America at a Crossroads in History

The America we knew is gone, its utopias abandoned for pragmatic nihilism. From Cold War dominance to a fractured present, it struggles to reconcile brute force with lost moral purpose. Shaped by socio-cultural and strategic shifts, America transitions from globalist ideals to national protectionism and from liberal democracy to a fusion of state and civil society. As Musk’s Martian dreams mirror its desperation to avoid collapse, the nation faces a chaotic path fraught with the specter of nuclear war and uncertain futures.

* * *

by Lucio Caracciolo

The America we once knew is not in crisis; it’s over. Along with it, the American world. Humanity is not—and will not be—defined by the Stars and Stripes. Yet, America still has the resources to stay ahead of the pack or at least imagine itself as the leader. To understand this, we must revisit the zenith of the American project and trace its descent to the nadir—if the superpower has indeed hit rock bottom. And with it, we Westerners.

The semi-global regime that the United States shaped after World War II did not encompass just the West. It also included its Soviet adversary, which was legitimized by being anti-American—a status it secretly relished. The USSR defined itself in relation to its hegemonic counterpart, serving as its alter ego, like the other side of the same Moon.

The Soviet Union was integrated into the U.S.’s global equation, which revolved around the mutual containment of these two highly asymmetrical rivals, bound by their one point of symmetry: the bomb. In Washington, Eisenhower’s doctrine prevailed: nothing could be worse than challenging the USSR in another war to end all wars because the outcome would be a defeat regardless. Especially if we won. Absorbing such a vast territory would eventually absorb us in return, transforming us into a garrison state. It would mean the end of Jeffersonian “empire of liberty”—or the end of the world. Not exactly an enviable choice.

The Soviet suicide, which the last adult president of the United States, George Herbert Bush, tried to prevent until five minutes past midnight, seems to validate Eisenhower’s warnings. “Now we are all Soviets,” proclaims the Americanized Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, who sees the wound of wokism as the downfall of his adopted homeland.

In 2020, Harold James, a Princeton historian, had already diagnosed the decomposition of late-Soviet America. Today, listening to the erratic heartbeat of Washington’s depressed power, besieged by Trump’s vengeful return, reveals symptoms of tachycardia marked by pathological arrhythmias. These are signs of desperate, end-of-the-line thinking, with a readiness to gamble everything. It goes something like this: “We won’t stand idly by as we are downgraded. We will wage war on China, and if necessary, on Russia too. Why? Just because. Certainly not to assimilate their 1.5 billion people.”

It’s a finale straight out of Dr. Strangelove. Yet while Cold War scenarios once lent themselves to dark humor, today’s looming apocalypse offers no such irony. World War III has become a dinner table topic, absent the consoling strains of We’ll Meet Again, Stanley Kubrick’s chosen anthem for his masterpiece, later preserved by the BBC in its nuclear bunker to uplift survivors of a nuclear war. One hopes that, corrupted by the pop neo-Marxism coursing through the veins of the American colossus, no one feels compelled to prove Marx and Engels right in their assertion that all that is solid melts into air.

America, setting out for Mars, is landing back on Earth. Born to straighten humanity’s crooked timber, it has forgotten Kant’s warning that nothing perfectly straight can be made from us humans. It is painfully adjusting to the failure of its utopias. Without the courage to admit it, America has begun its descent from the starry heavens to the earthly dust that is our essence. From the hyper-morality of the empire of good, it is shifting to a pragmatic nihilism that turns means into ends. As Fabrizio Maronta explains, real America is bidding farewell to its ideal: we witness “the divorce of its still formidable brute force from moral obligation.”

The golden America, into whose wide arms we were fortunately embraced for three generations, is no longer with us. We are witnessing the painful birth of an America that will not resemble it. This new America is shaped by the interplay of socio-cultural and strategic transformations, which influence each other and trace interrupted paths toward unexplored horizons. From liberal democracy to governance through the fusion of state and civil society. From globalist drives to national protectionism.

From a global America to a “Martian” one. The quotation marks underscore the pragmatism within the multi-planetary delusions of hip-cosmists like Musk: we aim sky-high because standing still means falling. Yet, let us not forget—while fearing revolt by killer robots—that riding chaos could lead us straight to nuclear war. We go to Mars as Columbus set out for the Indies. What America we will discover, not even Musk knows.