U.S. empire, rise and fall.

Lenin had it right when he wrote "Empire Is the Highest Stage of Capitalism" as we are witnessing in our own time, not only because, particularly in the wake of Bretton Woods, U.S. militarism, both overt and covert, enabled dollar hegemony to drain the financial and material resources of the neocolonized world into the pockets of U.S. creditors and corporations for 75 years, but also – and more importantly – because what Ray McGovern calls the MICIMATT, having acquired a murderous life of its own since the dissolution of the USSR, is in the process, by alienating three quarters of the world's population, of choking off U.S. capitalist vampires' supply of offshore financial blood.

The greatest irony in the rise and fall of the U.S. empire is that while its military ballooned to impose discipline across larger and larger swaths of the planet for its corporate and financial predators, those self-same predators offshored U.S. manufacturing to multiply their profits.

The U.S. being left with an industrial base incapable of producing weapons and ammunition on a scale equivalent to the Russian Ministry of Defense, arming the U.S. proxy in Ukraine, which could never have defeated Russia militarily in the first place, has finally for all practical purposes collapsed, although neither the U.S., Ukraine, nor NATO is willing to admit defeat.

Meanwhile, Washington, by imposing particularly secondary economic sanctions on a growing number of countries and ultimately stealing its enemies' U.S. dollar reserves, continues to drive the U.S. corporate and financial sectors' prey across the global majority to reorganize trade, investment, and financial relations among themselves to escape from the U.S. economic orbit.

With only hard power left in its arsenal, the empire is flailing, bereft of strategy, consuming what remains of its smoke-and-mirrors financial resources, and suffocating itself with debt.