Ian Welsh

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.

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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.

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