On Superpower Suicide And the recovery of justice -Timothy Snyder: US kills its own power

[Amaryllis]

https://snyder.substack.com/p/on-superpower-suicide
much more at link

On Superpower Suicide
And the recovery of justice
Timothy Snyder
May 09, 2026

The United States has just spent billions of dollars to lose a war that enriches its oligarchs, impoverishes the citizenry, sabotages its alliances, and strengthens its enemies. As justification for the self-destructive mindlessness, the White House gestures towards Jesus and genocide.

On April 20th I was asked to speak in New York about ethics and power. My thinking, which I expressed in a conversation at the Council on Foreign Relations, on this little video, and in the media, was that our utterly unethical war was also utterly self-destructive. The war, a catastrophe in itself, suggests the guiding principle of Trump foreign policy: superpower suicide. The term was since come into more general use, and readers have been asking me to spell it out.

Empires have risen and failed before, but to my knowledge no state has ever chosen to kill its own power, and succeeded with such rapidity.

It is hard to see this clearly. Even as we oppose individual Trump adventures, we hope that in some way they are based on some understanding of the national interest. They are not. To get the perspective we need to see the nature of this anti-strategic self-slaughter, it will help to consider thirteen traditional bases of state power.

[Wicked Blue]

1. He's acting on orders from Putin

to weaken and wreck the US.

[mike_c]

3. honestly, I don't think Putin or anyone else needs to give him orders

All they have to do is flatter him and make him want whatever they want him to do. He's a pushover for anyone who strokes his ego or sets an example of behavior that he views as self aggrandizing if he follows it, e.g. his ballroom modeled after the trappings of European monarchies. He wants a bigger and more expensive palace. He wants a bigger triumphal arch. A big underground bunker, because, you know, Putin has one. Wars, because ---fill in the blank-- has one. Pictures of himself all over everything, because monarchs and despots put their image on money, and passports, and heroic posters all over town. On and on and on. He's still an insecure child, forever in search of validation.

I don't think Bibi told him to attack Iran. All he had to do was model it for him to make Trump think that's what he should do, too. "I'll be your friend if you do this friendly thing with me." It was a whim, inspired by somebody in a club he desperately wants to belong to.

[The Madcap]

2. This country is looking more and more like the Holy Roman Empire at its end.

It's a loose assemblage of petty kingdoms that can't work together and will eventually fall apart under its own immense weight. Our federal system seems to be irretrievably broken, and the states are the next level down. Even they are mostly incompetent.

What will rush into the void to take over? Well, corporations, of course. I would expect something like: "Microsoftia" or "Googleland" to be plastered all over the maps. And eventually, as the corporations kill each other off, the "corporate states" would fuse into larger entities and maybe even separate countries.

I hope I'm wrong, but this seems to be the direction we are heading. Hold onto your hats, it's going to be a rough ride for lovers of freedom.