Perhaps the most significant outcome of the unjust war currently unfolding in the Middle East against Iran is the growing global conviction that the United States is no longer a superpower within the current international order. This applies not only in the military sense, but also economically, politically, and even in terms of its lifestyle model known as The American Way of Life. The same applies to its ally “Israel,” which over the past two years, during its war of genocide against Gaza, has also demonstrated that it is no longer a regional power in the sense that prevailed throughout the twentieth century. These are not wishful conclusions or biased interpretations, but rather a summary confirmed by realities on the ground and numerous facts across various domains.
If we begin with the military dimension, which has long been the central pillar upon which a superpower builds its philosophy of superiority, the recent aggression against Iran was intended to deliver a message of unprecedented military and technological dominance. Yet it instead exposed the limits of those capabilities when confronted with a rising military force that does not even claim to be a regional power. It also revealed that such military power still fails to distinguish between bombing a military target and bombing a girls’ school, and cannot differentiate between real targets on the ground and imaginary ones drawn by an artist’s brush.
The same reality had already been exposed during the war of genocide against Gaza. Despite employing the full spectrum of American and Israeli technology in surveillance, monitoring, sensing, intelligence gathering, and precision strikes, the attacking forces were unable to identify the location of a single captive or free him from the hands of the resistance. This is despite the fact that the resistance itself does not claim to be a conventional military power, but rather defines itself as a resistance movement seeking to reclaim its usurped rights with whatever capabilities and resources it possesses.
If we move north to Lebanon, where Hezbollah classifies itself among the forces of resistance, the same equation appears once again. Each time the superpower and its ally claim that the movement has been eliminated, it reemerges from beneath the ashes even stronger, as is happening today in the Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon. It appears as though it never suffered the losses it endured, and as though it has returned to the starting point from which it began in 2006, once again capable of defeating the army that describes itself as the strongest in the region, the best armed, and the most dependent on advanced technology.
The example of Yemen makes the picture even clearer. Neither American forces nor their ally have been able to eliminate the threat posed by resistance missiles there, despite aircraft carriers, immense military capabilities, and powerful air strikes against Yemen. All of this demonstrates that military power, regardless of how technologically superior it may be, has limits that cannot be surpassed and objectives it cannot achieve, as history has repeatedly shown.
This is a reality that the current American leadership either failed to understand, or understood but deliberately ignored, choosing instead to return to the logic of traditional colonialism from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, if not the logic of the Middle Ages. This approach appears to draw inspiration from extremist slogans proudly promoted by the American Secretary of War in his recent books The War on the Warriors, published in 2024, and The American Crusade, published in 2020.
Beyond this bankruptcy in what is known as hard power, a similar collapse has become evident in the sphere of soft power. Unlike China, which pursues its interests in the region and gains the goodwill of its peoples through investment and trade without seeking to build military bases or deploy troops, the United States continues to think with a mindset shaped by the era following the Second World War, as though the Soviet Union still existed.
Instead of investing in strengthening the American way of life, which once formed the foundation of global fascination with the United States, Washington has increasingly presented itself as a frightening “monster” that intimidates the world, and even frightens the American people themselves. In this regard it appears to be following the example of its ally “Israel,” which recognises that it possesses no lifestyle model to offer the world beyond military force and wealth.
In doing so, the United States has fallen into the traps of global Zionism, which is not concerned with building civilizations but rather with destroying them. By following this path, Washington has effectively signed the document marking the beginning of its own decline as a superpower, with the signature of President Donald Trump.
