• **The shift of power **
• An extractor’s endgame
• The human code of extraction
• So how does America stop stealing from the world?
• A nation torn apart cannot build
• The role of Bitcoin
• **The price of sacrifice **

The world is helter-skelter. A multipolar order is aggressively taking place, and with it, the old rules of engagement are giving way to something uglier: the return of overt colonization as a tool of last resort for declining powers.

This is what worries me most. Not the shifting of alliances or the emergence of new blocs, but the desperation creeping into how powerful nations now deal with weaker ones. 

We see open proposals to colonize the Global South, with economic warfare waged through sanctions that crush the poorest first. We see military buildups disguised as diplomacy, with aircraft carriers and hundreds of warheads positioned for war.  We see regime change spoken aloud by foreign presidents as if it were a casual preference rather than a violation of sovereignty. And underneath all of it, resource looting dressed up as liberation.

Can anything fix this? Can Bitcoin, of all things, offer a way out?

To answer that, we have to understand how we got here. And we have to be honest about who “we” are.

§**The shift of power **

After World War II, the global order was bipolar, defined by the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. When the Soviet collapsed, the system became unipolar as America stood as the sole superpower. International institutions like the UN and IMF grew in influence, but they operated within a US-led order where Washington still called the shots. The rules were written by the winner.

That moment is over.

In the past decade, power has continued to diffuse. China, India, and Russia now play more independent roles. The European Union attempts to do the same, though internal fractures raise questions about how long it can act as a unified pole. Global institutions weaken as shared rules are increasingly contested. 

We have entered a multipolar world, but without the multilateral frameworks that might have made that transition peaceful, and that is a dangerous combination. 

Desperation is creeping into how powerful nations deal with weaker ones. Day in and day out, we hear of atrocities, and the world is left choosing between silence and world war.

§An extractor’s endgame

America has not collapsed in the way Rome did. There are no barbarians at the gates. But as the most powerful country in the world? That dominance is over. What remains is a superpower struggling to accept its own decline by lashing out, tightening its grip, and mistaking force for strength

This didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t even happen with Trump, though he undoubtedly accelerated the visible decay. The rot set in earlier.

Some point to LBJ’s Great Society and the decision to fund both a war on poverty and a war in Vietnam without raising taxes, which was the beginning of endless money printing. Others point to Nixon taking the dollar off gold in 1971, severing the last link between currency and reality. But the deeper wound came with Reagan and the selling off of America’s productive purpose in the name of globalization. Factories closed, communities hollowed out, and finance replaced manufacturing as the nation’s beating heart.

And yet for a time, America kept building. Through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the engine of innovation hummed along. Intel was founded in 1968, Microsoft in 1975, and Apple in 1976. The personal computer revolution happened in garages and labs, and America gave the world the transistor, the internet, and the moon landing. This was peak product-led innovation with real value, real things, and real builders.

In the 1990s, everything pivoted.

On one hand, the dot-com boom brought Netscape, Amazon, and Google, and massive tech innovation continued. But on the other hand, NAFTA was signed in 1994, China prepared to join the WTO, and the ground shifted beneath American workers. Companies discovered they could manufacture overseas for pennies on the dollar, then bring goods back to sell to Americans whose wages were no longer growing. The excess profits flowed into finance. Stock buybacks replaced factory investments, and quarterly earnings replaced long-term vision. Paul Krugman championed the consolidation of large companies for export competitiveness, and the focus began to turn toward weapons and finance. The decade saw the beginning of the extraction shift.

Then came the 2000s and 2010s. The companies built in the 80s and 90s matured into giants. Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon became dominant as household names with indispensable infrastructure. They still built things, but they also became extractive. Surveillance capitalism replaced selling products with selling users and advertising models prioritized engagement over well-being. Financial engineering like stock buybacks, quarterly earnings obsession, and shareholder primacy, replaced the very culture that produced them. Builders became rent-seekers and makers became takers.

The greatest suicide attempt, however, was the endless printing of money. America could do this only because it held the world’s reserve currency. Countries that sold goods to America had to actually make those goods by expending real energy, real labor, and real resources. America could buy them with digits on a screen. This is the seigniorage privilege, and it allowed debt to accumulate to astronomical levels.

For decades, the world tolerated this arrangement, but tolerance is not loyalty. If countries ever stop using the dollar as their reserve, America faces bankruptcy. And so the strategy has shifted from earning trust to forcing compliance. Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, the message is clear: use our currency or else.

Globally, tariff wars become weapons. The original goal of tariff negotiations was reciprocal market access, but trade deals are leveraged into defense purchases, forcing countries to buy American weapons and oil for market access.

This is not strength. This is the behavior of an extractor running out of things to extract.

§The human code of extraction

Abstract arguments about monetary policy and reserve currencies miss the point if they don’t account for the human beings crushed beneath these systems.

Let’s look at Iran.

The situation is almost willfully misunderstood in Western media. Many Iranians do not want the regime. But they also do not want foreign interference dressed up as liberation. They have seen that movie before, in 1953, when the CIA overthrew Mossadegh, a democratically elected leader, to secure oil contracts for British Petroleum. They know that “regime change” is almost always a prelude to resource capture.

Iran sits on massive reserves of oil, natural gas, uranium, antimony, and other strategic metals. It also remains the last major obstacle to the “Greater Israel” project that certain factions in the region have pursued for decades. These are the real stakes. The human rights rhetoric is a convenient mask.

What many in the West do not realize is that Iran’s young women are among the most educated in the region. A quarter of the country’s STEM graduates are women, more than twice the rate in the United States. These are not people waiting to be saved. They are engineers and doctors and scientists trapped in a system that will not let them build. Give them the tools and they will build their own future.

What Iranians need is agency—the ability to work things out on their own terms, free from both domestic tyranny and foreign manipulation.

That requires tools that cannot be switched off by any government: communication platforms that resist censorship, monetary systems that cannot be frozen and navigation systems that do not solely depend on GPS controlled by the US Department of Defense. Bitcoin matters here. Decentralized communication like Nostr and Bitchat matters here. These are not libertarian abstractions as economists would put it. They are a survival infrastructure for people caught between a brutal regime and an extractive global order.

For a long time, sanctions were sold as precision tools against tyrannical governments, but in reality, they are siege weapons. They starve the population and hope the government falls. But the government never falls. It’s always the poor who pay first and pay the most. Sanctions must be removed as a matter of basic justice to the Iranian people.

Now look at Palestine.

What is happening there is the worst kind of human torture, enabled and funded by American weapons and diplomatic cover. Children are starved and killed, aid is blocked, hospitals are bombed. Homes have shifted to tents and everyday, people hope to just live another day. The justifications offered are the same ones used everywhere: security, self-defense, civilization versus barbarism. But the pattern is unmistakable. It is about land and resources, about who gets to exist and who must be erased.

Look at Cuba.

A sixty-year blockade designed to strangle the island into submission. Who helps Cuba survive? China, Russia, Mexico, Vietnam. This is certainly not out of pure altruism, but their engagement at least allows Cubans to eat, to receive medicine, to exist. America’s policy offers only suffocation.

And yet Cuba, despite the blockade, has more doctors per capita than any country on earth. It trains thousands of physicians and sends them across the globe to Africa, to Latin America, to disaster zones. The same country America strangles with sanctions is the one the world calls when health systems collapse. That is not weakness. Even under siege, they build.

The last American president who tried to change course was John F. Kennedy, reaching out to Castro after the missile crisis, exploring normalization before an assassin’s bullet ended that possibility. It remains a road not taken.

Look at Africa. 

France maintains the CFA franc in 14 countries, requiring them to deposit 50% of their foreign reserves in the French treasury in exchange for a supposedly stable currency. It is colonialism repackaged as monetary cooperation. French companies extract uranium from Niger for nuclear power, while Nigeriens farm with hoes. Meanwhile, Israel is the world’s largest exporter of polished diamonds and has no diamond mines of its own. Again, looting, dressed up as trade.

The only two major powers consistently building infrastructure across Africa are China and Russia. This is not an endorsement of their motives, as Chinese loans have trapped countries in debt, and Russian influence comes with its own pathologies. But the contrast is stark. America and its allies arrive with bombs and sanctions and “humanitarian intervention.” China and Russia arrive with cranes and cement. The Africans notice.

§So how does America stop stealing from the world?

This is the question that haunts me. How does a nation built on extraction—first of land and enslaved people, then of global labor through financialization, now of resources through military force—how does such a nation reinvent itself without war?

There was a time when people came to America because it offered something the old world never could. In Europe, your birth determined your life. Nobility owned the land, peasants worked it, and no amount of effort could change that script. But America was supposed to be different. Here, a regular person could build something, work hard, save, innovate, and watch their children live a better life than they did. It was a promise that drew millions across oceans.

That promise has frayed, and in many places, broken entirely. But the longing underneath it, the desire for a society where effort matters more than birth, has not disappeared. It is still there, waiting to be reclaimed.

So how does America stop stealing from the world ? 

The answer is simple. America has to start building again.

Build what, you might ask? Things that actually improve human life. Tools that empower rather than control. Systems that create value for Americans and the world.

Silicon Valley once showed what this could look like. It attracted some of the greatest innovators in the world and created a culture where building things seemed to matter. But even there, the finance-led model swallowed everything. The goal shifted from creating value to achieving exit, from building companies to extracting liquidity, and from serving users to serving shareholders.

The same pattern repeats everywhere. Great innovators emerge, build something meaningful, and then find themselves absorbed into the extraction machine. The product becomes the product only long enough to be sold to someone whose real business is finance.

Even the intellectual property system, meant to protect builders, now often walls them off. Walk into any startup pitch and you will hear about patents. Every investor wants to know about your IP. But innovation has always been about discovery, about standing on the shoulders of what came before. When you close off those shoulders, the next generation has to climb from the ground every single time.

China, for all its faults, seems to understand something America doesn’t. The same country once dismissed for reverse engineering now champions open source ecosystems. It has its own patents, certainly, but it also understands that lifting people from the ground requires shared foundations. In 2021, China wrote open source into its Five-Year Plan for the first time as part of its national strategy, explicitly aiming to cultivate international-leading open source communities by 2025. 

Ironically, many global business leaders I have spoken to lately are looking into adopting some kind of Chinese open ecosystem tools. And in a way, that’s how technology leadership spreads. 

The question is whether America can learn this too, whether it can remember that building together is not the same as stealing, and that a rising tide lifts all boats only when the water is open to everyone.

If America is to escape this death spiral, it needs a renaissance of decentralized innovation.

And not just in Silicon Valley, but in every nook and corner of the country. It needs entrepreneurs who build because they love building, not because they’re chasing an IPO. It needs communities that support real production, not just real estate speculation and financial engineering.

And if America can do this, if it can relearn how to make things the world actually wants to buy, then it can earn its way back to solvency. It can sell to the world instead of stealing from it.

§A nation torn apart cannot build

There is one more obstacle that must be named, because it sits at the heart of America’s inability to build: democracy itself.

Churchill said democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. Jefferson knew it required a virtuous and educated citizenry to function. Both understood what we are now living through: democracy, at its best, brings people together to solve problems collectively. At its worst, it rips them apart.

America is at its worst.

Left and right no longer debate policy; they inhabit different realities. Social media amplifies outrage and political tribalism replaces national identity. The energy that should go into building is consumed by fighting. Every problem becomes a cultural war and every compromise becomes a betrayal. The machinery of democracy, designed to channel conflict into constructive resolution, instead magnifies division until nothing can get done.

People who cannot talk to each other cannot build together. The greatest infrastructure project in the world will fail if half the country celebrates its failure. The most innovative company will be torn apart by cultural wars if it cannot find common ground with the communities it serves.

Building again requires more than capital and technical skill. It requires social cohesion, a shared sense that we are engaged in a common project, not permanent enemies occupying the same land. America has lost that. And until it finds a way back to itself, every attempt at renewal will be sabotaged from within.

This is the deeper work, the work of listening and finding common ground. The work of remembering that the person on the other side is not a traitor but a fellow citizen, equally lost, equally afraid, equally capable of building if given the chance.

§The role of Bitcoin

So where does Bitcoin fit?

Bitcoin does not “fix” everything. It does not end war or automatically redistribute resources justly. But what it does is create options.

For someone in Iran, Bitcoin offers a way to save that cannot be frozen by foreign powers or inflated away by domestic mismanagement. It offers a way to transact across borders without permission. It offers a kind of financial agency that the current system denies to entire populations.

For someone in Nigeria or Zimbabwe or Lebanon, Bitcoin offers escape from currencies that lose value by the month. It offers participation in a global economy that does not require a Western bank account or a passport from a powerful country.

For America itself, Bitcoin offers something harder to accept: a mirror. If the dollar’s dominance is based on force rather than value, Bitcoin reveals that. If America’s economy produces less than it consumes, Bitcoin reveals that too. A global, neutral, censorship-resistant monetary network means that capital can finally vote with its feet. It means that countries must compete on real productivity, not on their ability to coerce others into using their currency.

But Bitcoin also offers a practical economic path. Today, the dollar’s high value, a consequence of its reserve currency status, makes American exports more expensive and harder to sell abroad. The orthodox solution would be a painful devaluation, with all the suffering that entails. But what if America simply shifted focus? Instead of defending an overvalued dollar at all costs, what if American builders embraced a neutral global money? What if they built products and services priced and settled in Bitcoin, competing directly on quality and innovation? 

And if the world gradually moved toward Bitcoin as a neutral medium of exchange, something deeper would shift. Trade wars over currency manipulation would lose their purpose. The need for any nation’s currency to serve as the world’s reserve would fade. Countries could stop stockpiling each other’s debt and start trading on actual value. Bitcoin does not guarantee this outcome, but it offers a horizon where the old games simply stop working.

For America, this is not the loss it might seem. The fear that haunts Washington is that one day the yuan or the euro or some BRICS currency will replace the dollar, and America will be left with nothing. But Bitcoin offers a different possibility, not by substituting a new hegemon, but a world where no country holds that power over any other. The dollar’s dominance has been a burden as much as a privilege. It forces America to run perpetual deficits, to be the world’s banker and policeman, to turn every trade relationship into a geopolitical negotiation. Letting that go, if replaced by a neutral layer, is not defeat.

But here is the tension I cannot ignore. Even as Bitcoin offers a neutral horizon, the world is rushing toward stablecoins, meaning digital dollars, digital euros, digital yuan. They are faster, smoother, and backed by the very sovereign currencies this essay critiques. The currency war is going digital. Bitcoin does not guarantee victory in that war, but it can ensure that for those who want out, there is somewhere to go.

In a multipolar, multi-currency world, the path to prosperity lies in building things people actually want, not in defending a monetary monopoly by force. Bitcoin does not guarantee this outcome. But it removes the illusion that the old ways can continue forever. It forces reckoning.

§**The price of sacrifice **

I often think of Snowden and Assange. Whatever one thinks of their methods, they sacrificed their freedom to show us what the extraction machine looks like from the inside. They revealed the surveillance architecture that underpins the finance-led empire. They paid a price most of us cannot imagine.

If they were willing to do that, then surely we—who have sacrificed nothing by comparison—can at least focus on building something worthy of their sacrifice: tools that empower ordinary people, structures that resist capture by powerful interests and infrastructure that serves the many, not just the few.

This is the path forward. It is not easy. It is not glamorous. It requires patience, skill, and the willingness to fail and try again. But it is the only path that leads anywhere worth going.

Because underneath all of this, underneath the extraction and the division and the despair, there is still a question that will not go away.

What was the American dream, if not the belief that a regular person could build something in America that would outlast them? That their children might live better than they did? That effort could matter more than birth? Do people still believe it? Can it be revived?

I do not know. But I know that dreams are not revived by speeches or slogans. They are revived by people who build. By parents who sacrifice so their children can have better lives. By innovators who stay with their work long enough to see it serve people. By communities that pour themselves into something bigger than any one of them.

That is the only kind of building that lasts. That is the only kind that can make America a place where people want to plant their roots and call it home again.

America built once. It can build again. The question is whether it will choose to.

Bitcoin cannot make that choice for us. But it can make the consequences of our choices visible. And in a world that desperately needs builders, that insight might be enough.