Can Any Country ‘Divorce’ the US Empire?

This map, from Multipolarista, shows the US-centred Empire bloc of nations (in red) that subscribe to the US-invented Rules Based International Order. The countries in green do not recognize that order, and they continue to support de facto a UN-centred international system governed by international law.

Bilateral agreements are complex and tricky, kind of like the agreements parties enter into, both documented and tacit, in personal (and business) partnerships.

Once agreements have been made, it can be exceedingly difficult to unwind them, when one or more parties to the arrangement decide to end, or radically reform, the relationship. There are legal, financial, and logistic complications for a start — the division of assets (especially large ones that can’t easily be ‘divided’), rights of access, and ongoing compensation, among others. One need only look at the absolute fiasco of Brexit to see what can happen.

As Clinton Fernandez, an Australian professor and former intelligence officer, has taken pains to explain, the countries in red in the chart above entered into what he calls ‘sub-Imperial’ power arrangements — lopsided partnerships — with the US Empire over the past 75-80 years. Clinton argues that we entered into those relationships with our eyes open — we agreed to enforce the Imperial Power’s rule in our geographic region, in return for political, economic and military favours (including “security”). The deal seemed promising at the time.

But relationships change, and there is a lot of evidence that, whether or not this was a devil’s bargain originally, it has now ceased to be in the interests of many if not all of the ‘sub-Imperial’ nations in bed with the US Empire. To wit:

• The US Empire has abused our trust in order to acquire many (in some cases most) of the resources of our country, often at highly-discounted prices, and is using or has signalled plans to use those resources exclusively for the benefit of the US, and not for our mutual benefit.
• The US Empire has become politically and economically unstable due principally to the staggering incompetence of its leaders over the entire period of this Empire’s existence. It is now technically bankrupt, propped up only by its coercively retained ‘exorbitant privilege’ of being able to print endless amounts of worthless currency which we are obliged to honour at face value. The misdistribution of wealth and power within the Empire is so obscenely unequal that its own citizens seem now prepared to vote for a deranged neo-fascist in self-defeating protest for their exclusion from a fair share of the bounty and spoils of the Empire’s activities. They are also putting up physical and economic walls around its borders, and arming the perimeters of the Empire to the teeth, by bullying the sub-Imperial powers into buying its mostly-useless, insanely-overpriced military products, and allowing the Empire to occupy large swathes of each country for purposes of launching, or threatening, military actions against non-Empire countries.
• The US Empire has always put its own interests first, even when those interests are severely detrimental to the interests of the sub-Imperial nations. That of course makes sense to the US Empire, the same way that spousal and child abuse by a stronger family member ‘makes sense’ to advance the interests of the abuser. Biden’s bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines, and the US Empire’s endless sanctions programs, have seriously damaged the economies of the sub-Imperial powers. Its arm-twisting, enabled by a massive and sustained global propaganda campaign, of the sub-Imperial powers to support the US Empire’s endless wars against nations that don’t kow-tow to it, even when those nations actually pose no political or military threat, only an economic threat (caused by the US Empire’s own colossal mishandling of its domestic economy), has severely tarnished the reputation of the entire Empire, including that of the sub-Imperial powers, in the eyes of most of the rest of the world.
• This massive propaganda campaign, directed against the citizens of the sub-Imperial powers as well as the US Empire’s own citizens, has instilled such intense fear and misunderstanding that many citizens of the sub-Imperial powers are now convinced that their own governments’ long-standing and world-leading mixed-economy, social tolerance, social security, egalitarian, and immigrant-welcoming programs are wrong-headed, and that the sub-Imperial powers should instead pursue the utterly failed privatize-everything, might-makes-right, everyone-for-themselves, intolerant, wall-building, caste-based, unregulated, and brutally inhumane programs espoused and pursued by decades of the US Empire’s leaders.

In short, the ‘marriage’ of the sub-Imperial powers to the US Empire (just as with the vassal states of the Roman Empire as it was crumbling) no longer serves the interests of most if not all of the sub-Imperial powers.

We in the sub-Imperial nations now face massive global dangers and insecurity instead of security. We face economic collapse because we have ceded control of our own economies to the US Empire. We are facing political strife because the Empire’s relentless propaganda has perverted our citizens’ understanding and appreciation of our healthy, collaborative, internationalist, tolerant, egalitarian values, into a fear-driven distrust and loathing of public institutions, public services, and bilateral agreements of nations dealing with each other as peers.

And we are facing the near-global opprobrium of non-Empire nations’ citizens (most of the planet’s population) because we refuse to stand up the Empire’s endless attacks on and interference in the affairs of sovereign nations, and its relentless bullying, hate- and war-mongering. And we refuse to stand up to these abuses by the Empire because, like the battered victims of serial abusers, we know all too well the consequences of saying ‘no’ to what we’re told by our abuser.

If we were honest with ourselves, we would admit that this ‘marriage’ is a disaster, one that threatens to pull us down with the Empire as it collapses. But we cannot be honest with ourselves. We know how dangerous and horrific it could/would be for us to withdraw from this terrible ‘partnership’ of unequals. We are ashamed of our own weakness in letting things get to this state, in not realizing that this ‘partner’ we admired enough to commit to is actually an abusive, pathological tyrant, and an existential threat to us all.

How could we ‘break the news’ to our citizens, who have been heavily propagandized throughout the relationship to see the our abusive partner as a strong, just, powerful leader? Maybe our citizens would, in the face of ‘divorce’, choose to go with the abuser they have always depended on instead of the weak partner who wants to tear up the relationship they have known their whole lives.

And that, I think, is where we stand now. We knew our troubled partner back when it appeared kind, generous, and honest, and when it seemingly shared our values. We keep hoping that, with some help perhaps, that partner we tied ourselves to will go back to being what it was when we first established our relationship.

We are fooling ourselves.

But it probably doesn’t matter. There are no independent ‘divorce courts’ to appeal to in the cases of unequal partnerships of nations that have broken down due to irreconcilable differences. No one is going to help us exit this awful relationship, and if we try to leave, we will lose everything.

Empires, especially in the advancing stages of collapse, will not tolerate sub-Imperial powers that refuse to support them, that refuse to do what they’re told.

There is no undoing what we’ve done.