The End of American Hegemony

Robert Kagan, a leading neoconservative thinker and co-founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in 1997, has long championed the aggressive projection of American power. 

Through PNAC, Kagan and his collaborators advocated for substantial increases in defense spending and the adoption of pre-emptive military action against potential threats to U.S. interests and global stability.

His intellectual output, including influential books and essays, positioned him as a key architect of the post-Cold War interventionist consensus that justified operations such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Compounding his establishment credentials, Kagan is married to Victoria Nuland, the former senior State Department official who, in a 2013 speech, famously remarked that the United States had “invested more than $5 billion” in Ukraine to get a successful regime change. For decades, the Kagan family embodied the neoconservative faith in American exceptionalism and the moral imperative of sustaining a unipolar world order through strength and resolve.

As the author of The Big Reset: War on Gold and the Financial Endgame, first published in early 2014, I have maintained for over a decade that the American-led monetary and geopolitical order carried within it the seeds of its own structural exhaustion. I expected a methodical erosion of dollar hegemony driven by unsustainable debt, and the parallel rise of gold or commodity-backed alternatives.

What I described then as the inevitable “endgame” of the postwar financial system is now materializing with clinical precision, and it carries particular weight that Robert Kagan, one of its most articulate guardians, has now chronicled its passing in two decisive essays. In the analysis that follows, I dissect Kagan’s arguments, weave in his most telling formulations, and register my own reactions to demonstrate why these texts represent both an intellectual watershed and the overdue confirmation of a reset long in motion.

Kagan’s earlier essay frames the crisis as a conscious choice rather than an inexorable decline. He contends that the United States has not been forced from its hegemonic perch by material weakness or external rivals alone. Instead, the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy “made it official: The American-dominated liberal world order is over.”

This is not, he insists, the result of incapacity, “the United States proved materially incapable of sustaining it”, but of a deliberate decision “that it no longer wishes to play its historically unprecedented role of providing global security.” The American might “that upheld the world order of the past 80 years will now be used instead to destroy it.”

Here, Kagan evokes the grand bargain of 1945: allies surrendered spheres of influence and territorial ambitions in exchange for American protection, fostering decades of relative peace and prosperity even amid Cold War tensions. That bargain, he argues, is now void. The administration’s embrace of tariffs against allies, threats to NATO partners, demands for payment for defense, and a worldview that treats Russia and China as co-participants in a multipolar carve-up of the globe marks a return to nineteenth-century Machtpolitik.

Exactly as expected when mapping the Saudi-BRICS pivot and the quiet dedollarization of oil settlements, this rupture is no policy accident but the predictable consequence of a monetary order that has finally exhausted its capacity to underwrite global commitments. Kagan’s phrasing captures the essence of the mechanism: empires rarely fall on the battlefield alone; they dissolve when the financial arrangements that once subsidized their primacy lose credibility.

The “grand bargain” he mourns was always financed by the dollar’s exorbitant privilege, the unique ability to monetize deficits and underwrite alliances without immediate consequence. When that privilege frays, as I demonstrated it must through accelerated central-bank gold purchases and commodity-based settlement systems, the political appetite for sustaining the bargain evaporates.

Kagan’s own reaction is one of unmistakable lament: “Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II, one that will make the Cold War look like child’s play and the post–Cold War world like paradise.” Without the stabilizing architecture of alliances, the United States will confront a more dangerous environment. Allies, long habituated to American security guarantees, will rearm and recalibrate. Europe, stripped of its transatlantic umbrella, faces the resurgence of nationalism; Germany “has no choice but to become normal again,” while Poland and France may pursue nuclear options.

In Asia, Japan and South Korea confront similar imperatives. The result is not a stable balance of power but proliferating flashpoints, as “in a multipolar world, everything is up for grabs.”Commentators sympathetic to realist traditions might applaud this shift as a long-overdue correction to over extension, yet Kagan’s reaction is one of lament.

His prose carries an elegiac tone, underscoring the aberration of the postwar order: “This was truly aberrant behavior and defied all theories of international relations as well as historical precedent.” The essay’s power lies in its insistence that the unraveling is not inevitable but chosen, a form of strategic abdication that leaves the United States “neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future.”

One reaction from within the academy might note the irony: Kagan, once a champion of the “benevolent empire,” now chronicles its self-dismantling. Yet his analysis invites a deeper critique. By attributing the end of hegemony primarily to domestic political will rather than to structural erosion, debt, deindustrialization, or the diffusion of power, he risks underplaying the fact that Trump’s policies merely accelerated trends already latent in American society’s war-weariness and fiscal constraints. Still, his warning resonates: the retreat from global responsibility may purchase short-term sovereignty at the expense of long-term primacy.

In my assessment, this framing understates the monetary driver I have emphasized since 2014: the hidden costs Kagan enumerates, greater military spending, and economic isolation are the direct symptoms of a dollar system that can no longer socialize its deficits across the globe.

If the first essay diagnoses the policy-induced twilight of empire, the second declares its strategic noon has passed into night.

In “Checkmate in Iran,” Kagan examines the U.S. confrontation with Tehran as the crucible in which abstract decline becomes concrete defeat. Writing in the immediate aftermath of military operations that failed to achieve decisive objectives, he asserts that the United States “suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored.” Unlike Vietnam or Afghanistan, “costly but [which] did not do lasting damage to America’s overall position in the world, because they were far from the main theaters of global competition”, the Iran episode is qualitatively different. “Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character.

It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done.”The centerpiece of this verdict is Iran’s retention of control over the Strait of Hormuz. “With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world.” Tehran can now exact tolls, restrict passage, and punish adversaries economically, transforming a theoretical nuclear threshold power into a choke-point hegemon over global energy flows.

Kagan details the cascading effects: Gulf Arab states, once sheltered by American hegemony, “will ineluctably go begging to Tehran”; Israel finds itself isolated; European naval initiatives prove risible. The war itself exposed American vulnerabilities: “Just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels”, while adversaries gain: “The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished.”

The global adjustment “to a post-American world is accelerating. America’s once-dominant position in the Gulf is just the first of many casualties.”Kagan’s language is starkly final. “If this isn’t checkmate, it’s close.”

He rejects optimistic narratives of reversal: blockades or renewed strikes risk regional economic catastrophe, and the conflict has already “revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started.”

The Strait of Hormuz episode confirms the monetary, commodity and energy reordering I highlighted in my books: the petrodollar, long the cornerstone of American financial dominance, fractures precisely because the underlying architecture that financed expeditionary power has reached its terminal limits. Kagan’s comparison to Pearl Harbor’s early reversals drives the point home: earlier setbacks were tactical; this one is structural and, as I have consistently argued, irreversible without a comprehensive monetary reset.

Read in tandem, Kagan’s two essays form a coherent narrative arc: from deliberate policy choice to irreversible strategic consequence. The first establishes the intellectual and doctrinal foundations of decline, the rejection of the liberal order’s “grand bargain” in favor of spheres of influence and transactionalism. The second supplies the empirical confirmation: a regional conflict that, far from restoring deterrence, cements multipolarity.

Together, they suggest that the end of the American empire is neither myth nor hyperbole but a lived transition. Kagan does not celebrate this; his tone remains that of the reluctant realist, mourning the loss of an order that, for all its hypocrisies, delivered unprecedented peace and prosperity. His reactions to the unfolding events, alarm at European rearmament, dismay at Gulf realignments, foreboding about Taiwan or European flashpoints, betray a conviction that the United States has traded long-term strength for illusory autonomy.

Scholarly reactions to Kagan’s thesis have been predictably polarized. Liberal internationalists echo his lament, decrying the self-inflicted wound to collective security. Realists counter that hegemony was always unsustainable and that multipolarity, however volatile, restores agency to other actors long subordinated. Yet even skeptics must grapple with Kagan’s historical acuity: empires do not collapse overnight, but through cumulative missteps that expose underlying fragilities.

The Iran episode, in his telling, is not an isolated misadventure but the logical outgrowth of a doctrine that prioritizes “homeland security and hemispheric hegemony” over global stewardship. One might extend the commentary further: Kagan’s work implicitly challenges exceptionalist narratives by demonstrating that American power, like all preceding hegemonies, is contingent on will, alliances, and perception. When those erode, the “indispensable nation” becomes merely another great power among rivals.

What renders Kagan’s recent interventions a huge shift, and one that reverberates far beyond the academy, is the radical departure they represent from the very neoconservative worldview he once helped define and defend. Having spent a career warning against the perils of American retrenchment and insisting that only vigorous U.S. hegemony could tame the “jungle” of international anarchy, Kagan now chronicles its deliberate demise with a tone of resigned finality.

This volte-face, from architect of primacy to eulogist of empire, underscores the depth of the crisis: even the most ardent defenders of the liberal order have come to see its foundations as irreparably eroded.

In this light, Kagan’s essays do more than analyze decline; they mark the intellectual capitulation of neoconservatism itself, signaling that the era of American global dominance, once deemed both necessary and eternal, has reached its unanticipated and self-inflicted conclusion.