Ian Welsh

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

Category: Age of War and Revolution Page 12 of 24

Notes On The Structure Of American Imperial Collapse (State of the World 2023, #1)

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On October 31, 2023

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The American empire is now in essentially unstoppable decline. Certainly there are things that could be done to stop it, but they will not be done, much as the British had to avoid WWI and not take profits by sending industry to the US.

(This is the first article on the state of the world, as promised in last year’s fundraiser.)

Everyone knows about comparative advantage, but what doesn’t get talked about is absolute advantage. In absolute advantage you have something people need that they can only get from you.

This can be weapons. It can be jets. It can be advanced computers. It can be the capital equipment (like lithography machines used to create semiconductors) used to make other things. Sometimes it can be a resource, like oil.

The USSR was competitive with the America and its satrapies when it could still offer most of what other nations wanted. They could shop at the West store or the USSR store and get jets and weapons and dams and electrical networks and so on. By the 70s this had started to come apart, and in the 80s their failure at microcomputers was starting to really hurt, plus their domestic economy was in serious trouble.

So from somewhere in the late 70s to early 80s, and certainly after the collapse of the USSR, if you wanted jets, good weapons, computers, internet and so on, you had to go to the US and its allies: or rather, its satraps. There were American jets, or there were European (Airbus) jets, and so on.

Starting in the 80s, but really taking off in the 90s, China began to really industrialize in the standard way: start at the bottom of the chain and sell to the West. They moved up the chain very fast.

For example:

Huawei and ZTE are both Chinese.

The numbers above are worse than they look, because Huawei 5G is banned in much of the West. So really, Huawei is dominant in much of the developing world (the South.)

China now has a domestic jet industry. It isn’t quite up to snuff, but within ten years it will be. The latest Huawei phone, post sanctions, was made with domestic chips and outperforms Apple and Samsung on some important metrics.

So, let’s move to the important charts. The world in 1990, right after the collapse of the USSR.

The world in 2020:

China is more dominant than the US was in its prime. (Well maybe not in 1946.)

Now this sort of thing is a leading indicator. Countries who were dominant are able to control more of the world’s resources than they deserve for some time after they lose their dominance.

Be clear, the US has LOST its dominance already. It’s all over except for the shooting. It doesn’t look or feel like that because of generations of accumulation and because the dollar is used for most world trade.

But those are lagging indicators. Britain’s pound was the main instrument of trade for decades after the US had overtaken it industrially.

This time it’s going to happen faster, because the US has abused its central position in financial networks in ways other countries, like Russia and China won’t tolerate.

Now, understand clearly, Western prosperity is based on commanding more of the world’s resources because everyone had to get what they needed from the US and its satrap (well, and the whole imperialism and military thing, but that’s another article.)

Since China now offers almost everything the West does, at better terms, they will come to command those resources. It’s that simple, though that doesn’t mean the road will be smooth. This will be an Age of War and Revolution, and civilization collapse, especially as this isn’t a normal changeover because of climate change and ecological collapse.

Within the West we are already seeing the US cannibalizing its satrapies. Germany had to have cheap oil and natural gas to run its industry and European patents are lagging, badly. Europe’s garden will go, and go relatively quickly. The Chinese will dominate the EV market, eat Airbus and Boeing alive and bypass European control of the machines which make semiconductors.

The main industry the West seems to still have a dominant lead in is biotech, but the Chinese will get there.

Japan and South Korea will do better because both are keeping up in scientific innovation, but my bet is that South Korea will peel off into the Chinese sphere at some point, economically they already have. I’m less sure about Japan, but they’d be wise to do so.

As for Europe, well, for twenty years I’ve been warning them they had to regain their independence and forge their own path. Most of Eastern Europe should never have been allowed into the EU or NATO. The EU should have built its own army and left NATO. And yeah, they should have done everything necessary to keep good ties with Russia, which would have been easy, because until fairly recently Russia wanted to be a European nation.

They did none of this, their rate of scientific advancement is abysmal outside of a few areas and they’re toast.

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Political v.s Physical Tipping Points

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On October 5, 2023

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Back in the 2000’s I belonged to the Netroots movement. Our mantra was “more, better democrats.” We ran primaries, fundraised and put pressure on politicians, on top of all the normal blogging stuff, much of which we were the first mass practitioners of.

We failed. Obama was our loss moment, as he bypassed us and was able to get our readers without having to appease us.

But Obama was something more important. The financial crisis of 2007-9 was a moment which would have allowed for radical change. An FDR figure could have changed the nature of America in their response to it, breaking up banks and other monopolies and letting a vast swathe of the rich go bankrupt and charging them with crimes, thus breaking their power for generations to come.

Obama didn’t do that. He didn’t even seriously consider it, instead he supported the Federal Reserve and Treasury in saving them and enriching them.

I considered it then, and now, a political tipping point. The financial crisis was the last real political chance to change the direction of society, globally (since an American response would have cascaded throughout the world, as it did), enough to perhaps stave off climate change and ecological collapse, since politically dealing with those required breaking the power of the wealthy.

The most important political tipping point was actually the neoliberal empowerment moment: 79’s election of Thatcher and 80’s election of Reagan. Clinton and Blair ascending to the top of the Democrats and Labor were the second political points, since each of them institutionalized the changes made by their Republican/Conservative predecessors. Thatcher understood well, noting that her victory was sealed by Blair.

For both climate change and ecological collapse to be stopped, for the physical tipping points to be avoided, we had to make a radical change in how we ran our societies. Continuing on more or less as we had before meant disaster. To be sure, the changes necessary were truly radical (though less so the sooner they were begun), but nonetheless they required political victory and destruction of the power of vested interests.

So while others were saying “we still have time”, I was looking at the politics and the realities of power and saying the opposite, “it’s too late, we missed the window”, because there was no political possibility.

The physical tipping point for climate change was reached this year or last year, I’m reasonably sure. The ecological collapse tipping point may have been somewhat earlier. The civilization collapse point has also probably passed, and I put that around 2020.

All along the road off-turns were offered. People laugh at Dennis Kucinich, but he wanted to do the right things and ran in the Democratic primaries multiple times. The fact that he was considered laughable even though his policy prescriptions were correct is exactly the problem.

While Corbyn came too late to turn the tide, his election and success, if it had been the precursor of serious political realignment, as was Thatcher, could have saved hundreds of millions of lives and made the process much less painful. Indeed his defeat is one reason (though only one) that I consider 2020 the turning point for civilization collapse. It was definitely the turning point for UK collapse.

Modern propaganda is mighty indeed, and Corbyn lacked the necessary ruthlessness to defeat entrenched interests, if it was even possible. Unlike Obama, however, he at least wished to do the right things.

And that’s the main point: whoever runs society must want to do the right thing. Physically we had plenty of time, if you look at it from back in the 70s, which is when I first became concerned as a child.

Politically, though, we did not have lots of time. Changes in ruling sub-ideologies and opportunities to break the power of elites are not that common, and we failed to do so at each possible political tipping point.

And so, here we are.

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The End Of The Post-War & Post-Soviet Eras

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On August 25, 2023

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So…

The BRICS group of nations has decided to invite six countries – Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates

BRICS already included Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

The era isn’t over yet, but when you consider that US/European sanctions against Russia failed to gain much support from India, China, and almost all of Africa and South America, it’s clear that US/West is down to its core again: the EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. These are all either core West states or their key “uplifts” — the nations they let into the club and industrialized.

This leads to the new cold war, which everyone has noticed now, and has the world’s greatest industrial power, China, on the other side. Ironically the most important nations on the West’s side, other than the US, are South Korea and Japan, which remain technological powerhouses, while Europe is coasting on legacy technology and failing to advance compared to China, the US, Japan and South Korea (more or less in that order.)

The majority of trade, about 90%, still uses the dollar, but dollar reserves are at their lowest since the fall of the USSR, and will continue to fall, as the freezing of Russia’s dollar reserves (which will probably be seized in the end) and the massive sanctions have made it clear that dollars are only useful if you don’t cross America, and many nations, including China, know that’s only a matter of time.

Bilateral trade using local currencies will continue to increase, as will trade using the Yuan.

All Empires end, as do all eras. Neoliberalism is dying, the US world order is dying and the unipolar era is dead. A new multipolar era is upon us.

These are all good things, more than bad, for most of the world’s population as the post-Soviet order was used to crush countries the US disapproved of under horrid neoliberal austerity policies. That doesn’t mean the new era will feel good, or even be good: that’s not possible with our environmental problems, and the onrushing civilization collapse, but at least countries will increasingly be able to do what they feel is good for them and their citizens without the IMF and US/EU sanctions crushing them.

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Ukraine Has Lost & A Negotiated Peace Is The Only Sane & Humane Solution

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On August 7, 2023

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OK, I’m on the record from the start saying Ukraine would lose the war militarily. The counteroffensive has failed. NATO equipped and trained an entire army for Ukraine and it didn’t even get to the main defensive lines.

The Americans told the Ukrainians to charge entrenched, mined positions without air superiority and in the face of an enemy with more artillery than them.

That went about as you’d expect.

The Ukrainians are not taking back the territory they have lost, let alone Crimea, which was always a ludicrous fantasy.

Ukrainians are dying like flies and I am firmly on the side that says that their casualty numbers have to be higher than the Russians, because the Russians are launching a ton more artillery shells and have air superiority. Meanwhile six million refugees have moved to the EU, and I’ll bet most of them will never return to Ukraine, which was a depressed and extremely corrupt nation even before the war.

Russia has not been squeezed out by sanctions and is not going to be. China will not let it happen and most of Africa and Latin America are on their side, while India wants more trade with them. The nation hurt most by sanctions is probably Germany, which is losing much of its energy price sensitive industries (very important industries that have been world leaders for over 100 years in many cases.) Since Germany is the industrial heartland of the EU (and cemented that by using the EURO and enforced austerity to devastate other EU countries industrial base), this will hit the EU hard.

Russia, meanwhile, is churning out ammunition and weapons and buying them from North Korea and Iran, who don’t care at all about US sanctions, for obvious reasons. In the West, weapons warehouses are bare and we don’t have the capacity to restore them, nor are we ramping up production quickly.

So Russia has a larger population and army, and more weapons and equipment than the Ukrainians. They have air and artillery superiority.

The only road forward for anyone who isn’t a horrific bastard is a negotiated peace. Russia (sorry) is going to get the Russian parts of Ukraine, and Ukraine is just going to have to suck it up. If the war continues, Russia may attempt to grab the entire coastline and that would make Ukraine a land-locked country.

The longer the war goes on, the worse for Ukrainians. The war is lost and a negotiated peace will save tens of thousands of lives and make it so that Ukraine is less of a complete basket-case after the war.

There will be a guerilla war after any peace. It could be won by the Ukrainians, but I doubt it. Eastern Ukraine is flat and occupied mostly by Russian speaking sympathizers who want to be in Russia.

Sometimes you lose the war on the ground. Russia will not get everything it wanted, but they will get some of what they wanted and so will Ukraine, in the sense that they may get real security guarantees or NATO membership after the war is over.

But Ukraine has lost. Pretending it hasn’t is ridiculous and monstrous. Throwing more hastily conscripted soldiers into the meat grinder is stupid and evil.

The best possible end at this point is a negotiated peace.

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Preparing For Collapse During Collapse

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On August 1, 2023

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As regular readers know my judgment is that we are now into civilization collapse. It’s slow right now, and it will be stop and start, but it will continue and pick up speed over time.

That means that you should be preparing for collapse to get worse, including climate change and ecological collapse.

Civilizations rise and fall, that’s normal, and ecological collapse commonly happens at the same time, but what’s unusual right now is that we have a world system which is global, and thus is collapsing all at once, and we have a global ecological collapse.

So it’s going to be bad. Very bad.

Still, there are things to be done.

The most important thing is to make and sustain social ties. The people who do best in collapses are those whom other people like and need. Join a church if you can stomach it (and there are churches which come with little theological baggage, for atheists.) Make friends with your neighbours and join groups. Be liked.

If you have family you can stand or good friends, consider communal living. An extended household will often do better than a person alone or a nuclear family, being both cheaper and having more ability to take care of itself and its members.

Get some skills: basic maintainence abilities will be worth a lot: electrical, plumbing, minor repairs, etc…

Figure out a way to grow some of your own food, or set up a relationship with local farmers, ideally one that is a trade of your abilities for their food. Back in the Great Depression one friend’s father was a lawyer, and he did the legal work for a lot of farms and they kept  him fed.

Gardens are so-so. Climate change is going to make outdoor gardening very uncertain. If you can, create something with climate control, ideally a green house and figure out a way to keep it cooled when necessary. You can do this in your house too, by replacing some walls and part of the roof with a transparent material, ideally with some form of shutters. If you have a flat roof, and it’s load bearing, you can put your green house up there.

Do something about water. Lack of water will kill you faster than anything but temperature and lack of oxygen. Some sort of storage system and ability to gather rain water is one possibility. If you’re somewhere humid, dehumidifiers of the right type can produce enough water for drinking. Get some sort of purification system, something simple.

Power is going to be an issue. Solar panels have a limited lifespan and so do batteries, but they’re better than nothing. You want to be able to provide power for a couple weeks and/or during brown outs — if power will be out hours every day due to rationing, you need to be able to handle that. Some form of non-panel solar is a good idea: research heat engines and see if you can figure out how to store energy mechanically by raising water or physical objects or some other way.

Temperature control is another obvious issue, and figuring out  how to stay cool is important. As heat rises, public power will become less reliable at exactly the times you need it, so the power equation above is important.

If there are local violent authories, whether government (police/military) or non-government (gangs) make sure they like you. Become friends with their leaders if possible. As civilization breaks down, be part of whatever replaces them in certain areas. (Like in Iraq, where various militias and mosques took over.

In general, though, understand that supply chains are going to become more and more unreliable. Get the tech you need as soon as possible, and make it tech that is durable and/or easy to maintain. Buy spare parts and take training so that you can fix your own equipment, which will also make you valuable to your neighbours.

Learn how to make certain simple medicines if you can: basic antibiotics are not hard to make and the same is true of the sulfa drugs. If you can do this, you’re golden, because you’ll be able to help other people and you will be valuable to them.

Medical systems, especially public ones will become more and more unreliable and less and less available to people who aren’t on the inside. Take care of as many medical issues as you can right now. I like to joke that it’s a good thing I got cancer now, because in 10 years I’m not sure I’d have gotten care soon enough. You can’t schedule something like cancer, but you can make sure whatever problems  you have now are dealt with.

Taper off drugs you use all the time if that’s possible. For some, like insulin, you’re out of luck (but should look into how to get an alternative supply), but for many other drugs, tapering now rather than being forced to go cold turkey is advisable IF it’s medically appropriate.

Take action as soon as possible. The more money you have, of course, the easier this will be, but if you don’t have money there are still things you can do, like joining local maker clubs, churches and organizations. If you have extra money do use some of your money to prepare: money will become less valuable as time goes by.

We’re on the downward slope now. If you want to survive, or to have a decent life, take whatever steps you can.

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The Distributed Nature Of Collapse

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On July 26, 2023

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When the western world sanctioned Russia they expected Russia to collapse. It didn’t. The first reason is that most of the non-western world didn’t cooperate with the sanctions, but the second is simple: Russia has a food and fuel and mineral surplus.

The world as it stands now is every inter-dependent. The supply networks are dizzyingly complex and a final item like a car is made up of materials and parts extracted, made and assembled in dozens of locations.

The world isn’t always this way: it was like this in the late 19th, but after WWI that changed and the era of free trade ended, collapsing in particular during the Great Depression. The world did not become as “free trade” as it was before WWI again till the early 21st century.

But we are in a period of collapse. The peak, I would guess, will be seen to have been 2020, though different parts of the world economy will peak at different points (peak conventional oil was 2005, fracking and shale oil is not as good.) There will be water peaks, food peaks, peaks for various minerals like copper and so on. There will be a population peak, which will occur after a lot of other peaks. One model, which has been pretty accurate in general terms, is the Limits of Growth model, which regular readers will be familiar with:

Now the thing to understand is that as resources become genuinely scarce rather than simply distributionally scarce (we have more than enough food and have for a long time but people still go hungry) countries will stop trading away what they need and will move to more restricted trade. “We have excess food, you have excess minerals, we will trade with you for this, but we are not selling food generally on the world market to just anyone.”

In periods of genuine shortages, countries stop trading indiscriminately. Food riots are one of the main causes of government collapse and elites losing their lives. Running out of heating or cooling fuel or fuel to run the distribution network (diesel is probably near peak) can lead to fast internal collapse, and so on.

So when there isn’t enough, you stop playing around. You don’t trade unless you’re getting something concrete you need. If you need something, don’t have enough of it and either can’t or would rather not trade for it and still can run your military, you send your military to go get it. (This will become harder and harder though, as modern militaries are resource hogs.)

We’ve had a world economy for a long time now: most of the world since 45, virtually all of the world since the collapse of the USSR (and even before that the USSR, which had food shortages and petroleum to sell, was in the world market.)

Increasingly we will not. Some of this is driven, right now, by competition between the West (which includes S. Korea, Japan and Taiwan) and China, but even much of that is, I suspect, shortages in drag. Soon it will just be “there isn’t enough, who is going to get it?”

Take a good hard look at where you live and what it can make and grow and dig up itself, and how well it can be defended. Because that is going to matter even more in the not-so-far future.

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The January 6th Fools & Basic Coup Lessons

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On July 5, 2023

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The January 6th invasion of Congress included people with zip ties and paramilitary equipment. While there were a lot of idiots there, there was a core which had a plan of capturing important people like Pelosi, and they came fairly close. There’s no question that Trump abetted it, but the Secret Service refused to drive him to the capital and the effort failed.

As it happens, I know and like someone who was there, though obviously they have different politics than I do. I talked to them briefly about it and one thing was clear.

They genuinely believed and believe the election was stolen. Now both sides cheat, though as far as I can tell the Republicans do so more, and Democratic election finangling is primarily meant to exclude progressives and left-wing populists from running. But the point is that if you believe an election was stolen, and you take steps, even violent steps, to fix that you, consider yourself a patriot trying to save democracy.

Now, of course, the people who encouraged the occupation of Congress may well not have believed that the election was stolen (we’ll leave Trump out, he’s delusional and there’s no way to know what he really thinks.) But a lot of the people who were there genuinely believed it was.

These people didn’t understand Trump. The main thing I pointed out to my acquaintance, was that Trump betrayed them. He could have pardoned them before he left, and he didn’t. They were loyal to him, and he was not loyal to them. He was also a fool, because if he had pardoned them, they’d be there for him in his next attempt, and most of them now won’t be, in large part because most of them are going to prison.

You come for the king, you’d best win. If you’re going to invade Congress, well, you’d better succeed. These people didn’t think things thru, and neither did Trump. As I wrote early in Trump’s reign, he might want to do a coup, but he was too incompetent to pull it off, and so it was. The only chance of it happening is if it was run by someone more competent under him, but Trump had a habit of getting rid of his most able lackeys, like Bannon.

There needed to be a plan to call in paramilitary forces who would have wanted another Trump term, and a chance to reform America. The most (dis)loyal of these are the border guards, who are brutal brownshirt thugs and there needed to be more doubt about the election to give cover to politicians and business leaders.

Some work has been done on this since 2001. A lot of electoral officers were replaced by Trump loyalists who will certify based on politics, not vote counts, and judges, likewise, have been systematically replaced when possible.

But bottom line, Trump didn’t have enough enforcer class or elite backing, and he didn’t have enough right wing radical support either. There should have been much more simultaneous action at the state level. The goal would be to force the issue to a supreme court controlled by Republicans and get some legitimacy, as was done in 2000 (which, according to the numbers I saw and ran back in the day, was a Democratic victory.)

Trump’s a boob in many ways. He has (non moral) virtues, but he’s fundamentally scattered and somewhat stupid. That doesn’t mean he isn’t effective, however, and thinking that smart and effective a synonyms is a mistake too many people continue to make.

You don’t need a majority to succeed at a coup, 70% of the population can be against you, but you do need a chunk of the enforcer class on your side with the rest unwilling to stop you or so much of a minority they can be crushed. You do need support from an elite faction, and you do need about 30% of the population on your side.

I leave it to readers to decide what the risk is in the US.

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France Isn’t In A Civil War Yet, But It Is Close

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On July 4, 2023

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So, the main police unions in France put out this rather deranged statement:

Now that’s enough…

Facing these savage hordes, asking for calm is no longer enough, it must be imposed!

Restoring the republican order and putting the apprehended beyond the capacity to harm should be the only political signals to give.

In the face of such exactions, the police family must stand together.

Our colleagues, like the majority of citizens, can no longer bear the tyranny of these violent minorities.

The time is not for union action, but for combat against these “pests”. Surrendering, capitulating, and pleasing them by laying down arms are not the solutions in light of the gravity of the situation.

All means must be put in place to restore the rule of law as quickly as possible.

Once restored, we already know that we will relive this mess that we have been enduring for decades.

For these reasons, Alliance Police Nationale and UNSA Police will take their responsibilities and warn the government from now on that at the end, we will be in action and without concrete measures for the legal protection of the Police, an appropriate penal response, significant means provided, the police will judge the extent of the consideration given.

Today the police are in combat because we are at war. Tomorrow we will be in resistance and the government will have to become aware of it.”

So. The bolded part is important: it’s a declaration that the police unions won’t obey the orders of the government if they don’t agree. This is something I’ve been expecting (and seeing) for a while. During the Trucker Convoy in Canada, the police refused to enforce the law and arrest the protestors. That’s why, in the end, the government froze the bank accounts of protestors, because they couldn’t get the cops to enforce the law against people they liked and agreed with.

The same sort of thing happens over and over in the US, where right wing protestors aren’t arrested, often even when they commit violence, but are protected by the police.

Now the riots in France are largely Muslim, though not entirely. The Muslim immigrants have been pushed into suburbs and left to rot, with no effective way to move up in society, and at the same time social services have been repeatedly cut and money has, in France, as in all neoliberal nations, been funneled to the top. This bleeding ulcer is old, about 50 years old, and everyone has noted that it was bound to cause problems. These aren’t the first riots, they’re just the worst.

France has had a lot of riots and protests over the past few years, notably related to Macron’s increase of the pension age and rules, which means that many people will have to work into their 70s. (Theoretically one can retire before then, but for most people, the pension will not be enough without more years of work.) Those protests and riots were mostly white.

One of the topic categories on this blog is “the age of war and revolution”. I put it up in 2000, to indicate what was to come.

The current riots will be defeated. They’re large, but not serious. The rioters are not marching on the government and government officials, which is what would be required to actually overthrow the government. It isn’t a civil war.

But the police indicating they won’t accept legal orders, not just by passive resistance (as in Canada) but in outright defiance of the government is a very dangerous sign. The usual requirements for a successful revolution are an elite faction in support, a popular protest and the defection of at least some of the enforcer class.

France is very close to meeting those requirements: part of the elite agrees with the cops, there is a right wing primarily white conservative populist movement and the police are now showing clear defiance.

So, France isn’t in a civil war yet, but it could be soon.

As for the left, this is a fulcrum point. They need to strike and strike hard as soon as possible, because France’s Fifth Republic appears to be on its last legs. If the right overthrows it, the left will be in exile for at least two generations. It’s the right or the left, and right now the right seems most likely.

More on this and the general situation soon.

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