Years ago, while researching a book about a rising China’s self-image as a global power, I came across a parable about the risks of sudden and excessively naked geopolitical ambition that was so remarkable that I quoted it in length, as I will again here.

The imagery in the passage by the strategy writer Edward N. Luttwak has lost none of its power. What stands out today, though, is how much the world it applies to has changed and how thoroughly the principals have switched roles.

“Riders in a crowded elevator cabin into which an extremely fat Mr. China has just stepped in must react self-protectively if he is becoming fatter at a rapid rate, squeezing them against the walls—even if he is entirely unthreatening, and indeed affable. True, the crowded elevator cabin already contained an even fatter, louder, and frequently violent Mr. America, but simply because he had long been a fellow rider, almost everybody had over the decades come to a satisfactory accommodation with his noisy bulk…”

Luttwak’s elevator scenario, with its offending body imagery, was published more than a decade ago, at a time of sharpening anxiety about a fast-rising China. What was then still the world’s most populous country, and the nation with the most extraordinary record of economic transformation over a quarter-century, was making lots of people nervous. This, of course, included Western countries, led by the United States, which had long been accustomed to their own world-beating wealth and far-reaching power and influence that this fed. Increasingly now, they were reduced to nervously watching China gain on them in the rearview mirror.

China may have still been capable of affability, as Luttwak then put it, but it was far from “entirely unthreatening.” The sense of an already overcrowded elevator with an outsized new passenger he described verged sometimes on suffocating for neighbors of China like Japan and the maritime countries of Southeast Asia, who felt they were being openly bullied as it invested in a new blue-water navy and began using it to enforce extralegal claims to nearly all the surrounding region’s seas.

The two things that have changed most since then are the way most of the fellow passengers in the proverbial elevator car have grown accustomed to China’s heft. The country’s phenomenal economic growth has slowed a bit, and more importantly, has come to be seen in more matter-of-fact terms than as a mind-blowing reality. The other, of course, is the astonishing comportment of the United States under the leadership of President Donald Trump.

In 2017, when I wrote my book Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power, it seemed common sense to me to counsel calm for the United States. The country’s best path, I advised, was to keep its own house in order. That meant remaining relatively open to the rest of the world while continually investing in its formidable strengths in science and education. Washington should not overreact to China’s new strength by making the mistakes of behaving more aggressively or overemphasizing military power. Instead, it should strengthen its alliances and reinforce international law.

Things like these would renew its attractiveness to the rest of the world and oblige China to compete on terms greatly favorable to the United States. These involved soft power, democracy, the rule of law, and the ready embrace of talented and hardworking people from whatever corner of the world they might come from. Although China has done little among these last few items, it has continually reinvested in its own strengths, keeping its head down diplomatically while bolstering its educational system as a down payment on future competitiveness.

As president over two discontinuous terms, Trump has done practically the opposite across the board. But for me, it is only in the last few weeks that Luttwak’s colorful parable has been brought powerfully back to mind.

With its hyperaggressive actions in countries as geographically far-flung as Nigeria, Syria, and Venezuela, where Trump declared himself the “acting president” after ordering the abduction of Nicolás Maduro, and with threats of more attacks in places like Iran, it is now the United States that is squeezing a host of countries against the elevator’s walls. In Luttwak’s metaphor, China was mostly expanding by growing economically. Under second-term Trump, Washington began seeking to do so in an entirely different way, one that harkened back to the imperial age, when the first instinct of nations competing for wealth and power in the world was territorial aggrandizement. This has all resulted in something almost unimaginable in the era in which the elevator parable was written. Nowadays, it is often China more than the United States that appears as a global status quo power.

The most glaring example of this involves Trump’s recent escalation of claims to Greenland, which threatens to remake the image of the United States into that of a rogue nation. His language vowing to get it one way or another, easy or hard, echoes gangland dialogue from Hollywood more than it does traditional diplomacy. And it threatens to finally break Washington’s relationship with Europe, transforming it from an increasingly wary alliance to something much more situational and potentially distant.

As Trump’s seeming fondness for Russian President Vladimir Putin, and his corresponding equivocal support for a besieged Ukraine could attest, this has possibly been his goal all along. The American president has never impressed me as a systematic thinker or someone capable of much long-term vision, but followed to its logical conclusions, the Luttwak scenario can tell us a lot about what to expect in a rapidly changing world. And some of these changes are indeed already underway.

When a passenger in an already overcrowded elevator begins to behave aggressively, throwing sharp elbows around and coughing in people’s faces, in utter disregard for common conventions, the other passengers at some point have little choice but to push back. That’s the reality the world is awakening to after Trump declared he has no use for international law and is only limited by his own “morality.” Pushback, especially early on, can take many forms and doesn’t necessarily mean mirroring the offensive behavior. Few may have the courage to take on the behemoth alone. But to switch to the language of international relations, they seek strength in numbers, forming coalitions with their aggrieved neighbors and even with sympathetic passengers outside of their immediate circle.

That’s the meaning, at least in part, of Europe’s recent but long-belated finalization of a trade agreement with South America. The logic of this is called hedging. It’s what countries do when long-standing partnerships are cast into doubt, and one can expect to see more and more of it around the world in response to a Trump who appears to be giving in to megalomania.

Another example, both more obscure and surprising, comes with the news that Saudi Arabia, an oil power that Trump has courted heavily, has been in talks to acquire Chinese-made fighter jets for its air force, and has struck a strategic mutual defense pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan. Under the current president, Washington has shown a willingness to sell the Saudis virtually whatever weapons their hearts desire, including the United States’ most advanced fighter airplane. The problem is that Trump’s erratic and aggressive behavior has made them nervous like everyone else.

The urge to hedge is an ominous sign for a United States that is in the midst of an extremely foolhardy geopolitical paradigm shift—one that weakens its commitments and interdependence with long-standing allies in Europe and Asia in favor of the fantastical notion that by dominating the Western Hemisphere, America will be just fine, if not even better off.

Latin America compares poorly with the United States’ traditional close allies in NATO, Japan, and South Korea in terms of wealth, innovation, technology, manufacturing prowess, population, and almost every other significant competitive metric one can think of. This is no argument against reinvesting in Latin America, which the United States has long treated as an afterthought. But the idea that Trump’s America will emerge richer and stronger by recentering its geopolitics on its home hemisphere is sheer folly.

But a further problem arises. By throwing its weight around in Latin America the way it has done in Venezuela, and is threatening in Colombia, Mexico, and Cuba, the United States is ensuring that more balancing will come to its own backyard, too. It’s just a matter of time.