In 1905, when the Japanese fleet defeated the Imperial Russian Navy in the Strait of Tsushima, the outline of a new world came into view. The vanquishing of a European power by a nominally inferior Asian state effected more than a strategic realignment. It caused a foundational rupture in imperial common sense, which had long posited the supremacy of the West as an immutable law of world order.

Reflecting on the shock of this reversal, Mohandas Gandhi, then an unknown lawyer in South Africa, correctly predicted that “so far and wide have the roots of Japanese victory spread that we cannot now visualise all the fruit it will put forth”. The true harvest of this “fruit” – what we would now call decolonisation – came later in the twentieth century. But before that, the underdog’s triumph at Tsushima triggered an interior revolution – the psychological emancipation of those long relegated to the status of ‘backward’ peoples – and galvanised leaders from Ataturk to Nehru, for whom the secrets of Western power were not objects of envy and adoration, but tools for collective strengthening.

The news of this triumph reverberated across the world. Passing through the Suez Canal shortly after Russia’s collapse, Sun Yat-sen was congratulated by Arab workers who, exuberant at the news from the Pacific, mistook the Chinese revolutionary for a Japanese citizen. In that moment of solidarity lay the significance of Tsushima: the outcome transcended mere geopolitical reordering, and instead marked the onset of a world revolution in moral and political consciousness. The secrets of Western military and economic power could be learned, and then deployed against the West itself.

The catastrophic failure of the American-Israeli war on Iran seems certain to inaugurate another revolution in global consciousness. The most powerful nation in world history has suffered a strategic defeat – a modern Tsushima in the Strait of Hormuz.

Unlike at Suez, where the feebleness of old Europe was brusquely corrected by the rising American hegemon, Hormuz erupts in a landscape where the West’s moral and material “soft power” has been incinerated in the ruins of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and undermined by the spectacle of blatant white supremacism and risible incompetence in Washington. The emotional and psychological consequences of this collapse of post-historical illusion are profound.

The war on Iran, designed to satisfy the maximalist fantasies of an Israeli partner and collapse the Islamic Republic, has achieved neither. Instead, the survival of the Iranian state against the full spectrum of US coercion has clarified the outlines of a post-American world.

The material strength of the American empire remains immense. But what cannot be recovered is the plausibility of the American story: the overarching narrative of the US as a model for all of humanity; the rational centre of human progress around which the world was destined to orbit.

There is no denying the historical novelty, the sheer originality, of the US – a country founded to rid citizens of the weight of history and orient them towards the future. And so the global disaffection with America today is arguably a more extensive and traumatic event than the European Romantics’ disillusionment with revolutionary France, or the twentieth-century loss of faith in communism. Millions of people around the world came to invest their faith in the American dream; the dissolution of this ardently imagined homeland leaves a great part of humanity spiritually and ethically adrift.

Beyond Washington’s military and economic primacy, the essential element of America’s post-Cold War hegemony has been its paramount ability to narrate and describe the world: to legislate the meaning of global events according to its own precepts. The Holocaust and the defeats of Nazism and Communism remained its landmarks of world history even as the growing power of countries like China and India affirmed that decolonisation was the defining event of the twentieth century. Even as the numerical majority of the world’s people and the growing economic power of later-developing nations began to shift the balance, the dominance of Anglophone intellectual life persisted as a kind of authorial seigniorage, which denied most of humanity the permission to narrate history as it unfolded.

For the past four decades, this prerogative – exercised by an Anglo-American intellectual and political establishment – ensured that Washington’s interests passed for common sense. This uncontested jurisdiction to cast itself as the sole arbiter of progress was the peak of Western exceptionalism – what Reinhold Niebuhr described as the tendency to “regard the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm of human existence”.

For two generations of unbudging Atlanticist commentators, the “rest of the world” appeared only as a deviation from the path to modernity. A state like Iran could never be understood on its own terms – as a resilient formation with a long civilisational history and own internal logic – but only as a pathological resistance to inevitable convergence with the Western model.

The West had steadily deprived itself of the vocabulary to describe places, whether China or Iran, that sought modernisation outside the liberal-capitalist mould. It is striking to consider the mutual bewilderment of observers as different as V. S. Naipaul and Michel Foucault, who both failed to comprehend the 1979 revolution. Where Naipaul saw Islamic “rage” and “anarchy”, and Foucault saw a “political spirituality”, a more lucid analysis would have discerned a secular commitment to the sovereignty of the nation-state. The Iranian revolutionary project was a deliberate appropriation of the West’s most influential idea – revolution – and the modern state’s most potent administrative and technical forms. Understanding Tehran required less attention to the hagiography of the Battle of Karbala and more to the empirical metrics of female literacy and scientific publication – the indices of a society adopting the techniques of its adversaries while rejecting their tutelage.

The danger of this present moment lies in the fact that while the West’s narrative has collapsed, its capacity for violence remains. The American-Israeli axis, shorn of its moral pretensions, can still inflict enormous physical harm, yet this power no longer carries the weight of authority, since the world increasingly no longer sees its own future in the mirror of America’s present. There is no successor hegemon waiting to provide a fresh universalism, but a post-American future is becoming imaginable. In its place emerge the rudiments of a consciousness liberated from the vanities of the West: one that can make intelligible a freshly revealed world, and transmute the widespread despair of our age into intellectual excitement and rejuvenation.

The world’s majority is steadily moving off the marked-out paths of the Atlanticist map, ceasing to look for guidance from people who are themselves lost. In this new configuration, the terminus of history isn’t any single Western capital; the road has returned to the sea.

It is here, in the cold waters of the contemporary passage, that the ghost of the Baltic Fleet finally meets its modern successor, not in a single naval engagement, but in the lost illusions that once sustained the imperial ego. One hundred and twenty years later, the anti-imperialist consciousness that flickered to life at Tsushima has returned as the default setting for the twenty-first century.