A tweet from The New York Times’ Chinese-language account said Donald Trump is undermining the foundations of America’s status as the world’s leading power. When the tweet was reposted on Zhihu, China’s Quora-like Q&A platform, it set off a wide-ranging debate. The question itself came with a built-in premise: either Trump is sabotaging the country, or the Times is fearmongering. What is more worth examining is the structural layer both sides sidestep.
One Zhihu respondent framed the issue through “two Americas”: the American empire, which in practice governs the globe and maintains international order, and the United States in North America, where three hundred million voters decide who holds the presidency and Congress. The first has under its authority a large allied population and pro-American forces around the world; the second is the one that actually holds the ballots. These two systems have long run in parallel, and the conflict did not begin with Trump.
The empire’s ledger versus the voters’ ledger
Split the US into these two layers and much of what is happening makes sense. Maintaining overseas bases, honoring alliance commitments, opening markets and providing security as a public good are costs borne at the imperial level, while the benefits are spread around the world. For Washington’s policy circles, this arrangement is the necessary cost of hegemony. For an ordinary voter in the Rust Belt or the Midwest, the ledger shows only jobs moving abroad, military spending shared out, and distant conflicts.
When the empire’s ledger and the voters’ ledger stop balancing, electoral politics pushes the conflict to the surface. Demands to scale back overseas projection, make allies pay more and bring resources home were not invented by Trump out of thin air; he was more like the person who packaged that sentiment into a votable option. The Times’ account, by pinning the problem on one man, is easy to explain but avoids the question of why that sentiment could win enough votes.
Overseas supporters have no vote
The respondent also raised a less-discussed point: the empire has a large number of de facto beneficiaries and ideological sympathizers around the world, but these people have no influence on US presidential elections. Decisions are made by voters in the core territory, while the consequences are borne by the entire system. Conversely, the costs felt by voters in the core territory do not disappear because overseas allies object.
This mismatch between authority and responsibility was not obvious during the empire’s expansion, because the gains were large enough to cover domestic dissatisfaction over distribution. Once the gains thin out and the costs rise, voters in the core territory use their ballots to demand retrenchment. At that point, the anxiety of allies and the demands of domestic voters exist at the same time, and both are legitimate, yet they point in opposite directions. No president can easily satisfy both.
Turning a structural problem into a personal one
The logic of the Times tweet compresses structural tension into individual responsibility: Trump withdrew from agreements, imposed tariffs and questioned allies, so the foundations are damaged. This narrative has a factual basis; Trump’s policies are indeed changing how the US interacts with its allies. But it cannot explain one thing: if this were one man’s destruction, why did his positions still have a market after he left office, and why did his successor not fully return to the old路线?
A more reasonable view is that Trump accelerated a certain adjustment rather than inventing it. Changes in America’s relative power, domestic distributional conflicts and disputes over allies free-riding are all long-accumulated issues. Blaming all of it on one person both overestimates individual power and underestimates the social base behind the ballots.
Where the debate really divides
Back to the original question: the disagreement is not about facts but about judgment — whether maintaining global primacy is still worth the cost the US pays now. The Times’ answer is yes, so anyone who damages the foundations is unacceptable; the respondent’s angle is that the books no longer balance, and the pressure to retrench comes from the voter structure itself. Both judgments can find evidence, but the latter at least pulls the question back from personal evaluation to a calculation of interests.
For people watching American society, the value of this debate is not in defining Trump but in seeing how an established power handles the pull between “bearing burdens abroad” and “answering to voters at home.” That pull will not disappear when the person changes; it will only change shape.
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