The flag rises over the White House on a chilly January day in Washington. The reassuring routine of the Star-Spangled Banner’s raising belies a startling reality: the long era of world history known as Pax Americana—or the American Peace—is coming to an end.

Unlike the Romans of yore, or Britain’s empire upon which the sun would never set, America is not ceding global hegemony to her foes by force of arms or by threat of revolution.

America is walking away.

Under President Gunnz, the nation that would one day make the world safe for democracy has instead taken a sharp turn inwards. Unstable allies that have counted on American aid during the decades-long War on Terror suddenly find themselves alone.

How long they will survive in the face of popular uprisings and ethnic strife is anyone’s guess.

The announcement last January that the United States would be withdrawing from a half-dozen of its key Middle East allies came as a shock in both foreign capitals and on Capitol Hill. The Speaker and the House and Senate Foreign Affairs chairs all deny any advance knowledge of the order, which the White House disputes.

“I know committee members were deeply shocked to hear of the withdrawals, and we most certainly would have advised otherwise if we had been reached out to,” clarified Sen. DexterAamo (R-DX), then-chair of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.

“Such unpredictability is quite obviously detrimental for the integrity and trust maintained in us by our allies around the world,” added former Secretary of State Nothedarkweb (Dem.). “This shouldn’t need to be explained to the executive of the United States.”

The White House also readily admits that the President had not been in contact with host governments before upending their relationship with the United States. Even critical US allies such as Israel were not consulted in advance, as a Pentagon press release made clear.

Joint Base Balad in Iraq is one of the many US military installations across the Middle East that would have been abandoned following President Gunnz’s now-rescinded executive order.

Predictably, the result was complete pandemonium.

While Capitol Hill tripped over itself in talk of subpoenas and revocation, the White House has been engulfed in a storm of its creation and, under overwhelming crosspartisan political pressure, backtracked for the time being.

The foreign policy establishment’s victory was short-lived, however, as the President was already planning his next move.

In a statement to the Atlantic, then-Press Secretary Tucklet1911 (Soc.) insisted that the White House remains “committed to seeing the withdrawal of our troops from unnecessary countries.” The Atlantic has also independently verified that the President continued to insist on a large-scale withdrawal of American forces from across the Middle East, including even Iraq, even as his top advisors assured Capitol Hill of consultation going forward.

As of publication, the Gunnz administration has already unveiled phase two of its plan, removing troops from Kenya, where they were helping regional partners in the the Horn of Africa fight the terror group al-Shabaab, and Uganda, where a US airbase has proven instrumental to intelligence-gathering and rapid deployment across the continent.

However, more than what it actually did, the President’s actions were important for what they stood for: the retrenchment of American foreign policy.

World Power on the Wane

No longer would the United States be a reliable global presence to defend the gains of the liberal world order since the end of the Cold War.

While this comes as little surprise to those familiar with President Gunnz’s worldview, the extent of America’s foreign policy one-eighty has been shocking even to his erstwhile allies.

A US Air Force C-130J prepares to land at Kenya’s Camp Simba, where American military personnel are deployed in the fight against regional Islamist group al-Shabaab. The force is expected to withdraw shortly as a result of the President’s recent executive order reducing the US presence in Africa.

“Gunnz is probably one of the most ineffective people to communicate, or execute, a coherent foreign policy,” former Press Secretary Tucklet1911 declared to the Atlantic. “His own Vice President and Cabinet have often had to pick up the pieces from his disastrous foreign policy.”

Aggravating this radical shift in American foreign policy is the seeming lack of overarching geopolitical strategy emanating from the White House. The planned reduction of American hard power has not been met by a corresponding increase in diplomatic engagement, leading many on Capitol Hill to wonder: what’s the plan?

Although the administration plans mass troop withdrawals across the Middle East, the prospects for peace in the region appear to be as dim as ever due to the administration’s myopic focus on the demilitarization aspect of peacebuilding.

The line of thinking goes: America’s long war is the cause of instability in the Middle East, so total withdrawal will bring immediate peace.

However, this is the sort of simplistic foreign policy thinking that one would expect from a Michael Moore documentary, not official Washington. It is easily belied by the swift growth of the Islamic State following America’s rapidly-executed withdrawal from Iraq in the early years of the Obama administration, resulting in one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes in recent history and the failure of its objective as the emergence of a new threat in the region necessitated re-engagement, ultimately defeating the point of withdrawal.

The administration’s failure to meaningfully engage diplomatically is also starkly reflected in its dealings with three nations that formed the cornerstone of former President GuiltyAir’s foreign policy.

Iran was the first foray into global diplomacy for the Gunnz White House, with the President issuing a memorandum withdrawing from the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) within days of taking office. Although critics quickly pointed out that JCPOA had long been replaced as the basis of US-Iranian relations, the fact that the administration singled out Iran as its first target of diplomatic pressure was a clear message of continuity—not change—with past Republican presidents. The end result, after much hand-wringing, was a nuclear deal with Tehran that is broadly identical to President GuiltyAir’s Easter Day Treaty.

In Palestine, a landmark vote for international recognition at the United Nations should have served as an opportunity to restart the long-moribund Oslo peace process, but the resolution of the longstanding conflict in the Holy Land does not figure anywhere in the administration’s plans. On a recent state visit to Israel, Secretary of State Jerry LeRow made no mention of the conflict at all—a highly unusual omission given the United States’ longstanding interest in Israeli-Palestinian peace. With the issue on the backburner, many fear that the leverage generated by former Secretary of State IGotzDaMastaPlan’s diplomatic coup that could have brought the parties to the table is being squandered.

In Yemen, the Gunnz White House has done little to follow up with the country’s delicate progress towards democracy. State Department press releases appear to indicate that the current administration is under the clearly erroneous impression that the Yemeni Civil War is ongoing, when a peace treaty was signed and elections were held under the supervision of US observers. Rather than dealing directly with the fragile new government to promote democracy and the rule of law, the current administration has perplexingly instead opted to discuss Yemen’s situation exclusively with the Gulf monarchies, whose military intervention was responsible for some of the bloodiest fighting in the troubled state’s civil war.

The United States embassy to Israel in Jerusalem, pictured here in an undated file photo, is a flashpoint for the United States’ involvement in the Israel-Palestine peace process.

Although President Gunnz claims a clean break with the past in his foreign policy approach, many of his diplomatic priorities would find themselves well at home in the Bush administration as it launched its Global War on Terror or in the Trump administration as it ineptly moved from disaster to disaster.

With a Pentagon run by ardent doves and a unilateral foreign policy inherited from hawkish neoconservative thought, President Gunnz’s foreign policy can be generously described as quixotic.

The end result is not non-interventionism—a stance that would require genuine and protracted global cooperation to eliminate the need for military conflict—but more akin to Lindberghian isolationism.

The Free World has never been more alone.

The Fall of the Liberal World Order

The retrenchment of the United States will be the gain of illiberal regimes such as China and Russia.

In the absence of American leadership on the world stage, her foes will find it easier to gain influence and displace liberal democracy from the privileged position it has occupied since the fall of the Iron Curtain.

China’s $210 billion Belt and Road Initiative to expand its geopolitical influence throughout Eurasia has gone without coherent answer from the Gunnz White House, continuing a longtime weakness of US foreign policy that has persisted since the Obama administration. And with the President’s recent budget request cutting $800 million from multilateral development banks, including the key Asian Development Bank, the administration appears to be in no hurry to change course.

In Turkey, the United States has broken with its European allies to maintain a punitive sanctions regime on the Erdoğan government after the end of the former’s incursion into Syrian Kurdistan. This move, coupled with the unilateral withdrawal of US forces from the strategic NATO member-state, has raised alarm at the prospect of Turkey turning away from the West.

President Gunnz’s current nominee for Secretary of Defense, former House Majority Leader Dr0ne717, has even called for Turkey’s expulsion from NATO, which would inevitably result in Ankara’s shift towards Moscow and the United States’ loss of control over a crucial waterway to a major geopolitical adversary. With Mr. Drone set to be confirmed by a Republican Senate, the strength of the Western alliance will be tested in the weeks to come.

The Turkish Straits are the sole access point to the Black Sea, where Russia maintains substantial naval assets, and the West’s control over the strategic waterway could be jeopardized if the United States continues alienating Turkey, a treatied NATO ally.

Foreign policy has dominated the priorities of the Gunnz administration.

Yet for all of the President’s external machinations, he has delivered little more than rehashed versions of past agreements and cheap political victories without a coherent geopolitical plan for the future of the United States’ place in the world. What the White House has presented as a measured withdrawal has instead taken on the appearance of a full-on rout, with little planning going into addressing the inevitable consequences of the power vacuums created.

And so, with feeble protest from Congress, the withdrawals from around the world continue.

Once the withdrawal plan is complete, America’s isolation on the world stage will be almost as complete as the President’s foreign policy isolation on Capitol Hill.