Simon Dixon: the US empire is being wound down by design

Muzamil opens this episode of Thought Behind Things against the backdrop of the US–Iran confrontation, noting that for younger Pakistani audiences the world no longer maps onto the categories they were taught. His guest, Simon Dixon — investment banker turned founder of BnkToTheFuture.com — offers a framework that explains why. Dixon does not read geopolitics through nations. He reads it through capital. Over nearly two hours, he lays out a thesis that is, by his own admission, controversial: the American empire is not collapsing under external pressure. It is being deliberately wound down by the same private financial powers that built it, in coordination with China, and Pakistan has been quietly repositioned at the centre of the new order.

Reading media as financing, not truth

Dixon’s opening move is methodological. “Whenever I hear media, I don’t look at media as truth. I look at it as who wants us to believe that.” Twenty-five years in finance, he says, has taught him to read financial statements of countries the way he reads them for companies. What emerges is a world organised not around nation-states but around three interlocking power structures he labels the FIC, MIC and TIC — the financial, military, and technical industrial complexes.

The TIC, in his telling, is the Magnificent 7 stack — Nvidia, SpaceX, Palantir and the rest — companies that were “groomed and created from Pentagon budgets and CIA financing or DARPA financing” before being privatised. The MIC is the Lockheed–Raytheon–Boeing constellation that “profits from war and rebuild cycles.” Sitting above both is the FIC: the bond market, the stock market, the currency market, the asset managers. “All companies are subordinate to this financial power. And it’s global in nature.”

This is the analytical floor for everything that follows. When a country negotiates with America, Dixon insists, “they’re not negotiating with America, the private country, they’re negotiating with transnational capital.”

How Pakistan got vassalised — and why it ran out of dollars

Muzamil presses Dixon on the historical arc, and Dixon traces it back to 1971, when America left the gold standard and the petrodollar system replaced it. Countries faced a binary choice: subordinate to the IMF or resist. Iran resisted, was sanctioned, suffered regime-change operations. Saudi Arabia integrated — pricing oil in dollars, recycling them into US Treasuries, hosting US bases.

Pakistan, in Dixon’s reading, took the third path: dollar loans, IMF subordination, currency warfare. “Pakistan is a classic example of such an operation.” Once dollar reserves run low, the country must either find alternative financing or print its own currency — and printing while owing dollars destroys the local currency’s value, deepening dependency. The exit, when it came, was forced rather than chosen: at COVID, Pakistan ran out of dollars, restructured its debt with the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and joined the Belt and Road Initiative. It now sits between three creditor blocs rather than one.

The Dutch playbook and the British handover

Muzamil pushes the history further back, suggesting transnational capital simply moved from Dutch to British to American hosts. Dixon agrees and fills in the mechanics. The Dutch invented the template: the Amsterdam central bank, the Dutch East India Company as the first limited-liability corporation, and a government bond market to absorb the debt. “The debt is dumped onto the government. The profits are privatised through the company and if anything goes wrong we socialise the losses onto the government and the people.”

The British inherited the model with the Bank of England and the British East India Company. The Americans inherited it with the Federal Reserve in 1913, followed by World War I, the Balfour Declaration, and what Dixon describes as a Wall Street operation that funded both the Bolshevik revolution and the rise of Hitler — “they were playing the Russians against the Germans” — to engineer the transfer of European gold to America. By the end of World War II, he claims, America held roughly 75% of the world’s gold. The IMF and World Bank were then constructed as the loan-issuing arms that would lock the rest of the world into the dollar system.

The strategy throughout, Dixon argues, was the one the British had perfected on the subcontinent: divide and conquer. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kashmir, the entire Middle East — balkanised deliberately, religious tensions weaponised, militia groups funded, and rebuild contracts auctioned afterwards.

Why the empire has to retreat now

The hinge of Dixon’s thesis is that the American host has been bled dry. Public debt at 125% of GDP. Suicide rates and homelessness at record highs. Foreign central banks selling US Treasuries and buying gold. “It looks like the Weimar Republic of Germany, which is what you do when you’re trying to asset strip a country, transfer all of its assets and reset the order.”

Crucially, America no longer needs Middle Eastern energy — fracking and partnerships with Canada and Mexico took care of that. But the petrodollar needed Middle Eastern oil sales to recycle dollars back into US bonds. With that loop broken, Gulf sovereign wealth funds turned to China, which had become the world’s manufacturing base. The TIC and MIC both now depend on China for rare earths, components, and assembly. “The American military cannot produce a weapon without China,” Dixon says.

So when Trump, Tim Cook, Elon Musk and the rest met Xi Jinping in Beijing, Dixon reconstructs the meeting as a negotiation, not a confrontation. Trump cancelled a $13 billion arms shipment to Taiwan. Visa and Mastercard asked for fee access to China’s payment rail. The military complex agreed, in Dixon’s paraphrase, that “we kind of need to pretend that we’re going to go to war with each other” because the pretence is profitable.

The 5D chess behind the Iran war

This is where Dixon’s framework produces its sharpest reading of current events. The Iran–Israel war, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the destruction of US bases — none of it, in his view, is what it appears.

“I think Iran agreed to: we’ll give up the resistance in exchange for a regional stability and the expulsion of US from the region. That’s the deal.” The theatrical war is the cover that lets everyone keep their domestic narratives intact. The destroyed infrastructure becomes a $300 billion rebuild contract funded by the Gulf. The destroyed US bases become the justification for American withdrawal. The Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas — proxy networks that justified forever wars — get folded back into national armies and national politics.

The endgame Dixon sketches is a regional defence pact between Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt and Iran, funded by Saudi Arabia, backed by China. Israel, stripped of its strategic function as an agitator, gets privatised — its assets bought up by India and the UAE, its radical Zionists already relocating. “All the people that are radical Zionists that are wealthy, they’ve already left. They’re in Cyprus. They’re in Argentina.”

Muzamil interjects with a Pakistani reader’s confusion: why is Trump now praising the field marshal weekly? Why has Pakistan, the pariah, moved to centre stage? Dixon’s answer is direct. “Its number one asset is its military. So I think it needed to be in this moment that it is in right now.”

Trump as the wealth-extraction crew

Dixon is unsparing on the American president. Trump, in his framing, is neither a strategist nor an idiot. He is a vehicle. “Trump has one job. Get rich while dismantling the US empire.”

He traces the funding: $250 million from Elon Musk (TIC), $150 million from the Mellon banking family (FIC), Miriam Adelson representing Israel (MIC), and above all roughly $5 billion connected to Jared Kushner’s fund, which profits from regional stability in the Gulf. World Liberty Financial, the Trump-linked crypto company, is “50% owned by UAE.” So while the dominant narrative says Israel owns America, Dixon argues the opposite: “Trump is bought by the Gulf, funded by the tick, then the fick, and mick lost.”

This reframes the chaos. Trump’s erratic behaviour is not strategy gone wrong. It is the visible surface of an asset-stripping operation that needs to look like strength while the empire withdraws.

The four triggers China can pull at will

Asked where financial markets go from here, Dixon describes an architecture that is structurally fragile and centrally controlled. China, he argues, holds four triggers. It could pop the AI bubble with “a couple of press releases” demonstrating DeepSeek-style efficiency. It could crash the bond market if Japan, the UK and China coordinated sales. It could squeeze the commodity market because Shanghai now holds most of the physical gold while Western markets run on leveraged paper. And it could break the currency system at the FX layer.

“There is a Ponzi scheme in the currency market, a leverage trade in the derivatives market, an AI bubble in the stock market, and a debt cycle that is 100% dependent upon the Federal Reserve in the bond market.”

The choice for the FIC, then, is between continuing to inflate — which means the K-shaped economy keeps concentrating wealth upward — or engineering a controlled crash that lets the same actors buy up assets at distressed prices, as happened in 2008 and during COVID. “Crisis is built into the fick program.”

On AI specifically, Dixon thinks the current wave of investors will be cleared out. “AI will still change the world. But the people that invested in this wave will be rugpulled and the people that invest in the next wave will end up owning all the infrastructure.”

Proxy wars end, the surveillance state comes home

The corollary to the empire’s external retreat, Dixon argues, is its internal hardening. The tools of colonisation — covert wars, regime change, manufactured civil unrest, mass surveillance — are coming back to their countries of origin. Palantir-powered pre-crime systems across Europe. Privatised prisons in America. Denaturalisation drives. “The enemy is our internal populations.”

Across the Middle East, by contrast, he expects proxy wars to wind down as state sponsorship dries up. The Houthis revert to Yemeni national politics. Hezbollah negotiates its position in Lebanon. Iran undergoes internal regime change to align with the new regional framework. “A bunch of Muslim countries unified around their resources with collective sovereignty backed up by the largest manufacturing base, China” — this, he says, is exactly what the British, Dutch and American empires spent centuries preventing.

Bitcoin, in self-custody only

The conversation closes on Bitcoin, where Dixon — long a maximalist — draws a careful distinction. He corrects the framing that the US “took Iran’s Bitcoin.” It took Iran’s stablecoins and centralised crypto, which Tether can freeze on command. Actual Bitcoin held in self-custody cannot be confiscated without physical coercion of the key holder, and even then, killing the holder destroys the coin.

His broader warning is about the institutional capture of Bitcoin. Wall Street’s project, in his telling, has been to split Bitcoin into two categories — the version you own, and the version they own for you. “If they can persuade you to give your Bitcoin to them, then there’s an institution and they can steal your Bitcoin, confiscate your Bitcoin, get you to borrow against your Bitcoin, margin call the Bitcoin, give you a share instead of Bitcoin.” Micro Strategy shares, BlackRock ETFs, Coinbase custody — all of it, Dixon insists, is “paper Bitcoin. A Bitcoin IOU, a promise to give you your Bitcoin. That’s not Bitcoin.”

Seventy-five percent of Bitcoin, he notes, is still held in self-custody. That version still does what it was designed to do.

Muzamil closes by acknowledging that the conversation has opened more threads than it could resolve — the surveillance state, the digitisation of money, India’s positioning — and books a round two. What lands by the end is not a set of predictions but a lens. Whether one accepts Dixon’s framework or not, the question he forces is uncomfortable: if the actors that matter are not governments but the capital that rents them, how much of what we are told about geopolitics is description, and how much is theatre?