The Collapse of the US Empire and Rise of New Fascisms

EDITORIAL, 20 Oct 2025

#921 | Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service

What Would Galtung Do or Say?

Johan Galtung foresaw the collapse of the United States as the post-Soviet empire two decades ago while the outward signs pointed to the sole superpower, then basking in Cold War triumphalism in the unipolar years. For those of us old enough remember Mikhail Gorbachev signing off on the peaceful dissolution of the “evil empire” with dignity of a statesman albeit he later succumbed to the need to finance his post-Soviet Gorbachev Foundation by becoming a character in the Pizza Hut Hebrew language Israeli TV channels advert!

With proper professional education, one can build expertise on understanding the behaviour and behavioural pattern of imperial states, or “the Great Powers” in the jargons of international relations scholars.  Predicting their collapse, within an approximate time-frame?  Well, that is an entirely different matter.  Some would say the whole exercise is an act of tea-leaf reading or fortune telling.

But that was precisely what our dear friend, colleague and teacher the late Johan Galtung did, with unconcealed characteristic confidence.

As a matter of fact, Galtung was one of a handful of astute students of international affairs who predicted the collapse of the USSR in the 1990’s, a seismic development that caught many a Sovietologists in Washington flatfooted.

Maybe that explains the US neocons trying to prove themselves by chasing the dinosaur of the Cold War by remaking, with such palpable vengeance, Putin’s Russian Federation Washington’s arch-enemy.  The proxification of Ukraine   and the eventual war between the two old Slavic cousins are Exhibit A of the US empire’s contemporary crimes.

In the early fall of 2007, Galtung made his lesser-known prediction, that the Pax Americana had another 25 years shelf life, during his Annual Memorial Lecture sponsored and hosted by Oxford Department of International Development, then directed by Professor Barbara Harriss-White, the renowned scholar of informal economies and agrarian change in South Asia, in particular India.

The downfall of the American empire was the theme of his lecture.   At the time it sounded like a fantasy. The audience inside the Nissan Theatre at St Antony’s College, Oxford, including a few Americanophiles such as the Europeanist Timothy Garton Ash, made comments that conveyed their incredulity towards what the TRANSCEND founder was telling them.  Galtung, who had an early academic stint at Columbia University in the early Cold War years of 1950’s, assured the audience that he had nothing against the North Americans as a people, nor the country as a republic.

In his words, “I love America, the Republic, but I hate the US Empire.” 

Galtung is no longer with us. He did not live long enough to see that his incisive analysis is materializing within his time frame.  Under Donald Trump, Pax Americana is fast-losing trust, prestige and standing on virtually every continent. The United States remains the most heavily armed and militaristic state in the world.  But it no longer is a hegemon as it has lost its “soft power” – or hegemonic grip ideologically on the way states and populations perceive it.

The sheen of “the Empire of Liberty” is gone.  The world sees the US leaders as erratic cowboys on the back of a jumpy horse, trying to shoot from their hips, in international affairs. At home, the US republic is in deep trouble as the ideological winds are blowing in the direction of fascism with the US characteristics.

One famous Fascism expert after another has packed up and left the United States for safer pastures as they, more than average Joe, know that Fascism has arrived, and the White House is now the North American Chancellery with Stephen Miller as the hybrid US clone of Himmler and Goebbels.

That the American Century is a thing of the past is beyond dispute.

However, there is something else, something even Galtung did not factor in in his doomsday’s projection of the collapse of the United States as the world’s (then) sole superpower.

That is, the dangerous rise of Israel as the most influential factor in the downfall of the United States, not simply as the empire but also as a republic (with its rule of law, constitutional checks and balances, and bill of rights for individuals) at home.

Whatever the shortcomings, it has been said, “democracies don’t go to war against one another”.   In the defence of liberal democracies (of the West), obviously.

But what Israel, as a Jewish supremacist apartheid state, has succeeded in doing since Galtung’s passing, is the following:  it has made liberal democracies of the West, led by the United States, to join its final solution to the question of Gaza’s Palestinians.

As a young man, Galtung witnessed the arrest of his anti-fascist father in the Nazi-occupied Norway. He himself joined the anti-fascist resistance in the country where the collaborator regime of Quisling transported hundreds of Norwegian Jews from the Oslo Harbour.  About 10 minutes-walk from the City Hall in Oslo where the Norwegian Nobel Committee holds its annual award ceremony on 10 December every year, lies a memorial for the Jewish victims who were forced onto the seagoing ships which would carry them to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and other extermination and slave labour camps.

Following the lead of the United States, European Union and several most important western European states, specifically UK, Germany, and France, have allowed themselves to be collaborators with Israel as it reportedly pursues “Mein Kampf in reverse” with respect to the 2.3 million captive Palestinians inside Gaza.

Noteworthy is the fact that former Israeli MP Moshe Feiglin was on the record, in one of the most watched Hebrew language Israeli TV, saying that “(a)s Hitler said, ‘I cannot live if one Jew is left,’ we can’t live here if one [Palestinian] remains in Gaza.”

To make matters even more painful, and to the deep and widespread dismay of anti-fascist citizens around the world, the Norwegian Nobel Committee selected María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader with an extremely dodgy record. She openly supports Israel’s post-October 7 “war” against the Palestinian population in Gaza and has built a close and official tie to Netanyahu’s Likud leadership while advocating openly US and Israel military intervention to oust her country’s government–in return for oil bonanza.

These are indeed “very dark times”, as the University of Chicago Professor John Mearshimer, the best-known realist scholar of international relations, remarked.

The moral and reputational collapse often precedes the literal collapse of big powers, and the turn of events at home in the United States, and Washington’s global conduct, seem to fit this historical pattern of the fall of empires.

We know that Galtung had long advocated a sunnier vision of what multicivilizational Palestine could really be: a vast civilizational space with no hard borders nor narrowly defined ethnocracies. The above-mentioned dismal state of affairs today would certainly test our late friend.  Would he support the anti-fascist move?  Would he advise us to transcend the differences with today’s foes of humanity?

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A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia. Zarni is the co-founder of FORSEA, a grass-roots organization of Southeast Asian human rights defenders, coordinator for Strategic Affairs for Free Rohingya Coalition, and an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge. Zarni holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education, National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015). His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, Essays on Myanmar Genocide.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 20 Oct 2025.

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