The Structural Logic of Imperial Decay and the Physics of State Collapse
Note to Readers: Because of the length and structural depth of this analysis, I have divided this essay into two parts. This is Part I, which diagnoses the empire's current predicament, traces the historical shift from classical colonialism to modern imperial fragmentation, and maps the sociological "physics" of how the US-led system attempts to shatter large, autonomous states. Subscribe below to receive Part II directly.
The war on Iran has confirmed what most analysts already knew: the US-led empire is in a process of falling. F-35s lost, THAAD radars destroyed, bases evacuated. The dollar challenged by BRICS, yuan pricing, and de-dollarization. Europe de-industrializing. The military picture is one of overextension and depletion, and the strategic picture is one of gradual loss of unipolarity and hegemony.
This essay argues that stopping there, at the diagnosis of a sudden collapse, misses the architecture being installed during this interregnum. This empire is crumbling bit by bit and it is violently grabbing at everything within reach on the way down.
Because while the US bleeds in the Gulf, European capitals are signing 20-year LNG contracts with Washington that permanently sever their energy connection to Russia. While Iranian missile cities survive unscathed, a World Bank reconstruction fund for Gaza is already operational, channelling every dollar of rebuilding money through conditions its population had no part in setting. While Ukraine’s sovereign bonds rally from 19 to 76 cents on peace speculation, a €90 billion EU loan is embedding digital procurement standards and regulatory frameworks into Ukrainian state infrastructure that will persist long after the last tranche is disbursed. While Iran’s central bank is cut off from SWIFT, a dollar-backed stablecoin is being designed for Gaza that traces every transaction made through it.
A crumbling empire is, unfortunately, not an inactive one. It is one that can no longer achieve its objectives through military force alone and has therefore accelerated every other instrument it possesses.
This essay names the strategy that has organized US grand strategy since the end of the Cold War. It is a strategy now operating at great velocity precisely because the empire’s traditional military and industrial instruments are failing, hollowed out by the very financial ruling strata that now rein supreme. This financial portion of this power elite wield the military as an enforcement arm to violently shatter any emerging autonomy. This strategy has not been named because it is structurally unspeakable within an international system premised on sovereign equality. But it is visible in every theatre and reproducible across every context: from the attempt at the shattering of large contender states, to the severing of global energy flows, to the attempts at breaking the economic consolidation between the periphery and the Eurasian region, to the attempts at fracturing rival ruling classes through intelligence and market coercion. Most importantly, this strategy is installing technical and financial governance rails that will outlast the current phase of military intensification by years (or, in dependency cases, by decades). Once embedded in payment, procurement, and accreditation systems, these rails persist even when the enforcing power weakens. (Unless we get a sudden global systemic collapse, as can happen in complex systems... but that’s a different scenario.)
Understanding fragmentationism means understanding what is being built in the interregnum: a governance architecture designed to outlast the states that created it, operated by a ruling class that has no intention of vanishing alongside it.
Empire Without Territory
Let’s start in the 1990s with the post‑Cold War moment. The question of the "end of history" emerged out of this historical period. The ideological rival, state socialism, had collapsed. NATO, the alliance supposedly built to contain the USSR, should logically have disbanded once the threat was removed. Instead, NATO kept expanding, launching forward operations and interventions more aggressively than ever before.
At its most basic level, this occurred because the geographical expansion and networked consolidation of other countries inherently constitutes a threat to a US-led transatlantic empire whose entire premise rests on unipolarity.
Before we delve into this seemingly simple argument, which many will dismiss with, “Of course, this is just Divide et Impera”, I want to preface all that follows with a clarification: I am not arguing that the US-led ruling strata are following a literal, secret blueprint called “Fragmentationism.” All of the documents presented here, and the arguments that follow, rest on the premise that the empire is responding to a historical, structural predicament (the loss of shallow hegemony, rising contender states, declining surplus, deteriorating energy efficiency, and military overextension). Their responses simply converge on fragmentation as the operative logic. The doctrines and white papers are consequences and symptoms of the disease. When I write about a structurally emergent logic, I am talking about a pattern of action that arises from the structural position, interests, and constraints of a state formation; key actors then rationalize, codify, and partially consciously pursue that pattern.
With that in mind, let’s document how this "size-as-threat" lens has been utilized by the US-led empire since the fall of the USSR.
Colonialism Without Formal Occupation
While the current empire is the undeniable heir to previous colonial powers, the mechanics of imperial control are not hereditary. They constantly adapt to larger structural forces like resource availability, energetic efficiency, dominant ideology, contender territorial entities, and technological development. Thus, for the US-led empire, we see a shift from traditional territorial conquest to what historian Daniel Immerwahr terms a “pointillist empire.”
This operational logic of controlling and influencing small points throughout the globe lays the geographical groundwork for fragmentation. As anthropologist David Vine has meticulously documented, the US ruling strata garrisoned the globe to control its strategic chokepoints and establish nodes of military-imperial containment. This militarized footprint emerged to perpetuate the colonial mode of dominance, allowing the empire to shed the massive administrative burdens of direct occupation while maintaining a ubiquitous coercive threat—functioning, in essence, as a global Panopticon.
And this process hasn’t stopped. Here is a list with US-bases or similar military structures, even weapon production hubs and so-called access agreements (legal architecture that makes rapid force projection and logistics access possible at existing host-nation facilities), in the works in other countries in the last three years: Philippines, Guam, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Japan, India, Romania, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Kenya, DRC, Morocco, Peru, Panama, Ecuador, El Salvador, Paraguay, Dominican Republic.
Beyond the material reality of military bases, historian Andrew Bacevich in his book American Empire (2002) identified post-Cold War administrations (Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr.) as following a coherent "strategy of openness." This was a project aimed at constructing a global imperium through economic expansionism, the removal of barriers to trade and capital, and the use of military force to overcome any resistance. Openness, too, is about an empire without formal occupation; hegemony without direct control. Bacevich explicitly traces this ambition back to Woodrow Wilson:
“The strategy of openness returns to the revolutionary project that President Woodrow Wilson outlined during and immediately after World War I: bringing the world as a whole into conformity with American principles and American policies”
This is the core formula of the US-led imperial project: global hegemony achieved through a mixture of manufactured consent and latent coercion. This dual architecture, both material and immaterial, dictates that host nations cannot exist as sovereign equals; they are structurally required to be compliant nodes.
Documenting the Imperial Logic
Having outlined the crumbling empire’s characteristics in broad strokes, we can now move from the structural framework to the primary sources themselves. By the 1990s and early 2000s, the macroeconomic reality was already set in motion. The US was financializing, its manufacturing base was hollowing out, and the survival of the dollar depended entirely on controlling global energy flows.
The job of the meso-level (the strategists, planners, and paper-writers) is to look at that structural imperative and translate it into a menu of actionable policies for the maintenance of their empire. Drawing upon their available ideological and institutional resources—neoconservatism, petrodollar logic, and military superiority (while it lasts)—they construct their strategic options.
In other words, these documents are the rationalization of the structural logic, codifying and institutionalizing it. Indeed, because the US empire’s logic is so incredibly rigid, planning 20 or 30 years ahead is quite easy. They know the empire will never choose the path of peaceful multipolar integration.
Preventing Large Autonomous Rivals
The clearest documentary example of this post-Cold War threat perception—the realization that territorial size and consolidation equate to a structural threat—was codified in the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance. Written by Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis Libby under Dick Cheney at the Pentagon, this leaked document stated that the US must prevent any rival power from dominating any critical region of the world, maintaining the capacity to act unilaterally:
“The third goal is to preclude any hostile power from dominating a region critical to our interests, and also thereby to strengthen the barriers against the reemergence of a global threat to the interests of the U.S. and our allies. These regions include Europe, East Asia, the Middle East/Persian Gulf, and Latin America. Consolidated, nondemocratic control of the resources of such a critical region could generate a significant threat to our security.”
Read carefully, the core anxiety here is not ideological. Indeed, the ideological rival had already disintegrated. The threat is structural: any power, or coalition of forces, whose sheer size and resource wealth could challenge US primacy and block imperial extraction is unacceptable. Within this unipolar framework, a rival’s actual ideology is incidental.
Which leads us to our next famous document. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the ne plus ultra transatlantic securitocrat, wrote in The Grand Chessboard (1997, p. 35):
“The scope of America’s global hegemony is admittedly great, but its depth is shallow, limited by both domestic and external restraints. American hegemony involves the exercise of decisive influence but, unlike the empires of the past, not of direct control. The very scale and diversity of Eurasia, as well as the power of some of its states, limits the depth of American influence and the scope of control over the course of events. That megacontinent is just too large, too populous, culturally too varied, and composed of too many historically ambitious and politically energetic states to be compliant toward even the most economically successful and politically preeminent global power.”
Tellingly, Brzezinski admits that US hegemony is “shallow,” relying mostly on influence rather than direct control. But if we follow this line of thought all the way through, it undeniably leads to a specific conclusion: when shallow influence fails against territorial entities that are simply too large to be compliant, this hegemony-seeking system will necessarily default to fragmentation. Stated differently, this system has to shatter large entities into smaller pieces so that its shallow influence can function once more.
On the level of action, Brzezinski recommended cultivating Ukraine as a separate entity, integrating Eastern Europe into NATO, and preventing Russia from reconsolidating the post-Soviet space. Indeed, NATO did not disband; instead, it absorbed Eastern Europe, ensuring Western, Central, and Eastern Europe were locked firmly within the US-imperial sphere of influence.
By 2016, Brzezinski himself acknowledged the waning of the unipolar moment. He recognized that the US was no longer a global empire and argued that Washington needed to divide Russia and China—cooperating with one to contain the other—in order to preserve its economic and financial superiority, admitting:
“While no state is likely in the near future to match America’s economic-financial superiority, new weapons systems could suddenly endow some countries with the means to commit suicide in a joint tit-for-tat embrace with the United States, or even to prevail. Without going into speculative detail, the sudden acquisition by some state of the capacity to render America militarily inferior would spell the end of America’s global role.”
This brings us to an interesting question: if NATO was expanding to secure a post-Cold War peace, why didn’t it simply include Russia? While ideological and historical excuses abound in the policy literature, one of the reasons is structural. Russia was excluded from NATO explicitly because it is too large.
Take, for instance, a 1995 report from the National Defense University (James W. Morrison, NATO Expansion and Alternative Future Security Alignments, McNair Paper 40, p. 56), which stated plainly:
“Russia is too large. Russia is far larger than any other European member of NATO and admitting it to NATO would change the balance.”
Similarly, former US Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, who chaired a 1995 Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force (Should NATO Expand?), wrote bluntly on a transatlantic security paper that same year:
“Russia ‘almost surely will never become a NATO member; its size, geography, and history make it unsuitable as part of a transatlantic security organization.’”
But why is size so inherently threatening to this particular imperial architecture? Simply put: scale guarantees resources, and if a massive state retains its political autonomy (treating its population as its citizens and not an apolitical mass), it can block imperial access to those resources. It can also generate adequate means to defend itself (as Brzezinski foretold). Furthermore, if such states successfully develop within their own sovereign financial and economic architectures, they naturally exert a gravitational pull. Other nations will inevitably want to cooperate with them. The result is the birth of a rival order—one that cancels unipolarity.
Honorable Mentions
While a comprehensive history of US fragmentationism would require volumes, several key documents, doctrines, and historical laboratories deserve honorable mention. Though they span different decades and theaters, they all point to the exact same structural logic: the crumbling empire cannot tolerate scale, and it manages that threat through engineered dissolution and fragmentation.
The Unipolar Genesis (Krauthammer to PNAC): The ideological opening for this strategy was articulated in Charles Krauthammer’s 1990 essay, The Unipolar Moment, which declared a brief, unique window for the US to aggressively reshape the international order before any rival could emerge:
“We are in for abnormal times. Our best hope for safety in such times, as in difficult times past, is in American strength and will - the strength and will to lead a unipolar world, unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them.”
This ideology was operationalized a decade later in the Project for the New American Century’s (PNAC) Rebuilding America’s Defenses (2000). Drafted by the very securitocrats who would soon run the Bush administration (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz), the document explicitly called for maintaining US preeminence globally, expanding military basing worldwide, and, critically, deter the rise of a “new great-power competitor.”
The “Middle East” Blueprint (Yinon to Wesley Clark): In West Asia, the blueprint for fragmentation is a matter of public record. It begins with the 1982 Yinon Plan, which argued that Israel’s survival depended on fracturing the surrounding Arab states (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt) along ethno-sectarian lines into weak, manageable statelets. This logic was seamlessly laundered into US foreign policy via the 1996 Clean Break memo and subsequently PNAC. This pipeline represented a neocon-Zionist ideological amalgamation, evidenced by the exact same personnel drafting strategy papers for both Likud and the Pentagon. A recent Byline Times investigation documents how the same network has reorganized under the Vandenberg Coalition, advising the current Trump administration...on Iran. We see this exact logic in US Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters’ infamous 2006 "Blood Borders" map (proposing redrawn Middle East borders along ethnic and sectarian lines), and in General Wesley Clark’s disclosure of a Pentagon memo to "take out seven countries in five years."
Seen through this lens, Iran’s true crime is neither its ideology nor its theology; as the CFR noted in 1997:
“In Iran, the United States confronts a country with potentially considerable military and economic capabilities and an imperial tradition, which occupies a crucial position both for the Gulf and for future relations between the West and Central Asia. If Iraq poses a clear and relatively simple immediate threat, Iran represents a geopolitical challenge of far greater magnitude and complexity.”
and Pete Hegseth echoed in at the beginning of March 2026, most famously known as the “death and destruction from the sky all day long” speech:
“This is a big battle space with a lot of capabilities — that’s part of the reason why it’s such a threat to us.”
The Balkans: Before West Asia, the Balkans served as the 1990s laboratory for this strategy, borne out of a structural logic. The deliberate application of economic shock therapy (as detailed in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine) since 1980 “leading to the disintegration of the industrial sector and the piecemeal dismantling of the welfare state”, paired with calculated military intervention, successfully dismantled the multi-ethnic Yugoslav state. As a 2019 book by the name of “Balkanization and Global Politics” noted:
"colonial powers first balkanize the world and then politically and socioeconomically absorb the newly created zones through human exploitation and resource extraction."
Yugoslavia provided the US-led securitocracy with a flawless template by weaponizing peripheral nationalisms and leverage engineered fiscal crises to shatter a non-compliant geopolitical bloc into easily digestible, compliant micro-states.
European Subordination via NATO: While Europe was not territorially fragmented, after all it consists of smaller to medium-size countries, its absorption into NATO follows an identical logic of structural severance. To prevent the emergence of a consolidated, autonomous Eurasian pole, European strategic, financial, digital, and energy autonomy had to be surgically severed from Russian resources. As Christopher Layne documents in The Peace of Illusions (2006), US grand strategy since 1940 has consistently aimed at “extraregional hegemony,” the preemptive domination of every major region to prevent the rise of any independent power center, driven primarily by political-economic interests. Within this framework, NATO expansion is the mechanism of capture. Political scientists Rajan Menon and William Ruger (2020) explicitly argued that NATO enlargement ensured Europe remains a “strategic subordinate,” structurally dependent on Washington for its “security”, preventing “it from becoming a rival center of power either collectively or because one state achieves dominance on the continent.”
This reasoning was openly championed by US strategists as a tool for managing both Russia and Western Europe. A 1993 Foreign Affairs piece by Ronald Asmus, Richard Kugler, and F. Stephen Larrabee outlined how NATO expansion provided Washington with indispensable situational control by ensuring that American military leverage would outweigh European economic integration. Indeed, the center of Eastern Europe would then fall on the United States, instead of, say, Germany or France:
“Their views on security issues closely coincide with those of the United States and other Atlanticist members such as Britain, Portugal and the Netherlands. Their inclusion in NATO would strengthen the Atlanticist orientation of the alliance and provide greater internal support for U.S. views on key security issues.”
The urgency of this institutional capture was driven by the fear of eventual Eurasian consolidation. In 1994, figures like Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and former National Security Council official Peter Rodman argued for rapid NATO enlargement precisely because Russia’s post-Cold War weakness was viewed as temporary. The strategy was to exploit this window to permanently alter the geopolitical map. The NYT publicist William Safire crystallized this imperial opportunism in 1996:
“In coming decades, Russia—with its literate population and rich resources unencumbered by Communism—will rise again. Its leaders will [pursue irredentist goals] under the guise of protecting their ‘near abroad.’ The only way to deter future aggression without war is by collective defense. And only in the next few years, with Russia weak, do we have the chance to ‘lock in’ the vulnerable.”
By moving aggressively to “lock in” the East, the US securitocracy achieved a masterful, dual application of the Fragmentationist Grand Strategy: it geographically fractured the post-Soviet sphere, while simultaneously ensuring that the industrial and technological core of Western Europe would not merge with the resource base of the East.
The Settler-Colonial Continuity: Even though, I argue that fragmentationism emerges in its most pure and open form after the fall of the USSR, at its deepest historical level, it is the globalized reflection of the American settler-colonial project. As scholars Patrick Wolfe and Glen Coulthard have theorized, settler-colonialism operates on a “logic of elimination” rather than mere exploitation; it requires the absolute and continuous erasure of native geopolitical and governance autonomy to secure the land as a prequisite for capitalist accumulation. The contemporary drive to secure unhindered operational space globally dictates the fragmentation of any sovereign entity (whether a conglomerate or a large state) that attempts to restrict the flow of Western capital.
In other words: Scale + Autonomy + Geoposition = Structural Rival Order.
The mere capacity to be autonomous through the potential that a large territory brings, to feed, fuel, finance, and defend oneself independently, to generate a historical and collective memory, is the crime and is the threat. In the next section we’ll see exactly why this fragmentationist logic emerged so saliently for the US-led transatlantic empire that is currently in a state of erosion.
A Continuous Colonial Logic: From Colony to Hegemony to Fragmentation
The structural pattern of fragmentation is a direct continuation of the colonial logic, manifesting in its current form due to several intertwined historical developments:
The Historical-Structural Shift: The Untenable Colonial Mode
First, the traditional colonial model, characterized by the direct control and occupation of foreign lands and populations, became untenable just as US functional elites were assuming the mantle of imperial leadership. This transition was a historical-structural outcome. The rapid development of global communications and transport technologies accelerated formal decolonization processes and forged a highly networked, globalized anti-colonial consciousness.
Further, by the mid-20th century, the classical mode of direct territorial occupation had become prohibitively expensive in both blood and treasure, largely due to the proliferation of asymmetric military technologies that made local insurgencies highly viable. Simultaneously, the post-WWII international legal framework, anchored in the UN Charter’s codification of sovereign equality and self-determination, made formal and open imperialism legally and morally indefensible. For a superpower to maintain hegemony in this new era, naked occupation was no longer an option; it would instantly strip the hegemon of its perceived global legitimacy.
Even before this mantle was passed to the US, European colonial logic did not rely solely on elimination and naked violence. It depended equally on an architecture of control: military outposts, the “cultivation” of compliant colonized elites, and the imposition of structural financial and market mechanisms. Through targeted taxation, tariffs, and strict laws dictating what a colony could develop or trade, the empire ensured that autonomy was severed and active underdevelopment was enforced—dynamics masterfully detailed by Walter Rodney and Rui Mauro Marini in their respective works on Africa and Latin America. What changed in the mid-20th century was the fact that the sheer, unapologetic visibility of these practices could no longer be sustained.
Capitalist modernity still required open, extractable territories. Because the empire could not rely on the visible, administrative machinery of the 19th-century colonial state to secure them, it was forced to adapt. Indeed, the same legal frameworks, and the same technological developments allowed this new heir of empire and colonization to control and influence on a global scale the way it did—through “shallow hegemony.” (Though we must remember, hegemony, as Gramsci theorized, is always an alloy of both consent and coercion.)
The Hegemonic Mode and the Limits of “Indirect Influence”
As the US ruling strata assumed the mantle of empire—primarily inheriting it from the British in the decades following World War I, and definitively after World War II—one of its first acts was acquiring British military bases without operating them as explicit colonial outposts. To resolve the contradiction of needing global reach without formal colonies, the US transitioned to a hegemonic mode of global management. Hence, instead of territorial colonies, it built a pointillist empire of military bases. Instead of imperial governors, it utilized alliance architectures (like NATO) to enforce strategic subordination and facilitate transatlantic elite capture. It deployed financial architectures (like the IMF and dollar hegemony) to ensure capital extraction, and it relied on vast intelligence apparatuses to act as mechanisms of shadow governance. This is the precise dynamic Zbigniew Brzezinski conceded in The Grand Chessboard when he described US hegemony as “shallow,” relying strictly on “indirect influence” rather than direct control. However, Brzezinski also identified the fatal flaw in this system: certain states in Eurasia are simply “too large, too populous... culturally too varied, and composed of too many historically ambitious and politically energetic states to be compliant.”
Just as in the traditional colonial mode, this hegemonic model’s financial and intelligence instruments over time, actively cultivate a domestic class fraction whose material interests are structurally aligned with tranatlantic capital. This is a process of encroachment of private capitalist forces on a contender state’s power monopoly via a hollowing out from within; a foundational component of the “elite capture” mechanism.
The transatlantic US-led ruling strata, and more precisely, its financial sector that provides the financial framework for this mechanism—what political scientist van der Pijl calls “finance capital” or “sovereign capital”—transcends any single state. It is indifferent to nationality and treats populations as anonymous, replaceable factors of production. Yet, it is not “stateless” in the sense of being placeless: it is historically constituted within a specific transatlantic social space, but it has structurally exempted itself from the political and civic obligations that such a space would normally impose.
The Logic of Fragmentation: Breaking the Target to Fit the Tool
The logic of fragmentation activates exactly at the point where this hegemonic mode reaches its limit. When Brzezinski’s “shallow” hegemony encounters an entity that is simply “too large to be compliant,” it faces a potential threat to its order. And a structural crisis, when these large entities deveop on their own. Because the empire cannot revert to direct colonial occupation, and because it cannot intensify an “indirect influence” that the autonomous state has already rejected, it is left with only one remaining move. It must alter the size of the target. To fit the tool of shallow hegemony, the entity must be made smaller. Indeed, not only had more states been created after the Cold War, but with the introduction of the “fragile state” concept after 9/11, the empire produced the fragmentation, then legitimated its further and open intervention by naming the affected state a "failed state."
Fragmentationism is, in essence, colonial logic operating under conditions that strictly prohibit the traditional colonial form. It deploys when the old ideological and legal frameworks no longer serve their purpose—specifically, when enforced underdevelopment has failed. When these large, autonomous states successfully achieve technological, military, and economic development, they do two intolerable things: they physically block the Western financial class from accessing their resources, and they act as new gravitational pulls for the consolidation of a rival order.
These developments signal the undeniable twilight of the US role as the undisputed unipolar hegemon. However, we must understand a crucial distinction. Those at the helm of this crumbling system may be forced to accept the loss of hegemony—shedding the facade of global consent and reverting to pure, naked coercion—but they absolutely refuse to accept the loss of empire and all that this entails. (Even though one could argue, the US empire is no more, the US ruling strata still play a global role and won’t just give up.)
This brings us to the socioeconomic dimension of the threat. In Kees van der Pijl’s terms, the contender state commits an additional, unforgivable crime: its state class treats its population as a qualitative national asset. By lifting its people out of anonymity and recognizing their particular social identity, the contender state directly threatens the needs of transatlantic sovereign capital, which structurally requires an anonymous, infinitely replaceable, and exploitable labor pool:
“What constituted the real challenge was the social protection extended to their populations. Shielding these from the world market movement of capital allowed autonomous forms of everyday life to develop, including a democratic potential unacceptable to transnational capital.“
Sovereign capital cannot tolerate this qualitative development at scale. Therefore, the contender state does not merely anchor a rival geopolitical order; it actively removes a massive population as well as all material resources from the quantitative logic of capitalist extraction, simultaneously serving as a dangerous, viable model for the rest of the periphery to follow.
Targets of Fragmentation
The targets of this fragmentationist strategy are multidimensional. Most obviously, the strategy targets the territorial integrity of contender states, seeking to shatter massive, cohesive nations into weak, dependent, and mutually antagonistic fragments. Equally critical, however, is the targeting of resource and energy sovereignty. By actively fracturing supply networks, trade routes, and logistical circuits, the empire ensures that no alternative physical architecture is able to consolidate. Both are expressions of the exact same logic: to survive, a “shallow hegemony” requires entities that are too small, too disrupted, and too dependent to anchor a rival order—whether that is achieved by geographically breaking a country apart, or by physically severing its vital supply chains.
A third target cuts across both the geographic and energetic domains: financial sovereignty. This is the capacity of a state to settle trades internationally, borrow independently, and invest without passing through dollar-denominated clearinghouses (financial intermediaries). By destroying this capacity (through sanctions, asset freezes, and trade restrictions among other tools), the empire ensures that even a territorially intact and resource-rich state remains structurally unable to self-finance its own development or reconstruction (specifically, after being targeted kinetically). Inducing this state of financial paralysis is the prerequisite for the transatlantic financial class to step in and dictate terms of surrender that are structurally irresistible—when other tools have significantly weakened the targeted state that is. Of course, the more such tools of financial fragmentation are used, the more avenues of alternative finacial mechanisms are constructed and worked out among targeted states.
A fourth target operates through bureaucratic statecraft rather than the acute crises of violently breaking territories or supply chains. This is the targeting of South-South solidarity and interstate consolidation. The empire actively seeks to destroy the collective bargaining power that would otherwise allow peripheral states to resist bilateral coercion. Through the intentional bilateral atomization of trade and tariff regimes—such as pitting Vietnam against Malaysia, or Indonesia against India, reducing or terminating cooperation with China—fragmentation is applied not to physical territory, but to political cohesion. Simply put, any organic cooperation or consolidation between states (peripheral or not) that occurs outside the crumbling empire’s frameworks is treated as a threat to be fractured. As with almost anything, paradoxically or not, South-South trade has actually grown tenfold over three decades and now represents over a third of global commerce; according to UNCTAD (2025):
"South–South cooperation is becoming more important due to both the rising share of their trade and investment in global flows and the increasing importance of South-South initiatives such as the BRICS, ASEAN and Mercosur."
Additionally, even the enforcement of these financial tools is not uniformly supported by all transatlantic ruling elite factions. As the US supreme court ruling on tariffs and, for example, Belgian government’s protest in using frozen Russian assets, demonstrates.
Lastly, the ruling strata of target nations are themselves subjected to fragmentation. The empire actively fractures the domestic political cohesion of peripheral and contender states by trying to capture a specific fraction of their elites—primarily the financial and technocratic class. By binding the material interests of this class to the transnational, transatlantic sphere, the empire ensures the target state is hollowed out from the inside, managed by a faction whose ultimate allegiance is to global financial architecture rather than sovereign national development. (Paradoxically, when this strategy escalates from financial coercion to outright military intervention, the empire's plan often backfires since it is typically militant factions and other social classes—not the compliant financial elite—that gain influence in the targeted state.)
The Physics of State Collapse
As we have established, the use of fragmentation as the tool of choice for US-led transatlantic elites was born out of specific historical-structural forces, compounded by the orientation frameworks inherited from colonial legacies. While this strategy targets multiple dimensions of a potential rival order—disrupting supply chains, financial networks, and diplomatic alliances—the primary target remains the large, autonomous state (such as Iran, China, or Russia). To understand exactly how this imperial reflex is operationalized on the ground, we must examine the mechanics of state collapse.
For this, we turn to the sociological model detailed by Jieli Li in State Fragmentation: Toward a Theoretical Understanding of the Territorial Power of the State (2002). Li provides a precise, sequential anatomy of how states break apart. The process begins with the induction of geopolitical strain—stoking the animosity of surrounding states or external powers against the target as well as through the disruption of financial, energy and other supply lines. This external pressure triggers a severe fiscal crisis, which subsequently degrades the coercive capacity of the central state. The resulting power vacuum creates the perfect conditions for peripheral mobilization, leading to the fragmentation of the state itself. The most crucial insight of Li’s work is that pre-existing ethnic or cultural divisions do not, on their own, cause fragmentation; rather, it is the decline of the central state’s coercive power that allows these latent divisions to violently fracture a territory.
Within what I call the Fragmentationist Grand Strategy (FGS), this sequence is engineered; geopolitical strain is deliberately manufactured by the external actor. In every theater targeted by the US-led system, this strain is engineered through maximalist sanctions, proxy funding, and targeted military strikes. What’s more, the empire actively sustains the pressure even when the target state attempts to negotiate a peaceful off-ramp.
Consider the recent diplomatic maneuvers surrounding Iran: when a potential diplomatic breakthrough was announced by Oman’s Foreign Minister on February 27, the very Western envoys ostensibly conducting the talks immediately characterized it as a stalling tactic. By the following day, a potential diplomatic resolution had been forcibly converted into a kinetic military escalation. This illustrates a vital mechanism of fragmentationism: the imperial operators (those diplomats that are not diplomats, rather financial operators of settlements) ruthlessly manage the exit doors. By systematically blocking or sabotaging diplomatic resolutions, the empire ensures that the target state cannot de-escalate the geopolitical strain. They start the fire, and then, they barricade the fire escapes.
A central pillar of this manufactured strain is the weaponization of the US dollar. By controlling global dollar liquidity via the Federal Reserve, the US holds a direct, coercive lever over peripheral economies. Squeezing a large, autonomous state out of the dollar system—through secondary sanctions and forced currency depreciation—is the exact real-world application of the “fiscal crisis” step in Li’s model. By deliberately inducing hyperinflation and starving the central government of revenue, the US intentionally degrades the target state’s coercive capacity (or at least hopes to do so). Indeed, this was exactly what was hoped would weaken Iran’s government. (US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had claimed that Washington engineered a dollar shortage for that very aim, to cause street protests.) Once the central authority is weakened, the empire can then actively fund, arm, and support peripheral, ethno-sectarian mobilizations (something that has been confirmed for Iran, as well, the Trump administration sending weapons to protestors), encouraging them to rise up and shatter the state from within. Plus, let’s not forget the parallel cultivation of financial elites that might support the empire’s actions somehow.
The Limits of Fragmentation: The Resilience of the Target
As powerful as this imperial wrecking ball is, it has structural limits. According to Li’s sociological model, fragmentation follows a sequence: Geopolitical strain → fiscal crisis → erosion of central coercive capacity → power vacuum → centrifugal forces fill the void.
However, cases like Cuba, and now Iran (so far), demonstrate that strong social and political organization can absorb massive geopolitical strain without losing its coercive capacity. The key variables determining survival are clear. First is legitimacy and social cohesion. A state whose population has been mobilized around a genuine national or revolutionary project—fortified by collective memory and a shared history—is inherently harder to hollow out than a fragile rentier state or a post-colonial patchwork (such as Libya or Iraq).
Furthermore, institutional depth is a vital bulwark. Cuba has survived over sixty years under absolute siege, while Iran has spent two decades preparing for this exact confrontation. Both have built state structures explicitly engineered to withstand maximalist pressure. External support networks—no matter how subtle—also play a crucial role; economic and diplomatic lifelines from China and Russia actively offset the empire’s engineered “fiscal crisis” mechanism.
But perhaps the most profound structural limit to Li’s ideal model is its assumption that a state’s coercive apparatus is fiscally and territorially centralized. Iran disrupts this assumption entirely. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) controls an estimated 30–40% of the domestic economy through its own construction, energy, and logistics conglomerates. This provides a parallel revenue base specifically designed to survive the exact fiscal crises that transnational sovereign capital tries to engineer. Furthermore, Iran utilizes a “mosaic” strategy of defense. Its civil and military infrastructure, including distributed underground networks, has been decentralized and engineered specifically to withstand a strategy that relies on decapitating a central state. Combined with a hardened socio-political cohesion, Iran represents the ultimate anomaly: a case where Li’s physics of state collapse simply cannot be triggered through the empire’s available instruments.
Lastly, we must examine a critical point of contention within the “geopolitical strain” phase: the weaponization of energy. Because oil (and increasingly LNG) is the universal prerequisite without which an industrial economy ceases to function, whoever controls energy controls everything downstream. But there is a spatial-structural layer that imposes another limit on fragmentationism: it is no longer enough to merely control production (as in the classic Saudi petrodollar era). An empire must also control, or deny, the flows—the pipelines, maritime chokepoints, LNG terminals, and shipping lanes.
Theoretically, fragmenting states that sit astride these flows (such as Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Iran) achieves two goals simultaneously: it denies multipolar rivals a consolidated energy base, and it ensures that remaining flows are routed exclusively through US-controlled or monitored channels. In this sense, territorial fragmentation and global energy control are the exact same move viewed from two different angles: fragmentation of the state that would otherwise anchor the independent energy infrastructure of a rival order.
However, this strategy encounters a fatal paradox: what happens when the targeted state itself physically commands that key energy position and possesses the asymmetric capacity to disrupt those very flows?
So, while the Fragmentationist Grand Strategy remains the empire’s weapon of choice today, it is not omnipotent. Its success or failure rests on whether the target state possesses the socio-political organization to resist the hollowing-out process.
Note: Because of the length and depth of this analysis, I have split this essay into two parts. In Part II, releasing this Thursday, I will formally outline the 5-step operational sequence of this strategy, provide a typology of how it is applied differently across the globe, among other points.
Addendum
These are the Notes that partly touch upon the topics discussed here:
FuturEarly Dialogues YouTube: An empire simply won't just give up.
Is the US empire expanding? Is it declining? What is the empire even?
Why the US/transatlantic core cannot sustain global hegemony indefinitely.
The Exit Conditions of FGS and the Bunker State Framework.
The Geopolitical Paradox of the Gulf War
Jeff Rich In Iran the West Trapped Itself in the Bunker
FinLogs YouTube Interview: Escalating situation in West Asia and the structural geopolitical motives behind the US/Israel war with Iran
Pascal Lottaz YouTube Interview: Munich 2026, NATO Integration, Colonialism, and the "Bunker State"
Join the Conversation
As we conclude this first part of the analysis, we must ask how this shift from colonial occupation to structural fragmentation plays out in reality.
Do you see the mechanics of this “physics of state collapse” operating in your own geopolitical region? Are the signs of engineered geopolitical strain—whether through dollar weaponization, maximalist sanctions, elite capture, or the hollowing out of central state capacity—visible in your local landscape? Or, conversely, do you see the resilience we discussed? How are the communities or states around you cultivating the social cohesion, resource autonomy, and institutional depth needed to resist this pressure?
Share your observations in the comments below, and join me this Thursday for Part II, where we will map the exact five-step operational sequence of this strategy and explore the crumbling empire a bit more.
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