THEY PLACED THEIR HEAD IN THE NOOSE
The world did not witness diplomacy at the UN this week.
It witnessed a slow-motion imperial disaster — an empire stepping forward when the ground beneath it had already liquefied.
Washington sold its Gaza resolution as humanitarian restraint.
But everyone else saw something else:
The United States voluntarily accepted responsibility for a conflict it cannot shape, cannot control, and cannot politically survive.
China and Russia did not endorse it.
They simply refused to interrupt it.
Great powers do not always defeat their rivals.
Sometimes they merely let their rival proceed.
And the United States proceeded.
THE ABDICATION DISGUISED AS LEADERSHIP
By abstaining, Beijing and Moscow made a choice older than diplomacy:
When your opponent insists on claiming ownership of a disaster, you do not wrestle the pen from their hand — you let them sign.
A veto would have trapped them in the mud:
• They would have had to table a plan of their own
• They would have been expected to enforce it
• They would have inherited Gaza’s intractability and Israel’s volatility
They did not veto, because they understand how quagmires destroy.
They have survived their own.
So they stepped aside and let Washington declare stewardship over a war that no state can steward, least of all a state that has lost the trust of the region and the credibility of the Global South.
The U.S. now holds the deed to a collapsing building.
THE NEW COLONIAL ADMINISTRATOR
Israel has no intention of restraint.
Its government has already signaled:
• continued bombardment
• continued displacement
• continued pursuit of “Greater Israel”
By allowing the resolution to pass, the United States becomes:
the guarantor of Israeli action
the manager of Palestinian suffering
and the face of a conflict that will not end
This is no longer a mediated war.
It is an American-branded war.
The U.S. lacks the leverage to restrain Israel.
It lacks the legitimacy to convince Palestinians.
It lacks the diplomatic capital to administer anything resembling peace.
It lacks the geopolitical bandwidth to absorb another endless war.
This is not a peace process.
This is a transfer of liability.
THE US BROUGHT THEIR OWN ROPE
Commentators misread Russia and China’s abstentions as “granting space.”
No.
This was colder than strategy.
It was arithmetic.
They did not hand Washington a rope.
They simply opened their hands and let the U.S. keep pulling on the rope it already held.
Because the U.S. resolution ensures that every future Israeli action —
every strike, every atrocity, every escalation —
lands squarely at America’s feet.
This is not moral speculation.
This is geopolitical fact.
The U.S. has stepped into a conflict where:
• consequences arrive faster than solutions
• casualties arrive faster than diplomatic cover
• moral exposure arrives faster than narrative management
The following months will not shape U.S. legitimacy.
They will erase it.
THE BANALITY OF DECLINE
Empires do not collapse in cinematic spectacle.
They collapse in administrative burdens they cannot carry, in diplomatic overreach they cannot sustain,
and in moral debts they can no longer pay.
Decline is not thunderous.
It is banal.
It looks like:
• leaders making announcements, their states lack the capacity to fulfill
• allies quietly ignoring them
• adversaries no longer bother to oppose them
• the world watching an empire extend itself one inch beyond its remaining strength
This is not the moment the U.S. falls.
It is the moment the trajectory becomes visible to everyone but Washington.
An empire does not die when it is defeated.
It dies when its confidence exceeds its capability,
and when its declarations exceed its power.
Empires die not with a bang, but with an appointment they cannot keep.
THE VERDICT
The United States now owns Gaza.
It owns every death that follows.
It owns every escalation it cannot restrain.
It owns a disaster it cannot administer, mitigate, or escape.
And history will remember this moment not as leadership,
but as the quiet, final step of an empire
walking willingly into the quicksand.
