If we look at the current macro geopolitical phase, fundamentally characterized by the manifestation of Western decline, it is possible to note that the strategic policy adopted by what was the pivotal power of the West, namely the United States, is characterized by a fundamental contradiction. The US strategic objective, in fact, is not simply to slow down the decline, or to limit its scope, but to reverse its course, to reconstitute and reaffirm the North American hegemonic position over the rest of the world. And, given the current conditions of the American empire, this requires time. Putting US power back in a position to confront and defeat the countries that challenge its hegemony, requires the need to buy time. In this respect, the choice made by the power bloc that has taken the lead of the USA is to try to divide these countries – especially the most aggressive ones – both to try to defeat them separately, one at a time, and to prevent the awareness of the strength deriving from their sum from inducing them to strike first.
But – and this is the contradiction mentioned – in doing this Washington is imposing a generalized acceleration. Apparently, the two things could even appear coherent: I don't have much time available, so I speed up my action. But, obviously, this could be true if the lack of time was due exclusively to external objective factors, while in the case of the United States the time needed depends on a subjective condition (decline), whose recovery process cannot be accelerated. The strategic objective can only be achieved by obtaining more time to restore sufficient operating conditions, and therefore the action should focus on time dilation, on the slowing down of global processes, and at the same time on the massive use of available resources in order to reconstitute the lost power.
The United States must rebuild its industrial capacity – which is the main factor that allowed its victory in the Second World War – it must rethink and re-establish its armed forces, it must defend the international standard of the dollar, it must reduce a monstrous public debt. And this requires an incompressible time.
These, and no others, are the reasons that push Trump towards a temporary peaceful resolution of the most acute crises. It responds to the dual need to open divisions on the enemy front, and to free itself from onerous and fruitless commitments, which slow down the ability to recover.
And yet, in addressing these crises, the American administration is once again accelerating, reproducing the same contradiction in individual strategic contexts, between the time objectively necessary to find a solution and the rush to resolve them.
This is what we are witnessing in relation to the conflict in Ukraine. It is clear that this conflict is taking place – precisely – in Ukraine, but that the clash is between Russia and NATO, that is, the United States itself, and that it has been dragged on for so long that it has reached a point of no return, in which military defeat is no longer avoidable, and one can only try to limit the damage of that policy. But the negotiation with Moscow should have started from a realistic analysis of the context, something that Washington does not seem to have worried about at all.
The issue is in fact very simple. In the Russian perception of the conflict, this is much more essential, existential, than it is for the USA. And this, among other things, means that Russia has equipped itself in every respect – political, military, psychological – to face even a long-lasting war, but one that it absolutely cannot lose. So, in fact, the opening of a negotiation implies that Washington has essentially only one card in its hand, namely the willingness to discuss and formalize a framework of mutual security, in particular with regard to the European theater. Contrary to what they think in Washington, for Moscow a possible reopening of the West towards Russia (symbolized by the offer to welcome it back into the G7) is of little or no interest. And for the US to be able to play this card, it is obvious that the fundamental condition was to ensure the full support of the European countries, and the iron control of Ukraine. But not only have the White House not made the slightest attempt in this direction, but even – the acceleration – they have tried and are trying to exploit the situation to rake in and steal resources from the entire continent, accentuating the gap between the two sides of the Atlantic and, in fact, putting spokes in their own wheels.
The result is that, quite predictably, the negotiation is struggling to get off the ground, even just with respect to the resolution of the conflict – which, and it was not difficult to understand, already poses so many problems in itself that it was truly naive to think of resolving them quickly. It follows that, while Trump needs to quickly obtain results – which he also needs, if not above all, on the internal front [1] – he finds himself with a situation further complicated by his own actions, with European countries marching in the opposite and contrary direction, and doing everything to hinder his attempts at negotiation, and Ukraine (also thanks to European support) digging its heels in. And this, simply, deprives Washington of the possibility of playing the only card it has. Not only that. The evident difficulty of the United States in getting both its allies and the Ukrainian proxy back in line, increases Russian distrust, which sees in its counterpart a subject not in a position to offer the only things that are truly important for Moscow.
The situation in the Middle East is completely similar. Here too, we are faced with an extremely complex strategic situation, whose roots lie in the disastrous legacies of European colonialism, exponentially aggravated by the birth of the Zionist colonial state. A general framework that makes the region one of the most complex geopolitical situations, but that the US administration is addressing without any consideration of it, driven solely by two contradictory needs: to quell the conflict, for the reasons mentioned above, and to support at all costs its Israeli proxy - which instead, exactly like the Ukrainian one, has its own agenda, its own strategic plan, its own block of interests that only partially coincide with those of the United States. The result is that the United States finds itself once again mired in a conflict situation that, while its main strategic interest would be to press the pause button, risks dragging it into a worse conflict, because someone has pressed the fast forward button…
The situation in the Middle East, moreover, is perfectly explanatory of the eternal gap between the intentions of American administrations, and the results of their actions.
Some will remember the famous revelation of US general Wesley Clark, who in 2007 spoke of the US plan for the Middle East after 9/11: “We will eliminate 7 countries in 5 years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and we will end with Iran”. Beyond the fact that 24 years have passed since 2001, not 5, and in the best of cases the plan is not complete, it is worth underlining – and in a certain sense debunking – the idea that this US plan represents, according to some, a complete success. It is the so-called chaos theory, according to which the objective would be precisely destabilization, the generation of a situation of instability. A reading of events that, undoubtedly, is convenient for the narrative according to which America always wins.
But if we pay attention to what the new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, recently stated, a different reading emerges. One of the key men of the Trump administration has in fact candidly blurted out a simple truth: since the end of the Second World War, the United States has lost all the wars. And, we add, if this long chain of defeats has not translated into a strategic defeat, it is simply due to the fact that these wars have never touched US territory: the North American continental island has in fact protected the imperial power, and the thalassocratic strength of the US fleets has served to keep them away. But this chain of defeats has nevertheless produced a cumulative effect, and is one of the causes that have led to the decline of the empire. The Middle Eastern chaos, then, is (also) the result of the US wars, but this result does not coincide with the initial objectives. It is in fact paradoxical that the United States, whose defense budget is simply gigantic, so hypertrophic as to recall that of the Soviet Union, which contributed to its fall, has then proved so incapable of producing even a single clear and clear victory, in eighty years of wars.
On the other hand, not only does this chaos practically only occur in the Middle Eastern quadrant, while it is not present in the other theaters of the stars & stripes wars - proving that it is mainly other factors that determine it, which the American intervention exacerbates if anything - but it is not clear why it should be pursued as an alternative to a definitive victory, which would subjugate the region by stabilizing it, if not for the simple reason that this victory has never been possible to achieve.
And today the United States finds itself here faced with the same situation, but made even more complex by its own weakening, and by the strengthening of that of its adversaries. And here too they propose the contradictory scheme, which sees the coexistence of the strategic need to bring the regional conflict back to a low intensity level, which does not require any direct commitment, and a tactical action that instead goes in tow of Israel, which aims to exacerbate and widen the conflict, bringing it to a high intensity level.
The situation of the negotiations with Iran, therefore, appears here as a mirror image of the Ukrainian one. The United States has many cards in its hand, but is pushed to raise expectations so much that it is extremely difficult to obtain results in a short time, and extremely unlikely to obtain any at all. What Washington (and Tel Aviv) essentially want is Iranian disarmament, on the model – not coincidentally indicated by Netanyahu – of the agreements with Gaddafi's Libya, which then led to the fall of the regime under the pressure of the NATO attack. A scenario that Tehran is very clear about, and which obviously has no intention of replicating. The Iranians, on the other hand, are not only aware of being much stronger militarily than Libya was, but have a much clearer strategic vision. Their position, in fact, is not only guaranteed by their own war potential, and by their geographical location, but also by a solid network of relations with Russia and China, with which - even in the absence of a real military alliance - there is a strategic cooperation, which not by chance has already been expressed in various joint naval exercises. The common interest of the three countries, in fact, is to maintain the viability of the trade routes between the Far and Middle East, a real vital node.
A framework, this, in which the importance of Yemen fits perfectly - and with extreme clarity - and its capacity for resistance, which represents just a small fraction of that which Iran could oppose. Here too, as already seen in relation to the conflict in Ukraine, the US action is marked by a substantial ambivalence, which condemns it to fail to achieve its objectives. On the one hand, in fact, the White House is persistently seeking a negotiating confrontation with Tehran, also through Russian mediation, and with Sana'a (lastly, also seeking Chinese mediation), well aware of the enormous difficulties that would entail undertaking military action (against Iran), and of the uselessness of continuing the current one (against Yemen) [2], as well as of the fact that any action against the Islamic Republic would have immediate repercussions on Russian-American negotiations, and on relations with China. On the other hand, however, it is exerting strong negotiating pressure across the board, which pushes the counterparts to harden their positions, insists on the blackmailing approach (“either you do it this way or…”), asks for much more than it is willing to offer, and above all continues to passively follow the genocidal and warmongering action of the Netanyahu government.
In the Middle East, too, the strategic action (if the term is appropriate at this point) of the United States is contradictory, with two lines of conduct that – far from functioning like the jaws of a pair of pincers – get in each other’s way, revealing that behind ambitious objectives there is neither an adequate awareness of the complexity of the situation, nor a realistic plan to achieve them.
A situation that, once again, we also find in the third major crisis area, the Indo-Pacific with China at its center, the great strategic adversary of the USA. Here too, in fact, US policy appears ambiguous, and poorly calibrated. Everything revolves around Taiwan and the trade war. Washington does not stop fomenting Taiwanese independence (even if, formally, the USA recognizes only one China, and therefore the island’s belonging to the PRC), and encouraging its rearmament (which favors the war industry made in the US); This in turn, however, has stimulated China to fully develop its military capabilities, so that today the Zhōnggúo Rénmín Jiěfàngjūn (People's Liberation Army) is a modern and highly respectable armed force, which can count not only on a large mass of manpower (2,250,000 in service), but also on advanced armaments.
The recent tug-of-war unleashed by Trump with his protectionist policy of tariffs, launched in rapid succession on practically every country in the world, in turn leads to an intensification of the confrontation with Beijing, which certainly does not go in the direction of lengthening the time before the final clash, and above all does not offer any guarantee of leading to success [3]. Engaging in a tug-of-war with at least unpredictable outcomes is yet another gamble by US politics, which in this historical phase appears as assertive as it is lacking an effective global strategy, capable of measuring itself against the given conditions, and against the challenges that these pose to the now disappeared American hegemony.
Experience and reasonableness should push towards a much softer approach, especially towards the most difficult and resilient adversaries, trying to take paths that lead to a reduction of conflicts (in a broad sense), and therefore to postpone the most bitter confrontations over time, rather than pushing towards an intensification of tensions, and therefore to hasten the possible showdown.
The great American contradiction of the third millennium, which then has repercussions and is reproduced, on an ever smaller scale, in the strategic management of decline and in that of the most important crises in the area, is ultimately that between the reality of the empire and the perception of it by the elites who lead it. Not only did the golden age of American hegemony end between the end of the last world conflict and the fall of the USSR, but in recent decades the decline of this hegemony has manifested itself at 360°, marking an increasing speed of fall. To the point that today Washington is simply no longer able to exercise it in almost any way.
Despite decades of lost wars, it has tried to redeem them with a move as ambitious as it is unlikely, imposing a strategic defeat on Russia, a move that however has translated into its reverse, with an American strategic defeat that is just waiting to be certified. And which, among other things, has produced that internal reaction to the US deep power [4] that brought Trump to the White House.
Likewise, the power of the dollar is falling, and openly opposed, while the country's productive capacity has been dissipated during the years of financial intoxication of globalization.
Today, the United States is a lame duck, which however deludes itself into thinking it is still, in some way, the bald eagle it once was, and acts accordingly. Like an old lion that roars in the belief that this is enough to keep the young lions at bay, while the latter are aware that its reign is over, and are only waiting for the right moment to give it the final blow.
This is, in essence, Trumpism. The attempt to save itself from decline, pretending it does not exist. Rather than accept, even just tactically, an international scenario characterized by an effective multipolarism (which is more and more than a mere US-China-Russia tripolarism), it has chosen the reiteration of the old imperial-hegemonic scheme. If during the decades in which the neocon-democrat axis dominated Washington, the strategic choice was to defeat the enemies on the field, one at a time (and starting with the most aggressive one), now the choice seems to be that of "peace through strength"; only that this strength simply no longer exists, and therefore all that remains, without them realizing it, is a "slow-motion geostrategic surrender" [5].
Game over.
Notes
1 – The internal situation in the United States is not particularly favorable at the moment. Even if the Democrats are in a serious crisis, the power bloc that opposes Trump is not limited to them, and has solid roots both in the establishment and in society. The numerous and well-attended demonstrations of the last few days, for example, are a sign of how a front – even a composite one – can be mobilized on occasion. The measures to demobilize the federal apparatus by Musk's DOGE, for example, are generating a mass of unemployed, in a general situation that is not particularly favorable. The need to bring home some success, therefore, also responds to the need to blunt the initiatives of the opposing bloc, which awaits Trump at the mid-term elections.
2 – According to Al-Akhbar (“US ‘Lethal Force’ Fails: Repeated Offers to Halt Yemen’s Red Sea Operations Go Unanswered”, Rashid Al-Haddad, Al-Akhbar), “Western diplomatic sources revealed that the US ambassador to Yemen, Fagin, recently met in Riyadh with the Chinese chargé d’affaires for Yemen, Shao Zheng, and asked him to initiate contacts with the Houthis”.
3 – The policy of brutally imposing heavy duties, which among other things is causing divisions within Trump’s inner circle for the first time, is equivalent to randomly throwing a few nuclear bombs to see what effect it has. In the short term, it is likely that the weaker countries will go to Canossa, and give in in part to US blackmail – which will certainly bring some relief to the federal coffers – but already in the medium term it will push them to look for alternatives capable of removing them from the blackmail threat. An alternative that could already be available: the union between the countries of the BRICS+ bloc and those of the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) bloc, which is starting to be discussed (“Слияние и повышение: в ШОС допустили объединение рынка с БРИКС”, Anastasia Kostina, Ekaterina Khamova, Natalia Ilyina, Iz.ru), would be able to offer an alternative to dollarized world trade, and to Western markets. While obviously the most resistant countries will react with equal harshness.
4 – See “On the Deep State”, Enrico Tomaselli, TargetMetis
5 – See “Iran’s Iron Chessboard: The Empire Negotiates from the Backfoot While Tehran Tightens Its Trilateral Trap”, Gerry Nolan, The Islander