When Market Fundamentalism Collides With Command Economies
The belief that market-driven economies inherently outperform state-coordinated systems has long been a foundational tenet of Western economic orthodoxy. Proponents point to America’s post-World War II ascendancy as definitive proof of capitalism’s superiority, yet this narrative selectively omits the historical conditions that enabled U.S. dominance. Far from a triumph of free markets, America’s rise stemmed from unprecedented state intervention: massive public investments in infrastructure, industrial capacity, and technological innovation under public programs. These initiatives transformed the U.S. into a manufacturing colossus, while the devastation of rival economies left it without meaningful competition. By 1945, America produced over 50% of global industrial output, a position secured by strategic state planning as opposed to reliance on laissez-faire policies.
Similarly, despite losing 27 million citizens and a third of its national wealth during World War II, the Soviet Union rebuilt itself into a peer superpower through centralized economic command. Its rapid reconstruction of cities like Stalingrad and leap forward in aerospace and nuclear technology demonstrated the efficacy of state-driven models in achieving strategic goals.
These historical facts present an uncomfortable truth for free-market ideologues: both Cold War superpowers reached their zenith through state-led development, not laissez-faire capitalism. America's own industrial dominance was forged through New Deal programs and wartime economic controls, while the Soviet Union's rise occurred despite unimaginable devastation. The common thread was strategic state intervention in economic development.
However, America’s postwar ideology sowed the seeds of its own decline. The neoliberal revolution of the 1980s marked a decisive shift from production to financialization, with manufacturing's share of GDP collapsing from 31% in 1953 to just 10% today. Critical industries were offshored in pursuit of short-term profits, leaving the nation dependent on foreign suppliers for essential goods ranging from advanced microchips to basic pharmaceuticals. This deliberate deindustrialization, celebrated as "progress" by financial elites, has rendered the United States ill-equipped to counter emerging rivals whose economies pragmatically blend state coordination with market mechanisms.
The End of Unipolarity
The global shift toward financialized capitalism accelerated decisively following the Soviet Union’s collapse, coinciding with America’s consolidation as an unchallenged superpower. Absent ideological counterweights, the U.S. prioritized exporting neoliberal frameworks to subordinate economies while deliberately neglecting the degradation of its own productive infrastructure. This dual trajectory of globalizing market fundamentalism abroad while tolerating industrial decay at home was a critical miscalculation. What we're now seeing is that financial dominance is not a substitute for material productive capacity in sustaining geopolitical primacy.
The consequences of this miscalculation started to become evident during the Ukraine conflict. At the start of the war, many Western analysts falsely assumed Russia would face swift military defeat and that aggressive economic sanctions would cripple its economy. Under the Biden administration, the United States and its allies sought to isolate Moscow, aiming to trigger domestic unrest and catalyze regime change. Their strategy, however, proved to be a catastrophic misjudgment that accelerated the erosion of American global influence. Rather than fracturing Russia’s resolve, the sanctions galvanized its pivot towards state-directed planning and centralized resource allocation. Meanwhile, Russia successfully pivoted its trade relationships eastward, accelerating the development of alternative financial architectures that increasingly erode dollar hegemony. Far from eroding Russian power, Western sanctions exposed the fragility of America’s financialized hegemony and accelerated the emergence of a multipolar order.
From the outset, the U.S.-led sanctions regime faced widespread rejection beyond the Western bloc. China and India, representing nearly a third of humanity, explicitly refused to comply, dealing a fatal blow to the effort to economically quarantine Russia. Other nations across the Global South similarly declined to take sides, framing the conflict as a regional dispute rather than a moral imperative. Despite these clear signals of a fragmented international order, the Biden administration doubled down on military escalation over diplomatic engagement, squandering opportunities to de-escalate.
As Western pressure intensified, Russia deepened strategic partnerships with BRICS nations and the Global South, with its alliance with China emerging as the cornerstone of the realignment. The two powers’ economies are complimentary in nature. China’s industrial machine relies on Russia’s vast energy reserves, agricultural exports, and raw materials, while Moscow gains access to critical technology and consumer markets. Bilateral trade surged to $244.8 billion in 2024, marking a 1.9% annual increase and a 48-fold jump from 1990s levels. This interdependence mirrors the U.S.-Canada economic relationship in scale, but with a crucial distinction that Russia remains a peer military power, enabling a partnership of equals rather than client-state dynamics. Together, they are crafting trade frameworks and security architectures that increasingly bypass Western institutions, signaling a durable challenge to U.S. hegemony.
The Western economic offensive against Russia has catalyzed a structural rupture in the global order, hardening divisions between the U.S.-aligned bloc and an ascendant coalition of states representing the Global Majority. BRICS now commands a greater share of global GDP (PPP) than the G7, having evolved from a symbolic forum into a functional counterweight, its members coordinating trade, energy flows, and monetary policies to bypass Western-dominated systems. Russia’s decoupling from the West proved pivotal, compelling the creation of parallel financial infrastructure untethered from the dollar.
A parallel economic system, operating through bilateral currency agreements and regional payment networks like China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), now facilitates over 40% of Russia’s trade. Through necessity, Russia has demonstrated that large-scale commerce can function entirely outside Western financial channels. As a critical global supplier of energy, food, and raw materials, Russia could not simply be excised from the world economy. Instead, its expulsion from SWIFT accelerated the adoption of alternative trade mechanisms undermining Western financial dominance.
Dollar hegemony is being dismantled in a deliberate and accelerating global realignment. China, recognizing the strategic vulnerability of dollar dependence, has also been systematically shifting away from its reliance on Western financial infrastructure. The People’s Bank of China (PBoC) recently confirmed that its digital yuan cross-border settlement system will integrate with all ten ASEAN economies and six major Middle Eastern nations—a move that, once operational, could redirect nearly 38% of global trade away from the SWIFT system. Unlike dollar-cleared transactions, these exchanges remain opaque to Western surveillance, creating a financial blind spot that neutralizes U.S. sanctions and undermines Washington’s ability to monitor and control international flows of goods and capital.
Lack of visibility into transactions conducted outside the SWIFT system also undermines strategic planning capacity of Western businesses. Farmers, manufacturers, and traders have long relied on transaction data from established financial systems to forecast demand, adjust production, and allocate resources efficiently. With a growing share of trade occurring outside these systems, such critical market insights are becoming inaccessible. This data blackout may already have distorted Western perceptions of economic realities. For instance, recent predictions of China’s economic contraction were likely based on observable declines in dollar-denominated trade volumes while failing to account for the surge in transactions conducted through alternative networks. By overestimating the reach of its financial systems, the West ends up underestimating the true resilience and scale of rival economies.
Equally consequential was the West’s weaponization of financial infrastructure through the seizure of $300 billion in Russian central bank assets. While the stated intent was to deter aggression, the move triggered a crisis of confidence among non-aligned states. Nations holding trillions in Western bonds and reserves began quietly diversifying into gold, yuan, and cryptocurrencies, questioning whether their assets might similarly be confiscated during future geopolitical disputes. The dollar’s role as a neutral medium of exchange, already eroded by decades of U.S. overreach, suffered irreversible damage, accelerating the emergence of a multipolar monetary landscape.
Why Markets Fail at Reindustrialization
Three years into the conflict, the West’s military and economic pretensions stand exposed. The Biden administration’s gamble that NATO’s arsenal and sanctions could rapidly defeat Russia revealed a systemic weakness instead. Ukrainian forces, despite receiving over $380 billion in Western aid, failed to dislodge Russian positions, exposing critical shortcomings in NATO-standard artillery, air defenses, and armor. Meanwhile, Russia’s defense industry, bolstered by Iranian and North Korean partnerships, now outproduces NATO in key munitions by a factor of three. On the other hand, the alliance’s inability to replenish its own stockpiles reveals the depth of the industrial decay resulting from financialization of western economies. Nations that were once dominant in aerospace and other advanced technology sectors now visibly lag behind China and Russia in key areas such as hypersonics, electronic warfare, and drone swarms.
Russia’s ability to outproduce NATO militarily stems directly from the structural efficiency of its state-driven industrial model. Unlike Western defense contractors driven by profit motives and shareholder demands, Russia’s state-owned military complex operates as a unified national project, prioritizing volume and cost-effectiveness over market returns. This system, largely inherited from the Soviet era, maintained dormant production capacity in form of mothballed factories. When conflict erupted, the state reactivated these assets with remarkable speed, scaling artillery shell production beyond NATO’s combined output. This advantage partially stems from the dramatically lower manufacturing costs of state-owned industry. While Western nations expend 5,000−6,000 to produce a single 155mm artillery round, Russia manufactures comparable 152mm shells for merely $600 each, representing an order-of-magnitude cost efficiency.
In fact, state-controlled enterprises rapidly came to dominate Russia’s overall economic architecture. A 2023 World Bank analysis categorizes Russian state influence into two tiers—businesses of the state (BOS), with at least 10% government ownership, and state-owned enterprises (SOEs), majority-controlled by the state. Notably, SOEs now account for a share of Russia’s GDP comparable to China’s, reflecting a deliberate alignment with Beijing’s model. In both nations, majority state ownership enables rapid resource allocation, long-term planning impervious to market volatility, and the suppression of production costs through centralized coordination.
The synergy between military and civilian state sectors further amplifies this advantage. Russia’s defense factories leverage subsidized energy, state-directed supply chains creating conditions that allow sustained high-volume output even under sanctions. China enjoys similar efficiency through its own SOEs, which dominate critical industries from steel to semiconductors, ensuring production aligns with national objectives rather than profit margins. It is becoming increasingly clear that such command-driven systems prove superior to short-term market logic in sustaining attritional struggles.
The decline of Western industrial capacity stands in contrast to the productive advantages of state-coordinated systems. Germany, once Europe’s industrial powerhouse, is now grappling with factory closures and mass layoffs. Businesses cite unsustainable energy costs as a primary driver, a crisis compounded by competition with Chinese manufacturers who benefit from cheap Russian energy and state-managed labor markets. Where China’s command-driven model strategically insulates production from market volatility, Germany’s privatized industries must prioritize short-term profitability over long-term resilience. These selection pressures lead companies to increasingly offshore operations to survive, hollowing out Europe’s manufacturing base while Beijing consolidates global market share.
The industrial erosion directly undermines Western military readiness. NATO’s reliance on profit-driven defense contractors has proven catastrophically inadequate for sustained conflict. Admiral Rob Bauer revealed in October 2023 that the cost of a single 155mm artillery shell surged from €2,000 to €8,000 within 18 months of Russia’s invasion. This fourfold price spike reflects private industry’s inability to scale production efficiently. Unlike Russia’s state-owned defense conglomerates, which leverage fixed costs and centralized planning to maintain high-volume output, Western firms prioritize shareholder returns over strategic stockpiling. Market-driven “efficiency” becomes a liability as supply chains optimized for high profit margins buckle under wartime demands.
Similar structural flaws plague the United States. On April 27, 2023, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan acknowledged that decades of financialized capitalism have “atrophied” critical industries, as offshoring and Wall Street’s dominance over Main Street gutted domestic manufacturing. Private sector focus on quarterly earnings discouraged investments in infrastructure, skilled labor, and production scalability.
These are all areas where China’s state-owned enterprises excel. While Beijing directs capital toward strategic sectors like semiconductors and green technology, U.S. industrial policy remains hamstrung by lobbying, regulatory capture, and a misplaced faith in market self-correction. The consequences are measurable and severe: the United States currently produces just 4% of the lithium, 13% of the cobalt, and none of the nickel or graphite needed to sustain its electric vehicle ambitions. Worse still, over 80% of global critical mineral processing occurs in China alone. This dependency extends to semiconductors, where America’s share of global production has dwindled to roughly 10%. The most advanced chips are almost entirely manufactured abroad, leaving U.S. supply chains vulnerable to geopolitical disruptions.
China, by contrast, has methodically built vertically integrated supply chains, ensuring control from raw materials to finished products. Profit-centric models prioritize cost-cutting and shareholder value at the expense of productive capacity, leaving Western industries ill-equipped for strategic competition. State-driven systems, by contrast, treat industrial output as a pillar of national power as opposed to a commodity to be traded or outsourced.
Before the conflict, conventional wisdom held NATO as the world’s preeminent military alliance, its supremacy so widely accepted that no state risked challenging this presumption. The war in Ukraine put this theory to the test with disastrous results. NATO-standard weaponry has not only failed to demonstrate decisive technological superiority but also exposed critical vulnerabilities in the alliance’s defense-industrial base. Most damningly, the conflict revealed NATO’s inability to scale production of munitions, replacement parts, and advanced systems at wartime pace revealing a structural shortfall undermining its capacity to sustain prolonged high-intensity combat against a near-peer adversary. These deficiencies, once taken as articles of faith to deter aggression, now stand exposed as liabilities in an era defined by industrial stamina and logistical resilience. Western economies now find “the need to look closely at Russia” to understand how to adapt.
The result is a paradigm shift in global statecraft. Smaller nations, observing the West’s inability to enforce outcomes in Ukraine, now hedge their bets, aligning with neither bloc but extracting concessions from both. The unipolar moment has ended with the quiet accumulation of gold reserves in Global South vaults and the hum of servers processing non-dollar oil trades.
The economic dimensions of Western decline now overshadow even its geopolitical missteps. While Western economies stagnate under inflationary pressures and recession risks, the World Bank has reclassified Russia as a high-income nation, while the IMF projected its GDP growth to outpace all Western economies in 2024. Far from collapsing under sanctions, Russia’s strategic reorientation toward Asia and the Global South has insulated its economy, exposing the hollowness of Western coercive measures. Meanwhile, Europe’s self-inflicted energy crisis, driven by the abrupt severing of Russian oil and gas imports, has further highlighted the asymmetry in power. As Moscow thrives by selling commodities to willing buyers, Brussels scrambles to offset shortages at ruinous costs.
The Trump administration’s escalating trade war with China marks a belated recognition of America’s industrial decay resulting from years of offshoring and financialization. While Washington now identifies reshoring as a priority, its reliance on tariffs as a primary tool reveals a profound misunderstanding of economic fundamentals. Tariffs function as blunt instruments, attempting to reverse decades of deindustrialization through coercion rather than addressing systemic drivers like shareholder primacy, wage suppression, and infrastructure neglect. The reality is that corrective action will be impossible without radical structural reforms that challenge the profit-driven logic of financial capitalism.
Over 95% of U.S. industrial sectors rely on Chinese inputs when accounting for intermediate goods. However, Trump’s tariffs ignore this reality, treating supply chains as transactional relationships rather than deeply integrated ecosystems. Temporary stockpiles of Chinese electronics and components have initially masked the coming shock, but when reserves deplete, entire industries, from automotive manufacturing to medical devices, will face production halts. The administration’s erratic reversals on critical tariffs underscore how punitive measures collapse under their own contradictions when confronted with economic necessity.
The human costs compound these strategic errors. Tariffs act as regressive taxes, inflating prices for households with no capacity to absorb further shocks. A consumption-driven recession would trigger cascading defaults on credit cards, auto loans, and mortgages creating a 2008 style crisis but without the tools to mitigate it, given depleted interest rates and exhausted fiscal buffers.
Washington’s dwindling leverage compounds the danger. The U.S. consumer market, once an irresistible magnet for trade partners, shrinks alongside its economic stature. The European Union’s thawing relations with China, negotiating climate partnerships and trade agreements, reflect a global realignment toward stability and production capacity over volatile consumption. Beijing offers infrastructure investments, energy partnerships, and manufacturing ecosystems that Washington cannot replicate.
Rebuilding U.S. industry would require trillions in sustained public investment, workforce retraining, and strategic capital controls to prioritize national resilience over shareholder returns. Tariffs alone cannot achieve this. Private investors, rational in their aversion to risk, will not commit to decades-long projects in a shrinking economy prone to political whiplash. Without state-led industrial planning, an anathema to America’s financialized elite, the trade war will accelerate decline rather than arrest it.
Markets optimized for quarterly profits cannot rebuild what they dismantled. Either the U.S. adopts the state-coordinated models it claims to oppose, or it cements its transition from industrial superpower to financialized rentier — a decline punctuated by predictable, and preventable, crises.
Thus, the strategic errors made by the Biden administration in regard to Russia are being compounded by the Trump administration’s misguided trade war against China. Both efforts relied on flawed assumptions about relative economic strength and dependence of the powers involved. U.S. policymakers wrongly presumed China needed American markets more than America needed Chinese manufacturing. This was a shocking oversight given that U.S. exports account for roughly 2% of China’s overall GDP. More critically, they failed to grasp China’s centrality to global supply chains compared to America’s role as a consumer of last resort. When Washington pressured nations to decouple from China, none complied. The reason is obvious given that 128 out of 190 countries in the world now trade more with China than with the U.S., and Beijing dominates the production of goods essential to modern life, from electronics to pharmaceuticals, while America offers little beyond its dwindling consumption capacity.
Critically, these vulnerabilities have been fomenting for years. Corporate bankruptcies in 2024 reached a 14-year high, with 61 major filings in December alone, signaling systemic instability in private sector resilience. Household finances reveal deeper rot with consumers having accumulated $74 billion in new credit card debt last year, while defaults surged to levels unseen since the 2008 recession. Over half of U.S. households now rely on credit to purchase essentials like groceries, exposing the collapse of wage growth against inflation. Unsurprisingly, consumer sentiment has cratered to its second-lowest level since record-keeping began in 1952. These pressures culminated in an official GDP contraction during the first quarter of 2024, confirming recessionary conditions that threaten to destabilize global markets. This erosion of economic fundamentals stems from the reliance on a profit-driven model that prioritize liquidity and shareholder returns over productive capacity and wage sustainability.
China’s economic architecture presents a completely different picture from America’s mounting vulnerabilities. Unlike the U.S., where stagnant wages, unsustainable debt, and evaporating savings plague households, 90% of Chinese urban families own their homes, with 80% holding deeds free of mortgages or liens. State-subsidized healthcare, education, and transportation systems further reduce living costs, while price controls on essentials like energy and food insulate citizens from inflationary shocks. These structural advantages propelled Chinese household savings to a record high in 2024, ensuring ordinary citizens retain financial buffers unimaginable to U.S. families, 52% of whom now rely on credit cards to afford groceries.
The resilience also extends to China’s industrial base. While U.S. manufacturers grapple with offshored supply chains and speculative financial markets, Beijing has mobilized its tech giants to help exporters pivot decisively toward domestic and non-Western markets. Tariff-affected industries, supported by state-funded digital platforms and logistics networks, are rapidly securing customers across Asia, Africa, and the Global South. Once these new trade corridors solidify, even a full reversal of U.S. tariffs would fail to restore former export volumes. Beijing’s strategy appears to have already borne fruit with total exports from China having risen 8.1% last month from a year earlier, much faster than the 2% pace most economists had been expecting.
The contrast in economic stability couldn't be sharper. Where the U.S. faces a self-inflicted recession fueled by financialization and wage collapse, China leverages state coordination to balance strategic autonomy with social welfare. Its citizens enjoy affordable housing and healthcare as birthrights, not commodities; its industries adapt to sanctions through planned diversification rather than chaotic market reactions. Household security paired with industrial agility positions China to endure prolonged economic conflict, while America’s fraying social contract and profit-driven decay leave it increasingly isolated in a multipolar world.
A prolonged economic rupture with China would inflict catastrophic consequences on U.S. consumers and industries reliant on imported goods, exposing a dependency Washington cannot remedy. The United States lacks domestic capacity to manufacture critical essentials from consumer electronics to advanced military components. This vulnerability persists even as the political class accelerates its decoupling agenda through trade wars and sanctions.
By severing access to affordable imports without viable alternatives, Washington risks paralyzing industries from automotive manufacturing to defense contracting, where Chinese-sourced rare earth minerals and microchips remain irreplaceable. The adage “be careful what you wish for” now looms over policymakers who, in their zeal to dismantle economic ties, have overlooked the structural impossibility of swift autarky. What began as a quest for sovereignty may end as a lesson in unintended consequences exposing the limits of wishful policymaking in a globally interconnected economy.
These structural weaknesses are intensifying as the U.S. economy contracts under the cumulative strain of strategic miscalculations. Declining consumption, long the bedrock of American global influence, threatens to catalyze a self-perpetuating spiral of disengagement. Nations once compelled to appease Washington for access to its markets now confront diminishing returns, even as China solidifies its grip on the foundational pillars of 21st-century power: renewable energy infrastructure, advanced manufacturing ecosystems, and critical mineral supply chains. This tectonic shift has redefined the locus of economic authority. Where Wall Street’s financial engineering and Silicon Valley’s disruptions once set the global agenda, primacy now belongs to those who control the tangible means of production in form of factories, refineries, and logistics networks. In this recalibrated order, the West’s dependence on abstract financialized wealth as its chief export has become a relic of a fading unipolar era.
Mounting recessionary pressures and collapsing household spending are eroding the foundational appeal that once positioned the U.S. as an indispensable economic partner. While America remains a sizable market, its role as the gravitational center of global commerce has irrevocably diminished. Trade-dependent nations, recognizing this decay, face mounting pressure to reorient their economies toward alternative systems. China, already working on multilateral trade agreements with the EU, Canada, and ASEAN states, stands poised to absorb this realignment. A state-directed economy capable of strategic long-term planning paired with a consumer base of 1.4 billion positions China as the architect of a parallel economic order defined by predictability and industrial scale.
Where Western democracies grapple with political unrest fueled by inflation, wage stagnation, and energy insecurity, the Chinese government retains broad public approval anchored in tangible stability. First-quarter GDP growth of 5.4%, surpassing expectations despite U.S. tariffs, underscores Beijing’s capacity to insulate its economy from global turbulence. Such resilience amplifies China’s appeal as a bastion of certainty in an era of cascading crises. While the IMF projects global economy to experience declining growth and inflation, China continues to leverage state-coordinated infrastructure investments and consumer subsidies to maintain equilibrium. These are the very tools missing in the West as a result of decades of neoliberal policies.
In a world destabilized by climate shocks, supply chain ruptures, and financial speculation, China’s model of state-mediated stability will increasingly supplant reliance on market fundamentalism that the U.S. champions. Nations battered by dollar volatility and recessionary contagion now prioritize access to Chinese manufacturing hubs and development financing over the fading allure of American consumer markets. What began as a recalibration of trade relations is hardening into a structural schism that rewards centralized planning over chaotic market forces, and long-term strategy over short-term profit.
At this point, these trends are likely irreversible. Nations hedging against U.S. decline will increasingly bypass dollar-denominated trade, invest in yuan reserves, and prioritize access to Chinese infrastructure financing over American consumer demand. An attempt to decouple from China may culminate in the world decoupling from Washington exposing the hubris of conflating market size with enduring power.
The Liberal International Order's Sino-Soviet Moment
The Sino-Soviet schism of the 20th century finds a modern parallel in today’s transatlantic tensions. Just as Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin triggered irreparable ideological fractures between Moscow and Beijing, Trump’s second-term policies are deepening strategic fissures between Washington and Brussels. Faced with American unilateralism, the EU increasingly views China as a pragmatic counterpart that can act as a stabilizing force against Washington’s erratic diplomacy. Though wary of Beijing, European leaders now openly court Chinese investment in green technology and critical infrastructure, signaling a reluctant pivot driven by necessity rather than idealism.
The American colossus, once unchallenged in its global dominance, now clings to relevance through coercive economic measures rather than cooperative leadership. Tariffs and export controls, framed as tools to revive domestic industry, instead serve as instruments of bloc discipline.
The U.S. does not have allies who are equal partners and decision makers. It has subordinates, bound to the American sphere by a web of obligations, elite integration, and geopolitical utility. Some provide military bases; others, economic leverage. Some serve as ideological outposts; others, as buffers against rival powers. But all exist within the gravitational pull of the American empire, their orbits determined by the whims of Washington. And now, as the empire seeks to shore up its position, it is only logical that it would demand more from its subjects. Satellite nations will be expected to increase NATO budgets, suffer tariffs, and even make territorial concessions.
The moment of reckoning has arrived, and countries who allowed themselves to become dependent on the U.S. must now face the reality that their security, prosperity, and very identities have been contingent on the strength and benevolence of the hegemon. They must now decide how to navigate the new reality they find themselves in. They can seek protection outside the American sphere, deepen their integration and make themselves useful, or simply endure the increasing demands with resigned acceptance. Each path carries its own risks and rewards, but none offers the comfort of the status quo.
The dependents are acting shocked as they find themselves on a receiving end of economic aggression from their patron. What they fail to understand is that the notion that they deserve better treatment is a relic of a bygone era. For example, Denmark has become a quintessential vassal state, its military stripped bare, and its foreign policy subsumed into the broader American aims. It sent its soldiers to fight in distant wars, not for its own interests, but as a gesture of fealty. And what has it gained in return? As the U.S. retrenches, Denmark, and nations like it, must confront their own impotence. They cannot defend themselves. They cannot seek help from their peers who are equally feeble. And so, they will likely endure the demands placed upon them because they have no alternatives available to them.
The global order of American unipolarity where the world was policed by a single superpower is gone. It is not coming back. The mirage of a post-historical utopia, where conflicts are minor and challenges are manageable, has evaporated. The rules-based order that the Western nations hid behind has been revealed as a fragile construct, dependent on the strength and will of its enforcer. As the hegemon weakens, all the dependents must now confront their own vulnerability.
It’s not a pleasant realization, but the nations in the U.S. sphere of influence must choose between embracing their dependency with open eyes or seeking pathways to autonomy. The latter path will require risk, sacrifice, and a fundamental recalibration of national priorities. But it may be the only way to reclaim a measure of historical agency.
The era of coasting on borrowed security and ideological rhetoric is over, and nations must decide whether to cling to the fading light of the empire or to seek new opportunities. For some, the choice may be clear. For others, it may be agonizing. Countries will either rise to the occasion or fade into irrelevance. In the grand scheme of things, empires rise and fall. But the choices made in the twilight of the empire will shape the world for decades to come.