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 21 of 26

Americans Have Found the Enemy, and It Is They

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On January 7, 2021

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I want to return to this once more.

If you’ve watched videos of the protestors who got past security in Congress you know they weren’t exactly the A-Team. It’s true they had a little bit of inside help, and that the cops clearly didn’t want to seriously oppose them. Even so, it wasn’t a super-sharp operation.

Yet, they did get in, and if a few of them had automatic weapons in bags, they could have killed a lot of Congress members. It is fortunate for Congress that’s not why they were there.

The conclusion I draw from this, though I’m no military man, is that an organized attack could easily take Congress and kill or take hostage almost all its members.

Even if the Capitol cops made an effort to fight back, I don’t think they’d stand a chance against people who knew what they were doing.

The defense is essentially intelligence: If you know an attack is coming, well, the Capitol cops have plenty of backup they can get onsite. That was, apparently, offered before the protest/attack and refused.

So, anyway, anyone with decent op-security can eliminate most of the legislative branch any time they want. Good to know.

(America continues to amaze. With the largest military and police budgets in the world, they persist in the legacy of 9-11, when they couldn’t get any armed planes into the sky, despite having the world’s largest air force.)

The next thing to note, AGAIN, is that the people who did this appear to have genuinely thought they were saving democracy. Had that been the case, they’d be heroes. What they are, instead, is suckers. The people who convinced them are the primary criminals here, not the schmucks who believed them — who are now likely to get a hammer dropped on them, as a cop has now died.

Next, note the following:

I have seen polls where about 70 percent of Republicans think the election was stolen. So what happens next is the creation of a myth:

There was an election, it was stolen. We tried to intervene, mostly peacefully, and we lost.

Trump has now backed down fully, and his partisans appear to be furious. They feel used, but that will turn into a “stabbed in the back” narrative.

In other words, the ideological justification for a coup will be in place: “They stole the election, and mostly peaceful efforts didn’t work, and the patriots who tried it are martyrs.”

Now this doesn’t automatically mean a coup, or revolution, or anything, but understand absolutely clearly that what has happened is a consequence of the swamp of American politics and governance. You have a massively polarized electorate and a media system which repeatedly lies to people or lets them believe lies. Slamming the barn door isn’t going to work, because what will happen is a complete distrust of remaining media.

This distrust is rational in its own way. It’s not like the “liberal” media doesn’t lie all the time, about consequential things too, like Iraq or whether Russia is putting bounties on American soldiers. They just lie about different things, in service of a different set of elites.

Once you lose trust, as in the case of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, it’s hard to get it back — even when you’re telling the truth. There’s no reason to trust the New York Times, say, or CNN, or MSNBC. They might be telling the truth, but they’re serial liars.

Add to this the fact that the US has spent 40 to 50 years dealing with economic decline for a plurality to a majority of the population, especially the young, and you have a classic recipe for bad times, including the possibility of insurrection, coups, civil wars, and so on.

There’s no way to be certain what will happen, but we can recognize that the necessary conditions are in place for very bad events.

The US has no real enemies who can harm it, except Americans. It has been that way ever since the Revolution; it’s a simple matter of geography (and these, days, insane over-armament.)

The enemy is inside the house, and he’s you.

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Trump Has Proven the US Is Ripe for a Right-wing Coup

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On January 6, 2021

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So, my take on Trump was always that he wasn’t a coup threat because he was too incompetent to pull it off, but that he was dangerous in the sense that he was showing someone who IS competent what was possible.

I still think that’s the case. He’s a boob.

But Trump has proven something important today: Capitol police, whose job is to protect Congress, just let the protestors through. They removed barriers and even took selfies with them.

If an Antifa group had tried this, swarming up, trying to climb through windows, shoving aside barriers, lounging in the Speaker’s Office, they’d have been shot down like dogs. Instead, I’m seeing arrest totals of around fifteen.

So what we now know is that when a serious right-wing mob or militia, one that really does intend to overthrown US government (this group did not), shows up, the cops will not stop them; their opposition will be no more than token.

At that point, it will come down to the military. In this case, it’s clear the military would not acquiesce, but for a President who gets the military onside enough to at least paralyze them, or is smart enough to make sure that the colonels or generals in charge of capitol-adjacent troops are on his side or will not intervene, the coup will succeed.

Anyway, the US is now a pre-coup nation. The necessary conditions are in place: vast inequality, poverty, a stabbed-in-the-back narrative, and a storyline that a right-wing President was overthrown through voter fraud. The police have indicated they will not stop a coup. All that remains necessary is to paralyze the military, or make a deal with them, and a smart, would-be dictator will be able to do the job.

I don’t say this lightly, and I don’t say it WILL happen. I don’t know if it will. But the conditions for it are there.

Note that the conditions are there, right now, for a right-wing coup, not a left-wing one. The cops and many members of the military are sympathetic to the right, not the left.

I’ve been saying for some time that left-wing people should consider getting out of the US if they can, and if not, figure out how to protect themselves from what is coming.

That is now more true than ever. A right-wing coup in the next ten years or so, or a civil war is now at least in coin-flip probability territory.

Might avoid it; might get lucky. But it is a bet and one with near equal odds.

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Plus c’est la même chose

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On December 31, 2020

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***MANDOS POST MANDOS POST MANDOS POST****

Jeremiads notwithstanding, it appears that Biden’s strategy of appealing to Trump-disgusted suburban voters worked. At the US presidential level, at least, left-populists and Sanders supporters proved to be essentially irrelevant, politically. The Democratic consultant class has had its biases confirmed. What is, haha, left to the left-wing populist is to double down on the jeremiads: to predict that in the future, the inevitable failure of now-successful beige neoliberal centrism to reinstate its heavenly mandate in the USA will result, down the road, in the election of a smart fascist/right-populist Man On Horseback, if we’re lucky, merely a Viktor Orbán figure or suchlike for the American context — or worse, possibly much worse.

This reasoning seems very plausible to me. Because it is true that unless the neoliberal establishment has a change of heart, Bidenist/Obamaist US leadership will not be able to turn the ship around from an on-going trajectory of national and global decline. And insofar as that decline is felt in shrinking living standards, and insofar as “beige centrism” manages to suppress left-wing alternatives, the population will likely turn to forceful/violent right-wing populism, and all the inherent divide-and-conquer grifts that right-wing populism brings with it alongside the nationalist emotional highs and the “sugar rush.” As I said, it seems very plausible.

One of the bad habits of neoliberal intellectualism is an excessive reliance on “counter-intuitive” explanations as exemplified by the once-popular book Freakonomics.   We should be rightly suspicious of narratives that tell us that things we view in common-sense terms as bad are actually good. Sometimes counter-intuitive explanations like that are valid, but only sometimes. But we should not fall into the reverse trap and always uncritically accept simpler explanations that happen to match our moral intuitions. A common left-wing moral intuition is what I explained above: A people increasingly deprived of access to the good life and unable to access progressive responses to that deprivation will eventually provide reactionary forces a breakthrough. It has, after all, happened before.

It is the implied determinism that we should view with at least a little bit of suspicion. First of all, although we should heed history’s warning signs, history actually does not truly repeat reliably, and context matters. Trump’s senility and incompetence was, in point of fact, part of the Trump political brand. It was the riposte to a failing elite in a time when elite “competence-signalling” was part of the elite self-image. The specific trajectory to the “competent Trump” is much harder to fathom, when the incompetence was specifically a part of what he was and still is lionized for by his most ardent followers.

If we leave aside the typical and easy materialist determinism that thrives particularly on the more left end of the spectrum and accept a little bit of “counter-intuitive” reasoning, a different picture emerges. One in which the success and failure of Trump was highly dependent on circumstances over and above material discontent, circumstances that are difficult to line up again.  Circumstances in which the very competence of the future feared competent fascistoid is one of the features that prevents his (or her) rise, just to give a possibility. One in which the bad memory of Trump is sufficiently mobilizing for a long enough period of time that the mainstream neoliberal centre is protected from attempts at overcoming it.

In that world, between every election, things just keep getting worse and worse. And yet, the process of coalition building in a complex society given the American political system simply throws up Biden after Biden, Democrat or Republican. Decline centrism, unending. Like Tyler Durden’s vision in Fight Club, with people drying meat on the asphalt of a ruined highway, except they’re still arguing over whether they should choose the chieftain with the red trim or the blue trim as head chieftain, out of fear that one of them might reduce the incentives created by the fear of winter freezing by their proposed “peltfare” program.

Imagine this future: the soft, dirty sole of a comfortable white Reebok runner gently stroking a human cheek — forever.

Divided Societies in Decline Use Scapegoats to Re-Unify

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On November 24, 2020

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Chinese and American flags flying together.

A while back, Haydar Khan wrote an excellent article on American economic and technological decline, focusing on the diagnosis and differing solutions offered by economist James Galbraith and by Peter Thiel (the founder of Palantir, who made his initial fortune with PayPal and who is famous for his libertarianism, despite running a surveillance company).

The US is riven by divisions, split into two factions, who mutually hate, fear, and distrust each other. It has been in relative economic decline since the 70s, and this decline shows up in productivity statistics and in other ways like corruption and inequality. China is now, by some measures, the larger economy, and still growing faster than the US. While still somewhat behind technologically, in some areas, like 5G wireless, China is ahead.

So how does one fix this decline? We’ll skip Galbraith’s plan and move to Thiel’s.

Khan thinks that Thiel’s solution is more likely to work, because unlike Galbraith, Thiel has found scapegoats: The PC Left, parts of Silicon Valley (Google in particular), and China.

This is a standard policy. When a country is cracking up with internal divisions, it is common to find enemies to focus on. The German Nazis found socialists, Jews, and other “mongrel” races like Gypsies (whom everyone seems to forget), and the nations who had taken what they saw as German land, in particular France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.

Obviously, any country that is “great” can’t “fail” and if it does, it must be because of “traitors and enemies.”

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The pivot against China began with Obama, ramped up with Trump, and despite some fears among China hawks, seems likely to continue under Biden. The PC left includes all the usual scapegoats, people who violate “purity” ethics: transsexuals, gays, blacks, and so on. The people the US and, indeed, many nations, love to beat down. Its core includes a LOT of Jews. These are groups many people live to hate and hurt.

As for Silicon Valley, it’s a neat trick for Thiel to pretend he doesn’t belong, but also it’s smart: He’s picking a part of Silicon Valley (his enemies) to be taken out, hoping to avoid the backlash himself. Silicon Valley isn’t loved, everyone believes that tech companies took and take away the good jobs, leaving people driving cars for Uber and doing odd jobs for Task Rabbit, and so on. There’s no dignity to these jobs, and definitely no money to speak of.

The political classes have bought in, big time, to the China part of this pivot, and there is a lot of hatred among both Democrats and Republicans of big tech, though more Facebook than Google. The PC left is a harder question; the liberal core of the Democratic party loves PC politics because they treat it as weaponized tokenism. It doesn’t matter how blacks are doing, what matters is that a black man was President. It doesn’t matter how women are doing, what matters is that a woman is going to be vice-President. Liberals want the glass ceiling shattered for minorities and women, not for the majority of minorities to have a good income and good health care, say. Plus, PC politics is easy weaponized against the Left: claim someone is racist, sexist, or anti-semitic (or is 30-years old and dares to date a 20-year old) and by the time it’s shown they aren’t, they’ve already lost.

Still, there’s a deep contempt in the liberal class whenever identity politics are taken truly seriously. Joe Biden may make noises about Black Lives Matter, but his plan is to give the police more money, after all. He doesn’t actually believe in it.

Thiel’s trying to package up all his personal hatreds and enemies into one bundle and get them chosen as the scapegoats. This may or may not work, but that’s what he’s doing. The problem is that, even if he doesn’t get everyone he wants in, the basic strategy is working. The US is moving towards a cold, and perhaps hot war with the rising superpower and the last superpower (China and Russia, respectively). At home, passions are hot and, at some point, some groups are going to be chosen as the “bad Americans.” The traitors. Some part of the elite (a small part) will be thrown to the dogs and so will many of the powerless.

This doesn’t happen in all great powers in decline, to be sure. But it’s a common play, and it has powerful people other than Thiel pushing it. They see US decline and its disunity, and they are looking for a way to turn the decline around or at least distract Americans from the actual authors of the decline (that would be people like Thiel) towards scapegoats.

Given how angry the American people are, this seems like a good odds bet. It’s not a sure thing, but it’s one of the high probability outcomes, especially with regards to China.

If you’re in one of these groups, or if you have ties to China or Russia or countries which will fall into the Chinese bloc, you should be keeping a very careful eye on how this develops. These are people who don’t blink at mass casualties to keep their power and wealth, and they won’t blink if you become a statistic.

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The European Union

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On September 21, 2020

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CONTENT WARNING: *** MANDOS POST *** MANDOS POST *** MANDOS POST ***

Both inside and outside Europe, the left is highly divided on the topic of the European Union, with a large current being firmly against it for reasons that are actually quite understandable, from multiple perspectives (not just economic). The recent history, especially the Syriza episode in Greece, does not help the reputation of the EU from a left-wing perspective, and there is a temptation to see anything that damages the EU as being good for the people of Europe.  Jeremy Corbyn’s somewhat incoherent position towards the EU can therefore be dismissed by some as the result of a circumstance impossible for him, whereby a good chunk of Labour voters were supportive of EU membership while a principled leftist like Corbyn would have to, in their inner selves at least, be against it.  The EU’s association with neoliberal economic policy has led some, including a large percentage of this blog’s own commentariat, to view Brexit as just another stick with which to beat the neoliberal dog, so to speak, and to take at best a neutral view of who and how the stick is wielded.

It is absolutely correct to say that EU institutions have developed in such a way as to embed neoliberal attitudes and policies deeply within them. The institutions of European integration were largely built at the very same time as the neoliberal consensus’ apparent accession to the Mandate of Heaven.  (Providence does not hand out these mandates on the basis of evident goodness or wisdom.)  Starting from the late 2000s, it became obvious that neoliberalism was losing the Mandate, and no clear claimant has as yet emerged, a worrying sign.

The dilemma for those who want a more just and sustainable human future is extent to which the active dismantlement of the EU is necessary or warranted.  There is a left-wing position that is a kind of short-term nihilism which celebrates the destruction of institutions as a necessary step in creating the opportunities for beneficial change.  This position should certainly be taken seriously and becomes increasingly relevant as neoliberal institutions continue to operate in “zombie” mode, deprived of the providential imprimatur.

The ideal case is that the dismantlement of the EU would lead to a condition that was more beneficial, i.e., replacement from the ground up with, if not with a single institution, then with a collection of polities that are better empowered to serve the needs of their citizens.  The prospects for this can only be understood in terms of the forces that created the European Union (and its predecessor organizations) in the first place.  Europe as viewed from a Martian height consists of extremely unstable, contentious nation-states with badly drawn borders (as it is impossible in Europe, the birthplace of the nation-state, to draw the borders well).  A handful of these nation-states took advantage of a specific set of historical circumstances to become great colonial-imperial powers, but partly due to their own internal contradictions and external developments eventually lost their own heavenly mandates.  Present-day Europe, ex-EU, is a checkerboard of small states and middling industrial powers which had to reinvent themselves in the latter half of the 20th century.

A cursory, common-sense examination of Europe’s present-day geographic situation indicates that the checkerboard (or chessboard) analogy is more than apt.  European countries sit on geographically strategic (if resource-poor, relatively speaking) real estate between the current hegemonic military powers and become easy prey for the very colonial tactics Europe itself perfected.  The post-WWII architects of European convergence, themselves functionaries of states skilled in colonial tactics, were absolutely correct to surmise that Europe required a super-state level of organization that was at least partly independent of other power blocs in order to prevent being further carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey. The Middle East’s current, long-standing troubles illustrate clearly what can happen in that case.

The adolescence of European institutions during the neoliberal moment presents the central dilemma, because it itself is now a major threat to a protective European unity.  The question is: what is the optimal and most feasible way to lever out zombie neoliberalism without putting European countries at risk of “integration” into the pathologies already evident in the current hegemons?  The question is not an abstract one: one of Brexit’s consequences is that the UK likely will adopt an even harsher internal economic stance with integration into the weaker, less consumer- and worker-friendly economic regulation of the USA.

My own position is that the only way to resolve the deadlock is by the boring, difficult work of building cross-border, cross-polity popular solidarity both inside and outside the current EU.  It is the only way to enshrine the benefits of European integration with the necessary reform of the EU’s economic management.  Anything else — and admittedly, “anything else” is the most likely prospect — risks that those who live in Europe jump from the frying pan into the fire, following a mirage of dead-end cultural-nationalist idylls and emotional appeals to a clean, safe world that never really existed.

Square circles

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On September 15, 2020

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*** MANDOS POST *** MANDOS POST *** MANDOS POST ***

I just want to draw some attention to this post on Naked Capitalism that I thought was an excellent analysis of the dilemma of left-wing electoral politics.

They have done so mainly by convincing a layer of affluent, middle-aged professionals that the Left ultimately represents a threat to their most cherished social values: meritocratic, individualistic, cosmopolitan liberalism. In the US, this perceived threat has mainly taken the form of a repeated insistence (against absolutely all psephological evidence) that a Sanders candidacy would inevitably lose to Trump, thereby extending the life of his cartoonishly villainous regime. This same threat was used to convince older Black Democratic voters in the South that the defence of centrist liberalism was the only alternative to a perpetuation of Trumpian white supremacism. In the UK, the same effect was achieved by convincing a small but strategically crucial section of middle-class voters that Jeremy Corbyn was an advocate for Brexit and an antisemite, and that voters should instead lend support to the Liberal Democrats or the Greens (or abstain).

Secondly, again in each case, a nationalist, and increasingly irrationalist, populism on the Right has attracted enough support from some of the social constituencies who we might have hoped would unite around a radical social democratic agenda to make it impossible for that programme to win a majority. In the UK this was the constituency which voted for Johnson to ‘get Brexit done’. In the US, Trump’s economic nationalism and nativist populism mobilised lots of his base.

His failure to deliver on any of his promises (either to build a wall on the Mexican border or to bring jobs back to the rust belt) has undermined much of his credibility with that section, which is partly why increasingly deranged conspiracy theories are circulating among his die-hard supporters. There isn’t much reason left to vote for Trump, if you didn’t benefit from his tax cuts, or don’t believe he’s engaged in a secret war with the ‘deep state’.

This is exactly right, but I would cast it in another way.  There is still a large segment of opinion on the left that wants to engage in electoral politics but without taking into account voter subjectivity.  Well, of the votes meaningfully available to the left (construed as generously as possible) in Western countries, they do not conceive of the universe in the way that many people, particularly on the economic and environmental left, want them to.  If you are interested in exerting power via electoral politics, you must seriously engage with the subjective reality that these voters live in.  In the USA, one large group views Trump and all his supporters to be a critical values threat (what I’ve been calling the “dire aesthetic emergency” — keep in mind that I do not use “aesthetic” in a derogatory and trivializing way), another group (black voters) exist in a state of justified mistrust towards the rest of the electorate, and another group wants economic improvement but only if it is obtained through an aggressive posture towards those they view as an outgroup.  How these groups formed is a matter of a complex social history that is not fully amenable to class politics via “vulgar Marxism”.

Perhaps because it is, ultimately, the expression of inchoate and malleable emotional forces, nationalism can become attached to various political projects and tendencies. Its most extreme manifestation may have been in the murderous modernity of mid-twentieth century fascism, but the New Right of Thatcher and Reagan also managed to convince xenophobes and nationalists that they were on their side, willing to endorse racist and militarist projects as long as they also got to sell off public utilities and slash taxes for the rich. So the discourse of nationalist authoritarianism has proven remarkably flexible over the years, being used to justify everything from imperialist war to the destruction of the British coal industry. But the purpose that conservative nationalism always serves is to provide alternative explanations for historical events to those that would inform a progressive response: blaming unemployment on immigration; blaming union unrest on unpatriotic militant workers; blaming crime on the supposed moral degeneracy of ethnic minorities.

In the UK, the most recent and powerful iteration of this narrative was the Right-wing argument for Brexit. The Brexit story offers a compelling and plausible account of almost all of the cultural, social, political and economic changes of recent decades that many UK citizens have cause to regret, while promising an easy remedy to them. The weakening of our democratic institutions, the collapse of manufacturing industry and the consequent loss of secure employment in many places, the changing cultural composition of our cities and other communities: all could be laid at the door of EU membership. Of course a few of the people who voted Leave did so out of a hard-headed Left-wing understanding of the EU as an institution committed to the implementation of neoliberalism. Of course almost everyone who took such a view was a committed supporter of lifelong anti-racist Jeremy Corbyn. But absolutely every relevant survey suggests that the proportion of leavers who were motivated by this view, free from any nationalist fantasies of ‘recovering sovereignty’ or restoring cultural purity, was statistically negligible. A certain section of the American Left loves the idea that Brexit was in fact a vote against neoliberal policy rather than the reactionary form taken by dismay at some of its effect. The truth is, for most of its supporters and opponents, a vote for or against Brexit was the precise symbolic equivalent of a vote for or against Trump’s border wall.

There is a strong temptation, again especially among economic leftists, to see favorite leftist bugbears (e.g., the construction of European institutions while neoliberalism still seemed to bear the Mandate of Heaven) as the “real” thing that underlies the false consciousness of nationalist resentment.  Arguing this requires the kind of psychologizing that typically heralds weak armchair sociological reasoning.  Perhaps if one were already in power, one could use economic policy or withdrawal from neoliberal globalization to abate the underlying impulses that motivate proto-fascist ideation in the population.  This is putting the cart before the horse.  There is no evidence that catering to those impulses before attaining power enables you to create a cadre of voters that is more motivated by economic policy than by latent cultural resentments.

There are therefore two overall options:

  1. Accept the electorate as it is (yes, fully understanding the power of capitalist media to shape public opinion without overestimating it or imputing omnipotence to it). Then make a decision as to what are the palatable compromises in order to exert power.
  2. Set aside electoral politics as the center of available political progress and do the hard work, outside the question of elections, of raising public consciousness and reshaping the attitudes of the electorate.

This is, of course, not a complete dichotomy, since a combination of the two is possible.  The option that has not been available at this present time, however, is running on a platform that centers economic and environmental improvement, given the constraints of the electoral system and its social history to date.  This is not a circle you can square.  The prospects for this have improved (the fact that Corbyn and Sanders got as far as they did is a relevant indicator), but the world is not “there” yet.

Cold War 2.0 Incoming

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On August 11, 2020

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Right, with the ban on Huawei using chips made with American manufacturing equipment (one of the US’s last few places of absolute advantage), the bans on TikTok, Tencent, and WeChat, the attempt to convince other countries to not use Huawei 5G, and the arrest of the Huawei founder’s daughter for doing business with Iran, along with the US seizing a freighter full of medical supplies for Iran, I think we can state that the world is moving towards a second cold war.

The US pivoted to China containment under Obama, not Trump — though Trump has been far more aggressive. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was created as a way of marshaling Asia-Pacific countries into an anti-Chinese trade area. While Trump didn’t go ahead with it, he’s pushed hard against China in other ways.

When the US asked Canada to seize the daughter of Huawei’s founder, for example, it destroyed Canada-China relations: Canada was forced to take sides, and the Chinese were furious. The USMC (the NAFTA replacement) included a clause that says signees cannot make new trade deals with non-free states if the others object: This was aimed squarely at China.

Britain had originally intended to use Huawei 5G, but after leaving the EU, reversed course.

It’s important to understand that the anti-China pivot is bipartisan, as are the sanctions against Huawei and others.

The United States has a number of advantages and it’s using all of them aggressively. First, the fact that it is the center of the financial universe, to the point that movement of funds often goes through the US even when the transaction doesn’t involve them, is a major one. The US has made its financial laws extra-territorial, in effect. If a transaction goes through the US at all, even if no one involved in the transaction is American-related, the US claims jurisdiction. (Famously, this was used by the US to launch an investigation in the World Cup, in which the US is a trivial player, because a bribe went through the US on its way somewhere else.)

This often happens unintentionally, and firms that do business with the US at all are thus often unwilling to do business with anyone whom the US has sanctioned.

US naval power and military presence is also important, with their ability to interdict the Strait of Malacca. China imports about 70 percent of their oil, and 80 percent goes thru the Malacca strait and the US can shut it down any time they want. This is true of much else that China imports or exports.

The Belt and Road Initiative is, in part, meant to cut out the US ability to use its navy to hurt China; it creates alternate land routes, including one right across the continent to Europe, and it includes pipelines. The alliance with Russia, fraught as it is, is also about reducing dependence on Malacca.

Indeed, even the ability to protect and control trade to nearby neighbours is in doubt, which is why China built artificial islands in the South China Sea.

Fundamentally, the post-WWII trade, financial, and military order is an American creation, with a European assist.

When the US let China into the WTO, they let the power most likely to overtake them inside, as it were, the house. They did so for the simplest of all reasons: greed. Oh, sure, there was talk of capitalism meaning democracy and all that, but basically, offshoring and outsourcing to China made a lot of money for a lot of corporations and rich people, and that’s why they allowed China in.

The US deliberately sped up the transfer of industry to China as a way of making more money and undercutting wages at home. China knew the deal it was offering; they understood Americans, and they were patient.

So now, China is a larger manufacturing country than the US and, by some measures, has a larger economy.

China is a threat.

China is seen as a threat and this perception is, again, bipartisan.

There is no reason to expect this to change. China is not going to buckle under to the US, like some third-world nation or a vassal like Canada. They now have a de-facto alliance with Russia. China has nuclear weapons, and Russia is not going to allow China to be taken out with a nuclear first strike (without China, they’d have to give the US anything it wants, and they know it.)

The US will keep using its financial and technological power to weaken and isolate China.

So what will happen is an acceleration of the creation of a banking system that routes entirely around the United States and which does not use the US dollar, but instead the Yuan. Countries will be folded into this, as part of the Belt and Road Initiative. Even core US allies may have little choice: South Korea does twice as much business with China as with the US, for example, and Australia is extremely dependent on China.

For many countries, China clearly offers the better deal: they provide far more cheap loans than the US, they provide development, and their goods and services are suitable for both developed and developing nations. Nor do they natter on about “human rights” while they bomb Yemen.

For others, China will be unacceptable.

This leads to a world with two trade areas, not a free trade world. It leads to an end of the dollar as the world reserve currency. It leads to a continued arms race. It may well lead to a breaking of world IP into two sets: one American lead, one China lead. (There’s no particular reason for China to respect US IP if the US refuses to let them use it.)

This is a recipe for Cold War 2.0.

This time, however, understand that the US is facing an “enemy” with more population and more industry than it, not a nation devastated by World War with less population. Likewise, China and Russia combined have more land and more resources, while Europe is not a sure American ally, though Britain, absent EU support, will fall completely into US vassal status.

This is especially true as the US is experiencing late-imperial rot. It is nearly completely unable to handle its internal affairs, and its social cohesion is breaking down to the point where it may soon become a failed state.

Many American supporters of Cold War 2.0 are trying to use China as the external enemy to rally Americans around and, by closing China off from the US, to drive manufacturing back to the US, or at least to its firm allies (like Taiwan).

Bringing manufacturing back is smart, it should never have been sent overseas, but American elites are confused: Their primary enemy isn’t China, their primary enemy is themselves. They are responsible for the US decline and China could not have risen so fast if they were not so corrupt, greedy, and short-sighted.

It’s a very stupid world we’re moving into, but some of what is going to happen has to happen. It’s not good that the US has the ability to sanction anyone it wants to. Those medical supplies seized off that freighter? Covid-19 medicines.

Power which is routinely abused, as the US has abused its financial and military power, is eventually removed. The US is accelerating this progress as fast as it can.

The ban on Huawei using chips manufactured with US tech will hurt, for example. But it’s time limited: China isn’t some backwards third-world country. They will advance their own chip manufacturing and erase the deficit.

By fighting the dragon, the US is making a rival an enemy.

Cold War 2.0 is coming and essentially inevitable, because it is something the leadership of both countries either wants or is willing to accept. The only monkey wrench in this are the effects of climate change and ecological collapse. More on them later.

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America Is About to Feel Like a Third World Nation

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On August 7, 2020

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I spent a good chunk of my childhood in third world countries. Most of that chunk was spent in Bangladesh, which was then arguably the poorest country in the world, but I visited or lived in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Nepal and India, among others.

There’s a feel to the third world one becomes familiar with: beggars, infrastructure that doesn’t really work, people doing terrible menial jobs. There’s the huge disparity between the wealthy and everyone else, or even those who have managed to attach themselves in a semi-dignified way to the wealthy.

Cruelty is routine and unremarked. Indian police officers routinely beat people as punishment (similar to their American counterparts). Servants are treated terribly, and in fact the locals routinely treated the servants far worse than foreigners. This has hardly changed, Vivekenanda, in the 19th century, noted that Americans treated their servants far better than Indians did.

The US is about to make a double digit percentage of its population homeless. Something like 20 to 30 percent — or more — of American small businesses have or are soob to shut down by the end of the pandemic. The jobs won’t all come back and those that do will pay worse and feature worse treatment than the ones before (which were mostly not well-paid and featured routine meanness).

We’re talking about 30 million to 60 million homeless.

These are staggering numbers.

The United States will feel third world. Oh, parts already did, when I landed in Miami airport the first time I immediately thought “third world.” Relatively prosperous third world, but third world.

Those places will be worse–and Florida (as I predicted near the beginning of the crisis) has handled the pandemic noticeably badly.

Of course, for many, little will change. They’ll keep their jobs, they’ll be fine. I recently witnessed a discussion of infosec jobs, talking about how for a person with a degree and a couple certifications, $120,000 was a lowball. There will still be good jobs, and you’ll still be able to lose everything in a few months if you become seriously ill.

But when those people who are hanging on go out in the streets, they’ll see, even more than now, the fate that awaits them if they slip.

So much of American meanness, and the culture is mean in the details of its daily life, comes from this fear. Because it is so easy to slip into the underclass, even if one “does everything right,” Americans are scared, even terrified, all the time. They suppress it with massive amounts of drugs (most of them legal), and most deny it, but the fear drives the cruelty.

In the Great Depression, people became less cruel, not more. They saw that the idea of meritocracy was absolute bullshit: The richest people in society had fucked up, good people wound up in poverty, and merit had nothing to do with who had how much.

I hope this is what will happen in the US this time. I fear, instead, it will lead to even more cruelty. Instead of saying, “We should make sure everyone is taken care of” and instituting universal health care, good wages, and a non-punitive welfare system (whether through a universal income or some other way), Americans will instead become even more cruel out of fear of losing their place.

The US is “undeveloping.” It is moving away from being a developed nation to being an undeveloped nation.

This process has been going on for a loooooong time. At least 40 years (1980), and arguably since about ’68 or so. The frustration, as an analyst, was that the trend was obvious but it took so long. There is, as Keynes said, a lot of ruin in a nation.

Change is slow, very slow, until it is fast. People who live in the slow period, of long decline, don’t really believe in collapse, they assume that things will get worse in a steady line.

But, in fact, there are long periods where everything changes slowly, then periods like earthquakes. 2008 was an earthquake (and collapse nearly inevitable by bailing out the rich). This is also an earthquake. Amercians will FEEL different afterwards, even if Covid goes away 100 percent, which it may not, because Americans refuse to do what is necessary. American media keeps having articles about how Covid will never go away. Well, except for quarantining visitors, it will for many countries. But not for the US, or Brazil, or India. Third world countries all.

Nor should we get too down on third world countries. The US is third world and experiencing the complete corruption of its ruling and governing classes, with the collapse of its administrative ability. When your post office can’t even deliver mail, you’re a failing state; this is such a basic part of being a government that it’s part of the Constitution, written in the 18th century, but because the post office isn’t a kleptocratic institution, the American political class is destroying it.

Most third world nations, indeed, are handling Covid better than The US.

Nonetheless the process is underway. The US is already governed like a third world nation, it just has a lot of legacy infrastructure and institutions to destroy to get the full experience.

So, expect that this is one of the times that matters. Expect that the US will be different after this. Expect that it will feel different. Understand that your personal position has become much more perilous. You must reduce your vulnerability and/or attach yourself to a corrupt money stream in a way which makes you indispensable. Being valuable is not enough, it needs to hurt important people if you you go down. If it doesn’t, the second the numbers say you go, you’re off, and any individual who can be replaced will be if you get on the wrong side of someone more powerful.

There’s lots of good paying jobs, yes, but almost all of them can be done by someone else. It doesn’t have to be you.

Bear all this in mind as you plan your future in the new third world United States.

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