The Age of American Humiliation is Here
We're waking up today in a new and stupider world.
I can’t tell you the number of people who reached out on Tuesday asking if the President of the United States was preparing to launch a nuclear strike on Iran. It was one of those days where the veil of civilization and decorum peels away to reveal the true madness of this fucked up world. The stakes became hauntingly clear and the specter of living another day under the rule of this madman appeared in its full audacious terror. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t cute. It was the equivalent of snapping out of a dissociative fugue and realizing you’re in the passenger seat of a car going a hundred miles an hour down the wrong way of a busy interstate.
The largeness of Trump’s threats reveal something critical here. As I’ve often talked about, abusers are never more dangerous than when they are cornered or weak. Looking back over the past month or so, it’s obvious how atrocious and historical the decision to carry out war in Iran was from the very beginning. Intoxicated by the feeling of power from kidnapping Nicolás Maduro, Trump was led into the war by Israel and Saudi Arabia, a pair of rogue client states, thinking he and his anti-brain trust were smarter than all of the intelligence and military strategists warning him it was a disaster in the making. Iran ran circles around the U.S., exposing our most critical lies, and sprung an economic trap that was so telegraphed that Iran themselves told everyone leading up to the war it would be one of their first moves.
In the past few days, the picture has only grown clearer. The “rescue” mission that took up headlines over the holiday weekend has gotten progressively foggier and less believable, now focusing on the twist of “Ghost Murmur,” a “top secret” CIA device that utilizes “long-range quantum magnetometry” to find a missing weapons officer, and Hollywood-ready stories about the officer directing strikes from his hiding spot. Meanwhile, just a cursory glance at the situation tends to speak more toward the very real possibility that Trump and company greenlit a special operation to try and steal over 1,000 pounds of enriched uranium from a base near Isfahan and were summarily ambushed, defeated, and had to escape in a hell of a hurry.
This disaster, on top of a whole heap of other disasters, has now resulted in a ceasefire that isn’t even a ceasefire. Iran is still striking Israel and just hit a pipeline in Saudi Arabia. They’ve assumed total control of the Strait of Hormuz, which is an earth-shaking development that could change almost everything. Israel is still pounding away at both Iran and Lebanon and shows no signs of stopping. Trump’s “last second” deal was brokered by Pakistan and likely only happened because we begged China to pull some weight with Iran to get them to accept an offer that was, despite what you’re being told, an American surrender gussied up with lies and laughable deniability.
Welcome to the Age of American Humiliation.
An Exposed Goliath
The basis of American hegemony since the end of World War II was a guarantee of safety. In exchange for ultimate global power, the U.S. promised its allies around the world that it would protect them from aggression and use its power to secure free and unfettered trade. To this end, the U.S. created global capitalism, a system of supply chains and relationships that set the stage for a period of historic profit. Of course, that arrangement including longstanding partnerships with dictators and warmongers who would keep their peoples in slavery and poverty, but the resulting “1st world” privileges were prioritized above human dignity.
In the last few years, this has all started to go to hell as capitalism is preparing to abandon American hegemony and head for brighter skies. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and then the genocide in Gaza, accompanied by one endless war after another by Israel, exposed that the U.S. was incapable of holding the order together anymore. All it took was someone, in this case Vladimir Putin, to dare the empire to do something. When they didn’t, everything else was fair game.
With Iran, the U.S. was exposed. Simple strategy revealed that America’s military, the most expensive project in the world, was actually wildly vulnerable. For all of the jets and systems and everything our wealth has been plundered to create, all Iran had to do was launch dirt-cheap drones and missiles at critical infrastructure - exposing the vulnerabilities of a global capitalist system - and bleed shockingly expensive interceptors dry. The Iron Dome didn’t matter. U.S. swagger didn’t matter.
Then, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz took advantage of those vulnerabilities and revealed simply kinking the hose of the supply chain could bring the entire world to its knees. Though there isn’t much talk of it now, we’re likely going to suffer shockwaves, as will the rest of the world, emanating from that closure. The effects could range from pretty bad to catastrophic. Add that to an already precarious economy and you could have a total disaster on your hands that could alter history. Oh, and Iran is now going to charge millions of dollars for ships to move through the Strait, an arrangement Trump seems fine with as long as he gets a cut. If you think about the effects of free shipping now being charged at this level, you start to feel a little antsy.
But, what’s more, the failure of the U.S. to protect gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE will have incredible repercussions. The petrodollar system - an arrangement by which the U.S. bought fossil fuels from these gulf states and, in turn, those gulf states reinvested in the U.S. economy - is in absolute tatters. Surely the gulf states will still invest in American interests, but to the same extent? Why would they? The investment, in the past, was a promise to borrow the U.S. military in case of emergency and now we’ve seen that that isn’t the safest bet in the world. Not to mention, the gulf states in question have suffered immense damage to their infrastructure and will need those resources to repair themselves.
Now, consider that the tech industry and the AI project are largely kept afloat by gulf state investment. Oh, and the AI project is also an umbrella for the data center construction boom, which accounts for a massive share of all U.S. construction projects. Kind of makes you wonder if the entire AI bubble, which was on the verge of popping before the war, is quivering.
Not With a Whimper, but With a Bang
A few years back I was talking with a group after my book The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis came out. Back then, in January of 2023, a lot of people were still convinced that Joe Biden would right the ship and that maybe even Trump would end up in jail. So, in my talks, I received a little bit of pushback here and there. Surely the American Empire wasn’t heading toward a collapse and surely capitalism wasn’t nearly finished with American hegemony and looking elsewhere.
Sometimes that pushback would take the form of someone asking what I imagined the U.S.’s collapse into failure would look like and it was a welcome exercise. The American “character,” so to speak, is defined by arrogance, delusion, and militaristic violence. So, I figured, it would look something like one humiliation after another as the empire faltered and refused to learn its lessons. We would be reduced to a laughingstock as we alienated our allies and friends and walked stupidly into an escalating series of traps laid out by our rivals. The people would recognize it before our leaders because we were experiencing the “leadership” of increasingly senile and corrupt men. The tension between the people and that terrible leadership would lead to increased oppression and possibly even revolt.
Well, we’re here.
The staggering nature of this failure is really hard to appropriately convey. The foundation for American Hegemony is pulverized. A memory so distant those who believed in it, outside of the U.S. at least, are probably shocked they ever believed in it in the first place. Europe is busily working on a new alliance that excludes us because they can read the writing on the wall. China is quickly becoming the new fulcrum of world power and its alliance with Russia and Iran is paying wild dividends. Conversations among their strategic minds has to be akin to what Americans watching the decrepit Soviet leadership prior to collapse sounded like. Giddy disbelief.
What does this mean? Economic hardship. Increased oppression and surveillance at home, where the fascist regime can still lash out and exert control. Probably an excursion to somewhere like Cuba in order to rack up an “easy win.” More threads to Canada, Greenland, and anyone else. The U.S. will continue lording over the Western Hemisphere and playing directly in the Spheres of Influence strategy that China and Russia have envisioned. Sometimes we’ll lash out and get over our skis and then we’ll get our asses handed to us while we dole out unbelievable and unnecessary tragedies.
It reminds me, a lot, of this guy I knew in elementary school. He talked a lot of shit and started a lot of fights. He didn’t win many of them. In fact, a friend of mine were chatting not too long ago about how we both had a rite of passage where his provocations had to be met with violence. We kicked his ass and he went off to find someone else to bother until they kicked his ass.
This is far, far from the last time America will be humiliated, and it is likely, if we do not take a democratic stand and shut our economy down, that it will only get dumber and dumber. I know that sounds unbelievable now, but what lies beyond Trump, in the faraway fields of American collapse, is something uglier and meaner and stupider. And, considering the nature of these things, probably more violent. Already the Far Right is divorcing from MAGA and lining up to blame Jews for this failure and embarrassment, and you don’t need a PhD in history to see where those things go.
These mistakes will compound. The economic impact and the political impact and the military impact and every other impact will create new problems that these idiots will fail to solve and will, through their idiocy, make even worse. Their attempts to fix things will, once again, humiliate us and dig the hole deeper.
There is a future where this humiliation compounds and, like past shiftings of cycles and power, a war will be “necessary.” Already we should see where the battle lines are drawn and what the consequences would be. This disastrous “excursion” in Iran, which might not even done yet, needs to serve as an illustration of just how nightmarish modern war can be. In case it isn’t already obvious, you cannot rely on these “leaders” to make the right choices and midterms or presidential elections, in this current stake, will not set things right. If we are to avoid the worst case scenario, it is on us to take action and step up to the moment.
Humiliation is painful, but it is also information. Do not shy away from it. The American Empire has been a horrendous and earth shattering disaster. We have terrorized the world for far too long and this defeat, like that of the bully lying bleeding in the dirt, is both deserved and telling.
Don’t look away now. Feel it. Know it.
