Unlike the colonial empires of old, U.S. power was built not with boots on the ground, but with balance sheets. In this riveting account, economist Michael Hudson traces how the U.S. engineered a new form of empire after World War I—one rooted in debt, gold hoarding, and financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank. From Versailles to Vietnam, America’s strategy was simple: enforce global dollar dependency, use war spending to deepen deficits, and extract tribute not through tribute states, but through creditor logic. This is the hidden architecture of modern empire—and how Nixon’s 1971 closure of the gold window crowned the dollar king of a post-colonial, post-gold world.
