By M Muneer, Fortune-500 advisor, start-up investor, and co-founder of Medici Institute for Innovation
Greatness is a fascinating word. It sounds absolute, like Everest or the Pacific Ocean. But in practice, it behaves more like a school ranking—meaningful only because someone else is below you on the list. Nations love to declare themselves “great”, preferably while glancing sideways to ensure others look slightly less so.
The more interesting question, however, is this: Can a country become great by simply doing the right things—investing in innovation, building resilient institutions, imbibing trust, advancing technology, and creating economic systems that attract talent and capital? Or does it require a villain, a foil, and a convenient “other” to outshine?
Enter Donald Trump and the slogan that launched a thousand red caps—“Make America Great Again”. It’s a phrase that sounds like a nostalgic hug but behaves like a geopolitical elbow.
Zero-Sum Fallacy
At its core, MAGA carries an implicit assumption—that America’s greatness has been diminished not just by its own policy choices, but by the rise, behaviour, or mere existence of other nations. If that’s the diagnosis, the treatment becomes tariffs, trade wars, strategic hostility, and the increasing flirtation with military bravado, all packaged as patriotic duty.
The logic appears to be that if others are brought down a notch, America rises by default. It’s the international equivalent of lowering the class average to ensure you top the exam. But greatness built on comparison is fragile. Greatness built on destruction is corrosive. And greatness built on both tends to age as well as milk.
History, humanity’s most overqualified and perpetually ignored consultant, has been leaving the same memo for centuries—empires that confuse muscle for immortality eventually get a very expensive reality check. They collect land like Pokémon cards, hoard resources like it’s a clearance sale, and build influence that looks invincible—until they also collect resentment, rebellion, and a slow collapse.
The idea that destabilising resource-rich countries can enhance domestic prosperity is not new. It has been attempted, refined, and rebranded with phrases like “national security”, “strategic interests”, or the ever-flexible “spreading democracy”.
The outcomes, however, tend to follow a familiar pattern—short-term gains, long-term entanglements, and a global reputation that oscillates between suspicion and outright hostility.
When a nation begins to act as the world’s moral police, deciding which regimes are acceptable, which governments are threats, and which countries require “correction”, it enters a paradox. It claims to enforce order but ends up amplifying instability. It seeks to project strength but reveals insecurity. And then comes the selective application of outrage.
Selective Outrage
If the goal is to “save people” from oppressive regimes, one might reasonably ask why certain countries are spotlighted while others remain curiously offstage. Why is a regime like North Korea, with its well-documented internal conditions, not subjected to the same intensity of interventionist enthusiasm? The answer, of course, lies not in moral clarity but in strategic calculus. Some risks are too high, some consequences too unpredictable, and some adversaries too inconvenient. In other words, morality filtered through geopolitics develops preferences.
When decisions conveniently align with oil fields, trade routes, or electoral optics rather than any consistent moral compass, “moral leadership” stops looking like a lighthouse and starts behaving like a stage light, illuminating only what serves the script. Principles are simply put on a flexible subscription plan.
Now layer onto this the question of global responsibilities, particularly around climate change. The US, as one of the world’s largest historical emitters, occupies a unique position in climate negotiations. Yet, by opting out of COP30, it has challenged the rest of the world to take action against them, The absence of such an action emboldened the US to flex its muscles in more aggressive ways ever since—in Venezuela, Iran, and possibly Cuba.
Can a nation claim greatness while sidestepping collective responsibility? True greatness is not just about power. It is about credibility. It is about the ability to lead not merely by force or fear, but by example. And examples, unlike slogans, are difficult to spin.
The real comedy of MAGA is its spectacular misreading of what greatness means. Greatness isn’t a zero-sum spreadsheet where you downgrade others to upgrade yourself. It isn’t built by manufacturing enemies, but by manufacturing competence. You don’t extract your way to excellence, you create your way there.
Nations that binge on external disruption tend to starve internally. Every dollar spent flexing abroad is a dollar not fixing what’s broken at home. Fear-based politics may win applause, but it quietly corrodes social trust. And a foreign policy that breeds resentment doesn’t create dominance; it creates distance.
Most dangerously, once a country starts bending its moral compass for convenience, it doesn’t spring back, it warps.
These are not mistakes that fade with election cycles. Distrust becomes default, alliances become transactional, and credibility becomes expensive to rebuild.
Is greatness comparative? Inevitably yes, but the comparison need not be destructive. It can be aspirational. Nations can compete to innovate, educate, decarbonise, and to uplift citizens. The race does not have to be to the bottom.
And what of the idea that one can achieve greatness by undermining others? That is less a strategy and more a historical rerun with a predictable ending. In the long arc of time, greatness is not awarded to those who dominated the most, but to those who built the most enduring systems of trust, prosperity, and progress.