MADRID - Empires rarely collapse all at once. In his monumental study of Rome, Edward Gibbon argued that decline is usually gradual, shaped by long-term structural transformations. Yet history occasionally records moments when a strategic miscalculation accelerates the process. The question worth asking is whether the United States may have reached one of those moments.

The joint American-Israeli war against Iran, launched on February 28, is not simply another conflict in West Asia. It may represent a geopolitical turning point comparable to the 1956 Suez Crisis, when Britain and France succeeded militarily but collapsed politically, revealing that Britain could no longer act as an independent imperial power.

What is at stake goes beyond military calculations. The issue concerns the architecture of the contemporary global order and the racial structures of power that sustain it. For seven decades, the United States has anchored that order not only through force but through institutions and economic arrangements. The legitimacy of American leadership rested on the perception that its system produced stability and prosperity. Yet that legitimacy also depended on something more fundamental: the assumption that certain peoples – white, Western, liberal – possessed the natural right to govern the world, to decide which political forms were legitimate, and to determine which forms of violence were permissible.

This racial assumption has structured American policy in West Asia since 1948. Washington positioned itself as a neutral arbiter, but that neutrality always rested on an implicit racial hierarchy. The United States offered security guarantees to the Persian Gulf monarchies in exchange for pricing oil in US dollars – the petrodollar system. Iran, however, stood outside this system. After 1979, Iran positioned itself in opposition to American influence.

For decades, American strategy rested on three pillars: containing Iran, preserving the petrodollar system, and guaranteeing Persian Gulf security. Yet it also reproduced a racial geography of power. America’s allies – monarchies willing to integrate into the liberal order – were treated as legitimate partners. Iran, which rejected that integration and organized politics differently, was marked instead as irrational, fanatical, and premodern.

Recent events suggest this system is weakening. The war has raised doubts about American credibility. It is worth recalling that negotiations were still underway in Oman when the first attack took place. Launching a military operation during diplomacy undermines confidence in negotiation itself. The operation is clearly illegal under international law. But something deeper is at stake. Washington’s willingness to violate its own legal frameworks reveals the racial structure of the liberal order: norms are applied selectively. The United States may violate Iranian sovereignty without consequence, while Iran cannot do the same without being branded a terrorist state.

Iranian retaliatory actions have targeted infrastructure associated with Persian Gulf states. For these governments, a fundamental question arises: if the United States cannot protect them from regional escalation, can it still function as a reliable security guarantor? These concerns have been developing gradually. Persian Gulf states have diversified their strategic relationships. China’s expanding economic presence has created alternative partnerships. The 2023 agreement restoring Saudi-Iranian relations, brokered by Beijing, demonstrated that alternative diplomatic actors are emerging. States that for decades had little choice but to align with Washington can now pursue alternatives.

Wars are also fought in the realm of perception. And it is precisely on this terrain that Iran has achieved its most decisive victory. By confronting both the United States and Israel without capitulating, Iran has transformed resistance into regional political capital. This is not a conventional military victory but something deeper: the consolidation of an image of a state capable of imposing limits on imperial power. Even the debate within the United States reveals a growing discomfort with the erosion of the myth of American military superiority – a superiority that no longer guarantees strategic victory. Destroying targets does not resolve the central problem: the inability to translate force into durable political control.

From Vietnam to Afghanistan, American firepower has repeatedly proved insufficient to secure submission. What is different now is that Iran is not merely resisting: it is reorganizing the battlefield, shifting the conflict into an asymmetric, politically exhausting struggle for its adversaries. By avoiding confrontation, Iran operates through regional allies, low-cost technologies, and indirect control over strategic chokepoints. The issue is no longer who possesses greater military power, but who can sustain confrontation without political collapse. Prolonged war exacts a heavy price within the United States – inflation, energy pressures, and political fatigue. The ability to sustain long-term conflict, once a pillar of American hegemony, is eroding.

Yet the deeper transformation is beyond the battlefield. For much of the Global South, victory is measured by the capacity to remain standing against the Western war machine. To resist is already to win. The West continues to underestimate this perception. The more pressure Iran has faced, the stronger its image has become as a resilient power. The 'discourse of resistance' has moved from a marginal slogan to a regional political language, crossing borders and sectarian divisions. Its growing appeal reveals a strategic fracture in the Western project of fragmenting the Middle East.

What makes this transformation particularly intolerable for the liberal order is that it challenges the racial geography that has structured the modern international system. Iran is not supposed to be capable of resisting, developing advanced technology under embargo, maintaining complex alliances, or imposing costs on the United States. Each of these capacities contradicts the narratives used to justify the Western posture towards Iran. If those representations collapse, then the justification for sanctions, threats and regime change collapses with them.

America’s inability to translate military superiority into political victory reveals something fundamental. For decades, Washington assumed that the capacity to inflict violence translated directly into the capacity to shape political outcomes. The war with Iran demonstrates that this assumption no longer holds. Iran has developed mechanisms to absorb pressure, ideological resources to sustain legitimacy under siege, and strategic doctrines that privilege resistance over comfort. These developments challenge the narrative of invincibility that has always been central to American imperial power. Iran’s capacity to remain standing dismantles that narrative. And once the invincibility of the oppressor is called into question, space opens for a profound transformation in the political psychology of people.

It would still be premature to announce the end of American global leadership. Yet hegemonic orders rarely disappear abruptly. They enter a phase of slow erosion: a gradual loss of authority marked by weakening confidence in the dominant power’s ability to sustain the system it created. If confidence in American security guarantees continues to deteriorate, the international system may evolve towards a more fragmented, less hierarchical configuration. What is truly significant about this war is that it has revealed that military supremacy no longer guarantees political control; that the capacity to destroy does not entail the capacity to order. Iran’s real victory lies in forcing recognition that the Western monopoly over political legitimacy and the definition of modernity can no longer be assumed as permanent. Iran has demonstrated that other models of political organization can resist and contest influence. The rupture set in motion by this war is at once discursive and material: it has altered the language through which the liberal order was legitimized, and it has shown that the hierarchies sustaining that order can no longer reproduce themselves without mounting costs.