“That politics ain’t nothing, but if you stretch it so long that it can’t go no further, then you know what you got on your hands? You got an antagonistic contradiction. And when you take that contradiction to the highest level and stretch it as far as you can stretch it, you got what you call war. Politics is war without bloodshed, and war is politics with bloodshed. If you don’t understand that, you can be a Democrat, Republican, you can be Independent, you can be anything you want to, you ain’t nothing.” – Fred Hampton

Introduction: Billionaire Feud and Uprising in a Falling Empire

In early June 2025, an astonishing duel erupted on social media between two of America’s most prominent figures: Elon Musk and Donald Trump. What began as a spat over a Republican spending bill quickly escalated into an exchange of personal insults and even threats of impeachment. Musk, the world’s richest man and owner of X, Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, and more, publicly called for President Trump’s ouster, citing sealed court documents allegedly implicating Trump in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Trump fired back by threatening to cancel federal contracts and subsidies for Musk’s companies, bragging that cutting Elon off would save “billions.” The feud turned ugly and surreal: Musk tweeted “Time to drop the really big bomb: Donald Trump is in the Epstein files… Have a nice day, DJT!”, while Trump raged that he was “very disappointed in Elon,” insinuating the tech mogul was “constantly full of ketamine.”

What a ridiculous world we live in.

As Musk and Trump traded insults online, the streets of Los Angeles were exploding in a different way, with mass protests and riots sparked by draconian federal immigration raids. In California, demonstrators clashed with ICE agents conducting what many called gestapo-like operations in migrant communities. This bizarre public breakup between a sitting U.S. president and a superstar billionaire – one-time pals who not long ago posed together at White House photo-ops – coincided with urban uprisings in LA. It would be easy to dismiss both as disconnected episodes of American political absurdity, reality-TV melodrama on one hand and routine unrest on the other, but a deeper look suggests these flashpoints are symptoms of something much larger: a structural crisis within a collapsing U.S. empire.

This article examines the Musk–Trump rift and the LA uprising as case studies through the lens of Peter Turchin’s theory of societal collapse. Turchin, a scientist-turned-historian, pioneered the field of “cliodynamics”, which uses data and mathematical models to find cycles in history. He predicted that the 2020s would usher in an “Age of Discord” in the United States – a period of intensifying instability driven by structural pressures. Central to Turchin’s model are concepts like elite overproduction, the rise of counter-elites, and vicious intra-elite infighting. These concepts help explain why two billionaires are at each other’s throats while disillusioned crowds rise up against oppression in Los Angeles. We will situate this feud in the context of Turchin’s prediction and link it to the broader decline of U.S. global hegemony – a decline marked by sharpening inequality, political breakdown, imperial overreach, and even environmental collapse. From elite egos waging civil war, to declining living standards and street battles at home, to endless wars and climate disasters abroad, the signs of systemic breakdown are multiplying. Paradoxically, this breakdown might also open the door for transformative change on a global scale – from movements for racial and climate justice to indigenous rights and post-capitalist alternatives.

Turchin’s Theory: Elite Overproduction and the Age of Discord

Peter Turchin’s work foresaw the turbulence of the 2020s with eerie accuracy. In his 2010 analysis (later expanded in books like Ages of Discord and End Times), he warned that the U.S. faced a “perfect storm” of social pressures building toward explosive instability around the year 2020. His prediction, published in Nature back in 2010, was that America would suffer a period of major upheaval beginning in the 2020s. Few took him seriously at the time, but by the late 2010s Turchin was sounding the alarm: by around 2020, several long-term trends would converge to trigger a spike in political instability – and here we are. Indeed, 2020 began with unprecedented wildfires in Australia, the U.S. assassination of Iranian general Soleimani in Baghdad, a global pandemic, mass protests over racist police killings, public discontent over the pandemic response, and a contested U.S. election; Turchin felt vindicated, if horrified, to be proven right. According to Turchin’s research, America had entered what he calls an Age of Discord, a disintegrative phase comparable to the eve of the Civil War or the fall of the Roman Republic.

Turchin’s cliodynamic model identifies three core structural drivers behind societal collapse: elite overproduction, popular immiseration, and state fiscal strain. In plain terms, too many elites are fighting over a stagnant pie, the living conditions of the masses are deteriorating, and the government is increasingly unable to manage the resulting chaos and costs. Let’s unpack these:

Elite Overproduction: When the number of people seeking elite positions far exceeds the number of actual positions available, elites turn on each other. The social pyramid grows top-heavy, as one observer put it, like a game of musical chairs where new contestants keep piling in but no new chairs are added. Ambitious members of the upper class – including frustrated heirs, Ivy League graduates, and upstart moguls – find their path to power blocked and become “elite aspirants” with axes to grind. They begin to view rival elites as enemies. This leads to intra-elite conflict, fragmentation, and ultimately violence. Turchin emphasizes this factor above all: an overproduction of elites breeds counter-elites who mobilize popular anger to battle the establishment and grab power for themselves.

Popular Immiseration: This refers to the declining material well-being of the masses – the working class and middle class seeing their fortunes fall. When wages stagnate or drop, when inequality skyrockets, when the “American Dream” evaporates, social frustration grows. The “wealth pump” in Turchin’s terms has been siphoning wealth from the many to the few for decades. For example, back in 1983 there were only about 66,000 U.S. households worth over $10 million; by 2019, there were 693,000 such super-rich households – over a tenfold increase. Meanwhile, the share of wealth controlled by the richest few ballooned at the expense of average workers. Turchin calls this dynamic the wealth pump, and it has left a large class of people feeling economically stuck or downwardly mobile. This widespread immiseration creates a powder keg of discontent – raw material that can be ignited by those elite aspirants looking for a mass base.

State Fiscal Strain: This is essentially a government running up against the limits of its financial resources and legitimacy. Mounting debts, deficits, and costs (from endless wars, bailouts, or policing an increasingly restive society) put enormous strain on the state. As public finances wobble, the government’s capacity to respond to crises or redress grievances shrinks. Bread-and-butter issues go unaddressed, infrastructure crumbles, and people lose faith in the state’s competence. In Turchin’s analysis, spiralling public debt was one of the warning indicators that turned sharply negative in the 1970s. By the 2020s the U.S. government had accrued over $30 trillion in debt, burned through trillions on wars and tax cuts for the rich, and struggled to provide basic services – a classic prelude to crisis, particularly when the U.S. monetary system is propped up by fossil fuels and ever-expanding debt – two things that can’t be relied on indefinitely.

At the heart of Turchin’s theory is elite overproduction feeding directly into elite civil wars. When too many big players are crowded into the elite tier, their competition stops being polite and turns antagonistic. Unable to all secure the top jobs and status they feel entitled to, some elites splinter off and become counter-elites: dissidents within the upper class who harness the anger of the “common people” to fight rival elites and topple the old order. History offers many examples: frustrated aristocrats led uprisings in ancient Rome; disaffected intellectuals stoked the French Revolution; impoverished samurai overthrew Japan’s shogunate. As Turchin and his colleagues note, “the masses may be miserable, but without someone with status and resources to organize them, they’ll simply languish.” It often takes a “political entrepreneur” – typically a discontented elite figure – to galvanize popular rage into a real rebellion. Robespierre, Lenin, Castro were all highly educated or privileged individuals who felt shut out of power and proceeded to lead mass revolutions.

Sound familiar? Donald Trump, despite being born into wealth, ran for president in 2016 as somewhat of an outsider champion of the forgotten working class who were sick of the establishment – effectively a counter-elite insurgent against the Republican establishment and the self-serving liberal technocrats. Elon Musk, despite his immense fortune, now casts himself as an anti-establishment truth-teller, railing against “woke” institutions and hinting at dark secrets among his elite rivals. Both men exemplify Turchin’s point that when the elite tier becomes overcrowded and rife with internal distrust, factional war is inevitable. The Musk–Trump feud, though laughable on the surface, is a textbook case of elite overproduction leading to elite infighting.

Before we delve deeper into Musk and Trump’s battle, let’s review how the United States got to this boiling point. Over the past two decades, one crisis after another has confirmed Turchin’s model – revealing the feedback loops of inequality, instability, and conflict in real time. Below is a brief chronology of America’s unravelling, showing how elite overproduction, popular immiseration, and other stressors have intensified since the 2000s, bringing us to the current Age of Discord.

The Age of Discord Unfolds: Flashpoints from 2008 to 2025

2008 – Financial Crash:
Wall Street’s collapse triggered a global crisis, exposing decades of private-debt expansion, speculation and neoliberal deregulation. Elites bailed themselves out while millions lost homes and jobs, igniting the wealth pump and popular anger that shattered faith in the system.

2009–Present – The Wealth Pump:
U.S. policy shifted decisively toward financialization. Bailouts, asset inflation, quantitative easing and Fed interventions enriched the elite while wages stagnated. Elite overproduction accelerated as degrees outpaced opportunity. For most, the American Dream died; for some, it never existed.

2014 & 2020 – Black Lives Matter:
Protests over police killings exposed racial injustice and deep immiseration. The militarized state cracked down, reforms were symbolic, and elite co-optation defused momentum, but the discontent simmered, pointing to systemic strain.

2020 – COVID-19:
The pandemic magnified inequality: billionaires doubled their wealth while essential workers died. Institutional trust collapsed as two Americas diverged—those profiting, and those perishing. Social fragmentation and elite profiteering deepened populist fury.

2021 – January 6th Insurrection:
A billionaire ex-president marshalled angry followers, many of whom from far-right armed militias, to storm the Capitol. Far from a bottom-up revolt, it was a textbook counter-elite bid—Turchin’s elite overproduction erupting into open civil strife.

2023–Present – Gaza & Domestic Uprisings:
As the U.S. backed Israel’s destruction of Gaza, Americans erupted in solidarity. Millions protested imperial complicity amid domestic austerity. The gap between public sentiment and elite consensus became a chasm.

2020s – Climate Chaos:
Wildfires, floods, and blackouts revealed elite neglect. The wealthy insulated themselves; the rest suffered. Climate breakdown became a force multiplier for unrest.

Ongoing – Authoritarian Drift:
With legitimacy in decline, the U.S. state leaned on surveillance and militarized policing. Institutions froze; repression replaced persuasion. Projects like “Cop City” symbolized democracy’s decay.

2025 – Musk–Trump Meltdown & LA Uprising:
The Musk–Trump feud and LA’s urban revolt converged as elite warfare mirrored street unrest. From Twitter threats to burning barricades, the empire’s contradictions exploded into view. As Turchin warned, the system is nearing rupture.

None of these events are isolated; they are cumulative and mutually reinforcing. In Turchin’s words, “oscillations arise because of nonlinear feedbacks between different interacting components of the social system (state-level society).” The 2008 collapse fed the inequality that fuelled the disillusionment and “counter-elite” surge capitalised on by Trump in the 2016 political earthquake that led to the 2021 insurrection that presaged the current crisis – each stage adding tinder for the next. In Turchin’s framework, the United States has entered a phase of structurally driven breakdown. The feedback loops of social distress and elite conflict are now in motion, pushing the nation toward what looks like a systemic rupture. The Musk–Trump feud and the LA uprising are additional observable steps on the road to societal collapse, not freak occurrences. They embody the logic of this Age of Discord.

Musk vs. Trump: Elite Civil War or Counter-Elite Coup?

So how do we interpret the Musk–Trump battle? In Turchin’s terms, it’s a prime example of potential elite civil war – and possibly a counter-elite rebellion in the making. Trump and Musk may both sit atop the global capitalist class, but they represent rival factions of a fracturing ruling elite. Trump, despite his populist trappings, was President of the United States – the established political elite – and presided over an administration that delivered historic windfalls to his cronies and fellow billionaires. Musk, for all his wealth, has cast himself as an insurgent against the establishment, a disruptor from Silicon Valley taking on what he deems the corrupt coastal elites (ironic, given Musk’s own elite status). For a while, these two had a marriage of convenience: Musk enjoyed cozy relations with the Trump White House (even securing invitations to showcase Tesla on the White House lawn), and Trump basked in the tech mogul’s adulation of his anti-“woke” stance. Both men delighted in flouting liberal norms and pissing off the coastal intelligentsia but such alliances are notoriously fickle – especially in times of elite overproduction. When push comes to shove, big egos with big ambitions inevitably collide. Or as the Guardian columnist Moira Donegan quipped, it was perhaps inevitable that “the two worst people in the world” would eventually have a “big, beautiful breakup.”

From another angle, Musk’s manoeuvres look like a classic counter-elite power play. Here is a billionaire outsider barging into a new arena – first technological, then social media and now politics – and challenging the reigning powers on their own turf. In 2016, Trump himself played a similar role: a reality-TV braggart who hijacked one of America’s major parties by weaponizing mass anger against the party’s old guard. Trump was a counter-elite who stormed the gates of the GOP establishment and won. Now, in an ironic twist of fate, Trump is the establishment, and Elon Musk is positioning himself as the fresh outsider voice for all those who feel betrayed by Trumpism. Musk’s call for Trump’s impeachment – hinting he has kompromat (the Epstein files) – is a classic counter-elite tactic: paint the incumbent elite as irredeemably corrupt, stoke public outrage, and attempt to knock over the king to seize the throne. Musk has spent the past year cultivating a base of disaffected conservatives and libertarians on his platform X (formerly Twitter), styling himself as a champion of “free speech” against woke tech companies and mainstream media. He has even floated the idea of launching a new political party to represent the “middle 80%” of Americans. In short, Musk is playing the political entrepreneur, using his platform and cult of personality to rally a following by denouncing other elites as evil – very much in line with how counter-elites operate historically.

Whichever way one slices it – whether as a petty ego squabble or an attempted palace coup – the key point is that the cohesion of America’s ruling class has shattered. The nation’s most powerful figures are now openly airing each other’s dirty laundry (from Epstein to ketamine use to election meddling) and actually massively reducing each other’s wealth through stock and crypto price depreciation. That is a hallmark of system breakdown. In more stable times, elites close ranks against common threats. In disintegrative times, it becomes more of a competitive zero-sum game, as Turchin observes, “one ‘elite’ arms itself against another… and things fall apart.” The Musk–Trump feud, absurd as it appears, is symptomatic of an empire cracking from within. It’s hard to imagine, say, FDR and Rockefeller duking it out in public during the American Century’s heyday – but in today’s America, such elite brawling is becoming the new normal, as evidenced by recent political debates. History suggests that when elite civil wars heat up, broader social crises or even state collapse are often not far behind. The Roman Republic’s collapse was preceded by decades of aristocrats betraying and backstabbing each other. France’s ancien régime fell after elite factions splintered and some sided with revolutionaries. We seem to be at a similar juncture.

To fully grasp why this is happening, we must zoom out beyond America’s domestic woes and look at the bigger picture of the American empire’s decline. Turchin’s theory deals mostly with internal dynamics, but those dynamics are deeply intertwined with the United States’ role as a global hegemon. The Age of Discord at home coincides with mounting contradictions in the American-led world order. In fact, imperial overstretch and hubris have fed directly into the internal crisis. Let’s examine how the fall of U.S. global dominance underpins the unravelling we see today – and how, in turn, that fall might create openings for a new kind of future.

An Empire Undermining Its Own People

For the past 75 years, the United States has been not just a country but an empire – the architect and enforcer of a global system that enriched itself while dominating the world. In recent decades, that imperial project has started to undermine the very society it was built upon. Decades of neoliberal globalization, union busting and endless war have eroded the American middle class, hollowed out productive industry, and shredded social cohesion. After World War II, the U.S. experienced a golden age of rising prosperity (broadly shared income growth, expanding unions, public investments) – but starting in the 1970s, things took a sharp turn. Under the neoliberal agenda (think Milton Friedman economics, Reaganomics, etc.), the economy was restructured to serve global capital at the expense of American workers. Factories shut down and jobs were offshored en masse to chase cheap labour and resources abroad, while finance and speculation became king. The U.S. went from an industrial powerhouse to what some call a “casino economy” or a FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) economy. Communities across the Midwest and South were devastated by deindustrialization, breeding the anger and despair that would later fuel populist movements like Trump’s base (and ironically, some of Musk’s online following), who have been tricked into abandoning their class interests in favour of culture politics.

Meanwhile, the wealth pump roared at full blast: as noted earlier, inequality surged dramatically from the 1980s onward. The elite grew fabulously richer – CEOs, Wall Street traders, tech founders, “defence” contractors all raking in fortunes – while working-class wages stagnated and benefits were slashed. Public services deteriorated as austerity became political orthodoxy whenever the rich wanted to squeeze government spending (except, of course, on things that benefitted them, like bank bailouts or tax cuts). By the 2020s, the vast majority of Americans had been pushed into precarity or indebtedness. Surveys showed that something like 4 in 10 adults couldn’t cover a $400 emergency expense – a damning indicator of how many live on the edge in the richest country in history, and yet, the number of billionaires multiplied. This is the popular immiseration Turchin flags as destabilizing: a society where most feel they’re getting a raw deal, even as propaganda insists things have never been better.

Crucially, the empire’s external adventures directly drained resources that could have been used to fix problems at home. Washington poured astronomical sums into the Pentagon and foreign wars – money that, had it been spent on infrastructure, healthcare, or education domestically, could have shored up the social contract. The U.S. military budget is now nearing $1 trillion per year – larger than the next 10 countries combined – and that doesn’t even count indirect costs of war. Trillions were spent on invasions and occupations like Iraq and Afghanistan. As whistleblower Chelsea Manning and others revealed, U.S. military interventions essentially shovelled taxpayer money into what Julian Assange dubbed a “transnational elite” of war profiteers – arms manufacturers, private contractors, oil companies – with significant cost to the average American. In Iraq and Afghanistan, thousands of American soldiers lost their lives and tens of thousands were physically or psychologically wounded, yet the primary beneficiaries were companies like Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, and ExxonMobil. Back home, infrastructure crumbled and social mobility stalled. It’s no wonder many Americans grew cynical and angry: their communities were collapsing while their government spent blood and treasure policing far-off lands.

Turchin notes that rising popular immiseration and intensifying elite competition is an especially volatile mix. By the 2020s, volatility was evident everywhere. The 2008 financial crisis – caused by elite predation – was paid for by ordinary people, leaving a legacy of bitterness. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 hammered home the sense that the system is rigged: billionaires got richer while essential workers got poorer and died. Social trust hit historic lows. Polls showed Americans deeply polarized and pessimistic about the country’s direction. A nation that once prided itself on opportunity now produced college grads working as baristas and delivery drivers alongside millions of others who rightfully feel the American Dream has flatlined. This disillusionment is dry tinder for demagogues to ignite – or, potentially, for a united mass movement from below if people can overcome manufactured divisions. Indeed, the sparks of such unity are visible now in places like Los Angeles, where multiethnic crowds united against ICE raids, and in nationwide labour strikes where workers from all demographics demand dignity. The social fabric has been badly frayed by the empire’s choices, but that very breakdown is making new alliances thinkable.

Global Misadventures and Blowback at Home

Externally, the American Empire has also been racking up costs and enemies in ways that feed back into domestic breakdown. The United States spent the last 75 years constructing and defending a worldwide imperial system – often euphemistically called the “liberal international order.” In practice, for those on the receiving end, this order was brutally illiberal. From the Cold War through the War on Terror, the U.S. routinely trampled international law and human rights in pursuit of geopolitical dominance. It backed coups, dictators, and death squads to thwart any challenge to its hegemony. To pick just one example: in 1965, U.S. intelligence agencies aided the Indonesian military in the mass murder of up to one million suspected leftists, paving the way for a friendly authoritarian regime. This so-called “Jakarta Method” (the title of the book by Vincent Bevins) became a template the U.S. exported elsewhere – from the Pinochet coup in Chile to the dirty wars in Central America. Entire generations of progressive leaders in the Global South were jailed, killed, or marginalized with U.S. support. The human toll was horrendous: countries were destabilized, development stunted, and deep resentment of the U.S. festered globally.

After the Soviet Union fell in 1991 and the Cold War supposedly ended, one might have expected the U.S. to scale back its militarism. Instead, Washington doubled down on playing global policeman. NATO expanded right up to Russia’s borders despite promises not to, sowing the seeds of future conflict. In 2001, the Bush administration launched the “War on Terror,” a crusade so expansive it encompassed dozens of countries. The 2003 invasion of Iraq – based on lies about weapons of mass destruction – was a watershed moment: it violated international law and shattered America’s moral standing. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed in the chaos unleashed by that war. A whole region was further destabilized. The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that the post-9/11 wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, etc.) have directly killed over 900,000 people and led to as many as 4.5 million deaths when indirect effects are included. These wars have also displaced at least 38 million people – the largest number of refugees and displaced persons from conflict since World War II. Think about that: tens of millions of lives upended. Many of those refugees came knocking at the doors of Europe and the U.S., only to be met with barbed wire, armed police boats, and xenophobic politics (fuelling the rise of far-right demagogues in the West). This is blowback in its rawest form: wars started by the U.S. generated refugee crises and regional chaos, which then ricocheted back as moral and political crises in the West, taken advantage of by right-wing politicians from Europe to the U.S.

All the while, these imperial ventures hollowed out America’s treasury and its soul. The U.S. has spent an estimated $8 trillion on the post-9/11 wars when you count long-term obligations like veterans’ care. This is money essentially sucked out of the productive economy and funnelled to the military-industrial complex. The federal government’s debt skyrocketed (a chunk of it owed to foreign creditors like China, ironically). Fiscally, this is part of Turchin’s state strain: gargantuan military budgets contributing to deficits that then become excuses to gut social programs, As Musk’s DOGE team took care of. The irony is rich – politicians plead poverty when it comes to universal healthcare or student debt relief, but spare no expense for F-35 jets and drone bombs used to bomb Arab children. The moral authority of the U.S. has been shredded by its own actions as well. How can a nation claim to stand for freedom and democracy when it has Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and a litany of war crimes on its record? The Patriot Act and mass surveillance, the normalized use of torture and assassination (remember the drone strike campaigns), the detention of migrant children in cages – all these have eroded whatever democratic ideals America professed.

The world saw through the hypocrisy, and increasingly, Americans did too. People on the left and right in the U.S. now regularly decry the American system as “corrupt” or “broken,” for apparently different reasons, albeit with the same root cause. However, as evidenced by the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024, people on the right and left seem to be uniting together as part of a bottom-up approach to politics as people rightly lose faith in Democrats and Republicans alike, putting the CNN/Fox News created culture wars aside, and fighting against their common parasitic enemies.

The loss of U.S. prestige and the failure and unscrupulous nature of its military adventures from Vietnam to Iraq to Gaza, have direct domestic effects. Veterans come home with PTSD and scant support; trillions in war spending translate into inflation and debt that ordinary Americans must bear; propaganda about “fighting for democracy” rings hollow, fuelling cynicism, and citizens acknowledge that the imperial boomerang is working its way back to them one cop city at a time. Even the militarization of U.S. police (those MRAP armoured vehicles rolling through American streets) is a form of war blowback – surplus military hardware and a siege mentality brought home from Fallujah to Ferguson. The empire, in trying to rule the world, has undermined its own foundations.

The Empire as Obstacle to Climate Survival and Global Justice

One area where the American Empire’s decline is most desperately needed is in the fight for a liveable planet. For decades, the United States – historically the largest carbon polluter – has been the single biggest obstacle to meaningful global climate action. The math is simple: if everyone consumed resources like the average American, we’d need about five Earths to sustain humanity; if everyone lived like the average billionaire, it would be more than a thousand Earths. The perpetual growth and endless accumulation that distinguish capitalism from other economic systems have humanity on track for extinction, with societal collapse even being discussed as a real possibility in the 2024 State of the Climate Report, due to the “perilous illusion” of “unlimited growth in a world with finite resources” which has led to the ecological overshoot at the heart of the climate crisis, which, according to legendary climate scientist James Hansen’s paper “Global Warming in the Pipeline”, we are on track for ten degrees of warming based only on what we have already emitted. Surely a civilisation ender if ever there was one. Yet the U.S.-led order has pushed a model of growth, consumption and domination that is literally unsustainable. Washington refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol in the 2000s. Under Trump, it pulled out of the Paris Agreement. It refused to honour treaties made with indigenous people to build new pipelines. Shock. And even under more ostensibly pro-climate administrations, the U.S. has consistently watered-down international agreements and failed to meet its commitments. Why? Because powerful American corporate interests– Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Auto, Wall Street – profit from the status quo of fossil capital and hyper-consumption.

Today, the United States is the world’s #1 oil producer, pumping over 13 million barrels per day and exporting more oil than Saudi Arabia. This surge in output (up ~50% compared to Saudi levels) is treated domestically as a triumph of “energy independence,” but globally it’s a climate disaster. In late 2024, even as U.S. diplomats talk out of one side of their mouth about leading on climate, America is aggressively expanding fossil fuel production – directly flouting the International Energy Agency’s finding that no new oil and gas fields can be developed if we hope to hit net-zero emissions by 2050. As one climate advocate bluntly put it, “No country can show up to the international stage and claim to be a climate leader while continuing massive fossil fuel expansion back at home. The US is the most significant culprit.” This gross hypocrisy has not been lost on the rest of the world. It has undermined trust in international climate negotiations; many see U.S. promises as empty talk while it protects oil profits. The American empire’s stranglehold on global finance and trade also props up the fossil fuel status quo – from the petrodollar system (whereby global oil sales are required to reinforce dollar dominance and U.S. banks’ power) to U.S. control of institutions like the World Bank that have historically funded oil/gas infrastructure in developing countries. In effect, U.S. hegemonic power has been used to block or slow the transition away from fossil fuels, pushing the world closer to climate catastrophe.

Similarly, the U.S.-centric global economic system has entrenched staggering inequality between rich and poor nations. Through the IMF, World Bank, and trade agreements, the U.S. and its allies have enforced a regime of “unequal exchange”: poor countries export cheap raw materials and labour, rich countries (led by the U.S.) capture the high-value production and profits. It’s a neo-colonial setup dressed in neoliberal clothes. By some estimates, wealth on the order of trillions of dollars flows from the Global South to the North every year due to unfair terms of trade, debt payments, and profit repatriation – more than enough to end extreme poverty several times over if it stayed where it was produced. Whenever countries in the Global South have tried to chart a more equitable path (say, by nationalizing resources or creating alternative development banks), they’ve often been met with U.S. sanctions, coups, or covert destabilization. The U.S. has supported the assassination or overthrow of countless leaders who dared challenge its economic diktats – from Patrice Lumumba in Congo to Salvador Allende in Chile. Even in recent years, U.S. sanctions regimes (against Venezuela, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and others) have strangled economies and caused untold suffering, largely because those nations defied Washington’s line. All of this has made the American-led order synonymous with injustice for much of the world. If you’re in the global South, the decline of U.S. hegemony isn’t necessarily unwelcome – it’s the lifting of a boot from your neck.

In short, the American Empire has been an obstacle to the very changes needed to prevent planetary collapse and global misery. Its overwhelming military and financial power have served to maintain an untenable status quo – whether that’s burning fossil fuels until the seas drown cities, hoarding wealth until billions live needlessly in poverty, or funding Israel as they obliterate Gaza and kidnap Great Thunberg. For decades, this order was simply presented as the way things are. But now it is collapsing – and not a moment too soon.

Breakdown of the World Order: Signs of a Multipolar Future

One clear sign of imperial breakdown is the erosion of international law and norms under U.S. watch. After World War II, the U.S. helped build the United Nations system, supposedly to promote peace and rules to govern conflicts, but in practice, the U.S. and other great powers ignored the rules whenever it suited them. As the U.S. empire fades, that hypocrisy is coming home to roost. We discussed how the Gaza war revealed U.S. contempt for international humanitarian law. Consider also the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine: Moscow’s aggression was flagrant, but part of Putin’s calculus was likely that the U.S. (distracted, divided, and itself tarnished) wouldn’t directly stop him beyond sanctions and arms to Ukraine. And he was right – the U.S. ruled out direct military intervention, not least because Americans had no appetite for another foreign war. Meanwhile, longtime U.S. partners like Saudi Arabia began acting in their own interest regardless of Washington’s wishes – for instance, cutting oil deals with China, mediating between Iran and the Houthis in Yemen, and inviting the Chinese to broker a Riyadh-Tehran détente. When Trump visited Saudi Arabia in 2024, the royal reception was lavish, but it belied a new reality: the Saudis, like others, are hedging their bets, making sure they have other patrons (or at least neutrality) if Uncle Sam falters. Europe, all too late, are starting to learn this lesson too. Just this week Trump bragged to German Chancellor Merz that he was responsible for the bombing of Nordstream 2, a shocking admission given that this was a terrorist attack on Germany and the EU, and potentially the largest single emitting event of methane in history.

Indeed, new powers are rising as U.S. dominance recedes, ushering in what some call a “new world disorder” or more optimistically a multipolar or pluriversal world. Chief among these emerging powers is China. In the past 20 years, China has skyrocketed to become the world’s second-largest economy (on track for #1), the manufacturing workshop of the planet, and a technological peer competitor to the U.S. in areas like AI, 5G, and renewable energy. China’s Belt and Road Initiative has built infrastructure across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, extending Beijing’s influence through investment and trade where the U.S. mostly offered military bases and exploitative loans. Along with Russia, Iran, India, Brazil and others, China is championing forums like BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that aim to bypass Western dominance. For many countries in the Global South, these shifts are empowering. They suddenly have alternatives to the U.S.-run SWIFT banking system (Chinese digital yuan and Russian MIR), alternatives to the IMF’s austerity diktats (China Development Bank), and even alternatives in diplomatic alignment (note how dozens of countries chose neutrality rather than support the U.S. position on Ukraine, or how Global South solidarity on Gaza overwhelmed Western narratives). There is a palpable sense that a “transformation in the unjust order that rules the world” is underway – as one world leader put it. Hyperbole? Maybe. But the trend is real: the unipolar moment is over. We are moving toward a more pluriversal world where no single empire holds uncontested sway.

Even within the U.S. establishment, there is begrudging acknowledgment that American primacy isn’t what it used to be. Think tanks churn out papers on “great power competition” that tacitly concede the U.S. must share space with China and others. Hawks rage against the dying of the light, pushing decoupling from China or proxy conflicts to slow rivals, but these are rear-guard actions. The momentum of history is against a U.S.-dominated 21st century. Hegemonic decline doesn’t mean the U.S. vanishes or becomes irrelevant; it means it can no longer dictate terms globally without serious pushback or consequence. We’re already seeing this: U.S. sanctions are less effective as target countries find workarounds; U.S. diplomatic pressure often falls flat (see how many countries ignored U.S. pleas to isolate Russia, allowing the Russian economy to stay resilient through diversifying or how OPEC+ cuts oil production despite U.S. objections); and U.S. soft power has been severely damaged by its own domestic chaos and blatant double standards.

For many ordinary Americans and Westerners, the end of empire is confusing and even frightening – it’s the unravelling of a familiar world, but for billions of people elsewhere and millions being exploited in the U.S., it offers hope that some long-overdue justice and peace may finally be possible. Which brings us to the big question: Does this collapse spiral inevitably into dystopia and violence (at home and abroad)? Or could it be, as the proverb goes, that the night is darkest just before dawn?

Collapse or Transformation? Hope in the Ruins

All this paints a rather grim picture of an American empire in decline – riven by internal discord, overextended abroad, haemorrhaging legitimacy, and challenged by new powers. The doomsday scenario practically writes itself: instability and uncertainty grow; as the U.S. loses grip, violence and chaos fill the void; a wounded empire lashes out with its trillions in military arsenal, perhaps dragging the world into larger conflict, with China, Iran, Mexico, Canada and Greenland all receiving thinly vailed threats, amid the genocide they are committing in Palestine. Turchin’s data indeed suggest the U.S. is entering a dangerous phase. The 2020s could see surging violence or even civil strife domestically as elite factions and popular anger boil over, with militias and heavily armed individuals multiplying (remember, Americans bought some 20 million new guns in 2020 alone, a record). Externally, there’s the nightmare prospect of a desperate U.S. leadership choosing war as a distraction or “solution” – a frightening thought given the nuclear weapons and drones at their disposal.

And yet – there is another side to this story. One could argue that the collapse of U.S. imperial hegemony might not only be a blessing for humanity, but the only way humanity survives. Our current world order, dominated by Washington and Wall Street, has brought us to the brink of climate catastrophe, another, and potentially nuclear, world war, and entrenched grotesque inequalities. It has fuelled countless wars and propped up countless tyrants (so long as they were friendly to U.S. capital). If that order wanes, it could remove a huge obstacle to progress. We might finally see movement on issues that have been blocked for decades by American intransigence.

Imagine a world where Washington can no longer bully countries into watering down climate agreements, sanctioning Israel or vetoing global taxes on the ultra-rich. Perhaps international climate talks would yield stronger action, and major polluters could be held to account by a true concert of nations rather than derailed by a superpower protecting its oil barons. If the U.S. dollar’s stranglehold on finance loosened, maybe the Global South could get out from under the thumb of debt and austerity; debt jubilees or development-oriented monetary reforms might become possible. If the U.S. military footprint recedes – fewer bases, fewer covert ops – then regional conflicts might find more breathing room for diplomatic, people-powered solutions, and the temptation for American presidents to use foreign wars as political theatre would diminish. The end of Pax Americana could mean the end of CIA-sponsored coups and regime-change meddling that have snuffed out so many popular liberation movements. Long-suppressed voices might flourish without Uncle Sam’s heavy hand tipping the scales: indigenous movements, socialist experiments, pan-African, pan-Arab or pan-Asian collaborations. We could see a more decentralized world order, where power is distributed and no nation can unilaterally enforce its will everywhere by sanctions or stealth bombers. This might democratize international relations and allow countries to pursue adaptive, sovereign development models that actually serve their people and ecosystems, rather than serving ExxonMobil or Goldman Sachs.

From the perspective of American citizens, the coming reckoning could also spur positive transformation at home. History shows that periods of crisis can be crucibles of renewal. The violent upheavals of the 1860s (Civil War) and the 1930s (Great Depression) in the U.S. were followed by periods of significant progressive change – the Reconstruction amendments (short-lived though their promise was) and the New Deal social contract, respectively. In Turchin’s analysis, past Ages of Discord were eventually resolved when a “prosocial” faction of the elite arose that conceded reforms to rebalance society. For instance, in the early 20th century, America’s robber-baron era gave way to the Progressive Era: steep income taxes on the rich, antitrust laws to break up monopolies, labour protections – measures that tamed the excesses of the Gilded Age. Perhaps our current turmoil will likewise force a reboot. This time, it may need to go further than a New Deal or mild reform; it must mean a true systemic shift away from capitalism and the economics of extraction. The ideas are already in the air: nationalize Big Tech and energy monopolies, eject billionaire money from politics, tax extreme wealth out of existence and redistribute, significantly shorter workweeks and public job guarantees amidst AI job displacement, make human rights and critical resources (healthcare, housing, education, energy) public goods rather than monopolistic profit engines. More radical yet, people are imagining new forms of democracy such as cooperative workplaces, community ownership of land, and economies built on true freedom, collaboration and regeneration instead of endless growth and domination. None of this is utopian – it is precisely the kind of bold change that becomes thinkable, and necessary, when the old system crashes under its own weight.

Of course, nothing is guaranteed. Decline can just as easily lead to dystopia – fascism, fragmentation, civil war or ecological collapse – right now, this is the trajectory, in reality, it could be a mixture of all of the above. The U.S. elites seem, so far, intent on steering toward a very dark path (more police states, more scapegoating, more fortress mentality), but understanding these dynamics, as Turchin’s work helps us do, is a first step toward navigating them. If we see the patterns, maybe we can choose a “less bloody exit” from this crisis, as Turchin delicately puts it.

Dawn After Discord?

As Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s feud rages on – one tweeting about Epstein files, the other about ketamine – it’s tempting to treat it as a spectacle, but their very public breakup is a telling sign of empire in decline, a vivid illustration of Turchin’s warning that elite overproduction breeds vicious elite rivalry. When the big sharks start tearing each other apart, it means the tank is overcrowded and the food supply is running low. This is what Fred Hampton referred to as an antagonistic contradiction. The American body politic is nearing a crisis point, brought on by runaway inequality, internal rot, and the backlash of decades of imperial overreach. The Age of Discord isn’t looming – it’s here, right now. And when you factor in environmental breakdown, AI upheaval, multiple genocides and refugee crises, it feels like we’re living in the prelude to something epochal.

Yet, as the old order cracks, new possibilities are already sprouting in those cracks. The waning of U.S. hegemony could remove one of the biggest roadblocks to global justice and ecological sanity. A more multipolar world, and a more humble America, might allow long-stalled dreams to take root – from climate cooperation to true decolonization and solidarity among peoples. Imagine an America that finally reckons with its history and gives land back to Indigenous communities, letting the wisdom of those who tended this land for millennia guide healing and restoration. In fact, just this week, 47,000 acres of land were returned to the Yurok tribe in California’s largest land-back deal in history.

Imagine a world where no single superpower can impose neoliberal austerity, veto global wills or enforce a genocide – where instead, cooperative regional blocs and grassroots movements set the agenda for peace and sustainability. These outcomes are not guaranteed by any means; collapse could just as easily bring nightmare scenarios of authoritarianism or widespread violence (and indeed, our elites seem hell-bent on that route), but the window for transformation is there, if the people are brave and organised enough to seize it.

In the meantime, we can expect more scenes like the Musk–Trump drama – elite infighting exposed, polemical and raw – alongside more popular uprisings as people refuse to stay immiserated and voiceless, just like in L.A. now. It’s often said that when empires fall, they make a loud noise. The noise in the United States is certainly growing louder as the contradictions become more antagonistic. The task for people both inside and outside the empire is to ensure that as the old system crashes, the opportunity is taken to build a new one that is more just, adaptive, regenerative, and humane. The age of the American empire is waning; this very decline – hastened by elite feuds, imperial failures, and global resistance – gives the rest of the world a rare chance to break the chains of a violent order and replace it with something better. Out of the discord of this moment, a new dawn can emerge – if the people can fight for it.

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