Bannon, a self-declared general of global populists, wants to break the world order. And he’s tapped into something much bigger than Trumpism.
There are times when Washington still feels like what it used to be—a sleepy little Southern city. Generations of some of the most powerful people on earth have spent their days in DC griping that the city is a backwater. But Washington’s modest position in our constellation of great cities was always part of its charm, well-suited to our sprawling continental republic. American power has no center, or rather, it has centers all over—New York for finance, Houston for energy, the low-slung hubs of Menlo Park and Atherton, California, for tech, all the way back to the elite schools of New England, where our scribes and aristocrats are trained to manage the subsystems that keep the American project functioning. America, as many of the most powerful people in the world now fret, may suddenly feel like the Roman Empire entering its age of chaos and decline. But America has never had a Rome.
The DC area has grown immensely in population, wealth, and importance since the end of the Cold War. Its new status as the capital of a free-spending and unchallenged global hegemon made the region into one of the world’s richest metro areas. Washington now even boasts an infrastructure befitting its position as the administrative center of an empire, as the casual phrasing among policy elites now often puts it—one that depends as much on flows of money and information as it does on raw military force. A cluster of cables and data centers in northern Virginia now funnel a huge majority of global internet traffic through unassuming exurbs like Tyson’s Corner, where communications can be conveniently monitored by the experts at the National Security Administration. But this past July, Washington felt barely prepared to host an event like the 75th-anniversary summit of NATO.