Khamenei’s funeral makes clear the global order is moving on

The United States turned 250 on July 4. The celebrations were spectacular: 850,000 fireworks launched from ten sites across Washington, military flyovers every hour, a speech from a president who promised it would be the “largest fireworks show in history”. At Mount Rushmore the night before, Donald Trump declared America “the most extraordinary republic ever, ever, ever”.

But anniversaries have a way of exposing what lies beneath the pageantry. And beneath this one, the foundations are crumbling.

While Trump spoke of American greatness, Iran began a six-day national mourning for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, killed in a US-Israeli airstrike on February 28. The timing was not incidental. The casket of the slain leader lay in state on the very day America celebrated its independence. 

More than 10 million mourners were expected in Tehran. Representatives from over 100 countries attended. And yet, hours earlier, the world learned that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had issued a confidential directive on June 26 instructing all US embassies to warn host governments that attendance would be treated as an ‘unfriendly act’ with consequences for bilateral relations. US ambassadors in several African countries reportedly warned that participation could result in cuts to development assistance. Rubio personally pressed at least five Arab nations.

The result? At least 13 countries—three from Eastern Europe, five from Africa, two Persian Gulf Arab states, two major East Asian powers—withdrew or scaled back their delegations. Some reportedly apologised to Iran through intermediaries, explaining their inability to attend.

This was not diplomacy. This was an empire claiming jurisdiction over grief itself. Think about what that means. A nation that built its mythology on freedom and self-determination now deploys its vast diplomatic machinery to dictate who may mourn and who may not.

The United States has arrogated to itself a papal power of excommunication—casting the enemy dead beyond the pale of legitimate remembrance, threatening secondary excommunication for any state that dares to participate in funeral rites. 

The global order, if it accepts this arrogation, ceases to be an order of sovereigns and becomes an imperial death-cult in which the only legitimate mourning is that which the hegemon permits.

And then there was Trump’s other message. Standing at Mount Rushmore—a monument carved into a mountain sacred to the Lakota people, on land stolen through treaty violations—the president warned of a resurgence of “the communist menace” and “newcomers” who embrace ideas “totally opposed to our way of life”. “America will never be a communist country,” he insisted. Communism, he declared, is “like a cancer” that “must be excised”.

A president, on his nation’s 250th birthday, defining his country not by what it is, but by what it is not. An identity reduced to negation. A civilisation that can no longer articulate a positive vision of itself, only scream into the void about phantoms.

This is not the rhetoric of strength. It is the rhetoric of a polity that has exhausted its ideological reserves and now runs on fumes. The mythology of American exceptionalism—the city on a hill, the indispensable nation, the arc of justice—has collapsed under the weight of centuries of violence, hypocrisy, and a global population that no longer buys what Washington is selling.

The numbers are devastating. A Pew Research Centre survey of 42,151 adults across 36 countries found that a median of just 23 per cent have confidence in Trump’s handling of world affairs. Only 35 per cent believe the United States contributes to peace and stability. In Canada, the share viewing the US as a reliable partner crashed from 83 per cent in 2022 to 35 per cent in 2026. In France: 62 per cent to 27 per cent. Germany: 83 per cent to 39 per cent. Britain: 82 per cent to 49 per cent. Australia—Washington’s most steadfast Pacific ally—saw confidence fall from 79 per cent to 37 per cent.

The Lowy Institute’s 2026 poll is even more stark. Trust in the United States to act responsibly in the world has fallen to 31 per cent—the lowest level in the history of the poll, a 25-point drop from just two years ago. Confidence in Trump stands at 21 per cent, the lowest for any US president ever recorded. For the first time, a majority of Australians—51 per cent—now say the relationship with China is more important than the relationship with the United States.

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The gap in trust between the two superpowers has compressed from 53 points in 2022 to just three points today. America is not losing its edge to China because China is winning hearts and minds; America is losing because it has burned its own credibility to ash.

Domestically, the picture is no brighter. An AP-NORC poll found 72 per cent of Americans believe the country is heading in the wrong direction. Only 45 per cent say the US is one of the greatest countries in the world, down from 55 per cent in 2016. PRRI’s 2026 survey found 51 per cent of Americans are extremely or very proud to be American—down from 82 per cent in 2013. Thirty-eight per cent do not believe the United States will exist in another 250 years. Nearly half of Americans—46 per cent—do not even know what the 250th anniversary commemorates. Among Gen Z, that figure rises to 61 per cent.

A nation that cannot remember its own founding mythology is a nation whose mythology has already died.

Ray Dalio, the billionaire investor who has studied the rise and fall of empires for decades, declared in March 2026 that the United States has experienced its ‘Suez moment’. The Suez Crisis of 1956 did not create Britain’s decline; it exposed a loss of power that had already occurred. Within a decade, Harold Macmillan’s ‘winds of change’ speech formalised what Suez had revealed: the British Empire was in managed retreat, not strategic expansion. 

The parallel is haunting. The United States possesses overwhelming military superiority—nearly $954 billion in defence spending in 2025, more than the next several countries combined—yet it cannot win the wars it starts, cannot secure the outcomes it demands, cannot command the deference it once took for granted.

The US national debt crossed $39 trillion in March 2026. All three major ratings agencies have downgraded US credit. The dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency—the foundation of American financial hegemony—is under sustained assault from BRICS nations pursuing de-dollarisation, with over 85 per cent of settlements now in local currencies. The petrodollar system, the backbone of US global power since 1973, is fraying.

This is not a temporary setback. This is the structural unravelling of an empire that has outrun its own contradictions.

The American founding was built on a paradox that was never resolved: universal rights declared by men who owned other human beings; freedom as a positional good whose value derived from the unfreedom of others; a settler-colonial project that required the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty to sustain itself.

The founders were not betraying liberal principles when they wrote the Declaration while holding slaves and surveying Indigenous lands for expropriation. They were enacting the deepest logic of those principles: equality was always predicated on a prior determination of who qualified as ‘man’. The category itself was a violent sieve, calibrated to exclude.

That sieve still operates. It operates in the carceral state that incarcerates Black and Brown bodies at rates unmatched in the developed world. It operates in the drone strikes that reduce wedding parties to ‘bug splats’. It operates in the diplomatic pressure campaign that tells sovereign nations they cannot mourn their own dead. And it operates in the desperate incantation of a president who can only define his nation by the enemies he conjures from the dark.

The 250th anniversary was not a birthday. It was a séance—a gathering around a dying myth, desperately channelling the ghosts of slain enemies to prove the corpse still breathes. The fireworks over Washington, synchronised with the funeral rites of an assassinated leader and the bombs falling on Gaza, constituted a globally broadcast image of a civilisation that has lost its moral compass and now celebrates its own accelerating decline.

How many more birthdays does this order have? The question is not whether the American empire will collapse—all empires do. The question is whether it will collapse gracefully, or whether it will drag the world down with it in a paroxysm of desperate violence. 

The evidence from July 4, 2026, suggests the latter. An empire that polices mourning, that defines itself through negation, that celebrates its own mythology while the world watches in disbelief—such an empire does not have decades. It has years. Perhaps fewer than anyone imagines. The post-American world is not coming. It is already here. And the fireworks are already fading.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.