The Declining Empire on Steroids

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 13 Apr 2026

Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service

Is there an alternative?

28 March 2026 – With disastrous news hitting the headlines daily, it is often difficult to keep the big picture in mind. Yet the big picture is of vital importance for establishing a future for humanity beyond war, torture, murder and slavery. We live during a transitional period between empires, not in a Pax Britannica or in a Pax Americana, but in a time of chaos, struggle, and desperation. And yet, perhaps the future will not give us another empire but a transcendence beyond wars and empires altogether.

Journalist Pepe Escobar names today’s US hegemony correctly in his 2014 book Empire of Chaos. The Trump administration has abolished all “soft-power” international aid and buckles down on an “in-your-face” nationalism claiming it needs no one and cares for nothing beyond the “greatness” of America. Its “Secretary of War” declares that the military will “give no quarter,” a statement which violates both international law and the US Military Code of Justice. It is an empire on steroids, out of control. It is not simply that these people are profoundly stupid, it is also that a dying empire will lash out, thoughtlessly and recklessly, onto a world that has few ways to fight back except through ever more war.

Historian Alfred McCoy points out that the first soundings of a conflict between empire and human rights came from a Portuguese priest who protested at the treatment of slaves by the Portuguese Empire which saw immense wealth coinciding with sea-power in its policies of conquest and enslavement.  A few Spanish priests like Bartolome de Las Casaś also spoke out some 500 years ago using the concept of “one humanity” (and the dignity of all human beings), concepts raised in opposition to the quest for wealth and power by national entities intent on these goals.

This five hundred year struggle between the idea of human rights and dignity and the lust for wealth and power on the part of empires has defined the rise of modernity through the present day. It has perhaps come to a head in our own time in such works as The Last Utopia (2011) by Samuel Moyn in which Moyn declares that human beings have no credible future unless we achieve the global social transformation to a human rights regime in the near future. In the face of the world system as it has evolved to date, respect for human rights, he declares, would indeed be a Utopia.

Interestingly, Moyn places the chief voices for human rights within non-governmental movements such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch and fails to associate the crushing of human rights worldwide with the structure of the militarized sovereign nation-state system itself. The real defenders of human rights are those advocating democratic world government. So-called “international laws,” such as the Geneva Conventions that define what cannot be done in war or the Genocide Convention that prohibits the targeting of particular civilian groups in warfare, do indeed bring in a vague and degraded moral perspective, yet these presuppose both the nation-state system and the acceptability of warfare itself. This doctrine of “international law” maintains that nations have a right to use war in self-defense, even though the very existence of this structural right at the heart of the world system negates morality in the relations between nations and in terms of each country’s relations with citizens of other countries. In case any nation needs to go to war, the inevitable death of civilians, women, and children, is considered legitimate “collateral damage” as long as the real targets in the war are designated as “military” in nature.

The lust for wealth and power is consolidated in nation-state systems set within a structure of competition against other nation-state systems. Within a world fragmented into competing power-systems, nations strategically see their survival and flourishing as a zero sum game of “I win you lose.”  A global regime premised on one humanity, on human rights and dignity, would not be subject to this structural compulsion to compete for empire. Only such a global regime could in practice universalize human rights and dignity to the universal principle that it truly is.

The Bretton-Woods meetings of the heads of victorious nations at the close of World War Two afforded an opportunity to establish a new world system transcending the competition among nation-based empires by uniting humanity within a single legal framework.  But Stalin, on the one side, with Roosevelt and Churchill on the other, were each thinking in terms of empire, and the possibilities of extending and consolidating empires afforded by the destruction caused by World War Two.  The result was the United Nations, a body with zero authority over the nation-states and their quest for empire.

Nevertheless, there was a meeting about that time (in August 1947) of over 500 delegates from 45 countries that called for an Earth constitution. Their “Monteau Declaration” urged: “the mobilization of the peoples of the world to bring pressure on their governments and legislative assemblies to transform the United Nations Organization into world federal government by increasing its authority and resources, and by amending its Charter.” Albert Einstein’s many writings and speeches about the absolute need for world government were an essential component of this movement.

Instead, the quest for a world order premised in one humanity, human rights, and dignity was marginalized into non-governmental organizations promoting the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the face of autonomous militarized power centers hell-bent on expanding power and crushing opposition. The ideology of the USA government to this day revolves around the 1948 book by Hans J. Morgenthau entitled Politics Among Nations that restricts the moral dimension of human life to the personal relations among citizens of nations while declaring the relations between nations are governed strictly by considerations of power.  In the background here, we see the legacy of the early-modern paradigm that reduced morality to merely subjective attitudes of persons and understood “objective reality” as having to do with power rather than ethical principles.

“Objective reality” in the Portuguese and Spanish eras had to do with the huge economic value of accumulating slaves.  In his 1944 book Capitalism and Slavery historian Eric Williams traces the history of the quest for slaves in relation to the accumulation of wealth by nation-states. In our day machines have replaced slaves, so they are no longer needed, and today the accumulation of wealth depends not on slave labor but on oil and gas. In his 2004 book Oil, Power, and Empire, Larry Everest traces the USA’s progressive devastation of Iraq in the light of this quest. Today, with Iraq destroyed, the target now under attack is Iran as the major resistance to imperial domination of the middle east.  Beginning with its 1979 revolution, Iran emerged as the major threat to the imperial control of oil and gas in the Persian Gulf.

It is important to remember the roots of Iran’s 1979 revolution against Western imperialism. A nascent democracy in Iran had elected Mohammad Mosaddegh as President in 1951, and, for the benefit of the people of Iran rather than Western based multi-national corporations, he moved to nationalize the oil production in Iran.  The US imperial system cannot tolerate any such humanitarian initiatives within nations because the Morgenthau dogma states that (1) morality only operates at the personal level, never the national and (2) since all other nations are external to the imperial center, morality (that is, human rights and dignity) count for zero in the machinations of nation-state politics.

In 1953, the CIA engineered a coup d’état that removed Mosaddegh and installed the Western-backed Shah of Iran. The CIA helped him consolidate his power by creating SAVAK, the secret police that soon amassed some 50,000 political prisoners and “tortured dissidents cruelly” as Alfred McCoy puts it in To Govern the Globe (2021). It was this reign of terror on behalf of the empire’s oil rights that led to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and the creation of the “Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Today, in the year 2026, we hear echoes of this same theme behind this coup d’état in the statement by President Donald Trump upon invading Venezuela that Venezuela had “stolen our oil” 23 years earlier when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez had nationalized their oil for the benefit of the people rather than the imperial oil companies. The wealth and power of empire trumps (pun intended) any and all humanitarian considerations. Oil in their countries belongs to us.

In Empire’s Workshop (2007) historian Greg Grandin traces the imperial repressions of humanitarian movements within Latin America from the time of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. With the end of World War Two, the imperial organizer of this “workshop” graduated to a global field of action, using the same tactics of torture, murder, regime change, repressions, deceit, proxy wars and direct wars to continue its system of domination.

Five hundred years ago the theme of human rights and dignity was first raised by Spanish and Portuguese priests within the framework of burgeoning nation-state empires. Today, a pervasive nihilism and skepticism eviscerates resistance within the empire’s heartland (few citizens care what is done to people in other countries). This also leads citizens to misconceive the moral basis of Islamic resistance in Asia. In Islamic Resistance to Imperialism by Eric Walberg (2015), we find the following declaration as foundational for organizing the Muslim Brotherhood (a movement viciously maligned in mainstream Western media): “In Islam, it is forbidden to slay women, children, and old people, to kill the wounded, or to disturb monks, hermits, and the peaceful who offer no resistance. Contrast this mercy with the murderous blanket warfare of the ‘civilized’ people and their terrible atrocities! Compare their international law alongside this all-embracing, divinely ordained justice!”

Islamic scholar Rashid Shaz in his book Islam—Another Chance? (2021) affirms that Islam speaks to all humanity, not as one religion among others but as a moral and spiritual stance that embraces the entire diversity of humankind as a “direct, unmediated meeting of God and man.” This moral stance of Islam in the face of the corruptions of imperialism is real and compelling, despite its misuse by terrorists on both sides of the struggle. Nevertheless, the moral framework often remains tied to nation-states such as “The Islamic Republic of Iran” rather than recognizing that the nation-state system itself is destructive of any and all moral stances.

In Base Nation (2015), David Vine documents the vast system of more than 800 military bases worldwide assembled by the US to ensure its global domination. This system of bases intentionally attempts to encircle Russia, China, and Iran, allowing the US to project power rapidly from nearly any angle against its perceived enemies. It is no accident that there are multiple bases on the Persian Gulf and other locations encircling Iran, bases that many Westerners are just learning about for the first time as they are targeted by Iran in its defense against the US-Israeli aggression that begin February 28^th.

In Russia, the strategy of encirclement meant promoting  CIA organized “color-revolutions” in the former Soviet nations now occupying Russia’s borders, with special attention to Ukraine. In America’s Final War (2024), Andrei Martyanov traces this strategy by Western imperial thinkers such as Zbigniew Brzezinski whose “dictum went: deny Russia the possession of Ukraine and Russia will remain eternally weak.”  The plan was to entice Russia into a war in Ukraine “in a second Afghanistan-type quagmire” along with a “’shock and awe’ sanctions regime,” and this would result in the “overthrow of Vladimir Putin,” which would then “help the United States and its vassals to break up Russia and surrender its resources to the West’s transnational corporations.”

In fact, after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, such a plan appeared to be going well as the US sent legions of “economic advisors” into Russia to help with the conversion from communism to capitalism under its weak and malleable President Boris Yeltsin. Vladimir Putin discerned the dismantling of his country and forced a transition of power to himself in order to save Russia from this predatory assault. He was very successful and that is why he is hated by the West today with its ongoing attempts to displace him through the war in Ukraine and other subversions.

Those who support the emergence of a multi-polar world should read McCoy’s account of China’s ascendance in To Govern the Globe. China has retreated from the UN’s “freedom of the seas” doctrine to claim “sovereignty” over the South China Sea. Its imperial reach is expanding even into its regional oceans. It well knows that the US has long been aiming at control over all major shipping lanes (Strait of Malacca, Suez and Panama Canals, the Strait of Hormuz, the Bab el Mandeb, etc.), a control that could cut off China immediately in any future direct conflict. Human rights mean little to China, which thinks of them as Western propaganda used to cover up its horrific imperial repressions and interventions. In its effort to circumvent these choke points, among other initiatives, China has recently secured a direct land-based trade route with Russia in which all customs and inspections are done at the beginning, where a truck is sealed and travels without cross-border interference to be next opened only when it arrives in Moscow.

Like Moscow, China is watching the Iran War closely (while both countries also provide background support). It calculates the vulnerability of US Navy ships, including aircraft carriers, and notes the kind of missiles that can circumvent their defensive systems.  The US has exposed its vulnerabilities for the entire world to see, making the attack on Iran as foolish as it is criminal. And a large portion of the US power to prosecute this war comes from the existence of Israel, perhaps the poster-child of the criminal system of “sovereign” nation-states.  In 1948, a new nation, with no historical precedent or boundaries, was arbitrarily imposed in the middle of Palestine.  It began with a vast “Nakba,” forcibly removing more than 700,000 people from their homes and declaring itself a God-given new nation in the midst of all this violence and suffering.

That this could even happen tells us something about nation-states.  There is nothing “natural” about them. They are arbitrary divisions of our planet into territorial segments treated by the UN system as if they were somehow “natural” and legitimate realities. However, I am echoing Garry David (founder of the World Service Authority) in affirming that human beings are the foundation for genuine government, not arbitrary territorial centers that by nature destroy the rule of law both within and without because they falsely place so-called “legitimate” government within this system.

From these criminal beginnings, the state of Israel has quite naturally continued to criminally attack and displace more and more people in the region with its settler-colonial policies that harken back at least a century to an earlier time when such criminal behavior was a norm of Western imperialism.  In the example of Israel we begin to discern the horror of a “sovereign” nation-state.  No higher law restrains its use of force, nor its imposition of a terrible apartheid on the peoples of the region. The entire nation is predicated on war and violence, which are only possible because of the system of “sovereign” nations of which it is a member, makes such aggressive actions both possible and probable.  All sovereign nations are potentially this criminal, because none of them recognize one humanity, nor universal human rights, as the sole basis for legitimate governance everywhere on Earth.

Whatever the result of the war against Iran, the world’s peoples will be severely impacted with escalating prices, with serious deprivation, and likely starvation. Neither the US nor Israel care about this in the least in any moral sense. An empire is a system, a system centered on a national sovereignty recognizing no higher authority, and any system will include systemic imperatives in terms of which its actors operate. The very existence of an independent Iran was the threat to the Empire, just as are the very existence of Russia and China. As Emery Reves declared, “War takes place whenever and wherever non-integrated social units of equal sovereignty come into contact.” They do not have to behave aggressively to be considered enemies—system imperatives demand that they be designated so.

That is why the Constitution for the Federation of Earth presents an idea whose time has come. An “empire on steroids” not only threatens the very future of humanity, it reveals and underlines the illegitimacy of the entire world non-system. The only legitimate form of governance is global, since it is the job of any and all legitimate government to protect and advance human rights, justice, and one humanity.  500 years ago this theme was introduced by a few priests who understood the basic teachings of Jesus, and today those teachings can tell us that “the world is one family,” as the Upanishads of India also declare.

Human rights are relatively meaningless unless protected by universal law. Slavery is now illegal in most places on Earth.  Why do “sovereign” nation-states remain legal? As with slavery, we must abolish war—and that means abolishing the war-system and the empire-system altogether. The present world disorder is profoundly and plainly illegitimate.

It must be replaced by a world system founded on our common dignity, on the whole of our human civilizational project. Our only viable option is the Earth Constitution, which abolishes both slavery and war. The Constitution offers humanity a world system predicated on planetary peace, justice, and freedom. Instead of being dragged into World War Three, let us act now to replace the UN’s war-system with the Earth Constitution’s world-peace system.

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Dr. Glen T. Martin:
– Member, TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment
– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
– Founder/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
www.earthconstitution.world – Email: gmartin@radford.edu

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 13 Apr 2026.

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