WHY AMERICA ISN'T THE BOSS ANYMORE

17 September 2026

High prices at the petrol pump and supermarket are episodes in a story that started 200 years ago.

You've noticed it at the till. A tank of petrol, a trolley of groceries, a packet of sweets, the heating bill: all of it keeps creeping up. Most explanations stop at "inflation" or "the war". But to understand why your money buys less, you need three old stories, and you need to see where they collide.

An Old Fear of Russia

Two hundred years ago, Britain ruled India and called it the "jewel in the crown". Russia was a vast empire pushing south and east across Asia, and British leaders grew frightened that it might one day reach India and seize their jewel. For most of the 1800s, the two empires spied on and outmanoeuvred each other across Central Asia. People called it the Great Game.

In the 1850s that fear turned into real war, when Britain and France fought Russia in Crimea. Fifty years later, a British geographer named Halford Mackinder gave the fear a theory. Whoever controlled the "heartland", the great middle of Europe and Asia where Russia sits, could dominate the world. The lesson his followers drew was simple: never let Russia grow too strong.

That idea never died. Britain handed it to America, and many European leaders still carry it today. Whatever Russia actually does, it is cast as the dangerous giant.

The Playground With One Big Kid

For most of the last century, there were two big kids on the playground: America and the Soviet Union. Neither could push everyone around, because the other would stop them. Then in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. America was suddenly the only big kid left, and it decided to run the whole playground, forever.

Israel's Story

To understand the Middle East, or West Asia as many now call it, you need one more story.

For centuries, Jewish people in Europe were persecuted and attacked in violent riots called pogroms. In 1897, Theodor Herzl led the founding of Zionism, a movement with a dream of a homeland where Jewish people would finally be safe.

Then came the Holocaust, when Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews. In its aftermath, the UN proposed dividing Palestine, and in 1948 Israel was put on the map, although the UN conditions were not fulfilled. But Palestinians already lived there. Thousands were killed in the wars that followed, and around 700,000 were driven from their homes and never allowed to return.

In 1967, Israel won a major war against its neighbours and took more land: the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and Syria's Golan Heights. Flush with confidence, a dream of safety now became something very much darker: a drive to hold and expand that land, build Israeli settlements on it, displace or exterminate hundreds of thousands, rule over millions of Palestinians who have no say in their future. Some call this the vision of a "Greater Israel" a murderous update to Herzl's Zionist ideology: The West Bank (which the Israeli government calls Judea and Samaria) and Gaza are the very lands the world has long treated as the basis of a future Palestinian state; some also describe this as "ethnic cleansing" and even  "a genocide".

Over time, Israel's leaders came to believe their country could only be safe if every neighbour was weak, submissive or broken up: Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and now Iran, as well as Gaza and the West Bank.

This is about the zionist policies and actions of the Israeli state and its leaders, not Jewish people overall - many Jews worldwide oppose these policies on religious and moral grounds.

Where the Stories Meet

Israel's leaders and their supporters in Congress have long pushed America to fight Israel's enemies. And America, wanting to stay boss of the playground, has often agreed. For decades it has fought, openly or in secret, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and now Iran. It has spent staggering sums and rarely achieved what it promised.

Meanwhile, the rest of the playground moved on. China grew strong by building roads, railways and trade links instead of fighting. Russia got back on its feet. Countries like India and Brazil started making their own choices.

Why Your Shopping Costs More

Now America and Israel are at war with Iran. The fighting began at the end of February and has now dragged into its seventh month.

Iran sits beside the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow channel that before the war carried roughly a fifth of the world's oil out to world markets. For months, Iran has choked it almost shut. Shipments of refined fuels like diesel and jet fuel are running at a fraction of pre-war levels, and ships are being struck near the strait. Peace talks are stuck as well: latestas of October is that Iran offered to reopen the strait within a week if the US lifted its naval blockade and oil sanctions, and President Trump rejected the offer.

Same demand, less supply, more risk: prices go up.

And oil is in almost everything. If it isn't in the products you buy, it's in the processes that make and deliver them. Fertiliser for the fields to grow our food, fuel for the tractors, and for the lorries that bring food to the shops, energy for factories that make our goods, gas for heating and electricity, even helium for hospitals and high-tech industries. So expensive or scarce energy means expensive food, heating, goods, medicine and travel.

Wars also cost governments fortunes. When they spend more than they have, they borrow or create money (to cut public services or raise taxes is difficult). Whichever way they choose, money loses value. That's inflation: over time, your money buys less.

The Simple Story

An old fear of Russia. An ally that wants its rivals crushed. A superpower determined to stay boss. Together they have dragged the world into war after war. The playground bully is getting weaker, and ordinary people everywhere are paying for it at the petrol pump and the supermarket.

A boss who has to keep fighting to stay the boss is a boss who is losing.