White Empire as always been bad, this is history, not news. Whether it was headquartered in Amsterdam, London, or Washington DC, they've always been genociding, stealing, and spreading corruption. That's the whole business model. What's ending White Empire is not its bads but its lack of goods. Not its sins but the fact that there's nothing redeeming them.

Evil For Goods

Manufactured goods make a fool out of man, this much is known. In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney relates the story of Estaban Montejo, an African who ran away from a Cuban slave plantation in the 1800s. Montejo said,

It was the scarlet which did for the Africans; both the kings and the rest surrendered without a struggle. When the kings saw that the whites were taking out these scarlet handkerchiefs as if they were waving, they told the blacks, "Go on then, go and get a scarlet handkerchief" and the blacks were so excited by the scarlet they ran down to the ships like sheep and there they were captured.

This story was the history across the world. Since the beginning of colonialism, smaller forces (usual corporate armies like the VoC) were able to colonize much larger populations by dividing and conquering them. For comprador elites in the colonies, the deal (at gunpoint) was sell out your homies and get “Dutch linen, Spanish iron, English pewter, Portuguese wines, French brandy, Venetian glass beads, German muskets,” as Walter Rodney wrote. Not even the good stuff, usually shit they didn't want, but it worked.

Like waving a red flag in front of bull, if an embarrassingly small minority went for European goods, evil spread across whole continents. Colonialism is a stick-up but also an inside job. If you beguile a few natives, they'll do the colonizing for you. This has been the deal since time immemorial (from the offer of Roman citizenship to the perfidy of Albion to the consumer culture of America). Evil for goods.

The End Of History

After occupying Western Europe (really Far West Asia) after WWII, America inherited White Empire and kept the devil's deal for most of the 20th century. As Ho Chi Minh (of Vietnam) said in his Political Report of 1951, “Immediately after the end of World War Two, the US became the ringleader of world imperialism and reaction,” and “Aspiring to world hegemony, the US holds out dollars in one hand to entice people and brandishes the atomic bomb in the other to menace the world.”

Uncle Ho said the main obstacle to this was the Soviet Union and socialist liberation movements across the world, but the Cold War (which was hot to us) defeated one and seemed to defang the other. The carbon carrot and nuclear stick seemed to work. So much was the over-confidence (and ignorance) that Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history in 1989. As he wrote,

that state of consciousness that permits the growth of liberalism seems to stabilize in the way one would expect at the end of history if it is underwritten by the abundance of a modern free market economy. We might summarize the content of the universal homogenous state as liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic.

You can see the colonial deal restated here. Adopt corrupt liberal democracy (beware Greeks bearing gifts!) in exchange for goods (VCRs and stereos). Japan was the poster-child for this ‘new deal’, nuked when they were bad, but able to make endless anime about being nuked when they were good. At the same time, however, you can see the root White Empire's undoing in Fukuyama's triumphal musings. All of the goods he talked about (VCRs and stereos) were not made in America at all!

This was a marked departure from history as it was. Early Europeans had the only industrial base. America had the only unbombed industrial base after World War II. Both conveyors of White Empire were able to fulfill their part of the deal (manufacture goods) on their own. After World War II, however, America got drunk on the spoils, over-reliant on the colonies and then communists, and slowly, surely spoiled it all.

America outsourced energy production to the occupied/chaosified Middle East that they inherited from the British. Then gradually outsourced industrial production to the occupied Axis (Germany and Japan) and occupied Korea also. This was all happening well before China entered the WTO. America was deindustrializing and financializing from at least the 80s, hard. America was quite confident in their incarnation of White Empire, stretching across the Pacific and Atlantic and keeping Africa and South America down. They thought they could pump up their stock market and cover up inevitable crashes with money printing because, hell, all those global suckers still bought it. But pride, as They say, goeth before the fall.

The End Of The End Of History

The triangle trade works, fundamentally, as long as you have something to trade. Yes colonialism was evil, exploitative and fundamentally theft, but it was gave people—especially colonized elites—stuff they wanted. Sam Huntington said, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion... but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.” but I'm telling you that corrupt local elites (like me) and their serfs did most of the violence for them. This worked because they could deliver lace and cannons and all the manufactured stuff men go foolish for. The White Empire had something to trade, and we were willing to trade our souls. This enabled them to go incredibly force light (a few thousand white men at a time conquered India), because manufactured goods were better than manpower.

After inheriting White Empire from conquered Britain, America went even more force light, relying even more on fossil-fuelled trade to sustain local oppressors and co-opt local bourgeois. Cars and carcinogens, degrees and jobs, these were the levers of soft power that allowed them to not go hard. Indeed, everywhere that people mounted sustained armed resistance (half of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan), America lost. After Vietnam, they lost the ability to conscript armies at all.

At the same time, America slowly lost (outsourced, forgot, private equitied to death) the manufacturing power they built up in World War II. This was actually the base of their power, and they freebased it in the 1980s. By 2000 it was vestigially there, but by 2020 it was gone. You can see it in this one picture.

In these two maps, via the cursed Economist, you can see the breakdown of the modern Triangle Trade. Not an explanation, but how it literally breaks down. For centuries, everybody's abusive trading partner was White Empire in some incarnation. This geographically and demographically unusual situation (why should a minority of the population have most of the wealth?) continued until the turn of this century, but then it turned hard.

By 2020, most of the world was trading primarily with China, and this has only accelerated in the years (which have each been decades) since. At the same time, China began trading more with the global majority than the rapacious minority in America. America was both losing its place in the triangle trade and the whole concept was becoming redundant because people just traded with each other. Now while China continues building global infrastructure via the Belt and Road Initiative, America is practicing auto-erotic asphyxiation via tariffs. It's not just that China is actively coming up, America is actively going down.

Now an increasing number of the consumer goods used to pacify the internal population of America are made in China, or made in China and assembled somewhere that America isn't tariffing in terror.

If you look at this graph from the also cursed American Enterprise Institute, you can see two distinct trends. Everything made or monopolized in America is ruinously expensive (like housing, healthcare, and education), whereas the consumer goods that make life bearable are increasingly made in China. The working part of America's economy is actually China's economy. This is why the American government is freaking out so much about social media (TikTok) and AI (DeepSeek). These were like the quarterbacks of their tech industry, the last place a white man could lead. But now that lead has evaporated. America's only a few years away from being a failed state with just a strategic OnlyFans reserve to its name.

The Broken Triangle

This reorientation of trade changes the whole triangle. Remember that during European colonialism, manufactured goods were at the top of the slavery plantation chain. And that American imperialism is literally fuelled by oil and goods through their wartime shipping lanes. The engine of power is literally engineering, and without it power cannot be triangulated. Today, White Empire's hold on this power is tenuous, largely artificial, and waning.

To give you a personal example, in Sri Lanka when you travel you are always asked to bring stuff. Electronics, clothes, toys, books. This diasporic dance, however, has become increasingly absurd when you go west. Almost all of the items people request have come from Asia in the first place. Electronic, clothes, toys, books, almost none of this is made in Empire anymore. The goods are made in China or wherever, sail past us to England, then we fly over there to bring them back.

Now I increasingly ask my wife, why would I go West to bring something from China? This exasperates her to no end, but I always ask if we can get those branded good unbranded from AliExpress, because that's what the brands are doing themselves. Western brands are just bulk shopping from the same factories and literally white-labeling it. Then it takes a boat ride to White Empire, I pay the worst people on earth unconscionable markup, and I bring it back to Asia, taking a huge carbon dump on the entire planet in the process. WTF are we even doing here? This is the question, in microcosm, that the world is asking. If White Empire doesn't even make manufactured goods we want, what are we letting them kill our children for?

Right now everything is denominated in dollars, but that's in name only. Rather than the heart of a beating Empire, the dollar is increasingly just a medium of exchange, and a bad reminder of an Empire that beats us. The US dollar and US society itself is propped up by Chinese manufacturing, something inchoate markets are increasingly aware of. In November 2024, for example, China was recently able to issue USD bonds at effectively the same rate as the US government, which is unheard of, except you just heard about it. People trust China because people know that China is the manufacturing power behind the throne. But then WTF do we need the White Empire for? It's becoming increasingly obvious that the empire has no clothes. It literally does not make them anymore. It's just a matter of time before enough people point this out, and America goes bankrupt as Hemingway said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

An Extended Shower Metaphor

As an example of why things go on like this—in a shitty, obviously non-optimal state—just look at your life. In my life, for example, the overhead shower kept popping off. In soapy frustration, I tried to fix it, ripping the whole thing off the wall in the process. Now we just use the hand shower and there's a hole in the wall. This is most people, and most people in aggregate. I called this the cracked screen phenomena, where will avoid fixing something until it's completely unusable.

This is what I think is happening with the obviously necessary decoupling from a vestigial White Empire. White Empire kills our children, overthrows our governments, and is despicable and rude, but changing financial and economic systems is a pain in the ass and most people would rather not do it. Even Russia, despite being neoliberally raped by White Empire for a decade, still wanted to trade, reconcile, and even fight with them. As Vladimir Putin told Oliver Stone, “During the meeting [in 2000] I said: ‘Let’s consider an option that Russia might join NATO,’ Clinton said ‘Why not?’ But the U.S. delegation got very nervous.” As shitty as the ‘rules-based order’ was, it was an order, and most people were happy to exist within it rather than tear it all down.

All of America's avowed enemies—from Venezuela to Iran to China—would happily trade with them for another century. All they ask, a la Aretha Franklin, is a little respect. But this, for a White Empire used to domination, is too much. So they rage, rage against the dying of the white and die this decade, instead of chilling and retaining vestigial power for a century more. So they push out Russia, push out Iran, push out China, and push all of rising Asia together, while their own fortunes only fall. Like me pushing and pulling on the shower until it broke, this is what America is doing to the bloodbath they were enjoying.

Bads Vs. Good

As I said at the beginning (this is the conclusion), White Empire has long been bad, whether it was molesting us from Amsterdam, London, or Washington Das Capital. This never stopped it before and, indeed, it only grew stronger on filthy lucre. That was because for all the bads in the world, the goods were good.

But now the goods are shit or literally white-labeled Chinese products and all that's left are the bads, which are many and reprehensible. The petty corruption via consumerism that made native elites complicit is gone, and the natives are restless now. People put up with all the humiliation and homicide because they got color TVs and sneakers (or smartphones and AI), but that's stuff all made in China or elsewhere now. They put up with it a little bit longer because those products were designed in America, but now China is designing its own versions which are better on their own, and also don't explode if America ('Israel', same thing) doesn't like you. If you can get goods without the bads, why wouldn't you?

The entire deal behind White Empire is looking like a steal (at our expense), which is what it always was. It's interesting how history rewrites itself as someone loses power and new ‘victors’ come into view. All the rage, rage against the dying of the white (Dylan) is just making the end come faster, the falcon cannot hear the falconer and so on (Yeats). Now all the bads of White Empire stand out, because there are not nearly enough goods to counterbalance them. The last, most precious manufactured good is history. And that's made in Sri Lanka now. You heard it here first (nevermind my citations).

Further Reading, please do