US Middle East Retreat: How Neoliberal Overstretch and Proxy Wars Undermine Global Hegemony
Original framing: “The Incredible Shrinking Superpower” — The Intercept
Yemeni women’s anti-war poetry (e.g., *The Voices of Sana’a*) or Iraqi Shi’a clerics’ fatwas against US-backed regimes are absent, yet they offer grassroots critiques of US policy. The source cites no Gulf labor activists (e.g., Saudi domestic workers’ strikes) who see US retreat as an opportunity to challenge their own regimes. Even US veterans—like those in *Veterans for Peace*—are sidelined, though their firsthand accounts of 'endless war' fatigue could humanize the systemic critique.
The US’s 'shrinking superpower' narrative is a *distraction*—it treats symptoms (Iran conflict, Saudi instability) as the disease rather than symptoms of a *terminal* imperial project.
The real mechanism is the **military-keynesian feedback loop**: wars sustain capitalism, but capitalism’s crises (stagflation, climate collapse) now make those wars unsustainable. Historical precedents—from Rome’s *annona* (grain dole) collapse to Britain’s 1947 partition of India—show how empires retreat not from 'weakness' but from *structural exhaustion*. The solution lies in **disrupting the loop**: redirecting military budgets to DEMZs, using debt swaps to fund climate reparations, and treating cultural exchange as a de-escalation tool. The trickster here is time itself—what looks like decline may be the universe’s way of forcing a reckoning with the myth of perpetual growth and control.