Post-Iran War: The End of an Era, Not to Decline, But as a Trigger to Abrupt Change
Professor Michael Hudson, in a recent discussion, takes issue with those who speak today of the ‘decline of the US hegemon’. A decline implies something goes up and down, Hudson says, but it always recovers.“But there’s never been any such thing statistically as a cycle … There’s no decline, it’s a crash” —
“We’re seeing the ending of an era, not a decline, but an abrupt change. And this change is not stemming from without: The ending of the American power did not result from any foreign civil war or other war against American dominance. The end came from the United States itself in trying to juxtapose its interest as hegemon against that of every other country”.
Paradoxically, Professor Hudson says:
“Every move taken to escape US ‘decline’ has become the mechanism that delivers it. The US went to war to reassert dominance – and proved it could no longer dominate … It waged forty years of maximum pressure to break Iran, and instead forged the very adversary that is now [facing down US domination]”.
In order to preserve America’s power, President Trump turned to trying to impose a series of choke points on the entire world economy “through controlling oil — because everybody needs it”, Hudson says.
That Trump went to war on Iran, on Russia and instituted the attempted chokehold on China, however, does not, in itself, constitute the full matrix of American power-preservation. That matrix is broader. But oil is one of its principal dimensions — as is the connected dollar hegemony. Trump clearly wants to consolidate global energy control in order for the US to determine who may have access to energy (i.e. not Iran, nor Russia, nor Cuba), and those whose energy supply will be squeezed to constrain competition potential (i.e. China).
On the other hand, suppliers of fuel, such as Russia, are sanctioned precisely to try to limit those to whom Russian oil and gas may be supplied. Client states of the imperial power (i.e. Europe) seem surprisingly content to act as the US’ energy-stranglehold enforcer — transforming itself into a prolific sanctions issuer, in its own right.
The other facets (aside from oil dominance) to America’s attempt to establish a chokehold over the rest-of-world economies are firstly, the tariff policy — by which Trump had hoped to use the threat of economically disruptive tariffs to coerce pliable states to lend allegiance to Washington; to acquiesce to US policy alignment; and to provide America with the raw materials it needs — in return for admission to the Washington ‘insider network’ (America’s client states).
In effect there are two Washington ‘insider networks’: One consisting of Trump, his family and extended business partners; and the other being that of Trump’s overseas protégés (Gulf states, etc.).
The tariff policy is effectively a polite way to say, ‘we will use tariffs, or an energy squeeze, or a financial squeeze to create disruption to your economies, unless you agree to join the US-led ‘network’’.
Neither tariff nor energy-choke policies have been without their set-backs, however, not least because Iran has refused to comply, and continues to provide oil to China and other Iranian allies.
So, the new ‘leg’ to the strangle-hold policy is the ‘Pax Silica’ initiative. Arnaud Bertrand explains that the Trump Administration has ‘spelt out its ‘syndicate’ purpose explicitly’:
“Countries sign up, align their supply chains with Washington, shut out China (politely referred to as those engaging in “non-market practices” and “unfair dumping”) – and in exchange they get access to the imperial technological ecosystem”.
“Lest there be any ambiguity, Under-Secretary of State Jacob Helberg — an ex-Palantir guy who is the architect behind the initiative — spells it out clearly: Whoever controls “compute and the minerals that feed it” will run the 21st century, and he wants to form a group of “aligned” countries around Washington in a “new economic security consensus” to make sure they’re the ones who do”.
Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ war therefore has world-wide implications. The world cannot simply return to the way it was before. Wall Street and ‘the markets’ seem to believe that this is likely and even inevitable (they can envision no different future), but the rest of the world sees the Iran war as marking a systemic change to a new era, precisely because fossil fuels, fertiliser and other allied products are the components that make the world ‘tick’.
The Iran war will prompt greater recognition, throughout the world, that countries need (at minimum) food self-sufficiency to save themselves from US weaponisation of foreign trade in food, oil, fertiliser, and in just about anything that the US can create a choke point for — and weaponise. This implies a return to self-circulating, self-sufficient economies — in contrast to the World Bank ‘export-led’, debt financed model.
Andrey Bezrukov, Professor at the Russian University MGIMO and a former SVR intelligence officer, specifically addressed the challenges of a changing world at the St Petersburg Forum on 3 June 2026. And though he cast his comments in the context of Russia, his remarks apply across the world.
In his speech — which Laura Ru has summarised — Bezrukov argued that Russia has entered a new, prolonged global confrontation with the West. According to him, this conflict represents a fundamental shift in the nature of warfare that will define Russian policy and society for the foreseeable future.
‘Bezrukov emphasized that the current (military) struggle is not primarily about capturing territory, which he described as having lost much of its traditional value. Instead, it is a war of attrition focused on undermining critical systems, including infrastructure, command networks, technology, space assets, biological security, and the information domain … “The West’s strategy in this war is very simple: avoid nuclear collision with us, from which they will emerge as losers. Therefore, they boil the frog on a slow fire”’.
‘He warned that Russia should expect to remain in a state of war for many years, possibly 20 to 30 years. During this period, Russia must learn to coexist with the reality of war, whilst continuing its economic development’.
‘A central theme of his speech was sharp criticism of Russia’s current approach. Bezrukov argued that the country has been too lenient toward its adversaries — “We are slow. We allow [our enemies] too much. They don’t fear us … because many, many red lines that we talked about remained only on paper”’.
‘To adapt to this new reality, Bezrukov called for a fundamental restructuring of the state and economy. He urged the creation of a dual-purpose system capable of pursuing both development and long-term defence. Critical infrastructure — such as data centres, oil storage facilities, and communication hubs — must be buried underground, or protected to the same standards as nuclear power plants. He also stressed the need to close the gap between the military and civilian society, and to adopt more assertive policies. Russia cannot expect a quick return to peacetime conditions and must therefore reorganise society, economy, and strategy accordingly’.
Bezrukov’s speech has drawn much attention for its tone, and for its call for Russia to psychologically and structurally adapt to a generational-long era of confrontation — a theme already addressed at length by Professor Sergei Karaganov.
What these two contributions represent is a changing world trying to re-structure itself in wake of the aggressive face of a declining US hegemon, and looking around for how both to insulate their economies from US’ tariffs, energy, technology and dollar attack on the rest of the world, and concomitantly, to adapt to the new era of asymmetric geo-political war that the Iran war has espoused.
Professor Hudson concludes,
“Iran is fighting for a way of life against people who want to deny them … of the ability to make their own future. This is what the fight is all about. And it is ultimately a moral fight that finds itself translated into an economic fight and a trade fight — and is leading to this [global] split”.
It is this moral, civilisational way-of-being versus the radical Trumpian-US materialist void that likely will come to define our era’s civil and global wars.
https://conflictsforum.substack.com/p/post-iran-war-the-end-of-an-era-not