America’s Future: A Prosperous, Peaceful Nation, or a Bankrupt, Violent Empire?

May 7, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The US is at a juncture faced with two choices. It can either manage a transition from global hegemon to a prosperous, peaceful nation working together as equals with all other nations, or it can double down on its continuation as a bankrupt, violent empire seeking continued control over all other nations. 

To answer the question as to which path the US will take requires understanding the structural features that underpin US hegemony in the first place. 

A System Built on Domination 

The current US system is predicated on global domination. 

The US dollar as the global reserve currency is what has allowed the US to accumulate a multi-trillion dollar debt and still maintain immense power and wealth not only within its borders but far beyond them. 

This resulting hegemony allows the US to set “global norms” regarding global trade, human rights, and the development of and control over key technologies - especially in terms of exercising immense hypocrisy and selective enforcement while doing so. 

It has also allowed the US to create a network of what it calls "security guarantees” in which US military forces occupy nations around the globe, from Europe and the Middle East, to Southeast and East Asia - predicated in principle on ensuring the security of these “allies,” but in practice simply serving as cover for what the US calls “power projection” - the ability of the US to exercise military aggression virtually anywhere on Earth at a moment’s notice.

Often this US “power projection” comes at the cost of the security of nations hosting US troops. 

The threat or use of US military aggression around the globe is essential for maintaining the US dollar as the global reserve currency and thus American hegemony overall. 

US military aggression serves to degrade or eliminate potential rivals and the alternative financial and monetary systems they inevitably seek to create to work their way out from under subordination to Wall Street and Washington. 

This has been US policy spanning decades - including from the end of the Cold War to today. 

The growing power of alternative systems across what many call the emerging multipolar world has forced the US to embark on not only unprecedented wars of aggression around the globe including wars and proxy wars against Venezuela, Russia, Yemen, Lebanon, and Iran, but also unprecedented military spending with the current US military budget hovering around 1.5 trillion US dollars and growing. 

While at face value this appears to be unsustainable and irrational - there are several reasons why the US refuses to adopt a more rational course of policy. 

The US military industrial base is composed of immensely wealthy and influential corporations.  The US dominance stemming from the military aggression worldwide they enable, helps establish and expand monopolies across other US industries including big-oil, big-agriculture, the auto industry, big-pharmaceutical corporations, big-tech and many more. 

These industries together serve as the foundation of US economic, military, political, and informational power. Each corporation’s trajectory is guided by shareholder primacy - meaning each and every one of these corporations are required by law to constantly expand profit for its shareholders. 

Because perpetual growth is both irrational and unsustainable in a finite world, with a finite population, and finite resources - this creates structural necessities to constantly expand markets and growth at any cost - including through war, exploitation, predatory lending, and many more toxic practices. 

While this economic system drives the pursuit of US primacy around the globe, ideology serves as structural reinforcement - this includes the notion of “American exceptionalism” which insists the US is not only inherently superior to all other nations, but that it has a moral and even “divine” duty to assume global hegemony. 

Not only is perpetual growth within a finite system irrational and unsustainable - there are other external reasons the US pursuit of hegemony is dangerously unrealistic. 

China’s rise is driven by several core realities the US cannot readily change including the fact that China has a population over 4 times greater than the US thus a vastly larger workforce, a vastly larger industrial base, better infrastructure, deeper and better developed supply chains, a better education system producing millions more graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and growing military power - both conventional and nuclear - that make the application of US military aggression less and less likely to succeed in coercing or containing China. 

“What if…”

What if the US were to decide to abandon this irrational and unsustainable pursuit of global hegemony? 

Analysts imagine the US could achieve this by retreating to the Western Hemisphere, reshoring industrial capacity, auditing and cutting the US “defense” budget, shifting from global “power projection” to investing in domestic infrastructure, and rebuilding the strength of the US dollar on productivity rather than global military aggression. 

US Seeks Greenland Grab as Pursuit of Primacy Accelerates

December  30, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - All under the guise of “pursuing peace” in a proxy war the US itself engineered and is for all intents and purposes fighting against Russia simply through its Ukrainian proxies, the US continues setting the stage for wider and more dangerous escalation - both in terms of expanding an emerging global maritime blockade against Russian, Iranian, and even Chinese maritime shipping, as well as in terms of preparing Europe to feed itself into Washington’s proxy war as Ukraine’s fighting capacity collapses. 

Continued (and now renewed) US interest in seizing Greenland from Denmark serves to accomplish both of these objectives. 

A New Base for Wider Proxy War with Russia 

Existing US military bases in Greenland are located closer to Moscow than any other US military base outside of mainland Europe (including Turkiye) and the UK.

Assuming that open US plans to have Europe “double down” on supporting Ukraine, including expanding military industrial production and arms shipments to Ukraine as well as preparing “European and non-European troops” to actually enter into Ukraine proceed, all under a US-led “division of labor,” US military facilities across mainland Europe and the UK would run the risk of dragging the US itself into any resulting Russian-European conflict. 

This would defeat the purpose of this “division of labor.” Thus the US either reducing its military presence across mainland Europe and the UK or relocating essential operations to Greenland allows the US to provide close, but technically indirect support for European forces fighting Russia in the same way the US is currently providing close, but technically indirect support for Ukraine as it fights Russia. 

Greenland could serve as a base of operations for continued and essential US ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) support, without which neither America’s Ukrainian nor its European proxies could effectively fight and successfully overextend Russia. 

With the US operating outside of most of Europe, it could project the illusion of plausible deniability amid a Russian-European conflict enough to give itself and Russia the ability to avoid escalation into a direct US-Russian conflict - an escalation both Washington and Moscow presumably seek to avoid. 

For the US, the entire purpose of waging this proxy war is to have US proxies pay the full cost of the conflict while the US enjoys the full benefits of it. For Moscow, the Ukraine conflict expanding into a European-Russian war backed by the US is still a lesser evil than a direct US-European-Russian war. 

The US Preparing a Global Blockade 

For years, prominent US corporate-financier funded think tanks have published policy papers planning blockades to strangle all peer and near-peer adversaries into submission. Chief among these adversaries is China.

A 2018 US Naval War College Review paper titled, “A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China,” describes not only a strategy to cut China off by imposing a maritime blockade, but examines all potential ways in which China would seek to circumvent such a blockade and proposes measures to take (which have since been implemented) to prevent China’s success in doing so. 

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) - a network of land routes that allow China to circumvent many of the key maritime chokepoints the US has invested decades of military expansion to threaten - is identified as one of these possible means of circumvention. The paper suggests targeting and destroying these routes, using the Myanmar-China oil pipeline as an example. 

Since the paper was published, US-backed militants have actually begun physically targeting this pipeline (and more recently here). The paper itself suggests that amid any potential open US-China conflict, the US itself could conduct military strikes against such infrastructure. 

US-backed militants have also attacked Chinese BRI infrastructure in Pakistan - particularly in Pakistan’s southwest Baluchistan region where US policymakers have sought to eliminate BRI projects since as early as 2011. 

The 2018 paper also mentions Russia as a key partner of China, sharing a long land border and already exporting huge amounts of energy across it to China. Russia presents a formidable challenge to US plans to strangle China through maritime blockades. Since the 2018 paper was published the US has since begun its proxy war with Russia itself - and more specifically - targeting both Russian energy production itself and Russian energy exports. 

Nominally “Ukrainian” maritime drones have begun targeting Russian energy exports far beyond just the Black Sea and have now carried out attacks in the Mediterranean Sea, the Caspian Sea, and even off the coast of West Africa.  

The New York Times itself, in a March 2025 article titled, “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine,” would admit: 

…the Biden administration had authorized helping the Ukrainians develop, manufacture and deploy a nascent fleet of maritime drones to attack Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. (The Americans gave the Ukrainians an early prototype meant to counter a Chinese naval assault on Taiwan.) First, the Navy was allowed to share points of interest for Russian warships just beyond Crimea’s territorial waters. In October, with leeway to act within Crimea itself, the C.I.A. covertly started supporting drone strikes on the port of Sevastopol.

The implication is that the US is both supplying the maritime drones being used to attack Russian vessels, as well as “supporting the drone strikes” themselves through deep CIA involvement. More recent “Ukrainian” maritime drone strikes far beyond the Black Sea are almost certainly the product of US support being only possible leveraging America’s global network of military and covert action facilities. 

US Still Dangerous Despite Limits of Military Production

July 9, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The US has recently paused the shipment of some weapons and munitions to Ukraine “due to worries that U.S. weapons stockpiles have fallen too low,” Politico reported. 

This is only the most recent development amid a growing military industrial crisis unfolding across the collective West as Washington and its network of client states wage increasingly intense and protracted wars and proxy wars including in Ukraine against Russia, across the Middle East against Iran and its allies, and as the US prepares for similar conflicts in the Asia-Pacific region against China. 

Politico would note air defense systems, other precision guided weapons, and even artillery shells were among the shipments being paused due to concerns regarding depleted US stockpiles.

Since the beginning of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) in February 2022, initial surges of US-European weapons and munitions have steadily decreased despite promises to expand military industrial production across the collective West. In some cases, US weapons already faced critical shortages even before the conflict in Ukraine expanded in 2022. 

In January of 2022, Saudi Arabia announced critical shortages of Patriot air defense interceptors, exhausting them amid its US-backed war with neighboring Yemen. The US, even at that point, was unable to replace Saudi Arabia’s depleted stockpiles forcing Riyadh to borrow missiles from other Persian Gulf states operating the systems. 

Lockheed Martin, which produces Patriot missiles, does so at a rate of about 500-600 interceptors a year, with plans to expand production to only 650 by the year 2027. Ukraine’s requirements alone far exceed this quantity with Russia producing between 720-840 Iskander ballistic missiles, according to Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, that only the Patriot missile system is capable of intercepting. 

US President Trump Streamlined the National Endowment for Democracy, not Dismantle it

June 11, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - While many believe that under the Trump administration the controversial National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was defunded, dismantled, or otherwise dissolved, the reality is far less dramatic and far more dangerous.

Despite President Donald Trump’s outspoken criticism of global entanglements and calls of "ending the era of endless wars," stretching back all the way to his first term in office, the NED not only continues to receive taxpayer funding under his administration to facilitate instability and conflict worldwide, it has quietly expanded its reach behind a newly adopted policy that makes its activities less transparent than ever.

On its official website, the NED recently revealed what it calls a “duty to care” policy - an internal shift that effectively ends the organization’s long-standing practice of openly listing most of the foreign organizations and movements it finances. This change, framed as a protective measure for recipients in “high-risk environments,” marks a complete reversal of one of the few things that previously distinguished NED operations from covert CIA influence campaigns - the veneer of transparency.

A "Pro-Democracy" Front With Covert DNA

Founded in 1983, the NED was created to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly, according to former NED co-founder Allen Weinstein. For decades, it served as the US arm of so-called “soft power,” funneling money to foreign political groups, media outlets, labor unions, and activist organizations deemed favorable to US interests - usually under the banner of “promoting democracy.” 

But “democracy” in this context is indistinguishable from regime change. From Venezuela to Belarus, from Hong Kong to Myanmar, NED-funded groups have played central roles in political destabilization and even precipitating war, many of them advocating positions explicitly aligned with US foreign policy and done entirely at the cost of their own nation’s stability and best interests. 

The obvious purpose of creating the NED wasn’t to end covert interference around the globe, but rather to continue the CIA’s work Americans and people worldwide were increasingly aware of and opposed to, by whitewashing it and repackaging it as transparently “promoting democracy.”  

Since the NED’s founding, the Western media has intermittently admitted the NED has been involved in global-spanning regime change. In 2004, the London Guardian admitted the US government through the NED overthrew governments in Serbia in 2000 and Georgia in 2003, while unsuccessfully attempting to do so in Belarus and Ukraine. 

The article described unrest taking place in Ukraine at the time as: 

…an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.  

Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.  

Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze.  

Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.

The article names the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), and Freedom House by name, all three of which are subsidiaries of the NED. 

In 2011, the NYT would admit the US government through the NED was behind the regional destabilization and regime change in 2011 referred to as the “Arab Spring.” 

Washington’s “Golden Dome” - Multi-Trillion Tax Dollar Heist at Best, Dangerous Provocation at Worst

May 25, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - US President Donald Trump has announced his administration has chosen the architecture for the proposed Golden Dome missile defense system, claiming it will cost $175 billion and be operational in “less than three years” with a “success rate close to 100%.”

During President Trump’s announcement on May 21, 2025, it was claimed the Golden Dome will consist of technology deployed across land, sea, and space capable of intercepting hypersonic, ballistic, and advanced cruise missiles, “even if they are launched from other sides of the world and even if they are launched from space.” 

Former-US President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program (also known as the Strategic Defense Initiative) was repeatedly cited during the announcement. That program sought to use space-based weapons to void the doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” allowing the US to conduct a nuclear or non-nuclear first strike on another nation and avoid what had otherwise been an inevitable nuclear retaliation that would destroy both nations in the process.  

Specifically because mutually assured destruction was seen as a better deterrence against a first strike by one nuclear-armed nation against another, along with concerns over costs, technological limitations, and then-existing arms control treaties like the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), the initiative was never fully realized. 

Granting the US Impunity to Attack, Not “Defend” Itself

US Space Force General Michael Guetlein, picked to lead the Golden Dome project and present during its announcement, would claim: 

As you're aware our adversaries have become very capable and very intent on holding the homeland at risk. While we have been focused on keeping the peace overseas, our adversaries have been quickly modernizing their nuclear forces, building out ballistic missiles capable of hosting multiple warheads, building out hypersonic missiles capable of attacking the United States within an hour and traveling at 6,000 mph, building cruise missiles that can navigate around our radar and our defenses and building submarines that can sneak up on our shores and worse yet, building space weapons. It is time that we change that equation and start doubling down on the protection of the homeland.

Yet what General Guetlein calls “keeping the peace overseas,” is in reality the United States encroaching along the borders and shores of nations like Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea. 

This includes the stationing of not only missile defense systems like Patriot, THAAD, and the Aegis Ashore system in close proximity to these nations in violation of the ABM treaty the US has since abandoned, but also first-strike offensive weapons like the Typhon missile launcher capable of firing both Standard SM-6 anti-air missiles, but also ground-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles previously prohibited under the INF treaty the US has also since abandoned. 

US Plays “Mediator” in its Own War on Russia

April 22, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - Recent comments from current US Secretary of State Marco Rubio have signaled Washington’s intent to abandon peace efforts if progress isn’t made between Russia and Ukraine.

CNN in a recent article has reported that: 

The United States could end its efforts on ending the Ukrainian conflict within “days” if there are no signs of progress, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned Friday. 

“If it is not possible to end the war in Ukraine, we need to move on,” he told reporters before departing Paris, where he had held high-level talks with European and Ukrainian officials. “We need to determine very quickly now, and I’m talking about a matter of days, whether or not this is doable,” he said. 

This is framed as if the US is serving as some sort of mediator between Russia and Ukraine. In reality, the US is one of two primary parties to the conflict - the other being Russia with whom this war was provoked. 

A US War on Russia Since the Cold War Ended… 

The US had since the end of the Cold War invested billions of dollars in political interference within Ukraine, including regime change operations attempted in 2004 and successful regime change finally taking place in 2014. From 2014 onward, Ukraine was transformed into a military proxy of the United States aimed specifically to threaten the Russian Federation just as a politically captured Georgia in 2003 was used to attack Russian peacekeeping forces in 2008. 

The growing security threat this posed to Moscow precipitated the launching of Russia’s February 2022 Special Military Operation (SMO) and the subsequent fighting that has continued ever since. 

A series of articles from the Western media itself has revealed over recent years the degree to which the US had not only politically captured Ukraine, but also institutionally captured its military and intelligence agencies, reconfiguring them to operate as armed extensions of the US along Ukraine’s border with Russia, and even across it within Russia itself. 

Among these admissions is the New York Times’ February 2024 article titled, “The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin,” which admits to, “a C.I.A.-supported network of spy bases constructed in the past eight years that includes 12 secret locations along the Russian border.”