One cannot help but feel a deep, visceral satisfaction at the sight of the United States, that bloated, preening colossus of the modern age, brought low by the Islamic Republic of Iran. After months of bluster, sanctions, assassinations, and reckless bombing, America has capitulated. The terms now being finalised represent not merely defeat but outright surrender, dictated by a nation Washington once dismissed as an impoverished pariah state crushed under forty-seven years of the most savage sanctions ever imposed. The world’s self-proclaimed sole superpower, with its trillion-dollar military budget and its armadas of floating scrap metal masquerading as aircraft carriers, has been humbled by an adversary it could neither intimidate nor defeat. This is not tragedy; it is poetic justice, and for those of us who have long regarded the American experiment with contempt, it is a moment of pure, unalloyed pleasure.

As an Englishman, that pleasure is sharpened and rendered all the more exquisite by vivid recollections of the betrayal at Suez in 1956. There, in the dying days of Britain’s rightful imperial role, when British and French forces moved to secure the Suez Canal against Nasser’s nationalisation, the United States—under Eisenhower—delivered the stab in the back. Threatening sterling with financial ruin and forcing a humiliating withdrawal, America revealed its true nature: a treacherous upstart only too happy to accelerate the decline of its transatlantic cousin once the latter had served its purpose. The memory of that betrayal, of watching those hypocritical lectures on colonialism from a nation built on genocide and conquest, lingers as a bitter inheritance. How fitting, then, that the same power now finds itself routed by Persia. The wheel turns. An Englishman savours this American humiliation not merely for its own sake but as a long-deferred reckoning for Suez, a sweet measure of historical justice served cold.

I have always disliked America and Americans with a settled, reasoned intensity. The United States became a great power not through any inherent virtue or genius, but through the most treacherous land grabs from weaker peoples. The slaughter of the Red Indians was genocide on a continental scale—systematic extermination, broken treaties, and cultural erasure that makes the worst excesses of European colonialism look restrained by comparison. Into the territories stolen from Mexico, Spain, and the indigenous nations, it poured waves of second-rate nationalities from Europe: the dregs and hustlers, the ambitious but mediocre, the criminal and the discontented, who were then ruthlessly exploited by a business class as rapacious as any in history. That class has never been able to compete honestly; it has always sheltered behind high tariff walls and a grotesquely bent legal system. Its twentieth-century ascent was completed in the 1940s not by superior industry, but by the transfer and outright theft of British and German technology and patents while those greater nations lay prostrate. In its entire history, the United States has never won a proper war against a peer or near-peer except with the indispensable help of more competent allies. Its armies have ever been cowardly rabbles—over-equipped, and led by incompetents—capable only of overwhelming the grossly inferior or murdering civilians from the air.

There has not been a single American of the first rank in the higher realms of human achievement. Not one outstanding writer of English prose or poetry has emerged from those several hundred million obese clowns to stand beside the great English masters. There has not been one supremely great composer, not one scientist who can be ranked with Newton or Darwin, or even Pasteur or Koch. What America has produced in abundance is noise: whiny, nasal voices delivering sermons on their own exceptionalism. I hate the sound of the American voice almost as much as I hate the smug, low-grade grifters who populate the place—the hucksters, the televangelists, the political operators, the endless parade of mediocrities convinced of their divine right to lecture the world.

And now this same republic lies defeated. How fitting. The anatomy of the catastrophe is as comprehensive as it is humiliating. America’s political and business leadership—the Epstein Class, or perhaps I repeat myself—stands revealed as a collection of puppets dancing for AIPAC, Adelson, Soros, and Israeli interests. Its military elite has been purged of critical minds for decades. Its doctrine remains fossilized in the pre-WWII era of carrier groups and global bases, utterly unsuited to asymmetric reality, because the mission has been run by idiots. The military-industrial complex long ago ceased to be about winning wars; it became a Wall Street grift for extracting taxpayer billions. Culturally, the Frankfurt School’s long march—Cultural Marxism in all its progressive ugliness—has hollowed out traditional values, leaving a society unfit for serious conflict. Manufacturing evaporated under the religion of Milton Friedman, turning the nation into a hollowed-out service economy of consumers and debtors.

The systemic collapse runs deeper still, as the evidence makes laughably clear. Narcissism has consumed the culture: a plague of self-absorption, isolation, and Dunning-Kruger overconfidence that elevates the incompetent while driving out the capable. Generations raised on useless parenting, credentialism without substance, and therapeutic coddling have produced adults incapable of competence or independent thought. Gen Z, staring at screens, scores lower than their parents on every measure of cognition, and the parents themselves were hardly of adequate quality. Institutions select for connections over merit, cronyism over excellence. The result is a civilisation in freefall: family breakdown, failure to launch, sandwich-generation despair, and a political class that exploits the wreckage for power. America was never the shining city; it was always a big fat lie, optimized for fraud, now reaping the whirlwind.

The terms of “peace” confirm the totality of the rout. Iran will manage the Strait of Hormuz and continue collecting tolls. Frozen assets will be unblocked. American forces will withdraw substantially from the Middle East. The naval blockade ends. Hostilities cease across Lebanon and Yemen. The Israelis will cease crowing from the dunghill of human flesh the Americans have enabled them to heap up. Negotiations on the nuclear issue will proceed on Iran’s timeline. Before the war, Iran controlled none of this. After the war, it dictates the architecture. Thirteen massive American bases in the Gulf, once symbols of dominance, now look like expensive relics of a failed empire. This humiliation dwarfs Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The JCPOA that Trump once tore up as the “worst deal in history” now appears, by comparison, a glorious American triumph. Goliath has been slaughtered, not on the battlefield in grand combat, but through attrition against the system sustaining its regional hegemony. Iran wisely targeted the American-led infrastructure protecting Israel rather than courting nuclear apocalypse—degrading bases, radar, and the illusion of Gulf invulnerability. It has exposed American protection as a liability, not a shield.

I am glad—profoundly glad—that America has lost to the Iranians. I hope Donald Trump is impeached and imprisoned for ordering a war attended from beginning to end by atrocities and threats of atrocity. I hope the political troubles now engulfing the United States accelerate into a full breakup of that unnatural federation, with its various fragments descending to their proper station in the world order: secondary powers of no greater significance than Bolivia or Ecuador. The eclipse of American power is a blessing for humanity. A bully humbled is a world made marginally safer from its predations. Let the grifters whine. The verdict of history is in, and it is merciless.

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