The Empire in Self-Destruction: Inevitable Collapse | Fabian Scheidler

## Introduction and book thesis What collapses is not simply an empire or an economic model but a complex machine of power that has, for centuries, converted people and ecosystems into fuel for accumulation. The conversation foregrounds Fabian Scheidler’s provocative claim: modern global crisis — ecological breakdown, social disintegration, and geopolitical convulsion — is the inevitable product of what he calls the “megamachine.” This megamachine fuses militarism, concentrated capital, media-driven ideology, and a logic of linear force into a civilization-sized mechanism whose single irrational imperative is endless growth. Crucially, the argument reframes decline not as a quiet sunset but as an intensifying danger: as the system loses dominance, it can become more violent, more reckless, and therefore more destructive. Scheidler’s thesis draws on a long historical sweep. The megamachine is not a novelty of the twenty-first century but an outgrowth of 500 years of Western-driven capitalism, in which military power and commercial expansion were mutually constitutive. The system’s institutional architecture — laws that prioritize property, media that normalize accumulation, and states that arm themselves to enforce order — produces not only inequality but ecological tipping points. The conversation insists that the present moment is a terminal phase of a hegemonic cycle: the Western-led order is unraveling, and that unraveling is producing cascading crises whose character is shaped by the instruments the system has honed for centuries. ## End of Western hegemony The exchange makes clear that what is unraveling is first and foremost a subsystem: the era of Western hegemony that imposed a particular configuration of state, capital, and military power on the globe. Scheidler emphasizes that empires rise and fall; the United States’ unipolar moment was always vulnerable to structural decline. Economic indicators reflect this shift: the G7’s share of global GDP has halved since the late twentieth century while the BRICS and other emerging blocs command a growing share of production. Decline, however, does not mean impotence. The conversation stresses a paradox of fading power: when a hegemon loses relative economic weight, it often leans harder on the one instrument it can still wield at scale — its military — producing escalatory dynamics rather than peaceful transitions. This perspective complicates simple triumphalist narratives about a post-American world. Decline opens space for alternative regional orderings and different state-capital relations, but it also increases the risk of conflict as the old center resists redistribution of power. The Iran strikes, proxy confrontations, and contested spaces such as Ukraine and the Eastern Mediterranean are not isolated episodes but symptoms of a system trying to buy time and maintain dominance. The key insight is structural rather than personal: systems that institutionalize coercion and accumulation will increase coercion as their legitimacy and footprint shrink. ## Europe Iran and double standards A striking theme of the discussion is how Europe has become complicit in escalating violence while shedding the legal and ethical language it once claimed to uphold. The conversation highlights a bitter double standard: Western states that loudly defended sovereignty and international law in one context have been willing to abandon those principles when strategic priorities demand it elsewhere. Domestic rhetoric about human rights and legal norms frays when those norms constrain alignment with allied military action. The European turn toward militarization comes with political consequences at home. Sanctions, emergency measures, and the suspension of basic procedural guarantees in the name of security expose how quickly civil liberties can be eroded when an overarching security narrative takes hold. The result is not only hypocrisy but institutional weakening: international law becomes instrumentalized, diplomacy is subordinated to coercion, and policy debates narrow to alignments that favor immediate power politics over mediation or negotiation. In this light, Europe’s posture toward Iran and Gaza is less an expression of principle than the reflex of a polity that has tethered itself to a hegemonic partner and adopted its logic — a logic that privileges decisive force and delegitimizes alternative modes of conflict resolution. Scheidler’s framing helps explain why such double standards are not mere aberrations but structural: when state power and capitalist interest are deeply intertwined, moral language is selective. Rights, because they can be inconvenient to accumulation or to strategic alliances, become expendable. That selectivity both reveals and deepens the megamachine’s crisis — legitimacy erodes, dissent is policed, and democratic norms suffer. ## Nuclear danger and Gulf realignment One of the most urgent threads in the conversation is the escalating nuclear risk that accompanies geopolitical shifts. A fading hegemon that still controls vast destructive capacity creates a dangerous asymmetry: declining legitimacy paired with unparalleled destructive means. The dialogue warns that the politics of decline can make catastrophic options more thinkable. When a system perceives its survival as being on the line, norms that once constrained state behavior — including against nuclear brinkmanship — may fray. At the same time, the conversation explores how regional realignments are reshaping strategic calculations. The Gulf, long a theater of Western influence because of oil, is becoming a site of diversified alignments. States previously anchored to Western security umbrellas are hedging, seeking economic ties with rising powers, and recalibrating their regional ambitions. China’s global economic ascendancy and its different historical attitudes toward trade and territorial rule create incentives for many countries to pursue alternatives to a Western-dominated order. This realignment has two implications. First, it diminishes the ability of the old hegemon to command unanimous regional support for military endeavors. Second, the proliferation of new partnerships can reduce the probability of large-scale hegemonic wars but increase the number and complexity of flashpoints. In such a multipolar setting, miscalculation and rapid escalation become more likely, and nuclear risks are not limited to superpower standoffs but arise from misread signals among regional actors and their patrons. The megamachine’s instruments — military bases, arms flows, media narratives — remain in lethal supply even as the center’s moral authority wanes. ## Europe on the warfare path The final section of the conversation takes a close look at Europe’s trajectory: from postwar integration and a cautious security posture toward an assertive militarized role. The conversation observes that European politics now often equates geopolitical relevance with military capability. Investment decisions, industrial policies, and public narratives increasingly center on defense. This is not merely a budgetary shift but a cultural and institutional reorientation: diplomacy, welfare, and legal norms give way to logics of deterrence, readiness, and alliance signaling. The consequences are multifold. Militarization reconfigures public priorities, diverting resources from social infrastructure and climate action into armaments. It shifts political incentives toward short-term threat management rather than long-term cooperative problem-solving. And it narrows civic space: dissenting voices that advocate negotiation, neutrality, or de-escalation can be marginalized as naive or traitorous. The conversation warns that such a path risks Europe importing not just weapons but the political pathologies that come with them: securitization of public life, emergency governance, and erosion of pluralistic debate. Yet the conversation also points to p

The Empire in Self-Destruction: Inevitable Collapse | Fabian Scheidler The old Western order looks more brittle, more violent, and more desperate than at any point in recent memory. In this conversation, I speak with German author and playwright Fabian Scheidler about his book "The End of the Megamachine" and the deeper system of militarism, capital, media power, and linear force that he argues is driving ecological collapse, war, and political decay. Fabian lays out his view of a declining American empire, Europe’s turn toward militarization, and the way welfare, rights, and diplomacy are being pushed aside in favor of permanent conflict. The discussion also moves through Gaza, Iran, Ukraine, China, and the Gulf states, with a strong focus on the risks that come with a fading hegemon that still has huge power to destroy. In the end, the key point is stark: a failing system can become far more dangerous as it loses control. Links: Fabian Scheidler website: https://fabianscheidler.com The End of the Megamachine: https://www.megamachine.org Fabian Scheidler on Substack: https://fabianscheidler.substack.com Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com (Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack.com/s/academic) Merch & Donations: https://neutralitystudies-shop. fourthwall.com Timestamps: 00:00:00 Introduction and book thesis 00:05:07 The mega machine framework 00:08:06 End of Western hegemony 00:10:49 China and the global shift 00:15:14 Europe Iran and double standards 00:25:53 Colonial extraction and backlash 00:37:46 Nuclear danger and Gulf realignment 00:44:23 Limits of the US war machine 00:48:23 Europe on the warfare path #Pascal Welcome back, everybody. Today we are joined by Fabian Scheidler, a German author and playwright who recently published a book on this very topic, *The End of the Megamachine: A Brief History of a Failing Civilization.* That’s what we want to discuss today. So, Fabian, welcome back. Thanks for having me. Great to have you back, and great to have your new book here and your analysis. You’ve also been speaking all over Germany and Switzerland in recent months to get the word out about this whole war machinery that, unfortunately, has really gone into overdrive—also in Europe. Can we talk a little bit, maybe first, about the thesis of your book and where Europe stands today? #Fabian Scheidler Well, the book *The End of the Megamachine: A Brief History of a Failing Civilization* is about the roots of the power structures that led us into the global crisis we see today—the ecological crisis, the social crisis, and the geopolitical crisis. It’s a long story of what I call the four tyrannies: the tyranny of the militarized state; the tyranny of structural violence in the form of, let’s say, property relations -- 1 of 16 -- and juridical relations; ideological power—and the media, of course. It’s a long history, going back into our early past. And then there’s the tyranny of linear thinking, which is the belief that in a complex world we can achieve our aims by applying force in a linear way. So that could be very instructive for Donald Trump—to read this book—because he would understand that linear force will not get him the results he wants in Iran, for example. But this is a long history, and it’s also a history of the capitalist world system over the last 500 years: the expansion of capital accumulation in close relation with the military. The capitalist world system would not have been born, would not have emerged, without firearms and without the military. So the military state and the institutions of capital accumulation went hand in hand from day one of the system. And, of course, it’s a system that cannot stand still, that has to incorporate territories and people into its machine of accumulation and exploitation. And so that’s a motor of war—and has always been a motor of war. And concerning our current situation, the world system as we’ve known it for the last 500 years has seen different hegemons. First of all, we had the Spanish hegemony, which was financed by the banks in Genoa and elsewhere, to pay the return on investment of these wars and the looting of other countries. The second empire, if you will, was the Dutch one, then the British one, and then the American one. And we clearly see the decline of the American empire. So it’s the end of a hegemonic cycle, and that’s always a very dangerous time because the old hegemon tries to maintain its power by all means—and that means war as well. The situation this time is different, however, because the new hegemon—if you will, if it’s a hegemon—is China. And China has a very different story; it has a different history. It has a different history of foreign policy, which was mainly based on trade and not on colonization. So that gives us a chance to prevent a major war between the U.S. and China, because China does not want that war. Most of those in charge in China do not want this war. However, the U.S. is trying whatever it can to assert its power by the only means it still has, which is its military. Economically, the percentage of global GDP that the U.S. and the G7 hold has declined steadily—it’s about half of what it was in the 1980s and 90s. And the BRICS clearly have the upper hand here; they account for almost half of global production. So I think the U.S. cannot stop its decline. But what it’s doing now in Iran, of course, is accelerating that decline. And we can go into that further if you like. #Pascal We should. Let's go further into this. But is there something more that needs to be said about the way you're framing the situation? I find the title quite intriguing—that you're looking at it as a machine, a mega-machine. Can you explain that concept a bit? #Fabian Scheidler -- 2 of 16 -- Yes. The megamachine is a concept coined by Lewis Mumford, an American historian of technology. It’s a metaphor—a metaphor for a system that reduces human beings, and nature in general, to cogs in a machine. Because it has one ultimately irrational goal: the endless accumulation of capital. It has to subordinate everything else—our human relations, our relationship to nature, nature itself— to that end. And of course, a system that works like that cannot maintain itself indefinitely on a finite planet. It’s impossible. And we’re seeing that now, because we are very close to tipping points in the Earth’s system. It’s not only the climate. We see tipping points in the climate system—the Greenland ice sheet, the West Antarctic ice sheet, the Amazon rainforest. If we cross these tipping points, there’s no return to the previous state of affairs, and we could drop into a new state of the Earth system, what’s called the “Hothouse Earth,” an entirely different planet. And it’s not only the climate; it’s also biodiversity. The capitalist megamachine has already caused the biggest mass extinction of species in the last 65 million years. So this goes beyond even human history, and that’s why some have called it the Capitalocene. You know, there’s this notion of the Anthropocene, which says that human beings as such are responsible for the state of affairs. But I think it’s a certain social organization—what we call capitalism—that’s responsible. And it’s much more than an economic system; it’s also an ideological system, a military system, a political system. That’s what has led us into this planetary crisis. So that’ s one dimension of this failing civilization, because I think we have institutions that are not compatible with human survival on this planet. The main thing we have to think about is how to change these institutions, right? #Pascal Hey, very brief intermission because I was recently banned from YouTube. And although I'm back, this could happen again at any time. So please consider subscribing not only here but also to my mailing list on Substack—that’s pascallottaz.substack.com. The link’s going to be in the description below. And now, back to the video. Completely agree. Thank you very much. This is also very much a lefty, kind of Marxist interpretation of what is leading and driving foreign policy and the global system, right? And in a sense, I really want to ask you: why do you think the megamachine is ending now? Because, you know, what you just explained—Karl Marx already said that, what, 150 years ago? He said, “Look, this is exactly how capitalism has to end, because it’s the logical endpoint.” On the other hand, we had 1989–1990, the collapse of the Soviet Union—hooray, hooray—the Francis Fukuyama “end of history,” liberal democracy and market economy. Capitalism is going to reign supreme. The question is over. But the question is not over at all, right? #Fabian Scheidler -- 3 of 16 -- So, it’s not over. I don’t agree with a certain Marxist view of determinism in human history—I think it’ s never determined. But for a logical reason, a system that has to turn nature into commodities at an ever-faster pace cannot sustain itself indefinitely on a finite planet. And we also know there is no eternal civilization; there has never been one. So this notion from Francis Fukuyama—the “end of history”—has been nonsense from the start, I think. It was sort of the idea that the U.S. was approaching its unipolar moment. And in that unipolar moment, after the nineties, as an American elite, as somebody who was part of the U.S. establishment, you could think, “Well, that was it.” We have conquered the world. But it's a very naive vision of history. All empires and all civilizations have a starting point. They rise, they have their inner contradictions, and at a certain point, they decline. The decline is usually faster than the rise. So we don't know how long it will take for the megamachine to unravel. I mean, it's a civilization—it's not the end of the world if the megamachine fails. There will be other forms of human social organization. We don't know which ones, but we know this system is not eternal. I assume it will not survive this century. And we can already see, in the geopolitical upheaval we're witnessing, the germs of something new. #Pascal Yeah. If you're talking about civilization, you're talking about more than just the United States, right? I mean, the way Europe is integrated into this megamachine, the way Japan is integrated into it. The global economy is integrated too, but in very different ways. And now we see opposition to that kind of structure of international trade and global power politics, and so on. How are you seeing this unraveling—this ending of the machine—happening now? #Fabian Scheidler Well, I think what we see, first of all, is a subsystem that’s unraveling—and that subsystem is the era of Western hegemony. The megamachine was run by Western powers; it emerged from the West. The whole notion, the idea that the world is a machine, emerged in the 17th century, when capitalism was already in full development in Europe. So we have almost 500 years of Western dominance in the world system, and that is clearly coming to an end. The Iran war is part of that story. China has very different traditions. It’s part of the world system, it’s part of capital accumulation, and so on. But first, it has a different foreign policy, and second, its basic—let’s say, civilizational—background is different. They have a different—there has been for centuries a different—relation between the state and capital in China. That’s also mirrored in Confucian culture, a philosophy which holds that the state should not let capitalists become too powerful and should not let the military become too powerful. In the West, we have the opposite. Basically, capital owners are more powerful than heads of state because they are internationally organized, while states are territorial. And that was different in -- 4 of 16 -- China. So I think what we’ll see is a different approach to the relationship between state and capital. And we’