Ross Douthat: The American Empire In Retreat

How much longer will ZOG or the American Empire endure?

Is it on the verge of collapse? Will it last for decades? Will it last for centuries? Will it fall apart within our lifetimes? Is the defeat in Afghanistan a recoverable setback like in Vietnam or the beginning of the end? Does it go the way of the Soviet Union or the British Empire or the Roman Empire?

New York Times:

“That cold-eyed view, taken from somewhere centuries hence, might describe three American empires, not just one. First there is the inner empire, the continental U.S.A. with its Pacific and Caribbean satellites.

Then there is the outer empire, consisting of the regions that Americans occupied and rebuilt after World War II and placed under our military umbrella: basically, Western Europe and the Pacific Rim.

Finally, there is the American world empire, which exists spiritually wherever our commercial and cultural power reaches, and more practically in our patchwork of client states and military installations. In a way this third empire is our most remarkable achievement. But its vastness inevitably resists a fuller integration, a more direct kind of American control. …”

Ross Douthat is correct to distinguish between the different layers of the American Empire although I would argue that there are four layers of the empire.

The American Empire was created by Abraham Lincoln who transformed what had been a White Republic and a voluntary union of sovereign states which was dominated by the South into an Eastern-based consolidated despotism which sought to build up an imperial navy and emulate Great Britain’s liberal world empire. In between the War Between the States and World War II, the South and the West were basically resource colonies, captive markets and possessions of the industrialized North.

In the second phase of the American Empire, it expanded around British possessions into the banana republics of the Caribbean and Central America and began leapfrogging across the Pacific. We acquired Hawaii and Alaska. We took Puerto Rico, Cuba, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Philippines, Guam and American Samoa. We opened up Japan and China. We created Panama. We occupied Haiti and sent troops into Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico and the Dominican Republic which fell into our expanding sphere of influence. American imperialism was already hotly debated at the turn of the 20th century. Woodrow Wilson attempted to expand the American Empire into Western Europe after World War I, but the backlash at home killed American membership in the League of Nations and put that project on ice for a generation. There was also a backlash against American imperialism in Central America and for a time the United States shifted from Dollar Diplomacy to the Good Neighbor Policy.

In the third phase of the American Empire, we emerged as a mature empire and the major victor of World War II. We took control of Western Europe and the Pacific Rim. West Germany, Italy and Japan became American satellites. We inherited the British Empire and power in the Anglosphere shifted from London to New York City and Washington. NATO was created to entrench our rule. We created the global financial system which was pegged to the dollar which was originally pegged to gold. Great Britain was reduced to Airstrip One and became the junior partner and lapdog in the Anglo-American special relationship. We contested the rest of the world – Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa and southern Asia – with the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc for the rest of the Cold War.

In the fourth phase of the American Empire, we won the Cold War and ever since have been trying with varying degrees of success to incorporate Russia and China and the old Eastern bloc countries and the Third World into the American Empire. This project outright failed in Russia and its immediate periphery. It succeeded in its Western satellites like Poland, Hungary and East Germany which are now part of the European Union. You could say it succeeded in the Baltic states and parts of Latin America, Africa and southern Asia. We created “Chimerica” which is both a success and a defeat. It has spectacularly failed in Afghanistan. The jury is still out on Iraq which regardless of the final outcome there wasn’t worth the expense. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are joined at the hip with the United States which is why we have such a poisonous relationship with Iran. Overall, the American Empire has expanded since the end of the Cold War while it has internally decayed and become less stable.

In the event the American Empire does collapse, the most likely scenario is that it gets knocked back on its ass to its second tier. The dollar ceases to the world’s major reserve currency. China becomes a true rival of the United States. Russia remains the junior partner of China. Europe and the Pacific Rim go their own way. India, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia/Gulf states emerge as regional powers in Eurasia. Perhaps Brazil becomes a regional power in South America. Even in the worst case scenario, it is likely that the United States would retain much of its empire. Even today, Britain still has possessions like the Falkland Islands, Bermuda and various Caribbean islands. We would still dominate Mexico and Canada. The end of the American Empire really means no longer being able to dominate Eurasia which is more or less inevitable as we continue to move further away from World War II.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

47 Comments

  1. Re-Read Dune. It’ll be like that. Some sort of Messiah/Madhi appears. CHOUM, Emperor, competing leaders, pfffftt. The last couple of years has revealed the nihilism at the heart of the beast of all these projects.

    • “there is the American world empire, which exists spiritually….”.

      The American Empire’s ‘spirit’ is a spirit of delusional filioquist dialectical Gnosticism.
      Let it die. Restore Patriarchy, Autarky, and Orthodoxy.

      To hell with everyone and everything else.

    • “Re-read Dune.” Did any read it? I doubt it. Herbert’s style is the worst. I tried to read it three times, but never got more than 20 pages in. The Bible is easier to read than that. I did want to read it because of the various great paperback artworks on the covers of the many editions. Sandworms? Hell yeah! But no, the execution was awful, reading it is like swallowing nickels. It’s literature engineering, like Elon Musk writing a fantasy novel.

      • There’s a really good Audio that is available made from a composite of various audios. It’s quite a good listen.20 hours though. But you can dip in and out. Tbh I find these books heavy going but there’s several startling elements in Dune. Joe McCarthy’s cousin. I can’t read Lord of the Rings easy either…yet, pretty good when I do.

      • After years of putting it off I finally read Frank Herbert’s 1965 classic, but it did require a commitment that not every reader is prepared to make. I did ultimately enjoy reading Dune but so far have no interest in reading any of its sequels. Maybe I’m just losing patience with reading books and long articles or essays altogether. Is consuming too much social media and cable TV to blame for that?

        Hopefully the worst days of American imperialist aggression are over. But if so it’s still being replaced by the power of transnational corporations, aka, Globohomo.

        • Don’t bother with the sequels. That was just author printing cash. Beside that, theres several parallels to now. Jihad will spread, but not as a neocon predicts. I enjoyed the audio versions. I’m amazed he didn’t sue George Lucas.

          • I was thinking the same thing about Herbert suing George Lucas, Cap’n. Lucas is not a great film director.

        • In Dune Messiah Paul researches the Empires of earth and finds an account of Emperor Hitler who notably killed 6,000,000, Paul dismisses him as a lightweight, “I’ve killed 61,000,000, 000.”

    • Do you think the US retreat from Afghanistan is comparable to the Romans leaving Britain in the early 5th century, Cap’n?

  2. “transformed…a voluntary union of sovereign states which was dominated by the South into an Eastern-based”:

    It’s interesting that the seat of Judaism in the U.S. shifted with the war from Charleston to New York.

    “How much longer will ZOG or the American Empire endure?”

    With continued good luck (in the absence of a stronger hostile competitor and any too-great natural disaster) the U.S. could last for thousands of years like ancient imperial Egypt. But every empire SHOULD be ended immediately, like every “class society” (system of exploitation of the majority by a small elite) should be ended, as soon as possible. Development of class consciousness in the exploited majority is essential for the change.

    • I should have added: Besides well-developed class consciousness, a natural, “organic” well-developed ethno-national consciousness (purity and solidarity) is also essential for successful change from empire or other class society to socialism. Therefore it is important for the Empire or any other class society to mix and blend ethnic groups as much as possible.

  3. HW – you have to put aside your grievances with the North and come to terms with the fact that the whole of the US is the fiefdom and slave plantation of the same jewish European banking families that brought Europe under their control in the 1600s. They killed Lincoln over his issuance of debt-free money, tried to kill Andrew Jackson over his defeat of the Central Bank and brought the whole world down on Hitler over his withdrawal from the European banking system. It’s always about money and the power to control it- to believe otherwise is naive.

  4. Only European origin national groups can and have mixed successfully, more or less, never perfectly though, over the last 150 years. This is because all of these groups’ have common European origins. The differences that do exist can fade over time resulting in an Anglo-European type American, speaking English, of a Christian Faith (or at least not non-Christian). Those who don’t fit this mold will always be outsiders, and they know it.

    This is the source of the bitter antagonism of non-Whites to original America, real America: they never can fit in 100%. This is most obvious with blacks whose entire political agenda is based upon antagonizing Whites and stealing White wealth through the legal process as well as criminal activity. After 400 years and vast fortunes spent over the last 100 years, especially the last fifty years, after every imaginable (and many previously unimaginable) social engineering schemes to fix black misbehavior the result is unmitigated failure.

    The bitter lesson gullible Whites refuse to learn and acknowledge is that outside of other White people other groups; blacks, hispanics, Asians, Moslems, Near Easterners etc. will always be trouble, always hate Whites and will wreck the country when their numbers get too large. The ruling class knows this, that is the major reason it keeps encouraging these hostile groups to migrate, it dilutes White political power, something the ruling class fears and hates.

    • @12AX7 ……….As always, excellent comment.

      “The inferior races hate the White race precisely because of its superiority. It is galling to the lower races to be reminded of their inferiority, and White superiority instills in them a burning desire to tear down whites and their creations in order to make themselves whites’ ‘equal’.

      This is not all, however, for tearing down whites removes a burr from their consciousness — that of being reminded of their inferiority — and indeed is an act of revenge for such reminding. Accordingly, when Whites are so stupid as to treat the lower races as equals, this but whets the appetite of those races to see Whites destroyed, for they see vulnerability in this stupidity, and thus an opportunity for inserting their grappling hooks into the edifice of White civilization.” — JBR Yant, Mortal Words v 11

  5. Hunter, great summary of the progression of empire. The republic died at Appomattox. Good to note that the Lincolnite goal of replacing Britain – Roosevelt did more damage to the Empire than Hitler ever did.

  6. A Syrian withdrawal is a on the horizon. And the same crowd of blue faces is going to be screaming bloody murder.

  7. The empire was created in 1787-1789, when the Imperial Constitution, with a King called a President, replaced the Articles. It was sollidified when the American Judas, Washington, rode out with an army to massacre tax protesters in Pennsylvania.

    It was all downhill from there.

    • “in Pennsylvania” – ahhhh – those pesky Germans(who made up a lot of Central/W PA then) that the Anglos love to stomp out when they get too uppity. And your assessment of how important the Whiskey Rebellion was to showing TPTB’s hand so early in the American game is spot-on. The Whiskey Rebellion was a seminal event in US history and (purposefully) overlooked in the history books. The W Rebellion was a small glimpse of the lengths to which the sociopaths that run the US will go to maintain power over their slave plantation – the ultimate expression of which was the Civil War.

      • I keep getting the Whiskey Rebellion in PA confused with Daniel Shay’s Rebellion in the Connecticut River Valley. I think it was the latter event which hastened the demise of the Articles of Confederation government in favor of a stronger and more centralized Federal system, yes? And the Whiskey rebellion was a revolt against that new Federal / Constitutional government, an event which took place during the George Washington administration?

        • I am not too knowledgeable about Shays Rebellion but – yes – the Whisky Rebellion was largely about centralization of power, taxation and using Federal armed soldiers for enforcement of that taxation. It was basically the IRS in its embryonic stage. The more that I read about G Washington the more I am inclined to believe he was an Agent Of the Crown. His memorial in DC is an obelisk ffs – it doesn’t get more Cabal than that.

      • There was also a rebellion of rural folk in eastern Pennsylvania (another part of what was called “Pennsyltucky” by city boys in the early nineteenth century) – against a different tax, led by a Lutheran minister. Tax collectors from the city were turned away by angry crowds but the state police/militia was sent, and the leaders were captured, and imprisoned in Philadelphia.

  8. “Even in the worst case scenario, it is likely that the United States would retain much of its empire. Even today, Britain still has possessions like the Falkland Islands, Bermuda and various Caribbean islands. We would still dominate Mexico and Canada. The end of the American Empire really means no longer being able to dominate Eurasia… ”

    I think your analysis fails to adequately assess two facts and one geopolitical theory.

    1st Fact. I think it could easily argued that the white interior of the North America Economic Zone (the future political entity after the destruction of the DC/NY/LA murican imperial nomenklatura) will be dominated by, and not dominate, the countless illegal immigrants from the south, now living in Norte Aztlan. Canada will be consumed by the same forces that will destory Murica since they too are part of the Five Eyes Anglosphere. And I think it is likely that we will have to give up Alaska (to the RF) and our pacific possessions, including Hawaii. and maybe some of the West Coast (to the PRC) to pay for an armistice after a non-nuke WW3.

    2nd Fact. The Yankee empire has always been a commercial, maritime empire. As important as the end of the dollar as the world’s major reserve currency, when the combined Anti-Access/Area Denial weaponry of the RF and PRC sink the USN, the two oceans will become a curse rather than a blessing. We will descend into an all against all; think the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after WW1 or Yugoslavia in the 1990’s.

    One Theory: I suspect that most if not all of the military leadership in the RF and PRC have heard of a theory (re: AD, he who must not be named) that places the Eurasian heartland in a death struggle with the maritime World Island … see the PRC’s Belt and Road Initiative, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the RF’s Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). I think that our enemies are not going to be satisfied until the Murican Empire is dismembered. Our enemies (the PRC and RF) are not known their merciful treatment of conquered populations.

  9. @ Wouldn’t it be wonderful, if we had a southern , christian, military order? Where men could actively, devote themselves too our lord and too our kith and kin. Perhaps when babylon has drawn it’s last sorry breath, the Lord will forgive us and bless us and we can be masters of our own house once again, hopefully people will see the wisdom in having a christian military order, servants of the living God and defenders of the realm, our lord will bring the empire down and when it happens, the whole world will know who did it, I am thinking, our father who art in heaven, might give us another chance, with our confederacy, if he does, I hope we have the good sense, too do it, his way, this time.

    • Terry, if you reach out to them, I’m sure those good Christians over at the Federal Bureau of Entrapment would be more than happy to send over some volunteers and money to help you start you “southern, christian, military order, servants of the living God and defenders of the realm”. When they start talking about committing acts of violence, join right in, they just joking around, have some fun! (PS, that’s sarcasm, especially for the snitches monitoring this blog)

      • @ WP nice too hear from you, thank you for your response, I hope you are enjoying your holiday, I just finished a ten hour shift, holiday pay you know, a decent standard of living for me and my family, is expensive here in the empire, thanks for the heads up, but I am not worried about the feds, the Lord of host, has my back and the devil has theirs, we will see, who wins……..,…

  10. Hunter, look into the China-Russia-Iran-Pakistan alliance and the North South Transportation Corridor infrastructure project. These are the forces that really drove ZOG out of Afghanistan. CRIP/NTSC countries made a deal with each other and the Taliban to not resist Taliban rule. A deeper Eurasian alliance against ZOG imperialism is forming now. There is an ideological element to this as well, all oppose American liberalism.

    https://www.sundayguardianlive.com/opinion/can-crip-alliance-authoritarians-counter-quad

    https://www.veteranstoday.com/2021/03/23/victory-for-iran-india-nears-completion-of-chabahar/

    NTSC is an underplayed story that only serious business and policy elites have even heard of. Major clout to whoever starts taking about it first. NTSC is critical because it the the link between the CRIP nations and India, the geo-strategic prize on the Asian landmass. ZOG strategy is to cultivate India as a zionist client to break Eurasian unity and disrupt Eurasian infrastructure integration. The real prize for China and Russia is India/Pakistan rapprochement. Then, there will be no barriers to Eurasian infrastructure integration. That integration, when realized, for the first time in history, gives land based nations in Eurasia an economic efficiency advantage in transportation over sea based powers in Oceana. That’s the big picture according to ZOG policy and business elites’ inner discourse.

    “CRI” is going to be putting strong pressure on “P” to warm up to India so NTSC can cross by land from Iran to India. India can only have a direct land transportation corridor to the huge markets and resources of Europe, Russia and the Middle East by going through Pakistan. Bringing India into CRIP and Pakistan into NTSC is game over for ZOG on the Asian landmass.

    BTW, consider using comments like letters to the editor where only a few good comments are selected for publication. Many comments continue to detract from this otherwise excellent blog.

  11. The oft-cited Roman Empire lasted 2,200 years from its founding in Rome around 750 BC to the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 AD. If we are following Rome’s trajectory, we have another 2,000 years to go.

    • There’s two falls of Rome and maybe even 3. The end of the Republic, the sacking by the Vandals and the sacking by the Ottomans. I think people can often refer to the fall of the Republic in the civil war between the Senators. The Roman Empire under the winner Augustus arguably became a military dictatorship by the time of Vespasian and definitely by the time of Trajan. I’d say that Rome lasted more like 600 years as a going organisational concern. Sacking Carthage from bases in Italy to the Vandals sacking Rome from a base in Africa. The Americans have been a going concern since the middle of the 1600s. That’s 400 years. It’s gone from colony to Republic to Military dictatorship already. The trajectory is accelerated. Also the Rise of China. The 400 year long white run in the Americas basically knocked the Chinks out as the heavyweight. Now they back. 200 years left imho.

    • The U.S. Government will try to fall back upon conscription after defeat in Taiwan. The burden of conscription will be directed at White males, the very people reviled by the ruling class. They may also try to conscript White females but that is likely to be met by direct action from girls’ fathers, uncles, brothers etc. causing the Government to back down.

      Hopefully, there will be an explosion of protest against conscription causing it to fail. Not only will this be another embarrassment to the ruling class, it will also severely restrict the Government’s ability to wage war, the very purpose of conscription. A failure of conscription combined with severe financial and economic problems may fatally weaken the Empire.

      • The only hope OUR people have is that TMFIIC DO renew the military draft and, thanks to the Snivel Rights laws they imposed, EVERYBODY has to register and be required to do a Tour of Duty regardless of RELIGION, race, sex, gender identification, sexual preference, age, and most importantly, class. And that would include any dual citizens with the empire pursuing them all the way to the old country if they haven’t renounced American citizenship completely.

        And any time some politician or Deep Stater or Military Industrialist starts the saber rattling, the first people who get their draft board notices are THEIR children and then the children of their relatives. To demonstrate that they believe the intelligence concluding that another war is necessary so much that they are willing to jeopardize their family’s future existence.

        NO college deferments whatsoever and you will have to do handstands to prove a condition and/or disability that keeps you from serving. Assignments would be decided by random lottery and the number the recipient drew would be duly recorded and then s/h/it, would be dispatched to that area of the conflict.

        And no way to buy your child a safe tour of duty far, far away from enemy lines. And any attempts to do so would end up in such draconian repercussions, your family would be bankrupt by lawyer bills and fines, you’d end up doing hard time in jail and not at any “Club Fed.”

        How quick would a CIA deep-stater like George Herbert Walker Bush be to sign onto the War Against Communism and cosign the Gulf of Tonkin incident to allow LBJ to lie America into another war, for example, if any conscripted American regardless of class or education, got a bad lottery ticket, especially if it was one of HIS sons?

        Upset about the gigantic Jewish influence in this country? Watch THAT problem go away, because I guarantee it that every Jewish family with children would flee to Israel and renounce their American citizenship. The same goes for any OTHER large group that has dual citizenship. There would be so many emigrant caravans scampering south of our southern border, it would’t be funny No need for a “big, beautiful wall” then, is there?

        Watch trannies, homosexuals, bisexuals, gender fluid people claim they ARE mentally ill rather than possibly fall into the hands as POWS of Muslim fundamentalists.

        Ohh, and gentlemen for all the “You GO, Gurlll” blather from women, for those of you lamenting our demographic decline, LOOK OUT, because there would be a WHITE BABY BOOM by women determined to stay barefoot and pregnant until they were too old to be useful to the Neo Con Artists. You’d be surprised to know that the Millennial baby boomlet was actually caused by Gen X women by GHW Bush’s Operation Desert Storm.

        Go ahead Deep Staters, resurrect the draft. I double dare you.

        You keep whining about January 6th as a Domestic insurrection. You whine about American domestic terrorists? What went down during and after the January 6th insurrection will be exposed as a comedy compared to the tiger you will grab the tail if you resurrect the draft. The politicians who go along with this will be lamppost ornaments. Anyone perceived to have profited from the grift will be strung up, as well. You won’t be able to breathe from the stench of the bloated corpses rotting on those nooses.

        You make up your mind if it would be a whole lot smarter to take your bags of cash that you grifted of the so-called War on terror since 9-11-2001 or wake up THAT tiger!

        We ALL need to be drafted into the military to fight the Muslims extremists for hating us for our freedumbs.

      • The way the Chinese would take Taiwan would be to set up a political movement in Taiwan demanding reunification. Buy off the remaining various players who might fight back. The Chinese can place their own ethnic group there easy and politically flip what they need to get a working majority in the Taiwan government. Bish bash bosh.

  12. Today the good news that the U.S.’s last hope, the mainstream media hyped “resistance” of the last U.S.-backed drug warlord “in control of” the Panjshir valley” suddenly collapsed, and now the Taliban is indisputably in control of every square mile of Afghanistan including the Panjshir: https://niqnaq.wordpress.com/2021/09/06/videos-from-panjshir/ and https://sputniknews.com/asia/202109061083804733-taliban-spokesman-says-war-in-afghanistan-is-over-as-group-claimed-it-controls-panjshir/ The defeated drug lord had been considered for someday replacing Ashraf Ghani as puppet president.

    To balance that out with some bad news: The Economist, a reliable source, reports there have been at least fifteen MILLION excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic, so far: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates In African countries and some other countries such as India and Indonesia where very little testing was done, excess deaths run up to 700 to 800% higher than the official death tolls for Covid. India has over 4 million excess deaths during the pandemic.

    • So the U.S. has probably really lost about 800,000 citizens to Covid, according to the Economist research report, but that’s mostly old and sick people who are a drag on the system. The U.S. replaces them with daily imports of hundreds of young, cheap labourers from all over the world, and now in just one shot, 100,000 “refugees” – collaborators from the illegal invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

  13. Empire will end up like Soviet Union and very soon. There is already USD saturation in the world so Empire can no longer live on the money print. Inflation is everywhere all over the planet.

    Hyperinflation is cunning thing. It comes like thief in the night. In the spring 1991 nothing special went on in the Soviet Union. Suddenly Government cancelled 50- and 100-ruble banknotes so lot of people lost their life savings. It also removed enormous amount of worthless money out of circulation. Our rulers thought that this time economy is safe. But within few months we reached the point where children played shop with money packages. After few months we had coup and this was the end.

  14. I think the original idea was for a system of world financial control as described by Carroll Quigley which incorporated intact nations or regional blocs of nations. Anyone hear of the North American Union lately? There was apparently too much resistance. Now the idea is to disintegrate nation-states through deliberately amplifying political, cultural, racial, religious and ethnic differences as well as financial instability. But that is a messy process which can and will spiral out of control. I give the US about 5 years before we have breakaway states.

  15. I’m guessing it will die relatively shortly after I do, just to deny me the satisfaction of witnessing it.

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