When empires end

Are we witnessing the end of an imperial era? Usually, these periods are fraught with violence and uncertainty. Empires are power structures, which crumbles from inside, and everything that stood on its edifice, values, ideas and systems, go down with them. Empires are stable - that's their raison d'etre! Even those who are disadvantaged by the empire support its existence because people would rather tolerate tyranny than anarchy. The end of any empire is therefore accompanied by instability. I know it is odd for me to think this is the end of an empire. The second Trump Presidency is as imperial as it gets. The United States, the world's overlord, is throwing its power around, threatening other countries with tariff and even invasion. It has approached major world issues unilaterally, pulling out of multilateral institutions or conventions, sitting down with Russia without other parties around and proposed to turn Gaza, in defiance of the all norms and wishes of everyone else, into a tourist resort. This is not a dying empire, but a reborn one by all counts! But it is always a mistake to see any empire as an empire of a nation, any nation! No one nation, however powerful, can dominate everyone else without the consent of the governed. In fact, this is what turns any occupation into an empire, from something temporary to something which seems natural and long-lasting. In that sense, all empires are empires of values, systems and ideas. Trump may impose himself on the world, but the fact he needs to resort to this means that the empire is endangered. Therefore, what is ending is not the American Empire, which, if my positon above is to be accepted, never existed. America was the pre-eminent power - the cæser - of an empire, but this is a residue of the European one. It maintained a certain idea of the world, which may have originated in the enlightenment and spread over the world by British and French arms, Dutch finance, German engineering and religious systems with European base, which pervaded everything: How we think of personal lives, success, work, economies, states, all that. Everyone who had power subscribed to a certain basic set of ideas, and moreover, rejected the alternatives as either unsuccessful (for example, the traditional Indian, Chinese or the Islamic ones) or unscientific (for example, the indigenous ideas of kinship, property, gods and time). In the edges of this ideas universe, there was violence: Anyone who did not follow it was brutally suppressed, but at its core, there was remarkable consensus and tranquility. Trump is shaking up the core and questioning its basics. The fundamental principles, how economies are organised, how nations deal with one another, how societies are organised, how one deals with natural resources, are being torn apart. And, as he started his bonfire, we see something remarkable: That this is not just an act of a madman in a hurry, but how flimsy and untenable these ideas were in the first place. Trump's acts are not surprising: If anyone was watching him, he said he would do all of these things; what is surprising is that the other side doesn't have any counter-points. Trump came charging, but he seemed to be charging towards an undefended windmill. To the extra-ordinary acts of undoing that happened over the last three weeks, the liberals only hoped that Trump's alliance would fall apart. Musk and him couldn't coexist for much longer! But again, does it even matter if that comes to pass? Isn't the core issue that the key ideas - multilateralism, DEI, free trade, North Atlantic Security - look empty, undefended, indefensible? The American democrats and European centrists are seeing the ground shift beneath their feet and hoping for redemption in the disorganisation of Trump's team, but the rest of the world is seeing another spectacle: The Davos set is actually naked and being called out! That is the end of empire. Trump Tower in Gaza wouldn't save it. The American tariffs would show to the world that the McKinseys, the privileged people sipping champagne in Davos and even those geniuses exploring new language models have no stakes in actual lives of most of us and have nothing concrete to offer. The stability we hoped for, the authority we trusted and the history we thought were living in are all illusions. The white men has bailed, and their bag carriers in different capitals are going to melt away. Tanks and equipments may come next, but as we know, armies come only after the empire is lost. The age of European ideas may have irreversibly ended.