Category: Age of War and Revolution Page 4 of 31

Amid all the bad news, all the thrashing of a dying Empire, I re-iterate that while one needs to maneuver through this period deftly, the big picture remains unchanged.

There was a slow decline from 2014 to 2022, which could have just been part of normal perambulations. But from 2022 to 2025 the US dollar has dropped from 50% of reserves to 40%. That’s FAST. Right now there is no alternative reserve currency, everyone’s piling into gold. However trade is increasingly being done in local currencies.

This is exactly as predicted. It will continue to accelerate. Venezuela is in part an attempt to shore up the US dollar. It might make a slight bump, but it’s irrelevant to the trend or larger picture.

There’s a comment from Some Guy I want to highlight in whole:

The Interstate Bridge crosses the Columbia River, connecting Oregon and Washington State. It has a moderate length, about 1km, and was built first in 1917 and then twinned in 1958.

There has been talk of replacing it for decades, but it was reported today that the estimated cost has risen to a range of $14bn – $18bn (USD), with the new estimate so high that is simply may not be feasible to replace the bridge. Part of the eye-watering price tag is the expected timeline for construction, with the replacement taking 20 years and finishing in 2045.

By way of comparison, and barely scratching the surface, China completed the Huajiang Canyon Bridge a few months ago. The bridge is not particularly long by Chinese standards, 2.8km, but is noteworthy for being the highest bridge in the world. It was constructed in under 4 years, for a cost of roughly $300mn USD.

Nothing more really needs to be said, in my opinion.

The US is done. Done. Done. It will, as I keep saying, die ugly. But it is a walking corpse. This is really basic stuff. China can build infrastructure for less than 5% of the cost of America, and in less than a quarter the time. (Often 10% of the time.) This is a general Western problem, by the way, all of us are expensive and slow. Until we fix this very basic issue, nothing else matters. In fixing something this basic we will have to fix almost everything else.

It’s not just that China is ahead in tech, it’s that we are no longer even able to do things we could do twenty, forty or in many cases a hundred year ago in any reasonable time frame at any reasonable cost. This is, in Jane Jacobs’ term, a “Dark Age”, a forgetting. Dark Ages are when you lose the ability to do what you used to be able to do. That’s us. It goes far beyond building: we had defeated multiple infectious diseases like Mumps and Measles, for example, which are coming back. We literally can’t make products we used to make 30 years ago, because we sent all that industry to China and we DO NOT have the know-how any more. That know how is embodied in people and those people are dead or sixty or seventy or eighty years old.

Modern generative “AI” slop cannot actually learn. It is a copying mechanism. We do not have the people it can copy from. It cannot solve this problem for us, whatever the insane boosters say, and we have just laid our entire bankroll on the table in one huge bet, which we will probably lose and which even if we win will still not solve our fundamental problems.

If there was ANY sign of reversal, that’d be great, but there isn’t. In fact we are doubling down: we are deskilling even faster than we were before and giving up on research. We aren’t re-shoring industry, we’re still losing it.

Venezuela sucks. Gaza sucks. Greenland will suck. None of it matters to the big picture. State power since the Industrial Revolution is a function of industrial power and technological level as limited by resources and population. Population and resources are limiters, they are not useful by themselves except in rare cases that are weakening over time. (aka. mass infantry for horrific attrition warfare.)

If you’re in the West, prepare for the continued decline. If you’re elsewhere, know the the days of suffering at America’s hands are now running down. If you live another twenty years you WILL see the end of most of this nonsense. Trump has announced he wants to increase the military budget by 50%, but it doesn’t really matter, because money cannot buy what the US needs unless it fixes its real problems, which defense spending done the way Trump or Democrats will do it will not.

Empires die ugly. But this Empire IS dying and it is accelerating towards its end.

This site is only viable due to reader donations. If you value it and can, please subscribe or donate.

Understanding America’s Plan and Venezuela’s Possible Submission

By Ian Welsh

On January 7, 2026

49 Comments

So, some stuff has begun to come out though so far it’s all from the US and I haven’t seen Venezuelan confirmation. First, Trump:

Second, the oil blockade per Hegseth (Secretary of War):

And third, Miller:

Meanwhile a Russian flagged oil tanker was seized. I’m not sure that it’s legitimately Russian flagged, there’s some indication they may have changed the flag in the last two weeks, but if it was, the Russians now have a quandry. The only real response is something symmetrical: seize a US bound freighter, like Iran has. We’ll see if Putin has the guts. He’s overlooked too many red lines in the past for me to be confident in his response.

Anyway, the play is obvious: no oil gets in and out of Venezuela without going thru the US first. The current government may or may not be allowed to stay in charge, we’ll see, but the Venezuelan economy can’t survive without oil exports so the US expects submission.

If neither Russia nor China are willing to intervene and Venezuela isn’t willing to take horrific losses (they’d probably win, but they’d get hurt doing so), then this is what will happen. If I were China I’d probably just end all military and dual use exports including all rare earths while there’s any blockade. What America is doing is clearly piracy. US law does not determine whether other countries can trade with each other—not de jure, anyway.

If there’s to be any remaining shred of freedom of trade it’s going to have to be enforced.

The next question is Greenland. If the US seizes that, then NATO is finished. Anyone MAGA friendly in Europe will be annihilated. Everyone will fall into China’s grasp, there’s no other alternative and there will be a mad scramble of nuclear proliferation. (Should have happened long ago, but people didn’t want to admit the US was an evil overlord.)

Trump may be able to coerce Venezuela (though China could stop him, it seems unlikeley they will) but he is accelerating the collapse of the American Empire something fierce. Again, the US is auto-catabolic in economic terms, and this is just the mad thrashing of a dying Empire, dramatic as it is.

Venezuelan crude is heavy oil. It will be of little value to the US economy, China can replace it without much difficulty and Russia doesn’t need it. This is seizing a wasting asset, acting like it’s 1935 or 1970 and oil is the most important strategic resource. It isn’t. It isn’t even close any more, as long as you have enough. China is aggressively moving away from dependence on oil, in particular, and China is who matters.

Trump’s just an aggressive moron. None of this will stop or even slow US decline where it matters. Instead it will speed it up, and in the longer term, the US will not keep control of Venezuela either.

No one’s talking about Trump being a pedophile right now, however, so I guess it’s “Mission Successful.”

This site is only viable due to reader donations. If you value it and can, please subscribe or donate.

Keep Your Eyes On The Long Game of Imperial Collapse

By Ian Welsh

On January 5, 2026

35 Comments

The kidnapping of Maduro is fascinating and it’s interesting to speculate whether it was inside job. Some sources have claimed it, we’ll know by the actions the new leadership takes. If they let the oil majors and American “advisors” in, then the allegations are probably true. Other sources are saying that Acting President Delcy and the new leadership are actually more dedicated Chavistas than Maduro was. Until we see what the Venezuelan government we don’t know which storyline is true.

There’s also talk of taking Greenland and perhaps even Canada or Mexico.

This is all standard late Imperial collapse messiness.

But nothing has changed in the fundamentals. The US is in auto-catabolic collapse and so far there is no sign of the oligarchy losing control, which is the pre-condition for any attempts to change the trajectory. I’ve now seen data indicating China is leading in 89% of key tech fields, up from 80% a couple years ago. US industry is still collapsing. Research funding has been slashed. Final bastions like chips, AI, civil aviation and biotech/pharma are all under assault and will fall like dominoes over the next five to ten years. The US has no ship building capacity to speak of, is behind on drones and missiles (the key weapon systems of modern war) and can’t even make key components in its military chain without Chinese help. Dollar hegemony is no more than five years out from being lost.

None of the trends have changed, and there is zero sign that they will change. Actions against Venezuela will speed up the purchases of Russian and Chinese AA, missiles and drones by other countries to avoid this situation, and while China’s reluctant to send “advisors”, Russia is much less so and once the Ukraine war is over (this year or next) it’ll be happy to do so, with combat proven troops and tech. This is going to make South America more resistant to America and more determined to diversify away, not less.

As I have repeatedly said “Empires die bloody.” The US is no exception. But it is dying and NOTHING has changed which effects that. Imperial power in the modern world is entirely a product of industrial capacity and technological supremacy, with resources and population placing upper limits on what industry can accomplish.

The US is done, this is just the thrashing about of a dying giant. A lot of people will die or be hurt in the process, but, again, nothing of significance has changed.

This site is only viable due to reader donations. If you value it and can, please subscribe or donate.

The Accelerating Nature Of Financialization Collapse

By Ian Welsh

On January 1, 2026

21 Comments

There’s a lot of confusion about the end of the American empire, and the fall of neoliberalism. Many people think the US will just be in “second place” and it’ll be OK.

No.

The problem is the nature of America’s decline. Since 1980 the US economy has been progressively financialized. Profits are all that matters, not what is done to make profits. In properly functioning markets the idea is that products fill a need, on net improve human welfare and lead to more growth of real products.

If a company doesn’t make a profit, that means it isn’t growing the real economy with products which are a net positive. In such a case it goes out of business.

This is approximately how the Chinese economy works. It’s how the US economy worked for much of its history. It’s how the British economy worked up till about 1890 or so.

It’s not how the US economy works.

You could say that the US economy is currently auto-catabolic. The more money that is made, the more the real economy is damaged. You see this most purely in Private Equity. They buy up companies, loot the company, load it up with the debt (including all the debt used to buy the company), then the company goes out of business. This is what happened ToysRUs, it is also, contrary to the current storyline, what happened to Blockbuster. The company was trying to pivot to online, but all profits were drained out by PE owners.

This happened to, literally, tens of of thousands of companies.

The sort of monopoly roll-ups which Matt Stoller so ably covers increase prices without increasing product quality. Health care price increases provide no utility (you can get a CT or MRI scan in China for under $100.) All of this damages the economy. Headline GDP goes up, but the actual strength of the economy decreases. I would estimate that fully half of US GDP is essentially “fake”, driven entirely by increased prices and fake profits. The US economy has been smaller than China’s, in real (not PPP adjusted, but “how much do we produce”) terms for at least ten years.

This process continues till there is no muscle left to consume.

The only possibility of the US avoiding the UK’s fate, despite being a continental power, is for the oligarchs to lose power and for there to be a huge compression of asset and service prices. This process will be extremely painful and is currently politically impossible, due to the control of the duopoly. Both parties are owned by oligarchs, the tech bros are rising and none of them have the least interest in creating a good economy when it’s so much more profitable to loot America.

Real innovation is moving to China and will increasingly do so. They are at least equal in pharma and will soon be ahead in biotech. Their markets prioritize increased production (which westerners complain about as “over-capacity.”) The Chinese government does not want high GDP numbers or high profits, they want increased human welfare and a more powerful state and country. So their markets are organized, well, as actually competitive markets, the most “free” in any major economy.

So Americans who are patting themselves on the back, figuring “well, how bad can it get? We’ll still be number 2” are underestimating how bad the economy is going to get. India is effectively a continental power too, and it punches way below its geographical weight.

This isn’t to say there is no hope for the US, but decline has a long way to go yet because reversing it requires the most powerful people in society to give up massive profits, and many of them, in the process, would lose their fortunes. Meanwhile many ordinary Americans are still doing “OK” if not great, and they don’t want radical (change from the roots) change either.

All of this is not a worse case scenario either, it’s the default—maybe even slightly optimistic. The worst case scenario involves some form of civil war, not like the War between the States, but low grade shit wafare that slowly drives a country into the dirt.

The bottom is not yet close.

This site is only viable due to reader donations. If you value it and can, please subscribe or donate.

2025 Is The Year The US Empire Acknowledged The End of Hegemony

By Ian Welsh

On December 31, 2025

17 Comments

Let’s keep this brief. In 2025 the US:

Gave up trying to win the Ukraine war;
Turned NATO from a vassal protection scheme into a vassal looting scheme;
Slashed scientific spending massively;
Lost a trade war to China;
Doubled down on the AI Bubble, in a race it will lose;
Was humiliated by China’s rare-Earth sanctions, realizing it couldn’t build weapons without China;
Pivoted hard to trying to hold onto Latin America, after almost all Latin American countries had replaced the US with China as their main trade partner;
Went to war with their own university system;
Realized (this is now widespread) that dollar hegemony is almost over;
completely destroyed what remained of their moral soft power to enable a genocide in Palestine, making everyone realize America is run by people who might as well be Nazis;
Was governed by the most corrupt and stupid President of the 20th and 21st centuries; and,
Gave up on solar and renewable energy.

Some of this is sort of admirable. Ukraine can’t be won, so you might as well not pretend it can be and acknowledging the end of dollar hegemony is wise. Pivoting to the Americas won’t work in the medium run, but it’s at least an acknowledgement of actual power realities.

However basically the US now knows that it is weaker than China. China has a larger navy by ship number, and it won’t be long before they have more tonnage (if they wanted to, they could have larger navy by tonnage in two years, they have the capacity.) The Chinese and Russians have more advanced missiles and drones, and far more production capacity. The Chinese are ahead in almost all tech areas with only a few bastions (civil aviation, chips, space launch being the most important ones) remaining and all those bastions are under assault and WILL fall. There is precisely no question that in 10 years, perhaps even five, China will be equal to the West or ahead in every important technology and almost all non-important techs.

What people are not understanding is that while the US may be able to turn Venezuela (MAY) their days of throwing their weight around are almost over. The drone/missile revolution and China’s advances in making them cheap and abundant mean that sitting offshore and freely bombing other nations is a strategy whose best-by date is now in sight.

The US/West had already lost years ago in the most important sense: all the important trends (tech, industrial capacity, military build capacity, shipbuilding) were running against it and there was zero possibility that those trends would change. For over 20 years I have pointed out that US policy and international trends meant the US dollar would lose its reserve and default trade status, now it is becoming common wisdom.

2025 wasn’t the year the US lost, but it was the year when everyone with two brain cells to rub together and even a smidgen of objectivity realized it.

The US is still a great power, and ex-hegemons do not go gracefully into that long night. America will kill and impoverish a lot of foreigners and Americans as its decline accelerates.

But it is all over but the shooting, and 2025 is the year it became impossible to argue otherwise without people laughing in your face.

This site is only viable due to reader donations. If you value it and can, please subscribe or donate.

American Sanctions Are Now Benefiting Countries

By Ian Welsh

On December 30, 2025

22 Comments

The war against Russia was a big bet on sanctions. The Russian military was always stronger than Ukraine, but the West believed that sanctions would destroy the Russian economy, enabling a win and hopefully weakening Russia so much that it could be broke up.

Instead Russia’s economy has performed better since the war than it did before. Sanctions encouraged re-industrialization and Russian and Chinese businesses replaced Western ones.

Venezuela has been under sanctions ever since Chavez launched his Bolivarian revolution. Every year there are more sanctions. For a while, it worked. But…

That’s right, the most sanctioned country in South America has the highest GDP growth. It’s not doing as well as it was a couple years ago, but it’s still growing fastest.

This explains, in part, the desperate attempt to overthrow Maduro and install an American backed government.

The simple truth is that America and Europe just don’t matter much any more:

No one needs the West any more. They’ve got China. Thus the oil blockade, which is a simple act of piracy. Sanctioned ships are only sanctioned by the West, not by the countries that Venezuela is sending oil to like Cuba, China and Iran. This is a last ditch effort to collapse Venezuela’s economy, in a way that failed with Russia. The bet is simple enough: you can’t really mass-seize Russian ships, because Russia is a great power and anyway, increasingly oil is shipped by land. Venezuela has one major weakness left and Trump, led by the nose by Neocons and Cuban exiles is making a last gasp government change effort.

We’ll see if it succeeds. My money is on “no”, though they can cause a lot of damage along the way, and probably hope that seeing the damage, other countries will be dissuaded from outright hostility to America.

My bet is that it doesn’t work: Chinese and Russian anti-ship and and anti-air systems will be sold in vast quantities to developing countries and increasingly America will find itself unable to enforce blockades. It couldn’t even defeat Ansar-Allah, after all.

The twilight of Empire is an ugly time, but this is America’s twilight.

This site is only viable due to reader donations. If you value it and can, please subscribe or donate.

Western Leadership Is The Most Worthless In My Life

By Ian Welsh

On December 22, 2025

21 Comments

Which is saying something, because worthless has been in charge of the West for generations. There are no leaders in charge of any major Western country who aren’t functionally morons.

Europe is run by utter idiots who want war with Russia, refuse to acknowledge that Ukraine is losing, are actively speeding up their loss of industry and imagine they can bully China and think America was their friend before Trump.

Trump is the stupidest president of my lifetime. No one else even comes close. Reagan with Alzheimers was better. Congress is a sewer of morons. Every major American politician, even AOC and Bernie, are functionally psychopaths. (Yes, both Bernie and AOC have repeatedly voted to send more money and weapons to Israel.)

Britain’s Starmer is the stupidest PM of my lifetimes and stunningly incompetent and evil. Yes, his job is to make rich people richer and suck off Netanyahu, but a competent pol would do that without destroying Labour as a party.

Macron has accomplished nothing for France except to make it weaker and its citizens poorer. Germany’s government is presiding over the destruction of a German industrial base that is 150 years old and one of the greatest in the world: the very foundation of Germany’s power and affluence.

Australia is acting as if America is more important to them than China with a military buildup, which is insane since Australia’s future is with China, or it has no future. Japan is antagonizing China, again, insane, without a serious plan. Either make nice or try and get nukes, there are no other paths.

Everyone is destroying free speech to symp for a genocide. Everyone is immiserating their own populations, setting up serious future political instability.

The US is all-in on AI, spending trillions it does not have, driving up energy prices, and creating a larger more concentrated bubble than the real-estate bubble which caused the 2008 crash. If AI is everything they say, it will utterly destroy the US economy by replacing 30% of workers, and if it isn’t, it’ll never pay back all the resources spent. Plus China will win the AI race anyway, since no one with sense will pay for a proprietary model when Chinese open source models are about as good and mean you can’t suddenly be hit with a massive price increase or rate restrictions.

Politicians are either ignoring climate change and doubling down on fossil fuels (which are more expensive than solar) or using climate change as an excuse to immiserate their own people.

Britain is destroying their own farmers.

Meanwhile morons are constantly whining about fertility rates when humanity is in population overshoot so severe that it is causing the second fastest great extinction in Earth’s history. Most countries would be better off with fewer people, but because they don’t know how to stabilize an economy whose population isn’t always growing leaders and their intellectual dupes are panicking.

Only China is handling this with some grace, but they’re not Western. They’re trying to increase fertility somewhat but have accepted there will be population decreases and are moving hard on robotics to care for an aging population and reduce the need for workers.

There isn’t a single major challenge that the West is facing that our leaders are not actively making worse, not better. Not a single one. It’s extraordinary. Even Nixon managed to sign Clean Air and Water Act and to pivot on China. Reagan reduced nuclear weapons. Clinton made everything worse long-term, but was able to manage the economy during his Presidency, at least, so that it felt good to ordinary people, including pushing oil prices under $20/barrel. George Bush Sr. managed the collapse of the USSR with grace. Biden had good anti-trust policy and half decent industrial policy. Trump has done nothing good of significance. Nothing. Even when he has a good idea (tariffs, reduction in H1-B Visas) he fucks it up completely because he can’t execute and has the attention span of a coked up flea.

This reminds me of the Weimar Republic or the late Roman Empire. Most things can be fixed in principle: in theory. Nothing can be fixed in practice because leadership is beyond corrupt and incompetent, high on their own wealth and convinced they are the masters of universe and that reality is what they want it to be.

Prepare, if you’re in the West. By all means feel free to keep working at the politics, but don’t count on it. Instead prepare as individuals and groups. Government isn’t going to save you, not in the West. Your leaders are the number one danger to you, more than any outsider, “terrorist” or “foreign enemy.” Treat them as such, and protect yourselves from them.

We just spent a couple thousand getting the site and email subscriptions working properly. If you value this site and can, please subscribe or donate.

We Don’t Have To Live In Hell

By Ian Welsh

On December 18, 2025

29 Comments

A friend of mine once used the metaphor of “The Lords of Hell” to describe most of the world. There are a few people with lots of money and power, a few billion people who live in constant fear of not having enough, and a billion or so who don’t have enough. There is more than sufficient food in the world to feed everyone, but people go hungry. The entire western world has more empty homes than it does homeless people, yet there are increasing numbers of homeless. It costs less to give everyone health care than it does to “optimize returns” yet sick people go without medicine and help, and the disabled at left to rot with the least possible care in many countries. (Britain has literally stopped paying for wheelchairs for many disabled.)

Over the years my writing has had many themes, but they all boil down to one Ur-Theme.

We don’t have to live in hell. It’s a choice.

We have other choices. There are ways to make the economy work for everyone, and ways that we, the human species, can live well without driving mass numbers of other species to extinction. Indeed, by destroying the environment and extincting other species, we damage the very ecosystem which, long term, makes our own prosperity and well-being possible.

The worst lie in the world is always some version of “there is no other option. This is as good as it can be.”

It has many variants. “Capitalism is the only thing that can work.” “Some people must be homeless and poor for the economy to work.” “We need that oil no matter how many species die.” “People will only work if they’re driven by fear.” “Rich people are job creators”. “Human nature means we’ll always be evil and mean.” “Everything has to be owned by someone because commons don’t work.” (They have worked for hundreds of years at a time.)

Many, many more.

They are all lies. As humans we have an angelic nature as well as a demonic one. One of the most useful books to read in this regard is “A Heaven Made In Hell.” The author studied how people act after great catastrophes. Strangely enough behaviour like looting occurs far less than people helping each other, coming together and fixing things. In fact, people who go through this often find it was heavenly: for once almost everyone is taking care of everyone. Trust and community flourish.

There is great joy in helping. Great joy in care. Great joy in not being scared all the time. The best economies are always full of optimism and hope and have a rising tide that lifts all boats. (Rising tides don’t lift all boats unless we make sure that no boats have holes in their hulls.)

China has, recently, proved this yet again, despite some significant flaws. (FDR proved it before, and he was not the first.) We can take care of each other. We can live without fear that one bad bounce means homelessness, misery and death.

It’s a choice. We have made other choices far too often, but we can choose to be happy, prosperous and realistically optimistic because we take care of each other.

And while my writing often seems negative, this is the hope that underpins my criticisms. There is no point in criticizing something if some law of nature means that it must be so. But there is, despite claims otherwise, no law of nature which says we have to be bastards to each other or to the species we share this world with.

And in that is a genuine hope.

We just spent a couple thousand getting the site and email working again properly. If you value this site and can, please subscribe or donate.

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Age of War and Revolution Page 4 of 31

Eyes On The Big Picture: Dollar Decline & The Great Forgetting

Understanding America’s Plan and Venezuela’s Possible Submission

Keep Your Eyes On The Long Game of Imperial Collapse

The Accelerating Nature Of Financialization Collapse

2025 Is The Year The US Empire Acknowledged The End of Hegemony

American Sanctions Are Now Benefiting Countries

Western Leadership Is The Most Worthless In My Life

We Don’t Have To Live In Hell