American Century is Over: Imperialism at Breaking Point

Akhilesh Chandra Prabhakar | 16 Feb 2026

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Debt expansion, monetary weaponisation, de-dollarisation, sanctions erosion, and the rise of alternative systems reveal an imperial order entering contested transition.

The year 2026 marks a decisive moment in the deepening crisis of world imperialism. What bourgeois analysts portray as a “financial transition” or a “multipolar adjustment” is, in fact, the unfolding of a structural truth long established by Marxism–Leninism: imperialist domination is historically limited, sustained only through unstable contradictions that eventually rupture.

The so-called American Century, constructed through the global supremacy of the US dollar, the militarised control of energy flows, and the subordination of the Global South, is now entering its terminal phase. This is not merely a geopolitical contest between the United States and China, but a systemic crisis of the imperialist stage of capitalism itself. As Lenin wrote, imperialism is the epoch in which monopoly capital, finance capital, and the export of capital dominate the world order. That order is now fracturing under the weight of its own contradictions.

Debt Empire: Finance Capital Devours the State

At the centre of the US decline lies the unsustainable explosion of sovereign debt. By early 2026, federal liabilities surpassed $38 trillion, exceeding projected GDP (gross domestic product) of $30.5 trillion (Congressional Budget Office, 2026). This is not merely a fiscal imbalance, but a classic symptom of an imperial core no longer able to reproduce dominance through productive expansion, relying instead on speculative finance, credit inflation, and militarised accumulation.

Read Also: The Battle for a Multipolar World

Annual deficits remain near $2 trillion, forcing the Treasury to issue new debt simply to sustain State operations and service existing obligations (Congressional Budget Office, 2026). Revenues of roughly $5.26 trillion are overwhelmed by expenditures above $7 trillion, while interest payments now rival military allocations (USFacts, 2026). The empire survives by mortgaging its future to preserve its present rule.

The Federal Reserve has become the central mechanism of imperial solvency. Through large-scale bond purchases and liquidity injections, it stabilises Treasury markets and sustains deficit financing (Federal Reserve Board, 2026). This represents the fusion of State and finance capital that Lenin identified as the essence of imperialism.

Moreover, more than $7.1 trillion in intragovernmental debt is drawn from Social Security and Medicare trust funds, meaning the state increasingly borrows from its own future obligations (Social Security Administration, 2025).

De-Dollarisation and Erosion of Monetary Command

For decades, dollar supremacy rested upon the petrodollar regime, through which global oil trade was overwhelmingly settled. That foundation is now steadily eroding.

Russia and China now conduct nearly 90% of bilateral trade in rubles and yuan, while Iran and Saudi Arabia have expanded non-dollar settlement mechanisms in energy exports (World Financial Review, 2026). Central banks are also reducing exposure to US Treasuries. China’s holdings have fallen to $680 billion, while Japan has shown increasing hesitation to expand dollar reserves amid instability (US Treasury TIC Data, 2025/2026). This is not technical diversification, but the gradual weakening of imperial monetary discipline.

Stagnation in Britain, Adjustment in Europe

The crisis is not confined to the US. Britain’s economy reflects the contradictions of late capitalism: stagnant output, weak investment, and growing insecurity for the working class. Forecast GDP growth of only 1.2% in 2026 signals not renewal but the exhaustion of Britain’s imperial economic base. Even inflation’s decline toward the Bank of England’s 2% target is achieved through suppressed demand, wage restraint, and intensified discipline over labour—hardly a victory for the masses.

Across Europe, the EU’s diversification toward India and Brazil through trade agreements is not progressive internationalism but an imperialist adjustment strategy. The India–EU Free Trade Agreement, eliminating tariffs on over 90% of trade, reflects capital’s search for new markets and cheaper value chains amid weakening internal accumulation. Yet, investment remains sluggish, exposing the limits of neoliberal restructuring.

Europe’s selective engagement with democratic BRICS members, while maintaining hostility toward China and Russia, signals not independence but recalibration within the imperialist hierarchy—a hedging maneuver under conditions of US decline.

Washington’s Shift: Pragmatic Protectionism

Under the current US administration, imperial strategy has shifted from ideological crusades toward pragmatic protectionism. The rhetoric of “regime change” has been replaced by transactional trade stabilisation, particularly with China. Yet, structural dependence persists: the US remains a major recipient of Chinese capital inflows through Treasury holdings, underscoring the interlocked contradictions of global finance imperialism.

BRICS Expansion and Multipolar Energy Front

The enlargement of BRICS to include major energy exporters such as Iran and the United Arab Emirates —alongside tacit Saudi coordination—accelerates the emergence of a multipolar oil regime. Late-2025 energy contracts involving Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China were reportedly settled in yuan, signaling the weakening of petrodollar monopoly power (Foreign Policy, 2026). This directly undermines one of the core pillars of American financial hegemony: compelled global demand for dollars through oil dependence.

Alternative Financial Architecture: Beyond SWIFT

The weaponisation of SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) and Western banking networks—most clearly through the freezing of Russian assets in 2022—has driven the construction of parallel infrastructures now operational in 2026.

• mBridge has processed over $55 billion in cross-border CBDC settlements (Ledger Insights, 2026).
• CIPS/SPFS enable trade beyond US surveillance.
• BRICS Pay, launched in 2026, bypasses Western credit monopolies.

Under India’s BRICS chairmanship, CBDC (central bank digital currency) linkage is advancing toward bypassing the dollar entirely in trade settlement (Ledger Insights, 2026). This is the material emergence of a post-imperial financial geography.

Sanctions Exhaustion: Empire’s Siege Weapon Blunts

Sanctions, long central to US coercion, are losing effectiveness. Russia recorded GDP growth of approximately 2.6% in 2025 despite SWIFT exclusion and frozen reserves, sustained through energy exports and alternative payment systems (International Monetary Fund, 2026). Iran increasingly circumvents blockades through barter arrangements and yuan-denominated exchange, weakening unilateral siege tactics (World Bank, 2026).

Material Constraints on US Technological Power

Despite “decoupling” rhetoric, US high-tech and defence sectors remain dependent on Chinese industrial capacity. China controls roughly 30% of global semiconductor backend packaging and testing (Semiconductor Industry Association, 2025). Restrictions on gallium, germanium, and graphite have exposed severe vulnerabilities in Western military-industrial supply chains, while US refining capacity remains insufficient for rapid substitution (U.S. Geological Survey, 2026).

Imperialism’s Crisis and Revolutionary Opening

The decline of the American Century is not a moral event but the structural outcome of imperialism’s contradictions. Debt expansion, monetary weaponisation, de-dollarisation, sanctions erosion, and the rise of alternative systems reveal an imperial order entering contested transition.

The question is no longer whether US hegemony can endure indefinitely—it cannot. The decisive question is what replaces it:

• renewed militarism and inter-imperialist conflict, or
• the revolutionary advance of oppressed nations and working classes against global monopoly capital.

History has entered a new phase. The American Century is over. The struggle over the future has begun.

The writer, an economics professor and author, is currently engaged in research on Sustainable Economic Development, Political Economy of the Global South, and India’s Socioeconomic Crisis. The views are personal. acpuum@gmail.com. 

Community Political Power v. the Corporate State

Seth Sandronsky

February 13, 2026

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The multi-racial resistance to violent federal immigration enforcement in Minneapolis and across the U.S. is an exercise in community political power. That’s a clear and present danger to the wealth behind the two political parties, or duopoly.

It’s not a mystery. The Democratic Party and GOP advance the class interests of corporations and billionaires, and don’t want challenges.

This political duopoly wants the corporate and billionaire dollars to keep flowing.

Community political power has other interests—meeting people’s needs. They are primary: food, health care, education and shelter, necessities for a reasonable quality of life.

Building community political power are working class Americans such as Viviana Salazar bringing food to immigrants too terrified to leave their homes to shop for groceries in Minneapolis. There are no illegal aliens on stolen land.

Popular culture is instructive. English is my second language, according to Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known as Bad Bunny, the global megastar rapper and singer who hails from Puerto Rico. English is also the second language of America, he added, which should be common knowledge but isn’t for reasons of ideology.

Ruling ideology dismisses and distorts European colonialism (sin papeles, or without papers). This bloody conquest systematically underdeveloped the Global South for over five centuries. Economic imperialism is the name of this game.

Immigrant labor powers the U.S. economy. Removing that demographic from the nation harms native-born workers under a capitalist economy that requires an expansion of sellers and buyers of wage labor.

Labor of all national origins makes our world. Americans building community political power understand and act on that.

The Poor People’s Campaign builds community political power by organizing and mobilizing poor and low-wealth Americans. Their numbers have swelled with the corporate state’s war on labor unions.

Philosophers have interpreted the world according to the 19th-century writings of Karl Marx. The point is, however, to change it, he wrote.

Much maligned as a godless communist during the Cold War, Marx’s critique of global capitalism as it grew from European feudalism via colonialism and industrialism remains strong. Later, Soviet communism defeated German fascism during World War II.

Then, communism was popular around the planet. Then, capitalism was unpopular, having birthed fascism and the Jewish Holocaust.

A sustained campaign of anti-communism to legitimize capitalism since the end of the Second World War rose as the dominant ideology in the Global North of the former colonial empires and the U.S., once a British colony. However, the ideology of anti communism has limits, as all who choose to see can comprehend.

Consider this. Capitalist investors, not atheist communists, bought millions of people’s foreclosed homes at fire sale prices after the housing bubble burst and caused the Great Recession. The financial interests behind the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s got a federal government bailout, while homeowners got sold out.

Capitalism is causing the climate catastrophe. Extreme weather and species extinction are two examples. Can’t blame such planetary destruction on communism.

Recessions are to capitalism what water is to fish. Recessions recur regularly, baked into the system that prioritizes profits over people and the planet. Instability is systemic.

Uncle Sam bailed out capitalist investors after the popping of the housing bubble. Capital, a social relationship between the sellers and buyers of labor services, demands and receives Democratic and Republican help. That equation holds no matter who is in Congress and the White House.

Community political power confronts the duopoly that handles the capitalist economy this way. The protracted conflict in Minneapolis is a case in point of ordinary people resisting the system’s drive to crush humanity in favor of profitability that bankrolls Blue and Red politics. Its primary purpose is to create the political conditions for the continuation of capital accumulation.

There is a history of the political duopoly shifting income and wealth from the bottom and middle to the top, relentlessly, during the past forty-plus years. This political process has spawned the monopoly corporations that dominate industries (Big Pharma, Big Banks, Big Tech etc.). The faces of this new Gilded Age are the smarmy billionaires like Bezos, Ellison, Musk and Zuckerberg, the public faces of a minority ownership of the two political parties lock, stock and barrel.

Therefore, Democrats and Republicans prefer to focus on the personal identities of their voting bases. There is no lack of greenbacks to pursue a politics of ugly. Patriarchy and white supremacy loom large.

The color line remains a flashpoint of division and its opposite, unification. Hence the threat to the social order that the Minneapolis resistance poses. The multiracial uprising after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 was a kind of dress rehearsal for President Trump’s unleashing of violent federal immigration enforcement in 2025-2026.

Democrats appeal to labor unions and minorities. Democrats nod and wink at the military-industrial complex that enforces the American empire directly and by proxy. Recall former President Biden’s reassurances to his donors that “nothing fundamental will change.” It didn’t.

Republicans are the party of white Christian nationalism. Patriarchy or male supremacy, thrives because and despite the fact that the U.S. economy of a male worker in a labor union earning a family wage to support a wife and children that prevailed in the postwar era has been over for decades. The American working class has suffered horribly.

MAGA is an ideology, a band aid covering up wounds of late capitalism. The rise of finance and decline of industry in the U.S. has devastated the working class under successive Democratic and GOP administrations. The safe haven of MAGA ideology is a cruel hoax.

The ideological war of ideas is powerful. Debating the amount of surplus value that can balance on the head of a pin does nothing to weaken the ruling ideology of capitalism and imperialism. Ideology flows directly from a global economy that disappears the human labor making our world of commodities for reasons of profitability.

Building community political power like working-class folks in Minneapolis are doing is a post-capitalist move. Delivering groceries to immigrants terrified to leave their homes to avoid arrest via violent federal immigration enforcement officers is an example of working-class solidarity. Call it a vote for humanity.

Is this socialism in practice? That’s fine in practice, according to the egghead professor. But how does it work in theory?

Being on the side of humanity is a theory of building community political power. Its practice is feeding the hungry, working-class people, born abroad or stateside. A look back is instructive.

The Black Panther Party fed poor people in the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1960s. As a result, over 20,000 poor black school kids ate breakfast before school. That was a material example of building community political power.

Food Not Bombs feeds hungry people in America today. No doubt some of the recipients are the so-called working poor. No doubt some of them are laboring union-free at Amazon and Walmart, the two biggest private-sector employers now.

President Trump seeks to increase the annual war budget to $1.5 trillion versus the current level of $1 trillion. Damage abroad from U.S. bombs harms poor people in America, according to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., shifting resources to the military and away from humanity. The Democratic Party is central to this military-industrial complex that former President Eisenhower warned against.

Meanwhile, the U.S. president has demonized and scapegoated immigrants in a campaign of sustained skin-color identity politics, successfully. The tip of this spear is the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, masked like a modern Klan, which received increased funding under the Biden administration. That created the conditions to hike ICE spending to $75 billion over the next four years under Trump 2.0.

Identity politics divides the laboring class from their material interests. Democrats and Republicans for reasons of public distraction and manipulation can and do perpetuate myths about the other.  Against this backdrop, public division and unification flow from the material conditions of living and working.

Here’s the thing. The parties’ similarities far outweigh the differences. Ideology distorts that similarity of ruling class interests that in times of crisis can create a clarity out of uncertainty.

The corporate state is the delivery system for a status quo. The political duopoly and the wealth that controls it play a version of three-card Monte, a rigged game that defeats the working class. Bear with me.

For example, the GOP slams Democrats as the extreme left of cultural Marxists. Democrats critique the GOP as extremist warmongers. The former is farcical, while the latter is partial.

Together, the political duopoly perpetuates capitalism and imperialism. The political defeat of health care for all financed via the tax system that could prevent a cancer diagnosis from meaning one must declare personal bankruptcy to fight the disease, is proof of that. There are other examples of the U.S. political economy of health care that benefits the few and harms the many.

Here’s more on the tentacles of a medical-industrial complex. It’s the goose that lays the golden eggs via campaign contributions to the political duopoly. These are legal bribes producing reforms that grind down the working class.

Meanwhile taxpayer dollars currently buy the bombs and bullets that Israel deploys against Palestinians in Gaza. It’s a siege of extermination. The building of community political power stateside challenges that grotesque priority of death over life.

One main challenge to building community political power is collectively forming an approach to self-governance to replace the existing system of political disempowerment. Its feature is what author, consumer advocate and presidential candidate Ralph Nader terms “lesser evilism” (vote Blue no matter who).

The Democratic Party masquerades as a liberal alternative to racist and militarist Republicans. The GOP wraps itself in the flag of patriotic national interest.

Biden’s staunch support for Israel and the U.S. arms industry to maim and murder Palestinians after Hamas killed Israeli settlers on Oct. 7, 2023, that Vice President Harris refused to change, led to Trump’s victory in 2024. Polling in swing states bears that out.

Liberalism U.S.-style paves the path for fascism. The authoritarian police state, e.g., mass black incarceration and working class immiseration, that community political power is wrestling against in Minneapolis and across the U.S. today, emerged well before President Trump arrived.

“Spending on policing has risen by 40% since 2017,” according to the Prison Policy Institute, “and one-third of that change is due to increases in federal spending on policing (not including ICE or Customs and Border Patrol). Taken together, federal spending on policing and the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda now makes up 25 percent of all government spending on the criminal legal system.”

It’s of course a mismatch, economically and politically, between community political power and that of the corporate state. But that’s where things are at currently. Imbalances in power of the status quo generate resistance.

Recently, Bishop William J. Barber II—president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, and founding director of the Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy—began a 50-mile march from Wilson to Raleigh as part of the “Love Forward Together” movement. He emphasizes a moral revolution of values. Christian nationalism is not the only rodeo in town.

“Clergy and impacted people are protesting the relentless policy violence against poor and low-income people and gerrymandering efforts to suppress these voters in the midterm elections,” according to a Repairers of the Breach statement. There were 300 marchers at the beginning of this nonviolent protest. Its multiracial character is a strength.

Participating groups range from the North Carolina Poor People’s Campaign to the Institute for Policy Studies, St. James Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), North Carolina Council of Churches, Union of Southern Service Workers, Indivisible, Second Chance Alliance, Human Rights Campaign, Service Employees International Union, Public Schools First NC to the Save America Movement.

Masses of people in motion can build community political power from a democracy in form but not content under Trump, spawning one crisis after the next, drenched in bigotry and misogyny. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian author, communist and labor organizer, who the fascist dictator Mussolini imprisoned between World Wars I and II, wrote the following. “The Old World is dying and the New World struggles to be born: now is the time for monsters.”

The future is unwritten.

Seth Sandronsky is a Sacramento journalist and member of the freelancers unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com