The noose cinches.
Second-rate George H.W. Bush got a first-rate Washington
send-off. For one day it interrupted the downtrend in equity markets. It may
mark the US apotheosis of inflated grandiosity. Across the Atlantic, Emmanuel
Macron, pretentious popinjay of Gallic grandiosity, has gotten a deserved
comeuppance. Brexit, Trump’s election, and nationalist uprisings in Southern
and Eastern Europe apparently insufficient warning to the globalists who would
rule us, the French rioters are sending yet another wake-up call. If that’s not
enough, so too are many of the nations outside the Euro-American welfare state
asylum.
The crazies’
kings, queens, and courtiers face a dwindling inheritance and mounting debt,
but spend lavishly to keep up appearances. Falling markets and rioting
taxpayers are unwelcome reminders that the money’s running out, leaving behind
a stack of IOUs that won’t be paid. The aristocracy wants to offload the pain
to the peasantry, but the riots demonstrate that the peasantry has other ideas.
Our betters also want to blame their sea of woes on Eurasia’s leaders, but
Russia, China, Russia, Turkey, and Iran are having none of that. They are,
however, delighted to see the West crumbling and will do nothing to stop it.
Empire is America’s
noose, hubris America’s curse. Once upon a time it didn’t matter much to the American people
or their politicians what happened in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, or even
Europe. During the nineteenth century, for the most part we minded our own
business, and what a business it turned out to be. America became the world’s
industrial, technological, and commercial powerhouse.
Success may be the hardest human condition to endure. Few
individuals withstand it. For empires, it’s always temporary. They fail and
topple from the pinnacle with monotonous regularity. Preceding the fall is that
heady feeling of invincibility, just as the those you ignored, scorned, or
subjugated on the way up are putting in place their plans to take you down.
World War II left America and its satrapies at the top of
the global heap. They neither recognized that their position was the result of
fortuitous circumstances nor that their embrace of income taxes, central
banking, welfare and warfare states, and governments’ ever-expanding
interference in the lives of their citizens would eventually undercut their
preeminence. Not until financial catastrophe, insurrection, and the relative
progress of nations outside the empire unmistakably confronts them will they
recognize that things have changed.
Donald Trump,
titular leader of the empire, hasn’t gotten the news. He made some encouraging
noises during the campaign and early in his administration about taking on
corruption and reigning in military commitments, but it’s only been talk. He
may yet get a scalp or two from the bungled attempt to depose him, but he
hesitated and lost. The incoming Democrat-majority House of Representatives
will stymie him at every turn.
Trump’s foreign
and military policy is indistinguishable from the policy of Bush father and
son, Clinton husband and wife, Cheney, Obama, and the rest of the
neoconservative/neoliberal clown posse who run this country. No kerfuffle is
too trivial for the US not to intervene, no hamlet too remote to send the
troops and hardware. The only requirements are that the intervention projects
power—Washington-speak for forcing somebody to do what they don’t want to
do—and funnels money to the connected.
Trump, Pompeo,
Bolton, and the motley menagerie of mendacious mendicants who run the European
and Asian divisions of US Empire Inc. might want to ponder the meaning of place
names, maps, and their countries’ balance sheets.
Why is the
Persian Gulf called the Persian Gulf, and the South China Sea the South China
Sea? Here’s a hint: proximity. The former is next to Persia, the latter China.
The difficulties of far-flung interventions are magnified when your naval
staging areas are proximate to nations that can put up a fight. Persia, or Iran
as it’s now called, would be a lot tougher nut to crack than uncracked nuts
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or Libya, no matter how many carriers we park in the
Gulf. China is an economic and military superpower. Ludicrously, we’re trying to
“contain” it in its own backyard while indulging in policy schizophrenia. Trump
talks Let’s Make a Deal, but our northern satrapy arrests an important Chinese
executive for not observing our Iranian sanctions.
Russia throws
off no handy nomenclatural clues; you have to know some geography for insight
into Imperial idiocy. A glance at the map reveals that the Baltic and Black
Seas, and the Sea of Azov are proximate—there’s that word again—to Russia.
Ukrainian grifter Petro Poroshenko, who in the rogue’s gallery of dubious US
allies ranks right up there with Mohammad bin Salman, decides to tickle the
bear. Russia responds and the US talks tough while parking ships and flying
jets over what are essentially Russian lakes. Putin is not reported to have
lost any sleep.
If hubris and stupidity don’t fell the Empire, insolvency
will. France’s revolt can spread like a California wildfire. The dirty secret
of the welfare state is that somebody has to pay for it. France has the highest
tax burden in the developed world, but there’s a long list right behind where
it is almost as onerous. Especially galling is the largess bestowed on
immigrants The horror: taxpayers might get the idea that they—not the state and
its wards—own their own lives. Around the globe, the French revolt could
inspire those stuck with the tab to do something more drastic than vote for
candidates who pledge to cut tax rates a percentage point or two.
Crashing stock
markets and a global recession, or worse, would expand the ranks of the Gilets Jaunes. Crashing bond markets
would drive up interest rates for profligate governments and tighten the noose,
just as they’re faced with aging populations, unfunded liabilities, shrinking
economies, and demonstrations and riots. Any sympathy for the ruling class
rather than its victims would be woefully misplaced.
Meanwhile,
the Eurasian powers are building a network of trade, telecommunications,
infrastructure, and transport links spanning Halford
Mackinder’s center of the world. If successful, such links could
lead to unprecedented peace and prosperity in that historically troubled
region.
In America,
particularly in Washington, the concept of patriotism has tragically
transmuted from pride in one’s country and heritage to: We run the world.
SLL has said that the eventual goal of President Trump’s foreign policy is to
make peace with multipolarity, leaving superpowers China, Russia, and the US
dominant in their geographic spheres of influence (see “Trump’s
New World Order” and “The
Eagle, the Dragon, and the Bear”). Alas, SLL may be wrong. With
Pompeo and Bolton whispering in his ear, it now appears Trump is trying to turn
the clock back to The Ugly American 1950s.
To the consternation of
faux patriots like Pompeo and Bolton, the effort is doomed. Hubris won’t
generate prosperity, pay debts, keep the disaffected off the streets, or
challenge the aspirations of competing global powers. The imperial delusion has
felled another empire. Its potentates and subalterns won’t realize it until
grasping creditors and deplorable barbarians have stormed the gates. By then,
it will be too late to forestall the fate that lurks as their deepest fear.