U.S. empire is now falling apart.

Eric Zuesse

Though the U.S. economy seems to be doing well now, via extracting manufacturing jobs from the EU by forcing up energy-costs there (such as by blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, sanctioning firms that trade with Russia — which was by far the lowest-price energy-source for European countries — etc.) and by otherwise encouraging those European employers to manufacture in America, where the energy-prices have thus become much lower than they now are in Europe; all of this harm that the U.S. has thus done to European economies incentivizes EU countries to end their being U.S. colonies (‘allies’), and to become more associated with EurAsia, and less with America’s anti-Russian military alliance, NATO. Thus, the ties that are binding the U.S. empire together across the Atlantic, are actually becoming weaker, even as the U.S. Government and its NATO expand into the Asia-Pacific region so as to become a military alliance against China too. The EU, which was created by the U.S. Government as part of its Cold War against the Soviet Union, is increasingly being treated by the U.S. Government as colonies that (like its Latin American banana republics famously have been) it exploits economically, not merely politically. In fact, one of former U.S. President Barack Obama’s major themes, which he stated repeatedly in his speeches, was that ONLY the U.S. is “indispensable,” which means that all other nations are “dispensable”; and he even made a point to America’s future generals, that their function must be to keep down every other country, because “rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek greater say in global forums,” so that “it will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.” This also means keeping European countries down, which is actually being done. So: increasingly, in order for the U.S. Government to remain #1 as the world’s most powerful, it must treat even the other members of its own NATO military alliance as being nations that are to be exploited instead of served, since they too are “dispensable.” Any idea of the empire’s being a two-way street is increasingly discordant with the existent realities. (In fact, this trend of America’s draining Europe so as to prop itself up has been in place ever since at least 1998.)

The U.S. empire could collapse from these increasing stresses upon the mortar (i.e., any previous mutuality) that has been holding it together. If this happens, the U.S. economy itself will then go into a tailspin, especially because the U.S. Government now spends half (50%) of the entire world’s military costs (not the mere 37% that U.S.-allied agencies report), and the resultant enormous military drain upon the American economy has been causing the U.S. federal debt to be soaring, so that U.S. Treasuries are becoming riskier and riskier. You can eat butter, but not bullets, and the only national-security risks that the U.S. actually faces result from its own hyper-aggressiveness, since (unlike the nations of Europe), it is surrounded north-south only by friendly countries, and east-west by over 3,000 miles of ocean to separate it from any potentially hostile power; so, it has actually no enemies but only ‘enemies’ (in order to ‘justify’ its spending $1.5 trillion annually for its military). All of these weapons are useless for any constructive purpose. Their only usefulness is to destroy people outside the U.S. — and a lot of this immense public expense is titled as being “foreign aid,” so as to sell it to the American people in order to get the public to be willing to fund it in the taxes they pay. A con-game inevitably has an end, and it’s very sudden. This one will be no exception. The decline might be gradual at various times, but the vast majority of this decline will happen in that ultimate, final, and shocking, collapse. In this sense, it’s like any other Ponzi scheme, and the only question about it is, then: who will be holding the bag of ashes at its end.

Ever since 25 July 1945, when U.S. President Harry Truman made the fateful decision that (as he had been advised by the Rhodesist Prime Minister of the UK, Winston Churchill, and seconded to Truman by Truman’s personal hero, General Dwight Eisenhower), either the Soviet Union would take over the world, or else the U.S. would do that, and the people who have controlled the U.S. Government since then have been committed to America’s ultimately coming to control the entire world; so, what Truman started has never terminated. After 1990, while the Soviet Union and its communism, and its 1955 Warsaw Pact anti-American mirror to the U.S. Government’s 1949 anti-Soviet military alliance NATO, all of that era’s assertions by the U.S. that the Cold War was against communism, came to a crashing end in 1991, when the U.S. Government started, on 24 February 1990, to instruct the heads-of-state of its colonies — first, West Germany, and then France, and then the others — that though the Cold War would soon be ending on the Soviet side, it must secretly continue on the U.S. side until Russia itself will become captured by America; and, so, NATO continued on, as being now America’s anti-Russian military alliance (even though Russia’s communism and Warsaw Pact were gone). And, ever since Truman made that decision in 1945, the U.S. Government’s top nation it targeted to turn against Russia has been Ukraine, because it’s by far the closest of all nations (barely 300 miles) to Russia’s central command in The Kremlin. Finally, in a coup by Obama that was hidden behind anti-corruption demonstrations in Ukraine in 2014, the U.S. Government achieved that decades-long objective. All that was needed once Ukraine became controlled from Washington DC was to get Ukraine installed into NATO so that the U.S. could then get those nuclear missiles positioned right on Ukraine’s border only about 300 miles away from The Kremlin, for a checkmate to capture Russia.

The U.S. Democratic Party’s chief international strategist, the intensely anti-Russian Polish aristocrat Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was a protege of David Rockefeller just as the Republican Party’s Henry Kissinger had been a protege of Nelson Rockefeller, came out with Brzezinski’s influential The Grand Chessboard in 1997, which viewed Ukraine as being essential for the U.S. to take, because (supposedly not of its being the only Russian-bordering country that is only around 300 miles away from The Kremlin and so a U.S. nuclear missile placed there could annihilate Russia’s central command within a mere 5 minutes — far too fast to be able to be responded to) but (p. 45 in this version; p. 24 in this one) Brzezinski gave this reason:

Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state, more likely to be drawn into debilitating conflicts with aroused Central Asians, who would then be resentful of the loss of their recent independence and would be supported by their fellow Islamic states to the south. China would also be likely to oppose any restoration of Russian domination over Central Asia, given its increasing interest in the newly independent states there. However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as its access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia. Ukraine's loss of independence would have immediate consequences for Central Europe, transforming Poland into the geopolitical pivot on the eastern frontier of a united Europe.

If he was stupid enough to believe that that’s why Ukraine has, ever since 1945, been the U.S. Government’s main nation to add to its military alliance against Russia, then he’s even dumber than his readers are, but, otherwise, he might simply have thought that they’re dumb enough to read that without laughing at it. (His calling “Ukraine a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard” is especially a howler, since the U.S. Govenment had been trying ever since 1945 to do this.)

What the impending collapse of U.S. global hegemony and the partition of the world, by the U.S. Government, into “us” (its empire) versus “them” (its targets), means (if it won’t mean World War Three) is an emerging contest between two fundamentally different value-systems: on the one side, the past’s, which is supremacist, believing in (but always redefining) “Might makes right” (in the post-WW2 liberal interpretation: it’s that the best rises to the top and has a right to fool or otherwise enslave those below), versus the future’s, which is anti-supremacist, believing in “Everyone has the same rights” (and the same obligation to relate on that basis to everyone else). Internationally, this is imperialism versus anti-imperialism. Imperialism is the ancient aristocratic international system; anti-imperialism is the future democratic international system. 

A major proponent of imperialism has been the U.S. mega-billionaire George Soros, whose Open Society Foundations had 226 (out of the 751) “Reliable allies in the European Parliament (2014 – 2019)”. In March 2022, the EU Parliament issued a 75-page statement, “The role of values in the EU’s external policies”, allying itself with America’s Government, and opposing itself to “autocracies” such as Russia and China; so, reinforcing the bifurcation between, on the one hand, the U.S.-and-‘allied’ bloc, of ‘democracies’, and, on the other, Russia, China, and other ‘autocracies’. Soros also has virtually owned, ever since 2 June 1994, the CIA-created Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), but started, on 4 September 2023, divesting himself of it. So, during almost the entirety of the period since the Soviet Union’s, and communism’s, and the Warsaw Pact’s, termination in 1991, when the anti-‘communist’ excuse for America’s imperialism had essentially ended, its colonies have proceeded onward with their ‘democracies’ (such as the post-coup government in Ukraine is called) being opposed to their economic competitors as being ‘autocracies’, such as Russia and China. But those ‘autocracies’ have actually been performing far better than those ‘democracies’ in economic performance.

And how democratic are the U.S. and its colonies? They aren’t; calling themselves “a democracy” is a lie. The scientific data that the U.S. isn’t even remotely a democracy are especially conclusive.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.