In 1996 Samuel P. Huntington wrote The Clash of Civilizations, but it hasn’t quite worked out like that. It’s more like the crash of one. The question is what made America powerful, and why does it suck now?

This dude Jeffery R. Barnett whittled it down to 14 points which Huntington referenced in his book. As Andrei Martyanov said, “No person with common sense could deny that, with possibly some minor additions to this list, it is a generally correct framework for identifying the key factors which make a civilization, or a specific nation, strong and, in many cases, dominant.”

Let’s look at the 14 points, and then see how the latest flag-bearer of White Empire is doing now.

THE 14 POINTS OF DOMINATION

1. Owns and operates the international banking system;
2. Controls all hard currencies;
3. Is the world’s principal customer;
4. Provides the majority of the world’s finished goods;
5. Dominates international capital markets;
6. Exerts considerable moral leadership within many societies;
7. Is capable of massive military intervention;
8. Controls the sea lanes;
9. Conducts most advanced technical research and development;
10. Controls leading-edge technical education;
11. Dominates access to space;
12. Dominates aerospace industry;
13. Dominates international communications;
14. Dominates the high-tech weapons industry.

Even at the time that this was written in 1994, cited in 1996, and recited by Martyanov in 2008, White Empire’s power was already fading, point by point. Economically, morally, militarily, and industrially. It was always obvious that this was going to happen. Now it’s obviously happening. Let’s go through it—if not point by point—chunk by chunk.

A) Money

1. Owns and operates the international banking system;
2. Controls all hard currencies;

America (the latest capital of White Empire) has controlled the international banking system, had the hardest currency, and even forged it into a weapon. Countries like Iran were cut off from the SWIFT messaging system, Venezuela had their gold stolen through the vassal state of the UK, and Afghanistan had its reserves outright stolen.

Empire was able to flex by starving and depriving entire populations but now in 2022 they’ve picked on someone their own size in Russia, and it’s not going well. Empire’s attempt to ‘reduce the ruble to rubble’ has instead hurt its own allies, starved the world’s poor, and caused inflation at home.

Biden calls the blowback ‘Putin’s price hike’ not realizing what a colossal admission of defeat this is. If someone else is hiking your prices, what does that say about imperial power. The Emperor has no clothes.

The truth is that it’s Biden’s price hike, in that he decided to unilaterally sanction Russia without thinking it through. He’s imposed huge costs on allies and peasants alike, and many of them are just fucking off from imperial control.

The key wedge state in Imperium is India, the only comparable population to China, and they want no part of these sanctions. India is hoovering up cheap Russian oil and even reselling it back to Europe. China has increased their energy supply even more. Empire is starving its allies while its enemies and frenemies gorge. It’s a historic self-own.

Now Russia and China have accelerated their own alternatives to SWIFT and the imperial banking system, countries like Saudi Arabia are trading crude in yuan, and even Europe, the ancestral home of white supremacy, is buying energy with rubles now. The Empire got used to roughing up poor countries, but now they’ve hit someone resource-rich who doesn’t give a fuck. The financial weapon forged by Empire has broken.

B) Stuff

3. Is the world’s principal customer;
4. Provides the majority of the world’s finished goods;

The next thing that defines power is what you do with money, either buying stuff or investing in production. On both counts, White Empire is fucked. The natural population center is in Asia and things are just regressing to the mean. Global consumption growth increasingly comes from China and Asia which makes sense, that’s where the people are.

If everyone ends up consuming as greedily and wastefully as white people we’re all dead, but that’s another story. Whatever consumption means in terms of power, it’s fading from the white world, which will eventually collapse under its own debt and fundamental unproductivity.

As the imperial fuckbois at McKinsey say, “Asia is on track to top 50% of global GDP by 2040 and drive 40 percent of the world’s consumption, representing a real shift in the world’s center of gravity.”

In terms of trade the change of gravity is even more obvious. As the Sichuan rappers Higher Brothers say, “The alarm that wakes you up — made in China, written on your toothbrush and toothpaste — made in China, put your breakfast in a bowl — made in China.”

China is increasingly not just the leading trade partner, they export industrialization itself through the Belt & Road. This is not top-down, colonial conditionality but what Chinese scholars call ‘coevolutionary pragmatism’.

Western countries throw stones at this development work, falsely calling them ‘debt traps’. China builds infrastructure while western banks and the IMF keep poor countries trapped in interest payments and forced privatizations for generations. Some of the infrastructure is not productive, but at least it exists, unlike the predatory financialization of western development. China does real work on the ground, building ports and high-speed railways where Empire has sent only bombs.

Hence in the 2022 African Youth Survey, 76% of respondents from 15 countries said China has a positive influence on their lives.

As a note, I’m mentioning China a lot here, but the point here is not that a new Empire is in town. While America was quite directly the heir to British and European imperialism, China has an entirely different culture. Going back to Zheng He in the 1400s, their idea of international relations is very different, less about conquest and domination and almost exclusive trade based. Unlike Europeans, they had most of the shit they wanted and didn’t need to rob everyone. Even India influenced all the way through South-East Asia through religion and scholarship, not conquest. These are different cultures and have to be analyzed as such.

Simply mapping the historical anomaly of white supremacy onto everybody else is incorrect. We’re returning to a more multi-polar world, of which China is just the biggest point in a multi-polar world.

C) Capital

5. Dominates international capital markets;

One place western capitalism still dominates is capital markets, but capital markets are the most ephemeral power of all.

The point is really what you deploy that capital to do, and America doesn’t manufacture things or produce effective weapons anymore. It’s all stock buybacks, companies that don’t make money, and fucking ape JPEGs now. As Martyanov said:

The financial balance sheet killed manufacturing planning and impeded the retention and development of real manufacturing skills required for true national greatness. There is no national greatness without the ability to build complex machines and weapons. The crucial lesson of WWII that real military power must rest on the solid foundation of a real economy was also forgotten.

D) Morality/Mendacity

6. Exerts considerable moral leadership within many societies;

Moral leadership for an Empire is basically just lying convincingly. After all the torture and invasions, after Donald Trump, after getting publically decimated by COVID-19, after countless school shootings, America has no moral leadership left at all. People still talk about American values, but the global majority knows that they’re worthless.

I won’t give you graphs or data here. Let me just say that I used to believe in America’s bullshit and now I don’t. This is a realization that has dawned across most of the world not because of morality, which can be convincingly lied about, but material concerns, which are harder to conceal. Whatever America is doing it seemed to work and be at least headed in some idealistic direction, but now it just looks like a clown car, careening off a cliff.

E) Military

7. Is capable of massive military intervention;
8. Controls the sea lanes;

With its genocidal wars on the Middle East—killing millions and displacing tens of millions—America showed that it was capable of military intervention but by 2022 these have all turned to losses. As this guy Patrick Armstrong said (via Martyanov), “I can’t get two questions out of my mind: When was the last time the USA won a war? When was the last time US-trained troops fought effectively?”

America can certainly start wars and certainly kill people and devastate poor nations, but it cannot win. It has suffered ignominious defeat after defeat since Vietnam. Even the elder Bush’s ‘victory’ in Iraq was brutally undone by his son. As Martyanov said, “where are the tangible results in what throughout human history has served as the most important test of power: victories in wars?”

Even in regards to control of the seas, America doesn’t even aspire to it anymore. As published on the US Naval Institute:

The Navy recently shifted its focus from command of the sea to local sea control. In 2015, Admiral Thomas Rowden introduced distributed lethality, a concept he deemed “the motive force behind offensive sea control.” He made the focus of the 2016 Surface Warfare Flag Officer Training Symposium a “Return to Sea Control,” and said in 2017 that while command of the sea is a useful term for historical analyses, it is “less useful in modern parlance.”

America still has over 800 military bases, a huge Navy, and sails warships through the Taiwan Strait at will, but all this somehow doesn’t equal naval supremacy. And the fact is that command of the seas still isn’t enough. You ultimately have to be able to land men, take strategic objectives, and hold on to territory. And America sucks at this. They get chased out by poor people with improvised weapons, they simply can’t stand against a modern army, as Russia has shown.

For all the noise they make about Ukraine, NATO has not taken the field, they just stand on the sidelines yelling and offering weapons. It’d be one thing to shut up and try to negotiate a quiet peace, but making a loud show of war and not taking the field isn’t a show of dominance. It’s a show of impotence, and that’s not a good look for Empire at all.

F) Science and Technology

9. Conducts most advanced technical research and development;
10. Controls leading-edge technical education;
11. Dominates access to space;
12. Dominates aerospace industry;
13. Dominates international communications;
14. Dominates the high-tech weapons industry.

I’m lumping a lot of stuff together at the end because I’m tired of writing this and you must be tired of reading.

• In terms of technical research and development, China has led the world in patents for years now, and the United States lags even ‘developing’ countries in science and math education, and even basic literacy.
• China has launched whole-ass space stations, Russia continues its space program unabated, and India launches highly cost-effective probes to Mars. All while America is launching billionaires into space for fun.
• China has built and deployed 5G technology across the world while Americans spread conspiracy theories about it. Even the most popular social network is Chinese now (TikTok) while America struggles to keep its own social networks from destabilizing its own government.
• While Russia and China have built effective and cheap military technology, America produces wildly expensive boondoggles like the Joint Strike Program that take decades to develop and then crash into the ocean. Hell, even the Taliban could chase them out with improvised weapons and time.

Hence on all the signs of what makes a civilization dominant, White Empire looks completely fucked.

Crash Of A Civilization

Even in the heady 90s, Huntington said “gradual, inexorable, and fundamental changes are also occurring in the balances of power among civilizations, and the power of the West relative to that of other civilizations will continue to decline.”

Today those gradual changes have become sudden. As the saying goes, there are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen, and we’re having a lot of weeks like that now.

First, a plague ravaged the Empire, then their Capitol was sacked by barbarians, then Russia exposed their military and financial might as impotent. These are not survivable losses for an Empire. The mandate of heaven is obviously withdrawn.

The Empire rage, rages against the dying of the White, but it’s inexorable now. The country is one election cycle away from complete implosion. And so the rest of the world inherits a ruined Earth, completely wrecked after centuries of colonial empire, passed as it was from the Europeans to the British to the Americans.

It’s not that some other civilization is taking White Empire down. These fuckers killed themselves, and they’re taking 90% of life on Earth with them. There’s no clash of civilizations here. Just the spectacular crash of one.

Holy shit you read all this, here’s an 18 minute video: