Skip to content

US Empire

Biden’s ‘Samson Option’

It has been clear since the terror attacks in New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001 — the date I choose to mark a great turn in the global order — that America’s abdication of its postwar hegemony was to rank high among the 21st century’s defining events. The questions from that day onward have been how the policy cliques in Washington would respond to such a change in America’s place in the community of nations and what they might do — how great the risks they would take — to avoid, or at least forestall, this world-historical shift. How chaotically or otherwise, to put this question another way, would the arrival of a new, post–American world order prove?

Biden’s APEC Summit Visit: ‘One More Slap In Face To Western Empire’

Outgoing US President Joe Biden was unable to score a diplomatic breakthrough of any kind last week during his appearance at the annual APEC Summit in Peru. The meeting between Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping was pure formality, argues Jeff J. Brown, author of “The China Trilogy” and founder of Seek Truth From Facts Foundation. “The Chinese know that Biden is the quintessential lame duck. Being very Confucist and wanting to respect protocol, position and tradition, they met. But that is about all,” Brown says. According to him, what Xi told Biden during the meeting basically amounted to reiterating what the former previously told Donald Trump by phone earlier this month: “cooperation is mutually beneficial for both sides; as two leading world powers, humanity depends on us to do the right thing, and trying to limit China’s progress and development is bound to fail.”

The End Of The US Empire And The Denial Of The US

I mean to tell you all that if you ask me to tell you what is the biggest reality we now have to face, it’s the end of the American empire, what we inherited from the British because they had the last Empire before this one is now over, and there is zero chance it’s coming back. It ought to have been a central issue in the presidential election we just had. Instead, the two candidates and their parties worked overtime to practice denial. No such a thing. The war in Ukraine, just to take one of countless examples, will show you how costly this denial is.

Samir Amin On The Theory Of Multipolarity

It is almost universally recognized today that we are living in a multipolar world, symbolized by the continuing decline of U.S. hegemony; the economic stagnation of the imperial triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan; and the rise of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). But the historical and theoretical significance of this is in dispute. The foremost theorist of multipolarity was Samir Amin, through his concept of “delinking,” which he developed throughout his career. For Amin, the struggle against imperialism required a delinking from the law of value on the world level centered in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo, and its replacement by a more “polycentric” or “multipolar” world order, in which nations in the periphery of the system could reorient their economies toward their own nation-based value systems, thereby meeting their own internal developmental needs.

BRICS, The Dollar, And The End Of US Empire, With Ben Norton

The United States is socially, politically and economically in crisis. As an increasingly large number of people are priced out of the economy, fewer and fewer buy into the sham of electoral politics. On the world stage, too, the U.S. is suffering. Countries everywhere are beginning to drop the dollar as the standard unit of exchange, and Washington’s prestige has been severely shaken due to its relentless, unequivocal support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Ben Norton joins MintCast host Mnar Adley to discuss all this and more. Norton is an investigative journalist and founder of Geopolitical Economy Report, a news source dedicated to looking at the world and seeing the big picture. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Beijing, China.

The Decline Of The US Empire: Where Is It Taking Us All?

The evidence suggests that empires often react to periods of their own decline by over-extending their coping mechanisms. Military actions, infrastructure problems, and social welfare demands may then combine or clash, accumulating costs and backlash effects that the declining empire cannot manage. Policies aimed to strengthen empire—and that once did—now undermine it. Contemporary social changes inside and outside the empire can reinforce, slow, or reverse the decline. However, when decline leads leaders to deny its existence, it can become self-accelerating.

Nicaraguan Democracy Exposes The US Oligarchy

There is probably no group of people more isolated from the rest of humanity than residents of the United States. Far from being the “leader of the free world” and a robust democracy where the exchange of ideas is respected, the United States is under the thumb of billionaire oligarchs who restrict what we see and hear. The corporate media play the role of servant and keep the people simultaneously uninformed and misinformed. Knowledge of the rest of the world is extremely limited and only those who are sufficiently self-motivated will venture outside of the bubble. Yet doing so is imperative.

The Impending Collapse Of US Empire

The public perception of the American empire, at least to those within the United States who have never seen the empire dominate and exploit the “wretched of the earth,” is radically different from reality. These manufactured illusions, ones Joseph Conrad wrote so presciently about, posit that the empire is a force for good. The empire, we are told, fosters democracy and liberty. It spreads the benefits of “Western civilization.” These are deceptions repeated ad nauseam by a compliant media and mouthed by politicians, academics and the powerful. But they are lies, as all of us who have spent years reporting overseas understand.

Old Man Shouting, ‘The American Empire Is Doing Great!’

Democratic elites and the reporters who clerk for them were effusively approving of Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech last Thursday evening—not so much for what he said, which came nothing new, as for the demeanor of our enfeebled president. Never mind that Biden reduced an occasion intended to address all Americans as to the condition of their nation to a cheap stump speech. He avoided falling down for his hour at the podium while stringing coherent sentences (mostly) together in the cause of his political survival. That is what counted.

K. J. Noh On The Coming US-China Clash In Asia

The United States is no longer able to exert its will in the very arbitrary and unitary way that it has been able to and the problem with this is that it is a very dangerous moment because as the Empire weakens, as it senses its power waning and slipping away from its grasp, it becomes more dangerous. It's like the drunk at the bar and the bar is closing and the drunk is drunk with power. It has maxed out its credit cards and it has struck out with everybody. It is time to go home. It is time for the Empire to go home but it doesn't want to go home. It wants to pick a fight even if it has to take on the whole bar.

Righteous Protest Drowned Out As Empire Was Worshipped At AME Church

Let’s start at the top - with President Joe Biden. Using the lame excuse of memorializing the victims of the 2015 racist massacre at Mother Emanuel Church in which nine church members were murdered in cold blood by white supremacist Dylan Roof, who they had welcomed into their Bible Study, Biden’s true purpose for speaking at the church was to beg Black people to save his lagging campaign for re-election . But Biden didn’t even memorialize the victims of that massacre nearly a decade later by name, nor did he bother to speak at the church on the actual anniversary of the massacre, June 15.

The Dangers Of Minstrel Diplomacy

There have been defining times in history-moments, epochs and periods that are typically marked by notable events or particular characteristics that have changed the world forever. Nicolaus Copernicus’ publication of On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in 1543, postulating the model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center was such a moment. The Industrial Revolution (1760 – 1840), was a defining period in the methods and processes of global production that transitioned most of the world away from hand production, towards more efficient and stable mechanical manufacturing processes.

Can The US Adjust Sensibly To A Multipolar World?

In his 1987 book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, historian Paul Kennedy reassured Americans that the decline the United States was facing after a century of international dominance was “relative and not absolute, and is therefore perfectly natural; and that the only serious threat to the real interests of the United States can come from a failure to adjust sensibly to the newer world order.” Since Kennedy wrote those words, we have seen the end of the Cold War, the peaceful emergence of China as a leading world power, and the rise of a formidable Global South. But the United States has indeed failed to “adjust sensibly to the newer world order,” using military force and coercion in flagrant violation of the UN Charter in a failed quest for longer lasting global hegemony.

Chris Hedges: A Declining US Empire Is Committing Suicide

The Unites States Empire is falling, just as previous empires have done. Clearing the FOG speaks with journalist and author Chris Hedges about his newest book, "The Greatest Evil is War," and the connection between wars and the end of empire. Hedges compares current conditions in the United States and the fall of Rome. He describes the Western war against Russia being fought in Ukraine and aggression against China as part of the last gasp grabs to hold onto US hegemony, but they are failing. He talks about the Military Industrial Complex as an institution that has taken over and is out of control. It will continue to siphon every dollar it can from the US coffers while an increasing number of people are unable to meet their basic needs. Hedges provides an outline of where we are headed and what we must do to change course.

Why US Foreign Military Bases Should Be Reduced Significantly

Soon after the Second World War ended, the British government with its vast colonial empire made significant territorial concessions to the USA which could facilitate the rapid spread of USA military bases in many parts of the world. In addition of course the defeated Axis countries and their territories could provide another suitable place for the rapid proliferation of the US military bases that was to follow. In recent decades there have been several closures of these bases but there have been several new ones coming up as well. This together with definitional issues makes it difficult to give precise numbers, and it has been stated that even the Pentagon may struggle to give a precise number and list.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Sign Up To Our Daily Digest

Independent media outlets are being suppressed and dropped by corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our daily email digest before it’s too late so you don’t miss the latest movement news.