The U.S. military carried out strikes against two facilities in eastern Syria used by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and groups it backs, the Pentagon said on Thursday, in response to a spate of attacks against U.S. forces in both Iraq and Syria.
You’re greatly overestimating the late-stage empire. The brinkmanship and provocation aren’t part of some plan, they’re just ordinary imperialism. What has changed is the empire is too unstable to enforce its own hegemony and so preexisting enemies of the empire have been able to strike major blows against it.
Soft power is dead. Military power is all that’s left. The empire is not in control of any of these conflicts and is on the back foot.
Soft power is dead because the two most recent Presidents of the US are completely incompetent at it.
China and Russia and India are happily projecting soft power even as the US seems to have forgot how.
I think it’s actually due to the decline of the US as a stable partner. Not just Presidents, but the whole government is seemingly unable to function.