In terms of physical resources and power potential, the American Empire died in 1975 when US forces fled Southeast Asia. The nation had already peaked in energy production, steel production and per capita wages. The future would only bring further decline and debt.

Even as this death was dawning upon the power structures of the United States, however, the petrodollar system was expanding and invading trade, finance, and market appropriation.

A group of policy advocates already known amongst themselves as the Neoconservatives noticed this.

They recognized the potential for renewed imperialism inherent in the petrodollar, and so the majors financed another drive, through this 'free money' machine & wielding all that had been learned from the Cold War, toward global American hegemony.

In this they were successful.

Brandishing the laurel of having won The Cold War, the Neoconservatives accelerated their mad, doomed-to-fail, imperial program. They goaded Iraq in 1990, struck Somalia, splintered Yugoslavia (a dry run forRussian Federation), and fostered Islamic terrorism in the Caucasus.

Had the Exxon exploratory energy wells beneath and astride the Caspian Sea not been such a massive disappointment history might have been different.

The results came back negative however, and in a panic (having believed a “second Saudi Arabia” lay under the Caspian) the Neocons turned southwards to conquer the last remaining oil reserves on the planet. In 2001, one must recall, Russian Federation seemed about to disintegrate

The Neocons, now under Vice-President Dick Cheney, arranged a casus belli and invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. The original plan entailed a complete redrawing (via serial invasions) of the map of the Middle East, culminating in a triumphant re-conquest of the nation of Iran.

Things did not go according to plan, however.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not the quick victories people were promised. The planet crossed its production of hydrocarbons peak in 2006; economic activity, thereafter, became a zero-sum game.

Consequently, the old magic no longer worked for the Empire’s client states. Resistance to American hegemony grew, but the Neocons could only double-down, for to do otherwise would have initiated economic collapse.

Libya, Syria and Ukraine were the results of this final Neocon throw-of-the-dice. The first opened the world’s eyes to the lie of Western Civilisation; the second resulted in America’s greatest defeat since Vietnam; and the third determined the American general election in 2016.

The Neoconservatives, who had been the steersmen of US foreign policy for nearly thirty years, were not marked for destruction because of Libya or Syria. Those catastrophes were important, but it was the Ukraine fiasco that actually did the trick.

The so-called Anti-Terrorist Operation by the US proxy regime in Kiev against the oblasts of Lugansk and Donetsk was the straw that finally broke the camel’s back.

For the very first time in history, the Russians decided to defeat the West once and for all.

They could see, in the destruction of the cities, towns and villages of the Donbass, what the Neocons intended for them. Sometime in very late 2014 or very early 2015 (perhaps even as the Debaltsevo cauldron closed upon Kiev) the fateful decision was made.