America Is in Big Trouble

Wealth is created by the real economy—sectors like agriculture, manufacturing, mining, energy, and construction. In contrast, trade, professional services, and financial sectors merely support the real economy, extracting value in exchange for their services rather than generating wealth independently (see Mammonism).

Over the past few decades, the United States has undergone severe deindustrialization. Aside from a few remaining high-tech and military industries, most manufacturing has relocated to countries with lower production costs. Today, the U.S. economy is dominated by financial capitalism, relying heavily on monetary maneuvers to extract global wealth, even as its real productivity has long been unable to sustain its hegemony. America's perceived economic strength now rests more on financial engineering than on genuine economic output. Over the past 20 years, while the real economy has grown by only 1.5 times, the annual issuance of U.S. dollars has increased fivefold, national debt has surged sevenfold—exceeding $34 trillion—and private lending has ballooned to another $30 trillion. Much of this money flows abroad through the purchase of foreign goods, international loans, U.S. bond sales, and debt repayments, driven by continued global demand for the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. It is estimated that more than $100 trillion in U.S. dollars circulates outside the United States.

This excessive money printing has fueled global inflation, doubling food prices, raising oil prices by 4.5 times, and tripling the price of iron ore. The dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency enables the United States to manipulate the global economy through its monetary policies. Monetary easing (lowering interest rates and increasing dollar supply) stimulates borrowing and spending, while monetary tightening (raising rates and restricting supply) strengthens the dollar, prompting capital to flow back into the U.S. and contracting other economies. Through this cyclical process, American financial elites are able to periodically acquire foreign assets and stocks at bargain prices. These monetary policies are reinforced by geopolitical strategies—fostering regional conflicts, inciting social unrest, and supporting "color revolutions" under the pretense of promoting human rights—to destabilize investment climates elsewhere. In this way, the U.S. extracts wealth from other nations while profiting from arms sales and conflicts. However, the primary beneficiaries are not ordinary Americans, but elite special interests.

From the perspective of developing nations, the global economic order—established and maintained by U.S. elites—is profoundly unfair and immoral. To protect this system, the United States has historically sought to suppress rising economic competitors, from the U.K., Germany, Japan, and the USSR in the past, to Russia, Europe, and China today. By instigating the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the U.S. seeks to weaken Russia while simultaneously engineering a security crisis in Europe. Severing Europe's access to cheap Russian energy has allowed American energy to dominate European markets at much higher costs, fueling inflation, driving up production costs, damaging European industries, and accelerating capital outflows. This has further eroded Europe's strategic autonomy, binding it more tightly to American interests against the emerging East. Similarly, in the Indo-Pacific, the United States is forging alliances—with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, India, Australia, and NATO's expansion—aimed at containing China.

The American oligarchy’s commitment to maintaining global dominance directly conflicts with the aspirations of other nations, which seek a cooperative, equitable international environment conducive to mutual growth. Yet the U.S.'s pursuit of unilateral hegemony, its extraterritorial reach, and its prioritization of self-interest have provoked growing resistance around the world.

At home, soaring debt, inflation, and a hollowed-out economy have left U.S. policymakers increasingly anxious. Instead of addressing deep-seated structural and institutional weaknesses, they double down on aggressive tactics to externalize their crises: raising the debt ceiling repeatedly, coercing other nations into buying U.S. treasuries with little intention of repayment, flexing military power, provoking regional conflicts, launching trade and financial wars, imposing unilateral sanctions, freezing and confiscating foreign assets, and exercising long-arm jurisdiction. They also weaponize the U.S. dollar and the SWIFT financial system, sabotage foreign infrastructure, and engage in economic embargoes, decoupling strategies, and geopolitical isolation. While intended to suppress rival economies, these strategies simultaneously harm the U.S. itself, eroding its global reputation, undermining confidence in the dollar, and accelerating de-dollarization and global sell-offs of U.S. treasuries—ultimately hastening the decline of American economic dominance.

Meanwhile, rampant inflation has forced the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates aggressively, triggering a wave of bank failures, a global economic downturn, and widespread financial market turmoil, particularly in heavily indebted countries.

For its own self-interest, the United States has become a major source of global instability. Yet the ruling elite remains unwilling to change course, clinging to the belief that they can perpetuate American dominance through financial manipulation and military interventions. Some imagine they can continue harvesting the wealth of other nations indefinitely through unchecked money printing. Others seem willing to risk a world war to preserve their primacy.

On the surface, America’s crisis stems from over-financialization, but at a deeper level, it is rooted in the toxic ideologies embraced by its plutocrats—capitalism taken to extremes, social Darwinism, Machiavellianism, the law of the jungle, and a zero-sum-game mentality (see Philosophies that Separate Two Worlds). They fail to recognize that hegemony built on endless debt, rather than real economic strength, is fundamentally unsustainable.

I believe that most tango dancers do not share the ideologies of America’s oligarchs. Tango, in its spirit, opposes such predatory mentalities. Nonetheless, we must remain vigilant about the insidious influence these ideologies may have on our lives—and on tango itself.

The world that most nations seek is not one of dominance, but of democracy: a system where every country has an equal opportunity to develop and improve their people’s lives through cooperation and mutual benefit. If U.S. policymakers truly believe in democracy, they must abandon their selfish, coercive, hegemonic strategies. The American people deserve leaders of greater moral integrity. Otherwise, America will inevitably face the consequences of its own actions (see The Vicious Circle of Regime Change).

P.S.
The following video provides an in-depth explanation of the American monetary system—from the Bretton Woods Agreement and the decoupling of the U.S. dollar from gold, to its peg to oil, the rise of consumer capitalism, vendor financing, the outsourcing of manufacturing, job losses, trade deficits, growing inequality, military expansion, perpetual warfare, uncontrolled money printing, escalating debt, and the resulting dollar devaluation and inflation crisis. The speaker attributes these issues to the U.S. dollar's role as the world’s reserve currency and predicts that the system will ultimately collapse when a new currency regime emerges. The key question remains: will America's elite special interests allow change before their empire crumbles?