Is the US empire expanding? Is it declining? What is the empire even?

The financial power elite is decoupling from the US state apparatus, holding the Board of Peace in Trump's personal capacity, positioning reconstruction capital outside any single sovereign authority, even the so-called tariff war, and new "bilateral agreements."…these are all signs of a reconfiguration of the US-led empire to survive (whether they’ll succeeed is another question).

These are some of the mechanisms in how the US-led transatlantic elites are rather consolidating (even though the state itself is declining). They are doing this by privatizing, relegating the state strictly to its monopoly of violence. (Hence, Bunkerization.)

Every layer of this ruling strata (the financial elite, the operators and planners, and the political elite) are different actors with different instruments (even though the lines are not clear-cut). Because of this, a US military defeat does not automatically mean the financial power elite loses its position. At least not yet.

Further, as long as the predator class sits at the table of those constructing mutipolarity, the empire will keep surviving. In other words, the ruling class survives (or tries to survive) the US and European states' decline by pre-positioning its architecture and tools beyond any single state's jurisdiction. (Hence, states are merely territorial nodes, and its citizens objects of security.)

My coming essay on the topic of Fragmentationism will tackle these points: What is declining is a state form (it is bunkerizing). What is being built in the interregnum is a governance architecture designed to outlast the states that created it, operated by a class that has no intention of declining alongside it.