Henry Kissinger once quipped that he was like the cowboy who rides into town alone to sort things out. The line stuck. Not because it was true, but because it felt true. America likes that image—solitary, principled, unbothered by the noise of lesser powers. The sheriff with a plan.

But Kissinger wasn’t actually playing cowboy. He was channeling Metternich. The man behind the curtain, not the man in the white hat. He understood that power without structure is just noise. That even the strongest rider needs a posse and a system that makes people follow him, even when they’re scared or angry or think they can do it better.
That’s the difference between foreign policy as theater and foreign policy as architecture. We used to know the difference. Now? We’re losing the thread.

Strategic loneliness is back in vogue. America is no longer just questioning its alliances; it’s actively shaking them. Insulting partners, imposing tariffs on friends, ghosting summits, and praising strongmen in the same breath, it scolds democrats. Call it what you want: realignment, recalibration, a new era of realism. But the effect is the same. Allies don’t feel allied. Friends don’t feel needed. And rivals don’t feel restrained. Margaret MacMillan, in a sober and unsparing essay, lays it out plainly: the United States is doing something no other great power has done so casually; casting aside the very alliances that made it great. NATO. Japan. South Korea. Canada. Not perfect partners, but proven ones.

The postwar order wasn’t inevitable. It was built imperfectly, expensively, and often hypocritically, but it was built. And now, it’s being treated like a burden, not an asset. That’s not realism. That’s nihilism with good tailoring.
Let’s be honest: the liberal order had it coming. It overpromised. It assumed that capitalism would soften the edges of autocracy. That democracy would become the default. That markets could outgrow identity. And that U.S. power could underwrite it all, forever.

Then came Iraq. Then came 2008. Then came China’s rise. Russia’s revenge. Trump’s first term. Biden’s cautious repairs. And Trump’s second act, louder, looser, and fully unrestrained. By then, the fantasy had cracked.
So yes—realism is back. But this version isn’t the steely-eyed kind Kissinger preached. It’s a populist realism, more instinct than insight. Fewer maps, more moods. Less Metternich, more Macho Man. The cowboy myth rides again—not because it works, but because it feels like control in a chaotic world.

But power doesn’t scale on feelings. Geopolitics is a confidence game. Countries don’t just align because of values. They align because they trust the anchor. The biggest economy, the biggest military, the biggest promise that someone’s got your back. That’s what America used to offer. Not perfection, but predictability. That’s what’s gone missing. Japan, facing Chinese aggression, now questions whether the U.S. will show up. South Korea wonders if nuclear independence is no longer unthinkable. Canada—stable, friendly, joined at the hip—now gets tariff threats and missile defense bills like a hostile subcontractor. These aren’t foreign policy flukes. They’re signals. The kind that investors notice. That policymakers’ memo. That adversaries exploit. Because trust, once broken, doesn’t reset. It calcifies. It becomes contingency plans, regional pacts, quiet exits.

And this is the real cost of the cowboy moment. Not war. Not collapse. But drift. An America too big to ignore, too erratic to follow. An order that exists on paper, not in practice. A global system where everyone’s hedging—and no one’s betting on consistency. This isn’t strategic independence. It’s strategic shrinkage. The U.S. still has the most powerful military, the deepest capital markets, the most dynamic innovation. But those are inputs, not outcomes. Power isn’t just what you can do; it’s what others believe you’ll do. And increasingly, they don’t believe much. Realpolitik isn’t about tearing up the rulebook. It’s about knowing which rules to bend, and when. It’s about managing risk with cold clarity, not performative unpredictability.

Trump’s approach—transactional, theatrical, short-term—isn’t grand strategy. It’s deal culture. Useful in business. Deadly in geopolitics. Because deals end. Relationships endure. And great powers don’t thrive alone. Kissinger built relationships with people he didn’t like because the alternative was instability. Roosevelt made common cause with Stalin because he understood the stakes. Churchill wooed Roosevelt because he knew survival sometimes requires charm. Today, the ‘cowboy’ scolds allies on stage, praises autocrats off-script, and turns diplomacy into a stage-managed grievance tour. Even Metternich wouldn’t try this in a bad year.

The world is shifting. Not toward war, necessarily—but toward division. Blocs. Hard borders. Fewer illusions. The polite fiction of the global community has given way to strategic accounting. Who matters. Who pays. Who’s useful.
China builds its parallel architecture. Russia flexes where it can. Europe looks both ways. The Global South bargains up. And the U.S.? It plays the part of the disenchanted giant—powerful, lonely, and increasingly indifferent to the choir of former believers. It’s not isolationism. It’s high-functioning detachment. The belief that America, on its own, can muscle through a fragmented world while everyone else eventually folds. But that’s not how power works anymore. This isn’t 1945. It’s 2025, and the frontier’s crowded.

So what’s left?

America can still lead. Still shape outcomes. Still, define the terms of engagement in most regions. But only if it remembers what leadership actually is. Not volume. Not unpredictability. Not one-off wins that leave everyone bruised. Leadership is building the table and keeping others seated at it, even when they’d rather walk away. It’s consistency with teeth. Vision with backup. In a world where every state is rethinking its bet, trust is the real superpower. And it’s running low.

The cowboy rides alone. That’s the image. That’s the mood. But in geopolitics, that’s not a victory pose. It’s an elegy. The great powers that endure aren’t the ones who go it alone. They’re the ones who understand that even the strongest need structure. That loyalty isn’t owed. It’s earned. Even Kissinger knew that. Even cowboys knew that. The question now is whether America remembers it.

Dimitris Kollias is a Junior Research Fellow, ELIAMEP.