When "Allies" Bite the Hand That Feeds Them: America's Vassal States No Longer Obey
Imperial cults require blind faith, but the vassals become heretics, fleeing their false temples and leaving the high priests alone at the altar.
By Karim Bettache
In 1971, President Nixon unilaterally ended the Bretton Woods system by refusing to convert dollars into gold. He embarked America on a disastrous financial experiment: unbacked fiat money, fractional reserve banking, and the dollar reigning supreme as the world's reserve currency. For decades, this system of dollar hegemony sustained America's global empire. But today it is finally coming undone.
The bones of empire, once clothed in the flesh of industry and production, are showing through a shredded thin tissue of financial transactions and asset bubbles. The empire feeds itself not by creating wealth but by extracting it from the periphery and funneling it to the imperial core - where corporations and oligarchs gorge themselves while throwing scraps to those below. This is the system that is unraveling before our eyes.
Rival powers like Russia and China are creating alternative trade and financial institutions to bypass Western control. Sanctions weaponized by Washington are forcing more nations into bilateral barter arrangements. Western capitalism is in a never-ending cycle of crises with ever larger and more frequent boom-bust collapses. Meanwhile, the world's reserve currency is being printed with abandon, revealing its worthlessness.
Even close allies are defecting from the empire. Saudi Arabia, whose petrodollar alliance with the U.S. underwrote dollar hegemony for decades, is pivoting to China and Russia. The Saudi crown prince's visit to Moscow and talks of purchasing the Russian S-400 missile system signal the end of Washington's monopoly over Riyadh. Once the linchpin of petrodollar recycling, Saudi Arabia is now threatening to abandon dollar-only oil trading. This would demolish one of the last pillars propping up the dollar as the global reserve currency.
Meanwhile, Israel, the empire's military proxy in the Middle East, has descended into a far-right fascism that knows no limits. The open apartheid regime and industrial-scale oppression of Palestinians exposes the lie of Israel as a "democracy." It has become an international pariah dependent on the U.S., even as it drives America's disastrous interventions in the region. But Israel's dependence on dollar largesse also makes it vulnerable. As dollar dominance declines, so too will American aid to Israel - and with it the impunity to ethnically cleanse Palestine and provoke wars across the region.
The bonds of alliance and dollar dependence tie each party - Saudi Arabia, Israel, Wall Street, and Washington - to the empire with an unbreakable grip. But as the imperial cult of dollar supremacy collapses, so too will these bonds. Allies will defect, client states will rebel, and global finance will seek new centers of power. The collapse will be chaotic - but no rose garden was ever made without pruning shears. As the scythe of crisis cuts through petrodollar pacts and peels apart alliances, new spaces will open for the oppressed to demand freedom and redistribution.
For America's ruling classes, the end of dollar dominance signals the end of their unipolar moment and the privileges that come with it. As America descends into political and social chaos, its empire will follow the fate of all empires: collapse. The war in Ukraine, driven by Washington's desire to provoke Russia and tighten its grip on Europe, only accelerates the unravelling. The coming crisis will expose the hollowness of Western "democracy" and the lies of "endless growth." But it will also open opportunities to build a new system that serves both humanity and the planet. The sunset of empire is a sunrise for all those it has oppressed. Darkness is falling on America's unipolar moment. Let us welcome the dawn.