© UnknownSymbols of America in downfall
Indeed, from Rome to London, by way of Byzantium and Vienna, all superpowers have shared the same illusion of permanence. Endowed with hegemonic power at a given moment in world history, each believed it held the world for eternity. Each also carried within it, from its zenith, the seeds of its downfall: military hubris, the economic predation of the peripheries, and the inability to reformulate an acceptable global contract. The Pax Romana collapsed under the weight of its overextended legions. The Pax Britannica expired at Suez in 1956, humiliated by its own American creation. The Pax Americana is not exempt from this iron law of history, culminating in Tehran seizing power and burying the illusion of the Pax Judaica.
It is dying today under the lucid gaze of a global South that, at last, dares to name the empire.
The Middle Kingdom... Western
We must call things by their proper names. Pax Americana was not peace. It was an order. An imposed order, codified, sanctified by the victory of 1918, then consolidated on the smoldering ruins of 1945. One hundred and eight years of hegemony. A century in which Washington believed itself to be the center of gravity of the world. This center has now definitively shifted, capsized in the tumultuous waters of the Straits of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb, forcing Washington to accept an agreement of capitulation towards Tehran.
The collapse did not stem solely from military defeat (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, Iran, etc.). It stemmed from the silent accumulation of contradictions. The American empire carried within itself its own termites, or rather, the seeds of its own destruction: jurisdictional arrogance, the logic of economic predation, and the reflex of proxy wars. These three pillars, once sources of power, became accelerators of decay.
Extraterritoriality, or the law as a weapon of war
American law does not stop at American borders. Washington has methodically transformed its legal system into an instrument of global domination. The extraterritoriality of American law - this self-proclaimed right to sanction, freeze assets, prosecute, and convict foreign sovereign entities - constitutes the most advanced form of contemporary colonialism.
Companies and banks - BNP Paribas, Alstom, Airbus, Huawei, and Deutsche Bank - the list of non-American companies subjected to Washington's legal inquisition is long. Fines run into billions. Forced buyouts follow. The technique is well-established: destabilize a strategic foreign company, bleed it dry financially, then buy it back at a bargain price. It's predation disguised as legal procedure. It's plunder in black robes.
This mechanism was tolerated as long as no one dared name it. Today, it is named, denounced, and systematically circumvented. Economic sovereignty is being reclaimed.
Proxy wars: the Ukrainian model as a revealing example
Ukraine has revealed everything. Not just the brutality of the Russo-Western military clash. It has revealed the inner workings of American power: transforming entire populations into geopolitical cannon fodder. Kyiv has become the ultimate laboratory for this logic. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian deaths to weaken Moscow. Billions were spent on armaments to prolong a conflict that Washington could have ended with the Istanbul Accords in March 2022, and which it deliberately sabotaged. These billions have not produced the desired effect, but the opposite: Russia is stronger than before, and its alliances are just as solid as ever.
This isn't a theory. It's a timeline. Boris Johnson arrives in Kyiv on April 9, 2022. Negotiations collapse. Fighting resumes. The United Kingdom bears the mark of Washington's hand here. Ukraine was not meant to make peace. Ukraine was meant to bleed Russia dry. Zelensky, a willing hostage of a strategy beyond his control, sacrificed his people on the altar of a geostrategic vision forged in the corridors of Langley and the Pentagon.
The result? Russia, though certainly wounded to some extent, held firm. Its economy is holding up. Its army has grown stronger. And the non-Western world watched. It understood.
The Global South is waking up
What Washington did not foresee was the political maturity of the Global South. Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Arab world: these regions have absorbed a hundred years of condescension, sponsored coups, structural debt, and structural adjustment programs - these shock therapies imposed by the IMF and the World Bank, the financial armed wings of Pax Americana.
The mechanism was relentless: indebted states, conditional aid, imposed privatizations, and extracted resources. Françafrique was merely the Francophone version of a universal model. Eurafrica, the European counterpart to this model. Everywhere, the same recipes. Everywhere, the same results: corrupt elites, strangled middle classes, young people condemned to exile.
But something has changed. The BRICS+ countries now represent more than 45% of global GDP in purchasing power parity. Dedollarization is progressing. Trade in yuan, rubles, and local currencies is increasing. China has built roads, ports, and hospitals without imposing democratic conditions. Iran, under sanctions for more than forty years, survives and exports. Russia sells its oil to India, China, Africa, and Latin America at reduced prices, and everyone benefits, except Washington.
The surge of solidarity from the Global South is not ideological. It is pragmatic. And Washington doesn't know how to respond to pragmatism.
Time for a review
The American century ends in 2026 not with a bang, but with a gradual fading away. The symptoms are everywhere. The dollar is losing its status as the undisputed universal reserve currency. NATO is exhausting itself in a war it cannot win. American influence in the Sahel and elsewhere on the continent has evaporated in three years. In the Middle East, Riyadh is negotiating with Tehran under Chinese mediation, unthinkable ten years ago.
The empire was not defeated militarily. It exhausted itself. Through a series of unjustified wars: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Venezuela, Iran, and so on. Through institutionalized lies. Through a double standard erected into a permanent and accepted doctrine.
History is not cruel. It is simply honest. Every hegemony carries within it the seed of its successor. The Pax Britannica collapsed at Suez in 1956. The Pax Americana is fading away in Kyiv, Gaza, Bamako, Caracas, Tehran - everywhere the lie of the "international community" has shown its true face.
Westerners, fearful of the world's multipolarity, are already claiming that what comes next is not necessarily better or just. But for the Global South, what was leaving was unbearable.
The American century is dead. It doesn't know it yet. Or rather, it knows it, and that is precisely why it remains so profoundly dangerous.
Comment: It is easy to connect all negative dots to create a one-sided argument. Every country leans one way or another given needs, perspective, history, future, honesty, corruption and leadership...shades of gray blunting its 'red, white and blue'. Could it, should it all be better? Indeed!