Our imperial overreach began 25 years ago with the War on Terror. It is being brought to a grim conclusion by Donald Trump’s war on Iran.
The Chris Hedges Report
Sep 12, 2026
And Now a Word From Our Monster – by Mr. FishSubscribe
Donald Trump, whose war on Iran is the greatest strategic blunder in United States history, is not responsible for triggering the decline of the American Empire, but he is responsible for its fatal denouement.
This is the end.
U.S. bases in the oil-rich Persian Gulf have been damaged or destroyed and I expect will not be rebuilt. Our allies, even those in Europe, are abandoning us. The decadence and immorality of American society, embodied in the vulgarity, stupefying ignorance and cruelty of Trump, are the defining characteristics of the Empire. The Global South, horrified at the Empire’s flagrant disregard for international humanitarian law, including the enabling of genocide in Gaza, sees us as the enemy. Abu Ghraib Prison may have receded from our consciousness, but for the rest of the world, its images of U.S. soldiers and contractors sadistically humiliating and torturing imprisoned Iraqis has replaced the Disneyfied version of America we once exported. The war on Iran, which has disrupted the world’s oil supply, is rapidly pushing the global economy over the cliff.
We are going down. And we will bring many with us.
Osama Bin Laden may be in a watery grave in the North Arabian Sea. Al-Qaeda may be a shadow of itself. But Bin Laden’s most fervent dreams have been realized in the last twenty-five years of gross miscalculations of the Empire — its squandering of trillions of dollars on military debacles and the ascendancy of our version of Ubu Roi, Donald J. Trump.
Rather than defeating supposed enemies, the U.S. has swelled their ranks. It and its colony, Israel, are the most reviled nations on the planet. Every advance by Iran in its asymmetrical war against the Empire is cheered across the globe.
The humiliating defeats, the diversion of resources and at least $8 trillion to mount one war after another, which has killed an estimated 4.5 to 4.8 million people, has hollowed the Empire out. Its infrastructure is crumbling. Its democratic institutions are impotent. It survives on an unsustainable $ 40 trillion debt. The jewels of its democracy, including its education system, fair elections and a free press, are discredited and degraded.
An abandoned working class, crippled by economic insecurity and a government that steadily strips away social programs that keep those in distress afloat, is propagandized to believe the palpable decline is the work of traitors and enemies within. It has led Trump supporters to turn on the very institutions and ideals designed to sustain democracy. The usual targets of fascism — the “radical left,” Muslims, migrants, intellectuals, artists, people of color and journalists — are persecuted under laws such as The Espionage Act. Lies permeate the airwaves buttressing the self-delusion that once internal enemies are silenced, or eradicated, the glory days of the Empire, defined by hyper-nationalism, patriarchy, stable jobs and white supremacy, will return.Subscribe
Violence against internal enemies along with election fraud are openly advocated by Trump and his court of sycophants, buffoons, grifters and Christian fascists. Attempting to bribe voters by promising them $5,000 if Republicans win the midterms, along with Trump’s contempt for the constitutional order, is the transparent admission that U.S. democracy is a farce.
George W. Bush, who was appointed to the presidency by judicial fiat, planted these seeds of lawlessness and impunity. Trump has brought them to floraison.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goons, masked and offered the kind of impunity that allowed the torture and killing of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorize U.S. cities. They carry out military-style raids against unarmed civilians that look no different than those the Empire carried out in Fullujah or the Helmand Province in Afghanistan. They are setting up a network of squalid internal concentration camps.
The tools of subjugation the Empire used abroad, including the stripping of civil liberties and the implementation of mass surveillance, were legalized at home with the passage of The Patriot Act, with its watchlists, informants and racial and religious profiling.
Empires in decay impose the tyranny familiar to those subjugated abroad on their own citizens.
I was in the Middle East when it all went wrong. Nearly all of the Muslim world was appalled by the attacks of 9/11. There were massive public expressions of solidarity, including candlelight vigils in Iran. If we had built on this empathy rather than demonizing Muslims and inflicting suffering and death on millions in the Middle East, we would be far more secure today.
Instead, we drank deep from the poisonous elixir of nationalism. We foolishly believed we were attacked, as Bush said, because “they hate our freedoms,” not because of our support for the apartheid and genocidal state of Israel, our callous indifference to human life beyond our borders, including the killing of over a million people in Iraq by U.S. sanctions, and our propping up of brutal Arab dictatorships.
The wreckage we have left behind from our forever wars include the obliteration of whole cities, along with 940,000 direct deaths in post-9/11 war zones, 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths and 38 million people displaced.
The hijackers chose massive death and destruction on a city skyline to send a message. They spoke the language we taught them. It is the message our warplanes, missiles and drones have delivered from Vietnam to Iraq. We did not listen. We naively believed we could use our military to remake the Middle East in our own image.
The failure of the War on Terror is not simply a moral failure. It is a strategic failure. We refused to ask the obvious question. Why did many outside our borders feel so much hostility towards us that they were willing to kill themselves and thousands of our fellow citizens?
Those of us who dared to raise these questions twenty-five years ago were vilified as supporters of terrorism and silenced.
The only way to defeat terrorism is to isolate those who carry out acts of terror within their own societies. It is to build networks of understanding and solidarity. We did the opposite. We became the terrorists we claimed we were seeking to defeat. We did what Bin Laden wanted us to do. We defeated ourselves.
Trump is presiding over the last act.
The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Subscribe
Discussion about this post
2dEdited
And let us not forget good ole Joe Biden who happily supported the lies around Israel and October 7th enabling Israel’s plan to go eventually go after Iran. Joe was the catalyst along with his Zionist loving goons who really got the ball rolling for Trump to put the final nail in the coffin. Biden was happily hammering away for Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians which is why I and many others refused to vote for Kamala who was fine with the genocide too. The worst crime humans can do to each other is GENOCIDE. To say nothing of the ongoing climate catastrophe and ecocide which both parties effectively support on behalf of their corporate masters. Both parties have done everything they can to destroy the USA. Good old Bill Clinton sold the democrats out once and for all back in the day. I’ll never forget when Obama came into office the Democrats who also had controlled Congress refused to go after Bush and his administration for his war crimes, saying we need to look forward and not back. Blah, blah, blah. In other words, they were just fine with what Bush did and god forbid we wouldn’t want to be prosecuted for the crimes we have done and will do either. And if you think voting blue is going to change anything, you have the intelligence of a rock. Actually rocks are likely smarter than that.
2dEdited
Yesterday was 9/11. Every network and local news broadcast urged viewers to “remember 9/11”. My unvoiced question was to remember what?
Certainly not the victims or their families, except as pawns and tools of the narrative; certainly not the coverup of the foreknowledge of the attacks by many in the elite circles; certainly not the heroic firefighters and others who worked in the weeks after the towers’ collapse to recover victims, and who now suffer from PTSD and debilitating illnesses. The MSM message seemed to be urging everyone on with the eternal war against ‘terrorism’.
So, now we are living – as Chris discusses – in the final act of empire. Perhaps the important mission is to remember why and how it happened. In future years, our individual memories may be the only things keeping the real history alive – particularly with those too young, or yet to be born, to have understood what was happening in their world.
The official narrative will be it was socialists aka ‘communists’ and other non patriots, aided by evil doers in the third world, Iran, China, or Russia that caused our downfall. And count on the MSM to embrace and shout it at every turn – with other alternative voices silenced.
Knock nock 
Leave a comment