Militarizing the Ledger, Colonizing the Future:
US Public Debt, National Accounting, and the Weaponization of Value
When we begin to examine U.S. hegemony, the Military-Industrial Complex often serves as the shorthand for understanding the entangled relationship between investment capital, militarism, neocolonial extraction, and unipolar power. But to truly unravel this system, we must look deeper into how the Military-Debt Nexus is legitimized—not only through ideological alignment or geopolitical pressure, but through institutional mechanisms such as trade agreements, national accounting rules, and debt-financed militarization. The intersection between military expenditure and global trade is not incidental; it forms the core infrastructure of compliance and control, shaping everything from resource acquisition to sanctions enforcement, all under the veil of economic normalcy.
To change this system—toward one rooted in equitable access, sovereign infrastructure, and multilateral governance—we must fundamentally reimagine how national accounting functions. The history of colonialism is encoded in the very ledgers of modern economies, yet this connection remains largely absent from global post-colonial discourse. National accounts, treated as apolitical and technocratic, are in fact deeply ideological. If we are to meaningfully address the social and ecological crises facing our communities, we must recognize that accounting aggregates are not immutable laws of nature—they are political choices. To remain bound to them without critique is to remain enslaved to unjust and crooked math. The global economy must be built on a transparent, inclusive framework of value—one that communities can understand, revise, and hold accountable.
In 2008, two events quietly but fundamentally reshaped the architecture of global power: one in the ledgers of the United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA), and the other in the smoldering ruins of Wall Street. While one was a bureaucratic and technical revision of how nations calculate value, the other was a cataclysmic financial implosion that exposed the hollowness of Western capital’s speculative core. Together, they marked a new epoch—not of recovery or reform—but of the acceleration of militarized value, enforced austerity, and a global contest over who will shape the next architecture of economic security.
From Expense to Asset: The Militarization of GDP
In its 2008 revision, the SNA made a critical shift: military expenditures, long treated as consumption (i.e., non-productive spending), were reclassified as fixed assets. In other words, tanks, missiles, warships, and military facilities were no longer considered budgetary outflows but productive capital contributing to GDP. This wasn’t just a creative accounting maneuver. It was a paradigmatic inversion that gave national militaries the same economic value as schools or hospitals—if not greater.
The rationale for this shift hinged on the notion that military systems provide National Security, a supposed intangible asset whose value lies in deterrence and enforcement rather than direct economic output. But this security was never democratically defined; it was not for all people or species, nor did it take into account the security of the planet. Simultaneously, and tellingly, the same 2008 SNA rejected the inclusion of environmental degradation and resource depletion in national accounts—considering it too “experimental”. In effect, destruction of the biosphere could not be valued, but its militarized defense could.
This asymmetric treatment of security reveals the ideological substrate of Western economic thought: military might can be capitalized, but ecological security—life itself—cannot.
The Dollar’s Final Bailout: Debt, Default, and Dispossession
The 2008 financial collapse could have been a moment of reckoning. The speculative bubble should have popped. Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers should have been buried with the failed logic of deregulation and derivative-led capitalism. Instead, the U.S. government—backed by the Federal Reserve and global dollar liquidity—deployed government/public debt to resuscitate private capital. And to be clear this government debt is public debt, and is what citizens owe in either taxes or the leveraging of our national assets. Like our environmental and general welfare protections, it turns out that our National Security—our military— is an asset. Public debt should not be confused with private debt, like what we owe to the banks, leveraging our assets for loans at high interest rates.
The U.S. debt explosion that followed—trillions in bailouts, low interest rates, and asset purchases—created a dependency cycle: a government subsidizing capital, capital reinforcing government debt, and both leveraging military supremacy to maintain the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency. This dollar hegemony, once an invisible infrastructure of trade, increasingly became a weapon of war: sanctions against Iran, Venezuela, Russia, and others were used not as diplomatic tools but as instruments of compliance. And many nations—especially in the Global South—began to take note.
BRICS+: Architecting an Economic Counter-Alliance
The global counter-response was not ideological but infrastructural. Countries in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) bloc began constructing a parallel architecture—designed to function with or without the dollar. From the New Development Bank (NDB) to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), from the Contingency Reserve Arrangement (CRA) to the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), the infrastructure was laid.
More than institutions, these projects signaled a new system of value and security: one centered on development, access, and sovereignty—not compliance, control, and debt. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) all worked in tandem to reduce exposure to dollar-based systems. In the event of another U.S. collapse—or a geopolitical financial blockade—these institutions could maintain trade, stabilize currencies, and protect regional cooperation.
I should mention that this “new” system, is more aligned with the original Bretton Woods system agreed to in the postwar economic recovery in 1944 and that it was the United States— under the Marshall Plan— that co-opted the multilateral global architecture to assert its hegemonic industrial privilege to counter the Soviet Union. Ostensibly, this was less about the ideological processes of communism vs capitalism, since really, that was only a shifting regulatory scale with the free market at one end and social, environmental, and labor protectionism at the other. This competition had to do with the cooperation of newly formed countries and access to resources, and since the communist model had been the more equitable post-colonial model, the colonial countries enforced their own neo-colonial methods for administering their former territories.
Debt as a Weapon, the Military as Collateral
The U.S. now carries a $36 trillion public debt—growing at nearly $1 trillion annually, or more. Conventional macroeconomics debates whether this is sustainable. But the deeper question is: for whom and by what means? The answer lies in militarism and investment regimes.
Instead of productive infrastructure or climate restoration, U.S. debt is increasingly funneled through the Department of Defense, and in turn, into the coffers of BlackRock, Vanguard, and other financial oligarchs. These firms are not just investment managers; they are policy shapers, resource accumulators, and speculative colonizers.
The U.S. military, meanwhile, functions as the global enforcement arm—not just of the nation-state—but of private capital. Whether in Iraq, Niger, the South China Sea, or the Arctic, it protects investor access to transport, oil, water, land, agriculture, minerals, food production, and increasingly, data. These are no longer national resources—they are global assets, privatized, securitized, and denationalized.
This is colonialism 5.0: no longer territorial but data-driven, enforced not by flags but by algorithms and drones, secured through treaties, trade laws, and financial enforcement.
The EU's Colonial Continuity: Coal, Steel, and the Commons
While often seen as a peaceful, post-war experiment, the European Union has its roots in a different kind of integration. The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC)—one of the foundational pillars of the EU—was ostensibly created to prevent war through shared resource governance. But its underlying principle was expansion: shared control over industrial resources to prevent competition, not dismantle colonial relations.
The EU today continues to impose extractive trade deals on not just African, Caribbean, and Pacific nations, but also on the eastward expansion of the EU, itself. This may seem surprising, but when you consider Nato’s post-Soviet rationale for expansionism, the common thread encompassing all of the former Soviet regions has been the de-nationalizing and privatization of its national industries. Not just steel and coal, but oil, gas, water, agriculture, food production services, etc. From the break up of Yugoslavia to the coup in Ukraine, the common denominator is not simply access to resources but about reconfiguring capital flows through transnational asset management. Its Common Agricultural Policy, digital regulations, and environmental standardizations often function as trade barriers to the Global South, reinforcing dependencies and market control. Even the SDGs and its “green transition” threaten to become another mechanism for ecological data expropriation, rather than reparative justice.
In other words, transnational asset management—the privatization regime— has been the primary beneficiary of state-led restructuring, mostly enabled through conflict.
Accounting for Empire: From GDP to Global Data Sovereignty
Million-dollar carbon trades are literally, a sliver of a penny off the dollar when it comes to the future value of environmental data
GDP, as once conceived, was the sum of production, consumption, investment, and trade. But today, GDP includes increasingly abstract components: military systems, Research and Development, and intellectual property rights—all bolstered by speculative futures of value. In its next iteration, it will include environmental data through the System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA), a framework that seeks to value ecological systems into national accounting systems.
Already, the World Bank has estimated global “natural capital” at over $100 trillion. The rush to accumulate and own this data—often collected from the Global South—is not about conservation but privatization. Environmental data accumulation is wealth accumulation, and whoever owns this data will hold the keys to the post-carbon economy.
The U.S. military's increasing presence in "protected areas" is no coincidence. These zones—biodiverse forests, ocean territories, and indigenous lands—are being securitized not for ecological stewardship but for data-driven financialization. The real war of the 21st century may not be over oil, but over the right to count, own, and speculate on life itself.
Even now, it was just formally announced that the OECD countries are going to try to shift away from Gross Domestic Product to Net Domestic Product (NDP) by 2030, to account for degradation and depletion, as had been proposed as early as the 1990s in the early SEEA meetings taking place in the UN Statistical Division. But what I would warn, as I have been with Intemerate Earth, a decolonial environmental-economic accounting program, is that whatever iteration in national accounting should evolve, Global South countries and fragile, displaced, and impacted communities need to own their data. Million-dollar carbon trades are literally, a sliver of a penny off the dollar when it comes to the future value of environmental data, and while NDP may be too little too late when it comes to environmental sustainability, it’s not too late to decolonize accounting systems. One must understand that the OECD economies were organized as a neocolonial cooperation, and it is no different today than it was then— there are just more members now, mostly because of Nato’s expansion.
Towards a Decolonial Accounting paradigm
In a world where national security is measured, but ecological security is dismissed, where debt funds militarism but not climate restoration, and where environmental data is financialized but not democratized, we must ask: what do we value, and who decides?
The U.S. debt is not a number; it is a system of extraction, domination, and denial. It functions through the militarization of accounting and the privatization of the future. But across the world, communities, movements, and multilateral blocs need to reimagine value—not as capital, but as cooperation, restoration, and sovereignty.
What is needed is not just a new metric but a new ethic—a decolonial accounting program that places well-being before profit, ecological stewardship before militarized security, and the rights of the planet before the balance sheets of empires.