While many of these issues are playing out on a global scale, the focus here is on the United States, where systemic failures are accelerating collapse in ways that impact daily life. As an American, I fully recognize that the U.S. does not exist in a vacuum—quite the opposite. Many of these crises are exacerbated by my country’s historic obsession with individualism, which has prioritized short-term profit over collective well-being, especially in the last 40 years—that is except when it came to resources in other countries that could be exploited.

Since the 1980s, U.S. economic and political policy has embraced deregulation, privatization, and corporate power consolidation, often at the expense of public infrastructure, social safety nets, and long-term sustainability. This shift has widened economic inequality, gutted labor protections, and left critical sectors vulnerable to collapse, from housing to healthcare. Meanwhile, when it comes to global resources, U.S. foreign policy has consistently prioritized access to oil, minerals, and other commodities, often through military intervention or economic coercion. The Iraq War and the U.S.'s long history of involvement in Latin American resource politics, from the United Fruit Company-backed coups to modern lithium extraction interests, are just a few examples.

The irony is that while the U.S. has promoted a hyper-individualist domestic ideology—where citizens are told to pull themselves up by their bootstraps—it has also relied on global interdependence to sustain its economic and military dominance, particularly in resource-rich regions. The consequences of these contradictions are now playing out: domestic infrastructure is crumbling while geopolitical instability over resources intensifies. The goal of this article is not to claim that collapse is universal but to highlight how the U.S.'s deliberate choices—both at home and abroad—have accelerated its own decline.