It turns out that Trump’s plan to help ships go thru the Strait was ended when both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait refused to let the US use their airspace or US bases in their countries to launch attacks.
The reason is obvious—Iran has repeatedly said that if the war restarts they will hit the Gulf States much harder than before, going after oil infrastructure in particular.
America has proved it can’t protect its Gulf allies. It’s low on interceptors, and what they have goes to Israel. Even with interceptors attacks get thru.
Bases have gone from defending countries to being liabilities. Being American allies drew the Gulf states into a war that devastated them. The Sauds and Kuwaitis have nothing to gain from letting the US launch attacks from their territory. The lesson was painful, but it has been learned.
This also puts an end to the idea that countries can’t deny the US. They just did, as did Spain.
The US Empire is dead. Officially dead. It does not come back from this because the new way of war centered on drones and missiles means that it is impossible for the US to protect its allies.
Likewise the US can no longer guarantee free navigation. This has been obvious for a couple years: if they couldn’t even defeat the Yemenis, they weren’t going to stand a chance against any real nation.
It’s over.
Again this doesn’t mean the US isn’t still a Great power, especially regionally. It can still shove around weak countries which aren’t willing to bear the heavy cost of standing up to it, like Venezuela.
But as time goes by the missiles and drones will spread from China, Russia and Iran to everyone else. Aircraft carriers will be forced way back, reducing sortie tempos, and blockades using ships will become harder and harder. Probably the best way to do a blockade against a far away country will be drone carriers, but even they will be vulnerable to counter-strikes.
This is also going to be a huge problem for the American military industrial complex: their weapons suck. No one is going to want to buy them. The key weapons needed are missiles, drones and air defense and all of those are cheaper and in many cases better from other suppliers.
At this point without data centers the US wouldn’t have essentially zero GDP growth. The stock market is being held up by a few major internet firms who are engaged in a massive circle jerk of financing their customers purchases. Chinese AI is behind American, but 95% cheaper, open source and will converge on the same general abilities, but better for real world tasks involving robots, autonomous vehicles and so on.
If you need to buy something you don’t want to get it from the US. Odds are China has it for less and at least as good, possibly better.
The world doesn’t need American goods. Everyone’s going to move off oil as fast as possible and it’s China that sells that stack. American weapons are crap. American alliances do nothing but give you a nuclear umbrella you can’t trust the US to deploy. Trade is increasingly moving off the dollar and on to the Yuan, so sanctions will work less and less well and in less than five years will be basically useless except against vassals.
All that will be left is a wasting ability to use a legacy 90s tech military against the weak, and that’s going away too.
The US Empire is cooked. America’s elites were handed one of the strongest hands in history and pissed it all away in three generations. Truly late Roman Empire levels of incompetence.
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Mark Level
Can’t quibble with anything said, Ian, a masterful summary, thank you. KT Chong weighed in on last thread viz what I’d covered in the 2 days prior (I don’t think I explicitly credited Jimmy Dore, but the link he shared has it, from another source). China said US sanctions will NOT apply to them, US Empire has a naked God-Emperor “leading” it, his Karl Rove “We create our own reality” is denied by ROW, has no force in world of reality. No visit from Mafia Don to Xi, scheduled later this month, as I already noted.
The Fat Lady is singing for US, and in the days and months to come for Russia and Ukraine too. The fact that Saudis and Kuwait (!!) have tapped out of the fight means no rebuilding of Mideast bases, US has lost the region except for the Genocidal IsraHell, still in the drivers’ seat with both D & R Elite political class, not with many others except the failed earlier Empires: White-Supremacist UK and Deutscheland, shit, even li’l Zelensky said he hates Trump, has been “abandoned” by him, no more billion$ to grab his 35% cut for Golden Toilets and Cocaine. And where is Sean Penn? Crying on the floor in a corner, remembering the last time he was a real Big Man, when he and Madonna broke up and he slapped her around, may’ve raped her (allegedly) and tied her to a chair before walking out.
Some idiot subbing for Lie and Suborn on the last thread said Ukraine will be Russia’s “Vietnam.” Incredibly stupid and counter-factual. 1. Russia was forced to defend itself from a Proxy War, 1,400 minimum dead in shelling in Donbass by “their” goverment for their naughtiness in speaking Russian, being Russian Orthodox, and the evil Orcs having defeated the 3rd Reich at a cost of 27 million lives. How DARE they oppose Banderists burning up their people in the local Trade Unions building? (Which even the European Union at the time admitted was a criminal atrocity, no punishment for “our” Nazis forthcoming however.) 2. Russia doesn’t WANT Ukraine, poorer, violent, corrupt, drug- and sex-trafficking, weapons-trafficking. It doesn’t want Estonia or even a relatively nice place like the Niederlands either. Who in their right minds would want to be in Poland, a racist, Authoritarian crap hole whose social mores are on a par with Victor Orban’s Hungary, gay-killing legal, bars that have entry signs saying “White Only”? Russia just wants to be left alone to prosper, along with their Chinese and Iranian and other BRICS allies, and will get there soon enough with US (as Ian noted) largely out of the picture.
I feel bad for Cuba, possibly Mexico, Venezuela, Canada and others now on the “local menu.” However with Trump and his Loony Toons bunch running things, perhaps they will fail at that as they have with Regime Change fantasies in China, Russia and Iran.
spud
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bill-clintons-true-legacy_b_1852887
“It’s not surprising that Bill Clinton was picked to deliver the nominating speech at the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night. Two thirds of Americans have a favorable opinion of the 42nd president, the highest approval rating of any president, including Ronald Reagan and John F Kennedy.
Talk about ironic — especially since his speech takes place two days after Labor Day. I would say his legacy should be Worst President Ever, who, like “Teflon Ron” Reagan, was able to Photoshop his tarnished reputation. And the shame has nothing to do with Monica Lewinsky and everything to do with the fact that the biggest beneficiaries of his administration were Wall Street, Chinese factory owners and U.S. banks and the biggest losers were blue collar workers. Mitt Romney may have run a company that outsourced jobs but Clinton ran a country that did.”
———
https://jacobin.com/2024/01/bill-clinton-neoliberalism-welfare-nafta/
Bill Clinton’s Presidency Was a Disaster for Labor
By
Anne Colamosca
Though Bill Clinton ran for president on promises of empowering workers, in office he gutted welfare and passed NAFTA, undermining organized labor and driving working-class voters away from the Democratic Party. We’re still living with the consequences.
y the end of the 1990s, after the biggest stock market boom the country had ever seen — real wages were rising, the federal budget was actually running a surplus, and high tech and finance were flying high — things would come to a devastating stop, and everything would disintegrate, leading to, according to Lichtenstein, the 2008 bubble that caused a near decimation of the global finance world.
Today Clinton’s presidency wins little respect. Few liberals want to return to the Democratic Party of the 1990s because so many see his presidency as a betrayal of the progressivism that was once the hallmark of the New Deal and the Great Society. According to Lichtenstein and Stein, his presidency was merely an “accommodation to an ideology that privileged trade liberalization, financial deregulation, and privatization of government services, while tolerating the growth of class inequalities.”
In addition to servicing longtime Democratic donors, at the heart of the presidency was a growing belief that America’s high-tech “new economy” was unlike any other that the nation had witnessed. The Silicon Valley high-tech industry — sustained by four decades of large federal subsidies — would come into its own in the stock market during the 1990s. The economy grew for 116 months, with economic growth averaging 4 percent a year and twenty-two million private sector jobs being created.
But as Lichtenstein and Stein remind readers, much of this was impressive in numbers alone. Most of the job growth was in retail trade, hospitality, care work, and so on. These sorts of jobs — which Clinton had created as Arkansas governor — had no health benefits, pensions, or decent working conditions, and would soon morph into the “gig economy” work blighting the world today, with workers additionally subject to a growing culture of surveillance and workplace spying. The benefactors were companies such as Walmart, McDonald’s, Amazon, and FedEx, not the software engineers and new technical specialists that many anticipated.
————-
you can’t make this stuff up!
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5276816-james-carville-newsnation-town-hall-domestic-manufacturing/
Carville during NewsNation town hall: ‘We don’t need to make T-shirts’
by Filip Timotija – 05/01/25 8:02 AM ET
Link copied
The Hill’s Headlines | PM — April 30, 2025
Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville, during a NewsNation town hall Wednesday, went off when debating domestic manufacturing, telling the crowd that the U.S. does not “need to make T-shirts.”
“I have on six items of clothes: shoes, socks, jeans, skivvies, T-shirt, and sweatshirt. You know how many of these were made in America? None. None,” Carville said during the event hosted by NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo alongside commentators Bill O’Reilly and Stephen A. Smith.
“And I don’t want to live in a country that makes T-shirts,” he continued. “I can buy them from somewhere else.”
———–
Bill Clinton’s support for free trade agreements, particularly NAFTA, is often criticized for contributing to job losses in the U.S., as it allowed companies to outsource jobs to countries with cheaper labor. This shift has been linked to a decline in living standards for some American workers and increased economic inequality.
epi.org UC Santa Barbara
Bill Clinton and Free Trade Agreements
Overview of NAFTA
Bill Clinton’s administration was pivotal in the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which came into effect on January 1, 1994. This agreement aimed to create a trilateral trade bloc between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, promoting free trade by eliminating tariffs and trade barriers.
Economic Impact
The implementation of NAFTA has been a subject of significant debate regarding its impact on the U.S. economy. Key points include:
Job Losses: Critics argue that NAFTA contributed to the outsourcing of American jobs to countries with lower labor costs, leading to a net loss of approximately 700,000 jobs in the U.S.
Living Standards: The agreement has been linked to a decline in living standards for some American workers, as competition from cheaper labor markets pressured wages and job security.
Economic Inequality: The shift in job dynamics has been associated with rising economic inequality, as benefits from trade have not been evenly distributed among the population.
Conclusion
Clinton’s support for free trade agreements, particularly NAFTA, is often viewed as having “traded away” American jobs in favor of corporate interests, resulting in long-term economic challenges for many workers in the U.S.
Wikipedia epi.org
cc
“Bases have gone from defending countries to being liabilities.”
Hopefully the colonies surrounding China, “protected” (occupied) by US military bases, like the Philippines, South Korea, Japan, see how they are making themselves targets to be quickly neutralized if conflict arises.
“The US Empire is dead. Officially dead.”
Just in time for the USA’s 250th anniversary of Independence in less than eight weeks on the Fourth of July.
Meanwhile the US stock market keeps on hitting all-time highs. They probably can’t allow a sell-off to start right now ahead of the big celebration.
As Indi writes: “You really don’t need to be a political scientist to understand ‘America’. Just watch Goodfellas.”
https://indi.ca/why-america-dumb
Carborundum
Don’t discount the possibility that Saudi and Kuwait are attempting to prevent the US from declaring victory and slinking off, leaving them to deal with the very considerable fallout from a job they view as half done. They weren’t bitching about the use of basing when Iran was getting pummelled – only now when it looks like the US is looking frantically for an off ramp are they concerned…
Feral Finster
1. Ironic, as the gulfie tyrannies were all for the US and Israel attacking Iran in the first place, and apparently were chomping at the bit for the US to resume the war once and for all, as soon as they could reload.
2. @Mark Level: Of course the regime in Kiev is evil. That has nothing to do with whether they and their CIA/MI6 masters are competent.
Mark Level
Spud is so well versed on Bill Clinton’s crimes and foibles that I think he should write a book, I’d buy it. Much respect.
Donnie will undoubtedly look worse, at one time I was so naive I believed no one could more awful than Bush Jr. But it’s baked into the system, every President gets Worse. If we get Newsom, at least he won’t be putting his Name and Graven Image on everything, but otherwise will be just as hateful to the populace as pretty much every President since Eisenhower has been. JFK never got a chance, he pissed off the wrong people, not just the Fascist Dulles Brothers and his daddy’s Mafia pals, but reportedly the Zionist Entity as well. RFK booted the N’Awlins Louisiana gangster Carlos Marcello out of the US, he had a fake Honduran passport, feds kidnapped him and dumped him on a mountain in the middle of nowhere in Honduras, he barely escaped with his life when bandidos pursued him, had to roll down the mountain, got only minor injuries.
The lesson: be careful when you make enemies. As the great Allen Toussaint (also of NOLA) sang, “The same people you misuse on the way up, you might meet up on the way dowwwwwn.”
Feral Finster
The Americans jerked the leach, the gulfie tyrants came to heel.
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-kuwait-lift-restrictions-on-u-s-military-access-to-bases-airspace-8504c830
Feral Finster
Meanwhile, China simply wants this war over with so they can get back to selling things and making money.
https://houseofsaud.com/beijing-sets-the-clock/
Feral Finster
It is fairly obvious that the “dispute” was manufactured in hopes Iran would let its guard down so that the Americans can take another suckerpunch. The Americans have form in doing so.
This also shows that, wishful thinking aside, the Americans have no interest in any kind of negotiated exit. In fact, they are determined to make negotiations impossible.
Unfortunately, China is desperate to avoid conflict.
https://houseofsaud.com/beijing-sets-the-clock/
mago
The US “leadership” class or should I say Epstein class has no idea how mad dog rabid stupid they sound. Whiskey Pete we’re not picking a fight Hegseth proclaims a 1.5 trillion pentagon budget benefits taxpayers. Some other official who I’m too lazy to look up claims high gas prices are a sign of a booming economy and consumers should be happy about going further in debt. I don’t want to know what drugs these clowns are ingesting nor what other toxic substances make up their daily fare, but they seem to think everyone else is as high as they are. Yeah, these people are the face of Empire’s end days. Dog save us all.
Then about that other Epstein jerk off , Slick Willie Clinton, an arch villain who spud so accurately and aptly nails, I’m old enough to remember when he slashed welfare and shoved NAFTA down our throats. That’s when my naïveté about the Dimmies (h/t ML) bit it. I didn’t care about cum stains on a blue dress, but when he bombed a pharmaceutical company as a distraction, that pounded the nail home.
Gee maybe in these end days the Clinton and Obama spawn can team up and run a lib feminismo ticket for POTUS and vice something or another, because it’s all vice, grift and corruption from breakfast to dinner with a bedtime snack.
And let’s not forget corporate personhood. They poop and pee and procreate just like you and me.
I’m so sick of this shit. Waiting for that fat lady to belt out an aria.
bruce wilder
I think of the Empire as a zombie robot, its brain (or driver) consumed by some parasitic infection, its dis-coordinated parts moving without any capacity to process feedback or conceive a rationalized purpose or interest of its own. It can’t even just lie down and die quietly. The end of empire, a Monty Python skit. Or, the Tin Man crying, “If I only had a brain . . .”
NGG
USA has lost this war- there will probably be another round – but it is futile. Iran will not capitulate to satisfy Trump. Trump should just declare victory and retire from the field. Unfortunately — Israel wants to attack Iran to the last USA bomb. Iran is NOT a threat to USA – never was – – never will be- they are what 6000 miles away, and all the intelligence agencies confirm that they were not buliding a nuclear weapon. BIBI sold Trump a bill of goods. The world will suffer immensely. I predict that China, Russia, India, and a few other countries will try to talk some sense into Trump. Or we are onto the Highway to Hell!
Purple Library Guy
So the Saudis and Kuwait backed off, huh? Less dramatic than it seemed, then . . . but still somewhat significant. We haven’t moved, as it seemed, to “satraps can get away with bucking the hegemon” but we are nonetheless at “satraps try it on”, which is not something we used to see.
Like & Subscribe
This is great news! I couldn’t be more joyful. Finally, the utopia we’ve been promised can and will manifest now that the Great Satan has been vanquished. It’s a dawning of the new age — the long-awaited and highly-anticipated Age of Aquarius. Yes, Donald Trump, the astronomical price of gas, nay the price of everything, is worth THAT.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlrQ-bOzpkQ