How a US Think Tank accidentally wrote the most honest document about American empire

This might be one of the most insane reports ever produced by a U.S. Think Tank, and that’s saying something.

The Hudson Institute just published a 128-page blueprint titled “China after Communism: Preparing for a Post-CCP China,” edited by Miles Yu (director of the Institute’s China Center), which provides detailed operational plans for inducing Chinese regime collapse through systematic information operations, financial warfare, and covert influence campaigns, followed by detailed protocols for U.S. post-collapse management including military occupation, territorial reorganization, and the installation of a political and cultural system vassalized to the U.S.

I genuinely don’t know whether I should laugh or cry.

Cry at the sheer arrogance and casualness with which they write about overthrowing the government of the world's largest economy, the primary economic lifeline for most of the planet, and a quarter of the human race.

Laugh at the comic book villainy of believing that a declining empire that can't even maintain its own infrastructure and has lost every major conflict of the past two decades could somehow orchestrate and manage the controlled collapse of a country of China's importance.

Regardless, reading the report was actually fascinating because it reveals so much about the diseased soul of the American empire and some of the key reasons behind its decline - the comical detachment from reality, the inability to learn from past failures, the zero-sum worldview, the denial of agency in others and, more than anything else, the fact that this report screams of desperation.

There's a common pattern well known to political sociologists: when groups face existential threats to their status and identity, they often exhibit compensatory extremism - becoming caricatured versions of themselves as a defense against irrelevance. It was for instance famously the case with the Southern Confederacy prior to the American civil war, which responded to growing abolitionist pressure by becoming more fanatically committed to slavery and "Southern honor" than it had ever been before.

This Hudson Institute report reads a bit like this: witnessing the end of American primacy, some in the imperial establishment are transforming into a grotesque caricature of themselves, taking every toxic aspect of U.S. foreign policy and amplifying them to absurd extremes, becoming more imperially ambitious and delusional than ever before, planning interventions of unprecedented scope and audacity as if doubling down on their worst impulses could somehow restore their fading dominance.

As such, this report shouldn't be read as an actual blueprint for policy - its analysis of China is so wildly detached from reality as to be completely worthless. Instead, it should be read as an anthropological specimen, a fascinating window into the fever dreams and neuroses of a dying empire, where the compensatory extremism strips away all pretense and reveals what American hegemony has always really been about - just as the Confederacy's fanatical doubling down on slavery exposed the moral rot that had always defined the system.

So let's examine this artifact piece by piece and see what it reveals about the dying empire that produced it.