As with all speculation, all opinions expressed here are my own personal opinions at the current and present time. They will be different in a year, five years, or even tomorrow. My supporting claims may be factually wrong, either partially or completely, you will note I haven’t bothered to reference any of my claims nor speculations to emphasise how untrustworthy anything in this essay is. I write this essay purely to clarify my own thinking and to better position my family and those I care about.
Last post I claimed:
I am one of the few I believe to have correctly predicted the current secession of the United States from its colonial outposts in Europe in approximate timing, form and nature. Because I never wrote any of that down, only the people who know me well enough to have heard me blabbing on about all this since a few years after the financial collapse will be able to confirm it. I made the suspicion roughly after returning from working for BlackBerry in Canada [ed: in 2013], it got confirmed with how the first election of Donald Trump came about, and obviously we are right now in the beginning of said secession.
We are used to empires of antiquity only shrinking due to misfortune, defeat or incompetence. As a result, we tend to assume that once you have an Empire, nobody would willingly give it up. However, this hasn’t been true in recent centuries in Europe – those who gain Empire generally did so for good reasons at the time, and those reasons can change in ways where maintaining Empire no longer seems worth it. After all, Empire is (i) expensive (ii) unpopular with the citizenry who would much rather rulers concern themselves with local issues not faraway ones (iii) a lot of complicated effort balancing off competing foreign interests in a long term sustainable way, replete with much unpleasant surprise and blame whether things were your fault or not. One thus sees a pattern throughout European recent history of empires voluntarily disestablishing themselves, as I think the United States has just begun to do for its empire.
Five hundred years of European colonial empires
So, why does an Empire voluntarily give up its imperium? As the United States is the latest in a series of European globe striding colonial empires over the past five hundred years, I’ll only look at what I think are the relevant subset of European colonial empires preceding the American one, as I think how those ended are the most applicable to the current disestablishment:
- The Spanish-Portuguese empire collapsed in the 1820s after Napoleon showed that Spain was no longer a worthy keeper of its colonies.
- The First British empire (up to 1783, mostly in North America).
- The First French empire, up to the Napoleonic conquest of Europe ended in 1815 and taking with it many of the institutions that had kept Europe relatively stable for centuries – in particular the Holy Roman Empire, which had kept the Germanic peoples restrained.
- The Second British and French empires from 1820 onwards peaked around 1920, which together had been a sufficient global superpower to ensure a century of relative global peace. It ended by the 1960s after it had become fully internalised that the United States had taken over as global hegemon.
I use the term ‘colonial Empire’ because that’s what the literature uses, and readers will instantly know what it means. But really all these are sea-faring Empires based around far away colonies overseas – and most of the other European empires at the same time were principally land-based Empires, who tended towards regional spheres of influence as a result. Nations surrounded by sea have a natural advantage to specialise in maritime projections of power and trade, but it has an effect on cultures and values too – liberalism, individualism and egalitarianism as philosophies and mentalities tend to be more popular in maritime-focused cultures than land-focused cultures. This distinction will matter later in this essay.
Let’s take each of those colonial Empires in turn. The first modern European colonial empire ended because Spain and Portugal principally used their colonial income to purchase goods and services from Northern Europe, including mercenaries to fight their wars, rather than develop their own local industry and maintain their own local military of sufficient potency. Partially this was geography – the Iberian peninsula is almost like an island off the coast of Europe as its land bridge is high mountains. Certainly, at the time, by far the easiest way to get to it was by sea, which bred a certain complacency about invasion from anywhere but from the Moors to the south. Additionally, the land and weather were neither as agriculturally nor industrially forgiving nor bountiful as in Northern Europe, plus Northern Europe was where all the finance was. This is a good example of what happens when you offshore the wrong things to others – the others grow stronger off your wealth until you can’t stop them from invading you.
It’s not like all this wasn’t well known at the time by Spanish rulers. They embarked on multiple rounds of reform. Unfortunately, they weren’t executed competently, and arguably a full century of effort was put into turning things around by the Bourbons without much to show for it when Napoleon turned up. All that said, out of all the places Napoleon conquered, by far the most indigestible was the Iberian peninsula until his fateful Russian invasion. The lessons on how the Spanish managed their Empire and how they lost it was noticed by other Europeans.
The French and British empires fed off one another, with each desperate to prevent the other from gaining a significant advantage. In this, they continued an ancient rivalry as neighbours which had continually invaded one another for centuries and had then gone on to compete for North America which the British initially won, only for the newly formed United States to then secede. Though it waxed and waned, since independence the United States was mostly ambivalent towards Britain and France, and not much of an ally until the 20th century. They were happy to trade with the other maritime powers, and the wealth which accumulated within the US enabled the industrialisation which made the US Empire possible later. In any case, Europe had its reliable flows of cheap raw materials from North America without the hassle of governing, which was another useful lesson learned.
Obviously, Napoleon conquering all of Europe within a few short years scared the pants off the British, which caused them to double down on imperial expansion after 1815 to ensure that France would not threaten them again. France kept up a fair pace of colonial expansion into especially Africa to ensure it didn’t fall too far behind Britain. Between the two of them, the world gained a century of relative peace (‘Pax Britannica’) during which Central and Eastern Europe industrialised and militarised, setting the stage for WW1, then a pause, then its continuation WW2 which put Germany back in its pre-Napoleonic role as the restrained European hegemon, this time with the EU replacing the Holy Roman Empire as the German-restraining mechanism (both of which have eerily similar internal structures and processes, which is surely not a coincidence).
My claim is that Britain arguably overextended its Empire after the shock of Napoleon principally out of fear of what might happen if it didn’t. You need a critical mass of people to agree on that fear to achieve enough consensus to agree on such an allocation of resources to abroad rather than to home (which is never popular under any system of government). When post-revolutionary France suddenly leapt ahead in imperial accomplishment, and Britain had to muster everything to defeat Napoleon, it established uncontroversially with the British ruling elite that that genie must be firmly kept within the bottle going forth.
Whilst the British Empire technically peaked in 1920, it was approaching bankruptcy and it was widely recognised as having been unwell for some decades by that point. Most think that imperial decline set in during the long economic depression starting from 1873, during which continuing to pay for Empire began to be increasingly questioned. By the time the 20th century had begun, real doubt had set in whether the monies spent on ensuring the empire were worth it. After all, by then most regions of the world now had regional rulers who were more than happy to extract resources, put them on a boat and sell them to you for a price just like the United States. Why bother directly running colonies and getting all the blame, hassle and stress, when you could get most of the value of having colonies without the bother of running them?
Also – and I think this is more important than people realise – by 1890, approximately four generations had lived since Napoleon. By the time you get to great-grandchildren in charge of things, the memories and convictions of great-grandparents become more abstract facts than sincerely and deeply held truisms. I note that the United States believed in the need to maintain its empire for around 80 years after WW2; what it is doing now is because a sufficient number of its ruling elite no longer fears the consequences of withdrawing US hard power from Europe. That is almost exactly the same timescale on which Britain stopped committing fully to its Empire. I think this parallel in Imperial evolution timelines is not widely realised, in fact let’s compare the British and American imperial timelines directly:
| Britain | USA | Time since existential threat was dealt with | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Existential threat vanquished | 1815 | 1945 | ||
| Imperial overexpansion caused extended Economic depression1 begins | 1873 | 2008 | (58 years) | (63 years) |
| Usefulness of Empire loses consensus within ruling elites | 1900 | 2025? | (85 years) | (80? years) |
Ah, but what about the 1973 stagflation period I hear you ask? Well, WW1 ended in 1918. 1973 - 1918 = 55 years. I’ve no idea if it isn’t just coincidence that these durations happen to align so well, and no doubt that the 1970s stagflation was brought on early by the oil price shocks from the Middle East (though the Economics literature is fairly sure stagflation would have happened anyway by the end of the 1970s).
All these resonances make you ponder, don’t they?
[1]: The meaning of ‘Extended Economic depression’ ought to be clarified – it is when an economic downturn lasts decades and during which a majority of the population feels that their lot in life is diminishing. The 1873 long depression lasted a quarter century and was particularly notable for most workers remaining both employed and increasing their purchasing power throughout due to falling prices; despite this there was rising anger with ruling elites for ‘cheating the system’ in favour of themselves – in reality, profit margins had fallen as mass production had soared, so this long depression was one of industrial overcapacity tying up capital in unproductive uses, so the ruling elite looked like they owned all the wealth, but they were actually quite trapped by how little capital there was around for growth. The current long depression starting in 2008 has run for seventeen years so far, and looks more similar to the 1873 long depression than any other I can think of – once again populists who impose tariffs are put in power by angry populations despite that on most measures, those populations are better off economically than they were before the depression began. The 1873 depression was ended by remilitarisation and sending off enough of that population to war that those who returned were grateful for their lots in life, and no longer so angry with ruling elites (which is paradoxical given those elites sent them off to die, but there you have it!). I suspect this depression is also ending with remilitarisation, and the only question will be whether war can be averted this time?
The post-WW2 European compact
It is worth recollecting why the US colonised Europe in the first place after WW2, and were generally welcomed in to do so at the time by most European countries – indeed, only France, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland and Ireland out of all the European countries west of the Iron Curtain do not host US military bases.
Europeans, having repeatedly demonstrated their fondness for ethnically cleansing each other over millennia, were clearly unfit to have nuclear weapons. And I think that most of the Western and Central European ruling elite were wise enough to agree more or less to not obtaining them for the most part, and so you got the strange system of America lending nuclear weapons to various European countries who then claim they have no nuclear weapons, which persists to this day. Britain does have her own nuclear weapons, but depends exclusively on the US to maintain those weapons, which gives the US considerable soft power over British nuclear doctrine. Only France and Russia have a completely sovereign and independent weapon, targeting and delivery system. They alone can independently posture a potential nuclear strike by airplane bomber to warn off aggressors, as the British rely exclusively on US kit for non-submarine launched strikes i.e. British nukes would need to be mounted on US made missiles or aircraft, which gives the US a say over most of their use. And apart from Russia, France and Britain, no other European country has the capability to target hard power anywhere on the planet.
The United States holding a veto over European hard power was designed into the system from the beginning. The US, having been drawn into global war for a second time to protect its interests, was keen on preventing Europe from waging war going forth. So a compact was formed: European nations provided boots on the ground and raw numbers and paid for lots of expensive US kit which generated lots of good US factory jobs. The US kept a monopoly on strategic command, intelligence, and the ability to coordinate all the European militaries as a whole, with only France mounting a relevant objection to such submissiveness. Yes, some individual countries could to a limited degree coordinate and plan a mobilisation on their own – France independently, Britain with much quiet technical help and therefore acquiescence from the United States – but nobody other than the United States had the capacity to marshall European forces as a single entity.
Whilst expensive, the United States at the time gained much from this arrangement:
- They got a front seat to preventing the expansion of Communism (and actually Eurasianism) via Soviet Russia.
- They stopped European countries getting themselves into a state where they would blow up civilisation, including the United States.
- Post WW2, only three other parts of the world had shown any ability to challenge US power across a global scale: the Soviets, Japan, and Europe. By keeping Europe and Japan under the US colonial thumb, they were neutered as threats to US hard power preeminence. And Japan and Europe ‘bookended’ the Soviet threat from both sides, physically containing it with buffer states between it and the US.
- Whenever the US wanted to do something globally unpopular, it could hark back to the allied coalition of WW2 by getting most of those same countries to send their troops to fight alongside US troops. It therefore could claim a moral superiority by likening whatever unpopular thing it was doing with defeating Nazis in a coalition of the same allies which defeated Nazism. This was very useful – especially to the domestic audience – so long as you cared about looking morally superior and enough people remembered and cared about what happened during WW2.
The expansion of the United States Empire came with submission of Western Europe and Far Eastern Asia, and constraint of historical Eurasianism. This is what geopolitics calls ‘Atlanticism vs Eurasianism’, which is very long recognised in the literature – indeed, Orwell’s three warring superstates in 1984 were called Oceania (Americas + Anglo Saxon countries), Eurasia (Europe + Russia) and Eastasia (China + Far East). This gross oversimplification was at the time less true than it is today – but as with much in 1984, Orwell did a great job at extrapolating the future accurately from ongoing trends in his time.
I think things began to change the status quo due to these principle events:
- The elimination of Soviet Russia as the only near peer global power (1991), which made Eurasianism as an ideological and economic competitor to Atlanticism seem a spent force to the United States ruling elite (to a certain extent, I think they conflate the defeat of Soviet Communism with the defeat of Eurasianism as an ideology and dream).
- The rise of the EU and China as peer economic competitors. I’m going to claim year 2005 for that realisation sinking in (see below). Europe no longer seemed to be where one ought to be concentrating compared to the rising ‘Eastasia’.
- The older generations who could still remember WW2 died off, and ever fewer people in charge held the old truisms about the need for American Empire.
- The partial deindustrialisation which had earlier afflicted Europe as industry moved to cheaper locations was applied on relevant portions of the United States after a lag of a couple of decades. Europe mostly reacted with worker retraining programmes which were somewhat successful at least with the children of the dispossessed – whereas the United States mainly did not, leaving behind multiple compounding generations of dispossessed citizens whose chronic illnesses are amplified by obesity, opiates and insecurity.
I began to notice calls within the US to withdraw from Europe starting from around year 2005. At the time, I took it as the Americans being pissed off by European negativity about their invasion of Iraq, but with hindsight I think that the organisation of the invasion of Iraq had made people deeply evaluate the cost benefits of empire for the first time since the end of the Cold War. I think the financial crash of 2009 both distracted the ruling elite for a while, but also strengthened the belief that the money spent on maintaining Empire is an opportunity cost, and that money would be better spent elsewhere. Currently, much noise is made in the US about ‘pivoting’ to Asia, conveniently ignoring the fact that a remilitarised Europe is a far stronger challenge to US interests not least due to simple geographic proximity, and that Europe still controls far more of the critical supply lines for the US economy than anywhere else (indeed, something like twice that of China). So I actually think that enough of the US ruling elite have decided that empire is no longer worth it that its disestablishment has begun, and there will be no more a pivot to Asia than comprehensive withdrawal from its Empire worldwide, despite the loud claims otherwise.
To be clear, I think belief in things like Empire is a bit like herd immunity from vaccines. If 95% of your ruling elite think it important enough, you get continuing Empire. If ‘herd immunity’ drops below some threshold – let’s say 75%, you get no more Empire. The same happened in Britain, by around 1900 you had a significant few influential people within the establishment holding the opinion that colonial Empire no longer suited British interests. That was all that was needed for it to unwind – all you need is ‘just enough’ doubt.
As Britain then learned, losing your Empire means losing lots of other things too. As late as 1970, Britain still made something like one eighth of all manufactured goods produced globally, and its opinion carried global weight worldwide. Within ten years, all those factories had been closed and all their workers made unemployed. Strikes were called, and then labour was crushed, permanently transforming British society into what could be called a traumatised people prone to epidemics of mass false belief and lashing out against manufactured fake threats. Until very recently when the recently appointed UK Prime Minister Starmer very unexpectedly actually turned out to be something of a global leader, I think it reasonable to say Britain had become mostly viewed globally as a self destroying basket case, and its opinion worth only ridicule if it was noticed at all.
It’s no fun for a country to lose empire. Yes, your young adults no longer need to go fight in endless foreign wars; yes, the money saved can now be spent on national urgencies instead, whether infrastructure or hospitals or more social welfare; yes your politicians can now spend far more time attending to domestic issues than worrying about countries far away.
But the loss of international clout and global dominance also means substantial economic and cultural retrenchment, and as with Britain, generally it is your lower socioeconomic classes who get hit especially hard as economic primacy ebbs away. The US has plenty of ‘left behind’ places, but not as many as Europe in my opinion, and nothing like as entrenched either. I have visited ‘shit holes’ in the US, UK and France. The ones in the US have started to dig themselves out after a decade or two – the ones in the UK and France are as awful and unchanged as they were when I first visited, and I see no good reason that they will ever get better so long as their countries remain on the path they have been on.
I am therefore confident that misery will become especially entrenched in swathes of the US, far worse than at present. I am confident that shrinking US military capacity will mean Europe and/or China will be far more capable of dictating how things shall be to the US in the decades to come – something which will be a shock to a population and culture not used to submissiveness. If the effect of British, Spanish, French, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman post-imperial relative decline on their populations and culture are anything to go by, it’s going to be real not fun for the American people over the next few decades as their relative decline of importance in the world speeds up, and their population reels at how much appears to have gone so very wrong. I expect they will become very bitter, like in swathes of Europe today, bitter at anything and everything they define as ‘other’.
What I think is next medium term for Europe?
Europe has clearly decided to remove the United States monopoly on the power to mobilise European armies as a single entity, and they have committed at least one trillion (yes, one thousand billion) euro to excising US hegemony from Europe. That is a very serious amount of money by any standard. It demonstrates genuine true commitment to the end goal. It means that this time, they really are serious about achieving this, unlike in the past.
From my best calculations, going forth from now Europe will spend in PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) terms more than the US spends annually on its military2. Given how Germany went from negligible military power in 1933 to being able to conquer Europe by 1939, a decade from now Europe should be once again the most powerful, most modern, and most recently battle-hardened by modern warfare hard power on the planet. I expect at least 500 new nuclear weapons and delivery systems based on the French design to be secretly manufactured starting about now. Europe will eventually need to have about 2,000 nukes, I expect China to top out at around 2,000 nukes, and I expect the United States and possibly Russia to shrink their down to maybe 2,500 nukes each for the simple reasons that (a) maintaining them is very expensive and (b) two thousand modern nuclear weapons is more than enough to end current human civilisation: each bomb will vaporise a city. The United States has about 300 medium-sized cities; Europe has around 800 similar sized cities. Destroy all the cities and put radioactive nuclear fallout over anything which can grow food … well, no more current civilisation. Two thousand nukes is enough to simultaneously destroy both the US and China. You don’t need more.
However, due to lack of any singular command, Europe will be a highly impotent hard power incapable of fully directing itself at more than the most urgent of self interest. So, a bit like with how the Holy Roman Empire and how now the EU restrains Germany, how Europe governs itself will undoubtedly enfeeble its newly reacquired hard military power. Uncontroversial things like direct threats to European borders will galvanise support (and as a result, I think Russia’s recent expansionism is now doomed in the medium term), but for distant hard power projection I don’t see Europe being able to easily muster sufficient consensus unless it is completely uncontroversial. UN-backed peacekeeping missions etc will be the extent of concerted EU global hard power projection.
This will leave the relatively less potent military powers of China and the US competitive because they will have a single leadership able to focus on a single set of coherent objectives in a way Europe never will, barring a massive change in how Europe coordinates itself e.g. another Napoleon. I don’t doubt both the US and China will establish their regional spheres of influence, and rivalry will appear wherever those spheres intersect. In any case, the days of a single global hegemon will in the medium term be over.
[2]: A US dollar bought 45% more stuff if spent in the EU in 2023 according to PPP calculations because costs are 45% lower than in the US, so a US dollar ‘goes further’.
Will a three global hegemon state be stable long term?
Game theory says that only two actors can achieve stable outcomes. Three actors cannot. Physics agrees – two similar sized bodies in a gravitational system is stable. Three similar sized bodies is not.
However, the three future bodies will be anything but similar sized. I don’t see Europe as capable of jockeying for power at the edges of its sphere of influence like China and the US will be able. It simply will move too slowly, with too much uncertainty to compete with speed. Where it will undoubtedly compete instead is where its slow, ponderous processes work best which in my opinion is surely going to be expansion of its boundaries. Europe’s population is one of the oldest in the world, and will decline in population quicker than China’s and especially America’s. As mass immigration from outside the EU is deeply unpopular, the obvious solution is to admit more neighbouring countries into the EU. I can see Ukraine, Turkey, and even Russia joining the EU in the next few decades.
Yes – Russia. Due to so many decades of Atlanticism prevailing, people in Anglo-Saxon countries forget that half of Europe – and arguably more than half – naturally tends to illiberal Eurasianism in thought and culture. Having been suppressed for decades, that is currently most noticeable in the resurgence of the far right, however European illiberalism has never disappeared nor do I expect it ever will.
While American Atlanticism may currently consider Eurasianism a spent force, many towards the east of Europe think Eurasianism is on the cusp of re-ascendency. A Europe freed of US colonial influence would be acceptable to Russia, and Russia has cheap energy and raw materials and thousands of nuclear weapons all of which would be very useful to European soft and hard power. Europe has the economic clout and financing Russia lacks. Russia would correctly conclude that by joining, it could exert considerable influence over EU policy and direction from within, more so than by staying out, plus it would neuter the considerable military threat now growing right on its doorstep. Indeed, Putin’s equivalent to Mein Kampf for Hitler is arguably Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics in terms of a single book which lays out his preferred vision of the future and how to get there. Published in 1997, it is about pushing the US and Britain out of Europe by weakening them from within by sowing discord and misinformation within their liberally managed but not well educated polities, and forcing repeated crises which rock the establishment, and then ‘reverse merging’ the EU to regain all the lost Russian satellites back under its wing i.e. Russia gets everything its ruling elite have wanted since the Mongolian Empire ended – the Russian Empire restored, now including all of Europe, with a single continuous hegemonic platform from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Russia becomes able to project herself as a global power never possible previously with the insufficient economic heft Soviet Communism could generate.
Obviously that’s the dream, and reality will fall far short of any dream. But there’s a lot of mutual benefit to doing a deal if the US leaves the European stage – Russia has plenty of the stuff Europe wants both ideologically and in materials, and US withdrawal will leave a vacuum which shall be filled. Russia similarly gains, and post-Putin those running things on both sides will surely see a blue moon historical opportunity for a union. I think it highly likely that post-Putin and post-US, Russia will declare itself to have renounced all its bad ways, apply to join the EU, and I think the EU will accept after putting on a sufficient show of ‘being tough on Russia’. This could begin as soon as fifteen years from now, so maybe by year 2040. The historical dream of Eurasia will be finally achieved.
The founding of a stable Eurasia will disturb status quos – admitting Russia would give the EU an extensive land border with China, which may or may not be welcomed at the time. China’s government is generally pragmatic – a land border with an expanded EU may well be considered an opportunity as much as a threat, if China continues to think of the EU as it does now – rather ineffective, and therefore not much of a threat. That said, such a Eurasia would truly be a colossus globally speaking – the biggest economy, by far the biggest military, the biggest continuous land mass, and around one billion (admittedly rather elderly) citizens. China has always feared threats from its north, so such a titan appearing alongside may go down poorly. Hard to say this far out – it may insist on some sort of buffer state in between, as is likely for Canada to become between Eurasia and the United States.
I’m not at all sure how much I personally would like the EU with Russia and her supporting countries exercising her influence within, tilting the centre of political discourse and culture far to the right of now, and with distinctly illiberal elements. I think the new centre would be somewhat around Hungary’s present right wing, and I think such an EU would be quite distasteful to me personally. But I know from history that systems of equally sized powers lead to catastrophic war – you need somebody to be the biggest, baddest hegemon to ensure peace. An illiberal Europe as the global hegemon is better than nuclear ashes, and it will still be relatively liberal compared to many parts of the world. It is therefore better than almost all the alternatives I can think of, so I’d have to get over it.
There is also India, which is surely to become a great power sooner rather than later. I don’t currently see imperial ambitions, but I do see them expanding their sphere of influence to the detriment of China’s and Russia’s. And that will truly make the system a three body problem, which is definitely unstable. Long term stability needs to avoid equally sized powers.
What I think is immediately next for the US?
I can’t say anything useful about a potential US-Europe-China-India world as it’s too unpredictable, so bringing it back to what I care about i.e. family, friends etc, what happens in the next few years in Europe and the US?
It seems hard to believe that the US won’t experience a substantial economic contraction next. Never mind the tariffs, it’s the uncertainty which ruins economic confidence. Nobody can now trust that anything from the United States, including from its companies, will provide uninterrupted service after the current US President put a halt to even commercial supplies of services by US firms to foreigners (one example of several is when the US very recently prevented its companies supplying commercial grade satellite photos to Ukraine – something I personally have purchased in the past, and from now onwards I could not be sure I could purchase in the future). Why make your business reliant on goods and services from US firms when they could be suddenly halted, or their price suddenly rise by 20% or more? So I expect a hefty withdrawal by global buyers from anything US supplied, and there is nothing anybody can do to stop that now as confidence and trust have been lost.
Not only is anything from the US now unreliable, Economics teaches that fiscal deficits are financed by trade imbalances i.e. you can run a deficit in your fiscal budget if and only if you have a negative flow in your foreign trade so they cancel each other out. If you remove your trade deficit with foreigners using tariffs and/or by scaring them off to other suppliers, you have to also eliminate your fiscal deficit, otherwise you get a run on your currency and capital flees your economy (i.e. a stock and bond market crash combined with your currency crashing). That means the US government will have to close their fiscal deficit either by spending cuts or tax rises. Neither is good for economic growth. It doesn’t help that two of the major sources of US deficit financing – Europe and China – will be spending lots of money domestically going forth instead of putting it into US Treasuries which fills in the US government fiscal gap. There is a confluence of factors all at once very negative for the US economic outlook. In fact, I struggle to think of a parallel in Economic history where so many negative economic factors occurred simultaneously. From a pure Economist perspective, what will happen next is very exciting, but for real people on the ground in the United States I can’t see it being anything other than awful.
On that basis, it would seem reasonable that due to severe recession, the mid-term US elections in 2026 could put both houses under the control of Democrats, who would surely then impeach the current US President who by then would be very deeply unpopular with voters. I am sure some purging of his movement and ideology would then occur, some passing of new laws to reduce the powers of the ‘elected King’ going forth, and somebody more reliable put into the White House instead. Some fine words might be said about recommitting to US hegemony, but to be honest once enough of the ruling elite don’t want to do Empire any more – and by proactively enabling Trump v2 which they very easily could have stopped, they clearly don’t want to do Empire from now on – only more rapid withdrawal from the world is coming next for the United States. Only a crisis which existentially threatens the US can change that now.
What I think is immediately next for Europe?
Europe is about to receive a sustained fiscal firehose of money. Due to such substantial and sustained fiscal stimulus, it seems very hard to believe that the recession of the past few years won’t end as a result. Parts of Europe strongly tied to the US economy like Ireland will see recession, but Central Europe I think will roar to life as factories start churning out weapons by the million, and most of Central and Eastern Europe starts mandatory military training of its citizens. All that new spending combined with taking so many workers out of the workforce will surely be inflationary, so I think the cost of living is going to rise, and therefore so will interest rates to try and hold down inflation.
As supply chains diversify away from the US to more reliable suppliers, I expect China to especially benefit, perhaps even enough for its economy to exit the economic depression they’ve been faking that they’re not having. Their leadership is more than well aware of this once in a generation opportunity to end the unipolar world and the ‘collective West’, so they’ve been sending lots of high level representatives to Europe all of whom have been saying lots of nice things to Europeans about how poorly they’re being treated, and making it very clear that Chinese factories stand ready, and Chinese supply chains are reliable and trustworthy not like American factories. I see Turkey has been doing the exact same, pitching itself as a near shore supplier of anything Europe might need locally produced, and also talking up how poorly the Europeans are being treated. The Turks, like the French, are amongst the very few in Europe to have 100% US independent weapon systems to sell, and as a member of NATO all their kit will work with existing NATO kit without issue. All very canny of them, and I expect the military industrial complexes of France-China-Turkey will do well out of all this.
All that said, there is substantial external risk for Europe. If there is a run on US treasuries, the catastrophic consequences on the global economy cannot be overstated. I find it hard to believe that the US Congress wouldn’t do what it takes to prevent that, same as during the financial crash, but unlike last time they can’t just print a whole load of cash and throw it at the problem which was politically relatively easy to do. This time they’d have to drastically cut spending (most probably military spending, cutting anything else would negatively impact the economy more severely), also raise taxes up to European levels, and the Fed would have to severely raise interest rates to sustain the value of the US dollar. As the saying goes, when the US economy sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold, and that will remain true even after years of active economic decoupling by everybody else from the US. US decline is bad for all short term.
I’m getting the distinct impression that either there will be a temporary pause to the war in Ukraine while both Europe and Russia rearm as fast as they can, or there will be no pause at all and it’ll just grind on until Putin exits the stage. Either scenario suits European leadership, as they don’t really care about Russian and Ukrainian lives lost. So long as they keep the fighting in Ukraine so Russia doesn’t threaten other European countries is all that matters to them in the short term. It seems very unlikely Russia can sustain the current pace for five more years; and five years from now, European military might will far exceed Russia’s. Both together will force an end to fighting, Putin and those close to him will meet an untimely end, and I expect EU entry talks for a newly rehabilitated Russia to begin not long thereafter.
The ideal outcome in my opinion
I’m getting into very speculative territory now i.e aspirational rather than speculative. Everything above speculates Niall’s best guesses about the short to medium term, and that ultimately leads into ‘wouldn’t it be lovely if?’ territory. So here goes my aspirational ending of this essay.
The relative decline of a single superpower is invariably good in the short term for other powers, who can rise to occupy the vacant space just as how Spain-Portugal was replaced by France-Britain, who then were replaced by the United States as dominant global hegemon. As the United States retreats from its Empire, it is a fair bet that at least China, Europe and India will occupy a larger space than they currently do.
However, three bodies of similar size are not stable – and four bodies of similar size are profoundly unstable. This is very not good when those powers all have nuclear weapons. So the ideal would actually be for at least one power to be generally recognised as supreme over all the others, in the same way as the Holy Roman Emperor was recognised as above all other Kings. As with the Holy Roman Empire, for this arrangement to work well for everybody, that Emperor needs to be restrained sufficiently that everybody can agree to them being supreme precisely because they are ineffective. I can’t currently think of any better solution than that the direct descendent of the Holy Roman Empire, the European Union, becomes the globally recognised supreme power, precisely because it will be quite incapable most of the time.
If the EU expands to include Russia and Turkey and their surrounds, she ought to be very well placed to become the new global hegemon. Everybody will dislike her equally, yet all would conclude that with her in charge no one power gets too big to cause the others problems. EU dispute mechanisms are meandering and slow, but they are effective in the long term – there is a mutually acceptable outcome which is eventually reached, no matter the initial intransigence of the interlocutors. The rule of some commonly agreed law is what matters long term for preventing Armageddon.
The Holy Roman Empire, towards its end, had two main powers of Prussia and Austria, with lots of smaller principalities supporting it. When Napoleon emerged to threaten that Empire, Prussia looked away towards Poland instead of supporting Austria. It was the perceived indifference of mighty Prussia that caused smaller principalities to defect to Napoleon to avoid invasion, which resulted in Austria standing alone against Napoleon until defeat. The Prussians then became easy takings for Napoleon. Had they all stood together initially, Napoleon would have been defeated at the beginning, and all would have benefited. To put things bluntly, we may all dislike the current system, but by collectively agreeing to support said system, we all ensure our collective survival and prospering.
Even if the EU were to become the replacement global hegemon, at some future point it will fall apart and either something better will replace it, or a new Dark Ages will begin and it’ll be up to the next civilisation which emerges centuries later to do better than we did. But for right now, I can’t think of a better replacement for US colonial empire as the global hegemon than the European Union.
Conclusion
I can’t say that I started the process of writing this essay with my ideal outcome just described. I have somehow arrived at the conclusion that more EU doesn’t just solve European problems, but it also solves world problems. More EU – and I find myself wincing as I type this – is probably the least worst solution to a post American world order in my opinion at the current time.
This essay has ignored most of the future growth areas of the world – India, Africa and South America – concentrating only on the currently dominant cultural spheres of influence of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia as Orwell grossly oversimplified it. This does a disservice to those regions and especially their own histories which European colonial empire has suppressed in recent centuries, but surely will not in future centuries. The reason I didn’t get into them above is that none of them have shown interest past nor present in globe-striding colonial Empire, and this being an essay about that, they necessarily were omitted. There is another big reason – this essay is basically a reheated synthesis of the last one hundred and fifty years of mainstream conservative Western geopolitical thought, which only concerned itself with the three spheres of influence above. Representative works might be:
- Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction (1919) by Halford Mackinder.
- America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (1942) by Nicholas Spykman.
- Diplomacy (1994) by Henry Kissinger.
I should point out for balance’s sake that France, Russia and China all have their own independent schools of geopolitical thinking and literature. My own personal understanding is that they all agree on the same basic points as the Anglo-Saxon literature, they just reach different conclusions and recommendations. There is universal consensus, as far as I am aware, on the natural gravitational force to create Eurasia which only the Russian literature favours. Everybody else writes about how to counter, frustrate, mitigate and impede Eurasianism. Chinese geopolitical thinking, in particular, considers itself as closest to the classical British Empire as a maritime-focused trading power, and has been borrowing from British Imperial geopolitical strategy to keep its unruly neighbours at each other and therefore in thrall to China.
Due to a lack of academic literature, it is hard to imagine how things might play out globally if one of India, Africa or South America decided to begin playing ‘the great game’ – it depends on the accumulation of capital and wealth and therefore the means to disrupt the status quo. I think I’ll likely be quite old before how things could play out might become clear. With a bit of luck, myself, family and friends will all be happy, healthy and content. Ultimately, that’s what matters the most to me.
Addendum
I started writing this essay on the 9th March, the day after the post where I mentioned that I would write this essay. In the weeks since then, two things worth noting have happened.
The first is I was slightly annoyed to see an article in The Economist which pretty much is the analysis part of this essay with the future speculation parts removed. It felt a bit like somebody had cribbed off my essay … of course, in reality, they probably started writing exactly when I did and obviously they can’t publish the wild speculation parts in a magazine as respectable as The Economist. And almost certainly they’ve read all the same material that I have. In any case, the analysis part was almost identical to the above, so I guess despite being ‘out of the loop’ of dinner parties held by the ruling elites, I appear to have fairly well nailed what they’re all discussing internally. I guess that shows I’m on the button.
The second is that for a few days before the US vetoed the idea of a multinational peace keeping force in Ukraine entirely, it would appear that China was willing to commit a surprising amount of resources to enforcing peace in Ukraine as part of a European-led peacekeeping mission. Apparently thousands of very well armed troops were offered without being asked for it, and the quantity and depth offered was above what anyone had anticipated. Obviously social media went mad over it, but having thought it through, while it would be a bold move by China, it makes a great deal of sense for them on every axis I can think of. I don’t doubt that China’s many scenario planning strategists had cooked up this game play years ago, and having dusted it off and run it through the various committees of the party as a quick final check, President Xi gave final approval.
China desires most of all a multi-polar world made up of regional spheres of influence with its border to the North secure and supply lines safe. To this end, it has put Russia under its thumb economically to secure the Northern border; expanded its sphere of influence to the North, South and West and to a much lesser extent, its East; engaged in a directed social media campaign of propaganda across the world to favour its talking points, to the detriment of the collective West; and tried its best to set the stage for an anticipated and hoped for relative decline of US power. China’s best outcome from all this would be:
The USA’s soft power destroyed, with the collective West as a force ended and all its allies actively removing US influence from within themselves.
BUT with the bulk of US forces overseas tied up in Europe and therefore not relocated to Asia.
AND with the historical threat from the North firmly kept within its box (I believe the last successful toppling of Chinese rulers from outside China was the Mongol conquest – indeed most of the modern Great Wall was built after to prevent that ever happening again).
Helping out Europe with Ukraine at this time after the last few years of helping out Russia with Ukraine therefore makes sense. Europe is peeling itself away from US hegemony and will soon become a major world hard power – getting in early with helping them out is good politics and good business. The fact China was willing to put boots on the ground while the US was not would have had a superb return on investment in terms of both optics and further weakening US reputation and reliability – with a good chance that the Americans would be goaded into not removing itself from Europe, leaving Asia for China. Supporting Russia to peel Europe away from the US made sense until now, but now one needs to also tie up Russia in Europe and keep it away from thinking of what to do with all those troops who will be otherwise now kicking around – never mind the longer term concern of what if Europe and Russia unite? And finally, it surely has not been lost on the Chinese leadership that an even worse threat from the North would be if the US and Russia got together into an alliance against China.
As much as paying for a few thousand Chinese peacekeeping troops to be stationed in Ukraine going forth would have caused political problems at home, it would have been an inexpensive way of getting a whole load of bang for the buck. I don’t doubt that down the line, once Europe could ignore US requests, all the stuff the US insists Europe can’t sell to China as it threatens US interests could be dispensed with. Especially in gratitude for the Chinese being a friend when it was needed.
In any case, it became moot. What remains of the strategic analysis complex in the US recognised how catastrophic it would be for an ‘everybody bar the US has boots on the ground’ outcome, so they removed from discussion entirely the peacekeeping force proposal as an option. Even the quite unserious current US administration could see what terrible optics it would have, so they suddenly stopped demanding boots must go on the ground, and now demand that no boots must go on the ground. Hence whatever ‘peace deal’ for Ukraine which now emerges will no longer have a multinational peacekeeping force as a component.
My thanks to those who gave feedback on this essay and corrections of spelling and grammar: Megan Bean, Clara Douglas, Francis Douglas, Liz O’Sullivan, David Sankel, Chris Schumerth, Robert Seacord, Matt Thompson and Ruth Wright.
I hope you all found my little essay thought provoking. Here’s hoping the best possible outcomes arise from the current change in great power configuration!
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