The Decline of the American Empire and Rise of the New Multi-Polar Order

From the Introduction

An excerpt. The complete Introduction appears in the finished book.

The American Century ended before most Americans noticed. It did not end on a battlefield, because on the battlefields where it was tested against serious adversaries in this century it lost or drew, and lost or drew again, and the country continued about its business as if losing were a rounding error. It did not end in a treaty room, because the empire never signed the surrender documents that the empires of the twentieth century, at least the ones that were beaten cleanly, had the discipline to sign. It ended by attrition: through repeated demonstrations that the American state could no longer coerce, cajole, or persuade the rest of the world into arrangements it declared to be indispensable, and through the growing willingness of the rest of the world to build the arrangements it needed without American permission. This book is about the years in which that ending became visible.

The book is also about what is coming next, because the interesting question is not whether the American empire has declined, which is now beyond serious dispute, but what is arriving in its place and how the transition is being managed by the parties that stand to lose the most from it. The multi-polar order that is now taking shape, with China, Russia, India, Brazil, the states of the Gulf, and the ten states of ASEAN as its load-bearing structures, is not a Western nightmare. It is the ordinary condition of the international system for most of recorded history. Unipolar moments are rare. American unipolarity lasted roughly a generation, from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the joint Russian and Chinese declaration of a strategic partnership without limits in February 2022, and its passage into history is neither a tragedy nor a triumph. It is a fact. The question this book puts to the reader is what the fact requires of us, as citizens of the state that is losing its primacy, and what it will cost, in blood and treasure and moral standing, to pretend the fact is not a fact.

I write this book at the moment of transition. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel, acting as two rogue regimes outside the Rule of Law, jointly launched an unprovoked war of aggression against the sovereign nation of Iran that had neither congressional authorization nor United Nations Security Council authorization, that assassinated the head of a sovereign state during active nuclear reduction negotiations, and that has continued through the summer of 2026. The genocide in Gaza continues. The Ukraine war grinds into its fifth year with a negotiated settlement rejected by Washington and its European clients at every serious opportunity. The Pentagon has submitted the largest single-year defense budget request in American history, 1.5 trillion dollars, an increase of 44 percent over the current base. Ten separate war-powers votes have failed in the Congress since February 28, defeated in each case by the same alignment of members whose primary campaigns depend on the same handful of donor networks. These are not disconnected events. They are the same event, viewed from different vantage points. They are the ways an empire in decline reaches for coercion when consent has failed.

The argument of this book is that the decline of the American empire and the rise of the multi-polar order are the same phenomenon, seen from opposite sides of the ledger, and that the transition is being actively resisted by a narrow confederation of financial, technological, and military interests that have captured the American state and that intend to extract every remaining dollar of rent from the imperial arrangement before the arrangement collapses under them. The extraction is not a byproduct of the decline. It is the mechanism by which the decline accelerates, because every dollar extracted for private benefit is a dollar removed from the public capacity that would be required to manage a graceful transition. The war with Iran is not a strategic aberration. It is the extraction machine operating at full throttle, converting American treasure, American law, and American credibility into revenue for a handful of contractors, super PACs, and executive-branch loyalists while the rest of the country pays the fuel bill and buries the dead.

I am not a credentialed academic. I am a citizen who has spent forty years in structured finance and capital markets, who has watched from a professional vantage point the transformation of the American state into an instrument of private extraction, and who has concluded that the transformation is now advanced enough that a public reckoning is required.

One Note on Language

I use the word war to describe a war. I use the word genocide to describe a genocide. I use the word murder to describe the killing of a head of state during ongoing negotiations. I use the phrase rogue regime to describe a government that conducts an unprovoked act of aggression against a sovereign nation, outside the Rule of Law, and that includes both the United States and the State of Israel in their conduct since February 28, 2026. I use the word war criminal to describe a person against whom an International Criminal Court warrant has been issued for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and I use it against the American president whose conduct meets the same threshold.

I do not use the euphemisms that have been developed over the last generation to soften these words. I do not describe the bombing of Iran as an operation or a strike. I do not describe the genocide in Gaza as a war or a conflict or a crisis. I do not describe the assassination of Ali Khamenei as a targeted killing. The euphemisms are how the empire launders its conduct through the language it controls. This book will not participate in the laundering.

Language is where empire begins, and language is where the reckoning must begin. If the reader is uncomfortable with the words, I ask the reader to sit with the discomfort long enough to consider whether the words describe the conduct accurately. If they do, the discomfort is the appropriate response, and the euphemisms that have concealed the conduct are what the reader should have found intolerable long before this book was written.

The book is about a country I love, in the moment of its decline. The love is not incidental to the argument. The argument is only meaningful because the country is worth the reckoning. What comes next is not the end of the country. It is the end of the empire. Those are not the same thing, and the book will spend its final pages insisting that they are not, and that the citizen who understands the difference is the citizen who will have something worth doing when the empire is gone.

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