Empires do not die with a bang—they default. No civilization in history has survived the moment its debts outgrew its power to collect. I first read David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years in 2012, drawn to its anthropological exploration of how debt is interwoven with barter, religion, slavery, law, war, and the very notion of civilization.
Reading it again in the second decade of the twenty-first century, I find it less a historical study and more a prophetic text—a ledger of civilizational rise and inevitable collapse. This time, one revelation cuts through like a blade: the American empire is not merely an empire of influence or innovation. It is, more profoundly and more precariously, an empire of debt. And that empire now trembles on the edge of implosion.
Graeber, with anthropological precision and revolutionary insight, showed that “markets are founded and usually maintained by systematic state violence.” This is not just a reflection on antiquity—it is an indictment of American-style capitalism, which sustains its market supremacy through global militarism and financial coercion.
The Pax Americana has not been built by trade alone, but by a peculiar alchemy of aircraft carriers and credit ratings, drone strikes and dollar diplomacy. Its economic order is not based on mutual value creation, but on debt enforcement—enabled, reinforced, and policed by overwhelming military force.
America's global dominance, then, is not the supremacy of a benevolent market, but the coercive apparatus of a creditor-state. In the guise of international institutions and alliances, it has institutionalized an imperial form of usury, where debtor nations dance to the tune of Washington’s debt collectors: the IMF, the World Bank, and even the global bond markets.
“There’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence,” Graeber wrote, “than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.”
But the problem with debt as a pillar of an empire is that it works only as long as others believe you’ll be able to collect. The moment you can’t—or worse, the moment you no longer have the appetite to enforce your collections—the illusion shatters.
The United States is now approaching that moment. Its national debt has swollen to an astronomical $36 trillion, more than 124% of its GDP—a burden unseen since the aftermath of World War II. Even more staggering is the annual interest bill: over $1 trillion, a sum that eclipses even its formidable military budget. The empire is now paying more to maintain the illusion of solvency than it does to maintain its soldiers, ships, and satellites.
This isn’t merely a fiscal headache—it’s a civilizational migraine. Interest rates are rising as the Federal Reserve tries to tame inflation. But as rates rise, bond prices fall. Global creditors — China, Japan, and others—are dumping the U.S. Treasuries, wary of the risks and the returns. This forces the U.S. to borrow at ever-higher costs, compounding its debt burden. What emerges is a doom loop: debt begets interest, interest demands more debt, and faith in the dollar—America’s most potent weapon—begins to erode.
Without the ability to militarily enforce debt obligations on other nations, America risks losing its access to cheap, endless capital. And without that capital, the machinery that keeps its domestic politics lubricated—entitlements, subsidies, corporate bailouts, and military largesse—begins to grind and sputter. An empire cannot long survive when it must choose between paying its creditors and pacifying its citizens.
Every empire has its mythology. For Rome, it was the divine order of the Caesars. For Britain, the civilizing mission. For America, it is the sanctity of the dollar and the inevitability of growth under its capitalist system. But myths are fragile things. The moment they are questioned, they unravel. Once the dollar is no longer seen as the world’s ultimate store of value—once its debt instruments are no longer treated as safe havens but as liabilities—the edifice will crack.
India, like most Asian nations, lies within the blast radius of this implosion. As the American empire turns inward to grapple with its own insolvency, the geopolitical space it occupied may fragment into chaos—or opportunity. We must be ready to navigate a world where Washington no longer writes the rules, and where economic sovereignty is earned, not inherited.
In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Graeber reminded us that debt is not just an economic arrangement—it is a moral narrative. And that narrative is beginning to collapse under its own contradictions. When an empire survives by indebting the world while enriching itself, it eventually loses the credibility to moralize. And when it loses the power to compel, its debts become just numbers—unpaid, unpayable, and unheeded.
This is not the fall of Rome. It is something more insidious: the slow-motion unraveling of an empire that bet its soul on compound interest. The world must now ask: What comes after the empire of IOUs?
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