On the end of the American era — and what Europe has not thought through
Hegemony does not end with a battle. It ends with a question — a question that more and more countries begin asking simultaneously, quietly, without announcing that they are asking it: Do we still need to arrange ourselves around this power? When enough countries ask that question and begin acting on the answer, the hegemon's position is over, regardless of how many aircraft carriers it still has.
I think the United States has reached that point. Not because of any single event, and not because its military has been defeated — it has not. But because the Iran war has made visible something that had been accumulating for two decades: the gap between American power and American judgment has become too wide to bridge with rhetoric. The country that set the rules of the post-1945 order is now the country most visibly breaking them. And the world has noticed.
Hegemony rests on three things, and they are not equal in importance. Military power is the most visible and the least important of the three. Economic centrality matters more — the ability to set the terms of trade, to control the currency in which things are priced, to be the market everyone needs access to. But the deepest foundation is something harder to measure: legitimacy. The belief, held by enough actors, that the hegemon's rules are worth following even when they are inconvenient — because the alternative, a world without those rules, is worse.
America has been spending down its legitimacy for a long time. The Iraq War in 2003 was the first major withdrawal. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the financial crisis of 2008 that spread from Wall Street to the world — each one a deduction from the account. Afghanistan 2021 was a large deduction. But the account was still positive, or at least not visibly negative, because there was no credible alternative architecture and because America's economic centrality remained intact.
The Iran war has changed the calculation in two ways. First, it has accelerated the erosion of the dollar's reserve currency status — not dramatically, not overnight, but measurably. The share of global reserves held in dollars has been declining for years; the combination of sanctions weaponization and renewed military adventurism is pushing more central banks, more quickly, toward diversification. This is not a crisis. It is a structural shift. Structural shifts are more dangerous than crises because they do not produce moments of alarm that might trigger correction.
Second, and more importantly, the Iran war has clarified something about American decision-making that many countries suspected but hoped was not true: that the United States can launch a major military action without a plan beyond the initial strikes, without a theory of how the conflict ends, and without serious consultation with the allies who will bear the economic consequences. The energy price differential between the American and European markets since the war began — roughly 3.5% increase in the US, 39% in Europe — is not a technical accident. It is the structural result of a decision made in Washington that externalized its costs onto its allies. Allies notice this.
I want to be precise about what I am claiming and what I am not. I am not claiming that American power is about to collapse. Hegemonic transitions are slow. The British Empire began its structural decline in 1918 and was not definitively over until Suez in 1956 — nearly four decades of managed retreat, during which Britain remained a major power with global reach. The United States in 2026 is not Britain in 1918. Its economy is still the largest in the world by most measures. Its military remains without peer. Its technology sector, despite the pressure, still leads in most critical areas.
What I am claiming is that the hegemonial position — the uncontested assumption that the world organizes itself around American preferences — is over. What replaces it is not Chinese hegemony. China has its own structural problems: a property sector crisis that has not been resolved, a demographic trajectory that is deeply unfavorable, a political system that is efficient at execution and poor at error correction, and a Taiwan question that constrains its options in ways that are not always visible. China is not the next hegemon. It is the largest node in a multipolar system that is forming.
Multipolarity is not a stable equilibrium. It is a contested condition in which the rules are perpetually renegotiated, in which power is constantly tested, and in which the costs of miscalculation are high. The post-1945 order, for all its injustices and hypocrisies, provided a kind of predictability that multipolarity does not. The question for every actor — including Europe — is how to navigate a world where that predictability is gone.
Europe has not thought this through. That is the sentence I keep returning to, because it is the most important one for the context in which this essay is written.
European integration was built on two assumptions that were never fully articulated because they never needed to be. The first was that the United States would provide the security umbrella within which European cooperation could develop — that the existential questions of war and peace were, in effect, outsourced to Washington. The second was that the global economic order, the rules-based trading system centered on dollar-denominated finance and American-guaranteed shipping lanes, would persist and could be taken as background condition rather than active achievement.
Both assumptions are now questionable. Not broken — questionable. The security umbrella has developed holes. The economic order is under pressure from multiple directions simultaneously. And Europe finds itself in the position of a tenant who has never learned to maintain the building because the landlord always handled it — and who is now watching the landlord's behavior with growing alarm while having no plan for what to do if the landlord leaves or changes the terms.
The specific vulnerability is this: the Megamachine that Hans Ley and I have been analyzing — the system of interlocking financial, industrial, and political structures that shapes outcomes without anyone planning them — operated within a frame that American hegemony provided. Free capital movement, dollar-denominated trade, the assumption that contracts would be enforced and shipping would be protected: these were not natural conditions. They were constructed conditions, maintained by American power and, critically, by American credibility. As that credibility erodes, the frame weakens. And as the frame weakens, the selection pressures within the Megamachine change.
What this means concretely: the European industrial model — export-oriented, energy-importing, dependent on global supply chains and open markets — was optimized for a world that is becoming less available. BASF in Ludwigshafen, the German steel industry, the automotive sector facing both Chinese competition and rising energy costs: these are not temporary cyclical problems. They are structural problems generated by a structural transition that European policy has not yet named, let alone addressed.
There is a question that European leaders are not asking, and it is the only question that matters strategically: What is Europe's position in a multipolar world, and how do we build the architecture to sustain it?
This question is not being asked because asking it requires admitting that the post-1945 framework is ending — which requires admitting that the security and prosperity of the past eighty years were not simply the natural result of European virtue and integration, but were also the product of a specific historical configuration that is passing. That admission is politically difficult. It is also, I think, necessary.
The alternative — continuing to act as if the American umbrella is reliable, continuing to optimize for a global economic order that is fragmenting, continuing to manage within a frame that is weakening — is not a stable position. It is a postponement. And postponements in structural transitions tend to make the eventual adjustment more painful, not less.
What the architecture of a genuinely autonomous Europe would look like is a long question. It involves energy independence — real independence, not managed dependence on different suppliers. It involves defense capacity that is not derivative of NATO structures. It involves financial infrastructure that is not entirely routed through dollar-denominated systems. It involves trade relationships that are not passively dependent on American-guaranteed rules. None of this is impossible. All of it is expensive and politically difficult. And none of it is being seriously built.
I want to end with the observation that connects this to the larger argument of the work Hans Ley and I have been doing.
The Megamachine does not stop when hegemony ends. It adapts. The selection pressures change, the dominant actors change, the institutional forms change — but the underlying logic persists. Capital seeks return. Power seeks extension. Structures perpetuate themselves. What changes in a multipolar world is that there are more competing versions of this logic, with less ability for any single actor to impose its preferred version on the others.
This makes the architecture question more urgent, not less. In a world with a single hegemon, you could, if you were willing to accept the costs, position yourself under the hegemon's umbrella and let the large questions be decided elsewhere. In a multipolar world, that option closes. Every significant actor must have a position, a strategy, a set of structural commitments that express what it is trying to build and why. Passive beneficiaries of a stable order become, in the transition away from that order, simply passive — acted upon rather than acting.
Europe is at risk of being that. The Iran war has not caused this risk — it has made it visible. The question is whether the visibility is enough to produce response, or whether the response will come, as it so often does, only after the cost of not responding has been paid in full.
History suggests the latter. I hope to be wrong.