It says something about the state of the world that we are once again treated to the theatre of summits: the red carpet rolled out on an Alaskan runway, Trump clapping like a vaudeville compère as Putin descends the steps of his jet. Anchorage, of all places, becomes a stage for history to repeat itself as farce. The communiqués, the press conferences, the staged intimacy of handshakes without interpreters. All of it an attempt to conjure up the aura of a world still divided into two superpowers.
That phrase, “superpowers,” is the most revealing. It was Alexander Dugin, the Russian traditionalist-turned-philosopher of empire, who summarised the meeting with the line: “The meeting went splendidly… Russia and the United States must reach an understanding as superpowers.” It is the kind of formulation that tells you more about the speaker’s need for myth than about the reality of international relations. Dugin remains trapped in a Cold War imaginary, one where great men in great rooms decide the fate of lesser nations. It flatters Russia, which is no longer a peer competitor to the United States, and it flatters America, which clings to the memory of unchallenged hegemony even as its empire buckles.
The truth is both states are diminished. Russia is a declining petro-state with nuclear weapons, its economy no larger than that of Italy, held together by repression and imperial nostalgia. The United States is larger, wealthier, but no less fragile: wracked by internal division, addicted to debt, incapable of projecting order beyond spectacle. If Russia is a shadow of the Soviet Union, America is a parody of its own Cold War triumphalism. A nation that once proclaimed the “end of history” now led by a president who rules through memes, tariffs, and televised pageantry.
Yet, the myth persists. Dugin calls it “splendid” because for him, the return of bipolarity is the return of intelligibility. Multipolarity (the reality of China’s rise, the European Union’s bureaucratic gravity, India’s demographic power, the restless insurgency of the Global South) is messier. Worse, it resists the metaphysical neatness of Dugin’s worldview. He longs for a return to the drama of the Cold War, where his country could stand as a civilisational equal, even as it rotted from within.
For Washington too, the language of superpowers is narcotic. To say “the United States and Russia must understand each other as superpowers” is to forget that the world has moved on. It is to ignore that the actual superpowers of the 21st century are not nation-states but forces: capital flows that can bring down governments overnight, climate collapse that redraws borders and buries coastlines, technology platforms that monitor and discipline populations more effectively than any secret police. Dugin and Trump can cling to the theatre of bilateral summits, but the reality is that the world is governed elsewhere — in markets, in servers, in the accelerating instability of the biosphere.
What’s dangerous is not that men like Dugin believe this fantasy, but that it shapes policy. If Russia and America continue to imagine themselves the only two players who matter, they will act accordingly: carving up spheres of influence, reducing Ukraine, Palestine, and countless others to bargaining chips in their game of superpower recognition. The guns may remain in their humvees for now, but they are always implied, always waiting to be rolled out once the theatrics of handshakes and red carpets fail.
This is the pathology of Cold War nostalgia: it encourages both decline and aggression. Russia, incapable of competing economically, leans on war and energy blackmail. America, incapable of imagining a post-imperial role, veers between isolationism and militarism. Both are drawn to the fantasy of two superpowers keeping order, even as the actual world slides into disorder produced by the very structures they uphold — fossil capitalism, authoritarian nationalism, extractive imperialism.
To speak of “superpowers” in 2025 is to utter a ghost word. It is as if Britain still ruled the waves, or Rome never fell. The insistence on the term is not just delusional nostalgia; it is actively dangerous, because it obscures the multipolar, unstable, ecological reality we inhabit. When Dugin says the meeting went “splendidly,” he means that the illusion held. That for a few hours, in a closed room in Anchorage, two men could pretend that history had not moved on.
But history has moved on. And the sooner we stop indulging the fantasy of superpowers, the sooner we can confront the actual forces shaping our world, and the fact that neither Putin nor Trump has any answers to them.
