Brilliant editorial in the equator magazine:

The attempt to enforce American primacy by military means led to catastrophe in Helmand and Fallujah, just as Wall Street imploded at home. What has emerged from that failure is something more dangerous than either the Cold War order or the unipolar moment. The US may still be hegemonic in Europe, where obedient satraps like Merz and von der Layen genuflect to Washington, but for the rest of the world, America has stopped being either leader or lodestar. “The unravelling of the neoconservative project,” Giovanni Arrighi wrote in 2009, “has for all practical purposes resulted in the terminal crisis of US hegemony – that is, in its transformation into mere domination”.

Under the current regime, the US has little left to offer the world but a shameless display of coercion and destruction. Trump and his lieutenants seem intoxicated by their own impunity, indifferent to international law, uninterested in manufacturing consent, and exercising a form of political gangsterism through intimidation, kidnapping or offing rival heads of state. “Force,” Weil wrote, “is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims. The second it crushes; the first it intoxicates.” The stupefaction that descends on those who discover they can act without consequence is what she saw as arguably the deeper and more enduring catastrophe. The wielder of force experiences their own power as the natural order of things, and cannot imagine that it could be otherwise, or that the people their force is directed against – women, immigrants, Muslims, progressives and liberals – are human beings at all.