by Norman Ball for the Saker Blog
“Potentially the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia and perhaps Iran, an ‘anti-hegemonic’ coalition, united not by ideology but by complementary grievances” —Zbigniew Brzezinski
Are we reaching the penultimate and petulant back-end of the American Empire’s Unipolar Moment, a denouement hastened by a raft of sanctions regimes as imperiously doled out as they are laden with unconsidered paradox?
Though the sun is prohibited from casting its light between them, Nation and Empire are not an organically indivisible formation. Indeed Americans, no less than others, should relish the prospect of a resumed, unalloyed nationhood after decades of Empire co-optation. Few Americans realize the skulking entity that looms in the shadows of their overrun and diminished formal institutions as being a separable imposition capable of (to use a Benjamin Netanyahu phrase) drying up and blowing away.
Empire overlay is an uninvited and usurping agent bent on hostile, world-conquering aims to which America plays safe harbor and unwitting hostage in equal parts. Though the mode of exploitation varies, no nation on the world stage is left untouched by transnational exploitation.
America, like all nations, is a boundaried fixity; whereas Empire despite travelling under the former’s name is a projective and extraterritorial expanse whose designs exceed the devise and interests of the nation-host itself. Invariably Empire doesn’t so much succumb to overreach as it overreaches the capacities of its nation-host; wrecking the balance sheet, debauching the currency, taxing the capacities of the deputized military and (most importantly as we shall see) sullying the conceptual coordinates so central to a nation’s actionable sense of self.
Post-Empire, the nation-host suffers the aftermath of ruinous inflation or worse. Empire, a continuous organism, bides its time before alighting elsewhere. Thus unipolarity is an Empire project in the same manner a tapeworm mimics the appetites of its host, the afflicted nation being little more than a body-snatched, debt-amassing hostage-vessel.
Daniel 2’s prophesied statue gives anthropic form (and thus systemic coherence) to Empire succession. Each empire ‘chapter’ pours into the next with corporeal fluidity, the respective statue material and animal totem befitting the situational needs of Empire in that historical moment. The anatomy suggests an eschatological continuum, hardly a severed procession of akimbo body parts. The purposeful succession of empires conducts human history to a terminus.
Usury is the arithmetically ordained travel-partner or Empire. Indeed the latter is more Babylonian mystery than secular-geopolitical formation. Through it, all earthly power and wealth is to be gathered under one aegis until no nation can lay claim to an autonomous storehouse. The whole purpose of human history is demonic consolidation by the God of this World.
In the same way, the events of the world prove less yielding to geopolitical analysis absent an explicit awareness of Paul’s Principalities or the slow-thighed onset of the Antichrist/Dajjal. As human history thins like gruel in the twilight, the spiritual backdrop moves inexorably to the fore.
(Understanding the present moment demands continual oscillation between the world-beyond and the world-at-hand. So be it.)
Sanctions negate the very notion of empiric expansion. Beneath all the bluster, continual recourse to a ‘remedy of retreat’ signals the exhaustion of Empire’s Pax Americana phase. Like medieval bleeding, the cure soon exceeds the lethality of the underlining disease.
For the moment, America’s economic activity, 25% of the world’s GDP, is a big party to be dis-invited from. Furthermore, 70% of that GDP is buffered from international trade disruptions as it consists of internal consumption. (In China, for example, the figure is closer to 40%). When push comes to shove the US economy is sufficiently self-contained such that a protracted period of inwardness is a viable course of action.
Joseph Micallef hardly overstate things trumpeting the arrival of American energy independence. One wonders how the Empire would coax the Nation to do its bidding absent the inducement of vulnerable overseas energy supplies. Of course this too argues for the end of the American phase of Empire:
“U.S. energy independence is going to be a game changer in international affairs and will have far-ranging consequences. It will drive a reorientation of U.S. foreign policy as profound as that driven by American dependence on foreign oil in the second half of the 20th century.”
While inconsistent with empiric expansion, sanctions and their threat can for a time inflict asymmetric damage on the sanctioned party –until some vague tipping point is reached.
Midwives to a nascent neo-nationalist era, President Trump and his formidable trade team have been leveraging (some would say weaponizing) America’s economic primacy in order to redirect product origination and trade flows.
For example the USMCA’s closing of the infamous NAFTA loophole or ‘trade toll’ will be a huge boon to US consumers and workers alike, not to mention an indirect trade assault on China which advantaged the loophole via finished goods assembly plants in Canada and Mexico. The so-called ‘regional vehicle content’ has been boosted from 62.5% to 75%.
What are the implications of this USMCA provision alone? Lexicology explains:
“Mexico and Canada are pushing for the smallest amount of North American parts in NAFTA automobile production. This means that Mexico and Canada can import the difference from China, Asia or Europe, finish the product with some basic assembly and then pass off the product to the American market- saving big money on tariffs for the original producing country in the process.”
The necessity of a resurgent manufacturing base is being characterized (correctly) as a national security (if not even a national dignity) issue with implications far beyond the usual econometric equilibrations.
What the world needs to understand is that the unacknowledged obverse of America First is Empire Never Again. America’s self-reclamation process on the trade front will be a boon for the planet. Re-nationalization is synonymous with ‘de-empirization’. As America reacquaints with nation-among-nations status, multipolar clusters will fill the void.
America the Empire routinely pulls the wool over America the Nation’s eyes. One deft bit of corporatist misdirection (articulated through that multinational stalking horse, the US Chamber of Commerce) has been to assure Americans they could thrive as a service-sector economy.
As nothing is gained alerting regular Americans to the divergent interests of Empire and Nation, the Empire is adept at posing as the Nation. (Besides, what people would knowingly seek empiric imprimatu anyway, a dubious appointment demanding more blood and treasure than it ever bestows?)
Globalists would have us favorably envision a world where the US holds the edge in 2030 Powerpoint presentations while China captures the high-performance medical device and industrial robotics markets. As Yogi Berra might say, “all left-handers over here to flip charts, all right-handers over there to flip burgers. The rest of you come with me.” Yes, but where to exactly, Yogi? The Argentine Paradox circa 1950?
The same can be said for Made in China 2025, from a Chinese perspective of course. Geopolitical hegemony is the goal, economic nationalism the rallying cry for respective domestic audiences. No wonder trade wars metastasize into shooting wars. No less than everything is at stake.
(Some expect that, with centuries of practice under its belt, the Chinese empire model, historically one of ebb-and-flow concentric flexibility, will improve upon the winner-take-all Western model. Time may tell.)
Parsimonious when it comes to sharing the planet’s ill-gotten gains with its erstwhile nation-host (American real incomes peaked in 1973), Empire is all too willing both to off-load the debt burden and share the vainglory of its overseas military exploits.
We seek evidence of the Heartland tiring of its conscription obligations, or that their nation’s subsidiary role has even dawned on the average American after nearly two decades of ruinously fruitless overseas campaigns. The enthusiastic reception afforded Clint Eastwood’s 2014 movie American Sniper —to belabor one cultural touchstone– is hardly a bullish indicator.
In fact, the Nation still wraps itself in the Empire’s exploits with a patriotic vigor that obliges it to insist, against all evidence, that Iraq and Afghanistan were missions of existential import to the safeguarding of American neighborhoods. That this misprision persists is a powerful testament to the Empire’s ability to enforce and sustain a narrative steeped in false consciousness to which clarifying epiphanies must forever be kept at bay. In recent months scores of alt-media sources have been exiled from Youtube in veiled recognition of their counter-narrative incursions. The Empire cannot relinquish narrative hegemony. The most decisive conflicts are conceptual.
Sartre famously called this insistent and externalized apparatus of persuasion America’s ‘implacable machine’. Eastwood, the Leni Riefenstahl of our time, fashions empire exploits into pastiches of Americana. This is pure propaganda. Empire is a rapaciously unnatural imposition. Rooted in no soil, it descends from above. Transnationalism sustains itself on grassroots alienation and collective misdirection.
The Vineyard’s Saker indirectly acknowledges this differentiated two-headedness when he says, “Russia does represent an existential threat, not for the United States as a country or for its people, but for the AngloZionist Empire, just as the latter represents an existential threat to Russia.” He might just as easily have extended the empire threat to America itself. Where Saker offers daylight, Eastwood extends the darkness of a confused nation.
It would surprise many Americans to know that their nation hosts one of the least democratically answerable national governments in the world (though far fewer would be surprised today than, say, two years ago). Trump, the exogenous usurper, is trying to reverse this expropriation of the country’s traditional Madisonian Institutions by the Security State’s Trumanite Network (what Michael Glennon calls our Double Government, the prior terminology being his).
How did the empire accomplish this parallel sovereignty?
The hijack occurred in two sizable chunks (the 1947 National Security Act and the USA Patriot Act of 2001). Yes, America has a divided government alright. Just not in the sense American civics classes define the concept.
Moreover this sovereignty split occurred without benefit of referendum or Constitutional Convention. The division was assented to –and furtively institutionalized– over the ensuing post-WW2 decades by the nation’s elected leadership, the latter bartering away democratic self-determination and their own discretionary power for more attractive post-public sector career vistas.
A further lubricant was mass fear, something the Security State excels at fanning. This is a toxic oroborus: fear rationalizes enhanced security measures, obliging it in turn to identify more threats and thus promulgate more fear.
America’s captured political system (captured, in the main, by treasonous greed) perennially offers no material recourse away from Empire objectives. Carroll Quigley exposed the degradation of choice mounted by the two-party charade decades ago. His protestations fell on deaf ears.
Then came Trump, arguably more detested by ‘Rino’ Republicans for helicoptering onto their half-acre of Quigleyan turf than the Democrats who openly shower their contempt upon him, aided by a not-so-secret confederation of Senior Executive Service (SES)personnel and an assorted Five Eyes gallery of International Men of Mystery.
That new attention is being drawn to this fissure is a function of the Trumanites’ open rebellion against Trump’s subversive (Madisonian revivalist) presidency. Trump has forced the Deep State to the surface, a process that compels an explicit –and never before attempted– referendum on globalism, something the movement cannot possibly prevail on as the closest thing it possesses to a natural constituency is a beholden media, George Soros’ checkbook and a traitorous ruling class.
These transnational Trumanites, the true empire-builders, seek geopolitical hegemony, (over)-employing trade sanctions as a tool towards that end. Whereas Trump, a businessman to his core, seeks only comparative advantage and level playing fields i.e. trade for its own sake. Trump has the inclinations of a competitor and possesses an abiding faith in the productive capacities of his fellow Americans. His America-first exertions are sincere.
Despite a near-daily (and 92% negative) onslaught of CIA-Mockingbird anti-Trump vitriol, there is a dawning realization that the current President is as close to an anti-Empire crusader as any POTUS can possibly be, given the powerful institutional constraints (and Trumanite presence) he must work within. (The latter qualification cannot be emphasized enough.)
Just this week in his essay ‘Trump Has Done More to Take On and Take Down the American Empire Than Any Other President’, Gareth Porter concedes, with the obligatory reluctance attending any favorable Trump assessment that, “…[despite] Trump’s multiple serious personal and political failings…[his] unorthodox approach has already emboldened him to challenge the essential logic of the US military empire more than any previous president.”
Creditably, Porter manages to overcome his early subjectively-derived aversions with dispassionate analysis. More thinkers will follow. Trump will never inspire great wellsprings of affection. Yet shouldn’t likability deficits fall within the rehabilitative purview of Oprah Winfrey and her top shelf of gauzy sofa lens? History books are replete with highly eccentric, yet transformative, leaders. Who but the most media-besotted automatons really care?
As for our beleaguered trading partners, the list of American pariahs (sanctioned and tariffed) grows by the month: China, Russia, Iran, Turkey come immediately to mind, obviously in varying modes and degrees. What happens should the EU (the world’s 2nd largest ‘economy’) continue to trade with Iran under a “special payments entity” arrangement despite US warnings? For the record, India has no plans to cease its Iranian oil purchases. This comes at the cost of American producers as will European demand absorbed by the onset of Nordstream 2.
The US Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) maintains a list of sanctioned nations and programs. It’s well worth a look.
Weapon system defections present a knottier dilemma as military and trade considerations commingle. The Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) of 2017 addresses punitive measures and waiver procedures; a bill opposed, it must be said, by President Trump. Turkey, a NATO member, is taking delivery of the Russian S400 missile defense system, playing havoc with weapons (F35) inter-operability, among other things.
Commenting on the likelihood that India will extract a waiver from the US for the purchase of a S400 system, Fort Russ’ Joaquin Flores suggests America’s quiet acquiescence may be the biggest news of all, indicative perhaps of a dawning realization in Washington that the sanction whip is losing its lash:
“But the real signal here is that the US is willing to publicly also disclose that a waiver is possible…that in its gambit to shore up the empire and force countries to choose Atlanticism over Multipolarity, it will not by way of hubris or over-playing, engender the very multipolarity [it] presently work[s] against.”
Flores surfaces the nub of the paradox: By waiving sanctions and allowing breakaways on a case-by-case basis, does unipolarity preserve itself by exception or compromise itself by non-inclusion? A contrary beast, this unipolarity.
First of all, absolute power is an unnatural configuration if it isn’t a fairy tale altogether. Kenneth Waltz, one of the 20th century’s leading scholars on International Relations, recognized unipolarity as being among the most tenuous of international power arrangements.
Fully consummated unipolarity contends with no nemesis at the gate, no rudely apparent countervailing force with which to remind itself that power consolidation is always an asymptotic function forever falling short of omnipotence. Whereas bipolarity increases overall system stability as each power has only the other to regard warily. A vigorous checkmate ensues. Like a two-headed Cerberus, power is affixed to one mode of action.
In short, power is a distributed resource requiring a corner of contested ground upon which to construct an antithetical lever. One can calibrate power only in the context of someone else existing beyond one’s own locus of control.
Until history fully resolves itself, the ascendant antithesis must germinate in a strange province that forever looms on the frontier of the prevailing thesis. In this way, ideas inhabit their own conceptually balkanized geographies.
Is internal contradiction the ultimate empire-killer? In his 2013 essay, ‘The Inevitable Has Happened in Egypt’, Alastair Crooke surfaces a dialectical reality, in the context of that particular moment’s crisis, the Muslim Brotherhood’s massacre at the hands of Egyptian President al-Sisi. Speaking to the larger demise of the USSR and the lessons drawn, in Sunni circles, from its collapse, he observed:
One has to think Crooke intended ‘omnipotence’ instead of ‘omniscience’. Beyond that, he captures the Hegelian primacy of ideas (as opposed to the brute accouterments of tanks, planes and automobiles) as being the first-order Empire battleground.
As Flores suggests, the unipolar moment does have an antithetical nemesis. It exists, not for the moment at least, in the guise of a discrete nation-contender, but rather from amidst the inchoate forces of over-extension, hubris and internal contradiction.
One way for unipolarity to hasten its own demise is to persist in the practice of briskly escorting bad actors out of the Big Tent. At some point a critical mass of delinquent nations finds itself on the outside-looking-in; to which a new inside and fresh synthesis are baptized. The formative institutions, structures and initiatives already exist: OBOR, BRI, BRICS, AIIB, SCO.
The evolving role of the Shanghai Cooperative Organization (SCO) for example is on vivid exhibit his week with rather self-conscious pronouncements of multilateral cooperation, due no doubt to American trade frictions with key members Russia, China and India. These are the formative orbits that can exert and accelerate gravitational tugs away from prevailing global governance models and power centers.
Left untended, yawning internal contradictions lead to a strange and strident logic rooted in self-injury and geopolitical masochism: By shooting myself in the foot, I promise you will bleed to death. A spiritual forebear? Bob Dylan with ‘it’s alright Ma, I’m only bleeding.’
Analyzed in myopic isolation, each sanction regime may indeed conform to a calculus of advantageously asymmetric bleeding. That is, Empire appears to crush each recalcitrant outlaw in serial procession.
Yet how fully considered is the cumulative effect of a dozen rocks being hurled simultaneously at a Goliath convinced of his insuperable size? Death ensues at the instigation of a thousand Davids. Perhaps the Empire’s quant-model betrays a methodological flaw in its singular regard for each battle to the exclusion of the cumulative toll of mounting departures.
Trumpism, the exuberant renewal of national self-confidence by a man who exudes it to the near-level of parody, obliquely acquiesces to the death of empire (without formally announcing it). Out of America’s re-acquaintance with itself springs a psychic reinvestment in the traditional facets of the American character, sublimated arguably since the Nixon Shock of 1970: enterprise, self-reliance, innovation and a can-do work ethic.
For those who doubt the powerful emotional and psychic ramifications of the Trump renationalization, watch this steel worker tear-up at the realization he’s been rescued from oblivion. Work is a moral calling that instills purposeful existence. Trade merely extends that calling beyond a nation’s borders. Fellow Glaswegian Adam Smith was not a Wall Street economist running balance-of-payment Excel spreadsheets for the ‘grand’ purpose of sector fund allocations. He was a moral philosopher.
The American people, most of them anyway, could have frankly gone to hell as far as the bankers were concerned. The enterprise costs (a productively idled and hollowed-out nation) proved fantastically exorbitant. No privilege accrued to the common man. Middle America became the Military Industrial Praetorian Guard hiring pool.
Recalling Major General Smedley Butler (the bold-face mine):
“War is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
Sanctions betray the unipolar moment’s faltering grasp. They are the unacknowledged road back from Empire to Nation. The contracting enterprise puts the best face on what can only be deemed a mutually assented to rejection. For, equally, the sanctioned nation is declining its prescribed role within the Empire playbook. Thus sanctions better resemble a divorce stemming from mutually irreconcilable differences than a unilateral flash of Empire pique.
Trump, almost certainly, is accepting of these geopolitical normalizations, which ultimately will entail the cessation of the US Dollar as reserve currency.
Hegemony is succumbing to variegation. There are other globally-aware approaches. Pope Francis’ polyhedral globalism for example combines comparative advantage with the inherent dignity of each nation’s native culture. Monoculture is a Unipolar aim. Global economies-of-scale seek to arbitrage away –to flatten– indigenous human character. Uniqueness is the lumpy stew that bedevils rote, commodity pricing.
The sanctioned nation makes a calculation that its interests are better served relinquishing the benevolent gaze of Washington. In so doing, it embarks on a path alone.
But not so alone as to be lonely. Not anymore. Other diasporees have preceded it. As will a re-nationalized America in due course.
Norman Ball, MBA aka Full Spectrum Domino is an author, poet, political scientist and businessman whose writings have appeared in Counterpunch, Asia Times, Dissident Voice, Global Research and Russia Insider, among others. His last book ‘East-West Dialectics, Currency Resets & the Convergent Power of One’ is available on Amazon. He can be reached either via his Youtube channel, Facebook or gspressnow@gmail.com
Unipolarity was an accident (intended) of history. The USSR total collapse timed before the opening up and rise of China allowed ascendance of the US Hegemon. All Unipolar parts (bases, institutions, traitors and sabotage Fifth Columns) were in place. But, the US was not prepared for its responsibilities as Hegemon.
Triumphalism was all it could offer its own people, instead of a share in the Wealth that fell into its hands.
Exceptional America was the meme.
Yet, it had already unleashed/lost control of the Islamic Terrorism it thought it had to use to control the world it inherited.
Now, it begot wars, endless wars with no victories. This Unipolar system was fleecing the taxpayers and young generation (tens of Trillions of Dollars budgeted and spent, and Debt becoming multiples of GDP).
From 1991 to 2004, things seemed to be going well in holding down Russia and China. And the saps in Europe played their vassalage well with the EU and Euro. But both future adversaries could not be distracted from their sovereignty, unlike most other ‘nations’.
And ten years later, Russia acted the sovereign, reclaimed Crimea and organized its move into Syria and the ME (now into MENA). All the while, the Chinese piled its banks full of wealth from its capitalist growth, unleashed by US Wall Street greed which made huge multiples on its Sino-investments, movement of production to China and transfer of technologies for exploitation by the Communist-capitalist pigs who used every American-British trick transferred to them.
Unipolarity did not stand a chance against the new Russian military weapons and Putin geo-strategies. Nor did it understand the Chinese mentality to share its wealth in OBOR and BRI. Both adversaries sought to assist the emerging and developing countries of Eurasia, Africa and Latin America to achieve their own destinies. The weight of so many lives and minds and civilizations set against the hegemony of the US/West was impossible to imagine in 1991.
The US and NATO had just stewed itself in the successes of several color revolutions. Its trajectory was limitless, it thought.
It merely lost track of the heart and mind of its opposition because it disconnected from its own people’s heart and mind of what America should be.
Thus, 9-11 became an imperative. Fear and control was necessary. And the last two decades have become the denouement of Unipolarity.
The only option left to the Hegemon is World War. A war Russia (and China in lesser ways) have assured humanity will not be survivable by any entity on Earth.
Thus, accommodation must be made. Putin and Xi await their counterpart.
“Putin and Xi await their counterpart” … To emerge from the center of the empire? Surely that is extremely unlikely?
“Putin and Xi await their counterpart.”
If you are meaning their counterpart in the Hegemonic, Fascist Empire, it cannot happen. Not for some time, and not while America + vassals are as they are now.
It seems so often forgotten that leaders are not dropped on nations from on high. They emerge from the populace and are reflective of some part of that nations’ culture.
Putin emerged from the best of the Soviet Union, from the part still devoted to service to country, love of country, a willingness to spend years in training for a job with no public, overt rewards of fame and recognition.
An education system surely second to none, which – it is often forgotten – put the first craft into space orbit, sent up cosmonauts, the first and still only solo woman astronaut, and taught Law back to the basics of Roman Law and it’s influence down the ages.
Do we see anything to equal this in current America? A land of appalling dumbed down non-education, primacy of minority group sexual aberrants, soldiers trained by wearing ladies high heeled court shoes? A country riddled from alpha to omega with corruption, degeneracy, atheistic nihilism and violence without equal, visited both on it’s own people and anyone of any other country small and weak enough to be unable to defend itself.
Such a country can produce a Clinton, a Trump, a Bolton, a Mad Dog. But a Putin, or a Xi??? I see nothing in it to offer any hope of such.
And herein, although it seems unable to see this, lies it’s future. For the best resource any country has is not it’s mineral wealth, nor it’s climate, it’s agriculture, it’s military hardware . The best resource of any and every country is it’s people. I so often thought about the devastation the 1% were wrecking on America “what sort of a nation do they think they are going to build with these, with what they have produced of her people?”
Well, now we know. And it’s not a nation than can produce Putin, or Xi.
@Isabella
Good one Isabella. I too see no Putin, Xi, Nasrallah in USA.
With all respect to Hollywood characters the only real hero USA ever produced was Muhammed Ali, a black muslim.
Any society is only as strong as its weakest link
You are absolutely right. The western world needs another Bismarck, and what we get is Merkel, May, Macron, Trudeau.
”It merely lost track of the heart and mind of its opposition because it disconnected from its own people’s heart and mind of what America should be.”
Not really. Rather, just like the Euro-trash, it was the 99% which lost track of the perceived heart, love, and compassion of the 1% but, even now, there are still quite a few die-hard Empire bootlickers to be found although their numbers are dwindling. The US majority population’s heart and mind of ”what America should be” can be summarized as ”We, the exceptional and indispensable people, are entitled to other peoples’ labour output and natural resources. Constitution this, amendment that, and firearms-for-all, come what may”. They don’t follow the world anymore deeply than that; pure survival instincts as a parasitic nation based upon genocidal settlerism (hence the obnoxious firearm fetishism).
Likewise, the Euro-trash will — slowly but surely — be able to assess that the 1% is less and less supportive of their just, supreme cause: Equitable sharing of the spoils of imperialism. Indeed, the open border policy to bring back the destitute working class again was a particularly nasty surprise. The majority population in Western Europe looked up to the EU as a solid, dependable defender of imperialist privilege, and in Eastern Europe it was perceived as a gravy train for the very same reason. Syriza and the Ukronazis illustrate the point admirably from the ”left” and ”right”, respectively.
”Putin and Xi await their counterpart.”
Well, how about BHL and Nikki Haley? If Putin and Xi expect sane people from the West, they will be waiting forever. Better get in touch with the West’s genuine, truly combustible folks.
“Unipolarity was an accident (intended) of history. The USSR total collapse timed before the opening up and rise of China allowed ascendance of the US Hegemon. All Unipolar parts (bases, institutions, traitors and sabotage Fifth Columns) were in place. But, the US was not prepared for its responsibilities as Hegemon.
Triumphalism was all it could offer its own people, instead of a share in the Wealth that fell into its hands.
Exceptional America was the meme.
Yet, it had already unleashed/lost control of the Islamic Terrorism it thought it had to use to control the world it inherited.”
I have posed an ‘arrested dialectic’ explanation for the hollow triumphalism you describe, Larchmoster. (See my response to parrhesiastes, below). Russia passed through the Hegelian furnace. America has yet to. That’s why it fights Bolshevism/Antifa in the streets of Portland in 2018 when, in the War of Ideas, Bolshevism served its 70-year tenure on Earth and was defeated. The hubris of PNAC prevented America from digesting this historical outcome.
“The only option left to the Hegemon is World War. A war Russia (and China in lesser ways) have assured humanity will not be survivable by any entity on Earth.”
Yes WW3 is as close to a near-certainty as any eventuality I can think of. Alas, you’ll get an argument on your second statement from the Nuclear Primacy School of American Madness.
NATO is a conceptual muddle. Again, for reasons of dialectical subversion, America is being kept from thinking clearly –something it was never top-of-the-class in even at the best of times. NATO is a MacKinder occupation force deployed to prevent a German pivot east, though it continues to advertise itself, twenty years into the post-Cold War era, as a ‘defense alliance’. As former Strator head honcho George Friedman confessed in a rare moment of candor, the two world wars were fought precisely for the ulterior goal of exhausting Russia and Germany against one another, thereby making rapprochement and full-on Eurasian integration so psychically abhorrent that it would never be commenced.
-FSD
“The whole purpose of human history is demonic consolidation by the God of this World.”
Quite liked this quote in the article above, it sure provides more pertinent info than the usual “the history of humanity is the history of war”.
And since consolidation / Globalization means to bring different entities together and make them one, it follows that separation / Independence / Nationalism is better, that strict border control is what God wants, that regulated and controlled cross border trade is what God wants, that self sufficiency is what God wants, that people living within their means and not taking on untold debt is what God wants, that people disregarding national borders (transnational companies) and people holding multiple passports is NoT what God wants.
Monoculture, the Unipolar aim, is just too boring – “It is quite legitimate for nations to treat their differences as a sacred inheritance and guard them at all costs” Pope Pius XII.
Glad to hear “the US economy is sufficiently self-contained such that a protracted period of inwardness is a viable course of action” as I actually like the USA, but its people will still need to music with regards to having bombed so many countries since the end of WWII.
@gT
“the God of this world” is the devil. The devil claimed to be able to do it better than God, why God threw him down to the earth and said “show me”!
God also demanded, “dont take my name in vain”. Meaning do not involve God or claim what God wants in any human plans and actions.
corrections: but its people will still need to face the music with regards to having bombed so many countries since the end of WWII.
“the US economy is sufficiently self-contained such that a protracted period of inwardness is a viable course of action”
No it’s not. For inwardness to occur the US Dollar ponzi scheme has to collapse first. The US stock market is a stupendous bubble built upon a sea of debt. De-dollarization is a necessary first step to a US reboot, but that also means a US default, which means end of Empire, which is exactly what the Empire is not prepared to face.
This means we have a situation where Trump and the US are attempting to have their cake and eat it. Trump is riding two horses at once, Empire and Nationalism. Both cannot exist at the same time but not for Trump’s lack of trying. So:
* We see Trump putting a gun to the head of lesser nations and demanding more tribute to US coffers while building up the US military through budget deficits.
* We see Trump preparing to loot Saudi Arabia’s $Billions ($Trillions?) of dollars by imposing a puppet king (MbS) beholden to him for survival.
* We see Trump attacking Iran diplomatically and economically, and quite likely militarily before long.
* We see Trump attack China in the South China Sea and economically.
* We see Trump building up NATO to keep Europe under the US military and economic boot print. Keep in mind the EU together is a larger economy than the US.
* We see not so hidden attacks on Germany to weaken it and prevent it reaching it’s full potential.
* We see the US starting a religious war in the Orthodox world community, which means another dimension in the attack on Russia.
* We see Trump holding nothing back for Israel.
None of these actions have anything to do with a US inwardness, it is all about crushing everybody else to prevent them from raising above the US. The US has reached it’s limits, so now nobody else is allowed to go past them. If they do, like China has, this means war.
The fact of the matter is either the US reboots itself in a managed deconstruction and reconstruction based on mutual cooperation, or it will go to war to preserve it’s privileges based on endless dollar printing. War it is.
Trump will build a new domestic industrial base of sorts, but it will be on behalf of the MIC and for reasons of Empire. Trump is serving the American people nationalism in the service of Empire. It will end the same way it always does – in disaster. But at this point America is too dysfunctional and numbed down and dumbed down to care. It’s tragic really, but more so for the rest of the planet. It won’t be long before the US takes over Venezuela for example.
“The fact of the matter is either the US reboots itself in a managed deconstruction and reconstruction based on mutual cooperation, or it will go to war to preserve it’s privileges based on endless dollar printing.”
I agree with your above response. I found the article rivetingly interesting except for the very odd casting of Trump as a (however unintentional ) revivifying force, which for me seems wishful thinking that stretches credulity and ignores his record, both pre and post election.
Trump’s specialty has never been business acumen, it has been engineering a string of bankruptcies (tutored in the art by Ray Cohn) where he personally walks away with a wad while his creditors go broke and hungry for want of payment for work already done.
Hardly a revitalising force, except for his own bottom line of course.
Good Post.
The US has accumulated personal, corporate and government debt that exceeds 1929.
October is the month when stock market tops usually occur and the last market top occurred in 2007.
Wall Street can put its head between its legs and kiss it’s US dollar hegemony goodbye.
What the US needs to reboot itself is an elite that isn’t composed of incompetent, poorly educated sociopaths.
A welcome essay, and good!
Some may question the idea of: “As will a re-nationalized America in due course.” Sun Tsu says a Kingdom once destroyed never recovers, and it is understood that History may rhyme, but never it repeats. There is no way back to status quo ante condition. Time is one-way function.
However the geographic existence of the place “America” will continue, so some sort of new State or States or political grouping must develop…and some have reasoned that regional States will be the form, possibly in a Federation of some coherent features, and possibly in adversary postures, and possibly strongly colonized. (Panarin etc)
Meantime the primary agency of “unipolarity” in the hands of Empire is the US Navy…as the Empire controls global economy, ultimately, by controlling sea transport and littoral affairs, primary with aircraft carrier groups.
However, it seems that the Empire lacks sufficient agency to achieve this under W3 conditions…ships and so forth are too few, the land-based support system cannot build ships rapidly…all sorts of “little” problems…and – worse! – it seems that “Ivan” can sink whatever they want to sink and the glorious navy can’t prevent it.
(The US has more admirals than ships!)
two articles to support this claim:
(unable to support MSTS) https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2018/10/10/youre-on-your-own-us-sealift-cant-count-on-us-navy-escorts-in-the-next-big-war-forcing-changes/
(No carriers East of Greenland) http://www.voltairenet.org/article203445.html (in French)
(machine translates excerpt):
“In a previous article, Valentin Vasilescu had shown the impossibility for the Pentagon to establish an anti-Russian blockade in the Mediterranean and, more generally, to carry out some naval blockade against Russia. Continuing his reasoning, he shows today that the United States no longer has the ability to conduct a naval war against Russia east of Groeland. Moscow has already demonstrated the superiority of its ground weapons in Syria. Even if the clash between the Big Two has been avoided with caution, it is clear today that Russia no longer fears a possible US conventional attack.”
(This leaves fear of a non-conventional attack, eh?)
Not very pretty.
“(This leaves fear of a non-conventional attack, eh?)”
Your parenthetical speaks volumes, parrhesiastes…
Thermonuclear war is a near-certainty and sooner rather than later imo.
The gratuitous NATO provocations occurring along Russia’s borders are attempts imo to coax responses from Russia that can then form the rationale for a first strike from the West (Nuclear Primacy has been the post-MAD de facto US doctrine since about 2006). Some may ask, why is a rationale even required as it smacks of carefully arranging deck chairs on the Titanic?
Because the US is quite certain a) it can survive and prevail in a nuclear exchange and b) its legitimacy post-nuclear requires this pretext as in “we had no recourse but to…” The first strike must look provoked and not opportunistic or strategically derived.
The conventional phase of WW3 will thus be brief and perfunctory as the US wants to precipitate a nuclear escalation and bring about a final outcome quickly.
Shiekh Imran Hosein’s eschatological musings re: the onset of Pax Judaica ring in my ears. Two things are poised to happen in short order to accomplish the desired global scale: Israel must get larger through territorial expansion and the population of the world must get appreciably smaller. Nuclear war climactically accomplishes these twin objectives.
–FSD
“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
Why is that not ingrained into human logic, where unintended consequences would be taken as a given?
The problem goes to the core of Western civilization. We are story telling animals and the stories which are the most repeated and remembered are those with a clear cut narrative arc and valuable lesson. This creates the basic assumption that the ends always justifies the means.
The reality of time is the opposite though. It is not the point of the present moving past to future, but change turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Potential>actual>residual. Duration is simply the present, as events form and dissolve.
What is far more elemental than human civilization, based on the cumulative narrative of history, are the thermodynamic cycles propelling this constant feedback loop. We rise and fall, big and small. The present consumes the past, in order to be informed by it.
Reality is the dichotomy of energy and information. As energy changes configurations, the formulations coalesce and dissolve, thus energy goes past to future, as form and information goes future to past. Our consciousness goes past to future, while the thoughts and beings it manifests go future to past.
We evolved a central nervous system to process the information and the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems to process the energy propelling it. That is why it is agreed that we feel with our heart and gut, but think with our head.
A spiritual absolute, universal/communal state, wouldn’t be an ideal of wisdom and judgment from which we fell, but the essence of sentience from which we rise. More the new born babe, than the wise old man. Yet while the Ancients gave passion its due, we now seek to tie it down with logic. This will fail. Passions are the motor, while logic only steers and occasionally brakes. Though they appear to be quite worn.
As the executive and regulatory functions of society, government is the central nervous system of the community, while finance functions as its circulation system. When communities were small, economics was reciprocal, but as they grew, accounting became necessary and that is what money is, an accounting device. What we need to learn is that as a giant voucher system, money functions as the social contract enabling mass society, not a commodity to be mined from it. It can only really function as a medium of exchange, not a store of value. For instance, blood is a medium and fat is a store, or for cars, roads are the medium and parking lots are the store.
We need to relearn the art of reciprocity and store value in healthy communities and environments, not try saving it individually, as abstractions in a bank, at the expense of the society and environment that support it in the first place. Which only creates the atomized culture we live today, with a metastasized financial system as its de facto ruler.
Enjoyed very much your comment, thank you !
Welcome. Thanks.
I seem to be shadow banned from various philosophy and science blogs for making such comments.
That would be ironic.
I enjoyed your musings too.
Bloody hell, Saker! Truly excellent though your website is, you do host some hyper-wordy wafflers. This essay needs to be precis-ed. (Remember: that process includes cutting to one-third the length – sic! – and yet still getting all the essential meat of the essay into the reduced text. It also includes substituting short, plain words familiar to everyone for obscure polysyllabic ones.) I managed about half a dozen paragraphs before my eyes glazed over terminally.
Get rid of your tv. That will help your attention span and endurance.
My attention also wanders a great deal, especially when I encounter the same old, same old cynicism seeking the agreement and comraderie of other cynics who have no solutions to offer other than fellowship in the pessimism and contented misery of believing themselves to be righteous and correct.
The first comment here was far, far and away the best, but those armchair critics of it and the crossroads for America (and the world!) that it lays out will have none of the risk of even imagining such a thing as nuclear WW III not being a feasible way out for anyone in this Condemned Nuthouse..(made up of people from ALL of your nations..) or there being any such thing as Necessity Being the Mother of Invention.
They project from their understandable weariness and pessimism NO inventiveness, NO creativity, NO possibility of Victory for Reason over Insanity…and condemn America…and in the process quite probably the rest of the planet as well, including their own “self-wrongtious” selves to a tragic, insane END of the WORLD…..unless they could just cordon off this here nuthouse…..and let it sink into oblivion without harming anything else.
Since that is probably a most unlikely eventuality, I would suggest that people be more careful what they wish for, consider that there own perspectives and prejudices might be highly subjective and possibly error prone rather than objective ture and complete reality, and carefully consider what this (relatively) young black man, with greying, whitening hair named Dennis Speed, in the link herein, has to say, namely:
“The presidents of China, (Russia), and that of the United States and the prime minister of India and various other political figures such as those of North and South Korea and Japan and the like have now moved the world into a position where it is poised, for the first time in human history, to engage in a form of physical economic activity that could truly free the human race from the various forms of slavery that still encumber it.”
I know him and the featured speaker he introduces.
I know him to have been involved in the Sixty-Eighter Mass Strike in the US and to have not tired in nearly HALF A CENTURY of seeking to creatively guide a second, much more world-wide wave of the sort of rise of mass consciousness that must appear of necessity or the human race won’t make it.
https://youtu.be/o34F-7G-h5w
Cutting the Gordian Knot With the Sword of Damocles
A vital part of that necessary rise of consciousness will be the increasing capacity of greater and greater numbers of persons, world-wide, to grasp more and more “Profound conceptions concerning Man and Nature”, as Shelley put it…………. and develop the necessary attention span to grasp and participate in what Necessity…..the Mother of Invention…..requires them to grasp and participate in…..if they are to be ANY part of the solution, instead of mere grousing onlookers of unfolding tragedy.
“Profound conceptions concerning Man and Nature”, as Shelley put it…
Is that like the: Man vs God duality, Male vs Female duality, where mankind is a part of nature.
And the duality split of the universe is nature is the female goddess of the universe composed of matter and the male god is composed spirit.
Great Spirit/Mother Earth, Yang/Yin, non-local spacetime/local spacetime. In Christianity nature is the devil but the Holy Spirit is female
Negative comment about contributor removed … mod Thanks to some comments I gather that the author sees a possibility for an inward-looking US in the forthcoming multi-polar context, but this assumption is refuted by Christian W. (above) with a line-up of some of the most serious spasms of an empire clinging to its eminence (spurred on by Albion and Zion).
I beg to differ, old chap. It is so utterly delicious to read such a delightful blend of style and substance, literacy and accuracy in the telling of such a Homeric story. If you want monosyllabic platitudes there is always MSNBC. I do however share your appreciation of Homer Simpson as a social commentator. I assume you do like Homer Simpson….
The Neocons and their kind cheered when the Communist world collapsed in 1989-91.
They thought they had won and could now sweep the board – nothing could stand in their way.
Communism had collapsed and there was now no opposition to whatever they wanted to do.
But more shrewd individuals realised that Communism just collapsed FIRST.
The system that was foisted on western countries collapsed as well – it just took a bit longer, lasting till 2007-8.
That system, crony capitalism, crapitalism, parasitic finance capitalism, a looting kleptocracy, call it what you like (just don’t call it free market capitalism), collapsed then and never recovered.
It has been on life support ever since, continuing a zombie like existence sustained by tens of trillions in money printing and negative interest rates. If and when this life support is ever withdrawn, it will turn into dust, like Dracula exposed to the sunlight.
Nothing has been done to address underlying problems. All the actions taken have just compounded the disaster.
Cameron took over the UK in 2010. At that time the National Debt stood at £750 billion. The Banking Bail Out more than doubled it to £1,600 billion by 2015. It is now around £2,000 billion.
Tens of trillions more toilet paper money was printed in the US and across the EU. The true level of US Debt has been credibly estimated at around $250 trillion, or $750,000 per man, woman and child.
This ignores the hundreds of trillions in toilet paper derivatives. The whole financial system is like a house of cards that can collapse at any moment. It is only a question of when and where this happens, not if. The current trade wars may just be the first tremors of the earthquake.
The current US military budget is $1,136 billion, not $718 billion as officially stated. At the end, the Roman Empire had an army of 500,000. But it was bloated, corrupt, inefficient, and no longer able to win wars. The same situation prevails today.
We constantly see similar characteristics of an empire in decline. A gross disparity of wealth and poverty, and the flaunting of obscene wealth by a small ruling elite increasingly divorced from reality. The debasement of the currency. A catastrophic collapse in the quality of leadership that is increasingly venal, arrogant, corrupt, ignorant and deluded. Rampant degeneracy and perversion and a general decline in standards of all kinds. Increasing strife, social division, and chaos.
War could break out at any time. If limited to Iran, DPRK, or Venezuela, the results would be merely disastrous, catastrophic if extending to Russia and China. It is difficult to see how this can be avoided.
The whole world, and western countries in particular, are becoming increasingly unstable, turbulent and fractious. Any residual support for existing elites and the systems they represent is dwindling rapidly.
We find ourselves in a revolutionary situation.
“The Neocons and their kind cheered when the Communist world collapsed in 1989-91.They thought they had won and could now sweep the board – nothing could stand in their way.Communism had collapsed and there was now no opposition to whatever they wanted to do.But more shrewd individuals realised that Communism just collapsed FIRST.”
Right on, mark…
“In a climate hostile to resolution, facile bumper stickers preside. PNAC’s 1997 Statement of Principles serves as apt blueprint to our nation’s conceptual paralysis. Ripe with hubris and devoid of introspection, it forced a triumphalism upon the natural course of dialectical progression”
https://fullspectrumdominoes.wordpress.com
Dialectical synthesis was beneath the cheap triumphalist fantasies of the Neocons. Thus America took no lessons from the Cold War. History is not kind to those who will not digest its lessons. America suffers for its unconsciousness today. –FSD
Triumphalism was all it could offer its own people, instead of a share in the Wealth that fell into its hands.
Exceptional America was the meme.
Yet, it had already unleashed/lost control of the Islamic Terrorism it thought it had to use to control the world it inherited.
Likewise, the Euro-trash will — slowly but surely — be able to assess that the 1% is less and less supportive of their just, supreme cause: Equitable sharing of the spoils of imperialism. Indeed, the open border policy to bring back the destitute working class again was a particularly nasty surprise. The majority population in Western Europe looked up to the EU as a solid, dependable defender of imperialist privilege, and in Eastern Europe it was perceived as a gravy train for the very same reason. Syriza and the Ukronazis illustrate the point admirably from the ”left” and ”right”, respectively.
The gratuitous NATO provocations occurring along Russia’s borders are attempts imo to coax responses from Russia that can then form the rationale for a first strike from the West (Nuclear Primacy has been the post-MAD de facto US doctrine since about 2006). Some may ask, why is a rationale even required as it smacks of carefully arranging deck chairs on the Titanic?
The whole world, and western countries in particular, are becoming increasingly unstable, turbulent and fractious. Any residual support for existing elites and the systems they represent is dwindling rapidly.
“Likewise, the Euro-trash will — slowly but surely — be able to assess that the 1% is less and less supportive of their just, supreme cause: Equitable sharing of the spoils of imperialism.”
“Equitable sharing of the spoils of imperialism. Indeed, the open border policy to bring back the destitute working class again was a particularly nasty surprise. The majority population in Western Europe looked up to the EU as a solid, dependable defender of imperialist privilege”
The inequity of imperialism was pointed outward. The British Empire, to use an example, needed its home population to subdue and administer the world. Beyond the pittance they received, the foot soldiers of imperialism were permitted to bask in the pomp and circumstance and feel ‘exceptional’.
There was in the UK for example what was known as the Working Class Tory, deferential to class, cognizant and accepting of its place, etc. Call it a social contract leavened with a bit of false consciousness. In the absence of this working class faction, no Conservative government would ever have attained power. With the 1% acceding to the non-enfranchised 3rd world immigrant, the venerable class contract suddenly reveals itself to be what it was all along, albeit in disguised form: a sucker’s game.
Encountering a more vigorous Eurasia, imperialist spoils, post-mercantilism, are to be found increasingly at home (chasing the central crisis of capitalism, the subsistence wage, on the continent itself; erasing the social safety net).
As you say, the implied social contract that the Euro-elite would never turn on its own domestic populace was never explicitly drawn. Though the so-called Euro-trash took it to be so.