Timothy Snyder recently described the United States under Donald Trump as engaged in “superpower suicide.” The phrase is harsh, but useful. It names a situation in which a state does not need to be defeated by an external enemy in order to lose the conditions of its own power. It can destroy those conditions from within.

Snyder should be valued here not as an oracle of American politics, and not because one must agree with every political judgment he makes. His importance lies elsewhere. He belongs to a rarer type of public intellectual: not merely a commentator of the present, but a historian of institutional degradation. Where many analysts follow the rhythm of scandal, election, personality, and tactical advantage, Snyder asks a more disturbing question: which conditions of public truth, legal continuity, responsibility, and political succession are being destroyed before collapse becomes visible? That kind of intelligence matters beyond the American case. It notices when institutions continue to exist but no longer perform their corrective function, when patriotism becomes a private shield, and when emergency begins to protect power instead of limiting it.

A superpower does not survive merely because it has aircraft carriers, intelligence agencies, universities, currencies, alliances, laboratories, and myths. It survives because these elements remain organized into a structure capable of producing public consequence over time. When that structure is converted into a private opportunity for oligarchs, loyalists, contractors, dynastic networks, and ideological performers, power does not simply decline. It changes its function.

The American case, in Snyder’s account, is not only a story of bad leadership. It is the conversion of state capacity into private spectacle and private gain. Alliances become props. War becomes theatre. Public office becomes a commercial platform. Institutions are not abolished overnight. They are hollowed out, intimidated, renamed, repurposed, and made........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)