America Has Been Demoted (Part One)

Well, America has never been what you think it is. It's never been what you think it is. You know? When you see someone with a a a gold medal on their chest or they have a a title belt around their waist, you think that that means that they beat somebody. You think that that means that they won something.

That's what you think. That's logical. But that's not the case with America. That's not the case with America at all. That it it never was.

That was never the the the case. When did America become the world's superpower, the unipolar superpower? Okay. Most people will say after World War two or when the Soviet Union collapsed and so forth. Okay.

These this is technically correct. Technically, that's the right answer. But think about what that actually means. Think about what that actually means. America did not become the world's superpower by defeating its rivals.

America became the world's superpower because its rivals ceased to exist. That's very different. Their rivals collapsed. Their rivals wore themselves out. That's victory by default.

Victory by default. That's not dominance. Victory by default is not dominance. It's just filling a vacancy. If everybody in the race drops dead, then you don't even have to be the fastest runner to win.

That was the case with America. That's how America got to where it is, and that changes everything. A power that only holds its position because nobody else is standing, that's fundamentally fragile. That means that the moment credible alternatives emerge, the whole thing dissolves. Not gradually, not after some long struggle.

It dissolves because the conditions that produced it were always temporary. They were always conditional. You know? If you're if if you're the only pizza place in town, then you can sell people microwave pizzas and still be successful. But the moment a real competitor real competition arrives, then that's over.

Your business is done. And that's exactly what we're watching. That's exactly what we're watching right now with The United States Of America. The so called unipolar moment. America as the the sole global superpower, the unchallengeable, the indispensable.

Well, moment is over. It's over. And I'm not saying that because I want it to be true, because I hope it's true. I'm saying it because this is an objective reading of what the evidence shows. I'm saying it with open eyes and clear vision.

And you need to understand this because you cannot keep thinking about America and you cannot keep treating America like it's something that it no longer is or like it's something that it never really even was. I can take you through it, and I'll I'll be as methodical as possible. Let's look at three three different things. Okay? Look at the historical record, first of all, because you have to understand how America got to where it got, so that then you can understand how how or why it cannot it it's impossible for it to stay there.

Second, we'll look at the structural evidence. The structural evidence of America's demotion. The institutional shifts, the military realities, the political economic realities, and so forth. Again, this is not aspiration. This is fact.

We're just gonna look at evidence. And third, and this is where it might get genuinely complicated, the internal dynamics of American power because it's not just external. It's not just America is not just being constrained by external competitors. The constraints are coming from within as well. There are domestic constraints being imposed upon America.

Domestically, the the domestic power dynamics in America are also contributing to the demotion of America from a global superpower to a regional hegemon. So let's start with history because history is is mistold about America and that the mistelling of that history has consequences to your understanding. Okay? So phase one, you're talking about 1914 to 1945, the industrial and and and economic ascendancy of America. This was not built by out competing Europe.

It was built while Europe was destroying itself across two catastrophic world wars and America was isolationist. So by 1945, The United States Of America held had approximately 50% of all global industrial output, global GDP. That wasn't because American industry was superior, it was because European industry had been bombed out, had been blockaded, had been exhausted into ruin, was destroyed. So The US emerged from World War two as the only major industrial economy that had their productive base still completely intact. That's the foundation.

Not American superiority. European self destruction, that's the basis, the beginning basis. Okay? Then phase two from 1945 to 1991, this is the cold war. So you had Soviet industrial capacity, nuclear deterrence, they had the Soviet sphere of influence across Eastern Europe, across Central Asia, across significant parts of the global South.

And American dominance during this period was always contested and it was always geographically constrained by the Soviet Union. Okay. You had proxy wars that, you know, like Vietnam ended in defeat, Korean war was a stalemate. Even though the Soviet Union was economically and technologically inferior and behind, still they were enough to keep The United States Of America in check globally for fifty years. That's your your superpower.

Okay? Phase three from 1991 onwards, Soviet Union collapses, and this is the moment that everyone points to when the Soviet Union collapses and America became the unipolar superpower. But why did the Soviet Union collapse? Was it defeated by the by the Americans? No.

They collapsed from within. It was ideological exhaustion. It was it was economic dysfunction, elite fragmentation, and corruption. The United States did not defeat the Soviet Union. They just outlasted it.

They outlasted the Soviet system until the system the Soviet system collapsed collapsed itself by its own internal contradictions. So unipolar moment happened. This is a phrase that was that was coined by Charles Krauthammer in 1990 or 1991. And it was always intended to describe a vacuum. Not a victory not a victory when you conquer your challenger.

But the moment between when you're when when one challenger disappears, between that period and when the new challenger emerges. That's the unipolar moment. It was always understood to describe a vacuum, not a victory. This this vacuum period when when one challenger has exited the stage, not been defeated, but exited the stage, collapsed, and then the next challenger emerges. It was always understood that this is what would happen because a power whose position rests, like I say, if their position rests entirely on the absence of any viable alternatives, then they will be automatically demoted the moment any viable alternatives appear.

The military defeat doesn't have to happen. No formal transfer of power has to happen. No resistance threshold has to be crossed. No revolution has to happen, what have you. The mere existence of genuine competitors dissolves the whole thing because the whole thing was never earned in the first place.

It was just inherited by default. And it can only exist in the absence of competitors. Well, have appeared. So the the the demotion of America is already structurally complete. So what we're watching now, what you're going through now is just the the institutional and the narrative catch up.

That you're trying to catch up to a reality that has already been unfolding for the last twenty years. But structurally, it's already happened. So I mean, look at the evidence. Not that we don't have look at arguments. Look at the evidence.

In 1991, the birth of the unipolar moment, The United States at that time accounted for approximately 25% of global GDP. Okay? So that's already half the post war World War two peak of 50%. In other words, over the Cold War period against an economically inferior rival, the Soviet Union, America lost half of its share of the global GDP in that fifty year period. And by 2024, The US share of global GDP declined to approximately 15%.

So that's a 10% drop in just thirty years. In thirty years during which you had no rival whatsoever, losing while having total global dominance. Okay? And now more significantly, you have BRICS, the BRICS plus, China, Russia, India, Brazil, South Africa. And then with the with the expansion in 2024, it includes functionally Saudi Arabia, officially UAE, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia.

They collectively exceed the entire g seven share of the global GDP. That's the first time since the post World War order World War two order that the the Western bloc of industrialized countries do not constitute the majority of global productive capacity in the world. Okay? This is a structural reordering of the global economy. It's already underway.

It's already happened. Okay? The dollar is still there. Yes. And the dollar still is a dominant reserve currency, but their share of global foreign exchange reserves has already declined also from 72% in two thousand twenty six years ago to approximately 58% in 2024.

So that's 14 percentage points in two decades that it has declined. And that trajectory sharpened after 2022 because of that the decision to freeze the the the the Russian assets, the Russian sovereign reserves. $300,000,000,000 worth of Russian state assets that were held in Western financial institutions, unilaterally frozen. Okay? So every state outside the western alliance immediately understood that that means that our dollar assets are not ours.

They're conditional. We're holding on to them on someone else's terms. We're holding all of the the those dollars on someone else's terms, and they can do whatever they want with them. They're not safe. Our dollars are not safe.

That was the message as of 2022, and everybody understood that. So the rational response that's now underway across multiple economies all around the world is to reduce dollar dependency. You have China's c I p s sips payment system that's now already processing transactions for over a 100 countries. You have the Enbridge Central Bank Digital Currency Project that was developed jointly by China, by The UAE, by Hong Kong, Thailand, and Saudi Arabia. And it is explicitly designed explicitly designed to enable transactions that bypass SWIFT, the SWIFT system entirely.

So the alternative financial system is being built and being used. And then there is Saudi Arabia's decision in 2023 to price a portion of their oil sales in Yuan. Okay? Everyone knows the petro petro dollar arrangement where oil can only be sold in dollars artificially increased demand for dollars. That was the load bearing pillar of dollar hegemony for fifty years.

So when Saudi Arabia decided to fraction that agreement, they did it very carefully, they did it very calculatedly the way they do everything. Well, this signaled that even one of America's most historically reliable allies in the in the region, one of the most important economic allies had come to the conclusion that being aligned exclusively to the dollar was no longer strategically viable and they're right. Now, people look at the US military as a sign of their global superpower status. They're actively bombing Iran right now. They kidnap Mundurov.

They got bases all around the world and so forth. So everyone says that, you know, they're the most powerful military on earth and that makes the narrative of military dominance sort of essential to the whole unipolar story. But the evidence in terms of their military is actually operationally, in my opinion, one of the most concrete signs that the demotion has already taken place and is and is continuing to take place. I mean, you look at their defense spending, sure, they are the winner. But the defense budget in America is not a metric of military capacity, military capability.

It's a money laundering device. You know? It's like if you buy a property at 10 times the value because you're actually just trying to gift that money to someone, and you want it to look like a transaction. That's how you do. That's what the military industrial complex is.

That's how that works. It's a subsidy. It's a it's it's like a bribe. They overpay for everything. It's corruption.

They literally lose money. So the numbers don't tell you anything about what the military can actually do. Look at the actual capacity to fight. You know? A genuine global superpower is supposed to be able to manage simultaneous peer level conflicts across multiple theaters.

The United States can't do that. America can't do that. Not anymore. Said so themselves. It's not me saying.

The 2018 national defense strategy formally acknowledged that. They don't have that capability anymore. So if you want a real metric, look at their track record. Look at their performance. So you go at 1991, Desert Storm, 34 nation coalition.

Right? Defeated a regional military power in a hundred hours of combat ground combat. That's the high watermark. Then Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan. Afghanistan, the longest war in American history concluded with a chaotic withdrawal and the restoration of the same government that you went there to overthrow in the first place.

Iraq, you had okay, you achieved your regime change, but that was followed by Iranian sphere of influence expansion into Iraq, which directly contradicted the whole stated objectives of your whole mission in the first place. Libya, you have state collapse and ongoing civil civil conflict, civil strife. In Syria, you failed in in in in all those years to get rid of Bashar Assad. You weren't able to get to get rid of him. But but Bashar didn't leave until his patrons decided to remove him.

The United States didn't remove him. So you couldn't even get rid of Bashar. You couldn't really even get rid of ISIS. Yemen, you can't stop the Houthis. You can't stop the Houthis from disrupting the Red Sea shipping lanes.

You know, what can you do now except brag about destroying fishing boats off the coast of Venezuela? And even that that that Maduro operation, you required Russian and Chinese agreement in that cooperation and you even need a cooperation from inside Maduro's own government. They're attacking Iran right now because that operation, that conflict is folded into the regional interests. And even in that, you can't even defend your own bases. You can't even defend your own allies.

Even Israel keeps getting hit. They can't prevent it. You see? They they wanna withdraw from all this. They can't manage they they wanna leave NATO.

They want Ukraine to fight to fight Russia, but they won't fight Russia. They won't fight China. No. They won't. They won't fight North Korea.

No. I mean, honestly, in terms of their capability capabilities, look, Egypt could actually do what the United States is doing here on right now. Turkey could do it. Pakistan could do it. They wouldn't do it obviously, but they could do it.

In terms of actual capacity, actually what's being done, anybody can bomb a girl's school. It's not exactly storming the beach at Normandy. No. What The US has had that others haven't had is the hubris and the psychopathy. But in terms of raw military capability, don't think that we've seen The United States military forces do anything that surpasses what other large militaries could do in at least thirty years.

Like I say, they're not doing anything in Iran that Egypt couldn't do or that Turkey couldn't do or that Pakistan couldn't do or that India couldn't do. Certainly, China couldn't do. Anyone could do in Iran what you're doing in terms of the actual military capabilities. Anyone can drop bombs. You're not doing something special.

You're not the the power that you're showing is not showing you to excel or to surpass any other military power in the region or in the world. And then you can look structurally at the the diplomatic cloud that America has lost. In 2023, it was China that was credited for brokering the normalization between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Uncle Sam wasn't in the room. Uncle Sam wasn't in the room.

That used to be his room to control. That everything in The Middle East used to belong to America. They nothing could happen in that region except that America said so. Within all within the living memory of anyone alive today, everyone knows that that was America's fear of influence, and now China is brokering deals there. The 2024 BRICS expansion with Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia joining BRICS, this is very significant.

Saudi Arabia and The UAE joining BRICS while still maintaining US formal US security ties, intelligence ties and so forth. This is the clearest possible statement that these states that are allies of America have concluded that The United States centric world order is not a permanent condition. They're building relationships with the emerging multipolar order, the multipolar system. Even while they're maintaining this with America even while America calls BRICS explicitly anti American, but they can't stop them. They can't stop them.

Anyone who wants to join Bricks, Bricks will decide. America has no say. So that's the external picture. America has been demoted. This is clear.

It it it's structural demotion and it's compounding. But the external story, the the the rising multipolarity, the the increasing options, this is a second order story. The first order story is actually, like I said, what's happening inside of America itself domestically. Obviously, I've talked about this many, many times. I've talked about the OCGFC, the owners and controllers of global financialized capital.

And I have I've said that The United States, as a state has been captured. I don't know if you really understand or really think through the ramifications of what that means that America has been captured as a state. A state that has been captured by private sector interests does not and cannot project power in pursuit of coherent national strategic objectives for the nation. It projects power in pursuit of the revenue and positioning objectives of the private sector of their captors. This is completely different.

You understand? The state cannot undertake foreign policies that conflict with the interests of a national capital. Even if it's in the even if it's in the interest of the nation. Ask not what your shareholders can do for you, ask what you can do for your shareholders. Uncle Sam is a company man.

I'm using the word captured in the technical sense. This means the demonstrated ability of concentrated private actors. Their ability to veto, to preempt, to rewrite, to delay, or to selectively enforce state policy through finance, through procurement, through media, through lobbying, through dependency. This is captured. It means you're captured.

You can see it everywhere in America. The revolving door between the United States treasury, the Federal Reserve, and all of the major financial institutions. This is so well established with the banks and so forth. This is so well well established and so well known that it's not even scandalous anymore. The regulatory agencies that are tasked with overseeing finance, with overseeing energy, telecoms, pharmaceuticals and so forth.

These are all staffed by and they return their staff to the very industries that they're supposed to be regulating. This is self regulation essentially. And American electoral politics, I mean, let's be serious. They're an auction. It's an auction.

Your politics, your your elections are an auction. There's documented bidders, there's documented prices, there's documented returns on investment. And the consequence is that the most expensive state apparatus in human history is not pursuing nationalist state strategies, it's managing a portfolio. This is the the most comprehensive constraint on American power, the most the the deepest constraint. But let me be more precise because I always have to make this distinction.

Within the OCGFC, there are two primary factions and their interest and their revenue models are not necessarily the same. They're quite different. I've discussed this before many times obviously, but it's worth repeating. The first faction is what we call the a national OCGFC. This is capital, business, and so forth that is that have they've transcended national loyalties as a category.

Their assets are distributed across jurisdictions. Their supply chains are around the world. They're global. Their supply chains are from here and there and everywhere. Their financial instruments are all denominated in multiple currencies.

They use they do transactions through multiple systems. They don't need American dominance. They're not reliant upon American dominance. What they need is a stable, legally predictable, commercially accessible global system. This is the faction that grew out of financialization and globalization accelerating through the nineteen eighties and through the nineteen nineties.

And they just outgrew any meaningful sense of nationalism. They outgrew it. The nation no longer serves their interest. Nationalism doesn't serve their interest. In fact, it can interfere with their interest.

That that was the booster rocket that got them up, but now that booster rocket has become dead weight and they wanna jettison it. You understand? So they're repositioning, and that repositioning is what we're seeing. The Mar A Lago Accord framework, they include dollar devaluation, tariff restructuring, pushing security costs onto their allies, exiting from multilateral institutions and so forth. This is not nationalistic economic policy, it's a nationalistic economic policy.

Dollar devaluation undermines dollar hegemony, which is fine for them. Institutional retreat dismantles the the the American managed so called rules rules based order. Security burden redistribution reduces the cost that America bears for maintaining the enforcement structure of their own dominance. It means they're not interested in that anymore. You understand?

This is a national capital conducting a controlled demolition of the American system of dominance. America is being downsized. It's being downsized because it can't perform like it used to at the at the scale that it used to. So it's being downsized. Because why would the captors of of the American state, the ones who captured the American state, the private sector and so forth, why would they dismantle its dominance?

That's that's one of the reasons why they captured it. Because the dominance has become an interference for them. It's gotten in the way. Then the second faction is what we call the nationalistic faction of the owners and controllers of global financial capital, the OCGFC. Their capital, their revenue model is geographically and institutionally bound to American state power, to American supremacy.

The military industrial complex, that's the archetype. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Palantir, and so forth. Their whole sort of contractor ecosystem. These are entities and companies that require The US as a customer, the US military as a distribution channel, The US geopolitical conflict as a demand generator. Their revenue model is not portable.

They can't relocate to Singapore. They need American dominance because their whole business model depends on it. So their interests are different from a national capital. But now because they're stuck in America, they have no other way to make their money except being tied to America. Now they have shifted.

So now their profit center is going to become and already is increasingly domestic. You're talking about private prison operators, surveillance technology and so forth, border enforcement contractors, data driven policing systems and so forth, militarized policing. All of these things require a very active and easily spending interventionist American state. And they require one very specific thing which is permanent insecurity. A stable secure domestic population does not generate sufficient demand for surveillance, for detention, for militarized policing.

So they need things to be unsteady. They want a counter insurgency. So insecurity is managed. It's managed not resolved. Immigration is managed.

It's managed to sustain border enforcement contracts. You want to you want problems always. You don't want them to be resolved. You don't wanna eliminate the demand. Urban instability is managed to justify the militarized policing surveillance detention and so forth.

It's not addressed. It's not addressed through any type of measures or policies that would actually reduce the problems. People think this is a conspiracy. It's not a conspiracy. It's a business model.

It's just a business model. And internationally, obviously, we already know this translates directly into conflict management logic. The nationalistic OCGFC have no interest in a negotiated settlement in Ukraine, for example. Settlement would terminate the weapons contracts. Settlement would terminate the intelligence expansion, the the advisory deployments and so forth.

The conflict as a managed asset that is supposed to be sustained and not they're not supposed to let it escalate to the point of great power confrontation. This is their the the optimal outcome for them. Latin America follows the same logic. The cartel economy is not a policy failure from their perspective, from the nationalist negotiate GFC perspective, no. Cartel activity justifies militarized border enforcement.

It justifies counter narcotics programs, counter terrorism programs, surveillance technology, deployment, again, detentions and so forth. I mean, the conditions that generate cartel power, they give the cartels the power, that could be addressed at some point, but it's never gonna be addressed. That will never be addressed. Because if you resolve these problems, then you would also eliminate the demand for the entire domestic the entire domestic security suite security product suite. Now these factions do have competing interests, but the but you understand the relationship between these two factions is not a competition between equals.

The nationalistic OCGFC, those companies are are investment holdings within a national OCGFC portfolios. BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, and so forth. The three largest institutional shareholders in most of The US defense and security firms. These are a national entities. These are the same entities whose capital is simultaneously positioned across the global South and and and investing in the global transition.

So the nationalistic faction can't go rogue. They can't go too rogue anyway. There will always be an escalation ladder and there will always be a ceiling to that ladder where it can't go past that. They can pursue conflict maintenance operations through a corridors of permissibility defined by a national capital. You understand corridors of permissibility and they can't break through those corridors and they can't act outside of those corridors.

This applies in my opinion to Iran right now. The military operation that the attacks that are going on now, this serves that the nationalistic o c OCGFC, they get to drop their bombs and they get to sell the replenishments for those bombs, but they're not gonna be allowed to escalate to the point of state collapse because that would produce regional chaos that is damaging to Gulf capital positions. And and the Gulf is connected to the a national o c g f c. That would disrupt energy infrastructure and so forth. That's it within the a national portfolios.

And it would put a whole a complete freeze on the whole global south repositioning project. So I think that constraint will hold. I don't think that we'll see state collapse in in on. I don't think anyone is actually trying to pursue that. So let me put this together.

The full picture of American power constraint, the constraints on American power right now is not just external multipolarity and the existence of alternatives, and it isn't just the internal capture. It's the interaction between the two, between these two dynamics. External multipolarity, the existence of alternatives. This constrains what American power can actually achieve. Chinese military capabilities, for example, constrain US dominance in the in the the Indo Pacific, the South China Sea and so forth.

Russian nuclear deterrence constrains direct confrontation in Europe. For example, the BRICS plus financial systems and alternatives. This constrains the coercive reach of American unilateral sanctions, dollar sanctions. Okay? These are the hard constraints on American power projection from the external.

And the internal capture constraints on American power is it constrains what what American power is permitted to do. There's the external, what they it it constrains what they can do, what is actually achievable for them, but the internal constraints by by the by the fact that they have been captured. Those in the internal constraint of their capture, the private sector capture of the state, this puts constraints on what they are even allowed to try to do. The a national OCGFC's repositioning requires the multipolar system to succeed because their capital is being placed in the global south. Their capital is being placed in bricks financial systems, in the in the commodity corridors that constitute the emerging multi polar economy.

So the a national OCGFC have a direct interest in constraining the American state from disrupting this transition too badly. This is why for example decoupling from China is so selective on the part of America. They target specific sectors, semiconductors, AI adjacent technologies and so forth, military supply chains and whatnot, while still leaving completely intact the vast manufacturing and the commercial interdependence that a national capital depends upon. A genuine rupture with China would destroy enormous value in their portfolios, and this isn't gonna happen. They're not gonna do that.

I mean, even the decoupling itself is not really about trying to hurt China. It's about shrinking America's sphere of influence and pushing China to expand their sphere of influence into the regions where The US is withdrawing from. The nationalistic faction channels the American power towards American state power towards whatever generates revenues for them. Regardless of whether it serves any coherent national interest, any strategic objective. It doesn't matter at all.

This is the most consequential paradox in in in contemporary geopolitics, you could argue. That you have the most expensive military in human history that cannot win wars and that doesn't have to. They don't have to because victory would terminate the revenue stream. They're not interested in winning wars. You understand?

The war in Afghanistan transferred approximately $2,100,000,000,000 from the US treasury into the coffers of the nationalistic OCGFC. After which, the original adversary was restored to power. I mean, from a national strategic standpoint, that's a catastrophic failure. But from the revenue standpoint, it's a perfectly executed operation. It's beautiful.

It's perfect. They're not interested in winning wars. America is a regional power now. No more, no less. They are a regional power.

They are no longer the global superpower, and this has direct implications. You have to understand this. This has direct implications for how non western states should now engage with American power. That's the whole point. That's the whole point of talking about this.

Because the countries of the global south have to understand how to navigate dealing with America. Because America still has tremendous coercive capacity. They're still dangerous within the a national OCGFC's permitted operational corridor for the nationalistic OCGFC. So states that fall within that corridor, states that have accessible extraction targets without having countervailing a national associated interest, then they remain genuinely vulnerable. See, none of this none of this change makes American power benign in any way whatsoever, but it does make it more predictable.

You can map where it may be applied, where it will be applied, where it will be constrained, where it should be constrained by mapping the factional interests that are tied to this or that area, this or that region, or these or those interests. You understand? Yes. The multipolar transition is happening. It's underway and it will proceed.

There's not another way for things to go. But everyone who's happy about multipolarity and understandable that everyone is happy about it. But don't overlook the risks, the actual risks. The risk isn't that the transition is gonna fail. The risk is that the transition will succeed, but it will succeed on terms that are preset by a national capital and not by our own people.