Steven Lichty, Adnan Arif, Barbara Bok, Carol Mei Mei Lim, Jose Ramos, Kateryna Ostrovska, Keil Eggers, Pierce Othlhogile-Gordon, Ramya Kumaran
This article revisits Johan Galtung’s prediction of U.S. imperial decline by 2020–2025, analyzing it through the lens of the current “polycrisis” and a second Trump presidency. Drawing on workshops convened by the Participatory Futures Global Swarm in late 2024 and mid-2025, the authors argue that Galtung’s original fifteen contradictions have intensified and been joined by three new transversal fault lines: planetary limits versus imperial growth, digital surveillance versus the commons, and universalist versus pluriversal knowledge systems. The study maps these contradictions against a near-term trajectory of intensification rather than resolution. Looking toward 2050, the paper outlines four scenarios for a post-hegemonic world: a loose Multipolar Alliance, a hardened New Cold War, a chaotic Great Depression and Exodus, and a transformative Gaian Reformation focused on planetary stewardship. Ultimately, the authors posit that the disintegration of the imperial center offers a “field of possibility” for social movements to enact decolonial and regenerative futures beyond the logic of empire.
The United States enters the mid-2020s amid a visible fracture. A second Trump presidency, democratic backsliding, and open contestation of the “rules-based” order signal that what once appeared as semi-stable U.S. hegemony is now openly disputed at home and abroad. The liberal international order the United States helped build after 1945 is described by its own advocates as rigid and brittle, in need of redesign rather than repair (Goddard et al., 2025). These dynamics unfold within a wider planetary polycrisis—climate disruption, digital disinformation, and resurgent authoritarianism—that unsettles any linear story of U.S. “rise” or “decline.”
This article revisits Johan Galtung’s prediction that the U.S. empire would decline and fall around 2020–2025, driven by the synergistic effects of fifteen contradictions across economic, military, political, cultural, and social domains (Galtung, 2009). Building on his structural theory of imperialism, which conceptualises empire as a centre–periphery system held together by unequal exchange and a “harmony of interest” among core elites (Galtung, 1971), the authors asked how far these contradictions have evolved, mutated, or been joined by new fault lines in the early Trump 2.0 era.
Methodologically, the paper draws on four interactive online sessions hosted by the Participatory Futures Global Swarm, which convened over 30 practitioners from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and Latin America to collectively map contemporary U.S. contradictions using Galtung’s framework as a scaffold. The first two sessions, held in December 2024, wrestled with the implications of Trump’s election win and its impact on Galtung’s 15 contradictions (see Fig. 1 from the group Miro board). 
Participants worked through Galtung’s contradictions and collectively discussed if the contradiction was growing or shrinking. The second two sessions in June 2025 focused on the first six months of Trump’s presidency and identified new domains of contradictions beyond Galtung’s original five. A 21-page advanced reader was prepared for the June sessions and guided participants in incorporating diverse perspectives ranging from historical realism to Global South and feminist critiques and in analysing systemic contradictions to collectively imagine plural, justice-oriented post-imperial futures.
This article has a threefold purpose: 1) revisit Galtung’s framework and assess its contemporary relevance; 2) propose three additional domains of contradiction—planetary, digital, and epistemic—that have become structurally central in the Anthropocene; and finally 3) explore how these old and new contradictions may evolve over 2025–2028, including long-range scenarios for post-hegemonic world orders toward 2050 and beyond. Throughout, the Swarm treated U.S. decline not as an isolated national story but as one thread in a wider struggle over decolonial, pluriversal, and justice-centred futures.
2. Galtung’s framework and its contemporary relevance
Johan Galtung approached empire less as territorial control than as a centre–periphery relationship of domination, held together through unequal economic, military, political, cultural, and social exchanges (Galtung, 1971, 2007, 2009). In The Fall of the U.S. Empire – And Then What? (2009) he argued that imperial systems generate their own demise through “contradictions” – structural tensions between what an empire is and what it does – whose synergies eventually erode legitimacy, capacity, and consent. He grouped fifteen such contradictions into the following five domains and forecasted that the U.S. empire would face a terminal crisis around 2020–2025.
- Economically, Galtung highlighted three fractures: growth versus distribution, the real versus the financial economy, and production–consumption versus ecological limits.
- Militarily, he traced three feedback loops: between U.S. state violence and global resistance; between US-led alliances and rival powers; and between NATO/EU structures and broader global opposition.
- Politically, he emphasised a clash across two geopolitical areas—between U.S. exceptionalism and multilateralism, and tensions between U.S. leadership and European autonomy.
- Culturally, he mapped three fault lines: between US-centred civilisational narratives and Islam; between older civilisations and publics increasingly fatigued by Americanisation; and between US-centred civilisational narratives and Islam.
- Socially, he pointed to widening gaps between elites and workers, between generations, and between the myth and reality of the “American Dream” (Bouza, 1996), alongside an overarching structural contradiction between the U.S. self-image and external realities.
Rather than displacing Galtung, these developments extend and densify his framework. The five contradictions of the U.S. empire now operate within a thicker field of planetary, digital, and epistemic tensions. It is this expanded field that our Swarm sessions sought to map, and against this background, the Swarm proposes three new domains of contradiction.
3. Assessing the trajectory of contradictions (2025–2028)
The first Swarm session took place a month after Trump’s election and the second session six months into the second Trump administration. Participants overwhelmingly read the near term (2025–2028) as an intensification phase rather than a resolution phase, in which contradictions were synchronising rather than dissipating.
Geopolitically, Swarm participants perceived Middle Eastern and Indo-Pacific realignments as amplifiers of the contradictions. A plausible consolidation of a U.S.–EU–NATO–Israel axis, alongside efforts to deepen Indo-Pacific security cooperation, was read as both a projection of residual U.S. military strength and a symptom of its insecurity. By contrast, the EU was imagined as a potential climate and social-welfare leader, yet hamstrung by demographic decline and internal fragmentation—a mixed/flexible actor unable to fully stabilise the wider order.
Economic contradictions were judged to be worsening most rapidly. Steep, rapidly expanded U.S. tariffs—applied not only to adversaries but to key allies and strategic sectors. In Swarm deliberations, this pattern read as a volatile replay of earlier failures of “financial statecraft” (over-financialisation, weaponised currencies, and debt-driven growth) now overlaid with ecological stress and technological disruption. Several participants explicitly raised the spectre of a new Great Depression centred in the West—less as a single crash than as a grinding combination of stagflation, asset deflation, and legitimacy crises in core institutions.
At the same time, some contradictions appeared to plateau rather than spiral. U.S. expansionism, for example, persists but increasingly shifts into off-planet and digital domains. Swarm participants noted that the much-touted Russia–China–BRICS multipolar alternative remains fragile—lacking a coherent financial architecture and unified military strategy—which partially offsets U.S. decline and keeps open the possibility of a renegotiated, though not necessarily just, imperial settlement.
Taken together, the 2025–2028 horizon was therefore read not as terminal collapse but as a dangerous synchronisation of economic, military, planetary, digital, and epistemic contradictions. This inflection point makes multiple post-hegemonic futures thinkable, but by no means guaranteed.
4. The New Contradictions of a Failing Empire
Building on Galtung’s fifteen contradictions and our advanced readings, the Swarm did not try to invent an entirely new typology. Instead, we asked: what contradictions cut across the older five domains in ways that feel qualitatively different today? Reading Galtung alongside ecological political economy, feminist, Indigenous, queer, and Global South thinkers, three transversal fault lines kept surfacing—planetary, digital, and epistemic contradictions. These are not replacements for Galtung’s original clusters. Rather, they name new horizons—earth systems, digital infrastructures, and knowledge regimes—on which older contradictions are now playing out.
4.1 Planetary contradiction: imperial growth on a finite earth
For the U.S. empire, the planetary contradiction can be summarised as: The pursuit of endless growth, military reach, and consumer affluence collides with biophysical limits that can no longer be externalised or outsourced.
Galtung already flagged a tension between “production and nature,” arguing that an empire built on continual economic expansion would eventually collide with ecological limits (Galtung, 2009). Planetary science has since rendered this contradiction empirically stark. The planetary boundaries framework identifies nine Earth system processes—climate, biodiversity, biogeochemical cycles, land use, freshwater, and others—that define a “safe operating space for humanity” (Rockström et al., 2009). Recent updates conclude that at least six of these nine boundaries have already been transgressed, placing the earth “well outside” a stable holocene-like envelope (Richardson et al., 2023).
In our readings and Swarm dialogues, this scientific picture intersected with ecological political economy. U.S.-led racial capitalism is not merely environmentally harmful; it is structurally dependent on extractivism, fossil fuel infrastructures, and sacrificial zones in the Global South.
Climate disasters, infrastructural fragility, and environmental injustice increasingly strike inside U.S. territory—from wildfires and superstorms to poisoned water and climate-driven migration—blurring the historical boundary between “homeland” and “frontier.” At the same time, U.S. diplomatic leadership has been eroded by its hypocritical climate posture of rhetorically championing climate action while remaining deeply entangled with fossil fuels.
4.2 Digital contradiction: surveillance empire vs. digital commons
For the U.S. empire, the digital contradiction can be framed as: The same networked infrastructures that extend U.S. power also erode its capacity to control narratives, borders, and social cohesion.
Galtung and his colleagues already anticipated a phase of “communications imperialism,” in which control over global media and information flows would become a key mechanism of domination (Galtung et al., 1979). Today’s digital landscape realises this prediction in ways Galtung may not fully have foreseen. U.S.-anchored technology platforms—Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple—operate as planetary infrastructures for communication, finance, logistics, AI, and culture. They are simultaneously instruments of soft power and zones of geopolitical contestation, or what Zuboff (2019) calls “surveillance capitalism” and Couldry and Mejias (2019) refer to as “data colonialism”.
Digital infrastructure projects U.S. power but simultaneously weakens it by facilitating global resistance, adversarial disruption, and domestic epistemic chaos. The empire thus finds itself in a bind. Efforts to reassert control—through platform regulation, AI nationalism, or digital trade agreements—risk confirming critiques of digital authoritarianism and data extraction. Yet failure to regulate leaves democratic institutions vulnerable to manipulation and deepens distrust at home and abroad. In Swarm discussions, participants described this as living inside a “self-hacking” empire. A system whose most powerful communication tools continuously destabilise the cognitive and affective foundations of its legitimacy.
4.3 Epistemic contradiction: universal knowledge vs. pluriversal worlds
For the U.S. empire, the epistemic contradiction can be posed as: A state that claims to embody universal reason, freedom, and democracy is increasingly challenged by those whose lived histories show these universals to be partial, violent, and exclusionary.
This contradiction emerges from the collision between a U.S.-centred, liberal-universalist knowledge regime and a growing insistence—especially from Indigenous, Black, feminist, queer, and Global South thinkers—on pluriversal ways of knowing and being. Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice gave the Swarm one anchor. She distinguishes between testimonial injustice, when prejudice unfairly deflates a speaker’s credibility, and hermeneutical injustice, when marginalised groups lack the shared interpretive resources to make sense of their experiences. Spivak (1988) pushes this further with her critique of “epistemic violence,” arguing that there can be no global social justice so long as the subaltern is silenced, and that Western domination has entailed a long history of projecting its own narratives onto the Other—effectively erasing indigenous knowledge systems.
Globally, this appears in disputes over human rights, development, and democracy promotion. The Swarm asked if these are genuinely universal frameworks, or vehicles for what Spivak identifies as “sanctioned ignorance,” which renders non-Western knowledges illegible or non-existent. Domestically, the same contradiction surfaces in struggles over whose histories are taught, whose grief is recognised, whose expertise counts in policy, and whose spirituality is dismissed as irrational. The empire’s effort to “manage decline” without transforming its epistemic foundations risks reproducing what one participant called “imperial ventriloquism”—a new language about diversity and decolonisation voiced through old knowledge hierarchies.
Across planetary, digital, and epistemic domains, the Swarm saw not incremental policy problems but civilisational fault lines. Each contradiction both expresses and accelerates the decay of U.S. imperial power, while simultaneously opening space for alternative futures. This aligns with Tuck and Yang’s (2012) warning against the “metaphorization of decolonization.” They argue that when the empire adopts the language of social justice without the material repatriation of land, it engages in “settler moves to innocence”—strategies that relieve the settler of guilt without relinquishing power or territory.
5. Implications for the future: Scenarios for a post-hegemonic world (from 2050 onward)
To explore how today’s contradictions might crystallise over the longer term, the Swarm sketched four scenarios looking toward 2050 and beyond. These are not predictions but structured thought experiments, informed by the Swarm’s collective insight, macrohistorical analysis (Galtung and Inayatullah, 1997), and debates over a “multiplex” or post-American order that is more regionally anchored and plural than either unipolarity or simple bipolar rivalries. Each scenario imagines different ways the planetary, digital, and epistemic contradictions might evolve once U.S. hegemony has clearly waned.
Scenario 1: The Multipolar Alliance
By the 2050s, no single state or bloc can credibly claim to “lead the world.” Instead, a loose but resilient web of regional alliances—across Africa, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, and parts of Europe—coordinates climate action, financial reform, and peacebuilding. This resembles Acharya’s (2014, 2017) “multiplex world order”: overlapping institutions, shared responsibility, and plural centres of authority, with the United States one influential node among many rather than the hub of the system. South–South cooperation expands into common platforms for technology transfer, debt restructuring, and climate reparations. Epistemic justice becomes partially institutionalised through reformed multilateral bodies that give Indigenous, Black, feminist, and youth movements a formal voice in global agenda-setting.
In this future, U.S. decline is real but not catastrophic. The American empire’s capacity to dominate is curtailed, yet its cultural and scientific resources are repurposed within a more reciprocal architecture. Planetary contradictions are managed, though not solved; digital infrastructures are partially de-corporatised into global and regional commons. The key risk is that multipolarity hardens into elite regional cartels, muting deeper decolonial and democratic transformations.
Scenario 2: The New Cold War
Here, the long 21st century is defined by a hardened dual bloc structure. A U.S.–EU–NATO–Japan–Israel grouping confronts a China-centred cluster around expanded BRICS and Eurasian allies. Arms races extend from hypersonic weapons and cyberwarfare into AI-enabled command systems, orbital infrastructure, and geoengineering. Economic decoupling produces rival payment systems, standards regimes, and digital ecosystems—an entrenched “splinternet.”
In this world, many of Galtung’s original contradictions persist but are displaced outward. Domestic inequalities and political decay are contained through nationalist mobilisation and securitised welfare, while planetary breakdown is framed as a competitive arena (“green race” vs. “brown resilience”) rather than a shared crisis. Digital contradictions deepen as both blocs normalise surveillance capitalism and information warfare; epistemic contradictions harden into mutually exclusive civilisational narratives. For the U.S., hegemony shrinks to bloc leadership, but the underlying imperial habitus remains intact, limiting any substantive move toward pluriversal or decolonial futures.
Scenario 3: The Great Depression and Exodus
The third scenario imagines that the synchronised crises of the 2020s–2030s—financial volatility, climate shocks, pandemics, AI-driven labour disruption—tip the world into a protracted “Great Unravelling.” Attempts to restore business-as-usual fail, and instead the U.S. and much of the West experience rolling recessions, infrastructural decay, and a legitimacy crisis for parties, media, and expert institutions. Formal democracy survives in name only by losing all substantive credibility.
In response, large segments of the population abandon decaying institutions in favour of local mutual-aid networks, platform cooperatives, informal economies, and translocal solidarity infrastructures. The exodus is uneven—riven by race, class, and geography—but it seeds experiments in commons-based care, restorative justice, and low-carbon livelihoods at the margins of the old order. U.S. imperial reach contracts sharply, yet nothing coherent replaces it at the global level. Planetary, digital, and epistemic contradictions are negotiated bottom-up through thousands of locally situated struggles rather than through a redesigned world-system (Wallerstein, 2003).
Scenario 4: The Gaian Reformation
By the 2050s, the synchronised polycrisis of the early 21st century has catalyzed not a collapse, but a profound ontological shift—a transcendence of the nation-state and corporate logics that created the Anthropocene. A new form of planetary governance emerges, focused less on geopolitical borders and more on stewardship of the Global Commons (atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere). This order is underpinned by a widespread “spiritual culture” that recognizes humanity’s fundamental entanglement with Gaia (earth as a self-regulatory system). Economically, the world moves toward what Sarkar (1962) called Progressive Utilisation Theory (PROUT)—a post-capitalist framework characterized by decentralized, cooperative economies and the guarantee of basic necessities. Here, production is strictly bounded by ecological balance, and the United States, shedding its imperial identity, reorganizes itself into a confederation of bioregional cooperatives focused on restoration and local resilience.
In this future, the contradictions of the old world are not just managed but transformed. The planetary contradiction is resolved by closing the “metabolic rift” and growth is redefined as the expansion of consciousness and community rather than material accumulation. The digital contradiction is navigated through the creation of “wisdom infrastructures”—AI and data systems designed explicitly for planetary health and social equity, replacing the surveillance-for-profit model. Finally, the epistemic contradiction is addressed by fundamentally redesigning the table rather than simply adding seats to it. Justice is found through land back initiatives and other forms of Indigenous sovereignty. Feminist, subaltern, and ecological ways of knowing move from the margins to the centre, fusing with systems science to create a holistic decision-making framework where the rights of nature are as inviolable as human rights.
From that vantage, Galtung’s contradictions are not simply indicators of an empire’s end-state but openings into a pluriverse of possible successors. The “new contradictions” the Swarm highlighted—planetary, digital-imperial, and cognitive-epistemic—force us to ask whose futures become imaginable as U.S. hegemony fractures, and whose are still foreclosed. The Swarm’s analysis emphasises that decline is not destiny. It is instead a field of possibility. The disintegration of the imperial center opens vast spaces for agency at the margins. The future will be determined by how social movements, communities, and emerging powers navigate these contradictions. Whether humanity descends into chaotic fragmentation or rises toward a civilisational reset depends on the capacity to imagine and enact futures beyond the logic of empire. As the American albatross falls from the neck of the world, the challenge for the post-2050 era will be to learn to swim in the turbulent yet open waters of a pluriversal history.
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