This video is part organizational announcement, part mea culpa. The organizational announcement is the easy part: since fewer and fewer people read, I am switching to video format for most of my blogging. I used to think that the pen is mightier than the video camera, but now I am no longer so sure. In any case, I have the video equipment, so why not use it. And now, on to the confession. It is long overdue and far more complicated. Let's start at the beginning and go until the end, then stop.
 
In 2005 I published a series of articles on Mike Ruppert's website "From The Wilderness." It was titled "Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century." In it I made the claim that the USA will collapse pretty much like the USSR did, except a bit later. How much later, I did not say. This article served as the basis for my 2008 book, "Reinventing Collapse," which was quite a hit and even won an Independent Publishers award. Its main point was that the USSR was inadvertently much better prepared for collapse than the USA was. In that book, I humbly suggested that some preparation for the collapse of the USA is in order. This suggestion mostly fell on deaf ears.
 
Then, in 2013, I published my next book, "The Five Stages of Collapse," which has been published in 10 languages. Some say that it is a seminal text which served as the foundation for the new science of Collapsology. I am not so sure about that. It was a French person who proposed this new discipline and, indeed, it sounds better in French: "collapsologie." Since then I have published an entire bookshelf of books of essays covering the various aspects of this same general thesis.
 
They were all based on a certain hypothesis: that the USA and the USSR were largely symmetrical and would therefore suffer a similar fate. After all, these were the world's two major superpowers during the second half of the 20th century. In the years between 1945 and 1991, together they dominated the entire planet. They split it roughly in half between East Bloc and West Bloc.
 
They espoused diametrically opposed ideologies: free market capitalism in the US; communist central planning in the USSR. Both of these ideologies were highly fashionable and wildly successful for a time. The USSR set an all-time record for industrial growth: 29% per year. That was in 1936 under Stalin. But both of these ideologies are now almost universally understood to be defunct. The most successful ideology of the present is a combination of political communism and economic capitalism with distinctive Chinese characteristics. Attempting to following it is pointless unless you somehow manage to become Chinese.
 
Fleshing out my collapse hypothesis, I formulated something I called "Superpower collapse soup." Its main ingredients are four primary macroeconomic and resource-driven factors. I thought that it is these that put a global superpower on an unavoidable trajectory toward collapse. These are: a severe, chronic deficit in domestic crude oil production; a worsening trade deficit; a runaway military budget; and a mushrooming foreign debt. Let's briefly look at each factor.
 
Conventional oil production in the US peaked in 1970, under Nixon. This precipitated a major crisis, but no collapse. Conventional oil production peaked globally in 2005 or 2006, resulting in the financial near-collapse of 2008. But then unconventional shale oil rushed to the rescue. In turn, shale oil production stopped growing and reached a plateau in 2019. It is likely to start declining, slowly at first, then faster and faster. Meanwhile, Trump's failed war against Iran has plugged up the Strait of Hormuz. Trump's old brain can't process the fact that he lost. This makes the problem intractable. Meanwhile, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been largely emptied in a futile effort to keep gasoline and diesel prices under control.
 
Keep in mind: shale oil is not exactly oil. It is mostly gas condensate. It is too light to make diesel fuel or jet fuel. But diesel and jet fuel are what most of the freight in the US runs on. To make diesel, shale oil has to be doctored up with some imported heavy oil. The heavy oil has to be imported into the US, from Canada, Saudi Arabia, Russia or Venezuela. The recent effort to get at Venezuela's heavy oil is a desperation move. Venezuela's oil is not exactly oil either: it is tar sand which lies between 350 and 1,000 meters underground. The good news is that at that depth it is warm enough to make it flow. The bad news is that it is still tar, not oil. The tar has to be pulled out of the ground using powerful pumps, then thinned with imported naphtha or other light hydrocarbon fractions. This is the only way to make sure that it still flows once it cools down. It would take the better part of a decade and hundreds of billions of dollars of investment to ramp up Venezuelan production. Even after all of this effort, the resulting product would be very expensive. Thus, Venezuelan oil is not going to offer a quick fix for the looming oil shortage.
 
The effort to replace hydrocarbon energy with solar and wind power didn't go quite as planned. Yes, wind generators can provide ventilation while the wind is blowing. And, yes, solar panels can provide illumination while the sun is shining. But how useful is that? Every bit of wind and solar has to be backed up by natural gas. These plants sit idle half the time but cost just as much. Add to that the cost of wind generators and solar panels. And then, as the Europeans are finding out, renewable energy causes climate change. They blocked sea breezes by erecting giant wind generators along the coasts. They covered the ground with dark, heat-absorbing solar panels. And then, lo and behold, people started dying of heat stroke during summer heat waves. Fields and forests burned up in forest fires. Rivers started running dry. Nuclear reactors, cooled using river water, had to shut down.
 
Moving on down the list of collapse soup ingredients, the US trade deficit has significantly expanded over this period of time, nearly doubling from the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009. Not just the quantity but also the quality of the imports has changed. The US economy can no longer function without a steady supply of Chinese products. What's more, the US can no longer manufacture weapons systems without imported Chinese parts and materials. This makes the US plans to oppose China militarily a complete joke.
 
Speaking of the US military budget, it has been in runaway mode. It now amounts to over one trillion dollars a year. It is larger than the combined defense spending of the next 10 countries combined. It is between 50 and 100 times larger than the defense budget of Iran. The US has just lost a war with Iran. Draw your own conclusions as to the effectiveness of US defense spending.
 
And then there is the foreign debt: overall, US government debt has surpassed 40 trillion. Much of that debt is held by entities within the US, such as the Social Security Trust Fund (the largest holder). A third of that amount is held by foreigners, and this is where signs of distress are becoming more obvious. The interest rate on the very important 10-year treasury note has shot up. The behavior of the 10-year yield directly validates this last ingredient of my "collapse soup" hypothesis. It previously peaked at 4.29% in June of 2008. Then, during a period of easy money and galloping debt, it fell to an absolute all-time historical low of 0.52%. It broke the 5% ceiling in late 2023, surging to 5.02%. And now, as yields remain high, the U.S. government is forced to pay significantly more interest to entice foreign lenders to continue buying its debt even as many of them are trying to unload it. This year, debt service has breezed past 1.5 trillion dollars.
 
Thus, with respect to debt, the US seems to be entering a bit of a death spiral. It is trying to service the expanding national debt while continuing to borrow frantically in order to finance the ever-expanding national budget. Debt service now consumes more money than the defense budget. This is a telltale development that in the past often heralded the demise of military empires. Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, recently came up with a debt buyback plan. He wants to use some 1 trillion dollars in cash held in reserve by the US Treasury to buy up newly issued US treasury paper. His idea is that this buyback strategy will keep the interest rates on federal debt under control. This seems like an extremely short-term strategy, considering that the US Treasury will be forced to borrow that same trillion, and then some, just a little while later, to keep the US federal government functioning. It will do so by issuing more of that same treasury paper it just bought back. Perhaps this is just a ploy to game the market in a way that would make Bessent, who is already very rich, even richer.
 
But there is a problem with my soup analogy. You see, these ingredients are all in the pot and simmering for two decades now. And yet the USA still hasn't collapsed. Meanwhile, the situation in each of these four categories has been getting progressively worse. "How much worse does it have to get?" is a question that has no answer. But the fact that the situation is getting worse is uncontroversial. Is there a limit to how bad it can get before something blows up? Yes, there probably is a limit. But we don't know what it is. All we can do is stand back and watch. But inquiring minds want to know: how much longer can this show go on?
 
Undeniably, the superpower collapse soup is piping hot, ready to serve and not the least bit tasty. If my collapse soup hypothesis is correct, then, at some point in time, the US finally going to collapse just like the USSR did. But it's been over two decades since I first formulated my hypothesis. In the past, have I tried to brush this nagging question aside with some general considerations. You see, the timing of such major events is notoriously difficult to predict. Everybody was taken by surprise by the Soviet collapse. It stands to reason that the collapse of the US should come as a surprise as well. I tried my best to explain how it is easy to determine that some event is inevitable, be it death from cancer based on a diagnosis or a bridge collapse based on an inspection. But then the timing of such events cannot be predicted if the information on which such a prediction can be based just doesn't exist. In fact, there are many situations where adding more information to a forecast model makes the forecast less accurate by adding more unknowns and more uncertainty.
 
But this is all deeply unsatisfying and I feel sorry to have led people down a garden path that doesn't lead to anything specific. People wanted to know when to throw the bags full of cans of spam and shotgun shells into the back of the pickup truck and drive for the hills. "Feel free to do that any time you like," I kept telling them. But I feel that I must do better, and now I believe that I finally can. If I think about something long and hard, sometimes a good idea does eventually pop into my head. I have no idea how that happens: it just happens; or it doesn't. And in this case it has finally dawned on me that there was, to begin with, a flaw in my comparison of the USA and the USSR. They are not quite symmetrical after all. There is a key difference that I have been neglecting to take into account. Yes, they were both 20th century military and industrial superpowers and they both espoused opposing, now defunct ideologies, and my superpower collapse soup analogy applied almost equally to both of them.
 
But there is a rather important difference between them. The US is a colonial empire, much like the British Empire and other Western empires once were. These empires were based on the exploitation of their colonial possessions. They sucked resources out of them while preventing their social and economic development. Along the way, they saddled them with permanent debt servitude. They enforced their trade policies through military means. But the heavy-handed tactics of previous colonial eras are no longer necessary. Instead, there is control of mass media, cyberwarfare, color revolutions, the IMF, the World Bank and the US Treasury with its endless sanctions. These are all means of coercing compliance from countries around the world. And what this compliance means is willingness to export products and commodities in exchange for US government debt.
 
This is the wealth pump which the US has been running for decades to drain wealth from around the world, to export inflation and to subjugate much of the planet. This wealth pump has become less effective over time. But even if it stops working altogether, there is a fallback to an older American technique: piracy. How well it can be made to work in the 21st century remains to be seen. But it won't fail for the lack of trying. It is, after all, quite easy. Just announce some ship to be part of a shadow fleet or its cargo subject to sanctions, and the ship and the cargo suddenly become yours without having to pay for them.
 
And so, from its earliest beginning of English settlers stealing native lands and privateers robbing Spanish galleons, America was a predatory entity, an empire. In stark contrast, the USSR was an anti-colonial empire. You see, Russia is unique among the world's nations. Be it medieval Rus, the Russian Empire, the USSR or the Russian Federation, it is the only country in the world which the West never succeeded in engulfing and devouring. At various times, various Western countries tried to meddle, to invade, to intervene and to foment revolts in Russia. None of that worked to the West's satisfaction. Russia has always had a mind of its own, a very powerful and independent one, and it always frustrated all Western attempts at domination. The Russian Federation currently controls one-ninth of the planet's dry surface. This is a huge expanse covering 11 time zones. The territory is down from one-sixth of the planet's total dry land area that was controlled by the USSR and its Eastern Bloc allies, but it's still the largest country in the world. Its territory contains as much as a quarter of the world's valuable natural resources. Western imperialists cannot ever hope control it because it is also happens to be the best-defended territory in the world.
 
Russia was never an empire in the Western sense; it was, rather, an anti-empire. Russia never followed the Western imperialist model of colonial exploitation. Instead, it lavished aid on countries and fostered local development. Russia financed economic and social development in the 14 other Soviet Socialist Republics, the Eastern Bloc countries in eastern Europe and on many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. More than 40 independent, sovereign nations owe their national sovereignty, liberation, or formal exit from empires to either direct military aid, diplomatic intervention, or formal agreements of the Russian Empire, the USSR, and the Russian Federation. Some of these, in Eastern Europe especially, have since turned out to be absolute, incorrigible ingrates. Some, especially in Africa, Latin America and Asia, are quite grateful but how much is their gratitude really worth? Russia was, overall, not the economic beneficiary of these efforts. It was these 40 countries that benefited from Russia's good will and largess. By 1990 the USSR had exhausted itself. It collapsed swiftly because it could only draw on its own resources, which were very much depleted.
 
Nevertheless, following the collapse of the USSR, the Russian Federation formally assumed responsibility for the $104.5 billion in total Soviet-era debt. Over the course of the 26 years that followed, Russia paid off every dollar of that debt. What's more, the Russian Federation has written off and forgiven more than $140 billion in foreign debt owed to it by various countries around the world. Added together and adjusted for inflation, this adds up to almost half a trillion dollars. That is more than the gross domestic product of 80% of the world's countries.
 
This was, then, the path Russia chose. Realizing that its system was defunct and could not continue, the USSR collapsed swiftly, shed dependents, paid off and forgave debts. Barely two decades later it reemerged, smaller but stronger and wealthier than before. But it did not reemerge alone. There are now several other huge countries — China, India, Iran and several others — which have grown much stronger over time and are no longer willing to put up with US and Western colonial exploitation. They took inspiration from Russia's example as a perennial bulwark against Western imperialism. Working steadily, they are eliminating the US dollar from world trade. More and more countries trade with each other using their own national currencies and payment systems. Washington's once global reach is by now much diminished. American economic sanctions have been largely defanged.
 
So, what will the US do now? Will it collapse like the USSR, let go of its dependencies, repatriate its troops from bases around the world and work extra hard to pay off its debts? I wouldn't bet on that. Colonial empires, as they fail, tend to do the exact opposite. They rob their colonies until there is nothing left to steal, then they attempt to rob their allies, then they rob their own citizens. Finally, some new-found usurper steals whatever is left and attempts to start over. It is not collapse, it is something much more disgraceful. I choose to call it "disgraceful degradation."
 
There is an engineering term: "graceful degradation." Engineers try to design systems so that they do not fail catastrophically. When faced with an error condition or a problem, they continue functioning at a reduced level. "Disgraceful degradation" is a play on words. It describes the opposite situation, where a single, minor fault causes the entire system to fail catastrophically — to collapse. I choose to use the term "disgraceful" in its moral sense: as dishonorable and reprehensible. And I choose to use "degradation" not as a catastrophic event but as a drawn-out process of deterioration and decay.
 
And so, here is my brave new prediction. The US will not collapse like the USSR. Instead, it will meander downhill, following the path of "disgraceful degradation." It will attempt to extract whatever wealth there remains out of Europe, Japan and South Korea, which are still under its military occupation. Australia and Canada are certain to get fleeced as well. The entire Eurozone is there for the taking. The euro is hitched to the US dollar. Printing euros is not possible without a dollar-euro currency swap line maintained by the Federal Reserve. This makes it quite effortless to pull the rug out from under the Eurozone when the time comes. But such extreme measures are not yet called for. For now, the Europeans are being rather effectively fleeced by being forced to impoverish themselves to the benefit of US defense contractors. Supposedly, they are doing so in defense of the Ukrainian regime in Kiev or to prepare to go to war against Russia or some such ridiculous ruse. Meanwhile, other ploys, such as the ridiculous Artificial Intelligence buildout in the US, are being used to loot Americans' own retirement accounts, insurance policies and other savings. The obvious goal is for a handful of billionaires to cash out before it all crashes.
 
It will be interesting to see to what depths of cynicism and depravity the Americans will descend before they are forced to declare their national project null and void. A good guess is that this will happen only after all those countries the Americans can still control are reduced to impoverished, deindustrialized, migrant-infested wastelands. But perhaps the recognition of its collapse will never arrive. Why concede failure and your complicity in it? Isn't it so much easier to continue bloviating about being the best and the greatest? And isn't that what Americans have come to expect? Every four years some clown pops up and declares his intention to make America great again. Then he pull a few swindles and absconds with the stolen goods. Americans are quite inured to this. But what if somebody came along and actually attempted to do something constructive? Wouldn't that be hopelessly naive? What's more, Americans would probably find it funny.
 
This, then is my brave new prediction: the USSR collapsed from the inside out; the USA is collapsing from the outside in. Or perhaps it never will collapse at all. Perhaps, when the time comes, its "inside" will be so hollowed out that its collapse, should anyone still choose to call it that, will not be noticeable. If there are no longer any "states" or if there are a few left but they are no longer "united", then what is there left to collapse? Some local crime syndicate? Well, then, in the fullness of time it would be replaced by some other local crime syndicate, la-de-da.
 
I intend to continue following the progress of this "disgraceful degradation." I will do so on this channel, as well as on my blog at boosty.to/cluborlov, where many of my books and articles are freely available. From now on, I intend to avoid making recommendations as to what people should do about any of it. The content I am going to offer from now on will be strictly informational.
 
Thank you for watching and I hope to see you here again same time next week.