The cracks are showing. The US empire is in decay. What will the world look like once it’s no longer able to bully everyone? What do we have to look forward to both inside and outside the imperial core?
In the short (next couple lifetimes) term, the US will continue receding from different geopolitical arenas, followed by some political jostling to change that region’s power balance.
As the empire shrinks, the politics of scarcity will become more pervasive, entrenching clientelism and mistrust in an already fairly low-trust society.
It’s not a hot take to say that mask-off fascism is on the menu given how fascism-shaped the US is, but given how autocanibalistic this particular right wing wave is, I have no idea what to expect.
Don’t know whether the new boss will be the same as the old boss; while India and China don’t seem particularly empire-inclined, few countries do until they’re the one with the biggest stick. Both have been drumming up nationalism internally for the last decade, so if they can’t defuse it safely they’ll point it at each other, to everybody’s detriment.
I expect there will be more wars as countries no longer have a nation to enforce current borders. My guess is that the next international order will look more like the Concert of Europe with varying spheres of influence.
The US Empire has a small chance of Balkanizing, which the map drawers would love. The global south would develop far more rapidly, though this process has already started thanks to countries like the PRC. Europe will be forced into working with Russia and/or China. Countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and the DPRK that are heavily sanctioned will do a lot better with the US Empire out of the way, and Korea may even reunify down the road. Countries with strong socialist sentiment in the populace will better be able to become socialist and rapidly develop.
So many oppressions that we didn’t even notice, that we thought of as natural, will be gone. It will be like a whole new world, beyond our imagination.
China will be the dominant world superpower for a while and their standard of living will drastically increase. Middle East will be unlikely to stabilize any time soon. Africa might be put into play as serious economic competitors to fill the gap in skilled labor and services that the United States will leave behind in its wake. South America might finally have a chance to heal from the destructive regime meddling of the USA.
Post-Soviet Union Russia
the global south will have another chance and the east will eventually shine. and a period of peace after the storm passes. quite a lot of nuance and drama and death all along the way.
climate change fucking everything up for the worse somewhere in the middle of all this.
The coasts will be wealthy and independent. The middle will be poor and warlike. Two coastal countries and a lot of warlording in the middle.
Unless there’s some critic event like a civil war, I’m guessing it will be a slow decline of the U.S. I don’t think any country stands to replace it, at least not in the same amount of dominace that the United States had. I think two or three countries, including the U.S., will dominate economic and military power for quite a number of years with a great deal of shuffling between them.
A multi polar world will surely emerge. The empire will crumble slowly and gradually cede power to other forces.
I think the reality is the US will still be one of the most powerful countries but in a world where they seriously have to operate in diplomacy and not just imperial shows of force will be a net positive for the world overall.
The hope there is other nations that are polar powers and are nominally engaging in anti capitalist behavior will spread that ideology and help lift the the tides of revolutionary fervor to wholesale replace capitalism as the global economic system.
Unless the US does the thing where they decide to violently lash out (as empires do in the past collapses) and nukes the world a few times over. I don’t think this is likely but also it is assuredly not non zero which is insane.
Unless the US does the thing where they decide to violently lash out
yeah they are already gearing up for it
It’s a very optimistic outlook. I hope you’re right.
What’s uncomfortable for countries in the Western hemisphere is that upon shifting to a multipolar or “spheres of influence” model of the world (which was the norm preglobalization), America will continue its imperialistic tendencies to claim some form of dominion over Canada Mexico and South America. The latest foreign policy strategy document from the Trump administration seems to harken to the Monroe Doctrine (which was a warning that colonization of any further territory in the Western hemisphere by European powers would be viewed as a threat to U.S. security). It seems like Trump sees the Western hemisphere as “belonging” to America on some level.
I also don’t see the US competely discarding neoliberalism when it comes to tech / services, where it still dominates. That requires some type of openness to the world otherwise they won’t be able to continue to enforce their IP rights. When someone makes a Doordash order in Kathmandu, they want some portion of that transaction flowing through both Silicon Valley and their payment processors (Visa, Mastercard etc). How will the US respond when socialism spreads and those countries make their own versions of these services? Hard to imagine they would respond reasonably, especially since their approach to any resistance up until now has been to stage a coup. Old habits die hard.
Change in the US will happen out of necessity when the US does try to do this but can actually receive pushback but much of it will have to happen because average people take up the call to build something better. The movement is growing every day.
I am optimistic that over enough time and with enough deliberate action anything is possible. Maybe not in my lifetime but that’s the fight I’ve committed myself to and it’s a righteous one.
You said it so much better than I did.
Naw I just expanded on your already great points
Lmfao, we’re not going to make it another 3 years. This system is designed to implode immediately, and even if it doesn’t, our highschoolers are already functionally illiterate and plagued with learned helplessness.
Agriculture, housing, medical, finance, all guaranteed to collapse shortly. All on top of our already fragile shipping networks, it’s not looking good.
Right I think a lot of this is going to collapse and STILL the US will be one of the most powerful countries. That is how disgustingly evil we have been at suppressing the rest of the world. Once our oppressive boot is less potent there are some beautiful developments in this world waiting to happen.
China and India
With international banking freely printing money in much of the world (debt and taxation via inflation), I’m guessing we will have more and more frequent boom/bust cycles followed by a massive rug pull that will finally break the system’s back, death by banking.
Then China will run the show for our lifetimes, which means we’ll finally get fast rail.
Safer, regardless of whatever atrocity-defending propaganda y’all have been eating. And once the dollar goes from reserve currency to just another coin to exchange with, America’s privileges will be gone. That’s gonna be interesting to see.
My hope is that when the USA falls, it will take global capitalism with it. I’ve been speculating about the post-capitalist world on Mastodon lately.
My hope is that Russia balkanises. At least enough to no longer threaten Europe.
We just gonna have other bully. That’s how power vacuums works
A global hegemon on the scale of the British and then US empire is kind of a blip historically though — it’s not obvious that another state will continue in the same role
There were many empires throughout the history. Of course there were very few at the scale of your examples. We didn’t had internet or ability to fly and sail bunch of tanks across thousands of kilometers within days. But history shows that intend was always there
‘intent’ is a bit of a devious notion in this context though, isn’t it? Whose intent?
We didn’t had internet or ability to fly and sail bunch of tanks across thousands of kilometers within days.
We didn’t have these when the current global power structure was established. We didn’t have AK-47S either, and much of the world had yet to industrialize. It was a very specific context.
You can’t separate imperialism from its economic basis. The ability for a country to take on the mantle of empire post-US is extremely mitigated. Imperialism isn’t a magical force but a material process.
The people who down voted you don’t really understand how world history has played out. You are absolutely correct if the US fails you’ll just have somebody else.
A single dominant hegemon is extremely uncommon in world history
The US must have been thinking about China at least since 1990. Now they fumble the hardest when they need to be the wittiest?
I don’t buy it. The US are preparing to contain China. At best they have AI and robotics first and retake global productions. But I expect a war. Edit: And unless the USA lose, the empire will remain for a long time.
It’s difficult to say what the winner will do with a most likely radioactive world. I would expect that there is no need for disinformation, especially if robots do the policing. So those people who survive will have a physical constrained, but intellectually rich life.
However, without AI and destroyed knowledge from bombing the civilization centers, technology could also fall back to the 1960s or even 1860s, but with internet.
They’ve never been witty, they’ve been playing on easy mode since the end of WWII and now the tutorial level is over.
They are fumbling now because of their hubris, overextension, and the contradictions of the system.
In the '90s, they believed that exposing China to capitalism would naturally and inevitably cause the fall of the Communist system, so they threw the doors wide open.
2001 is when China joined to the WTO and also when…9/11 happened, crippling and distracting the Western empire for two decades.
When Hillary Neocon Clinton became Secretary of State in 2009, she unveiled with much fanfare the “pivot to Asia”. The Obama administration spent the next 8 years trying to replicate the EU and NATO in Southeast Asia. (TPP and the Quad).
Trump-1 came into office and immediately withdrew the US from the TPP. He did some blustering and flailing around with tariffs, which people seemed to think constituted containment of China at the time.
Biden came into office and he and the other Western leaders sabotaged and escalated their way into the Ukraine war. (Read up on the Istanbul process before you get annoying in the replies, Libs). You can read The New Atlas for excellent analysis about how this is a substrategy for Chinese containment, which is an argument that I agree with. However, it had the effect of once again paralyzing, weakening, and distracting the Western imperial alliance.
Now we are in Trump-2. He committed perhaps the worst foreign policy blunder in the history of the US empire when he went on the attack against India with tariffs to try and separate them from Russia. This blew black in the most spectacular fashion by driving them closer to Russia and kicking off a rapprochement with China that is still bearing diplomatic fruit to this day. Therefore, we can say that Trump severely weakened the overall strategic plan for the Asia Pacific region by single-handedly preventing TPP and the Quad from coming into force as tools of the US empire (for the forseable future), unlike NATO and the EU.
At the present day, the empire is struggling to extricate itself from Ukraine without having a Kabul / Saigon moment. The Western armories are bare, having sent everything they can spare and very much they could not spare in a desperate attempt to turn the tide of the proxy conflict. The F-35 fighter jet is STILL NOT OPERATIONAL ACCORDING TO THE PROGRAM’S OWN DEFINITION. By contrast, at the 80-year commemoration parade, the Chinese unveiled no fewer than a dozen new weapon systems, many a generation or more ahead of their US counterparts.
They are failing everywhere and cannot admit it. A humiliating defeat in Ukraine is inevitable, now the only question is whether the Russians will end up with Odessa. American warships are powerless against Chinese hypersonic cruise missiles. Japan tried to ramp up the rhetoric on Taiwan only to get slapped down by the US. We are witnessing the death throes of a wounded animal with suicidally inflated ego. Unfortunately, this wounded animal also has nuclear weapons, so it’s a very dangerous time for all of us.
This is solid geopolitical analysis.
The India blunder cannot be understated. This is one of the fastest growing large economies in the world and its struggles in the past half millennia are more a blip in history than the norm. This similarly applies to China and its century of humiliation.
Multiple US administrations were carefully and measurably courting India over the past several decades which Trump undid essentially overnight.
India has a very strong history of trust with Russia which dates back hundreds of years but more recently the USSR directly supported India when the US sent nuclear armed vessels into the Bay of Bengal in support of Pakistan during the '71 Indo Pak war (before either India or Pakistan had nukes). Portugal also tried to keep one of it’s Indian colonies (Goa) after the end of WW2 which India took by force. Western nations intended to collude through the UN to force India to give the territory back but the USSR vetoed the vote.
Blunders like this generally come from not knowing history and it feels like Western leaders both in Europe and the US are no longer knowledgeable.
A few months ago Kaja Kallas, the Vice-President of the European Commission said: "I was in ASEAN meeting, and Russia was addressing China, like: ‘Russia and China, we fought the Second World War, we won the Second World War, we won the Nazis…’ And I was like, ‘Okay, that is something new. If you know history, then it raises a lot of question marks in your head… but nowadays, people don’t really read and remember history that much.’
Completely diminishing the obvious sacrifice of both countries, having been the two countries with that suffered the most casualities (25 million in the USSR and 20 million in China).
If these are the top minds in the West then we are absolutely cooked.
You’re absolutely on point about Ukraine and the Istanbul process also. One can only imagine how many peace processes have been undermined by the idea of the West being an ally and the might of the West being a reason not to compromise.
European attempts to freeze Russian assets in Euroclear and use them towards Ukrainian military efforts also seems like an act of desperation and it’s no surprise that Belgium has essentially said they will not comply unless other European powers also take on the liability involved.
At the very least Zelensky has said today that they are no longer going to pursue NATO membership which is a step towards reality based geopolitics.
Thank you very much and I also completely agree with your analysis. The ignorance of history on display is truly frightening.
I didn’t know the Ukrainians were finally willing to concede on the NATO question. As you say, a victory for sanity and realism.
We are also seeing peak China. Their demographic problems will be a severe drag going forward. It’ll be a multi-power world, not a Chinese hegemony.
The whole demographic crisis in China is largely based on misinterpretation of the data for the benefit of low intellect racists
First off, the Chinese don’t seek global hegemony like the Western powers, no matter what the projection and propaganda says. (This is far too big of a topic for short comment but the Chinese have never done Roman-style imperialism in all of their history. Also, according to my research, China hasn’t made a new territorial claim in over 70 years, since the KMT era)
Second off, I did some comparisons on this website. I honestly wasn’t sure what I was going to see but China’s pyramid is better than all the “developed” countries and it really blows their East Asian neighbors out of the water. Therefore, I don’t buy the argument that China is doomed by its demographics, unless we are saying that all the peer comparison nations are even more doomed.
I happen to believe that the Chinese are right and we are entering a New Chinese Century, with the Middle Kingdom once again the economic center of a prosperous and powerful Asia. They are on the cusp (speaking in years) of completely defeating “containment”, and have built an industrial ecosystem unlike anything the world has ever seen. Of course that all goes out the window if the nukes start flying.
What‘s your perspective on Trump‘s motion to increase and secure US rule over the Americas?
Fascinating question, and highly relevant.
A few points:
- I think it follows from the great power geopolitics logic except they are already too late. They failed to contain Brazil, and they can’t even confidently bully Venezuela.
- it seems like there is a division between North and South America. The Mexicans and Canadians have offered up essentially no resistance. Lots of failed States and vassals in Central America and the Caribbean. By contrast, it seems like South America is proving more difficult to subdue. By that same geographic logic, I think they will end up with domination over Greenland if they keep pursuing that strategy
- it’s possible that it is a short-term or rhetorical-only shift and the empire will continue overextending trying to control the whole world
We are witnessing the death throes of a wounded animal with suicidally inflated ego.
Unfortunately, this wounded animal also has nuclear weapons, so it’s a very dangerous time for all of us.
So we agree on what is going to happen?
So we agree on what is going to happen?
Well nobody knows the future but the times are extremely dangerous. I’m not personally yet seeing signs that the logic of MAD is failing, but things could change very quickly, especially if there was a direct hot war and US forces were facing humiliating defeat.
I think our best hope lies in incompetence exceeding malevolence… Hardly comforting
I’m not personally yet seeing signs that the logic of MAD is failing
Reagan called for a system that would end MAD and render nuclear weapons obsolete.[2] Elements of the program reemerged in 2019 under the Space Development Agency (SDA).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield
Add to that the thoughts behind tactical nukes.
I totally agree that strategic missile defense technology is very destabilizing and dangerous. However like always, the enemy gets a vote.
Myself and others believe that in developing and announcing these weapon systems the Russians have achieved their goal of restoring their nuclear deterrent.
On that basis I would agree that I think tactical nukes would be the way the taboo is broken if it happens in our present cycle of instability.
