America’s empire is collapsing

First of two parts

THE Marcos regime’s insistence on enacting a 2026 budget, so vulnerable to corruption as the 2025 one was, has fixated the national discourse on how to remove this corrupt administration. However, largely unnoticed here is that there is a tectonic shift in global geopolitics occurring, which, if these take a turn for the worse, could overwhelm our local problems.

US global hegemony that started right after the last world war and started to fade in the late 2000s — the so-called “unipolar moment” — appears to be reaching its end. “America’s imperial collapse is now unstoppable,” declared Ray McGovern, a 26-year CIA veteran and much-respected expert on geopolitics. His lecture on YouTube with that title should be required reading for Filipinos.

A multipolar world in the long term would result in a peaceful period for the world: It has been the US military-industrial complex that has started most of the wars during the unipolar world, the latest of which has been its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. However, history has shown that a fading hegemon fights first its rivals in a war that affects the entire world.

Most of this nation’s generation, the current and the previous, had lived in an era of US hegemony, which with intense American propaganda, made them its little brown brothers, as evidence in the fact that most of the media have become so pro-US that despite its unfair impositions on us — such as making us magnets for Chinese missiles in case of a war, after designating nine Philippine camps and an international airport (Cebu) as bases they can use whenever they wish.

The world is entering a dangerous transition in which US military power is still unmatched, yet no longer uncontested, and this unstable in between — neither clearly unipolar nor securely multipolar — creates exactly the kind of ambiguity that can lead to a major war. The US intervention and decapitation operation in Venezuela, layered on top of Ukraine, Gaza, and sharpening US-China rivalry, shows a system where law and institutions are weakening while raw power politics returns to center stage. In such a world, competing blocs test their limits without agreed rules of crisis management, and history teaches that this is how local conflicts can spiral into global conflagrations.

On Jan. 3, 2026, US forces launched a special operation to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, effectively decapitating the country’s leadership under the banner of counter narcotics and “restoring democracy.” [This was not an isolated raid but the culmination of a campaign that began with US strikes on Venezuelan vessels in September 2025 and escalated through a tightening blockade widely described by legal experts as an undeclared act of war.]

Reaction

International reaction has been telling. The United Nations publicly stated that the US intervention violates Venezuelan sovereignty and the UN Charter, warning that it undermines the very foundations of the post 1945 order built to restrain wars of conquest. Rising powers such as China and Russia condemned the operation, presenting themselves as guardians of non intervention and rallying parts of the Global South behind a call for alternative security arrangements — a preview of a new multipolar world led by the two superpowers.

The intervention in Venezuela also revives an older script. Analysts note that Washington’s latest action is framed by an explicit revival of the Monroe Doctrine in US strategy documents, asserting a special right to intervene in the Western Hemisphere to secure American interests, including access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves. For many states in Latin America, Africa and Asia, this confirms that the leading power now claims exemption from the rules it invokes against others, accelerating their search for regional patrons and new blocs as protection against unilateral force.

Yet the intervention’s immediate aftermath revealed that even this attempt at hemispheric domination faces friction from unlikely quarters. Brazil under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had already warned that a US naval build up in the Caribbean was a “source of instability,” responded decisively when the decapitation strike came. Brasília closed its ports to US warships associated with the operation and signaled that Amazonian and Atlantic infrastructure would not be available to sustain a long US campaign on the continent’s northern rim.

This complicates US logistics, forcing Washington to lean more heavily on islands and partners in the Caribbean and to route air and sea traffic in ways that increase cost and visibility. It also marks a political line in the sand: the largest South American power, custodian of the Amazon, has effectively declared that its territory and hinterland will not be an accessory to regime change next door, and that Latin American sovereignty includes denying support facilities even to a superpower ally.

Brazil’s stance resonates with broader Global South sentiment. Lula has positioned Brazil as a leader of a more autonomous South, skeptical of both US hegemony and great power rivalry, and the port closure reinforces the idea that regional blocs can raise the cost of extra regional interventions by leveraging geography and chokepoints — in this case, Amazonian air corridors, coastal ports and offshore logistics.

Russia

While Brazil denies access, Russia escalates in the shadows. In the maritime depths of the Venezuela crisis, a Venezuela linked “dark fleet” tanker became the symbol of escalating contestation over sanctions and sea power. The vessel, previously known as Bella 1, changed its name to Marinera, repainted its hull with a Russian flag, and re registered under Moscow’s flag in an attempt to evade US interception after the US Coast Guard tried to board it near the Caribbean in December.

After the US managed to have its crack-troops board and control it, reports in major outlets state that Russia dispatched a submarine and other naval vessels to escort the tanker toward its own waters. The US didn’t resist this, with its forces evacuating from it.

The incident illuminates several features of the new era. First, sanctions enforcement now blurs into open confrontation, with coast guards and navies from multiple countries interacting with a reflagged vessel carrying oil for clients such as China. Second, Russia’s willingness to send a submarine and surface ships — even if partly symbolic — signals that Moscow is prepared to use gray zone naval moves to contest US enforcement far from its home shores, raising the risk of miscalculation in crowded sea lanes.

Whether the submarine was directly on station or operating at some distance matters less than the political message. By tying its flag and naval assets to a formerly Venezuelan tanker under US sanctions, Russia signaled that it is willing to internationalize the enforcement dispute, presenting itself as a protector of sanctioned trade and as a counterweight to what it calls US economic warfare.

Misstep

In the fragile not quite multipolar system, such moves are a warning shot. A misstep — an unexpected collision, a misidentified sonar contact, an aggressive maneuver — could suddenly confront leaders in Washington and Moscow with a naval incident off Ireland or in the Atlantic that both sides feel compelled to answer, for reasons of credibility, prestige, or domestic politics.

The Venezuela episode unfolds against a wider breakdown of what used to be called the liberal international order. Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, Israel’s devastating campaign in Gaza, and intensified US-China confrontation have exposed how fragmented the global security system has become and how little capacity remains to negotiate or enforce peace.

By 2025, multiple reports were already describing a transition from rules based multilateralism to a more transactional “world disorder” defined by military rearmament, economic fragmentation, and technological decoupling. Governments have rewired supply chains around security, not efficiency, entrenching blocs and deepening mistrust.

At the same time, non Western “middle powers” and Global South coalitions have become more assertive. Surveys and diplomatic initiatives — from Asean GCC China summits to expanded Brics formats — show these states refusing automatic alignment and instead hedging between great powers to maximize autonomy. This hedging, however, does not replace the old order with a coherent new one; it produces a patchwork of overlapping arrangements and ad hoc deals that can crumble in the first major crisis.

Strategists argue fiercely over whether the system today is unipolar (rule solely by the US), bipolar (with China replacing the US), or multipolar (jointly ruled by China, Russia and several other countries), and the answer is not just academic; it shapes how states behave in moments of danger. On raw indicators of power — military spending, global finance, technology — the United States still stands alone as the only full spectrum superpower, suggesting that unipolarity has not yet fully ended.

Gap

Yet the gap is clearly narrowing. China has become a comprehensive peer competitor in several domains, from advanced manufacturing to naval power in its immediate region, leading many analysts to describe the emerging configuration as effectively bipolar: an intensifying US-China duel with everyone else orbiting around it. Meanwhile, a cluster of significant regional actors — India, the EU, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and others — exercise enough leverage in their neighborhoods and in issue specific regimes (energy, digital rules, logistics) to claim the status of secondary “poles.”

The result is a world that is multipolar in potential but not yet in structure. There are multiple centers of power, but no agreed hierarchy, no stable balance, and few shared norms about red lines or crisis management between them. Instead of the relatively rigid bipolarity of the Cold War, today’s system features shifting coalitions, opportunistic alignments, and overlapping conflicts in which major powers test boundaries through proxies, economic coercion and limited force.

By kidnapping a legitimate head of state, Venezuela’s Maduro, the US may have demonstrated combat skills fit for movies. It has, however, accelerated a chain of events that would end the unipolar world it has controlled for seven decades.

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America’s empire is collapsing
Source: Breaking News PH