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 1 of 30

Ceasefire Talks In Pakistan Fail

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On April 12, 2026

24 Comments

Not precisely a surprise, given they sent Kushner, Witkoff and Vance to negotiate. Apparently Vance talked to Trump six times and Iran says that the negotiations were going OK until Netanyahu called Vance, then suddenly it seemed like the American delegation was negotiating for Israel.

More to the point, the US wanted the Strait open and for Iran to give away its enriched uranium, and Iran said “if you can’t win it in war, why should we give it to you in negotiations?” After all the damage inflicted on Iran, they need a lot of revenue to rebuild.

I remain convinced that Israel has child rape blackmail on Trump.

Meanwhile Pakistan has been moving planes to Saudi Arabia, which sure looks like a stab in the back to me, and Israel continues to bomb the shit out of southern Lebanon, wiping entire villages off the map, though it seems like Hezbollah is doing a fair bit of damage to them in return. Israel learned nothing from Ukraine and doesn’t even have cope cages on their Merkava tanks.

I’m not sure if Iran should have accepted the ceasefire or not. On the pro-side, they’re not getting bombed and the Strait is still closed and they have time to dig out damage around their underground mountain bases. On the negative side, Israel gets to pound Lebanon and Hezbollah, and the US is able to bring in interceptors and weapons stripped from the rest of the world, getting ready for the next round. And, of course, Pakistan used this time to reposition military to Saudi Arabia, and Iran doesn’t want a war with Pakistan.

That said, Pakistan’s taking a real risk here, domestically, ninety percent of Pakistanis support Iran, and the country is one spark from a revolution anyway. The army, of course, will gun down any number of civilians to retain control, but even so…

Israel’s losing pieces of the world, however. South Korea’s Prime Minister criticized Israel, and as Trump says all trade will be cut off with Spain because it won’t let the US uses bases in its territory to attack Iran, well…

What, exactly does Spain need from the US which it can’t get from China?

And as for South Korea, well, Iran lets friendly nations tankers thru the Strait? US hegemony was based, in part, on its control of oil. If it can no longer guarantee its allies the oil they need, why should they remain allies? South Korea is one of the first to make this calculation, but it won’t be the last.

This is probably why Trump is considering blockading access to the Strait himself, but countries will start sending military escorts, especially China if he does, because many countries are going to have serious problem: no cars on the road, no fertilizer for farms, no diesel for tractors, no bunker fuel for ships crises if this goes on much longer. Plus, of course, Ansar Allah will then shut the other Strait.

However much they may be scared of the US, however much they may be trained to be vassals, East Asian countries NEED Gulf Oil.

And if the US fires on escorts, well, that’s how World War III starts.

A complete clusterfuck. The only available courses appear to be a US military coup or a revolution, neither of which seems likely. If Congress wasn’t completely compromised, they’d have already impeached Trump, so there is no legal solution.

Or the US or Israel may nuke Iran. This is already being normalized, with Mark Levin suggesting the situation is similar to Japan: drop a couple nuclear bombs to convince them to surrender.

The difference is that Japan had already lost the war conventionally, and Douglas MacArthur, among others, thought that they would have surrendered with the nuclear bombing. Iran has not lost conventionally, and they have retaliation ability against Israel. They can:

  1. Destroy the desalination plants that provide 80% of Israel’s drinking water;
  2. Hit the Dimona Nuclear reactor causing a containment breach which would make Israel uninhabitable; or,
  3. Make dirty bombs with their 60% enriched uranium. One gets thru, and Israel is, again, uninhabitable.

Iran doesn’t need nukes to destroy Israel. I hope someone has forced this knowledge on both Trump and Netanyahu. So far the Iranians have fought a very moral war, as such things go, but if they get nuked, one of those thirty-two mosaic commanders is going to retaliate hard.

Really tiresome watching the world’s stupidest people screw everything up because many of them felt the need to rape girls in houses rigged for video by the Mossad.

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American Profits Are One Of The Causes of American Decline

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On April 9, 2026

15 Comments

Stumbled upon this chart of US corporate profits vs. corporate taxes. The important part isn’t the taxes, it’s the profits. (Note that this is nominal and doesn’t include inflation adjustment, not that American inflation numbers mean anything anyway.)

Now let’s look at another chart. This one of his how much profit companies that produce actual products (aka. not finance, insurance and so on) make per dollar of GDP added.

Notice that the long term rate through the “good” period of American prosperity (where there was a huge middle class and wages rose at the same rate as productivity) is pretty steady, and never goes above about 13cents to a dollar. It starts rising around 76 (Carter, who was very neoliberal)and continues a sustained rise, with a huge spike after Covid.

What you see in America are constant fears of inflation. Every single BLS adjustment to inflation rate measures that I am aware of since 1980 has had the net effect of reducing stated inflation. The real inflation rate in America is massive.

Meanwhile, in China, the constant fear is deflation.

Why? Because China has competitive markets and America does not. Barriers to entry are high, and everyone is looking for high profits thru barriers to competition. American firms took economic studies that showed that in competitive markets profits were low and spent all their time trying to make markets un-competative so they could have high profits. This mostly meant capturing government, because it is government regulation and enforcement which keeps markets competitive.

China wants competitive markets in most sectors, except those which provide public goods. They are aggressive about it. Chinese firms compete on quality and price and often engage in price wars, so much so that sometimes the government steps in to stop them from driving themselves bankrupt. Last time I checked the the EV manufacturing market I found over a hundred companies. The competition is savage.

So Chinese companies have low prices, “over production” and constantly introduce new models and products to try and either increase quality or price. Tesla goes years between new models, Chinese companies sometimes introduce multiple new models a year.

Everyone wants to get a share of high US profits, that’s one reason why money floods into the US. But US companies have become uncompetitive. They keep effectively shrinking: more profits, sure, but only by slowly, then quickly, destroying the companies. This is why the US has 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, if they let them in at all. And now they’re losing their foreign markets, as Europeans and Canada start letting in Chinese EVs.

The story is similar in most industries. America and Europe can’t compete. Period. Because instead of trying to be competitive, they’ve tried to create non-competitive markets and then soaked their customers as hard as possible. This works, till there isn’t any competition, or until you destroy your customers, who are also your employees, because US companies have also been keeping wage increases for everyone except executives and a few key employees (used to be programmers, but they’re about to get it in the neck) below price increases.

And this is how you wind up with 50% of all spending being done by 10% of the population, making most of America’s population economic cripples. It’s why you can’t afford tickets to a rock concert or a sports game, even though those were once solidly middle class pursuits and affordable to the poor.

This is a specific example of a general rule that you can always extract more profit if you’re willing to drive your company or your country into the ground.

About 20 years ago I wrote an article titled “there was a class war. The rich won.”

They’re still winning, but by doing so they have destroyed America’s place in the world, and indeed, the entire West’s. Hundreds of years of Western dominance are coming to an end because these greedy bastards wanted high profits for fifty years, and didn’t care what they did their country or most of their fellow citizens.

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The Twin Pillars of the Interregnum of Unreality Are Under Stress

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On April 8, 2026

29 Comments

Guest Post by Nat Wilson Turner

Last Fall, I posited that the US and greater West are in the grips of an Interregnum of Unreality that began when Barack Obama successfully papered over the Great Financial Crisis while addressing none of the causes and leaving the very same banksters whose antics caused the crisis in place.

The Interregnum of Unreality is the legacy of Barack Obama who achieved near-total information dominance via traditional and social media and used that power to promulgate a message that everything was fine, nothing ever happens, the neo-liberal order will never end because it rests on two indestructible pillars:

  1. The perception of American prosperity
  2. The perception of global American military dominance

Thanks to Trump’s impericidal decision to attack Iran in February, kicking off a war he can’t TACO out of, the reputation of American invincibility has taken a beating.

The estimable Aurelian writes in his latest missive of the global political implications of the ass-whipping the American military has taken in the Ramadan War:

That hit is going to be all the larger because of the massive, orchestrated PR campaign that has been going on for more than a generation, presenting the US as the Empire and the Hegemon, its military the unstoppable colossus trampling small countries underfoot. But the test of a hegemon is not how loudly you shout, but whether you can in fact do what you claim. In spite of defeats in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and the ignominious scuttle from the Red Sea, both boosters and critics of the US have been prepared to believe the US had that much power until the last month or so. But now we have price discovery, and it turns out that the US has large and quite capable forces, but it’s not the unstoppable giant ogre that it claimed to be, and never was. The whole “hegemon” thesis, people are beginning to realise, was smoke and mirrors all along: it’s just that now it’s obvious. It’s not just how it is now, it’s how it always was: a traditional result of wars, after all, is to reveal the truth about militaries. No doubt even as I write, pundits are busy composing apologias along the lines of “well, of course by hegemony we just meant Quite a Powerful Nation with a Large Military, actually.” But overselling and underperforming will have their usual political consequences.

He also brings in the second pillar of our interregnum of unreality, the markets:

There’s an interesting comparison to be made with the “Artificial Intelligence” racket, which was similarly hyped, and also expected to somehow guarantee world-dominating status for the US. But in quiet corners away from the hysteria, people who know what they are talking about have been pointing out for several years now that “AI” is a scam, that as an industry it will never be profitable, and that the money, and even more the power and the infrastructure needed, will never be available. And just in the last few weeks, the media are discovering that that’s how it is, and indeed that’s how it always was, if you had bothered to do a few sums. We can add the interesting rider, however, that in a world where generating power is going to have to be rationed, and silicon chips may be scarce, the “AI” scam may come to a swifter and more brutal end than even its worst critics supposed. Exactly what that will do to the US economy I’m not qualified to say, but I imagine it won’t be pretty.

And the damage will not just be financial. Most of the big names of international business, the Musks, the Zuckerbergs, the Altmans and the rest of that lot, treated with fawning reverence by the media and governments of the world, and who have persuaded us that what they think is actually important, will turn out to have empires built on not very much. How badly the poisonous mixture of world depression, financial crisis, and shortage of power and chips will hit them I don’t think anybody knows, but if they survive, their image, and that of the US as a technological leader, will have suffered as badly as the image of its military.

Earlier this week I posted at Naked Capitalism about the deep ties between OpenAI, Oracle and the UAE and that there are indications they are deepening those ties even as the foundations of their partnership are being lit on fire.

The weak links in the AI boom and the Middle East — OpenAI, Oracle, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — are strengthening their ties even as the Ramadan War exposes their increasing vulnerabilities.

Spoiler alert: Despite OpenAI’s jarring strategic shifts last week, the UAE is still pouring money down that hole.

Is reality finally intruding on our generation-long delirium?

When Trump failed to calm the markets last week with his ridiculous address to the nation, it seemed that a little reality was peeking through the veils.

But when Iran joined Trump yesterday in claiming that the basic terms of a ceasefire and ensuing negotiations had been reached, the markets roared their approval, with American equities markets posting huge gains.

This despite the ceasefire never taking place and the Strait of Hormuz only being open for a few hours.

As I attempted to document in a post earlier today at Naked Capitalism, “cognitive dissonance and conflicting agendas among key players” has allowed the western media to engage in an orgy of chatter about this ceasefire that never was even as Israel, Iran, and reportedly the UAE all launched strikes at civilians and industrial infrastructure.

One hopes that Trump realizes he went too far in his genocidal threats to destroy Iranian civilization and will at least refrain from implicitly threatening to nuke Iran going forward.

However it’s almost certain he will attempt more attacks on Iran involving US ground forces and equally certain that those attempts will end as disastrously as his first.

We’re seeing a full-on anti-Trump mutiny from leading MAGA media figures and even 70 of the senescent US House Democrats are calling for Trump to be removed from office because Trump’s rhetoric freaked the American mainstream the fuck out.

Democratic 2028 aspirants Rep. Ro Khanna and Sen. Chris Murphy both capitalized on the Trump-triggered panic and ensuing TACO to raise their profiles. Most of rest of the Dem 2028 aspirants have been caught flat footed, trapped by their zionist obligations and inability to recognize the political moment.

The freakouts and cognitive dissonance will continue until they can’t.

And as Aurelian pointed out, the consequences of the Interregnum Ending will be serioius:

For the US, as I’ve indicated, the shock is likely to be existential: Americans have been so misled for so long by their governments and media about their economic and military strength that the sudden discovery of its limits will be brutal and de-stabilising. Above all, a political culture of entitlement, which is used to issuing demands and threats to try to get what it wants, will suddenly have to cope with the US becoming the demandeur, as it is over the current “ceasefire,” obliged to make compromises and sacrifices to get what it needs to keep the country going, and seeing others expand into the strategic space it has vacated. Whether the current political system will survive the shock, and whether it will be capable of actually making the concessions necessary for survival, are very open questions.

Meanwhile the majority of Americans are getting their faces vigorously rubbed in the litter box of reality every time they pump gas and soon the inflationary impact of Trump’s war will resonate throughout the economy.

The longer it takes for the official narrative to adjust to new circumstances, the longer the Interregnum of Unreality continues, the worse the impact will be and the bigger the looming revolutionary moment will seem to be and the more forceful the ensuing crackdown will need to be to snuff it.

Twenty-One Simple Facts About the Iranian War

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On April 7, 2026

40 Comments

Update 3: Attacks continue on Lebanon and Iran, from Israel. Iran let two ships thru, then closed the Strait again. The original announcement from Pakistan said that Lebanon was part of the ceasefire, but then Israel said it didn’t, and now Trump says the same.

As ceasefires go, this isn’t one. I’ll probably write a new article when the situation becomes more clear, but so far the “Israel has Trump on a leash” hypothesis looks strong and the “Iran will not agree to a ceasefire” point looks like only needs to be modified to “no ceasefire is possible until Israel is beaten into the ground.”

Update: I’ll leave this up, but there’s a ceasefire, which I didn’t expect. Three possibilities:

1) Iran is getting the deal it wanted, and won the war.

2) They’re making a mistake.

3) Quite possible that Israel blows the ceasefire up.

Update 2:

This is Iran’s statement, if Trump did agree to all of this Iran just won:

In this plan, America is fundamentally committed to guaranteeing non-aggression, the continuation of Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz, the acceptance of enrichment, the lifting of all primary and secondary sanctions, the termination of all resolutions of the Security Council and the Board of Governors, the payment of Iran’s damages, the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from the region, and the cessation of war on all fronts, including against the heroic Islamic Resistance of Lebanon.

However Israel has said they will not cease attacks unless Iran opens the Hormuz, and they will continue attacks in Lebanon. In principle the agreement is between the US and Iran, and doesn’t include Israel, so Iran could just re-target all the drones and missiles which would have been used to America and Gulf States to Israel. Given Israel appears to be withing a few days of running out of interceptors, I think it’s clear who’d win that. I hope they do, and don’t abandon Lebanon. If they do, we’ll see how much control Israel has over Trump.

 

First, the war was started by America and Israel, not by Iran. There was no threat from Iran. This makes starting the war a war crime, the same crime for which many Nazis were hung at Nuremberg.

Second, there is no evidence that the Iranians had or were trying to get nuclear weapons. This is the consensus of the American intelligence community, who were under ferocious pressure to find otherwise.

Third, every person who condemns Iran without noting that that America started the war discredits themselves.

Fourth, every person who condemns Iran’s attacks on Gulf States without noting that the reason those states are being attacked is that they allow the US to launch attacks from their territory, discredits themselves.

Fifth, Iran has clearly stated that all the Gulf States have to do to stop being attacked is to stop allowing attacks from their territory and stop allowing Americans to have bases there.

Sixth, by both international law and by common sense, if you allow attacks on a third country from your country, you are a co-belligerent, whether or not your own military is involved. This matters specifically because the closer air power is to where they’re bombing, the more often they can bomb. The bases also matter because they hold (or did, till the Iranians destroyed most of them) communication and radar systems which aid America.

Seventh: If the Bushehr nuclear plant has had missiles land as close as the auxiliary building. The Russians have taken the threat so seriously that they have withdrawn their technicians. It is on the coast and if there is a containment breach, given the prevailing winds, fallout will contaminate the Persian Gulf. This will end desalination, which is how the Gulf nations get almost all their drinking water. It is also likely that the radiation will make the UAE and parts of Oman uninhabitable. All the oil from those regions will never be usable again.

Notice that such a containment breach will damage America’s allies far more than Iran. The map above is only partly accurate, the winds change and often blow south or west and not just southwest. Iran does have blocking mountains which should protect it quite a bit, but radiation is nasty stuff.

Eighth: Iran is capable of entirely destroying Israel. If nuked and possibly in the case of a containment breach, the majority of their arsenal will continue to exist. It is almost all hidden in deep underground mountain missile bases. In such a case Iran can retaliate by:

  • Destroying Israel’s desalination plants, which provide 80% of the drinking water;
  • Hitting the Dimona nuclear reactor and causing a breach would render Israel (a very small country) uninhabitable; or,
  • Iran has enough 60% enriched uranium to make dirty nuke bombs and send them by missile. Once again, this would make Israel uninhabitable.

Iran does not need nukes to destroy Israel. It can do so any time it chooses and this is a fact which American and Israeli planners seem to discount. Iran is a fairly ethical nation as nations go, and they also don’t want to kill Palestinians and Lebanese. But there are 32 Mosaic commanders. If Tehran is nuked, well, all it takes is for one of them to decide to get revenge.

Ninth: At this point Iranian missiles are getting thru a lot, because interceptor stockpiles are depleted. Claims of high interception rates are as believable as similar Ukrainian claims.

Tenth: it is not possible, absent perhaps dropping many nukes, and perhaps even then, to take out Iran’s ability to launch missiles. And even then if any are left, well, it won’t take many to wipe Israel off the map.

Eleven: Iran is not going to sign a ceasefire deal, because they know that Israel and the US will keep assassinating their leaders and eventually launch another war. Well, I was WRONG. I suspect Iran’s making a mistake, but we’ll see. Iran is saying Trump accepted their 10 point proposal, if so Iran won the war and this ceasefire makes sense.

Twelve: There can be no peace deal which leaves the US any bases in the region, because the US is, to use the delightful Russian phrase “agreement incapable.” The US has never kept any agreement it didn’t feel like keeping and it certainly won’t do so with Iran. Any promises to never attack again and stop assassinations cannot and will not be trusted by Iran’s leadership. This means Iran must win the war decisively, in a way that makes it as difficult as possible for the US to attack again (no bases in region) and Israel too scared to do so because they know any attack or assassination will mean immediate and savage retaliation.

Thirteen: The Iranians have included Lebanon and Hezbollah in their demands: Israel will have to withdraw from Lebanon and stay out and not bomb it ever again. Again, this is a maximal goal and requires a complete victory.

Fourteen: Iran is never giving up control over the Strait of Hormuz. This is especially true now that their industry and civil networks have been hit hard. They will need a lot of money to rebuild. They have also said they want reparations. I don’t think that will happen, but I could be wrong. The more damage the US and Israel do, the more Iran is incentivized to use Hormuz as a lever to get money.

Fifteen:  A side effect of this war is that weapons stockpiles have been drawn down from the entire world. There was  never any possibility of the US winning a war with China, there is no longer any possibility of even fighting such a war.

Sixteen: None of the weapons being used up can be replaced in any significant numbers without Chinese materials, and even if China cooperates it will take at least a decade to rebuild credible stockpiles.

Seventeen: Iran has pushed the Americans back significantly. Their sortie rate has dropped, and they are running out of stand-off munitions. That means they have to fly closer and risk their planes, and if they insist on using Gulf bases they risk planes being destroyed on the ground, as has already happened.

Eighteen: Carrier groups have been forced back to maximum range. They are no longer the Queens of the Sea, and it is not credible that they could be used against China or Russia, both of whom have longer range missiles and in the case of China, enough to simply deplete the entire carrier group’s interception missiles.

Nineteen: Barring the use of nukes, Iran will win this war. The longer it takes and the more damage that is done to them, the more they will use their control of Hormuz and their ability to hit any Gulf State, to obtain the needed reconstruction funds and assistance.

Twenty: Internationally this war is the end of the American global Empire. Everyone knows how to defeat them now. They will retreat to the Americas and try and push around local states. China and Russia are big winners, Europe’s deindustrialization will accelerate and Europe will continue its descent into a meaningless backwards and poor region.

Twenty-One: The economic impact of this war, even if it stopped today, would be bad enough to cause a major worldwide recession. If it continues, we will see economic devastation which will last for years. There will be famines. There will be brown outs and blackouts. Jet travel will only be for the wealthy. International trade will crater due to lack of bunker fuel and most goods will rise in price and/or become rare, how much so depending on where you live. Price increases will be much higher than necessary in the Anglosphere, in particular, as oligarchs use the excuse to jack up prices even more than they need to and governments do nothing to stop them. The AI bubble is most likely toast. Oh, and prices of all devices with chips in them are about to soar throught the roof.

***

This was and is a stupid war which neither Israel nor America should have ever fought. It is an endless series war crime, with deliberate and extensive attacks on civilians and repeated genocidal threats. It has demolished what little credibility remained in the West, as leader after leader condemns Iran and somehow leaves out that America started the war and that Iran’s attacks on infrastructure were retaliations after their infrastructure was hit. It is going to cause economic catastrophe, kill millions from hunger and power disruptions, and if Trump goes completely insane it could lead to the end of Israel and Iran both.

I’ve always said the stupidest war in history was World War I, the “Great War.” But this one may wind up taking the crown.

Finally, if the US had a functioning government, Trump would be impeached or removed under the 25th amendment. It does not, and this war has made that clear. There is no possibility of making deals with America and the only sane policy for every nation in the world is to disengage economically and militarily as quickly as they can while trying to avoid an American attack.

(A small laugh after a grim post)

 

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The Illusion of a Revolutionary Moment

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On April 3, 2026

32 Comments

As the blowback resulting from Trump’s foolhardy attack on Iran begin to directly impact Americans, it’s natural to hope for substantive, positive political change in the U.S. of A.

Polls show Trump hemorrhaging support from all quarters, even among his base.

Polls show the Democratic leadership is deeply unpopular, even with a majority of Democratic voters.

In Maine, polls show sitting Governor Janet Mills is getting crushed by Graham Platner heading into the June 9th primary vote which will determine the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate.

Platner has already survived a brutal oppo dump that dropped just as Mills (backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer) entered the race last fall, including getting caught with a nazi tattoo on his chest.

Platner’s rhetoric is getting remarkably leftist, even using the old Coal Miner’s Union song “Which Side Are You On” in a campaign ad.

And the average price of gasoline in the US has only just hit $4/gallon.

Just wait until it’s $6/gallon nationally and $10/gallon in California.

And wait until more than 45% of the American public figures out that Trump’s War on Iran is not only “not going well”, but that the empire has already suffered a crushing, permanent blow.

This is all happening in a context of economic collapse that was well underway before Trump’s February 28th attack.

In review, we’ve got:

  1. Looming US military defeat
  2. Looming economic crash
  3. Trump and the MAGA movement bleeding out
  4. A rotten, unpopular Dem leadership class hated by all sides

Seems like a recipe for political turmoil, maybe even serious political change, right?

Right.

Yes. This part is obvious.

The not-so-obvious part is this: who will fill the looming political vacuum?

The answer is simple, if not obvious: the political void will be filled by those who are most prepared to seize the moment, and possibly just seize power.

The MAGA forces that brought Trump to power are the most to blame for his disastrous reign.

The Christian Zionists who latched onto MAGA (and took it over) have made their play and it is ending disastrously in West Asia. They could only have emerged as a force in a completely degenerate United States built on delusion and propaganda.

Their day is done.

So, who else?

The Techbros, as the biggest winners to emerge in the neo-liberal era, intend to conquer and dominate the coming era.

They’ve had the most cash and are used to running rings around incumbent powers.

They’ve planned feverishly for the coming opportunity and have massive resources to back their play.

Except they’ve sunk it all on a bet on Large Language Models aka AI which is seemingly on the verge of imploding disastrously (at least from a financial and economic perspective).

Should we join Whitney Webb and Taylor Lorenz in warning against the Techbros?

How scared should we be of the idiot who wasted $83 billion on “the Metaverse”?

Thought much about being “de-banked“? Might want to consider it before “hitting the streets” or just doing journalism.

Americans think it can’t happen here? Well just avoid Ohio and you’ll be fine….for now.

When Does Money Matter?

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On April 1, 2026

25 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

None of us do.

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

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

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

That’s where we are.

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Risk and Reward As Perceived in American Strategic Culture

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On March 26, 2026

17 Comments

~by Sean Paul Kelley

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

Let’s take a look.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Is The End Of The American Empire. Period.

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On March 20, 2026

31 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Mencken wrote,

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

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

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

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

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