Soyinka’s Prophecy Fulfilled: Trump’s America and the Cost of Imperial Hubris By Prince Taofeek Ajibade

When Wole Soyinka cut up his American green card in 2016, many dismissed it as theatrical excess. A Nobel laureate choosing dignity over privilege seemed excessive to those still enchanted by the myth of American exceptionalism.

Today that gesture stands as one of the clearest moral diagnoses of our time. Trump’s record in domestic life and foreign policy has vindicated the Nigerian writer’s refusal to remain a permanent resident of a republic sliding into open aggression and internal decay.

Look at the body count and the rhetoric. Endless proxy wars, the casual expansion of sanctions that starve civilian populations, the open celebration of “peace through strength” that in practice means domination through fear: these are not aberrations.

They are the logical continuation of an imperial posture that treats the Global South as a resource and a battlefield. Soyinka saw the trajectory early. He refused to wait for the formal invitation to leave. He left on his own terms.

The parallel with Ayatollah Khamenei’s 2019 observation is striking. Khamenei identified Trump’s rise as a decisive accelerant of American political decline. Both men, from very different traditions, recognised the same disease: a great power so confident in its military and financial supremacy that it no longer bothers to hide the violence required to maintain it.

Soyinka’s personal protest and Khamenei’s strategic analysis converge on a single truth. Empire that discards even the pretence of restraint invites its own unravelling.

Standing against aggression demands more than abstract pacifism. It demands the refusal to lend legitimacy to institutions that wage war by other means. A green card is not merely a document. It is a quiet endorsement of the state that issues it.

Soyinka withdrew that endorsement when the state’s direction became unmistakable. In an age when American foreign policy continues to prioritise power projection over human consequence, that withdrawal remains not only justified but necessary.

Those who still defend endless military adventures and economic strangulation as “leadership” have learned nothing.

Soyinka’s scissors cut more than plastic. They cut the illusion that residency in the heart of empire is morally neutral. History is already rendering the verdict.