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Is This the American Suez?

If the pointless war on Iran is a historical marker equivalent to Suez in ignominy, the question becomes, what do we do with this “Decline of Empire” moment?

Flash back to the boastful, triumphalist 1990s, as in Madeleine Albright’s telling Matt Lauer in 1998, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.” Well, goodbye to all that. The United States is now enduring a singular humiliation akin to that Britain and France suffered 70 years ago in the Suez Crisis. That event, little-remembered here but iconic for the rest of the world, signaled the end of old-style European imperialism. In its wake arrived something new, the Americans’ vast “empire of liberty” constrained only by the Soviet Union’s upstart “empire of justice,” as Odd Arne Westad put it in his now-classic The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2006).

Following Tehran’s systematic checkmating of US authority, only an ostrich could deny our decline as a Great Power. Unless you are like Trump and his minions, who think history stops at our shores, the fall of the American imperium was preordained. Sooner or later, other nations would innovate, expand, recover from defeat—but not this soon, most of us thought! Even 50 years ago, while it was regaining strategic equilibrium after the disaster in Vietnam, it was self-evident that the United States would never regain its dominance circa 1945, when we had a majority of the world’s industrial capacity, a nuclear monopoly, and the only globe-spanning naval and air forces, plus the legitimacy granted by defeating fascism and creating the United Nations. Nonetheless, from 1991 to 2016, various Bushes, Clintons, and Obama still hailed US preeminence. That’s gone for good. The myth of the sole superpower has been blown to bits by cheap Iranian drones, and no one buys it anymore. Not the Gulf satrapies whose security we guaranteed, not the European Union, warily gearing up for war over Greenland—not anyone anywhere.

For me, the augury came in 2010. For many years, I taught how in a single generation, 1870–1900, the United States outstripped Great Britain, the fabled “workshop of the world,” in the key markers of industrial capacity—coal, iron, and steel. Twenty years ago, China had been........

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