Watch the video -> USA COLLAPSING
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What if everything happening right now, the war in Iran, the dollar weakening, the chaos in America wasn’t random at all? Stick with me until the end because once you see the pattern, nothing will look the same. So today, I want to talk about something I believe is truly important. Once you understand this, everything unfolding right now will suddenly make complete sense. The war in Iran, the weakening dollar, the political chaos in America, none of it is random. It’s a pattern. a pattern that has repeated itself across 3,000 years of human history. And right now, America is following that pattern almost perfectly.
Okay, let me introduce you to a historian named Sir John Glo. Most people have never heard of him. He isn’t very famous, but I believe he is one of the most important historians of the 20th century. He was a British general and scholar who spent his entire career studying empires. Not just one or two, but all the great ones. the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Mongols, the Ottomans, the Spanish, the British. After studying all of them, he published a short book called The Fate of Empires. And in that book, he made one of the most remarkable observations in all of historical scholarship. He said that all empires without exception go through the exact same stages, the exact same sequence every single time. And the average lifespan of a great empire is 250 years. Now, I want you to hold that number in your head. 250 years. America is 249 years old. So, let’s walk through these stages together because once you understand them, you’ll see exactly where America stands right now and why everything happening was always going to happen.
Stage one is what Gub calls the age of conquest. Every empire begins the same way. It’s lean, hungry, disciplined, full of raw energy. It expands through military and economic superiority. At this stage, there’s no corruption. There’s no wealth yet to corrupt. There’s no complacency. There’s no comfort yet to grow complacent about. The soldiers are motivated. The leadership is focused. The purpose is clear. For America, this was roughly from 1776 through World War II. America fights a revolution against the greatest empire in the world and wins. It expands across an entire continent. It builds the largest industrial economy ever seen. And then in World War II, it does something unprecedented. It fights on two fronts at once, across the Atlantic and the Pacific against two major powers and defeats both. Think about what that required. Think about what that took. 18-year-old boys landing on Normandy beach knowing most of them would die. Soldiers fighting in Pacific jungles against diseases they’d never seen. Factories running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Women leaving their homes to build ships and aircraft. That is what stage one looks like. sacrifice, focus, hunger, discipline. And when it was over, America didn’t just win the war. It rebuilt its enemies. The Marshall Plan, Breton Woods, the dollar becomes the world’s reserve currency. 800 military bases around the world. At the peak of stage one, America was genuinely the most powerful civilization in human history.
Stage two is what Gub calls the age of commerce. Once military dominance is secured, it turns into economic dominance. The empire controls trade routes. Wealth flows to the center. Living standards rise. The middle class grows. And for a brief golden moment, the empire is both the most powerful and the most prosperous society on Earth. For America, this was the 1950s and 1960s. The American middle class at that time was the strongest in the history of human civilization. Factory workers could afford houses, cars, vacations, and college for their kids all on a single salary. The dollar was backed by gold. American manufacturing outproduced any country ever. American universities were the best in the world. American science put a man on the moon. This is stage two and it feels like it will last forever, but it never does.
Stage three is what Gup calls the age of affluence and this is where things start to go wrong. Wealth creates comfort. Comfort creates complacency and complacency creates a very specific kind of thinking. We’ve always been dominant, so we’ll always be dominant. We don’t need to sacrifice anymore. We don’t need discipline anymore. We already won. This is where the military-industrial complex comes in. I’ve talked about this before. After World War II, America kept his war machine running. Eisenhower, a general himself, warned about it when he left office in 1961. He said, remember these words, beware the military industrial complex. He was warning that a permanent military establishment combined with a large arms industry would gain too much influence over government and that influence would distort everything. Instead of the military serving America’s strategic interests, America’s strategic interests would start serving the military. And that’s exactly what happened. Vietnam was the first clear warning. America spent over $800 billion dollars in today’s dollars, lost 58,000 soldiers, and accomplished nothing. It left. Vietnam became communist anyway, and there was no accountability. No one asked, “Why did we spend all this money and achieve nothing?” Because in stage three, the purpose of military spending is no longer to win wars. It’s to keep the system going, to keep contractors profitable, generals employed, politicians funded. Winning or losing becomes almost secondary. During this time, America also began exporting its manufacturing to China and Southeast Asia. Wall Street discovered it was more profitable to make money from financial instruments than from making real things. Factories closed. The middle class started shrinking. Wages stopped rising. Real wages for the average American worker peaked in 1973, and they’ve barely moved since. Think about that. 50 years and no real raise. That is stage three. Wealth at the top, stagnation at the bottom, and an establishment too comfortable to admit there’s a problem.
Now we come to stage four. This is the critical stage. Glo calls it the age of decadence. Let me be very clear. Decadence here does not mean moral failure. It does not mean the people are bad. It means the system itself has become self-destructive. It’s eating itself from within. And four things happen at the same time, reinforcing each other, which is why no empire has ever escaped this stage.
First, military spending becomes completely divorced from military results. America spends about $900 billion a year on its military, more than the next 10 countries combined. China spends about $250 billion. Russia spends about $80 billion. Yet, America couldn’t defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. Fighters in sandals with Kalashnikovs. It couldn’t stabilize Iraq after 20 years. And right now in Iran, it’s spending $3 million interceptor missiles to stop $50,000 Iranian drones and struggling. Here’s the game theory point I want you to really understand. When the cost of an action consistently exceeds the benefit, a rational actor stops. But an empire in stage 4 cannot stop because the military-industrial complex has captured the political system. It’s a closed loop. And that loop is designed to keep spending going regardless of results. This isn’t stupidity. It’s a system doing exactly what it’s designed to do. But what it’s designed to do is destroy the empire.
The second thing in stage 4 is that debt becomes existential. America now has about $36 trillion in national debt and is adding roughly $2 trillion more every year. But here’s what most people miss. America is now spending about $1 trillion per year just on interest payments. Not paying down the debt, just the interest. That’s more than the entire defense budget of any other country. America spends more on interest than China spends on its whole military. This creates a debt trap. You borrow new money to pay interest on old money. The interest on the new money adds to the debt requiring more borrowing. It’s a mathematical spiral. The only exits are default or inflation. Both of which destroy the currency and every bomb dropped in Iran. Every expensive interceptor adds to that spiral.
The third thing is that the empire weaponizes its currency until it can’t anymore. After World War II, America created the Bretonwood system and later the petro dollar. The deal was simple. Global trade, especially oil, would be in dollars. That created permanent demand for the dollar, allowing America to print and run deficits like no other country could. But in stage four, it starts weaponizing that tool. Sanctions on Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, freezing Russian assets.
Now, if you’re another country holding dollars and you see America freeze $300 billion of reserves overnight, what do you learn? Your dollars aren’t safe. So, you start moving them out. You build alternatives. That’s exactly what’s happening. Ricks now represents about 40% of global GDP. They’re building non-dollar payment systems, settling trade in local currencies, buying gold. Saudi Arabia is selling oil to China in yuan. America thought it was punishing enemies. Instead, it gave every country the strongest possible reason to abandon the dollar. Short-term power move, long-term self-destruction.
American empire crumbling
And the fourth thing in stage 4 is that the social fabric breaks from within. America has the highest homelessness rate of any developed country. Its infrastructure is crumbling. Life expectancy is declining. Drug addiction is a national crisis. Wages have been stagnant since 1973 in real terms. Meanwhile, the richest 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 90% combined. This creates a population that has lost faith in its institutions. People can’t even agree on basic facts. Elections offer candidates that neither side fully trusts.
The country is both the wealthiest and the most internally fractured major power in the world. An empire facing external pressure while fracturing internally faces a two-front problem. Resources for external threats get eaten by internal problems. And resources for internal problems get eaten by external threats. They feed each other. Rome faced exactly this.
Now, here’s the most important insight of this entire analysis and it comes from game theory. People always ask, why don’t the people in charge fix this? Can they see the problem? The answer is the prisoners dilemma at civilizational scale. Every individual actor makes the rational choice for themselves. But together, those choices create catastrophe. Defense contractors need wars. Banks need dollar dominance. Politicians need their money. Media needs their advertising. Generals need their postretirement jobs. Every decision is rational. The collective result is destruction. No empire has ever escaped stage 4 from within because the prisoner’s dilemma has no internal solution. The only thing that changes it is a big enough external shock.
Now, let’s talk about stage five, collapse. It doesn’t mean the country vanishes overnight. Rome didn’t fall in a day. The British Empire didn’t. It’s usually three things happening at once. A currency crisis, loss of allies, and an internal political rupture. Let me give you the British example, the most recent and clearest. In 1939, Britain still had the largest empire in history. By 1949, it was over. World War II destroyed their finances. India gained independence in 1947. Palestine collapsed in 1948. The dollar replaced the pound as the reserve currency. All three forces converged in one decade. Now connect this to today. America is deep in stage 4.
Three things are accelerating us towards stage 5 right now. First, a war it cannot win. Iran prepared for 25 years. America went in with no plan beyond bombing. It’s spending millions to stop cheap drones and struggling. Its carriers and surveillance assets are being challenged. Every day drains resources, credibility, and will. But the system can’t stop. It can only double down. Second, a debt it cannot repay. $36 trillion. $1 trillion in annual interest plus war costs on top. A dollar crisis is coming. Third, a currency the world is actively replacing. Bricks, gold buying, UN oil deals. The dollarization is happening and accelerating. When multiple independent actors, China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, Brazil, all move in ways that converge on the same outcome, that’s dominant strategy convergence. No conspiracy needed, just rational self-interest producing the same result, the end of stage 4 and the arrival of stage 5.
So, let me bring it all together. Sir John Glo studied every major empire. They all follow the same five stages. Average lifespan 250 years. America is 249 years old. Right now, America is showing all four hallmarks of stage 4 while facing the external pressures that push empires into stage 5. No empire that reached stage 4 has ever escaped stage 5 without radical change. And the prisoner’s dilemma tells us that radical change from within is almost impossible because everyone who could change the system benefits from keeping it exactly as it is.
So the question isn’t whether America reaches stage 5. The historical record across 3,000 years shows a 0% survival rate without transformation. The only question is how fast and what comes next.
This isn’t meant to be pessimistic. It isn’t anti-American. It’s meant to be clear thinking. The purpose of studying these patterns isn’t just to predict. It’s to understand the present so we can think more wisely about the future. If this framework is wrong, we go back to the evidence and revise. That is what good analysis looks All International affairs
