Alex Krainer : L’économie mondiale bouleversée après la guerre en Iran

 

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The Fragmentationist Grand Strategy: On the Intolerable Nature of Large Autonomous States - II

Engineering Chaos, Imperial Decay, and the Interregnum

Nel Bonilla

Apr 08, 2026

Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors (1533). Wealth, diplomatic statecraft, and the instruments of global extraction, and the specter of imperial decay.

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.

If you value this kind of independent, structural analysis of global power, consider subscribing below to receive future deep-dives directly in your inbox.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2007), p. 384. The question is whether the Global Majority will continue to surrender its surpluses to be weaponized against itself or will finally use them to build genuine alternatives.

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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.

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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”

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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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Nel

The Fragmentationist Grand Strategy: On the Intolerable Nature of Large Autonomous States - I

 The Structural Logic of Imperial Decay and the Physics of State Collapse

Nel Bonilla

Apr 06, 2026

Johannes Vermeer, The Geographer (1668). The cartographer's gaze—measuring the globe for early European commercial and colonial expansion—prefigures the structural architectures of today.

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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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"

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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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