We are in "Imperial Overstretch" --

by omahadomer, Saturday, June 20, 2026, 08:37 (34 days ago) @ domer.mq

a term coined, I think, by Yale historian Paul Kennedy in "The Rise and Fall of Great Powers." The phenomenon (I'd call it a "theory" but it's too well established to be called just that) is that great powers expand past the point where their underlying productivity and capacity can maintain their commitments and begin to retract -- sometimes in spectacular collapses. The Mongols, the Romans, the Ottamans, the Dutch, the French, the British, the Soviet Union -- they all went splat.

The best you can hope for is an orderly contraction. But inevitably there comes a foolish leader who thinks he can restore the empire to its former glory and fails utterly.

We have met the enemy and they is Trump and MAGA (with apologies to Pogo).

Despite Trump's isolationist rhetoric, his underlying promise was that he'd restore the U.S. to the height of its post-WWII dominance on the world stage. Being a man utterly without a sense of history (consider, for example, that "America First" was a slogan perpetuated by pro-German Americans who wanted to keep the U.S. out of WWII) he inevitably was going to fall into the trap of thinking he could project dominance just through military might.

The only surprise to me is that it took this long. But it's not a surprise that he picked the worst possible place in the world -- the Middle East. Not that we'll know, but 500 years from now the tribalism there will still be going on.

It would have been so much better just to have stayed out of it, because he exposed America's soft underbelly. Iran is emboldened because we lack the resources and will to, for example, keep the Strait of Hormuz open. That would have required a ground invasion and even that would have either failed (Afghanistan) or been insanely expensive in lives and money (Iraq) with mixed results.

This MOU will ultimately be meaningless. The fool that is Trump is now hearing it even from GOP congressional sycophants that this is a horrible deal, even from our weakened perspective.

We'll inevitably walk away with out metaphorical tail between our legs.

--
"Somewhere in Middle America"