What if the United States collapses?

Today, the United States of America holds more power and influence than any other nation in the history of humanity. What would happen if it collapsed?

What if the United States collapses?

You may think it is an improbable scenario but it is actually not totally unrealistic to the extent that it has already been hypothetically considered by people like Emmanuel Todd and professor Igor Panarin. In both cases, their reflections have caused controversy although they are rightly underpinned by the fact that, historically, all great Empires have, at least once in their existence, entered a recession and in the worst cases, disintegrated. After all, Vladimir Putin said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the worst geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century and that he would work to regain its once-possessed influence across the world.

A collapse of the United States would be a geopolitical catastrophe for the whole world. Those who butchered Iraq? Afghanistan? Those who destabilized Syria? Destroyed Libya? Yes. Despite all, the United States has become ‘too big too fail’ in terms of international relations. It has become a systemic ‘geopolitical bank”, along with its market makers like Citadel. We are seeing increasingly more anti-trust cases brought by the US government which aim at limiting the monopoly of the Big Five giants. The other way around does not work; individuals cannot sue the United States and seek to limit their power and influence by bringing anti-trust cases of that sort against it. The United States (and the world) has let itself gain so much importance in foreign affairs that its collapse, to stress it one more time, would be a global catastrophe which would probably incidentally take the lives of tens of millions of people.

So, how can we even imagine such a thing?

Despite the fact that today’s balance of great powers is far less stable than, let’s say during Soviet era (The Soviet Union, for better or worse, balanced out Western influence and countries like France were looking to act as a nonpartisan middleman, which is no longer the case). Today, the United States has the greatest diplomacy in the world, the reserve currency, the largest military logistics. The big issue we are facing today is the immaturity between States which started to appear after the Thirty Years' War which ended in 1648 when the Westphalian sovereignty came into being. It underlined a new international system of sovereign states, which was enshrined in the United Nations Charter : "Nothing shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state". In 1815 came the Treaty of Vienna, which regulates treaties among sovereign states. Since then, international relations have not changed that much. We still have compromises dictated by the balance of power and when the balance of power between nations evolve, we have wars and a redistribution of roles. The fact that we today think the same way we did in 1648, even though we have nuclear bombs and colossal industrialized, computerized militaries, is the reason why the United States is ‘too big too fail’ in international relations. In order to have stability in a Westphalian system, it is necessary that there be an ultra-dominant and all-crushing nation. An all-crushing nation which is going to abuse its leverage and ‘americanize’ the world in the case of today’s United States. One way it currently does it is with its top-tier universities, which attract young elites of the whole world and ultimately spread the American gospel.

It is always amusing yet necessary to compare the United States with the Roman Empire to the extent that, as an example, the Eagle (one the most enduring symbols of Roman civilization) with its olive branch and arrows is a national symbol of the United States.

The Bald Eagle - America’s national symbol

At a meeting with John Bolton ⎯ former U.S. President Donald Trump’s national security adviser ⎯ in 2018, Vladimir Putin joked by asking him "Has your eagle picked all the olives and only has arrows left?"; a jab implying that the US is playing the Romans.

Zbigniew K. Brzezinski also addressed the question in his book The Grand Chessboard (1997). In his view, if the United States came to collapse, he explained how Japan would be forced to hastily rearm itself. Indeed, without the American Empire, what would stop China from invading Japan or at least from declaring war and laying claim to the Senkaku islands (which China calls Diaoyu islands)? Nothing, except Japan’s capacity to develop nuclear weapon.

That said, the first thing we would see if the United States was to enter a ‘geopolitical recession’ is a massive global rearmament in massive destruction weapons. This would include Japan but also Germany (knowing that NATO would lose significance), a few African countries, Iran (due to neighboring nuclear powers like Pakistan, Israel, Russia), probably Turkey, Malaysia to cite some examples. The fact that no South American country, through the Monroe Doctrine, does not possess nuclear weapons, suggests that they would become vulnerable as soon as the United States loses its dominance. Brazil would likely be tempted to develop its own nuclear technology, given its technical and technological capacities. The world would become far more dangerous in which there would be local actors and regional powers which would dominate others. Such a world would come with new conflicts.

On the one side, we have the United States utterly abusing their ‘too big to fail’ status in geopolitics; because let’s be fair, if Malaysia, Japan or even Germany wanted to arm itself with nuclear warheads, France or Britain could not prevent them from doing so, but the United States most definitely could.

Nobody should wish for the collapse of the United States of America; rather we should wish for a readjustment, a greater multipolarity, perhaps an emergence of the BRICS and a capacity for the world to develop diplomatic powers. The capacity for local arbitrage is something that lacks in today’s world. International relations remain fundamentally dictated by the current balance of power in the sense the United States can violate international law with impunity. But one reason of today’s stability comes from the United States’ capacity to quash and dominate any country whether diplomatically (if the country has nuclear capacity) or economically (like it has been trying to do with Russia since the invasion of Ukraine). Not only does the United States hold more power and dominance than any other country in the world but also any other nation in the history of humanity. No other nation has ever been able to impose its rules in the way the United States can do it today.

If the United States came to collapse, the world would be much more dangerous, unstable, with regional wars of an intensity equivalent to the Iran-Iraq war (which by the way was spurred by the US) emerging pretty much everywhere, in every zone of reconfiguration and we would be needing arbitration which could no longer be found. After all, the League of Nations was created to avert WW2, which it did not. The United Nations was created to avert the Cold War, which it did not. Today, we are not that much more advanced than we were in 1914; we continue to have an international policy based on bilateral treaties. We are simply given the illusion that the United Nations function as a peace-keeping system but the reality is that the one that decides is the United States given that its military budgets exceeds the sum of the nine next military powers with the largest expenditures.

The United States is ‘too big too fail’ in international relations and as a result, takes advantage of its dominant position and allows itself to violate the law and destroy countries like Irak and Libya if it serves their interests. Humans have never yet been capable of creating an international order more effective than ‘the law of the strongest’ and they have never succeeded in creating a system of relations between peoples and sovereign nations that can self-regulate and function in the long term.

Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed - UNESCO constitution.