The American Empire

Sometime during the Cold War, the United States ceased to be a nation in the traditional sense and became an empire. This likely occurred during the 1960s when it solidified its global military footprint, undertook a massive expansion of its bureaucracy, and flung itself open to mass immigration.

Empires function quite differently from nation states, most notably in how they define their interests and from where they derive the capital to support those interests. A traditional nation state defines its interest more locally, with the priorities of its rulers focused on a home population that shares common heritage and culture. Ideally that means working for the benefit of that population (though oppression happens when the state is perverted in some way.) The nation state will make international alliances where prudent, since it tends to be vulnerable to the aggression of larger nations or coalitions. But it knows where home is.

Empires, on the other hand, are run by an elite that derives its wealth and power primarily from the “provinces.” They are alien to their home populations, first in spirit and then in ethnocultural actuality. They have constructed elaborate systems to safeguard their position and maximize resource extraction from the borderlands, and that wealth can placate the masses at home for a while as they grow more and more disgruntled under the elite’s disdain. The elite turns more and more indifferent to the concerns of their home population, and that indifference turns to hostility when said population eventually has the gall to openly complain or otherwise doubt the legitimacy of the imperial regime. Once the wealth dries up, and no true core “nation” remains, all bets are off.

In its latter stages, the aristocrats of the Roman Empire gained most of their riches from the outer territories like Spain and the eastern Mediterranean. They considered the plebeians in the capital city to be an impudent mob that needed to be controlled like cattle. The plebs squabbled amongst each other as more and more immigrants from the Germanic and Gallic hinterlands streamed into the imperial center, and the aristocrats used this dynamic to their benefit. The core Roman meant little to them, and when Alaric and the other Hunnic barbarians arrived at the gates, the elite found neither the legitimacy nor the will to resist them.

And so now we have the American Empire, the most powerful in the history of the world. It’s a bizarre creation, built on a ferocious blend of industry and finance that long sat on top of a sturdy Anglo-Germanic cultural core. Its reach is truly global, but its direct provinces include Western Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and a smattering of fragile regimes in the Middle East that will either sit things out or ally with China and Russia when the next war comes. Beyond this, it extends its sphere of influence over places like India and Turkey and Latin America through trade deals that give its elite access to cheap debt and capital in exchange for the gutting of domestic American industry. It has also created a slew of international institutions to give its actions an air of “global consensus” — rat dens like the World Bank, the International Criminal Court, even the European Union and the United Nations. The “rules-based international order” is essentially an imperial diktat.

Much of the empire’s territory was won in the Second World War, which devastated every major power on Earth except for the United States, who held plenty of of guns and even more bank notes to secure just about everything outside the sphere of the also-victorious Soviet Union. The Americans even pulled the clever trick of not annexing their new provinces directly. The U.S. just annexed their financial systems, selected their governments, and decided which of them could nominally protect their sovereignty with a military. It created a wealth machine the likes of which the world had never seen, and was able to pull off the ultimate coup for any empire - establishing its currency as the world reserve. When things got rickety in 1970s, it was able to leverage its vast military infrastructure to back its currency with Middle Eastern oil. This enabled it to pay for its ballooning military industry complex and its immense welfare state with essentially free money. Numerous wars were fought to make sure the currency remained backed. Reckless, aggressive wars that left a lot of client states grumbling under the boot.

But now the American Empire faces a cascade of crises. The liberal democratic system that it has tried to impose on their entire globe is getting diminishing returns. Burdened with enormous debt and a degrading currency, it can no longer garner faith in its wealth machine. Humiliated in Iraq and Afghanistan, its military no longer inspires the respect nor the fear it used to. Beset by corruption and bureaucratic incompetence, it cannot command trust in its institutions. It can no longer even promise its younger generations the same standard of living as their parents — a telltale revolutionary signal throughout world history.

As it’s gorged itself over the last half century, the American elite has also immersed its home population in decadence and social fracture. The holders of power are now laden with decrepit skills in institutional maintenance and statecraft, neoliberal delusions of infinite growth, outsized Jewish/Israeli influence, and a hatred for the Anglo-Germanic national core that formed the engine of American greatness over the country’s first two centuries. They have driven the WASPS from power positions in the imperial state, and what we have now is a dysfunctional menagerie of globalist parasites content to pick the bones of the American nation, sure that they have the lifeboats and foreign safe harbors needed if things really go south. The borders are essentially open, rendering laughable the idea of national sovereignty. The dregs of the entire planet are invited to enter the country, bleed its coffers dry, destroy its cultural institutions, and claim immediate grievance against the founding national stock. By all these metrics, if one doesn’t see an empire in dangerous decline, they’re staring into the wrong screens.

All this while war drums sound in the distance, and as the bomb of currency implosion slowly ticks. China and Russia and their willing allies among the unhappy American client states smell opportunity. The early moves in the next great game seem to be taking place, and with every one it becomes harder to turn back.

Mighty Persia is actually fragile, believed Alexander the Great. And so he set his armies to march and see if they could just tip her over.