“America doesn’t just compete, we DOMINATE, and the whole World is watching.” US president Donald Trump’s message to the departing Artemis II crew applies equally to the US-Israel war against Iran. The two momentous events presage US imperial decline, even as its leader trumpets interplanetary domination and a genocidal end to Iranian civilisation.
Domination is a key feature of imperial power, signifying the systematic command and control of populations and territories.
Historically, empires promise dominated populations the safety to settle and move as part of a trade-off in which the acceptance of imperial power is exchanged for public goods, such as security.
The US qualifies as an empire through its history of settler colonialism, wedded in the 19th century to hemispheric power and then colonial expansion in Cuba, Hawaii and the Philippines under president William McKinley, who has been glorified by Trump.
Twentieth century US domination depended on colossal economic power and worldwide military extension rather than colonial conquest, but its imperial character expanded during the Cold War. Enduring hostility to Iran after the 1979 Islamic revolution and overreach in Iraq and Afghanistan after September 11th 2001 revealed its weaknesses in the region.
These weaknesses were compensated for by the benefits it gained from being the world’s dominant power – especially the global dollar, and the competitive and soft power hegemony it enjoyed after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Those advantages are now being challenged by China’s emerging hegemony in a world order with many more poles of middle, regional and private economic power.
Trump’s conversion of soft power into transactional zero-sum trade-offs, along with the crudest might-is-right case for hard power, are signs of weakening, rather than strength.
His confrontation with Iran and its closure of the Strait of Hormuz recalls another confrontation with Vietnam’s intransigent communist nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. On that occasion, it ended in US retreat after internal dissent and allies’ refusal to get involved. In a similar vein, then US president Dwight D Eisenhower’s refusal to endorse the Franco-British invasion of Egypt in 1956, when Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser scuttled ships in the Suez Canal, hastened the birth of post-imperial European integration in 1957.
Those decades also recall space competition – first the 1957 Soviet cosmonauts and then the 1969 US moon landing. Trump imagines colonial competition on the moon, but Artemis is a wider human endeavour with a strong European component. The Iran war is anything but a co-operative effort and could have a huge negative impact on Europe if it continues on US-Israeli terms. Energy shortages triggering economic recession and large migrant flows from failing Middle Eastern states are now plausible scenarios.
This is prompting “resets” of policy among hitherto loyal transatlantic elites. Leaders such as Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer, Friedrich Merz – and even Giorgia Meloni and other far-right figures – are reconsidering relations with such an unsettling US ally under this untrustworthy president. The West’s own soft power trade-offs are fast disappearing with tariff wars, uncertainties over Ukraine and Greenland threats.
Civilisational erasure is perceived both ways – as JD Vance roots for Viktor Orbán in tomorrow’s Hungarian elections and Trump threatens to bomb Iran back to the stone ages.
European elites are ill-prepared for this scale of change in their relations with the US – in which they are junior partners in security, fellow practitioners in economic globalisation and an alternative site of developed liberal democracy, for which the rest of the world is assumed to aspire. That model of transatlanticism now lies shattered.
The world can no longer assume US participation on security; globalisation has morphed into competitive regionalism and liberal democracy has lost its promise of balanced development for Global South states, which are now more attracted to China’s model of multilateral co-operation without political intrusion. The changes have been some time coming, but are accelerated by Trump’s second term and especially by this year’s events and surprises.
As Washington shifts from soft power and persuasion to hard imperial discourse, the US’s continuing domination grates in Europe.
There is public backing in Europe for a firm and coherent response from European leaders to avoid a new vassalage.
Individually, however, social democratic parties are in a much weaker position politically and intellectually to provide resistance, as most lose ground to far-right and eco-socialist left forces. Centre-right and liberal parties are challenged on their right flanks and lack confidence for the adventurous strategies required. Buoyant far-right parties compete on white ethnic anti-immigration, but they resist the Trump-Vance embrace. Meanwhile, a more centralised and autocratic European Commission led by Ursula von der Leyen is unappealing without wider constitutional debate and change.
Collectively, the EU is not in a position to offer a coherent account of interests and values that would assert strategic independence from the US, a dynamic economic model and an attractive centre of power for China and the Global South.
Bold diplomatic moves are needed – like direct diplomacy with Russia on Ukraine; resurrecting the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran; imposing sanctions on Binyamin Netanyahu’s Israel for its actions in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon; opening up relations with Africa or reaching a strategic agreement with China.
How can these leaders take such bold risks to renew European integration?