Trump cements end to US ‘global empire’ – and the economic damage ‘will be huge’: expert

Empire Doesn’t Drift Away. It Is Run Into the Ground.The Source of the DamageThe article is built around Richard Wolff’s warning that the United States will lose its war against Iran and that the defeat will expose the end of American global dominance. Its concrete claim is simple: Trump launched the war, Iran survived it, and the political and economic consequences may be substantial.That is the useful part. The rest is empire talk that risks obscuring the more basic fact: wars are not abstractions, and they are not accidents. Someone authorized them. Someone owns the decision.Power Sat at the TopThe institutional power here is not diffuse. It sits with the president, the military apparatus that executes the order, and the imperial state that has spent decades treating force as routine policy. According to the article, Donald Trump made the decision to launch the war against Iran. That is the central fact of accountability.Wolff’s language about a declining empire may be broad, but the decision point is not. Trump chose escalation. Whatever the outcome, the responsibility begins there, and the machinery below him exists to turn that choice into policy, violence, and fallout.Blame Should Not Be LaunderedThe article gives Trump a personal insult and moves on, calling him “not the sharpest knife in the drawer.” That is not accountability. It is a cheap substitute for it. It makes catastrophe sound like the product of stupidity rather than intent backed by institutional power.This is a common political misdirection: reduce a structurally violent decision to a story about one man’s supposed clumsiness. The result is morally convenient and analytically weak. It invites readers to think the problem is incompetence, when the deeper issue is that the state still treats war as a usable instrument.Iran as Proof of Imperial LimitsThe article’s sharper claim is that Iran emerged from the conflict as a “major world power” because it withstood the “full military might” of the United States and survived largely intact. Whether that judgment proves durable or not, the political meaning inside the article is clear: U.S. force no longer guarantees submission.That matters because American power has long depended not just on weapons, but on the expectation that resistance is futile. Once smaller states can imagine winning, the intimidation regime weakens. Wolff’s point about other countries turning to China reflects that same logic: empire relies on the assumption that there is no real alternative. This war suggests that assumption is fraying.Economic Decline Is Not Separate From Military HubrisWolff links the war to damage on an already declining American economy. That connection is not decorative. Imperial power has always depended on the ability to convert military dominance into commercial advantage, shipping control, currency privilege, and political obedience.If that arrangement weakens, the cost is not just reputational. The article points to a possible shift in how states calculate risk, trade, and dependency. Once the U.S. can no longer reliably punish defiance or monopolize the terms of exchange, the empire’s economic scaffolding starts to crack. The war did not create that weakness, but it may have exposed it.The Larger PatternThis is the recurring American pattern: leaders launch wars, institutions carry them out, commentators frame the result as confusion, and the public is told to focus on personality rather than structure. That is how empire protects itself while bleeding credibility.The deeper story here is not that Trump blundered into disaster. It is that the U.S. political order still permits one man, backed by an obedient security state, to gamble with war and then present the consequences as geopolitical tragedy instead of governed choice. Get full access to Systemic Error at paulstsmith.substack.com/subscribe