The Suicide of the USA
The destruction of democracy begins with the destruction of press freedom, academic freedom, culture and the rule of law.
All this happened in the USA during Donald Trump’s first term in office and is continuing even more brutally in his second term. The tragedy is that democracy in the USA was once a model for many democracies around the world.
The renowned US historian Timothy Snyder, holder of the Chair of Modern European History at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto and author of the new book “On Freedom” (Crown Books 2026), describes this destruction powerfully in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 17 May 2026).
Snyder writes of the “suicide of the superpower” and of “strategic suicide”. Trump, he argues, has simultaneously created a “business opportunity for a select few”, including himself and his own family. For example, the Trump administration launched a devastating offensive against renewable energy in order to continue supporting the old fossil-fuel and nuclear energy industry. Yet it has long been scientifically proven that the future belongs to renewable energies.
According to Professor Snyder, Trump is thereby also supporting the Communist People’s Republic of China, which is banking on renewable energies and will export them throughout the world both now and in the future, as well as Vladimir Putin’s oil and gas policy, which uses these fossil fuels to finance his war in Ukraine.
A key question for the future is indeed: oil sheikh or Sun King?
Whoever switches completely to renewable energy first secures not only ecological but also economic advantages. Even militarily, says Snyder, the US will soon be overtaken by China. What Trump is planning militarily for the future of the US, for example battleships, is a “pure fantasy”. The Iran War alone shows that, although the US under Trump has the highest military spending in the world, it is increasingly being outdone by others. The US government today celebrates even military defeats as successes, which is simply embarrassing. This is “strategic folly”.
The current US administration under Donald Trump is, in effect, nothing more than a service provider for the super-rich tech billionaires. Only a resurgent civil rights movement and a strong peace movement, as in the days of the Vietnam War, will be able to save US democracy. Perhaps!
