The end of an empire does not come suddenly in a thunderclap. No. Empires fall by degrees both internally and externally concurrently as internal failures lead to the failing empire being abandoned by its former allies and challenged by its enemies. And that, folks, is where the US empire stands today – we are a failed empire that is collapsing – collapsing slowly but surely collapsing.
America remains an economic superpower with an enormous military budget. And the combination of a supine Republican Party, along with a Supreme Court that shamelessly greenlights Trump’s authoritarianism, has given this president more control over U.S. policy than any president has ever had, or ever should have. But while Trump is able to run roughshod over Americans, he can no longer bully the rest of the world. Thanks to Trump, the U.S. has seen its global influence plunge.
There are three big reasons for that precipitous decline.
First, there is the debacle in Iran. Not only did Trump’s war of choice fail in all its objectives, it revealed that U.S. military power is far more limited than almost anyone realized. The insistence by Trump and his lackeys that this humiliating defeat was a great victory shows that American foreign policy only serves to pander to Trump’s fragile ego. And when his ego meets reality, it slithers away.
In addition to showing the limits of U.S. military power, the war also showed the limits of U.S. financial power: It is increasingly easy for nations to bypass U.S. banks and the dollar using cryptocurrency — and Chinese yuan.
A second, in its way equally important, blow to U.S. prestige and influence has been Trump’s failure to deliver Ukraine to Vladimir Putin – as Trump promised Putin he would do.
For make no mistake: everyone at that summit in Ankara knows that Trump, JD Vance and company both expected and hoped that their betrayal of Ukraine would lead to Russian victory. Surely, they imagined, Ukraine would be unable to hold off the onslaught from its much bigger neighbor without U.S. aid. To America’s everlasting shame, Trump told Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he didn’t “have the cards.”
Yet after Trump cut U.S. aid to Ukraine by 99 percent, Ukraine not only survived but began gaining the upper hand. Europe has stepped up financially, more or less replacing the lost American dollars. And Ukrainian military innovation has largely made up for the loss of American weapons.
The result has been to make the U.S. increasingly irrelevant. Put it this way: Iran taught foreign governments not to fear American might; China, along with the crypto industry, has taught rogue countries that they needn’t fear American financial control; and Ukraine has taught foreign governments that they don’t need American support.
Finally, Trump’s global power play rested on economics even more than on military force, above all on his belief that other nations would cower in fear at the prospect of facing U.S. tariffs. But Trump’s attempt to weaponize international trade has been a bust. Most notably, China’s economy has powered right through the Trump tariffs. Furthermore, it turns out that China has escalation dominance in the trade war: we need their rare earths more than they need access to our consumers.
And other nations — even Canada and Mexico, which have historically been highly dependent on the U.S. market — are moving to reduce their dependence. Canada’s move to build a new pipeline that will let it sell Alberta oil to Asia rather than the Midwest is just a highly visible symbol of a general world move toward bypassing America now that we have become an unstable, unreliable economic partner.