stan van houcke: This is How America Collapsed As a Superpower

zondag 12 april 2026

This is How America Collapsed As a Superpower

Trump attends UFC fights as the world braces for a resolution to an unwinnable war. America is weakened and in decline with rising right-wing movements. How did we get here, and how we do we get out?

THE LEFT HOOK WITH WAJAHAT ALI AND RANA DASGUPTA

APR 12, 2026

After WW2, the United States had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to emerge as a superpower that learned from the suicidal mistakes of the “Western” empires that rose and diminished before it.

Europe was battered, Japan was recovering, and much of the Middle East and Africa was trying to emerge from decades of exploitation, dictatorships, and corruption. America became the world’s undisputed superpower, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, the sins of racism, imperialism, and greed ultimately became the fuel of short-term success, but the agents of our inevitable weakening and collapse.

The Trump Administration represents the murder-suicide of an empire that overextended its military-industrial complex, wreaked havoc in emerging countries instead of investing in robust democracies, decimated unions and labor, and rigged a capitalist system to benefit the elite at the expense of the majority. Trump was a wrecking ball of America’s own creation that quickened the downfall.

Celebrated author and journalist Rana Dasgupta spent years researching how once great Western empires fell. What were the engines of their success and what, ultimately, caused their weakness and self-immolation? In his new book, After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order, he identifies several recurring patterns and points to Brexit, the Trump Administration, and the rise of the modern Silicon Valley broligarchy as harbingers of a new, dangerous, and uncharted era.

However, the collapse of the post-WW2 order also invites opportunities to correct the remedies of the past and pave a fairer, freer, and more equitable future for the next generation. He joins The Left Hook for the first time to give us a history lesson on how we got here and where we could be going.

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Thank you Jenn Budd, Cathy R. Payne, Rasha Refaie, Paul Busch, Grace Alexandra Hayden, and many others for tuning into my live video with Rana Dasgupta! Join me for my next live video in the app.