Trump’s second term is the beginning of the end of the American empire, including the Western geopolitical order fashioned by US power after the Second World War. But in the ashes of this decline, a liminal space is emerging for a new system.

2025 – the Year of the Fall

In 2016, a futurist and doyen of peace studies who had predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union told me he had used the same framework to pinpoint the coming collapse of the United States. The late Johan Galtung, a renowned Nobel Prize-nominated sociologist, had made his original prediction of US collapse in the year 2000. The process would start, he warned, in 2025.

It’s now 2025, and the fulcrum of American collapse can be found at the seat of the US federal government under a second Trump administration. Nearly a decade ago, Galtung had said that he saw Trump as an accelerant of American collapse at the beginning of his first term. Now under his second term, Galtung’s extraordinary prescience is on display again as we see a second Trump administration tear apart the fabric of the US government, democratic checks and balances, and the rule of law. Galtung had warned that as American power retracts globally, this could end up reflecting internally – even resulting in the potential breakup of the US.

Back in 2010, in my book A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save it, I had warned that the escalating synergy between multiple, simultaneous ecological, energy and  economic crises – what’s now fashionably called the ‘polycrisis’ – would, without systemic transformation, drive processes of state-militarisation and a shift to authoritarian control as incumbents seek to shore-up power and profits against the forces of disruption and destabilisation: the result would be a great Otherisation. Large governing structures such as the United States or European Union would also increasingly struggle to maintain territorial integrity. And the shift to authoritarian militarisation would increase chances of exclusionary political violence.

By 2017, in Failing States, Collapsing Systems: Biophysical Triggers of Political Violence, I elaborated on this, setting out a framework that demonstrates how the US and Europe faced a growing risk of state-failure in the face of such crises. This is being driven by the inability of conventional political and economic policies to deal with their intensifying impacts on people’s lives.

We’ve already seen the beginnings of this with Brexit, and the emerging nationalist forces urging a breakup of the EU. We are now on the brink of a crippling of the US federal government that is so consequential it undermines the unity of the American nation.

The far-right takeover of the United States government and the series of extraordinary actions of the second Trump administration amount to a ‘shock and awe’ display of power. These actions do not really manifest strength, but signify major systemic ruptures that are the precursor to collapse.

Looking through the lens of the phase shift

I derive this conclusion from planetary phase shift theory, my systems framework for understanding the life-cycle of human civilisation in terms of energy, information, and organisation.

Planetary phase shift theory draws on C.S. Holling’s adaptive cycle model, which describes four phases to the life-cycle of any living system: a growth and accumulation phase, a conservation/stability phase, a release (collapse) phase, and a reorganisation (renewal) phase which is the creative incubator for a new life-cycle.

For many years, researchers assumed that Holling’s adaptive cycle was a powerful heuristic device, a conceptual model that captured key ecosystem dynamics but was ultimately still just that – a conceptual model. However, in my paper, I pull together the data showing that the adaptive cycle is not just a metaphor but accurately mirrors the dynamics of living systems at all scales from cells to civilisations, and therefore appears to reflect the real dynamics of flows of energy and information in living systems.

This has momentous implications for the current moment, when we situate US collapse in the context of the life cycle of industrial civilisation.

As the centre of a unipolar order which is now unravelling, Trumpocracy 2.0 is therefore the fulcrum of the movement of industrial civilisation through the “release” stage – a period of breakdown in which entrenched structures and institutions unravel under their own rigidity and contradictions​.

In Holling’s terms, this release (or omega) phase is when accumulated resources and energy are released in a cascade of systemic failures, creating a liminal space of breakdown and uncertainty that simultaneously opens up potential for renewal.​

The release stage manifests as a collapse dynamic: old paradigms and power structures begin to break apart, opening up a new (if turbulent) possibility space for transformation. Crucially, this phase is inevitable once a system has reached critical instability – you cannot prevent the release stage of a civilisational cycle, only modify its pathway​.

Instead, society must navigate through it and begin seeding the elements of the next system. In summary, Trumpocracy 2.0 is merely a symptom of our current polycrisis as the hub of the system passes the threshold of critical instability in the context of a civilisational breakdown phase (release), characterised by disorder and entropy as the old industrial order decays, but also pregnant with the potential for a new system to emerge​​.

The USSR as a model of collapse

In fact, the US path to collapse under Trumpocracy 2.0 may be closer to that of the USSR than many imagine.

One of the most respected economists in the world, Dr Wim Naudé, has examined some of the core features of the breakdown of the USSR in a fascinating new study, ‘The End of the Empire that Entrepreneurship Built: How Seven Sources of Rot will Undo the West’, published in Foundations and Trends in Entrepreneurship.

Naudé, who is among the top 2% of cited scientists in the world, is Visiting Professor at RWTH Aachen University, Germany, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Previously he held the Chair in Economics at University College Cork, Ireland, before which he was Dean of Maastricht School of Management and Special Chair in Business and Entrepreneurship in Emerging Markets at the Maastricht University School of Economics and Business in The Netherlands. 

Wim Naudé’s argues that the West is experiencing systemic decline in ways similar to the Soviet Union’s collapse. He identifies seven key 'sources of rot' that contributed to the USSR’s failure and are now manifesting in the West:

1. Military-Industrial Complex & Kinetic Diplomacy – Over-reliance on military power, excessive defense spending, and an economy increasingly tied to warfare.
2. Rejection and Capture of Science – Politicisation of scientific research, erosion of trust in expertise, and ideological attacks on institutions.
3. Disincentivising Innovation – Declining entrepreneurial dynamism, regulatory stagnation, and economic policies that favour incumbents over new industries.
4. Technological Conservatism – Resistance to adopting new technologies, clinging to outdated systems, and favoring status quo over disruptive innovation.
5. Informational Bubbles and Sensemaking Crisis – Fragmentation of truth, rise of misinformation, and inability of society to reach consensus on basic facts.
6. Bankers’ Takeover – Financialisation of the economy, prioritisation of speculative gains over productive investment, and increasing inequality.
7. The End of the Hydrocarbon Age – Dependence on fossil fuels despite global shifts toward renewable energy, making the West vulnerable to economic and environmental crises.

While Naudé applies these to the West broadly, it’s clear that the fulcrum of this decline is emanating from the most powerful economy that fashioned the Western order – the United States. These factors indicate the US is following a trajectory similar to the USSR before its collapse: economic stagnation, institutional decay, and ideological rigidity preventing adaptation. Ironically, the focal point for Naudé’s analysis is not ‘woke’ ideas, but something foundational to capitalism: entrepreneurship.

Once the engine of the West’s rise, entrepreneurship is now constrained by bureaucratic inertia, monopolistic dominance, and short-term economic policies. Systemic collapse, he warns, may be inevitable unless fundamental structural reforms are made.

Naudé’s ‘Seven Sources or Rot’ and the Release Stage of the Planetary Phase Shift

What happens when we examine these seven structural factors through the lens of planetary phase shift theory? All of them amount to symptoms of systemic instability that align with the collapse dynamics of the third stage of civilisation’s life-cycle, the release stage. Let’s look at Trumpocracy 2.0 by integrating Naudé’s analysis with the planetary phase shift framework.

• Military-Industrial Overreach: The West’s increasingly powerful military-industrial complex thrives on a perpetual “Warfare Economy”​. In a failing system, ruling powers double down on military expansion and authoritarian control to “stave off” crises – a hallmark of the release stage. As crises deepen, there is a lurch toward militarism and authoritarianism as elites attempt to maintain order through force. This overextension of imperial power is ultimately self-defeating and accelerates collapse​, much as late-stage empires in history exhausted themselves through military overspending and conflict. Trumpocracy 2.0’s hawkish policies, “America First” nationalism, and ideological propensity for territorial expansion (threatening to annex Canada, Greenland, Panama and beyond) exemplify this overreach. Such militaristic overreach breeds instability and drain on resources – classic release-phase symptoms.
• Rejection of Science and Expertise: Naudé notes a decline in scientific research and respect for expertise in the West.​ This rejection of science cripples society’s adaptive capacity exactly when it’s needed to solve compounding crises. In the release stage, dominant actors often ignore or deny reality to cling to ideological comfort. Incumbents often don’t understand, or care to understand, reality as the world changes, and thus double down on old, outmoded beliefs – which however were linked to their earlier glory days​. The 2025 Trump administration’s open war on climate science and public health guidance (e.g. destroying scientific institutions, dismantling environmental regulations, banning and suppressing research across the natural and social sciences) reflects this dynamic. By undermining science, leaders blind themselves to systemic risks – hastening breakdown as problems like pandemics or climate shocks outpace the diminished capacity to respond. This erosion of truth and expertise is a release-phase phenomenon, contributing to poor decisions and systemic failure.
• Stagnation of Innovation: Real innovation in the West is increasingly disincentivised; the entrepreneurial dynamism that once drove growth has given way to rent-seeking and monopolisation​. In a mature system nearing collapse, new ideas and adaptations are stifled by entrenched incumbents. The industrial-era institutions resist change, even as conditions demand fresh solutions​. We see this in technological stagnation: for example, despite the economic superiority of sustainable technologies, legacy interests (fossil fuel companies, conservative bureaucrats) slow their adoption. The result is an innovation drought. Incumbents double-down on the old and familiar in search of certainty amidst escalating uncertainty. This explains policy choices like subsidising coal and oil while defunding clean energy R&D – short-term clinging to obsolete industries that forestalls innovation. Such stagnation is characteristic of the release stage, as the system’s internal complexity and rigidity prevent it from adapting, leading to breakdown.
• Technological Conservatism: Related to innovation stagnation is a broader technological inertia. The West shows reluctance to deploy radical new paradigms (e.g. decentralised energy, open source AI governance frameworks) and instead keeps reinforcing hierarchical 20th-century infrastructures built for increasingly obsolete industries. This halts progress just when bold innovation is most needed​. In the release phase, this manifests as clinging to incumbent technologies and business models even as they become unviable, or shoehorning genuine technological innovation into stagnant old paradigm governance frameworks that restrict their benefits to a few. Incumbents respond to chaos by maintaining prevailing hierarchical structures that are in decline, rather than embracing the new​. For instance, the 2025 Trump administration’s policies aimed at reviving coal mining or protecting Big Oil echo this mindset. Such policies attempt to resurrect or preserve dying industries instead of investing in emerging alternatives, reflecting a fear of change. This conservatism exacerbates collapse: by refusing to evolve, the system becomes more brittle, unable to buffer shocks or leverage new opportunities.
• Informational Breakdown: Healthy societies require accurate information flow in order to adapt to the real world, but Naudé warns that the flow of information in the West is increasingly distorted, undermining both entrepreneurship and democracy. Symptoms include rampant misinformation, propaganda, and polarised media ecosystems – all signs of a release-phase unravelling of the information commons. Our sense-making apparatus is overwhelmed and disoriented by the changing system​. Prevailing institutions and media, built for the old paradigm, cannot effectively interpret the complex crises of the release stage, leading to confusion and conspiracy in the public sphere​. This breakdown is evident in the 2025 era: social media echo chambers and state-sponsored disinformation fuel extreme partisan polarisation, eroding social cohesion. Trumpocracy 2.0 has become a hub for sophisticated disinformation campaigns driving a rise in extremist right-wing support, seeking to exploit chaos​. The result is a self-reinforcing feedback loop of fragmentation: as trust in institutions and facts collapses, collective problem-solving fails, pushing the system further into dysfunction. Such informational pathologies both mark and worsen the release phase of collapse.

• Financialisation and Economic Fragility: The Western economy has become heavily financialised, with wealth flowing into speculative finance instead of productive investment​. This creates short-term gains at the expense of long-term stability, making the system more prone to booms, busts, and inequality-driven crises. This trend reflects a late-stage system exhausting its productive frontier and turning to ever more abstract value extraction (debt, complex financial instruments) – analogous to an organism living off its fat reserves. As I’ve written extensively elsewhere, a root cause of this dynamic is declining energy returns on investment (EROI) across the global fossil fuel system on which economic flows depend. Financialisation was used to continue driving economic growth through systematic debt-creation, contributing to the 2008 crash and continuing to threaten systemic collapse. Declining net energy returns from fossil fuels since the 1970s have coincided with slowing growth, rising inequality, and persistent economic fragility​. Rather than reforming this unsustainable model, incumbent elites in a release-phase system often double down (e.g. deregulating finance, inflating asset bubbles) to paper over structural decline. The 2025 Trump administration’s policies – such as tax cuts for the wealthy, rollback of financial regulations, and resorted to tariffs along with plans to annex territories with considerable natural resources – exemplify this. It temporarily props up the old system but increases risk, contributing to the instability characteristic of collapse.
• Fossil Fuel Dependence: Finally, the West’s structural dependence on hydrocarbons has become a source of rot as we enter the end of the hydrocarbon age​. Industrial civilisation grew during an era of abundant high-EROI fossil fuels; now those returns are diminishing, and climate change imposed by continued fossil dependence is destabilising the planet. Declining EROI from fossil fuels is driving incumbent industries to obsolescence, forcing a fundamental energy transition​. In the release stage, however, the old energy regime fights to survive, even as it undermines the system’s viability. We see this in policies that expand oil and gas extraction despite ecological and geological limits, and against diminishing energy returns, reflecting a dangerous inertia. Yet the incumbent fossil fuel-centric infrastructure is in terminal decline, colliding with an emerging renewable energy system​. The Trump administration’s aggressive promotion of drilling, coal, and pipeline projects – effectively doubling down on fossil dependence – illustrates the release-phase pattern of escalating the very drivers of collapse. This not only worsens climate crises (heatwaves, fires, extreme weather) but also leaves the economy ill-prepared for the inevitable transition, thereby deepening the instability.

Collectively, these seven “rots” mirror the pathologies expected during a release (collapse) phase of a civilisation. Each reflects systems that have exceeded their adaptive capacity: overextended militarism, suppressed knowledge, inertia against innovation, entrenched technologies, dysfunctional information flows, hollowed-out finances, and dysfunctional energy use. All these dysfunctions are symptomatic of industrial civilisation’s breakdown​.”

They create self-reinforcing crises – from polarisation and conflict to institutional paralysis – that indicate the incumbent system is in its death throes​. They are part of the ongoing collapse of the prevailing industrial paradigm

The challenge, then, is how to navigate this turbulent release stage through an unfolding reorganisation phase, that lays the groundwork for the next life-cycle of civilisation.

From Release to Reorganisation

While the release stage is fraught with chaos, it also creates the opportunity for renewal. The seeds of the next civilisational cycle are already sprouting within the old, and by scaling key organisational changes and production system innovations, humanity can move through the reorganisation stage​ toward a life cycle enabling abundance for all.

​These critical shifts include:

Revolution in Energy and Production Systems:

A suite of disruptive innovations across all fundamental sectors – energy, transportation, food, materials, and information – is driving a phase transition to new production systems​

Central to these is the renewable energy transformation. Empirical trends show that solar, wind, and battery technologies are advancing exponentially and will outcompete fossil fuels within decades​

Unlike oil, gas, and coal, renewables become cheaper and more efficient the more they are deployed, yielding improving energy returns​

​This means the emerging energy system can potentially generate far more net energy with far less ecological harm. As I’ve documented elsewhere, this new system creates the unprecedented opportunity to fully circulate all materials in the system at near 100% levels of efficiency, eliminating the need for endless extraction. Similar upheavals are underway in food (e.g. precision fermentation and cellular agriculture), transport (electric and autonomous vehicles), manufacturing (automation and circular design), and digital technology (AI and open information networks)​

Scaling these innovations is crucial to replace the failing components of the old system and provide the material basis for a new life cycle. I call this emerging configuration a “post-materialist technological infrastructure” that could enable a circular, regenerative economy rather than an extractive one​

By investing in and deploying such technologies (clean energy, circular production, sustainable agriculture, etc.) at scale, we plant the seeds of the next life-cycle amid the decay of the old​.

Decentralised and Participatory Organisational Structures:

Technological innovation alone is not enough; organisational and cultural transformation is equally vital​.

The new decentralised technologies work best in a context of distributed, participatory governance – a stark contrast to the top-down hierarchies of the industrial age​.

To move into reorganisation, we need to redesign institutions and governance models at all levels. Key changes include decentralising ownership and decision-making in emerging systems. For example, rather than centralising the renewable energy grid under a few corporate oligarchs, the new model could be an energy commons: energy infrastructure owned at the community, co-op, or household level, with the freedom to share surplus power​

This sort of distributed ownership would democratise energy access and distribute prosperity in ways that were unthinkable in the old system.

Similarly, production could be organised through local and regional networks – think community-supported agriculture, community-owned precision fermentation hubs, makerspaces, platform cooperatives – that increase resilience and equity. Politically, a shift toward decentralised governance means empowering cities, localities, and grassroots participation in decision-making, rather than all power flowing through centralised nation-state or corporate bureaucracies. Our current industrial OS (operating system) is built on centralised, fragmented hierarchies that are now losing effectiveness​.

To foster reorganisation, a new governance OS must emerge that is networked, distributed and participatory, aligning with the capabilities of new technology and the needs of communities​.

In practice, this could involve new forms of deliberative democracy, global cooperation on planetary boundaries, and inclusive institutions that prioritise well-being over pure GDP growth. Scaling up experiments in participatory governance (from local citizen assemblies to transnational climate cooperation) will help replace the failing command-and-control structures with a more adaptive, inclusive order.

Cultural Shift to Regenerative Values:

Underpinning organisational change is a deeper shift in values and mindset – essentially a cultural innovation. The industrial-era worldview of extreme materialism and extraction is incompatible with the emerging phase​.

A successful reorganisation requires embracing ecological values of reciprocity, and long-term stewardship of the planet. This means redefining prosperity: instead of maximising consumption and GDP at all costs, the new paradigm prioritises human and ecological well-being - the health and wellbeing of people and nature, together.

Initiatives like the well-being economy, Doughnut Economics, or Gross National Happiness are examples of this value shift gaining traction, and scientifically-robust frameworks that should be scaled up. Organisational changes must be coupled with this cultural evolution – for instance, businesses adopting triple-bottom-line objectives, and governments measuring success via new well-being metrics. We need an operating system that recognises the importance of regenerating the earth, rather than simply extracting from it without limits – and ironically, this alone is the pathway to unleashing entrepreneurial spirit, innovation, prosperity and abundance.

Scaling up education, narratives, and policies that reinforce these regenerative values is key to moving through the reorganisation stage, because it aligns human behaviour with the requirements of the new technological infrastructure (like respecting planetary boundaries and sharing the gains broadly). In short, a new cultural narrative of human empowerment through interconnection (or interbeing), resilience, and science must replace the collapsing narrative of endless growth and conquest. This shift in collective values will support the institutional innovations (like energy commons or circular economies) that mark the reorganisation phase.

By implementing and scaling these changes – rapid deployment of renewable technologies, decentralising economic and political power, and institutionalising a culture of planetary regeneration– society can begin to tip the balance from chaotic release to creative reorganisation.

Even as Trumpocracy 2.0 rampages through Washington, real shoots of material and cultural reorganisation are emerging within the chaos​. The task is to nurture these shoots into a coherent new system. Each innovation or organisational reform that is successfully scaled (be it a community solar grid, a local food cooperative, or a multinational climate accord) builds resilience and coherence in the new pattern, helping it out-compete the collapsing legacy system.

A New Civilisational Cycle

Of course, the window of opportunity is narrow, as the longer we remain stuck in the old paradigm, the more we risk a deeper collapse​.

However, the very forces driving collapse are simultaneously driving transformation: the failure of old institutions is spurring experiments in new ones, and the crisis of fossil fuels is bound up with the escalating catalysis of rapid clean energy innovation.

Those of us who are waking up to this must make far more planetary-oriented decisions at all levels now​ – mobilising in support of next-system technologies, inclusive institutions and postmaterialist paradigms. This is what can tilt the trajectory from a dark age to a renewal. We need to focus efforts on creating a new centre of gravity to attract attention and action.

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