American Power Is Collapsing
This will be looked back on as the year in which American power, hard and soft, entered into accelerated collapse.
The World Cup is, in so many ways, a distraction from the war, mass murder and genocide inflicted by the empire and its proxies, but it has signalled the further fracturing of the soft power which has been integral to maintaining the myth of benign American empire.
The last four World Cup hosts - South Africa, Brazil, Russia and Qatar - used the event to bolster their soft power by doing everything possible to present an outward-looking, friendly face to the world. Russia, for example, waived all visa requirements for fans to enter the country, made long distance train transport between host cities free, and also made all local transit, from buses to subways, free.
The United States, by contrast, has used the opportunity to bare its imperialist, capitalist teeth.
It has outright travel bans on citizens of four countries playing at the tournament, has rejected fans and fan groups from countries around the world, denied visas to players and has banned referees from entering. Rather than using the moment, as past hosts have done, to repair images and restore reputations, the US has used the moment to showcase its essential imperialism. Rather than use the World Cup to defy critical narratives about who they are, the US has used it to reaffirm: yes, this is exactly who we are.
On the capitalist front, it has used the opportunity to showcase another favoured American tradition. Grift. New Jersey Transit, for example, has hiked a return ticket from Penn Station in Manhattan to MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, to $100 from a normal price of $12.90. The Massachusetts Transportation Bay Authority has priced return tickets from Boston to Gillette Stadium at $80 from the usual event-day price of $20. Other cities have enacted similar price hikes.
Every preconception about American greed has been validated, every assumption confirmed.
This fracturing of American soft power at the World Cup has been on full show for the globe to see, and it is all wonderfully self-inflicted. American leaders are capitalists and imperialists to their bone marrow. And I don’t just mean Trump, Hegseth and the MAGA crew. Do you hear complaints from Democrats about the entry bans, about the travel prices? In some cases Democratic cities are the ones grifting. Mamdani, to his credit, has been a lone critical voice. But still, New York under his and Kathy Hochul’s leadership isn’t offering free transit around the city, or to the MetLife stadium, for visiting fans.
The World Cup has perfectly encapsulated the venal spirit of the United States.
Ego, arrogance and hubris, undergirded by ideologies of capitalism and imperialism, have converged to create exactly the kind of experience they were always bound to create.
American disregard for soft power, its inability to set aside ideologies, even minimally, in order to boost its image, is underpinned by the fallacy of American hard power. American leaders, pumped up on militarism and nationalism, addicted to the action movie star aesthetic, care nothing for soft power because they believe hard power is the only type of power they need to dominate the globe.
But this misconception is coming undone in real time.
If the reports are to be believed, the US and Iran will sign a peace deal this week, and the signing will seal, regardless of its contents, a definitive and historic defeat for the United States.
The US and Israel attacked Iran explicitly to effect regime change and end the Islamic republic. They failed. However else this deal is dressed up by Trump and legacy media, this is the stone cold fact. The reopening of the Strait of Hormuz simply reanimates a status quo that existed before the attack. But the signing of this deal is anything but a return to the status quo. Iran has demonstrated deterrence, staved off two nuclear powers, dictated Israeli conduct over Lebanon, and the Islamic republic has survived. On top of that, Iran is likely now to achieve sanctions relief and the unfreezing of billions of dollars while still being able to enrich uranium. And with the toll system it initiated, while maintaining its ability to keep sending its own oil and gas out, Iran has been able to demonstrate strategic dominance over empire. The country has also inflicted billions of dollars of material damage on US military assets, damage it inflicted right up until the final round of attacks last week, and has forced US military forces to abandon their bases across the Middle East.
I’ve got no time for the petty complaints I’ve seen emerging from anti-imperialists about the deal Iran is about to sign. We’ve witnessed an undeniable, all-time anti-imperial win.
No near or medium-term US president will want to repeat Trump’s Iran misadventure, which means the country has staved off the threat of another imperial attack for some time, time it can use to manufacture thousands more of the missiles and drones which proved so effective.
Israel as always is the wildcard, but it cannot go it alone against Iran, and if it defies its handlers and reignites the war, it will be plunged it into a crisis that would help speed-run the end of that diseased colony.
In so many ways, the imperium in 2026 is the outcome that Donald Trump always promised: the inability to reckon with a multi-polar world, the refusal to recognise the limits of American hard power and the rejection of soft power virtues. These pathologies have melded into a crisis for empire, a crisis anyone who understands the necessity for the end of that empire should welcome.
In 1980 the historian William Appleman Williams wrote a book about US imperialism titled Empire As A Way Of Life. While acknowledging that empire doesn’t end overnight, he also urged Americans to imagine a way out of their imperial idiom.
Despite the World Cup debacle and the Iran deal, US empire hasn’t ended. Empires end by a thousand cuts, not one decisive blow, something Iranian leaders understand well. But the US has taken on some deep gashes recently. And while we shouldn’t expect the end of imperial violence, because dying empires lash out, the last few months are a sign that US empire as a way of life is, mercifully and gloriously, coming to an end.
Now, as Williams wrote, it’s up to Americans to do some imagining about what comes next.
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Most of this planet's human residents have a pretty good idea of what the USA is. If only they were US residents. The most misinformed are here with me, living in the putative land of the free and the home of the brave.
You might think that pictures of a flattened girl's academy would take a bit of the burnish off the home of the brave claim, but not yet for most of us. Too, one might think that shooting citizens for exercising their first amendment rights to free speech and assembly might make us dubvious about whether freedom really does flourish over this land, but indoctrinated propaganda dies hard.
The first target for my blame cannon is the national news media. Timely disclosures of our drastic loss of military hardware are not relayed. There is no attempt to allow us to see these events from a different perspective: say human. A long and distinguished culture, that of the Persians, is defending its existence without lashing out indiscriminately against American citizens. Our media owes us this perspective and also an accounting of the decades of imperious interference in Iranian governance over the span of my 73 year life. But the purveyors of violence, our military industrial corporations underwrite and frankly dictate the news for our consumption.
The cannon should next point at our education policy. We do not teach our own history to our children, nor do we seek to correct our own misinformed views.
Our most pressing problem is the cherished document that shackles us to injustice: The Constitution. It protects wealth and power, which is not me, and not you, dear reader.
I want to believe multipolarity and some sense of fairness is possible but I actually observe the empire failure is in outdated means while the financial centre of gravity is the main stage event. This looks more to me like the holders of power are just shrugging off military failure and slaughter of proxies while their main efforts are focused on creating notional value and power outside the reach of the common human. The tools at the disposal the power structures have never been so omnipresent, insidious and concentrated.