Melbourne and writes a column for the Australian Financial Review) shared a chart comparing our data for estimated life expectancies of Chinese elites (600-1800), European nobles (800-1800) and European scholars (~1350-1800). Chinese elites consistently have life expectancy 10-15 years ahead of the European nobles (60-65 years vs. 50-55), although European scholars catch up with them occasionally (~1400 and then again ~1700, when they even claim a very brief lead.)
https://bsky.app/profile/simongerman600.bsky.social/post/3mebd7ykw7r22
Findings like these aconitine-coated surgical tools certainly provide one bit of context as to why that had been the case!
With the current Pasts Imperfect doing all the comparisons between the US and both the past empires and the contemporary European capitals, and with our host posting about the “Status Quo Coalition” again, I feel like now is a pretty good time to discuss the contemporary Pew polling (screenshots of which served as a major supporting argument in the original “Status Quo Coalition” post in 2023) over here.
For those who haven’t seen it yet; here’s how people thought about the US in the spring of this year:
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/06/23/trump-gets-negative-reviews-internationally-as-fewer-say-u-s-is-a-reliable-partner/
Unfavorable/Favorable split of attitudes (yes, unfavorable goes first):
Europe + Canada:
Asia/Oceania:
“The Middle East”:
Africa:
Latin America:
36-country median: 57/37 (i.e. 20 points underwater)
In contrast, the 2023 version of the same poll had a 30/59 median (29 points net favorable) – though admittedly it had “only” included 23 countries, and way fewer Muslim-majority states (i.e. no Malaysia, Pakistan Turkiye or West Bank/East Jerusalem: 81/9), whose opinions would have likely been more negative even then. However, Indonesia was included in 2023, and it had a majority positive opinion then, at 24/56 (similar positives and smaller negatives than just about any European country in 2023, in fact), in sharp contrast to this year’s 70/29.
Either way, the 23 countries in both versions of the poll had almost universally seen substantial declines (main exception was in Hungary, whose opinion of the US was majority negative in 2023 and had apparently improved with Trump). Most dramatically, Poland went from 4/93 (!) to 43/49. All of this is also a massive break with the initial Trump term as well; to quote our host:
As the article itself notes:
Now, here’s a major, (“load-bearing”?) paragraph of the 2023 post:
Compare and contrast with this year’s results:
Helpfully, Pew had also included the comparison of 15 largest statistically significant opinion changes between 2023 and 2026. The number to the left of the slash (/) is “contributes a great deal or a fair amount”, and to the right is “not too much/not at all”:
Now, the burning question is how much of this decline in standing is transient, connected to Trump specifically (who has managed to be less globally popular than Putin, never mind Xi) and how much of it would persist after his time in office. There, Pew notes that on one hand, across two of the more important “SQC” nations (UK and Spain), “confidence in US President to do the right thing regarding world affairs” is still not quite as low as it was by the end of W. Bush’s 2nd term in 2008. (in Spain, the opinions of Trump were actually at their lowest in 2017, when they were on par with GFC-era Bush, and improved by the end of his term -to ~20%, mind, which is also roughly their spring 2026 level.) On the other hand, it also notes that across the UK, Germany and France, Biden already had a lower improvement on this measure relative to Trump I than Obama had relative to Bush II. (In Spain, though, he was briefly more trusted than Obama – until Taliban’s victory shaved some 20-30 points of this measure, much like it did in the other three.) Hence, it hardly seems crazy to suggest the post-Trump (Democratic) President would continue the trend and also start at lower levels of trust.
Another page from same report had also covered how global views of Trump compare with 5 other world leaders – and I think a lot of these findings would be relevant even after he’s gone.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/06/23/how-do-views-of-trump-compare-with-other-global-leaders/
That is, 6 world leaders were included in the poll, ranked on that “confidence to do the right thing regarding world affairs” metric, and their performance goes like this (no confidence/confidence – so, no leader has an above-water rating across all nations surveyed):
To quote Pew itself:
To be honest, surprised that they were either unable or unwilling to poll global opinion on Modi, given not only the power of his country, but also that he’s had over a decade to build up his profile. On the other hand, the fact that Macron is the only Western European leader prominent enough for such polling, and everyone else currently serving apparently loses out in media stature not just to him, but also to Zelenskyy hardly surprises me at all.
A few other interesting observations:
And for comparison, here’s Pew’s subsequent report on how the same nations view China. For simplicity, I’m going to bold every set of numbers that’s above-water.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/07/15/views-of-china-and-xi-are-improving-globally/
Unfavorable/Favorable split of attitudes:
Europe/NATO:
Asia/Oceania:
“The Middle East”:
Africa:
Latin America:
37-country median: 39/51
Pew summary:
Annoyingly, I cannot find a head-to-head comparison for all countries on the “contributes to peace and stability” metric, which our host considered the most important back in 2023 – Pew only includes it for 15 (mostly higher-income) countries in the American set of polls, and 17 middle-income countries in the Chinese poll. Nevertheless, might as well share those numbers:
% who say China contributes to peace and stability
Asia:
“The Middle East”:
Africa:
Latin America:
According to a summary in another linked page, the median across those 17 countries in fact believes that China already contributes more than the US to global peace and stability; the split between “not too much/not at all” and “a great deal/a fair amount” is 52/40 for the US, and 41/58 for China.
The other three metrics (“interferes in the affairs of other countries”, “is a reliable partner” and “takes into account the interests of countries like our own when making decisions”) were somewhat minimized by our host in 2023 because the US didn’t do all that well on them in 2023 either; nowadays, though, China does better than the US on those three as well, at least across those countries. Its worst metric, “interferes in the affairs of other countries” has an exact 45/45 “not too much/not at all – a great deal/a fair amount” split – vs. 22/75 for the US. For “reliable partner”, it’s 27/69 for China (the 2nd number is good) vs. 48/49 for the US, and for “takes others’ interests into account”, it’s 51/42 for the US and 38/57 for China.
P.S. Something else that’s rather interesting.
To elaborate on that last part: the head-to-head comparison page shows that across 36 countries, both the US and China are now underwater on this metric; it’s 56-39 “does not/does respect” for the US and 58-26 for China. This suggests any continued usage of such well-known/cliched Cold War framings of the US as “the leader of the free world” and the like are likely to be increasingly ineffective nowadays. (Which might perhaps include the “rich and free” thesis at the end of the “Status Quo Coalition” post.)
I think the real question is the midterms.
On the one hand, obviously we elected Trump and Trump has done almost as much as he possibly can to damage our reputation on the international scene. He’s been actively hostile toward long-time allies, including openly threatening war against allies over the stupidest nonsense imaginable (Greenland, for example). Everyone else is going to be asking whether this is what our nation really is–it feeds into every stereotype of the ignorant, belligerent, drunken hick that many people have of us.
Trump’s failure against Iran only adds to this. If Trump had won it would be bad enough, but the current situation simply makes us look foolish. So now our allies are asking themselves if we’re really up to the task of maintaining global peace and trade, the one thing that has allowed everyone to put up with us this far.
On the other hand, sometimes weird things happen and if the USA pulls back from Trump’s policies and sends a strong message next month that we’re not in favor of this nonsense, maybe the international community will regain trust in us. Everybody has a bad day, and one bad election doesn’t necessarily make a nation bad. How we respond will tell the world a great deal about us.
That said….Trump tore the lid off Hell here. He demonstrated that a single election can make huge shifts in US policy, shifts that are often unpredictable and nonsensical. We are not a trustworthy ally anymore. Even if the next president is good, everyone will wonder what the one after that will be like now that Trump has shown that a sitting president can use the US as their personal plaything and piggybank. Who’s going to trust a nation that will do a complete 180 tomorrow? It will take a significant amount of time for us to regain the trust Trump cost us, assuming we ever do–the EU could fairly easily position itself as the new head of the Status Quo Coalition before we can repair the damage.
The US just has such an advantage as such a huge single actor that it is the natural leader absent much more prolonged rogue behavior. Also the EU has similar dynamics to the US going on just at a subunit level. For instance Le Pen is the favorite to win in France and she is highly Euro-skeptic to say the least.
I have seen many state similar points as you two, on Bluesky and elsewhere, and while not untrue/implausible, I believe it overlooks a whole lot as it’s overly focused on the US/EU relationship. While that’s normally a useful prism, the most distinct aspect of “Status Quo Coalition” as a premise is the notion that other countries would be expected to more-or-less automatically align with it as they become “rich and free”. If that notion is not really true, the current “core” coalition becomes rather less important even if it avoids fracturing – i.e. the EU’s relative weight in the global economy would only continue to decline relative to emerging markets.
So, I would say it’s massively important that the most recent polling above shows us that the perception of the US in Indonesia had flipped from just a quarter of the population disliking it in early 2023, to less than a quarter liking it this year – whereas it’s now China which enjoys the support US had over there in early 2023. Crucially, neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore are not only similar on both the anti-US and pro-China metrics – but for the former, their opinions had already been similar in 2024! (And even Singapore was slightly more negative than positive back then, at 50/48).
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/06/11/views-of-the-u-s/
Unfortunately Pew had, for whatever reason, done no polling on Indonesia in 2024 (just like how it did no polling on Malaysia and Singapore in 2023), so we are left with two competing hypotheses:
Obviously, if the second hypothesis is correct, then by far the most likely explanation is that the American virtually-lockstep support for Israel-perpetrated genocide had rapidly turned the two large (even Malaysia is about as populous as Poland), Muslim-majority flawed democracies (and to a lesser extent, the neighbouring small but immensely wealthy, Buddhist-plurality hybrid state) against the country and towards China, and this is only being solidified with every remaining year of this administration. This explanation would also be consistent with the Nigerian opinion on the US becoming religiously polarized – and with the Turkish public opinion having already been almost as immensely negative in 2024 as it is now in 2026. (I.e. on a sub-page of the 2024 report, Turkish confidence in Biden was at 8% – barely above the 6% in Trump this year.)
Furthermore, the base scenario at this point (given, e.g. the failure to publicly “excommunicate” Biden’s foreign policy inner circle by either the Congressional Democratic leadership or the likely 2028 candidates) is that any upcoming Democratic administration still fails to alter the American relationship with Israel to anywhere near the degree required to reverse the trend. (Basically the only halfway plausible candidates discussed right now who could do it are Van Hollen, El Sayed (assuming an “Obama-level” ascent) and maybe AOC – and there are enormous structural barriers to either one winning in 2028.)
If so, 2029-2033 could easily become the time Indonesia and Malaysia “lock in” their realignment, with massive implications. Perhaps most dramatically, I don’t think anyone’s conducted a Taiwan Crisis wargame yet where these countries do everything in their power to block Malacca to the USN relief force.* Imagine all the warships having to expend interceptors to dodge missiles when they are just passing through on their way to the actual “battlefield” – or having to run convoys to protect all the logistics this far back (Malacca Strait is about 3,000 km away from Taiwan.)
The above is the most dramatic near-term scenario, but there are many more longer-term implications which would add cracks to the “SQC” thesis. As noted above, the Turkish population had statistically been about as anti-American as the Polish one is anti-Russian for the past several years, and if the next administration fails to reverse this, it’s only a matter of time before we see the downstream implications of that. The only reason it’s not immediately pressing is because there is no major power which is sufficiently pro-Palestinian from their POV, and they retain some technological dependencies (i.e. the Turkish stealth fighter program, which is otherwise far more advanced than e.g. the moribund ones in the EU, relies on American engines, and having to switch could well delay it by a decade or so) – but those considerations won’t last forever.
And in general, if any Muslim-majority state that is even slightly freer than a Gulf monarchy (which includes so many of the African states) no longer sees the status quo coalition as one underwriting prosperity and stable international trade, but rather one where America will bomb anyone and sacrifice anything (including stable international trade) so that Israel can continue to be a Jewish-supremacist state with ever-expanding buffer zones, then it’s implausible that they would choose to join that coalition, even as they otherwise become “richer and freer”.
In fact, that approach does not even have to be exclusive to those states: consider how South Africa (<2% Muslim), the most “rich and free” of the African nations, also has the most negative perception of the US out of the continent’s major countries – which is hard to disconnect with their active pro-Palestinian stance in the court of international law. (Admittedly, unlike e.g. Malaysia or Turkiye, it wasn’t yet fully negative in 2024, at 31/46 (and a near-exact 35/36 split for “confidence in Biden”) – but that was already markedly more negative than either the results from Nigeria, Kenya or Ghana or even their own 30/59 split in 2023.)
Now, the two of you debate whether one of the other NATO countries could take on the “Coalition captain” role while still preserving its outlines – and I’m skeptical. EU countries (and us in Australia) are barely past patting ourselves in the back for finally recognizing Palestine (which almost everyone else, sans the US and a few other holdouts like Taiwan, had done decades ago). I believe only the UK (and perhaps Spain) is finally moving to impose meaningful economic sanctions on West Bank settlements – and neither makes for a likely coalition leader at this point. (I.e. on present-day trends, median Polish incomes are about to exceed British ones in a decade.) Out of the two most plausible leaders, Germany and France, I think only the latter might realign to the extent that would arrest the trend of Muslim-majority states trending towards China if they elect Melenchon next year – which appears unlikely given the present-day head-to-head polling.
*You might suggest their spite towards the US, and even the newly-strengthened ties with the PRC, won’t extend far enough to potentially take 2026 Iran-level casualties for the sake of helping the PRC extinguish Taiwan and I’ll admit that there are still substantial structural constraints here – i.e. several hundred thousand Indonesian migrant workers live in Taiwan. (Though, the presence of Indian citizens in Ukraine did not make India support it – rather than the opposite, when the incidents of Ukrainians taking out frustrations on the fleeing Indians for their country’s UN votes went viral on their social media.) On the other hand, the decision to block US relief to Taiwan could be framed as the fastest way to end the war and therefore eliminate the danger to those Indonesians.
And of course, the way the campaign vs. Iran has been going to date may also convince them that the present-day US would rather do nothing at all then to fight China and Indonesia at once. (For that matter, my default assumption is that Taiwan is more likely to effectively surrender once the next KMT administration is elected (their leader already went to Beijing for a photo op with Xi this year) then to fight an open war, and moves from Indonesia tilting the regional balance of power would only increase the likelihood of that.)
Bret, you’d keep us posted about your podcast appearances, wouldn’t you?
I try to do so!
This might be irrelevant to the post, but how did military recruitment exactly work in ancient and medieval times? Did volunteers go to a place where they listed their strengths and qualities to a captain in change of local recruitment, or did a kingdom or empire in need of soldiers/mercenaries send envoys to do the job instead?
https://acoup.blog/2026/06/05/collections-pre-modern-armies-for-worldbuilders-part-i-why-they-fight/
Articles discussing this general question.
Incidentally, they need to be added to the resources for world-builders page.
Thank your for suggesting me that post. I kind of figured it was that, but I’ve been so busy with my studies and writings (and household chores) that I often don’t have the time to read an ACOUP article from start to finish.
Thank you