America and Russia still own everything a military needs. They have lost the only thing that ever made it matter.

By Jules Barberini
On the way to a deal with Iran, or to whatever can be called a deal as long as no one asks who actually surrendered what, after nearly three years of war in the Middle East and an even longer one in Ukraine, something has become clear that no security conference will say aloud.

The great powers still own everything a military needs to be great: the carriers, the warheads, the satellites, and the budget of an empire. Only the victories have stopped.

Take Russia. Three years of war against a neighbour, Moscow expected to take in a long weekend, and the result is an army dug into trenches that could have come from 1916, an economy on rations, and a few provinces that look like gains on the map until you count the graves.

What is left is an arsenal and a parade to prove the arsenal is still there. That is not a world power. That is North Korea with more territory and more gas.

With America, it was visible earlier. Twenty years in Afghanistan, trillions of dollars, the most advanced military on earth, and in the end, the Taliban drove into Kabul in abandoned American Humvees. The greatest military power in history left its motor pool behind and called it an orderly withdrawal.

A gang in pickup trucks, armed with patience, outlasted the Pentagon, not by winning, but by staying until Washington got bored. That is the secret every weaker enemy now understands. You do not beat America. You wait until the voter discovers that the country his government is fighting for is not in Ohio, and then America goes home on its own.

Iran is the cleanest case. America bombed and threatened, moved its carriers toward the Gulf, drew its red lines, and then learned that a red line is only a line until someone steps over it and the sky stays where it is.

First, the big talk: every power plant flattened, every bridge down, an entire country bombed back out of the modern age, all of it to save civilisation.

Then a deal. The regime keeps its nuclear program; America keeps a press conference. There is a handshake for the cameras. The humiliation puts on a suit and is allowed to call it a victory.

That Europe still sees America as its protector is self-deception. A continent that has spent thirty years eating its defence budget as a peace dividend needs a fairy tale in which the big friend shows up in time.

Europe believes in America the way a child believes in a father who is never home, promises everything, and mostly makes noise in the hallway when he walks in. For a moment, you think: now it will be all right. Then it turns out he only came back for his coat.

And even that fairy tale is running out, because America stopped behaving like an ally long ago. It began its war against Iran without consulting anyone in Europe, and Europe did something more humiliating than watch. It got in the way.

France refused overflight rights. Italy kept an air base in Sicily closed. And for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the entire continent managed nothing more than a willingness to consider contributing, a war answered with a letter of intent. The most powerful military on earth went to war, and its oldest friends would not even let its planes land.

That same Europe still expects America, one day, to die for it. America stands alone, and standing alone is a different thing from being great. However strong you imagine yourself to be, without allies, you are not.

Because the war has changed, and the great powers are chasing it with the most expensive hardware ever built. The mistake is to think they lose the battles. The opposite is true. They win every battle and lose every war. They bomb flawlessly and deliver images of precision as if a war were won on resolution.

But the battlefield moved long ago. A drone worth a few thousand dollars does not need to defeat an aircraft carrier. It only needs to make it ridiculous. Power used to belong to whoever had the most steel. Now it belongs to whoever can bleed the longest without falling over.

Israel proves it at the top. For its size, it is probably one of the best armies in the world, and still, that craftsmanship does not win the war. It intercepts a cheap rocket with an interceptor that costs many times more, and keeps doing it, because in this war, you can be bankrupted into defeat one interception at a time.

After years of fighting, there is no clean ending. You can win in the air and lose in time. This is not an indictment of Israel; if anything, it is the reverse. Even a state that still takes war seriously does not escape the new logic.

The other side understood this long ago. It does not go looking for the great power head-on; it hits what surrounds it. One tanker on fire in the right strait is enough to make half of the world trade stutter. The Houthis, with weapons built in a workshop, made the Red Sea unnavigable for the world's largest navies for months.

No one needs to invade Washington. It is enough to raise the price of gas and disturb the conveniences the West runs on, because this is a civilisation that can no longer stand discomfort. You do not have to destroy it. You only have to disrupt it.

And America does what every bully does once his fist stops working on its own. It talks louder. It threatens in capital letters and has its generals explain that the operation was highly successful, which usually means the bombs hit their targets and the war escaped them. Noise is not strength. Noise is the sound power made when it no longer knows how to win.

Not that America is weak. The joke is worse than that. Since 1945, it has not won a war that it has held. Korea entered a ceasefire that is still in force. Vietnam was lost. Iraq and Afghanistan ended in retreats no one dared call victories, and the win in Kuwait in 1991 lasted twelve years, until 2003.

It can flatten an entire country, it can decapitate a government in a single night, it can reopen a strait for the tankers, and in the end, it has won nothing, because destroying and bullying is not winning.

An army that can destroy anything and win nothing no longer frightens anyone. America still wins every war it simulates; the real ones it buys off or freezes and calls the result peace. What remains of the superpower is the noise it makes as it leaves the room—volume where there used to be force.

This is how the age of empire ends, and it has found the perfect face for the occasion. A man who threatens in capital letters and delivers a press conference, who turns every retreat into a triumph, is the right master of ceremonies for a power with nothing left to perform but a very bad movie. Trump did not end the American century. He is the face it had coming.

Jules Barberini is an essayist who writes about power, war, and the slow unmaking of the postwar order. He lives in Europe and has no patience for security conferences. This is his first contribution to The Liberum