Anne Applebaum wrote another sermon and y'all posted it like scripture.
The thesis is that America stopped running the world like a NGO and that's "corruption." Tariffs on Brazil because they're lawfaring an ally isn't the same as the old State Department lecturing everyone while China buys the minerals. Informal channels exist because the official ones spent 30 years talking and losing.
She compares MAGA to Bolsheviks. That's not analysis. That's a tantrum from a magazine that thought "spreading democracy" meant endless lectures, open borders, and never noticing who actually got rich off the old order.
If the best they've got is The Atlantic calling it an "empire of grift," they don't have a foreign policy argument. They have a eulogy for their own club.
I came for the rumors, stayed for the overreactions.