There’s a series called American Gods with a powerful concept: people’s beliefs and ideals are embodied as physical gods. As old beliefs fade from people’s minds, new ones take hold—giving rise to new gods. This sparks a war between the old gods, desperate to remain relevant, and the new ones, eager to dominate. The old gods, if forgotten, vanish into oblivion.
The tragedy unfolding in Gaza cannot be explained by rational arguments alone. It symbolizes the collapse of rationality as we once understood it. And yet, we might grasp its significance if we accept, as Matthew Arnold wrote, that we are “wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.” Just like in American Gods, some belief systems are dying while others are still struggling to emerge.
The end of World War II consolidated a new nomos, in the sense used by German jurist Carl Schmitt. He defines nomos as “the immediate form in which the political and social order of a people becomes spatially visible.” This post-war nomos, based on a U.S.-led Western economic order, spread across the globe.
The United States was modeled, both symbolically and practically, after Rome. Rome claimed universality—what lay beyond its borders was chaos. But Rome’s universality was limited by the known world. The U.S., in contrast, claimed imperium over the entire planet.
Rome reached the peak of its universal claim under Emperor Augustus. Yet that peak, as historian Ronald Syme observed, also marked the beginning of its decline. Augustus’ seal was the Sphinx, a symbol rich in metaphor. Augustus was the guardian of Rome—but he was also the riddle. The enigma lay in the fact that, while the Republic’s formal structures (senators, consuls) remained intact, true power rested solely in his hands. If you couldn’t solve the riddle, you’d be devoured by the Sphinx.
The peak of visible U.S. power was, arguably, after the dissolution of the USSR. But if Augustus’ symbolic seal was the Sphinx, the U.S. symbol was the dollar—both devouring those unable to unravel the riddle.
Historian Edward Gibbon pointed to currency debasement—especially to fund foreign wars and state expenses—as one of the clearest signs of imperial decline. It’s debatable when exactly this began in the U.S., but there’s no doubt it is happening now. When an empire declines, its nomos begins to vanish.
But that nomos doesn’t disappear on its own—it is also forced by those competing to take its space. These challengers are both physical and ideological: they embody alternative visions of what society should be. Sometimes, the old order is pushed into the abyss, because that’s the only way a new one can rise.
Two major conflicts today have the potential to dismantle the U.S.-established postwar order: the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza. What links them most visibly is the hand of the United States behind both. Though the conflicts appear different, each represents a different face of the same coin—a chipped one, at that.
Consider Ukraine. It’s hard to say whether the path to this war was plain stupidity, blind hubris, or a calculated strategy. The first two are intertwined, but I lean toward the second. Perhaps NATO expansionists believed Russia wouldn’t react. More likely, they believed Russia couldn’t react—as theorized by Brzezinski and his ilk.
The third possibility is even more provocative, though harder to prove: that NATO’s eastern expansion was a calculated move with two potential outcomes. Either Russia would acquiesce, becoming just another client state of the U.S.-led West. Or Russia would resist—and that resistance would mark the end of the West’s expansionary cycle, requiring its nomos to collapse so that capital could continue to grow elsewhere.
This last scenario may seem far-fetched, yet it is the one that’s materializing. The war in Ukraine cannot be resolved by reverting to the old status quo. The U.S. seems to understand that—but refuses to accept it. Europe, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to understand it—but has no choice but to accept it. And the main beneficiary of this new emerging scenario? Kapital—with Marx’s capital K.
The resolution of the Ukraine war will dismantle the previous geopolitical order. Borders will no longer be fixed. Spheres of influence will shift. Resources will grow more contested. Security agreements will have to be rewritten—and with them, new alliances will take form. Space—both geographical and political, a cornerstone of Schmitt’s nomos—will be reshaped. A new nomos is being born.
But nomos is not merely a spatial order. It is also symbolic. It demands new laws—and laws require new ideals. For the new gods to emerge, the old ones must die.
Gaza is where the old gods are dying. International law, the laws of war, humanitarian principles—they are being shattered with every hospital reduced to rubble, every school obliterated, every child killed by a drone or a sniper. More than that, the very foundation of liberal democratic legitimacy is being corroded by the complicity—and, often, the silence—of the U.S.-led West. After Gaza, the world we’ve known will have morphed into something else: the beginning of a new one.
We are witnessing it in real time. Europe is on a path to dismantle its social structures—the last remnants of working-class resistance against the encroaching force of capital. It is also unraveling the sovereignty of its nation-states, replacing them with a supranational governing entity. This process is not new, but it is being accelerated by the war in Ukraine. Re-arming Europe is not merely a military endeavor; it is an economic strategy designed to deliver the coup de grâce to national sovereignty.
The United States is already far ahead in this mutation. The White House even circulated a meme depicting Trump as a king. A joke, perhaps—but as if proving true Polybius’ cycle, it represents the next logical stage. New economic power, or, better, a rising oligarchy, needs to upend the previous order in order to establish its own. That is Ronald Syme’s thesis in his book The Roman Revolution.
This is evident in the rise of what economist Yanis Varoufakis calls technofeudalism—a system where tech-lords inch ever closer to the centers of global power. Despite his recent fall from grace, Elon Musk remains one of them. So do Sam Altman and Peter Thiel. And Palantir—Thiel’s fief—is, by its own admission, deeply involved in the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Israel—modeled as the last Western-style colonial project—is now leading the West toward its own demise. Like the protagonist of a Greek tragedy, its defining trait—the claim to nationhood—is the very force that propels its downfall. And it is dragging the old gods with it into the grave.
If Ukraine is offering the geopolitical justification for a reordering of space, Gaza is providing the ideological justification for a transformation of spirit. Gone are the days when freedom of speech was even pretended to be an ideal, when human dignity was considered universal, or when equality before the law was a shared aspiration. Now, technology allows governments and corporations to efficiently censor thought and speech, accuse without real proof, and detain without due process.
Yet one force remains unchallenged: capital’s relentless drive to invent new ways of living. In its Freudian compulsion to replicate and expand, capital is reshaping not just markets, but space itself. It is forging a new nomos.
The question is not whether this is happening—I trust readers will agree that it is—but what form this new nomos will take. If we allow capital to dictate its terms, cloaked in the garments of new technologies, then we will all become—if we are not already—subservient to it.
