Empire and the End of the Europe - Chas Freeman

The Insider’s Judgment: Biography and Uncomfortable Truth

Chas Freeman belongs to a rare generation of American diplomats who understood foreign policy not as ideology, but as a craft. He served for decades in the U.S. Foreign Service — not as a public figure, but as a strategist, negotiator, and sober analyst of global power shifts.

Freeman served as U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, later became president of the Middle East Policy Council, and advised senior decision-makers during the Cold War and the turbulent decades that followed. He was directly involved in sensitive diplomatic engagements with China, the Middle East, and countries of the Global South.

What distinguishes Freeman from most contemporary commentators is his institutional experience. He understands how governments, intelligence services, and multilateral organizations think — from the inside. Today, he analyzes them with the distance of an insider who no longer has a career to protect.

His warnings are not directed at individual states, but at structural failures of Western foreign policy: moral double standards, strategic short-sightedness, and the growing instrumentalization of non-state actors for geopolitical objectives.

While Donald Trump delivers what Freeman describes as a “completely unhinged” campaign speech before the UN General Assembly, a former Al-Qaeda leader is celebrated in New York as a democrat — and almost no one seems to notice the irony.

Ambassador Chas Freeman — one of the most decorated diplomats in American history — delivers a verdict on U.S. foreign policy that is as sweeping as it is damning: the United States is dismantling the very world order it spent a century constructing, and may not survive the contradiction.

Five Centuries, One Reckoning

The Munich Security Conference of 2026 did not debate the future of the Western order — it autopsied it. Ambassador Chas Freeman watched the proceedings with the weary clarity of someone who helped build what is now being dismantled.

There is a particular clarity that comes with age, experience, and no remaining career to protect. Ambassador Chas Freeman — former Assistant Secretary of Defense, U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, and one of the architects of post-Cold War American security doctrine — possesses all three. When he speaks, the words carry the weight of someone who has not merely observed the machinery of American power but has helped operate it.

His assessment of this moment in history is not delivered with satisfaction. It is delivered with something closer to grief. The United States, he argues, is not managing a difficult transition — it is actively destroying the foundations that made its global leadership possible in the first place, and doing so with a speed and recklessness that bewilders even seasoned observers of American foreign policy.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in Munich not to reaffirm Western idealism but to invoke Western dominance — drawing a line from Christopher Columbus through five centuries of Euro-Atlantic expansion and arguing, with remarkable candor, that the United States intends to restore what has been lost. Freeman dismantles the framing immediately.

The historical irony is almost too rich: a Cuban American arguing against decolonization is arguing against the liberation of his own country from the Spanish Empire that launched the very centuries of domination he extols. The deeper problem, Freeman argues, is not the hypocrisy but the strategic delusion — the assumption that dominance can be restored through assertion, that tariff threats and military deployments and the theatrical flexing of diminished power can reverse a structural shift in the global balance that has been building for thirty years.

The consequences of this posture are already visible in Munich and beyond:

• Rubio’s message to European allies — conform to American priorities or accept the consequences — was substantively identical to Vance’s contemptuous performance the year before; tone is the only difference, and Freeman is not persuaded by packaging
• The Munich Security Conference, once a reliable stage for the reaffirmation of transatlantic solidarity, has become a public autopsy of that solidarity — conducted in real time, with the pretense of unity stripped away and the underlying divergences finally in the open
• Freeman is unsparing in his verdict: “I don’t find arguments based on nostalgia for dominance very appealing — and I doubt many others do either”

The shared grammar of liberal internationalism — rules, norms, institutions, the common interest in a stable and predictable order — has been replaced by something rawer and less disguised. The conversation at Munich in 2026 was not about values or principles. It was about power, about who controls what, and about who is willing to fight to defend or overturn existing arrangements.

For Europe, the implications are staggering. Freeman notes that the continent is beginning to come to grips with a reality it spent eighty years denying: that it is once again on its own, responsible for its own security in a world where the American guarantee is no longer unconditional. The smug complacency that characterized transatlantic relations for decades has evaporated, replaced by something more volatile and considerably more dangerous.

What Rubio’s Munich appearance revealed, Freeman argues, is not a new American foreign policy but the unmasking of an old one — the reassertion of primacy stripped of the idealist packaging that once made it palatable to allies and to the American public alike. The Declaration of Independence begins with an assertion that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights. The Trump administration has, in Freeman’s assessment, officially repudiated that tradition — not in rhetoric alone, but in the systematic dismantling of the institutions, processes, and principles that gave those words operational meaning. That is not a foreign policy adjustment. It is a civilizational rupture.

Munich, Then and Now

Vladimir Putin’s 2007 warning in Munich was dismissed as revanchism. Nineteen years later, it reads as a precise diagnosis of everything that has since gone wrong.

In February 2007, Vladimir Putin delivered what became one of the most discussed speeches in the history of the Munich Security Conference. It was widely characterized in Western capitals as hawkish revanchism, as the declaration of a new Russian aggression.

Freeman reads it differently — as a lament that Russia had not been allowed to join the West, which it had genuinely sought to do in the years following the Soviet collapse, and as a warning: that unipolarity generates its own resistance, that the attempt to organize the entire world around a single center of power would not merely provoke opposition abroad but corrode the institutions sustaining that power at home, and that empires, in the long run, tend to consume the republics that create them. It was not a declaration of war. It was a diagnosis. And nineteen years later, that diagnosis has acquired the uncomfortable quality of prophecy.

The 2026 Munich conference bears almost no resemblance to the gathering Putin addressed. The language of shared principles and international law has been replaced by the language of restoration and dominance. European governments are being forced toward a reckoning they assumed they would never face — choosing between strategic autonomy they have allowed to atrophy for generations and subordination to an American partner that now treats alliance obligations as optional.

J.D. Vance’s appearance the previous year scandalized European officials with its contemptuous dismissal of democratic norms and transatlantic obligations. Rubio’s tone in 2026 was nominally friendlier. Freeman is not persuaded by the packaging. “After all, Marco Rubio is a dyed-in-the-wool neoconservative,” he says. “He believes in the use of force.” The substance of the message was identical: do it my way, or go your own way.

What Munich 2026 revealed about the state of the Western world:

• The pretense of seamless transatlantic unity — maintained for decades through a combination of genuine shared interest, diplomatic convention, and what Freeman calls smug complacency — has been stripped away entirely and cannot be reconstructed by communiqués alone
• Putin’s 2007 warning that the pursuit of unipolarity would tear at the United States itself has proven correct — not through Russian design, but through the self-defeating logic of hegemonic overextension that Zbigniew Brzezinski himself acknowledged in The Grand Chessboard nine years earlier
• Europe is scrambling to rearm, to develop strategic autonomy it never prepared for, and to calculate its interests in a world its entire postwar architecture was built to prevent — a world in which American commitment is conditional and the alliance is a transaction rather than a community

Freeman sees in this not merely a policy disagreement but a philosophical rupture whose consequences will unfold over decades. The United States was founded on the principles of the European Enlightenment — due process, democratic accountability, the sovereignty of the individual against the state, the rule of law as a constraint on power rather than a tool of it. Those principles were not rhetorical flourishes. They were the operating system of American political life, the justification for the revolution against the British crown and the distinction between the American republic and the empires it sought to transcend. The Trump administration has, in Freeman’s assessment, moved to dismantle that operating system — and in doing so, has severed the intellectual tradition that connected American power to American legitimacy.

The best that can be said for the 2026 Munich conference, Freeman argues, is that it exposed differences that could no longer be papered over — the divergence between an America pursuing restoration of dominance and a Europe clinging to the institutions of a liberal order the United States is now actively dismantling. Prior to Vance’s appearance in 2025, there was a pretense of transatlantic unity that allowed both sides to avoid confronting the underlying tensions. That pretense is gone. The confrontation, however uncomfortable, is now unavoidable.

The Enlightenment Abandoned

The Trump administration has not merely shifted American foreign policy — it has repudiated the philosophical tradition that gave American power its claim to legitimacy. Freeman calls it what it is.

Freeman’s most striking argument is his insistence on treating the current moment not as a shift in foreign policy — adjustable, reversible, the product of a single administration’s preferences — but as a philosophical rupture with the intellectual tradition that gave American democracy its distinctive character. “The United States was founded on the principles of the European Enlightenment,” he says.

“That’s why the Declaration of Independence begins as it does — with an assertion that all men are born equal and have the right to the pursuit of liberty, happiness, and so forth.” The key word is process: it is the fairness of the process that determines whether an outcome is legitimate. That principle — due process as the foundation of political legitimacy — is now being openly repudiated, not merely violated in practice as administrations have always sometimes done, but explicitly discarded as a governing philosophy.

The repudiation is systemic and extends far beyond domestic politics. The entire edifice of international law — built from Grotius through the Peace of Westphalia through the UN Charter, with the United States as its primary architect and most powerful guarantor — is being dismantled. Freeman does not reach for euphemism. He enumerates: murders on the high seas, invasions of other countries’ sovereignty, efforts to resubordinate nations in semi-colonial fashion.

Venezuela, Cuba, Canada, Greenland, Panama — each subjected to coercion with little pretense of appeal to shared principles or mutual benefit. The logic connecting them is consistent: the reassertion of American primacy through raw power, with the rules invoked only when convenient and discarded when they are not. This is not, Freeman argues, the behavior of a confident hegemon. It is the behavior of a declining power thrashing against its own diminishment, mistaking aggression for strength.

The consequences of this philosophical rupture are systemic and self-reinforcing:

• When the U.S. demands rules for others but accepts none for itself, that is not a rules-based order — it is dominance dressed as principle, and the rest of the world has noticed the difference with a clarity Washington appears unable to match
• The grand Chessboard acknowledged the tension explicitly: running an empire requires concentrating executive power in ways corrosive to democratic culture; Freeman believes, unlike Brzezinski, that this contradiction cannot be managed indefinitely — only resolved, and the resolution now underway is the dissolution of the republic
• Russia and China are drawing the logical conclusion that agreements with Washington offer no security — and are adjusting their strategic posture accordingly, accelerating precisely the multipolar reorientation that American policy claims to be preventing

The Hobbesian Leviathan — the sovereign whose authority is absolute because the alternative is the war of all against all — is, Freeman argues, the philosophical template for what is emerging in American political life. It is the antithesis of the Lockean tradition that inspired the American revolution, the constitutional design that distributed power to prevent its abuse, and the Enlightenment conviction that government derives its legitimacy from consent rather than force.

Freeman finds it telling that the Trump administration’s instincts align with Hobbes rather than Jefferson, with the logic of empire rather than the logic of republic — because the contradiction between those two logics, suppressed for two and a half centuries by the peculiar circumstances of American power, is now finally forcing a resolution.

“I hope that our libertarian tradition — with all the difficulties it contains, including the right to bear arms against the government — prevails over a Hobbesian notion of the Leviathan,” Freeman says. He acknowledges the outcome is uncertain. The knife’s edge cuts both ways. But the trajectory is visible, and it runs directly against the founding principles that gave American power its claim to something beyond mere domination.

The Gulf States and the New Balance of Power

Washington assumes the Gulf states remain loyal anchors of American strategy in the Middle East. Freeman argues that a quiet but fundamental reorientation is already underway — and that the signals could not be clearer.

Nowhere is the gap between American ambition and geopolitical reality more starkly visible than in the Arabian Peninsula. The Gulf Cooperation Council states — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman — have spent four decades as the cornerstone of American strategic architecture in the Middle East: purchasers of American weapons systems, hosts of American military bases, reliable partners in the management of regional order and oil market stability.

The assumption in Washington has long been that this relationship is durable, institutionally embedded, and essentially unconditional. Freeman, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War and has studied the region’s strategic culture for decades, believes that assumption is dangerously outdated — and that the signals of a fundamental reorientation are now too clear to ignore.

A quiet but consequential shift is underway across the Gulf. A de facto détente between the GCC states and Iran is emerging — not out of any affection for the Islamic Republic, but out of cold strategic calculation about the costs of continued alignment with an increasingly erratic American patron and an increasingly aggressive Israel. The Gulf states have told Washington explicitly that it may not use their bases or overfly their airspace in any military operation against Iran.

When the United States proposed a coalition meeting in Istanbul — hoping to assemble the Arab states in a common front against Tehran — they refused to co-sponsor Washington’s maximalist demands: total nuclear disarmament, dismantlement of Iran’s missile force, and severance of ties with Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and allied movements in Iraq. Iran declined the terms. The Gulf states declined to endorse them. The meeting did not happen. The episode revealed, with unusual clarity, how far American followership in West Asia has eroded.

The strategic logic driving this Gulf reorientation is straightforward and rarely acknowledged in Washington:

• A weakened or fragmented Iran would not make the Gulf states safer — it would remove the only effective counterweight to Israeli regional ambitions, leaving the monarchies more exposed to Israeli expansion, regional chaos, and the loss of whatever leverage they currently possess in a multipolar Middle East
• Iran’s support for Hamas reflects its democratic orientation, which Freeman notes is something the Gulf monarchies genuinely fear — Hamas repudiates monarchy and derives political legitimacy from the ballot box, a direct challenge to Saudi Arabia and the UAE — and yet even this ideological friction has not prevented the emergence of a de facto strategic alignment against Israeli hegemony
• The Arab states and Turkey have been actively working to prevent a war, understanding that the spillover from a regional conflict would damage their own interests regardless of who prevails — a calculation that Washington’s strategic planning appears to discount or ignore entirely

“Nobody in the region wants to see either a war, because of the spillover effects it would create and the damage it could do to their own interests, or a defeat of Iran,” Freeman says bluntly. The old framework of permanent and irreconcilable Arab-Iranian enmity — which American strategy has relied upon and, in Freeman’s analysis, actively cultivated — has given way to something more fluid, more cautious, and from Washington’s perspective far more inconvenient. A de facto coalition is forming to balance Israeli regional ambitions, and Iran is very much part of it. The United States, which once positioned itself as the indispensable manager of this rivalry, now finds itself with far fewer reliable partners than its strategic assumptions have required.

Freeman describes Israel’s position in this architecture with characteristic precision: not a follower of American policy, but something closer to a co-driver — with Netanyahu pressing Trump to join an attack on Iran not merely for the stated reason of preventing a nuclear weapon, but for the deeper objective of eliminating Iran as a strategic competitor and, ideally, breaking it into smaller states through a combination of military action and regime change. The Gulf states understand this objective clearly, and they want no part of it. Their passive-aggressive resistance to American and Israeli pressure is, Freeman argues, the most coherent strategic response available to states that lack the power to confront Washington directly but refuse to subordinate their interests to a policy that serves neither theirs nor the region’s long-term stability.

China, Russia, and the Defense of Westphalia

For three decades, China and Russia were cast as the revisionist powers threatening the liberal order. Freeman documents a remarkable reversal: it is now Washington that is dismantling what it once built.

For the better part of three decades, the dominant Western narrative cast China and Russia as the revisionist powers — states determined to overturn the rules-based international order in pursuit of territorial aggrandizement and spheres of influence. The United States, by contrast, was the status quo power, the guardian of the liberal international system that had produced seven decades of relative peace and an unprecedented expansion of global prosperity.

Freeman finds this framing, in 2026, almost comically inverted. The states that were supposed to be tearing down the international order have become its most vigorous defenders. The state that built that order is now its most aggressive antagonist. This is not a minor irony. It is a civilizational reversal with consequences that will shape the architecture of global power for the remainder of this century.

The reasons for this reversal are not sentimental. They are structural. China prospered within the American-sponsored world order in ways that had no historical precedent — lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, developing the world’s largest manufacturing base, and accumulating the financial reserves and technological capacity to compete with the West on its own terms. All of this occurred precisely because of the stability, open markets, and rule-governed institutions that the post-World War II order provided.

Beijing has every rational incentive to preserve the system that made its rise possible. Russia’s investment in the existing order is different in character but equally deep: for Moscow, international law is not primarily about trade or investment but about survival — a world in which borders are respected, sovereignty is protected, and great powers cannot simply reorganize their neighbors at will is a world in which Russia is safer than it would be under unconstrained American primacy.

The strategic positions of China and Russia reflect this structural logic:

• China staffs the UN, provides peacekeeping forces for UN operations, and insists on respect for international law — not out of principle but out of interest; Freeman notes the paradox with evident appreciation: “Communist China began as an outlaw from the UN system, and it’s now become the most faithful defender of that system”
• The BRICS coalition is not a revolutionary movement seeking to overturn the existing order but a defensive coalition seeking to preserve the parts of that order — sovereignty, non-interference, multilateralism — that the United States is currently abandoning; they want to reform it slightly, Freeman says, but fundamentally they want to preserve it
• China has reportedly provided Iran with advanced three-dimensional radar capable of tracking stealth aircraft including the F-35, and the HQ-9 air defense system — working to strengthen Iranian self-defense capability precisely because Beijing sees the U.S. as tearing down the Westphalian order that the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence are designed to protect

The United States spent decades insisting that its hegemony was qualitatively different from earlier empires — that American power was legitimate because it was rule-governed, exercised through institutions and consent rather than raw coercion, and therefore acceptable in ways that previous concentrations of power had not been. That claim is now in tatters. The abandonment of international law, the contempt for multilateral institutions, the willingness to use economic coercion and military threats against states that refuse to subordinate their interests to Washington’s preferences — all of this has stripped the idealist packaging from American power and revealed what it looks like without it. The rest of the world has drawn the obvious conclusion.

Freeman is particularly struck by what he calls the unprecedented nature of this moment: a hegemon deliberately destroying its own hegemony, dismantling the very architecture through which its power was exercised and legitimized. He has studied the history of great powers carefully and cannot find a comparable case. It is, he suggests, what happens when the internal contradictions of an imperial project finally overwhelm the republic that launched it — when the logic of empire, having progressively colonized the institutions and culture of the metropole, begins to tear them apart from the inside.

The Saudi Nuclear Dimension

Rumors that Saudi Arabia has acquired Pakistani nuclear weapons are circulating with new intensity. Freeman — a former U.S. ambassador to Riyadh — addresses the question directly, with skepticism grounded in decades of regional experience.

No serious examination of Gulf geopolitics can avoid the nuclear dimension — and specifically the rumors, circulating with increasing intensity in early 2026, that Saudi Arabia may have acquired nuclear weapons from Pakistan. Freeman addresses the question directly, and his answer is carefully calibrated. He is skeptical — not dismissive, but skeptical, with reasons.

The backstory is well established. In the mid-1980s, after Washington declined to provide Riyadh with the non-nuclear ballistic missiles it sought as protection against Iranian and Iraqi missile threats, Prince Bandar bin Sultan flew to Beijing and negotiated the deployment of Chinese nuclear-capable CSS-2 ballistic missiles to a base in central Saudi Arabia. Those missiles remain there today, upgraded and manned by Chinese personnel who control them entirely. Saudi Arabia paid for their deployment but does not operate them. The arrangement reflects something fundamental about Saudi strategic culture that Freeman captures with characteristic precision.

“Saudi culture tends to persuade other people to take risks and do things,” he says — and offers a T-shirt he owns as illustration, which reads: “Please don’t ask me to do stuff.” The missiles are Chinese-controlled. If Saudi Arabia were to obtain a nuclear weapon from Pakistan, Freeman argues, it would almost certainly operate under the same principle — Pakistani personnel, Pakistani control, Pakistani custody. The Pakistan-Saudi relationship adds another layer of complexity.

Riyadh is widely believed to have financed a significant portion of Islamabad’s nuclear weapons program in the 1970s and 1980s, with an implicit understanding that Pakistani weapons would be available for Saudi defense if existentially threatened. A formal defense pact now codifies something approximating extended deterrence. Turkey is seeking to join the same arrangement. The nuclear umbrella over the Gulf is becoming institutionalized — not through direct Saudi acquisition but through alliance architecture with Pakistan as the operational guarantor.

The nuclear question in the Gulf resolves into three distinct issues that are frequently conflated:

• Whether Saudi Arabia currently possesses nuclear weapons — Freeman doubts it; the arrangement would be detectable, the operational logic points to Pakistani custody, and the political convenience of the allegation makes it worth treating with skepticism
• Whether a formal extended deterrence arrangement with Pakistan exists — this is considerably more plausible and arguably already operational; the defense pact provides the legal framework, and the historical relationship provides the financial and political foundation
• Whether the conditions for actual proliferation are being created by current policy — this is where Freeman is most emphatic; if maximum pressure drives Iran to build a nuclear weapon, which he regards as the logical consequence of depriving Tehran of any diplomatic alternative, the entire regional nuclear calculus shifts and the Gulf states’ relationship with Pakistani weapons becomes far more concrete

Freeman does not dismiss the proliferation risk. He inverts it. The policies designed to prevent nuclear spread in the Middle East are, in his analysis, the policies most likely to cause it. Iran has not made a decision to build a nuclear weapon — the intelligence services of both the United States and Israel have consistently reported this. But every instrument of maximum pressure, every threat of military action, every rejection of diplomatic off-ramps brings that decision closer. North Korea built its nuclear weapon in response to exactly this kind of pressure, and the logic is not difficult to follow. If Iran concludes that the only guarantee of its sovereignty and survival is a nuclear deterrent, the restraint that has characterized its nuclear program for two decades will evaporate.

The irony is sharp and worth sitting with: the architects of maximum pressure believe they are preventing a nuclear Iran. Freeman’s analysis suggests they are constructing one. And once that threshold is crossed, the Saudi-Pakistan arrangement moves from ambiguous deterrence to something considerably more operational, the UAE and Turkey recalibrate their own nuclear postures, and the Middle East — already the world’s most volatile region — acquires a nuclear dimension that no amount of American military power can subsequently roll back.

Empire and Republic: The Fatal Contradiction

The American Constitution was designed to make the concentration of power difficult. Running a global empire requires the opposite. Freeman argues this contradiction has never been resolved — only suppressed, and the suppression is now failing.

The deepest argument Freeman makes — the one that underlies everything else and gives his analysis its coherence — is not about any particular region or crisis or policy. It is about the structural impossibility of the project the United States is currently attempting. The American constitutional order was designed, with extraordinary deliberateness and by men who had lived under imperial authority and were determined to prevent its recurrence, to make the concentration of power difficult.

The separation of powers, the system of checks and balances, the Bill of Rights, the federal structure distributing authority between states and the center — all of it was engineered to ensure that no single actor, whether a president, a faction, or a class, could accumulate the kind of power that the British crown had wielded and that the founders found intolerable. The genius of the Constitution, as Freeman characterizes it, was precisely this: a government designed to have difficulty governing.

This design is not well suited to the management of a global empire. Empires require swift, unchecked executive decision-making. They require the projection of force at vast distances with minimal democratic oversight. They require the maintenance of client relationships through a combination of patronage and coercion that cannot survive public scrutiny. They require the insulation of strategic decisions from the pressures of electoral politics and popular accountability.

The American constitutional order was built to resist precisely these demands — and for most of the Cold War, the tension was managed, imperfectly but recognizably, through the shared external threat that justified extraordinary executive authority and through international institutions that allowed American power to be exercised through rules and consent rather than naked coercion. Both of those moderating mechanisms have now collapsed simultaneously.

The collapse of these moderating mechanisms has exposed the underlying contradiction in its starkest form:

• The Trump administration is resolving the tension between empire and republic not by scaling back the empire but by dismantling the republic — attacking institutions, pressuring the judiciary, and cultivating personal loyalty over constitutional accountability
• Foreign adventurism and domestic lawlessness feed each other: the habit of coercion abroad normalizes coercion at home, and the logic of imperial command does not recognize the boundary at the border
• “There is a fundamental contradiction between the libertarianism of Thomas Jefferson and the management of an empire,” Freeman says. “What we’ve shown is that this contradiction is ultimately fatal”

Freeman reaches for Hobbes rather than Jefferson to describe the political philosophy now driving American governance. The Hobbesian Leviathan — the sovereign whose authority is absolute because the alternative is the war of all against all — is incompatible with the Lockean tradition that inspired the American revolution, with the constitutional design that distributed power to prevent its abuse, and with the Enlightenment conviction that government derives its legitimacy from consent rather than force. “I don’t know whether Donald Trump has ever read Hobbes; I rather suspect he hasn’t,” Freeman says. “But he’s clearly in line with that way of thinking — not with John Locke and the other English inspirers of our revolution against the crown.” The alignment is instinctive rather than intellectual, which makes it no less real.

The consequence is visible in both the foreign and domestic dimensions of American politics, and it is precisely the consequence that the founders designed the Constitution to prevent. A republic pursuing empire does not remain a republic. The pressures of imperial governance — the demand for swift decision, for unchecked executive power, for the suppression of dissent, for the subordination of law to will — erode the institutional architecture of self-government over time. The United States is not the first republic to discover this. It is, Freeman hopes, not the last to find a way back.

The Post-Hegemonic Horizon

The end of American hegemony need not mean the end of American relevance. Freeman lays out what a serious adjustment would require — and why the window for making it is narrowing faster than Washington appears to understand.

Is there a way out? Freeman believes so, though he does not underestimate the difficulty of getting there, and he is too experienced to indulge optimism unsupported by evidence. The first requirement is conceptual: the abandonment of the assumption that the end of American hegemony is equivalent to defeat, that adapting to a multipolar world represents a surrender rather than a maturation. The post-hegemonic world need not be a world of American diminishment.

It could be a world of American renewal — a chance to redirect the enormous resources currently devoted to the maintenance of a global empire toward the repair of a domestic society profoundly damaged by decades of war, deindustrialization, inequality, and institutional decay. The contradiction between the demands of empire and the requirements of a functioning republic could, in principle, be resolved in favor of the republic rather than against it.

The alternative — insisting on global dominance that can no longer be sustained, pursuing the restoration of a unipolar moment that closed definitively sometime in the first decade of this century — leads, by Freeman’s reckoning, in only one direction. The United States will exhaust itself in the attempt. It will damage the alliances that multiplied its power, discredit the institutions through which that power was legitimized, alienate the partners whose cooperation made its global reach possible, and accelerate precisely the multipolar reorientation it is trying to prevent.

Putin’s 2007 observation — that the pursuit of unipolarity would tear at the United States itself, not through external assault but through the internal contradictions of hegemonic overextension — has proven correct with a precision that should give pause to anyone still committed to the restoration project.

A serious American adjustment to the post-hegemonic world would require three things above all:

• A genuine recommitment to the rules-based order the United States built — accepting that sovereignty, non-interference, and multilateral institutions protect American interests as much as they constrain American unilateralism
• A willingness to treat allies as partners rather than clients — Europe, Japan, South Korea, and the Gulf states are the relationships through which American power derives its legitimacy, and they require reciprocity rather than submission
• A reconnection with the founding ideals now being abandoned — liberty, due process, and the rule of law are not liabilities but the source of the credibility that made American leadership worth following

None of this is likely in the near term. The spectacle at Munich — the language of restoration and dominance crowding out any serious discussion of adaptation and renewal, the absence of strategic thought beneath the geopolitical theater — is disheartening precisely because it reveals how completely the conversation has been captured by a politics of nostalgia that no amount of military power can redeem. The world that Rubio evokes — five centuries of Western dominance, American primacy unchallenged, the rules set by Washington and enforced at Washington’s discretion — is not coming back.

The question is not whether the United States will adjust to a multipolar world, but whether it will adjust while it still has the institutional capacity and the alliance relationships to shape that world’s architecture, or whether it will exhaust itself in denial and arrive at multipolarity isolated, diminished, and stripped of the credibility it spent seven decades accumulating.

“I think it’s not over yet,” Freeman says — carefully, without flourish, in the manner of a man who has seen governments fail and recover and fail again and has not yet abandoned the conviction that the American republic contains within its founding logic the resources for self-correction. “But we are on the knife’s edge. I don’t know which way it will go.” That uncertainty is not pessimism. It is honesty — and in the current environment, honesty about the depth of the crisis is the prerequisite for any serious response to it.

Thank you, Chas Freeman.