Afrasianet - Elhami Meligi - When the individual is ahead of the state, temperament over the establishment, and the improvisation of strategy, the empire is not in its full power as it imagines, but at one of its great thresholds of confusion.
At the height of its rise, the United States was not just an enormous military arsenal, not just an economy that swallowed up markets and remapped influence, but also a carefully crafted portrait of a country whose deepest power was said to lay in its institutions: its ability to curb individual whims, control decision-making, and prevent emotion from becoming a global destiny.
That was the great American narrative: another president may come and go, but the state remains deeper than the occupant of the White House, more entrenched than the whims of the moment, and able to turn power into order, not chaos.
But what the world sees today in Washington torpedoes this image from its roots. We are not just facing a noisy, narcissistic, or showman-obsessed president, but a spectacle that reveals, with rare bluntness, that a state that has long presented itself as the pinnacle of institutionalism sometimes behaves as if it is run by personal temperament rather than institutional logic.
A president wakes up in the morning, sips his coffee, and launches a tweet that ignites markets, policies and alliances, and then hours later he sends another signal that contradicts the first one or empties it of its meaning, as if the whole world has become hostage between the excitement of the morning and the evening rush.
Here the question is not only about the strangeness of the man, but about the meaning of what is happening in the heart of the empire itself. For the question, in essence, it is not just an unbridled method of communication, but a political and historical exposure of a state in which the individual has crowded the establishment, improvisation crowds planning, and the clamor crowds the cold mind that has long been said to be one of the secrets of American supremacy.
When this happens in an ordinary country, it is a crisis of governance; when it happens in a power that still has the world's widest network of military, financial and political influence, it becomes a universal issue that affects the destinies of entire peoples and continents.
But it is an absurdity that is not written this time in the texts of Beckett, Genet, or Adamoff, nor even in Tawfiq al-Hakim's fantasies of a world in which logic is flawed, but is written directly on maps of the world. Absurdity that the empire emits from its center, not from its periphery; absurdity that not only confuses the American interior, but also confuses allies, adversaries, markets, and battlefields at the same time.
When the world's greatest power reaches such a daily contradiction between signal and its opposite, and between the threat and retreat from it, we are not only facing political confusion, but also a crack in the image of the center itself.
A fundamental part of the prestige of the United States was based on the fact that its decisions, even in the most brutal moments, seemed to come from a state apparatus, not on the whims of an individual.
The world treated Washington not as just or moral, but as understandable and predictable, at least as a minimum. Today, one of the most dangerous shifts is that this predictability is eroding, and the image of the "country that knows what it wants" is declining to the expense of another: a state with a surplus of power, but gradually losing the discipline and meaning of that power.
This is where the essence of the imperial predicament lies. Empires begin to decline not only when they are militarily broken or defeated by their opponents, but also when they are unable to govern themselves with the mind with which they made their glory.
When a show of power becomes a substitute for good use, when noise replaces coherence, and when the distance between the state and the individual is eroded to the point where a strategic decision seems more like an immediate emotion or a mood response. It is precisely at this point that imperial arrogance transforms from a sign of dominance to a sign of dysfunction.
The United States is still, without a doubt, a mighty power. No sane person can deny its military, financial, or technological weight, or the depth of its alliance networks. But the issue here is not in the denial of power, but in understanding the nature of the moment. The empire may be very strong, and yet it is in decline. Perhaps the tragedy of the great empires is that they continue to act as if the height of their glory is still ongoing, at the very moment when they are beginning to lose their internal equilibrium.
This is what makes the current American landscape so significant: Washington is trying to act as the only pole that does not regress, at a time when the fissures within its center are multiplying, and it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between the decision of the state and the emotion of the president.
Talk of the shaking of unipolarity does not seem merely an ideological desire on the part of Washington's opponents, but a reading imposed by the facts themselves. The world is no longer living in the same pure American moment as it was after the collapse of the Soviet Union. China is escalating, Russia is fighting to define its position, regional powers are expanding their margins for maneuvering, and the United States' traditional allies are becoming less certain and more concerned about the shifts in the center of American decision-making. Multipolarity has not yet stabilized, but it is certain that the stage of reassuring American exclusivity is no longer what it used to be.
More dangerously, this transformation comes not only from the rise of others, but also from the confusion of America itself. When the center is shaken, the world does not need the fall of the empire to feel that a whole time is about to pass. It is enough for the empire to lose its ability to convince itself that it can still control itself, for others to begin to recalculate, and for its prestige to decline even before its tools have receded. Power lives not only by weapons, but also by image, trust, certainty, and the ability to produce meaning. All of these are now being clearly drained at the heart of the American landscape.
We are likely not seeing the end of America, but the end of its old image: the image of a state that for decades seemed bigger than the whims of its presidents, and capable of containing extremism within a cohesive network of institutions. What is being revealed is that the institution itself is no longer immune from invasion, and that the empire that has long claimed to rule with a cold mind is in danger of being run by a hot nerve.
It is precisely here that the moment acquires its historical gravity. When the individual takes precedence over the state, temperament over the establishment, and the improvisation of strategy, the empire is not in its full power as it imagines, but at one of its great thresholds of confusion.
This is the moment when the surplus of power becomes a mask that hides a deeper crisis, and the clamor becomes a desperate attempt to postpone the recognition that the world is changing, that the center that has imposed its rhythm for so long can no longer monopolize the definition of rhythm itself.
This is not, then, just a president's crisis. It's a model crisis. A crisis of a state that built a large part of its hegemony project on the image of institutionalization, discipline and leadership, and then found itself, at a critical historical moment, captive to a president who writes the world in the form of a tweet, leaving allies, adversaries and markets to contemplate, in their own way, the meaning of the next signal.
And so the great transformations begin: not only when adversaries knock on the doors of the empire, but when the empire, at the heart of its center, hears the sounds of cracks rising from within.
