Alastair Crooke: The Anatomy of Imperial Contraction
https://x.com/apocalypseos/status/2000114144113045617
Alastair Crooke: The Anatomy of Imperial Contraction
From Symbolic Might to Systemic War: How the US NSS Confronts a “Burgeoning Debt” and a Rival Architecture
Alastair Crooke frames the new US National Security Statement as the opening of a decisive new phase. The global conflict, he argues, is moving “away from what I’d call symbolic military might” and toward the core question: “which incoming global system and architecture will dominate in the future?”
This shift has crystallized a distinct “Trumpian geopolitics,” embodied in the mantra of “peace through commerce.” The NSS, Crooke notes, revealingly sidelines Western values as obstacles, part of an old order that worked “to the disadvantage of the United States.” At its heart, the document is a stark admission: it is “the warning of imperial collapse.” The image of Atlas buckling conveys the explicit message that “the United States cannot shoulder this burden any longer.”
The strategy is not to abandon empire, but to correct it. It must bypass “deep structural contradictions,” primarily “a burgeoning debt and an out-of-control fiscal matrix” which, unsolved, means “the empire will fold—will implode.” Sanctions have failed because rivals adapted. The NSS response is a model of franchised influence abroad and a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” asserting exclusive US primacy in the Western Hemisphere.
Economically, Crooke dissects a central flaw. While the NSS invokes Hamilton and tariffs, these are not tools for industrial revival but for “shakedowns” to coerce investment. The core contradiction is ordering overseas buyers to purchase U.S. debt as the dollar declines—a plan that “does not make much sense.”
He illustrates this transactional logic in Ukraine, where the aim is to construct a “financial reward system” so all stakeholders can “get a slice of the cake,” replicating the financial “boondoggles” of past wars. Yet this ignores non-financial realities: Russia’s demand for “watertight security” and Europe’s “psychotic” need for Russia’s “obvious and humiliating” defeat.
The pivotal case is Venezuela. Crooke highlights a telling refusal: Maduro offered the US “complete surrender of resource sovereignty,” and Trump said no. The reason lies in China’s rival offer of a zero-tariff deal and integrated development. Here, two architectures clash: the US system of Bretton Woods and dollar hegemony versus a Chinese model of infrastructure and finance “stripped of any conditionality.”
The US response is a naval blockade to “push out” this alternative. The critical question is whether this corollary will be enforced militarily. Crooke is skeptical, as China’s “invasion” is systemic—“alternative systems of finance, of integrated supply lines, of energy corridors” already rooted in the region. The outcome will symbolically decide if an economic vision free from IMF or dollar hegemony can survive in America’s sphere.
posted by Satish Sharma at
14:56
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