Grand Illusion - Read by Eunice Wong

This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible’s list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor

Text originally published January 8, 2026.

The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Full Text:

All empires, when they are dying, worship the idol of war. War will save the empire. War will resurrect past glory. War will teach an unruly world to obey. But those who bow down before the idol of war, blinded by hypermasculinity and hubris, are unaware that while idols begin by calling for the sacrifice of others, they end by demanding self-sacrifice. Ekpyrosis, the inevitable conflagration that destroys the world according to the ancient Stoics, is part of the cyclical nature of time. There is no escape. Fortuna. There is a time for individual death. There is a time for collective death. In the end, with weary citizens yearning for extinction, empires light their own funeral pyre.

Our high priests of war, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, are no different from the fools and charlatans who snuffed out empires of the past — the haughty leaders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the militarists in imperial Germany and the hapless court of Tsarist Russia in World War I. They were followed by the fascists in Italy under Benito Mussolini, Germany under Adolf Hitler and the military rulers of imperial Japan in World War II.

These political entities committed collective suicide.

They drank the same fatal elixir Miller and those in the Trump White House imbibe. They too tried to use industrial violence to reshape the universe. They too considered themselves to be omnipotent. They too saw themselves in the face of the idol of war. They too demanded to be obeyed and worshiped.

Destruction to them is creation. Dissent is sedition. The world is one-dimensional. The strong versus the weak. Only our nation is great. Other nations, even allies, are dismissed with contempt.

These architects of imperial folly are buffoons and killer clowns. They are ridiculed and hated by those rooted in a reality-based world. They are followed slavishly by the desperate and the disenfranchised. The simplicity of the message is its appeal. A magic incantation will bring back the lost world, the golden age, however mythic. Reality is viewed exclusively through the lens of ultranationalism. The flip side of ultranationalism is racism.

“The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus,” wrote Yugoslav-Serbian novelist Danilo Kiš. “Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled, he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that’s to say national, that’s to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his, hell — it’s other people (other nations, other tribes). They don’t even need investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own image — as nationalists.”

These stunted human beings are unable to read others. They threaten. They terrorize. They kill. The art of power politics between nations or individuals is far beyond their tiny imaginations. They lack the intelligence — emotional and intellectual — to cope with the complex, ever-shifting sands of old and new alliances. They cannot see themselves as the world sees them.

Diplomacy is often a dark and deceptive art. It is by its nature manipulative. But it requires an understanding of other cultures and traditions. It requires getting inside the heads of adversaries and allies. For Trump and his minions, this is an impossibility.

Skillful diplomats, such as Prince Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian Empire’s foreign minister who dominated European politics after the defeat of Napoleon, do so by crafting agreements and treaties such as the Concert of Europe and the Congress of Vienna. Metternich, no friend of liberalism, adroitly kept Europe stable until the revolutions of 1848.

I reported on Richard Holbrooke, the assistant secretary of state, as he negotiated an end to the war in Bosnia. He was bombastic and enthralled with his own celebrity. But he played the Balkan warlords off each other in the former Yugoslavia until they acquiesced to stop the fighting — with some help from NATO warplanes that pounded Serb positions on the hills around Sarajevo — and signed the Dayton Peace Accords.

Holbrooke had little regard for the diplomats who diddled in conference halls in Geneva while 100,000 people died or disappeared in Bosnia, an estimated 900,000 became refugees and 1.3 million were internally displaced. He had a loathing for military commanders who refused to take risks. He detested the Croatian, Serbian and Muslim leaders he had to corral into signing the peace accord.

Holbrooke, whose blustering style and volcanic eruptions were legendary, left bruised egos and slighted, embittered colleagues in his wake. But he knew how to cajole and mold his adversaries to his will. He was likened, in a not very flattering comparison, to Jules Cardinal Mazarin, the crafty 17th-century prelate and statesman who solidified France’s supremacy among the European powers. “He flatters, he lies, he humiliates: he is a sort of brutal and schizophrenic Mazarin,” a French diplomat told Le Figaro, of Holbrooke, during the Dayton talks.

True.

But Holbrooke, however mercurial, understood the interplay between force and diplomacy. This understanding is essential. It is why nations have diplomats. It is why great diplomats are as important as great generals.

Gangster states have no need of diplomacy. Trump and Rubio, for this reason, have gutted the State Department, along with other forms of “soft” power that achieve influence without resorting to force, including the U.S. role in the United Nations, the U.S. Agency of International Development, the U.S. Institute for Peace — renamed Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace after most of the board and staff were fired — and Voice of America.

Diplomats in gangster states are reduced to the role of errand boys. Hitler’s Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, whose primary experience in foreign affairs before 1933 was selling fake German champagne in Britain, appointed party hacks from the SA or Brownshirts — the paramilitary wing of the party — to diplomatic posts abroad. Benito Mussolini’s Foreign Minister was his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano. Mussolini — who believed that “war is to man what maternity is to woman” — later executed Ciano for disloyalty. Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steven Charles Witkoff, is a real estate developer, often accompanied on diplomatic missions by Trump’s feckless son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce quipped that fascism had created a fourth form of government, “onagrocracy,” a government by braying asses, to add to Aristotle’s traditional triumvirate of tyranny, oligarchy and democracy.

Our ruling class, Democrats and Republicans, piece by piece, dismantled democracy. In Germany and Italy, the constitutional state, as well, collapsed long before the arrival of fascism. Trump, who is the symptom, not the disease, inherited the corpse. He is making good use of it.

“I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent,” Chalmers Johnson wrote two decades ago in his book, “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.”

He warned:

The founders of our nation understood this well and tried to create a form of government — a republic — that would prevent this from occurring. But the combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency. We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play — isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy. Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation.

The American Empire, defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan — as it was at the Bay of Pigs and in Vietnam — learns nothing. It leaps into each new military fiasco as if the previous military fiascos did not happen. It believes it needs no allies. It will rule the world.

If occupying Greenland blows up NATO, so what? If funding and arming Israel to carry out genocide and bombing Iran and Yemen alienates huge swaths of the Global South and enrages the Muslim world, who cares? If invading and kidnapping the president of Venezuela stinks of Yankee imperialism, tough! No one else matters.

Nations that stomp around the globe like King Kong infect themselves with a fatal virus.

Johnson warned that if we continue to cling to our empire, as the Roman Republic did, we will “lose our democracy and grimly await the eventual blowback that imperialism generates.”

Blowback is next and with it the collapse of the crumbling edifice of the American Empire. It is an old story. Although to us, and the cabal of misfits ensconced in our version of Ubu Roi’s court, it will come as a terrible shock.

Photos:

Woman Placing Food Into Refrigerator

(Original Caption) View of a modern kitchen. A young housewife places a container of carrots into the refigerator. Photograph circa 1950’s.

President Trump Attends Pentagon Ceremony On 24th Anniversary Of 9/11

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA - SEPTEMBER 11: U.S. President Donald Trump shakes hands with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth during a September 11th observance event in the courtyard of the Pentagon September 11, 2025 in Arlington, Virginia. Today marks the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks that claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 people. 9/11 terror attacks that claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 people. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich -

Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich - engraving by Samuel Cousins after painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence. SL, English engraver: 9 May 1801 - 7 May 1887. TL, English painter: 13 April 1769 - 7 January 1830. Fürst von Metternich, German - Austrian diplomat and statesman: 15 May 1773 - 11 June 1859. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

U.S. Envoy Richard Holbrooke Dies

WASHINGTON - NOVEMBER 23: U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke chats with members of the media after a briefing at the State Department November 23, 2009 in Washington, DC. Holbrooke briefed the media on State Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton’s recent trip to Afghanistan. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

President Clinton Meets With Foreign Policy Advisors

American politicians US Vice President Al Gore (second left, in dark suit) and US President Bill Clinton (third left, in lighter-colored suit) meet with principal foreign policy advisors, both in the White House’s Situation Room and via a television hook-up, Washington DC, September 25, 1995. (Photo by Sharon Farmer/White House/Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Images)

Holbrooke Annouces Bosnia Agreement

Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke announces agreement on a unified Bosnia at the United Nations. (Photo by Najlah Feanny/Corbis via Getty Images)

President Trump Presides Over Cabinet Meeting

WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 10: U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks alongside U.S. President Donald Trump during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on April 10, 2025 in Washington, DC. President Trump convened a Cabinet meeting a day after announcing a 90-day pause on ‘reciprocal’ tariffs, with the exception of China. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Joachim von Ribbentrop

(Original Caption) Shown in his office as Nazi Foreign Minister.

Hitler And Ciano

German Chancellor Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945) in the new Reich Chancellery in Berlin, Germany, with Count Galeazzo Ciano (1903 - 1944, left), the Italian Foreign Minister, after signing the Italo-German military pact, 22nd May 1939. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu Meets With Trump At The White House

WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 29: U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff (R) and Jared Kushner, san-in-law and advisor to President Donald Trump, arrive for a joint news conference between U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the State Dining Room at the White House on September 29, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Senator Benedetto Croce

(Original Caption) This is one of a series of three intimate pictures of Senator Benedetto Croce at his villa in Capri. Highly regarded as a philosopher in Italy and considered its greatest, Croce is revered by all antifascists throughout Italy, from the Communists to the most conservative.

TOPSHOT-ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN-CONFLICT

TOPSHOT - This picture taken from Israel’s southern border with the Gaza Strip shows Israeli army battle tank at a position along the border with the Palestinian territory on March 19, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the militant group Hamas. (Photo by JACK GUEZ / AFP) (Photo by JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images)

Nicolas Maduro Transported To Court Hearing

NEW YORK, NY - JANUARY 5: Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, are seen in handcuffs after landing at a Manhattan helipad, escorted by heavily armed Federal agents as they make their way into an armored car en route to a Federal courthouse in Manhattan on January 5, 2026 in New York City. (Photo by XNY/Star Max/GC Images)

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chrishedges.substack.com/subscribe