I’m saying the US cannot do anything to bring the global south as a whole to heel. It is weaker than its been in 100 years. It’s less able to wage war in Latin America than its ever been. They’d need 50 Iraq wars to stand a chance, and they don’t have the wherewithal for two. They have lost their grip on the wheel of history.

It is no coincidence that after the defeat in Vietnam War, the empire began to fade as an industrial superpower. Betting on the wrong side of the Oil Crisis further resulted in the decay of American industrial capitalism with a rising Japan (the OG China) that soundly defeated America in manufacturing, infrastructure building, high-tech industries, automation, and even the financial and real estate sector itself (the GDP of Japan’s Imperial Palace alone was greater than the entire state of California by the late 1980s at the peak of the bubble).

However, as history has clearly shown, the empire did not go down with the defeat in Vietnam and the ending of Bretton Woods. It did not go down with the oil crisis in the 1970s. It did not go down with being overtaken by Japan in nearly almost every aspect (except for military).

Instead, the empire leaped into finance capitalism, as the dissolution of the USSR in the 1990s enabled the plundering of wealth at such unprecedented scale that it created the material conditions for the empire’s leap into a hyper-financialized economy (and even fueled the dot com bubble in the early 2000s), leaving behind its own contradictions while generating new ones in the process.

For the first time in history, the world’s hegemonic superpower is the debtor, not the creditor of the world. It leverages its vast consumer market to shape global economy by running persistent trade deficits, effectively allowing the endless extraction of surplus values from the labor and resources of the Global South, while the latter countries accumulated their freely printed IOUs in exchange.

It no longer exerts its influence through the use of its military strengths (the last time the US military had a proper show of force was the 1991 Gulf War, immediately before the end of the USSR) or industrial power, but through financial and monetary imperialism, sprinkling in regime change, terrorism and political chaos in the periphery (e.g. the Balkan conflicts immediate after the EU was formed in the 1990s).

It would be a grave mistake to think that the American empire will go down with neoliberalism. If anything, it is the BRICS countries that are clinging on to neoliberal free trade status quo (explicitly demanded by export led growth strategy) and accuse the US the hypocrisy of protectionism (fair point, but still defending the neoliberal status quo instead of racing ahead of the US to transition into socialism).

Once again, it is the US empire that is taking the initiative to leap out of the sinking neoliberal capitalism, into a new but unknown stage of capitalism.

We do not know what the end result will look like, nor do we know if this will end up helping or damaging the American empire, but it is a fact that they are the ones currently taking the initiative to actively reshape the global economy while the rest of the world still clings on to the status quo (a truly missed opportunity after the Ukraine war opened up for a radical change, for once). Those who think that the empire will just crumble by itself without exerting widespread damage to the rest of the world, and that the periphery can simply do nothing and win, are going to be sorely disappointed.

As you already noticed from what is happening over the past few years, the Ukraine war and Nord Stream bombing have ended the EU rise as a consumer market (once predicted to overtake the US by the 2020s), while Covid (by luck or by design) had decimated China’s consumption market. This gives the leverage firmly to the hands of the US, for they get to dictate how the global economy and the supply chain are going to be shaped. The fact that no major country is doing anything to stop an active genocide supported by the US empire tells you as much. Trump’s actions are madness, but so were Nixon’s.

What we can do as Marxists is to study, study, study, as Lenin said, study the theory more, further develop from the existing theory, in hopes to understand the dynamic changes of global capitalism, and hopefully armed with this new found knowledge, we can develop a strategy to defeat it. If our current model cannot explain what’s going on, then we will continue to get surprised by how they got away with it while we face certain defeat.