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 3

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.

Dollar Hegemony Decline Watch

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On September 17, 2024

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So, nice little chart here:

Seems… bad. At least for America and Europe.

Let’s lay this out:

  1. Most of what you want to buy you can buy from China, you don’t need to get it from the West, so why use dollars?
  2. China almost never uses sanctions or seizes foreign currency. The US often does. US dollars are risky, the right to use them can and is often taken away, and so often are the dollars themselves.

So why use the dollar, except that it’s still easier in some cases?

What happens when it’s no longer easier? The BRICS are spending a lot of time on an international banking system which bypasses the West and it’s allies (Japan and South Korea, basically). As that system becomes easier to use, why use the Western system or the dollar? It only exposes you to risk.

This is similar to what happened after the Huawei sanctions. Chinese firms saw the damage that was done to Huawei (they’ve roared back, but it was touch and go for a couple years.) The cry in Chinese business was “delete America.” If you bought anything important from the US you needed to find another source outside of the West, which for manufactured goods usually meant domestically, and for resources meant Africa, South America and Russia.

For a long time the way the banking system was set up you had to use the dollar, but more and more you don’t. And for a long time some key providers, like oil producers, would only take dollars, but now they’ll take Yuan.

So, again, why use the dollar when there is a safer alternative which can be used to buy or sell almost anything you want?

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China Continues To Crush In Science & Intel Falters In Chips

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On August 2, 2024

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Well, this is practically nail in the coffin news:

Meanwhile Intel is laying off 15,000 workers, slightly over 15% of its workforce and announced yield issues with its new “Meteor Lake” semiconductors. Its last two generations of chips have hardware problems which cause and crashes and have no software fix. (Buy AMD for your next computer.)

The CHIPS act was supposed to cause a rebirth of US chip manufacturing, but so far this seems unlikely. The US no longer has the necessary skills. Meanwhile, China is roaring on chips, taking over the legacy end of the market and pushing hard on the rest of it.

The end result of semiconductor sanctions is going to be that China will become the dominant player in semiconductors, a field which American allies dominate.

This wasn’t necessary. Chinese companies preferred foreign semiconductors before the sanctions: they sneered at domestic made ones and felt the quality was inferior, which it was. But what was done to Huawei told every Chinese company and China’s leadership that they couldn’t rely on foreign suppliers under Washington’s thumb.

A little history, because sanctions and CHIPS were aimed just at China.

Back in 1986 the US dollar was very high due to Volckers high interest rates. The great powers of the time got together and agreed to intervene to depreciate the dollar. The great loser was Japan, and the great winner in Semiconductors were Intel and Micron: Japan had previously been clearly in the lead. The Plaza accord later contributed to Japan’s crash, and the real end of its post war golden age. Doing so may have helped America, but it weakened the American alliance system’s overall power significantly.

CHIPS and sanctions can be seen as an attempt to return the lead from Taiwan and South Korea to America, but this is failing and it will also lead to American allies losing the lead.

As Kissinger once said, It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal. This is especially true as American hegemony ends. America is cannibalizing or trying to cannibalize its allies: much of German industry crushed by anti-Russia sanctions, for example, has moved to America.

But America no longer has the real engineers (not software engineers) and factory know-how to scoop up cutting edge semiconductor production.

We’ll see if China, which is now more powerful than the US in every way that matters except deployed military, is better to its allies.

Smart nations will cut deals with the Chinese and re-align towards it if they can get anything close to a good deal. The West is going down and the decline will not be halted any time soon.

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Get Out If You Can. If Not, Prepare

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On July 16, 2024

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Starting in 2009 and especially after Citizens United, I’ve been advising Americans who can get out to do so. I recognize that many people can’t: you have to “shelter in place”, but for those who are able to leave America and haven’t, well, the advice is the same, but more urgent.

The US is no longer meaningfully a Democracy. The funneling of wealth and income to oligarchs continues unabated and even accelerated during the pandemic. Official economic statistics from the US are now almost entirely fantasy based: completely unrelated to reality due to how inflation and other statistics are “calculated” and due to the over-reliance of GDP, which is no longer tracking welfare.

The massive increases in necessities like food is a very very bad sign.

The possibility of civil war is real, and so is the chance of collapse. Nothing is going to get better for the majority of Americans; everything is going to get worse.

So, at the least, if you can get a second passport, do it. If you don’t have any passport, apply for one. If you can go somewhere reasonable and make a decent living, consider it. If you’re rich enough to set up a second citizenship and home, get it done.

Where to go is difficult. If you speak Mandarin and they’ll let you in, China’s not a bad choice. Avoid the UK unless you have no other options: Britain is in terminal decline. In general Europe is in decline and the chance of the Atlantic Meridian Overturning Current (AMOC) stopping makes it questionable for those who are younger or who have children, but while Europe is going down, the welfare state still exists and will take longer to go away, so long as you choose your destination carefully. (Obviously Greece is out of the question.)

Canada is trending right hard, and is “too close” to America, but if you can’t get anywhere else and have money or skills in demand, it might work for you. This is especially true if you’re healthy, younger and comfortable on the frontier, of which there is still plenty.

The truth is that there are no longer any completely “safe” choices. But there are places where government and society are more functional and more caring, and where the destruction of the welfare state (which includes, oh, universal healthcare, functioning power and sewage) is less far along.

If you have to stay and indeed if you’re in many countries, do what you can to improve your “grid collapse resistance.” Brownouts and blackouts and failures of water systems will become worse. A couple of big camping batteries + solar recharging may keep key electrical appliances running. Find some way to store or produce water and keep some surplus food around. If you’ve got power, water and a way to boil said water, something as simple as a lot of vacuum packed rice and beans can keep you going for quite a while.

In general, take measures. Assume that things are going to keep getting worse for the rest of your life. There will be some exceptions, but there’s no way the majority of people can or will avoid these trends.

Don’t sleep on this. Back in 2009 it wasn’t urgent, but we’re now at the point where local collapse or violence is a real possibility: we don’t know when exactly, but we do know the conditions have been met. Once that happens, when is hard to predict, but bad is dead simple to predict.

Dead being the operative word.

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The Dollar Is Impregnable & The West Will Always Control International Banking (Honest)

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On July 11, 2024

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What is geopolitical risk, you ask, and the Saudis answer:

Saudi Arabia warned it could sell off some European debt holdings in retaliation to a move by the G-7 to seize almost $300bn in frozen Russian assets, according to a report by Bloomberg.

The veiled threat was passed along from Saudi Arabia’s finance ministry earlier this year to some G-7 counterparts, as the group weighed seizing Russian assets designed to support Ukraine.

Saudi Arabia specifically signalled out the euro debt issued by France, according to Bloomberg.

Riyadh has been concerned about western efforts to seize the Kremlin’s assets for months. In April, Politico reported that Saudi Arabia, along with China and Indonesia, was privately lobbying the EU against confiscation.

Notice that Indonesia is also involved. China is less surprising, they know that freezing and even confiscation is in the cards for them when things heat up between the West and china.

China has been reducing its risk:

Edit: (Or perhaps they aren’t?)

No one wants to do business with nations that will simply take away their money. Freezing was bad, but normal. Seizure is not. Since no one seized or freezed America’s overseas assets when it invaded, say, Iraq, and no one ever seizes or freezes West European assets, it might be thought that this isn’t about “law” but about “power.” For that matter, why haven’t Israel’s overseas assets been seized?

The level of geopolitical risk from doing business in the dollar or using the Western banking system is just too high. Freezing, seizure and sanctions, plus the US applying its law extra-territorially simply because a transfer happened to go thru an American bank even though the sender and end party were both outside of America.

This abuse is long-standing, you can read accounts from the fifties, but it really picked up in the 90s. Indeed there’s an entire book, Treasury’s War, about the phenomenon.

And this is what all the economists and similar pundits who go on about how the dollar can’t be replaced don’t understand: that they are right that the costs of replacing the dollar are significant; that it’s hard, and that it’s not really worth it.

Except it is worth it, because if the cost of trade and money transfers goes up slightly under a non-dollar regime, and even a slight increase is massive when multiplied by the number and amount of transactions, it’s still worth it because of the massive reduction in geopolitical risk. And nattering on about how the Yuan can’t be used because the Chinese can’t accept the costs of using the Yuan is stupid: that’s not what the BRICS are trying to do: the idea is to create a central, multinational currency, and to simply use local currencies whenever possible, while avoiding the Western banking system entirely.

Everyone knows that the dollar and the Western banking system are guns, and that everyone who uses the dollar and the Western banking system are under those guns and can be hit at any moment if D.C. or Brussels desires it.

When this was hardly ever done, it was a risk worth taking. When China was the main industrial power who you could buy almost everything you wanted from, and the West was the only option for most technological goods, well, you had no choice.

But now nations see a way out from under the guns, and they’re going to take it, even if it costs them, because the potential cost of not doing so is catastrophic.

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