Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CCXXXIX
The Empire As a Depleting Engine
In this Contemplation, I begin with an exploration of the ideas that: the geopolitical actions of the nation state of the United States of America (USA) are reflective of how empires have behaved in general throughout history; there is no international body or coalition capable of reining in the actions of a powerful state or holding it accountable; and the historical pattern tends to be that empires dominate regions and expand until they eventually overreach their ambitions, encounter significant diminishing returns, and then a combination of enemies and estranged allies helps to put an end to their imperial project.
The following outlines some of the evidence to support these general ideas.
While it’s quite debatable as to whether the USA is a formal empire in the traditional sense, the evidence for the USA’s behavior reflecting historical imperial patterns of overreach, insulation from accountability, and decline is compelling.
Overreach
One of the defining characteristics of a declining empire is its tendency towards imperial overreach/overstretch, as first proposed by historian Paul Kennedy. As economic headwinds appear, an empire’s military commitments become too expensive to sustain and failures begin to mount. The USA is showing this in spades.
During the twentieth century, the USA transitioned from a continental republic to a global “policeman” (or, as some have suggested, “global predator”), using stories about “bringing democracy” to nations to justify interventionist wars and regime change. However, from Vietnam to the “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq, the USA has failed to achieve decisive strategic victories. For example, the Iraq invasion is now regarded as a massive blunder and the war in Afghanistan was a multi-trillion-dollar catastrophe; combined, they strongly suggest imperial overreach and may have ultimately weakened American global power. The recent escalation with Iran may yet prove to be another instance; time will tell.
Imperial decline is also marked by internal dysfunction. The USA, with its ongoing and growing political divisions and paralysis, ballooning debt, and fraying social fabric, exhibits such dysfunction. In fact, its plunder of other nations and internal rot mirror the decline witnessed in Spain (roughly 1492–1976), the Netherlands (roughly 1595–1975), and Britain (roughly 1497–1997).
Accountability
There is no international body that can rein in the actions of the USA–many of which are considered illegal under international law. The United Nations was designed to oversee a cooperative world of sovereign nations where such law was applied equitably; however, major powers were given a permanent veto on its Security Council that complicated this process. This veto has been used as a shield to protect the powerful from the consequences of acting outside UN policies and charters. The USA has demonstrated this repeatedly for itself and for at least one important ally—it has used its veto more than fifty times to block resolutions critical of Israel, and at least five times to block resolutions attempting to hold Israel accountable for its actions in Gaza.
This structural impunity has created a system where legal standards are invoked but rarely applied against permanent members–China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States–or their strategic allies. Less powerful states are regularly condemned and suffer consequences when the Security Council deems it necessary, but powerful actors almost never face the same treatment. The result is a two-tier international order in which the powerful act with near-total impunity.
Diminishing Returns
The law of diminishing returns appears to be illustrated in the various military quagmires the USA has found itself in. Its economic power has experienced a similar dynamic. A significant contributor has been the accelerating weaponisation of the US dollar. Sanctions and legal overreach directed against perceived competitors have acted as a spur to de-dollarisation. While the dollar remains the world’s dominant fiat currency, trade is increasingly being settled in alternative currencies. The dollar’s share of global central bank reserves, for example, has fallen from over 70 percent two decades ago to under 60 percent today.
Political and territorial overreach can be seen in recent aggressive and unilateral rhetoric—talk of making Canada or Venezuela the 51st state, purchasing or annexing Greenland, and reclaiming the Panama Canal. Such bombastic language serves to alienate allies and reduce political influence across the globe.
Enemies and Estranged Allies
The current geopolitical landscape for the USA seems littered with both enemies and estranged allies. After joining the World Trade Organization, China experienced a meteoric rise in economic power, putting the USA on notice and prompting it to identify China as its primary challenger for hegemony. Given American rhetoric and the steady imposition of sanctions, China has become one of the leading voices calling for a multipolar world order and a move away from US dollar supremacy. Long-time allies, especially NATO members, have felt the sting of threats and alienation and are increasingly exploring alignments that do not depend on Washington–consider, for example, the recent trade agreements between China and Canada.
This situation closely mirrors what happened to the Aztec Empire centuries ago. Its power declined significantly not because of a lack of military strength but because it encountered strategic isolation as a result of its coercive rule. When an opportunity to escape that rule arose, estranged allies refused to fight alongside the empire against its enemies.
A Future Foretold?
The thesis explored through these ideas is not a fringe theory. It stands at the centre of debate in international relations, and the evidence increasingly points toward the USA following historically grounded patterns of imperial decline.
A combination of economic decline and massive military overreach has been fatal to many great powers. The ability to shield oneself from accountability and to pursue unilateral actions on the geopolitical stage has allowed such powers to burn through resources far faster than might otherwise occur. This tends to accelerate economic decline and political overreach without immediate corrective consequences. While this may seem advantageous in the short term, over the longer term it erodes the foundations of power, fosters strategic isolation, and speeds the rise of challengers.
History suggests that the end for such powers comes not from a single catastrophic defeat but from a slow, corrosive process of dwindling power and accumulating resentment among enemies and former allies. The once-dominant state eventually finds itself increasingly alone. One would be hard-pressed to argue that the USA is not mirroring this pattern, particularly in recent decades.
Thus far, the evidence supports a geopolitical explanation for imperial decline. But when we layer on the physical realities of resource overshoot and hydrocarbon depletion, the diagnosis deepens into something far more inescapable. I’m going to now reevaluate the ideas above through the lens of resource extraction and throughput, deliberately setting aside climate change and carbon emissions to focus on the material and thermodynamic constraints.
What was a political analogy now becomes a thermodynamic diagnosis.
Viewing the USA as a material and energy system instead of via a political lens, the pattern of imperial decay witnessed throughout history becomes even more persuasive. An empire, at its core, is a machine for extracting and dissipating resources to support the typical ambition of geopolitical expansion. In the case of the USA, the master resource that has helped its growth has been hydrocarbons, especially after the Second World War. And the USA has extracted and leveraged this resource to aid its aspirations at a rate unlike any other in the history of complex societies. The political analogy outlined in the first part of this Contemplation has been turned into a thermodynamic machine as a result of this resource use.
Diminishing Returns Redux
Viewed through a resource lens, diminishing returns are no longer simply a cost-benefit problem for an overextended military—they form a net-energy trap.
Empires require surplus net energy to power their expansion. Dependence on a finite resource can provide such a surplus at first when the easiest and cheapest reserves to access are readily available. In the case of conventional oil, the mid-twentieth-century energy-return-on-investment (EROI) was roughly 100:1 or higher—what one could consider nearly pure energy profit. Today, the global average EROI for oil has fallen to perhaps 15:1 and continues to decline. For unconventional tight oil, the marginal barrel on which the USA now heavily relies, the EROI operates between roughly 5:1 and 2:1, with individual wells losing 60 to 80 percent of their output within three years.
Merely maintaining current extraction levels requires a perpetual treadmill of drilling and technical innovation (something that also experiences diminishing returns). The great surplus that historically funded a vast military, massive infrastructure, and globe-spanning supply chains is shrinking rapidly.
Today’s militaries run on liquid fuels, not fiat currency. The US Department of War is the world’s largest institutional burner of liquid fuels. As the net-energy surplus contracts, the operational reach of the American military is increasingly constrained. Imperial overreach ceases to be a policy failure and becomes a physical barrier: the USA may simply find itself unable to move the equipment and personnel required to hold its positions, because the energetic cost eats into the fuel needed for the mission.
This is more than a shift from expensive to impossible. Past empires might address rising costs by raising taxes or plundering new territories, which also bump up against limits and eventually experience diminishing returns. A geological depletion curve offers no such temporary escape. The USA did attempt to secure Iraq’s resources through force but could not convert military victory into a reliable, cheap flow of hydrocarbons. The failure in Iraq may be seen in retrospect as a critical threshold—the moment military supremacy proved insufficient to reverse the biophysical logic of depletion.
Diminishing returns biting the USA are no longer a metaphor. They are the measurable and irreducible decline in the quality and accessibility of the master resource—cheap hydrocarbons—that made the globe-spanning empire (with its hundreds of off-shore military bases) possible. This decline is now locked in by geology and thermodynamics, not by political miscalculation.
Global Policing to Global Predation
When high-grade resources begin to deplete, dominant powers tend to shift their focus from stabilising the existing order to maintaining privileged access to material and energy flows. American behaviour since the end of the Cold War reflects exactly this pivot.
The Carter Doctrine of 1980 and the later creation of US Central Command were explicit in their intent: any disruption to the flow of Persian Gulf oil would be met with military force. The drive to control the Eurasian “arc of instability” in the early twenty-first century maps almost perfectly onto the location of the world’s last remaining giant oil and gas fields. Afghanistan laid astride proposed pipeline routes and held significant gas reserves; Iraq held some of the largest conventional oil reservoirs on Earth; and Iran–the current “hotspot”–possesses major conventional oil and gas reserves (as does Venezuela and Canada). The language of fighting terrorism and promoting democracy has been the political skin stretched over a body built of resource imperative.
The simultaneous pursuit of Arctic reserves, deepwater wells, and shale oil and gas shows a system willing to accept rapidly declining EROI and extensive ecosystem destruction in order to sustain throughput. This is not the behaviour of a society managing a transition. It is the reflex of a high-throughput system facing withdrawal, throwing ever more of its dwindling surplus at the problem of extracting new energy. An empire has begun converting its remaining resource output into geopolitical leverage—lifting export bans and pressuring allies to accept liquefied natural gas, for instance—even when doing so eats into domestic reserves and long-term relationships.
The American economy and its built infrastructure are completely dependent on a continuous, massive flow of liquid hydrocarbons. Maintaining this throughput is a non-negotiable imperative. It requires not only relentless extraction but also control over the maritime choke points—Hormuz, Malacca, and others—even if the effort alienates allies and erodes long-term interests.
The USA has moved beyond managing the open systems that once enabled its rise. It is now confronting the physical limits of the resource streams it depends upon. Its interventions will increasingly look less like traditional imperial policing and more like desperate, resource-driven coercion.
Unrestrained Extraction
In the absence of any international body that can hold the USA to account, impunity becomes especially dangerous in the resource sphere. The empire’s extractive appetite cannot be externally constrained, and its structural advantages are likely to ensure this remains the case for a time.
First, the USA uses its Security Council veto as a shield against any consequences for resource-related aggression, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It is virtually guaranteed that any future resolution attempting to restrict a permanent member’s access to critical resources, or to impose sanctions for a resource-motivated war, would be vetoed by the power in question. In this domain, we must remember that international law is optional for the strong.
The USA also leverages the dollar system as an extraction mechanism. Because the dollar dominates global energy and mineral trade, the USA enjoys an asymmetrical claim on the world’s material output. It can issue the fiat currency that commands real resources while simultaneously imposing sanctions that cut rivals off from hydrocarbons, metals, and fertiliser—all without multilateral oversight.
There is no international institution with the authority to restrain a powerful state intent on increasing extraction rates and throughput. It will not heed concerns about finitude or distributed consequences. The USA lobbies, finances, and coerces to ensure that domestic extraction and competition over other nations’ reserves continue without limits. This unchecked behaviour accelerates both domestic depletion and global fragility, especially because there appears to be no internal or external off-switch capable of halting the empire’s pillage of its own and others’ resource endowments.
The accountability void is now an accelerator of depletion. The empire continues to burn through the remaining resource base faster and more violently than any sensible collective governance would permit, deepening the eventual crisis and alienating the rest of a world forced to share what remains. For the moment, the US still participates in open resource markets, but when that participation turns unprofitable or domestic need becomes acute, the posture is likely to shift toward outright hoarding.
Closing In on a Resource-Scarce World
In a world of depleting cheap and highly-concentrated resources, alliances fracture as allies become resource competitors. A once-dominant power can find itself encircled by rivals and former partners, all scrambling for a tightening resource base and declining throughput.
The recent geopolitical cleavage between Europe and Russia laid bare European dependence on Russian energy. However, even the tightest of alliances can devolve into zero-sum contests for molecules of methane and barrels of oil. The USA’s revived attempt to purchase Greenland from Denmark—aimed at securing its rare-earth minerals and offshore oil potential; the rhetoric about absorbing Canada or coaxing its oil-rich province of Alberta towards separation; and the kidnapping of the Venezuelan president to help secure control over and access to Venezuelan hydrocarbon reserves are further examples. One consequence has been a growing wariness toward American intentions across the planet.
The “cheap oil” era of relatively high-EROI and easily accessible global supply that coincided with the American unipolar moment (roughly 1991–2008) may prove to have been a fleeting interlude. As conventional oil production peaked and plateaued, and high-grade mineral ores became more expensive and difficult to find, competitors to the American imperium constructed their own resource-securing networks. The Belt and Road Initiative, for example, is in large part a logistics and extraction corridor. It was likely not designed to defeat the USA in a direct war, but to ensure access to depleting resources in a world of lower material throughput. Meanwhile, the USA, structurally configured for extreme per-capita consumption, finds it increasingly difficult to hold its expansive global network together.
Earlier, I noted the Aztec Empire’s strategic isolation due to coercive rule. The resource lens adds a material dimension: allies defect not simply out of resentment but out of the necessity to secure their own energy survival. Today’s high-throughput empire is experiencing growing isolation as access to the overseas resources that sustain its economy slips. The BRICS+ grouping develops alternative payment systems for oil and mineral trade, bypassing the dollar and dealing a blow to the extractive privilege the empire has long enjoyed. The USA is left trying to sustain its material metabolism on a domestic endowment whose best years are behind it.
The revival of the Monroe Doctrine as an explicit posture—treating the Western hemisphere as a protected resource pool for the metropole—follows logically. For former allies, the empire’s words and deeds increasingly make it a threat to their own resource sovereignty. Canada pivots tentatively toward China and Europe; Denmark strengthens its military presence in Greenland alongside European allies. These are not yet fully formed alternative alliances, but they signal a slow, resource-driven realignment.
This isolation is unlikely to crystallise into a single grand coalition against the empire. More probably, it will happen gradually, as nations quietly reorganise their relationships to secure access to energy and materials. The USA will likely find itself alone in a geopolitical environment where material flows are hotly contested and its privileged lifestyle of extreme per-capita throughput is widely resented.
The Depleting Engine of Empire
The original thesis—that American behaviour reflects historical imperial patterns of overreach, insulation from accountability, and decline—was already persuasive through a geopolitical lens. Adding the lens of resource extraction and throughput transforms it into a biophysical diagnosis.
The recurrent pattern of imperial decline is accelerated by the inescapable reality that the USA’s primary energy resource, high-EROI hydrocarbons, is in terminal depletion. The lack of international accountability has served as an enabler, allowing the empire to squander what remains of the resource base faster and more violently than any sensible collective governance would permit.
Diminishing returns have become thermodynamic. The empire must now spend increasing amounts of energy and capital simply to access energy itself, tightening the noose on the surplus needed to power a globe-spanning military and its immense imperial complexity. In a world of declining net energy and falling material throughput, rivals and estranged allies alike are being pushed toward alignment with one another, because the empire’s final-phase behaviour—dollar weaponisation, resource hoarding, unilateral extraction—has turned it into a liability for everyone else’s survival.
The US empire has become a high-throughput material system that dominated the planet for a time not because of American exceptionalism but because of a finite, depleting pulse of cheap and accessible hydrocarbons that it was able to leverage to its advantage. As that pulse fades, so too must the geopolitical arrangement it enabled.
The question that remains is not whether the historical pattern will hold, but how chaotic the descent into a lower-throughput world will be—and what fragments of the engine might remain when it can no longer turn over.
Recent and relevant articles of interest:
China Openly defies US Sanctions, Strengthens Ties with Canada - Global Research
Lawrence Wilkerson: Rogue State America - Decay of a Superpower
The New Geography of Power: Europe Pays, America Pivots (Short Version) – Global geopolitics
The Moment of Bifurcation: Hormuz, Empire, and the Possible End of the Western World System
When Global Order Begins to Fracture – Preppgroup
The “Fury” is about China, not Iran!
America’s Suicide Pact - The Chris Hedges Report
A blockade of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait could reshape the global economy
From Civilian to Military Economy (Part One): This Is What a Declining Empire’s Economy Looks Like
All Empires Collapse. - by Sean Beaudoin
The Beijing Chokepoint - Shanaka Anslem Perera
The Unipolar Machine: Structure of Unipolar Warfare – Global geopolitics
BREAKING: MAGA Operative/US Ambassador Pete Hoekstra Caught Meddling In Canadian Politics. Again
Iran & Russia Find Common Cause Against US Aggression
Gilbert Doctorow: European Naval Blockade on Russia? Europe-Russia War Coming
China’s Foreign Minister Tells Rubio That Taiwan Is the ‘Biggest Risk Factor’ in US-China Relations - News From Antiwar.com
Trump on Hormuz Blockade: “We’re pirates…and it’s very profitable.”
Will the US Curtail Oil Exports As Fuel Prices Rise?
US Spends More Defense Than Next 8 Countries Combined
China’s First Direct Rejection of U.S. Financial Jurisdiction – Global geopolitics
John Mearsheimer: Alliance System Collapses & Risk of Nuclear War
The China Perspective: War Without Declaration
Zakharova Echoed Lavrov’s Warning About The West’s Plans To Dominate Russia
How the US government wages low intensity warfare on the citizens of countries it wants to take over--as witnessed by two members of Congress
Kagan and Boot: The Guilty Are Writing the Verdict (Short Version)
Mattias Desmet: The West’s Descent Toward Totalitarianism
The Choke Point Doctrine – Global geopolitics
Sergey Lavrov: “Trump continues Biden’s policy towards Russia” - Esmail Baghaei: “USrael-Iran war is a battle of good vs. evil”
Europe’s Dependence on U.S. LNG Is Set to Surge | OilPrice.com
Death to Empire: Trump, China, and Moving Beyond this Wretched Order
Dispatches From the Home Front
What is going to be my standard WARNING/ADVICE going forward and that I have reiterated in various ways before this:
“Only time will tell how this all unfolds but there’s nothing wrong with preparing for the worst by ‘collapsing now to avoid the rush’ and pursuing self-sufficiency. By this I mean removing as many dependencies on the Matrix as is possible and making do, locally. And if one can do this without negative impacts upon our fragile ecosystems or do so while creating more resilient ecosystems, all the better.
Building community (maybe even just household) resilience to as high a level as possible seems prudent given the uncertainties of an unpredictable future. There’s no guarantee it will ensure ‘recovery’ after a significant societal stressor/shock but it should increase the probability of it and that, perhaps, is all we can ‘hope’ for from its pursuit.
If you have arrived here and get something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my “fictional” novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website or the link below — the “profits” of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers).
Attempting a new payment system as I am contemplating shutting down my site in the future (given the ever-increasing costs to keep it running).
If you are interested in purchasing any of the 3 books individually or the trilogy, please try the link below indicating which book(s) you are purchasing.
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You can also find a variety of resources, particularly my summary notes for a handful of texts, especially William Catton’s Overshoot and Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies: see here.
Here in the states we suffer from the mirror of lack of accountability. Rich pedophiles go unpunished. Citizens United floods politics with money and corporate control. Our "democracy" is managed by central committees that prevent solutions or even rational management. We can afford just about any "want" (new TV, $250.00) but "needs" (three stitches at an ER, $25,000.00) are unattainable.
If seems like we keep electing presidents who promise peace but throw bombs like rice at a wedding.
We feel powerless because we are, but still carry the guilt of millions of dead innocent.
Media reports I have read about the meeting between President's Xi and Trump is that the first thing Xi said to DJT was beware the "Thucydides Trap", I hope he was prebriefed on that bit of history and scholarly debate from President Xi.
China, the masters of soft power.
Discussing the Thucydides Trap
https://gsas.harvard.edu/news/discussing-thucydides-trap