Unbuilding an Empire

Maybe now you tongue-tethered, honey-speechified, ear-chained consumers will take elections and governance more seriously than pretty issues like gender-bending (a lib distraction) or DEI (an empty gesture without reparations because austerity discourages it).

There's an empire to unbuild.

America’s drift toward something resembling a Toynbeean Universal State isn’t a smooth, linear descent. It’s more like a contested corridor — three forces wrestling over who gets to write the final chapter of Western civilization. 

What follows is a synthesis grounded in Toynbee’s model, Spengler’s “Money → Caesar” arc, and the contemporary geopolitical-economic structures.

America’s movement toward a Universal State is being contested and shaped by multiple actors. But interference is the wrong frame. What’s happening is a struggle among internal elites and institutional blocs over who gets to become the Dominant Minority that presides over the Universal State.

Toynbee would say: The Universal State is not prevented — only delayed, distorted, or captured.

The Three Interfering Forces are not conspiracies; they are structural blocs with divergent interests.

1. Reactionary Finance (Spengler’s “Money Power” bloc like the City of London) seeks to freeze the system in its current financialized form. It resists reindustrialization. It resists state coordination. It resists platform-state fusion unless it can dominate it. It prefers a hollow Universal State: globalized, extractive, brittle.

This is the force most aligned with interrupting the consolidation of a Universal State — not out of benevolence, but because a strong state would curtail its power.

2. Platform Technostructure (the new “Priesthood”) wants a Universal State, but one built on data governance, algorithmic coordination, soft power - global platforms as quasi-sovereigns.

It interferes by trying to capture the Universal State and make it informational rather than material.

3. The Security–Administrative State (Spengler’s “proto-Caesar”) bloc wants territorial sovereignty,  industrial capacity, supply-chain control, energy dominance, and military-technological supremacy.

It interferes by trying to accelerate the Universal State — to force unification and centralization before the system collapses.

Toynbee’s model says a Universal State emerges when the creative minority fails; the society enters a Time of Troubles, a dominant minority imposes unity, the populace accepts order over vitality.

The sources we reviewed emphasize that the Universal State is a 𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙢𝙞𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙨𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙙𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣, not a renewal. 

Toynbee also notes that Western civilization might be unique in potentially escaping the cycle — but only if it finds a new creative response. Right now, America is in the “Time of Troubles” phase, and the interference I sense distorting the transition is simply the struggle over who becomes the Dominant Minority (factionalism).

So the Universal State is being interrupted — but only in the sense that multiple factions are fighting over its final form.

None of these forces can stop the Universal State.  

They can only shape whether it is hollow and brittle,  technocratic and post-national, militarized and territorial, or (in the rarest case) revitalized by a new creative minority.

The deeper Spengler–Toynbee alignment: Spengler’s “Money → Caesar” sequence is the same transition Toynbee describes as “Dominant Minority → Universal State.” 𝗠𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘆 = the late-civilizational financial elite; 𝗖𝗮𝗲𝘀𝗮𝗿 = the strongman or strong-state consolidation; Universal State = the political form that emerges when Caesar wins.

The interference I was sensing is simply the Money bloc trying to prevent Caesar from emerging — and the technostructure trying to replace Caesar with something softer.

Let’s widen the lens. When I bring in China, Russia, and the BRICS sphere, I'm asking whether external civilizations can derail, distort, or accelerate America’s movement toward a Universal State. That’s a sharp question, because Toynbee, Spengler, and contemporary sources all treat external pressure very differently.

The short version is that external civilizations don’t stop a Universal State — but they can profoundly shape how it forms and what kind of Universal State it becomes. They act as stressors, mirrors, and sometimes parasites, but not as authors of America’s destiny.

Let’s take them one by one.

China: The Counter-Universal State: China is the only external actor with the scale, coherence, and civilizational memory to function as a true rival Universal State candidate.

See what China is doing structurally: Building a Sinic Universal State prototype (BRI, SCO, Digital Yuan, industrial policy, civilizational narrative). Reasserting a civilizational identity rather than a nation-state identity. Pursuing material sovereignty (energy, minerals, manufacturing, logistics). Offering a non-Western model of modernity.

See how China interferes with America’s trajectory: China doesn’t “manipulate” America’s Universal State formation. Instead, it forces America to choose: remain a financialized, post-industrial hegemon, or reindustrialize and consolidate into a hard Universal State. This verges upon Reform/Reconstitution.

China’s rise is the external pressure that pushes America toward Caesarism — the strong-state consolidation Spengler predicted.

China is not stopping the Universal State. China is shaping its form.

Russia: The Disruptor, Not a Civilization. Russian civilization is a 19th‑century political technology, not a coherent civilizational organism. So what is Russia’s structural role? It cannot form a Universal State of its own. It cannot offer a rival civilizational model. It can act as a spoiler, a pressure multiplier, and a chaos amplifier.

Russia’s influence is indirect: It forces America to maintain a global security posture. It ties down Western resources. It accelerates the militarization of the American administrative state. It pushes Europe closer to America, strengthening the Western bloc.

Russia doesn’t interrupt America’s Universal State. It accelerates the hardening of it.

BRICS: The Fragmentation Engine. BRICS is not a civilization. It’s a coalition of civilizational dissatisfactions.

Its power is not in unity but in collective refusal: refusal of Western financial dominance; refusal of Western security architecture; refusal of Western ideological universalism.

In its global role, BRICS weakens the global reach of America’s would-be Universal State by undermining dollar hegemony; creating parallel institutions (NDB, CIPS, local-currency trade; reducing the West’s ability to impose sanctions; fracturing global supply chains  

BRICS doesn’t stop America’s Universal State. It shrinks its imperial radius.

Putting it together: the external triad. Each external actor plays a different structural role: 

None of them can prevent the Universal State.  

But all of them can shape its character.

Toynbee is explicit: Universal States form due to internal breakdown, not external invasion.

External pressure accelerates the Time of Troubles, forcing the Dominant Minority to consolidate; narrows the civilizational options; hardens the political form  

In other words: external civilizations don’t interrupt the Universal State — they midwife it.

Spengler would say: 

1. China = the rising young Caesarism of another civilization.

2.Russia = a pseudomorphosis, not a civilizational rival.  

3. BRICS = the late-civilizational revolt of the Wallersteinian periphery.

And all of them together push the West from Money → Caesar.

Contemporary interpretation. They would see:

1. China = a society with a new Economic Instrumentality of Investment.  

2. Russia = a society in an Aborted Reconstitution phase after narrowly escaping a Czarist Universal State.

3.BRICS = societies resisting Western Universal Empire.  

And America is being forced to choose among:

1. Reconstitution (rare).

2. Universal Empire (likely).

3. Collapse (possible if elites remain divided).

Now let's add post‑Ottoman Islam into the field of external civilizational pressures. The whole geometry of America’s trajectory shifts. Not because post‑Ottoman Islam is a viable Universal State candidate — it isn’t — but because even a non‑viable civilization can exert structural pressure on a dominant one.

[Actually it is a gaggle of successor states similar to China's Warlord Era into which the British Empire had injected a divide-and-rule Israel.]

And in Toynbee’s framework, pressure from a declining or fragmented civilization can be just as consequential as pressure from a rising one.

[Toynbee’s reaction to the creation of Israel was unambiguously negative, and over time it hardened into one of the most controversial positions he ever took.]

Post‑Ottoman Islam as a Civilizational Pressure.

I'm right to call its viability doubtful. The post‑Ottoman world is fragmented, lacking a creative minority, lacking a unifying political form, divided between rival ideological projects (Islamist, secular-nationalist, petro‑monarchical, neo‑Ottoman, revolutionary Shi’a), and economically dependent on external powers.

But viability is not the same as influence.

Toynbee is explicit: A civilization in disintegration can still exert enormous pressure on a neighboring one.

Think of:

1. Late Hellenistic Syria on Rome.

2. Post‑Achaemenid Persia on the Seleucids.

3. Post‑Han China on the steppe polities.

4. Late medieval Islam on Iberia.

A fragmented civilization becomes a field of turbulence. And turbulence shapes the Universal State.

What post‑Ottoman Islam actually does to America.

1. It doesn’t rival America.  

2. It doesn’t replace America.  

3. It doesn’t form a Universal State of its own.

Instead, it acts as a permanent destabilizing frontier, neither EU nor Arabic.

1. It forces America into a quasi‑imperial security posture. The Middle East is the last region where America behaves like a classical empire:

A. bases  

B. protectorates  

C. client states  

D. energy chokepoints  

E. counterinsurgency  

F. drone policing  

This keeps America in a militarized, globalized stance, which delays the inward consolidation typical of a Universal State.

2. It creates a “Time of Troubles” feedback loop. Every crisis in the region:

A. refugee flows  

B. terrorism  

C. energy shocks  

D. proxy wars  

feeds back into American domestic politics, intensifying polarization and accelerating the breakdown of the creative minority.

3. It prevents the emergence of a coherent Western Universal State. A Universal State requires:

A. internal unity  

B. external stability  

C. a clear imperial frontier  

The post‑Ottoman world denies all three.

4. It gives rival powers leverage. China, Russia, and Iran all use the region as a pressure valve against American influence.

This doesn’t stop the Universal State. It distorts it.

So what is post‑Ottoman Islam in Toynbee’s terms? Toynbee would classify it as:

A. a broken civilization 

B. with no creative minority  

C. generating internal proletariat movements (Islamism, Arab nationalism, pan‑Islamic revivalism) and external proletariat pressures (migration, insurgency, piracy, proxy warfare).

This is the exact pattern that destabilized Rome’s late Republic and early Empire.

A broken civilization becomes a peripheral turbulence engine.

Spengler would say:

1. Islam is a civilization in winter, but still spiritually potent. ZEAL.

2. Its political forms are exhausted, but its religious energy remains.  

3. This religious energy acts as a counter‑force to Western secular universalism.

4. America’s Universal State must either absorb or suppress this energy.

In Spengler’s terms, post‑Ottoman Islam is a late-Faustian irritant, not a rival destiny.

Contemporary consensus:

1. no functioning Instrumentality of Economic Progress.  

2. no new institutional innovation.

3. only parasitic elites and ideological residues.

But they would also note that civilizations in disintegration often exert disproportionate influence on their neighbors, because they export instability.

So does post‑Ottoman Islam “interfere” with America’s Universal State? Yes — but not as a rival. It interferes as a destabilizing frontier.

Its effects: 

This doesn’t stop the Universal State. It delays, distorts, and militarizes it.

America’s Universal State is not being shaped only by China (rival), Russia (spoiler), and BRICS (fragmentation). It is also being shaped by the turbulence of a disintegrating civilization on its frontier. This is exactly how Rome’s Universal State was shaped by the post‑Hellenistic East.

They’re seeing the same pattern.

[So does the Irishman with his Arab up, but I think he's fading out. BRICS hasn't embraced him. He thinks that America's Universal State will be hollow instead  of hard or soft. He thinks the Money Power has won.]