It’s over now

It’s over now. And they will never understand what they lost.

I can still remember the day. I was in Sydney when it truly began, when the world stopped listening to America.

Stopped caring. 

The warning signs had been there for years, but no one wanted to believe them. Even when the alliances cracked, when the dollar wobbled, when their president blustered about greatness and turned his back on the world, on his allies. On us. There were still people who swore it was all part of the plan. That America wouldn’t abandon its allies. That they wouldn’t turn their backs on us. 

But they did. 

We watched it unfold from here, shaking our heads at the headlines, joking about the latest absurdity. But it wasn’t funny. Not when the markets spiraled, not when the military bases in Darwin and Perth quietly emptied, not when the U.S. ambassador packed up and left in the middle of the night, leaving behind a consulate draped in dust like a coward. 

To run under the cover of darkness without a word. Tail between his legs. 

What happened America?

That’s when the power shifts began. Unwelcomed. Intrusive. Beijing filled the void, their ships patrolling waters once dominated by the U.S. Navy. Canberra forced to make deals we never would have considered before. The Australian dollar crashed, trade routes altered overnight, and entire industries collapsed, caught in the crossfire of a global realignment. Our resources were no longer ours. Traded away for “security assurances”. 

Extortion. 

At first, America raged. They talked a big game. Threats, sanctions, tariffs, defending essential allies. It was all bluster without bite. Their government, bloated with corruption and paranoia, turned inward. Within a week they made “a deal”. We were no longer required. They kept Guam. 

Overseas foreign aid dried up. The last U.S. soldiers in the Pacific were recalled, their withdrawal broadcast like a victory speech. Then, nothing. A silence heavier than any declaration of war.

Isolationism. Reigniting the American Dream. To hell with the world they’d spent the last 80 years building. 

And we realized: they weren’t coming back. We learnt, we were on our own. This was our new reality. American influence replaced with Chinese. Democracy manifested into Authoritarianism. Freedoms censored. The Australian dream now dead, like so many other dreams these days. 

We watched as the news grew fragmented. Protests in California, crackdowns in Texas, mass arrests in New Jersey. A president who refused to leave office, then another who seized it in a so-called emergency. The American dollar was abandoned as the world’s reserve currency, their debts called in, their empire reduced to a struggling nation clinging to past glories. 

Irrelevance. It wasn’t pretty, it didn’t feel right. For the first time in my life, America was just another country… only worse. Because they never saw it coming. Because they never believed it could happen to them. 

But it did. And they don’t realise that on the way down, they dragged so many more along with them. 

Some still don’t believe it. I see them online, trapped in their echo chambers, insisting they’re still the center of the world, that this is all temporary, that any day now, they’ll rise again. They won’t. The world has moved on.

And yet, their collapse still shakes us. It hasn’t been long enough in this new system to forget everything. The old order might be gone, and the new one is colder, harsher, unfamiliar. But we adjusted because we had no choice. As for them…I don’t know if they ever did. I don’t know if they ever could. It’s not in their nature. They don't understand what being a small fish in a big pond is like. The next decade will be difficult for them.

Maybe that’s the real tragedy… watching them try to claw back something that wasn’t theirs to claim anymore. The stubbornness, the defiance. The arrogance of believing they could go on as they always had, that the world would just bend to their will again.

But here, in the quiet of our morning, we knew. We knew the day had come when the sun didn’t rise with the same promise. It was just another day. Only worse. The streets were still, the city’s pulse less vibrant than before. The cafes are quieter now, the office buildings emptier, and when the news comes through about whatever’s happening in Washington, the reports seem more distant, like echoes. They never quite reach us anymore. Like it doesn’t matter. What matters these days is what happens in Beijing. 

I remember watching the news last week. The U.S. president—whoever it was at the time—facing off against yet another crisis that no one had the stomach to deal with. And there were the voices behind me in the bar, murmuring about the sanctions, the trade deals, the fallout. 

The fucking Americans.

But it wasn’t just business. There was an undercurrent of something else in the air, something deeper. Something that made us look at each other more often, as if we, too, were to blame. 

The truth is, we don’t know what the world will look like in five years. Maybe the Pacific becomes a Chinese lake. Maybe we adapt to a new currency. Maybe we just keep scrambling in the ashes of the past. But one thing is clear, the world of certainty, the world of alliances, the world where America was the undisputed leader, the world where we could rely on Uncle Sam, is over.

Now, China calls the shots. They’ve built their empire not on military might alone, but through a soft, unyielding influence. The yuan is the new currency of choice. Their ports, once distant, are bustling with trade routes that bypass everything America used to control. The northern bases now fly the Five stars, replacing the Stars and Stripes next to our Southern Cross. 

The change is impossible to ignore. Every corner of our lives has shifted: the brands we buy, the media we consume, the political systems that now look more like Beijing’s model than Washington’s. The world feels unrecognizable, fractured into pieces that no longer fit the way they once did.

And I can’t shake the feeling that while we’ve accepted it, while we’ve moved on and found a way to adjust, there’s no real reconciliation in them. They can’t go back. Not now. Not ever.

It’s over now. And they will never understand what they lost.