After a couple world wars left every other major power weakened, the US inherited a position of supreme power, with no historical parallel to match the overwhelming global influence that the US Government now commanded. Going into WWII, US planners were well aware America was the strongest economic force in the world, as it had been for decades at this point, and that it would be in a position of strength at the wars end which would allow Washington to shape the affairs of international politics—indefinitely if that were possible—and that they would need to create a global order that would ensure the control of a majority of the worlds resources for American corporations, primarily those in the energy sector.

To be sure, these supposed “wise men” at the creation of the “Pax Americana” indeed achieved much success. The US overcame the Soviet Union in the Cold War by way of “containment,” have controlled the worlds primary energy resources for 80+ years now, and maintain the largest economy in world history, as well as holding the reserve currency of the world, which gives the US Government an absorbent amount of authority over global trade and the ability to coerce other countries to do their bidding or else face devastating sanctions that cripple their economy.

While the empire maintains its peripheral status as the world’s leading power, the gap between the US and peer competitors has grown considerably smaller. Much has changed the last decade-plus. The unipolar moment is no more, mostly cordial relations with the Russians in the 1990’s and 2000’s have completely devolved, the Chinese are the leading manufacturer in the world (the US held this title for more than a century until 2010), Beijing and Moscow have formed a defacto coalition with the Iranians and others to fight American hegemony, and the US—after having unmatched power and credibility once again after easily liberating Kuwait from Saddam in 1991—has lost what goodwill it has in the world and is now viewed, largely, as a rogue state that threatens international peace and security.

Of course, all imperial powers behave like rogue states, but the cultural hegemony and prestige of America has had nearly as much to do with its global dominance as military strength or economic might. To instill obedience into an empire, a state needs mystique and the ability to seduce allies and partners to do their bidding. The US doesn’t really have this any longer, as the world has long seen the hypocrisy of American actions. Latin American colonies are in revolt, both amongst citizens due to neoliberal policies guided by Washington that have driven populations to the brink and politicians who increasingly work with American adversaries in China and Russia to reduce their economic dependence on the US.

Colonies in Africa are literally revolting more each year with ever increasing military juntas seizing power and ousting their Western colonizers. From Niger and Mali to Gabon and across the Sahel, the US/West are actively losing the Neo-Cold War to Russia and their imperial owners in China, who are now swooping in to replace the old colonizers by offering infrastructure, security/weapons, and economic aid for precious resources that will be sent back to the core areas of the Chinese empire in Eurasia. Although this simply means ordinary Africans swapping one set of rulers for another, these coups ousting the West have been met with massive support from local citizens who have a deep hatred for American and Western imperialism.

While America maintains comparative advantages over its primary enemies in the Middle East (Iran) and East Asia (China), the dominance of Washington in these regions is in decline due to the expanding power of these empires who seek to kick the US out of both regions entirely one day. The US Government is being challenged by emerging Chinese, Russian, and Iranian power in the Red Sea and Middle East more broadly.

Egypt has been balancing relations more and more, with reports in recent years of the Russians using Egyptian ports as logistical hubs and staging points for military operations in Libya. Russia is also getting its first Red Sea naval base in Sudan as Beijing and Moscow are seeking Red Sea dominance. Iran’s regional proxies, meanwhile, have revealed key weaknesses in America’s defense posture in the Middle East from Iraq and Syria down to the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea. China and Russia have also been strengthening ties in the Red Sea region by enhancing economic and security cooperation with Eritrea and Ethiopia, while Beijing is fast expanding its presence across the South China Sea via artificial islands being turned into military facilities, continually ramping up pressure on American colonies in the Philippines and Taiwan primarily, while joining the Russians in naval exercises as displays of force in the East Asia region. A region policed and controlled by the US Navy since the 1940’s.

And while American power has actually expanded in Europe after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and is similarly dominant across East Asia and Oceania, there have been at least minimal signs of US influence reducing in these regions. Western leaders, although still deeply committed to their relations with the US, have been far more vocal in recent years while breaking with American policy.

They’ve also been wary of America’s new Cold War with the Chinese, as European and Asian economies—like the US—are now massively integrated with Beijing. No American allies, or US corporations themselves, want to lose the lucrative Chinese market. To be sure there have been signs of the Western sectors in the American empire attempting to reduce their economic co-dependence with China, but this has more to do with the fear of a Sino-American conflict happening than it does with anyone taking Washington’s supposed respectable lead.

Most people tend to lay blame on America’s unilateral wars of choice in the War on Terror (Afghanistan and Iraq) on the decline in US leadership and respectability globally, as well as its economic decline. It’s true that these wars did serve to delegitimize US foreign policy in the eyes of most of the world, in addition to removing Saddam as a regional counterweight to Iran, allowing Tehrans influence to spread across the region the last couple decades. It’s also true that these wars have exponentially raised the US deficit and devalued the US dollar (USD) further, but I think the decline in American empire has more to do with other grave strategic errors caused by short term thinking and political ignorance more than any other factors.

While American colonies in the Middle East face pressure from the emerging Iranian empire, the colonies in Europe are facing their most significant security challenge since the end of WWII with Russia’s war in Ukraine, brought about by short term and wishful political thinking. Although Iranian power is a threat to US interests in the Middle East, Tehran is much easier to deal with than Moscow, who have vast resources at their disposal, an imperial footprint spanning several continents, and are the leading nuclear power in the world. The expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe, often seen as evidence of American geopolitical wins, was a major strategic error on the part of planners in Washington. This has been opposed by the Russians since forever and remains existential to their imperial interests in Eastern Europe.

The US Government, drunk off the power of the unipolar moment, simply thought they could shove NATO expansion down Russian throats and still maintain positive momentum in their relations with the Kremlin. Wishful thinking, indeed.

What they really did here was drive Russia and China into each other’s arms, with both feeling they were being surrounded by the American empire. By 2008 the US had created the kind of geopolitical situation that gave birth to the first European war of the 21st century when Russia invaded Northern Georgia. This was undertaken primarily to prevent the ascension of Georgia into NATO after Bush II publicly promised Georgia and Ukraine would both become members at some point. As mentioned, this is a well known red lines for the Russians, just as Soviet forces in Cuba back in 1962 were for the US Government. So, exactly why did US planners expand NATO into Eastern Europe, promising to move the alliance into Ukraine and Georgia? For profit, of course.

Expanding the US-led military alliance meant expanding markets for American weapons manufacturers. It also meant they could greatly increase the odds of Russia reacting aggressively, which the US could then use as means to sever the increasing European reliance on Russian oil/gas, which is exactly what US planners have done the last few years after getting the kind of escalation they were looking for in Ukraine.  But while the US has been bogging itself down in Europe (massive military expenditures to Ukraine, increasing US force posture across the continent, NATO expansion into the Nordic, etc.), they’ve been doing so at a time when their imperial eyes ought to be focused and locked onto the rising Chinese empire, who US officials acknowledge poses the most significant strategic threat to American dominance in history.

Part of me wonders how much China gave a general ‘go-head’, or at least a seal of approval, when Putin and Xi met just before the invasion. China surely understood the war would bring Russia further into their orbit (dependence/empire), with Moscows war machine raging but only possible given China propping up the most sanctioned economy in the world. They also surely understood the war would shift American geopolitical focus, diverting resources and military assets from East Asia to Europe, which is welcomed news to an expanding empire looking to dominate its neighbors who are backed by the US. Washington expending resources on a war in Europe, as well as forever wars in the Middle East, is exactly what planners in Beijing want them to be doing.

But how did the Chinese become the economic force, emerging military power, and geopolitical mammoth that they’ve become? With lots of Western help (capital), which brings us to the two gravest strategic errors in the history of the American empire:

1 – Opening up to China in the 1970’s

2 – Admitting China to the World Trade Organization in 2001

The US and China are currently in the midst of a battle for currency dominance, with the Chinese Yuan or Renminbi gaining considerable power over the last decade in global trade. Not to mention de-dollarization entering with ferocity into an international landscape where many countries are seeking less reliance on the USD as the US Government ruthlessly weaponizes its currency. Chinese planners want this power for themselves, and although they’ve still a ways to go, this is largely why the US wants to prevent and contain China’s geopolitical influence and imperial rise.

Washington doesn’t stand a chance economically in the long term. You can see this in the Trump tariffs, launched on not just China but essentially the entire world. Trump’s “liberation day” and trade war is a sign of desperation from an empire that knows it can’t compete economically with its top competitor anymore. Their only avenue is tariffs in an attempt to slow industry and production down in China, as well as in America’s own colonies, while hoping this will somehow strengthen the US economy long term.

Washington is really gambling on damaging the global economy in the hopes of maintaining American primacy. As Yanis Varoufakis explains: “This is what his (Trump) critics do not understand. They mistakenly think that he thinks that his tariffs will reduce America’s trade deficit on their own. He knows they will not. Their utility comes from their capacity to shock foreign central bankers into reducing domestic interest rates. Consequently, the euro, the yen and the renminbi will soften relative to the dollar. This will cancel out the price hikes of goods imported into the US, and leave the prices American consumers pay unaffected. The tariffed countries will be in effect paying for Trump’s tariffs.”

That’s one possible outcome. The American empire is hoping the world falls in line and that the damage done to economies across the world leaves the US in the drivers seat, albeit much weaker both economically and geopolitically. Another far likelier scenario, in my view, is that America simply further isolates itself and slides deeper into economic recession, imperial decline, and drives allies into adversarial hands because they simply cannot trust doing business with such an unstable and untrustworthy regime. America has become the rogue nation of our time in not only reality, which it’s always been, but even to most of the world who essentially fear it. What they’re most likely accomplishing is simply strengthening the bilateral relations between key allies and their top adversary long term. Japan, South Korea, and China recently announced a strengthening of economic and bilateral ties to weather the storm. They’re also accomplishing further economic decline for the vast majority of Americans, meaning the US economy is only going to get weaker as the years drag on. America went from containing its arch rival (Soviet Union) during the Cold War to containing itself in the Neo-Cold War against China, effectively isolating itself from the world and containing its own power. This is why I say the fall of an empire has never been so patently ludicrous and absurd in all of human history.

With China set to become the largest economy in the world by the decades end, and once Beijing controls global trade via its own reserve currency, the USD will be largely worthless with America’s enormous debt obligations. When Nixon took the USD off the gold standard in the early 1970’s, this allowed American corporations to massively increase their profit margins but it also weakened the strength of the currency. The neoliberal era has really been a shell game to maximize the wealth of corporations while the USD inflates and becomes a less reliable (and valuable) currency. Eventually, as with every other global empire that declined over time, the US will lose its reserve currency status to a rising power.

We can see this happening with the USD and Chinese Yuan or renminbi today. Once this happens, the global empire—the US military apparatus that policies global trade and occupies countries for resource extraction—will collapse immediately, and China will be the most dominant power in the world. This is the “China threat” we all hear so much about in the West. When the US opened up to China via the Nixon visit with Mao in 1972, later allowing Beijing to join the World Bank in the late 1970’s, and with Clinton essentially admitting the Chinese to the World Trade Organization (WTO) at the turn of the century, these were grave strategic mistakes. By opening up to China, planners were seeking to exploit the Sino-Soviet split and prevent Moscow and Beijing from converging, fearing the economic threat this could pose to US and Western hegemony in global affairs.

Which is why it’s rather interesting that subsequent US administrations drove each power together primarily by disregarding core Russian geopolitical interests in Eastern Europe and around the Black Sea. US administrations from the late 1940’s and up through the early 2000’s could never understand that the Chinese (and later the post-Soviet Russian regimes) were always acting on their own interests and had no intention of being under the thumb of Soviet or American hegemony. However, thinking they could simply entice the Chinese with helping to build their economy off the back of American and Western capital, they admitted China to the World Bank/WTO, which allowed their economy to grow rapidly and turned Beijing into Washington’s most formidable enemy in history. This is the kind of strategic thinking that kills empires.

From corporate America’s perspective, opening up to China made sense. It allowed US corporations to increase profits, offshore exploitation to places where they could suppress wages and working conditions more easily, and gain financial advantage. But in reality, they began dismantling the manufacturing capacity of the US and simply built China’s up. Nowadays the real value of an ‘Apple’ product is literally physically located in China: the capacity to build computers, and the computers themselves that ship from there. This is why the US is feverishly trying to diversify supply chains and re-boost its production capacity, because the leverage China could have in the event of a war, or if they took over Taiwan and controlled the semiconductor industry. Of course at present, with Beijing relying on energy imports to function their society, the US military could still impose a crippling blockade of China that would bring their economy to a halt within a few months.

But if there’s a serious war, or trade war, where shipments actually stop, the US may be screwed. China has the capacity to build computers (and many other things) and America simply doesn’t. For China’s part, despite not being remotely communist in reality, they are familiar with Marxist thinking, and were happy to sell their working class out as labor for American corporations in order to enrich their own ruling class, as well as having Western capital develop their productive forces for them.

I seriously wonder the extent to which US planners cynically saw it as another way to enrich themselves, or which of them actually drank their own capitalist kool-aid and believed that by merging financial interests they could bind China into the global capital system under American control. From the point of view of finance capitalism, or corporate America, it has worked; capital is mobile and if the US loses international power and prestige, they can simply move investments and livelihoods wherever they’d like, or insulate themselves from the consequences.

But from the perspective of US planners actually concerned with American power and hegemony, they really dropped the ball.

I mean, how do you squander the greatest gift history has given any empire: the victory in WWIl which came at a relatively minimal price in American lives, no negative impact on the US homeland or infrastructure, the most expansive military in history which was never de-mobilized, and the moral halo that accompanied it all because the US was the supposed good guy rescuing the world from German and Japanese aggression. I don’t think any empire has had that rapid of growth while still coming off as benevolent, and they’ve spent the whole post-war era fumbling that to pursue short and mid-term objectives of enriching their own elites and using violence to prevent anyone else from developing independently. But had America continued to pursue a policy of containment, then there’s a very real chance the Soviets would have collapsed anyways, as the Eastern European rebellions were the primary reason, and China would be far less of an economic powerhouse for the US to deal with. Of course that means corporate America wouldn’t be quite as wealthy, which should tell people all they need to know about how state policy and power operate.