Engineering Chaos, Imperial Decay, and the Interregnum
Note to Readers: This is Part II of a comprehensive structural analysis of the US-led empire’s defining geopolitical doctrine. If you missed Part I, where we diagnosed the structural decay of the imperial core, traced the historical shift from direct colonial occupation to the engineered “physics of state collapse,” and established why the empire views large, autonomous states as an existential threat—you can read it here. In this concluding part, I formally outline the five-step operational sequence of the Fragmentationist Grand Strategy. We will explore how shattered states are captured via the “Reconstruction Trap” and how intact states are subjected to forced “re-compradorisation”—often in conjunction with peace, ease of sanctions or sieges, or ceasefire talks.
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The Fragmentationist Grand Strategy — Named
Across three decades, US interventions have followed a highly predictable, structurally determined sequence or “behavioral pattern” to put it differently. This is the operationalization of the Fragmentationist Grand Strategy, unfolding in five distinct steps:
Identify: Target a large, autonomous state whose scale, geopolitical position, or sovereign infrastructure constitutes a structural threat to unipolarity. Or identify a potential consolidation of several states as a structural threat for similar reasons.
Contain: Encircle the target geographically with military bases and economically with maximalist sanctions regimes. In the case of smaller states, it is mostly about trying to contain from within.
Subordinate the Periphery: Systematically peel away the target’s regional allies, trading partners, and buffer zones through bilateral coercion, or actual kinetic coercion or intelligence operations.
Fragment: Induce a severe fiscal crisis to degrade the central state’s coercive capacity, creating a vacuum that allows the empire to arm and elevate peripheral or ethno-sectarian insurgencies, shattering the state from within. This only works if the state’s coercive capacity is, in fact, centrally organized. And it only works if the social-political cohesion is not as strong.
Absorb: Integrate the weakened fragments into the hegemonic security and financial architecture.
It is this final Absorb step that requires the most careful analysis, because imperial absorption today does not mean formal annexation or even absorption into some kind of US-led multilateral institution. Rather, it operates along two distinct tracks, depending on the condition of the target state:
The Reconstruction Trap (For Shattered States): For states that have been successfully shattered by kinetic war or fiscal collapse or both, absorption operates through conditional reconstruction. This is achieved by installing financing mechanisms through a clearinghouse (financial intermediary) positioned strictly outside any single sovereign authority. By leveraging debt conditionality, programmable money, digital identity infrastructure, and Western accreditation standards, the empire ensures that the compliance architecture outlasts the initial financing. It becomes a permanent system of governance that requires zero administrative burden from the imperial core—a model currently being blueprinted for Gaza via the proposed “Board of Peace.”
Re-compradorisation (For Intact States): For states that have not been physically destroyed but are drifting toward a parallel multipolar architecture, absorption operates without the acute crisis phase. Decades of neoliberal integration have cultivated domestic class fractions whose material interests are inextricably tied to US market access and dollar clearing. In these cases, the empire utilizes tools like the tariff threat or other types of financial or market acess threats, often in combination with military threats. The tariff does not create a new vulnerability; it reactivates an existing one. It weaponizes the domestic financial class against its own state, forcing “re-compradorisation” and converting what could be collective, South-South resistance into capitulation, one state at a time.
This five-step sequence is the empirical record of the post-Cold War era. It is clearly visible in the 1990s balkanization of Yugoslavia, the ongoing fracturing of Syria and Libya, the aggressive containment of Russia, and today, Operation Epic Fury’s kinetic attempt to permanently dismantle Iran.
Why a “Grand Strategy”?
Why, then, designate this as a “Grand Strategy”? Because what we are observing is clearly not a series of reactive, ad-hoc policies. It is a coherent operational logic that meets three rigorous criteria: doctrinal continuity (tracing an unbroken line from the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance to the 2026 National Security Strategy), personnel continuity (sustained by the revolving door connecting think tanks, the Pentagon, and defense contractors), and structural reproducibility (the exact same operational sequence applied across vastly different geographic theaters).
Yet, if this is a Grand Strategy, why has it never been formally named as such?
Primarily, it remains unnamed because it is structurally unspeakable within an international legal system ostensibly premised on sovereign equality and territorial integrity. Academically, International Relations scholars tend to silo their analyses, examining only isolated pieces of the puzzle—a sanctions regime here, a proxy war there. Politically, naming the strategy is also radioactive; doing so explicitly exposes the ideological amalgamation that connects US imperial planners with ethno-nationalist blueprints. Its very absence from mainstream discourse is evidence of its pervasive normalization. To borrow an old adage, the foreign policy establishment does not see the strategy because they are the fish swimming in the water.
Admittedly, this veil of unspeakability is beginning to slip. Driven by a new wave of critical scholarship, and amplified by the blatant openness of the current Trump administration on these matters, there is a growing public acknowledgment that the norms of sovereign equality and territorial integrity have been functionally discarded. There is also a much wider recognition of the radicalized, ideological elements currently operating within the transatlantic ruling strata and their proxies.
However, because we are still embedded in the chaos of this interregnum, the big picture often remains obscured. So, don’t get me wrong, I am not naming this a “Grand Strategy” because it exists as a single, bound master plan locked in a Pentagon vault. I am naming it as such because it is a ingrained, structural behavioral pattern of a crumbling empire. It is an emergent historical logic that acts, looks, and destroys exactly like one.
The Formula and Its Implications
We can summarize the driving formula of this strategy this way:
Scale + Autonomy + Geoposition = Structural Rival Order → Fragmentation as the logical response.
To fully grasp this formula and its implications, we must historicize the economic engine of this crumbling and vanishing empire. Nineteenth-century British colonialism extracted tribute directly from formal colonies without compensation, allowing the empire to maintain global dominance without running massive deficits. The twenty-first-century US hegemony, however, lacks formal colonies. It funds its pointillist empire of over 900 military bases entirely through debt, relying on the enforced global monopoly of the US dollar to extract global wealth.
In short, under traditional colonial conditions, the drive for tribute produced territorial occupation; under post-colonial and post-Cold War conditions, it produces fragmentation. Any state (or consolidation of states) possessing the scale and autonomy to bypass the dollar system—to trade in local currencies, protect its own resource wealth, or anchor a parallel financial architecture—poses a fatal, structural threat to the imperial balance of payments. The systemic response cannot be direct occupation (which is prohibitively costly), nor can it be peaceful competition (which allows the rival order to consolidate). It must be fragmentation: shattering the target state (or consolidation of states) to either forcibly extract its resources as modern tribute, or neutralize its economic gravity by rendering it fundamentally unable to function.
This formula yields several implications:
First, the regime type or domestic ideology of the target state (or states) is effectively irrelevant; its sheer size and multidimensional autonomy (financial, infrastructural, and energetic) are the criteria that matter. Even though, multidimensional autonomy in and of itself signals a total ideology different from the transatlantic ruling strata.
Second, the strategy is inherently self-defeating. By weaponizing finance, supply chains, and global energy flows, the empire organically forces the Global Majority to build the exact parallel economies the US-led empire fears. The strategy perpetually generates its own enemies, birthing ungovernable, radicalized zones out of the ashes of shattered states, while pushing those who simply fear becoming the next target into defensive blocs.
More precisely, the weaponization of dollar clearing forces every targeted (and observant) state to build financial autonomy before it is strictly needed—accelerating the development of CIPS, the petroyuan, bilateral settlement protocols, and BRICS payment mechanisms. Maximalist sanctions accelerated Iran’s integration into China-Russia supply-chains. The unprecedented asset freeze on Russian central bank reserves did not collapse the Russian state; it accelerated de-dollarization across the entire Global Majority sphere. The strategy actively manufactures and accelerates the rival architecture it was designed to prevent.
However, this self-defeating dynamic operates asymmetrically. It is self-defeating for the host state (or host states) executing the strategy: its military stockpiles are depleted, its industrial base is hollowed out, its fiscal space is compressed, and its domestic social safety net is slashed. Yet, it is not necessarily self-defeating for the sovereign capital class that uses this state (or several states) as its blunt enforcement arm. This transatlantic elite simply migrates its financial architecture beyond the declining host state, securing its wealth in governance vehicles held in personal capacity and entirely outside sovereign jurisdiction (as seen with the privatization and reconstruction instruments deployed for Ukraine and planned for Gaza).
Divide et Impera?
At this point, one might ask: is this not just classic divide et impera (divide and rule)? The distinction is precise and vital. Classic divide-and-rule (such as the British strategy in India) was designed to produce administered fragments within a formal empire. Fragmentationism, by contrast, produced unadministered fragments within a hegemonic system.
The fragments do not need to be governed, rebuilt, or administered by the hegemon; they simply need to be too weak, too unstable, and too consumed by internal conflict to ever exercise autonomy or anchor a rival order. As superficial hegemony erodes, this logic becomes more adaptive. Depending on a fragment’s specific geostrategic value, the empire will actively transition certain zones out of chaos and into administered nodes—captured and managed through undeclared, transatlantic financial and security frameworks. In other words, the Fragmentationist Grand Strategy (FGS) operates on a typology based on whether the empire’s goal is to deny the space or absorb it.
For strategically valuable fragments—those sitting on vital corridor routes, energy chokepoints, or lucrative reconstruction markets—the mess is merely transitional. These fragments are eventually offered the “clearing house”: conditional reconstruction financing that installs a permanent Western compliance infrastructure while the debtor state ostensibly governs itself. The permanent, unadministered mess and the bureaucratically absorbed node are simply two outcomes of the same logic, applied based on the specific strategic valuation of the territory. Now, with the caveat, that denying might also be a step before absorbing and specifically when the step of absorbing cannot be completed by the transatlantic ruling strata.
We can see this operational flexibility clearly by contrasting Syria and Venezuela. Neither fits a simplistic “fragment” template, which is precisely what makes them so useful for understanding how this strategy adapts.
Syria was a large, strategically located state holding immense geopolitical value: a Silk Road hub, a guardian of Levantine basin gas, a guarantor of Russian naval access, and the critical land corridor for the Resistance. The US/Israel/Gulf axis calculated that the functional destruction of Syria—turning it into a contested, ungovernable space—was vastly preferable to leaving a stable, defiant state intact. The resulting “ruler” today (HTS/al-Jolani) does not represent a consolidated sovereign; rather, it is managed chaos with a thin lid on it. This is an example of functional fragmentation without formal, legal break-up.
Venezuela, conversely, represents a different application of imperial force. It is a mid-size state that the US wanted to flip, not fragment, precisely because of its massive oil reserves. Traditional regime change preserves the physical resource-extraction infrastructure; fragmentation would destroy it. Thus, the US power elites aim for controllability. Fragmentation is the brutal fallback option deployed when controllability through a compliant regime proves impossible, and when the primary strategic value shifts from extracting the resource yourself to simply denying the resource and the geography to your rivals.
We can therefore map the Fragmentationist Grand Strategy across a specific operational matrix. Depending on the target’s scale, resource endowment, and geopolitical proximity, the crumbling empire selects its method of intervention accordingly:
Target: Large, resource-rich, potentially rival-aligned states.
Operation: Fragmentation / Functional destruction.
Imperial Logic: Deny the geographic space and resources to multipolar “rivals”, accepting unadministered chaos as a strategic victory.
Target: Mid-size, resource-rich, potentially flippable states.
Operation: Regime change / Constant coercion.
Imperial Logic: Preserve the state’s physical extraction infrastructure, but install compliant elites to manage it, or likewise coerce ruling strata to become compliant.
Target: Large, rival-adjacent blocs.
Operation: Prevent consolidation / Tie to the US order.
Imperial Logic: Sever any organic regional integration through enforced security dependence, institutional capture. Or likewise implement any of the above tools: regime change, constant coercion, kinetic operations, fragmentation, functional destruction.
In pure imperial theory, the overarching goal across all three of these categories would be the creation of perfectly compliant states that have been rendered small and weak enough to be easily managed by “shallow influence.”
However, theory rarely survives contact with systemic decay. In reality, this strategy does not work as flawlessly because the US-led transatlantic elite suffers from two fatal limitations: they are materially depleted within their respective host states, and they are operating under ideological blindness and consequently, misinformation and miscalculation. It is precisely this friction—between the empire’s rigid geopolitical ambitions and its collapsing material and epistemic capacity—that generates these outcomes rather than the compliance it originally sought.
From Ideological Equilibrium to Pure Extraction
To fully grasp why this strategy accelerated so violently after 1991, we must recognize a structural shift in the nature of imperial power. During the Cold War, the presence of a rival ideology (state socialism) forced a tense but stable geopolitical equilibrium. Because the conflict was framed as a systemic clash of models, the US was structurally compelled to maintain alliances, actively rebuild Europe, and at least superficially adhere to international institutional frameworks in order to prove the superiority and legitimacy of its system.
During this era, the US mostly preferred traditional regime change and the cultivation of stable client states over outright fragmentation. Korea was divided, but along rigid Cold War fault lines rather than by unilateral US design. Vietnam was kept divided for as long as possible, but the overarching imperial goal was always a stable, controllable state. The US functional elites actively avoided creating chaotic vacuums for a simple reason: the USSR could potenatially fill them.
With the fall of the USSR, that ideological restraint vanished. The necessity for equilibrium evaporated, revealing a naked unipolar logic of pure extraction, exploitation, and coercion. Without a rival ideology to contain, the US empire no longer needed to legitimize itself through international frameworks—frameworks it now routinely bypasses, violates, or ignores entirely. The geopolitical arena defaulted to a pre-1914 scenario: a raw, unrestrained economic contest over resources and supply chains. In this landscape, the crumbling empire sheds any pretense.
While significant fragmentation occurred at the Cold War’s immediate end (with the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the USSR, and Czechoslovakia), the post-Cold War era is when fragmentation became a deliberate, systemic strategy. We see this unbroken operational lineage in Iraq (from 2003 onward), Libya (2011), Syria (2011 onward), Somalia (which began earlier but was violently intensified), and Sudan (partitioned in 2011). There was no longer a USSR to fill the vacuums, no need for the discipline of ideological containment, and essentially, no US capacity—or will—to rebuild what it had broken.
Therefore, the Fragmentationist Grand Strategy is historically specific to the unipolar-to-multipolar transition, roughly spanning from 1991 to the present. During the Cold War, the US needed stable clients; during the brief post-Cold War “unipolar moment,” it could afford to simply destroy and leave; today, facing re-emerging rivals, it must use fragmentation strategically to actively prevent rival consolidation.
Europe serves as the ultimate case in point. The prevention of European consolidation with Russia has been a consistent Mackinder/Brzezinski imperative: a unified Eurasia would equal the end of US primacy. Or at least it would have been one of the avenues to do so. In this light, NATO expansion into the former Soviet space is the structural fragmentation of potential Eurasian consolidation. Each small state incorporated into NATO is a puzzle piece permanently removed from any rival regional order. Therein, each energy supply chain severed functions for the same aim.
This is not classic divide et impera aimed merely at weakening a single enemy. This is the Fragmentationist Grand Strategy at its core, specifically engineered to prevent the emergence of a continuous, integrated geographic space that could eventually, as it creates a rival order, challenge the US-led empire.
Distributed Enforcement
To fully grasp the mechanics of the Fragmentationist Grand Strategy (FGS), there is another vital distinction of note we need to make: the imperial host state (or host states) and the transatlantic ruling strata are not the exact same entity. Even though a part of these power elites can be part of the states’ institutions. Consequently, the FGS does not rely on a single military instrument commanded by a single sovereign government. Instead, the heavily financialized transatlantic ruling strata utilizes the militaries and private contractors of a myriad of states as its distributed enforcement arm.
For instance, within this architecture, Israel functions as a semi-autonomous enforcement node. Its institutional fusion with US-led strategy is both ue to its ideological overlap, but also due to an operational division of labor. Similarly, Gulf state militaries operate as coordinated sub-instruments, a role cemented by the fact that their massive sovereign wealth funds are invested in the empire’s financial architecture. Furthermore, we must account for the “financial military”—the weaponization of SWIFT exclusions, central bank asset freezes, and secondary sanctions. This invisible military requires no troops at all, yet it can systematically degrade a target state’s coercive capacity over years without a single physical deployment.
This distributed, transnational nature explains a glaring anomaly in modern diplomacy: why all major current conflict negotiations are being conducted simultaneously by informal envoys lacking formal institutional or democratic mandates. They are operating on behalf of a kind of “clearing house” framework. State differently, this framework is about an overarching transnational financial regime consisting of Western central banks, the IMF, Wall Street platforms among other institutions, that dictate global dollar settlement, debt restructuring, and conditional reconstruction financing. This framework relies on what we can call an hybrid intermediary class (think Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner). It is made up of technocrats, informal envoys, think-tank strategists, and private consultants who straddle the permeable boundary between transatlantic sovereign capital and national political classes. They act as a transmission belt. These operators serve to compile pre-existing financial conditions and demands into working settlement terms and actionable state policy. (Besides, they do all of this capture and financialization while officially talking about ceasefires, peace, and the easening of sanctions.)
The imperial ruling strata-relate division of labor, thus, can be summarized as, on the one hand, the host state providing the military enforcement; and on the other hand, the sovereign capital class providing the financial architecture; and the operators providing the compilation and negotiation.
In this arrangement, the costs and benefits are quite asymmetric. The US state (and other allied or proxy states) absorbs all the costs—military depletion, weapon stockpile drawdowns, and catastrophic reputational damage—while the transatlantic financial layer collects the lucrative returns on the resulting reconstruction and debt-servicing. This parasitic symbiosis is the absolute crux of the system. Moreover, it explains exactly why the current US political class is so brazen with its own stock market gaming and financial speculation. The politicians are personally benefiting from the chaos, acting as willing junior partners who nominally represent the state, but in effect serve sovereign capital. Here, the US military (along with its proxy and vassal militaries) is an instrument of last resort, not the primary tool of first instance. Its depletion is a tragic cost borne by the US citizenry, not by the sovereign capital class that profits from the reconstruction that such depletion makes possible.
However, this distributed enforcement architecture is now buckling under immense structural pressure. Israel is being rapidly depleted alongside the US. Gulf militaries are strictly theater-specific and lack the capacity to substitute for industrial-scale global force projection. The “financial military” is being deployed at such a reckless speed that it has become self-defeating, forcing the Global Majority to actively de-dollarize. Finally, the domestic re-industrialization that would be required to physically rebuild the US enforcement arm runs on a decade-scale timeline—a timeline that available compensatory strategies simply might not be able to cover.
This brings us to the ultimate contradiction. Sovereign capital’s own operational logic—four decades of unchecked financialization, global labor arbitrage, and debt-financed state operations—has systematically degraded the very industrial, demographic, and fiscal base from which its military enforcement arm was built. The transatlantic ruling class is now facing the accumulated, material consequences of its own wild success. In short, the strategy is eating itself.
The Engine of Sabotage
The FGS-framework allows us to assemble the seemingly disparate pieces of the current geopolitical puzzle. Why does the US frequently and seemingly prefer failed states over stable, non-compliant allies? Why was and is Russia systematically excluded from European security architectures? Why is European strategic autonomy actively sabotaged by Washington? Why does the exact same personnel write strategy papers for both the US and Israel? And why does every major US intervention since 1991 repeat a similar arc of state dissolution?
The answers lie in the structural decay of the imperial core itself. The US has heavily de-industrialized, offshoring the basic and enabling industries required to maintain a productive economic pyramid. Specifically, domestic productive capacity and the enabling industries (machine tools, capital goods) required for military production have been diminishing. It simply lacks the industrial capacity to out-compete a rising multilateral order through infrastructure and development. Furthermore, the US ruling strata are ideologically uninterested in engaging in a peaceful competition over the quality, quantity, and speed of societal development.
Possessing only a financialized, rent-seeking economy and a “baroque,” inherently corrupt military-industrial complex, the US cannot build a competing global architecture. The baroque nature of the US arms economy is reflected in how it produces capital-intensive, high-cost, low-transferability weapons systems that absorb investment without actually generating productive spillovers for its own economy. Therefore, its only remaining competitive advantage is sabotage.
One might ask: why not simply accept and manage this imperial erosion peacefully? Why not coexist with other sovereign states and ruling strata? This is where ideological blindness intersects with material desperation. A fragmented, perpetually unstable Eurasian landmass is the only environment where a de-industrialized, financial hegemon can survive. Creating a permanent “mess” ensures that rival orders cannot consolidate (though, as established, certain strategic nodes will be selectively absorbed and controlled).
We must not forget the macroeconomic baseline: because the US is the most indebted nation on earth, it must (in its own logic) forcefully extract resources (like oil in Venezuela or the Middle East) to prop up the dollar. When “shallow hegemony” fails to secure these resources peacefully, the US deploys FGS to break large, autonomous states into weak, compliant fragments and to stop others from consolidating. This allows their resources to be looted without the massive cost of formally administering them.
Moreover, the dollar’s supremacy requires absolute global dependency. If a state is large and autonomous enough to feed itself, fuel itself, and protect itself (e.g., China, or a unified Russia-Iran-China axis), it does not need the Federal Reserve’s swap lines or overpriced US-controlled LNG. Therefore, a large, autonomous state is an existential threat to a financialized empire simply because it proves that life outside the dollar system is possible. As economist Prabhat Patnaik noted, when the US aggressively sanctions large autonomous states, it inadvertently forces them to trade with each other in local currencies. To prevent this rival architecture from solidifying, the US uses FGS to keep the Eurasian landmass violently fragmented, ensuring everyone remains desperate enough to rely on the US dollar and the US military umbrella.
Operating in the background for three decades, FGS is historically interesting in three distinct ways:
Structural Doctrine over Tactic: It elevates fragmentation from an opportunistic tactic (divide et impera) to a permanent structural doctrine applied to all large states that cannot be made controllable. (Let’s not forget, however, that this is an emergent structural reflex rather than a master plan. When an empire is cornered by historical forces, and its institutional worldview is built entirely around coercion—rendering every geopolitical problem a nail for its military-financial hammer—fragmentation is simply the path-dependent reaction of a cornered beast.)
Post-Cold War Specificity: Cold War discipline required the US to maintain stable clients rather than chaotic vacuums, precisely because the USSR could immediately fill them. FGS is uniquely tailored to the post-Soviet landscape.
The Fusion of Chaos and Finance: It fuses geopolitical fragmentation with energy-financial architecture, ensuring that the chaos it generates simultaneously acts as a rent-extraction circuit through dollar-denominated energy flows. Notwithstanding that this strategy might only generate temporary benefits while the global role lasts.
Its limits, however, are equally clear. States with strong social cohesion, institutional depth, and external support networks (such as Cuba, and Iran thus far) can successfully resist the hollowing-out mechanism that Li’s sociological model describes. This means FGS does not produce universal fragmentation, but rather the selective fragmentation of the weakest links within any potential rival order.
Because the US-led empire currently relies on fragmentation to survive, it cannot allow the globe to stabilize. Peace and integration in Eurasia mean the death of US financial hegemony. Therefore, FGS is locked into a permanent cycle of escalation, deliberately dismantling the globalized capitalist market it originally built. Its logical terminus is not a utopian world of liberal democracies.
Its terminus is the Bunker State: a global landscape of (some and partially) shattered peripheries, compliant nodes managed through conditional debt and programmable compliance, influenced and controlled from heavily fortified, unassailable, securitized, and hyper-militarized imperial cores that are entirely un-democratic, functioning merely as territorial nodes for transnational sovereign capital. Outside of it lies the rival architecture that the empire’s own weapons-grade financial isolation forced into existence.
The Fragmentationist Grand Strategy is helping build the rival order it feared. It actively accelerated its consolidation and its creation of alternatives. Whether this parallel architecture consolidates into a genuine alternative—one that does not simply reproduce the same extractive logic under different management—depends entirely on whether its contender states can discipline their own comprador fractions before those fractions repeat the “hollowing-from-within” that transatlantic elites so heavily rely upon. (As well as on whether targeted countries can survive all types of coercion coming from this crumbling empire.) The answer to that question is not yet known. And in the midst of this interregnum, that uncertainty is the most honest conclusion this framework can offer
What this essay has named is the story of a crumbling empire whose traditional power has almost vanished, its hegemony has been eroding with it, yet its global role has not. It is a system that has crossed structural thresholds it cannot reverse; it is still moving, still deeply dangerous, and still capable of pulling others down with it, but it is no longer able to arrest its own direction.
Closing Thoughts: The Interregnum Exists
As we close this two-part essay, it is vital to explicitly name the historical moment we are living through: the interregnum. Antonio Gramsci’s original formulation applies here with clinical precision. We are in a transitional phase characterized by three distinct dynamics:
The loss of hegemony: The old order can no longer reproduce ideological or political consent on a universal scale. At best, its capacity to manufacture consent has itself become fragmented. In this degraded phase, even brazenly lawless declarations—stripped of all moral pretense—can function as instruments of hegemony-building. “Saying the quiet part out loud” paradoxically builds a new, darker kind of reactionary consent among certain factions who deeply respect the naked use of force and view the world through a dichotomous machiavellian lens. That’s still hegemony, even only factional and partial.
The retention of domination: The old order still ruthlessly controls the coercive and financial apparatuses. Since hegemony is fragmented, the use of force becomes much more apparent and necessary.
Accelerated institutional crystallization: Competing orders are racing to lock in structural advantages before the transition completes.
When Gramsci spoke of the “time of monsters” emerging during the interregnum, we must recognize that these monsters are not solely creatures of kinetic force and violence. They are also the technical and financial governance architectures designed to outlast the very power that installs them. We typically think of imperial erosion in terms of ideological and political hegemony. But there is a third layer: infrastructural hegemony. This is the power embedded in payment rails, procurement standards, and debt conditionality. This infrastructure persists independently of whether the enforcing ruling strata remain globally dominant. Therefore, it is absolutely critical that any new multipolar order emerging from this crisis successfully exits this institutional architecture.
I anticipate that some readers will scratch their heads at this paradox. How can the empire be simultaneously dying—plagued by military overextension, the loss of soft power, de-dollarization, and ideological blindness—while also successfully installing a permanent governance architecture? The answer is that governance rails do not need a living empire to function. The IMF conditionality apparatus, the US dollar’s incumbency advantage in global trade invoicing, NATO’s mutual defense commitments, the Western procurement standards currently being hardwired into Ukrainian state infrastructure—these are institutionalized coercive structures. They will operate on autopilot long after the enforcing power weakens, just as the IMF’s structural adjustment programs continued to hollow out African economies long after the Cold War rationale for them had dissolved. The architecture survives the architect. This is institutional inertia.
Last but not least, I want to add that the crumbling empire is facing several crisis. Internal and external. One I find quite interesting is that the ruling class is competing amongst themselves, producing incoherent policy. For example, the Trump coalition’s “energy dominance” doctrine makes no sense as a coherent national strategy, but it is coherent as a fraction strategy designed to benefit domestic fossil fuel extractivists against the transnationally-oriented green-energy fractions. These fractures result in policy contradictions: preaching energy dominance while maintaining a structural dependency on heavy crude; waging financial warfare against SWIFT users while developing a dollar-backed stablecoin for global surveillance; expanding NATO while simultaneously threatening to withdraw from it. Still, no matter the party and their disputes, the overaching goal is to maintain or rather regain a position in the world, to revive the unipolar order by destroying an emerging multipolar one.
Thus, while the empire as a coherent hegemonic project—one capable of organizing global consent—is failing, specific capital fractions within it are doing well, actively using this systemic crisis as a historic accumulation opportunity. The defense industry, the LNG exporters, the reconstruction finance sector, the digital payment infrastructure builders—these fractions are the beneficiaries of wars and interventions. At least for now. Viewed through this lens, the Gaza stablecoin concept is exactly the kind of instrument a declining hegemony produces. Unable to maintain legitimacy through consent, the empire turns to financial enclosure and digital surveillance to maintain dollar-circuit discipline in spaces it can no longer govern through soft power.
This form of domination is being executed with the tools of the financial and tech fractions rather than purely the tools of the militarist fraction. What is replacing the old multilateral order is a crisis-management strategy for accumulation without hegemony (or partial hegemony): maintaining dollar circuits and military dominance without the ideological legitimacy that once made them appear natural and universal. Historically, capitalism moving from hegemony to sheer domination is a sign of profound erosion. And domination without consent is structurally brittle and massively resource-intensive. Yet, what is being built in this interregnum will not automatically disappear when the military overreach becomes terminal.
Pattern recognition
After all I have written here, please understand this essay as an exercise in pattern recognition. I am not pretending to possess a crystal ball, my speculations on future scenarios notwithstanding. The future will be dictated by highly volatile variables: path dependency, self-fulfilling prophecies, critical junctures, tipping points, and self-reinforcing socio-political dynamics that could lead to vastly different outcomes a decade from now.
I am simply presenting the structural patterns I have perceived operating beneath the surface over the last thirty years. Nothing less, and nothing more. This framework might help you understand the world through your own lens, which is naturally forged out of your own biography and social environment.
Indeed, we must remember that an empire is, at its core, a social phenomenon. As with all social phenomena, we are left with the eternal question of structure versus agency. Are we—including empires and their social fractions—blindly pushed by larger historical forces, or do we act of our own accord? Can we even separate the two? Or is history a constant, dialectical, and dynamic movement between the structure we inherit and the agency we exert?
Whatever the case may be, I hope this essay finds you well in these trying times.
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 two-part analysis, we must ask how the architecture of this interregnum is manifesting on the ground.
Where do you see the “Reconstruction Trap” or forced “re-compradorization” operating today? More importantly, are the states in your region successfully building the institutional discipline and the social or political cohesion needed to resist being hollowed out from within? Or are they actively being absorbed into the finacialized compliance architecture?
The terminus of this strategy is not inevitable. Where do you see genuine South-South solidarity pushing back against this structural fragmentation? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
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