You can trace the US imperial decline through those QDRs. By 2006, under Bush II, the QDR had retreated from its initial promise of fighting and winning two Gulf War-style conflicts simultaneously to “1-4-2-1” model.

The US would now maintain (1) defense of the ‘homeland,’ police (4) different regions of the world, and confront (2) adversaries simultaneously so it could decisively defeat (1) while holding off the other.

Basically, the US military either recognized or admitted that it absolutely could not fight and win two simultaneous wars; the most it could hope for was to defeat one adversary while buying time to shift its focus against another.

This was in the wake of Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq in the Second Gulf War, a conflict that bogged down the US military and vacuumed up its resources for years.

The US military stopped producing QDRs not long after that. I can only imagine what humiliating confession the next edition would have had to make.

So here we find ourselves, in 2026, with the US humiliatingly unable to achieve *any* of the strategic goals against Iran in a catastrophic war of choice it started a few months ago.

It’s important to understand that the US has lost this war, in every way that matters, and in a shockingly short period of time. While the US remains objectively very strong, and still possesses immense coercive capacity, it is both materially weaker than it was before it started this war and has demonstrated what those QDRs pointed to: a steady decline in US power.

The US couldn’t even maintain its 1-4-2-1 posture anymore; it has had to redirect missile defense systems and other resources from places like South Korea in an attempt to clean up its mess in the Middle East and cancel weapons sales to European partners, weakening its “police” role and calling into question its ability to hold off an adversary in another theater while it struggles against Iran.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/11/redeployment-us-missiles-thaad-south-korea-middle-east-seoul-iran

Blair Fix, as is often the case, has some really interesting analysis on US military spending, which remains astronomically high in absolute terms. If you look at US military spending as a share of total national income, though, it has shrunk considerably from its high during World War II. All those dollars spent on the military can buy many fewer goods and services or incentivize recruits compared to the US ability to mobilize resources in the 1940s.

US policymakers, in short, have gotten so used to global power that they haven’t realized they’ve been coasting on fumes for decades.

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2026/05/22/the-business-of-war-and-the-mismeasurement-of-military-might/

There are two thinkers here who I think are relevant, from two slightly different angles.

The first is French economist Thomas Piketty, who has done exhaustive work on understanding the origins and operation of economic inequality in modern states. Piketty has argued that a state’s rate of taxation essentially reflects the ability of that state to mobilize public resources to achieve its goals. When tax rates are low, especially on the richest, then the rich can amass fortunes that represent a competing ability to mobilize public resources.

In the US, inequality has skyrocketed since the neoliberal rebellion began in the 1970s and tax rates on the wealthiest were slashed. Despite its massive absolute spending, the US government simply cannot mobilize the resources it needs to achieve its goals, because those resources have been captured instead by the rich and especially the ultra-rich.

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/pentagon-spars-with-spacex-over-starlink-price-hike-during-iran-war-2026-05-26/

The second is Joseph Tainter, the American anthropologist who authored “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” Tainter argued that societies, when confronted with new challenges, tend to add layers of complexity to solve those problems. By “complexity,” Tainter specifically meant new specializations and new layers of hierarchy. But that complexity comes at a cost: while engaged in those new specializations or performing those new hierarchical roles, these people still need to eat, live in homes, wear clothes, etc. So, as complexity rises, so too does the burden on society’s primary producers who are feeding and clothing those people.

This is sustainable when returns on complexity are high. When returns on complexity stop rising, though, eventually society is directing all its spare resources into maintaining hierarchy. If that society that has no spare resources left encounters a new problem, it might simply not be able to respond, even if it is exploiting more resources than ever before, and collapse—an economizing process of shedding layers of complexity to free up resources.

This is, I think, another way of looking at Piketty’s problem of inequality. US society simply supports too many people who are simply filling roles in hierarchy without returning any benefits to society. Bureaucrats, sure, but mostly capitalists, landlords, and other rentiers. US society now devotes an enormous percentage of its overall economic activity not to anything useful, but to filling the pockets of Donald Trump’s adult sons, or paying for Jeff Bezos’ toy space program, or building LLM slop factories.

US society simply has no slack left and Donald Trump dragged it into a pointless war with Iran and it promptly began losing, even though the US has fought and won wars against much stronger adversaries.

@cybervegan

The jobs that Graeber defined as bullshit could be understood as part of the problem Tainter was defining, sure. I saw Graeber’s argument as much more akin to Veblen’s depiction of conspicuous consumption, in that most of those jobs seem to exist just to give elites someone to boss around rather than doing anything useful.