Trump and his team have been busy dismantling – and exposing to public view – the mechanism to the all-encompassing narrative control machine which has been shown to be both authoritarian and industrial in its global scope.

The Musk investigations have begun to peer into the USAID complex. They reveal

The big picture however is not that USAID has been a sub-silo for CIA; that is not revelatory. What is revealing, however, is the evidence that USAID was so heavily involved in domestic influence operations. This latter aspect serves to highlight USAID’s relationship with the CIA and the fact that CIA, FBI, Dept. of Homeland Security and USAID were one big Intelligence Community structure, held together (in flimsy legal terms) by the Office of Director of National Intelligence (the role that Tulsi Gabbard will fill now she has been confirmed in post).

Trump’s insistence on Gabbard for the post reflects his absolute need for Intelligence ‘truth’; but it is also likely that the DNI will become the locus for unscrambling and revealing the shadow ‘Intelligence Control Machine’ that is twin to the narrative manipulation complex.

Likely more revelations will follow, as part to a carefully managed release of further exposés – adding to the atmosphere of a breathless hurtling towards a new era. And keeping the opposition off-balance.

The Spectator magazine correctly observes that the head-spinning acceleration towards a new era is not confined to America, Canada, Greenland and Panama: “There is a wind of change blowing through the West. It emanates from Washington DC”, Gavin Mortimer writes.

A number of EU leaders congregated last weekend at a ‘Patriots for Europe’ (PfE) summit in Madrid. Geert Wilders declared:

“We are living in an historic age, and my message to all the old leaders from Macron to Scholz, to your own Pedro Sánchez?: It’s time. It’s over now. They are history”.

Viktor Orbán said:

“The Trump tornado has changed the world in just a few weeks … Yesterday we were heretics, today we’re mainstream”.

Marine Le Pen claimed that the West is “facing a truly global turning point … Meanwhile, the European Union seems to be in a state of shock … [in the consensus Brussels view however], Trump isn’t an inspiring figure – but an antagonizing one”.

Nonetheless, in the U.S., the first CBS-YouGov snapshot poll; n) shows what public sentiment thinks of Trump: 69% see him as tough; 63% as energetic; 60 % as focussed, and 58% as effective. His overall job rating stands at 53%. Just how Trump would like his image to be, we imagine.

Trump’s ‘showman’ image and ‘shock psycho-therapy’ clearly works for domestic America. In the world beyond, it is another story. There they have only Trump’s ‘reported’ rhetoric by which to judge. They do not get to see the full theatrical ‘global leadership show’, so his conjuring is understood more literally. And the rest of the world is only too aware of America’s history of broken-words (and withdrawals from agreements).

Overseas, Trump sticks with this same strategy of presenting shock interventions, or rather, an image (Gaza, for example) of an aspirational outcome that is intended to be novel, and to evoke surprise and evenshock. The purpose seems to be to toss a psychological grenade into congealed and stultified political paradigms, hoping to find movement and intending perhaps, to trigger changed conversations.

There can be validity to such an approach, providing it does not just stick a wrench into complex geo-politics. And for Trump, this is a real danger: Advancing extreme and unrealistic notions that can simply confuse and undermine confidence that his outcome could be realistic.

The inescapable fact is that the three key foreign policy issues which Trump faces however, are not ‘conversations’ – they relate to existential wars; to death and destruction. And wars are not so susceptible to off-hand grenade tossing. Worse, ‘careless words’ fired from the hip, have real import and may produce unintended and distinctly adverse consequences.

The cease-fire between Israel and Hamas remains close to the brink of collapse, as [“the magician” [Netanyahu] continues working to sabotage it](https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-02-12/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-works-to-derail-gaza-cease-fire-but-trumps-agenda-could-override-his/00000194-f9d8-df1c-ad94-fbfe38a00000 "https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-02-12/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-works-to-derail-gaza-cease-fire-but-trumps-agenda-could-override-his/00000194-f9d8-df1c-ad94-fbfe38a00000"evertheless Hamas’ pressure in recent days worked, and the ceasefire (for now) continues.

Trump may have believed that by unilaterally raising the stakes (demanding publicly the release of “all” Israeli hostages this Saturday) – thereby collapsing a complex process down to just one single release – he would be able to bring more hostages home quicker. However, in so threatening, he risked the complete collapse of the deal, since the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, and the withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza in Phase Two, form the absolute bedrock to Hamas’ continued participation in the negotiations.

Any resulting resumption of the Israeli destruction of Gaza would also constitute a black stain on Trump’s aspiration to end wars – for he would then ‘own’ the consequences to a renewal of war in the Middle East.

Netanyahu’s principal concern primordially lies with not completing the deal, but with the continued survival of his government. This was the meaning to his statement in reaction to Trump’s ‘threats’ (hell let loose) that Israel would halt negotiations on Phase Two of the Gaza deal, and in Netanyahu’s echoing of Trump’s demand that Hamas release “all” the hostages on Saturday – or else. The Israeli government however, duly has backtracked under pressure from Hamas – Israel, officials report, has conveyed the message to Hamas that the ceasefire will continue, should the three hostages be released this Saturday.

Whilst it is now obvious from the Trump Team’s discourse that the U.S. is intent to present a new face to the coming multipolar world – “with multi-great powers in different parts of the planet”, as Marco Rubio outlined in a recent interview – it is also true, however, that this change came about (was driven, in fact) by a seismic shift in how the world views America. Rubio effectively admits to this ‘truth’ when he adds that “the postwar global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us”.

Some members of the Trump Team, however, persist with threats (‘inflicting maximum pain’, ‘bombing to extinction’) that hark back to the old era of U.S. imperium. That is to say, some of Trump’s Team repeat Rubio’s rubric well enough, but without showing any indication that they have been affected or transformed by the new understanding. The ‘seismic shift’ is two-way.

The World is in a new era too. It has had enough of western unlateral impositions. It is this that triggered their shift. Their swivel of ‘the face that the U.S. presents to the world’ – the one outlined by Rubio. Understanding that both Hegemon and its vassals have transformed demands new approaches by all sides.

When Trump signed a Presidential Order for maximum pressure on Iran, the Supreme Leader simply said “No” to all talks with the U.S. Trump was just too unpredictable and untrustworthy, Khamenei said. Kellogg’s exaggerated claim that Iran ‘is scared’ and effectively defenceless, didn’t bring the expected response of talks. It brought defiance.

The West’s insensibility to what is going on in the world – and why the world is what it is – has been made possible because it was partially disguised through the ability of the U.S. – in the past era – to be able to impose itself on crises, and control the way that those problems were presented across the global narrative machine.

Trump’s Ukraine Envoy Kellogg said recently that Russia’s current sanctions ‘pain level’ is at about 3 out of 10, and that Trump has much more room to raise that ‘pain level’ by putting sanctions pressure on Russian oil and gas:

“You have to put economic pressure; you have to put diplomatic pressure, some type of military pressures and levers that you’re going to use underneath those to make sure [this goes] where we want it to go”.

The arrogance and misreading of the Russian position in Kellogg’s statement is so complete that it brought Russian Deputy FM Sergei Ryabkov to warn that Moscow-Washington relations are “teetering at the brink of complete rupture”; the ‘antagonistic content’ of Russian-U.S. relations has become ‘very critical’ today, Ryabkov cautioned:

“Washington’s attempts to give Moscow demands or to demonstrate the alleged doing of ‘a great favour’ in exchange for unacceptable U.S. demands are bound to end with failure in the dialogue with Russia”.

This ominous signal was stated by Ryabkov, despite Russia actively wanting a strategic, big-picture, written security deal with the U.S. – albeit one achieved on equal terms.

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has cataloged the deep-seated Russian experience (and resentment) for the West’s history of duplicity. It runs deep, and begs a question whose answer is yet to be seen: ‘The elephant in the room’. Drafting a paper of understandings on Ukraine is one thing. But Russians remain sceptical as to whether it can achieve a process that is written, binding and trustworthy.

Behind this lies a second question: Russia can see Trump searching for leverage over Moscow. But time (what Yves Smith calls “military time”) runs to a different tempo to that of “political time”. Trump wants to end the conflict, AND be seen to have ended it. The point here is that Russia’s slower military time may end with Trump falling into what Steve Bannon warned could be a deadly trap: ‘Too long, and you (Trump) will end by owning it’ (as Nixon ended up ‘owning’ Vietnam).

Trump Team members may, at one level, ‘understand’ the new balance of power. Yet culturally and unconsciously, they adhere to the notion that the West (and Israel) remain exceptional, and that all other actors only change behaviour through pain and overwhelming leverage.

What did emerge from the transcript of Trump’s long call with Putin was that it touched on big issues and did not at all stay captive to the Ukraine issue.

Yves Smith puts the ‘elephant in the room’ issue this way:

“It took a full 17 years from Putin’s 2008 Munich Security Conference speech, where he called for a multipolar world order, for the U.S. to officially acknowledge, via Mark Rubio, that the U.S. unipolar period was unnatural and had ended”.

Let us hope it will not take as long for Russia to achieve a new European security architecture. As The Telegraph avers: “This is Putin and Trump’s world now”.

Video Link

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation by permission of author or representative)

On all fronts, the Israeli internal paradigm is fracturing; and externally, the West is itself fissuring, and becoming a pariah on the global stage. The western leaderships’ explicit facilitation of a bloody cleansing of Palestinians has incised the old spectre of ‘Orientalism’ and colonialism onto the skyline. And is gyring the West towards being ‘the world’s untouchable’ (along with Israel).

Overall, Israel’s government objective looks to be to converge and then channel – multiple tensions into a wide military escalation disgorgement (a big war) – that somehow would bring a restoration of deterrence. Such a course concomitantly implies that Israel would thus turn its back to western pleas that it somehow act ‘reasonably’. The West mostly defines this ‘reasonableness’ as Israel accepting the chimaera of a passage to ‘normality’ arriving through the Saudi Crown Prince bestowing it, in return for a contrite Israel undoing seven decades of Jewish supremacism (i.e. accepting a Palestinian State).

The core tension within the Western-Israeli calculus is that the U.S. and the EU are moving in one direction – back to the failed Oslo approach – whilst polling underscores Jewish electors firmly marching in the other direction.

A recent survey conducted by the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs shows that since 7 October, 79% of all Jewish respondents oppose the establishment of a Palestinian State on 1967 lines (68% were opposed prior to 7 Oct); 74% are opposed even in exchange for normalisation with Saudi Arabia. And reflective of the internal Israeli divide, “only 24% of left-wing voters support a [Palestinian] State without conditions”.

In short, as the western institutional leadership clings to the shrinking Israeli secular liberal Left, Israelis as whole (including the young) are moving hard Right. A recent Pew poll shows that 73% of the Israeli public support the military response in Gaza – albeit a third of Israelis complained it had not gone far enough. A plurality of Israelis think Israel should govern the Gaza Strip. And Netanyahu, in the aftermath of the ICC arrest threat, is overtaking Gantz (leader of the National Union) in approval ratings.

It seems that the ‘western consensus’ prefers not to notice these uncomfortable dynamics.

Additionally, a separate Israeli divide concerns the purpose of the war: Is it about restoring to Jewish citizens the sense of personal, physical security, which was lost in the wake of 7 Oct?

That is to say: Is it the sense of Israel as a redoubt, safe space in a hostile world that is being restored? Or alternatively, is the present struggle one of establishing a fully Judaicised Israel on the ‘Land of Israel’ (i.e. all the land between the river and the sea) the prime objective?

This constitutes a key divide. Those who see Israel primarily as the safe redoubt to which Jews could flee in the wake of European holocaust, naturally are more circumspect at the risking of a wider war (i.e. with Hizbullah) – a war that could see the civilian ‘rear’ directly attacked by Hizbullah’s vast missile arsenal. For this constituency, safety is a premium.

On the other hand, a majority of Israelis sees the risk of wider war as inevitable – indeed to be welcomed by many, if the Zionist project is to be fully established on the Land of Israel.

This reality may be difficult for secular westerners to grasp, but the 7 October has re-energised the Biblical vision in Israel, rather than excite a surfeit of caution about war, or a desire for rapprochement with Arab States.

The point here is that a ‘New War of Independence’ can be held aloft before the Israeli public as the metaphysical ‘vision’ of the way ahead, whilst the Israeli government attempts to pursue the more mundane path of playing the long game, leading to the full military matrix control over the land between the river and the sea, and the removal of populations that will not submit to the Smotrich dispensation of ‘acquiesce or leave’.

The schism between Israel as a secular, post-holocaust ‘safe-space’ and the contrasting Biblical, Zionist vision sets a border between the two zeitgeists that is both porous, and at times overlaps. Nonetheless, this Israeli divide has bled across into U.S. politics and, in a more scattered way, has entered into European polity.

For the Jewish diaspora living in the West, keeping Israel as a safe-space is vitally important as, insofar as Israel becomes insecure, Jews feel their own personal insecurity worsens, pari passu. In one sense, the Israeli projection of strong deterrence in the Middle East is an ‘umbrella’ that extends to cover the diaspora, as well. They want quiet in the region. The Biblical ‘vision’ has an edge to it which is frankly too polarising.

Yet, those very power structures straining to sustain the Israeli strongman paradigm in the western consciousness now find their efforts are tending to shred those western political structures, on which they depend, thus alienating key constituencies, particularly the young. A recent poll amongst 18-24 year-olds in Britain found that a majority (54%) agreed that “that the State of Israel should not exist”. Just 21% disagreed with this statement.

The wielding of Lobby power to compel Western united support for Israel and its deterrent objectives – coupled with a lack of human empathy for Palestinians – is inflicting heavy losses on institutional leadership structures as underlying mainstream parties fracture in different directions.

The damage is exacerbated by the western peace camp’s ‘reality blindspot’. We hear it all the time: the only solution is that of two-states living peacefully side by side on the lines of 1967 (as enshrined in UNSC resolutions 242 and 338). Apart from in the West, the same mantra is also rehearsed (as the peace camp reminds us) by the Arab League.

It seems so simple.

It is indeed ‘simple’ – but only through ignoring the reality that such a Palestinian state can only come into sovereign ‘being’ through force – through military force.

The reality is that there are 750,000 settlers occupying the West Bank and East Jerusalem (and a further 25,000 settlers living in Syria’s Golan Heights). Who will remove them? Israel won’t. They will fight to the last settler; many of whom are zealots. They were invited and placed there in the years since the 1973 war (largely by successive Labour governments), precisely to obstruct any possible Palestinian state coming into existence.

The question that those who say ‘the solution is simple’ – two states living side by side in peace – do not answer: Has the West the will or the political resolve to instantiate a Palestinian State by force of arms, against the current will of a plurality of Israelis?

The answer, inevitably, is ‘no’. The West does not have the ‘will’ – and the suspicion then arises that in their hearts they know this. (There is perhaps a yearning for a solution, and disquiet that absent ‘calm in Gaza’, tensions will spike in the diaspora, too).

The hard truth is that the Resistance has understood the reality of the situation better than their western counterparts: A putative Palestinian State has only receded in prospect since the 1993 Oslo process, rather than having advanced a jot. Why did the West not take corrective action over three decades, and only then recall the dilemma when it became a crisis?

The Resistance has better appreciated the inherent untenable contradiction of one people appropriating to themselves special rights and privileges over another, sharing the same land, and that such a scenario could not long persist, without breaking the region apart (witness the wars and devastation to which maintaining the existing paradigm already has led).

The region stands at the edge; and ‘Events’ at any moment can push it over that edge, despite the efforts of regional actors to control incremental movement up the escalatory ladder. This is likely to be a long war. And a solution likely will only emerge through Israel, by one means or another, facing up to the inner paradigm contradiction within Zionism – and to begin seeing the future differently.

And of that, there is, as yet, no sign.

Hubris consists in believing that a contrived narrative can, in and of itself, bring victory. It is a fantasy that has swept through the West – most emphatically since the 17th century. Recently, the Daily Telegraph published a ridiculous nine minute video purporting to show that ‘narratives win wars’, and that set-backs in the battlespace are incidentals: What matters is to have a thread of unitary narrative articulated, both vertically and horizontally, throughout the spectrum – from the special forces’ soldier in the field through to the pinnacle of the political apex.

The gist of it is that ‘we’ (the West) have compelling a narrative, whilst Russia’s is ‘clunky’ – ‘Us winning therefore, is inevitable’.

It is easy to scoff, but nonetheless we can recognise in it a certain substance (even if that substance is an invention). Narrative is now how western élites imagine the world. Whether it is the pandemic emergency, the climate or Ukraine ‘emergencies’ – all are re-defined as ‘wars’. All are ‘wars’ that are to be fought with a unitary imposed narrative of ‘winning’, against which all contrarian opinion is forbidden.

The obvious flaw to this hubris is that it requires you to be at war with reality. At first, the public are confused, but as the lies proliferate, and lie is layered upon lie, the narrative separates further and further from touched reality, even as mists of dishonesty continue to swathe themselves loosely around it. Public scepticism sets in. Narratives about the ‘why’ of inflation; whether the economy be healthy or not; or why we must go to war with Russia, begin to fray.

Western élites have ‘bet their shirts’ on maximum control of ‘media platforms’, absolute messaging conformity and ruthless repression of protest as their blueprint for a continued hold in power.

Yet, against the odds, the MSM is losing its hold over the U.S. audience. Polls show growing distrust of the U.S. MSM. When Tucker Carlson’s first ‘anti-message’ Twitter show appeared, the noise of tectonic plates grinding against each other was unmissable, as more than 100 million (one in three) Americans listened to iconoclasm.

The weakness to this new ‘liberal’ authoritarianism is that its key narrative myths can get busted. One just has; slowly, people begin to speak reality.

Ukraine: How do you win an unwinnable war? Well, the élite answer has been through narrative. By insisting against reality that Ukraine is winning, and Russia is ‘cracking’. But such hubris eventually is busted by facts on the ground. Even the western ruling classes can see their demand for a successful Ukrainian offensive has flopped. At the end, military facts are more powerful than political waffle: One side is destroyed, its many dead become the tragic ‘agency’ to upending dogma.

“We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met … [however] unless Ukraine wins this war, there’s no membership issue to be discussed at all” – Jens Stoltenberg’s statement at Vilnius. Thus, after urging Kiev to throw more (hundreds of thousands) of its men into the jaws of death to justify NATO membership, the latter turns its back on its protégé. It was, after all, an unwinnable war from the beginning.

The hubris, at one level, lay in NATO’s pitting of its alleged ‘superior’ military doctrine and weapons versus that of a deprecated, Soviet-style, hide-bound, Russian military rigidity – and ‘incompetence’.

But military facts on the ground have exposed the western doctrine as hubris – with Ukrainian forces decimated, and its NATO weaponry lying in smoking ruins. It was NATO that insisted on re-enacting the Battle of 73 Easting (from the Iraqi desert, but now translated into Ukraine).

In Iraq, the ‘armoured fist’ punched easily into Iraqi tank formations: It was indeed a thrusting ‘fist’ that knocked the Iraqi opposition ‘for six’. But, as the U.S. commander at that tank battle (Colonel Macgregor), frankly admits, its outcome against a de-motivated opposition largely was fortuitous.

Nonetheless ‘73 Easting’ is a NATO myth, turned into the general doctrine for the Ukrainian forces – a doctrine structured around Iraq’s unique circumstance.

The hubris – in line with the Daily Telegraph video – however, ascends vertically to impose the unitary narrative of a coming western ‘win’ onto the Russian political sphere too. It is an old, old story that Russia is military weak, politically fragile, and prone to fissure. Conor Gallagher has shown with ample quotes that it was exactly the same story in World War 2, reflecting a similar western underestimation of Russia – combined with a gross overestimation of their own capabilities.

The fundamental problem with ‘delusion’ is that the exit from it (if it occurs at all) moves at a much slower pace than events. The mismatch can define future outcomes.

It may be in the Team Biden interest now to oversee an orderly NATO withdrawal from Ukraine – such that it avoids becoming another Kabul debacle.

For that to happen, Team Biden needs Russia to accept a ceasefire. And here lies the (the largely overlooked) flaw to that strategy: It simply is not in the Russian interest to ‘freeze’ the situation. Again, the assumption that Putin would ‘jump’ at the western offer of a ceasefire is hubristic thinking: The two adversaries are not frozen in the basic meaning of the term – as in a conflict in which neither side has been able to prevail over the other, and are stuck.

Put simply, whereas Ukraine structurally hovers at the brink of implosion, Russia, by contrast, is fully plenipotent: It has large, fresh forces; it dominates the airspace; and has near domination of the electromagnetic airspace. But the more fundamental objection to a ceasefire is that Moscow wants the present Kiev collective gone, and NATO’s weapons off the battle field.

So, here is the rub: Biden has an election, and so it would suit the Democratic campaign needs to have an ‘orderly wind-down’. The Ukraine war has exposed too many wider American logistic deficiencies. But Russia has its’ interests, too.

Europe is the party most trapped by ‘delusion’ – starting from the point at which they threw themselves unreservedly into the Biden ‘camp’. The Ukraine narrative broke at Vilnius. But the amour propre of certain EU leaders puts them at war with reality. They want to continue to feed Ukraine into the grinder – to persist in the fantasy of ‘total win’: “There is no other way than a total win – and to get rid of Putin … We have to take all risks for that. No compromise is possible, no compromise”.

The EU Political Class have made so many disastrous decisions in deference to U.S. strategy – decisions that go directly against Europeans’ own economic and security interests – that they are very afraid.

If the reaction of some of these leaders seems disproportionate and unrealistic (“There is no other way than a total win – and to get rid of Putin”) – it is because this ‘war’ touches on a deeper motivations. It reflects existential fears of an unravelling of the western meta-narrative that will take down both its hegemony, and the western financial structure with it.

The western meta-narrative “from Plato to NATO, is one of superior ideas and practices whose origins lie in ancient Greece, and have since been refined, extended, and transmitted down the ages (through the Renaissance, the scientific revolution and other supposedly uniquely western developments), so that we in the west today are the lucky inheritors of a superior cultural DNA”.

This is what the narrators of the Daily Telegraph video probably had at the back of their minds when they insist that ‘Our narrative wins wars’. Their hubris resides in the implicit presumption: that the West somehow always wins – is destined to prevail – because it is the recipient of this privileged genealogy.

Of course, outside of general understanding, it is accepted that notions of ‘a coherent West’ has been invented, repurposed and put to use in different times and places. In her new book, The West, classical archaeologist Naoíse Mac Sweeney takes issue with the ‘master myth’ by pointing out that it was only “with the expansion of European overseas imperialism over the seventeenth century, that a more coherent idea of the West began to emerge – one being deployed as a conceptual tool to draw the distinction between the type of people who could legitimately be colonised, and those who could legitimately be colonizers”.

With the invention of the West came the invention of Western history – an elevated and exclusive lineage that provided an historical justification for the Western domination. According to the English jurist and philosopher Francis Bacon, there were only three periods of learning and civilization in human history: “one among the Greeks, the second among the Romans, and the last among us, that is to say, the nations of Western Europe”.

The deeper fear of western political leaders therefore – complicit in the knowledge that the ‘Narrative’ is a fiction that we tell ourselves, despite knowing that it is factually false – is that our era has been made increasingly and dangerously contingent on this meta-myth.

They quake, not just at a ‘Russia empowered’, but rather at the prospect the new multi-polar order led by Putin and Xi that is sweeping the globe will tear down the myth of Western Civilisation.

The Jewish radicals have waited decades to reach office. They have the numbers now, and are loath to let this window of opportunity slip their hands.

• 

  Both Sides in the Region Now See ‘Big War’ as Possible

Events in the Middle East have been moving fast -- a ‘decade of change’ has been compressed into barely a few months: A world-shaping Entente has been sealed between Putin and Xi Jinping; China has mediated an accord between Iran and Saudi Arabia. President Raisi will meet King Salman after Eid; serious ceasefire talks have begun in Yemen. China, and Russia, have persuaded Turkey and Saudi to rehabilitate President Assad; the Syrian FM has visited Riyadh. Saudi Arabia has shifted towards China; OPEC+ has shrunk crude supplies. And everywhere from the Global South to the Middle East, the US dollar as a trading currency is being dropped in favour of national currencies. 

A new paradigm is consolidating.

At the geo-political plane, the humpty-dumpty of western hegemony in the Region has fallen from the wall and lies shattered on the ground. All the ‘king’s (neo-con) men’ will not put humpty together again.

And, at another higher plane, an axis of voices across the region (on Al-Quds day) spoke compellingly, and with one united voice, that the Israeli ‘egg’ had better be careful, lest it fall and break, too.

The Israeli security establishment -- albeit in coded terms -- sees the prospect in a matching dark vein. Moshe Yaalon, a former defence minister, recently said that the ‘radicals’ within the Israeli government want a ‘big war’; and when "Israel" wants a war, it usually gets one; and that war will come on the back of the Palestinian issue, Yaalon suggested. ‘Coincidentally’, Israeli military Intelligence says the same:  chances of ‘real war’ this coming year will spike.

Put simply, events in "Israel" are no longer in any one person’s ‘control’. The ‘newly’ empowered forces of Settler Zionist zealotry and of the religious Right to enact ‘Israel’ on the ‘Land of Israel’ are not about to ‘vanish’ the scene. They are pursuing no rational Enlightenment geo-political project, but the ‘Will of Yahweh’. And that constitutes an altogether different dynamic.

The Jewish radicals have waited decades to reach office. They have the numbers now, and are loath to let this window of opportunity slip their hands.

The US is putting enormous pressure on PM, Netanyahu, to abandon the Judicial ‘Reform’, which however constitutes the key-stone undergirding the whole ‘Land of Israel’ edifice: A project that is predicated upon ‘re-taking’ all of the West Bank from Palestinian ‘hands’. An enterprise that has the potential to shake the region to its very core -- and to trigger war.

It is an enterprise into which, the Israeli Right suspects, and the Supreme Court very well could insert a ‘wrench’. And they would be right.   

President Biden however, needs a Middle East ‘conflict’ on top of the war in Ukraine, at this juncture, like a ‘hole in the head’. Former PM Sharon was prescient some two decades ago in foreseeing that US power in the Region would wane and that the US ultimately would prove powerless to block "Israel" from ‘seizing’ the biblical Land of "Israel". That insight probably has become actualised in this precise ‘moment’.  

It is possible of course that Netanyahu will try to back down. The PM often has preferred caution. But realistically, can he retreat?

He is hostage to his coalition partners – should he wish to avoid jail – from which only his present government line-up can shield him. Absent that protection, court proceedings inevitably will result.   There is no sign of other coalition partners willing to partner with Netanyahu -- almost at any price.

It is not difficult to understand the origins to the radical Mizrahi intransigence over the Supreme Court. Those favouring a Jewish state, rather than a (secular) balanced ‘democratic’ state, have the numbers. They had them in the 2019 election cycle. The Haredim, the national-religious, and Mizrahim should have had enough votes to secure 61 Knesset seats (a majority). 

But over the course of four election campaigns, the ‘Right’ failed to materialise their majority -- as the Palestinian Arabs Knesset members entered the coalition-forming game to block the Right (which includes the Mizrahim) from capitalising on their numerical superiority.  

Minister Smotrich wrote at the time in a Facebook post that were this situation to persist, the Right would forever remain a minority.

It is the desire for ensuring the majority achieves power that lies behind the agenda to neuter the Supreme Court and expel Arab parties from the Knesset. Then -- and only then -- can the Ashkenazi secular-liberal Establishment be overcome (in this perspective), and a Jewish State on the biblical Land of "Israel" be instantiated.

If that State also happens to be ‘democratic’, that’s okay -- but any democratic attribute would be entirely subsidiary to its ‘Jewishness’.

The question posed at this point is: Is the collective West nearing the end of a cycle? Or are we still in mid-cycle? And is this a four-generational mini-cycle, or an epochal point of inflection?

Is Russo-Chinese Entente and the global tectonic discontent with the ‘Rules Order’ – on the heels of a long trajectory of catastrophes from Viet Nam, through Iraq to Ukraine – sufficient to move the West on to the next stage of cyclical change from apex to disillusionment, retrenchment and eventual stabilisation? Or not?

A major inflection point is typically a period in history when all the negative components from the outgoing era ‘come into play’ – all at once, and all together; and when an anxious ruling class resorts to widespread repression.

Elements of such crises of inflection are today everywhere present: Deep schism in the U.S.; mass protest in France, and across Europe. A crisis in Israel. Faltering economies; and the threat of some, as yet undefined, financial crisis chilling the air.

Yet, anger erupts at the very suggestion that the West is in difficulties; that its ‘moment in the sun’ must give place to others,and to other cultures’ ways of doing things. The consequence to such a moment of epochal ‘in-betweeness’ has been characterised historically by the irruption of disorder, the breakdown of ethical norms, and the loss of a grip on what is real: Black becomes white; right becomes wrong; up becomes down.

That’s where we are – in the grip of western élite anxiety and a desperation to keep the ‘old machinery’s’ wheels spinning; its ratchets loudly opening and closing, and its levers clanging into, and out of place – all to give the impression of forward motion when, in truth, practically all of western energy is consumed in simply keeping the mechanism noisily aloft, and not crashing to an irreversible, dysfunctional stop.

So, this is the paradigm that governs western politics today: Doubling-down on the Rules Order with no strategic blueprint of what it is supposed to achieve – in fact no blueprint at all, except for ‘fingers crossed’ that something beneficial for the West will emerge, ex machina. The various foreign policy ‘narratives’ (Taiwan, Ukraine, Iran, Israel) contain little of substance. They are all clever linguistics; appeals to emotion, and with no real substance.

All this is hard to assimilate for those living in the non-West. For they do not come face-to-face with western Europe’s repeat re-anactment of the French Revolution’s iconic secular, egalitarian reform of human society – with ‘the specific timbre, flavour and ideology’ shifting, according to prevailing historic conditions.

Other nations unafflicted by this ideology (i.e., effectively the non-West) find it perplexing. The West’s culture war barely touches cultures outside its own. Yet, paradoxically, it dominates global geo-politics – for now.

Today’s ‘flavour’ is termed ‘our’ liberal democracy – the ‘our’ signifying its link to a set of precepts that defies clear definition or nomenclature; but one, that from the 1970s, has drifted into a radical enmity towards the traditional European and American cultural legacy.

What is singular about the present re-enactment is that whereas the French Revolution was about achieving class equality;ending the division between aristocracy and their vassals, liberalism today represents a modification of ideology” that U.S. writer Christopher Rufo suggests, “says that we want to categorize people based on group identity and then equalize outcomes across every axis – predominantly the economic axis, health axis, employment axis, criminal justice axis—and then formalize and enforce a general levelling”.

They want absolute democratic levelling of every societal discrepancy – reaching even, back into history, to historic discrimination and inequalities; and to have history re-written to highlight such ancient practice so that they can be routed out through enforced reverse discrimination.

What has this to do with foreign policy? Well, pretty well everything (so long as ‘our’ liberalism) retains its capture of the western institutional framework.

Bear this background in mind when thinking of the western political class’s reaction to events, say, in the Middle East, or in Ukraine. Although the cognitive élite contends that they are tolerant, inclusive, and pluralistic, they will not accept the moral legitimacy of their opponents. That is why in the U.S. – where the Cultural War is most developed – the language deployed by its foreign policy practitioners is so intemperate and inflammatory towards non-compliant states.

The point here is that, as Professor Frank Furedi has emphasised, the contemporary ‘timbre’ is one no longer merely adversarial, but unremittingly hegemonic. It is not a ‘turn’. It is a rupture: The determination to displace other sets of values by a western inspired ‘Rules-Based Order’.

Being a ‘liberal’ (in this strictly narrow sense) isn’t something you ‘do’; it is what you ‘are’. You think ‘right thoughts’ and utter ‘right speak’. Persuasion and compromise reflect only moral weakness in this vision. Ask the U.S. neocons!

We are used to hearing western officials talk about the ‘Rules-Based Order’ and the Multi-Polar System as rivals in a new global framework of intense ‘competition’. That however, would be to misconceive the nature of the ‘liberal’ project. They are not rivals: There cannot be ‘rivals’; they can only be recalcitrant other societies that have refused the analysis and the need to root out all cultural and psychological structures of inequity from their own domains. (Hence, China is hounded on its alleged deficiency in respect to the Uyghurs).

The cognitive privilege of ‘awareness’ is what lies behind the western ‘doubling-down’ on imposing a global Rules-BasedOrder: No compromise. The moral enterprise is more intent on its elevated moral station than on coming to terms with or managing, say, a defeat in Ukraine.

Just yesterday, the Bank of America in London was forced to cut short a two-day, online conference on geopolitics; andapologised to attendees following the outrage expressed at a speaker’s comments that were deemed ‘pro-Russian’ by some attendees.

What was said? Professor Nicolai Petro’s remarks at the session where he said: “Under any scenario, Ukraine would be the overwhelming loser in the war: Its industrial capacity devastated … and its population shrunk as people departed to look for employment abroad. If this is what is meant by removing Ukraine’s capacity to wage war against Russia, then it [Russia] will have won”. Professor Petro added that the U.S. government had no interest in a ceasefire, as it had the most to gain from a prolonged conflict.

No compromise is allowed. To speak thus, to inhabit the western moral high ground creating ‘villains’, clearly is more important than coming to terms with reality. Professor Petro’s comments were condemned as “rolling through Moscow’s talking points”.

Yet, these cultural revolutionaries face a pitfall, Christopher Rufo writes,

“Theirs is actually, not an easy task. This is very difficult, and, in fact, I think is somewhat impossible. If you look at even the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960s … They had a program of economic and social levelling that was more totalitarian and more drastic than anything that had ever happened in the past. [Yet] after the Revolution collapsed, after the period of retrenchment, social scientists looked at the data and discovered that a generation later, those initial inequalities had stabilized … The point is that forced levelling is very elusive. It’s very difficult to achieve, even when you are doing it at the tip of a spear or at the point of a gun.

The levelling project being essentially nihilistic becomes captured by the destructive side of the revolution – its authors so absorbed with dismantling structures that they do not attend to the need to think policies through, before launching into them. The latter are not adept at doing politics: at making politics ‘work’.

Thus, discontent at the welling string of western foreign policy flops grows. Crises multiply, both in number and across different societal dimensions. Perhaps, we are closening to a point of beginning to move through the cycle – toward disillusionment, retrenchment, and stabilization; the prerequisite step to catharsis and ultimate renewal. Yet, it would be a mistake to underestimate the longevity and tenacity of the western revolutionary impulse.

“The revolution does not operate as an explicit political movement. It operates laterally through the bureaucracy and it filters its revolutionary language through the language of the therapeutic, the language of the pedagogical, or the language of the corporate HR department”, Professor Furedi writes. “And then, it establishes power anti-democratically, bypassing the democratic structure: using this manipulative and soft language – to continue the revolution from within the institutions.”

Alastair Crooke

Bibi is by nature cautious – even timid. His radical ministers, however, are not, Alastair Crooke writes.

Michael Omer-Man writes: Almost exactly 10 years ago, a young star rising in the Likud party, spoke to an audience committed to the outright annexation of the occupied Palestinian territories, laying out his blueprint. A year later, this same speaker set out certain prerequisites to full annexation: Firstly, a shift in the way the Israeli public thinks about a ‘two-state solution’ for Palestine; and secondly, a radical recast of the legal system “that will allow us to take those steps on the ground … that advance sovereignty”.

What was reflected in this statement is the structural dichotomy inherent within the ‘idea’ of ‘Israel’: What then is ‘Israel’? One side holds that Israel was founded as a ‘balance’ between Jewishness and Democracy. The other says ‘nonsense’; it was always the establishment of Israel on the “Land of Israel”.

Ami Pedahzur, a political scientist studying the Israeli Right, explains that the religious Right “has always considered the Israeli Supreme Court to be an abomination”. He points out that the extremist Meir Kahane “once wrote extensively about the tension between Judaism and democracy and the need for a Sanhedrin [a biblical system of judges] instead of the extant Israeli judicial system”.

In Israel’s attempt to balance these opposing visions and interpretations of history, the Israeli Right sees the judiciary as deliberately having been tilted toward democracy (by one part of the Israeli élite). This simmering tension finally exploded with the 1995 Supreme Court claim that it possessed power of judicial review over Knesset (parliamentary) legislation deemed to be in conflict with Israel’s quasi-constitutional Basic Laws. (An Israeli constitution has been considered since 1949, but never actuated.)

Well, that ‘young star’ of 10 years ago – who asserted so forcefully “We cannot accept … a judicial system that is controlled by a radical leftist, post-Zionist minority that elects itself behind closed doors – dictating to us its own values – today is Israel’s Justice Minister, Yariv Levin.

And with time, Netanyahu has indeed already brought about that first prerequisite (outlined by Levin almost a decade ago): The Israeli public perspective on the two-state Olso formula is radically changed. Political support for that project hovers close to zero in the political sphere.

More than that, today’s Prime Minister, Netanyahu, explicitly shares the same ideology as Levin and his colleagues – namely that Jews have a right to settle in any, and all, parts of the ‘Land of Israel’; he also believes that the very survival of the Jewish people is dependent on the actuation of that divine obligation into practice.

Many on the Israeli Right, Omer-Man suggests, therefore see the Supreme Court as “the central impediment to their ability to fulfil their annexationist dreams, which for them are a combination of messianic and ideological commandments”.

They saw the 1995 Supreme Court ruling as ‘a coup’ that ushered in the judiciary’s supremacy over law and politics. This is a view that is hotly contested – to the point of near civil war – by those who advocate for democracy versus a strict Judaic vision of religious law.

From the perspective of the Right, Ariel Kahana notes that although

“they have continued to win time and again – but they have never held power in the true sense of the word. Through the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the defence establishment, academia, cultural elites, the media, and some of the economic wheelers and dealers, the Left’s doctrine continued to dominate Israel’s power foci. In fact, regardless of who the cabinet ministers were, the old guard has continued with its obstructionist insurgency”.

Today, however, the numbers are with the Right – and we are witnessing the Israeli Right’s counter-coup: a judicial ‘reform’ which would centralize power in the Knesset – precisely by dismantling the legal system’s current checks and balances.

Ostensibly this schism constitutes the crisis bringing hundreds of thousand Israelis on to the street. Prima Facie, in much of the media, at issue is who has the final word: the Knesset or the Supreme Court.

Or, is it? For, beneath the surface, unacknowledged and mostly unsaid, is something deeper: It is the conflict between Realpolitik versus Completion of the Zionist project. Put starkly, the Right says it’s clear: Without Judaism we have no identity; and no reason to be in this land.

The ‘less said’ fact is that much of the electorate actually agrees with the Right in principle, yet opposes the full annexation of the West Bank on pragmatic grounds: “They believe that the status quo of a “temporary” 55-plus-year military occupation is the more strategically prudent”.

“Formally [annexing West Bank] would make it too difficult to convince the world that Israel is not an apartheid regime in which half of the population — Palestinians — are denied basic democratic, civil, and human rights”.

That other unresolved contradiction (that of continuing occupation within ‘democracy’) is also submerged by the prevalent mantra of ‘Right wing Orbánism versus democracy’. Ahmad Tibi, an Palestinian member of the Knesset earlier has wryly noted: “Israel indeed is ‘Jewish and democratic’: It is democratic toward Jews – and Jewish toward Arabs”.

The mass of protestors gathered in Tel Aviv carefully choose to avoid this oxymoron (other than around the kitchen table) – as a Haaretz editorial a few days ago made clear: “Israel’s opposition is for Jews only”.

Thus, the crisis that some are warning could lead to civil war at its crux is that between one group – which is no longer content to wait for the right conditions to arrive to fulfil the Zionist dream of Jewish sovereignty over the entire Land of Israel – versus an outraged opposition that prefers sticking to the political tradition of buying time by “deciding not to decide”, Omer-Man underlines.

And although there are ‘moderates’ amongst the Likud lawmakers, their concerns are eclipsed by the exultant mood at their party’s base:

“Senior Likud officials, led by Netanyahu, have incited Likud voters against the legal system for years, and now the tiger is out of control. It has its trainer in its jaws and threatens to crush him if he makes concessions”.

The flames lick around Netanyahu’s feet. The U.S. wants quiet; It does not want a war with Iran. It does not want a new Palestinian Intifada – and will hold Netanyahu’s feet to the flames until he ‘controls’ his coalition allies and returns to an Hebraic ‘quietism’.

But he can’t. It’s not possible. Netanyahu is held limp in the tiger’s jaws. Events are out of his control.

A prominent member of Likud’s central committee told Haaretz this week:

“I don’t care if I have nothing to eat, if the army falls apart, if everything here is destroyed … The main thing is that they not humiliate us once again, and appoint Ashkenazi judges over us”.

The ‘second Israel’ genres have wailed against ‘the ten Ashkenazai judges’ who discredited their leader (Arye Dery), whilst breaking into a song of praise for the ‘only Sephardic judge’ who was sympathetic to Dery. Yes, the ethnic and tribal schisms form a further part of this crisis. (A bill that effectively would reverse the Supreme Court decision barring Dery from his ministerial position over previous corruption charges is currently making its way through the Knesset).

The appeal of Religious Zionism is often attributed to its growing strength amongst the young – particularly ultra-Orthodox men and traditional Mizrahi voters. What became abundantly clear and unexpected in recent weeks, however, is that the appeal of a racist such as Ben-Gvir, is spreading to the young secular left in Israel. Among young Israelis (ages 18 – 24), more than 70% identify today as Right.

Just to be clear: The Mizrahi ‘underclass’, together with the Settler Right, have ousted the ‘old’ Ashkenazi élite from their hold on power. They have waited many years for this moment; their numbers are there. Power has been rotated. The fuse to today’s particular crisis was lit long ago, not by Netanyahu, but by Ariel Sharon in 2001, with his entry to the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif).

Sharon had earlier perceived that a moment would arrive – with a weakened U.S. – when it might prove propitious for Israel to complete the Zionist project and seize all the ‘Land of Israel’. The plans for this venture have been incubating over two decades. Sharon lit the fuse – and Netanyahu duly took on the task of curating a constituency towards despising Oslo and the judicial system.

The project’s content is explicitly acknowledged: To annex the West Bank and to transfer any political rights of Palestinians remaining there to a new national state to the east of the River Jordan, on the site of what now is the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. In the confusion and violence which would accompany such a move, Palestinians would be ‘persuaded’ to migrate to the ‘other bank’. As Hussein Ibish warned two weeks ago:

“We’re getting awfully close to the point where the Israeli government, and even Israeli society, could countenance a big annexation – and even expulsion [of Palestinians] – done in the middle of an outbreak of violence, and it would be framed as a painful necessity,” Ibish said. Such a move, he added, would be justified “as the government saying ‘We’ve got to protect Israeli settlers – they are citizens too – and we can’t let this go on anymore. Therefore we have to annex and even expel Palestinians.’”

To be fair, the unspoken fear of many secular protesters in Israel today, is not just that of being politically deposed, and their secular lifestyle circumscribed by religious zealots (though that is a major driver to sentiment), but rather, by the unspoken fear that to implement such a radical project against the Palestinians would lead to Regional war.

And ‘that’ is far from an unreasonable fear.

So there are two existential fears: One, that survival of the Jewish people is contingent on fulfilling the obligation to establish ‘Israel’ as ordained; and two, that to implement the consequent exodus of the Palestinians would likely result in the demise of the Israeli State (through war).

Suddenly and unexpectedly, into this fraught situation – with Netanyahu buffeted by a whirlwind of external and internal pressures – arrived a bombshell: Netanyahu was stripped of his ace card – Iran. In Beijing, China had secretly orchestrated not just the resumption of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, but laid down the framework for a regional security architecture.

This represents a nightmare for Washington and Netanyahu – particularly for the latter, however.

Since the early 1990s, Iran has served both these parties as the ‘bogey man’, by which to divert attention from Israel and the situation of the Palestinians. It has worked well, with the Europeans acting as enthusiastic collaborators in facilitating (or ‘mitigating’ – as they would see it), Israel’s ‘temporary’, 55-year occupation of the West Bank. The EU even financed it.

But now, that is blown away. Netanyahu may ‘huff and puff’ about Iran, but absent a Saudi and Gulf willingness to lend Arab legitimacy to any military action against Iran (with all the risks that entails), Netanyahu’ s ability to distract from the domestic crisis is severely limited. Any call to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities is an obvious non-starter in the light of the Iranian-Saudi rapprochement.

Netanyahu may not want a show-down with Team Biden, but that’s what is coming. Bibi is by nature cautious – even timid. His radical Ministers, however, are not.

They need a crisis (but only when the ‘prerequisites’ are all lined up). It is clear that the wholesale stripping of Palestinian rights, in tandem with the emasculation of the Supreme Court, is not a project that can be expected to quietly proceed in normal circumstances – especially in the present emotive state across the global sphere.

No doubt, the Israeli Right has been watching how the Lockdown ‘Emergency-crisis fear’ in Europe was used to mobilise a people to accept a compulsion and restrictions to life that in any other circumstance they would never rationally accept.

It won’t be a new pandemic emergency, of course, in the Israeli case. But the new Palestinian Authority-led ‘SWAT-squads’ arresting Palestinian resistance fighters in broad daylight is bringing the West Bank ‘pressure-cooker’ close to blow-out.

Ben Gvir may simply decide to follow in Sharon’s footsteps – to allow and participate in the Passover ceremony of sacrificing a lamb on Al-Aqsa (the Temple Mount) – as a symbol of the commitment to rebuild the ‘Third Temple’, permission for which, hitherto has always been denied.

So what happens next? It is impossible to predict. Will the Israeli military intervene? Will the U.S. intervene? Will one side back-down (unlikely says ex-Head of Israel’s National Security Council, Giora Eiland)? Yet even if the ‘Judicial reform’ is somehow halted, as one exasperated Israeli forecast, “Even if this time the attempt does not succeed, it’s likely that they [the Right] will try again in another two years, another five years, another 10 years. The struggle will be long and difficult, and no one can guarantee what the result will be.”

Since 2008, we have lived in a western world shaped by the ‘permanent state’ or by our managerial technocrats – label to choice.

Since 2008, we have lived in a western world shaped by the ‘permanent state’ or by our managerial technocrats – label to choice.

This ‘creative class’ (as they like to see themselves) is particularly defined by its intermediary position in relation to the wealth-controlling oligarchic cabal as ultimate big money overlords on one hand, and the dullard ‘Middle Class’ below them – at whom they sneer and deride.

This intermediary class didn’t set out to dominate politics (they say); It just happened. Initially, the aim was to foster progressive values. But instead, these professional technocrats, who both had accreted considerable wealth and were tightly congregated into cliques in America’s large metro areas, came to dominate left-wing parties around the world that formerly were vehicles for the working class.

Those who coveted membership in this new ‘aristocracy’ cultivated their image as one of cosmopolitan, fast-moving money, glamour, fashion, and popular culture – multiculturalism suited them to perfection. Painting themselves as the political conscience of the whole of society (if not the world), the reality was that their Zeitgeist reflected primarily the whims, prejudices and increasingly psychopathies of one segment of liberal society.

Into this milieu arrived two defining events: In 2008, Ben Bernanke, Chair of the Federal Reserve, gathered together in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, a room-full of the wealthiest oligarchs, ‘locking them in’ until they found the solution to the unfolding systemic bank failure.

The oligarchs did not find a solution but were released from their lock-up anyway. They opted instead, to throw money at structural problems, compounded by egregious errors of judgement about risk.

And to finance the resulting massive losses – which were over $10 trillion in the U.S. alone – the world’s central banks began printing money – since when they have never stopped!

Thus begun the era in the West where deep problems are not solved, but simply have freshly-printed money thrown at them. This methodology was whole-heartedly adopted by the EU also, where it was called Merkelism (after the former German Chancellor). Underlying structural contradictions were simply left to accumulate; kicked down the road.

A second defining characteristic of this era was that as the great oligarchs retreated from industrial production and threw themselves into hyper-financialisation, they saw advantage in adopting the burgeoning Metro-Élite agenda centred around utopian ideals of diversity, identity and racial justice – ideals pursued with the fervour of an abstract, millenarian ideology. (Their leaders had almost nothing to say about poverty or unemployment, which suited the oligarchs perfectly).

So, espying advantage, the Oligarchs too, turned radical. Led by such as the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, Big Philanthropy and Business, they adopted woke speech and thought codes. And endorsed putting wealth directly into the hands of those who have been systematically victimized, through history. But again, deep structural change in society was addressed superficially – as simply moving money from ‘one pocket to another’.

The real problem flowing from the 2008 crisis however, wasn’t essentially financial. Yes, the losses were shifted from failing institutions balance sheets to the Fed’s, but the real structural problems were never addressed. So, people soon believed that almost every problem could be solved by speech and thought codes – married to the printing press.

Political trade-offs were no longer to be considered a requisite. Costs no longer relevant. In this environment, no problem was too big to solve through behavioural management techniques and the central bank. And if there wasn’t a crisis to mandate and ‘liquify’ agenda change, then one could be invented. And, sure enough, as soon as the U.S. Fed began to return to ‘normal’ policies in 2018 and 2019, a new, even bigger crisis was found.

Not surprisingly, in the context of what was seen as failed Civil Rights and New Deal reforms, the activist movements being funded by the Oligarchic ‘wealth funds’ turned more radical. They adopted a revolutionary cultural activism deployed to “solve problems once and for all” – aimed at bringing about deep structural change within society.

This meant shifting power once again away from the liberal Middle Class ‘who were so often white and male’ – and were therefore part to society’s structural injustice. Put simply, the western Middle Class became seen by the technocrats as a pain in the backside.

The point here is what was missed in all the talk of ‘positive discrimination’ paths in favour of ‘victims’ was the other side to the coin: Negative harmful discrimination practiced against those ‘blocking the path’ – those failing to get out of the way.

Scott McKay’s Revivalist Manifesto calls this hostile discriminatory process, ‘weaponised Government Failure’ – such as the induced government dysfunctionality in U.S. cities to drive the Middle Class away. “‘White flight’ is a feature. It’s not a bug”, its advocates preached. The urban socialist Left wants a manageably small core of rich residents, and a teeming mass of pliable poor ones, and nothing in between. That’s what weaponized governmental failure produces, and it’s been a wide-scale success.

New Orleans votes 90 percent Democrat; Philadelphia is 80 percent Democrat; Chicago is 85 percent. Los Angeles? Seventy-one percent. None of those cities will have a Republican mayor or city council again, or at least not in the foreseeable future. The Democrat Party barely exists outside of the ruins that those urban machines produce.

The bigger message is that ‘induced dysfunctionality’ can produce a society that can be ruled over (made compliant through unpleasantness and hurt) – without having to govern it (i.e. make things work!).

This process is evident too, in the EU today. The EU is in crisis because it has made a hash of its governance in respect to sanctions on Russian energy. The leadership class thought the effects of EU sanctions on Russia to be ‘slam dunk’: Russia would fold in weeks, and all would return as it was before. Things would go back to ‘normal’. Instead, Europe faces melt-down.

Yet, some leaders in Europe – zealots for the Green Agenda – nonetheless pursue an approach parallel to that in the U.S. – of ‘weaponised failure’, conceived as a strategic asset to achieve Green Net Zero ends.

Because … it forces their societies to embrace de-industrialisation; accept carbon footprint monitoring and the Green Transition – and to bear its costs. Yellen and certain EU leaders have celebrated the financial pain as accelerating Transition, like it or not, even if it pushes you out of employment, to the edge of society. Dysfunctional European airports are one example to discourage Europeans from travel and adding to the carbon load!

Put simply, this is another noxious trait that has emerged with the 2008 ‘turn’. Sociopathy refers to a pattern of antisocial behaviours and attitudes, including manipulation, deceit, aggression, and a lack of empathy for others that amounts to mental disorder. The defining characteristic of the sociopath is a profound lack of conscience – an amorality however, which may be hidden by an outwardly charming demeanour.

‘Nudging’ us to compliance through cost, or making life intolerable, is the new way to rule. But our world is rapidly fracturing into potted zones of ‘old normal’ and surrounding pools of disintegration.

Which brings us to the big question: As the West skirts economic systemic failure again, why not then call together the billionaire Oligarchs, as in 2008, and lock them in a room, until they find a solution?

Yes, the Oligarchs may hold themselves in high regard (being so rich), but their last effort gave no solution, but rather was an exercise in self-preservation, achieved through throwing freshly printed money at broad structural problems, thus easing the transition of their empires into their new financialised identity.

However, something does seem to have changed around 2015-2016 – a reaction began. The latter originates not from Oligarchs but from certain quarters in the U.S. system who fear the consequences, were the mass psychological dependency on the printing of ever more money not to be addressed. Their fear is that the slide to societal conflict as wealth and wellbeing distortions explode apart, will become unstoppable.

The Fed however, may be attempting to implement a contrarian, controlled demolition of the U.S. bubble-economy through interest rate increases. The rate rises will not slay the inflation ‘dragon’ (they would need to be much higher to do that). The purpose is to break a generalised ‘dependency habit’ on free money.

The only question from market participants everywhere is when does the Fed pivot (back to ‘printing’) … when? They want their ‘fix’ and want it quickly.

So many are ‘dependent’: The Biden Admin needs it; the EU is dependent on it; the Re-set requires printing. Green requires printing; support for the Ukrainian ‘Camelot’ requires printing. The Military Industrial Complex needs it, too. All need a free cash ‘fix’.

Perhaps the Fed can break the psychological dependency over time, but the task should not be underestimated. As one market strategist put it: “The new operating environment is entirely foreign to any investor alive today. So, we must un-anchor ourselves from a past that is ‘no longer’ – and proceed with open minds”.

This period of zero rates, zero inflation and QE was an historical anomaly – utterly extraordinary. And it is ending (for better or worse).

A small Fed ‘inner circle’ may have a good grasp of what the new operating environment will mean, but any detailed implementation simply can’t extend faithfully down a long trickle-down chain of command oriented to the obverse ‘Growth’ paradigm pleading for ‘pivot’. How many of the people currently involved with this transition understand its full complexity? How many concur with it?

What can possibly go wrong? Starting the shift at the top is one thing. However, the cure for ‘induced governance dysfunctionality’ as an operating strategy in a ‘permanent state’ staffed by sociopath Cold Warriors and technocrats selected for compliance is not obvious. The more sociopathic may tell the American public F*** you! They intend ‘to rule’ – ruin or not.

Very occasionally, a single anecdote can almost completely summate a moment in history. And this one - did it: In 2005, Zbig Brzezinski, the architect of Afghanistan as quagmire to the Soviet Union, and the author of The Grand Chessboard (which embedded the Mackinder dictum of ‘he who controls the Asian heartland controls the world’ - into US foreign policy), sat in Washington with Alexander Dugin, the advocate for a ‘heartland’ cultural and geo-political renaissance.

Zbig had already written in his book that, absent Ukraine, Russia would never become the heartland power – but with it, Russia can and would. The meeting, had been set with a photo-prop of a chessboard placed between Zbig and Dugin (to promote Zbig’s book).
This arrangement with a chessboard prompted the latter to ask whether Zbig considered Chess to be a game meant for two:

“No, Zbig shot back: It is a game for one. Once a chess piece is moved; you turn the board around, and you move the other side’s chess pieces. There is ‘no other’ in this game”, Brzezinski insisted.

Of course, the single-handed chess game was implicit in Mackinder’s doctrine: ‘he who controls the heartland’ dictum was a message to the Anglo powers to never allow a united heartland. (This, of course, precisely what is evolving at every moment).
And on Monday, Biden channelled Brzezinski out loud (whilst addressing the Business Roundtable in the US): The remarks came toward the end of his brief speech where he talked about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and America’s economic future:

“I think this presents us with some significant opportunities to make some real changes. You know, we are at an inflection point, I believe, in the world economy: [and] not just the world economy - in the world [which] occurs every three or four generations. As one of my, as the one of the top military people said to me in a secure meeting the other day, 60 million people died between 1900 and 1946; and since then we established a liberal world order and that hadn’t happened in a long while. A lot of people died, but nowhere near the chaos. And now’s the time when things are shifting. We’re going, there’s gonna be a new world order out there; and we’ve got to lead it and we’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it.”

Again there is no ‘other’ at the board. When the moves are made, the board is turned through 180º, to play from the other side.

The point here is that the carefully deliberated counter-attack on this Brzezinski zeitgeist was formally launched in Beijing with the joint-declaration that neither Russia nor China accept for America to play chess alone with no others at the board. This represents the defining issue of this coming era: The opening-up of geo-politics. It is one for which the excluded ‘others’ are prepared to go to war (they see no choice).

A second chess-player has stepped forward and insists to play: (Russia). A third stands ready: (China). Others are silently lining up to witness how the first engagement in this geo-political war fares. It seems from Biden’s comments on Monday that the US intends to use sanctions, and the full unprecedent extent of US treasury measures, against Brzezinski dissidents. Russia is to be made an example of that which awaits any challengers, demanding a seat at the board.

But this approach is fundamentally flawed. It stems from Kissinger’s celebrated dictum that ‘he who controls money controls the world’. But it was wrong from the ‘get go’: It was always ‘who controls food; energy (human as well as fossil) and money can control the world. But Kissinger just ignored the first two required conditions - and the last has imprinted itself on the Washington mental circuits.

And here is paradox: When Brzezinski wrote his book, it was a very different era. Today, whilst, Europe and the US never have been more closely aligned. The ‘West’ paradoxically, has also never been more alone. Opposition to Russia may have seemed at the outset, a slam dunk global unifier. That world opinion would so robustly oppose Moscow’s attack - that even China would pay a high political price for failing to jump onto the anti-Russia bandwagon. But that is not how it is working out.

“While the US rhetoric pillories Russia for “war crimes” and the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, et al”, former Indian Ambassador, Bhadrakumar notes, “the world capitals view this as a confrontation between America and Russia. Outside of the western camp, the world community refuses to impose sanctions against Russia or even to demonise that country”.

The Islamabad Declaration issued on Wednesday after the 45th meeting of the foreign ministers of the fifty-seven member Organisation of Islamic Conference refused to endorse sanctions against Russia…Not a single country in the African continent and West Asian, Central Asia, South and Southeast Asian region has imposed sanctions against Russia”.

There may well be a further factor at play here: For, when these latter states hear phrases such as the ‘Ukrainians, through their heroism, have won the right to enter our “club of values”’, they scent a whiff of debilitated ‘white’ Europe clutching at the life-rafts.

The reality is that the sanctions to which Biden refered in his speech have already failed. Russia has not defaulted; the Moscow stock exchange is open; the Rouble is on the rebound; the current account is in rude good health and Russia is selling energy at windfall prices (even after discount).
In short, trade will be diverted – not destroyed (the benefit of being an exporter of goods almost fully produced locally – i.e. a fortress economy)
The second oddity in this Biden approach is that: whilst Clausewitzian doctrine (to which Russia broadly adheres) argues for the dismantling of ‘the enemy’s centre of gravity, to achieve victory’ – in this case presumably, the western control of the global reserve currency and payments systems. Today, rather, it is Europe and the US that have been dismantling it themselves: and further locking themselves into soaring inflation and contracting economic activity, in some unexplained fit of moral masochism.

As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard notes, “What is clear is that western sanctions policy is the worst of all worlds. We are suffering an energy shock that is further inflating Russia’s war-fighting revenues…There is a pervasive fear of a gilets jaunes uprising across Europe, a suspicion that a fickle public will not tolerate the cost-of-living shock once the horrors of Ukraine lose their novelty on TV screens”.

Again, perhaps we can attribute this paradoxical behaviour to Kissinger’s obsession with the power of money, and his forgetfulness of other major factors.

All of this has led to a certain unease creeping into the corridors of power in some NATO capitals over the course that this Ukraine conflict is running: NATO will not intervene. It will not implement a no-fly zone - and has pointedly ignored Zelensky’s plea for additional military equipment. Ostensibly, this reflects the ‘selfless’ gesture by the West to avoid a nuclear war. In reality, the development of new weaponry – too - can transform geopolitics in a moment (the Kinzhal bunker-buster). Simply, across the board, NATO cannot prevail against Russia in Ukraine.
For now, it seems the Pentagon has – for now – won, in the war with State department, and has begun the process of ‘correcting the narrative’:
Contrast these two US narratives:

(State Department): Monday signalled that US is discouraging Zelensky from making concessions to Russia in return for a ceasefire. The spokesman “made it very clear that he is open to a diplomatic solution that does not compromise the core principles at the heart of the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine. When asked to elaborate on his point, Price said that the war is “bigger” than Russia and Ukraine. “The key point is that there are principles that are at stake here that have universal applicability everywhere”. Price said Putin was trying to violate “core principles”.

(Pentagon): “drops two truth bombs” in its battle with State and Congress to prevent confrontation with Russia: “Russia’s conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely accepted view that Putin is intent on demolishing Ukraine and inflicting maximum civilian damage—and it reveals the Russian leader’s strategic balancing act,” reported Newsweek in an article entitled, “Putin’s Bombers Could Devastate Ukraine But He’s Holding Back. Here’s Why.”

One - quotes an unnamed analyst at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) saying, “The heart of Kyiv has barely been touched. And almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets. A retired U.S. Air Force officer now working as an analyst for a Pentagon contractor, added: “We need to understand Russia’s actual conduct. If we merely convince ourselves that Russia is bombing indiscriminately, or [that] it is failing to inflict more harm because its personnel are not up to the task or because it is technically inept, then we are not seeing the real conflict”
The second - directly undermines Biden’s dramatic warning about a false flag chemical attack. Reuters reported: “The United States has not yet seen any concrete indications of an imminent Russian chemical or biological weapons attack in Ukraine but is closely monitoring streams of intelligence for them, a senior US defence official said.”

Biden is positioned in the Middle: saying ‘Putin’s a war criminal’; but also that there will be no NATO fight with Russia: “The only end game now,” a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime. Until then, all the time Putin stays, [Russia] will be a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations. China has made a huge error in thinking Putin will get away with it”.

There it is – The Bottom Line: allow the carnage in Ukraine to continue; sit back and watch the ‘heroic Ukrainians bleed Russia dry’; do enough to sustain the conflict; but not enough to escalate it - and play it as the heroic struggle for democracy – in order to satisfy public opinion.
The point is that it isn’t working out that way. Putin may surprise all in DC by exiting Ukraine, when the military operation is complete. (When Putin speaks of Ukraine, by the way, he usually discounts the western part added on by Stalin - as Ukrainian).

And it isn’t working out with China. Blinken said in justification of new sanctions imposed on China last week: "We are committed to defending human rights around the world and will continue to use all diplomatic and economic measures to promote accountability."

The problem here is that the sanctions were imposed because China had failed to repudiate Putin. Just that. The language of accountability and (of atonement) used however, can be understood only as an expression of woke contemporary culture. It is enough to present some aspect of Chinese culture as politically incorrect (as racist, repressive, misogynist, supremacist or offensive ), and immediately it becomes politically incorrect. And that means that any aspect of it can be adduced at will by the Administration - as meriting sanctioning.

The Problem again reverts to the cultural refusal accept ‘others’ at the board. Everything is contested and potentially incorrect or offensive, or both — Ukraine is under attack from Russia, racism is immoral and Black Lives Matter, and the science of Covid is, while evolving, still recognizable as science – “I’m not willing to “both-sides” any of that – is the western politically-correct refrain. This cultural identity politics however has almost zero traction beyond US and West Europe.

What can China do; but shrug at such nonsense.

Biden in his speech to the Roundtable forestaged for his audience a New World Order – he suggested that a Great Re-set is coming.
Maybe so. But maybe also, a ‘Re-set Reckoning’ is on the cards: One that will return many things to that which, until relatively recently, had actually worked. Politics and geo-politics is metamorphosing - in every moment.

The war taking place in Ukraine has been understood on one side – the wider western view – in terms of the secular expression of today’s western culture. Typically, it is cast as a struggle of this culture, loosely packaged as ‘democracy’ versus the authoritarian culture of Russia, Iran and China – cultures that reflect offensive, nativist and repressively ‘incorrect’ values.

It is believed that Putin is held “to have sensed weak political leadership in America – and like a chess player who sees weakness on the board, and an opening for an attack – takes it”.

This represents the authentic reading of a majority in the West. It is not hard to see why it should have become the settled view. It comports closely with today’s zeitgeist that all politics is but a Manichaean tapestry of the ‘good’ who see things in a ‘modern’ and culturally-aware way – and those who have failed to ‘decolonise’ from their past.

This does not however, fully explain the frenzy of hostile passion directed at Putin, Russia and everything Russian. Nothing close to this has been seen since World War II. Even then, it was not everything German that was cast as evil.

Notwithstanding the passion, this western reading of the world has an underlying logic. And it is a logic which is ineluctable and fraught with peril: For example, Zelensky’s speech to the U.S. Congress underscored a nation facing unprovoked attack; a nation that has drawn support and sympathy from the rest of the world, but one that is not a member of the NATO alliance. The message was simple and clear: “I call on you [the West] to do more”.

In response, former defence secretary Leon Panetta described Zelensky this week as “probably the most powerful lobbyist in the world right now”. Again, the logic behind the construct that Russia has launched – unprovoked – the biggest land war in Europe since WW2 for tactical gain ‘on the chessboard’ ineluctably defines the inevitable response: More military support for Kiev is necessary, so that Putin senses the danger on the board, and acts to protect his high-value ‘chess pieces’.

So far, the U.S. support falls just – but only just – short of NATO intervention. Zelensky’s words and the video he shared (albeit clearly crafted by a professional PR agency – roughly shaven, fatigue t-shirt, etc.), carried an emotional impact that turned this appearance (and those in other Capitals) from the ordinary to the extraordinary. To what it will lead, is the obvious question.

Panetta suggested in riposte, “If Putin is doubling down, the U.S. and NATO have to double down”.

We should be clear: Panetta is not alone. The info-war; the frenzy for war, is gathering pace. There are those urging Zelensky to keep up the messaging; telling him that ultimately NATO’s refusal to intervene will crack.

But what if the above consensus analysis is WRONG? What if it constitutes a potentially catastrophic misreading of Putin and his team and – more importantly – of the mood amongst the majority of Russians?

Simply to view the conflict through such a reductionist lens, omits and erases all the hidden religious, racial, historic, political and cultural overtones to the conflict. It facilitates a banal stereotyping that can lead to bad decision-making.

If the West is wrong in its stereotype of an ‘unprincipled authoritarian leader’ – Putin, taking his country into war for some ephemeral tactical gain against the West – then the West may also be wrong in thinking that it is fighting a tactical war; and wrong therefore in imagining that tactical moves consisting in loading pain onto the Russian pan to tip the scales will result in ‘a climb down, by a Putin cut down to size’.

What we would have then is total war practiced on the one hand by Russia, cast as one in which Russia either defends itself, or it ceases to exist; and on the other side, a ‘west’, locked into the logic of its own construct, and edging closer to its own (secularised) ‘holy war’.

Zelensky’s words and video carried a heavy emotional impact across western capitals – clearly intended to feed into a heated atmosphere of emotions, at almost break-point. This emotional charge adds to the angst of America in decline; to the evidence that fewer countries instinctively now bow to the U.S., as readily as they did in the past. It is unsettling. It can trigger aggressive feelings of wanting to hit back at whoever it is that is belittling the notion of a nation with a unique destiny.

This emotional content already is blinding western commentators to military realities on the ground which are ignored and effaced by daily claims of heart-rending atrocities. In today’s West, analysis has become a mere expression of correct culture, and any mention of ground realities, almost a crime. It is the perfect context for mistakes to be made.

To what will it lead: The logic is compelling: A western total war?

An award-winning Russian filmmaker, Nikita Mikhalkov, made his own address to the Russian people – a parallel to Zelensky’s address to Congress, perhaps:

“Look at us [the Russian people] and remember that they will do the same thing to you when you show weakness … Brothers, remember the fate of Yugoslavia and do not allow them to do the same to you. I am personally convinced that this is not a war between Russia and Ukraine, this is not a war between Russia, Europe and America. This is not a war for democracy that our partners want to convince us of. This is a global and perhaps the last attempt of Western civilization to attack the Russian world, Orthodox ethics, on traditional values. He who is brought up on these values will never agree to what they offer us, from same-sex marriages to the legalization of fascism. War is a terrible thing. I don’t know a normal person who thinks war is a good thing. But Ukraine, America and Europe began preparing for this war back in 1991 … There are two ways out of this situation – we will either defend ourselves; or we will cease to exist. In the end, I offer the wise words of a smart man: “It is better to be hanged for loyalty, than to be rewarded for betrayal”.

Mikhalkov is no ‘outlier’. Dr Mariya Matskevich of the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences explains that a large part of the Russian population views the war in Ukraine as “a holy struggle” and “a war of Russia with the entire rest of the world.” She adds that this is a position many Russians find far more congenial than any cooperation with the outside world., She notes that polls consistently, and generally accurately, demonstrate this pattern, as well as the widespread belief that what Russia is doing in Ukraine is defending itself against a Western attack. Because of this, popular Russian support for Putin, his government, and even his United Russia party, has risen since the start of hostilities.

The notion of ‘total war’ was expressed forcefully on a primetime TV channel by a prominent Russian thinker and author, Professor Dugin. His views drew wide support:

• The war in Ukraine is not only existential for the Russian state, but is existential for the Russian people; its culture and its civilisation.
• A successful outcome in Ukraine is key to the creation of a New World order.
• Until now, the West would never accept Russia as a partner, but the operation in Ukraine will change that.

You may agree or disagree with this view, but that is not the point. The point is whether it be an authentic view, or not, of the Russian people. If it is, then Putin and Russia will not back-down over a new raft of western sanctions, nor even new drones or weapons supplied to Kiev: total war is, of course, existential – to the end.

An eminent Serbian academic, Professor Vladusic, puts this into wider context: “There is a map of civilizations in Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations: On that map, Ukraine and Russia are painted the same colour, because they belong to the same, Orthodox civilization. And right next to Ukraine, the dark colour with which Huntington marks the civilization of the West – begins:

“[As I] look at war through Huntington’s eyes, here is what I conclude: the war between Russia and Ukraine is a great catastrophe for Orthodox civilization. The hypothetical disappearance of Russia would also be the end of Orthodox civilization, because there is no other, sufficiently powerful Orthodox country to defend other Orthodox nations. Huntington then whispers to me that it has never happened in history for a country to move from one civilization to another, not because some countries did not try, but because, simply put, other civilizations never accepted them permanently. Without Russia, the geopolitical price of the remaining Orthodox countries would fall so much that other civilizations would, at best, bring them down to the level of dying colonies. This, of course, also applies to Ukraine. At the moment when Russia would be defeated, which means, most likely, divided into several states, the same fate would probably befall Ukraine. We all know what the word Balkanization means”.

It looks as if total war may become inevitable. The two different interpretations of ‘reality’ touch at no point. The logic is ineluctable. Within these architectures of hatred, selected or invented historical facts about Russia, its culture, and its racial nature are taken out of context – and slotted into prearranged intellectual structures to indict President Putin as a ‘thug’ and a ‘war criminal’.

If we are heading in this direction, it will be down to the potentially catastrophic error of perceiving Russia as a mere transactional actor – an approach which stems from the West’s denunciation of its own cultural legacy. The process is simple: in the past, a work of art, a great book was read to throw light and understanding on past events. Today, it is understood only as an expression of contemporary culture. It is enough to present this culture as politically incorrect (as white, misogynist or colonial), and immediately it becomes politically incorrect, which means that any mention of it is a crime. How then, can Russian history be understood? Simply, it can’t.

It cannot be understood how Russia might read history as a long, thousand-year succession of attempts to cancel Russia; of ancient antagonism and racism directed towards Slavs; of how Russians might read the U.S.’ recent intervention in Traditional Orthodoxy, through the Patriarchy in Constantinople as designed to foster a schism in the Orthodox Community in order both to undermine the Moscow Patriarchate (the bulwark of traditional social thinking), and to infuse the seeds of western liberalism, and western cultural values into the national Orthodox Churches. Many pious Russians do see the Ukrainian conflict as a ‘Holy War’ to preserve traditionalist ethos from a western nihilistic cultural impulse.

They might understand too, how many Russians view the Bolshevik revolution, the U.S. neo-liberal intervention of the Yeltsin era, and today’s woke culture, as all cut from the same cloth (Bolshevism being but ‘first edition’ wokeism): i.e. a struggle to nullify Russian civilisation and the Orthodox ethos.

We might read history differently, yet the above, nonetheless, may represent something of the authentic view of most Russians. That is the point. It carries implications for war and peace.

Ukraine has morphed – unexpectedly – from the Washington perspective from an ‘useful distraction’ to becoming Biden’s dilemma.

“What will we do if the West does not listen to reason?”, noted Sergei Lavrov. “Well, the President of Russia has already said ‘what’ [it will do]”. “If our attempts to come to terms on mutually acceptable principles of ensuring security in Europe fail to produce the desired result, we will take response measures. Asked directly what these measures might be, he [Putin] said: they could come in all shapes and sizes”. Russia had previously announced that absent a satisfactory western response, then Russia would lay aside the language of diplomacy – and resort to unspecified “military-technical” measures – incrementally ratchetting pain on NATO and the U.S.

It is unlikely that Moscow ever entertained any grand illusions about their ‘non-ultimatum’ ultimatum. The documents were never intended ‘to lure’ the West into ad aeternam negotiations. The point is that Moscow had already decided to break in a fundamental way with the West. What is afoot is today is the manifestation of that earlier decision.

The crux of Russia’s complaints about its eroding security have little to do with Ukraine per se but are rooted in the Washington hawks’ obsession with Russia, and their desire to cut Putin (and Russia) down to size – an aim which has been the hallmark of U.S. policy since the Yeltsin years. The Victoria Nuland clique could never accept Russia rising to become a significant power in Europe – possibly eclipsing the U.S.’ control over Europe.

If they were not intended as a basis for negotiations, what then were Russia’s treaty drafts about? It seems that they were about Russia and China coming down off the fence. This is much more important than many appreciate. It marks the beginning of a period of rising tensions (and maybe clashes), until a modified Global Order emerges.

The ‘non-ultimatums’ primarily were intended to draw out, and make explicit in the public sphere, America’s refusal to concede the validity to Moscow’s point that its own security interests are of no lesser significance than those of Ukraine and Georgia; that one state’s security interests cannot be augmented at the expense of another (i.e. the indivisibility of security).

Making this clear to all is a necessary condition for a joint Russian-China shift to co-ordinated ‘military-technical measures’. It seems that shortly after Putin returns from his consultations with President Xi in China, we may begin to see what these military-technical measures might be. The Russian calculation is that in the run-up to the November ’22 midterms, the U.S. side will be increasingly nervous and internally vulnerable. Team Biden has no convincing rejoinder to the question asked by the electorate: ‘So, what is it that you guys got right this last year?” And so Biden badly needs a distraction from his inability to give an adequate reply.

Ukraine has morphed – unexpectedly – from the Washington perspective from an ‘useful distraction’ to becoming Biden’s dilemma. Initially, a major info-war campaign on an unprecedented scale was thought to create a reason for Europe and America to impose ‘Sanctions from Hell’ that would put paid to Putin’s supposed ambitions in Europe, and beyond.

This apocalyptic sanctions ploy had its roots in the 2014 era, when the then Crimea sanctions (wrongly) were believed to be so utterly catastrophic for Russia that Putin’s future would be poised in the balance, bringing the possibility that he could be ousted by pro-western oligarchs. (Such was the mistaken analysis given to Angela Merkel by her own Intelligence Services).

It was so wrong: In 2014, Russia experienced only a mild recession (-2.2%), and in the event, its economy proved to be remarkably sanctions-proof, partly as a result of letting the Rouble ‘float’. This old meme of sanctions being the ‘neutron-bomb’ for Putin has been washed, rinsed and repeated by those (same old) Russia hawks – even though Russia’s economy is much more sanctions-proof today than it was in 2014. Thus the ‘Sanctions from Hell’ story has never held up; it is not credible.

The ‘imminent invasion’ frenzy perhaps, was thought by the hawks who seemed to have grabbed hold of the Washington ‘war narrative’, to be sufficient to goad Putin into military action – triggering these ‘Mother of all Sanctions’, or at the very least, a humiliating downsizing of the Russian forces adjacent to the Ukraine border:

Either outcome would easily have been presented as a ‘tough Biden’ successfully facing-down Putin and humiliating him. Earlier, U.S. think-tanks had rosily forecast that Putin was damned if he did; and damned if he didn’t take action over Ukraine. They were wrong. Essentially, Russia doesn’t want, or need Ukraine; there is no plan to occupy it.

It was firstly President Zelensky who unexpectedly did not co-operate with the U.S. plan. Instead of endorsing the threat of imminent Russian invasion, he claimed that invasion fears were overblown, and that the nervousness was bad for business, and the economy. Back at the time of the 2014 Maidan revolution, China had been promoting investment in Ukraine. Ditto today: Ukraine is reportedly on the brink of debt default, and has turned to China, looking for help.

This infuriated Washington: Julia Ioffe tweeted that the “White House and its Democratic allies have just about had it with President Zelensky. According to three sources in the administration and on the Hill, the Ukrainian president is by turns “annoying, infuriating, and downright counterproductive”. What is interesting is that these U.S. commentators’ principal moan was that Zelensky was not sufficiently attuned to domestic U.S. currents and narratives. There were rumours of a possible U.S.-led coup to replace Zelensky with a more compliant leader.

The invasion meme nonetheless is again being washed, rinsed and repeated: It continues life with a new allegation: this time that Russia is actively engaged in mounting a ‘false flag’ operation that would then justify a Russian invasion. This seemed so improbable that even normally compliant White House correspondents evinced utter disbelief.

And Washington’s problems just went on accumulating: the U.S.-orchestrated Security Council session was a débacle for Blinken: the ‘sanctions from hell’ have emerged as empty cymbals clashing, with fears taking hold that the sanctions would likely have hurt Europe more than hurt Russia; that they might even have provoked a global financial crisis. Reports suggest that the final nail was the Federal Reserve arguing that to expel Russia from SWIFT was a thoroughly bad idea.

And then, the second unexpected eruption for Blinken came: Europe (and NATO) far from being a resolute united front confronting Russia, clearly revealed their deep divisions.

Lavrov’s confirmation that the western responses to Moscow gave no basis for dialogue with the U.S. or NATO has an import which it seems has not been grasped. The crisis is not about Ukraine; as leading Russian journalist Dmitry Kiselyov noted: “The scale is much bigger”. It may, in the longer run, define Europe’s future as well as that of the Middle East.

It looks as if – even before the outcome of the Putin-Xi summit is known – Russia has already begun ‘coming down off the fence’, by which is meant, it is ready to dial up the pain for the U.S. and Europe slowly and deliberately on the basis that, if Russia’s concerns are ignored and dismissed, then Russia will ignore ‘yours’, too.

Russia clearly understands the geo-political and geo-economic pressure points that it controls. They can see that the U.S. does not want to raise interest rates, but has to. They can also see that they can force inflation far higher, inflicting significant economic pain. They can see that food prices are soaring, with potash from Belarus blocked, and Russia banning the export of ammonium nitrate.

The consequences for fertiliser prices – and therefore European food prices – is obvious, as is the consequence of European spot energy prices, were Russian gas to be barred from Europe. That is how economic pain works. The West slowly is discovering that that it has no pressure point versus Russia (its economy being relatively sanctions-proof), and its military is no match for that of Russia’s.

In the Middle East, a number of interesting developments have quietly taken place: Russia is mounting joint air-patrols with the Syrian Air Force over the Golan, and in the wake of Israel’s recent attacks on the port at Latakia, Russia has stationed its own forces there (meaning that Israel must stop attacking the port). Similarly, Israel recently complained to Russia that its’ blocking of the Global Positioning System (GPS) over Syria was adversely affecting Israeli commercial air traffic using Ben Gurion airport. The Russians replied, ‘Well, too bad’. And, in a forth blow to Israel, Russia has begun allowing Iranian planes carrying weapons supplies to land at the large Russian base in western Syria.

Is then, one military-technical action to block Israeli overflights of Syria? Might this also be a prelude to Russia enabling Damascus to regain control over the geographic extent of Syria – allowing the Syrian Arab Army to expel the jihadists from Idlib, and the Americans from north-east Syria, where they and their allies control Syria’s energy resources? The exodus of jihadis (some 2 million with dependents) would traumatise Turkish politics, damaging Erdogan’s re-election prospects, and terrify the Europeans with the threat of another migrant refugee crisis.

It looks like Russia has decided to come off the fence in other ways by inviting the new Iran president to Moscow and giving him full celebrity treatment: a one-to-one lunch with President Putin, plus a rare invitation to address the Russian Duma. This gesture, along with making Iran a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and the recent joint naval exercise with Iran, Russia and China in the Gulf of Oman, indicate Iran’s coming-of-age in international affairs.

Washington likes to compartmentalise its geo-political relations, believing it can be emollient in the ‘one’ compartment, but highly aggressive in an other. Clearly this no longer holds in the Russia-China axis. Iran however, is in a real way, a part of this Axis. Is it feasible now, to expect an Iranian JCPOA agreement with the U.S.? Can both Russia and China be saying – so explicitly – that the U.S. denial of any security sovereignty to either Russia or China marks the end to dialogue with the U.S., and yet expect that Iran would reach an accord precisely on such reductive terms?

Finally, what is the connection (if any), between the Houthis’ continuing attacks on the UAE, in response to the U.S. and Israel interfering directly in the Yemen war, and the Russian military-technical action project?

The port of Aden, the Bab al-Mandib Straits and Socotra Island fall neatly into a vital component of the Cold War build-up between China and the U.S. The Arab ally (in this case, the UAE) that can control this essential strait will give the U.S. leverage by which to jeopardize China’s Maritime Silk Road, and concomitantly, to weaken the East Asian Economic Community. Hence the key role of the Bab al Mandab Strait is seen by some Washington circles as the justification enough for America’s continued support for the war in Yemen.

The Houthis are giving the UAE a bitter choice: Strikes on its cities or yield up the strategic asset of Bab al-Mandab and its surrounds. Iran and China will be watching attentively. Is a new geo-strategic paradigm emerging?

Alastair CROOKE – Former British diplomat, founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum.

Nation-building in Afghanistan arrived in 2001. Western interventions into the old Eastern bloc in the 1980s and early 1990s had been spectacularly effective in destroying the old social and institutional order; but equally spectacular in failing to replace imploded societies with fresh institutions. The threat from ‘failed states’ became the new mantra, and Afghanistan – in the wake of the destruction wrought post-9/11 – therefore necessitated external intervention. Weak and failed states were the spawning ground for terrorism and its threat to the ‘global order’, it was said. It was in Afghanistan that a new liberal world vision was to be stood-up.

At another level, the war in Afghanistan became another sort of crucible. In very real terms, Afghanistan turned into a testbed for every single innovation in technocratic project management – with each innovation heralded as precursor to our wider future. Funds poured in: Buildings were thrown up, and an army of globalised technocrats arrived to oversee the process. Big data, AI and the utilization of ever expanding sets of technical and statistical metrics, were to topple old ‘stodgy’ ideas. Military sociology in the form of Human Terrain Teams and other innovative creations, were unleashed to bring order to chaos. Here, the full force of the entire NGO world, the brightest minds of that international government-in-waiting, were given a playground with nearly infinite resources at their disposal.

This was to be a showcase for technical managerialism. It presumed that a properly technical, and scientific way of understanding war and nation-building would be able to mobilize reason and progress to accomplish what everyone else could not, and so create a post-modern society, out of a complex tribal one, with its own storied history.

The ‘new’ arrived, as it were, in a succession of NGO boxes marked ‘pop-up modernity’. The 18th century British statesman Edmund Burke, of course, had already warned in Reflections on the Revolution in France, as he witnessed the Jacobins tearing down their old order: “that it is with infinite caution” that anyone should pull down or replace structures that have served society well over the ages. But this managerial technocracy had little time for old ‘stodgy’ ideas.

But, what last week’s fall of the western instituted regime so clearly revealed is that today’s managerial class, consumed by the notion of technocracy as the only means of effecting functional rule birthed instead, something thoroughly rotten — “data-driven defeat”, as one US Afghan veteran described it — so rotten, that it collapsed in a matter of days. On the extended blunders of the “system” in Afghanistan, he writes:

“A retired Navy SEAL who served in the White House under both Bush and Obama reflected,[that] “collectively the system is incapable of taking a step back to question basic assumptions.” That “system” is best understood, not simply as a military or foreign policy body, but as a euphemism for the habits and institutions of an American ruling class that has exhibited an almost limitless collective capacity for deflecting the costs of failure.

“This class in general, and the people in charge of the war in Afghanistan in particular, believed in informational and management solutions to existential problems. They elevated data points and sta­tistical indices to avoid choosing prudent goals and organizing the proper strategies to achieve them. They believed in their own provi­dential destiny and that of people like them to rule, regardless of their failures”.

Whatever was not corrupt before America arrived, became corrupt in the maelstrom of that $2 Trillion of American money showered on the project. American soldiers, arms manufacturers, globalised technocrats, governance experts, aid workers, peacekeepers, counter-insurgency theorists and lawyers — all made their fortunes.

The flaw was that Afghanistan as a liberal progressive vision was a hoax in the first place: Afghanistan was invaded, and occupied, because of its geography. It was the ideal platform from which to perturb Central Asia, and thus unsettle Russia and China.

No one was truly committed because there was really no longer any Afghanistan to commit to. Whomsoever could steal from the Americans did so. The Ghani regime collapsed in a matter of days, because it was ‘never there’ to begin with: A Potemkin Village, whose role lay in perpetuating a fiction, or rather the myth of America’s Grand Vision of itself as the shaper and guardian of ‘our’ global future.

The true gravity for America and Europe of the present psychological ‘moment’ is not only that nation-building, as a project intended to stand up liberal values been revealed as having ‘achieved nothing’, but Afghanistan débacle has underlined the limitations to technical managerialism in way that is impossible to miss.

The gravity of America’s present psychological ‘moment’ – the implosion of Kabul – was well articulated when Robert Kagan argued earlier, that the ‘global values’ project (however tenuous its basis in reality) nonetheless has become essential to preserving ‘democracy’ at home: For, he suggests, an America that retreats from global hegemony, would no longer possess the domestic group solidarity to preserve America as ‘idea’, at home, either.

What Kagan is saying here is important — It may constitute the true cost of the Afghanistan débacle. Every élite class advances various claims about its own legitimacy, without which a stable political order is impossible. Legitimating myths can take many forms and may change over time, but once they become exhausted, or lose their credibility – when people no longer believe in the narrative, or the claims which underpin that political ‘idea’ – then it is ‘game over’.

Swedish intellectual, Malcolm Kyeyune writes that we may be “witnessing the catastrophic end of this metaphysical power of legitimacy that has shielded the managerial ruling class for decades”:

“Anyone even briefly familiar with the historical record knows just how much of a Pandora’s box such a loss of legitimacy represents. The signs visibly have been multiplying over many years. When Michael Gove said, “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts” in a debate about the merits of Brexit, he probably traced the contours of something much bigger than anyone really knew at the time. Back then, the acute phase of the delegitimization of the managerial class was only just beginning. Now, with Afghanistan, it is impossible to miss”.

There is therefore, little mystery as to why the Taliban took over Kabul so quickly. Not only did the project per se lack legitimacy for Afghans, but that aura of claimed expertise, of technological inevitability that has protected the élite managerial class, has been exposed by the sheer dysfunctionality on display, as the West frantically flees Kabul. And it is precisely how it has ended that has really drawn back the curtain, and shown the world the rot festering beneath.

When the legitimating claim is used up, and people no longer believe in the concepts or claims that underpin a particular system or claim to rule, the extinction of that particular élite, Kyeyune writes, becomes a foregone conclusion.

Blue’s embrace of the woke cultural revolution may turn out to be its Achilles’ heel. It runs contrary to the historic norms of human cultures.

Predictions for the year ahead must be so ephemeral that they become pointless. The ‘unknown unknowns’ are too many; the situation, too dynamic. Yet, it is possible to take some key variables, which are all too easily taken for granted, and to look them more directly ‘in the eye’. Why do that, if ‘to look’ is uncomfortable? The answer, the ancients, told us is, that without that piercing ‘look’ of consciousness, our unspoken anxieties evolve through our unconscious, into psychosis – or physical sickness. Our bubble boundaries requires firstly rupture.

Let us then start with the U.S. at this point of fundamental inflection: Biden’s Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan speaking in recent days, exuded confidence that Biden’s chumminess with lawmakers ‘across the aisle’ in the Congress will help push through his China policies: “He (Biden) knows his mind on China and he is going to carry forward a strategy that is not based on politics, not based on being pushed around by domestic constituencies (sic – interesting comment). Sullivan described it as a “clear-eyed strategy, a strategy that recognises that China is a serious strategic competitor to the U.S. – that acts in ways that are at odds with our interests in many ways including trade.” Yet, at the same time, “it is also a strategy that recognises that we will work with China, when it is in our interests to do so”.

What is there to complain about in such ‘a normal, rational statement’? Nothing per se – except that it presumes a return to the old bi-partisan politics, in which Red and Blue lawmakers attend the same Washington cocktails, and assumes a shared desire to engage together in the ‘business’ of Washington.

Patricia Murphy of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, who has been covering the senatorial runoff in Georgia, noted that: “Republicans just don’t trust the election … Not one Republican voter, Murphy has spoken to since Election Day, believes that President-elect Biden won. “Not one, not a person”, she said. “And many of them don’t even think he’ll be inaugurated on January 20”.

Murphy’s statement speaks forcefully to two American realities: One is rooted in a deep distrust of the élites, and of a soiled status quo; the ‘other’ reality views Murphy’s interlocutors as not only in denial, but views them with contempt.

We have today almost unlimited web access: Yet, its sheer overload seems to cause us to ‘dig in’, rather than ‘open up’. Anyone who wants it, can find a whole universe of alternative viewpoints online, but very few do. Paradoxically, the Information age has made us less willing to consider worldviews unlike our own. We cleave to the like-minded. We want to hear from the like-minded and have them as our friends.

And since it is so much easier to confirm our perspective and biases – and disdain others’ – the notion of politics by argument or consensus, is almost entirely lost. We can, and do, live in our segregated digital worlds, even when physically, those ‘others’ may indeed be our next door neighbour. This has meant for the architects of the Trump campaign that his campaign – and politics more generally – must be about mobilisation – rather than persuasion. Politics, in other words is now Post-persuasion; post-‘factual’.

The ‘insurrection’ at the Capitol Building – for those who may have witnessed revolutionary mobs elsewhere – was comparatively inoffensive (one unarmed, former U.S. Air Force vet protestor, was shot dead by the police through a closed door). Clearly, this assault on the Hill was never intended as a real ‘coup’; it was rather Trump manoeuvring to keep his base energised and mobilised – and with him firmly in control of the Party. Nonetheless, it has been PR disaster, leaving many of his supporters bewildered. If the aim were to expose details of fraud as part of the confirmation hearing, it failed.

If it were a coup at all, it was one aimed by Trump at the GOP ‘old guard’, such as Romney, (who was taunted as a traitor, by fellow passengers during his flight to Washington). It is the country-club GOP élite who are struggling to ‘take-back’ the Party from the Trumpistas. Will they succeed, in the light of what has happened? The Deep State has closed ranks irrevocably against Trump. Are his nine (cats’) lives now expended?

Though Trump be at the forefront of what happened on 6 January, it is not just about him (as the MSM insist). Rather, the U.S. today is skirmishing its way towards an existential fight: This is a battle over the nature and direction of change itself; Over where society and its constitutional order are going; and how the legitimacy of republican rule, in its essence, is to be defined. “Simply, America’s longstanding political equipoise (from c. 1876) has completely broken down. Continuity and change, for better or worse, is now locked in a classic death match. How will it be resolved? How will it end?”.

Not trusting in the election, in U.S. democracy, therefore flags a profound change in politics taking hold in America and in Europe. The Georgia loss, perhaps, is less crucial now: Elements of the GOP are preparing for radical opposition (to save the Republic, which they see as courting complete loss). The objecting members of Congress knew that they could never succeed in obtaining supporting majorities in both houses of congress for their objections. Their aim rather, seemed to be to establish a baseline (evidence of fraud) for future activist opposition to the results of the 2020 election. Along this baseline they will insist that Biden/Harris are not legitimately elected, and are usurpers against whom any means of resistance is justified. They hoped to inherit Trump’s base, and to ‘ride its wave’. Is there a vacancy now? That is a question for 2021.

The next question for 2021 then, concerns that old adage: ‘Beware not to win too much’. It can be a mistake to corner your adversaries to having nothing to lose. The Blue state has ousted Trump; and Blue has taken everything across ‘the board’, and are ready to implement the ‘Re-set’ – the ultimate subjugation of Red by main force, achieved by the preponderance of wealth, ruling institutional leverage, and military power. A social ‘woke’ revolution, as well as a political transformation. The full outcome would likely reconstitute the constitutional order, in ways unrecognizable to most Americans today.

But will Red America succumb from exhaustion, or lack of leadership; or, on the other hand, might it find the energy to revitalise ‘their’ Republic? We shall see – a big question whose ramifications might make the EU élites particularly nervous. Of course Blue now possesses force majeure. But there is another old adage: ‘No passionate, partisan assessment has any value, save to inflame’ – and Big Tech and the MSM’s censorship and accompanying humiliation of Trump may turn him a martyr, and make the spirit of defiance all the stronger.

Despite the GOP Old Guard attempted ‘counter-revolution’ (talking 25th Amendment action), the divisions between the two Americas are now so great that it can only mean ultimately a de-coupling of the ‘across the aisle’ chumminess (even if this has to be postponed until the 2022 congressional election round). Is Jake Sullivan’s optimism that Biden’s chums across the aisle will allow him to push through his China policies unscathed – especially as Biden is viewed as deeply blemished in respect to China? Might 2021 rather underline the new era of civil conflict, rather than a return to old civilities – and hence to new, ‘take no prisoners’ politics?

The priority issues for all western leaders surely will be Covid; the concomitant push-back from small and medium sized businessmen against lockdown, and dealing with the noxious ‘them-and-us’ effects of a ‘free money’ economic paradigm. Foreign policy – other than China and Russia (on which there exists the one, and almost only, U.S. bi-partisan consensus) – may garner lesser attention.

And here are the inter-related shibboleths that may require a little more critical re-thinking for 2021: America and the EU – understandably – desperately want their economies to snap-back into recovery: “Biden’s blue wave almost guarantees it”, the Telegraph’s economics editor Evans Pritchard exalts – “as Fiscal stimulus meets monetary jet fuel already tanked in the system – just as America comes out of the pandemic”.

It may seem a tad curmudgeonly even to question such panglossian hopes. The vaccines have been sold as ‘the hope’ for normal; but the notion that the vaccines are about to propel the U.S. tout suite into jet-fuelled nirvana, seems premature. The WHO says that it is yet to be determined whether the vaccines actually stop infection (as opposed to merely mitigating its more severe symptoms).

It is yet to be discovered whether the vaccines are effective, at all, against the new strains of the Covid virus (such as the UK and South African mutations); and it is uncertain how many Americans will even accept to be vaccinated. It seems rather, to boil-down to a race between accelerating infections, and dawdling vaccine manufacture and distribution – with a final outcome to this race still uncertain. That outcome, whatever it is, will have political consequences – for the EU in particular in the year ahead.

There is too, a fragile and peripatetic frontier (in both America and Europe), between the notions that Covid lockdowns are a deliberate élite ploy to concentrate the economy in the hands of a few oligarchs – and, on the other hand, a conviction that the infection is a grave risk, requiring a high degree of public discipline. Where this ‘frontier’ flows; on which side of the median it comes to rest during this year; as well as the success (or lack of it) in rolling out effective and safe vaccines, will constitute a key political event – maybe even an existential one for some governments and institutions.

It is hard to see growth simply springing forth out of further massive increases in government debt – Biden’s ‘jet-fuel’. Since 2008, debt has suffocated growth, seeded a crop of zombie companies, and stimulated mainly a runaway asset appreciation. And it is hard to see such growth coming from an economy that is centralising around huge monopolistic behemoths, who stifle innovation, whilst small businesses are massacred. The question is about real growth, or are we looking at just another just another puff of liquidity pointed towards ‘make-believe’ growth? Polls (Forbes) suggest that 48% of American small businesses, risk closing for good.

Of course centralisation of economic activity around big business represents the central plank to the Great tech Re-set. The latter is promoted as an unstoppable, supply-side ‘miracle’ which will transform productivity, and growth. Yet, this thesis seems is not supported by history: “For a quarter of a century, post WW2”, the Chicago Booth Review notes, the value of production of every worker hour rose 2.7 percent per year. Then there was a slowdown for 20 years, from 1974 to 1994, when productivity growth fell to 1.5 percent per year. This was a period that included the rise of the personal computer and the integration of new technologies in a number of industries – and, as is the case today, people wonder why it was that productivity growth slowed down”. Robert Solow famously said, “I see computers everywhere, except in the productivity statistics.”

“Eventually, we did see the computers in the productivity statistics. Around the mid-1990s, productivity accelerated again, up to about 3 percent per year. It stayed there for a decade, before slowing again. It hasn’t yet picked up. So the 1.2 percent average annual productivity growth we’ve been experiencing since the mid-2000s is less than half of what it was in the decade prior, and is slower even than the 20-year slowdown from 1974 to 1994.

“Despite what seem like incredibly rapid changes in technology, we don’t see technologically-driven growth in the data – and in fact we see the opposite pattern. Since economic growth requires productivity growth: If we don’t figure out why this is happening, and how to fix it, we won’t get sustained increases in GDP per capita”.

Blue has swept the board. Yet, the year is new-born: Blue’s embrace of the woke cultural revolution may turn out to be its Achilles’ heel. It runs contrary to the historic norms of human relations and cultures. The danger of the liberal-style Re-set for Francis Fukuyama, would be that it cannot assuage the Homeric heroic ideal of Thymos – the greater passions which drive man to seek glory and renown. Fukuyama observes that “Thy­mos is the side of man that deliberately seeks out struggle and sacrifice”. With all our material and political wants satisfied, the human soul will search out deeper, older drives, a need for recognition and glory like that which drove Achilles, foreknowing, to his death on to the battlefield of Troy.

“Those who remain dissatisfied, will always have the potential to restart history”, Fukuyama observes.

“We’re not going back to the same economy”, Fed Chair Powell said recently: “We’re recovering, but to a different economy, and it will be one that is more leveraged to technology – and I worry that it’s going to make it even more difficult than it was, for many workers.” Klaus Schwab, the Davos Chair, was more blunt: “Nothing will ever return to the ‘broken’ sense of normalcy that prevailed [earlier]. We … will be surprised by both the rapidity and unexpected nature of these changes – as they conflate with each other, they will provoke cascading effects and unforeseen outcomes”. Schwab makes it clear that the western élite will not allow life to return to normal, suggesting that rolling lockdowns and other restrictions may become permanent.

‘Recovering to a different economy’? Well, actually the creeping ‘coup’ has been residing in plain view for quite a while. The changes have been less noticed – partly because western élites have stuck fast to the free market narrative, whilst incrementally shifting over the decades to an oligarchical economy blossoming alongside the free market economy. Yet it has been an important metamorphose, for it has laid the ground-work for a more fundamental fusion of interests of business oligarchy and government. This fusion used to be called the ‘administrative state’, and was widely practiced in 19th Century Europe.

If we want to understand the roots to this ‘quiet coup’, we need to return to the ethos that emerged from WW2. It was ‘never again’ in terms of that terrible wartime bloodshed, and it encapsulated the notion that the spilt blood should be somehow ‘redeemed’ by moving to fairer, more equitable societies. These latter sentiments turned activist, culminating in the 1960s – an occurrence that frightened U.S. business élites.

The élites moved their ‘counter-revolution’. They lobbied; they lobbied hard, evolving their lobbying enterprise into an ‘industrial scale’ enterprise, employing ‘brigades’ of lawyers and encompassing big money. And now, trillions of dollars are at stake: K Street (the lobbying HQ in Washington) is where the legislative ‘sausage’ is actually assembled, and not the U.S. Congress. It is external to Congress, to whom it is ‘sold’ in a mutually beneficial exchange.

Gradually, one segment of the erstwhile radical Boomers quietly folded themselves into the new Big Corporate ethos, whilst another part entered into politics, eventually going on to become the nation’s political leaders. It is not hard to see how a common zeitgeist might emerge. It is half-heartedly woke, big corporate in outlook, and committed to the notion of élite ‘scientifically administered’ rule.

The point here is that there was never anything inevitable to this American-led ‘quiet’ oligarchic take-over. It was never immutable. It happened in America, as it had ‘happened’ earlier in 19th Century Europe. The Boomer radicals never were true ‘revolutionaries’ – and the oligarchs took advantage of their reticence.

The Boomer influx into the corporate and business world, however, did lay firstly, that key incremental shift towards a fusion of big business to government. Secondly, that fusion is now being consolidated through the programmes of pandemic monetary relief concentrated in the corporate sector. And the third step – today’s U.S. Tech war with China – is both further entrenching Silicon Valley and the corporate oligarchy, as well as opening the prospect to a bigger power-grab that is intended to entrench a small Techno-élite at the head of a global administration and in command of global digital money and assets. This is the Re-Set – it aims to forge the new global order to its advantage.

And so, back to Jerome Powell’s warning of a ‘recovery’ to “a different economy”. It does have a whiff of inevitability to it; that is to say, Powell is presenting the fact that the Fed is now ‘painted into a corner’ – whereas Schwab’s hyping of a ‘welcome paradigm shift’, by contrast, is different – it is an exceptionalist ideology, with nothing inherently inevitable about it. The two should not be confused. But whether Powell likes it or not, in the Coronavirus ‘new normal’, the free market segment of the West’s economy is indeed being systematically destroyed, at the same time that the major portion of stimulus is being channelled to the largest of large multinational corporations, and to systemically important Banks. It will indeed be a different economy. This fusion of government to big business has been reinforced during the pandemic, and that plainly helps facilitate those hoping for a fundamental re-set of the global order. The Tech war is the cherry on the cake – if Silicon Valley succeeds in its bid for Tech hegemony, these U.S. Tech giants will be global political players. They are near that already now.

Will the Technocratic coup succeed? Or, will the ideology – the oligarchic vision – behind it, simply descend into a zero sum game of big power Tech rivalry on a par with 19th Century great power rivalries? Let us recall that those rivalries did not end well. As things presently stand, Tech rivalry between U.S. and China – on account of the fundamental difference between Tech rivalry and ordinary commercial competition – makes a clash quite possible. What then is this inherent quality to Tech that differentiates it from ordinary commerce, and exacerbates the risk of 19th Century style warring?

It is this: Not so long ago, the digital economy was thought to soar above conventional geo-politics. The global Internet, aspiring to be free and open, was seen as a general-purpose technology – as revolutionary and as fungible as the internal combustion engine, and a good in the sense of ‘public commons’. This halcyon chimaera about Tech lingers on amongst the public, even as elements of Tech have assumed the darker function of surveilling, and disciplining society on behalf of ‘big brother’.

Fast forward to today: Data is the new ‘oil’, and has become the strategic commodity that governments are fighting over, trying to protect, defend and even hoard, to the exclusion of others. Every state now feels obligated have its national ‘AI strategy’ in order to ‘refine’ this new crude and to profit from it. If big powers used to fight over oil, today they wrangle (more disceetly perhaps) over data. Taiwan may simply be a pretext, behind which lurks American ambitions to dominate the norms and standards for the next decades.

The optimism spurred by the original internet as a global ‘good’ thus has receded in favor of a rivalrous clash for Technological hegemony – a clash that might easily one day turn ‘hot’. One might have assumed that the next generation of digital technology would continue the Internet pattern as ‘win-win’ for everyone, but it didn’t. Machine learning is different. Machine learning broadly refers to ‘modelling’ that is not pre-programmed – as in having instructions (code) that the computer then executes, but which instead uses a set of AI learning-models which enable the computers themselves to extract patterns from large data sets, and evolve their own algorithms (decision rules). These new algorithms that the machine evolves then are run against new data, problems and questions (which can be highly profitable – such as in Cloud analytics).

These algorithms indeed are useful tools and have their positive aspects. They are not particularly new, and machines are not particularly good at learning. They do not approximate human psyche (nor can they) and models that work well in the laboratory often fail in real life. But in particular areas, where there are good data sets, they can be transformative (i.e. medicine, physics, energy exploration, defence, etc.).

And this is where the dynamics of geo-political rivalry comes to the fore. It is because big data and advanced machine learning systems lashed together constitute a positive feedback loop, where better data feeds better analytics, which in turn, feeds bigger potential returns from other, separate data sets. It has, in short, an accumulative dynamic – more profit, more political heft; more brings forth more. And leaders and laggards in this ‘competition’ usually will be states. It is precisely this – the hunt for a positive feedback loop, and fear of falling behind – that can pull the globe apart, if we let it.

And it is this feedback characteristic in analytics that makes Big Tech rivalry different from normal commercial competition. Data and lightning-fast analytics ultimately will determine military primacy, as well as Tech standards’ leadership. Big Tech companies therefore draw the intense interest of governments, not simply as regulators, but as principal users, funders, and sometimes owners of technology. Hence the oligarchic fusion has a built-in intensifier, in this optic – the fusion of oligarchy and governance interests tightens.

Yet hot rivalry over data and algorithms analytis is not pre-ordained. Again, the point is that the present resort to Tech war reflects precisely a particular way-of-thinking – an ideology. Recently, China’s Global Times published a piece by Xue Li, a director at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which makes exactly this point:

“Based on Christian monotheism, the spirit of Roman law and Greek formal logic, Western civilization largely views problems and world order from the perspective of binary opposition. Therefore, they prefer forming alliances in diplomacy so as to restrain and even assimilate allies through mandatory mechanisms. This allows them to confront and even defeat the non-allies.

“At the same time, they firmly believe that every country must have a similar diplomatic philosophy, so it is necessary to encircle and even disintegrate emerging powers. They not only try to equate the history of Christian expansion … with the universal history of humanity, but also view the diplomatic concept of the Christian civilization over past 500 years as the world’s universal diplomatic philosophy. They do not realize that 500 years is a relatively short period in the history of human civilization, and that different civilizations have different views on diplomacy world order.”

Xue is right. The Tech narrative is being inflated and weaponised both to serve the western binary, adverserial mindset, but secondly too, to advance the notion of the scientifically administered, progressive state, representing the political essence of modernity, to which Europe has hewed since Napoleonic times. It is, as Xue points out, a particularly parochial (and dangerous) view.

A perception ‘gap’, so wide, you could sail a Cruise Liner through it. On the one hand, we have the looming spectre of recession; a major loss of jobs, and of earnings cratered (some 80% of the global workforce has seen their workplaces closed, or partly closed, as a result of the virus crisis), and on the other hand, the shocking non-sequitur of the U.S. Fed reporting that, despite the crisis, ‘the average consumer expectation for higher stock-market prices one year hence has now surged to 47.7%, the highest on record’.

ZeroHedge wryly comments, “Right … because with his job gone, his $400 dollars of emergency savings just spent on a roll of toilet paper, his bank preparing to foreclose on his home, all while a deadly virus lurks in every corner, all Joe Sixpack can think of – is how to get his ‘money on the sidelines’ into the stock market – since it is about to soar to all-time highs. And so, thanks to the Fed’s now grotesque interventions in all capital markets … as the economy slides into a depression, it is only ‘logical’ – we use the term loosely – that expectations of higher stock prices have never been higher.”

A freak result, devoid of serious consideration? No. Actually, the paradox rather neatly ties together what is implicit, from that which has been explicit in U.S. policy, both domestically, and in terms of its foreign policy.

In foreign policy – in the post-Covid era – we see tensions with China ratchetting higher. The U.S. already is engaged in a full-spectrum info-war to blame China for the virus (and to divert criticism from the U.S.’ lack of preparedness). China, recalling the earlier ‘Century of Humiliation’ visited on it by western states, and sensing some inherent racism in the taunts, inevitably is responding unusually assertively.

In a recent episode of soul-searching by an Obama National Security adviser, Ben Rhodes has written of GW Bush’s speech (in wake of 9/11): “Our War on Terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated”. He further defined the nature of the conflict by saying, “Americans are asking, ‘Why do they hate U.S.?’ They hate what we see right here in this chamber – a democratically elected government”. To have this unfathomable event framed in a way that fitted neatly into the American narrative that I’d grown up with in the 1980s and ’90s, was reassuring, Rhodes admits.

He later (in the article), says that he had been naïve, and swept along by his emotions, at seeing New York’s Twin Towers cascade down into dust – and was roused by Bush’s fiery rhetoric. Mr Sixpack probably feels similarly: He too, had been told that America’s economy was strong and booming, until the virus flew into it, despatching America’s economy into free fall. Shocked and angry, Joe probably hopes that America will ‘Give it to them’ (the Chinese that is, “they”, whom the narrative suggests were responsible for it).

That is the explicit – in conjunction with Trump’s Trade War, triggered ostensibly by China’s ‘hijacking’ of America’s commercial assets.

The ‘unsaid’ in this narrative is an old story of warfare. Destroy your enemy’s supply-lines to weaken him. In Britain in 1891, a small circle of the inner élite was formed, in secret, around Cecil Rhodes, the South African diamond millionaire, and Lord Rothschild. Its members aimed to renew the bond between Britain and the U.S., and they believed that ruling-class men of Anglo-Saxon descent, rightly sat at the top of a hierarchy built on predominance in trade, industry, banking and the exploitation of other lands (much as America’s élites do today).

This élite harbored a deep-rooted fear however, that unless they acted decisively, British power and influence across the world would be eroded, and replaced by that of a burgeoning Germany. In the years immediately after the Boer War, the decision was reached: The danger had to be addressed. And ‘war’ with Germany was planned: initially as a severing of its supply-lines; a propaganda ‘war’ casting Germans as child-eaters, and through diplomatic containment.

Narratives were harnessed to this objective, and the historian, Paul Vincent, tellingly recreates the atmosphere of jubilation that surrounded the outbreak of the war that was truly the fateful watershed of the twentieth century. H.G. Wells, for instance, gushed: “I find myself enthusiastic for this war against Prussian militarism … Every sword that is drawn against Germany is a sword drawn for peace.” Wells later coined the mendacious slogan “the war to end war”.

Britain, from the onset of war in 1914, imposed a tight naval blockade on Germany. By preventing food from being imported into the country, the British brought starvation and malnutrition to large masses of the German people. German submarine warfare was a desperate response to the British blockade—a blockade so effective that it threatened to force the Germans out of the war.

Fast-forward to today: The uprooting, and ‘re-patriating’ of China’s supply-lines back to America (given new fuel now, from the discovery that so many of America’s basic medical needs are ‘made in China’); seizing the commanding heights of technology; building out, militarily, into Space; mobilizing Europe against China; sanctioning China’s external sources of energy, and casting China as the virus-demon – all form today’s toolbox for what threatens the Anglo-élite.

Perhaps the resident ‘Alchemist’ at ZeroHedge, will take Joe Sixpack aside, and quietly say to him: “Look, Joe, Covid-19 is merely a virus – an invisible organism. You can’t see it. You cannot ‘make war’ on it. When the British began imagining Germans as demonic monsters to be destroyed, they ended by not only destroying European culture, but also any commitment to the Ancient World’s notion of Virtù or Homeric heroic conduct.

In their place, successive generations embraced relativism, nihilism, brooding pessimism and resentment. And from the massive, warring, governments’ intrusions into every facet of civil society, arose the German Kriegssozialismus that was to become the model for the Bolsheviks. Again, as Vincent points out, “the British achieved control over their economy, unequalled by any of the other belligerent states: But everywhere state seizure of social power, was accompanied and fostered by propaganda lies, unparalleled in history, to that time”.

But why (asks Joe) did you smile so enigmatically when I said that I might buy stock (shares) on credit provided by my broker, to try to recoup my loss of earnings, as a result of the Coronavirus?

“Well”, says the Alchemist, “I was thinking of the ‘hidden ‘war’, and how a virus ‘out of nowhere’ has changed its course, for good”.

“What do you mean?”, queries Joe.

“You recall how you said that the U.S. economy was fundamentally the strongest in the world? Well that’s not quite true. Sometime ago, U.S. growth began to falter, and the Authorities opted for a debt-driven, consumer-led economy. Money was printed (as credit), and – normally – a lot of new money or debt in circulation, would have created inflation (such as we had during the Reagan Administration).

“How we managed this difficulty (apart from regularly re-jigging the price index), was by the so-called ‘China Trade’. China was then in the midst of its Industrial Revolution: they sent cheap products to Walmart. They effectively subsidised the middle classes, by giving U.S. a standard of living – access to cheap consumer-goods – which otherwise, we could not have afforded. And better still, they recirculated the monetary proceeds back to Wall Street, through buying U.S. Treasury bonds.

“The point here, was that in so doing (buying our debt), the Chinese allowed U.S. to shrink our created, new-money ‘footprint’, by exporting U.S. dollar debt out of harm’s way – to Emerging Markets. We have lent out $13 trillion in this way, thus repressing the domestic money footprint.

“These little ‘tricks’ were necessary to avoid inflation. But the inflation threat was mitigated also, in another way. All this new money was used to ‘financialise’ and leverage ‘everything’, from healthcare to education. They blew ‘bubbles’.

“This gave U.S. a simulacrum of ‘growth’ – but money-printing did not make the dollars available to you, I’m afraid, Joe. They got stuck in the financial system and were hoarded. You may have noticed that times were getting less rosy. But that was also a result of the U.S. business model, which has always prioritised capital formation and allowed labour costs to take the strain, or be eased-down by off-shoring labour costs to overseas.

“Ah, but what of the ‘hidden war’ that you spoke about. How does that fit in?”, asks Joe.

“You recall what I said earlier about Britain fearing that it could not stay at the pinnacle of international power forever? And seeing Germany somehow coming together, and building-out towards the East, in order in order to rival Britain? Well, China some years ago, stopped re-circulating the proceeds from the China Trade back to Wall Street, and instead started building-out towards Central Asia. It began spending the proceeds of the ‘China Trade’ building the Belt and Road, instead. As Germany had threatened to rival Britain, China was on a path to rival America.

“This posed a problem for the U.S.: firstly, how now to finance that China Trade; and secondly – not least – how to let the middle classes’ down gently, from the loss of their ‘China Trade’ ‘subsidy’, and avoid a ‘revolt’ inside the U.S. The blowing of the housing ‘bubble’ was intended – at least partly – as the offset.

“Equally problematic for U.S. was that the Chinese-Russian Eurasian project, was intended to channel trade – in a hugely important sphere, including energy and raw materials – not via our channel – the dollar – but rather, away from it. The dollar has been ‘squeezed’ by the de-dollarisation crowd since at least 2007.

“Hence all the ‘tricks’ in the toolbox that I outlined earlier. But it got worse: We have tried to keep all the oil sales in the world going through the dollar (sanctioning non-compliant producers, creating instability of supply etc.), but scattergun of sanctions just brought everybody into our jurisdiction, and made their financial systems subject to arbitrary U.S. Treasury threat. The world doesn’t want to do that anymore. The revolt grew.

“This, in essence, was the ‘hidden war’. And it was not going so well: The U.S. Treasury – simply – was running out of further bubbles to blow. Finally, it had resorted to blowing the ‘everything bubble’ to maintain the appearance of a strong economy; but as this structure became ever bigger, more leveraged, more complex and thus opaque – so it became less stable. The Coronavirus ‘pin’ popped the bubble – forcing Washington to deploy unlimited money-printing, and to bailout simply, ‘everything’ (which is the inevitable ‘logical’ response to an ‘everything bubble’, I would imagine)”, said the Alchemist.

“Then, what happens now” blurts out Joe, alarmed: “Will it end in war, like in the 19th Century?”

“Possibly, but probably, not”, responds the Alchemist calmly. “China is too powerful, but its economy inevitably will have been weakened too. More likely, America will continue the struggle against China (and Russia) through proxies, such as in Venezuela, or in the Middle East. (Iran though is a special case, on account of Israel).”

“At the end of WW1, European economies had been partly shut down by the war – and there were huge dollar debts owing to the U.S. Today, western economies are in partial lockdown due to Covid-19. And national debts today are similarly, more or less, at levels associated with (real) wartimes. And there is the $13 trillion – owed by emerging markets, and for which repayment in full, now must be viewed as problematic.

“After WWI, there was no debt forgiveness (no debt jubilee), just a pass-the-parcel practiced by the European states, as they tried to off-load their debts onto others. To find an exit, some hoped that austerity could fix the problem. But others did resort to ‘helicopter money’ (much as the U.S. is so doing, in its response to the Covid-19 lockdown). The gold-backed German Reichsmark became the unbacked Papermark. Initially, the Reich financed its war outlays, in large part, through issuing debt. But From May 1923, the quantity of Papermark started spinning out of control. Wholesale prices skyrocketed. By 1918, you could have bought 500 billion eggs for the same money you would have to spend, five years later, for just one egg. The Papermark was scrap value.

“With the collapse of the currency, unemployment was on the rise. Hyperinflation had impoverished the great majority of the German population, especially the middle class. People suffered from food shortages and cold. And political extremism was on the rise. This is a real risk, since all the earlier Treasury gigs to suppress inflation are no longer available.

“So what might Washington do – especially about the $13 trillion debt owed by EMs?”, pleaded Joe. “Why don’t they reform the system?”

“We don’t know what they will do”, sighed the Alchemist, “but the signals suggest that the Central Bankers are toying with a new global, reserve digital crypto-currency – against which EMs (and the U.S.) might devalue their currencies. (The former governor of the Bank of England has hinted at something like this). It might never happen. The type of ‘crypto’ the Central Bankers have in mind is one giving the authorities complete control: no real money, just a credit at the central bank with ATMs spitting out only what the central banks determine. And no, there will be no real reform – only ‘mumbleswerve’. But that – dirty money, lots and lots of it – is another story. Transparency is not an option.

“So, you would advise me not to buy stocks?”, asks Joe.

“No, I wouldn’t Joe. It seems that Trump now wants to bail out the American Middle Class in a different way. I know you, like many others, like to check out daily their 401K (stocks held as a future pension provision). And if it’s up, they are happy; if not they are gloomy. So Trump is trying to blast-up markets, with a wall of freshly printed money – and bailouts unlimited.

“The President has taken full control of the (nuclear) button that controls the global supply of money, in dollars. He has control of the Treasury which has completed its take-over and merger with the Fed. How things work is that Congress authorises $450 billion in a CARES bailout. The Treasury gives it to the Fed as its stake – and then instructs the Fed to multiply that stake, by a factor of ten (through printing fresh money). The $450 billion becomes $4.5 trillion and is handed over to a friendly Hedge Fund – Blackrock – to distribute. And the details of the distribution are all tied up in confidentiality clauses and opacity. Trump becomes a secular Croesus: he can ‘print’ as much as he wishes. Nothing to stop him. Will be able to contain himself?

Joe sighs.

“So, the question then, Joe, is – is it really feasible for the market to soar when maybe half the economy is semi-furloughed, and inherentvalue is plunging?

“As I mentioned earlier, money ‘printing’ does not always make dollars available. Liquidity is being provided to the U.S. banks: yes, but the problem is not so much liquidity; but one of potential default – especially on the $13 trillion owed overseas. So there is a massive scramble by those overseas debtors for dollars, with which to pay interest, and capital repayments, as they become due – and that means the dollar will soar (for now). It is the dollar strength that brings to world to its nadir (just like the 1930s). It is the dollar system that is the really big problem. This virus will either prick the dollar bubble and collapse it in an inflationary spiral downwards – or, the CBs will be forced to find some other solution (though God knows what!)

Joe sighs again.

“I’m afraid Joe, that I may not have been much help to you – sorry”.

President Trump’s ‘deal of the century’ has been published this week. Mostly, it has been examined as a purely political project – whether in terms of the domestic needs of Trump and Netanyahu, or as a maximum squeeze on Palestinians, which may, or may not, work. But there is another (implicit) dimension, lying – a little out of sight – behind these explicit politics.

It has been argued, by at least one US historian, that the U.S. is no ordinary nation-state, but should be understood as a system leader, a ‘civilizational power’ – like Rome, Byzantium, and the Ottoman Empire. The ‘system leader’, historically, has always sought to embed its particular civilizational vision onto those distant ‘lands’ that serve, or abut, its empire: which is to say that the universalistic vision may be bound to one state, but is forcefully unfurled across the globe, as ‘our’ inevitable destiny.

It is not hard to see what we are talking about when it refers to America: politically it is liberal markets, liberal capitalism, individualism and laissez-faire politics – and the metaphysics of Judeo-Christianity, too, if you like. For most Americans, their victory in the Cold War spectacularly affirmed the superiority of their civilizational vision, through the defeat and implosion of communism. It was not just a political defeat for the USSR, more significantly, it represented a triumph for America’s full cultural paradigm: It was a Civilisational ‘win’.

What has this to do with what happened in the East Room of the White House this Tuesday? Well, it gives us a better vantage point to perceive something less obvious than just the explicit politics to the spectacle. Something more often ‘felt’, than explicitly considered.

That is because Jewish Zionism, as expressed by Netanyahu this week, though ostensibly secular, is not just a political construct: It is, too, as it were, an Old Testament project. Laurent Guyénot observes, that when it is asserted that Zionism is biblical, that doesn’t necessarily mean it to be religious. It can, and does, serve as key leitmotiv for secular Jews too. For secular Zionists, the Bible is on the one hand, a ‘national narrative’, but on the other, a particular civilizational vision, bound around a modern state (Israel).

Ben-Gurion was not religious; he never went to the synagogue, and ate pork for breakfast, yet he could declare: “I believe in our moral and intellectual superiority, in our capacity to serve as a model for the redemption of the human race”. Dan Kurzman, in his biography (Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire, 1983) writes that “[Ben Gurion] was, in a modern sense, Moses, Joshua, Isaiah, a messiah, who felt he was destined to create an exemplary Jewish state, a ‘light unto the nations’ that would help to redeem all mankind”. This is the inner Universalist vision (tied to a state). These backstage, half acknowledged, convictions – of being ‘elect’, as an example – clearly do condition political actions, (such as disregarding legal norms).

Ben-Gurion was in no way a special case. His immersion in the Bible was shared by almost every Zionist leader of his generation, and the next. And the Israel of today, is no longer as secular as it once was, but rather, is in transit back towards Yahweyism — which is to say, away from the law of a secular state founded by the Zionists, towards traditional Hebraic law as revealed in the Tanakh (the Old Testament of the Christians). Netanyahu implicitly reverts to Hebraic tradition (from secular norms), when he states flatly that as ‘leader’, he should not be removed from power. In other words, Israel is becoming more, not less, ‘biblical’.

So, back to last Tuesday, when an Israeli leader speaks of Trump having secured Israel’s destiny, he is not just resorting to flowery flattery for the US President. The emphasis on ‘destiny’ is flagging something lurking in the background: “Zionism cannot be a nationalist movement like others”, Guyénot writes, “because it resonates with the destiny of Israel as outlined in the Bible … Israel is a very special nation indeed. And everyone can see that it has no intention of being an ordinary nation. Israel is destined to be an empire”.

An ‘empire’ – as in Isaiah, which describes the messianic times as a Pax Judaica, when “all the nations” will pay tribute “to the mountain of Yahweh, to the house of the god of Jacob”; when “the Law will issue from Zion and the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem,” so that Yahweh will “judge between the nations and arbitrate between many peoples.”

Further on in the same book, we read: “The riches of the sea will flow to you, the wealth of the nations come to you” (60:5); “For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you will perish, and the nations will be utterly destroyed” (60:12); “You will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the wealth of kings” (60:16); “You will feed on the wealth of nations, you will supplant them in their glory” (61:5-6). Pretty clear: this is not just run of the mill nationalism.

Aren’t such quotes just too historically arcane? What has this to do with last Tuesday? Well, a lot. Because these notions of election, of an exceptional mission and destiny are literally believed by many Americans, as well as by Jews. The point about last Tuesday – from this implicit vantage point – is that it then becomes evident that Trump’s “deal” is not about any two-state solution. Why would Trump encourage a rival state to emerge, or for that matter anything that would impede the path towards Israel’s becoming the dominant civilisational power in the Middle East? What Tuesday was about was firstly, conditioning the Palestinians – squeezing them – to accept that they have no alternative, but to offer their fealty to the regional ‘system leader’ (Israel). And secondly, as phase two, to assimilate subordinated Sunni components, under the regional Pax Judaica umbrella.

These old prophesies may not be uppermost in the daily consciousness of many contemporaries. But they are alive, and present in the Hebraic world. And they are wholly present in one key US constituency: Trump’s Evangelical base (one in every four Americans say they are Evangelists). They see the actualisation of Israel’s destiny as an eschatological necessity: It was they who insisted on the move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem; they supported the Trump’s assertion of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan; they support the annexation of Israeli settlements; and they were behind the demand that the US scrap the JCPOA. The Evangelicals may be unlikely to switch to vote Democrat, but if enough simply sit on their hands and don’t vote Trump, it could tip ‘swing constituencies’ in the November US Presidential elections.

The Evangelicals were, of course, very happy with Tuesday’s outcome. Israel’s civilisational imperium is, they believe, now assured – at least between the west bank of the River Jordan and the sea. The actualisation of these prophesies has the effect of hastening the arrival of the Redeemer (for these Christian Zionists).

And here again, our vantage point helps to understand a wider paradigm, which centres around the term ‘Judeo-Christianity’. American leaders today increasingly refer to the US as having a Judeo-Christian culture. Might the term not seem something of an oxymoron: Wasn’t Christianity supposed to represent a fundamental break with Jewish textual law? Certainly, Saint Paul proclaimed Christianity was exactly that. The question is: does this Judeo-Christian self-labelling imply some subtle change: That some American élites are becoming unconsciously more Hebraic? In which direction is the core cultural ‘vision’ travelling? Israel originally was viewed as a recipient outpost for western Christian ‘values’ (in the days when Zionism largely was secular). Tuesday’s events suggests that the travel of values may be reversing.

But why this ‘Judeo-Christianity’ nomenclature in the first place? What is going on here? After the fall of Rome, circa 800, the leaders of the Frankish church precisely turned to the Old Testament as the basis to legitimise cultural war on Orthodox (Eastern) Christianity, which the Franks then labelled (pejoratively) as ‘Greek’ – with its clear connotation of eastern ‘paganism’ and apostasy. And they further leveraged the Old Testament in order to reign Dei Gratia: as divine sovereignty, whether as Popes or Emperors (i.e. Charlemagne), demanding the unreserved fealty and discipline of their subjects. This Frankish ‘turn’ towards a ‘Judeo-Christianity’ gave Europe its feudalism; resulted in the obliteration of the Cathars as an exemplar punishment for ill-discipline; and saw the imposition of its Civilisational model (Judeo-Christianity) on the Middle East, via militarised Crusades. West Christianity was infused with the Hebraic textual tradition, then – and again, of course, with the rise of Protestantism. East Christianity (Orthodox Christianity) never was. The two Churches were split asunder at the Great Schism (1054).

This is the point: The Israeli civilisational vision may not be exactly the same as America’s, but America’s archetypal cultural stories – Abraham commanded to sacrifice his son – come from the Hebrew Bible. In short, the American exercise of power has never been more ‘Frankish’, as it were. And the exercise of it, increasingly is justified in terms of Israeli language – viz the targeted assassination of Qasem Soleimani.

This is the principal message to Tuesday’s events: When those on the American Right (such as Steve Bannon) speak incessantly of the need to sustainAmerica’s Judeo-Christian heritage, they almost certainly would see an Israeli project to spread its Pax Judaica right across the Middle East as a clear civilisational ‘win’ for America too. Trump may not be prepared to go to war for Israel, but others in the US Establishment view America ‘winning again’ in the wider civilisational war, as an existential issue for America.

And this latter understanding perhaps offers yet another vantage point onto today’s politics. Why are American Evangelists so hostile to Iran? Because Iran presents the greatest obstacle to Israel’s Pax Judaica hegemony; or, is it more the case that the demise or implosion of the Islamic Republic, would constitute a civilisational ‘win’ for America and Israel, almost on a par with America’s Cold War ‘win’ over Communism? Is that what the withdrawal from the JCPOA – for the Evangelists, at least – was all about? A step on the way towards America, starting to ‘win again’ – towards Judeo-Christianity maintaining ‘system leadership?

What has the ‘international style of architecture’ – now going out of fashion – but which arose as a universalist aesthetic intended as a weapon to counter the nationalist upheavals at the turn of the 20th century, got to do with today’s geo-politics?

Well – more than might be imagined.

We all can be only too aware of the so-called ‘culture wars’, which are rending Britain, the US and Europe apart. We can see plainly this fracture, around which are arranged the two warring armies: On one side fly the banners of the Enlightenment ideal of ‘incontrovertible’ reason, from which the leap the idols of technology, of cosmopolitan homogeneity – and too, the ‘progressive agenda’: i.e. the embrace of human rights, rights of immigration, diversity, ecology and gender politics. And on the other front, those like Philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who considered the great imperialists such as Charlemagne — the “villains of history” who “stomped out native cultures.” Herder believed every culture possessed a unique Volksgeist, or way of life, incommensurate with others.

In the end however, the internationalist values have been pursued overwhelmingly (and purposefully) to the cost of ‘belonging’.

The lesson of the ongoing backlash against globalization is that political and cultural logic – rooted in an emotional attachment to our own roots, and to a distinctive cultural way of life, cultivated among one’s own kind – belongs to a wholly different pole (and dimension) to that of a ‘rational’ and universalizing ethos of economics and technology.

Far from moving forward in lock-step progress, these two ‘poles’ of consciousness, when they meet, they clash. And clash bitterly (as recent events in Britain’s parliament exemplify). Is there a possibility for synthesis, for compromise? Possibly not. It is an ancient rift between global utopia and local sovereignty. The strength of the globalists lately has been waning, and the other pole notably strengthening.

Philosopher Roger Scruton explains this shift towards the ‘sovereignty-ists’: “We are, as the Germans put it, heimatlich creatures — we have an inherent need to belong, and to belong somewhere, in a place to which we commit ourselves as we commit ourselves to the others who also belong there. This thought is disparaged by those who see only its negative side — the side that leads to belligerent nationalism and xenophobia. But those are the negative by-products of something positive, just as the international style was the negative by-product of a laudable desire to soften the barriers and smooth out the suspicions that had been brought into prominence by World War I.”

A European or global ‘melting pot of identities’, in other words, is possible only at the cost of shedding community roots and particularities. But Scruton’s point about the internationalist style of architecture (those “glass boxes and concrete plazas” to which nobody could belong – a “nowhere” style), goes further.

His architectural metaphor extends to the globalist zeitgeist as a whole: “The evidence is overwhelming that ugly and impersonal environments lead to depression, anxiety and a sense of isolation and that these are not cured; but only amplified, by joining some global network in cyberspace. We have a need for friends, family and physical contact; we have a need to pass people peacefully in the street, to greet each other and to sense the safety of a cared-for environment, that is also ours. A sense of beauty is rooted in these feelings.”

Here is the point: Isaiah Berlin argued that cosmopolitanism was an empty vessel. “[I]f the streams dried up … where men and women are not products of a culture, where they don’t have kith and kin and feel closer to some people than to others, where there is no native language — that would lead to a tremendous desiccation of everything that is human.”

That ‘other’ political and cultural logic, rooted in an emotional attachment to our own roots, and distinctive ways of living life, cultivated among one’s own kind’, is of course the very rootstock for possessing the quality of empathy – of being capable to embrace ‘otherness’. Having a sense of one’s own roots, brings recognition that every culture possesses a unique Volksgeist, or way of life, incommensurate with others.

Washington today does not ‘understand’ otherness. It does not even try very hard. It cannot fathom Iran (or China, or Russia). These latter states seem to DC to reject the ‘incontrovertible rationality’ that the European Enlightenment bequeathed to the world. They too, are seemingly ‘irrationally opposed’ to the ‘progressive moral outlook’ that has, in past years, informed European and American foreign policy.

This lack of empathy precisely defines the multiple policy failures. ‘Internationalist foreign policy’, which like its namesake architecture – is a style, detached from any empathy with place or people. It is also a nowhere style (one size policy fits all), demanding global homogeneity and compliance.

Its root in an abstract, ‘irrefutable rationality’ clashes utterly with President Trump’s mercantilist foreign policy style. As a consequence, no one sees any point to negotiating with such a conflicted entity (as the US is), oscillating uncertainly between these two oppositional poles. No one knows where stands the policy, from day-to-day.

Let us illustrate with an example: President Trump – the mercantilist – wants to exit Syria. His Syria Envoy, James Jeffery, however, is explicitly ‘internationalist’. These two approaches do not march together in any complementary way — where they meet, they clash, and trip each other up.

Jeffrey, on Trump’s compromise of drawdown in Syria, rather than full withdrawal:

“There is some reduction in forces in Syria. [But] we are making up for that [the President’s drawdown order], by keeping a very strong presence in Iraq. We’re making up for that with very strong air components. We’re making up for that with more Coalition forces on the ground. So we’re finding ways to compensate for it.”

Interviewer: “I want to move on to the U.S. presence at al-Tanf. There are some 10,000 Syrians living in a remote settlement, living in squalor [on US militarily occupied Syrian territory]. There are reports of some having starved. And yet there’s a U.S. military base some 10 miles away. Why hasn’t the U.S. simply stepped in, and helped provide food?”

“Well, first of all because we’re not actually responsible for these people. The government of Syria is responsible for them. International agencies are responsible…”

Interviewer: I think critics of the U.S. approach to Rukban would say that in exercising military control over the area, the U.S. has certain responsibilities, certain legal ones, as laid out under the Fourth Geneva Convention. But I take it you don’t see it that way?

“First of all, on the Fourth Geneva Convention, I would check with that. I do not believe the Pentagon would claim that the Fourth Geneva Convention applies to the refugees in al-Tanf. That’s the first thing …”.

Interviewer: [US pressures on Assad?]

“… we’re doing a great deal. We’ve got a very broad sanctions program that Treasury runs. We have very close coordination with the E.U., which runs its own sanctions program. We have blocked all reconstruction assistance from anywhere including UNDP [U.N. Development Programme], World Bank, any place, anywhere, inside Assad’s part of Syria. We are pursuing aggressively a ‘no diplomatic recognition’ policy throughout the world. For example, the Syrians were not invited back into the Arab League. So we’re putting as much pressure on the regime, and on its supporters, Russia and Iran, as possible.

But also, although it’s not our purpose in being in northeastern Syria, we are in northeastern Syria. And that, by its nature, keeps the regime out. The Turks are in northwest Syria for their own reasons, but that keeps the regime out. The Israelis are going after Syria’s ally Iran for its long-range systems that it’s introduced into Syria. So there’s a great pressure we’re putting the regime under.

Interviewer: [Is the US fighting ISIS in Syria?]

“I’m concerned about, first of all, are they [ISIS] setting up another caliphate? Are they holding more territory? No. Are the incidents extraordinarily low by every measure we’ve made in Afghanistan and Iraq? Absolutely, yes. Do we have areas where they seem to be persistent, pervasive, resilient, especially in Iraq, yes? In certain areas. And that’s the thing that has concern.

“This, (an USAF attack on a base on the Tigris), is the only case I can think of in either country where we’ve actually had a little tiny military operation, or several military operations, to clean these guys up. Most of the time, they’re on the move. I know in the Badia desert, south of the Euphrates, and we’re very worried about that. We’ve taken certain actions that I can’t get into, against them. They float around like desert nomads. They strike the Russians. They strike the regime. They strike the Iranians. They stay away from us because they know what’s going to happen.”

A ‘progressive’ Israeli commentator, in a separate article, The progressive case for staying in Syria, for now, lauds how the “Pentagon and State Department have since been able to slow the pace of withdrawal of U.S. troops [that Trump wanted], and are looking for replacements from Coalition nations … Most importantly, perhaps, to progressives, this protection would prevent the grave human rights abuses that would otherwise await the millions of Syrians … [and additionally] Retreating from the northeast, would mean forfeiting U.S.-backed forces’ control of a third of Syria’s territory and 80% of its natural resources, eliminating what little leverage America has left in shaping the post-war landscape. The Assad regime, even at its weakest point, was unwilling to seriously negotiate with the opposition. Now that it feels confident and victorious, it is much less likely to accede to any Western demands to reform; or step down.” [Emphasis through-out has been added].

Scruton’s points about the ‘internationalists’ contingent loss of any sense of empathy and beauty – amidst the ugliness, and the de-cultured, drabness of our physical (and intellectual) environment – are evident in these excerpts on US policy: We are indeed living a strange de-humanised time, when it is desirable, according to Enlightenment rationality, to discard any attempt at (‘irrational’) empathy, or understanding, for the Syrian circumstance. And to consider the policy solution simply to be either technical (more, or different firepower); or mechanics: how and where, to move the levers of pressure.

And, secondly, to consider it ‘progressive’ to deny a stricken people (ordinary Syrians) the ability to go home, or to re-build their lives – and to deprive them of the chance still to think that there is something left to live for (unless they concede to submit to the Washington Consensus). And yet, still to regard this abstract ideological approach as somehow representing Europe holding the moral high ground? No wonder ‘otherness’ is tired of the Enlightenment’s ‘rational’ ‘order’.

To compensate for these lacunae associated with its attenuated style of consciousness, the US is resorting to technology and Artificial Intelligence to make good the gaps. It imagines that mining ‘big data’ – as is done in western elections, when 25 ‘likes’ on Facebook is said to be sufficient, to strip an individual politically ‘naked’ – might somehow compensate for the absence of empathy — providing the answers that this style of ‘reasoning’ can’t.

It is wishful thinking. Empathy is not machine generated. As Scruton points out, it derives from the aggregate course of individual lives pursued within the matrix of archetypal moral narratives that are the ancient skeleton to a community – which both bind it, and give ethos to that community. And which precisely are incommensurate with others.

With the US decision to end the eight waivers issued in respect to the import of oil and gas from Iran on 2 May, the Trump Administration effectively is taking its first steps along the path of undeclared war on Iran: An attempt to break the morale of the Iranian people (by pushing a greater proportion of the population towards absolute poverty), and to acquiesce to terms (Pompeo’s 12 conditions), which would amount to abject (and improbable) Iranian capitulation. It is a narrow path, bordered on all sides by lurking unforeseen, unforeseeable disasters – thorny thickets, in which Bolton and Pompeo may well find themselves painfully entangled. Will these steps then inevitably lead to grave escalation? They might; but also, Iran knows that if it can wriggle around these formidable impediments, and still remain standing, then Iran will stand victorious. To survive is to win. To survive will turn from Iran’s to America’s hurt.

Why should they take these steps? Why take the risk? All American foreign policy ultimately is domestic politics. Vice-President Pence at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year lauded Trump’s hard-nosed, shoot-from-the-hip decision-making. He commended ‘tough government’ as a quality that the EU too should try to emulate. This clearly will be the Trump platform for 2020: ‘I am the man who makes tough decisions and who then just ‘does it’’. The entrepreneur translated into politics.

But this is not what US Iran policy is about. It may be true that Washington is disappointed that its pressures on Iran, so far, have achieved no results – in terms of changing the Iranian polity. But this waiver declaration is more about attending to Trump’s Evangelical base. It is a particularly loyal base which wholly concurs with the Israeli Right that Revolutionary Iran stands as an impediment to the coming into being of the prophesied ‘Greater Israel’ – and concomitantly, with the return of the Messiah. This ‘base’ (25% of Americans profess Evangelism), has turned a collective blind eye to all Trump’s moral failings, and totally disdained the Russiagate allegations. Unmoved by either, they just have come to believe that Trump is the amoral, secular, flawed – yet somehow ‘chosen’ – instrument who can lead Christians in the Cosmic war of good versus evil – with Iran cast as the cosmic evil. And, behind in the shadows, lies ring-master, Sheldon Adelson and his billions, fusing together the (non-Evangelical) Bolton to Netanyahu’s Greater Israel project with the whole sitting atop Trump’s extraordinary loyal Evangelical base on which his continuance in office beyond 2020 may one day hang. The point here, is that this base is pressing for progress towards Rapture; the Bolton neoconservative base is pressing to settle old scores with Revolutionary Iran; the Israeli Right is pressing to take advantage of the ‘serendipidity’ of the Trump Presidency – and Trump wants to project his political muscularity as a campaign platform.

The most dense thicket into which the hikers may stumble is that by ending waivers for the major current importers of some one million barrels per day of Iranian oil – with China taking some half million, and India and Turkey most of the balance – the US is setting itself up for very troubled bilateral relations with key states: states with whom the US already has tense and finely balanced relations. India may cave to US pressure; but will China and Turkey? Iran says that it has other buyers waiting in the wings as well.

What will the US do if China ignores sanctions? Under the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, non-US ‘significant’ transactions with the Iranian Central Bank are sanctionable (US transactions are criminal). The point here is that it is the Iranian Central Bank that is the receiver of all oil and gas monetary proceeds. Will the US attempt to sanction China’s Central bank? Or, will it look the other way as China sets up non-dollar work-arounds that defy US sanctions? How will that mesh with US-China Trade negotiations? How will these issues too, play out in America’s bilateral relations with Turkey and India?

In fact, the issues go wider: Iran is the pivot to both Russia’s energy heartland strategy and China’s Belt and Road initiative. Why should these states quietly acquiesce as Washington tries to knock-out the ‘key stone’ to their economic architecture? China needs security of energy supply, and is acutely aware of its vulnerability to naval blockade via the Malacca Strait. Russia and China jointly have just stuck a small, yet psychologically significant, spanner into the US’s Venezuela regime-change project, as if to say, ‘We have had enough of these US games’. It is hard to imagine then that they would let the strategic prize of Iran be cast down by similar forces of chaos. We shall have to see.

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Though the waivers are declared by Pompeo to be ‘over’ and ‘no more’, in fact it is the structure of economic attrition that is mutating. Instead of ‘waivers’ that are publicly announced, and specific, the State Department is adopting a new form of economic warfare: They will henceforth only issue licences. Each will be issued only on an individual, application-by-application basis. There will be no framework to permissions, no guidance; only by making the application will the applicant know whether it will be granted – or not. The outcomes will not be made public.

It is the full weaponsiation of ambiguity – and recall that the following sanctions still apply to Iran: All US laws regarding sanctions on Iran permit national security waivers, usually temporary; some laws allow permanent exemptions, and of course the US President can modify any executive order. During President Trump’s term, the State Department appears to have granted waivers for the following sanctions:

• The Iran Freedom and Counter-Proliferation Act of 2012, specifically sections 1244 (covering energy, shipping, shipbuilding, and ports), 1245 (adding specially designated nationals and any sector of Iran’s economy determined to be “controlled directly or indirectly by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps”), 1246 (“nuclear, military, or ballistic missile” items and precious metals), and 1247 (insurance for the previously cited activities). These sanctions can be waived for up to 180 days.
• The Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act of 2012, sections 212(a) (covering insurance for Iranian oil shipments) and 213(a) (government borrowing), which can be waived for up to 180 days.
• The Iran Sanctions Act of 1996, section 5(a) (covering oil and gas investment), which can be waived for up to 180 days.
• The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2012, section 1245(d)(1) (covering foreign banks involved with Iran’s oil trade), which can be waived for up to 120 days.

With the move away from ‘waivers’ to unpublicized, specific ‘licences’, the US effectively sets itself up as the global trade governance, arbitrating on a truly wide range of trade – if one includes all the Russia sanctions, CAATSA legislation and entire cosmos of US global sanctions. Henceforth, the US Treasury will increasingly sculpt global trade toward US interests, in the dark, and with no public announcement. It seems hard to see how major trading nations can passively acquiesce to such a ‘sanctions architecture’. China, in particular, must be expecting that it will, one day, be an US sanctions target (beyond Iran).

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What is at stake precisely for the EU, is whether it can succeed to slow down, and curb in every way, the emergence of this process of cultural re-sovereigntisation, which of course, threatens to fragment the EU’s vaunted ‘solidarity’, and to fragment its matrix of a perfectly regulated customs union and common trade area.

It was Carl Schmitt – the political philosopher – however, who warned strongly against the possibility of what he called a negative katechon accelerator. This would seem to apply – exactly – to the situation in which the EU presently finds itself. This was a notion, held by the ancients, that historical events often have a ‘backstage’ contrarian dimension – that is to say that some given ‘intent’ or action (by say, the EU), may end upaccelerating precisely those processes which it was meant to slow down or to halt. For Schmitt, this explained the paradox through which a ‘braking action’ (such as the one being undertaken by the EU) may actually reverse itself, in an unwanted acceleration of the very processes the EU intends to oppose. Schmitt called this an ‘involuntary’ effect, since it produced effects opposed to the original intent. For the ancients, it simply reminded them that we humans often are merely history’s objects, rather than its causal subjects.

It is possible that the ‘braking action’ imposed on Greece, on Britain, on Hungary – and now on Italy – may precisely slide towards Schmitt’s Katechon. Italy has lingered in economic limbo for decades: Its new government feels obliged to relieve, in some way, the accumulated economic stresses of past years, and to try to re-kindle growth. But the state has a high level of debt to GDP, and the EU insists that Italy must endure the consequences: it must obey ‘the rules’.

Professor Michael Hudson (in a new book) explains how the EU’s ‘braking action’ in respect to Italian debt, represents a certain European strand of psychic rigidity that totally ignores historical experience, and may precisely result in Katechon: the opposite of what is intended. Interviewed by John Siman, Hudson says:

“In ancient Mesopotamian societies, it was understood that freedom was preserved by protecting debtors. A corrective model actually existed and flourished in the economic functioning of Mesopotamian societies, during the third and second millennia B.C. It can be termed the Clean Slate amnesty … It consisted of the necessary and periodic erasure of the debts of small farmers — necessary because such farmers are, in any society in which interest on loans is calculated, inevitably subject to being impoverished, then stripped of their property. and finally reduced to servitude … by their creditors.

In his autobiography, Carl Jung tells of “a moment of unusual clarity”, during which he had a strange dialogue with something inside him: In what myth does man live nowadays, his inner-self enquired? “In the Christian myth: Do you live in it?” (Jung asked of himself. And to be honest with himself, the answer that he gave was ‘no’): “For me, it is not what I live by.” Then do we no longer have any myth, asked his inner-self? “No”, Jung replied, “evidently not”. Then what is it, by which you live, his inner-self demanded? “At this point the dialogue with myself, became uncomfortable. I stopped thinking. I had reached a dead end”, Jung concluded.

Many today, feel similarly. They feel the void. The post-war era – perhaps it is the European Enlightenment phenomenon, itself – that has run its course, people believe. Some regret it; many more are disturbed by it – and wonder what is next.

We live in a moment of the waning of two major projects: the decline of revealed religion, and – simultaneously – of the discrediting of the experience of secular Utopia. We live in a world littered with the debris of utopian projects which – though they were framed in secular terms, that denied the truth of religion – were in fact, vehicles for religious myth.

The Jacobin revolutionaries launched the Terror as a violent retribution for élite repression — inspired by Rousseau’s Enlightenment humanism; the Trotskyite Bolsheviks murdered millions in the name of reforming humanity through Scientific Empiricism; the Nazis did similar, in the name of pursuing ‘Scientific (Darwinian) Racism’.

The American millenarian ‘myth’, then and now, was (and is), rooted in the fervent belief in the Manifest Destiny of the United States, and is, in the last resort, nothing other than one particular example in a long line of attempts to force a shattering discontinuity in history (through which human society would then subsequently, be re-made).

In other words, all these utopian projects – all these successors to apocalyptic Judaic and Christian myth – saw a collective humankind pursuing its itinerary to a point of convergence, and to some sort of End Time (or End to History).

Well … we do not live these myths now: Even secular utopia will no longer ‘do’. It will not fill the void. The optimistic certitudes connected with the idea of linear ‘progress’ have become particularly discredited. So, by what will we live? This is no esoteric debate. These are questions of history, and destiny.

The élites decry anything ‘alt’ – as ‘populism’ or ‘illiberalism’. Yet they decline to see what is before them: Certain values are emerging. What are they? And from where do they come? And how might they change our World?

These supposedly empirically-arrived-at certitudes – seated now in the human ego – triggered a re-awakening precisely to those early Judeo-Christian, apocalyptic notions: That history, somehow, was on a convergent course towards some human transformation, and an ‘End’, with fearful retribution for the corrupt, and a radically, redeemed, new world, for the elect. No longer (in today’s world), triggered through an act of God, but ‘engineered’ by the act of Enlightenment man.

World redemption from its state of corruption was to be brought into being through Enlightenment principles of rationality and science. Peace was expected to ensue, after the End Time.

These millenarian revolutionaries – exponents of the new Scientism, who hoped to force a shattering discontinuity in history (through which the flaws of human society would be excised from the body politic) – were, in the last resort, nothing other than secular representatives of the apocalyptic Judaic and Christian myth.

The American millenarian ‘myth’, then and now, was (and is), rooted in the fervent belief in the Manifest Destiny of the United States, ‘the New Jerusalem’, to represent humanity’s best hope for a utopian future. This belief in a special destiny has been reflected in a conviction that the United States must lead – or more properly, has the duty to coerce – mankind toward that future.

Some might argue, however, that early Enlightenment ‘liberal’ humanism, with its ‘good intentions’, has no connection to Jacobinism or Trotskyite Bolshevism. But, in practice, both are crucially similar: They are secular versions of progress towards a utopian, redemption of a flawed humanity: One strand aims to reclaim humanity through the revolutionary destruction of the irredeemable parts of society. And the other strand roots its redemption in a teleological process of ‘melting’ away cultural identity. It also seeks to weaken the sense of linkage through shared ‘blood’ and territory (place) – in order to create a tabula rasa on which a new homogenised non-national, cosmopolitan identity can be writ, that will be both peaceful and democratic.

The aim is a global, cosmopolitan society disembarrassed of religion, national culture and community, gender and social class. Processes of toleration that, formerly, were construed as essential to freedom have undergone an Orwellian metamorphosis to emerge as their antonyms: as instruments, rather, of repression. Any national leader standing against this project, any contrary national culture, or national pride displayed in a nation’s achievements, plainly constitutes an obstacle to this prospective universal realm – and must be destroyed. In other words, today’s millenarians may eschew the guillotine, but they are explicitly coercive – albeit, in a different manner – through the progressive ‘capture’ of narrative, and of state institutions.

In short, a global space is being sought that would recognise only an international global humanity — much as the Trotskyites wanted.