A Farewell to Empire

My deepest gratitude to my peers, mentors, and friends who inspired the ideas in this essay: Sophia Life, Jordan Siegel, Samantha Sweetwater, Forrest Landry, Patricia Parkinson, Primavera De Filippi, Felix Beers, and others.

I have been a student of empire since before I knew what I was studying.

In university, I split my time between international relations, economics, anthropology, and media studies, a combination that was, in retrospect, less an interdisciplinary education than an initiation into cognitive dissonance. My international relations courses were themselves divided into two barely compatible worldviews: on one side, the realpolitik tradition, which treated global order as a perpetual chess match between great powers jockeying for dominance; on the other, a more self-aware institutionalist critique, which held that the post-war international architecture: the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF, NATO, had been deliberately constructed to solve for the brutality that realpolitik described. The institutions were supposed to be the answer.

Then there were my economics courses, where the global order was discussed with the least critical scrutiny of all, because economics had been successfully disguised as a science rather than an ideology. In economics, the existing order wasn’t a political arrangement to be questioned but a set of natural laws to be modeled. Meanwhile, my anthropology and media studies courses were doing the opposite work entirely: revealing the social construction of everything my other classes took for granted. Power, they taught me, doesn’t just operate through armies and trade agreements. It operates through stories, through the ability to make a particular arrangement of the world seem inevitable, natural, beyond question.

Somewhere in this collision of epistemologies, I stopped believing in the story of empire. The story, if you grew up in the United States as I did, goes roughly like this: we are the good guys. We have flaws, sometimes serious ones, but fundamentally, we are a force for democracy and development in the world. Our military presence abroad keeps the peace. Our trade agreements spread prosperity. Our institutions, however imperfect, represent the best available framework for global cooperation and governance. The arc of American power bends toward justice.

I stopped believing that story. And what I found on the other side was not cynicism but clarity, the kind of clarity that comes when you stop trying to reconcile what a system says it is with what it actually does.

The End of a Pleasant Fiction

For decades, that clarity was shared by scholars, dissidents, and communities in the Global South who bore the brunt of the gap between rhetoric and reality. But within the corridors of Western power, the fiction held. Until January 20, 2026.

On that date, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stood before the World Economic Forum in Davos and said what decades of diplomatic protocol had made unsayable. The speech, titled “Principled and Pragmatic: Canada’s Path,” opened with Václav Havel’s parable of the Soviet-era grocer who places a sign reading “Workers of the world, unite!” in his shop window every morning. The grocer doesn’t believe it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway, to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists. Not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.

Then, with the full weight of historical irony, Carney turned the mirror of this Soviet parable on the West itself. “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false,” he told his audience of global elites. “That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.” He continued: “This fiction was useful. And American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security. So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals.”

Then the operative word: “This bargain no longer works… We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”

A rupture, not a transition. A transition implies continuity, the old order evolving gracefully into the next. A rupture implies that something has broken so fundamentally that the old frame can no longer contain what is happening. And what made Carney’s speech one of the most significant geopolitical addresses of our generation was not the content alone, much of which has been articulated for decades by scholars and dissidents outside the corridors of power, but the speaker. This was the prime minister of Canada, America’s closest ally, a former central banker, a consummate establishment figure, standing in the inner sanctum of global capitalism and admitting that the emperor had been naked for longer than anyone in that room had been willing or able to acknowledge.

When the middle powers start saying the quiet part out loud, it means the decline is already very far along. And it raises an uncomfortable question: if everyone knew the story was false, what exactly was holding it together?

The Machinery Behind the Story

The answer, of course, is power, specifically, the interlocking machinery of military force, financial control, and political coercion that undergirded the fiction of a “rules-based order” from the beginning.

After World War II, the United States, having emerged from the war with its industrial base intact and its competitors in ruins, constructed a global architecture that served two functions simultaneously. On the surface, it was a system of multilateral institutions designed to prevent another world war, promote development, and expand democratic governance. Underneath, it was a mechanism for projecting and maintaining American hegemony: the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, the petrodollar system tying global energy markets to American financial infrastructure, military bases in over seventy countries, and trade agreements structured to ensure American capital could move freely while constraining the economic sovereignty of everyone else.

When Nixon abandoned the gold standard in 1971, the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency was preserved through an arrangement with Saudi Arabia and other oil-exporting nations: oil would be priced and traded exclusively in dollars, ensuring that every nation on Earth needed to hold and continuously acquire American currency simply to meet its energy needs. This arrangement created perpetual global demand for dollars, allowing the United States to run enormous deficits, fund its military expansion, and export its inflation to the rest of the world. It was, in effect, an invisible tax on every economy on the planet, elegant in its design, devastating in its consequences.

And when any nation threatened to step outside this architecture, the response was swift. The history is long and well-documented, though rarely taught in American schools: the CIA-backed coup that overthrew the democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953, after he nationalized Iranian oil. The overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, replaced by the Pinochet dictatorship that served as a laboratory for neoliberal economics. The destabilization of governments across Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East whenever they attempted to chart an independent economic course. Saddam Hussein announced plans to price Iraqi oil in euros in 2000; by 2003, the United States had invaded. Muammar Gaddafi proposed a gold-backed African currency to replace the dollar and the CFA franc in African trade; by 2011, he was dead and Libya was a failed state.

The pattern is unmistakable: any government that threatens the financial architecture of American empire discovers that the “rules-based order” has a set of rules that operate beneath the ones advertised.

For decades, this machinery was effective enough that the fiction held. American hegemony did provide certain public goods: relative stability among great powers, freedom of navigation, a functioning (if deeply unequal) global trading system. The Soviet Union provided a useful counterweight: its existence forced the American empire to deliver at least some domestic prosperity, to demonstrate that capitalism could outperform communism for ordinary people, not just elites. When the Cold War ended, that pressure evaporated. The unipolar moment arrived, and with it, the merger of American imperial power with unfettered corporate globalization. The Clinton era represented the apex: the United States so secure in its dominance that it felt invincible, able to export its model of market democracy to every corner of the globe.

What followed was the long, slow unraveling. And the unraveling happened on two fronts simultaneously, external and internal, because the same extractive logic that governed America’s relationship to the world also governed its relationship to its own people.

The Shape of Decline

Internally, the United States has been consuming itself for decades. The symptoms are everywhere, visible to anyone willing to look past the stock market ticker. Infrastructure is crumbling, not metaphorically, but literally: bridges rated structurally deficient, water systems poisoning communities from Flint to Jackson, electrical grids failing under weather events that grow more frequent and more severe. The healthcare system bankrupts families while producing worse outcomes than every other wealthy nation. The education system has been defunded and politicized into dysfunction. Life expectancy in the United States has been declining, an almost unheard-of trajectory for a wealthy country.

And yet military spending continues to climb, year after year, regardless of which party holds power. And in a unipolar order, that spending no longer even correlates to actual military capacity. The endemic corruption of the defense industry, the cost overruns, the revolving door between the Pentagon and contractors, the weapons systems that don’t work, the trillion-dollar fighter jet programs that can’t fly in the rain, all mean that America spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined while producing less and less actual capability per dollar spent. The empire is running on fumes and borrowed money, and the borrowing itself is approaching crisis.

Externally, the pillars of American hegemony are buckling. The dollar’s share of global reserves has dropped from 71% in 2000 to roughly 57% today, and the decline is accelerating. The BRICS nations, now expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the UAE, and Indonesia, with Saudi Arabia hovering at the threshold, represent nearly half the world’s population and over 40% of global GDP. They are building alternative payment systems, conducting bilateral trade in local currencies, and launching initiatives like the gold-backed BRICS Unit specifically designed to reduce dependence on the dollar. Central banks worldwide have been buying gold at unprecedented rates, over a thousand metric tons annually for three consecutive years, hedging against a future in which dollar dominance can no longer be assumed.

When Trump threatened 100% tariffs on any BRICS nation that pursued de-dollarization, Brazil’s President Lula responded that BRICS+ was “committed to ending U.S. dollar dominance no matter what.” The threat of retaliation, which would have been decisive a generation ago, now reads as confirmation that the shift is real enough to provoke panic.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. It is happening because the story stopped working, because the gap between what the American empire promised and what it delivered became too wide for even its imperial vassal states to ignore.

A Harbinger of Our Multi-Polar Future

A few years ago, at a UN meeting on bioregionalism organized by Susanna Choe and GLOCHA, I found myself listening to remarks from the UN ambassador from the Bahamas. He was a thoughtful, measured diplomat, not given to polemic or ideology. But he described candidly the moment his own belief in the international order collapsed.

It was the global COVID-19 response. When the pandemic hit, the wealthy nations of the Global North hoarded vaccines, purchasing far more doses than their populations needed, while the Global South, lacking the manufacturing infrastructure to produce its own supply, was left to wait. The Bahamas, like dozens of other small nations, watched as the countries that controlled global pharmaceutical supply chains looked after themselves first, then their allies, and treated everyone else as an afterthought. The rhetoric of international solidarity evaporated the moment solidarity had a material cost.

But it wasn’t just COVID. He described the deep-sea mining treaty negotiations, where already-wealthy nations were positioning themselves to extract resources from the ocean floor, a shared commons that belongs to no one, using technologies that only they could afford, under rules they would write. The pattern was identical: the “international community” functioned as a club that set rules to benefit its existing members, while the nations that bore the greatest ecological and economic risks had the least voice in shaping those rules.

What struck me most was what came next. He didn’t describe despair. He described strategic reorientation. If the international order was a fiction that served the powerful, then small nations needed to stop trying to reform it from within and start building new alliances to work around it. He was looking for partners, not the traditional great-power patrons who offered development aid with strings attached, but other small and middle nations, even non-profits and values-aligned companies, willing to experiment with new forms of cooperation. He was, in his own diplomatic language, describing the end of the American imperial bargain, and looking for what comes after.

That conversation has stayed with me because it illustrates something essential: the collapse of the imperial fiction is not just an academic observation. It is a lived experience for billions of people, and for many of them, the response is not paralysis but creativity, the search for new forms of coordination that don’t depend on the goodwill of empires.

From Strength to Weakness

Now, against this backdrop of internal decay and external erosion, consider what is happening at this very moment.

On February 28, 2026, the United States, forced by its supposed ally, Israel, to launch coordinated strikes against Iran, targeting nuclear facilities, military infrastructure, and the country’s supreme leader himself, has initiated the largest American military operation in the Middle East since Iraq. Iran has retaliated with missile and drone strikes against American bases across the region, against Israel, and against civilian targets in multiple countries. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes, has become nearly impassable. Over three thousand ships sit stranded. Oil prices have spiked, stock markets have plunged, and the administration is already sending mixed signals about “winding down” operations while simultaneously requesting two hundred billion dollars from Congress and deploying additional marines.

The Iraq War of 2003 was, in a certain light, the last act of imperial confidence. After the psychological impact of September 11th, the United States was able to mobilize sufficient public consent for a war of choice. The stated justifications were fabricated. The intelligence was manipulated. The real motivations were a complex stew of neoconservative ideology, oil interests, and the profit motives of military contractors. But the empire was strong enough to absorb the costs. The only thing Americans were asked to do was to spend more money, to keep consuming, to keep the economic engine running. That the Obama administration failed to meaningfully reverse this posture, despite being elected on an explicit mandate for change, demonstrates that the trajectory was driven by structural forces, not individual leadership.

The Iran war is different because it is being launched from a position of profound weakness. The American economy is being propped up by an AI investment bubble that bears all the hallmarks of previous speculative manias. The stock market’s performance has been decoupled from the actual fundamentals of the economy for years, a disconnect that grows wider by the quarter. Everything is getting more expensive. Wealth is concentrating upward faster than at any point in living memory. The middle class has been hollowed out. And the petrodollar system that has financed American military adventures for half a century is eroding in the very moment the United States is needing to prop itself up most.

A dying empire launching a new war in the Middle East while its financial architecture fractures, its infrastructure crumbles, and its allies publicly eulogize the fiction that held the alliance together, this is not a position of strength. This is the late stage of empire that precedes total collapse. And whether this particular war ends in weeks or months, the trajectory it represents will not reverse. Trump seems to be playing his role in the collapse of empire perfectly, revealing the historical brutality of American imperialism by removing any of its remaining gloss or veneer. Now, implicated in the Epstein files which likely originated as part of a Mossad sexual blackmail operation, he has no choice but to be pulled by the Israelis into the conflict that will catalyze the final act of the American imperial project.

250 Years

In many ways, Trump is just the symptom of empire’s decay, not the cause. Empires have life cycles. This is not mysticism but observable historical pattern. They typically last about 250 years, roughly ten generations, long enough for the founding traumas and animating ideals to be forgotten, for internal contradictions to compound past the point of sustainability, for the institutional immune system to be captured by the very pathologies it was designed to prevent.

In 2026, the United States reaches that 250-year threshold.

The coincidence invites reflection, not nostalgia for a mythologized founding, but a serious examination of what happens when a civilization reaches the end of a cycle. Because the end of one cycle is always the beginning of another, and how we understand the shape of what’s dying determines our capacity to participate in what’s being born.

This is where I part ways with many of my progressive and leftist friends, who understandably recoil from anything that sounds like veneration of the American founding. The contradictions of that founding are real and damning: a declaration of universal rights authored by slaveholders, a republic built on indigenous genocide, a constitution that encoded human beings as three-fifths of a person for purposes of political representation. The founding generation drew heavily on the democratic practices of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and its Great Law of Peace, while simultaneously excluding indigenous peoples from the republic they built, one of history’s most bitter ironies. These contradictions were not incidental but foundational, the fatal flaw woven into the fabric from the first stitch, and the reason the experiment ultimately produced an empire rather than a genuine democracy.

And yet. The founding generation was also engaged in something genuinely revolutionary: the overthrow of the largest global empire that had ever existed on Earth. That a group of scrappy colonial subjects could conceive of self-governance, could imagine, and then enact, a form of political organization that did not require a king, was a radical break with centuries of political thought.

What made that historical moment transformative was not the specific institutions the founders created, many of which were compromised from the outset. It was the prior shift in consciousness. People had to first conceive that another way of governing was possible before they could build it. The revolution happened in the imagination before it happened on the battlefield.

Thomas Jefferson understood something essential about the fragility of what they were building. His proposal that the Constitution be rewritten every generation reflected a sophisticated grasp of institutional decay: how the living spirit of a political arrangement calcifies into dead letter, how the interests that coalesce around any stable institution inevitably capture it. Jefferson’s ward republics, small enough that all inhabitants could know one another and personally perform the functions of governance, represented his attempt to keep democratic power rooted in the lived reality of community rather than abstracted into distant bureaucratic structures.

That attempt failed. And the failure followed a predictable pattern: every expansion of freedom seemed to require an expansion of central authority. The Civil War required federal supremacy. Reconstruction required federal force. The New Deal required federal bureaucracy. Civil rights enforcement relied on the interstate commerce clause, a provision about economic regulation stretched to cover human dignity. Each progressive victory achieved through federal power created precedents for reaction. The federal authority that broke Jim Crow now militarizes local police. The administrative capacity built to provide social welfare now surveils and controls.

This is the Faustian bargain of centralized power, and it brings us to the heart of a deeper and longer cycle than even that of the American empire.

The Westphalian Inheritance

The 250-year arc of the United States is itself one of the final instantiations of a civilizational paradigm that dates back nearly four centuries: the Westphalian order.

The Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, ended the Thirty Years’ War, one of the most destructive conflicts in European history, driven by religious wars between kingdoms that could not tolerate the existence of neighboring territories organized under different faiths. The solution was elegant in its simplicity and catastrophic in its long-term implications: territorial sovereignty. Each prince would have supreme authority within his domain. Cuius regio, eius religio: whose realm, his religion.

This was not a natural law but a political compromise born from exhaustion. And the concept it established, that sovereignty means absolute authority over a defined territory, became the foundational grammar of all subsequent political organization. Colonialism was Westphalian sovereignty projected outward: European states, claiming absolute authority over their own territories, partnered with the Catholic Church’s Doctrine of Discovery to extend that sovereignty elsewhere by claiming that indigenous territories were terra nullius: empty land. This fundamental hypocrisy ensured that indigenous peoples, who had practiced consensual governance for millennia, were systematically excluded from the very notion of territorial sovereignty itself.

The nation-state was Westphalian sovereignty bureaucratized: territorial control administered through standardized institutions rather than the personal authority of a monarch. Even the American experiment, revolutionary as it was, remained conditioned by this inheritance. The founders seriously considered installing George Washington as king, not because they were stupid, but because their political imagination was still shaped by the assumption that sovereignty requires a sovereign. They broke the link between sovereignty and monarchy, but they preserved the link between sovereignty and territory. A democracy, especially one that grows as bloated and centralized as the American federal system, is still a form of territorial sovereignty: the power of the state to enforce its will on the people within its borders. The sovereign is collective rather than individual, diffuse rather than concentrated, but it is sovereign nonetheless.

Throughout American history, democratic movements have worked within this paradigm, using nonviolent protest, electoral organizing, and legislative reform to negotiate for legitimacy within a system of territorial sovereignty. Even the most radical of these movements accepted the basic frame: there is a state, it has power over a territory, and the question is who controls that state and how its power is exercised.

I want to suggest that this entire frame is now obsolete, and that recognizing its obsolescence is the key to understanding both why the current system is collapsing and what might replace it.

The Post-Westphalian Moment

What we are living through is not simply the decline of one empire or the transition from one dominant power to another, not a shift from American to Chinese hegemony, or from unipolarity to multipolarity within the existing paradigm. We are living through the exhaustion of the Westphalian model itself: the breakdown of the assumption that sovereignty means territorial control, that governance requires a state, and that the fundamental unit of political organization is a bordered jurisdiction administered by a central authority.

The evidence for this breakdown comes from both above and below.

From above: global coordination failures. The climate crisis, pandemic response, financial contagion, ocean acidification, artificial intelligence governance, these are problems that territorial sovereignty structurally cannot solve, because they operate across and beyond borders. The United Nations, the highest expression of institutional reform of the Westphalian order, has proven incapable of meaningful constraint on either global capital or state power, not because the people within it are incompetent, but because the architecture of state sovereignty and global markets prevent any authority from emerging above it. The result is a world that can identify existential threats with precision and respond to them with paralysis.

From below: the failure of existing institutions to serve local communities. The communities most affected by ecological collapse, economic extraction, and social fragmentation are also the communities with the least voice in the institutions that govern them. The federal government in the United States, or any large nation-state, is so distant from the lived reality of place that its interventions are as likely to harm as to help. Communities know this. They experience it every time a policy designed in a distant capital fails to account for the specific needs of a specific watershed, a specific neighborhood, a specific ecology.

This dual failure, the inability to coordinate globally and the inability to serve locally, is not a bug in the Westphalian system. It is a feature. Territorial sovereignty concentrates authority at a middle scale that is too large to be responsive and too small to be planetary. It creates states that are powerful enough to extract from their populations and project force against their neighbors, but incapable of addressing the actual challenges of our historical moment.

And now, from the side: the rise of non-territorial forms of coordination. Digital networks enable communities to form regardless of proximity and coordinate regardless of hierarchy. Capital already flows without regard for borders. The corporate sector has effectively operated as a post-Westphalian entity for decades, using the nation-state as a tool when convenient and routing around it when not. The question is whether the dissolution of Westphalian sovereignty will serve only capital, or whether other forms of post-territorial coordination can emerge alongside it.

This is the true significance of the multipolar moment we are entering. The shift from American unipolarity to a multipolar world is not just a rearrangement of the pieces on the existing board. It is an opportunity, perhaps only a brief one, to redesign the board itself. As the American empire loses its capacity to enforce a single set of rules on the entire world, space opens for experimentation. Middle powers and small nations, like the Bahamas ambassador I spoke with, are already looking for new forms of cooperation outside the imperial framework. The BRICS nations are building alternative financial infrastructure. Bioregional movements are creating governance structures aligned with watersheds instead of borders. Network and blockchain communities are experimenting with coordination mechanisms that don’t require territorial control.

The collapsing empire, in a kind of geopolitical aikido, can become the force that accelerates movement toward regenerative alternatives, not because the empire intends this, but because its decline creates the opening. When the center can no longer hold, the periphery discovers its own capacity.

Four Visions of Sovereignty After the State

The post-Westphalian landscape is being contested by at least four distinct visions of what comes next. What unites them is the recognition that territorial sovereignty is no longer the only game in town. What divides them is the question of what replaces it, or, more precisely, where sovereignty migrates once it leaves the state.

Sovereignty migrates to capital: corporate global governance. The corporate sector has, in effect, already built a post-Westphalian order through capital markets, global supply chains, and regulatory capture. From this perspective, the nation-state is a legacy institution that introduces friction into the free flow of capital. The push toward free trade agreements, international regulatory harmonization, and corporate-friendly governance structures represents this vision. It doesn’t need to be conspiratorial; it operates through the perfectly rational pursuit of profit maximization across jurisdictions. If the Westphalian state drew its sovereignty from control of territory, the corporate order draws its sovereignty from control of capital flows. And in a world where capital moves at the speed of bits and states move at the speed of legislation, capital has already won this particular race.

Sovereignty migrates to technology: the network state. Associated most closely with Balaji Srinivasan, the network state proposes building new states in digital space, organized around shared values rather than shared territory, and using cryptocurrency rather than democratic deliberation as the primary coordination mechanism. Sovereignty here is derived from the ability to exit: if you don’t like the rules, you fork the code and build your own jurisdiction. This is the libertarian fantasy of competitive governance, enabled by digital infrastructure. It breaks the Westphalian link between sovereignty and territory, but replaces it with a link between sovereignty and capital since the ability to exit, to start a new network state, to fork the protocol, requires resources that are not equally distributed. It is post-Westphalian in form but still operates within the zero-sum logic that Westphalian sovereignty was built on.

Sovereignty migrates to ecology: bioregional governance. Here, sovereignty is reorganized around watersheds and ecosystems rather than arbitrary political boundaries. Drawing on both indigenous wisdom traditions and ecological science, bioregional governance proposes that communities should govern themselves as commons within the limits of living systems, coordinating across bioregions for larger challenges. Sovereignty in this model is fundamentally relational: you are sovereign not through your ability to project force across a border but through the quality of your relationships with land, water, and neighbor. The bioregion cannot be owned; any attempt to claim authority over it reproduces colonial logic. Instead, governance follows natural systems: watersheds, migration patterns, forest ecologies, rather than imposing artificial boundaries on them. This is genuinely post-Westphalian because it relocates the source of political legitimacy from human institutions to living systems. The ecology is sovereign; human governance is in service to it.

Sovereignty migrates to relationships: network nations. This model proposes that sovereignty can be constituted through the quality of relationships between people and communities, networked together through shared infrastructure, voluntary or values-based solidarity, and mutual aid. Power is subsidiarity itself: it resides at the most local level possible and is only delegated upward when coordination across scales is genuinely necessary. Network nations are not states. They don’t claim territorial jurisdiction or monopolies on violence. They are webs of consent, deriving legitimacy not from control but from demonstrated care, transparent governance, and the practical capacity to improve the lives of their participants. This is the most radical departure from Westphalian logic, because it locates sovereignty neither in territory, nor in capital, nor in ecology alone, but in the living relationships between beings who choose to coordinate their lives together.

These four visions are not equally weighted. Corporate global governance has the resources and institutional momentum. The network state has Silicon Valley capital and techno-libertarian ideology. Network nations and bioregional movements have the least power and the most promise, because they are the only vision that takes seriously both the need for global coordination and the primacy of local relationship, and because they do not require seizing or building a state in order to function. They can begin now, with the people and places and networks already present.

Underthrow: A Different Relationship to Power

Which brings us to the crucial question: if we are indeed at the end of the Westphalian era, and if the American empire is composting itself under the weight of its own contradictions, what do we actually do?

I want to propose a word and a strategy that flows from it: underthrow.

Not overthrow, which implies seizing the existing apparatus of power, which would only reproduce the same dynamics under new management. Not reform, which implies the existing system can be fixed from within, when the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the system’s dysfunction is not a bug but a feature. And not revolution in its etymological sense, revolutio, a turning-over, because we don’t need the wheel to make another rotation through the same cycle.

Underthrow means something different. It means recognizing that the empire is declining and collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, and that our task is not to knock it over or to take it over but to build what comes next while the old structure composts itself. It is a refusal to engage on the empire’s terms, the terms of zero-sum competition, of power as domination, of legitimacy as the capacity for violence, instead flowing from an insistence on building from a fundamentally different set of premises.

This is not passivity. It is, if anything, the most demanding form of political engagement, because it requires not only building new institutions but shifting the imaginal space and ontological ground on which institutions are built.

Our current political and economic systems are grounded in what we might call a transcendent metaphysics, a worldview in which reality is fundamentally composed of separate, competing entities vying for scarce resources. In this worldview, power is the ability to impose your will on others. Value is extracted from the world by subjects who stand apart from it. The economy is a zero-sum game that requires institutions to mediate the inevitable conflicts between self-interested actors. The state exists to prevent the war of all against all. This metaphysics is so deeply embedded in Western culture that it feels like common sense rather than a philosophical position, which is precisely what makes it so powerful and so difficult to see past.

But it is not the only metaphysics available to us, and it is not the one that the living world actually operates by.

An immanent metaphysics, a worldview grounded in the recognition that we are embedded in, not separate from, the web of relationships that constitutes reality, generates a fundamentally different understanding of power. In an ecological model, every organism asserts its agency: the tree grows toward light, the mycelial network distributes nutrients, the watershed directs the flow of water. Each element is expressing its nature within a web of relationships, and the result is not a war of all against all but an intricate web of reciprocity in which the flourishing of each participant is bound up with the flourishing of the whole.

This is not survival of the fittest in the Social Darwinist sense that warped Darwin’s (likely stolen) insights into the aristocratic justification for the strong crushing the weak. It is fitness in Darwin’s actual sense: each organism fitted to its niche, thriving through the quality of its relationships rather than through dominance. An ecosystem doesn’t optimize for any single species’ advantage. It optimizes for the complexity and resilience of the whole. Competition exists, but it is nested within cooperation. Predation exists, but it serves the health of the system. Nothing is wasted. Everything is co-emergent and interdependent.

An ecological model of power, grounded in this immanent metaphysics, recognizes that we don’t have the right to assert our agency in ways that undermine or restrict the agency of others. This is not abstract moralism but a practical recognition that in an interconnected system, what harms the part harms the whole. In theory, our current legal system acknowledges a version of this: you can’t murder someone. But we utterly lack this principle in our economic life. When we go to work, most of us enter what is functionally a mini-dictatorship: we do what our boss says or we lose our livelihood. In the broader economy, we supposedly have the freedom to choose where we spend our money, but in a monoculture economy dominated by a handful of corporations, that “choice” is as fictional as the grocer’s sign in Havel’s parable.

The shift from a transcendent to an immanent metaphysics, from seeing ourselves as separate subjects competing for resources to recognizing ourselves as participants in a living web, is the ontological underthrow that precedes and enables the political one. It is the shift from which a different kind of governance becomes not just possible but obvious: governance that honors the agency of all beings, that optimizes for positive-sum relationships, that draws its legitimacy from the quality of care rather than the capacity for control.

Jefferson’s ward republic intuition pointed in this direction, even if the institutional form was insufficient and the philosophical framework incomplete. His insight was this: national coordination, the role that is currently filled by the federal government, should instead be composed of representatives from small, self-governing communities, negotiating among themselves how to coordinate and make decisions together. Power should reside in the hyperlocal, in the community that can see the river, knows its neighbors, and tends the relationships that make collective life possible.

Withdrawing Consent, Creating Legitimacy

This brings us back to the foundational insight of the American experiment, the one worth preserving even as the institutional vessel cracks apart: legitimacy derives from the consent of the governed. At the highest levels, elites understand this. The need for legitimacy is precisely why so much is spent to colonize our imaginations rather than to simply control our bodies. The system, however powerful it may be, still relies on our participation.

We have tacitly given our consent to an empire that has pretended to be a democracy. We have gone along with it because, to varying degrees, we have benefited, even as millions around the world have paid the price. Countries like Canada, which now claim the moral high ground through speeches at Davos, remained silent about the illegitimacy of this order for as long as it served their interests. Canada’s newfound moral clarity arrived precisely at the moment when compliance ceased to be profitable. We have all been complicit, in our different ways and to our different degrees, in not naming where we actually are: inside institutions that simulate democracy while serving the material interests of capital and the war machine that protects it.

And so the response to the collapse of empire is not to fight the dying machine but to redirect our consent. Not through a single dramatic act of refusal, but through the gradual, persistent redirection of our energy, attention, and participation toward the spaces where we actually have power and influence.

If the consent of the governed is what creates legitimacy, then we can create new legitimacy by investing our consent in new forms of governance. Small groups of people, choosing to coordinate their lives around shared values and mutual care, learning the difficult and unglamorous work of navigating shared power, making decisions together, stewarding shared resources, holding each other accountable with grace, are not just building community. They are building sovereignty. Not the sovereignty of domination over territory, but the sovereignty of relationship: the authority that arises when people genuinely choose to align their lives with one another and with the living systems that sustain them.

This is, to be completely honest, extraordinarily difficult work. We have been so thoroughly conditioned by the zero-sum ontology of empire, the assumption that reality is fundamentally competitive, that someone must win and someone must lose, that resources are scarce and must be hoarded, that learning to navigate positive-sum relationships requires something like an ontological rewiring. It means encountering, again and again, our own internalized empire, the parts of us that want to control, to dominate, to secure our position at the expense of others, and choosing, each time, a different path.

But there are still reasons to hope. These dynamics, once activated, have the same recursive, self-amplifying properties as the extractive systems they replace. A community that learns to coordinate through positive-sum relationships becomes more resilient, more adaptive, and more attractive to others. It generates surplus, not just economic surplus but relational surplus, the kind of abundance that emerges when people actually care about each other’s flourishing. That surplus enables more complex coordination, which generates more surplus. The feedback loop runs in the other direction from extraction. Instead of concentrating wealth and degrading relationships, it distributes capacity and deepens trust.

This is how the underthrow happens. Not through confrontation with the dying empire but through the construction of viable alternatives, relationship by relationship, community by community, bioregion by bioregion, that can catch us when the institutions fail. As the empire loses its grip, as the middle powers seek new alliances, as small nations experiment with new forms of cooperation, as communities everywhere begin to take seriously the work of governing themselves, each of these movements contributes to a new social contract, a fabric of coordination that doesn’t depend on the fiction of empire to function.

The multipolar moment is not just a geopolitical rearrangement. It is an invitation. An invitation to the middle powers, the small nations, the bioregional organizers, the network nation builders, the Indigenous sovereignty movements, and every community that has been waiting for space to breathe, an invitation to stop asking permission from the dying order and start building the new one. The aikido of imperial collapse is that the empire’s own weight, pulling it apart, creates the opening for everyone it once pinned down.

I am writing this to you, dear reader, in the spring of 2026, in the 250th year of the American experiment, with a new war unfolding in the Middle East and the global order visibly fracturing. The stock market swings wildly as working families struggle with basic expenses amidst inflation and spiking oil prices. The Strait of Hormuz is choked with stranded ships as the US moves its Navy out of the Pacific, leaving Taiwan unguarded from Chinese expansion. The Trump administration simultaneously claims the war is winding down while requesting hundreds of billions more to fund it. Missiles are landing on civilian neighborhoods in Tehran. Middle nations are publicly eulogizing the fiction that held the world together for three generations. And BRICS is quietly building the financial infrastructure for a world that no longer orbits the dollar.

None of this is surprising if you’ve been paying attention. And yet there is something vertiginous about watching the thing you knew was coming actually arrive.

The temptation, in a moment like this, is to either catastrophize or retreat, to declare that the sky is falling or to insist that none of it concerns us. But the underthrow asks something harder than either of those responses. It asks us to hold the grief of what’s dying and the responsibility of what’s being born at the same time. To refuse the false comfort of the old story without succumbing to the despair of having no story at all.

This is not a farewell to America: the land, the people, the still-radical promise that humans can govern themselves. It is a farewell to empire: to the fiction that security comes from domination, that prosperity requires extraction, that freedom means consumer choice, that our interests can be advanced at the expense of others without eventually consuming ourselves. It is a farewell to the Westphalian bargain itself, the assumption that sovereignty requires a state, that governance requires territory, that power must be held over rather than held with.

The empire is composting itself. What we grow in the soil it leaves behind depends on whether we have the courage to shift not just our politics but our metaphysics, to recognize that we were never separate from the web of life that sustains us, and that governance worthy of the name is nothing more and nothing less than the practice of tending that web together.

If you’d like to learn more about my process writing with AI, my commitment to you as a reader, and my intention for this publication, please read this essay or my about statement.