There are moments in history when empires do not collapse from a single blow. Not invasion. Not military defeat. Not the sudden fall of a capital city. They collapse from something slower — and more tragic: The slow exposure of their contradictions. Economic contradictions. Political contradictions. Moral contradictions. A great power, long accustomed to commanding history, suddenly finds itself unable to command reality. That is where America now stands. The war on Iran is being sold, as so many wars before it, as a demonstration of strength — another spectacle of missiles, threats, patriotic slogans, and televised triumphalism. Yet beneath the fireworks lies a harsher truth: This war is not proving American power. It is exposing American decline. As warned in conversation with : “We are living through the end of empire — and that end has been accelerated by everything going on in the Middle East.” That sentence should shake every capital on earth. Because t...