In 1992, Pentagon officials took stock of America’s fortunes. “Today, there is no global challenger to a peaceful democratic order,” observed the group, led by Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. The Soviet Union had fallen. America stood alone as a global power. At such a moment, the country might have declared victory and brought its troops home. Instead, it resolved to seek greater supremacy than ever. In the future that Wolfowitz and his colleagues envisioned, the United States would maintain a “predominant military position” atop the world. No one would dare rival it.

In the Middle East, America’s pursuit of primacy led it to contain both Iraq and Iran, and to treat the advance of either as a grave threat. Under this dictate, successive presidents imposed sanctions that starved Iraqis and squeezed Iranians. They launched wars to change regimes. They partnered with authoritarians throughout the region. If all this was the price of keeping America on top, so be it.

After decades of catastrophe, the same basic strategy endures. Donald Trump’s presidency makes plain that global supremacy has become an end in itself, unmoored from the interests of the American people and most of humanity. “Our military dominance must be unquestioned,” Trump has declared, “and I mean unquestioned.” Trump has stripped supremacy of ethical pretense and strategic justification. He values it for its own sake, as a gesture of brute domination.

What have liberals to say about this? Scandalously little. For decades, they have failed to stop war and violence for the same reason they have failed to reverse soaring inequality. At best, they have offered solutions inadequate to the scale of the problem. At worst, they have denied there was a problem, casting endless war as “global leadership.” Few Democrats will admit, for example, that not one power in the Middle East poses an existential threat to the United States, not one merits devoting precious lives and scarce resources to such misadventures as Saudi Arabia’s proxy war in Yemen.

Trump and the establishment are one in assuming that the United States must maintain global military dominance, regardless of circumstances, forever. It is long past time to question this assumption, and today only the rising left possesses the dynamism and independence to do so. In order to stand for peace, systematically not episodically, the left should oppose armed supremacy as a perpetual goal of America’s foreign policy. For permanent armed supremacy produces permanent armed conflict. And its burdens are mounting.