After the American Empire
On this episode of The Time of Monsters: Trita Parsi on why Donald Trump’s retrenchment doesn’t go far enough.

Donald Trump speaks in front of US Navy personnel on board the US Navy’s USS George Washington aircraft carrier at the US naval base in Yokosuka, Japan, on October 28, 2025.
(Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images)Donald Trump claims he wants to be the peace president and has even lobbied for a Nobel Peace Prize. But his foreign policy has been wildly contradictory. While the United States is clearly retrenching from many parts of the world, violence against hemispheric neighbors is increasing. I talked to Trita Parsi, cofounder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, for a wide-ranging discussion on why American hegemony is declining but also why the push for retrenchment hasn’t gone far enough.
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As millions of Americans protest Donald Trump under the slogan of “No Kings,” it is
worth asking how the nation ended up with such an authoritarian president. David Sirota
and the team at The Lever have provided a great answer to this question in their new
podcast seriesMaster Plan: The Kingmakers, which looks at the revival of the Imperial
Presidency after the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s. I talked to David about the
history uncovered in this podcast and why Trump is merely a symptom of a much
deeper problem.
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