There is no question that the last century, and particularly since the end of the Cold War, the world has been characterized by US hegemony exercised through its military and economic power, and control over financial institutions. But in a long article in Wired with the above title, Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman argue that under the Trump regime, the US is starting to follow the pattern of big tech entities like Google and Facebook and that this is eventually going to lead to a decline in US power and influence in the world.

Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the tactics change. The platform owners start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop. Then they start squeezing vendors and advertisers too.

People don’t usually think of military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations as platforms. But that’s what they are. When American allies buy advanced military technologies such as F-35 fighter jets, they’re getting not just a plane but the associated suite of communications technologies, parts supply, and technological support. When businesses engage in global finance and trade, they regularly route their transactions through a platform called the dollar clearing system, administered by just a handful of US-regulated institutions. And when nations need to establish internet connectivity in hard-to-reach places, chances are they’ll rely on a constellation of satellites—Starlink—run by a single company with deep ties to the American state, Elon Musk’s SpaceX. As with Facebook and Amazon, American hegemony is sustained by network logic, which makes all these platforms difficult and expensive to break away from.

For decades, America’s allies accepted US control of these systems, because they believed in the American commitment to a “rules-based international order.” They can’t persuade themselves of that any longer. Not in a world where President Trump threatens to annex Canada, vows to acquire Greenland from Denmark, and announces that foreign officials may be banned from entering the United States if they “demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies.”

Ever since Trump retook office in January, in fact, rapid enshittification has become the organizing principle of US statecraft. This time around, Trumpworld understands that—in controlling the infrastructure layer of global finance, technology, and security—it has vast machineries of coercion at its disposal. As Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, recently put it, “The United States is beginning to monetize its hegemony.”

So what is an ally to do? Like the individual consumers who are trapped by Google Search or Facebook as the core product deteriorates, many are still learning just how hard it is to exit the network. And like the countless startups that have attempted to create an alternative to Twitter or Facebook over the years—most now forgotten, a few successful—other allies are now desperately scrambling to figure out how to build a network of their own.

The article goes on to describe in detail how having the US dollar as the reserve currency for many nations enables the US to control them, because what is known as the “dollar clearing system’, a usually invisible part of the global economic infrastructure, works to achieve this.

Here’s how it works: Global banks convert currencies to and from US dollars so their customers can sell goods internationally. When a Japanese firm sells semiconductors to a tech company in Mexico, they’ll likely conduct the transaction in dollars—because they want a universal currency that can quickly be used with other trading partners. So these firms may directly ask for payment in dollars, or else their banks may turn pesos into dollars and then use those dollars to buy yen, shuffling money through accounts in US-regulated banks like Citibank or J.P. Morgan, which “clear” the transaction.

So dollar clearing is an expedient. It’s also the chief enforcement mechanism of US financial policy across the globe. If foreign banks don’t implement US financial sanctions and other measures, they risk losing access to US dollar clearing and going under. This threat is so existentially dire that, when [Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie] Lam was placed under US sanctions, even Chinese banks refused to have anything to do with her. She had to keep piles of cash scattered around her mansion to pay her bills.

That maneuver against Lam was, at least on its face, about standing up for democracy. But in his second term, Trump has wasted no time in weaponizing the dollar clearing system against any target of his choosing. In February, for example, the administration imposed sanctions on the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court after he indicted Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged war crimes. Now, like Lam in Hong Kong, the official has become a financial and political pariah: Reportedly, his UK bank has frozen his accounts, and Microsoft has shut down his email address.

On the communication issue, people have long warned of the danger that Elon Musk’s space program poses not only for the world but also for the US. His Starlink satellite system makes up about 65 percent of all active satellites in orbit. Other countries are realizing how vulnerable they are to this communication concentration.

On the eve of Trump’s second inaugural, Canada was planning to use Starlink to bring broadband to its vast rural hinterlands, Italy was eyeing it for secure diplomatic communications, and Ukraine had already become dependent on it for military operations. But as Musk joined the Trump administration’s inner circle, a dependence on Starlink came to seem increasingly dangerous.

In late February, the Trump administration reportedly threatened to withdraw Starlink access to Ukraine unless the country handed over rights to exploit its mineral reserves to the US. In a March confrontation on X, Musk boasted that Ukraine’s “entire front line would collapse” if he turned off Starlink. In response, Poland’s foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, tried to stand up for an ally. He tweeted that Poland was paying for Ukraine’s access to the service. Musk’s reply? “Be quiet, small man. You pay a tiny fraction of the cost. And there is no substitute for Starlink.”

Another focus is the control of cloud computing by Amazon and Microsoft that can threaten the databases that countries rely upon.

As long as the US was using its power in a restrained way, at least superficially, and suggesting that it valued its allies and that their needs were being taken into consideration, other countries were willing to work within that hegemony. But Trump has ripped away that veil of collegiality. His attitude is that other countries simply must bow down to the will of the US and he asserts that in crude and obnoxious ways, seeming to delight in humiliating them. His behavior is is similar to that of the emperors of old exercising suzerainty and treated other countries as vassal states that needed to pay tribute.

You can be sure that the countries that are trying to form blocs to counterbalance US hegemony, such as the BRICS+ consortium consisting of currently 10 countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates, that are working on creating alternatives to US hegemony.

The EU is in a position to create similar alternatives but it is compromised because of its deep entanglement with the US through NATO. But even they have realized that they need to find alternatives to US control of so many aspects of the global economy.

But moving away from US platforms entails large short-term costs which is why they have been slow to do so.

If allies keep building atop US platforms, they render themselves even more vulnerable to American coercion. But if they strike out on their own, they may pay a steeper, more immediate price. In March, the Canadian province of Ontario canceled its deal with Starlink to bring satellite internet to its poorer rural areas. Now, Canada will have to pay much more money to build physical internet connections or else wait for its own satellite constellations to come online.

If other governments followed suit in other domains—breaking their deep interconnections with US weapons systems, or finding alternative cloud platforms for vital government and economic services—it would mean years of economic hardship. Everyone would be poorer. But that’s exactly what some world leaders have been banding together to contemplate.

IN EUROPE, DISCUSSIONS are coalescing around an ambitious idea called EuroStack, an EU-led “digital supply chain” that would give Europe technological sovereignty independent from the US and other countries.

It is only a matter of time before they succeed in some areas, especially in terms of economic and communications alternatives, if not militarily. And the consequences for the US will be felt domestically as well.

In time, US citizens may find themselves trapped in a diminished, nightmare America—like a post-Musk Twitter at scale—where everything works badly, everything can be turned against you, and everyone else has fled. De-enshittifying the platforms of American power isn’t just an urgent priority for allies, then. It’s an imperative for Americans too.

In the heyday of empires, they seem invincible and their reach is vast, giving the impression that they will be around forever. This leads to arrogance and hubris and we see that nakedly in the Trump era. But empires do die and their decline is usually marked by the kind of behavior of their leaders that we see in the US now.

So Trump, by swaggering and throwing his weight around, far from making America great again, will eventually find himself labeled as the man who presided over the decline in US hegemony.