بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
Where Is the Trump Administration Leading the United States?
Part 3
(Translated)
https://www.al-waie.org/archives/article/20484
Al Waie Magazine Issue No. 482
Forty-first Year, Rabi’ I 1448 AH corresponding to August 2026 CE
By Essam Al-Sheikh Ghanem
US President Trump exploits, in economic matters, the fact that the US market is the largest in the world and that countries with strong economies need it. He has become more boastful, portraying America as an “indispensable nation.” Against this backdrop, he announced the imposition of significant tariffs on all countries of the world, including China, which received the largest share of these tariffs. He also imposed severe restrictions on China's export of electronic chips. When China did not stand idly by and imposed reciprocal tariffs, American farmers began pressuring Trump to ease his tariffs to allow them to supply agricultural goods to China. China also imposed restrictions on the export of rare earth minerals and intensified its search for alternative markets for its exports. At this point, Trump began to back down on his tariffs. Here, it became clear to him and to the world that China has become a true competitor to America, and even surpasses it in several economic sectors, including renewable energy, electric vehicles, and rare earth production. China has invested tens of billions of its abundant dollars in establishing a substantial chip industry of its own, genuinely threatening to become independent of America in the near future. Likewise, Chinese internet and technology companies compete with their American counterparts remarkably well, although they still lag slightly behind.
China plays a considerable role in reducing reliance on the dollar in its international trade, following the sanctions imposed by America on many countries, including Russia, which disrupted their international commercial dealings. China is moving confidently toward increasing its international trade transactions in its currency, the yuan, to the point that 40% of China’s international trade now takes place without the dollar. This represents a significant figure and threatens the dollar's global standing. This trajectory is a major source of annoyance for America, as the dollar is considered the cornerstone of its financial supremacy and one of the pillars of its global economic dominance. However, President Trump's policies and his harsh criticisms of the US Federal Reserve regarding interest rate hikes or cuts are causing global upheaval, prompting dollar-dependent countries to reduce their reliance on it due to the Trump administration's influence over its value. As for the tariffs imposed by Trump, he collected approximately $260 billion from them during 2025, a cost borne by the American citizen due to the higher prices of these goods. Meanwhile, other countries collected roughly $220 billion from the reciprocal tariffs they imposed on American goods. In other words, Trump’s policy resulted in little gain for the US treasury, extracted from the pockets of its own citizens, while American companies became less competitive abroad due to the retaliatory tariffs imposed by other countries on America.
According to his stated policy, Trump aspires to bring back the American manufacturing engine, a large part of which relocated to China over two decades ago. At that time, America wanted to increase the competitiveness of its companies by moving them to China and other countries where labor was cheap, and it succeeded in doing so. America had outsourced its industry abroad – especially to China – under deeply held convictions about its ability to control the global economy, because it possessed the strongest weapons, the most money, and held the reins of scientific research. In other words, it was the strongest militarily, and it dictated the direction of investment and its development. However, this American vision has completely failed with regard to China.
American companies transferred their expertise entirely to China, in line with the Chinese policy of technology transfer, which forced foreign companies to fully share their know-how within China. Chinese engineers acquired this expertise and transferred it to competing Chinese companies. Over time, America lost that expertise; moreover, it cannot easily bring it back to America in a short period. Likewise, these American companies are resisting Trump’s policy, and the majority of them do not want to return to America. This is due to the advantages they found in China, such as reduced taxes, cheap labor, and easy access to the Chinese market – a market that has also become vast and highly competitive, one which major companies cannot afford to sacrifice. It is true that dozens of companies have announced their readiness to invest anew in America – especially in the semiconductor sector – but this has not been reflected in job growth in America, meaning it is still just talk. When President Trump began harshly implementing his anti-immigration policies and started deporting thousands of Latin American workers, this resulted in heavy losses for American investors in the agricultural sector, and agricultural product prices rose significantly inside America amid the labor shortage.
As for the other side of the American failure in transferring industry to China, it has manifested in China becoming a wealthy country. It then began developing its military, building ships, aircraft, and nuclear capabilities, and its international investments surpassed those of America. It poured hundreds of billions of dollars into its universities, until it rivaled America in research and came close to it, then overtook it in 2015 in innovation and patents, with patent applications in China reaching double those in America. The tables have completely turned, and today America finds itself trying to catch up with Chinese innovation. All of this is happening at a breakneck pace, leaving America in a position that becomes more precarious year after year in comparison with China.
To secure resources and bolster its economy and its dollar, America aspires to maintain itself as the world’s financial hub. To achieve that today under current circumstances, it must raise interest rates in America and strengthen the dollar’s value to attract funds. However, Trump wants to lower interest rates to boost American exports. This inclination of Trump accelerates the processes of de-dollarization and moving away from the dollar, due to its trajectory toward weakness under the Trump administration. In other words, Trump’s financial policies are weakening America’s international financial standing. This happens amid the emergence of the Chinese competitor, which has made China an international financial center and is challenging the American hub. Yet, the financial policy of the Trump administration is also geared toward serving America’s wealthy—a consistent state policy—and it undermines America’s ability to compete. Government financial support in America, as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, focuses on supporting the wealthy, most of whom operate in stock markets, equities, and other financial trading sectors, not in manufacturing. Therefore, US government support, taxpayer money, has led to further bloating of financial trading companies, without reflecting on employment or reducing unemployment in America. Today, some leaders within the Trump administration at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department want to reverse this direction—that is, to raise interest rates to attract money to America and focus government support on manufacturing. Apart from being late, this also reveals, from another angle, the depth of internal disagreements within America, and even within the Trump administration itself, regarding financial policies and their impact on the state in what is almost an emergency time—a time that cannot afford experiments or waiting for results. Instead, America needs any financial lifeline to stop the ballooning debt. In essence, Trump’s policy on economic and financial matters—whether domestically, such as immigration policy, or externally, such as tariffs and reindustrialization—is not guaranteed to succeed, and Trump’s efforts to generate new resources for America from the international arena are not bearing fruit. When Trump and the Pentagon requested Congress to approve a fantasy military budget for 2026 amounting to 1.5 trillion dollars, this announcement came with almost no sources of funding other than increasing debt—debt that, at its current size, already poses a looming threat to America and is a noose around its neck that nearly chokes it, so what of increasing it further?
If Trump plans in a certain direction, he finds another obstacle in his way. For example, America incurs massive financial losses from its war on Iran to make it a subordinate state. Through this, America wants its companies to plunder Iranian oil and gas, but the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps did not surrender to America. America imposed a naval blockade on Iran, which increased its war costs. Then Gulf oil exports were cut off, and Gulf state budgets needed money, so they began withdrawing their investments from inside America. All these war expenses and Gulf withdrawals occur without America being certain whether its companies are getting closer to plundering Iran’s oil and gas or moving further away from that. This explains President Trump's nervous state regarding the quagmire with Iran.
The Trump administration operates on the logic that weakening others strengthens America, but it works to weaken everyone, making no distinction between its allies and its enemies. The result we see so far is industrial stagnation in Germany, comprehensive economic weakness across Europe, and the British economy standing on the brink of collapse. In other words, American policies have indeed weakened Europe, but they have not weakened China. The outcome is that European countries are suffering and struggling just to provide more military spending, while China is dangerously ramping up its military production. That is to say, America weakened its alliance and its allies in Europe and failed to weaken China. This is how America is today: when it plans an economic policy, it quickly finds its negative effects manifesting in other areas unrelated to what it planned for. In this way, it is incapable of comprehensive planning as it once was, as matters slip through its fingers, and today's global winds do not blow in the direction America’s ships desire.
Today, President Trump frequently describes America as the strongest military power, with the world's best industries, and with superior capabilities in every aspect. These statements reveal the extent of American anxiety over the rapid shift of power toward China. Indeed, the transfer of power and its slipping from the hands of America and the West in general has become a comprehensive phenomenon in light of the failure of America and the West and the near-bankruptcy of this capitalist system. Even non-major countries like Iran and Turkey have developed autonomous or semi-autonomous manufacturing of drones, whose participation and importance in modern warfare is increasingly growing, and major powers—including Russia—have turned to them to obtain these drones.
Against the backdrop of this American weakness, which is being revealed day after day, the prominent conservative American media figure Tucker Carlson stated that Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz has exposed the limits of America’s military power, as America cannot remain a superpower if its control over the world's vital straits is undermined. This control means control over international trade and control over global wealth. Iran’s success in closing the Strait of Hormuz during the war has revealed that America’s military hegemony and its dominance over global trade and wealth have weakened and suffered a real frailty. This weakness and frailty deepen when Americans themselves say that the cost of maintaining hegemony is far greater than the return from it. For example, the US military cannot reopen the Strait of Hormuz except through a full-scale war with Iran, and the US military might be capable of fighting and winning it, but such a war would be in no way less than America’s quagmire in Iraq. In other words, such a war to regain control of Hormuz could drain America's power in Iran, leaving it without enough strength to fight any other war—for instance, around China, or anywhere else in the world. For example, when America struck Iran with fourteen bunker-buster bombs on the Fordow Facility in 2025, America no longer had the capacity for a similar operation, as manufacturing such bombs requires years and vast sums of money. The same applies to the guided bombs and missiles that America used heavily during the 2026 war. This explains Trump's retreat from his demands that Iran offer “unconditional surrender.” This war, which the Trump administration waged against a country within its orbit, represented a major setback for American power—on top of the setback in confidence in US policy among America's allies, followers, and agents.
Amid these repeated American setbacks, America must consider shedding some of its international burdens—that is, withdrawing from certain regions of the world so that it can retain the highest-priority areas. This is a major challenge. America is gradually withdrawing its troops from Europe today, and if Europe is begging America to keep its military umbrella over it to protect it from Russia, America is leaving no room for that even in the future, rebuking these countries and telling them they must defend themselves. In other words, Europe, which for decades represented the center of American policy, did not remain so compared to the greater importance of China and the Islamic region, where the major risks lie—China’s economic might and Islamic ideology—each of which threatens America’s greatness and international supremacy.
America failed to push the Gulf States into a war against Iran—that is, it failed to push its agents and followers to fight its war with their resources and armies, leaving the US military to fight the war alongside its ally, the Jewish entity. This demonstrates the sterility of the Trump administration’s policies, which provoke both enemies and allies, thereby weakening America's ability to mobilize its allies. Trump’s intransigence pushes America to bear the greatest burden of wars to maintain global control, meaning further draining of its resources. The Trump administration also failed to capitalize on the state's global prestige. In Iran, America did not take a stance that frightened the Iranians from sliding into a war with it; quite the opposite—America began assassinating top leaders, including the Supreme Leader, which prompted Iran to activate its full strength, attacking US military bases in the region, attacking its allies, and attacking the Jewish entity. Thus, the Iranian offensive stripped the prestige from US bases and its allies, causing America to lose prestige and bleed in terms of troops, equipment, and spending—all resulting from this intransigence. Trump declares he wants to achieve 100% of his demands and is not satisfied with even 95%. This American intransigence led to the exposure of America's weakness and frailty when Iran challenged America and closed the Strait of Hormuz, and America could not reopen it. Trump subsequently began backtracking to reach an agreement not far in essence from the Obama-era agreement with Iran in 2015.
In the region of Muslims, the Trump administration's tendencies manifested in the following events:
First: In the Jewish entity’s war on Gaza, the Trump administration provided full support to the Jewish entity. Even the small stockpile of heavy bombs that the Biden administration had withheld from the Jewish entity, Trump forcefully reopened access to. He demanded that the rulers, in the face of this Jewish criminality, normalize with the Jewish entity, and demanded they coordinate with it to deter Iran. He declared his admiration for the Jewish entity's criminal operations, including the pager explosions that targeted thousands of Lebanese, many of whom were civilians and not military personnel. The Jewish entity's criminality reached new extremes under the Trump administration, as its bombing reached Arab capitals—Beirut, Damascus, and Doha—to impose a new fait accompli, placing the rulers of these countries under the scalpel of intense pressure and intimidating other rulers.
It is true that the agent rulers of the region have submitted and accepted this coercive hegemony, which resembles a crushing defeat in a war they never fought. However, its repercussions do not bode well for America or even for the Jewish entity. It is true that the first-tier rulers accept submission and further humiliation in the face of these crimes and accept coordination with the Jewish entity, due to their deep-seated vileness and their view of their own peoples as enemies, and because they tie their future to America and the Jewish entity. However, these rulers have lost the very last layer—however small—of certain popular sectors that still harbored some hope in them. Moreover, trust and loyalty have been lost even among the lower tiers of the ruling factions, who are now disintegrating from the system and standing by, waiting for horizons of change, and waiting for new leadership to emerge as an alternative to the old leadership, after these tiers witnessed that what is happening surpasses any reasonable bounds in life.
Second: The rulers—America’s agents and followers in the region—witnessed how America turned its back on Iran’s services in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, then launched two wars against it alongside the Jewish entity in 2025 and 2026, seeking to strip it of all nuclear and missile capabilities, even though Iran repeatedly declares day and night that it does not seek to manufacture nuclear weapons. The Trump administration does not value anyone who previously served America, and this frightens the followers in the region and terrifies them that America could disown them, fight them, and topple their thrones. Therefore, despite their deep-seated vileness, these rulers, under Trump’s tenure, have come to fear America and be wary of its plans—meaning trust has vanished. When trust is absent, these rulers’ initiative to serve America and its interests ceases, limiting them to merely executing demands, and even then at a minimum. This in itself is a loss for American policy that the Trump administration does not realize.
Third: America established its military bases in the region, especially in the Gulf States, largely funded by those states’ own money, because the rulers believed the American propaganda that these bases were there to protect their countries and their thrones. Then, when America launched its war on Iran and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps began shelling these bases, the rulers realized that these American bases had actually brought calamities upon them. In fact, it is the armies of these rulers that provide protection for them through air defense. The likelihood of these countries being drawn into a war with Iran persists because of these bases. Despite the continued American propaganda about the role of these bases in protecting the rulers and their thrones, the new reality emerging after the Iran war thoroughly refutes these American claims. These rulers—despite their vileness—no longer believe American propaganda. Thus, America loses ground in deepening its influence due to the recklessness of the Trump administration and its one-sided vision. The Gulf States witnessed the genuine American protection given to the Jewish entity—America’s defense of the entity from multiple countries, from the sea, from within the entity itself, and its interception of Iranian missiles aimed at it—while nothing similar was done for these countries. If one adds to this the losses suffered by the Gulf States due to Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz, then the rulers' calculations with America have certainly entered the realm of doubt.
Fourth: Tom Barrack and other envoys of the Trump administration to Syria and Lebanon spoke openly and arrogantly, with no ambiguity, stating that it is the duty of the rulers in Syria and Lebanon to protect the Jewish entity, even if it required them to engage in civil war—as in the matter of disarming the Hezb of Iran in Lebanon. Similarly, with Egypt, pushing it to intensify pressure on Hamas to disarm and expose its tunnels, which the Jewish entity had failed to accomplish over three years. These rulers push forward in this direction due to their deep-seated vileness and their conviction that their own peoples are their enemies. However, this makes the ruling system in each country consist of multiple tiers in terms of the degree of affiliation with America, such that the upper tiers issue orders while the tiers’ layers obstruct them as much as possible. Not all instructions and orders are equal. Instead, if instructions lose their justifications, they become very weak and inapplicable. This is extremely dangerous for the upper ruling tiers, from whom the Trump administration demands beyond their capacity, without the American calculus realizing what is beyond capacity and what is below it of tiers. America also does not realize the medium- and long-term consequences of this. This lack of awareness is a trait of dictators like Pharaoh, who want others to see only what they see.
Fifth: Nor does the Trump administration cease attacking Islam under various headings. During his election campaign, he promised to close America to Muslims. Even his US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, has a tattoo on his hand with the word “Kafir” (disbeliever) in Arabic. Terrorism remains a label applied against enemies, and the Trump administration has added new groups to it that were previously described as moderate. The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the US State Department monitors the curricula of Muslim countries and demands their alteration. Rulers, driven by their vileness, rush to alter Islam to please America. Saudi Arabia, which is accustomed to declaring itself the number one Muslim country, searches for pre-Islamic archaeological artifacts in an attempt to change its people’s culture, and holds licentious parties near the sacred sites to please America. In Egypt, they transgress against what remains of Shariah rulings within the family domain. Overall, the deep-seated hatred of Islam has driven America to demand that rulers fight any manifestation and any Shariah ruling, no matter how small.
So, you see them sometimes casting doubt on the Sunnah, and at other times, some of their pens attack the noble Companions (ra). This is on top of elevating the vile and the debauched and giving them high positions in society, broadcasting their news as if the Ummah is concerned with following the garbage that these vile ones have reached.
Upon careful examination of all these points, we find that American policy is retreating in the region of Muslims, not advancing. We also find that it is generating deep-seated hatred and sharp animosity among Muslims, which are gradually seeping into the lower ruling classes. This is because the Gaza war, the alignment of the West—especially America—with the Jewish entity, its military support, political cover, and defense of the genocide committed by the Jews as self-defense in response to October 7, as well as the imposition of sanctions on international judges for pursuing cases against Zionist leaders, followed by the American-Jewish war on Iran—all of this and more has firmly entrenched a fundamental idea: that America is the head of kufr (disbelief) and the head of enmity, and that it is leading or standing behind the new Crusader campaigns that kill Muslims and destroy their homes almost everywhere.
This has also generated an urgent conviction about the necessity of getting rid of this reality in which rulers stand with America and the Jewish entity. All of this has further strengthened the adherence of the peoples of the Islamic Ummah to their Deen, and the belief that they are antagonized for being Muslim. These collective convictions have begun to spread, expand, and deepen within Muslim populations, constituting a collective and new intellectual shift toward Islamic identity, replacing nationalisms and ethnic loyalties—because the disbelieving states, led by America, attack Muslims as a unified Western bloc that primarily targets their Deen. In other words, the Trump administration's policy and the momentum of its rush into the region of Muslims are accelerating America's losses in the region, exacerbating Islamic sentiment, and bringing it closer to turning into a real political danger, especially as the lower ruling tiers are detaching from the upper tiers. There is no clearer evidence of all this than America’s own consideration of abandoning many of its military bases in the region and relocating them inside the Jewish entity.
Thus, it becomes clear that the Trump administration is leading America from one loss to an even greater one—whether at the level of international policy, confronting China, or domestic American divisions. If the artificial momentum accompanying the numerous statements made by President Trump still obscures the reality of American weakness, making them appear to express American strength—much like Gorbachev’s slogans in Moscow about reforms and moving forward at the end of the 1980s, which turned within a few years into a debacle that devastated Russia and squandered its international standing—then the reality is stark. If China’s opportunity to strategically benefit from this weakness is very slim, as China wants America to remain economically strong so it can continue to profit from its markets, and it does not think of replacing it, nor is it capable of that, then the great calamity that is hoped to befall America is a decisive and imminent battle awaiting in Muslim lands. America could not defeat Iran, even though Iran’s army did not move its borders forward, and America is absolutely incapable of defeating any Muslim country that fights it resolutely and moves beyond a defensive posture to offense, mobilizing new energies from Muslims every day that increase America's despair, pushing it backward and returning it to where it belongs.
Those who think that the silence enveloping Muslim lands in the face of Jewish massacres in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, and the American-‘Israeli’ wars on Iran, is a state of defeat or despair are mistaken. Instead, it is a state of shock sweeping the peoples of the nation and the lower ruling classes, resulting from a serious discovery of political realities: that the West is an enemy of Muslims, and that Muslims have no path to salvation except through Islam and its ruling governance. By the permission of Allah (swt), it will not be long before this shock causes a real fall of one of the rulers in some country, bringing down the system with him, ending the era of forceful, oppressive coercive rule and the age of the contemptible meddlers, and a new Khilafah (Caliphate) for Muslims will be established. Then, the wave of change will spread like a tsunami, sweeping away the remaining rulers, and the peoples of the Muslims will unify to become one Ummah under one Book and one Khaleefah (Caliph).