The Empire ended in 72 hours?

In the past several days, two otherwise reliable commentators, John Mearsheimer and Yanis Varoufakis, have declared that the Russian President skillfully ended the American Empire in 72 hours. This assumption is based on the interval between Trump’s National Security Strategy and Putin’s December 19th address.

The supposed “bad” committed by Trump’s NSS is a recognition that Europe is not (and cannot be) a major world power and that cooperation between the major world powers is essential. These people conflate “spheres of influence” with spheres of security. Yes, the new Trump doctrine of the entire western hemisphere being exclusive U.S. territory for extractivism is a vast over-reach of power, a massive new sphere of influence encompassing a large number of previously sovereign nations. This cannot be equated to Russia hoping for a sphere of security along its borders. That’s not a horse of a different colour - it’s two different animals. The military-industrial complex REQUIRES constantly arming up for the next conflict with the next imagined “threat.” For 80 years (or more) it was Russia intermingled with China - the original Cold War ballistic missile system was targeted to take out both Russia and China in one massive First Strike. The NATO system was employed in Europe to push military bases right up to Russia’s borders and the Navy plus associated bases all around the South China Sea were active in “containing” China. Or so they wished. Now, over 800 U.S. bases are employed to project U.S. power around the globe, encircling Russia, China and Iran. These two commentators think that the U.S. is suffering from “strategic exhaustion” from over-extended commitments. In reality, it isn’t strategic exhaustion, its financial exhaustion, an own-goal by the Trump regime to terminate the US$ as the world reserve currency. To have that much currency in circulation around the world (and yet that was still in short supply) REQUIRES running a trade deficit and/or large amounts of foreign aid. Both have been chopped! Without the world’s savings coming in as investments in U.S. Treasury Bonds (T-Bills), the U.S. cannot afford to run its military to operate as the world’s policeman, they are even planning on cutting military pay. That will NOT go over well at all. Now add to those financial woes a collapse in the value of the US$ as this silver short unwinds, revealing the fragility of the Western banking system. The U.S. is no longer a monetary sovereign - it handed that role to the Federal Reserve in 1913, which sounds like a federal agency but isn’t. The U.S. Government had NO SAY in this devaluing of its currency - the ultimate Banker’s Bank again acted solely in the interests of its corporate banker colleagues.

Here’s the Mearsheimer and Varoufakis podcasts:

How Putin Ended the American Century Through Bluff in 72 Hours | Yanis Varoufakis

“In 72 hours, Vladimir Putin may have done what decades of wars, sanctions, and summits could not: expose the limits of US power and trigger the end of the “American Century.” Drawing on the latest 2025 shifts in US strategy and Russia’s negotiating posture, this video breaks down the mechanics behind the new spheres-of-influence world now taking shape—and why Europe, Ukraine, and the global order could be entering a far more dangerous phase.”

What Putin Did to End the American Empire in 72 Hours Is Terrifying | John Mearsheimer

“In just 72 hours, Vladimir Putin exposed a truth Washington had spent decades denying. According to Professor John Mearsheimer’s analysis, the American Empire wasn’t ended by war or defeat, but by a moment of strategic exhaustion that revealed how far U.S. commitments had outgrown U.S. capacity.”