Transcripts:
The United States right now is in the midst of something called plan 2027, also known as the birth of the fourth American empire. You see, right now we look around, we see the $ 38 trillion worth of debt that the United States has. We see the polarizing headlines, and we see the ddollarization around the world.
To some, it looks like we're seeing the final credits roll on the American Empire. But what if we aren't watching a funeral? What if we're watching the birth or the rebirth of a new America? In biology, there's something called ecisis. It's that moment when a creature outgrows its old rigid shell and sheds it to reveal a larger, more capable version underneath.
But in geopolitics, we call it kind of like a phase shift. Take France for example. Most people remember Napoleon's first empire. It was grand. It was landhungry and ultimately crushed in 1815. It died. But then just a few decades later, the second French Empire emerged, spreading across Africa and Asia, lasting well into the 20th century.
It wasn't the same as The Empire before, but it was more like a like a sequel or maybe a reboot, a good reboot, not like a lot of the reboots we see today in Hollywood, cuz oh lordy, I've seen a few of those. Now, to understand where the USA is going in 2027, we have to look at the three versions of America that came before this.
You see, America's first empire, which was from the 1800s to about the 1890s, it was a continental sprawl. This was the era of manifest destiny. It was about dirt. If you could walk on it, plow it, and build a fence around it, it was yours. From the Louisiana purchase to the forced displacement of indigenous nations, this empire was a land devouring machine.
By the 1890s, the frontier was closed. America had reached the Pacific, and the math was simple. Land equaled power. However, there was a second reincarnation of the American Empire and that was from 1898 to 1945. So, after the SpanishAmerican War, the strategy for America changed. America didn't need to turn the Philippines or Puerto Rico into the 51st state. It needed ports.
This was the empire of the open door and the bluewater navy. It was about controlling the trade routes. The math shifted. Access now equaled power, not land. And then their third version of their empire was 1945 up until just recently. This was one that occurred after World War II. America didn't want to occupy your land anymore.
It wanted to run your software. This was the empire of the liberal international order. It was built on the Breton Woods system, NATO, and most importantly the US dollar. It was a uniolar world where American rules were the global operating system. And this time the math was a little bit more abstract and that was American standards that equaled power.
But standards are being rewritten today. The rules are being ignored. The third empire, the one that was built on globalization and spreading democracy or democracy is currently undergoing a massive structural failure. But is it a fall? Or is it the ghost of American power just finding a new, more efficient body to inhabit? You see, as we sit here in early 2026, the blueprints for plan 2027 are already being executed.
And they're making headlines all around the world, and they have been for at least the past year, but actually more than the past year. And so, yes, even though America is trying to gain some more land, it's not just about the land. It's not even just about trade, which they're going after as well.
It's about owning the very foundation of the next century. You see, most people see a declining empire, but if you look at the data, you start to see the outline of a fourth American empire. So, now let's get into it here. So, why is this change happening now? Why is the fourth empire being born right now? I mean, the third empire seems to be very successful, and it has been.
The American empire was globalized. The dollar was dominant. It was rules-based. And America had influence all around the world. So why are we currently watching it being disassembled like a like a bad Lego set? So it comes down to a fundamental law of economics. Diminishing returns. Imagine you're at a buffet and the first plate is incredible.
The second plate is great and then you know by the third, fourth, and then the fifth plate you just aren't enjoying the food anymore. You're just in pain. And if you're old enough like me, you probably remember the Pizza Hut buffets from when you were a kid. It is just so delicious. But after five plates, you are just you never want to see Pizza Hut again.
For 80 years, the US sat at the global buffet. But in the early 2020s, the cost of being the world's hegeimon started to outweigh the benefits. And especially after 2020, this is when the real bad stomach ache started for the United States. So let's talk about the dollar. For decades, the greenback was the universal language of money.
If you wanted to buy oil in Riad or electronics in Seoul, you spoke the dollar. But something shifted. In 2000, the dollar made up about 71% of the global foreign exchange reserves. By early 2025, that number had slid to 58.4%. By the start of 2026, where we are now, we've seen a dip below 47% in some categories of official reserves.
So, why is this happening? Why is the dollar losing power? Well, because of weaponization. When the US used the dollar-based financial system, which is also known as Swift, which hasn't been brought up in the news in about 3 years, but when that was used as a weapon in 2022 against Russia, the rest of the world looked at their bank accounts and had a collective epiphany.
It's called counterparty risk. They realized that if the US owns the software your money runs on, you don't actually own your money. By 2026, the BRICS nations, now including heavy hitters like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, they moved from talking about an alternative to building a new one. The BRICS bridge, a blockchainbased payment system, is currently undergoing pilot testing aiming to facilitate 85% of crossber trade in local currencies.
And it's not just about the money, it's also about the math of growth. Look at the projection for 2026. So the G7 countries which are now becoming the old guard of the economic world, they are expected to grow at just 1.1% per year. Meanwhile, the BRICS plus nations are now projected to grow at 3.7%. In 1990, the G7 accounted for nearly 50% of global GDP.
Today, in 2026, the BRICS nations have overtaken them in purchasing power parody, also known as PPP. They are accounting for 41% of the world's economic activity compared to the G7's 28.4%. The United States power is currently being diluted all around the world, but it also has some political friction at home.
So in economics, we call it a political risk. When a country is unified, it can project power. When it's polarized, it spends its energy fighting itself. As of 2026, 43% of US CEOs rank uncertainty as their number one economic worry, higher than any of their global peers. I mean, when you can't agree on your own budget or your own borders, you can't effectively police the rest of the world as well, no matter how hard you try.
Although, it's not like the US has always been the best policeman to say the very least. But the United States was looking at the board. The dollar is eroding and getting bypassed. The competitors are growing faster. The home front is fractured. So, it had to change strategies. A 19th century empire would have started a world war to fix this.
But the fourth American empire is smarter than that. Hopefully, it's performing a strategic retreat. It's called the sunk cost fallacy. Most most of you may know this. Instead of spending trillions more to save a third empire that is structurally destined to fade, the US is taking its ball and going home and it's trying something else.
You see, if the third empire was about being everywhere around the world and having a say in everything, the fourth empire is more about being essential to the world. If the world wants to move away from the dollar, fine. But the US is building something where if you do something like that, you may have to pay a, let's call it a fortress tax.
So to a medieval knight, a fortress was stone walls and boiling oil. To a 20th century general, it was bunkers and radar. But to architects of the fourth American Empire, a fortress isn't made of stone. It's made of tariffs and contracts and atoms. For 80 years, the US played a game called globalism. And the goal was just to make the world one big happy interconnected circuit board.
But in 2026, the US is pulling the plug on that experiment. We are moving towards economic securitization. It's the idea that a supply chain isn't just a way to get a cheap toaster, it can also be a weapon. And if you don't own the weapon, you're a target. So let's take a look at the universal baseline tariff. So throughout 2025 and early 2026, the US has shifted to a 10 to 20% baseline tax on nearly all imports.
Why? Well, there's some basic math here. If a factory in Ohio costs $100 to run, and a factory in an adversarial nation costs $85, the math says go overseas. It'll save you some money. But at a 20% tariff, suddenly the overseas product costs $102. So, one of the goals of this is to force reshoring for people to move their factories back to the United States, but it's also to make money.
I mean, by the end of 2025, these tariffs were projected to generate about $264 billion in annual revenue for the federal government. And I'm sure the government will spend that very responsibly. And just some perspective, like how much money that is, that that's an entire war chest. That's the GDP of tons of other midsized countries around the world.
And that is just from the tariff revenue that was put in last year. So all that money is going into the war chest and the fortress. But you can't build a high-tech fortress without stuff. So cobalt, lithium, neodyenium, the vitamins of the modern world is what they're called. On January 15th of 2026, the president signed a landmark executive order adjusting imports of processed critical minerals.
Now, it said a ticking clock, a 180day deadline ending in July of 2026. The ultimatum, align or be excluded. The US is effectively building a minerals version of NATO. If you are a trusted ally, like Australia or Canada, depending on the day, or Japan, you get a golden ticket to the American market. If you aren't, you're on the outside looking in.
And the US is getting aggressive about where it finds these vitamins. So, Greenland, you may have heard of from uh some people that made some fantastic videos on Greenland just a little while ago. Please check out my video. But over the last few weeks and months, the rhetoric about purchasing Greenland returned, but with a sharper edge this time.
The US isn't just interested in the ice around Greenland or just using it as a military base. It's also about its minerals. It's the Tan Breeze Mine, home to arguably the world's largest deposit of rare earth elements. Now, there's also Venezuela. I mean, on January 3rd of 2026, the world woke up to news that uh Maduro was snatched pretty much out of his bed.
Now, with the removal of Maduro and the previous regime, there was a goal that was clear. Stabilize the nation to unlock the world's largest oil reserves and massive deposits of colan and gold. And there's also news about potential US intervention in Iran. With their instability right now with their protests going on around the country, the US could theoretically intervene and force a reorientation of the government, which would have a lot of benefits for the United States, but also one of the big plays is that it would ensure that for the next century, a lot of their
minerals and resources would be traded with the United States first and not China or Russia. But now we're going to move on to another powerful tool from the American fortress and that is secondary sanctions. So as America is building this fourth empire, it's realizing that it can't force everyone to use the dollar.
However, it can force them to use what is called the American stack. So, if you want the newest chips from Intel, which the US now owns 9.9% of, or if you want access to the newest and best AI models that run your hospitals and your power grids and maybe even your military, well, you have a choice.
Trade in dollars or lose access to all of these things. By using its fortress status, the US is making it nearly impossible for nations to deollize without also demodernizing. It's like a giant highstakes game of stay with us or you're going to be stuck with 2010's technology forever. But as the walls go up around this physical world, the Fourth Empire is busy building something that's even more invisible, something almost ghostlike.
And I mean, what is a ghost? In folklore, it's a spirit that haunts a house. But in the 21st century, the ghost is code. It's the intelligence that lives inside the machine. And the fourth American Empire has realized something profound. You don't need to occupy a country if you occupy its mind. It's kind of like one of my favorite movies, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
There was this quote about, "Yes, sure, the man can be the head of the household, but the woman is the neck, and the neck can turn the head any way she wants." So, the United States is trying to be the neck of many other countries. For centuries, empires were built on hard power. You know, soldiers, ships, and silk and other things that are manly.
The British Empire wasn't, you know, only selling tea. They were also building railroads and telegraph lines that made the modern world possible. They owned the standards. And if you wanted to communicate in 1890, you spoke British telegraph. And right now in 2026 and planned for 2027, the exact same thing is happening with the United States and artificial intelligence.
On July 23rd, 2025, the White House released a document that effectively declared the dawn of the cyber empire. Winning the AI race, America's AI action plan. Now, it sounds like a policy paper, but it's actually a blueprint for dependency. Accompanying this plan were three executive orders, including EO14179, designed to do one thing, export the American AI stack.
So, I've mentioned this a few times, but what is the AI stack? Well, here it is. You got the hardware, which is the specialized chips. You have the infrastructure, which is the massive data centers in fiber optics. You have the model, which is the brain, aka OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, whatever. And then you have the application.
That's the software you actually use to run your hospital, your bank, or your phones. So the strategy is fairly simple if you think about it. The US is no longer selling just software. They're kind of selling sovereign AI packages. So they're asking other countries, "Want to modernize your economy? Here is a pre-built American stack. It's fast. It's efficient.
It's brilliant." But here's the catch. The 2025 executive orders also fundamentally changed how we view data centers. Under the accelerating federal permitting of data center infrastructure order, I know that that's a giant mouthful, but under that, the US began treating these facilities as qualifying projects of national security.
The US has accelerated the buildout of these mega data centers, essentially facilities requiring more than 100 megawatts of power, taking up giant chunks of the electricity grid. By early 2026, many of these are being built on federally controlled land, making them essentially digital fortresses for the government and for the companies.
If your country's government, tax records, and power grid run on American controlled cloud things from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, do you still have full sovereignty or does the US have a kill switch for your country? Now, if you're a business person, this may sound like something familiar. This is called vendor lockin.
Meaning if you build your entire business off of the back of some other business's infrastructure, you pretty much cannot change without it being a giant pain to your business. And so for America, I mean, if a nation tries to leave this fourth American empire, it both loses a giant trade partner, but it also loses the operating system for their country.
Now, there's also another problem with this, and that is AI is well, it's thirsty. Not exactly for water, despite what you may hear, but for power. A single chat GPT query uses roughly 10 times the electricity of a Google search. By January 2026, the US faced a crisis. The grid couldn't handle the AI boom, so the empire pivoted.
The Department of Energy recently awarded $800 million in grants to first mover companies to deploy small modular reactors, SMRs. Now, these aren't your grandfather's massive nuclear plants. They are factorybuilt plugandplay nuclear batteries. Companies like Alphabet and Meta or you know Google and Facebook are already signing deals to buy this nuclear power directly.
So, the goal is to create AI fortresses which are you know data centers that are powered by their own dedicated nuclear reactors completely immune to global energy fluctuations or local grid failures. Now, as the US secures the ghost in the machine, it's also looking at the ultimate high ground. You see, one other part of this empire that people are not really talking about at all, it's not high ground of a hill or a mountain.
It's the high ground of the moon. When Romans looked at the Mediterranean Sea, they didn't just see like a body of water. They saw a highway. They called it Mari Nostrm, our sea. To own the Mediterranean was to own the heart of the world. Today, the fourth American Empire is looking up at the sky and saying the exact same thing. But they aren't looking at the deep dark void of interstellar space.
They're looking at the sis lunar region, the space between the Earth and the Moon, and they're treating it like the new Mediterranean. So, how do you build an empire in the stars? You don't do it with a few giant leaps. You do it with volume. In 2019, SpaceX launched 26 rockets. In 2024, that number was 134. By the end of 2025, that number was around 165 launches.
Roughly one space launch every 2 days. To put that in perspective, that's about 85% of all American launches and more than the rest of the planet combined. And the math goes like this. I mean, if you can launch a 100 times cheaper and 50 times more often than your adversary, then guess what? You're probably going to win this new space race.
Now, also quietly in the last little while, Space Force has also been doing some things. Yes, that's Space Force, both the TV show and the thing that got made fun of when it was announced like a decade ago. So, they have something now called the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve or CSR. They're essentially creating a civil reserve airfleet for the vacuum of space, ensuring that if a conflict breaks out, every Starling satellite becomes a military asset.
So what are the potential plans? Why is the United States doing this? So yes, it's about moving satellites and new tech into space, but it's also about denial. So on January 27th of 2025, a landmark executive order was signed to build the Iron Dome for America, later renamed the Golden Dome. in May of 2025. This isn't some groundbased system like you see in Israel. It's a spacebased overlayer.
So the goal here, well, it's to deploy a constellation of hundreds, potentially 600 specialized satellites rumored to be a $2 billion contract for SpaceX. And these will be equipped with sensors and proliferated interceptors. For the last 70 years, the world lived under the shadow of mutually assured destruction, also known as MAD.
If you hit me, I hit you and everyone dies. The Golden Dome aims to move the US into an era of assured survival by placing interceptors into orbit. The US aims to kill missiles in the boost phase before they even leave the atmosphere. Now imagine that if the fourth American Empire can neutralize its nuclear threat, it changes the fundamental math of the entire geopolitics of the world.
power is no longer who has the biggest bomb or the most bombs. It's about who has the best shield. Now, there's also the moon stuff. So, as we speak, in early 2026, NASA is rolling out the SLS rocket for Aremis 2, which is a scheduled moon mission for February 6th, 2026. And this will be the first time humans have looped around the moon in over half a century.
However, this is not as much of a science fair project as it used to be. It's becoming a property claim for the United States. So, the US is racing to establish norms of behavior on the lunar surface. By building the first permanent outpost near the lunar south pole, where the water ice is, the US is effectively setting the zoning laws for the 21st century.
The CIS lunar transportation market is projected to be worth $19 billion between now and 2030. So, if you want to mine the moon for helium 3 or set up a propellant depot in the 2030s, you'll be doing it on an American regulated highway. And in a sense, this version of the fourth American Empire, the one that is planning to expand into space and expand on the moon, that's actually mimicking what the United States did with its first empire, the manifest destiny one, the one that spread out so far and so quick and built up so much that no other
powers could come and claim land around them. Now, the next thing here about the fourth American Empire is actually one of the more controversial ones. You see, for decades, the United States told the world a story. It was a story about the invisible hand. The United States told everyone that the government should stay out of the way and that the free market was a wild horse that ran best if it wasn't fenced in.
But as of the last few years, the fourth American Empire stopped telling this story. Instead, it started building a national champion model. In the 20th century, we called this industrial policy, and it was a dirty word in Washington. So now we can take a look at Intel again, which is something I mentioned earlier. In the old world, if a company struggled, it went bankrupt or got bought out by a competitor.
But as of recently, the US government was doing something radical through the chips act in the subsequent national security grants. The government effectively took a 9.9% equity stake in Intel's foundry business. And this was a large signal that the US is okay with potentially not being a completely free market anymore.
It might be becoming something like state capitalism. The US government is now a shareholder in the world's most important hardware. This creates what economists call a dualuse corporate structure. The company remains private and competitive, but its north star is no longer the quarterly earnings report.
It's the Department of Defense's road map. And we've seen this before in history. I mean, think of the Dutch East India Company, the VOCC. It had its own ships, its own army and its own currency. But it existed to serve the interests of the Dutch state or the British East India Company which effectively governed India on behalf of London.
The fourth American Empire is reviving the model for the Silicon. And yes, the US is buying equity and companies, but they're also handing out great deals to its favorite tech giants. And these deals come with strings. So, if you want a $5 billion grant to build a data center in Virginia, you must grant the government priority access to your compute during a national emergency.
If you want to launch a new satellite constellation, you must ensure it is milspec compatible from day one. The line between Silicon Valley and the government or the Pentagon, it's becoming more blurred as of the last few years. And this is a pretty big shift. I mean from the third empire, third empire wanted efficiency.
It wanted the cheapest chips from Taiwan and the cheapest batteries from China. The fourth empire wants resiliency. It is willing to pay 30% more for a product if that product is made within the fortress. Essentially, this is state capitalism with American characteristics. And so these are the bones of what the fourth American Empire is going to be if the American Empire doesn't fall.
And that brings up the question, will the empire fall or will we actually see the fourth empire? So when we talk about the fall of Rome, we usually imagine a single fiery night in 476 AD when the barbarians broke down the gates. But that's a myth. Rome didn't fall so much as it liquefied. It shifted. It moved its capital to Constantinople and lasted another thousand years as the Byzantine Empire.
They didn't even call themselves Byzantines, by the way, in the Byzantine Empire. They still called themselves Romans. So, the question for 2027 isn't whether America will survive. It's whether the third empire must die so that the fourth can live. Now, here's the case for the fall. And if you're a pessimist, the data from 2026 so far is pretty loud.
So, as of right now, the United States national debt, as I'm checking, is $ 38.45 trillion. Interest payments alone are now the fastest growing federal expense, consuming roughly 19% of the federal spending. The United States is currently paying more to rent, the past debt, than they are building the future infrastructure of the country.
Even though the US is going to be projected to grow at about two and a half percent to maybe three and a half percent very optimistically in 2026, the BRICS nations are expanding their share of the global pie faster and most of those countries are at minimum hitting 3 and a half% GDP growth. There's also just a lot of other question marks currently going on in the United States and one of which is the current administration seems to be doing very random yet very powerful decisions on a whim.
It seems like sometimes who knows if they'll have any alliances in the next year or two or if they'll get tariffed or even embargoed by some of their big trading partners. There's potential that a war could theoretically start soon even though many think that is an unlikely scenario. There's just a lot of question marks going on right now which could lead to the fall of the United States before the rebirth.
Just something to leave you with here is empires don't usually end because they get conquered. They end because they become irrelevant. They stop being the place where the future happens. Is America becoming irrelevant or is it just rebranding? You know, in the future, we might look back and realize that the decline we all worried about was actually just the noise of a machine changing gears.
You know, there were many times throughout, for example, the Roman Empire where some of the writers, politicians, historians, they were saying in the moment that Rome was going to collapse at any second, and yet it hadn't even hit its peak yet. And so, theoretically, that could be something happening with the United States right now.
But what do you guys think? Let me know in the comments below. And make sure to click on my documentaries playlist if you want to see more videos like this. Also, please subscribe. Most of you that watch my videos are not subscribed. So, click on that, subscribe, hit the notification bell, do all that stuff that the people say. And thanks for watching.
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