Treasury’s Collapse Doctrine: Bessent, Trump, and the Sanctions Gamble

From Containment to Collapse: The Treasury as War Department

On September 7, 2025, NBC News ran a story by Alexandra Marquez that deserves close study. It was not simply a Sunday interview summary, not merely a Treasury Secretary speaking about policy. It was the public consecration of a new imperial rhetoric: the call not to contain, not to deter, not to sanction grudgingly, but to “collapse” the Russian economy outright. In a single word, a line was crossed. What had once been framed as “pressure” became an open strategy of destruction, dressed up in the language of fiscal responsibility and economic stewardship. The television set became the stage for the Treasury to recite the script of war.

The author, Marquez, is a journeyman of corporate media, specializing in political reporting that requires access more than investigation. Like so many before her, she reproduces without question the lines handed down by officials and their aides, smoothing over contradictions, turning radical violence into pragmatic governance. NBC itself, a pillar of the Comcast media empire, has long provided precisely this service: laundering the interests of the state and the corporations into something palatable, even respectable. They are not merely reporting the news; they are translating the empire’s intentions into the language of everyday common sense.

The cast assembled in the piece reveals the fusion of state and capital in all its blunt clarity. Scott Bessent, Treasury Secretary, proclaims the aim of collapse. President Trump, the executive arm, is present in the background, fresh from meetings with both Putin and Zelenskyy. Zelenskyy himself plays the role of echo chamber, validating Washington’s strategy while pressuring Europe to fall in line. Financial institutions like Goldman Sachs and Barclays are invoked to assure readers that tariffs are working, that the sky is not falling, that all is well in the markets. The chorus sings in unison: empire is strong, sanctions are necessary, collapse is inevitable.

The propaganda devices deployed are hardly novel, but here they are sharpened with a new edge. The framing turns a policy of strangulation into a common-sense necessity. Omissions carve out any inconvenient history of sanctions that failed, of economies that endured, of people who suffered. Emotional manipulation is achieved through juxtaposition: the article moves from Russia’s airstrikes to the Treasury’s “solution,” as though burning buildings in Kyiv can be soothed by tariffs in Washington. Cognitive warfare works by insisting that tariffs cost the people nothing, that they are bloodless instruments of leverage rather than tools of extraction. False equivalence is on display when stock market highs are presented as proof of general prosperity, as though the gains of Goldman’s shareholders trickle down to the unemployed worker. And looming behind it all is the new escalation: no longer the language of balance or deterrence, but the outright celebration of collapse, spoken aloud, normalized, printed in the pages of NBC News.

To excavate this piece is to see how empire teaches its people to accept destruction as prudence, war as policy, and collapse as responsible stewardship. The Treasury, in this telling, is no longer a steward of public finance but a war department dressed in fiscal clothing. The propaganda does not hide the brutality—it reframes it, sanitizes it, and passes it off as ordinary. This is not journalism; it is the liturgy of a fortress empire, and NBC is its cathedral.

The Dual Architecture of Collapse and Fortress

Stripped of its staging, the NBC piece offered a series of factual markers. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared that the United States and European Union must act together to “collapse” Russia’s economy. He promised secondary tariffs on countries still purchasing Russian oil, naming India through action as the primary target. The Trump administration, already imposing a 50% tariff on India, portrayed this escalation as both punishment and deterrent. Zelenskyy publicly blessed the policy, reinforcing Washington’s line while casting suspicion on European hesitation. Meanwhile, the article recited stock market highs and a 3.3% GDP rate as if they were evidence of popular prosperity. It closed with a discussion of Trump’s ongoing battle with the courts over tariff powers, in which Bessent asserted confidence while also acknowledging that if the Supreme Court rules against him, billions in tariff revenues would have to be refunded.

What the piece did not mention is as telling as what it repeated. Russia, under sanctions since 2014, has endured and adapted. Over 26,000 sanctions, more than any state in history, have not collapsed its economy. Instead, Russia turned east and south, reorienting trade through China, India, and the BRICS+ bloc. The International Monetary Fund, hardly a friend to Moscow, “>projects growth (albeit, sluggish) rather than collapse. Tariffs and sanctions may bite, but they do not break. Nor did NBC consider the consequences of secondary sanctions aimed at India, a country that not only buys Russian oil but now anchors the architecture of multipolar trade. To punish India is to punish a state moving toward BRICS+, to push it further away from Washington’s orbit, and to risk rupture with one of the very allies the U.S. once sought to woo against China.

Omitted too were the domestic consequences. Tariffs are not bloodless abstractions; they flow through every grocery bill and utility payment. To call them leverage is to ignore the inflationary squeeze borne by the working class, while financial institutions extract gains and call them growth. The Chamber of Commerce itself, a voice of business orthodoxy, has warned repeatedly that tariffs on imports raise prices at home. None of this intrudes on NBC’s narrative, which prefers the clean arithmetic of GDP and the triumphalism of record stock indexes. The lived arithmetic of rising rent and food costs does not appear in the pages of corporate media.

The historical lineage of collapse strategies tells the same story. The U.S. embargoed Japan in 1941, hoping to strangle its economy; instead it hastened Pearl Harbor. Reagan’s financial warfare on Nicaragua bled a small country but did not topple the Sandinistas. Obama’s sanctions on Venezuela were announced as “smart” and “targeted,” yet starved the people without bringing Caracas to its knees. Collapse strategies generate suffering, not submission. They produce resistance, not obedience. By omitting this lineage, NBC makes Bessent’s rhetoric sound new, when it is simply the latest iteration of an old imperial reflex.

When set against the Pentagon’s fortress doctrine that we excavated in earlier pieces, Bessent’s words complete the picture. The Pentagon builds walls, stations troops, and fortifies borders. The Treasury seeks to collapse economies abroad. Inward fortification, outward collapse: this is the dual architecture of the fortress empire. Together they reveal a recalibration: the empire cannot conquer as before, so it encloses its hemisphere and seeks to strangle its rivals from within. What NBC presents as economic common sense is in fact the scaffolding of imperial war by other means.

War by Other Means: Treasury as the Engine of Technofascism

When the empire’s economic chief declares that the goal is to “collapse” another nation’s economy, the mask slips. The Treasury does not appear here as a neutral manager of accounts, but as an engine of war. What NBC normalized as prudent policy is in fact the violent complement to the Pentagon’s deployments. Together they form the dual architecture of the fortress empire: walls and borders at home, collapse and ruin abroad. The story we excavated in previous analyses of the Pentagon now stands complete—the fiscal arm of empire has stepped forward, no longer hiding behind technical jargon but proclaiming destruction as policy. This is not economics; this is war by other means.

To understand this, we must name the structures. The sanctions architecture is not a set of isolated measures but a global regime of blockades, exclusions, and penalties designed to enforce imperial obedience. Financial piracy turns that structure into loot, expropriating through tariffs, seizures, and secondary sanctions under the guise of legality. Monroe Doctrine 2.0 provides the geographic frame: the Americas reimagined as a walled hemisphere, with chokepoints from the Panama Canal to the Rio Grande, and with fiscal nooses tightening on all who cross imperial lines. At the center of it all stands technofascism, the fusion of finance, surveillance, and executive decree, bending law and economy alike into weapons of class and empire. Each of these terms describes not abstractions but living machinery, visible in the very words NBC presented as normal.

The contradiction is stark. The Pentagon fortifies, the Treasury collapses. Inward fortification and outward ruin are not separate but dialectically bound: the more the empire tightens its grip at home, the more it must strangle abroad to justify the enclosure. Collapse abroad feeds fortress at home. Tariffs and sanctions enrich the treasury, which funds the machinery of militarization. Militarization enforces the discipline needed to withstand the social costs of tariffs and sanctions. The circle closes, binding working people in the United States to the same apparatus that impoverishes their counterparts in Russia, India, and beyond.

This shift in rhetoric—from containment to collapse—marks a deeper transformation in imperial ideology. Once the U.S. could speak of “leadership” and “order,” cloaking violence in the language of stability. Now, in decline, it speaks of collapse as if it were strategy, destruction as if it were stewardship. This hardening reveals both confidence and desperation: confidence that allies and media will echo the call, desperation that only ruin will stave off the erosion of unipolarity. NBC’s role is not to question this but to consecrate it, to dress collapse in the garments of fiscal responsibility.

For the global proletariat and the colonized, this means the line of battle is no longer only at the border or the base—it is also at the supermarket, the utility bill, the empty medicine shelf. Sanctions and tariffs, justified as leverage, are lived as hunger and scarcity. To the worker in Moscow, Caracas, or Delhi, collapse strategies mean lost jobs, broken supply chains, and shattered wages. To the worker in Chicago or Atlanta, tariffs mean higher food prices, rent hikes, and the same precarity. NBC would have us believe this is strength; in truth it is the crisis of imperialism revealing itself through policy. The only answer is sovereignty—economic, political, and social—won not through integration into the collapsing order, but through alliances, multipolar trade, and revolutionary struggle.

Breaking the Walls of the Fortress

If the empire is building its fortress with two hands—the Pentagon fortifying the hemisphere and the Treasury collapsing its rivals—then the task of those who live inside its walls is clear: break the machinery from within. Solidarity here is not sentimental but material. The Russian worker facing shortages, the Venezuelan fisherman sunk by a U.S. strike, the Indian farmer punished by tariffs, the migrant turned into an “enemy of the state” at the border—all stand on the receiving end of the same architecture that disciplines the U.S. working class with rising prices, police batons, and militarized borders. The lines that NBC draws between “us” and “them” collapse under the weight of material reality: it is the empire on one side, the people of the world on the other.

Resistance is already underway. BRICS+ experiments with new payment systems to bypass the dollar are not abstractions but living cracks in the wall. Indigenous struggles for land and water sovereignty, Black liberation campaigns against police militarization, and migrant defense networks across the Americas all embody defiance of technofascist rule. These are not isolated fires but the beginnings of a counter-architecture: a lattice of survival programs, dual power projects, and multipolar alliances that refuse collapse and resist fortification. Each step taken outside the dollar, each community refusing the export of surveillance policing, each blockade of imperial chokepoints is a breach in the fortress.

For those in the Global North, action begins with naming the enemy plainly. Campaigns must target the fiscal militarism that NBC disguises as prudence: the banks that enforce sanctions, the funds that profit from tariffs, the think tanks that draft collapse doctrines. Divestment from institutions like Goldman Sachs or Barclays, which NBC cheerfully cites as proof of “success,” is more than symbolism; it is a strike at the fiscal circuitry of empire. Mutual aid projects that move medicine and food across borders into sanctioned countries strike another blow, undermining the attempt to starve populations into submission. Political education that exposes the lie—stock market highs do not mean working-class security—arms people with clarity against propaganda. Even in cyberspace, counter-messaging and open-source platforms can map the flows of surveillance, revealing how technofascist tools circulate from border to barrio.

The fortress may appear impenetrable, but it is built on fear. Fear of multipolarity, fear of proletarian unity, fear of colonized peoples reclaiming sovereignty. Its walls are high, but they are brittle. The work of our time is not only to resist the collapse strategies and the fortified enclosures, but to create the alternative: networks of solidarity that link the barrio in Caracas with the worker in Detroit, the farmer in Punjab with the migrant in Texas. The task is to turn collapse back upon the empire itself, to break its fiscal siege, and to shatter the myth that destruction is policy and that ruin is governance. The walls will fall, not by waiting, but by organizing, struggling, and building power where the fortress is weakest—inside its own gates.