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 2 of 12

When Does Money Matter?

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On April 1, 2026

25 Comments

The core reason for America and Europe’s decline (and, in a way, Japan’s) was the belief by our elites that money was the only thing which mattered.

Money is the ability command resources from anyone who will, or must, sell. People who need to sell their labor or starve—Marx’s famous “whip of hunger.” Countries who must sell to get your money because you either make them militarily (see Venezuela right now and Iraq, both of which must sell their oil in US dollars and let the US treasury keep the money on account for them, then decide what they can spend it on, plus, of course the entire colonial era); or because they need to buy what you have.

For a long time the West had a monopoly on much of what you had to have: medicines, engines, planes, cars, tractors, fertilizer and so on. The Petrodollar was about having a monopoly on oil and all its products: gasoline, diesel, bunker fuel, jet fuel, plastics and fertilizer again. If you wanted electricity, well the equipment to make it came from the West too. If you wanted advanced weapons — the West, especially after the fall of the USSR.

During the early post war period you had options: you could get most of this from the West or the Soviets. But starting in the 70s, the USSR went into decline and then it fell, and the West was the only option.

Back to American elites: since everyone had to buy in dollars, and because they needed to get so much from the West, also had to sell in dollars, well having dollars was all that mattered. The more dollars, the more power.

What the elites forgot, thanks to complete retards like Francis Fukuyama, and sheer stupidity and greed was that smarter people than them had arranged the system this way: that it was contingent on the West having what everyone else needed, and having the military whip-hand.

Japan, poor fuckers, built an incredible industrial base and was pushing on taking the industrial lead. American leaders in the 80s, not having been taken over by complete retards made the Japanese sign the Plaza Accords, in which they would give that tech to America, open factories in the West and so on: give up their momentum, because it matters where you build.

As I’ve said many times, the tech lead follows the manufacturing floor: this is the LAW. Japan wasn’t strong enough to tell the US to go to hell. So they spent the last 4 decades in slow decline. This wasn’t primarily because of their big crash, though that was mishandled, but because they were no longer allowed to continue their industrial and technological snowball.

But by the 90s the last smart competent American elites were dead or retired, and the triumphalism over the fall of the USSR made them think, a la Fukuyama, that their system was superior, their shit didn’t stink, and they’d be on top forever. Everyone would have their system, and everyone would just keep buying and selling in dollars no matter what: it no longer mattered where things were made.

The key moment was when Clinton let China into the World Trade Organization (WTO) with developing world status. Western financiers (they weren’t capitalists, capitalists aren’t so stupid) looked at how cheap Chinese labor was and how willing they were to pollute and let workers get maimed, and they salivated. (And yes, lack of worker protections was part of it. One of my friends, in the 90s, visited a battery factory where the batteries were made by hand. Batteries are basically full of acid. Think it thru.)

So they sent industry to China and told themselves “well, we do the design here. That’s what matters.”

The Chinese leadership nodded, smiled and among themselves said, I’m sure, “what a bunch of suckers. Thank God they’re such idiots.”

And in learning to make all these things the Chinese learned the design and so on, and in time took the manufacturing lead. Then about 20 years later they took the tech lead decisively. Even three years ago American sanctions worried them. 

(In 2023) Xi Jinping warned that U.S.-led technology restrictions posed “unprecedented severe challenges” to China’s development.

Today:

Han Wenxiu, the senior official overseeing day-to-day operations at the Central Commission for Financial and Economic Affairs (CCFEA) — the Party’s top economic policymaking body — told the China Development Forum (CDF):

“After years of effort, China’s indigenous innovation capacity has passed a critical inflection point, making it difficult for external forces to derail our development”

As for overcapacity, the Chinese are no longer apologizing for it or dancing around it. They say our companies are uncompetitive and that’s our problem.

The bet seems to be that most countries, or trading blocs, won’t get their acts together enough to materially push back against China’s export juggernaut.

  • Even the U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods — unprecedented in recent history — have only succeed in diverting low-value manufactures (think toys, textiles, and fast fashion) away from the U.S. and toward new markets.
  • They’ve had less impact on higher-value exports to the U.S. — either because those goods were never sold there at scale (i.e. NEVs) or were exempt from the tariff regime anyway (i.e. smartphones and medical equipment).

To put it simply, the world needs what China has and can’t make it themselves. If they can make it themselves, well, it’s much cheaper coming from China and how many Western countries are willing to take a big hit to re-start their industries, and are competent enough to pull it off? (My approximate count is zero.)

And that, folks, is the end of the Western order. No one needs to buy from us any more. They’d still like to sell to us, sure, but they don’t need to because they don’t need dollars. If it’s something they need they can get it from China or, to a lesser extent Russia, India and so on. We don’t have a monopoly on anything that matters any more: the last real one was chip manufacturing, but the Chinese are catching up fast and confident that in a few years they’ll be there. In the meantime, they can make all but the most advanced chips and those are the ones that go in almost all manufactured good: the most advanced stuff is only useful for things like AI, and China’s find its way around that.

Now we come to Iran. Iran is showing that a fairly modest kit: missiles and drones, is sufficient to keep the US navy and air force far away and make any attack prohibitively expensive in men and material. Plus everyone knows that expensive US military gear needs Chinese supplies: the West doesn’t have the full kit any more, the Chinese can and in some case have, cut the West off any time they want. All those expensive radars the Iranians blew up? Well it’s not the cost (that’s irrelevant) it’s that they require materials on the Chinese have. They get rebuilt if the Chinese let America and there’s basically nothing the US can do about that.

Keynes famously said “anything we can do, we can afford.” The corollary, as I’ve written before is that it doesn’t matter how much money you have, anything you can’t do you can’t afford—or rather you can’t afford it if the people who can do it won’t sell it to you.

America had a great thing going, for America and for its allies. But American elites got stupid and didn’t understand the actual structure upholding their power. They though it was innate to a superior system and superior people, not a structure built by very smart and ruthless people over a period of about a hundred and fifty years: a structure that required maintaining.

And so, it’s over. It’s just over and anyone who tells you otherwise has zero idea what they’re talking about.

And everyone else is realizing this. Let’s take Australia, run by ‘tards even stupider than America. Twenty years ago, they had eight refineries. Now they have two. They’re running out of diesel and even if they could get crude oil (certainly not impossible, though hard) it doesn’t matter, because they can’t refine it.

This lesson should have been learned during the Covid Pandemic when the West restricted medical supplies and the logistics system stopped delivering enough international goods.

Anything really important: fuel, machinery required to maintain your infrastructure, food, medicine, etc… is something that you should be able to make yourself. If you truly can’t, you must have huge stockpiles. I would never want a country to have stockpiles less than three years of medicines, food, parts for important machinery like the electrical grid, and fuel.

None of us do.

Anyway, the structure of Western dominance is now dismantled, by Westerners. Perhaps the Chinese could have industrialized fully without us, but it would have taken a lot longer and as long as we had our own industry and tech stack, it would have just meant a cold war situation with two blocs and, absent de-industrialization, perhaps the West could have held its own, though China is innately stronger than the USSR ever was, especially with Russia as an ally.

We did this to ourselves, or our elites did, because of sheer stupidity and arrogance. Don’t underestimate how bad this will be. I’m in the “better China as hegemon than America” crowd. I think they’ll kill a lot less people. But be clear, they are going to be a hegemon, at least in industrial terms and this is going to mean a serious standard of living drop in much of the West. Europe will get hit the hardest (especially Britain) but everyone’s going to get hit hard. A few of us may make the switch over to the hegemon on favorable terms. Canada and Australia have the best chance of doing this being large countries with tons of resources and relatively small populations, but it’s not a sure thing.

Dominance and prosperity are both structural. They are always created by competent leaders and populations and when their successors become complacent they are always lost.

That’s where we are.

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Risk and Reward As Perceived in American Strategic Culture

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On March 26, 2026

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~by Sean Paul Kelley

How does the way an individual perceives time affect the way they approach risk? And can the way individuals perceive time and risk be applied on a macro scale?

Let’s take a look.

Sociologist Phillip Zimbardo developed a five way typology of how individuals perceive time. People who inhabit certain zones have certain characteristics unique to their typology. Diane Maye, commenting on attitudes toward risk by the US military at The Strategy Bridge writes, “future-oriented people tend to be more successful at achieving their goals, whereas people who frequently reminisce about the past can be overly nostalgic or fearful.” Makes sense, no?

What about those who live in the present? How do they perceive time and more importantly how do they approach risk? This type inhabits what Zimbardo calls the present hedonistic mode, and as Maye elaborates, “[are] more likely to engage in risk-taking behavior.” Maye adds that “the present hedonistic person “lives in and for the moment” and demonstrates a “lack of regard for future consequences.”

I can’t think of anything that describes the outlook of most Americans with more accuracy than this. America is a nation riddled with a present-mind perspective. Our media diet is now totally skewed towards immediate gratification with absolutely zero thought for the future. No one reads long-form essays any longer, much less books. Tik-Tok, X and even the nightly national news is geared towards quippy repartee, not well-informed consideration. Balance and objectivity in reporting just takes too long, especially when you can strike a pose, Right or Left. Such a thing is much easier and much more rewarding to ones endorphin producing centers. Intellectualism is so passé.

Indeed, one of the greatest losses of the last several years was NPRs shift from a medium whose central bias was intellectual, to one that skews left is overtly political. All part and parcel of the slippery slope towards an all pervasive AI-driven society concerned only about its own immediate gratification.

This typology can just as easily be applied to our national approach to such existential matters as voting, domestic economics, and foreign risk, mainly in the context of our conduct of war, best summed up as “bomb first, analyze the loss later.”

The consideration of risk and reward became uncoupled from each other during the Reagan Administration, when the debt markets were restructured drastically by a crucial innovation: MBSs, mortgage-backed securities and junk bonds–supposedly to democratize finance–and the equity markets were deregulated and then a Bull’s ass was set aflame by Greenspan’s long era of easy money. The spread between them only grew worse under Clinton, doubly so under Baby Bush, Obama and aren’t even spoken in the same sentence under our new Maximum Leader, Trump.

Americans, however, are soon going to learn that when you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. The consequences of which will be grim.

This Is The End Of The American Empire. Period.

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On March 20, 2026

31 Comments

My friends, this is it. America isn’t going to win this war, unless they use nukes, but even if I’m wrong and they squeeze out their .01% chance of success, it is over. The army is exhausted and can’t be re-armed in less than a decade, with Chinese help. The Middle East will be in ruins. The AI bubble will crash out without money and resources from the Gulf. Everyone’s going to turn hard from hydrocarbons to renewables, especially solar, and that means China is going to make absolute bank.

This is the second stupidest war decision I’ve seen in my entire life. (The first was Ukraine refusing a very generous peace deal and, as a result, losing the majority of its fighting and breeding age male population.)

The war is lost. It was lost the moment Iran proved it could keep fighting and wouldn’t accept a peace without achieving its aims. The Americans, with, it appears, help from NATO nations, are going to try and open the Strait militarily. They will fail and it will be a military clusterfuck of epic proportions. There is approximately zero chance of opening the Strait, and if they are stupid enough to try and land marines, those marines are DEAD.

I have never seen such military insanity in my life. If I were a colonel in the US army I’d be organizing a coup and I am not kidding. There are suicide missions and then there’s trying to land troops in the Strait while Iran has missile and drone dominance, thousands of speed boats and has mined the Strait. The US does not have air superiority, even, we just saw the Iranians hit an f-35, they’ve shot down at least eight aerial refueling planes, forced the US to keep its aircraft carriers far away, made it impossible to use most of the local bases and taken out almost all US radars in the area.

This is a loss. The smart thing for the US to do would be to just declare the war is over and evacuate the region. If Israel wants to fight on its own, let it.

But the Israelis almost certainly have video of Trump raping kids, and Americans can’t admit they’re losing, so the war will go on.

The oil field damage is severe enough already that it will take years to repair. Iran will probably retain control over the Strait permanently, deciding who gets to transit. Nations they like go thru free. Nations they hate have no access. Everyone else pays: after all Iran’s going to have a lot of rebuilding to do.

Meanwhile France, still under the delusion that it’s a great power, seized another Russian oil tanker. The Russians have said they’re considering military escorts in the future. This could go south in very bad ways, and France’s missile defense systems and interceptor stockpiles are not in any shape to fight a war with Russia. The EU has decided not to ease Russian oil sanctions and Putin, in any case, has said he doesn’t want to sell to Europeans any more because they’re unreliable.

Europe’s industrial base is evaporating. They’re so far behind in tech that they don’t even show up on lists of the top five tech leaders, even when you lump all of the EU together. (Top 4 are China/US/Japan/South Korea.) Trump just massively cut science and tech spending and scientists and academics are fleeing the US, often for China. Russia, by itself, produces more missiles, drones and artillery shells than all of NATO, which should tell you meaningless GDP is as a measure of state capacity.

The US is about to become a regional power. And I don’t think it will sustain even that. Iran has just taught everyone how to make tangling with even a medium sized nation unbelievably painful. The process of turning into porcupines should take five to ten years, at which point the US navy loses 90% of its power projection ability.

Further the loss of dollar hegemony will lead to a good 30% drop in the American standard of living. But America’s cost structure (if you need an MRI fly to China, stay in a five star hotel for a week and pay cash for your MRI. It’ll cost less than getting it in America) means that high nominal wages mean very little. Americans are going to strangle slowly to death. Meanwhile one-third of the world’s fertilizer supplies are about to evaporate, helium (used to make chips among other things) is about to become rare and expensive and China has put export controls on key elements like silver and all petroleum products. As the supply chain shocks multiply (who thought just in time was smart? Oh, all the usual morons) multiple countries will stop exporting key goods up to and including food.

US bases have been proven not to protect your country but to make it a target. Every American ally is noticing this and the Phillipines and South Korea in particular are taking note. Japan is still talking tough, but they’re being morons. They either get nukes and destroy their economy when China sanctions them, or they cut a deal.

The scale of this clusterfuck is mind boggling. America is destroying its ability to coerce other nations, destroying its economy and making having an alliance with it not just worthless but actively a detriment, while devastating all of its allies’ economies: Europe, Japan and South Korea are all going to take HUGE hits from this.

Meanwhile China’s oil stockpiles are at record highs, they spent the last 4 years buying 50% of the world’s grain supply and piling it up, and their hard move into renewables has proved to be 100% correct. As for Russia, another big winner, since their oil and gas, minus some minor damage from the Ukraine war is just fine, thanks.

While Ukraine’s decision to fight the Russians as a cat’s paw for the US was arguably worse it lacks the awe-inspring scale of this bout of epic stupidity.

As Mencken wrote,

“the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

And here we are. Americans elected the stupidest President in history, a known rapist, a pedophile being blackmailed by a foreign power, a con man, who is also suffering from dementia and all of this was known before he was elected to anyone paying attention.

America’s empire was doomed by Reagan and Clinton. Trump’s just bringing it to a messy end. But the decline could have taken another twenty years and been much, much less painful. Trump has decided to end it in the most spectacular and stupid manner unimaginable to anyone with the intelligence of a door-mouse. Meanwhile, Europe’s pygmy leaders are feeding Europe’s economy into a woodchipper, foot first and greasing the gears, “why is this machine so slow!? What can we do to speed it up?”

Welcome to the end of Western hegemony. It’s stupider, more venal and more darkly funny than I could ever have imagined.

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Donald Trump and the Apotheosis of Chimpanzee Politics

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On March 19, 2026

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The most salient observation in Lawrence Freedman’s book Strategy: A History, comes early, paraphrasing Frans De Waal’s seminal study Chimpanzee Politics, Freedman writes, “De Waal concluded that rather than changing the social relationships, the fights [to become or overthrow and alpha or to wage war] tended to reflect the changes that had already taken place.”

This “Chimpanzee Framework” is a useful way of understanding the catastrophe unfolding in the Persian Gulf today and the accelerating collapse of American power globally. The “Chimpanzee framework” clarifies just how and why American foreign and economic policy actions resemble a honey drenched giant fighting off an hungry sleuth of bears more than a smart, historically informed nation. American policy and its actions are uncoordinated, moored in shared delusion and filled with several metric shit-tons of hopium. (See, more proof ‘Muricans can do Metric!)

Why would American actions be otherwise? America inhabits a fundamentally different world than it did a decade ago. The unipolar moment is gone; multipolarity is fact, not wishful thinking. BRICS grow faster every day, searching for the perfect red-pill of knocking the dollar off its hegemony throne. Meanwhile, the United States cannot affect international policy change to its liking regardless where it acts. Not in the Ukraine. Not in Iran. Worse, the inevitable defeat in Iran will cascade into Venezuelan and Cuban failure as the small shrug off the rotten shackles of a wounded giant.

America’s inept inefficacy is not limited to international policy: economic policy vis-a-vis tariffs is an abject failure as it was under Biden. The United States will find re-industrializing an impossible adjustment when the reality of a nationwide collapse of its standard of living happens. Reindustrializing starts with a vigorous textile industry, not more computer and AI chip plants.

So, just how many Americans are willing to work for peanuts in sweat-shops? How many machinists can we realistically turn out in five, ten, even fifteen years? Do Americans even know what machinists do? How many high school graduates can use a lathe, much less know what one is? Our domestic reality is as equally grim as our international one, except our international collapse will compound already enormous burdens pervading an economy of misaligned priorities and a poorly performing one at that.

In Strategy, Freedman also discusses the utility and efficacy of coalition building among chimpanzees, their alphas and those tribes they war against. In his most striking note, he describes the political complexities, violence and the necessity of building stronger, effective coalitions, be they to wage war for a nearby fig tree or to install a new alpha. His conclusion is counterintuitive and profound: chimpanzee violence doesn’t represent an overthrow or revolution. It confirms a preexisting reality.

Henry Kissinger made the same argument in his doctoral dissertation, later published as A World Restored, not regarding chimpanzees, but in the context of Metternich’s formation of the Sixth Coalition against Bonaparte. The Befreiungskriege, as it was called in Metternich’s native German, confirmed the reality on the ground that Bonaparte’s 1812 invasion of Russia was a mortal own goal for the French; the War of the Sixth Coalition merely confirmed it; and the subsequent peace codified it for almost a hundred years.

The same argument can be made regarding the United States and its quickly deteriorating Western coalition of the unwilling. Not to mention its Far East allies who are quickly tiring of American shenanigans, outright betrayal and economic, tariff-related fuckery. That this coalition, a coalition that dominated the post-Cold War world, cannot now manufacture more artillery shells than a single nation, the Russian Federation, is proof positive of a deeply misunderstood alignment of power and an pre-existing altered reality is met with blank stares and outright denial.

That this coalition is blindly following a great power lead by the nose by a tiny, recalcitrant and criminal regime running Israel has historical precedent. Think Serbia and Russia in the days before August 1914. The Serbs were deeply complicit in the assassination of the Austrian Archduke (read Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark for proof). And Russian mobilization in support of their little Slav Brothers (or if you really need me to spell it out in today’s terms, those who we share Judeo-Christian values with) guaranteed German entry into the war.

Freedman’s “Chimpanzee framework” goes far in explaining the escalating devastation of petroleum related infrastructure and targeting of natural gas fields in the Persian Gulf. The world desperately needs to move away from fossil fuels. And many nations have made great efforts to do so. Thus, the destruction in the Persian Gulf of petroleum assets, refineries, gas wells, LNG and oil terminals, represents a symptom of a larger global reality: the world has turned an epoch making corner on fossil fuels. The day of fossil fuels is far from over, but this is the beginning of the end. There will be winners and losers, cliché I know, and yet countries that have made strong investments in renewable energy will make the inevitable and painful adjustments successfully. The losers like the USA, are those who will maintain their reliance on petroleum, come hell or high-water.

Most Americans dispute the idea that we higher primates and chimpanzees have a common ancestor or share any commonalities for that matter. They are in need of a rethink. Our politics are too similar, our warmaking just as brutal and our collective decision-making is too catastrophe prone to deny.

So, anyone got a fig? Or know where a fig tree is?

Iran Is Revealing The American Empire’s End

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On March 6, 2026

40 Comments

The Iranian strategy in the war has been fairly simple. They’re taking out all nearby American bases and prioritizing hitting all infrastructure, especially radar. While doing so they are running US and Israeli interceptor stocks into the ground, and driving up the price of oil, gas and potash (fertilizer.)

Attacks on radar matter. Accounts suggest that warnings for incoming missiles and drones have gone from fifteen minutes to two or three. And these radars can’t be placed in any reasonable time frame:

I wonder if China will LET the US rebuild it’s military. They do have a veto.

Meanwhile Putin is getting ready to twist the knife into Europe’s guts. The other day he was musing that since Europe intended to end all imports in 2027 anyway, perhaps Russia should just end it now. And now:

Novak: Russia will redirect gas supplies from the EU to other markets Russia is ready to supply gas to friendly countries committed to long-term, constructive relations, instead of Europe, said Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak.

“And such opportunities exist. Our companies have confirmed this today. They are already in negotiations, and gas quantities will soon be delivered to other countries,” Novak added.

It’s really hard to overstate how much the past few years have absolutely devastate Europe’s industrial position. Part of it’s just “China scale” but a lot of it has been high energy prices making Germany legacy industry (that’s almost all of Germany’s industry, they don’t have the tech lead in anything but a few obscure niches like lenses) uncompetitive. US natural gas is MUCH more expensive than Russia was.

Meanwhile Iran has targeted both Amazon and Microsoft servers, since both are used by the US and Gulf State militaries, including key targeting systems.

What the world is finding out is that an American base in your country doesn’t protect you, it makes you a target. The US can’t protect either its bases or its allies. Countries like the Phillipines, whose defense strategy was “ally with America, get American bases” have to be realizing the bases are a liability, not an asset.

The US can’t protect its allies. It can’t protect its own power projection capability. Iran hasn’t taken out any aircraft carriers, but every time it fires a salvo at them, the carrier groups scuttle another few hundred miles away, making them less and less useful.

I don’t know if this is America’s last great war, I think there’s one more left, but it’s the war that shows how hollow the US has become. Can’t defend it’s bases. Can’t defend its allies. Can’t keep the trade routes open. Can’t build enough interceptors for a real war. Can’t replace destroyed radars and other infrastructure in any reasonable time span or without Chinese aid.

As for America’s strategy? It’s wasting vast amounts of time bombing civilians, while Iran dismantles its military infrastructure.

The oil shock is going to be much worse than most people realize. Kuwait is already reducing production, all the Gulf States have limited storage and when it runs out they have to stop producing. But if you stop an oil well mid-production, it takes a long time to get them going again, same with refineries, and stopping production can damage oil fields permanently.

This is especially hurting US Asian allies. Both Japan and Korea are cruising for running out of oil and gas. But not China:

This is a complete fiasco for America and its alliance and satrapy system. If you can’t protect your allies and vassals, they are going to want OUT. And the Gulf States are already talking about reducing investments in America and even repatriation, because they’re going to have a lot of rebuilding to do.

Yet again America has wound up a baseball bat, taken a swing and hit its allies and itself.

After this it will take years for the American military to recover, if it ever does. Everyone will be safer as a result, except for a few Latin American countries it can still slap around. Even they will be scurrying to protect themselves: after all, Iran has shown how. Drones and missiles and a decentralized command system. China and Russia and Iran will be happy to sell them what they need and China at least will probably finance them at cut rates.

I remember reading some Chinese Christian Uncle’s theory that Trump was indeed chosen by God: to destroy the American empire. So far, true or not, that assumption has had very high predictive utility, almost everything Trump has done has made America weaker.

Maybe that’ll work out for the US, too, in the medium run. Losing its Empire and having nothing else to do but fix its own problems is what America needs.

But in the meantime, every day Iran makes everyone in the world safer by destroying the very sinews of American war and the myth of American superiority.

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The Weirdness Of Getting Old

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On February 23, 2026

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So, I’m now fifty-eight years old. My body feels it, though that’s more residual damage from various health problems than age, but my soul doesn’t: I feel like I’m still who I was when I was five years old, staring at multicolored fish in tide pools, making sand castles and telling myself stories about the freighters I saw steaming past my grandmother’s beach home.

When it comes to my life work, to understand the forces of history and civilization, it’s mostly given me a sense of the pace of change, and a feeling for momentum in human affairs. A human life, even a long one, isn’t very long. Human history operates on generations, with three and seven seeming to be the numbers which matter most.

A normal sub-ideological cycle (New  Deal and post-war liberalism, neoliberalism) is about 3 generations. Sometimes they can go longer, but making a bet of about fifty to sixty years for a run will usually work. The changes FDR made stayed substantially in place till 1980 with Reagan. Neoliberalism is dying as we speak. There’s always an overlap period, where the old order is dismantled, but substantial spars remain in place. It takes till the late 90s to repeal the major market reforms of New Deal liberalism, for example.

I was born in 1968. I was twelve when Reagan was elected. I lived the very end of the post-war order, and my entire teenage and adult life has been under neoliberalism. I watched as social services were cut, as every building went from “just walk in” to having security guards. I saw Universities go from being open to the public to closed. I remember the old “middle class” economy and I lived thru the transition to one where the top 10% does over 50% of all spending.

I predicted the ways that the neoliberal order would end, and was right about almost all of it: the rise of China, the end of dollar hegemony, elite capture, the effects of surveillance and electronic money, but in terms of a human life it has all felt like very a long time.

It isn’t, really, in historical terms. Fifty years isn’t very long, unless you’re living thru it.

Young adults today have the same relationship to the 80s and 90s that I do to to the 50s and 60s. They don’t remember them, but they grew up with adults who lived thru them. Heck, I knew adults who remembered the Great Depression, the 20s, World War I and II. My span—what I either experienced myself or what I heard about from people who were there goes from about 1910 to the current year. My teachers included Old Edwardians, Lost Generation types, Hippies and square jawed GI and Silent Generation types.

My parents had me late, so I was really raised mostly not by Boomers, but by the Silent Generation. My father was in training as a pilot when the war ended. Had it gone on another six months he’d have been deployed.

They were very foreign people, not at all like those who are adults today. There was an acceptance of personal violence that has faded, but also a sense of honor which no longer exists. The male adults who were most important in my life were all men whose word you could trust. They might be assholes, many of them were, but if they said they’d do something, they did it. They rarely lied, and they believed in duty and honor.

That’s all gone now in the West. I hardly meet anyone who has principles I trust them to stick to under duress. There isn’t even a pretense any more. Hypocrisy as the tribute vice pays to virtue is gone in America. Trump and the people around him don’t even pretend to be honest, good or honorable. They’re all cruel bastards looking out for number one and willing to hurt or kill anyone, and they don’t even pretend otherwise.

One can see that as preferable to the hypocrisies of Clinton, Bush and Obama, and in some ways it is, but it’s also an indication of how far we’ve fallen, that our lords and masters (and they are our masters, and we are their slaves) don’t even pretend to have any virtues. The only virtue left is being rich or powerful, if you’re neither, you’re nobody and if you’re nobody, in the eternal words of George Bush Jr, “who cares what you think?”

They have, of course, in becoming virtueless scum, destroyed their host nations. Both Europe and America are going down, and hard and it is precisely because of the loss of virtue in the ruling class and the inability and unwillingness of the ruled to do anything about it.

It’s not that you have to be “good”, precisely. It’s that if your culture is lead by people who are cowards, faithless and concerned only with personal wealth and power, well, they can’t run a society effectively. They will always run it into the ground. The punishment for neoliberalism is China’s rise and the end of hundreds of years of European superiority.

And I (and most of my readers) have had to watch this. The destruction of our societies and the aggrandizement of the worst among us. I assume these days that if someone is very successful, either in politics or private enterprise, that they are untrustworthy and effectively a psychopath, and the vast majority of the time, I’m right.

It’s felt very long. I knew it could not last. I knew how it would end. I fought to change it, and failed (no surprise).

This is nothing new, of course. Confucius felt this way, and died convinced he was a failure. “Stop doing all these evil things,” he screamed, and no one listened. The Chinese are good at this. They recognize there are times when public affairs are so evil that good men and women can do nothing but withdraw and try and live good lives, because any success in public affairs can only come at the cost of one’s character. To succeed, to become a billionaire, in America today, is to scream to the heavens “I am evil. I make money hurting people. I care only about myself and perhaps a few friends or family.”

But the torch passes on. China has its problems, but the Chinese leadership has, in fact, mostly made their people far better off. When they say they’ll do something, it isn’t a lie, they track what they do and publish the results against their promises. If they say they’ll build a thousand parks, be sure a thousand parks will be built.

And so it is this I have seen over the span of my life: the civilizational torch passed from the West to the East, from Europe (America is European, sorry) to China. I’ve seen the West lose its virtues, get rid of the civil liberties which were our greatest glory, and in losing its virtues lose its place.

Now we come to the rise of the Chinese century. I wonder how much I’ll see, and how weird it will be to no longer be a member of the important, ruling civilization, but only a barbarian, watching my civilization collapse and the glory and the future move elsewhere.

May the Chinese do more good than evil with their time in the Sun, and may they remember too, that the sun always sets.

And I’ll keep watching, because while most of this has sucked, the one virtue of interesting times is that they are interesting, and age’s great advantage is perspective.

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The China Super Boosters Are Super Tiresome

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On February 11, 2026

24 Comments

I stand second to few in my admiration for how well China has done. But the super boosters are super tiresome. If China had been a small nation, the best they would have done is parallel Japan: do very well, then the US breaks your legs. Reminds me of Americans in 1950 or 95.

They remind me of many Americans in 1950 or 1995. “We are at the top because we are the best. Our governance is superior, our culture is superior. It’s just because we’re better than you all, and we always will be.”

I doubt the CPC’s leadership is this stupid or arrogant (yet). They remember China getting its face pushed in for over a hundred years.

China is at the start of a good run. Leaving aside climate change and ecological collapse it’ll last 100 to 150 years, EXACTLY the same as the American run. China’s current rise is just a hegemonic replacement cycle story. Not even as impressive as Britain creating the industrial revolution. This is just taking the lead, China has done NOTHING revolutionary yet. This is a dirt standard hegemonic replacement cycle. Happens every 150 years or so.

(The American run began in the 1880s, when they overtook Britain in industrial production.)

The reason China succeeded when other nations didn’t comes down to three things: competence, the prior hegemon’s help and size. All three were required The Japanese were super competent after WWII, absolutely amazing. When they started to challenge the US, they were forced into the humiliating Plaza Accords. If China was the size and population of Japan, the same thing would have happened to them, no matter how “superior” their culture or leadership is. India failed despite its size because the government and leadership were (and are) terrible.

This also makes Chinese booster sneering at smaller nations the US has beaten down tiresome. It’s not the same situation. “Oh, they’re incompetent.” No, idiot, Cuba is an Island nation with 9.75 million people and no resources to speak of which has been under sanctions for every year of its existence since it through the Americans out. That they even still exist is amazing. Venezuela had 28 million and is close, Iran (though it is larger and further away and thus had a far better hand to play) has likewise been under sanctions since day one, and the Iraq/Iran war was sponsored by America.

China has done great. No regular reader of mine can think I don’t admire the hell out of China’s leadership and people (and I like Chinese culture and Chinese people and have all my life, I was practically raised by Chinese for my first five years.)

But stop with the glazing and remember that hubris is always punished.

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How Dependent Is Canada On The US?

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On February 10, 2026

26 Comments

This “issue” has flaired up again as Trump attacks Canada again.

The short answer is that in the short term Canada is moderately dependent on the US and the long term it is hardly dependent on America at all.

Right now we (Canada) have a lot of trade with the US. We buy mostly finished goods, and pay fees to American tech and copyright holders. The US buys oil (which it cannot easily substitute away from in the short term). The US buys cars from us (#2, but deceptive, since they’re made by US companies in Canada), a small amount of machinery like nuclear power equipment, and a grab bag of other industrial goods. We also sell Potash (about 80% of what the US needs) and aluminum to the US, for which there is no easy substitute: these things are in global shortage, and the best alternative for potash is Russia and despite various bullshit about American/Russian alliances, Russia doesn’t trust the US at all and would not be a reliable trade partner. Without potash American farmers are screwed, since it’s used for fertilizer. America can’t significantly improve domestic potash production, there isn’t enough in America.

There’s substantially nothing we buy from the US that we can’t get from China for less or Europe for a bit more. And what the US sells Canada is high value add goods, not resources. We’re a valuable customer.

And, at the brass tacks level, if all trade stopped tomorrow, Canada could feed itself and would have plenty of energy. Our houses would stay hot in the winter and cool in the summer, our trucks would have gasoline and diesel, our trains would run and our planes would fly.

Canadian dependence on America is about 80 to 90% a legacy issue. We currently do a lot of trade with America, but we don’t have to. We can sell manufactured goods to Europe, and resources to China and buy from China and Europe and various other nations. Nothing we get from the US is a “must have with no feasible replacement.”

So the game is very much along the lines of the old joke about saying nice things to a barking dog while you find a rock. Not that we will ever fight the US unless they invade, but we just need time to disentangle our economies and move to reliable trade partners.

America could hurt us a lot if they cut of trade, but it wouldn’t be a mortal blow and we would recover. We’d prefer to do it slow, but if we have to do it on an emergency basis it can be done.

Canada doesn’t need the US. It just needs some time to change trade partners, and that’s what Carney is doing, because as he has said, it no longer makes sense to do business with the US.

We’ll talk a bit more about trade with the US from a global perspective soon, but basically the US has a legacy trade position: no one needs to buy from it any more unless they’re stupid (Europe refusing to buy Russian gas). Selling to it is still necessary for many nations, but that will become less true over time.

America’s prosperity and power are both legacies, they have no solid foundation to stand on any more. Ironically Canada is in a better position in the middle to long term than America simply because it only has 40 million people and is a continent sized country with a continent’s worth or resources. The only significant danger is an American invasion.

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