The Fall of the American Empire

Growth is Sluggish, but Ruin is Rapid (Lucius Annaeus Seneca)

When President Trump announced sweeping tariffs on imports last week, many commenters interpreted the idea as a manifestation of madness. But in Trump’s madness, there may be some method.

It is starting to appear clear that Donald Trump is following a plan much more detailed and comprehensive than it would appear from simple slogans such as “MAGA.” Those who are behind the plan — whoever they are, oligarchs, dark elites, or Reptilians — are moving away from the neocons’ “Project for a New American Century” (PNAC) proposed in the late 1990s. The PNAC was a bold plan for world domination, and it was nearly realized in economic terms: it was just called by a different name: “Globalization.” For several decades, it was a successful mechanism that pumped wealth into the US economy out of the work of the rest of the world.

The next step of the PNAC project was global military domination, an idea related to the one expressed as “full spectrum dominance.” But that turned out to be too expensive. After a series of failed attempts, from Iraq to Afghanistan, it was clear that it was not just difficult but impossible. The US economy couldn’t support the huge military costs of occupying and controlling the whole world.

It is nothing unexpected; in 1972, the calculations of The Limits to Growth had foreseen the collapse of the global economic system for the early decades of the 21st century. It is happening. Crushed by the deadly mix of resource depletion and ecosystemic collapse, the world’s economic machine is sinking fast. Governments are now acting as passengers of the Titanic, scrambling to save themselves the best they can.

The US government is doing nothing different. Once you decide that the ship is sinking, you do what you think is to be done, even if that means pushing someone else underwater. It is what the US is doing by retreating inside its immediate sphere of influence. The US still has considerable mineral resources that can be used to rebuild its industrial system, but it has no more the surplus that would be needed for global domination. Hence, it makes no sense to squander what’s left to help other countries — what did they do to deserve the US help, anyway? Western Europe is among the big losers: it is the passenger of the Titanic who couldn’t grab a life jacket. Europe’s madness is not feigned; it is real. Only true madness can explain ideas such as “Rearm Europe.” It would need resources that Europe doesn’t have anymore.

Hence, the need for retrenching, abandoning unsustainable positions, and concentrating on what the US can actually control: its national territory and the nearby regions. It is what Trump’s government is engaged in doing. The latest bout of the maneuver is the heavy tariffs imposed by the US on imports. It is supposed to be aimed at China, but it is a deadly blow to globalization. The idea is to return the US to a largely domestic economy.

The switch to MAGA implies profound changes in the US policies. The idea of rebuilding the US industrial infrastructure requires getting rid of parasitic and obsolete bureaucratic structure structures such as USAID and eliminating the competition from cheap imports, hence the tariffs against China. Expanding into Greenland and maybe Canada is part of the idea: these northern regions will add their own mineral resources and will be less affected by global warming. It also makes perfect sense to find an agreement with Russia, which is in the same conditions as the US. Russia still has significant resources but not enough to dream of a new empire; hence it is concentrating on the control of its local sphere of influence. As Polonius said about Hamlet, “In his madness, there is some method.”

Of course, the US maneuver implies heavy sacrifices for the American people, and it is interesting how the idea is being presented to the public. Naively, you would think that a president would go on TV and say something like, “Fellow Americans, these are the problems facing us. Let’s work together and make some sacrifices for a better future.” It won’t work. Jimmy Carter did exactly that in during his term, in the late 1970s, and everybody thought he was feebleminded, to say the least.

Trump, instead, is ranting and raging against whatever he feels citizens will like to hear from him. The tariffs are self-inflicted sanctions, but they are presented as a punishment against China, the yellow peril. And people are happily cheering. The trick is to convince them that their enemies will suffer more than them, and that’s exactly what they deserve (the enemies, but also the citizens).

This is the beauty of propaganda: you can convince people to harm themselves and be perfectly happy about that. In my book Exterminations, I describe how, during WWII, the German government engaged with some success in a propaganda effort to convince elderly German citizens to commit suicide. Fortunately, MAGA does not imply that (so far…)

There are still plenty of possibilities for the MAGA plan to derail in mid-course; as it is typical of empires to resist dissolution. Russia, for instance, saw tanks bombarding the parliament in Moscow in 1993 as a consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Empire. If something similar were to happen in Washington DC, the results would be much more destructive than when a ragtag band of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol Building in 2021. Additionally, the US government may well make some horrible mistakes in the Middle East and take the country into some new, unwinnable wars. And there are still good chances for a bullet to do the work that a shooter failed to do on Trump in 2024.

In all these cases, the US — and the whole world — would be overcome by a rapid collapse rather than experiencing a managed decline. That is, on the other hand, the way history works, as the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca said when he noted that “Growth is Sluggish, but Ruin is Rapid.” But collapse is not forever; it is part of a movement forward into the future. Many things will have to change before they’ll need to change again.