The New Dark Age

The USA is certainly in economic and political decline, but this decline is uneven and the would-be world dictator remains dangerous as it tries to maintain global dominance. No longer pre-eminent in technology, let alone production and manufactured trade, the US still dominates finance and media-propaganda and has invested heavily in its war machine in an attempt to hang onto privileged access to resources around the world. The decline seems unlikely to lead to direct war with China, the rising rival economic superpower, and as is suggested by the “Thucydides trap”. The US preferred form of intervention in the 21^st century has become hybrid and proxy wars, or ‘wars of hegemonic decline’, which may spread as Washington further loses power and influence.

Challenges for those peoples who wish to avoid submission and enslavement and would prefer to see the emergence of a multipolar world should therefore pay particular attention to the construction of defensive alliances, economic cooperation with like-minded nations, participation in new financial architecture (especially through the BRICS) and new collaborative ventures in media and communications. Combined action is essential, as the USA relies heavily on tactics of “divide and rule”.

This paper will outline the elements of relative decline and relative strength of the USA, then the dollar dictatorship and the US wars of hegemonic decline, before moving to consider the main challenges for resistant peoples in face of this changing world.

1. Uneven US decline

The USA is no longer pre-eminent in technology, nor in production and manufactured trade, let alone domestic infrastructure. However, it has invested heavily in the technology and systems of war and still dominates the fields of finance and media-propaganda.

The most common way to measure US economic relative decline is against its nearest rival, China, and by GDP, comparing the dollar denominated size of those two giant economies. Economic capacity underwrites a country’s capacity to build its own social systems, secure resources and, in some cases, dominate other countries. On that basis, the US economy in mid-2025 was $30.5 trillion in yearly output, well ahead of China at $19.2 trillion. However, when that data is converted to parity price adjusted figures (allowing for different pricing systems), China is well ahead at $40.7 trillion to $30.5 trillion for the USA (Statistics Times, 2025).

Looking at more detailed elements, we can do better than either GDP or PPP comparisons. In 2025, World Population Review ranked the USA fourth in technologically advanced countries, behind Japan, South Korea and China (WPR 2025a). At the same time, the World Intellectual Property Organization ranked the USA third in innovation, for the third year in a row, after Switzerland and Sweden, with China rapidly climbing the ranks (WIPO 2025).

Even US agencies, like the Harvard Belfer Centre, which claims that in 2025 the US has a lead in defence linked Critical and Emerging Technologies, accepts that China is “competitive and is closing the gap across several sectors”. This study says China is lagging in semiconductors and advanced AI “due to reliance on foreign equipment” but is “far closer to the United States in biotechnology and quantum, where its strengths lie in pharmaceutical production, quantum sensing and quantum communications … China is leveraging scale to reduce dependence on imports, attract innovation within its borders and boost industrial competitiveness” (Belfer Centre 2025)

China’s manufacturing output and massive trade surpluses underwrite its economic strength. According to the World Bank, China produces about 18% of total global manufacturing output ($4.66 trillion), it surpassed the USA in manufacturing output back in 2010. The USA today accounts for roughly 9.5% of global manufacturing ($2.5 trillion) (WPR 2025b). The productive Chinese economy has led to huge trade surpluses, currently at around $100 billion per month. Despite a recent decline in China-US trade, due to US protection measures, China still maintained a trade surplus with the US in excess of $20 billion per month (Trading Economics 2025).

While the USA maintains many powerful but expensive military innovations, China has become the master of applied technology, investing in public infrastructure to the advantage of its own people, while the US struggles to maintain its global war machine. Over 2003–2016, China’s infrastructure investment as a share of GDP “outpaced, by a large margin, the average GDP share of entire government investment in advanced, developing, or emerging economies” (Dinlersoz and Fu 2022). China now leads the world in the development of roads, rail, airports and sea ports, and also in the layout of high-speed rail lines (Newsweek 2025), while the US has barely any high-speed rail (Gruet and Lawton 2025). The social benefits of this advanced public infrastructure should be obvious, a stark contrast with highly privatised transport systems in the USA. Building Public Infrastructure Investment (PII) is said to “drive economic growth in China, but also … is a useful strategy for the promotion of inclusive growth” (Zhang, Wang and Chen 2012).

In the military stakes, and on the basis of its economic strength, China is rapidly catching up to the US, though with a more modest nuclear arsenal. The USA has a military in cost terms almost four times that of China, but then US military hardware and services are much more expensive. China has the largest army and the largest Navy, and both have been rapidly modernising (Ellis 2025). China and Russia are ranked close behind the USA in total firepower and, combined, they outweigh Washington (GFP 2025). Washington would never take on both together, another reason why the US prefers hybrid and proxy wars.

None of this is particularly controversial. The US’ decline and its implications have been openly discussed within the US for some time now.

Nevertheless, the US retains control of the global financial system, and dominates global media and propaganda (Usman 2014), through a well-integrated system which goes well beyond an embedded corporate media into domination of online search engines and Artificial Intelligence systems. This is a multi-factored media imperialism (Soong 2025).

The US domination of media, propaganda and ideology persists amid an ongoing hegemonic-neoliberal destruction of knowledge. Western individualism and hegemonic dictates have introduced new and distinct currents of ignorance into ways in which we see the world. Anecdotal stories are elevated as ‘knowledge’, as we are warned off challenging key elite myths, and instead urged to accept designated ‘authoritative’ sources in place of original enquiry. Western ideology also diverts us into passing our time with individual identity fantasies. Together, this amounts to a systematic destruction of social understandings. Nevertheless, it is embedded in the Anglo-American propaganda systems and employed in support of a range of globalist myths (Anderson 2020).

2. The dollar dictatorship

The dollar dictatorship and its slow demise deserve special attention. The US dollar has dominated world finance since 1944, when the Anglo-American-dominated Bretton Woods agreement established a fixed exchange rate regime with the US dollar at its centre (Ghizoni 2013). That system gave artificial strength to the US dollar but also stabilised trade prices until 1971, when overvaluation of the dollar, which hurt US exports, led the US to abandon the fixed rates system.

Since then, exchange rates have fluctuated according to trade and foreign investment (under the so called ‘demand for dollar denominated assets’ theory) subject to, since the 1970s, the vagaries of secondary and financialised markets. But those rules did not apply to the US dollar, as the entire world wanted dollars for foreign trade and reserves. So the value of the dollar remains inflated by global demand that held up US purchasing power and its ability to sustain a huge debt burden. The US also gained control of the European SWIFT system, which registers and verifies interbank communications and transactions (CFI 2022). The US does not own SWIFT but controls it (Walsh 2018), especially after the Obama administration in 2012 threatened SWIFT with US “sanctions” unless it blocked Iran from participation (Gladstone and Castle 2012).

The result has been that this US-controlled financial system, bolstered by conventions such as those against money laundering and financing terrorism, allowed Washington to benefit from and ‘weaponise’ the dollar, blocking entire countries from financial transactions and turning the system to benefit the USA in its many trade wars. A strong reaction to this dollar dictatorship eventually led to attempts by many countries to ‘diversify’ currencies used for trade, finance and foreign reserves.

As a result, in the 21^st century, there has been a clear downward trend in dollars used for trade and as a proportion of foreign reserves. Global trade in USD has declined to about 50%, while forex reserves in 2022 were less than 60%. However, the dollar remains dominant in financial trading and debt. In 2022 the USD was involved in nearly 90% of global foreign exchange, at least 85% of secondary markets and 88% of debt and loans (Maronoti/BIS 2022). The dollar is still dominant.

Yet the economic damage done to developing countries by this dollar dominance, other than that through Unilateral Coercive Measures (US “sanctions”), seems to be:

– Artificial depreciation of local currencies

– Disadvantageous distortion of trade prices

– Depressing transmission of US interest rates, and

– Disincentives for foreign investment.

When the US dollar appreciates “other currencies essentially depreciate … [so] rising commodity prices can be a boon for emerging economies” particularly those that export oil, but also some exporting metals and food (Baldwin 2023: 3). Yet a strong dollar “often starts to depress global trade growth, as it is the invoicing currency of the world” and those with weaker currencies lose their capacity to engage in trade. “It also makes countries that have dollar denominated debt less creditworthy, as it makes it harder for them to purchase the US currency to manage their debts” (Baldwin 2023: 2). Others confirm that USD “appreciation shocks predict downturns in emerging and developing economies (EMDEs) … a strong dollar, higher interest rates and slower economic growth will be challenging for EMDEs” (Obstfeld and Zhou 2023).

IMF papers in 2015 and 2023 have confirmed that “negative spillovers from US dollar appreciations fall disproportionately on emerging market economies when compared with smaller advanced economies” (Bems and Moussa 2023: 1). US dollar appreciation has an income effect “as the dollar appreciates, commodity prices fall; weaker commodity prices depress domestic demand via lower real income, real GDP in emerging markets decelerates; and vice versa”. US-determined interest rates also have a negative impact (Druck, Magud and Mariscal 2015). Further, “periods of stronger US growth result in subdued growth in emerging markets … the tension between the income effect of a stronger dollar, which reduces the purchasing power of exports, particularly for commodity exporters, offsets any expansionary effect owing to a weaker domestic currency” (Druck, Magud and Mariscal 2015: 38).

Strong US growth may be good for emerging markets, as external demand for the latter increase. However, beyond that effect, a stronger US dollar “mitigates the expansionary effect of faster growth in the US, by an income effect … higher US interest rates further add to the mitigation/amplification effect through the tighter financial conditions that usually come” with a stronger dollar (Druck, Magud and Mariscal 2015: 38). As the US dollar appreciates, “capital flows to emerging markets are likely to moderate at best … on the back of weaker commodity prices” (Druck, Magud and Mariscal 2015: 38).

The effects of the strong dollar “spread via trade and financial channels … real trade volumes [of emerging markets] decline more sharply, with imports dropping twice as fast as exports … [plus] worsening credit availability, diminished capital flows, tighter monetary policy … and bigger stock market declines” (Bems and Moussa 2023: 2). US dollar appreciation is also “associated with current account [deficit] increases in both emerging markets and advanced economies through different channels … the external sector adjustment in emerging market economies is further hindered by their heightened exposure to the US dollar through trade invoicing and liability denomination” (Bems and Moussa 2023: 3-5). Global South countries would experience some relief from these adverse conditions if there were alternative financial options.

3. Wars of hegemonic decline

The struggles and realignments in West Asia, in particular, are best seen as part of a broader series of 21st century hybrid wars, including economic wars, linked to the declining US economy and the failing North American hegemonic project. While subverting the independent Latin American states, Washington backed coups and invasions in North Africa, drove multiple wars in West Asia in the name of an imperial ‘New Middle East’ plan, and is obsessed with blocking links between Europe and Asia. With dozens of countries subject to unilateral ‘sanctions’ and ominous threats against third-party states which refuse to comply, the old ‘neoliberal’ order is looking even less tolerant today than that of the late 20^th century.

There are already dozens of US military interventions and proxy wars (Turse and Speri 2022; TUFTS 2022). Most of these are driven by the declining hegemon’s fear of losing its dominant place in the world (Cooley and Nexon 2020). The multiple attempts to weaken, destabilise and divide rivals and independent states revolve around that concern. Republican and Democrat administrations represent tactical variations of this same essential strategy, to save US ‘exceptional’ rule. Republicans have stressed their rivalry with China while the Democrats maintained greater antagonistic focus on Russia. Yet the overall motivation remains the same.

Iran is seen as a common target as it leads the coalition of independent West Asian states and peoples (Palestine, Syria until 2024, Yemen and the resistance in Lebanon and Iraq). Venezuela plays a similar role in the Americas. Other states which threaten disobedience or normalise with independent ‘poles’ of power have been targeted. Both India and Pakistan have been pressured (Pasricha 2022; Gul 2022) for their reluctance to engage in the latest economic war against Russia.

It is widely accepted that the US economy is in relative decline, as against other rising economies, principally China. From his historical study, Kennedy (1987: 438-439) argued that the strength of great powers is always relative to their potential competitors and linked to resources and economic productivity. Most such empires – strong states with domination well beyond their borders – end up suffering overreach and relative decline.

Exports and manufacturing in the USA declined noticeably in the 1980s, while federal debt and deficit spending grew. These are typical indicators of decline (Kennedy 1987: 432, 526). Similarly, Bernstein and Adler (1994) note the 1990s stagnation of the US economy, accompanied by “falling real wages, slow productivity growth, and the loss of international competitiveness in major industries”. Even US state media (VOA 2022) acknowledges the growing consensus: China is set to overtake the USA as the largest and most powerful economy within a few years. Studies by the British research group CEBR show that the size of China’s economy would overtake that of the USA by 2030 and the dynamics of its international infrastructure would also leave it “better placed” (CEBR 2022).

The decline of US power can be traced back to the late 1960s. However, Washington maintained global influence through the dollar and the post WW2 institutions – NATO, the IMF/World Bank and the WTO – which it still dominates (Shor 2010: 65). Nevertheless, a 2008 National Intelligence Council report predicted that “the United States’ relative strength – even in the military realm – will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained” (National Intelligence Council 2008: vi).

This relative decline and the concurrent rise of China have been spoken of as a “Thucydides trap”, based on observations of the Greek historian Thucydides about rivalry and pre-emptive war between Athens and Sparta (Allison 2017). “Intrinsic” elements of a hegemonic state (e.g. an overvalued currency) are said to shift “the distribution of capabilities” to others, causing instability and potentially war (Gilpin 1981: 109-130; Wohlforth 2014). Layne argues that “accepting the unipolar exit … will be the … central grand strategic preoccupation” of the USA in the near future (Layne 2012: 1, 10). The process has also been framed as “the multipolar world versus the superpower” (Schwenninger 2003).

This dilemma emerged as Washington imagined it had finally gained a long-sought-after dominance of world affairs, after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Having regard to possible erosion of this position, and anticipating the dilemmas of decline in the late 20th century, Zbigniew Brzezinski argued for a “new type” of hegemony, drawing on ‘hegemonic stability’ ideas. This doctrine claims that the world needs a single dominant power, to secure the ‘public goods’ of stability and ‘free markets’ (Keohane 1984; Schmidt 1998; Grunberg 2009).

The Pentagon addressed this challenge in 2000 with its ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ doctrine, which saw military strategy linked to media, technological and economic supremacy (Engdahl 2009). By this line of reasoning, the main task of US foreign policy should be to prevent the rise of any new poles of power or any aggrupation of poles of power, especially those which made potentially powerful links between Europe and Asia (Brzezinski 1997). After all, the USA remains an American power which, almost by historical accident, gained a foothold in both Europe and Asia.

Yet conflict is on the rise. The United Nations (2019) speaks of a ‘New Era of Conflict and Violence’ while Uppsala University (2015) observed a rise in the numbers of 21st century wars. Increased numbers of bilateral wars since the late 19th century is sometimes attributed simply to an increased number of countries and, in terms of war deaths, absolute numbers have declined – ignoring some post 1945 ‘spikes’ in the early 1950s, early 1970s, the mid 1980s and in the years after 2012 (Roser et al 2016). Yet the decline in wars between the big powers – deterred by the widespread possession of nuclear weapons – has been offset by large numbers of US driven proxy wars, including more than 100 US military interventions since 1999 (TUFTS 2022). Most are justified on flimsy or fictional pretexts.

At the turn of the 21st century, Washington invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. These crimes were part of a ‘New Middle East’ strategy (Bransten 2006) which envisioned multiple Middle East and North African states being brought under the US umbrella. General Wesley Clark reported that this plan involved the overthrow of “seven states in five years … starting with Iraq and Syria and ending with Iran” (Conason 2007). However, the form of interventions shifted, with ideas of ‘Smart Power’ (Lewis 2009) and multiple proxy wars reinforced by increasingly aggressive economic warfare. The shift into multiple, semi-secretive proxy wars may have side-stepped the notion that the USA and China were heading for direct war (Allison 2017). Nevertheless, we can link most proxy wars and economic warfare to Washington and its allies.

In 2022, former senior Pentagon officials confirmed that a wide range of proxy wars, under the pretext of ‘counter-terrorism’, were being carried out in near secrecy. Under US Defense Code 127e, the U.S. military arms, trains and provide intel to foreign forces in a wide range of countries. Between 2017 and 2022, there were reports that at least 23 such operations were carried out, mostly in the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq and Yemen) but also in Africa (Niger, Tunisia, Libya, Mali, Cameroon and Somalia) (Turse and Speri 2022). Another study documented more than 100 US ‘military interventions’ since 1999 (TUFTS 2022).

Similarly, economic warfare (wrongly termed ‘sanctions’) has become an integral part of contemporary proxy and hybrid warfare. Its use has grown enormously in recent decades (Coates 2019; GAO 2020). Usually practised against whole nations it is necessarily indiscriminate but nevertheless is seen by Washington as a “less expensive alternative to [direct] military intervention” (Felbermayr et al 2020: 1). These unilateral ‘sanctions’ regimes have quadrupled in number since 1980, with 92 listed in 1980 and 407 in 2016 (Felbermayr et al 2020: 54). Of the 1,102 sanctions listed by a Global Sanctions Data Base since 1950, only 77 (or 7%) were imposed by the United Nations; the other 93% were mostly by the USA, the EU and its western European allies (Felbermayr et al 2020: appendix).

Most unilateral ‘sanctions’ have no basis in international law, as they typically attempt to coerce political objectives. International law prohibits this coercion, by the principle of non-intervention and an implied ban in the UN Charter. This is supplemented by customary and treaty law in areas such as trade, shipping and telecommunications (Anderson 2019: Chapter 3). The illegality is obvious when there is an ‘unlawful intent’, such as damaging the economy of another nation or retaliation to enforce political change (Shneyer and Barta 1981: 468, 471-475).

For these reasons, the widespread use of ‘unilateral coercive measures’ (UCMs) became a theme of concern at the United Nations in the late 1990s (OHCHR 2020). The UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights impact of UCMs has reported that illegality was widespread in these unilateral ‘sanctions’. The major offenders were the NATO states. Most UCMs “indiscriminately” harmed entire populations, and sanctions against third parties also damaged human rights (OHCHR 2021).

UCMs are often linked to interventions and proxy wars. It is no coincidence that UCMs by the USA against Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen correlate with US hybrid wars against these same countries. This form of hybrid warfare also correlates to the stated US use of ‘smart power’, where proxies wage war, and third parties pay for it (Barzegar 2008). Such hybrid warfare often relies on fake ‘human rights’ pretexts.

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This increased conflict is not just ‘technical’ – as some say, to do with climate change and water wars (BBC 2021; Vohra 2021) – but rather rooted in social power dynamics, principally hegemonic ambitions. It is a pattern of conflict quite distinct from that of the major wars during the twentieth century, where great powers and rival empires engaged in direct confrontations. The current form of warfare seems to substitute for that earlier pattern.

Despite all the jealous rhetoric, it is far from certain that China will replace the USA as the dominant hegemonic power, in the near future. Despite constant accusations from US sources (e.g. CFR 2021) and even the concerns of some of China’s neighbours (Bello 2019), China explicitly rejects the idea of Chinese unilateralism (Xinhua 2020) and its military, extraterritorial extension is minimal compared to that of Washington. The military interventions of both China and Russia are almost all at their borders. The USA, on the other hand, intervenes in all continents and maintains 750 foreign military bases worldwide (Slater 2018; Bledsoe 2022).

The global transition most commonly cited by critical thinkers is that we are moving from a unipolar world (with a single ‘hegemon’) to a multipolar world (Graebner 1988). One analyst in the US military frames ‘multipolarity’ as an environment of “mistrust” which could persist through “hedging” by Asian states, uncertain as to the outcome of US-China rivalry (Jackson 2014). Whether ‘balancing’ or ‘hedging’, the most common North American view of multipolarity is one of a transitional or unstable state of affairs.

However, the rest of the world, and in particular those who have suffered at the hands of US domineering, have developed more counter-hegemonic views of multipolarity. The Tricontinental group, for example, argues that China’s rise places limits on US unipolarity and “opens up windows of possibility” for what used to be called the world’s “periphery”. Old globalist institutions such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO, which were used to coerce submission and corporate penetration, no longer carry the same weight (Tricontinental 2022: 11).

China’s dissatisfaction with US-dominated multilateral institutions, NATO, the World Bank-IMF, the G7, the OECD and the WTO (Huang 2015), helped it consolidate support for counter hegemonic blocs. In the early 2000s, and with the failure to strike new agreements at the WTO, new Washington-led regional blocs (Trans-Pacific, Trans-Atlantic and Latin American groups) were confronted by several overlapping counter-hegemonic coalitions.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), created in 2001, is a huge contiguous security bloc representing half the world’s population, a quarter of world GDP, and three-quarters of Eurasia’s landmass. It has the broad goals of “strengthening mutual trust and neighbourliness” and building “a democratic, fair and rational new international political and economic order” (SCO 2015). Alongside this, the states of the cross-continent BRICS group, formed in 2006, represent over 40% of the world’s population and a quarter of global GDP (BRICS India 2021); more if we convert to PPP terms. BRICS has developed political economic objectives in areas such as industry, poverty reduction and public health, objectives quite distinct from those of the US-led neoliberal order (BRICS Information Portal 2021).

Further, BRICS’s expansion has been fuelled by the recent conflict between Washington, Russia and China, with many new states applying to join the bloc (Peng 2022). The “gradual but steady expansion” of BRICS (Kumar and Thomas 2022: 102-103) is already very attractive to regional groups, including the African Union and ASEAN. The war in Ukraine has undermined U.S. globalist ambitions as it pushed Russia to build even closer relations with China, India and Iran.

In Latin America, with more than a century of US military intervention, the term ‘multipolarity’ was picked up in the early 21st century by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. He argued that US hegemonic neoliberalism “is the road that leads to hell” and pledged that Venezuela would “raise the flag of sovereignty and join in the call for a multipolar world” (Comas 2002). In 2004, Cuba and Venezuela founded the progressive ALBA bloc as a counter-weight to Washington’s proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (Anderson 2014b). That 10 nation bloc (Telesur 2021) boasts substantial social achievements, especially in heath, literacy and regional solidarity (Minrex 2019).

The wider 33-member Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), also initiated by Chavez, immediately formed partnerships with China and the European Union. It proposed trade and a wide range of specific areas of cooperation (EU-CELAC 2015; COPOLAD 2021), including the EU-CELAC Platform for cooperation in research and innovation (EU-CELAC 2021). CELAC, which is based on common history rather than similar political systems, includes all the states of the Americas minus the USA and Canada. Chávez then moved beyond his Latin Americanism to build relations with Russia, Iran and the Arab world.

In many respects, the wars of the 21st century – and their widespread economic impact, putting at risk ‘normal’ international and economic relations – helped drive an antithetical process including new institutions which reinforce the practical appeal of multipolarity. Many nations now seek to escape ‘third party’ conflict and focus on their critical interests. Yet there are challenges and differences over how they see and engage with the changing order.

4. Challenges: new partnerships in economic cooperation, finance and media

Those peoples who wish to avoid submission and enslavement – and would prefer to live in a multipolar world without hegemonic coercion – should pay particular attention to the construction of defensive alliances, economic cooperation with like-minded nations, participation in new financial architecture (especially that of BRICS) and new collaborative ventures in media and communications. Combined action is essential, as the USA relies heavily on ‘divide and rule’.

The African proverb ‘when elephants fight the grass gets trampled’ seems to suggest that little people should stay clear of big power conflict. However, that has become increasingly difficult, in wars of hegemonic decline. The would-be global dictator does not allow neutrality. For example, since the mid-1990s the US Treasury has acted to penalise third parties doing business with Cuba (Bershteyn et al 2019) and from 2008 it began imposing large unilateral ‘fines’ on European banks (based on US law) for doing business with several countries, principally Iran and Cuba (Anderson 2019: Ch.3).

Following the more recent conflict in Ukraine, Washington threatened to punish other countries doing business with Russia (Politi 2022). India has tried to avoid these demands and has had to use currencies other than the dollar and has sought independent or Russian shipping for oil supplies (Tan 2022).

The new ‘great game’ was well set out by Eurasian theorist Glenn Diesen, who says that US hegemony “has relied on integrating [separately] the two other geo-economic regions of the world, Europe and Asia, into a US-led trans-Atlantic region and [an] Indo-Pacific region”. That was designed to prevent Russia engaging with Europe and to obstruct China from more fully engaging with Asia. On the counter-hegemonic side, “Moscow and Beijing counter the hegemonic ambitions of the United States by enhancing economic connectivity between Europe and Asia to restore the political subjectivity of Eurasia” (Diesen 2021: 1).

So, do states have to take sides? The logic of multipolarity says not necessarily. As with the various currents of resistance to hegemony, multipolarity cannot mean compliance or mono-cultural domination. There are principles at stake; the move is not fundamentally about a ‘clash of civilisations’ but rather of escaping unilateralism. Nevertheless, resistance ideologies are often defined in regional and cultural terms.

In the ‘Middle East’, Pan Arabist resistance was put into practice by Michel Aflaq, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Hafez al-Assad and others. According to Nasser, it was Arab solidarity “which constituted the firm basis upon which Arab nationalism could be built.” Arab solidarity would make “the Arab states stronger through their cooperation in the economic, military and cultural fields, and in the sphere of foreign policy” (Dawisha 2002: Ch 1). Aflaq spelt out the Ba’athist creed as a mission to resurrect the Arab people in a cultural ‘Renaissance’, to revive the humanity and creativity which had been suppressed through political divisions (Dawisha 2002: Ch 1). Similarly, the Pan Africanism of Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah and others, was said to have had two initial primary goals: to unite people of African descent, reminding them of their common culture and history, and to end European colonization (Davis 2018).

In Latin America, long standing ideas of regional integration, based on common history and culture, came from the independence leaders Simón Bolívar, José Martí and Túpac Katari. This Latin Americanism was drawn on to create 21st century regional groups, the ALBA, UNASUR and the CELAC (Anderson 2014b). The ALBA did not seek to impose one ‘model’ but rather spelt out common values of radical transformation, originality, popularity, solidarity, egalitarianism, independence and, for the most part, socialist (PortalALBA 2021). Similarly, the CELAC recognises a common history in culture and anti-colonialism, but allows for a wide range of political economies, stressing social inclusion, equitable growth, sustainable development and integration (CELAC 2011).

In West Asia, the long-standing idea of a great Islamic Nation has been practised by Iran and some of its allies but has been undermined by sectarian Islamist collaborators, such as Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabis and the Egyptian and Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (Anderson 2014a). Yet Iran’s ideas of “an Islamic society” have been defined in almost secular terms, as “a society in which there is justice … freedom … in which the people play a role in running their country … [with] national dignity and wealth … [without] poverty and hunger … with comprehensive advances in scientific, economic and political areas … a society that makes constant progress” (Khamenei 2018). Expressed this way, these are values which can be recognised by many cultures.

Participation in the resistance of one or other cultural bloc cannot define the way out of hegemonic unipolarity. Yet independent policy requires some form of organised resistance to the increasingly shrill hegemonic demands.

The need for multi-polarity implies a need to build international cooperation on shared, multipolar values. Washington’s strategic, relative decline is evident and accelerated by anxious over-extension. The US seems determined to punish even its allies for maintaining relations with independent states and, in particular, with Russia and China. Important counter hegemonic groupings in production and trade have been formed, and those in finance are coming. The coherence and definitive independence of these independent groupings still requires greater clarity in aims, strategic cooperation, financial architecture and media networks. In the meantime, independent states and peoples might best focus on the steadfast defence of independent national policy, respect for counter-hegemonic blocs, adherence to international law and insistence on mutually beneficial commercial relations. China has referred to very similar ideals in its Global Governance Initiative (MFAPRC 2025).

Escaping the dollar dictatorship is a key challenge. An initial financial benefit of BRICS will be in the use of bilateral swaps, plus access to a likely basket of BRICS currencies, which should improve terms of trade and help appreciate local currencies.

In 202,3 there were various initiatives from Global South countries to divest from or at least reduce dependence on the US Dollar. On September 5, 2023, Indonesia launched the National Task Force for Local Currency Transactions, which is mandated to reduce the country’s dependence on the US dollar in international transactions and encourage the use of local currency, especially in transactions between ASEAN countries. Promotion of this task force was carried out on the sidelines of the ASEAN Summit in Jakarta, and previously, at the ASEAN Summit in East Nusa Tenggara, ASEAN countries also agreed to jointly increase economic integration by using local currencies among fellow block members (Kristianus 2023).

Previously, in July 2023, Bolivia – following Brazil and Argentina – had paid for imports and exports using the Chinese Yuan. The United Arab Emirates has also been willing to exchange its LNG for Chinese Yuan in a sale and purchase process with China’s national oil company, CNOOC, and with France’s TotalEnergies.

The shift in Global South countries’ preference to divest from the USD did not start recently. In the case of Indonesia, efforts to free itself from its dependence on the greenback go back, at least, to 2017. Iran, as one of the main victims of the unilateral economic sanctions imposed by the USA, has also been trying for a long time to be able to trade without the US dollar. Iran has transformed into a more economically and politically independent power to establish non-dollar agreements with various countries. For example, in 2016, Iran agreed with India – the third largest economy in the world – to use national currencies to buy and sell oil and various other commodities (Simha 2016).

Previously, in 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a statement encouraging his country and the Caspian Sea countries to abandon the dollar. According to him, the United States has implemented a “dollar dictatorship” over oil prices, to the detriment of countries which do not want to submit to the will of the US. In implementing this plan, Russia has worked closely with China to integrate the Ruble and Yuan into global markets (Crosston 2015).

Economic sanctions used by the US to suppress countries that refuse to submit have also created a backlash for US allies, including the European Union. That is why, in 2019, several European leaders also spoke of the importance of de-dollarization. Efforts to find alternatives to dollar dominance are important because Europe was hurt by the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement and re-impose unilateral economic sanctions on Iran, a move which made targets of US ‘sanctions’ the third-party European companies which had invested in Iran (Johnson 2019).

Further, geopolitical developments such as the NATO versus Russia proxy war in Ukraine have strengthened enthusiasm for de-dollarizing amongst countries of the Global South. Washington’s unilateral ‘sanctions’ on Russia, even arbitrarily freezing Russian assets denominated in dollars, have increasingly opened the eyes of Global South countries to the fact that over-reliance on the greenback threatens their own national security. With rising interest rates the USD has become more expensive for Global South countries, encouraging the use of non-dollar currencies more intensively in inter-south trade (Morgan 2023).

The impact of de-dollarization will certainly shift the balance of power between countries, re-shaping the world order. In particular, de-dollarization will eventually weaken the financial and economic power of the US, leading to dollar depreciation and a worsening relative performance of US financial assets (Morgan 2023). This dynamic will have an impact on geopolitics, with an expected outcome of undermining the capacity of the US to carry out violent interventions.

Completely escaping the dollar dictatorship, however, will require a new banking information exchange outside the SWIFT system and also an alternate currency or currencies. BRICS is now well identified with the project of de-dollarisation (Sullivan 2023; Roach 2023), an extension of the wider ‘diversification’ trend away from the dollar (Horii 1986), which began many years ago and gained strength after the 2008 US financial crisis (Reuters 2020; Amadeo 2022; Tang 2022).

The candidates for a BRICS currency might be advanced soon, though some feel it will take longer, seem to be either a shared, gold backed BRICS money (Lewis 2023), or a Central Bank controlled Digital Currency (CBDC), similar to or based on China’s Digital Yuan (Deutsche Bank 2021; Elston 2023). Zharikov (2023) argues that “only a digital unit of account for a group of countries … unlike a cryptocurrency may help create a sustainable financial stability environment and solid money infrastructure”. He says such a CBDC would have to perform the traditional functions of a stable unit of exchange and a store of value, creating an asset which could “provide stable returns and benefit from the growth prospects of the BRICS economies”; digital cryptocurrencies cannot do this, he concludes (Zharikov 2023). In any case, this “counter balance” move is underway (Trackinsight 2023) and the BRICS bank is set to issue substantial bonds in local currencies (Rangongo 2023).

Substantial international media partnerships, like Latin America’s Telesur and Iran’s HispanTV are needed to repair the damage done by the very well integrated Anglo-American propaganda network. This is a medium-term challenge.

A final linked challenge must be in resistance education, as the bases of resistance to hegemonic tyranny are poorly understood in Western societies, due to neo-colonial culture, reinforced by Anglo-American propaganda and censorship. Important elements of the Palestinian and regional struggles require clarification, at least to honest and curious people. This is a cause which calls on the moral responsibility of intellectuals, to explain more fully the character of Western censorship and, in particular, the importance and key role of resistance in the path towards liberation and self-determination (Anderson 2024b).

Footnote:

Some sections of this article borrow from Chapter 3 (‘Wars of Hegemonic Decline’) of my 2023 book West Asia After Washington and from my joint article with Dina Yulianti, ‘The developmental case for BRICS’ (Anderson and Yulianti 2023).

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