The End of "Pax Americana"...

... and the Dawn of a New Era of Great Power Competition in a Multi-Polar World

(If you’re reading this in your email browser, I recommend clicking on the title to switch to reading on the Substack platform because most email programs truncate larger image-rich Substack posts.)

I shall open this essay with a deceptively simply question that has haunted humanity since the dawn of civilization… a question that is about to become extremely relevant again as we transition from the long relative stability of the American-led post-WWII global order to a much harsher, more volatile, high-stakes multi-polar world:

Is it better to be a sovereign nation or a province within an empire?

One of the central pillars of classical liberalism is that a nation — a group of people united by a shared ancestry, history, language, or geographic boundary — should govern itself, free from outside interference (a.k.a. self-determination). That core belief lies at the very heart of most of the intense geopolitical struggles that defined much of 20th-century history.

This noble classical liberal ideal emerged as a reaction to living under the “tyranny of empire” during the age of absolute monarchies and their colonial successors, which went far beyond mere taxation to also exploit their citizenry for military adventurism and top-down nation-building. Within that context, escaping the claws of suffocating empire to achieve that liberal ideal of national self-determination made perfect sense.

And yet, when we look at longer stretches of history, this choice between nationhood versus empire isn’t nearly as simple because the correct answer depends entirely upon the historical context of each era and the character of the empires involved. And that calculus is changing once again as the Sun sets on Pax Americana and Great Power competition once again rears its ugly head.

Throughout most of history, from the perspective of citizens trying to raise their families in peace, it was better to live in a province within a stable empire than to be on the outside amongst the self-governing borderlands where the Great Powers competed (often violently) for influence and control, and where the borderland nations themselves were permanently engaged in never-ending intrigue and warfare to prey upon their neighbors.

The urge to build empires, while frequently portrayed as a consequence of the megalomanic ambitions of key historical figures, is actually fueled by a desire to create strategic depth to reduce society’s vulnerability to outside predation. Being able to add captured loot to the treasury was certainly an added bonus, but the main prize was the relative peace, stability, and prosperity that reigned at home, coupled with unrestricted long-term access to the large markets at the center of the empire, all of which allowed families to hone the skills and make the multi-generational investments required to build civilization.

Most cultures throughout most of history have had to find ways to survive as provinces within larger kingdoms and empires. The Basques (perhaps better than anyone) can attest to this in their provinces in northern Spain and southern France. They have never had their own nation-state despite having a distinct culture (and distinct language) that can be traced back over many thousands of years across the rise and fall of multiple empires and all the way back into the Neolithic Stone Age, and despite having maintained a continuous unique genetic population tied to that very same location, which can be traced back over 35,000 years.

In the end, what matters most is that the tribute you pay to the guy on the throne actually buys you the necessary peace, stability, prosperity, and breathing space to ensure that your culture and your family can thrive.

Even the notoriously militant Roman Empire acquired somewhere between 10 to 30% of its territory through ever-closer alliances with allies on its borders who were eager to gain protection and tariff-free access to Roman markets — those allied provinces eventually lobbied successfully to gain full citizenship inside the empire. Likewise, despite the catalogue of never-ending petty wars that defined medieval Europe, much of their empire-building was actually accomplished through strategic marriage, with outright conquest only coming into play when marriage diplomacy failed.

Human societies, like cattle, seek security at the center of a large herd — this fundamental truth about human nature is equally true at the scale of vulnerable individuals (who band together to form tribes) as it is at the scale of vulnerable tribes (who band together to form empires). The greater the sense of danger, the greater the urge to seek out the security of a larger herd.

It is only during the late stages of empire, as internal predation within the empire reaches intolerable levels, that the pendulum swings decisively the other way as restless provinces begin to yearn to “go their own way” to escape the predatory tyranny of imperial control.

But unless geography creates an impenetrable barrier (like in Switzerland’s case), independence is usually fleeting in the borderlands before some other Great Power either manages to plant a puppet king on your throne, or begins to demand annual tribute in exchange for protection, or until someone else’s bigger flag is summarily hoisted over your re-conquered nation.

~ ~ ~

The great irony of the geopolitical struggles of our modern era is that as soon as modern nations achieved this noble “ideal” of national self-determination during the anti-imperial and anti-colonial fervor of the late 18th, 19th, and early to mid 20th centuries, those same newly liberated nations immediately set about eroding (consciously and unconsciously) their own national independence in countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways as their leaders sought to re-create the protective envelope of empire (free trade and military protection) while trying to preserve some degree of self-determination. It would seem that on the scale from fully sovereign nationhood to imperial empire, society naturally seems to want to find a balance someplace in the middle because there are monsters lurking on either end of that scale.

Even the bottom-up American Republic was the product of a treaty (the US Constitution) between the thirteen newly-liberated British colonies who voluntarily bound themselves together as a decentralized continental republic (a kind of proto-empire) in order to secure a permanent free trade zone between them, prevent themselves from unravelling into petty inter-state wars (as most small nations do when they are not bound together as provinces within an empire), and to create a permanent military alliance powerful enough to rival the strength of America’s enemies in order to muster the men and resources needed to fend off the hostile European empires prowling America’s shores.

However, unlike the centralized top-down empires back on the European continent, which sought to entirely dominate their provinces during that era, the bottom-up structure of the American Republic was meant to make “empire” tolerable to its people by ensuring that each individual state within their republic could maximize its own local sovereignty and retain as much local decision-making as possible, with only a very limited number of powers granted to the federal government to do the few things that its sovereign member-states could not do by themselves (a topic that I explored in detail in my previous essay: Clipping Leviathan’s Fingers).

Thus, the U.S. Constitution was designed to simultaneously (1) restrain the tyranny of top-down empire, (2) prevent the tyranny of predatory local rulers who exploit captive populations, and (3) also avoid the trap of excess political fragmentation to avoid what happened to Europe after Rome splintered into a thousand separate parts. That fragmentation is the primary reason why Europe was plunged into a nine-hundred-year Dark Age as the fragmented remnants of the former Western Roman Empire devolved into a never-ending and crippling cycle of petty local wars, intrigue, and self-serving protectionism. It ultimately took the re-emergence of large empires to break the cycle and restore some kind of order and stability after many long centuries of chaos.

The U.S. Founding Fathers had the wisdom to recognize that freedom of movement, freedom of interstate commerce, freedom from top-down imperial power, and freedom from bottom-up local tyranny all had to be built into the very heart of America’s new republic as the antidote to both imperial tyranny and feudal fragmentation.

Granular self-determination isn’t necessarily any less tyrannical than top-down imperial tyranny (ask any minority trapped inside an ethnostate). The US Founding Fathers chose the middle road of creating a bottom-up republic (a new decentralized version of empire) that sought to maximize the decision-making autonomy of its “provinces” while simultaneously limiting how much control those “provinces” could exercise over their own populations, while also taking away the ability of those “provinces” to plunder their neighbors through war, intrigue, and trade. In other words, America’s founders deliberately sought refuge in empire but built theirs to limit central authority.

Seen through this lens, it is not at all clear that the Basques would have been better served if their provinces had ditched Empire to become a single tiny independent Basque nation-state. They may well have simply replaced foreign tyranny with home-grown tyranny — nationhood may well have been little more than a leap from a foreign frying pan into a home-grown fire. Being denied nationhood might actually be a key to the longevity of their culture because it ensured that their culture continued to evolve organically, outside of state control, to be renewed across the generations by the natural impulses of society itself instead of having their cultural evolution fall under the control of Basque nationalist central planners.

Benjamin Franklin famously spent time in Europe prior to America’s Declaration of Independence and visited the loose collection of over 1,200 semi-sovereign microstates in what is today’s Germany but was then still part of the Holy Roman Empire (see image below), which stretched across the heart of central Europe from northern Italy to the Atlantic and Baltic coasts, and endured for over a thousand years from 800 to 1806 (that’s longer than the full lifespan of the Western Roman Empire!). This highly decentralized European Empire had a big impact on shaping his vision for America’s Republic in order to avoid repeating central Europe’s mistakes.

The loose collection of semi-autonomous microstates, known as the Holy Roman Empire (shown here in the year 1356), which were perpetually at war with one another and their imperial neighbors in central Europe from 800 to 1806. ©Cameron Pauley, CC BY-SA 4.0

The French philosopher Voltaire famously described this Holy Roman Empire as “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” After Benjamin Franklin visited it in 1766, a decade before the American Revolution, he wrote that “The Empire is a strange kind of Monster. It has one Head that thinks a little but can do nothing; and thirteen Heads that can do something but think wrong; and twenty-five Heads that can do little and think little; and thirty Heads that can do nothing and think nothing; and all these Heads are ever quarrelling with each other about their Rank and Precedence.”

The excessive fragmentation of the “empire” trapped these semi-autonomous micro-states in a perpetual cycle of inter-state warfare, feudal predation by local rulers, and the repeated ravages of marauding armies belonging to other Great Powers, which swept across their lands on a semi-regular basis but never managed to hang on to any portion of them for long. This trap lasted over a thousand years — somewhere between 33 and 40 generations!

The only reason these microstates weren’t gobbled up and absorbed by the larger kingdoms outside of the Holy Roman Empire’s borders is that they managed to band together to repel these invasions (and perpetually played those kingdoms off each other). Indeed, that seems to be the only real purpose of the treaties that bound them together under the loose structure of the Holy Roman Empire, without which these little nation-states would have been conquered long ago. But as soon as they were done collaborating to repel the armies of those larger foreign kingdoms, they went straight back to waging perpetual war on each another, strangling trade between one another, and ruthlessly preying on their own citizens through feudal taxation and military levies.

What finally broke this dysfunctional thousand-year status quo in 1806 was not some internal political innovation (the local lords had no intention of giving up their fiefdoms), but the consequences of the Industrial Revolution, which enabled the kingdoms surrounding this headless empire (France in particular) to finally muster the overwhelming military force to break the stalemate that had existed across central Europe for a thousand years. Once the treaties binding them together were absolved, the two strongest former member of the Empire (the Kingdom of Prussia and the Habsburg Duchy) quickly consolidated their power over their neighbors and emerged as full-blown top-down imperial states to rival the power and strength of the French, British, and Spanish Crowns. Centralized empire filled the void as soon as decentralized empire collapsed — had it not, then Germans would likely all be speaking French today.

Benjamin Franklin’s observations about the Holy Roman Empire played a key role in why the US Founding Fathers expressly sought a stronger more centralized structure for their Union because they recognized that in order to keep ahead of the growing military strength of increasingly industrial nations, a greater degree of power and financial resources was required at the federal level to be able to field permanent standing armies and muster the enormous numbers of men and mass-produced military equipment needed to repel the armies of industrializing nations — it is a point that echoes President Trump’s criticisms of NATO as America’s European and Canadian allies have stopped taking military defense seriously, leaving America to foot the bill for everyone else. Peace acquired at someone else’s expense breeds complacency. (America’s investment in the $500-billion-dollar Stargate AI project gives a sense of how seriously America is taking the rising threat of a technologically empowered China as warfare between the Great Powers takes on increasingly digital forms.)

By contrast, the decentralized Holy Roman Empire never had a single federal army and relied exclusively on each microstate’s local militia to send their quota of men and equipment if the empire as a whole was attacked — in effect, it was a kind of dysfunctional feudal NATO. This decentralized military structure proved to be their downfall, just as the U.S. Founding Fathers feared. In 1806, Napoleon’s massive new professional armies began to roll across Europe… which immediately triggered the collapse of the decentralized thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire.

If you take a boat trip down the Rhine River and look up at the multitude of castles up on the hills, you get a sense of how dysfunctional, militant, and exploitative this strange decentralized headless empire must have been, since each castle ultimately represents a different local fiefdom with his own predatory customs agents, which were employed to prey on merchants travelling up and down the river while keeping the serfs from escaping. The lords were well-fed in their castles, their long-suffering serfs toiled on the edge of starvation, and trade was strangled across central Europe for centuries. Their decentralized empire was no bottom-up republic — it was defined by absolute tyrannical control at the local level and almost no control at all at the federal level — the opposite of Napoleon’s Empire, but no less tyrannical.

America’s republic was specifically designed to prevent both types of European tyranny. Their republic was meant to prevent Americans from re-creating the tyrannical top-down imperial rule of the likes they’d experienced under Britain’s King George III, while equally being designed to prevent America’s newly liberated colonies from suffering the fragmented fate of Germany’s tyrannical hyper-decentralized semi-autonomous micro-states. Benjamin Franklin’s keen eye during his visit to Germany served America’s Republic well.

Independent small nations don’t survive for long outside the protective envelope of empires. Outside of the structure of some kind of empire, society doesn’t have the necessary protections, stability, and peace to build civilization. As it turns out, the choice is not between nationhood vs empire; the real choice is in what form empire takes and how formal the relationship is between the “satellite states” and the formal boundaries of the dominant empire.

~ ~ ~

America’s path from decentralized republic to full-blown top-down imperial empire has been slow, held back in no small part by both the structure of its Constitution, which was designed to restrain those urges, and the bottom-up vision of government promoted by its founders, which is ingrained in the patriotic vision that Americans have of the purpose of their nation, which they bring with them into the voting booth. Nevertheless, the 2024 election between Donald Trump’s and Kamala Harris’s competing visions for America’s future was a pivotal moment in that evolution — President Trump’s re-election was a clear mandate to revive the vision of a pared down republic that defends the checks and balances on power that were imposed by earlier generations rather than allowing the republic to continue to erase those limits as it is absorbed into the Global Socialist Empire that has been evolving out of the now defunct post-WWII global order. It was a fork in the road, and a dangerous one.

However, on the other side of the Atlantic, Europe is on a much faster track to top-down empire as its vision of the future decouples ever further from its Transatlantic ally. The emergent “ever-closer” 20th-century trade-and-currency union between European nations has evolved to become a full-blown 21st-century top-down continental empire in all but name — it’s almost a joke by now to speak of self-determination in Germany, Greece, Belgium, or Spain against the backdrop of all of the carrots and sticks used by Brussels to maintain conformity within the pan-European herd. Once again, the tribes are banding together to create an empire — only this empire is being constructed very deliberately by the people at the top.

The European Union has all the trappings of a top-down authoritarian imperial state, even it it’s still working out some of the kinks on how to keep its citizens away from those levers of power, like the censorship laws to suppress dissent, how to ban political parties that threaten to upset the established status quo, and how to wield a big enough hammer if any of its “provinces” deviate into wrongthink. It would seem that Europe’s technocrats are accomplishing by treaty what none of Europe’s 19th- and 20th-century strongmen were able to accomplish through conquest. In effect, the European Union is America’s nightmare from the 19th and 20th century finally coming true as the whole of the European continent comes under the control of a central authority (America’s entry into both WWI and WWII was expressly about preventing precisely this kind of outcome). In short, just as China rises, so does Europe as a third pole in the multi-polar order.

The last missing step to complete the European Union’s transformation to empire is the creation of a centrally controlled and centrally funded pan-European army, which may well prove to be the next step as America, under President Trump, increasingly distances itself from its entangling military alliances with Europe. The E.U.’s ongoing “Russia, Russia, Russia” warmongering, and its efforts to prolong the Ukraine War even in the face of President Trump’s efforts to secure a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, might be the E.U.’s ploy to overcome European national-level resistance to repurposing NATO to become a centrally-controlled European military.

~ ~ ~

Pax Americana — the “Long Peace” of historically unprecedented relative global stability that followed the end of World War II — created space for a multitude of small independent sovereign nation-states to thrive beneath the protective umbrella of the American-led global order.

During that era, America’s corporations conquered the globe, and its secret agents manipulated the world at every turn, but other than the battles that America waged in North America to consolidate its grip over the continent, Pax Americana never evolved to embrace comprehensive military conquest in any traditional sense with a permanent flag planted onto conquered territories. Military bases were constructed and treaties were signed, but the satellite states in America’s orbit remained free to manage their own internal political affairs.

This is in marked contrast to other previous “long peaces”, like Pax Britannia (the era during which the Sun never set on the British Empire), Pax Ottomana (under the Islamic reign of the Ottoman Empire), Pax Romana (during the golden age of Roman imperialism), Pax Byzantina (during the long period of relative peace within the Byzantine Empire), and so many other empires that came before.

During each of those “long peaces”, peace (mostly) reigned inside those empires even as the borderlands were consumed by never-ending war and intrigue. But only Pax Americana has ever achieved a peace that even extended out to its many global allies without demanding full formal control in return.

During “Pax Americana”, America never fully embraced its inner Napoleon to formally plant its flag all over the world because it never needed to. With the majority of an entire resource-rich continent under its control, its economic and cultural might was so enormous and created such a powerful center of gravity that it could enjoy the fruits of empire without necessarily having to formally shore up its sphere of influence using military force. By sheer force of gravity, much of the world voluntarily came begging at its door to participate in trade and enjoy the benefits of its military protection.

Canada remained free to make its own laws for Canadians as long as it remained a loyal satellite state. Belgium remained free to make its own laws for Belgians as long as it didn’t deviate from the pan-European ethos. And even little Luxembourg — which survived the centuries by laying out a red carpet for alternating waves of marauding empires — could, for perhaps the first time in its history, truly consider itself a sovereign nation governed by laws of its people’s own choosing.

And so, for a brief moment in history, political boundaries (mostly) lined up with cultural and geographic boundaries, and culturally distinct peoples could enjoy the luxury of making their own laws. This loose collection of borderland states under the protective umbrella and open markets of Pax Americana were united by trade, treaty, and certain common values, but not by a traditional occupying governing force. And with all allies equally dependent on the American security umbrella for protection, for a brief moment in history all of these permanently quarreling smaller states could pursue their never-ending rivalries via trade, treaty, and diplomatic negotiations without fear that their rivals’ armies would have the last word. Where peace reigns, prosperity grows.

During that unique and fleeting era under Pax Americana, the pendulum decisively favored self-determination. That “Long Peace” even encouraged a flowering of independence movements (some successful, some not), ranging from Quebec, to Ireland, to Scotland, to the Basque and Catlan independence movements in Spain, to the “Velvet Divorce” of Czechoslovakia as it fractured peacefully into two independent states in 1993, to the independence sought by Denmark’s satellite states (Greenland and the Faroe Islands), and many more besides.

Throughout that “Long Peace”, everyone was nominally free to “go their own way” as long as they remained faithful to the overall goals, values, and open markets of Pax Americana (while those who resisted Pax Americana soon found themselves with a new government thanks to the efforts of the U.S. Army or the CIA). The Soviet sphere stayed on the outside (another story for another day), but eventually even China decided there was greater prosperity to be gained by plugging itself into the American market system than to continue to go its own way.

But every era eventually must come to an end.

~ ~ ~

The solutions to the problems of prior eras eventually become the very problems that usher in the crisis that gives way to a new era. We are in the midst of that turning point.

Having taken individual self-determination and open borders to its most illogical extremes, the West is now unravelling into a collection of culturally-confused post-national states that are tearing themselves apart internally along countless real and imagined tribal lines as these emergent tribal identities replace the shared cultural identities that once lay at the core of their nations.

Furthermore, self-determination hasn’t reduced the red tape but has encouraged a flowering of it as petty leaders get a taste for power. Our neo-liberal nations are drowning under the weight of countless regulations of their own making and are struggling under the loss of their sovereignty, which they voluntarily ceded to international organizations and international treaties to try to fake the benefits of empire without formally belonging to one. In fact, those treaties have become the primary weapon that many of these nations have learned to use to deliberately manipulate and undermine their competitors and prey upon each other’s weaknesses.

The climate treaties that everyone signs but everyone except the gullible ignores are perhaps the best example of that “predation by treaty”. As I discussed in my book, Plunderers of the Earth (Amazon Affiliate Link), even small distant countries like the Maldives have figured out how to leverage the climate game to bring millions of dollars into their state coffers to build airports and tourist developments at others’ expense. And China is laughing all the way to the bank as the collective West throws a giant wrench into the path of its own industries in pursuit of net-zero policies even as China’s aggressively expanding coal-fired industrial capacity picks up the slack.

The internal self-inflicted social chaos is just as bad. As our neo-liberal nations were lured into complacency by a century of Pax Americana, they got so obsessed with catering to everyone armed with either a good story or a resentful grudge that the entire concepts of nationhood and democratic governance are also breaking apart as all the emergent warring tribes inside our nations are increasingly banding together across national borders to hold their own nations hostage to their self-serving victimhood narratives. At its core, “woke” has nothing to do with empathy and everything to do with money. Hyper-individualism has combined with weaponized empathy to enable neo-liberal tribes to hijack the ideals (and institutions) of the post-WWII era in a never-ending string of conspiracies designed to prey on the majority.

Meanwhile, and most relevant to this essay, the rising prosperity of the post-WWII era has ushered in a new multi-polar world as some of the key beneficiaries of a century of relative stability under Pax Americana have now grown so powerful and wealthy in their own right to begin flexing their muscles, break away from America’s lead, and even weaponize post-WWII treaties, post-national institutions, and their entangling alliances as tools to undercut America’s sovereignty and economic prosperity. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently said: “the post-war global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us.”

No-one rules for long — all to often powerful allies evolve to become rivals with their own Napoleonic ambitions for power, plunder, and dominion. By failing to plant its American flag to formalize control over its external “provinces” on the other side of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, Pax Americana is beginning to unravel as foreign entities (like China) gained access to America’s markets and got rich off of trade without sharing America’s values — they are using that accumulated wealth to assert themselves as a rival empire. And the largest block of “informal provinces” (Europe), has likewise gained the wealth and confidence to consolidate that block into an increasingly formal center of gravity of its own, independent and likewise in opposition to America’s world view.

And so everyone, including America, is now thrust into the turmoil of adapting to this emerging multi-polar world.

~ ~ ~

Trump’s second term (and his explicit goal to leave the post-WWII global order behind) is forcing the world to wake up to this shift towards multi-polarity as he confronts forces that have (until now) been most hidden out of sight behind the curtain. Instead of allowing America to either continue to stumble blindly into the clutches of the emergent Democrat-led and Europe-led Global Socialist Empire that was evolving out of the dying remnants of the post-WWII “rules-based” liberal international era or to continue to allow itself to be infiltrated by the emergent Chinese Empire, Trump is pulling the emergency brake. America is decoupling.

This shift away from Pax Americana towards the Multi-Polar Order has been underway for quite some time — Trump is merely shaking the world out of its slumber. I alluded to this in my recent two-part essay about Canada and Greenland, two of the most important borderlands where this multi-polar Great Power competition is now erupting into full view as America, China, and Europe each vie for influence and control.

Indeed, Trump’s decoupling from the Global Socialist order (and his invitation for Canada to join America as the 51st State) has come as such a shock that “Team Canada” is now unravelling into a complete panic as it struggles to resist a closer union with America, weighs if it should instead choose to go its own way (“Canada First”) — an approach that would necessarily massively expand its economic and political ties to China in order to decouple from its hyper-dependence on U.S. markets — , or whether Canada should ditch its sovereignty altogether by joining the increasingly authoritarian European Union (as recently suggested by state-sponsored mainstream Canadian media)… even as many of the people themselves defy their leaders by being receptive to the idea of the Canadian provinces acquiring full US statehood inside the bottom-up American Republic in order to get out from under the increasingly tyrannical, corrupt, dysfunctional, and ultimately unreformable top-down Canadian political system.

In a multi-polar world, borderlands can no longer share a bed with everyone without consequences — they have to choose sides to avoid being torn apart by the struggle between Great Powers. But which do you choose, and how formal should the marriage be?

Russia, China, the Middle East, and the other BRICS countries have been talking about this emerging multi-polar world for some time (and building the financial architecture for a non-Western counterweight against the financial dominance of their Western peers). But it took America’s abrupt disconnect from the emergent Global Socialist Empire to really solidify the outlines of this emergent multi-polar world. By disconnecting from the post-WWII global order and reasserting itself as its own independent pole, America re-emerges as a world power centered on the North American continent (a truly North American Empire), in distinct opposition to the Globalist Empire that (with America retreating from it) has now effectively become a European-led Global Socialist Empire.

Vice President J D Vance’s scathing speech in Munich on February 14th, in which he expressly confronted Europe’s increasing turn towards authoritarianism, revealed the sharply growing philosophical disconnect that is emerging between these two poles as the post-WWII transcontinental alliance begins to collapse. He specifically singled out Europe’s hostility to freedom of speech that is being used to keep Europe’s entrenched political cartels in power, its weaponized judiciary, its lack of transparency, its embrace of mass migration, and its meddling in the elections of its own member states — all of which are hostile to the principles at the core of America’s bottom-up Republic.

The Guardian writes:

And then came the crunch, and the explicit severance. “If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump. You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years.”

He continued: “For years, we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values.” But he looked at Europe today and wondered why the cold war’s winners had abandoned the values that let them prevail against “tyrannical forces” on the continent.

The message was implicit, but clear. Nato had been founded in the cold war as an expression of US determination to defend shared western values, but if those values were no longer shared, then the moral purpose of Nato itself fell away.

In identifying Europe’s perceived faults – multiculturalism, “globalism”, migration, gay rights, liberal wokery – and in excluding Russia from criticism, the speech came close to arguing that US democracy was at best neutral on the relative values of Russia and of the European elite.

America’s split with China (the third emerging pole) is no less abrupt. By pivoting to confront the opaque undemocratic mess of international treaties and international organizations, and by launching a crusade at home to root out the slime that has infiltrated America’s institutions, Trump is simultaneously exposing how deep China’s tentacles have penetrated into America’s backyard, in Panama, in Canada, and in Greenland.

As I wrote in my recent essay about Canada, Trump’s tariff war with Canada about drugs, organized crime, and border issues is rapidly revealing that these are just the external symptoms of China’s much deeper infiltration into every aspect of Canada’s political and economic infrastructure. And it’s merely one of many countries that have, in one way or another, compromised their national security and their national sovereignty by opening their doors a little too wide to the Communist Party of China.

The world is waking up to recognize how deeply China has embedded itself in nearly everything by virtue of its Belt-and-Road construction projects and predatory lending, through the expansion of its state-owned corporations onto the world state, and even through its state-level involvement with organized global crime syndicates (if you’re not already following investigative reporter Sam Cooper’s Substack, who has been documenting the organized global crime and money laundering crisis in Canada, you really should consider giving him a follow).

Canada is emerging as a prime example of the economic infiltration, social media manipulation, political subversion, coercive pressure, state-sponsored intrigue, deceptive activism, and even deliberate sabotage of the social fabric that is used by all Great Powers to infiltrate and influence the borderlands — that subterfuge is kicking into high gear as our world leaves Pax Americana behind to become a full-blown Multi-Polar World.

As we’ve already seen, in this Great Power competition, entire countries get used as battering rams to try to weaken rivals, like the way NATO is using the Ukraine as a battering ram to weaken Russia, the way President Biden’s regime abandoned a billon dollars worth of military equipment in Afghanistan (likely with the intended goal of fueling armed Islamist insurgencies on Russia’s and China’s back door), or the way China is using Canada’s dysfunction to foment a crisis right on America’s northern doorstep. Right or wrong is besides the question — this is how the Great Game has always been played when there’s more than one Great Power asserting itself simultaneously on the world stage.

A renewed and self-confident American Empire under President Trump is shoring up its borders to remove these other emergent Great Powers out of its backyard and to prevent itself from being drawn any further into their intrigues.

The “Long Peace” is over. A new grand game of chess is underway. The “Great Game” — the historic geopolitical rivalry between the British and Russian Empires that played out during the 19th century — is back on, but with new mix of players.

And that changes everything.

Borderland countries, like Canada, Panama, and Greenland, that have spent the last century enjoying their quasi-illusionary sense of self-determination under Pax Americana are now suddenly feeling the heat as this emergent Great Game kicks into high gear and they are forced to begin choosing sides.

Indeed, Europe’s infiltration into Canada is different but no less deep than China’s. As I discussed in my previous essay about Canada, with our political classes fully committed to the exploitative Global Socialist order, one of Europe’s top global socialists (Mark Carney, one of the key architects of this emergent Global Socialist order) is even now being positioned as Canada’s next Prime Minister in order to leverage Canada as tool to frustrate America’s vision of its future and spread the Global Socialist agenda.

This is rapidly becoming far more than just a war of ideas — the Great Game is already very much at play here in Canada. America has awoken from its slumber. The post-WWII era is over. “Pax Americana” is dead because America’s trading and military allies outgrew it.

As the British like to say, “the worm has turned”. There’s no going back to the Old Normal. We are slowly waking up to the fact that we now all need to find our places in a very different and much harsher, high-stakes, multi-polar world.

19th century Britain and France carving up the terrestrial globe into spheres of influence — 1805 cartoon by James Gillray.