First things first. I'm sorry to have abruptly ended my journey across the British Empire by way of Patrick N. Allitt 108 lectures for the Teaching Company. I'm not to blame, however. The movie I found myself suddenly making in the fall is. So, where was this journey through the British century (properly, the long 19th century) taking us? To the century we entered in 2008, with the crash of Wall Street and other markets. What makes this moment significant is made obvious in one of the best books of the year, Adam Tooze's Crashed, which is a detailed account of the world-historical episode. And what made it world-historical was not the massive amounts of money it burned and destroyed (or redistributed upwards) but how the US and China each responded to the crisis.

The US, Tooze points out, pumped trillions into its stock markets to keep share prices way above what they are actually worth (almost nothing). As for China, it pumped trillions into its infrastructure. The former took the form of numbers in servers; the latter, as David Harvey has explained in several lectures, as raw concrete. And in the way the US's New Deal (with a huge war it supported) dragged the world out of the Great Depression in the 1940s with massive real-world projects and expenditures, China, as Tooze states, dragged the world out the Great Recession (not the US) in the early years of the current decade. This is where the beginning of the end properly begins. But let's look at where things are now.

The transition to the Chinese moment, which is represented in pop culture by movies like Pacific Rim: Uprising, occurred between 2008 and 2016. We can say that Obama was the last figure of American empire, and had a practical plan (Plan B) to keep China in check. This was the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The project was accelerated after the Bush administration failed to govern Iraq (Plan A) with technological wizardry (the display and success of this plan was actually for eyes in Beijing, the emerging political capital of the post-American world). But the US failed in Iraq and had do something that even the Chinese military could do very easily: put troops on the ground (the "surge").

After the failure of Plan A, Obama, a neoliberal, turned to globalization, Plan B. After all, China's power was entangled with the international trade system. Weakening its economic position was the soft power form of the hard power of shocking and awing China's military brass. And, in the context of world trade, Obama's plan would have probably worked and kept America in play for several more decades. But the GOP had a racist base that needed to be fed, and so could not fully support Obama, a black president, on what was effectively all that was left (Plan B) for the survival of empire (a massive, pan-Pacific free-trade agreement that checked China). Its base also hates women, and so the person who would have continued Obama's globalization or a US-directed Pacific Century project, Hillary Clinton, was attacked and attacked to feed the GOP racist/sexist beast.

Trump tore Plan B apart upon entering the White House and has committed his turbulent administration to a Plan Z (zero or, if you are British, zed). His presidency (which neo-conservatives in the form of Jim Mattis attempted, and, in the form of John Bolton, are still attempting, to revert to Plan A—the military option that died in Iraq) is instead devoted to feeding the GOP base (about 30 percent of reliable the US voters) nothing more than more and more nothing (the wall). It is at this point that neocons found themselves sympathizing with neoliberal cosmopolitanists like Clinton and Obama (whose plans for maintaining US supremacy—through the State Department rather than the Pentagon—were at least credible and in line with the interests of significant sections of the elite and corporate America), and so cannot stick with the current administration's Plan Z.

Mattis was fired by Obama because of his devotion to Plan A. But Plan B, as a means of continuing US global hegemony into the 21st century, was far more plausible than Plan Z. Mattis had to exit the Trump administration. And eventually, so will Bolton. Because the GOP can do nothing about this worthless Plan Z, it has to go under with its current leader, and, in the process, take the whole of the US along with it. That is where we are now.