The president has replaced the ‘good guys’ myth with unapologetic brute force and greed – it could be a major mistake

Donald Trump’s attempt to seize Ukraine’s natural resources is another morbid symptom of the decline of US power. This may seem counterintuitive. Demanding half of all the revenues – not simply profit – flowing from Ukraine’s minerals, oil, gas and infrastructure, worth a staggering £400bn, sounds like the behaviour of a bully defined by swagger and brawn. It has rightly been described as reducing Ukraine to the status of an economic colony of the US.

But it epitomises the total discarding of one of the three central pillars of US hegemony. The first was military supremacy. This was shattered by the calamities of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, which associated the US military with atrocities, violent chaos and humiliating strategic defeat. The proxy war of Ukraine can now be added to that list. The second was economic supremacy, which remains, but which was severely weakened by the 2008 financial crash and the longstanding failure of the US model to deliver a sustained rise in real wages. And the third – the remnants of which Trump is scattering to the four winds – was moral supremacy. This was always a fiction, but an important means of legitimising US dominance. It is now ash.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist