US Cannibalizes Its Proxies and Itself as War on Multipolarism Expands
As its war on multipolarism expands, Washington is converting the Western economy to arms production, draining its client states, and eroding its own social foundations – repeating the terminal trajectory of the British Empire.
All of this is a continuation of the British Empire’s use of its colonies to help fight its wars and maintain global primacy up to and including throughout the World Wars.
And just as the British Empire increasingly leaned on its colonies as its power waned in its final years, extracting blood and treasure from them, draining and destroying them in the process – the US is increasingly leaning on its client states as its war on multipolarism expands against a reemerging Russia, a rising China, and a persistent Iran and many nations in between.
Just as the British used a combination of administrative control and political propaganda to induce obedience across its colonies, the US is using its political capture of its client states and unprecedented information dominance to maneuver its client states into position for war and proxy war and to justify the growing expenditure on military power at the expense of social programs and even economic viability – both at home and across its modern-day empire.
The Burden Sharing Network
Spanning the Obama, first Trump, Biden, and now second Trump administrations, the US has increasingly introduced a combination of political, economic, and military alliances used to consolidate US power worldwide.
This includes everything from the “Quad,” to “AUKUS,” from an ever-expanding NATO to faux anti-US alliances like Europe’s Ukraine-centric “coalition of the willing” and proposed European Union “associate membership” for Canada. All of these arrangements are meant to streamline the administrative process of leveraging regional power across multiple client states together with political narratives meant to bring as many people within these targeted nations on board with the use of these nations against targets of US foreign policy objectives.
The Quad and AUKUS use fabricated threats of “Chinese expansion” and “aggression” to dupe millions across Asia-Pacific into transferring tremendous and still-growing amounts of resources from national development toward military spending and potential confrontation with China itself.
The so-called “coalition of the willing,” a recycled term from the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, along with the EU associate membership proposed for Canada is aimed at fabricating the threat of an “invading Russia” to leverage further resources for Washington’s ongoing proxy war in Ukraine.
In West Asia, the US is using the so-called “Mecca Joint Defence Agreement” and the “Abraham Accords” to consolidate its client states in the region together despite decades of contradicting propaganda narratives maintaining a US strategy of tension across the region focused on Israel.
Manufactured public hatred and/or fear is used to drive these various attempts to consolidate the resources and power of US client states around the world amid interlinked conflicts spanning Europe, West Asia, and building tensions in the Asia-Pacific. Adjacent conflicts are also taking place everywhere from Latin America to the continent of Africa as part of this process.
Stripping away the propaganda reveals a very basic formula – all of these political alignments share a single imperative – more military spending – and spending on weapons that are either made by the US itself or part of US military interoperability around the globe. It is also military spending that is coming at the expense of social programs, economic and national development, and even the political stability of the various US client states that make up these alignments – whether they are created and led by the US or pretend to be in opposition to US actions.
While this “burden sharing network” took shape over the course of several US administrations this 21st century, it simply builds on what was always continuation of what had been the British Empire itself. The term “burden sharing network” was verbatim introduced in the 2025 US National Security Strategy and sold specifically as a means of preventing US overextension – just as the British Empire required to perpetuate its own power toward the end of its global power.
Eating Its Proxies, Eating Its Own Economy
Because China’s population and industrial base dwarfs that of the US and Europe combined, and considering the large and growing network of partners China is building as part of the emerging multipolar world, even the expanded squeezing of US client states alone is not enough.
This is why the US is seeking to convert the ailing Western economy from civilian economic production to arms production. Examples of this are rapidly appearing in Western headlines with car factories across Europe and now the US converting increasingly unused production capacity to build components for weapons and munitions.
While the West proclaims itself as a “free market” society – it is actively smothering the “free market” by forcing civilian production to transfer over to military industrial production – not through political declarations but through the careful management of socio-political and economic conditions leaving little other choice.
The US managed to force Europe’s collective economy to decouple from cheap, plentiful, and reliable energy from Russia through the US-engineered overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014 and the subsequent war US encroachment along Russia’s borders provoked. By eliminating Europe’s Russian energy imports, the US was able to shape Europe’s wider economy toward military industrial production by making any other economic activity prohibitively expensive.
While military industrial production will be likewise expensive, European governments are using stage-managed theater between themselves and the US to create the illusion of existential danger from Russia, the “abandonment” by the US to that “Russian danger,” allowing greater expenditures on military industrial production than would ever have been possible under actual free market conditions.
While recent US administrations including both the Trump and Biden administrations have declared policies to reindustrialize the United States – none of the actual policies required to do so – like reforming education, especially vocational education, investing in national infrastructure, or nationalizing key industries – have been proposed let alone implemented.
Instead, vast sums of US tax money is being transferred to the arms industry and companies upstream in the supply chains to expand production of weapons and ammunition – but because of the profit-driven nature of these companies, as little money as possible is being sent to expanding actual production.
Because the fundamentals of reindustrializing the US have not been addressed by any of the US administrations promising to do so, entire US industries find themselves in decline – including the auto industry. Rather than allow the “free market” to sweep away inefficient, incompetent corporations, the corporations are helping themselves likewise to US tax money to use increasingly unused industrial capacity to manufacture parts for weapons rather than automobiles.
GM, for example, recently boasted production of Patriot missile outer cases. GM is using underutilized computer numerical controlled machining equipment usually used for prototyping and mold making to instead produce these outer cases in quantities Lockheed Martin could not achieve without itself investing in similar equipment.
Like corrupt, incompetent corporations collapsing under the weight of their own greed and consolidating among themselves to maintain what can best be described as a pyramid scheme for as long as possible – a “civil-military fusion” is taking shape in the US where the government produces an unnecessary need for constant war and the weapons and ammunition to fight it, and US corporations help themselves to tax money to do so.
Empire mismanaging its economy amid terminal decline is nothing new. The British Empire likewise misappropriated national resources and industry in a desperate bid to maintain its global primacy rather than acknowledge the unsustainable nature of doing so and the necessity to reorganize itself from a predatory empire to a functioning and productive nation-state.
By doing so, it not only lost its empire, it was left without the socio-economic and political foundation to run a viable nation-state and has spent the entirety of its post-empire period as an extension of US empire, rather than as a sovereign, British nation-state.
The US – like the British Empire – in refusing to acknowledge this reality – is simply buying time to perpetuate its global primacy – not actually organize a viable plan to realistically sustain it. In the process, it is severely neglecting the necessary foundations required for a functioning, productive nation-state – with infrastructure rotting out from under the American people, inaccessible education and healthcare, and a divided, increasingly dysfunctional society.
Worse still – the proposed US method of perpetuating global primacy relies entirely on destabilizing and undermining the rising multipolar world rather than the US matching or exceeding multipolarism’s growing power and prosperity.
The final outcome is the US hollowing itself out while bleeding its proxies dry in a process of undermining and destabilizing the rest of the world – leaving all three in destruction and destitution if multipolarism cannot successfully contain this process and manage a relatively stable transition from US primacy to global multipolarism.
Only time will tell how exactly this entire process plays out. Interests on both sides have proposed plans and are implementing them upon the global stage. Only one has history and sustainable geopolitical and economic fundamentals on its side – and it isn’t Wall Street and Washington. That said, it is always easier to destroy than to build – thus multipolarism will have to build at incredible speed and scale to outpace the demonstrated destructive power of the US. Whoever proves more capable in their respective approach will either establish a new, better global order, or leave the globe in ruin.
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer