It Could Happen Here - The Death of American Hegemony

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

Mia discusses the long arc of the Pax Americana, its roots in the US Navy, and how Trump’s war with Iran has blown it up.Sources: https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-2/endnotes-misery-and-debt https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/encyclopedia/war-and-military-affairs/alfred-thayer-mahan/ https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-promised-economic-d-day-203113113.html See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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an epoch, an age, a way of life, a democracy. We have covered this end through a series of prisms, from the pure and total dissent of the presidency into a form of autocratic rule by fiat to the destruction of even the most basic state capacity, phyrology, meteorology, that now largely forgotten time that he funded the nuke police, the death of American science and the wounds dealt to the education system,

ISIS full on ethnic clenting of a significant portion of the American population. This is the end of America that has existed since the end of World War II. But it is also the death of the Pax Americana. And today we're going to be looking not just at the death of what we're, was in America, we're going to be looking at what it means in terms of the American Empire. We're going to be looking at the Pax Americana, the modern era of American hegemony. We're going to be looking at what it was. It's deep and profound ties and origins in the U.S. Navy, and how the remnants of that era and the empire that had been so carefully and bloodily constructed over the course of centuries.

was shattered by the Trump administration's attempt to do an even more overt form of imperialism. The era of American hegemony is over. And before we continue into the endless waking nightmare, let us look at what it was. Now, I have been talking about the death of American hegemony for a while now, originally in the context of the apoccal disaster of the American War with Iran. And recently we've seen one of the most embarrassing and humiliating incidents and evidences of failure of the old American system, which is the declaration and then subsequent walking back, immediate walking back, it failure to launch of what was called economic deeday. So for people who have forgotten what economic deede was, because I don't blame you, this. This was such a fiasco.

Economic D-Day was supposed to be this enormous campaign of secondary sanctions against anyone trading with Iran spread over a number of sectors. This was designed to cripple what remained of the Iranian economy. And there was a giant press blitz about it. Again, they were calling it Economic D-Day. And now, multiple weeks later, we have a couple of sanctions. You have a few sanctions that they applied at the time. we now have some sanctions against some Iranian airlines and a sanction against a Turkish bank.

Now, again, originally when this was described, this was described as a sort of like American total economic war, that the U.S. would completely isolate Iran from all of his trading partners. However, comma, in order to do this, you would have to actually go after China. And the Trump administration has obviously had trade disputes with China, but the kind of sanctions they would need to levy in order to actually, you know, completely isolate Iran are something that the U.S. is simply not willing to pursue because, get this, the U.S. and China make an enormous amount of money both from trading with each other. Now, what's interesting here is that this kind of devastating economic campaign, this is something that the United States used to be able to.

to do. Now, obviously, wouldn't have been able to do it easily, right? But this kind of sort of, in theory, right, coalition-built large-scale sanction package to completely economically isolate a country, this is what the American Empire has always been best at. And the fact that the U.S. can't do it now signals a fundamental transformation and death of what the old American Empire was. Now, to do the tie-in to the Navy here, because the Navy is a crucial part of the story and about what the sort of Pax-Americanacana was, just to explain this very simply, right, a huge portion of whatever the Pax-American was, was the ability of the American Navy and its sort of supremacy over most of the world's oceans, its ability to maintain open, safe, and stable trade routes for global capital. and to sort of inelegantly pivot to this sort of naval apparatus. We can notice that D-Day was also an exercise in American naval power that is sort of astounding. I mean, the ability to do force projection on the other side of the world on that scale is sort of mind-boggling for most of human history.

And it's a demonstration of the way in which American hegemony was built by the Navy. Now, obviously, the U.S. originally is a land empire in ways that are very easily sort of naturalized and forgotten, right? The United States is a settler colony. It was built on a series of genocidal exterminations and land seizures from the indigenous people who had been here before over the course of centuries and centuries to continue to this day. So there is, on the one hand, right, this, in some ways, very conventional. settler colonial land empire. But there's also always been a significant naval component to the United States because of, you know, how settlers got to the colony. And then also because of the economic ties that those settlers maintained with Europe and the ways that trade networks developed, you know, the U.S. has always to some extent been a naval-oriented power as it's

sort of established and as it sort of did its genocides across the continent of North America. But for our purposes, there's an important departure in the history of the American Empire and how it functions in the mid to late 1800s. And it particularly intensifies around this guy who was just kind of a random Navy captain named Alfred Thayer Mahan who writes this book called The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. It's this book basically arguing that if you're going to be a great empire, you're going to be a great empire, you need to have sea power, right? You need to be able to sort of, like, maintain control over the world's oceans. He releases this in 1890. A lot of what this turns into is this attempt, you know,

and this sort of reorientation of the American Navy around pushing into the Pacific. Now, obviously, the Navy had always been a tool of American imperialism. It is what the U.S. used to enforce its rule over Latin America. And this is even before this sort of late era that we're talking about. even before the 1890s, right? When you're looking at sort of, you know, American interventions in Latin America, a lot of that is being done through the U.S. Navy. But Mayan is responsible is kind of too strong of a word,

but he's an influential theorist of this push, you know, west into the Pacific, right? It's this, the 1890s is this era of, oh, well, we've done manifest destiny, we've like conquered this fucking brutal genocidal empire from coast to coast. And there's this question of where we're going next. And where we're going next turns out to be, okay, we need to be able to sort of refuel ships across the Pacific. So we need to seize control of these islands that will allow us to have like coal refueling stations so we can continuously move and project naval power through the Pacific. This turns into a like the Spanish-American war, which is, you know, not a war that is, you know, not a war that is, fought in Spain.

It is a war that is fought in Cuba and in the Philippines and at sea. And it also leaves the creation of what's called the White Fleet by Theodore Roosevelt, which is... I can plan a lot on this show

about how just there is no such thing as subtlety anymore. And it's true that there is not subtlety now. There was also not subtlety back then. when you read historical stuff about it everyone goes, oh, it was called the white fleet because the holes of the ships were white, and it's like, yeah, okay, like, yes,

technically speaking, that is true. But every single one of these just unhinged racists who are involved in this entire project, everyone knows what it means to have a fleet called the white fleet. Right. You know, this is the fleece that is used to sort of, like it was called Opening Japan, but like, you know,

is used to just force Japan. to open itself sort of Western traitors and Western imperialism. As a result of this, you also see eventually sort of the various stages of like conquest and annexation of Hawaii. What you're seeing is in effect the American Empire entering its sea era. The music you love. Your favorite radio stations. Everywhere you go. The podcasts everyone's talking about.

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Now, obviously, the U.S. has been doing naval interventions on the other side of the world, basically since the moment it was founded. There's obviously like the very famous. like war with the Barbary states that the U.S. has like right after it's founded. But this period marks this sort of transformation of the U.S. into something that's, it's not quite accurate to call it like true global force projection. But that's kind of what happens over the course of World War I and then World War II. And this gets us into talking about the sort of Pax-American.

itself, right? Because if you're familiar with the term, it comes from this period, you know, of sort of Roman history that was called like the Pact Romano where you have this kind of relatively unchallenged Roman Empire ruling as sort of a regional and global hegemon and that it was able to, you know, enforce some kind of degree of peace. Now, obviously, like, like, we say peace, right? And obviously anyone who has, like, lived through this period is well aware that, like, no, obviously, this is not like an enormously peaceful time. It is, I guess, technically less war than like World Wars 1 and 2. But, you know, and this is true with the Pax Ramana too.

This isn't like actual peace. It's just a time in which there is an empire that is large enough that there aren't really as many sort of hot wars. but what's sort of called the Pax Americana starts after World War II. And this is important for a number of regions. One is the effect of World War II on the rest of the world, right? The U.S. has a significant portion of the entire world's manufacturing economy after the end of the war. It's one of a very small number of intact industrial belts that exist in the worlds after the war. and also

World War II shatters it overturns the old sort of world-powered system in which the French and British empires and also by this point like the sort of burgeoning German empire Nazi empire and the Japanese fascist empire had sort of been dividing up the world

but it's this real sort of death knell specifically for our purposes for the British who go from being the kind of naval power of the US was modeling itself after, right? This naval empire with the ability to project force anywhere that's able to rule over vast swaths of territory because it completely controls the seas or controls enough of the seas that it has control of sort of like naval and trade lines. But like that fleet, like the British Navy gets just annihilated in World War II and the British Empire just doesn't have the

resources to maintain itself. And through also a bunch of anti-colonial rebellions, it begins to tear itself apart. You know, and for sort of capitalism to function and for it to function efficiently, you need someone who has the naval power to control the seas. And you need this because this is how trade operates, right? And this is going to become especially true as as this period goes on in ways we will talk about in a moment. So at the end of World War II, the U.S. is sort of the driving force in a lot of ways behind. I mean, obviously, the allied powers are involved in various ways in the establishing of the United Nations. but the U.S. becomes kind of the seat of like the world's sort of global economic and institutional apparatus, right?

If the IMF of the World Bank, you know, I mean like the United Nations meets in New York, right? And, and this is maybe the most important thing for our purposes right. Now, the U.S. becomes the world's reserve currency. And it also becomes the currency in which you buy oil. which is also just an incredibly important advantage. And this is the basis of the American Empire. And one of the things that makes it so powerful is that, you know, this is what's called seniorage privilege, right?

Which is that like everything is being operated. The whole world economy is being operated in U.S. dollars. It is the world reserve currency. You can buy almost anything with it. And what that means for the U.S. is like, A, every time the U.S. prints a dollar bill, right? it's however much it costs to like make a bill and then like $100 exists now. And then B,

and this is also extremely important, the U.S. can't run out of dollars in the same way that, you know, other countries, we've talked about this before in other episodes, in the same way that other countries can run out of American dollars, which causes a massive sort of economic crises.

The U.S. doesn't have that problem, right? Like, obviously you have to do like inflation management, but you can't just like run out of dollars in a way that like anyone else in the world can. And this is also the currency where, you know, U.S. government bonds become the currency that the rest of the world's reserve banks put their money in. So this means that the entire rest of the world by like purchasing these bonds, right, is effectively just like subsidizing anything the U.S. government wants to do. You know, government bonds are government debt, right?

And most of the government debt, it turns out, is war debt because what the U.S. U.S. wants to do over this period, and again, we're calling it the Paxon Americana, but like, the thing the U.S. ramps up government spending to do is fight horrifying imperialist wars in Korea and Vietnam. But these are like bankrolled for a large extent by these sort of large-scale bond purchases. But that is the deal of sort of the Pax Americana, which is that the U.S. has this enormous military. It will, quote, unquote, protect you from Congress. that is a twin-pronged thing. On the one hand, right, you have, and this is why I've been talking so much about the role of the U.S. Navy,

you have the U.S. Navy maintaining open shipping lines around the world. And then on the other hand, you have the U.S., shall we say, three-letter agencies and also the military and also still the Navy, you know, doing interventions and doing genocides and a whole bunch of countries in order to, like, the communist out of power. But the deal is, you buy into the American protection racket, right? The U.S. will put a shit ton of military bases in your country. You will buy American bonds. You let the dollar be the world's reserve currency. And in exchange for this, you're supposed to get, again, secure trade lines and the capitalist class gets to, like, maintain its control of the means of production, and the workers do not get to have that stuff.

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Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interest and they complain about the very thing they're receiving.

It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin Unfiltered. I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all going to scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. 12 seats. Those are moving south.

So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcast. wherever you get your podcasts. College football will hijack your weekend, ruin your sleep, and break your heart. And that's why we make the Solid Verbal College Football Show. I'm Ty Hildenbrand. He's Dan Rubinstein.

How's it going? Every week, we preview the games that matter, sort through the biggest storylines, and tell you what to watch before kickoff. There's a lot to keep track of. Who's for real? Which upset is hiding in plain sight and which storyline is about to take over your group chat?

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And I'm Trevor Sikkimah. Have you ever watched a game and wondered what really made the difference beyond the final score? That's exactly why we created NFL Prox. Got a man wide open. Touchdown! Seahawks! Every week, we use exclusive next-gen stats insights and NFL content to break down the biggest stories, matchups, and moments from around the league.

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our goal is to help you see the game in a whole new way. If you've ever wanted to know why a playwork, how a matchup was won, or what most fans missed on Sunday, NFL Pro delivers insights you simply can't get anywhere else. Listen to NFL Pro on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Now, the importance of these shipping lanes are exacerbated by the other sort of wing of what you would call this. I don't know. It's maybe a little bit too...

Well, I don't think it's too out there to say this is also sort of another wing of American anti-communism and, you know, just like the war on the global working class in general, which is the expansion intensification of what's called containerization, which is, you know, based on shipping containers, right? It's the process that begins what's called offshoring, where dealing with this sort of declining global profits and the rising power of the working class in a number of countries, the global capital. capitalist economies spearheaded by the United States figure out that using these giant shipping and logistics lines and using these shipping containers, they can ship their manufacturing off to more impoverished countries and countries in which it's easier to just machine gun workers. And this allows companies to reduce wages and have a firmer grasp on the control of the means of production by, again, just machine gunning workers if they try to go on strike. But in order to be able to suddenly make your cars not in the United States, but somewhere else, say, for example, Mexico or China,

you need to be able to do this massive set of shipping things, right? Because also you're now working in these extremely long supply chains that like stretch all over the world and they're bringing parts in a bunch of different places and they're being assembled a different place and they're being assembled in another place in order to sort of pit the workers of every single one of these places against each other and then those workers who are working on it against the workers you no longer have work. This is what's known as the spatial fix, by the way. It's a term that was popularized by a Marxist geographer, David Harvey.

I think it's older than him or his work, but I am blanking right now on exactly where it's from. Yeah, but the product of the spatial fix is that the capitalist class is able to keep making money. the international workers movement is sort of gutted and then has its spine ripped out. And you have this sort of like the end of history era. And even at this point, right, for a lot of countries around the world, this deal is worth it because this deal is like shut the fuck up and let the U.S. sort of rig things in its favor. It's obviously going to like have a bunch of carveouts in these in all these massive free trade deals.

that advantage it, you know, it's going to be running an empire. You're going to be complicit in this empire. It's going to force you to go do its imperialist stuff. But, you know, it's worth it because you, the capitalist class of your country, get to keep making money. But again, all of this was based on the American ability to maintain control of the world shipping lanes. And this was something that had been uncontested, right? Like, I mean, I guess you could argue like Somali pirates or whatever, but like, yeah, the U.S.'s ability to maintain global shipping isn't even a thing that until Trump decided to invade Iran, that anyone was like thinking about really being contested. Like, obviously, you know, you can look at sort of like Chinese

expansion in the South China Sea or whatever, but like, that's not threatening the ability to move oil around the world. but the problem here for this empire is that it was taken over by people who don't understand how it works like Trump doesn't really understand and I say doesn't really Trump doesn't understand any of this at all which is why you know it just never really seemed to have occurred to any of the people around them that like they wouldn't be able to take control of the Strait of Formuz

and American policy towards the Strait of Formuz other than that period where they said they were annexing it has kind of just been to pretend that it's open and also screaming about it not being open at the same time. But this event, this loss of control of one of the most vital shipping lanes in the entire world, which

the American Empire had been able to maintain and keep open even though one of its mortal enemies like borders it, right? He had been able to keep the shipping lanes open, not by actually necessarily applying military power, but by threatening it. And this is also the

important thing about the American Empire, is that American military power always works best when you're threatening it and not when you're actually deploying it. Because once you actually have to deploy the U.S. Army to a place and fight a war, that usually turns into a shit show. I mean, you know, you look at the modern American history of wars, and it's like, okay, well, you know, you have like the absolute nightmares in Vietnam and in Iraq and Afghanistan and these sort of like, you know,

actually like deploying the American military tends not to work out particularly well for the American Empire. but the threat of it and the threat of the ability to just, you know, to kill an unbelievable number of people to inflict this damage is enough to cause other countries to fall in line. One of the sort of Mia Wong promises if it could happen here is that if you're listening to this show, you will know what the Plaza Accords are and you will know what the reverse Plaza Accords are. So the Plaza Accords are this thing in the 1980s with the U.S., you know, the U.S. manufacturing economy is tanking. And the U.S. basically goes to negotiating table and just says, like, fuck it, you're American military protectorates. And the U here is Japan and West Germany, which are these rising industrial powerhouses, right? And the U.S. goes, fuck you, you're going to nuke your own manufacturing economies by increasing the value of your currency so that the U.S. can have a manufacturing economy.

And Japan and Germany are forced to do it. you know, they're not like explicit about this, right? But that's the underlying tension of what's happening here. This is the American Empire functioning in the Paxi-Miricana as it was designed to function, where, yeah, you have the Japanese economy, which in this period is, like, threatening to overtake the American economy as a large economy in the world, and the U.S. is able to just kneecap it. Because it's like, no, we control the seas, we have a million military bases there. We can just dictate your economic policy.

And this is like Ronald Reagan, right? Like, we're not talking about like the most subtle, technocratic, like, manager of empire, right? This is like a senile actor. He's become president. And he's able to do this. But Trump is not, right? You know, Trump sees the raw power of the American empire and goes, oh, right, the point is to use it. Right?

Like, the thing that makes you a man, the thing that makes you a nation is just deploying this shit and killing and trying to kill everyone who opposes you. And this has led to him ending the basis of American global hegemony, which is like for the first time, like, since World War II, it's like, yeah, no, the U.S. just, like, can't maintain the global shipping supply, right? And, you know, and you can look at the other sort of major challenge to this in OPEC, right? where OPEC is, to some extent, doing this attempt to, like, prevent the flow of goods through the capitalist economy, but OPEC is trying to do it directly from the production end, not through the distribution end.

And the U.S. responds to this and the attempts by a bunch of other countries to form what we're called mini-packs, to form, like, OPEX for, like, copper instead of oil, to form these, like, mini-cartels for all of the sort of, like, world's primary commodities. and the U.S. takes this enormously seriously. This is the G8, which was originally the G7, was founded specifically to head off this threat and to defeat it. Right. So the U.S. has always taken these kind of threats enormously seriously.

But even OPEC was threatening the production of like primary commodities, right? It was threatening oil, but it was threatening oil from the production side, not from the distribution end. And now it's like, no, the U.S. is like losing control of the distribution side. for no actual, like, strategic reason. And I obviously, like, I don't want it to sound like I'm angry that the U.S. Empire is failing. I am, in fact, quite glad that the U.S. Empire is failing. Although, obviously, you know, the way that it's going out in his death spasm is going to be absolutely hideous, right?

The death of rule by a single giant empire, if it's not actually replaced by the end of empire, more generally, tends to be. become a bunch of different empires fighting and, you know, a bunch of empires fighting and also one empire rule are both bad. And our outcomes that we, Czech's notes, do not like, obviously. But it is astonishing the extent to which an incredibly sophisticated and old empire has just been torn apart in a year for no reason. and now we have to sort of grapple with what it means that this older form of vampire has died and that we're having this sort of new more fascist form of empire rise and fight its horrifying wars

and the actual meaning of this is not just the peer examination of history what this all means is something that is going to be created by people like you and people like me and how we rise or fail to rise to the moment the death of empire is created. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. wake up and go, oh damn, wait a moment, hold up. They change all of that.

Yes. It's real. This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's raw. White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin

unfiltered on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. College football will hijack your weekend, ruin your sleep, and break. your heart. And that's why we make the Solid Verbal College Football Show. I'm Ty Hildenbrand. He's Dan Rubenstein. Every week we preview the games that matter and the storylines that are going to ignite your group chat. And you can join us in the aftermath as we react to what happened,

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