Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: End of American Empire Page 1 of 2

Elon Musk Threatens Congress Successfully

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On December 20, 2024

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This is some amazing shit:

Congress was about to vote on a bill called a “Continuing Resolution”, which would fund the operations of the federal government. But yesterday, Musk started tweeting around the clock about how he hated the bill and that he would fund the campaigns of politicians who ran against Congress members who supported it.

….Shortly after Musk decided he was against the Continuing Resolution, Trump and JD Vance issued a statement saying they were against it, too. The politicians in Congress fell in line, and now it looks like the government funding plan is dead.

Here’s the thing. Being rich only means you’re good at making money in a specific way. It doesn’t mean anything else. Gates, for example, pushed the “Common Core” education changes, and there’s no evidence they did any good and some reason to think they were harmful.

We have a rich man (maybe a billionaire) as President. We have Musk, the world’s richest man, who spent a lot money helping Trump win as one of the most important people in the new administration, who has said he wants to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Money is the ability to tell people what do. It let’s you control their actions, either directly or indirectly.

FDR defined fascism as:

Ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power

The US has been trending towards oligarchy for ages. The final victory for oligarchy was probably “Citizen’s United”, which made money the same as speech and thus protected under the first amendment.

The famous Princeton oligarchy study, which used data from 1981-2002, which is to say from back when the rich weren’t nearly as powerful as they are now, found that:

…when one holds constant net interest-group alignments and the preferences of affluent Americans, it makes very little difference what the general public thinks. The probability of policy change is nearly the same (around 0.3) whether a tiny minority or a large majority of average citizens favor a proposed policy change (refer to the top panel of figure 1).

By contrast—again with other actors held constant—a proposed policy change with low support among economically-elite Americans (one out of five in favor) is adopted only about 18 percent of the time, while a proposed change with high support (four out of five in favor) is adopted about 45 percent of the time. Similarly, when support for policy change is low among interest groups (with five groups strongly opposed and none in favor) the probability of that policy change occurring is only .16, but the probability rises to .47 when interest groups are strongly favorable (refer to the bottom two panels of figure 1). Footnote 41

Musk is the world’s richest man. He threatened members of Congress using his money, and they caved.

It’s always amusing when Americans call Russia an oligarchy. It isn’t. Russia’s oligarchs have very little power compared to Putin. If they cross him, he destroys them. They do what he wants, when he wants or they go to jail or have to flee the country, giving up any wealth in Russia.

America, on the other hand, is sickeningly an oligarchy and it’s going from indirect to direct oligarchical control.

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US/China Trade War Heats Up

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On December 5, 2024

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So, China has put export controls on rare earths.

People think “well, we’ll just mine them ourselves” but it often isn’t that simple. Gallium is refined as part of the process of aluminum smelting, for example, and the US has no aluminum smelting industry left.

More generally speaking the world is unfolding as I predicted: it’s splitting into two trade blocs, a cold war is developing (the Syrian “uprising” is a cold war maneuver) and the US is trying cannibalize its satrapies: that’s what Trump’s tariffs on allies are about.

Since the 50s it was deliberate American policy to offshore industry to its allies, especially South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, but also to Europe and the Anglosphere to some extent. Now it wants to pull that back in. This has been especially noticeable, of late, in Germany, where heavy industry is shutting down and much of it is moving to the US.

The problem, of course, is that China’s cost structure is lower and they are pulling ahead technologically. The Chinese believe in technology in a way the West hasn’t since the 60s—it’s good to them. They want more robots, more drones and more automation. They’re not scared of automation taking jobs, they associate rapid technological advancement with prosperity.

The problem with bringing industry back to the US isn’t just cost-structure, it’s the so-called competency crisis and the sparseness of the vast numbers of small industrial suppliers. The ecosystem which supports and allows rapid re-industrialization doesn’t exist in the West any more. A simple example is that almost all of the world’s machine tools and basic electronics which are needed to do everything else are produced in China (with a small machine tool industry barely surviving in Germany.)

The West is going to have increasing problems with resources, as well. Most of the “South” would rather do business with China, for reasons we’ve discussed ad-infinitum. As the US cannibalizes its allies it will also have difficulty with trade: if Europe’s poor and everyone else would rather buy Chinese, who are you going to sell to?

Trump’s tariff plans aren’t exactly stupid, but they require real industrial policy at the same time and managing relationships with trade partners, including partners the US insists on treating as enemies, and Trump isn’t up for that, any more than Biden was.

So America will decline, but will decline less fast than its allies, and the world will split into two competing blocs. Only this time the “Western” bloc will be the weaker, less technologically advanced one.

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The Most Important Issues Facing Humanity

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On November 19, 2024

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There’s been a lot of attention, much of it apocalyptic, paid to Trump’s election, but Trump is just a symptom of one of our three main issues.

In order of importance, they are:

  1. Climate Change and Ecological Collapse;
  2. Mass disabling, largely due to Covid; and,
  3. The End of the Western Era, and the collapse of American hegemony.

If we manage a nuclear war during the collapse of American hegemony, it’ll turn out to have been the most important issue, but I’m betting we’ll avoid it. If I’m wrong, you won’t be able to tell me so.

Warming continues:

But just as important as warming is the collapse of biodiversity, loss of habitat and species. We are able to live and live well because other species form the network of life, which keep the atmosphere breathable, soil fertile and feed us. Worse, we just don’t understand these systems, we can’t create the simplest of biospheres: if it goes awry, we will have a hell of a time fixing it, and the loss of genetic diversity means a vast swathe of scientific advances will be cut off, especially medical advances.

(The below are from 2018, the situation is accelerating, and will be worse now.)

Average case scenarios for climate change and ecological collapse mean billions of deaths for humans a world with a significantly reduced carrying capacity. Recovery, especially of species, will take so much time that on the human timescale, it might as well be “never.”

Meanwhile, the Covid epidemic continues and we’re at risk for other viral plagues. If Covid just killed people, that would be bad, but the mass disabling is a huge problem and even people who aren’t symptomatic have suffered real damage.

This chart is from 2023, so it’s behind the curve, but it indicates the issues. (UK)

There’s no particular reason to expect this to end. We aren’t doing anything about Covid. Here’s a projection chart:

Having to care for large numbers of disabled people at the same time as everything else is going to shit is… bad. Very bad. There’s a reason why assisted suicide is becoming legal.

We could do something about Covid. Many things. But we refuse.

The End of the European Era is probably a good thing, but world hegemonic transitions are nasty. The last one led to two world wars. The Chinese are striving mightily to avoid “Thucydides trap.”

The Ukrainian and Gazan wars, plus the Yemen blockade which is part of the Gaza war are best seen as part of the death throes of the American empire. But it’s not just America which is losing power, Europe is shedding industry, has fallen behind on technology and is in serious, probably terminal decline.

The Western era, which is four to five centuries old, depending on how you count it (the case for 4 centuries is that in 1500 the Ottomans and Chinese were still vastly powerful) is coming to an end. China is re-taking its place as the most important nation in the world. I’d argue it has already done so. Russia, which has been Europe facing and European aspirational for centuries now looks East and is a junior ally of China’s.

China doesn’t want war with America. It doesn’t need a war. Absent a war, it’s already won, it just has to sit back and watch America continue its decline. Trump is not going to “make America great again”, that ship has sailed. What needs to be done to make it happen are policies (including real industrial policy and a collapse of asset prices and rent, plus increases in real wages) which are anathema to most of America’s elites, and which, in any case, they are incompetent to implement.

But hegemonic powers rarely go easy into that long night, and a world war is entirely possible. American elites don’t want to lose their pre-eminence, and they still have a powerful military (or think they do) and a lot of nuclear weapons.

So this transition period is one of great danger, potentially for everyone in the world.

These are the three big issues, everything else is trivial in comparison. Trans rights, wokeism, AI… whatever, are all rounding errors on these three issues.

 

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The worst of it is that we’re not going to handle the first one: climate change and ecological collapse. We’ve already made that decision. Even if we immediately started doing everything right, they’re now self-reinforcing, and we aren’t going to do everything right. Trump, after all, ran on drill, drill, drill. The Chinese are doing more than anyone else, with a massive build-out of renewable energy, but their system is still an extractive and polluting industrial economy with massive freeways and so on.

The only “good” sign is one that many are bewailing: collapsing birth rates. Human population is in clear overshoot, and it needs to be reduced. Yes, in theory we could increase Earth’s carrying capacity so that a massive population decrease wouldn’t be necessary, but we’re not going to.

Ecological issues are in the bucket of “fix them or nature will fix them for you” and we’ve chosen not to.

Keep these three issues at the forefront of your mind, your analysis and your planning for your personal future. Compared to them, everything else barely matters.

Democrats will not adapt to this defeat

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On November 6, 2024

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There won’t be any introspection.

Empires, like fortunes, are lost slowly and then all at once.

I’m afraid what is coming is going to fall on every American fairly equally like the snow on the graveyard at the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead”

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Democrats who have themselves not yet fallen into precarity or the economic abyss can not and will not accept that our system is completely rotten and we need to change course and leadership.
It took the GOP from 2008 to 2016 to admit that the Reagan/Bush playbook and leadership class was bankrupt and had to go.
It will likely take multiple election cycles before some figure or movement arises that can win a Democratic primary. And given that the Democrats have a long and proud history of sabotaging the most popular and most likely to win the general election candidates it might require a whole new party emerging.
Democrats had their chance at a new direction and likely multiple administrations and an even longer dominance of the Congress with Bernie Sanders but rejected the clear will of the overwhelming majority of the young voters of their party.
Those young voters are drifting away in multiple directions.
Of my comfortably retired upper-middle classic acquaintances none are even willing to admit publicly (some will in private) that the Democrats make poor tactical choices, much less admit that the whole party and every individual needs to really re-evaluate their approach and even core beliefs.
Trump is at least a wild card which presents some chance of positive change, but the odds of radically negative change are much higher.
Regardless, the status-quo has been thoroughly rejected by the majority of the American public.
That is a fact people need to accept in order to try and steer that majority in the least self-destructive direction possible.
It’s unfortunate that the members of professional-managerial class (and those of us who have pretensions to it) have never truly accepted the idea of majority rule.
We’re going to lose a war in humiliating fashion — with an outside chance that it will be over quickly — which will trigger economic collapse (and that’s if we don’t start nuking people).
Then and only then will our ruling elites turn on each other in something that will be like a post-modern parody of the first American Civil War.
Hopefully it’ll be over in 5-7 years and some of us will be alive to adjust to the new normal and enjoy a few decades of relative peace as we adjust to penury, plagues, and rapidly worsening climate change.
Jonathan Cook had some good observations:

Kamala Harris didn’t lose because she’s a woman or because she’s black.

She lost because, if your political and media system – rigged by donors – limits the choice to two hardline neoliberal candidates, with anything else denounced as “communism”, the most hardline, neoliberal candidate has an edge.

Over time, the system keeps moving further to the hardline, neoliberal right. You can’t stop that relentless shift by voting for one of the two symptoms of your diseased political system.

You have to rise up against the diseased system itself.

As did Freddie de Boer:

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Jill Stein.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Putin and the Russians.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Bernie Sanders and his supporters.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Rogan.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Glenn Greenwald and The Young Turks.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the decision to run with Tim Walz.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the New York Times and its occasional Democrat-skeptical opinion pieces.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Biden for getting out of the race too late.

You can’t pull all the usual Democrat tricks. You have to actually figure out what’s wrong with your party, root and branch. Because you called the guy a fascist, again, and he walked right through that insult to the Oval Office, again. And the eternal question presents itself: what are you going to do about it?

No Gods, No Demons, No Superpowers

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On October 30, 2024

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The era of the superpower is over. The new missile and drone technologies have made naval dominance impossible and ended the ability to devastate relatively advanced nations without them being able to shoot back. There is no power in the world that has the capabilities and might of the old USSR and the USA from 1945 to 2010 or so.

We have three great powers: China, the US and Russia.

There are regional powers: Brazil and Iran and the EU and Turkey and Japan and even India, which punches way below its population numbers.

But even a backwards, bombed to hell country like Yemen can defy America’s hold on the seas.

(This blog is for understanding the present, making educated guesses at the future, and telling truths, usually unpleasant ones. There aren’t a lot of places like this left on the Web. Every year I fundraise to keep it going. If you’d like to help, and can afford to, please Subscribe or Donate.)

The EU is particularly amusing, in that they could have been one of the great powers, but over and over again chose austerity, contraction and vassalage to America. The ship is sailing out of port, it’s theoretically possible they could turn it around, but politically impossible. Their day: indeed, their centuries, are done. Pathetic.

This is going to be a fair different and more constrained world. There will be more wars and revolutions. Great Powers will actually have to seriously compete for the allegiance of important minor powers, though China’s been doing this for a couple decades now, offering huge benefits compared to the US.

Russia’s getting in on the game. Where China offers development, Russia offers to fix your military problems for you, or at least make them manageable and to sell you oil and grain cheap.

America and its allies offer your elites membership in the club, in exchange for impoverishing or otherwise screwing over your own population. If you don’t do what they say, they lecture the hell out of you and try to sanction you into an early grave, if they don’t launch a coup or use you as a cat’s paw in a war.

If America wants to compete, it’s going to have to start offering some deals that don’t suck.

Nations will be more free to act as they choose than they have been in, literally, centuries. Since they were forced into unnatural shapes and relations by the great powers and superpowers, this will lead to significant changes, especially in places where ridiculous borders were drawn which ignored geography and ethnicity. (This is most true in Africa, but not only there.)

But the most important thing is simply that the age of the military colossus is over. China is the new industrial colossus, but climate change and environmental collapse is likely to spike that before they reach their full growth.

Welcome to the post-European Age.

Postliberalism, Liberal Apogee, Routine Elite Failure and Then?

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On October 23, 2024

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I was alerted to Nathan Pinkoski’s “Actually Existing Postliberalism,” by N.S. Lyons’ response “The Post-Cold War Apotheosis of Liberal Managerialism,” and enjoyed both tremendously.

Pinkosi’s piece is an excellent short history of the public-private partnership currently aiming for absolute global cultural control via the weaponization of finance that he calls postliberalism.

I thought it would be fun to excerpt all the times Antony Blinken’s name appears in the piece.

First mention:

When Bill Clinton took office, he continued the pursuit of openness. In 1993, he ratified NAFTA and relaxed the ban on homosexuals in the military. However, he made it clear that the old liberalism was not enough. Eager to extend the reach of democracy and confront foreign enemies who stood in its way, his administration developed new tools to advance America’s global power. In September, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake outlined a new paradigm. His speech, “From Containment to Enlargement,” bespeaks a political revolution. It provided the blueprint not only for the foreign policy agenda of nearly every U.S. president since then, but for the convictions of every right-thinking person. Lake’s speechwriter was Anthony (sic) Blinken.

Second mention:

After Biden was sworn in as president, his administration shelved a plan to overhaul sanctions policy. A consensus held that if the kinks of the past could be worked out, then the Americans and Europeans had all the weapons in place to launch a devastating financial first strike against their preferred targets. Planning began in the first year of the new administration, with Secretary Blinken’s State Department taking the lead. So by February 2022, just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine faltered, the arrangements were already in place. The strategic possibilities seemed limitless. Russia could be brought to its knees; Putin would follow in the ignominious footsteps of ­Milosevic and Gaddafi.

The execution of the strike was dazzling. The scale, especially the involvement of SWIFT and the targeting of Russia’s central bank, caught the Kremlin by surprise. It was ­Barbarossa for the twenty-­first century. Yet the first strike did not yield the promised results. Nor did the second, third, or fourth. Putin’s approval ratings soared, Russia’s industrial output increased, and its military continues to grind away at the Ukrainian army. Despite implementing nearly 6,000 sanctions in two-plus years, the euphoria of spring 2022 (let alone that of the holiday parties of 2011) is long gone. Although American policymakers have said again and again that they have mobilized a global coalition against Russia that has left the country isolated, that is not the case. The map of the countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia closely resembles the map of the countries that have legalized same-sex marriage. Economic warfare against Russia has exposed the limits of the global American empire.

Lyons applauds Pinkoski’s essay but rejects the notion that this is a revolution against liberalism — instead, it is its apogee.

Sadly, he doesn’t mention Blinken, but he does elaborate on the frightening ambition of this movement:

The managerial ideal is the perfect frictionless mass of totally liberated (that is, totally deracinated and atomized) individuals, totally contained within the loving arms of the singular unity of the managerial state. To achieve its utopia of perfect liberty and equality, liberalism requires perfect control.

This ideal is, of course, the very essence of totalitarianism. Yet if we wonder why the distinction between public and private has everywhere collapsed into “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics,” this is the most fundamental reason why. Perhaps, for that matter, this is also why the U.S. and EU now habitually sponsor LGBT groups in Hungary or India, and finance human-trafficking “human rights” NGOs in Central America and the Mediterranean: because managerialism’s blind crusade to crush any competing spheres of social power has gone global.

In response, a comforting tonic from The Archdruid, John Michael Greer at Ecosophia, whose reader “Dave” asks him:

I’ve noticed a growing and extremely worrying trend of the “elites” of politics and entertainment pursuing reckless and (to me) clearly wrong courses of actions that blow up in their faces, and then instead of honestly looking at the situation they’ve had a large hand in creating and doing a mea culpa, either doubling down and getting mad at regular people when they’re less keen to do what the elites tell them, or trying something else without ever really honestly accounting for their mistakes. The actions remind me of signs of elite collapse that this blog has talked about for years now and it’s very surreal and worrying to see happening in real time. What is going on and why can’t the “elites”, the people with access to more data and resources and advisers than anyone else, seem to realize what’s going wrong? Do they not care or are their actions part of a larger plan, not to sound conspiratorial?

Greer’s response was just what I needed to hear:

Dave, I don’t think that it’s any kind of plan. Quite the contrary, this is normal elite failure, the thing that comes right before an elite replacement crisis. Just as the capitalist elite of the 1920s crashed and burned, and was replaced by a managerial elite in the 1930s and 1940s, the managerial elite of the 2010s is crashing and burning, and will be replaced by an entrepreneurial elite in the 2020s and 2030s. The entitled cluelessness of a class that has remained in power too long is a familiar thing; comparisons to French aristocrats just before the French Revolution also come to mind.

Although, honestly if this means that Elon Musk and company are going to win what Chris Hedges calls “The Choice Between Corporate and Oligarchic Power”…eek!

Kamala Harris, anointed by the richest Democratic Party donors without receiving a single primary vote, is the face of corporate power. Donald Trump is the buffoonish mascot for the oligarchs. This is the split within the ruling class. It is a civil war within capitalism played out on the political stage. The public is little more than a prop in an election where neither party will advance their interests or protect their rights.

And what do the oligarchs want?

Warlord capitalism seeks the total eradication of all impediments to the accumulation of profits including regulations, laws and taxes. It makes its money by charging rent, by erecting toll booths to every service we need to survive and collecting exorbitant fees.

Trump’s cohort of Silicon Valley backers, led by Elon Musk, were what The New York Times writes, “finished with Democrats, regulators, stability, all of it. They were opting instead for the freewheeling, fortune-generating chaos that they knew from the startup world.” They planned to “plant devices in people’s brains, replace national currencies with unregulated digital tokens, [and] replace generals with artificial intelligence systems.”

As much as I eagerly anticipate the long-overdue fall of our current elite, I truly dread what’s coming up in their wake.

Germany Honors Biden For Destroying Nordstream & Their Economy

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On October 19, 2024

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I cannot believe this is happening:

Germany honored U.S. President Joe Biden for his contribution to trans-Atlantic relations on Friday, ahead of his meetings with European allies on Russia’s war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East.

TIME Magazine: Germany Honors Biden for His Contribution to Trans-Atlantic Ties as the U.S. Election Looms

Germany Honors Biden for His Contribution to Trans-Atlantic Ties as the U.S. Election Looms

The sheer delight the pathetic “Traffic Light” coalition government takes in abasing itself before the US hegemon is pornographic in its shameless indecency. Especially the same week that the Danes reported this:

Just days before the Nord Stream gas pipeline attack in September 2022, warships belonging to the U.S. Navy were on the scene and ordered nearby officials to keep away.

That is according to John Anker Nielsen, who is harbour master at Christiansø, the easternmost part of Denmark in the Baltic Sea, northeast of the island of Bornholm and close to the sites of the Nord Stream explosions.

Map showing the route of Nord Stream 1 and 2 in the southern Baltic Sea and location of the leaks. AWZ=Exclusive Economic Zone
Map: AFP / Nadine EHRENBERG, adapted

Nielsen late last month told a reporter at Politiken, a major Danish daily, that he went out with a rescue team four or five days before the blast to check on nearby ships with switched-off radios, suspecting there might have been an accident, only to find U.S. warships, whose staff ordered the team to turn back immediately.

Never forget Biden threatened Nordstream:

Biden: If Russia invades uh that means tanks or troops crossing the uh the border of Ukraine again then uh there will be uh we there will be no longer a Nordstream 2. We will bring an end to it.
Reporter: What? How would you how will you do that exactly since the project and control of the project is within Germany’s control?

Biden: We will. I promise you we’ll be able to do it.

and Nuland did it too. This video is still up on the State Department’s official Facebook page because they’re proud of it:

“If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

And Never forget what Nuland said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on January 26, 2023:

“I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you [Ted Cruz] like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

Blinken celebrated it as an economic opportunity:

“…ultimately this is also a tremendous opportunity.  It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.  That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come…”

And then there was this from Anne “It’s Time to Prepare for a Ukrainian Victory” Applebaum’s husband who’s a Polish official:

Former Polish FM thanks US for damaging Nord Stream pipeline

The consequences of this have been the deindustrialization of Germany:

German industry increasingly struggles to compete on the world stage. Particularly hard hit are its mighty chemical and heavy industry sectors, which are now in rapid decline. One of the main drivers is policies that have made energy costs skyrocket, and there Germany serves as a canary in the coal mine for other leading industrial nations.

It’s kind of grimly amusing that Forbes’ use of the euphemism “policies that have made energy costs skyrocket” rather than say “self-defeating sanctions on cheap Russian gas combined with the biggest act of industrial sabotage in modern history” and it also doesn’t mention that it’s been America’s policies that have deindustrialized Germany.

It’s also so humiliating as an American that the neo-conservative cabal of psychopathic nitwits has been in sole control of US foreign policy since the Clinton administration and now they have a lock on US corporate media as well.

The above mentioned Anne Applebaum provided the perfect example of their delusion and idiocy with her September, 2022 prediction that Ukrainian victories in Kharkov would bring down Putin.

But that brings me back to Germany’s pathetic ruling coalition. This is how well they’ve done in recent state elections:

In the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia, the far-right AfD received more than double as many votes as the three parties which make up the federal coalition government — the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), environmentalist Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) — combined. These parties’ results are each in the single digits. The Greens in Thuringia and the FDP in both states even failed to meet the 5% threshold to be represented in the state parliaments.

And on the left:

A newly established populist party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), managed to score votes in the two-digit range in their very first election.

The German people are chomping at the bit to vote out the gang of traitors who have allowed the US to annihilate their economy.

Although in fairness, they also gave the last US President who walloped the Germany economy the same award:

“Biden received the highest class of Germany’s Order of Merit, which was also bestowed on former U.S. President George H.W. Bush for his support of German reunification.”

Kind of fitting that the era of American unipolarity is framed this way. Bush at the beginning. Biden at the end. The Germans footing the bill for American foreign policy.

 

 

 

The Death Throes Of The American Empire & Western Hegemony

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On October 2, 2024

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One theme of this blog, for the last four years or so, has been the end of the unilateral, American, order.

Let’s review:

The US & NATO poured support into Ukraine, and the Ukrainians are losing the war. This is clear now, and anyone denying it is either lying, stupid or a complete captive of propaganda.

The West can’t produce enough weapons or ammo. There have been massive drawdowns of stocks and production is not enough to replace it, nor is production ramping up either enough, or quickly enough, to deal with the issue.

Russia, however, was able to ramp up weapons and ammunition production fast. At the start of the war, and for far too long afterwards there were cries that the Russians would run out of missiles, shells and so on. No such thing. Their allies came thru, plus they massively increased their production.

China’s ahead in most scientific fields and has the larger industrial base. Ever since the industrial revolution, the most powerful countries have been those with the most production capacity, which is not the same thing as GDP or Economy.

China and Russia are closer together than ever. With China as Russia’s ally, sanctions can’t work. With Russia as China’s ally, China has a guaranteed, land-based supply of food and resources.

China’s ship construction capacity is more than the entire West’s, including Japan and South Korea. America doesn’t even figure in, they have almost no ability to build ships, the ships they build often aren’t combat-worthy, and they take two or three times longer to build and are far more expensive.

BRICS continues to expand, the percentage of trade conducted in US dollars continues to decline and BRICS is prioritizing a payment system which bypasses the West. Bottom line, the West now produces less than it needs from other nations, but dollar privilege has allowed us to get away with it. This era is passing.

Much of the third world would rather do business with China or even Russia. Multiple African nations have kicked the US and France out. China offers cheaper goods, cheaper infrastructure and loans are usually cheaper. Plus outside of Asia they mostly don’t interfere in other nations politics. Russian mercs are brutal, but they are preferable to Western garrisons, which are ineffective at putting down unrest and dangerous to their hosts.

China doesn’t want to use US goods in their supply chain. They’ll sell us stuff, sure, why not—till a war starts at which point our entire economy will seize up. But the Huawei and chip sanctions taught them that relying on US goods was a knife at their throat, and Chinese companies have spent the six years doing everything they can to reduce and end that vulnerability.

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Concluding Remarks

None of this was particularly necessary, but we made a series of decisions which lead here. We constantly aggravated Russia. They wanted to be Western, to join NATO and maybe even the EU eventually, but we treated them as enemies. With them as allies, China would be in a far weaker position.

We deliberately sent China our industry, thinking it didn’t matter where it was and that we (or rather our elites) would make more money that way.

We abused the payments system and dollar privilege thru incessant sanctions warfare, then made a grab for Russia overseas reserves. Everyone’s scared.

Where we still had technological superiority, we tried to use it as an economic weapon. That has backfired badly, but everyone worries it will be used against them.

No one except a few core allies trusts the US (and they shouldn’t, either). No one except the Anglosphere, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Europeans enjoyed the era of US or, for that matter, Western supremacy, and they’ll be happy to see it go.

As the saying goes, you see the same people on the way down as you did on your way up. We brutalized a lot of people over the last five centuries. Don’t be surprised if they get a few kicks in on our way down.

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