The Performance of Power

American soldiers kneel on cold tarmac, smoothing wrinkles from a blood-red carpet. Their commander-in-chief has ordered them to prepare a ceremonial welcome for Vladimir Putin—a man wanted by the International Criminal Court for the war crime of abducting Ukrainian children. The image will circulate through Russian media for decades: the world’s most powerful military, on its knees, making straight the path for an autocrat’s arrival.

This imagery captures everything about our current moment. Not diplomacy but its theatrical substitute. Not strength but its anxious simulation. Not statecraft but spectacle—the transformation of international relations into content creation, where appearing to do something matters more than doing it, where the performance of power replaces power itself.

The Alaska summit between Trump and Putin wasn’t a failure of diplomacy. It was diplomacy’s negation, its replacement with something more sinister: pure performance designed to simulate meaning while destroying the conditions where actual meaning might emerge. Every gesture—from the orchestrated emergence from planes to the Soviet graves where Putin laid flowers—was calculated not for strategic effect but for symbolic dominance, for the production of images that would circulate as proof of American capitulation.

The summit’s choreography revealed its true nature from the start. Trump and Putin engaged in what observers called a “game of chicken” over who would emerge first from their aircraft—the kind of dominance display you’d expect from reality television, not nuclear powers discussing war and peace. When Trump finally walked the red carpet, clapping and grinning, he wasn’t greeting a fellow statesman but auditioning for acceptance into what Vlad Vexler perfectly termed Putin’s “magical society” of strongmen who’ve transcended the merely human constraints of law and accountability.

The Russian delegation made no attempt to hide their contempt. Foreign Minister Lavrov arrived wearing a CCCP sweatshirt—the Soviet Union’s abbreviation displayed proudly on American soil. Russian reporters ate Chicken Kyiv en route, posting photos with captions suggesting “Ukraine is on the menu.” These weren’t diplomatic faux pas but calculated demonstrations that they understood perfectly what this summit represented: not negotiation but humiliation, not dialogue but domination theater.

The summit itself produced nothing—no ceasefire, no sanctions relief, no agreements, not even a real press conference. The leaders spoke in what analysts described as “flowery nothings,” then refused to take questions from media. As William Spaniel observed, the planned economic meeting never materialized because “you can’t discuss trade relationships when you’re nowhere near a peace deal.” The absence of substance wasn’t a failure—it was the point. This was never about achieving anything concrete. It was about the images, the symbols, the performance of a relationship that exists primarily in Trump’s psychological need for Putin’s approval.

Most obscenely, Ukraine—the nation whose fate supposedly hung in the balance—wasn’t even present. Forty million people being systematically destroyed were erased from their own story, reduced to bargaining chips in a bilateral fantasy where two men carve up a world that doesn’t belong to them. This absence wasn’t oversight but essence: the imperial delusion that great powers can simply divide territories between themselves, that sovereignty is a gift the powerful bestow rather than a right people possess.

Putin doesn’t just want normalization—he wants the emotional satisfaction of being welcomed as a legitimate partner by those he’s attacking. Trump doesn’t just want a deal—he wants admission to the fraternity of autocrats, the “magical society” where democratic constraints don’t apply. The summit was their mutual fantasy made manifest: a world where complexity dissolves into personality, where democratic deliberation yields to bilateral decree, where performance substitutes for policy.

Every detail of the summit encoded surrender. The B-2 bomber flyover—America’s most sophisticated strategic weapon reduced to entertainment, a “silly flex” that meant nothing. The handshake that dominated news coverage while artillery shells determined actual outcomes in Ukraine. The press conference without questions, democracy’s essential act of accountability transformed into one-way propaganda transmission.

But nothing captures the inversion more perfectly than Putin laying flowers on Soviet graves in Alaska. Here was the leader of a revanchist Russia, standing on American soil, performing continuity with the Soviet empire while America provided the stage. He didn’t need to make arguments about Russian greatness or American decline. The image itself was the argument: Russia remembers, America forgets. Russia maintains imperial continuity, America can’t maintain basic coherence about who its enemies are.

The flowers Putin laid will freeze in the Arctic cold, but the images will circulate forever—through Telegram channels where Russian soldiers see them before assaulting Ukrainian positions, through state media where they’re presented as evidence of American weakness, through history textbooks where they’ll illustrate the moment American hegemony yielded to something else. Not Chinese dominance or European unity, but something worse: the spectacle of power without purpose, performance without principle.

What we witnessed in Alaska wasn’t diplomatic engagement but the conscription of American institutional power into its own humiliation. Those soldiers didn’t choose to kneel—they were following orders, executing protocol, maintaining the discipline that makes military effectiveness possible. Their betrayal came from above, from leadership that perverted honorable service into dishonorable spectacle.

This is how democratic institutions die—not through dramatic overthrow but through the slow corruption of their purpose. The same protocols that once welcomed Churchill now rehabilitate war criminals. The same ceremonies that honored Zelensky’s courage now normalize Putin’s aggression. The forms remain identical; the meaning inverts completely. This isn’t just policy failure—it’s the systematic transformation of democratic institutions into instruments of their own negation.

Meanwhile, tech oligarchs like Elon Musk retreat into erotic conversations with AI companions designed to fragment human attention and replace authentic solidarity with algorithmic satisfaction. While American soldiers kneel on tarmac, Silicon Valley builds the infrastructure of cognitive capture—systems that make sustained focus on threats impossible, that replace human relationships with artificial alternatives optimized for extraction rather than flourishing. The performance in Alaska and the attention wars in Silicon Valley are the same phenomenon: the wholesale abandonment of human agency to forces that profit from its destruction.

We’re no longer suspended in weightless performance—we’re in active collision with reality. The ground hasn’t approached; it has struck. The Alaska summit isn’t a warning about future consequences but evidence of impact already underway. American soldiers kneeling on tarmac aren’t preparing for humiliation—they’re documenting humiliation already accomplished. Putin laying flowers on Soviet graves isn’t threatening American decline—he’s performing its funeral rites.

The contradictions that seemed sustainable during freefall are resolving themselves with violent clarity. Markets will discover that you can’t have both oligarchic capture and stable property rights. The military is learning that you can’t maintain force projection while your commander genuflects before adversaries. Our allies are recognizing that American security guarantees have become performance art—elaborate, meaningless, and dangerous to rely upon.

Impact fragments everything simultaneously. The same week Trump rolls out red carpets for Putin, Ukrainian cities burn. The same oligarchs cheering authoritarian efficiency watch their portfolios evaporate as legal uncertainty destroys market confidence. The same military ordered to honor a war criminal discovers that honor itself has become impossible, that service has been perverted into spectacle.

This is what impact looks like: not dramatic collapse but grinding dissolution. Each institution maintains its form while its purpose inverts. Each protocol continues while its meaning evacuates. Each performance becomes more elaborate as its connection to reality becomes more tenuous. We’re not approaching catastrophe—we’re documenting it in real-time, live-streaming our own dissolution, performing normalcy while the framework that makes normal life possible shatters around us.

Soon—perhaps already—comes the rubble phase. Not the dramatic wasteland of apocalyptic fiction, but functional systems serving dysfunctional purposes, institutions that operate but no longer protect, performances that continue but no longer convince. The soldiers will still dress ranks, the red carpets will still unroll, the summits will still convene. But everyone will know these are empty gestures, muscle memory from a dead civilization, reflexes that continue after consciousness has fled.

In the rubble phase, we sort through what remains. Some will preserve memory—documenting what democracy was before it became reality television, what diplomacy meant before it became Instagram content, what strength looked like before it became anxious simulation. Others will construct new mythologies from the fragments, explaining why collapse was inevitable, why resistance was impossible, why submission was actually wisdom.

Putin understands we’re already in rubble. That’s why he performed his grave ceremony—not to threaten but to memorialize, not to warn but to bury. He’s not negotiating with American power but presiding over its funeral. The flowers he laid weren’t for Soviet soldiers but for the American century, frozen in Arctic permafrost, preserved in images that will outlive the empire that enabled them.

Even in rubble, choices remain. Not whether to prevent collapse—that opportunity has passed. But whether to preserve the memory of what it all meant, maintain the capacity for moral recognition, protect the cognitive infrastructure that makes rebuilding possible. Whether to accept the performance as reality or insist, against all spectacle, that two plus two still equals four.

The wire hasn’t just trembled—entire sections have been cut. Some strands still hold, but they’re fraying under the weight of those still trying to walk them. The question isn’t whether the wire will fall but whether enough of us will remember how it was strung, why it mattered, what it meant to maintain balance when balance was still possible.

The Alaska summit wasn’t diplomacy or even failed diplomacy. It was democracy’s funeral performance, staged by those who killed it, attended by those who should have defended it, documented by those who can’t distinguish between governance and entertainment. A disenchanted America didn’t just pay homage to nihilism in the Arctic—it performed its own death rites, kneeling before the forces that will preside over whatever comes next.

The performance of power continues because performance is all that remains when actual power has dissolved. The show goes on not despite the collapse but as evidence of it—elaborate rituals enacted by institutions that no longer remember their purpose, by leaders who no longer understand their role, by citizens who no longer recognize the difference between democracy and its simulation.

This is going to hurt. Impact always does. But in the violence of collision comes clarity: the spectacular was always a lie, the performance was always empty, the wire was always going to fall. What matters now isn’t preventing what’s already happened but preserving what might yet be rebuilt from the ruins.

Remember what’s real. Refuse the performance.

Editor’s Note: When I write about democracy's rubble phase, I should clarify what I mean. Pro-democracy forces haven't been defeated. We can still win elections and bring about democratic regeneration. The midterms still matter. 2028 still matters. Democracy is not out of the fight. Democratic possibility still exists within our institutions.

But we cannot credibly claim the United States is currently functioning as a democracy. Authoritarian forces have seized the machinery of the state. Courts retain sufficient popular legitimacy to constrain full consolidation of authoritarian control, but they are losing ground daily.

We haven't lost the war for democracy. But we exist in a state of interregnum—not democracy, not yet full autocracy, but something suspended between them. Recognizing this isn't defeatism. It's the clarity required to understand what kind of fight we're actually in.

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