The Final Act

Both empires were fathered by Hitler and born in Potsdam in 1945 as Siamese twins. They could only live in their antagonism. Now that one twin has killed the other, the survivor is no longer viable either.

I. Born in Potsdam

The United States existed before 1945 as a great power. The Soviet Union had existed since 1917 as a state. But their role as world-ordering systems — as ideological antipodes that forced the entire world into their coordinate system, negotiated buffer zones, forged military blocs and fought proxy wars — this role was not chosen. It was imposed. By Hitler.

Hitler destroyed the European empires that had structured the world order until 1939: the British, the French, the Dutch. He created a vacuum that only two powers could fill — the only ones still standing after 1945. At Potsdam they divided the world. Not as a plan. As the result of the only question that still mattered: who had occupied which territory?

What was born at Potsdam was not two sovereign world powers. It was Siamese twins — bound together by common origin from the same historical moment, shaped by the same war, defined by the same enemy. They could not exist independently of each other, because their identity presupposed the existence of the other.

II. Life in Antagonism

The Cold War was not an accident or a malfunction. It was the way of life of the twins. Each system needed the other to justify itself.

The Marshall Plan needed the Soviet threat. Without it, it would not have been politically viable at home. NATO needed the Warsaw Pact. The American military budget needed an enemy of comparable size to justify its scale. The space race needed the competition. The ideology of the free market needed the counter-image of state socialism.

Mirror-image on the other side: Soviet repression needed capitalist imperialism as its justification. The restriction of civil rights was explicable through the siege. The priority of the arms industry was legitimisable through the American threat. The system that could not feed its own citizens enough had a ready answer: we are at war — with the other twin.

This was not hypocrisy alone. It was structural truth. Both systems would not have been what they were without the antagonism. The enemy was constitutive.

III. Gorbachev: The Twin Who Lets Go

Mikhail Gorbachev understood that the Soviet system was in crisis. He had seen the numbers — the falling growth rates, the crushing costs of rearmament, the technological backwardness. He understood that a system that must lie to its citizens to legitimise itself has no future. So he tried to reform it: glasnost, perestroika, the cautious opening.

What he did not fully understand: the system was not reformable, because it could not exist without its counter-image. The opening he enabled destroyed the ideology that held the system together. Every step towards liberalisation revealed what the antagonism had concealed: that the Soviet promise was not redeemable. In the end he faced a collapse he had wanted to prevent and had accelerated.

In the West, Gorbachev was celebrated — as the hero of a story he had not wanted to write. He wanted to save socialism. He buried it. That makes his figure tragic in the precise Greek sense: the hero fails not despite his strengths, but because of them.

IV. The Unipolar Moment as Death Throes

The West interpreted the end of the Soviet Union as triumph. That was the first great intellectual error of the post-Cold War era.

What ended in 1991 was not only an enemy. It was the organising principle that sustained American world power. NATO without an enemy. A military budget without justification. The ideology of the free market without a counter-image. The American identity as the leading power of an alliance — without the threat against which the alliance had been formed.

The “unipolar moment” was not the apex of American power. It was the moment when the shared organ failed and the surviving twin began trying to manage without it. The interventions in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya — these were not signs of strength. They were the groping movements of a system that had lost its purpose and was desperately seeking a new one.

For thirty years, American presidents continued to run the institutions of the postwar order — out of inertia, out of habit, because nobody wanted to pay the costs of dismantling them. The contradictions accumulated. The system did not stop functioning. But it stopped believing in itself.

V. Trump: The Twin Who Tears Down

Donald Trump is not a tragic figure. He is a grotesque one — in the literary sense: an exaggeration that reveals the nature of the system by caricaturing it. He was the first American president to say aloud what everyone knew and no one said: that the postwar order costs America more than it brings in, that the allies are free-riders, that the institutions of multilateralism tie up American resources without serving American interests.

Whether that is true is another question. What matters is that he acts on it. With a consistency his predecessors never had, because they knew the costs of dismantling and shrank from them. Trump knows no costs — or calculates them differently. He tears down what his predecessors called load-bearing, and watches what happens.

“We do that all the time” — that sentence about the diversion of weapons paid for by allies is no slip. It is the programme. The postwar order was a system of promises. Trump dissolves them — not because he is malicious, but because he inhabits a world in which promises are bargaining chips. And because the enemy for whom those promises were given has not existed for thirty years.

VI. The Bitter Symmetry

Gorbachev wound down the Soviet empire with sorrow. Trump winds down the American one with pleasure — or at least without sorrow. That is not a moral difference. It is a structural one: the reformer slows the collapse because he wants to stop it. The dismantler accelerates it because the collapse is a matter of indifference to him.

Europe is responding to Trump as the Eastern Bloc states responded to Gorbachev: with professions of partnership that no one believes any longer. With the hope that a more moderate successor will restore the system. This hope misunderstands what Gorbachev himself understood: that the contradictions are structural, not personal. Another leader would have maintained the same system a little longer — and merely postponed the same collapse.

The postwar order was not Trump’s invention. It was the product of a historical constellation that came into being in 1945 and lost its foundation in 1991. Trump did not destroy it. He stopped pretending otherwise.

The Soviet empire ended with a man who understood it too well. The American empire ends with a man who will not understand it. The result is the same — because the cause is the same: a system that has outlived its twin.

What comes next, Gorbachev did not know — and Trump least of all.