Warwick Powell offers a brilliant thermodynamic diagnosis of why the US/transatlantic core cannot sustain global hegemony indefinitely. He maps out how degrading EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested), combined with an explosion of fictitious capital and informational noise, creates an "endogenous crisis machine."

Powell perfectly explains why the transatlantic system is structurally self-defeating. But: we must be careful not to mistake structural decline for a naturally peaceful transition. Thermodynamics explains why the machine is breaking, but another question is: how does it breaks? There is no thermodynamic law stating that falling EROEI leads to a humane or egalitarian collapse.

This is where the political and ideological layers need to be considered. A ruling class facing structural decline will not quietly relinquish power. Instead, as I argue in my work on the Fragmentationist Grand Strategy (which is still in the works, and is not what it sounds like), they attempt to weaponize that very decline.

Washington's current gambits, like the LNG-dollar consolidation and chokepoint control, are exactly such late-phase rent pumps built on a degrading energetic base. They are attempts to harden a smaller, more violent imperial core. The crumbling and disintegrating empire retreats into a Bunker State, giving up universalistic claims to instead double down on coercion, externalizing chaos, and internalizing repression.

The current system is an endogenous crisis machine. But entropy does not automatically translate into emancipation. Without an organized, self-aware transatlantic movement capable of contesting power, the decline of hegemony will look like permanent emergency rule in a much more intensified form than we can already observe.

Highly recommended reading for understanding the material baseline of the crises we are witnessing (based Dr. Powell’s book called “Thermoeconomics in a Time of Monsters: Rethinking Theory, China and International Geopolitical Economy”):