There’s an old saying, “Fool around and find out.” On November 19, Ukraine fired six US-made missiles at a target located on Russian soil. On November 20, Ukraine fired up to a dozen British-made Storm Shadow cruise missiles against a target on Russian soil. On November 21, Russia fired a new intermediate-range missile against a target of Ukrainian soil.

Ukraine and its American and British allies fooled around.

And now they have found out: if you attack Mother Russia, you will pay a heavy price.

In the early morning hours of November 21, Russia launched a missile which struck the Yuzmash factory in the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk. Hours after this missile, which was fired from the Russian missile test range in Kapustin Yar, struck its target, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared on Russian television, where he announced that the missile fired by Russia, which both the media and western intelligence had classified as an experimental modification of the RS-26 missile, which had been mothballed by Russia in 2017, was, in fact, a completely new weapon known as the “Oreshnik,” which in Russian means “hazelnut.” Putin noted that the missile was still in its testing phase, and that the combat launch against Ukraine was part of the test, which was, in his words, “successful.”

Russian President Putin announces the launching of the Oreshnik missile in a live television address

Putin declared that the missile, which flew to its target at more than ten times the speed of sound, was invincible. “Modern air defense systems that exist in the world, and anti-missile defenses created by the Americans in Europe, can’t intercept such missiles,” Putin said.

Putin said the Oreshnik was developed in response to the planned deployment by the United States of the Dark Eagle hypersonic missile, itself an intermediate-range missile. The Oreshnik was designed to “mirror” US and NATO capabilities.

The next day, November 22, Putin met with the Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Missile Forces, Sergey Karakayev, where it was announced that the Oreshnik missile would immediately enter serial production. According to General Karakayev, the Oreshnik, when deployed, could strike any target in Europe without fear of being intercepted. According to Karakayev, the Oreshnik missile system expanded the combat capabilities of the Russian Strategic Missile Forces to destroy various types of targets in accordance with their assigned tasks, both in non-nuclear and nuclear warheads. The high operational readiness of the system, Karakayev said, allows for retargeting and destroying any designated target in the shortest possible time.

Scott will discuss this article and answer audience questions on Ep. 215 of _Ask The Inspector

“Missiles will speak for themselves”

The circumstances which led Russia to fire, what can only be described as a strategic weapons system against Ukraine, unfolded over the course of the past three months. On September 6, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin traveled to Ramstein, Germany, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who pressed upon Lloyd the importance of the US granting Ukraine permission to use the US-made Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) missile on targets located inside the pre-2014 borders of Russia (these weapons had been previously used by Ukraine against territory claimed by Russia, but which is considered under dispute—Crimea, Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Lugansk). Zelensky also made the case for US concurrence regarding similar permissions to be granted regarding the British-made Storm Shadow cruise missile.

Ukraine was in possession of these weapons and had made use of them against the Russian territories in dispute. Other than garnering a few headlines, these weapons had virtually zero discernable impact on the battlefield, where Russian forces were prevailing in battle against stubborn Ukrainian defenders.

Secretary Austin listened while Zelensky made his case for the greenlight to use ATACMS and Storm Shadow against Russian targets. “We need to have this long-range capability, not only on the divided territory of Ukraine but also on Russian territory so that Russia is motivated to seek peace,” Zelensky argued, adding that, “We need to make Russian cities and even Russian soldiers think about what they need: peace or Putin.”

Austin rejected the Ukrainian President’s request, noting that no single military weapon would be decisive in the ongoing fighting between Ukraine and Russia, emphasizing that the use of US and British weapons to attack targets inside Russia would only increase the chances for escalating the conflict, bringing a nuclear-armed Russia into direct combat against NATO forces.

On September 11, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, accompanied by British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, traveled to the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, where Zelensky once again pressured both men regarding permission to use ATACMS and Storm Shadow on targets inside Russia. Both men demurred, leaving the matter for a meeting scheduled between US President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Kier Starmer, on Friday, September 13.

The next day, September 12, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke to the press in Saint Petersburg, Russia, where he addressed the question of the potential use by Ukraine of US- and British-made weapons. “This will mean that NATO countries – the United States and European countries – are at war with Russia,” Putin said. “And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”

President Biden took heed of the Russian President’s words, and despite being pressured by Prime Minister Starmer to greenlight the use of ATACMS and Storm Shadow by Ukraine, opted to continue the US policy of prohibiting such actions.

And there things stood, until November 18, when President Biden, responding to reports that North Korea had dispatched thousands of troops to Russia to join in the fighting against Ukrainian forces, reversed course, allowing US-provided intelligence to be converted into data used to guide both the ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles to their targets. These targets had been provided by Zelensky to the US back in September, when the Ukrainian President visited Biden at the White House. Zelensky had made striking these targets with ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles a key part of his so-called “victory plan.”

After the approval had been given by the US, Zelensky spoke to the press. “Today, there is a lot of talk in the media about us receiving a permit for respective actions,” he said. “Hits are not made with words. Such things don’t need announcements. Missiles will speak for themselves.”

The next day, November 19, Ukraine fired six ATACMS against targets near the Russian city of Bryansk. The day after—November 20—Ukraine fired Storm Shadow missiles against a Russian command post in the Kursk province of Russia.

The Ukrainian missiles had spoken.

The Russian response

Shortly after the Storm Shadow attacks on Kursk occurred, Ukrainian social media accounts began reporting that Ukrainian intelligence had determined that the Russians were preparing an RS-26 Rubezh missile for launch against Ukrain[

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Trident D5 missile launch from an Ohio-class submarine
e. These reports suggested that the intelligence came from US-provided warnings, including imagery, as well as intercepted radio communications from the Kapustin Yar missile test facility, located east of the Russian city of Astrakhan.

Test launch of an RS-26 missile

The RS-26 was a missile that, depending on its payload configuration, could either be classified as an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM, meaning it could reach ranges of over 5,500 kilometers) or an intermediate-range missile (IRBM, meaning it could fly between 1,000 and 3,000 kilometers). Given that the missile was developed and tested from 2012-2016, this meant the RS-26 would either be declared as an ICBM and be counted as part of the New Start Treaty, or as an IRBM, and as such be prohibited by the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The INF Treaty had been in force since July 1988 and had successfully mandated the elimination of an entire category of nuclear-armed weapons deemed to be among the most destabilizing in the world.

In 2017, the Russian government decided to halt the further development of the RS-26 given the complexities brought on by the competing arms control restrictions.

In 2019, then-President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the INF Treaty. The US immediately began testing intermediate-range cruise missiles and announced its intention to develop a new family of hypersonic intermediate range missiles known as Dark Eagle.

Despite this provocation, the Russian government announced a unilateral moratorium of producing and deploying IRBMs, declaring that this moratorium would remain in place until the US or NATO deployed an IRBM on European soil.

In September 2023, the US deployed a new containerized missile launch system capable of firing the Tomahawk cruise missile to Denmark as part of a NATO training exercise. The US withdrew the launcher from Denmark upon conclusion of the training.

In late June 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would resume production of intermediate-range missiles, citing the US deployment of intermediate-range missiles to Denmark. “We need to start production of these strike systems and then, based on the actual situation, make decisions about where — if necessary to ensure our safety — to place them,” Putin said.

At that time the western media speculated about the mothballed RS-26 being brought back into production.

When Ukraine announced that it had detected an RS-26 being prepared for launch on November 20, many observers (including me) accepted this possibility, given the June announcement by President Putin and the associated speculation. As such, when on the night on November 21, the Ukrainians announced that an RS-26 missile had been launched from Kapustin Yar against a missile production facility in the city of Dnipropetrovsk, these reports were taken at face value.

As it turned out, we were all wrong.

Ukrainian intelligence, after examining missile debris from the attack, seems to support this assertion. Whereas the RS-26 was a derivative of the SS-27M ICBM, making use of its first and second stages, the Orezhnik, according to the Ukrainians, made use of the first and second stages of the new “Kedr” (Cedar) ICBM, which is in the early stages of development. Moreover, the weapons delivery system appears to be taken from the newly developed Yars-M, which uses independent post-boost vehicles, or IPBVs, known in Russian as blok individualnogo razvedeniya (BIR), instead of traditional multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles, or MIRVs.

In the classic weapons configuration for a modern Russian missile, the final stage of the missile, also known as the post-boost vehicle (PBV or bus), contains all the MIRVs. Once the missile exits the earth’s atmosphere, the PBV detaches from the missile body, and then independently maneuvers, releasing each warhead at the required point for it to reach its intended target. Since the MIRVs are all attached to the same PBV, the warheads are released over targets that are on a relatively linear path, limiting the area that can be targeted.

A missile using an IPBV configuration, however, can release each reentry vehicle at the same time, allowing each warhead to follow an independent trajectory to its target. This allows for greater flexibility and accuracy.

The Oreshnik was designed to carry between four and six IPBVs. The one used against Dnipropetrovsk was a six IPBV-capable system. Each war head in turn contained six separate submunitions, consisting of metal slugs forged from exotic alloys that enabled them to maintain their form during the extreme heat generated by hypersonic re-entry speeds. These slugs are not explosive; rather they use the combined effects of the kinetic impact at high speed and the extreme heat absorbed by the exotic alloy to destroy their intended target on impact.

Oreshnik missile impact on the Dnipropetrovsk military industrial complex

The military industrial target struck by the Oreshnik was hit by six independent warheads, each containing six submunitions. In all, the Dnipropetrovsk facility was struck be 36 separate munitions, inflicting devastating damage, including to underground production facilities used by Ukraine and its NATO allies to produce short- and intermediate-range missiles.

These facilities were destroyed.

The Russians had spoken as well.

Back to the future

If history is the judge, the Oreshnik will likely mirror in terms of operational concept a Soviet-era missile, the Skorost, which was developed beginning in 1982 to counter the planned deployment by the United States of the Pershing II intermediate-range ballistic missile to West Germany. The Skorost was, like the Oreshnik, an amalgam of technologies from missiles under development at the time, including an advanced version of the SS-20 IRBM, the yet-to-be deployed SS-25 ICBM, and the still under development SS-27. The result was a road-mobile two-stage missile which could carry either a conventional or nuclear payload that used a six-axle transporter-erector-launcher, or TEL (both the RS-26 and the Oreshnik likewise use a six-axle TEL).

In 1984, as the Skorost neared completion, the Soviet Strategic Missile Forces conducted exercises where SS-20 units practiced the tactics that would be used by the Skorost equipped forces. A total of three regiments of Skorost missiles were planned to be formed, comprising a total of 36 launchers and over 100 missiles. Bases for these units were constructed in 1985.

The Skorost missile and launcher

The Skorost was never deployed; production stopped in March 1987 as the Soviet Union prepared for the realities of the INF Treaty, which would have banned the Skorost system.

The history of the Skorost is important because the operational requirements for the system—to mirror the Pershing II missiles and quickly strike them in time of war—is the same mission given to the Oreshnik missile, with the Dark Eagle replacing the Pershing II.

But the Oreshnik can also strike other targets, including logistic facilities, command and control facilities, air defense facilities (indeed, the Russians just put the new Mk. 41 Aegis Ashore anti-ballistic missile defense facility that was activated on Polish soil on the Oreshnik’s target list).

In short, the Oreshnik is a game-changer in every way. In his November 21 remarks, Putin chided the United States, noting that the decision by President Trump in 2019 to withdraw from the INF Treaty was foolish, made even more so by the looming deployment of the Oreshnik missile, which would have been banned under the treaty.

On November 22, Putin announced that the Oreshnik was to enter serial production. He also noted that the Russians already had a significant stockpile of Oreshnik missiles that would enable Russia to respond to any new provocations by Ukraine and its western allies, thereby dismissing the assessments of western intelligence which held that, as an experimental system, the Russians did not have the ability to repeat attacks such as the one that took place on November 21.

As a conventionally armed weapon, the Oreshnik provides Russia with the means to strike strategic targets without resorting to the use of nuclear weapons. This means that if Russia were to decide to strike NATO targets because of any future Ukrainian provocation (or a direct provocation by NATO), it can do so without resorting to nuclear weapons.

Ready for a nuclear exchange

Complicating an already complicated situation is the fact that while the US and NATO try to wrestle with the re-emergence of a Russian intermediate-range missile threat that mirrors that of the SS-20, the appearance of which in the 1970’s threw the Americans and their European allies into a state of panic, Russia has, in response to the very actions which prompted the reemergence of INF weapons in Europe, issued a new nuclear doctrine which lowers the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons by Russia.

The original nuclear deterrence doctrine was published by Russia in 2020. In September 2024, responding to the debate taking place within the US and NATO about authorizing Ukraine to use US- and British-made missiles to attack targets on Russian soil, President Putin instructed his national security council to propose revisions to the 2020 doctrine based upon new realities.

The revamped document was signed into law by Putin on November 19, the same day that Ukraine fired six US-made ATACMS missiles against targets on Russian soil.

After announcing the adoption of the new nuclear doctrine, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov was asked by reporters if a Ukrainian attack on Russia using ATACMS missiles could potentially trigger a nuclear response. Peskov noted that the doctrine’s provision allows the use of nuclear weapons in response to a conventional strike that raises critical threats for Russia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Peskov also noted that the doctrine’s new language holds that an attack by any country supported by a nuclear power would constitute a joint aggression against Russia that triggers the use of nuclear weapons by Russia in response.

Shortly after the new Russian doctrine was made public, Ukraine attacked the territory of Russia using ATACMS missiles.

The next day Ukraine attacked the territory of Russia using Storm Shadow missiles.

Under Russia’s new nuclear doctrine, these attacks could trigger a Russian nuclear response.

The new Russian nuclear doctrine emphasizes that nuclear weapons are “a means of deterrence,” and that their use by Russia would only be as an “extreme and compelled measure.” Russia, the doctrine states, “takes all necessary efforts to reduce the nuclear threat and prevent aggravation of interstate relations that could trigger military conflicts, including nuclear ones.”

Nuclear deterrence, the doctrine declares, is aimed at safeguarding the “sovereignty and territorial integrity of the state,” deterring a potential aggressor, or “in case of a military conflict, preventing an escalation of hostilities and stopping them on conditions acceptable for the Russian Federation.”

Russia has decided not to invoke its nuclear doctrine at this juncture, opting instead to inject the operational use of the new Oreshnik missile as an intermediate non-nuclear deterrence measure.

The issue at this juncture is whether the United States and its allies are cognizant of the danger their precipitous actions in authorizing Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil have caused.

The answer, unfortunately, appears to be “probably not.”

Rear Admiral Thomas Buchanan

Exhibit A in this regard are comments made by Rear Admiral Thomas Buchanan, the Director of Plans and Policy at the J5 (Strategy, Plans and Policy) for US Strategic Command, the unified combatant command responsible for deterring strategic attack (i.e., nuclear war) through a safe, secure, effective, and credible global combat capability and, when directed, to be ready to prevail in conflict. On November 20, Admiral Buchanan was the keynote speaker at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Project on Nuclear Issues conference in Washington, DC, where he drew upon his experience as the person responsible for turning presidential guidance into preparing and executing the nuclear war plans of the United States.

The host of the event drew upon Admiral Buchanan’s résumé when introducing him to the crowd, a tact which, on the surface, projected a sense of confidence in the nuclear warfighting establishment of the United States. The host also noted that it was fortuitous that Admiral Thomas would be speaking a day after Russia announced its new nuclear doctrine.

But when Admiral Buchanan began talking, such perceptions were quickly swept away by the reality that those responsible for the planning and implementation of America’s nuclear war doctrine were utterly clueless about what it is they are being called upon to do.

When speaking about America’s plans for nuclear war, Admiral Buchanan stated that “our plans are sufficient in terms of the actions they seek to hold the adversary to, and we are in a study of sufficiency,” noting that “the current program of record is sufficient today but may not be sufficient for the future.” He went on to articulate that this study “is underway now and will work well into the next administration, and we look forward to continuing that work and articulating how the future program could help provide the President additional options should he need them.”

In short, America’s nuclear war plans are nonsensical, which is apt, given the nonsensical reality of nuclear war.

Admiral Buchanan’s remarks are shaped by his world view which, in the case of Russia, is influenced by a NATO-centric interpretation of Russian actions and intent that is divorced from reality. “President Putin,” Admiral Buchanan declared, “has demonstrated a growing willingness to employ nuclear rhetoric to coerce the United States and our NATO allies to accept his attempt to change borders and rewrite history. This week, notwithstanding, was another one of those efforts.”

Putin, Buchanan continued, “has validated and updated his doctrine such that Russia has revised it to include the provision that nuclear retaliation against non-nuclear states would be considered if the state that supported it was supported by a nuclear state. This has serious implications for Ukraine and our NATO allies.”

Left unsaid was the fact that the current crisis over Ukraine is linked to a NATO strategy that sought to expand NATO’s boundaries up to the border of Russia despite assurances having been made that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” Likewise, Buchanan was mute on the stated objective of the administration of President Biden to use the conflict in Ukraine as a proxy war designed to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia.

Seen in this light, Russia’s nuclear doctrine goes from being a tool of intimidation, as articulated by Admiral Buchanan, to a tool of deterrence—mirroring the stated intent of America’s nuclear posture, but with much more clarity and purpose.

Admiral Buchanan did couch his comments by declaring from the start that, when it comes to nuclear war, “there is no winning here. Nobody wins. You know, the US is signed up to that language. Nuclear war cannot be won, must never be fought, et cetera.”

When asked about the concept of “winning” a nuclear war, Buchanan replied that “it’s certainly complex, because we go down a lot of different avenues to talk about what is the condition of the United States in a post-nuclear exchange environment. And that is a place that’s a place we’d like to avoid, right? And so when we talk about non-nuclear and nuclear capabilities, we certainly don’t want to have an exchange, right?”

Right.

It would have been best if he had just stopped here. But Admiral Buchanan continued.

“I think everybody would agree if we have to have an exchange, then we want to do it in terms that are most acceptable to the United States. So it’s terms that are most acceptable to the United States that puts us in a position to continue to lead the world, right? So we're largely viewed as the world leader. And do we lead the world in an area where we’ve considered loss? The answer is no, right? And so it would be to a point where we would maintain sufficient – we’d have to have sufficient capability. We’d have to have reserve capacity. You wouldn’t expend all of your resources to gain winning, right? Because then you have nothing to deter from at that point.”

Two things emerge from this statement. First is the notion that the United States believes it can fight and win a nuclear “exchange” with Russia.

Second is the idea that the United States can win a nuclear war with Russia while retaining enough strategic nuclear capacity to deter the rest of the world from engaging in a nuclear war after the nuclear war with Russia is done.

To “win” a nuclear war with Russia implies the United States has a war-winning plan.

Admiral Buchanan is the person in charge of preparing these plans. He has stated that these plans “are sufficient in terms of the actions they seek to hold the adversary to,” but this clearly is not the case—the United States has failed to deter Russia from issuing a new nuclear war doctrine and from employing in combat for the first time in history a strategic nuclear capable ballistic missile.

His plans have failed.

And he admits that “the current program of record is sufficient today but may not be sufficient for the future.”

Meaning we have no adequate plan for the future.

But we do have a plan.

One that is intended to produce a “victory” in a nuclear war Buchanan admits cannot be won and should never be fought.

One that will allow the United States to retain sufficient nuclear weapons in its arsenal to continue to “be a world leader” by sustaining its doctrine of nuclear deterrence.

A doctrine which, if the United States ever does engage in a “nuclear exchange” with Russia, would have failed.

There is only one scenario in which the United States could imagine a nuclear “exchange” with Russia which allows it to retain a meaningful nuclear weapons arsenal capable of continued deterrence.

And that scenario involves a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Russia’s strategic nuclear forces designed to eliminate most of Russia’s nuclear weapons.

Such an attack can only be carried out by the Trident missiles carried aboard the Ohio-class submarines of the United States Navy.

Hold that thought.

Russia is on record as saying that the use of ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles by Ukraine on targets inside Russia is enough to trigger the use of nuclear weapons in retaliation under its new nuclear doctrine.

At the time of this writing, the United States and Great Britain are in discussions with Ukraine about the possibility of authorizing new attacks on Russia using the ATACMS and Storm Shadow.

France just authorized Ukraine to use the French-made SCALP missile (a cousin to the Storm Shadow) against targets inside Russia.

And there are reports that the United States Navy has just announced that it is increasing the operational readiness status of its deployed Ohio-class submarines.

It is high time for everyone, from every walk of life, to understand the path we are currently on. Left unchecked, events are propelling us down a highway to hell that leads to only one destination—a nuclear Armageddon that everyone agrees can’t be won, and yet the United States is, at this very moment, preparing to “win.”

A nuclear “exchange” with Russia, even if the United States were able to execute a surprise preemptive nuclear strike, would result in the destruction of dozens of American cities and the deaths of more than a hundred million Americans.

And this is if we “win.”

And we know that we can’t “win” a nuclear war.

And yet we are actively preparing to fight one.

This insanity must stop.

Now.

The United States just held an election where the winning candidate, President-elect Donald Trump, campaigned on a platform which sought to end the war in Ukraine and avoid a nuclear war with Russia.

And yet the administration of President Joe Biden has embarked on a policy direction which seeks to expand the conflict in Ukraine and is bringing the United States to the very brink of a nuclear war with Russia.

This is a direct affront to the notion of American democracy.

By ignoring the stated will of the people of the United States as manifested through their votes in an election where the very issue of war and peace were front and center in the campaign, is an affront to democracy.

We the people of the United States must not allow this insane rush to war to continue.

We must put the Biden administration on notice that we are opposed to any expansion of the conflict in Ukraine which brings with it the possibility of escalation that leads to a nuclear war with Russia.

And we must implore the incoming Trump administration to speak out in opposition to this mad rush toward nuclear annihilation by restating publicly its position of the war in Ukraine and nuclear war with Russia—that the war must end now, and that there can be no nuclear war with Russia triggered by the war in Ukraine.

We need to say “no” to nuclear war.

I am working with other like-minded people to hold a rally in Washington, DC on the weekend of December 7-8 to say no to nuclear war.

I am encouraging American[

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Trident D5 missile launch from an Ohio-class submarine
s from all walks of life, all political persuasions, all social classes, to join and lend their voices to this cause.

Watch this space for more information about this rally.

All our lives depend on it.

I’ve written a number of times now about the unreality with which the West habitually approaches the continuing crisis in and around Ukraine, and the almost clinical dissociation from the real world that it displays in its words and its actions. Yet as the situation deteriorates and Russian forces move forward everywhere, there is no real sign that the West is becoming more reality-based in its understanding, and every probability that it will learn nothing, and continue to live in its constructed alternative reality until it is dragged out forcibly.

True, some daring leading-edge thinkers in the West are starting to wonder about the need for negotiations, even if they are on the West’s terms. They have begun to accept that perhaps some of Ukraine’s 1991 territory will have to be considered lost, if only in the short term. Perhaps, they muse, there will be a Korean-style DMZ in place, guaranteed by neutral troops, until such time as Ukraine can be rebuilt to take the offensive again. And then they look at the map of Russian advances, and they look at the size and power of the two armies, and they look at the size and readiness of NATO forces and they fall into despair.

But actually, no: scrub that last sentence. They don’t look, and if they did, they wouldn’t really be able to understand what they were seeing anyway. The “debate” (if you can call it that) in the West largely excludes real life factors. It takes place at a high normative level, where certain facts and truths are simply assumed. Why that is so, and what its consequences are, is the subject of first part of this essay, and then because these subjects are inherently complex, I go on to set out how to understand them as straightforwardly as possible.

We’ll start with some practical considerations of political sociology and psychology. The first is that politics is the classic example of the Sunk Costs phenomenon in action. The longer you continue with a course of action, no matter how stupid, the less willing you are to change it. Changing it will be interpreted as acknowledging error, and acknowledging error is the first stage in losing power. In this case the old defence (“personally I always had doubts…”) is just not going to wash, give the gratuitously psychopathic terms in which western leaders have expressed themselves about Russia.

The second is the absence of any articulated alternative. (“So, Prime Minister, what do you think we should do instead then?) The very fact of not understanding the dynamics of a crisis means that you are helpless to propose a sensible solution to it. It’s better to stay with a sinking ship in the hope of rescue than to jump blindly into the water. Maybe a miracle will happen.

The third is to do with group dynamics, in this case the dynamics of nations. In a situation of fear and uncertainty like the present, solidarity comes to be seen as an end in itself, and nobody wants to be accused of “weakening the West” or “strengthening Russia.” If you have to be wrong, best be wrong in the company of as many others as possible. There are enormous disincentives to being the first to suggest that maybe things are looking pretty bleak, and in any event what are you going to propose instead? The chances of thirty-odd nations being able to agree on a different approach to the present one are effectively zero, not helped by the fact that the United States, which might otherwise give a lead, is politically paralysed until perhaps the spring of next year.

The fourth is to do with isolation and groupthink. Everybody in your own government, everybody you speak to in other governments, every journalist and pundit that you come across says the same thing: Putin can’t win, Russia is taking massive casualties, we must rebuild Ukraine, Putin is scared of NATO blah blah. Everywhere you turn, you get the same messages, and your staff write the same messages for you to deliver to others. How could you not wind up assuming all this is true?

These are what we might call Permanently Operating Factors in politics, common to any crisis. But there are also a number of special factors operating in this particular crisis which seem obvious to me, but which I haven’t seen much discussion of. So let’s look at a few.

To begin with, the current generation of western politicians is especially incapable of understanding and managing high-level crises of any kind. The modern western political class—the Party as I call it—resembles more and more the ruling party in a one-party state. That is to say, the skills that lead to success are those of advancement in the Party apparatus itself: climbing the greasy pole and backstabbing rivals. Even managing a purely national crisis—as we saw during Brexit, or as we are seeing now in France and Germany—is actually beyond their abilities, except perhaps the ability to turn a crisis to their own personal political advantage. The result is that they are utterly overwhelmed by the Ukraine crisis, which is of a scale and a type that occurs perhaps once every couple of generations. The fact that it’s also a multilateral crisis means that it ideally requires advanced skills of political management just to ensure that things don’t fall apart, and they don’t even have those. In turn, the ever-increasing reliance on “advisers” linked to the personal fortunes of the politician concerned means both that professional advice is increasingly excluded, and also that professional advisers are often selected and promoted because they are willing to give the advice that politicians want.

So far, so generic. But we are also confronted here with a security crisis, and our political classes and their parasites are completely ignorant of how to deal with such crises, or even how to understand them. During the Cold War, governments were forced to confront security issues regularly: often, they were also domestic political issues. Security issues were also objectively important, as East and West glared at each other across a militarised border, with the possibility of nuclear annihilation never very far away. None of that is true now. NATO summits still happen of course, but until recently they have been concerned with peacekeeping deployments, counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan and the endless succession of new members and partnership initiatives. No fundamental security decisions of any kind have been needed in the political lifetime of any current head of a NATO (or EU) country, until now.

This is the more unfortunate because a security crisis is a highly complex thing, and involves a whole series of levels from the political down to the military/tactical. And a security crisis is just about impossible to manage multilaterally: the only remotely comparable example I can think off is the 1999 Kosovo crisis, when a much smaller NATO effectively stopped working after the first week, and came quite close to breaking down completely.

I’ve pointed out before that NATO has no strategy for Ukraine, and no real operational plan. It just has a series of ad hoc initiatives, glued together by vague aspirations unrelated to real life, and by the hope that something will turn up. In turn, this is because no individual NATO nation is in a better state: our current western political leadership has never had to develop these skills. But it’s actually worse than that: not having developed these skills, not having advisers who have developed these skills, they cannot actually understand what the Russians are doing and how and why they are doing it. Western leaders are like spectators who do not know the rules of Chess or Go trying to work out who is winning.

Now, western leaders are not themselves expected to be military experts. It’s common to sneer at Defence Ministers with no military background, but this is to misunderstand how defence works in a democracy, and for that matter how a democracy itself works. Let me put on my lecturer’s hat for a moment, and explain that.

Governments have policies at different levels. One of those policies will be a national security policy, which in turn is the basis for more detailed policies in subordinate areas: in this case, defence. Conventionally, these policies are managed by Ministries, headed by political figures or appointees, who have advisers, and in most cases operational organisations to turn policy into actual activity on the ground. In the case of the Education Ministry, the operational units are schools and universities. In the case of the Defence Ministry, they are the armed forces and the specialist defence establishments. You would no more expect a defence minister to be a former soldier than you would an education minister to be a former teacher or, for that matter, a transport minister to be a former train driver. The responsibility of a Minister is to make and apply policy within the larger government strategic framework, and to manage the budget and programme of their area.

So it’s the responsibility of the political leadership—normally including the head of state or government—to say what the strategic purpose of any military operation actually is, and to set out  a situation (the “end-state”) where this purpose will have been realised. If this is not done, military planning and operations are pointless, no matter how good your forces and how destructive your weaponry is, because you won’t actually know what you are trying to do, and so you won’t’ be able to tell whether you’ve done it. This, not lack of military knowledge, is the fundamental problem of western political leaderships today. Indeed, it would be better to call them “managerships,” because they have no aspiration to lead. They are just MBA-trained fiddlers and bodgers, for who the concept of a strategic goal in the true sense of the term is basically meaningless. Instead of actual strategic objectives, they have slogans and fantasy outcomes. It is, after all, obvious that the strategic objectives government sets have to be actually realisable, or there is no point in pursuing them. They must also be clear enough that they can be passed to the military for the military to make an operational plan to deliver the “end-state.” And in addition, the political leadership has to set out constraints and requirements within which the military have to work. Because western leaders and their advisers do not know how to do this, they cannot understand what the Russians are doing, either.

After that, of course, you need a politico-military layer that is capable of doing operational planning, and so answering a series of questions like: what military outcomes will deliver the political end-state? how do we get there? what forces will we need? how should they be structured and equipped? how do we cope with political imperatives and limitations? Whilst these questions are generic, and it can be argued that they apply even to peacekeeping operations, they obviously apply with more and more force as operations become larger and more demanding.

And this is the essential problem. The war in Ukraine involves forces which are an order of magnitude larger than those sent on operations by any western nation since 1945. Indeed, it can be argued that the only time that forces of comparable size have been deployed in Europe is between 1915 and 1918, and again in 1944-45. European armies certainly studied these campaigns at one time, but with the passing of time they became historical examples, not things to learn applicable lessons from. And the planning from about 1950 to 1990 was for a short, defensive war which would probably go nuclear. It’s questionable whether there is actually anything at all in recent western military history that would help today’s commanders really understand what they are seeing.

Nor do they have the recent professional experience. It’s become fashionable also to sneer at western military commanders, but in many ways that’s unfair. In peacetime, the role of senior military leaders is only partially to prepare for war. There are also a thousand other issues to do with budgets, programmes, personnel questions, contracts, the future size and shape of the military, and many others. Senior military figures need of be capable of understanding all these issues and dealing with political leaders, diplomats, civil servants and their opposite numbers in other governments, as well as with parliament and the media. It is obvious that in peacetime you are not going to select a Chief of the Army just for putative war-fighting skills, if that person is an abrasive individual who is always arguing with the Minister.

This is why it is almost universally the case that military commanders are replaced wholesale at the start of a war. Some commanders may turn out to be natural war-fighters and others will not. Widespread personnel changes are therefore common because the task is very different: we have seen this with the Russian Army since 2022. Likewise, a peacetime army as a whole takes time to adjust to being a war-fighting one. The problem western experts have is that they are watching this process from a distance, without going through it themselves. Armies that still only know peacetime modes of operation are trying to understand the activities of armies that have completely transitioned to war-fighting.

Finally, western military specialists are limited by their own experiences. Imagine you are the Chief of Operations in a medium-sized western country. You joined the military in the 1990s, when the last senior officers who had known the Cold War were retiring. Your actual experience has been on peacekeeping operations and a couple of deployments in Afghanistan. The largest unit you have ever commanded on operations is a Battalion (say 5-600 personnel) and the last time you actually came under fire, you were a Company commander. How can you be reasonably expected to grasp the mechanics and complexities of manoeuvring armies hundreds of thousands strong, along lines of contact hundreds of kilometres long, and understand what the commanders involved are doing, and how they think? You will unconsciously focus on the things you can understand, at the scale that you can understand them. You will inevitably concentrate on the detail—some tanks destroyed here, a new variant of artillery deployed there—rather than the big picture.

All this seems to me to explain several things, including the curiously episodic nature of Ukrainian initiatives. Some of these were clearly suggested by the West, others by a political class in Ukraine which is highly westernised and thinks in western terms. (Ironically, the Army is probably more realistic and more able to grasp the wider picture.) But there has been very little sense of any long-term strategy, or even thinking. Take the attacks on the bridge to Crimea, for example. What were they supposed to achieve exactly? Now replies like “sending a message to Putin” or “complicating Russian logistics” or “improving morale at home” are not allowed. What I would want to know is, what is expected to follow, in concrete terms?  What are the tangible results of this “message” supposed to be? Can you guarantee that it will be understood? Have you gamed out possible Russian reactions and what will you do then? Supposing, again, that you complicate Russian logistics? What will be the direct result, and how easy will it be for the Russians to get round the problem. (Answer, fairly.)

Western political and military leaders have no answer to these questions, because they have no strategy, and do not really understand what a strategy is. What they have is a consistent habit of coming up with clever, publicity-generating ideas that are disconnected from each other, but all sound good at the time. Broadly, they reflect the following “logic.”

• do something that humiliates Russia.

• miracle happens.

• change of government in Moscow and end of war.

And I’m not exaggerating. This is all the “strategic planning” that the West is capable of, and all it ever has been capable of. I’ve stressed before the necessity of separating aspirations from strategy. For a good twenty years, important constituent parts of western governments have had the aspiration of removing Putin from power, and somehow creating a “pro-western” government in Moscow. From time to time they have come up with disconnected initiatives—sanctions, for example—which they believed might move events in that direction. But mostly it’s just hope, manured with the belief that no “anti-western” leader can ever be representative of his or her people, and so will not last very long anyway. But this approach ignores the most fundamental issues of strategy: what is the clearly-defined end-state you are seeking, how precisely will you achieve it and is it, in fact, achievable? Because if you can’t answer those questions, then any amount of “strategic” planning is pointless. As regards the last question, any military expert will tell you that although the military can create the conditions for political developments to take place, they can’t make them happen. The actual relationship between the two is very complex. Recall that in 1918, the German Army, badly hurt by the Allies’ attrition strategy, was in full retreat but still on Allied soil, and that the Allied armies advancing from the Balkans were still well outside German territory. What ended the War earlier than expected was a nervous breakdown in the German High Command.

And the West cannot answer those questions. The end-state is vaguely defined as “Putin gone,” the mechanism is “pressure” of an ill-defined nature, and the idea that a “pro-western” government will emerge is just an article of faith. So even if a “strategy” could somehow be constructed from these fragments, it would stand no chance of working. Thus the essentially reactive nature of western actions. I’ve talked before about the Boyd Cycle, of Observation, Orientation, Decision and Action. Whoever can go round this circle faster, and “get inside” the Boyd Cycle of the enemy, controls the development of the battle, or the crisis. This is essentially what the Russians (who understand such things) have been doing since the start of the crisis, well before 2022.

Conversely, the West, confusing vague aspirations with an actual strategy, has not understood what the Russians are trying to do, and has treated every Russian setback, or presumed setback, as a step on the road to victory without looking at the bigger picture. Take one simple example. From the beginning of the war, the Russian strategy was to bring about specified political changes in Ukraine by degrading and destroying Ukrainian forces, and so removing Ukraine’s ability to resist Russian political demands. Once the West became involved, this strategy, whilst the same overall, was nuanced to include the destruction of western-supplied equipment and, to a degree, western-trained units. (Though the latter without the former were not so much of a threat.) Two things followed from this.

The first was that the reduction of Ukrainian fighting capability on terms favourable to the Russians was independent of the larger ebb and flow of battle. Destroying stored equipment was if anything better than destroying that equipment in combat. Destroying stored ammunition was better than destroying it once it was deployed in units. Now generally, defenders in a military conflict have fewer casualties than attackers. If your objective is to destroy your enemy’s fighting power, especially if you know that it will be difficult and expensive for them to replace it, then it makes more sense to let the enemy attack you, where they will lose more resources than you. If you have a functioning defence industry and ample reserves of manpower and equipment, this is unarguably the best strategy, and was practised by the Russians in 2022-23. But the West seems incapable of understanding this, and massively over-interpreted Russian strategic withdrawals as crushing defeats which would soon “bring Putin down.”

The second is that, to the extent that Russia has territorial objectives, it is better to degrade Ukrainian forces to the point where they cannot defend territory and have to withdraw either preemptively or after a cursory defence, than it is to stage deliberate attacks to seize territory. The Russians have a whole series of technologies which enable them to attrit Ukrainian forcers from a position a long way behind the contact line. They can thus progressively destroy the Ukrainian ability to hold ground without needing to risk their own troops and equipment in direct attacks. Over the last few months, we have seen that this stage has effectively been reached, and that the Russians are advancing quite quickly in certain key areas. But the West, which is obsessed with the control of terrain as an index of success, cannot understand this, having forgotten how the War in the West ended in 1918, when Allied territorial gains were still quite modest.

To be fair (assuming that one wants to be fair), these issues are very complex: not more complex, perhaps, than neurosurgery or the taxation of multinational companies, but not any less complex either. They require years of study and experience, and a willingness to master strange and sometimes counter-intuitive concepts. The western Liberal mind has never wanted to do this: its ideology of radical individualism is incompatible with discipline and organisation, and its search for instant gratification is incompatible with any long-term planning and careful implementation. In retaliation, it likes to dismiss the military as stupid and war-mongering. When Liberalism was constrained by other religious or political forces all this was less obvious, but with the emancipation of Liberalism from all controls over the last generation, and its dominance of political and intellectual life, western societies have now pretty much lost the ability to understand conflict and the military. It is striking, indeed, that most western military personnel are still recruited from the more conservative and traditional elements of society where Liberalism has made less of an impact, and not from Liberal urban elites.

Since the nineteenth century, and especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, the Liberal mind has oscillated between dislike and disdain for the military in normal times, and panicked demands for their use in periods of crisis, or when Liberal norms need to be enforced somewhere. The spread of the Liberal mindset to countries like France, which has historically been proud of its military, has produced a European political and media class largely unable to understand military issues. American Liberals, so far as I can see, themselves oscillate between fear of the military and endless citation of the warnings by Eisenhower’s speechwriter about the Military-Industrial Complex, and demands for the use of the military to enforce their norms. (Eisenhower’s remarks were, of course, a cliché of the time: there was nothing original in them.)

The result is a decision-taking and influencing class that has no real idea about strategy and conflict at all, and just repeats words and phrases it has heard somewhere, as magical incantations. One minute “F16s” (whatever they are precisely) will save the day, the next, “deep strikes” are going to bring Putin down.

So for example, it is impossible for a society brought up on just-in-time delivery and impulse purchases on Amazon to understand the importance of logistics and the nature of the attrition war the Russians are fighting. If you look at a map and try to understand it (I know!) you can see the the Ukrainian forces are fighting at the end of very long supply lines, especially for western equipment and ammunition, whereas the Russians are only a few hundred kilometres, at most, from their borders. The fuel consumption of heavy armoured vehicles is measured in gallons per mile, and even if they can be delivered to the area of operations by train or transporter (which has its own problems) they consume frightening amounts of fuel, all of which has to be brought, dangerously and expensively, into the operational area. They also break down, require new tracks and new engines and an endless supply of ammunition, all of which has to be brought forward. So Leopard tanks are not just teleported into the battle area, and when they are damaged they have to be sent back to Poland for repairs. And just about every aspect of military operations requires electrical power: yes, even drone operations.

The Russians of course know this, and have been targeting power generation and distribution systems, bridges and railway junctions, ammunition and logistic storage sites and troop concentrations and training areas. But they are not capturing large amounts of territory with daring armoured thrusts, so the Ukrainians must be winning, mustn’t they? Yet tanks without fuel or ammunition, or whose engines have broken down, are useless, and once Ukrainian forces are operationally isolated from their supply lines it’s only a question of time before they lose their combat capability and have to surrender or make a run for it. This is what appears to be happening now around Kursk. And if you are fighting an attrition war, and your stocks and replenishment capabilities are greater than your enemy’s, you want your enemy to use up those stocks as quickly as possible. So why not send, for example, large numbers of cheap drones that can be replaced, to soak up large numbers of defensive missiles that can’t? But this is too much for most alleged western experts to wrap their neurones around.

Of course the logic applies both ways. It defies belief that anyone with a functioning brain-cell would ever have thought that the Russians planned to “occupy Ukraine,” let alone in a matter of days. Insofar as the idea had anything real behind it at all, it was a folk memory of the rapid advance of US forces to Baghdad in 2003, against no opposition and with complete air supremacy. A simple practical example: a NATO Mechanised Division (in the days when NATO had them), advancing against no opposition, would take up some 200km of road, and take several days just to organise, leave, arrive and deploy into combat formations. And that’s just one Division. The idea of doing this against a battle-hardened Army two to three times the size of the attacking force, and beating them in a few days at that, is beyond ridiculous. Again, look at the map. And while you are at it, think about the current hysterical cries that “Putin wants to invade NATO.” Everything I’ve said about the difficulty of NATO going Eastward applies to the Russians going Westwards, should they be insane enough to consider the idea.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Russians chose Kursk as a jumping-off point, then it’s about 2000 kilometres to Berlin, which is the first remotely plausible objective I can think of. (Oh, they would have to go to Poland to get there.) Just to give you an idea, in the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s Group of Forces in Germany was about 350,000 strong, supplemented by recalled reservists in an emergency. They would have attacked NATO forces in Germany, but they were only the first echelon, and were expected to be wiped out. Two more echelons would therefore follow them. The total distance needing to be travelled was a couple of hundred kilometres. As far as we know, subduing and occupying Western Europe alone would have required perhaps a million men in combat units, never mind the western flanks and countries like Turkey. This was in the context of an existential struggle, probably involving nuclear weapons, which a victorious Russia would take a generation to recover from. We are a little way from that at the moment.

I think that what we are seeing, as well as culpable deliberate ignorance, is the beginning of a gnawing realisation that NATO is not strong but weak, that NATO equipment is mediocre, that talk of “escalation” is meaningless in the absence of something to escalate with, and that if the Russians felt so inclined they could do a lot of damage to the West. But even there, western pundits are stuck in narratives of armoured warfare and territorial conquest. The Russians don’t need to do that, of course. With their missile technology, which the West has consistently ignored and downplayed, they can make a mess of any city in the western world, and no western state is in a position to respond. Of course the Russians, who understand these things, realise that they don’t need to actually use these missiles: the psychological leverage they have from just possessing them will do quite nicely. Ironically, I think the Ukrainians do understand these things, better than their supposed NATO mentors. Their Soviet heritage and the large Army they retained gave them an awareness of how large-scale operations are conducted at the political and strategic levels even if, since then, they have been got at by NATO

The French historian and Resistance martyr Marc Bloch, who fought in the Battle of France in 1940, wrote a book about it, only published posthumously, after the war, called L’Étrange défaite, or The Strange Defeat, in which he tried to explain what had happened. His central conclusion was that the failure was intellectual, organisational and political: the Germans employed a more modern style of war that the French were not expecting and could not cope with. Time has nuanced that conclusion: the German tactics were certainly innovative, involving fast-moving, deep penetration armoured units and close cooperation with aircraft, but they were also extremely risky and required a lot of luck to pull off successfully. But Bloch was right that the Germans had developed a style of warfare, dictated by the need to avoid long wars, to which there was no counter at the time, and which posed unexpected and, for a period insoluble, problems for the defender.

There’s something about the dazed incomprehension of the French political and military class and the people themselves, in the summer of 1940 that seems very relevant today. The defeat of the West—not yet even recognised as such—is at once intellectual, organisational and political. The ruling classes of the West seem to have no idea at all what has happened to them and why, nor what is likely to follow.

Huge hubbub surrounds Trump’s rapid-fire picks for key Cabinet positions over the last few days. A great division has ensued, between the two opposing sides, one screaming “betrayal!” at the slew of establishment Neocon Zionists chosen, while the other exults in triumph at the boldly unexpected picks.

Let’s examine what we have first—the longer list so far:

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SO FAR:

•Vice President: JD Vance
•Secretary of State: Marco Rubio
•Attorney General: Matt Gaetz
•Defense Secretary: Pete Hegseth
•Secretary of Homeland Security: Kristi Noem
•Director of National Intelligence: Tulsi Gabbard
•National Security Advisor: Mike Waltz
•CIA Director: John Ratcliffe
•White House Chief of Staff: Susie Wiles
•EPA Administrator: Lee Zeldin
•Ambassador to the United Nations: Elise Stefanik
•White House Counsel: Bill McGinley
•Deputy Chief of Staff: Stephen Miller
•Border Czar: Tom Homan
•Ambassador to Israel: Mike Huckabee
•Government Efficiency Advisors: Elon Musk & Vivek Ramaswamy
•Middle East Envoy: Steve Witkoff Dan Scavino, James Blair and Taylor Budowich will also take senior staff roles in the White House. Just the start.

Now, here is an elucidating post only and specifically from the perspective of the Ukraine situation:

Who the US President-elect has chosen for his administration. Trump's nominees

▪️For the post of US Secretary of State – Marco Rubio

He is an opponent of military aid to Ukraine, known for his anti-Castro and anti-Russian statements. Rubio has repeatedly advocated for launching peace talks and abandoning attempts to return Ukraine's lost territories .

▪️For the post of national security adviser – Mike Waltz

He advocated lifting restrictions on Kiev's strikes with Western long-range weapons on Russian territory, the Washington Post wrote. Waltz also suggests using economic pressure on Moscow to resolve the Ukrainian conflict .

▪️For the post of Minister of Defense – Pete Hagseth

He criticized sending money to Kiev amid domestic economic problems. He believes that in the Ukrainian conflict, Russia is getting its [way] .

▪️John Ratcliffe for the post of CIA Director

He has repeatedly spoken about the dangers of the partnership between Russia and China, and in 2020 he accused Russia and Iran of attempting to interfere in the US elections. However, it was Ratcliffe who dispelled the fake about the Russian trace in Trump's election campaign in 2016.

▪️For the post of Director of National Intelligence – Tulsi Gabbard

Gabbard was in the Democrats' camp, at the beginning of the SVO she even supported Ukraine, then she switched to Trump's side and began to criticize Zelensky, accused Biden of dragging the United States into a nuclear war, and admitted that the United States, under the leadership of the Democrats, is waging a proxy war with Russia.

▪️Elise Stefanik for the post of US Permanent Representative to the UN

In 2022, she advocated for Kiev to be accepted into NATO, but now she thinks differently and opposes financial support for Ukraine and Kiev’s entry into the Alliance .

▪️For the post of Secretary of Homeland Security – Kristi Noem

She is known for her criticism of American aid to Ukraine. In the spring of 2023, she said that military support for Ukraine was a “costly strategic mistake” that only served to strengthen the alliance between Russia and China.

▪️For the post of Attorney General and Head of the Department of Justice – Matt Gaetz

He stated that Ukraine’s goal of “separating Crimea from Russia” is unachievable. Gaetz has repeatedly spoken out in favor of a peaceful resolution to the Ukrainian crisis, and also noted that the United States “has sent enough money to Ukraine.” He also called it a “historically corrupt country.” (ed: he also prefers to bring Russia into NATO over Ukraine.)

▪️Susan Wiles for White House Chief of Staff

Known as the Republican Party's leading strategist, she is known as the "ice maiden." She is said to have been the chief architect of Trump's victorious campaign. She is a private person.

▪️For the post of deputy chief of staff for political affairs – Stephen Miller

He is known as the main ideologist of tough measures in the field of migration policy. His policies are characterized as far-right and anti-immigration.

▪️ Tom Homan has been nominated to serve as the "Border Czar" or "Border Czar"

He advocates for the mass deportation of illegal immigrants, which will likely be Homan's first task in his new White House position, which involves overseeing all immigration and border security issues.

▪️For the position of co-directors of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) - Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy

Both support Trump's policies, including the Ukrainian conflict. Ramaswamy withdrew his candidacy in favor of Trump. He said that the US should promise Russia that Ukraine will not join NATO .

A few things first: some believe that a few of Trump’s picks are either deliberate troll jobs or merely favors for support to people he knows cannot possibly be actually confirmed by the Senate. For instance Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, even RFK Jr.

On the other hand, Trump has tricks at his disposal, such as the infamous ‘recess appointment’ which would controversially allow him to put in his nominees while the Senate is at recess. Some have complained, yet when Obama put in various recess appointments in 2012, it seems no one batted an eye. Also, isn’t it interesting how there was no outcry when Obama considered RFK Jr. for his own Cabinet once long ago?

Now, Thomas Massie has gloatingly confirmed Trump reserves this right:

“You think he’ll (Matt Gaetz) will be confirmed by the Senate?”

“Doesn’t need to. Recess.”

GOP Massie says “recess appointments” when asked if GAETZ can get confirmed by the Senate “He’s the Attorney General. Suck it up!”

Though some thought the nomination of Gaetz was a kind of gag, Gaetz immediately resigned from his House seat, burning the ship behind him as token of his confidence. Even if something were to happen, Florida Governor DeSantis reserves the right to install Gaetz into Marco Rubio’s now-vacant Florida Senator seat, which I believe would last until 2026.

Now some of Trump’s more controversial picks have fired up the Deep State operatives in ways that are extremely elucidating in regard to how the Deep State works and keeps power amongst its own pre-vetted in-house people. John Bolton, for instance, has called Matt Gaetz’ nomination to Attorney General as the most shocking and ‘worst’ Cabinet nomination in the country’s history—how’s that for hyperbole?

Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic Senator from Connecticut, stated earlier today that 10 Republican Senators have already said they will not Approve the Nomination of Matt Gaetz to Attorney General; which if True, makes it very likely that his Appointment would be Rejected.

And this, of course, needs no introduction or explanation:

But the most telling reaction has been for Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination for the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Some of the most entrenched establishment figures crawled out the woodwork to waylay Tulsi for being an ‘outsider’ who would be ‘dangerously’ privileged with the most sensitive need-to-know information in the country.

But most revealing was what ex-CIA agent and House rep Abigail Spanberger said about why Tulsi absolutely cannot be allowed to become the DNI—listen closely:

She mentions how it’s the DNI’s job to control the information flow to the president. This is precisely how the Deep State wags the dog by easily misinforming US presidents into officiating any policy they so need. They don’t even have to lie: the main weapon in the DNI’s arsenal is careful curation of facts by omission. The things omitted from the president’s Cabinet meetings are even more powerful than the things said.

In short: this is a Deep State panic and revolt about the reality that they are about to lose their ability to totally puppeteer the US president into doing the bidding of foreign intelligence services, which are effectively who control the US agencies beneath the DNI.

By the way, Avril Haines—the current DNI—is a quite nefarious spook from the Obama days, and Tulsi would be leagues better than her. How about ex-CIA and NSA head General Michael Hayden replying to histrionic Spanberger from the video above, with the suggestive “what can we do” in keeping Tulsi out:

GenMHayden George W. Bush's CIA and NSA chief (who failed to detect 9/11) joins CIA operative RepSpanberger's panic over Tulsi's nomination. He was one of the 51 intel agents who signed the false Hunter Biden letter. These are the people who need to feel threatened and upset by Tulsi’s nomination.

Can you see how the entire Deep State neocon cabal of the Bush-Obama-Clinton dynasty days are in revolt against an ‘outsider’ cleaning house and installing actual patriots in key positions to insulate Trump?

Most people don’t know this, but since the days of Rockefeller, Kissinger, and co., the chief and only role of the presidential Cabinet is as bulwark against a ‘rogue’ president. The Cabinet is entirely selected by donors, financial interests, and foreign intel agencies and its members are essentially “minders” or ‘grey controllers’ whose job is to enforce a series of ‘off limits’ guardrails for the president. How can they enforce this? The 25th Amendment, which specifically gives the Cabinet the power to vote the president out of office due to “incapacity”. In short: if the president goes off-script, the Cabinet can vote to immediately remove him.

Recall that Obama’s entire Cabinet was famously chosen by Citigroup Bank:

“One month before the presidential election of 2008, the giant Wall Street bank Citigroup submitted to the Obama campaign a list of its preferred candidates for cabinet positions in an Obama administration. This list corresponds almost exactly to the eventual composition of Barrack Obama’s cabinet.”

So, Trump got his great Cabinet—everything should be peachy now, right?

Well, not exactly—I’ll leave the arch-Zionist of Twitter to explain:

Virtually every pick is not just pro-Israel, but is of a particularly virulent pro-Zionist stripe in the most cult-like and messianic way possible: Pete Hegseth, Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, Mike Waltz, and last but not least, Kristi Noem, who betrayed freedom of speech by literally signing the ‘strongest hate crime bill in America’ to combat “antisemitism”—a bill which vastly expands definitions of ‘antisemitism’ as guidance to law enforcement agencies in helping them prosecute the nebulous specter of ‘hate crimes’:

So, yes: we know Trump’s Cabinet is basically full of Israel-firsters, that’s no real shock. But the one aspect surrounding discussions that’s missing is the following: Everyone is busy making blanket generalizations because mentally differentiating the nuances is tiresome and time-consuming for most.

But we can clarify Trump’s picks as follows: They are pretty good domestically, and bad for foreign policy.

Obviously, for Americans the domestic issues take precedence, and it’s better to have a bunch of Zionists who will clean out the country, than a rotten lot that will be great for ending foreign wars and such, but completely totalitarian at home—or something to this effect. People must accept the fact that we will never solve all issues at once, and we must take our blessings where we can get them. That means if the next four years can be used to clean up the domestic in large part, there will always be time afterwards to worry about the other huge issues—like the US’ total enslavement to Israel.

The fact is, many of Trump’s picks will do wonders for cleaning up the domestic bureaucracy that has hollowed out the country and turned it into a dystopian techno-fascist panopticon. RFK Jr. can really go to town on Health agencies; hell, just look how Big Pharma tanked on his announcement:

Gaetz replacing the monstrous Deep State traitor Merrick Garland as AG will have incalculable trickle down effects on the Justice Department and every other facet of government. Of course, Ramaswamy and Musk will do a clean sweep on extraneous agencies and begin balancing the US’ check books for once—though it will likely end up being a drop in the bucket.

My colleague at MoA agrees that we should give Trump some iota of a chance and have an open mind for the time being. I think huge strides can be made on the domestic front with his picks, while the foreign stands as always to be 50-50, and has the chance to be usurped by the same old neocon policies of war against Iran, aggression and escalation against Russia, economic terror against China, and the like. But as I said, we have to start somewhere, and cleaning up the domestic bureaucracy could be a springboard for more eventual housecleaning of the foreign-policy neocon remnants.

Case in point: Pete Hegseth is a giant Zionist, but he’s about to patently take the scythe to the triple-headed Hydra of DEI, CRT, and ESG in the US military:

Then look at Trump’s new border czar Tom Homan—the guy is serious about mass deportations which could roll back much of the damage done by the globalist clique of the past couple decades—or even the ‘60s if you want to go as far back as the Hart-Celler Act of ‘65.

And there are other potentially disruptive appointments still coming up:

Don’t you think it’s at least a start? Rome wasn’t built in one day, and the US has been slowly encrusted in bloodsucking foreign limpets since about the early to mid-1900s. They have to be scraped off slowly and carefully, so as not to roust the roost and spark a full-on mutiny. Considering what we’ve gotten for the past several administrations, these appointments on paper appear revolutionary in nature; but as always: that doesn’t mean we must be naive and credulous, expecting them all to work out without a hitch—I myself remain skeptical as always, but cautiously optimistic.

After all, Trump has effected a perfect syzygy of Republican power that can give him a once-in-generations ability to carry out virtually any policy his team desires:

There’s still grave danger that Trump may fall short of accomplishing much of the above, though, particularly since the Deep State is regrouping and re-strategizing as we speak. For instance, here’s Democrat Rep Wiley Nickel openly calling for a ‘Shadow Cabinet’ to be formed in undermining Trump’s new administration and counteracting each of his ‘dangerous’ Cabinet picks:

Apparently committing treason is now “protecting democracy”:

https://x.com/RepWileyNickel/status/1857141802660229224

Like I said, Trump’s picks are strong on domestic and dangerous on foreign relations. Here’s an example—National Security Advisor nominee Mike Waltz describes how he believes Trump can or will end the Ukraine conflict, which is another way of saying how Mike Waltz will advise and militate for Trump to carry out the negotiations; and it’s not very promising or assuring:

Namely: Enforce the energy sanctions on Russia, which is nothing more than a ‘gas station with nukes’, then threaten Russia with allowing Zelensky’s long range strikes—typical hubristic neocon escalation.

As a last note, many astute observers have brought up just how oddly surreal it is that the person on the right is able to simper and dawdle with the person on the left, who he had just recently characterized as a grave ‘threat to the nation’, the new Hitler, et cetera. It beggars belief that one could smugly shake the hand of a man one believes to embody evil itself—it’s what made yesterday’s first post-election White House meeting between the two such a classic study:

The occasion calls for a larger-than-life splash page, as books could be written on the symbolism of this one photo alone:

The hieratic tableau is pregnant with meaning.

The only question is, which initiate level did he confer?

Jests aside: I personally believe Trump more liable to have made a threatening “gun gesture” with his hand at Biden, or perhaps even for cameras as a sort of “gotcha back” or “I know it was you” moment, referencing the hit attempts—made particularly poignant with Biden’s subtle choice of pinstripe gangster suit:

We all know the changing of the guard is just one mafia clique shoving off the other, but just like in the case of the Godfather, where Pacino’s character Michael had a generational plan to clean things up during his tenure so that the future of his family could go totally legit, Trump and his flawed team, too, can initiate some semblance of a move toward the light for the country.

There’s still a hell of a fight left, and we shouldn’t take for granted that Trump will even be allowed to take office. But given the abrogation of true neocon vermin like Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo in exchange for flawed characters with at least an inkling of some promising virtues, we’ve for once got an innings chance for improvement. For now, that makes the outlook considerably better than it’s been for quite some time.

Donald Trump and the impossible destination of Globalism (revisited)

Back in 2016 a month before Donald Trump was elected for the first time, I wrote a piece that I'm revisiting here. So much of what I said then still applies that I encourage you to read that piece. My thinking was heavily informed by a lecture by the now late French philosopher Bruno Latour entitled "Why Gaia is not the Globe."

Latour made the case that Trump's perplexing popularity could be traced to his ability to give voice to the anger and fear generated by the effects of Globalism. In fact, Latour noticed that the anger and fear were actually widespread and reflected in Great Britain's exit from European Union and the many right-wing movements in European countries that now are all too familiar eight years later.

I am capitalizing Globalism because it really is an ideology and not the "inevitable" reality that so many of us think it is. In fact, as Latour explains, it is an impossible destination. First, let me lay out a definition of Globalism by quoting from my 2016 piece:

With the discovery and then exploitation of fossil fuels on an ever growing scale, societies everywhere were faced with figuring out how to govern a world with ever increasing energy surpluses. Those surpluses made so many new things possible and in doing so led to rapid social and technological change.

We tried laissez-faire capitalism, communism, fascism, democratic socialism and finally globalism which I'll define as the management of worldwide economic activity and growth by large multi-national corporations which have no particular allegiance to any one country or people. Our belief has been that this arrangement is the most rational and efficient. Therefore, trade deals which bring down barriers both to international trade and to the movement of capital and technology across borders are believed to encourage global economic growth. That growth supposedly will ultimately lift the world's poor into the middle class and enrich everyone else while doing it.

Latour explains the binary trap we have laid for ourselves as a global society. We believe we can move forward toward a future of global economic growth and integration OR we can go backwards to a past of antiquated morals and technological stagnation.

But we already know that climate change, resource depletion, toxic pollution and species loss will prevent us from arriving at the endpoint implied by Globalism. As Latour puts it, the ever-expanding globe of our imagination will not actually fit into the thin layer of life where we live called the biosphere. In short, Globalism cannot be scaled up forever and, in fact, has already exceeded the limits of the biosphere. To continue our journey there is ecological suicide.

What we need to find then is another destination that neither situates us in an unrecoverable past nor forces us into an impossible-to-survive future. The binary trap keeps us locked into a framework with no good answers. As Latour says, we are like people on an airplane whose destination has disappeared and whose city of origin no longer exists. We must first realize this is our predicament, and then find a place to set down. But, to date, "we are extremely poor in inventing futures," he says. It would help, however, if we all starting looking for that third place.

Latour explains the anxiety of those not prospering under the continued movement toward Globalism. They seek protection in the form of work that supports them and their families, a stable community, and a stable identity as parent, spouse, provider and/or nurturer that anchors them in their community. But, the land of the "globe" in Globalism has striped away their protection by sending jobs abroad, damaging their small and rural communities through a loss of people and key institutions (closed schools and hospitals), and a loss of identity—under pressure of jobs losses and retrenchment at significantly lower wages and newfangled notions of gender roles and power—that can be painful, humiliating, confusing and stressful not just to men but also to some women.

The third destination that we are seeking will have to address these needs in order to be satisfying to these disaffected people.

There is also an epistemological disturbance in Globalism that is extremely disorienting. In the past, the lived experience was also largely regarded as reality. In the modernist world of Globalism, our lived experience is discounted and real is determined by "objective" science. In short, if our lived experience runs counter to the ideology of Globalism (often conflated with "objective" reality), we are told that we are ignorant, backward and unscientific, and need to get with the modernist program (even if we think that program is a corruption of our values).

The third destination needs to heal the rift between notions of reality and lived experience.

Latour does not offer a description of this third destination, but rather invites us to think about it and create it. He does not think the backlash against Globalism is actually doing the hard work of creating that alternate destination. But the backlash should not be dismissed as a mere desire to go back to the past. This backlash is actually an incipient recognition that Globalism as a destination is no longer either desirable or possible. What comes next is the political struggle of our age. To respond to that struggle with a reaffirmation of a destination that is impossible is of no use to human society and a failure of imagination.

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

During his first term, President Trump decorated the Oval Office with a portrait of President Jackson.

Almost all commentators do not understand what the re-elected President of the United States, Donald Trump, is doing because they wrongly interpret his actions through the prism of Republican or woke ideologies. However, Trump, who has successively frequented the Democratic Party, the Tea Party, and today the Republican Party, claims to be a follower of a fourth ideology: Jacksonianism. During his first term, he decorated the Oval Office with a portrait of his predecessor Andrew Jackson.

But what is Jacksonianism?

Andrew Jackson, whose family had almost all died as a result of the wars against the English, was a lawyer. In this capacity, he wrote the Tennessee Constitution (1796). It was considered to give too much power to the Legislature and not enough to the Executive (the governor), and it did not establish a Supreme Court. However, it was hailed as "the least imperfect and most republican of constitutions" by the President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson.

Section 1 of Article III gives the right to vote to all free men (white and black), 21 years of age or older, who own freehold property or have resided in the county for six months. There is also a provision giving men serving in the militia the right to elect their officers. The Bill of Rights contained in it states that agnostics and atheists have the same rights as believers. These last three provisions were a direct blow to the puritans of the East Coast.

During the war between France and the United Kingdom in 1812, Paris and London imposed a naval blockade. It was to force the Russian Empire to respect it that Napoleon attacked Russia and because Her Majesty’s Prime Minister confiscated 900 American ships that were trying to trade with France that Washington once again went to war against its former colonizer.

During this "second war of independence", Andrew Jackson, who had become a general, distinguished himself as much by his military as by his diplomatic skills. He managed to maneuver Creek Indians, especially Cherokees. This war was useless because it ended with a treaty that established a return to pre-war conditions, but General Jackson won the first military victory in the history of the United States.

Andrew Jackson later retired to Florida, where he was elected governor. He had two British spies executed, although this was not explicitly within his power, which his opponents called an assassination. He ran for president of the United States in 1824 and won a majority of the popular vote and a majority of electors (designated by the governors), but, following a sleight of hand (a post-election agreement by the two other candidates), he was not considered elected. The electoral college (i.e. the representatives of the governors) nominated John Quincy Adams (as in 2020, it nominated Joe Biden against Donald Trump). Furious, he created the current Democratic Party to rally his supporters. The reality of the election stolen by the corrupt political class served as an electoral theme for Andrew Jackson (as for Donald Trump).

He was elected by a landslide in 1828, when many states had adopted the consultative vote to indicate to their governors the electors they should choose (Reminder: the United States Constitution does not indicate that the president must be elected by universal suffrage, direct or indirect, but by the representatives of the governors. In the words of the "founding fathers", it was especially not a question of establishing a democracy). He was therefore the first president elected, not by, but with the support of universal suffrage. In his inaugural address, he pledged to push the Indians back to the West. His popular base came to cheer him at the White House, but his supporters were so numerous to crowd that they devastated it and forced him to flee through a window.

Jackson had married young Rachel who believed she was divorced, but in reality the act had not been registered. His opponents made a scandal of it, accusing him of living with a married woman. In fact, Rachel died before his second term. He therefore entrusted the role of "first lady" to his niece Emily who married her cousin, Andrew Jackson Donelson, who was his private secretary.

When he formed his administration, Andrew Jackson dismissed corrupt officials. Unable to replace them, he ultimately appointed his relatives and friends. Jackson appointed one of his friends, John Eaton, Secretary of War. For reasons of convenience, he was staying at the White House during the absence of the president. The anti-Jacksonians then spread the rumor of a scandalous life of the Eaton couple.

These sex scandals, all invented by his puritan opponents, caused Jackson to separate from his vice president, who thought like the East Coast elite.

In 1830, Andrew Jackson passed the Indian Removal Act. It was about sharing the territory of North America by placing the Indians west of the Mississippi. 70 treaties were signed for $68 million in compensation. Jackson then opposed the legendary David Crockett (representative of Tennessee). About fifty tribes were displaced, including the Cherokees who also signed a peace treaty. The tribe appealed twice to the Supreme Court to clarify its meaning. The exodus of the Cherokees (the episode of the "Valley of Tears") was particularly hard, a quarter of them died during the displacement. However, this genocide did not take place under Jackson, but under the presidency of his successor. Today, the Cherokees, who, unlike the other Indians, did not question these treaties, are the only tribe that is prosperous.

Andrew Jackson, like George Washington and many others, was a slave owner. Two centuries later, the woke movement presents him as a slave owner and a slaughterer of Indians, an adversary of minorities. In reality, he had adopted as a son an Indian baby, orphaned by war, whom he named Lyncoya. He was therefore accused, by his contemporaries, of corrupting civilization by introducing an Indian to the governorship of Florida, then to the White House.

He approved of the "Monroe Doctrine" which meant, at that time, that the European powers abstained from colonizing the Americas while the United States forbade itself from intervening in Europe. This principle was only twisted half a century later to allow the United States to colonize Latin America without European rivalry.

In 1832, he vetoed a law extending a private/public Central Bank of the United States (initially created by Alexander Hamilton). Similarly, in 1836, he vetoed the creation of the Federal Reserve (today’s Fed). In the meantime, he made sure to repay all of the country’s public debt. This is the one and only time in their history that the United States was not in debt (the public debt is now $34.5 trillion, or 122.3% of GDP).

Andrew Jackson, who symbolizes in the popular imagination the resistance to the power of financiers, appears on the $20 bill. The Democrats wanted to remove his image to replace it with that of a black woman symbolizing the dignity of minorities.

His opposition to the central bank crystallized the conflict between the elites and the farmers. He believed that this bank had monopolistic powers and played a role in political life, implying that it corrupted parliamentarians so that they would vote against the interests of the people. Andrew Jackson managed to broaden the electoral base in many states so that at the end of his mandates, seven times more citizens could participate in the electoral consultations. His re-election, in 1833, was triumphant: 55% of the popular vote against 37% and 219 electors against 49 for his rival (Reminder: in the United States the president is not chosen by electors. The popular vote indicates to the governors the color of the electors that he asks him to choose. It is only these electors who designate the president). His opponents accused him of populism.

Then came the dispute over customs duties, which would turn into a civil war 25 years later (which, contrary to official history, has nothing to do with the abolition of slavery that both sides practiced). South Carolina decided not to apply federal customs tariffs (sectionalism). Andrew Jackson, presenting the danger of a civil war, condemned these actions as well as the idea of secession. He threatened to kill those who took this path. The president managed to restore calm and preserve the unity of the nation by successfully proposing a middle position between that of the southerners (free trade) and that of the northerners (protectionists).

Andrew Jackson was the first US president to be assassinated. At that time, presidents had no personal protection measures.

Andrew Jackson always defended the central power against the governors, not out of a centralizing principle, but out of distrust of local elites. He tried to prevent civil war by appealing to the people. In his view, the interests of peasants and early workers coincided, while those of large landowners and captains of industry diverged. In this conflict, the central bank played the main role by speculating internationally and making the US economy dependent on fluctuations in foreign markets. It was therefore he who concluded tariff agreements with the United Kingdom, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. He designed a vast network of means of communication across Latin America to export US products to the Far East. He negotiated with the European powers for indemnities for the Napoleonic Wars. He was intractable with the French king, Louis Philippe. He failed, however, to buy Texas from Mexico, probably because he surrounded himself with bad diplomats. Although the expression is later, Andrew Jackson began to think of the "manifest destiny of the United States" ("To extend ourselves over the whole continent which Providence has allotted us for the free development of our millions of inhabitants who multiply every year"). However, it was only after him that this concept justified the extension of "the perfect form of government" throughout the world.

Jackson’s puritan opponents presented him as an atheist fighting against the Churches, as a manipulator of the populace against the educated elites.

On July 13, 2024, an individual linked to the US Intelligence services in Ukraine attempted to assassinate candidate Donald Trump. The Secret Service, responsible for his security, acknowledged a malfunction, but none of its members were sanctioned.

Jackson and Trump

The example of General Jackson has become a doctrine under the leadership of the President’s private secretary, Andrew Jackson Donelson. It is organized around two strong ideas:
• From a tactical point of view: move the conflicts opposing the federated states to the federal power towards the division opposing the people to the puritanical elites of the East Coast.
• From a strategic point of view: substitute trade for war. Tactics For example, during his first term, President Trump pushed the Supreme Court to refer the issue of abortion to the responsibility of each federated state. This led to his woke opponents, including Kamala Harris, wrongly accusing him of banning abortion, even though it is legal in 38 states.

Tactics

For example, during his first term, President Trump pushed the Supreme Court to refer the issue of abortion to the responsibility of each federated state. As a result, his woke opponents, including Kamala Harris, wrongly accused him of having banned abortion when it is authorized in 38 states.

Andrew Jackson tried to reform the electoral system in order to give the right to vote to all males, regardless of their skin color. He only succeeded in imposing universal suffrage for the election of senators. Donald Trump intends to extend universal suffrage to the election of the president by eliminating the electoral college designated by the governors.

Let us remember that the Constitution was designed by large landowners who wanted to found a monarchy without nobility and especially not a democracy. In their minds, and in the text they wrote, there was not supposed to be universal suffrage. Contrary to what we think, the debate on the 2020 election refers first to the ambiguity of the text of this constitution and not to the counting of the votes cast. The massive re-election of Donald Trump has proven that the reality of the popular vote has nothing to do with the impressions of the ruling class.

Trump, like Jackson, has consistently relied on the popular vote. Both have designed “populist” election campaigns, meaning, in their case, that they respond to people’s expectations rather than endorse the solutions they imagine. Trump has relied on Steve Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica techniques: scanning social media to analyze what people think, then targeting specific profiles with messages designed for them. In contrast, his opponents have relied on Cass Sunstein’s behavioral and cognitive techniques.

A quick note on crowd reactions. Andrew Jackson’s supporters who came to cheer him devastated the White House, not because they wanted to destroy it, but because there were too many of them. Similarly, Donald Trump’s supporters damaged the Congress buildings, not because they wanted to destroy them, but because there were too many of them. There was never an attempted coup as their opponents claim, but rather a mismanagement of the crowd by the police as Joshua Philipp (The Real Story of January 6) has shown.

Strategy

Andrew Jackson wanted to end the Indian wars by compensating and deporting the tribes, with the mixed success that we have seen. It is to be feared that Donald Trump will approach the Israeli-Palestinian question in the same way by compensating the Palestinians and forcibly displacing them to the Sinai. However, this would be to put on the same level the “manifest destiny of the United States” and the expansionism of the “religious Zionists”. This risk exists, but for the moment, there is no evidence that this will be the case.

Andrew Jackson expanded U.S. trade around the world, negotiating bilateral (not multilateral) deals. Donald Trump, a businessman, has withdrawn from multilateral trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). While his predecessors were about setting standards with their economic partners and then imposing them on China, Trump has no use for international standards as long as the U.S. can penetrate markets.

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  [@bears_with](https://twitter.com/bears_with)

In politics — the Kremlin is no exception — politicians don’t mean what they say.  In gardening, the plants always mean what they say. Gardeners, obliged to record what that is, are more likely than politicians to tell the truth.

In the records of Russian politicians since the Bolshevik Revolution, only one leading figure stands out as having the eye, ear, and nose for what plants have to tell. Not the present nor the founding one. The only gardener among them was, and remains, Joseph Stalin.

Nothing has been found that he wrote himself on his gardening except perhaps for marginal comments in books he read.  There is no mention of books on gardens or gardening in the classification system Stalin’s personal library adopted from 1925. He kept no garden diary. Without a diary recording the cycle of time and seasons, the planting map, colour scheme, productivity of bloom and fruit, infestation,  life and death, he must have committed his observations – “he possessed unbelievably acute powers of observation” (US Ambassador George Kennan) – to memory,  as peasants do.  

Unlike the tsars who employed English, Scots, and French architects and plantsmen to create gardens in St. Petersburg and Moscow in the royal fashions of Europe, defying the Russian winter to display their power and affluence without shovelling for themselves, Stalin dug his gardens himself in the warm weather of his dacha at Gagra, on the Black Sea. There he was photographed with his spade tending parallel, raised beds of lemon trees (lead image, top).  There is no sign of him wielding trowel and fork in the garden at Kuntsevo, his dacha near Moscow, where the photographs show him strolling in a semi-wild young forest or seated on a terrace in front of a hedge of viburnum. No record of Stalin digging at Kuntsevo has been found.

There is just one reminiscence of Stalin speaking to a visitor about his gardening. “Stalin is very fond of fruit trees. We came to a lemon bush. Joseph Vissarionovich carefully adjusted the bamboo stick to make it easier for the branches to hold large yellow fruits. ‘But many people thought that lemons would not grow here!’ [He said]  Stalin planted the first bushes himself, took care of them himself. And now he has convinced many gardeners by his example. He talks about it in an enthusiastic voice and often makes fun of would-be gardeners. We came to a large tree. I don’t know it at all. ‘What is the name of this tree?’ I asked Stalin. ‘Oh, this is a wonderful plant! It’s called eucalyptus,’ Joseph Vissarionovich said, plucking leaves from the tree. He rubs the leaves on his hand and gives everyone a sniff. ‘Do you feel how strong the smell is? This is the smell that the malaria mosquito does not tolerate.’ Joseph Vissarionovich tells how, with the help of eucalyptus, the Americans got rid of the mosquito during the construction of the Panama Canal, how the same eucalyptus helped with the work in swampy Australia. I felt very embarrassed that I did not know this wonderful tree.”   

Stalin read a great deal of philosophy, Roman and Russian history, art, and agronomy, and so he is bound to have reflected on the way in which the ideas of the classics he read took physical form in the gardens of the time. Especially so on the ancient idea of the paradise garden. It is this transference between thinking and digging, between the idea of paradise and the cultivation of it, which a new book, just published in London, explores in a radical way.

Olivia Laing, author of The Garden Against Time, In Search of a Common Paradise, knows nothing whatever about Russia or its gardens or its politics – except for propaganda on the Ukraine war she has absorbed unquestioningly and briefly repeats from the London newspapers. That’s a personal fault; it’s not a dissuasion from the book of reflections she has written out from her garden diary to an end which Russians understand to aim at, not less than the English.

In this wartime it’s necessary to keep reflecting on this end, on the aesthetic and philosophical purpose of the paradise garden. Laing begins her book and her garden with John Milton’s lament for gardening in wartime – in his case, the English Civil War of 1642-46 and the counter-revolution of 1660. “More safe I Sing with mortal voice, unchang’d”, Milton observed at the beginning of Book 7 of his Paradise Lost, “to hoarce or mute, though fall’n on evil dayes/ On evil dayes though fall’n, and evil tongues;/in darkness and with dangers compast round,/And solitude.”  

At the same time, Laing records for herself and Stalin certainly knew, “what I loved, aside from the work of making [the paradise garden], was the self-forgetfulness of the labour, the immersion in a kind of trance of attention that was as unlike daily thinking as dream logic is to waking.”

Source: [https://www.rulit.me/](https://www.rulit.me/books/vstrechi-s-tovarishchem-stalinym-read-60539-2.html)

Through the near eighty years of my life, I’ve made gardens in each of the houses I’ve lived in, four of them are in Russia. The first was on the bank of the Osetr (“sturgeon”) River, in the only brick cottage of the dying village of Ivanchikovo (“Little John”).

In a semi-circle around the front of the old house and its timbered verandah (Russian has also adopted the Hindi word, веранда), I excavated a trench in which I planned a tall hedge of roses, with underplanting of blue and white scilla siberica for the early spring, iris siberica for late spring, and mauve colchicums for late summer and autumn.

They were the evil days of Boris Yeltsin, however. Ivanchikovo’s collective farm had collapsed, and there was almost nothing, certainly no seed, no bulbs, not even flowers in the local shop or nearby market. What I should plant, I decided, was what I could fossick from the wild of the untended sovkhoz fields, the verge of the river stretching up to Kukovo (“Baker”) and down to Tregubovo (“Three Lips”), and the forest nearby. I started with wild roses. 

I also asked for the advice of the other villagers, my neighbours. They were unused to speaking with foreigners: the last of them they told me were German soldiers in retreat fifty years before. The only gardener in the village was a Soviet Army officer who had been made redundant at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and pensioned off with a pittance. In his cottage garden he had planted an orchard of apple trees. By patient experiment and skilful grafting, he explained, it was his ambition to revive as many of the old varieties of Russian apples as he could find. His paradise garden was filled with apples. Ground flowers he had excluded,  he told me.

In the rear garden of my cottage the hedgerows were composed of raspberry and blueberry bushes. A tree of Bolshevik vintage cast ample shade on to the narrow sward. Shade meant more specialized plantings for which there was no obvious source but the forest. For the time being, my priority was the front garden.

After a week of hiking, searching and excavating I had enough wild rose bushes to fill the trench and promise a luxuriant screen of flowers, blooming twice in the summer, I hoped. To cheer the poverty-stricken husband and wife on the left who had taken my fence palings for their oven fire, and to deter the wealthy transplant from Moscow who was erecting a double-storey house to the right, I engaged the local priest to conduct a ceremony of exorcising the evil spirits inside and around the house and to bless the garden for fertility and beauty.

But money and force defeated the plan. Without a preliminary word, the neighbours from Moscow — formerly high-ranking officials of the now defunct Communist Party — arranged for  construction trucks to make their deliveries of bricks, cement, timber, and workers by driving  across my garden. Dozens of tyre tracks destroyed the roses.

This was a violation of my private property rights, as the Yeltsin regime had announced them. But like everything else he did, this was false, and for me there was no recourse. My little paradise garden, blessed by the Church, hadn’t been nipped in the bud. It had been annihilated before it had a chance to bud.

My second Russian garden was planned and planted at the same time in Moscow. It was in the square in front of my apartment house at Kolobovsky pereulog (“Bun Lane”), in the Tverskaya  district of the old city. The building dated from the time of reconstruction after Napoleon had left. The square had been intended for the residents, my new neighbours. Its four corners had been planted with shade trees which had survived the Revolution and the Germans. But the space underneath had long ago been covered by refuse, then cars in various states of disrepair, poisoned by patches of oil, suffocated by weeds.

As the only non-Russian to own an apartment in the building, I was the only one to think of spending personal cash on the public space in front, for the benefit of our collective, so to speak. My neighbours gave their consent to my tossing my money on to the garden.

To remove the cars first of all, I installed a waist-high fence around the square in the wrought-iron style of the century before. The next task was to clear the surface rubbish; dig up the impoverished sandy soil, adding black top soil and worms; prune the dead boughs of the trees and fertilize the roots; lay down out diagonal paths from corner to corner; and plan plantings of spring and autumn bulbs in the quadrants formed by the paths, as well as an annual display in a raised circle in the centre.

Restored public benches on Strastnoy Boulevard.

Four old wrought-iron park benches, salvaged from elsewhere in the city, were placed in the quadrants, bolted to concrete foundations sunk into the soil, repainted. The babushki of the house were invited to take their morning and afternoon sittings there. They would become the guardians of the budding paradise. They shouted off drivers attempting to repair and oil their engines. They stopped dog defecation. They prevented anyone cutting the spring display of snowdrops and daffodils. In thus defending the Kolobovsky Pereulog garden, these women were, unlike my neighbour at Ivanchikovo, true communists.

Both gardens were ruined by theft.  To steal is a venal sin but in Russia not a mortal one. It was common in Russia, not only during Yeltsin’s time in the Kremlin, but after. It continues for me. Venal sins can be repented, reversed, compensated. But to ruin a garden is a mortal sin. No  punishment fits that crime.

This is because the paradise garden is a morality play on the soil —  as Laing has discovered, without her forgetting the deadly simple mechanics of how the land is owned, the labour paid for, the neighbours fenced off.  The English garden is not such a thing, Laing concludes in a revolutionary fashion.  Rather, it’s a “confidence trick. To reshape the land in your own image,  to reorder it so that you inhabit  the centre and own the view. To fake nature so insidiously that even now those landscapes  and the power relations they embody are mistaken for being just the way things are, natural, eternal, blandly reassuring…”

In trying to understand the idea of the paradise garden and to make it for herself, Laing writes of the English precursors of communism – the Levellers  and the Diggers of the Civil War period. About them, she notes, they are remembered for “declaring the earth to be a ‘common treasury’, given by God equally to all men and never intended to be bought or sold.” Laing has studied Karl Marx and the English socialists, some of whom gardened seriously  – William Cobbett, William Morris, George Orwell, E.P. Thompson. With their point of view, Laing goes on the attack against the English style in gardens – the fashion which was aped by Catherine the Great and her tsarist successors  in those palatial gardens which remain on show in St. Petersburg.

One of the “English views” in Catherine the Great’s garden at Tsarskoye Selo, nationalized in 1917.

This month it is the 93rd anniversary of Stalin’s idea, implemented by the Central Committee on [November 3, 1931](https://johnhelmer.net/russian-gardens-and-the-war-against-the-anglo-american-grass-sward/), to design, build, and pay for public parks and gardens as national policy. The pleasure garden of the rich and powerful for the preceding three thousand years had been revolutionized and democratized for the first time. “The parks of culture and rest,” the Central Committee declared, “represent a new kind of institution that has numerous political and didactic obligations to fulfil, all of which are for the wellbeing of millions of workers”.  The creation of Moscow’s Gorky Park had been an idea of Stalin’s inside the new layout he conceived for Moscow from Red Square to Sparrow Hills (called Lenin Hills between 1935 and 1999).  

For Laing, the privatisation of peasant farmland, the enclosures by Act of Parliament, the replacement of the village common with the aristocratic lawn and the ha-ha  to view it, the creations of Capability Brown and Humphry Repton – all are to be understood now to be “status symbols and adornments, a way for money  to announce its presence in a more comely or displaced form.”

“But where does the money come from?” Laing asks. Her answer is unique in the modern English gardening literature. In probing for the origins of the great English gardens, Laing goes from the corrupt Elizabethan trade and privateering concessions of the 16th century to the sugar and tobacco plantations of the US and Caribbean worked by slavery and the East India Company slaughter of India during the 18th and 19th centuries.  “There are gardens that have come at far too high a price, and I am glad that Crowfield is now obliterated, and that the historians at Middleton Place have tried to recover and foreground the stories of the enslaved people who build and paid for its garden, with its rare camellias and azaleas.”

Laing is confident enough of her own values to record her debts for gardening imagination and skill to the English garden writers Monty Don, Beth Chatto, Rosemary Verey,  Christopher Lloyd, and to several garden custodians at the university colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. She leaves out the best known of them, Robin Lane Fox, the classics don at New College where he has been the Garden Master.  Lane Fox is also the longest continuing garden  columnist for the Financial Times, platform for the display of what very large sums of money can buy. Laing calls that money laundering – “us[ing] gardens to cleanse and frame their reputation …to rise above the degraded and exploitative sources of their wealth.”

Source: [https://johnhelmer.net/](https://johnhelmer.net/cabbages-and-rothschilds-%e2%80%93-the-special-horticulture-of-spreading-manure-grafting-and-forcing-for-the-enrichment-of-everybody-%e2%80%93-well-almost-everybody-%e2%80%93-well-somebody-with-ta/)

For the land, the peasants are bound to fight the aristos, the communists against the oligarchs, the garden writers against each other – for the idea of the land and the idea of the paradise garden are collectively and personally a moral geography that’s worth fighting for.  

Laing correctly identifies this idea with John Clare (right), the 19th century farm labourer poet who ended up locked in an asylum. “His knowledge,” Laing writes, “was another way of saying his familiar ground , the place he knew… that knowledge  is itself a function of place, in which one’s capacity  to make sense of things, to generate understanding , is a product of being in some way rooted  and at home, and that, even more strikingly, this sense of home  is reciprocal: that one doesn’t  just know, but is known.”

In the story of this book, Laing succeeds in keeping the garden she makes. Milton wasn’t so fortunate. He went blind and was pursued by the counter-revolutionaries empowered by King Charles II. They are the “evil tongues”, the “dangers compast round”, and the “evil dayes” against which Milton wrote his Paradise Lost, “propelled” — Laing retells the story — “by an almost intolerable need to understand what it means to have failed and what one ought to do once failure has occurred, both by imagining a process of future reparations and by re-envisaging  the nature of an intact , untarnished world.”

Laing’s has got the question right, but not quite the answer. “A garden dies with its owner”, her book concludes.

I believe the opposite, and Laing is honest enough to allow it — the owner may die, the garden may remain in place. I am obliged to conclude so because my third garden in Moscow is being stolen from me as I write, but not quite yet.

The fourth, in the village of Kurlek, by the Tom River in the Tomsk region of Siberia, is the garden of Tatiana Vasilievna Turitsyna, my dead wife.   

By the acts of oligarch Oleg Deripaska and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, this garden too is being stolen from me, but not quite yet.

Yet is a long time, mind you.

For how long, Old Blind John claimed optimism at the very end of his Paradise Lost, “Som natural tears they drop’d, but wip’d them soon;/The World was all before them, where to choose/Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide.” In the Russian politics I know, as Stalin knew, there is no place of rest and no Providence.

by Editor - Sunday, November 17th, 2024

In one hour our conversation with host Nima Alkhorshid covered the waterfront of current international issues. We opened with discussion of the results of last week’s BRICS Summit in Kazan and then moved on to war in Ukraine and in particular to the latest stunning Russian successes in Donbas. The presence of North Korean troops in Russia, possibly in Kursk to assist in the mopping up operation there, was a further issue. We concluded with consideration of what a Trump win next week will mean both for shutting down the war in Ukraine and for possibly advancing towards war with China, an eventuality that I see as most improbable.

As I say out the outset of this video, the lighting is less than optimal and the possible intrusion of the sound of the refrigerator’s compressor is what you get when recording from the best lit room in a Petersburg apartment, the kitchen. Accordingly I ask viewers for their indulgence and hope that you will find that the content of this discussion justifies your time.

Nima R. Alkhorshid: 0:05
Today is Friday, November 1st. Gilbert is here with us. Welcome back.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Thanks. Good to be with you.

Alkhorshid:
You are in Russia right now.

Doctorow:
I’m in my apartment in St. Petersburg right now. So the lighting is not ideal. The sound is a little bit distorted when you’re talking in a kitchen and you have a refrigerator compressor behind you, but this is the way it is.

Alkhorshid:
Yeah. Let’s start with BRICS summit in Russia. You believe that there are a lot of misinterpretation of what has happened in BRIC Summit. What’s your take on what has happened?

Doctorow: 0:48
First, the overriding observation that I have is not very different from what my peers are saying. That is to say, I believe as well as they do that this is a world-changing event. But how it changes the world, what time frame it changes the world, here we have differences. I take as my basis for interpretation, not the declaration of the BRICS summit, not papers, but words, words by the most influential person at the event, the host, Vladimir Putin, in particular in a couple of speeches that he made. One is on the second day, the so-called outreach day, when more than 30 heads of government and foreign ministers from various states, both BRICS members, BRICS designate partner countries, and just those who are onlookers. His speech there, and then still more importantly, his press conference at the conclusion of the summit, were useful to see the dynamics, not a static statement of what our values are, but a dynamic statement of where the organization is headed and what are its priorities.

2:15
And there I find myself in a slightly different position from what others are saying, other Russia followers are saying. And what I have to say I think is quite important to anyone who follows markets, because the number one issue is, is BRICS about de-dollarization, or is BRICS about something much bigger? And a lot of focus has been placed on de-dollarization as if this were the whole objective of BRICS. It isn’t. The objective of BRICS is to create parallel structures for an emerging multipolar world.

2:58
That is the objective of BRICS. And breaking the American domination of finance is a part of the process, but you do this with a sledgehammer or do this with more subtle means that are not off-putting, that do not alienate prospective future members and partners of BRICS. And I would like to call out the real sophistication and the realism as opposed to the wishfulness of the organizers of this summit. And I direct my attention first and foremost to the Russians, to Mr. Putin, to the Chinese, Mr. Xi, and of course to Mr. Modi of India. They are the moving forces in what we saw last week. And above all, for, I think it’s Mr. Putin, not just because of his intellectual leadership, but because of the team that he has managed, that successfully organized a very delicate operation.

4:09
These are all, all the guests are being told that they are equal and that BRICS organization does not put one country above the other. And these principles had to be realized, they had to be put into action when the heads of government were assembled. You can’t have Mr. Xi having a ten-room suite and the president of Bolivia having a two-room or a studio. This is, they have to be matched.

4:45
And that is not an easy thing to do, particularly in a place like Kazan, which is of course an important center, an organizational center, but is not Moscow. I think it was very important for the whole purpose of BRICS and for the whole message of BRICS, that it was held precisely not in Moscow, but in a provincial center, a very wealthy provincial center, because Kazan is the capital of Tatarstan, is the main city in an oil-producing part of Russia. But nonetheless, it is not a normal center for receiving 30 heads of government and the like. So to have pulled this off, to have organized it in a way that left smiles on the faces of all the participants, as we saw from the television coverage, that was quite a feat.

5:40
Now, what did they agree on? As I said, they did not agree on dollarization as their prime objective. They agreed, it appears, to significantly raise the capital, the number of projects, the outreach of the New Development Bank, which is intended as an instrument to be built in parallel to the World Bank and the IMF. These are leading institutions of the American-dominated financial order in the world. And they are very cruel structures to emerging nations.

6:18
To anyone who is in financial trouble, they come to your aid, but they virtually decapitate your country. They take control of your budget and they impose this austerity, which of course is very cruel to the lower and middle classes of the country involved, and has political consequences. Well, the New Development Bank doesn’t do that. It doesn’t impose conditions of a political nature, and it is a very interesting point of attraction that BRICS has and will further grow in making itself a place, a safe harbor for emerging countries or for the global south. So that is one vector.

7:08
Another obvious point which has as the necessary consequence de-dollarization is who has been invited as the last round of 2023 and who as core members. I have in mind the United Arab Emirates and Iran. This is United Arab Emirates are a main repository of reserves from the oil-producing countries in the Middle East, and Iran, which is itself a major producer of oil and a lesser producer of gas. Now, in this round, in which no new core members are added, but 13 candidates have been named for partnership, we find two major producers of oil, and that is Nigeria– and gas– Nigeria and Algeria. The point that I’m making is that at its center, the core is growing, the BRICS is growing its control over global supplies of hydrocarbons. And that all bears on the dollar, because the dollar’s dominance and place as a reserve currency is bolstered by its position as the currency of exchange of the single biggest-traded commodity in the world, which is oil.

8:49
If BRICS has in it so many producers and so much, such control essentially, of the trade in hydrocarbons, it is working to de-dollarize the petroleum exchange. And that means that the petrodollar is in peril. And the petrodollar, as I said, is a major bolster, support, for American financial dominance. Mr. Putin announced also at the BRICS summit the planned creation of a bourse and a commodity exchange, global commodity exchange for grain trading.

9:33
The argument that was given is that this will take grain trading out of the hands of the speculators in Chicago and put it into safe hands of an exchange that seeks to reduce speculation and to assure the emerging countries of the world of food security. That is the humanitarian explanation for it. I can give you another explanation for it. It is another move against the dollar. Grain, wheat, corn, they are traded in dollars.

If the BRICS has an exchange, you can be sure they will not be dollar based. The same is true of the metal exchange. Putin announced that the BRICS is going to create a gold and silver exchange. That will not be denominated in dollars. These are all kicking the supports out from under the dollar. So there you have it, a very subtle but powerful move on the dollar.

10:46
But that is the sidelines of BRICS, not the central focus of BRICS. And why is there no effort to create a parallel to SWIFT, that is the global Brussels-based American-dominated messaging system between all banks of the world, except those that have been sanctioned by the United States, like Russia and Iran. The world trades, does its banking through SWIFT. It would be off-putting to perspective new members of BRICS if they had to forego the use of this existing functional system, if they had to self-isolate and turn themselves by their own efforts into sanctioned countries. So by their realism and maturity, the guiding hands of BRICS are saying to the world, “Look, this is a system we are working to change global management, financial management, and political management, but it doesn’t happen in one day. And there will be a period of coexistence. And as two systems exist in tandem, the one that we know till now and the one that is being created under the aegis of BRICS.”

12:19
“We do not require that you put all eggs in one basket, that you turn your back on the West and come running to us. No, no, you can keep one foot there. We don’t mind that. It’s just a matter of practicality that you do that.” So aside from the very serious technical issues of creating an alternative to SWIFT, there is a more important political consideration not to pressure prospective new adherents to BRICS by imposing conditions that they can object to.

So countries can have a foot in both camps. Turkey is an outstanding case, member of NATO. How could they possibly let it into BRICS? Well, into the core of BRICS, they’re not letting it. But as a partner, yes, all our partners will have, will be allowed to sit on the fence, sort of have, as I said, a foot in both camps.

13:16
That is a sign of real maturity and of self-confidence, that they don’t have to destroy the existing things to create a new system. They can tolerate a period of coexistence when they emerge and become more influential and more powerful than the G7 and all the other mechanisms. So these are the, I think what I saw as the main achievements and main directions for further development of BRICS, which none of us, and I put myself in that group as well, none of us foresaw. That was quite remarkable.

Alkhorshid: 13:58
What have we learned from what has happened between China and India in terms of their border problems?

Doctorow:
Well, I understand that in preparation for BRICS, the two sides had an agreement that they would take measures to reduce the tensions and to find a practical solution to the border dispute. It was kept quiet. It was announced just as BRICS was about to assemble. And at the very start of BRICS, the body language of Modi and Xi made it clear that they have reached an accommodation and they intend to proceed as good working partners in BRICS, notwithstanding the past differences they have and notwithstanding the fact that, let’s face it, they are serious competitors for global manufacturing. The United States has been playing India off against China in that way as a way of reducing the reliance of global supply chains on China. Nonetheless, the leaders of these two countries, I say, are quite mature and realistic, and they’re looking for accommodation and a way forward as leaders within BRICS. So that is all to the good. I don’t say that BRICS made this happen, but BRICS helped this to occur.

Alkhorshid: 14:58
And you mentioned Turkiye. On the other hand, we had Saudi Arabia being part of BRICS, and nobody knows what’s the situation in Saudi Arabia. Do they have any sort of solid understanding of what’s going on with Saudi Arabia?

Doctorow:
Certainly nothing in the public domain. The fact is that Saudi Arabia was at the summit one year ago; they were on the list of invitees. There should have been ten members of BRICS, or more actually, but Argentina dropped out and Saudi Arabia held off giving an answer. Still, the relationship of Saudi Arabia with BRICS members is much closer than appears to the naked eye. After all, the OPEC-plus is managed jointly by Russia and Saudi Arabia.

16:41
This is of key importance to the economic welfare of Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, that they have this ongoing, long-lasting partnership, very close cooperation with Russia. So, Saudi Arabia may not be in BRICS proper, but it’s on the fringes of BRICS because of its very close working relationship with Russia, including the question– and I should say China as well– including the question of de-dollarization. The Saudis did not renew their obligations under written agreements with the United States over the petrodollar. The Saudi Arabians have been playing with selling to China and Iran. Therefore, in the general principle, Saudi Arabia is presenting itself as a major prospective contributor to de-dollarization.

17:48
At the same time, Saudi Arabia is in a defense alliance with the United States, and it cannot just hop from one side to the other without taking very great risks. We saw that when the Houthis forced Saudi Arabia to desist from its support to their opponents in Yemeni civil war by bombing Saudi, by missile attack, Saudi oil installations, it was clear that Saudi Arabia is vulnerable militarily and has to be very careful. And part of that caution is not to competely alienate the United States. So I don’t think that we have to be too concerned that Saudi has not signed up. They haven’t said no, they haven’t said yes. They’re standing and watching, for obvious reasons. I think that everyone is watching how the Ukraine war is evolving.

19:00
And as I’ve said on other occasions, the mood of heads of state, heads of government, is very much the same psychology that applies to ordinary mortals. They want to be on the side of winners and not on the side of losers. And for the last year, and particularly for the last several months, it has been perfectly clear to every objective observer that Russia is winning, not just against Ukraine, but against the whole of NATO, plus another dozen or more countries that have signed up to provide support to Ukraine at the behest of the United States. But Russia is clearly winning. And so you had the, despite all of the efforts by Washington to sabotage the BRICS gathering and to remind the world that Vladimir Putin has been condemned by the International Criminal Court and all the rest of this propaganda, nobody paid heed to it.

20:07
They came, they enjoyed being guests of Vladimir Putin. They took their selfies with him when they had an opportunity. And so it is a way of saying that the 30 or more countries that were there, representing 45 percent of the world’s population, do not believe anything coming out of Washington.

Alkhorshid: 20:33
And the situation with Venezuela, you know, that the country is important for Russia in South America. On the other hand, we’ve seen that it seems that Brazil, Lula, without the possibility of Venezuela being part of BRICS, how, what are they talking about in Russia about this? It was all about Brasil blocking Venezuela

Doctorow:
The Russians aren’t talking about this They know very well what you just said. But there are a lot of things they don’t talk about. They don’t want to endanger relations with Brazil. Brazil takes over next year, the presidency of BRICS. They would be very foolish to antagonize Lula over the issue of Venezuela.

21:32
At the same time, I’d like to point out just the human side of this. I don’t know what you saw. I was very impressed by Maduro. He must have lost 20 kilograms. He looks very gentlemanly and very much a world leader. I think it’s a question of time before he’s admitted over– this will pass. The position of Lula will change over time. He has to show that he has some power, and he had every right to do that. It is the governing rule of BRICS that all decisions are made by consensus. Therefore, it would be, Russians would be bad sports if they denied the Brazilians the right to their own voice and to veto something. I don’t think this should be blown out of proportion.

22:34
On the other hand, it is notable that Bolivia was added. Bolivia is one of the 13 designated partners which will come on board in 2025. And the Russians gave some attention to Bolivia and to the president in advance of Greece. And they pointed out to their audience that he is a real intellectual leader. He is a major actor on the world stage.

Mr. Maduro is embedded in Venezuela, okay. And he stands for certain politics which are liked or not liked by his neighbors. Bolivia is not in that situation, and Bolivia’s led by a man who enjoys very big international respect. Therefore, for the sake of Latin America, I think it probably was better that Bolivia is the new flag carrier for their region of BRICS rather than Venezuela.

23:37
Then of course you have compensation. In compensation to the left, you have Cuba designated as a prospective partner. So– and then a few days later, as we know, just a couple of days ago, you had 187 countries in the United Nations General Assembly voting against American sanctions. You had– on Cuba, trade sanctions, the embargo, And you’ve had only two countries, the United States and Israel, who voted for continuation of that embargo. So I wouldn’t worry about which way the world is going. The American foreign policy of, as they used to say, me-me-I, that is pure unadulterated egoism at the expense of the rest of the world, has been shown up.

24:30
And remarkably, all of America’s allies had enough of this. And you would think that, all right, the EU abstained. The great British poodle would abstain. No, they all voted against the United States on this. So the times are changing.

Alkhorshid: 24:55
It’s out of our discussion, but do you understand the behavior of United States toward Cuba? Because they have been under the sanctions for more than, if I’m not mistaken, 68 years. It’s unbelievable what they’re doing to Cuba.

Doctorow:
The United States is a very vengeful country. I’m not speaking about individuals. Individuals have very short memories. But the deep state has a long memory and is vindictive. You speak about the sanctions against, the embargo on Cuba, the vitriolic language used to describe the Cuban leadership. What about Iran?

The conflict with Iran didn’t start last week. It didn’t start ten years ago. It goes back to 1979, the hostage taking of the American embassy in Tehran, which is never forgotten by the American political class. So this vengefulness towards Cuba is not an isolated case.

Alkhorshid: 26:08
Yeah. And talking about what’s going on right now in Ukraine, do you think that Russia is shifting its focus from the Kursk region to other regions?

Doctorow:
Well, I can’t say that it’s shifted its focus, but it’s shifted, well, it’s focused in the sense of what are they talking about? What is the news telling the Russian public? They’re talking only about the front lines in Donetsk and Donbass, because they’re scoring enormous victories, and the mood has changed entirely in Russian news coverage of the war. And they admit that, they say that themselves, that they have not seen anything like the present advances, not of inches, meters, but of kilometers every day.

And we talk about the collapse of the Ukrainian army. No, it’s not collapsing. And a different word is used, both in Russia and in Ukraine. They speak about sipitsa. They say the front is crumbling.

27:26
Now, crumbling is not the same thing as running away. But it means that there are weak points that are being revealed and taken advantage of every day along the front by the Russian troops. And they are proceeding with greater confidence, with more daring, I would say, because they are less fearful of a counterattack. But that being said, the Ukrainians still have very effective drone operations. And even on today’s news, one of the Russian war correspondents was counting his blessings that he was not blown to bits in his car, because a Ukrainian drone did hit his car earlier in the day. So the notion that its a steamroller, the Russians are just mowing down everything, is not inaccurate.

28:34
There is resistance. The Ukrainians, by pure perversity and I’d say cruelty of their senior command, are standing the ground, fighting and dying like men. That is praiseworthy, maybe, if you write patriotic poetry. But for the sake of the Ukrainian nation, of course, it’s a disaster that their men are being killed because they’re ordered to stand and hold the ground, which is untenable, which cannot be defended, and they don’t have sufficient fortifications to withstand the onslaught of the glider bombs and heavy artillery and so forth, and also the jet fighters that the Russians are throwing at them. For this reason, we see the front moving, evening out.

29:38
And we hear words said that we haven’t heard in two years, that they are moving not just on Bakrovsk, which is an immediate objective, but they’re now planning their moves on Kramatorsk and Slavyansk. Now these are towns which had great iconic values, like speaking of the Alamo in Texas, because that’s where the Russian Spring of 2014, the rising in Donbas against the coup-d’etat government in Kiev, this is where their valiant local troops held out for 85 days against the vastly superior Ukrainian army. But those towns in the middle of Donetsk oblast are now in the sights of the Russian army. So a lot of attention is being given there, and it’s as though Kursk doesn’t exist. Of course there’s fighting going on in Kursk, the mopping-up operation.

30:51
Somehow– I mean, it is a 160-kilometer-long border, And there obviously are some porous parts of that border in which some additional troops from Ukraine are getting into Kursk and giving some relief to the remaining several thousand out of what must have been close to 30,000 troops overall that were introduced by Ukraine into the Kursk oblast. But these are still rather small units that are spread out over large territory and that is highly forested. And so it’s difficult to flush them all out very quickly and at least cost in lives to yourself. So the Russians are doing a methodical– and they’re doing this at their own leisure, one can say, while all of the dynamism in the Russian war effort is taking place in Donbas and primarily in Donetsk. What we have to remember is that going back to 2014, when the line of confrontation was frozen, these two main oblasts or regions of Donbas, Donetsk and Lugansk, they were held substantially by Ukraine, not by Russia.

32:23
This was true particularly of Donetsk. Lugansk, going back to the start of the special military operation, was mostly liberated by the Russian forces. Donetsk was not. And Donetsk, when you look at the map, the capital of the Donetsk oblast was just a dozen kilometers or so away from the line of confrontation. And therefore for more than a year, maybe 18 months, the capital of Donetsk was subject to daily artillery strikes and short-range rocket attacks coming from the Ukrainian forces just over the border, so to speak.

33:17
Well, they have been pushed back. The only strikes that hit Donetsk now are long-range missiles, not artillery, because they’re out of artillery range. And the pushback that has been slow, very slow, by the Russians in Donetsk, was made slow because of the eight, nine years of fortification building and digging in that the Ukrainians had done in the period between 2014 and the start of the special military operation in 2022. So it looks like nothing happened, nothing changed, but on the ground, around the Donetsk, a lot changed, particularly from a year ago. And now it’s dramatic changes that we see in the last few weeks.

Alkhorshid: 34:11
Do you think that– because we’ve learned recently that Ukraine is preparing to conscript 160,000 soldiers, new forces coming out, coming into the army of Ukraine– do you think that they’re preparing, they’re getting some sort of information from the United States that in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, they’re going to get some sort of aid to improve their army, maybe put Ukraine in a better position — if, at the end of the day, they decide to go after negotiations?

Doctorow: 34:48
Well, you can project big numbers of mobilization. Implementing that in the present situation of a very demoralized population, which is what’s happened to Ukraine, when they’re entering a winter period with 80 percent of their power generation knocked out, when they’re going to face, the home front will be facing freezing temperatures in their residences, lack of water, lack of everything that electricity provides, that will further demoralize not just the general population, but the fighting population. And I believe the presently observed deserters level and presently observed flight and hiding of potential draftees will be exacerbated. So it’s inconceivable that numbers like this will actually find themselves in military uniforms. That being said, you come to the question of the disposition of forces. A large part of what the Russians are doing now is preparing for spring offensive.

36:15
Their offensive, not a Ukrainian offensive. And they’re doing that by occupying the heights. Now, there are no mountains in Ukraine, and heights means 250 meters above sea level. But if you are 250 meters above sea level, and the enemy is at sea level, then you have a very big military advantage. And that is what the Russians are doing. They’re taking all of the desirable locations to support a crushing blow if this war continues into the spring.

Alkhorshid: 36:56
How do you find right now in the mainstream media in the West, all over you find they’re talking about North Korean soldiers being in Russia, helping them against Ukrainians. How is that– in your opinion, what is the main reason of this type of rhetoric on the part of the West?

Doctorow:
Well, there’s several reasons, not just one. One of them is to cry foul and say the Russians are escalating and therefore we are entitled to an escalatory path. So they’re setting the public opinion to be prepared for the West to do something still more irresponsible in this war. That’s one aspect of it. It’s a diversion. It’s being used to suggest that the Russians are weaker than they seem. It is to detract from the military success in Donetsk, that their own newspapers and television reporters are putting out to the public every day, that Russians are steamrolling Ukraine, or perhaps I say that’s an exaggerated statement, but that’s how it’s being described, even in Western media today.

38:19
And if you say, oh, the Russians need to have those North Koreans to clear out Kursk, then it makes it seem as though the Russians really aren’t so formidable as you thought a moment ago. So it’s a demeaning disparagement of Russians and preparing your way for some kind of utterly stupid escalation from the side of the West. As for example actually setting off South Korean pilots and F-16s from Romania to defend Ukrainian airspace. That harebrained scheme is possibly what the dying days of the Biden administration might be plotting to enact. I don’t think it will happen. I imagine the South Koreans are not quite that stupid.

Alkhorshid: 39:15
We are approaching the day that the United States would decide who’s going to be the next president of the United States. So far it seems both candidates have a good chance of winning 2024. But in the case of Donald Trump, if he wins, do you think that … is he able to accept what Russia would put on the table to negotiate on? Because that would be so important that if he has the support from those people behind the scene to negotiate with Russia.

Doctorow: 39:53
There will be a difficult situation for Trump. The Russians have already put their cards on the table. That they have absolutely no trust in him or in his judgment, and they do not accept the notion that he can knock heads together and bring them to the table, the Ukrainians and the Russians to the table and end the war. I think that Trump, he and his advisors look closely at the situation will back away from this proposal of being honest brokers to end the war, because it will only involve them in making, approving actions that will be criticized by the opposition in the United States, by howls of anger over the American betrayal of this ally and future NATO member. So I think prudence will dictate that Trump solve the question in a manner that is least painful for his reputation, that takes the least political coinage from his side.

41:20
And that’s very simple. Stop, stop sending money, stop sending arms. That in itself will have the consequence of the Ukrainian capitulation, for which the United States can just wash its hands. “Well, guys, you couldn’t do it. Too bad.” But if he gets involved in negotiations, I think it will cost him a lot of political capital for no political gain.

Alkhorshid: 41:49
How about the situation with China? Do you think that as we have these two conflicts in Ukraine and in the Middle East, do you think that recently, I don’t know if you saw the interview of JD Vance talking about Iran and Israel, he said, “We are not interested in going to war with Iran because it doesn’t matter how much Israelis are pushing for a war with Iran. It’s not in our interest right now. We are not prepared for that.”

It seems that he wants to focus on China and what’s going on with China. And at the end of the day, we see that the case of Ukraine and even in the Middle East, somehow fading away. And the case of China is getting much more important in the eyes of the United States. Do you think … is that possible if Trump wins? We’re going to have at the same time, I don’t because I’m not, I don’t see that Trump would be able to put an end to any of these two conflict in Ukraine, in the Middle East. But do you think, are we going to have a new conflict? It doesn’t matter who wins, Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. And are we going to have a new front on Taiwan, a new conflict, which would, these two countries, Iran and Russia, would be part of this conflict again, against the United States.

Doctorow: 43:24
Look, Donald Trump is not a towering intellect, nor is he a man to make long-term commitments to anybody. He is a showman. He is a rather skilled political actor. And he knows the value of pre-election promises, which is nil. He is saying a lot of irresponsible things, which I think, should power come into his hands, he will not hesitate for a moment to discard.

Then is the timing issue. The Ukraine war is with us right now. The Iran-Israeli conflict is with us right now. It is very good politics to say, “Oh, we have to go slow on these things because the bigger issue is the coming fight with China”, which is not right now, which is by American military estimates three, five years away. In five years, Donald Trump will be out of power. Donald Trump today is not the Donald Trump of 2016, when he had virtually no control of who would be serving him.

44:49
He was stymied by inability to get anyone through the Senate for approval, except those who were actually going to implement the opposite of what he wanted. And so he had people from Tillerson to Pompeo, not to mention his national security advisor, who were undermining entirely his intentions for foreign policy. That was the Donald Trump then. Donald Trump today has at his side formidable thinkers and actors. He has the world’s richest man at his side, Elon Musk.

Musk, I don’t think for a second, could entertain the idea of a real conflict with China. Much of his fortune is invested in China. It’s unthinkable that he would encourage Trump to head into a war with China. The other members around, other people around Trump, RFK Jr. is one, and there are others, people of a lot of maturity and not an infantile wish to show who’s boss to China.

46:10
So I don’t take, I take it with a grain of salt, all of the pre-election discussion in the Trump camp about a coming showdown with China. Showdown in the future is one thing, showdown in the present is something very different. And for that reason, I’m not at all worried about relations with China leading us to a world war.

Alkhorshid: 46:35
You have to consider that Donald Trump is amazing when it comes to firing people as well.

Doctorow:
Look, I have one enormous debt to Donald Trump and so do all of my peers, only I admit it and they don’t. If it weren’t for Donald Trump, this show would not exist and none of the other shows would exist, and we all would be silenced. He by his impudent, irresponsible language, as viewed by the deep state, he has given us all a voice. Whatever else you can say about Trump and many things negatives, for me that’s a saving grace. I hope it’s also understood by all of your viewers. They wouldn’t be listening to you.

Alkhorshid:
Yeah. Thank you so much, Gilbert, for being with us today. Great pleasure as always. And have a good trip.

Doctorow: 47:35
Thanks so much.

Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. He chose this third career of 'public intellectual' after finishing up a 25 year career as corporate executive and outside consultant to multinational corporations doing business in Russia and Eastern Europe which culminated in the position of Managing Director, Russia during the years 1995-2000. He has publishied his memoirs of his 25 years of doing business in and around the Soviet Union/Russia, 1975 - 2000. Memoirs of a Russianist, Volume I: From the Ground Up was published on 10 November 2020. Volume II: Russia in the Roaring 1990s was released in February 2021. A Russian language edition in a single 780 page volume was published by Liki Rossii in St Petersburg in November 2021: Россия в бурные 1990е: Дневники, воспоминания, документы. View all posts by gilbertdoctorow

Published November 2, 2024

The Post-Cold War Apotheosis of Liberal Managerialism

First Things has just put out an essay by

Nathan Pinkoski

, titled “Actually Existing Postliberalism,” that I think is one of the most intellectually important pieces to be published in some time, and which I’ll go out of my way to recommend here.  

It is essentially a detailed account of how and why the United States government decided it needed to surveil and control the bank accounts and financial transactions of the entire world in the name of fighting terrorism — and then authoritarianism… and then the hazy universal evil of “hate.” More generally, it’s the story of how Western liberalism’s former separation of public and private spheres of life was torn down, thrusting us into our current hellscape of technocratic “global governance,” in which dissidents are liable to find themselves debanked from the financial system in the name of inclusion.

With this account Pinkoski fills in some important gaps in the record by identifying and documenting some of the key figures and decisions-points that led us to where we are now. In particular, he expertly reveals just how bipartisan the scheme to transform national “government” into global “governance” was, with the twin “neoliberal” and “neoconservative” sides of American politics working hand-in-hand to advance the same ambitious revolution after the end of the Cold War.

This includes uncovering some rather spectacular facts and quotes that I at least was unaware of, such as an open declaration by Bill Clinton’s National Security Advisor that America’s post-Cold War strategy would be to “pursue our goals through an enlarged circle not only of government officials but also of private and non-governmental groups,” including “private firms” and “human rights groups,” in order to fight the “intolerant energies of racism” across the planet and isolate “backlash states” “diplomatically, militarily, economically, and technologically.” Which is exactly the foreign policy chimera we got and still labor under decades later.

Or the fact that it was not some shadowy cabal of Blackrock and the UN that first invented manipulative “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) investing standards, but the George W. Bush administration’s national security staff, who noted that private finance “could drive the isolation of rogue entities more effectively than governments” and predicted that “the banks will fall into line” once “our campaigns leveraged the power of this kind of reputational risk.”

Or the timely reminder that in 1989 the supposedly conservative Wall Street Journal declared its commitment to achieving the following constitutional amendment: “there shall be open borders.”

Hence why we ought not be surprised that in 2021 G.W. Bush would stand beside his erstwhile establishment-left opponents on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and declare that the real threat to America comes from “extremists at home,” from the populist Trump supporters who, “in their disdain for pluralism,” are “children of the same foul spirit” as foreign terrorists — and who therefore necessitate that the same regime of coordinated public and private coercive force be applied at home as abroad.

Overall, Pinkoski’s essay powerfully demonstrates just how dramatically different Western “liberal-democratic” countries are from a mere three decades ago. Its publication is also something I’ve been awaiting impatiently for half a year now, because this summer I was present at the romantically-clandestine underground meeting of dissident scholars (aka a First Things seminar) at which Pinkoski originally presented his argument, then in the form of a much longer academic paper.

I was asked to present my own response to Pinkoski’s paper at the gathering, which I did, and which I will publish here below in case it is of interest. (Note that many of the lines cited in my response will not match the shortened version published in First Things, but I’ve decided to leave them unaltered here anyway.) In it, I make two main arguments: that the revolution Pinkoski describes is best thought of as the expansionary process of totalitarian managerialism (as described in The China Convergence), and — more disagreeably — that what he describes as “postliberalism” is in fact the triumph of liberalism unbound.

Definitely read Pinkoski’s essay first though! I expect and very much hope that he will continue to expand on it in the future, and that it will become a much-cited work in the years ahead.

Response to Nathan Pinkoski (N.S. Lyons, Palo Alto, June 2024)

Nathan Pinkoski has produced a bold, detailed, and compelling case study illuminating what is perhaps the signal phenomenon of our era: the abandonment of any meaningful distinction between state and society, between public and private power, and between public and private spheres writ large. In recent decades we have experienced the rapid rise of Western regimes that transcend any such distinction, and which thus — to cut to the point — grow increasingly totalitarian in aspect.

Pinkoski describes this as the collapse of 20th century liberal civilization and its replacement by something new. He has examined this rupture through the history of recent transformations in international monetary policy and finance. This includes the relentless expansion of the EU as a monetary union and then as a federalist empire, accompanied by the swift intrusion of the state into private finance in the name of maintaining stability and security — a trend also pioneered by the U.S. government’s expansive efforts after 9/11 to use state power to freeze first terrorist groups and then entire countries out of the putatively neutral global financial system. In doing so he traces a direct line of evolution from the neoliberal enthusiasms of the post-Cold War era to what he describes as the West’s “actually existing postliberal” present, in which “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics” means political dissidents and cultural thought criminals can now regularly find themselves de-banked by putatively private institutions in the name of “safety” and “reputational risk.”

With this history I can offer no significant disagreement. But it is only a case study of a larger pattern. And if I have any productive criticism to offer, it is that, in prudently limiting his scope to merely the realms of finance, monetary policy, and foreign affairs, Pinkoski has perhaps not been quite bold enough. Without a fuller picture of the leviathan that menaces us, we risk mistaking but one part of the beast for the whole, mere consequences for causes. In fact, let me posit that searching for the source of our era’s public-private collapse among the shadowy decisions of bankers and national security spooks — as noteworthy and telling as these decisions are — is to risk potentially getting causality backwards and understating larger forces at work.

After all, throughout his paper Pinkoski repeatedly notes that various policy decisions defy explanation in terms of pragmatic national interests. The architects of Clinton’s foreign policy are cited themselves describing taking actions they knew were unnecessary but felt to be of alluring “historical consequence.” The opening of borders to mass migration is described as a “quasi-theological event,” a “repudiation of a core culture or a fixed set of national values,” and “a response to Western guilt.” While in general after 1989, as Pinkoski puts it, “On both sides of the Atlantic, the spiritual principle became a resolve to construct a new national, social, and cultural identity.” From my point of view, such language hints that deeper forces were indeed at work. And it might be most profitable for us to try to more clearly uncover and connect at least some of these forces.

A year or so ago I wrote a long essay titled “The China Convergence,” which I bring up here because I think its main themes are quite relevant. Namely, that the same specific form of oligarchic technocratic governance, described by James Burnham and others as “managerialism,” has today successfully taken over almost the whole developed world, West and East alike.

Managerialism is, in short, the instantiated belief that everything can and should be deliberately engineered and managed from the top down, and that this necessitates an expert class of professional managers whose business it is to do so. Rooted in the techniques of bureaucratic organization and “scientific management” that sprang from the revolution of mass and scale brought on by the Industrial Revolution, managerialism took off with the early Progressive movements and flourished following the bureaucratic explosions produced by the two world wars.

Now, the evolutionary genius, so to speak, of managerialism is that it functions constantly to justify its own perpetual expansion. The larger and more complex any organization or system grows, the exponentially more managers seem needed to manage that complexity and the inefficiencies it generates; managers therefore have a strong incentive to ensure that their organization continues to grow larger and more complex, resulting in greater relative power and resources for the managers as a group within the system; more growth means more managers must be hired, who then push for more expansion by rationalizing a need for their cancerous bureaucratic apparatus to take over an ever-larger range of functions; as more and more territory is surrendered to bureaucratic management, more managers must be trained and educated, which requires more managers… and on and on. I call this expansionary dialectic the managerial doom loop.

But this process works just the same at the level of a country, or even an entire civilization, as it does for a company, non-profit, or government agency. The result, in the case of our societies, has been the exponential growth of a “professional managerial class,” with a permanent interest in seeing the continual expansion of managerial control into every area of state, economy, culture, and even international affairs. In this it has wildly succeeded, producing a new kind of regime — the managerial regime — staffed by a constituent managerial class and dominated by a distinct managerial elite. These elites all behave with flock-like similarity, no matter what institution or part of the world they are located in, because they all have the same basic managerial interests and personality.

To begin connecting this back to Pinkoski’s study, these managerial interests have over time in the West congealed ideologically into what we can describe as a managerial consensus: a unifying system of moral and philosophical beliefs that just so happen to not only rationalize the interests of managerial elites, but also to elevate them to a position of moral superiority, serving to legitimize their right to rule. This ideology consists of a number of core tenets, including technocratic scientism, utopian progressivism, a devotion to the “liberation” of individuals from all former norms and constraints (whether of nature or tradition), and an incentive to flatten any particularity of people, nation, or culture so as to produce more “free” individuals — in other words more predictable and easily interchangeable “undifferentiated human material,” as Renaud Camus has put it. R.R. Reno has similarly described the post-WWII ideological complex as the “open society consensus,” which I think is also accurate and an appropriate name for the same thing.

Now, I’ve rehashed these points from my own essay because I would propose that most of the events and decisions that Pinkoski observes in his history can actually be best explained as products of the sweeping advance of managerialism after achieving victory in the Cold War — or rather the victory of one particular form of managerialism: liberal managerialism.

We might divide the ongoing managerial revolution into roughly three eras, the first running from the French Revolution’s Cult of Pure Reason through to WWII; the second through the “post-war” era until 1989; and the third dawning with the end of the Cold War, alongside the concurrent emergence of the digital revolution. The end of the Cold War proved a transformative moment because, with the collapse of the Soviet Union — but before the rise of China — the Western liberal managerial regime appeared to have triumphed over its last remaining major competitor. The world had once contained not one but three rival ideological forms managerialism: liberalism, communism, and fascism. Fascism was crushed in WWII, but for decades Soviet communism still remained a competitor to liberalism. With its fall, however, liberal managerialism was effectively liberated from all restraint, the last dam was broken and the way opened for it to rush into the global power vacuum and seek complete domination.

Pinkoski argues that “1989 unleashed the revolutionary impulse in Western elites.” I concur completely. But what was the nature of this revolutionary impulse, exactly? He writes this in the context of resurgent appetite for both a new European monetary order and a new American security order. Which, true enough, are among the things that Western elites rushed to achieve. But I think these were only expressions of the full revolutionary impulse unleashed within the managerial elite: a giddy urge to fulfill their manifest destiny by expanding the mandate of their managerial apparatus to an unprecedented, truly global scope.

Whereas once these managers’ drive for technocratic control, social engineering, and cultural bulldozing had been largely restricted to the national level, these impulses could now be advanced to their maximum extent — i.e. to the whole world. And so we see the managerial elite almost immediately declare the nation-state obsolete once grander supranational opportunities beckon. The objects of managerial ambition become “global problems” necessitating “global solutions” and indeed “global governance.” Suddenly issues like the flow of “human capital” (aka mass migration) become complexities to be managed at the level of a global system, removing them from the legitimate concern of mere nations. This is the true meaning of the “globalism” which happened to appear at this moment in history: not free trade or anything so utilitarian, per se, but the conceptual expansion of the managerial elite’s eager, grasping reach to the entire planet.

In this context, the American managerial regime’s compulsion to begin attempting to surveil and manage the bank accounts of the whole world is wholly unsurprising — indeed it was essentially inevitable, as was the EU’s thirst for imposing monetary, regulatory, and ideological unity across the whole of Europe (and now beyond, as Elon Musk and others have discovered); as was the reckless expansion of NATO; as was the near-universal transformation of representative democracy into “managed democracy,” and so on. These things happened for exactly the same reason that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” apparatchiks invented themselves and burrowed into all our institutions, and why we now face the emergence of a transnational “censorship industrial complex” determined to minutely manage every word uttered on the internet: managerialism is a cancer, and cancers metastasize, it’s just what they do.

Before I conclude, however, let me address what I expect is one key difference in perspective between Pinkoski and myself: that is, the question of whether or not this managerial regime should be described as “liberal.” Pinkoski calls our actually existing regime “postliberal” on the view that “the cornerstone commitment of liberalism is to a meaningful distinction between society and the state.” But from my perspective that isn’t really a particularly liberal commitment at all; rather, liberalism has always been first and foremost about “liberation” (which is, after all, right there in the name).

Now, I’ve already described liberationism as a key part of managerial ideology, but this is perhaps to understate its centrality. For any managerial regime there is no more important task, no higher calling, than to relentlessly seek to crush the only real threat such a regime can face: any other social force able to compete for the loyalty and obligation of citizens. Any independent social sphere — any guild, association, church, tribe, or family, and any home town, region, or today even nation — is an obstacle to universal management (and to the universal proliferation of managers). For managerialism, all such communities and attachments represent competing power centers, and thus all barriers must urgently be dissolved, all bonds broken, all distinctions homogenized. All bottom-up functions once performed by other social spheres, from insurance against the risks of life to the achievement of personal fulfillment, must be replaced by top-down bureaucratic management. The managerial ideal is the perfect frictionless mass of totally liberated (that is, totally deracinated and atomized) individuals, totally contained within the loving arms of the singular unity of the managerial state. To achieve its utopia of perfect liberty and equality, liberalism requires perfect control.

This ideal is, of course, the very essence of totalitarianism. Yet if we wonder why the distinction between public and private has everywhere collapsed into “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics,” this is the most fundamental reason why. Perhaps, for that matter, this is also why the U.S. and EU now habitually sponsor LGBT groups in Hungary or India, and finance human-trafficking “human rights” NGOs in Central America and the Mediterranean: because managerialism’s blind crusade to crush any competing spheres of social power has gone global.

Did liberalism ever really stand in opposition to this crusade for total liberation? I honestly can’t see a time that it ever did; in fact, it seems to have always served as precisely the universal acid employed to do the job. Dissolving traditional bonds and limits has always been the heart of the liberal project. Thus I’m not sure we can say that liberalism ever held back the invasion of the public into the private; the progressive collapse of that distinction was actually its inevitable outcome. And so I think it’s fair to argue that we don’t yet wander in a postliberal age, but at liberalism’s apogee.

If a new, truly alternative civilization is ever to arrive, it will only do so in the wake of liberal managerialism’s self-induced implosion, and will have to be deliberately constructed — or, rather, reconstructed — out of the very same kind of strong communal and spiritual ties and identities that liberal managerialism has always sought to tear apart and devour.

Welcome to all new subscribers who found their way here via , who kindly recommended this Substack after my short piece about the whole Churchill blowout.

In this essay, I go into more detail on some of the philosophical points made there about our relationship with history — something that should be of interest to new and long-time readers alike.

Basically, what the Churchill debate and the screeching reactions show is that the political right needs to come to terms with where the historical consciousness is at in our age: we can’t go back to the ancient or medieval ways of dealing with history, because the experience of the scientific age makes this impossible. We want our myths to be provably true. But since history is not science, this can’t really be done, as the postmodernists understood. In the end, as I’ll argue, the only serious criterion for the quality of a historical story, a particular take, is the quality and level of the mind looking at history. Hence what kind of myth, what kind of story about our past we should tell, is not just relative to the power of this or that group enforcing it; there are better and worse stories. Good takes on history can only be brought forward by a mind coming at it with all it’s got: its experience and understanding of the deepest aspects of the human condition, paired with knowledge of every possible field and realm, looking at history from the inside, the world of thought and inner experience driving historical events. And since our minds exist in history themselves, it also needs to understand itself as part of history, conscious of how its own thinking came about historically. A good take produced by such a mind can only be recognized as such by another mind that has achieved a similar level of development. But there’s more to say about all that, as you’ll see, which may shine a new light on some of our political-historical controversies.

I took much inspiration from R.G. Collingwood’s work here. A few parts even follow his arguments quite closely. Check out his “The Idea of History” if you are interested in this sort of thing.

Don’t forget to subscribe or to upgrade to a paid subscription if you want to help me keep the lights on and continue this work. Thank you all.

“History does not presuppose mind; it is the life of mind itself, which is not mind except so far as it both lives in historical process and knows itself as so living.”

— R.G. Collingwood1

I.

The history of ideas can teach us a great deal about the world we inhabit and ourselves. By studying it, bare threads of thought running over long time stretches come to our attention, illuminating pathways that jump-start areas of our minds having laid dormant before. We make ourselves available to the great becoming of history itself: a version of which having always been there in potential; a version whose trajectory playing itself out is a necessary feature of the cosmos.

To trace the history of thought is to strengthen what makes us truly human: our capacity to step out of our minds, taking the position of an observer looking at our own thought processes. Such a jump-start can kick us out of the parthogenetic sauce our brains are habitually cooking up, enabling us to watch it, study it: notably its disastrous entanglement with an unconscious logic playing itself out mercilessly. For to a large degree, we are the product of our thoughts — so what could be more useful than discovering them, understanding them in their wider historical context, so that we may work with them instead of being worked by them?

One of those threads running through recent history is the decline, if not outright destruction, of our long tradition of valuing what we might call the art of truthful reasoning. It is the art of developing and cultivating a beautiful and sharp mind, one that cuts through the jungle in front of our mental eyes, able to conquer new lands in the vast expanse of wider reality; a mind that takes in the deeper fabric of the thoughtscape in stride, a fabric built of logical connections across time and space, therefore transcending what we moderns like to think of as material reality. This thought-structure underwriting reality can be discerned via a wholesome form of reason, a perception rooted not in empiricism, but in Experience unfolding over time, in time, as Being.

True thought, beautiful reasoning, is not aimed at stating true facts that you discover once and hammer in stone. What you gain isn’t a thing, a material price. Results of thought are just fossilized artifacts; you might hang them on the wall if you like, but try to take them as timeless truths from which to build a worldview, and you end up with a monster made of dead parts: twitch it will, perhaps, but not live. And like ideologies, which are just such monsters, it will eventually haunt you and everyone it touches.

True thought is a movement, a process. It’s a bold charge, fueled by the dialogue between soul, mind and the hidden nonverbal mindspace from whence our experience ultimately flows. While it expresses truth, its truth is only valuable in the very act of thinking or rethinking it. Hence the fruits of true thought are never the last word, but an achievement in a certain direction. Such thought, when told or written down, and when read or listened to, may open a connection to the ground of all truth for all who are equipped to do so. With each connection so established, the next connection may become easier. True thought breeds more true thought.

To understand the decline of this form of beautiful and truthful reasoning and how it relates to history, we must look at how the ideas have formed that got us there: ideas that are part of a thought complex playing out its inner logic in a sort of background program running in the collective mind. Such background programs can arrest our development in history towards self-awareness, towards mind understanding itself in an ongoing act of illuminating the wider thoughtscape.

II.

There is a long-standing battle in philosophy between the schools of realism and idealism. Realists, who (re)gained ground in the late 19th century particularly in Oxford and Cambridge and later went on to dominate Anglo philosophy entirely, emphasized the outside world, the reality that we see. In this picture, our mind’s purpose is to faithfully reproduce what’s out there, and it mostly does a decent job of it, to the point that we can safely ignore philosophical mind games for the most part. If this view seems to be entirely self-evident to you, this is because it is close to how science looks at the world, and as we know, we are in the near-total grip of a science-worshiping age: in fact, a big part of the realists’ motivation was to get rid of traditional philosophy as a competing sense-making framework and strengthen the scientific world view. This had been an ongoing process ever since Descartes and the dawn of the scientific age, fully actualizing itself in the positivist spirit of the 19th century. Figures like Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and later the logical positivists sought to inoculate the high priests of the scientific age against those pesky philosophers threatening to undermine their grand ambitions to know the secrets of the universe using empirical facts and the scientific method alone. (A corollary to this program was their rejection of the traditional idea that ethics should be about helping people build character; instead, they proclaimed morality to be just another object of scientific study: let’s figure out how morality works, why humans behave morally or not, but let’s not be fooled by outdated notions such as that studying ethics can actually make us better men.)

But this downplaying of mind hadn’t been the standard view before. Difficult as it is to imagine these days, people at different times took the primacy of mind for granted. Their deepest background assumptions, their absolute presuppositions, formed a different constellation, as R.G. Collingwood put it. How exactly they went about it varies from recognizing a divine plan behind it all to assuming an inner logic not just to movements of objects, but to thoughts as well, this inner logic coming from a place more fundamental than the material world. Others assumed the world to be alive right down to the smallest part, not drawing the hard line between mind and nature that we take for granted these days.

The idealists came at it from many angles, ascribing to mind various roles in the process of knowing, understanding and perceiving the world that are very different from simply reproducing external reality. While we are somewhat used to thinking of our minds at least as a sort of “filter,” like colored glasses that may warp what’s really out there, the idealist tradition goes far beyond that. For Kant and Schopenhauer, for example, while reality most certainly exists (we don’t just make it up in our minds willy-nilly), what we actually experience is to a large degree conditioned by the make-up of our minds. Not just in the sense of those colored glasses, but much more deeply: even such fundamental categories as time, space and causality for those thinkers are not “out there” in the physical world, but are imposed on our perception by mind, thereby creating the world of appearances we experience. While this still implies a certain mind-matter duality, other approaches went beyond that and sought to give up such dualistic thinking entirely by looking at our experience more holistically, refusing the sharp distinction between life on the one side and dead matter on the other. But even such an approach tends to be misunderstood these days because of our scientific presuppositions: a philosophy centered on life that assumes the cosmos to be alive right down to the smallest material stuff invites us to think biologically about the world, and therefore ultimately scientifically, again losing sight of the role of thought and its place. You don’t have to diminish the intellectual achievements born of the scientific mindset that focuses on “nature out there” to ask the question: isn’t it weird to exclude thought itself as an object of study — not via experiment but, well, via thought?

You might say the battle between philosophical idealism and realism is pretty far-out stuff; and it’s easy to get lost in all those different positions and arguments. But the important thing to understand here is whether consciously or not, we all adhere to this or that philosophical school, the habitual way of thinking of our age. This creates sort of a hidden program running in the back of our minds, through which much of our perception of the world is directed. And since realism, and the connected thought complex of the materialist-reductionist program, has won the day not only in academia, but in the wider collective consciousness as the founding myth of the scientific age, it forms our standard assumption — the story we all “know” somehow, without us even noticing it. One of the implications of the realist mindset is that our attention is magnetically drawn to bottom-up materialist explanations and a view that treats everything, including history, as a sort of spectacle best viewed from the outside. In this light, it’s no wonder that we tend to forget about thought proper, as experienced from the inside, in our inquiries: our background assumptions, unnoticed by us, push us away from such an endeavor. This is especially relevant when it comes to our relationship with history.

To continue reading and show some love for what I’m doing here, please become a paid subscriber. You’ll help me keep the lights on. Thank you very much to all of you supporting my work.

Mr. Chairman, esteemed members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, ladies and gentlemen.

The transition from years of confinement in a maximum-security prison to standing here before the representatives of 46 nations and 700 million people is a profound and surreal shift.

The experience of isolation for years in a small cell is difficult to convey; it strips away one’s sense of self, leaving only the raw essence of existence.

I am not yet fully equipped to speak about what I have endured – the relentless struggle to stay alive, both physically and mentally, nor can i speak yet about the deaths by hanging, murder, and medical neglect of my fellow prisoners.

I apologise in advance if my words falter or if my presentation lacks the polish you might expect in such a distinguished forum.

Isolation has taken its toll, which I am trying to unwind, and expressing myself in this setting is a challenge.

However, the gravity of this occasion and the weight of the issues at hand compel me to set aside my reservations and speak to you directly. I have traveled a long way, literally and figuratively, to be before you today.

Before our discussion or answering any questions you might have, I wish to thank PACE for its 2020 resolution (2317), which stated that my imprisonment set a dangerous precedent for journalists and noted that the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture called for my release.

I’m also grateful for PACE’s 2021 statement expressing concern over credible reports that US officials discussed my assassination, again calling for my prompt release.

And I commend the Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee for commissioning a renowned rapporteur, Sunna Ævarsdóttir, to investigate the circumstances surrounding my detention and conviction and the consequent implications for human rights.

However, like so many of the efforts made in my case – whether they were from parliamentarians, presidents, prime ministers, the Pope, UN officials and diplomats, unions, legal and medical professionals, academics, activists, or citizens – none of them should have been necessary.

None of the statements, resolutions, reports, films, articles, events, fundraisers, protests, and letters over the last 14 years should have been necessary. But all of them were necessary because without them I never would have seen the light of day.

This unprecedented global effort was needed because of the legal protections that did exist, many existed only on paper or were not effective in any remotely reasonable time frame.

I eventually chose freedom over unrealisable justice, after being detained for years and facing a 175 year sentence with no effective remedy. Justice for me is now precluded, as the US government insisted in writing into its plea agreement that I cannot file a case at the European Court of Human Rights or even a freedom of information act request over what it did to me as a result of its extradition request.

I want to be totally clear. I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today because after years of incarceration because I plead guilty to journalism. I plead guilty to seeking information from a source. I plead guilty to obtaining information from a source. And I plead guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else. I hope my testimony today can serve to highlight the weaknesses of the existing safeguards and to help those whose cases are less visible but who are equally vulnerable.

As I emerge from the dungeon of Belmarsh, the truth now seems less discernible, and I regret how much ground has been lost during that time period when expressing the truth has been undermined, attacked, weakened, and diminished.

I see more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth and more self censorship. It is hard not to draw a line from the US government’s prosecution of me – its crossing the rubicon by internationally criminalising journalism – to the chilled climate for freedom of expression now.

When I founded WikiLeaks, it was driven by a simple dream: to educate people about how the world works so that, through understanding, we might bring about something better.

Having a map of where we are lets us understand where we might go.

Knowledge empowers us to hold power to account and to demand justice where there is none.

We obtained and published truths about tens of thousands of hidden casualties of war and other unseen horrors, about programs of assassination, rendition, torture, and mass surveillance.

We revealed not just when and where these things happened but frequently the policies, the agreements, and structures behind them.

When we published Collateral Murder, the infamous gun camera footage of a US Apache helicopter crew eagerly blowing to pieces Iraqi journalists and their rescuers, the visual reality of modern warfare shocked the world.

But we also used interest in this video to direct people to the classified policies for when the US military could deploy lethal force in Iraq and how many civilians could be killed before gaining higher approval.

In fact, 40 years of my potential 175-year sentence was for obtaining and releasing these policies.

The practical political vision I was left with after being immersed in the world’s dirty wars and secret operations is simple: Let us stop gagging, torturing, and killing each other for a change. Get these fundamentals right and other political, economic, and scientific processes will have space to take care of the rest.

WikiLeaks’ work was deeply rooted in the principles that this Assembly stands for.

Journalism that elevated freedom of information and the public’s right to know found its natural operational home in Europe.

I lived in Paris and we had formal corporate registrations in France and in Iceland. Our journalistic and technical staff were spread throughout Europe. We published to the world from servers in based in France, Germany, and Norway.

But 14 years ago the United States military arrested one of our alleged whistleblowers, PFC Manning, a US intelligence analyst based in Iraq.

The US government concurrently launched an investigation against me and my colleagues.

The US government illicitly sent planes of agents to Iceland, paid bribes to an informer to steal our legal and journalistic work product, and without formal process pressured banks and financial services to block our subscriptions and freeze our accounts.

The UK government took part in some of this retribution. It admitted at the European Court of Human Rights that it had unlawfully spied on my UK lawyers during this time.

Ultimately this harassment was legally groundless. President Obama’s Justice Department chose not to indict me, recognizing that no crime had been committed.

The United States had never before prosecuted a publisher for publishing or obtaining government information. To do so would require a radical and ominous reinterpretation of the US Constitution.

In January 2017, Obama also commuted the sentence of Manning, who had been convicted of being one of my sources.

However, in February 2017, the landscape changed dramatically. President Trump had been elected. He appointed two wolves in MAGA hats: Mike Pompeo, a Kansas congressman and former arms industry executive, as CIA Director, and William Barr, a former CIA officer, as US Attorney General.

By March 2017, WikiLeaks had exposed the CIA’s infiltration of French political parties, its spying on French and German leaders, its spying on the European Central Bank, European economics ministries, and its standing orders to spy on French industry as a whole.

We revealed the CIA’s vast production of malware and viruses, its subversion of supply chains, its subversion of antivirus software, cars, smart TVs and iPhones.

CIA Director Pompeo launched a campaign of retribution.

It is now a matter of public record that under Pompeo’s explicit direction, the CIA drew up plans to kidnap and to assassinate me within the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and authorized going after my European colleagues, subjecting us to theft, hacking attacks, and the planting of false information.

My wife and my infant son were also targeted. A CIA asset was permanently assigned to track my wife and instructions were given to obtain DNA from my six month old son’s nappy.

This is the testimony of more than 30 current and former US intelligence officials speaking to the US press, which has been additionally corroborated by records seized in a prosecution brought against some of the CIA agents involved.

The CIA’s targeting of myself, my family and my associates through aggressive extrajudicial and extraterritorial means provides a rare insight into how powerful intelligence organisations engage in transnational repression. Such repressions are not unique. What is unique is that we know so much about this one due to numerous whistleblowers and to judicial investigations in Spain.

This Assembly is no stranger to extraterritorial abuses by the CIA.

PACE’s groundbreaking report on CIA renditions in Europe exposed how the CIA operated secret detention centres and conducted unlawful renditions on European soil, violating human rights and international law.

In February this year, the alleged source of some of our CIA revelations, former CIA officer Joshua Schulte, was sentenced to forty years in prison under conditions of extreme isolation.

His windows are blacked out, and a white noise machine plays 24 hours a day over his door so that he cannot even shout through it.

These conditions are more severe than those found in Guantanamo Bay.

Transnational repression is also conducted by abusing legal processes.

The lack of effective safeguards against this means that Europe is vulnerable to having its mutual legal assistance and extradition treaties hijacked by foreign powers to go after dissenting voices in Europe.

In Mike Pompeo’s memoirs, which I read in my prison cell, the former CIA Director bragged about how he pressured the US Attorney General to bring an extradition case against me in response to our publications about the CIA.

Indeed, acceding to Pompeo’s efforts, the US Attorney General reopened the investigation against me that Obama had closed and re-arrested Manning, this time as a witness.

Manning was held in prison for over a year and fined a thousand dollars a day in a formal attempt to coerce her into providing secret testimony against me.

She ended up attempting to take her own life.

We usually think of attempts to force journalists to testify against their sources. But Manning was now a source being forced to testify against their journalist.

By December 2017, CIA Director Pompeo had got his way, and the US government issued a warrant to the UK for my extradition.

The UK government kept the warrant secret from the public for two more years, while it, the US government, and the new president of Ecuador moved to shape the political, legal, and diplomatic grounds for my arrest.

When powerful nations feel entitled to target individuals beyond their borders, those individuals do not stand a chance unless there are strong safeguards in place and a state willing to enforce them. Without them no individual has a hope of defending themselves against the vast resources that a state aggressor can deploy.

If the situation were not already bad enough in my case, the US government asserted a dangerous new global legal position. Only US citizens have free speech rights. Europeans and other nationalities do not have free speech rights. But the US claims its Espionage Act still applies to them regardless of where they are. So Europeans in Europe must obey US secrecy law with no defences at all as far as the US government is concerned. An American in Paris can talk about what the US government is up to – perhaps. But for a Frenchman in Paris, to do so is a crime without any defence and he may be extradited just like me.

Now that one foreign government has formally asserted that Europeans have no free speech rights, a dangerous precedent has been set. Other powerful states will inevitably follow suit.

The war in Ukraine has already seen the criminalisation of journalists in Russia, but based on the precedent set in my extradition, there is nothing to stop Russia, or indeed any other state, from targeting European journalists, publishers, or even social media users, by claiming that their secrecy laws have been violated.

The rights of journalists and publishers within the European space are seriously threatened. Transnational repression cannot become the norm here.

As one of the world’s two great norm-setting institutions, PACE must act. The criminalisation of newsgathering activities is a threat to investigative journalism everywhere.

I was formally convicted, by a foreign power, for asking for, receiving, and publishing truthful information about that power while I was in Europe.

The fundamental issue is simple: Journalists should not be prosecuted for doing their jobs.

Journalism is not a crime; it is a pillar of a free and informed society.

Mr Chairman, distinguished delegates, if Europe is to have a future where the freedom to speak and the freedom to publish the truth are not privileges enjoyed by a few but rights guaranteed to all then it must act so that what has happened in my case never happens to anyone else.

I wish to express my deepest gratitude to this assembly, to the conservatives, social democrats, liberals, leftists, greens, and independents – who have supported me throughout this ordeal and to the countless individuals who have advocated tirelessly for my release.

It is heartening to know that in a world often divided by ideology and interests, there remains a shared commitment to the protection of essential human liberties.

Freedom of expression and all that flows from it is at a dark crossroads. I fear that unless norm setting institutions like PACE wake up to the gravity of the situation it will be too late.

Let us all commit to doing our part to ensure that the light of freedom never dims, that the pursuit of truth will live on, and that the voices of the many are not silenced by the interests of the few.

Heinrich von Kleist was a prolific German writer of the late eighteenth century whose work often focussed on the consequences of rhetorical confusion, the serious problems and personal suffering caused by writing or speaking incorrectly. In 1811, at the age of thirty-four, he formed a suicide pact with a close friend, Henriette Vogel, and shot her before turning the gun on himself. On the hundredth anniversary of his suicide, the district of Schöneberg in Berlin gave Kleist’s name to a small, charming park outside the Kammergericht (Chamber Court), the highest court in the state.

Germany is a place of dark irony.

The Chamber Court occupies a huge Neo-Baroque building that takes up an entire city block, bordered on three sides by the aforementioned park and facing a quiet cobble-stoned street. I’m standing outside on a crisp blue-sky morning in September, waiting for a thought criminal named CJ Hopkins.

CJ Hopkins is an American writer, an old-school lefty liberal with “an aversion to totalitarians, fascists, and other such authoritarian control freaks who get their rocks off intimidating, and dominating, and preying on the weak.” In 2004, he emigrated “because of the fascistic atmosphere that had taken hold of the USA at that time,” believing “that Germany, given its history, would be the last place on earth to ever have anything to do with any form of totalitarianism again.”

For thirty-odd years, twenty of which he has spent in Berlin, CJ has cranked out award-winning theatre, satire, dystopian fiction, and acid-sharp commentary on political and social issues. It’s the latter which has earned him, at the age of sixty-three, a sizeable international following, mostly centred on his Substack which has thousands of paid subscribers. He’s been called “a forbidden wit” and “an expert forecaster” by Matt Taibbi. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once referred to him as “our modern Jeremiah.”

He arrives at the courthouse in a brown trenchcoat, black beret, and sunglasses. He gives me a nod.

“Welcome to New Normal Berlin, Mike,” he says as he walks past me.

We’ve met twice before. I interviewed him remotely for my podcast, and I attended his first trial, in January 2024, at the Tiergarten District Court in Moabit, next to the infamous prison where the Nazis incarcerated and executed political prisoners.

The Crime

In May 2022, Hopkins published a book called The Rise of the New Normal Reich, the cover of which features a medical mask through which a swastika is faintly visible. In August 2022, he posted that image twice on Twitter (now X), accompanied by text.

In the first tweet, Hopkins wrote:

The #masks are symbols of ideological conformity. That's all they are. They always were. Stop pretending they're ever something else or get used to wearing them.

#Masks are not a mild remedy

In the second tweet, he quoted Karl Lauterbach, the Health Minister at the time, who had declared that “The mask always sends a signal”.

That’s it. That’s the crime.

In response, the public prosecutor’s office filed a criminal charge against CJ for “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.”

Thus began what CJ has referred to as a “Kafkaesque mockery of justice.”

The Law

When people hear about how CJ ended up in court, they’re usually surprised to find out that using a Nazi symbol such as the swastika is not absolutely banned in Germany. It actually depends on context and intent, and there are significant protections for creative, editorial, and educational purposes.

Clivia von Dewitz, a German judge who wrote her doctoral thesis on the ban of Nazi symbols, explained the law under which the charge was brought in an article for Berliner Zeitung:

According to the ban on [Nazi] insignia (§ 86 Para. 1 No. 4, 86a Para. 1 No. 1 StGB), only those who distribute or publicly display Nazi symbols “which, based on their content, are intended to reflect the efforts of a former National Socialist organization” are liable to prosecution. This means that not every use of a Nazi symbol falls under the ban. On the contrary, the law confirms that only material, the content of which is directed against the free democratic basic order or the concept of understanding among nations, is considered [criminal] propaganda media (Section 86 Para. 3 StGB).

And, according to the criminal statute (Section 86 Para. 4 StGB), criminal liability is also excluded if the material serves the purposes of civic education, defense against unconstitutional efforts, art or science, research or teaching, or reporting on current events or history, or similar purposes (the so-called social adequacy clause).

It was in the 1970s that Nazi symbols were first used in a critical or ironic way. In these cases, jurisprudence failed to establish criminal liability, either at the level of the offense or by virtue of the application of the social adequacy clause, because a critical and distanced use of Nazi symbols is not punishable, especially in view of Article 5 of the Grundgesetz [i.e., the German constitution, literally “Basic Law”]. The fundamental right of freedom of expression and freedom of art enshrined therein is constitutive of a democracy.

The law is also recognised by the courts as having a “protective purpose”, a raison d’etre that comes into play when examining whether the use of a proscribed symbol falls within or outside of what is permitted. The general understanding is that the protective purpose of the ban on Nazi symbols in Germany is to prevent the minimisation or, as the Germans call it, “normalisation” of the horrors of the Nazi era and the Holocaust, and to prevent a situation in which it becomes socially acceptable for Nazis or Nazi sympathisers to begin using those symbols more widely.

“You can’t use it, for example, for fun, and CJ agrees with that,” says Friedemann Däblitz, the fresh-faced attorney defending him. “If you write a book about history you can use the symbol. If it is clear that you are using it in a ‘distant’ manner, if everyone can see that this guy doesn’t support Nazism, in those situations, the risk of normalisation is not that big.”

So how normal is the use of the swastika in German media?

Normalisation For Me, Not For Thee

In May 2024, the cover of the German magazine Der Spiegel featured a flag draped over a swastika to illustrate its lead story, an essay by Dirk Kurbjuweit titled 75 Years of the Federal Republic — and nothing learned?

Here are the covers of Der Spiegel and CJ’s book, side by side:

Both CJ and Der Spiegel used the swastika to imply that something is amiss in the world of German politics, with a subtle but crucial difference.

Der Spiegel used the swastika to suggest that the increasingly popular political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), “a party with extreme right-wing tendencies,” represents a nascent form of Nazism.

CJ, however, riffed on the cover of William L. Shirer’s famous 1960 book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich to criticise the German government’s pandemic policies as “a nascent form of totalitarianism.”

The German magazine Stern has also featured the swastika and the Nazi salute on its cover.
May 2024

August 2017

Der Spiegel and Stern were not directly criticising the current German government, nor were they pressing on the sore spot of controversial pandemic policies. CJ did both. Those magazines have had no legal repercussions for their use of the swastika. Only CJ has been prosecuted.

“[M]y personal impression is this law is used completely arbitrarily against dissidents,” Däblitz tells me in an interview. “For me, everything got much worse with the beginning of the pandemic.”

The Pandemic

Pandemic restrictions in Germany were harsh. Citing advice from the Robert Koch Institute (Germany’s equivalent of the CDC), the Merkel and Scholz governments put stringent limits on the rights of the unvaccinated, in addition to lockdowns and mask mandates.

Critics at the time drew comparisons with the Nazi era, often by likening the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis to the government and media discrimination and rhetoric against the unvaccinated. In 2021, BBC News reported on the use by German Covid protestors of the infamous yellow Star of David armband with the word ‘Jew’ replaced by ‘Unvaccinated’.

While perhaps distasteful or inappropriate depending on one’s perception, it remains the case that the social repercussions of the German government’s pandemic policies are still being felt. In Germany, the loss of faith in government and the corrosion of the perception of the legitimacy of authority has been real and widespread, regardless of whether one believes the pandemic policies were well-intentioned or reasonable. The public’s (and CJ’s) suspicion regarding those policies also may not have been entirely spurious.

In late July 2024, the freelance journalist Aya Velásquez received unredacted copies of internal documents from a whistleblower at the Robert Koch Institute and published them. Sebastian Lucenti and Dr. Meyer-Hesselbarth, respectively a lawyer and a former judge writing for Cicero, claim that “the RKI protocols that were released and leaked show that a large proportion of the freedom-restricting norms created between 2020 and 2023 were tainted by the stigma of unconstitutionality from the outset.” Judge von Dewitz, in her article for Berliner Zeitung, wrote that the leaked documents “suggest that the government ordered significant parts of the measures restricting fundamental rights from 2020 to 2022 not on the basis of scientific findings, but out of political calculation, such that a new assessment of the government's actions from 2020 to 2022 is necessary.”

The First Trial

At his first trial, in Room 500 of the Tiergarten District Court, the prosecutor asked CJ if he understood the law in Germany with regards to the use of Nazi symbols. If he had played dumb and pretended to be an ignorant foreigner unaware of the rules of his host nation, the charges would probably have been dropped. Instead, he was honest. He said that he knew full well the history and weight of Nazi symbolism in Germany, and he knew the law as well, including the prohibited and permitted uses of the swastika.

“I don't want Nazis, neo-Nazis parading around in Germany with swastikas either,” CJ told me in an interview before the trial. “And I have to say, although I'm generally a free speech absolutist, I understand that law and I actually agree with it.”

When asked by the judge to give his intentions in posting the image, he stated that it was “to warn people about the emergence of a new form of totalitarianism that is hidden behind the official corona narrative just as the swastika is hidden behind the mask in my artwork.” This drew an involuntary derisory guffaw from the judge. He continued: “I absolutely compared a new form of totalitarianism to Nazi Germany, a twentieth century form of totalitarianism.”

In his opening argument, the prosecutor suggested that CJ was “relativising the Holocaust,” “relativising the Nazi tyranny which is also the aim of supporters of this ideology in a different form,” and equating the Nazi regime to “civic management of 2020 to 2022 which came about within constitutional procedures and was enacted through democratically legitimised institutions...and thus contributes, regardless of his intention, to the normalisation of National Socialist ideas.”

Permitted to respond, CJ pointed out that the well-documented rise of the Nazis likewise took place “within constitutional procedures” and “through democratically legitimised institutions,” closing by saying “I think I'm allowed to compare these [pandemic] measures with measures which took place in the twentieth century.”

He went on to describe instances where public figures had compared current events to the Nazis without subsequent charges from the German authorities, to which the judge responded by saying “We're talking about symbols, not words.”

Speaking of symbols, in that particular courtroom, the ornate ceiling featured two plaster rosettes with fasces in-set, and there were two more examples of the fasces at the entrance to the building. The name of the fasces symbol, a bundle of sticks bound together with an axe head attached, is the root from which the word ‘fascism’ is derived. If you squint, you’ll also see the fasces on either side of the Speaker of the House’s dais in the US Congress.

At the end of the proceedings, CJ read a prepared statement to the court, his voice occasionally betraying his emotions.

“The German authorities have had my speech censored on the Internet, and have damaged my reputation and income as an author,” he said. “One of my books has been banned by Amazon in Germany. All this because I criticized the German authorities, because I mocked one of their decrees, because I pointed out one of their lies. This turn of events would be absurdly comical if it were not so infuriating. I cannot adequately express how insulting it is to be forced to sit here and affirm my opposition to fascism.”

At the end of his statement, the thirty-seven members of the audience in the gallery broke out in applause and calls of “Bravo!” The judge shouted for order and threatened to clear the courtroom. Everyone was ordered to stand up. The judge delivered a stern chiding and, after a moment of suitable silent contrition, the room was allowed to be seated and the door was closed.

She then pronounced her verdict: “Freispruch”. Not guilty.

The judge dedicated half the time spent in delivering the verdict to ensuring CJ was made aware of how little she thought of him. She considered him to be arrogant, ideologically-driven, and incorrect in his views on the pandemic. He was wrong to claim that mask mandates and similar policies were driven by the government's desire to force compliance, and to equate safety measures with brainwashing. She told him that his was a “subjective emotional position” but that “objectively, the German public doesn't agree with you.” By acquitting him, she said, she was proving him wrong in his assessment of Germany as a nascent totalitarian state.

Upon delivering the verdict and ending the proceedings, the judge put on a medical mask and exited the courtroom. You couldn’t make it up.

In the written verdict published after the trial, the judge made it clear that, "when taking into account the text associated with the use of the mask, it can easily be seen that the connection to National Socialism is made in an emphatically negative sense."

Within the seven-day period allowed by law, the public prosecutor’s office applied to the Chamber Court for a “revision” of the verdict using a line of reasoning that Däblitz found highly questionable.

“The prosecutor…decided that if you use the symbol to bring a criticism, this criticism has to be against Nazism,” he explained. “It’s not okay if this criticism is directed against, for example, the government, because in this case it is not clear enough that you are also opposing Nazism.”

The prosecution had pivoted from arguing that CJ was disseminating Nazi propaganda to claiming that he was breaking the law by not specifically criticising Nazis.

“[T]he prosecutor in Germany is not free, it's part of the executive,” Däblitz told me during a podcast recording with him and CJ several months later. “It's part of the government, and they execute what the government wants.”

“The prosecutor is trying to rewrite the law in a much narrower way than it is written,” CJ added. “I believe that the prosecutor just wants to punish me. And so they're pulling arguments out of their ass. And this was really the only argument that they could try to make to continue this prosecution.”

The Second Trial

I join around two dozen familiar faces from the first trial in January, as well as journalists from Berliner Zeitung, Tagesspiegel, Der Spiegel, The Epoch Times, and Legal Tribune Online, in shuffling through airport-style security during which we are emptied, searched, patted, and prodded. A maximum of thirty observers are allowed into Room 145a of the Chamber Court, and no personal items are permitted. We are issued with a blue biro and a handful of blank looseleaf paper on request. The cause of the heightened security is described by Lisa Jani, the court’s press liaison, as being due to an ongoing espionage trial of a German intelligence agent who is accused of colluding with a Russian businessman on behalf of the FSB, Russia’s security service. To prevent anyone placing listening devices in the courtroom, we all have to submit to special measures.

“It would only make sense if this is really the only room available and it's not possible to get another room,” Däblitz tells me in an interview. “So I numerous times had some contact with the people working there and found out there are actually other rooms at least of the same size.”

“It's absolutely unnecessary,” CJ adds. “I see it as just a bald, a blatant attempt to discourage public attendance and to discourage press coverage.”

Once inside, the first thing that catches the eye is a wall of bulletproof glass about fifteen feet high separating the gallery from the area where the proceedings will be held. CJ, Däblitz, and a translator sit at the defendant’s table, set at the foot of a raised dais from which three judges and a new prosecutor frown down.

The ceiling is cross-hatched with a grid of clouded glass through which diffuse light falls. The carpet is a hotel-style mash-up of turquoise, puce, and duck egg, clashing with the wooden benches that we shuffle along to take our seats.

The prosecutor trying the case, which involves the use and interpretation of a symbol, is named Jung. The universe is not without a sense of humour.

In a British or American courtroom, the judge is seated in front of and above both the defendant and the plaintiff. Both parties come before the court as supplicants, pleading for justice, and the judge sits apart, emphasising their (hopeful) impartiality.

A German courtroom makes a strikingly different impression. The judges and the prosecutor sit on the same level, above the defendant, separated only by several metres of wooden panelling. It lands immediately: The prosecutor and the judges are on one side, the defendant on the other. Something about the layout makes me wonder if the fix is in.

Kathrin Jung, the prosecutor, opens with a desultory run-through of her side’s revised argument, which has already been submitted to the judges in writing, along with Däblitz’s defence. It is a scant few minutes before it is over.

Däblitz makes the argument that the prosecutor is attempting “a blurring of the law” and that “[t]he protective purpose of the law is, above all, to preserve the constitutional order” which “is therefore also to preserve the freedom of expression.” The purpose of CJ’s tweets was “to ward off unconstitutional efforts,” he adds. “Those who are determined to support the values ​​of the free democratic basic order should not have to face the risk of prosecution.”

At the end, CJ is given the opportunity to make a statement. Reading from a printout in German, he once again presents his position to the court.

“[H]ere I am, on trial in criminal court for the second time. The German authorities had my Tweets censored. They reported me to the Federal Criminal Police Office. They reported me to The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the German domestic Intelligence agency. My book is banned in Germany. The German authorities investigated me. They prosecuted me. They put me on trial for tweeting. After I was acquitted, that wasn’t enough, so they have put me on trial again. They defamed me. They have damaged my income and reputation as an author. They have forced me to spend thousands of Euros in legal fees to defend myself against these clearly ridiculous charges.”

While he reads, I see a couple of the journalists sitting in front of me chuckle or sigh dismissively.

“Why, rational people might ask, have I been subjected to this special treatment, while Der Spiegel, Stern, Die Tageszeitung, and many others who have also tweeted swastikas, have not?”

Five feet away from me, the reporter from Der Spiegel squirms a little while taking notes.

“It has nothing to do with punishing people who disseminate pro-Nazi propaganda. It is about punishing political dissent, and intimidating critics into silence. I’m not here because I put a swastika on my book cover. I am here because I put it behind a “Covid” mask.”

Just like the first trial, at the end of his statement the gallery erupts in applause and cheers to the annoyance of the judges.

The presiding judge, Delia Neumann, declares a forty-five minute break so that her and the other two judges, Dr. Ammann and Dr. Brunozzi, can deliberate and return a verdict.

In the corridor outside, I notice that on the clipboard showing the docket for today’s trial, the names of CJ and his lawyer have been misspelled: ‘Hopkings’ and ‘Däbitz’. CJ sits on a bench with his wife and tries to relax.

The time passes surprisingly quickly.

After we’re all seated, the judge begins to read her verdict. She reads for twenty minutes with barely any inflection or pauses. I find myself wondering how the judges managed to deliberate, reach a consensus, and write a twenty-minute verdict in forty-five minutes. Judge Neumann stops reading abruptly, stands up and leaves. We’re ushered out of the gallery. I turn to the person next to me and ask what happened. He shrugs.

“Guilty,” a helpful fellow observer says, leaning over.

In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, so it goes.

The Verdict

The official statement of the Chamber Court declares that CJ Hopkins has been found “guilty of using symbols of unconstitutional organizations.”

Referring to the judge’s ruling in the first trial, the Chamber Court calls her line of reasoning “legally incorrect” because “[t]he protective purpose of the law is to banish the use of symbols of unconstitutional organizations from the picture of political life, regardless of the intention behind it.” The Court’s statement continues by emphasising that “the communicative taboo” preventing the use of the swastika in daily life “must be maintained so that people do not become accustomed to such symbols.”

Däblitz is taken aback. “They left out what my core argument was,” he says. “My core argument was he was objecting to unconstitutional activities and in these cases it is explicitly allowed to use the swastika, and they didn’t say anything about that.”

When asked about “the communicative taboo”, Däblitz is adamant that according to the law as written “you can use [the swastika] to speak up against unconstitutional activities because this law, basically, wants to protect a free order, with freedom of speech, because a free democratic society needs freedom of speech, so basically that’s the ultimate goal and that’s why they want to ban Nazis and also Nazi symbols.”

The Chamber Court, it would seem, has either changed the law or is at odds with it.

Milling around on the steps of the block-sized building, nobody who attended the trial, from the Court’s press liaison to journalists to members of the public, gives the same answer when asked what the verdict actually meant, what the reasoning behind it was, how it related to the law in question, and what the implications are going forward. Confusion reigns.

Däblitz confirms that he and CJ will be applying to have the case heard at the Constitutional Court, the highest legal authority in the country. It’s their last chance, a Hail Mary, and, as he puts it, “they’ll probably refuse to hear the case.” The alternative is that the lower court will now decide on a sentence.

What Now?

Over wine and flammkuchen at a café in the Neukölln neighbourhood, I ask CJ what he thinks his sentence will be if the Constitutional Court doesn’t accept his case.

“They could do anything,” he says. “I could get three years in jail.”

His wife, who happens to be Jewish, holds his hand and watches him lovingly. I can see that she’s worried.

I ask him how it feels to have moved here from America specifically because of what he felt was a rising tide of fascism, only to have this happen.

The convicted thought criminal shakes his head. “This country broke my heart.”

In the famous German novella Michael Kohlhaas, published in 1810, the eponymous protagonist is wronged and sets out for justice, only to find that the system will not let him have it. In despair, he cries out: “I will not abide in a country in which my rights are not protected.”

That novella was written by Heinrich von Kleist, the suicidal author whose name adorns the park that surrounds on three sides the courthouse where Germany broke CJ’s heart.

Germany is indeed a place of dark irony.

_You can make contributions to CJ’s defense fund here, read his work on Substack and Consent Factory, and follow him on X where he is @CJHopkins_Z23.

Youtube - How the U.S. Took Over the World: The End of International Law

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Today is Thursday, October 17th, and we’re having Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson with us to talk about U.S. foreign policy. And the title of this video today, Richard and Michael, is over the world, the end of international law. We know whenever they’re talking about the foreign policy of the United States, they’re talking about the rules-based international order. And Michael, let’s start with you. Why have they decided to put an end to international law?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you’re right. That the build-up of this whole U.S.-sponsored aggression from Ukraine to Israel has caused a breakdown of international law. And just as important, what does international law mean when there’s no means of enforcement if there’s laws against genocide, laws against ongoing attacks on civilians? What can anyone do about it? There seems to be a global war, and all of the tactics now are different from all the wars that we’ve seen before, and we’ll get into that.

The basic political issues today in this new Cold War, very much like Europe’s Thirty Years’ War (from 1618 to 1648). That Thirty Years’ War ended with the Peace of Westphalia, and that led to the creation of international law that has ruled the world all the way from 1648 until the creation of the United Nations. Until just a few years ago, when the United States replaced it and said, ‘We are no longer following international law. We are following our own law. We call it the rules-based order, and it’s our rules, and our rules of order are the reverse of everything that international law has said before.’

It’s a radical change, and hardly anybody’s talked about this, because what do you do about the fact that you have the United States, Ukraine, Israel, NATO, all of a sudden reversing the principles that were considered to be the very basis of civilization for almost four centuries now? It’s very radical.

The United States has a unipolar drive for control over countries. The whole basis of international law after the Thirty Years’ War was to prevent future wars by saying no country can interfere with the political affairs of other countries. Every country has its own autonomy, and that’s what, essentially, the war was fought over. The Catholic countries were attacking the Protestant countries, and it was the largest and most devastating war that Europe had until World War I. But at the end they got together, and at the Peace of Westphalia they said, ‘How do we prevent this from happening again?

We’re going to recognize all nations are sovereign, and no country, as I said, permitted to interfere with other countries to bring about regime change.’ There was to be religious and political freedom, and the world was to be multipolar. They didn’t use that word, but that meant there wouldn’t be any single group dominating them, and they were referring specifically to the Catholic Church and the Habsburg monarchy. The Hapsburgs controlled Spain, that had all of the silver coming in from the New World, and was the big military power – as was France – and they were allied against Germany, Sweden, and the northern European Protestant countries.

A multipolar world was the whole basis of international law, and that was supposed to be the basis of the United Nations. And violation of these principles was viewed as if it was an attack on civilization itself. Emmanuel Kant and other German philosophers wrote about how this was finally a universal law, and you needed this universal law of individual freedom for persons, but also for nations.

Well, all this is now being rejected by the United States and its allies, and the proxy state of Israel in the Near East. The world is being separated into blocks between the East and West. In the conflict today, really, is whether the [?] nations, the BRICS – Russia, China, Iran, and the allies that they’ve been putting together – are going to be able to design their own destiny, or whether they’re going to have to be subject to whatever the United States does.

And you’ve seen in the last few days in Ukraine, the non-president Zelensky has just said, ‘We’re going to raise the money to buy arms and to bribe all of our officials to be loyal by selling off Ukraine’s titanium mines, to sell off the natural resources. So even if Russia takes over, the international law that America supports is going to say, wait a minute, we’ve already privatized all these resources.

Yes, you can take them over, Russia, but you won’t have any control over the land, or your ability to tax them, because we’ve privatized it all.’ That’s the kind of transformation of the way the world has organized that nobody could have expected before. So there’s a kind of ideological inquisition that’s taking place throughout the world by the United States that rejects the most basic principles of national sovereignty.

And what’s so remarkable in this is we’re seeing an economically shrinking and deindustrializing – the United States and Europe – trying to prevent the global majority from aiming at its own economic and political independence. The rest of the world has 85% of the world’s population, and it’s trying to recover from over a century of colonialism, and the financial neo-colonialism that the United States put in place after 1945.

The U.S.-centered rules of international trade and investment that sort of forced other countries to supply raw materials instead of industrializing and feeding their own population and their own economies and raising their own living standards. So you have this U.S.-NATO “Golden Billion” waging this new Cold War against most of the Western world, without an army, really, to enforce it.

Its policy makers have followed an entirely different track than was done before. They deem other countries and adversaries to be a different civilization altogether. And I’ll get to that shortly. It’s trying to dominate the world, but it no longer has the military dominance that it had in 1945. It’s lost its former ability to dominate the world monetary system, and by economic means. Its aim of retaining its former unipolar policy has been replaced by a whole different strategy, by escalating it all. We’re dealing with the end of civilization, and the end of civilization is supposed to be the United States taking control of the whole world, by imposing a neo-liberal privatization ethic, Thatcherizing and Reaganizing the whole world.

RICHARD WOLFF: Let me come at it. I appreciate very much Michael’s historical framework. I think it’s very helpful to keep that in mind. It avoids all kinds of mistakes. Let me add some comments to the story he’s told. In my view, what is going on is a desperate effort of a declining situation – a declining regime, if you like, a declining historical phase, that doesn’t want to give up, which I understand. They don’t usually go quietly, these empires, when they go down. I think the theory that you’re breaking all the customary rules that were in place – either explicitly or implicitly – for several centuries, is the right way to look at this. It’ll help us understand things that we might not see connected, but that are.

Number one, a level of horror in Gaza. I want to be clear. What was denied by people who could not face what was done to Jews in Europe in the Holocaust. We have the phenomena of people who have to deny it. That’s a way of recognizing how horrible that thing was that you can’t stand it. So you literally erase it.

It’s not the appropriate response – one should recognize it – but it helps you underscore just how horrible it was that people have to do that. It underscores in Gaza that the Israelis don’t want you to call this a genocide because if you do, then the victims of one Holocaust are busily perpetrating another one. This is horrible.

And you can’t have the United States quite deal with it, for a number of reasons. Number one, because Israel is the same settler colonialism that the United States is. We are a country of Europeans who come over to the Western hemisphere and ethnically cleanse the indigenous population out of existence, with the exception of the horrible condition the few remaining ones live out in the so-called reservations scattered across the United States, making their living from gambling, casinos, and so on. It’s this remarkable obliteration.

The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa: These are horrible examples of settler colonialism, but they were accomplished at a time when that was historically possible. Israel has the unfortunate historical fact that it isn’t possible anymore and trying to do it now is self-destructive – although it might take them a while.

But let me show you some other ways to connect. The international rules were that countries could keep their reserves, the backing for their currency in foreign banks. Russia kept a good part of its dollar and gold holdings in foreign banks. Those were seized early on in this war. That’s a violation.

To this day, there are legal ramifications percolating in Europe, even in England, questioning. For example, they couldn’t, they decided, because they’re torn too, about obliterating existing law. So they didn’t take that money. They froze it, which is already not legal. But when it came to giving the money to Ukraine, they have decided just to give the interest earned by those stolen funds. This is a playing-with-giving-up the rule, the idea, of the sacrosanct private property of Russia. And then you take the interest from it. That’s stealing too. These are lawyerly games. What’s important here is, as Michael says, leaving it.

Then there’s the war in Ukraine itself. Okay. Ukraine says it needs to have security. Russia says it needs to have security. Ukraine is behaving badly towards its Russian minorities. The Russians want to protect their minority. Okay. This has to be worked out. This is not the first time you’ve had this kind of a conflict. There’s nothing unique about that conflict.

You know, there were Germans living in the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. There were other examples. This could have been worked out as those others were, but it wasn’t. And that’s what’s interesting. The decision was made not to. Now, yes, it’s the United States flexing its muscle. But I see it a little bit less grandiosely, as – Michael put it – reshaping the world. It is that, but it comes out of a defensive posture. It comes out of desperation. It comes out of, ‘We are losing in the world and we will not tolerate losing again. You will not stop us from doing what we want to do in Ukraine. You will not stop us from having Israel as our secure outpost. You cannot attack it. We don’t care what your issue is. You are Palestinians, you were there, that’s not interesting for us.

For us, we need a reliable agent in the Middle East. Israel has been that, and we will protect it. And we have now controlled Ukraine. We rearranged their politics a few years earlier to make that the case. It’s ours. It’s part of our expansion of NATO.’ And the horror is that the Russians should resist. The Russians should say – and this has nothing to do with whether the Russians are right or wrong in any of this – ‘This is an empire,’ say, in the words of Lyndon Johnson, “So far and no further” (in good Texas English). So, I see the taking of the reserves from Russia, I see the misunderstanding of what’s going on, in terms of Russia’s allies, the power that the BRICS have. Forget, yes, that it takes time to replace the dollar.

The BRICS have made some moves in that direction, but they still have a long way to go. No question. No question. But the reality is the BRICS have made real moves. And one of the most important was supporting Russia against the United States and Europe in the Ukraine. That’s the reality. It’s not about right or wrong or anything else. This is about how you try to handle and understand what’s going on.

The United States is desperate. And, by the way, I want people to see it internally. If it were just external I wouldn’t be saying these things. But it’s internal too. The reason we have a character like Trump in a position to be president, there it is. That’s a symptom. People are so angry with what is happening to their lives here that they want something different and they don’t care who he has abused, or what he has said, or how many times he’s gone bankrupt. These are details.

He says he’s going to change everything and go back to when it was better. That is understood by people whose reality has decreased. When production leaves the United States, as it has. Manufacturing, in huge portion, has left the United States and moved overseas. It took the best jobs, it took the strongest unions, and decimated them by moving. UAW is a shadow of what it once was.

The same is true of the steelworkers, and all the rest of them. That’s a reality. That means jobs are not what they once were. That means the standard of living isn’t what it was, and the security of your job isn’t what it was. And what was done by the relocation of jobs to profit from overseas expansion will now be continued with another technological wave. This time not the computers and robots. This time artificial intelligence, which will be used for profit-making purposes at the expense of the quality and the quantity of jobs. People are correct. The empire that concentrated production and income growth here, is now not here anymore. It left. And the people understand that they are left behind. There is no mystery.

My last point. The media have been obsessing for several years now, with the Democrats, over the problem: The economy is doing well: Why do the mass of people answer every public poll with the statement, the economy is a disaster? The economy is a disaster. I’m in a disaster.

This is not because they are stupid. It’s not because they aren’t educated. None of those things. It’s a different experience. People question me: The stock market is doing well? Well, 85 to 90 percent of stocks are owned by 10 percent of the people. They’re doing well. But the other 90 percent are spectators about a process of prosperity from which they are excluded, and they identify with the shrinking American empire abroad.

For them, they’re losing their status as an American worker and they’re losing their status as an American. In short, they’re losing and they don’t want to continue to lose. No one addresses any of that. The Republicans say, ‘Let’s go backward.’ Okay, that’s a fantasy. That’s not a very good long-term proposal. That won’t go very far. He lost a good bit of the benefit of that the first time when he didn’t do shit (if you pardon my Spanish) to take us back to anything. He’s not going to do it in the second term either.

What you have is a declining situation and the spectacle of a politics that doesn’t either understand, or have any handle whatsoever on any of it. So you’re watching a dysfunctional system run by a dysfunctional government. I want to remind everyone of, what a great tactician once said are, the preconditions for revolution. They are two. Number one, that the people in charge don’t know how to govern anymore. Number two, that the mass of people feel that the people at the top can’t govern anymore. If you have those two conditions met, you’re going to have a revolution. We are getting real close in this country.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Richard, you begin by discussing what’s unique in the situation we’re in today. You use the word “desperation.” What you’ve been describing is desperation right along. That indeed is what makes it unique. The United States and the West no longer can mount a war of military occupation. That’s another part of the by-product of what you’ve been describing economically. Ukraine showed that the United States can’t win a war and that NATO needs proxy armies because their own population would resist if there were a draft. So the U.S. and NATO forces have only one policy to use: They can only bomb and shoot missiles. The basic political fact remains that they are too weak to win on the battlefield, according to the rules of war that formerly guided international law, and that made genocide illegal.

I want to focus on the effect of all of what you’ve described on what it means for international law and the global fracture that we’re seeing today. I think the U.S. and NATO fight to control the world – from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the United States and England all the way to the China Sea – can only be won in a dirty way – in violation of international law – by focusing on killing civilians, bombing hospitals, schools, and other basic institutions. That’s what makes this war unique.

U.S. naval fighting concentrates on civilian, instead of military, targets. You’ve seen Ukraine, focusing on the Russian-speaking civilian population, hoping that the civilians will say, ‘Please don’t bomb us anymore. We want our own Boris Yeltsin, or some Pinochet or Zelensky, to take over. We’ll do anything for peace.’ But that’s not what they did. They rallied around Russia and say, ‘You know what, you killing us is wrong and we’re not going to submit to you, because if you’re killing us now, what are you going to do if there were peace?’ So this is genocide in Ukraine, just as it’s genocide in Palestine.

The other countries are seeing that it’s a moral evil and it’s an attack on the very principle of civilization and common humanity. So what is the U.S. and NATO to do?

They’re relying on Ukraine and Israel Nazis to uproot or destroy any population that resists its economic or financial and political control, or are simply in their way. It’s a war of extermination – not a military war against armies – but a war of extermination of people, in order to create a neo-colonialism. That’s what the U.S. and NATO are doing. They are trying to create a neo-colonialism to make one world. Not a group of different civilizations. One civilization, that is the U.S. neo-liberal civilization. And other countries in their way are not really an alternative civilization. There’s no plurality of civilizations where each country or region can make its choice. There’s only supposed to be one.

Now this is evil, but it’s historically a characteristic of religious wars and wars of hatred – ethnic, national and even racial hatred – in the case of Europe’s colonialism and America’s war in Asia. Soldiers, and even the domestic civilian population, are propagandized to view the enemy as being sub-human and therefore it can be treated in utterly different ways than the rules of war. That’s the character of Israel’s war against Islamic countries, and against any population that stands in the way of Israel expanding from the sea to the ocean.

That is, all the land, and oil, and natural resources, extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean. That’s the aim. The broad West Asian area is to be turned into a land without a people. That’s what Netanyahu means. A land without a people, just as what Israel’s settlers did to the Palestinians who lived there for millennia. The occupants are held to be non-people, to be treated as the biblical Amalek whom the Lord directed his religionists to exterminate, along with all their cattle, trees and productive resources capable of sustaining life.

So when Israel goes into Gaza or the West Bank or now into Lebanon, they’re not fighting another army. They’re destroying the hospitals. They’re tearing up the olive trees that take 30 to 50 years to develop. They’re tearing up the infrastructure. They’re making it impossible to continue to live there. That’s what makes this unique, and even more destructive than the earlier wars, which at least left the civilization and the basic infrastructure in place. But it’s destructive because of what you said: Desperation of the West, and the U.S. and Europe, is the only kind of war they can fight.

RICHARD WOLFF: Let me tell you a story, even if I’ve done it once before, that I hope we’ll bring it home to an American audience. I once took some European visitors to a town in Massachusetts called Old Deerfield. It is a part of a little town called Deerfield located on the Deerfield River in Western Massachusetts. The town of Old Deerfield is a recreated community that has recreated all the houses in it to look like they did in colonial days, before the United States emerged as an independent country. If you visit this place and you start looking at these interesting old reconstituted houses, and you go inside and you see the colonial furniture and all that, you will be confronted with little plaques on the outside of each house that give you a little thumbnail description of life when this house was occupied by living family, etc.

I went and I looked at it, like my guests, and we all immediately reacted because of what it says on the plaques. To my knowledge, that’s what it says right now, as we’re speaking. It describes the family of John Jones and his wife and the children, and then on this difficult day back in 1691, the savages attacked. And then periodically it’s all about the savages who were then eventually beaten back. And the Europeans looked at each other, and I looked at them and they at me. The Europeans arrived here, killed these people, took their land, and called them savages; shot them like animals because the indigenous people didn’t have guns and gunpowder, and all the rest of that, whereas the Europeans did. So, it was quite easy to shoot them, and to deal with them as animals. They were savage.

When they resisted their land and their animals being taken from them, then they became more savage, and absolutely subject to extermination, which was considered a 100% acceptable social solution. The final solution to the Native American ‘problem,’ you might call it.

But you know, again, this is not about Europeans or Native Americans. It’s about settler colonialism that has a ‘problem.’ That’s why it has to imagine that the land is empty because otherwise it would be confronted with, ‘What are you doing if the land is full?’ Well, you are creating a Them versus Us. If you read the literature of those who support Netanyahu, that’s what they say every day. It’s them or us.

That’s what the colonial people in Old Deerfield felt. It was them or us, and they would celebrate the attack of the savages because it confirmed how savage they were. It didn’t confirm that settler colonialism might be questioned. That never occurred to them. I mean, it’s a study in what can happen to human beings when they trap themselves, or are trapped, in a dead end that they don’t want to confront. Well then, they rethink it, so it isn’t a dead end, it isn’t a problem. It is now [as] understandable as getting rid of these pesky animals that stand in the way of the noble Christian civilization we are constructing.

And in Israel simply substitute Jewish, or Zionist, or whatever word you want. But we do have to understand that this isn’t new. Michael is right. It is a particular historical conjuncture. That’s what’s fading. My fear is if we give it too much uniqueness, you’ll miss the fact that it is a rerun.

Look, the world looks back on those years 1933 to 1945. Twelve years, a long time. Twelve years. Mr. Hitler came to power in January of 1933 and he was finished in World War II. So from ’33 to ’45 – twelve years – he, the Nazis ruled, and the whole world has ever since looked back in horror at what they did, and what they were. For those twelve years it was scary, and people shook their heads and didn’t want to believe it, and turned away from it. But eventually – and it took 75 years for right-wing fascistic types to put their heads up above the sand – and we see them now again. But again, it took a long time.

The Israeli behavior will take a long time, and we will look back on it the way we look back on what the Nazis did in their part of Europe with the same horror, except we will have learned, maybe, something from this time more than we learned the first time.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I think, Richard, what you’re describing is there is something unique today, and that is that there’s a whole ideology to support something that supports what the settlers did in America – and you’re quite right to draw that parallel – and what settler states are doing elsewhere, and what the United States and NATO are trying to expand other countries. It’s much more than a clash of civilizations, like between the English settlers and the domestic indigenous population here.

It’s an attack on the very principle of what people traditionally have considered to be civilization, and I think America’s policy makers have come to realize that their plan for world dictatorship that they celebrated in 1992 as the “End of History” by Francis Fukuyama, has been a failure. That their idea of civilization, as everyone will funnel Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and will privatize the economy – and now that the Soviet Union is dead there is no alternative?

Well, Fukuyama’s book was very quickly replaced a year later by a book by his teacher at Harvard Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of World Order. And Huntington described the real organization, civilization, is U.S. nationalism, a neo-liberalism and its doctrine of a unipolar world, that was his definition of civilization as a universal world. Other civilizations are basically how indigenous populations were treated, and Huntington warned that the United States faced future fights that were not simply a move from a different trade and monetary policy by countries seeking to escape from the legacy of colonialism and U.S. dominance.

He meant a clash of culture and that’s really the key: Not to accept U.S. dominance was deemed to be trying to create a new civilization. So it wasn’t just the fight of the English settlers of America or the Jewish settlers of Palestine to take land. It was a cultural civilizational fight. That’s what made it basically different for all this and the principle of national self-determination and personal religious and political freedom used to be considered the basis of civilization.

Obviously, even though it was during the time of the Thirty Years’ War that what you’re describing was occurring in the settlement of America, but the U.S. neo-cons treated the idea of policy independence of other countries as all of a sudden a new alien civilization that threatens the entire West. The idea that there could be an alternative and that way of framing international relations inverts the whole traditional universal morality.

Well, so did the English settlement of America do it, and the Spanish settlement of America, but it was almost not even discussed by the legal theorists. It seemed to be outside the realm of something that could be discussed in terms of international law. And that gap, that creation of a new international law justifying settler colonialism, justifying the right of one nation to take over and destroy another’s people and culture, as well as just taking their land, is essentially what World War II was fought against, the principle of Nazism.

RICHARD WOLFF: If I could add, the way this is spun nowadays, I think, illustrates what Michael is trying to get us to understand. Only let me show you the words. The clash of civilizations is a very convenient way, and here’s a second way that is being used to make the same point: that one civilization is in favor of, and is roughly the equivalent of democracy, whereas the other civilization is the equivalent or equal to authoritarianism.

This is a wonderful dichotomization because what it allows you to do is to look at China and no matter how many times the Chinese tell you, ‘We have two goals.’ By the way, they’ve been saying this for 50 years. Number one, to end a hundred years of humiliation by which they mean colonialism, because even though China as a whole never became a colony, parts of it did: The cities along the coast were taken over, some by the Germans, some by the British (it was horrible); and they fought the Boxer Rebellion and they were defeated, and all the rest.

The second goal of China was to raise its people out of the worst poverty the world has ever seen. Two goals: not to be humiliated by foreigners and to raise their standard of living, basically. That’s what they set out to do and they have been the most successful in doing that in the history of the world, if you measure the amount of improvement and the time it took to achieve it. By those standards they are a roaring success. Notice I’m not commenting on their internal civil liberties or a whole lot of other qualities that are another conversation. But for the United States, it cannot see what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. They don’t anymore have the lingo of a great struggle between Capitalism and Socialism because that really doesn’t fit anymore.

So they have it between Democracy and Authoritarianism, which has no more pull or power of analysis than the old Capitalism versus Socialism ever did. These are ways of handling the rationalization that the United States needs to achieve what, for it, has become security. If you become a world power, then security requires you to control the world. If you don’t want to be worried about the rest of the world then don’t be a world power. Be a real strong power where the hell you are. But the United States has its 700-800 bases around the [world]. That’s the aspirations of a world power. And now it has the problem: How do you rationalize wanting to be perpetually what no empire has achieved? Answer: Everybody else is a threat to all that is good in the world. It is either non-human, or a real bad civilization, or authoritarian.

Last point. The irony here which – either a Hegel as philosopher, or a Bertolt Brecht as a theater writer, or a George Carlin as a comedian – you need that level of brilliance to capture. The most authoritarian political structure exists inside every capitalist corporation. The CEO tells everybody else what to do. And the people he orders about, the employees have absolutely no recall over him whatsoever. They don’t vote for him. They don’t approve anything he does. If he doesn’t like them, they’re fired. Oh my god. Finding other societies authoritarian when this is your reality five out of seven days a week for the vast majority of, that takes extraordinary ideological discipline, because it’s hard to be so blind in one area that you can call another area bad names that apply to you.

This is an extremity and I don’t think these cultures can long sustain it. And if I’m right then that’s another reason for those who run the United States to be very, very worried about their situation.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well then, the question is what are we going to do about it? What’s the outcome going to be? When the English attacked the Native Americans, they didn’t have an opportunity to create an alternative. All they could do is retreat further and further westward until they were backed into reservations, or what the Nazis called concentration camps.

Well, U.S. Presidents Biden and Donald Trump both have repeatedly tried to express their great fear that other countries will do what the Native Americans and the Palestinians couldn’t do, that they’d create an alternative. And that’s why they’ve designated China as America’s existential enemy, and to prepare the ground for conquering it, they’ve said, ‘well, that requires weakening Russia and Iran because they’re China’s two great military allies and suppliers of oil of the energy that it needs.’

However U.S. foreign policy suffers from the Hubris that it has always had. It assumes that foreign countries will have no active response. They’ll passively surrender like the Native Americans did to the settlers or, like the Palestinians did when they simply left the country or got killed.

China and Russia have taken the lead in moving to create an alternative world order that is going to defend their independence. And that’s what we’ve been talking about on this show for about a month now. They’ve created a set of alternative organizations to those of the West.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization has become a defensive counterweight to NATO, and the BRICS are creating a full-spectrum alliance to achieve trade and financial self-reliance independent of the U.S. and NATO bloc. Well, NATO’s foray into Ukraine to try to end Russia’s ability to survive as a fiscal state has failed. Russia’s got even stronger and Ukraine’s NATO-backed troops are close to total defeat.

So, the United States has shifted its military support to its long-term aim of gaining control of the world’s oil trade. For instance, well, if we can’t win on the battlefield, let’s control the key organs of control. And its policy here is very similar to that which it followed in Ukraine. It’s backing Israel to conquer the entire Near East, starting with the domestic Palestinian population and extending territory to absorb Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, culminating in the long-expressed hope that they’re going to be able to defeat Iran and pull it into greater Israel and control, as I said, the whole swath of oil, lands, and geography from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. And like Ukraine, Israel’s military is focused much more on the population that’s in its way than on military targets. It really doesn’t care about that.

If you can destroy a civilization’s hospitals, infrastructure, its culture, the basis that holds it together politically and culturally, then you don’t need to engage in a military war that you’re sure to lose. Well, it is this focus on attacking civilians and cultural genocide that violates the civilized world’s rules of warfare that I talked about at the beginning. The U.S.-NATO countries don’t have any troops of their own, so their target is extended to include entire populations: ‘Well, we can bomb them. We’re not going to fight them.

All we can do is bomb them, as long as they don’t have a bomb to fight back.’ And the Palestinians have no bombs, and they’re not being supported by other Islamic countries. There’s no religious or ideological support of the countries around the Near East and West Asian area that are willing to realize that they’re all under threat, that this drive for Lebensraum is not simply a Judaic Lebensraum, for its own population, it’s for the Western Lebensraum to control natural resources, sub-soil resources, oil, minerals, the land, infrastructure.

The concept of Lebensraum has morphed into great control of all of the pre-conditions of social survival. That’s why the Israeli soldiers concentrate on killing children and bombing hospitals and schools. If you kill the children, there won’t be any population you have to fight in the future. Netanyahu and the Israeli cabinet: Again, ‘that’s why we’re killing children. That’s why we’re bombing hospitals. We don’t want the population to survive.’

Well, that aim is genocide and it’s to prevent other peoples and countries from surviving and living to provide an alternative. Like Ukraine, Israel’s promoting racial hatred to justify its genocide against the Palestinians and Arabs. Just as it calls adversaries sub-human, just as the Ukrainians called the Russian speakers cockroaches, sub-human, the Israelis are treating the Arabs as that. That’s really what Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations means in progress, in practice: There’s really only one civilization in his view, and the other civilizations are the indigenous population in the way of the settlers. What’s this done? It’s reviving World War II Nazi ideology of hatred that was so shocking that it’s driving the whole world into an alliance to defend itself.

That’s what the United States, our planners, didn’t realize: that countries fear that the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s West Bank may be their own fate if the United States seeks to prevent them from following their own independence or achieving their own self-reliance, their own monetary system, their own trade, their ability to tax American corporations or to fine them if they’re polluting their land, if they deviate from the U.S. neoliberal policies. That is basically the U.S.-new religion. If other countries try to escape from their dollar debt or the incessant regime change consequences, they’re going to end up like the victims of the settlers.

So we can think of economic settlement of a country, economic settlement of taking over the rules of a country’s trade, its domestic laws, its ability to tax corporations to control its oil and mineral resources in its own natural interest, instead of letting American and European firms take them over and siphon off all of their output and the economic value of these resources for itself.

So we’re really in a fight for what kind of civilization we’re going to have. And there may be a global fracture, but if there is a global fracture between the 15% of the population that’s U.S.-NATO and the 85% of all the rest of the world, the part of the world that is industrialized, the part of the world that has the natural resources, well then, the fight that we’re seeing today, this new Cold War is really about what civilization’s all about, in contrast to the U.S.-NATO’s really anti-civilization.

RICHARD WOLFF: Let me add, if I could, because I think there’s another dimension. You get a different insight if you ask yourself, what comes next? Israel presumably is concerned about its security. That’s what it says all the time and I assume that that’s part of the story. Okay.

If you’re a nation worried about your security, here’s what you’re doing: You’re making yourself the absolute enemy of all Arabs and most Muslims by what you are doing, which, in case Americans don’t know, is widely advertised. The destruction in Palestine is front-page news in every Muslim country on this planet, every day. So, not like the United States, this is we, our people, our co-religionists, our brothers and sisters, being slaughtered.

Number one, Israel is going to have to deal with however this ends, whenever it ends, with a level of global isolation and enmity that is going to be expressed in a million big decisions, little decisions and medium decisions made by hundreds of millions, billions of people around the world, every chance they get. It’s not just the Houthis who figured out how they can strike a blow. Everybody else.

Number two and probably more important. This effort is destroying the Israeli economy. They will be dependent on the United States, totally, utterly, for many, many years, if not indefinitely. They will have no independence from the United States. It won’t just be a question of needing weapons all the time, but needing cash infusions, trade deals. You name it, they’re going to need it.

And the United States with whatever regimes come to power in the United States will hold all the strings. In short, Israel is creating by its war a level of insecurity, dependence, uncertainty that will haunt that society indefinitely into the future. This is not a strategy that gets them either security or independence. It is a joke. It’s not a funny joke. It’s a joke on them, by telling themselves it’s us or them, by refusing to try to find a way out. They are creating, they are painting themselves into an international, political, ideological corner. They’re going to be desperate for a long, long time.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I think that Israel is only one of the first arenas in this large international fight. The United States hasn’t said the Palestinians are an existential enemy. They noticed that the other Islamic countries are supporting Israel. Turkey is supporting Israel. Saudi Arabia is supporting Israel. Egypt is especially supporting Israel. They’re not fighting against it because the leaders are essentially bought off and are making money by supporting Israel, and they’re putting the benefit of their own leaders over their whole national destiny.

I’m more concerned about what other countries are going to do that will be able to mount a much stronger response than the Near Eastern countries are doing. Essentially, the response is going to be something that the Near Eastern oil countries haven’t done. The BRICS are moving to decouple from the West in order to create their own multipolar world, mutual benefit and development. This is the same issue that was fought over in the Thirty Years’ War.

The problem is that there seems little chance of the West accepting a Peace of Westphalia, permitting such a world, or at least a world that the United States, Europe, and Israel would want to be a part of. That’s the difference. At least at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Europe did accept a common interest in ending war and establishing ‘We don’t want more to tear our civilization – if you can call it that – apart.’ That’s not the case today.

The United States’ policy is to tear other countries resisting American policy apart, saying they’re not only a different civilization, they’re actually different species. Each civilization is a species and, somehow, we’re back into the ethnic racial stereotyping that underlay the settler colonialism and the American wars in Asia, Vietnam, Korea, everywhere else. The problem is that they’re not interested in mutual gain. They’re not interested in a world where everybody can live peacefully together. That’s why there’s not going to be a two-state solution to Israel. All the U.S. wants is the ability to use its brute power to control, grab whatever resources and revenue it wants. The aim is conquest without regard for the economic costs and benefits.

So you can’t look at it and say, ‘Well, what’s in the economic interest of the United States and Europe? Isn’t their economic interest to join with Russia and China and all have a prosperous world for mutual gain?’ Its leaders say, ‘No, we don’t care.’ The German leaders are willing to sacrifice the German economy, to destroy its industry, to shrink its GDP, quarter after quarter after quarter, to reduce its living standards, all because that’s the price of preventing an alternative world order to what the United States – which supports us – is interested in.

Andrei Martyanov has suggested that the United States is fighting today the closing years of World War II, in the sense that it’s fighting over the principles, what all of that was about, about what kind of international relations are going to be established, and it’s a fight against all other peoples as if it were a struggle for survival between different species, a kind of Darwinian survival of the fittest.

And yet, the West is now the least economically fit, and the least militarily fit, except for its atomic weapons. And there it’s a tie, because both the U.S. and Russia and China all have the power to blow up the whole world and start again with the Neo-Paleolithic age. So this fight treats populations that seek their own policy independence as a species to be exterminated.

That’s the essence of Nazi ideology and it’s being repeated today. So if there is a clash of civilization, where does all this leave the United Nations? All the countries except the U.S.-NATO and Israel want peace. But the United Nations is powerless to exclude the most genocidal violators of international law.

When Israel blocks humanitarian United Nations emergency food from being delivered to the starving victims of Gaza, the United Nations has no military power to just overcome Israel’s blockage. It doesn’t have its own tanks to just say, ‘You want to let their trucks in, we’re going to send the trucks in behind the convoy of tanks and if your Israeli guards block us, we’re just going to shoot you down.’

It doesn’t have any power like that. Egypt has the power, but the Americans manipulated the Arab Spring to put in the chosen successor to Mubarak. The dictator was put in place by the entirely corrupt Egyptian ruling class. And the only question is whether the army somehow is going to have a memory of Abdul Nasser. It doesn’t have to be this way. So far there is no sign that Egypt will not be an applauder of Israel and a backer of Israel, as it’s been right now. It’s not going to help deliver food aid. It has put up just the opposite. It puts up blocks saying, ‘We don’t want any Palestinians here. We want them to be starved instead of coming into Egypt.’ That is utterly contemptible.

I don’t think that arenas further eastward around China, Russia, Central Asia, South Asia are going to be anywhere near as passive and corrupt as you’ve seen in the Islamic states. You can see that they are working very rapidly to create an alternative in which the Islamic countries basically have no interest at all in joining. They’re trying to play it both ways, just as Turkey is trying to say, ‘Well, we’re going to be part of NATO but at the same time going to be part of BRICS.’ As the Chinese say, a man who tries to take two roads at once is going to have a broken hip joint. That’s basically what we have there.

So, if the United States cannot even admit Palestine as a member, what will it do? It was the United Nations that created Israel and it itself bears the responsibility for recognizing Israel and endorsing its explicit aim of genocide against Palestinians from the new settler countries.

In 1948, the United Nations accepted the settler state, even as the Stern Gang was killing all the Palestinians to let its Zionist followers come in, and the United Nations was powerless to stop it. And the United Nations is powerless to act in the very way it’s constructed, with a Security Council that can be blocked by the United States, and where you can have votes to condemn Israel by the only two countries opposing the United States, Israel and a few Pacific Island countries. The whole rest of the world is against them and cannot do anything.

It’s obvious that if there is going to be any way of preventing what we’re describing, this attack on civilization, there has to be a new alternative to the United Nations, and that alternative has to have a military enforcement arm of international law, and it has to realize that this is an existential issue that requires its own ideological doctrine to be spelled out, what the principles are and how these principles are going to be defended. I don’t see any sign of that happening right now.

United Nations officials tend to paper over this problem by expressing the fantasy that somehow, ‘well, we really want a two-state solution but we’re not going to recognize Palestine and we’re not going to do anything at all about Israel’s genocide. We’re not going to order the arrest. We’re not going to isolate Israel. We’re going to let trade with Israel. We’re going to accept Israel genocide because it has its own freedom to do whatever it wants.’ So, the United Nations has essentially become an arm of the U.S. State Department and military, and that’s an impossible way to survive if there’s going to be an alternative to the U.S. kind of order that we’ve been talking about.

President Netanyahu claims that the essence of Judaism itself is to exterminate the non-Jewish population there and he says it to protest against genocide. To claim that the Palestinians are people and should not be killed is anti-Semitic because Israel is a Jewish state and its settlers may suffer retaliation if, as they kill the indigenous population, and because they’ve killed so many Palestinians, it’s only natural that the Palestinians and Arabs would want to fight back.

And it’s that reality that they want to defend themselves that, as you’ve just said, is an existential threat to Israel. And so, any country that fights back against the attacks by the bombs of the United States (they’re the United States’ bombs that Israel is dropping) is anti-Semitic. Germany and the United States then pass laws that any support of the Palestinians, any claim that they are human beings, any demonstrations on campus, any political demonstrations are legally breaking the law.

That’s what’s so contemptible, certainly about Germany, but also about the United States and the other NATO nations. We’re talking about an ideology that is anti-civilizational in principle. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel because the wheel was basically already invented, in many ways, after the Thirty Years’ War. That became, I think, the basis for German philosophy and the whole European philosophy of law. They’re trying to reinvent it, but international law needs a means of enforcement. As long as you have the United Nations subject to veto power, you can’t do anything.

So, the principles of the United Nations are pretty clear. The principles, the aims should be similar to those of 1648, aiming to end the opportunities by America’s neo-liberal inquisition to interfere with the policies of other nations. The nation of Georgia has recently made a positive start in all of this. They’ve closed down the NGOs that are being financed by the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy. That is fascism to promote regime change, and to meddle in the internal politics of countries in the hope of creating a local Boris Yeltsin or Zelensky or a Shah. The National Endowment for Democracy wants to make Georgia into another Ukraine fighting to the last Georgian, if they can put in some U.S. puppet to go to war with Russia.

So, here’s the problem that has to be addressed. The West has to go beyond the idea of a clash of civilizations. It’s going beyond this idea of a clash of civilization, it wants to be the only civilization left, in fact. But it’s uncivilized. So its ideology of destroying countries moving to resist its political and economic conquest is the opposition of civilization. It’s barbarism.

So, instead of having a clash of civilization for nations, as in Europe’s Thirty Years’ War, we’re experiencing a war against civilization itself, and the great question is whether the global majority of civilization is going to realize how truly existential America’s fight to reverse the principles of civilization is for these other countries. And the most immediate short-term test is going to be America’s sponsorship of Israel’s fight against Iran, I think.

What appeared in the 1990s to be the end of civilization is a war of survival for countries seeking to withdraw from the U.S.-NATO orbit and this U.S.-Israeli-Ukrainian policy of dehumanizing the enemy is a military tactic going way back to biblical times, as we’ve discussed – what Israel calls Amalek and U.S. diplomacy calls Autocracy or Socialism.

Russia’s President Putin regrets now how gullible he was in believing that the West would somehow act in a way to avoid war in Ukraine because that was in the West’s interest. It was in Europe’s interest to import Russian oil because that was the basis of its industry and yet it didn’t do that. U.S. officials never had any intention of keeping their promise not to expand NATO eastward.

Likewise, Iran’s newly elected president regrets how gullible he was in believing that if Iran refrained from defending its country against Israel bombing and assassinating its officials, the West would remove, or at least lighten, the trade and financial sanctions against Iran. That didn’t happen so now he’s hardened his position. So, the big question is, where does this leave Chinese foreign policy – since America says China is America’s existential enemy – based on offering a win-win agreement that would benefit both countries for international gain?

But the U.S. leaders have no intention in that kind of policy because it doesn’t want anyone else to have the gains that are to be made from technological and economic progress. They have only one goal: unipolar control of the entire planet and its governments, its economies, its natural resources, its land, and its water. As in a religious war, they’re willing to die for the ideal and to bring all the world down in an atomic war if they fail. That’s what’s being threatened in Ukraine today, and in Israel and Iran this week.

RICHARD WOLFF: One of the questions that a lot of people have about all of this is why governments, particularly in Europe, but also governments elsewhere, remain – most of them – unwilling to challenge what the United States is doing. You have the Houthis – they do – but they’re not even a government. They are a part of Yemen.

Yemen is one thing and the Houthis are a community within Yemen. But you have to look long and far, where else you get people willing to do stuff. I understand, much is done – hidden – that we don’t know about, or we can’t measure, or we can’t see. So, I want to address if I can, in the time we have, why it would be that Olaf Scholz in Germany, or Emmanuel Macron in France, or the E.U. leadership, and on and on and on and on, are willing – as Michael correctly says, and as many have pointed out – to go along with the United States in Ukraine.

And I mean go along: condemn Russia as the total evil here, supply weapons, supply money, all the rest of it, to the Ukrainians; why they basically go along with Israel in the Middle East, some more, some less, I understand, but why are they doing it? And then people ask, well, why would Sweden and Finland join NATO? Why is that happening? Why, even when Germany is in recession? I believe last quarter, and this quarter they came in below zero in GDP growth, so that qualifies (two quarters in a row below zero, you’re in an official recession, at least by the usual standard of that measure).

So here’s my answer. For the last 75 years of United States dominance coming out of World War II, any government that the United States found in power anywhere in the world, but particularly in Europe, that wasn’t aligned with American objectives was considered unacceptable. In the beginning, for example, coming out of World War II – just to remind people since the history of this is so poorly known – the first post-World War II government in France had several members of the French Communist Party in the cabinet of Charles de Gaulle. Okay.

That meant that the United States had to deal with a government of France, a member of the Security Council of the United Nations, which had a Communist Party (which at that time was very pro-Soviet), sitting in the cabinet. The second largest political party for 20 years after World War II was over in Italy, the Italian Communist Party, the largest Communist Party outside of Russia anywhere in the world. So, you developed in Europe, in places like Germany, France, Italy, everywhere, even Britain, you had a version of what in the United States was called McCarthyism. It wasn’t as bad as the United States. You couldn’t do to the Communist and Socialist Parties there what you were able to do in the United States.

That’s because of particular historical cultural differences between them. But you were able to shut them down. What you were able to do was to create a situation in which the heights of political power, the dominant role in the major political parties, was people who were acceptable to the United States. And this became so routine and so normal that you didn’t have to impose it anymore from the outside. It was understood inside. People who sided with the United States saw their careers much more smoothly upward bound than people who had the temerity not to go in that direction. And there’s one after another in every one of these countries that learned that. So now we get to the present.

What you have are dominant political structures overwhelmingly populated by people who have decided, from their own experience, that going with the United States is the way to go, and going against the United States is a recipe for defeat and for decline, for disaster. They’re not unaware of what the Russians and the Chinese are doing, but they’re not yet convinced that the United States won’t be able to impose on those others what they have so successfully imposed on the Europeans. Olaf Scholz can’t think outside that box, neither can Mr. Macron, neither can Jens Stoltenberg, or Josep Borrell, or any of the other leading figures in European politics. And that’s true from Scandinavia to Greece, and from England to the Central European countries. That’s how they see the world.

The effort of the Soviet Union, let’s remember, was shown not to be up to the task by the reversals of 1989, 1990, 1991, and the place where that hasn’t happened – the far east – is far away from Europe. So, here’s what’s going on. The European leadership has decided to go with the United States – that’s the horse they’re betting on to win the race because it always has – but they are very worried, more now than ever, that they may have bet on the wrong horse. Right below the surface in European politics is a movement, partly on the right – that’s the rise of all the quasi-fascists, you know, the government in Italy, Alternativ für Deutschland in Germany, Marine Le Pen in France – but also on the left with the arrival of Sarah Wagenknecht in Germany, very clear on her position against the war in Ukraine; Jean-Luc Mélanchon in France, who now is the head of the largest political party in the French Assemblée Nationale, is a Marxist. So is Sarah Wagenknecht on the left, they have been Marxists all of their political lives, and they’re known as such in their countries, very clearly.

Okay. I think you’re going to see, very disturbing to the United States in the months and years ahead, you’re going to see eruptions of difference. You’re going to see emergence of more governments like those of Mr. Orbán on the right in Hungary, the Czech government, and others, that are going to be even less and less sure.

That’s why the United States is desperate. That’s part of why Israel is desperate. They are now convinced that time is not on their side. They’re frightened. They won’t say so, and they’re right to be frightened, because their allies in Europe – the ones they still count on even though they’re disrespectful of them, but they’re convinced they need them – and they do.

It’s very important people understand: Europe is in a terrible, terrible situation and the Europeans kind of know it. They’re caught between the United States and China. It’s not clear what place for Europe will emerge in this new BRICS versus G7. In the G7, Europe is a footnote. In the G7 versus China, Europe is even more of a footnote.
Europe is not used to being a footnote.

Europe is used to being in charge. They have a hard row to hoe, how to manage all of this. It’s going to be tumult, it’s going to be turmoil inside Europe now for a long time, and it’s going to be rough and difficult. And one of the things that may emerge is an attempt, either to make a real third player in the world out of Europe – with its own army, its own nuclear, its own ‘all that’ – or to join with BRICS and China and go after a multipolarity in which the Europeans, by getting in on it, have a place they won’t have if they don’t get in on it.

These are real existential conditions that are going to be fought out over the next period, and the horror of much of it is that – and here I want to take off my hat to you, Nima, for making these conversations happen – this is what has to be talked about. If you believe, à la Aristotle and Plato, that the unexamined life is not worth living; if you think it’s better to understand what’s happening to you than not to; to want to know the good, the bad, the risks, the hopes; then these are the conversations that have to happen, and the mainstream media keeps as far away from them as it is possible to be.

People like you, and these programs, are therefore crucial. It’s not a question about agreeing with what I say, or with what Michael says, it’s not. It’s important to have these questions opened up, to have to contend with the history that Michael reviewed with us and for us today; to have to contend with what that points to, rather than living in a make-believe world in which a clash of civilizations is going on, so you don’t have to face the real issues that are going to shape what happens to us all.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, President Putin said a few months ago that someday Russia and Germany and Europe will trade again, but it may take 30 years.

RICHARD WOLFF: It might. Here’s my guess: From the little I know (and it isn’t much) but I speak German, I read German, you know, so I’m able to access what goes on in that country. I can assure you, whatever else, it will be less than 30 years. Inside Germany is an enormous conversation and debate going on about these issues, with much more blunt honesty than we imagine here in the United States. Just like you have to say inside Israel, there’s more opposition to what Netanyahu is doing than we have allowed here in the United States.

The irony: they have a newspaper, they had access, they can actually have (I’m not saying it’s adequate and I’m not denying what Israel is basically doing not for a minute), but there is an opposition that the Israelis have mounted to the policy of their government. We shouldn’t forget that, and that these political winds can change. Israel is not (let me say this to my American audience) winning in Gaza, is not winning in Lebanon. It may win.

I’m open, I understand, but not yet. And, wow, you know, a year into Hamas, and there’s still a Hamas? After what you’ve done? That’s amazing! I ask my fellow Americans if, in this country, one of our 50 states was subjected to the kind of destruction that Israel has done in Gaza, would there be a strong resistance? Don’t answer so quickly because the truth is we don’t know.

In Israel, we do know. There is a Hamas; they’re still fighting back. That’s amazing, and in the long run, that’s going to be just as important as it turned out after the end of World War II, when we all learned about the Norwegian resistance and the French resistance and the Italian partisans, turned out that there were opponents to the Nazis in every country, including Germany.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I do write a monthly column for the German financial press auf deutsch. So you’re right, there is a resistance.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: I don’t know if you’ve learned that CNN reported that Joe Biden is going to be in Germany to receive Germany’s highest award.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yes, we see that’s Mr. Scholz trying to play ‘We are on your side, don’t worry, we are loyal, you help me get here, so I’m going to help you get there’. Absolutely. By the way, same relationship between Biden and Netanyahu.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah. Thank you so much for being with us today, Richard and Michael. See you soon.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Donald Trump will become the 47th president of the United States and given the host of global debacles the US has its hands in—ranging from the genocide in Gaza, to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Iran to the Ukraine war—nobody is quite certain what direction the country will take with the former president at the helm again.

Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report is Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. With his extensive insights and expertise into the Middle East and American foreign policy, Wilkerson provides a valuable understanding into what a Trump presidency may look like outside of the borders of America.

Wilkerson predicts Trump will stay true to “his disdain for war,” emphasizing “it's genuine. I don't think he likes war. I don't think he likes starting wars.” Regarding Ukraine, Wilkerson thinks Trump will shut down the war effort. But when it comes to the Middle East, that commitment clashes with one of Trump’s long standing loyalties: unwavering support for Israel.

War with Iran seems increasingly likely by the day despite, according to Wilkerson, resistance from the Pentagon and prior administrations. In the case of Trump, however, “you wonder how long that resistance can hold up if the president of the United States is intent on—and this is the one place where Trump really worries me—doing everything in his power for Israel,” Wilkerson notes. He adds, “Trump has made it quite clear that that's his policy, that's his belief, and I think he's being honest about it.”

Citing war-game simulations, reports, personal sources as well as his own expertise, Wilkerson lays down the reality of potential war with Iran: sheer disaster. With sources saying that the IDF is already taking heavy casualties in Lebanon, any sort of escalation with Iran would compound the suffering of the US and Israel. “Iran will top $10 trillion, take 10 years to pacify, if it's even moderately pacified, and cost a fortune in blood and treasure,” Wilkerson warns.

Transcript

Chris Hedges  

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, retired and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. He is a Vietnam War veteran, who attended Airborne School, Ranger School and the Naval War College, and who as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam logged over 1,000 hours on combat missions. He went on to serve as deputy director of the Marine Corps War College at Quantico and was executive Assistant to Admiral Stewart A. Ring, United States Navy Pacific Command and Director of the United States Marine Corps War College. His disillusionment with the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East followed the revelations of detainee abuse, the ineptitude of post-invasion planning for Iraq and the secretive decision-making by the Bush administration that led to the invasion of Iraq. At a congressional hearing recorded on C-SPAN in June 2005, he gave his analysis of the Iraq war's motivation: "'I use the acronym OIL,' he said, 'O for oil, I for Israel and L for the logistical base necessary or deemed necessary by the so-called neocons – and it reeks through all their documents – the logistical base whereby the United States and Israel could dominate that area of the world.'" Wilkerson has said that the speech Powell made before the United Nations on February 5, 2003—which laid out a case for war with Iraq—included falsehoods of which he and Powell had never been made aware. "My participation in that presentation at the UN constitutes the lowest point in my professional life,” he has said. “I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council." He called the U.N. presentation "probably the biggest mistake of my life.” He has taught at the College of William & Mary and George Washington University. He is a Senior Fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, a group of former military, intelligence and civilian national security officials who describe themselves as  offering "alternative analyses untainted by Pentagon or defense industry ties" and countering "Washington’s establishment narrative on most national security issues of the day." Joining me to discuss U.S. foreign policy, the conflicts raging in the Middle East, including the genocide in Gaza, and the fate of the American empire is Lawrence Wilkerson. 

Let's begin with the election and its effect. I mean, you saw the intelligence community, Milley, all sorts of figures essentially joined the Democratic campaign in support of Kamala Harris. Let's talk about why Trump triggers such deep animus within the Pentagon and the intelligence community, and what you see happening during a second Trump administration.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

I think the animus was created—within my community anyway, I still call it that, the Pentagon, the military in general—because they don't see any concerted effort on his part to express a strategic appraisal that agrees with theirs. Theirs being the one most parroted by the New York Times, for example, and others of their ilk, who are simply spokespersons for the military industrial complex and for the national security state, which we have most assuredly become. And so they're worried about anyone who would come in and threaten to break the china. And that's what Trump that's what his forte is, starting to break the china. And they're very protective of their china, just as are the national security agencies in general and the 16, I guess it's 16 now, entities that we have that are supposed to be our intelligence eyes and ears, led by the CIA. Not led by the DNI, because he still has no real power over the CIA, but led by the CIA. I would say Bill Burns is the most powerful guy in the United States with regard to intelligence and what goes to the White House and what doesn't go to the White House. So that's part of the reason they just don't know this guy, except from the first term. And the first term would not, through Kelly and Milley and other people's eyes, give you much hope if you were a Pentagon member of the bureaucracy, if you will. The second reason, I think, is because he's so mercurial. He's all over the map, and the military doesn't like that at all. They like constancy, even if it's incorrect constancy. They prefer constancy to change and mercurial nature. And I think that's a problem with them. And there's a third reason too, and that is that they're worried about what I call Christian nationalism, some of them anyway, others are aiding and abetting it. And what that means, in essence, is not just this far flung, but very ripe and alive effort by certain Christian groups in America to make Christianity the national religion, to change the Constitution in that effect, or to discard the Constitution with regard to religion, but they're worried that they have flag officers in the military who are very much Christian nationalists. We have an occasion right now that we're looking at it, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, Mikey Weinstein's group out in New Mexico, where the [inaudible], the three star general who is the chief of personnel, the personnel man for the Chief of Staff of the Army is married to a woman who rolls in the aisle and speaks in tongues. And Mikey's obtained a video of this general in uniform being at one of her gatherings with this group. That's just the surface, if you will. There are people like General Flynn, for example, who are still in the military. So that's disconcerting for the bulk of the military that doesn't subscribe to this theory or this desire to do away with the Constitution when it comes to freedom of religion. Those things are bothering them, and Trump has shown a propensity to use the Christian movement in this country for political gain and to not have much in the way of regard for what that might mean otherwise. So that's disturbing.

Chris Hedges  

Yeah, I graduated from Harvard Divinity School and wrote a book on the Christian right a little over a decade ago, called American Fascist: The Christian Right and the War on America. And of course, I know Mikey's work well. Let's just unpack that. Why do they see Christian nationalism—it's interesting that you raise that as an issue—why do they see that as such an important issue? Just explain, in their vision, and perhaps yours, how that could roll out in a really negative way. You're

Lawrence Wilkerson  

You're talking about the way the military looks at it, yeah, at least those who aren't... Yeah, I think they're most concerned about it in terms of what it might mean for the tyranny that would have to come along with it, and they're having to enforce that tyranny, because if you make Christianity the national religion, and that's their ultimate goal, is to not just put Bibles in classrooms and stop abortions completely, not those social issues that always loom up, and paint them with their brush. The secret that they want no one to know until it happens is they do want Christianity to be the national religion. In that regard, we even have a branch of American Catholics who are working on this. If you look closely at what's happened in the last 50 years, in particular, with the Catholic Church. My wife was Catholic, so I'm aware of some of the things in the Catholic church that I wouldn't have been aware of had she not been. She's passed away now. But if you look closely at it, there is this behind the scenes movement in America to create an American Catholic Church. We don't like it being in Rome, its head being in Rome. We don't like Francis in particular. We despise Francis. And when I say, "we" I'm using a rhetorical device to describe these people. We'd like to have our own Pope and our own Catholic Church. And there are people, some would say, one or two on the Supreme Court right now, are of that mind too, and would work for that, or might be working for that, were they given the occasion to do so. You put that together, that Roman Catholicism, Opus Dei like Roman Catholicism, and the other people who are, for example, like John Hagee fund funding millions of dollars to West Bank settlers in Israel, even now. And you've got a real fear on the part of rational military people, this might get out of hand Be more specific, in what way? If you make Christianity the national religion, and you do all the things that you would have to do, constitutionally and otherwise, or just totally disregard the Constitution in that process. What you get, as we have just seen probably enough Americans behind you to do it, then you have a whole different ball game for the military. Because the military then is called on, domestically and otherwise, and most Americans don't understand the domestic missions that the Army in particular, but the military in general, has to defend that, and they don't want to. They think that's fractious, they think that's unconstitutional. They think that's something that would cause more harm than good. And I'm glad to say that there are still some people like that left in my military.

Chris Hedges  

Well I mean, Trump has an ideological void, of course, but we saw in his first term that he filled it with these Christian nationalists or Christian fascists, Betsy DeVos, Mike, Pence, Bill Barr and others. Certainly it appears that they will fill that void again. I want to talk about Ukraine.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Let me add one other thing. This is not just Trump. Remember, I served in the George W. Bush administration. I cannot tell you how many times I had to deal with the White House personnel office over such things as this man can't go to Iraq. Why can't he go to Iraq? Why can't he serve in Iraq? He's not a Christian. Talk about counterintuitive.

Chris Hedges  

Let's talk about Ukraine. I mean, Trump has deviated from the establishment consensus on Ukraine, I never understood, perhaps you can unpack it for me, the whole Ukraine policy, other than as a kind of proxy war to degrade the Russian military and isolate Putin. I was in East Germany when the Berlin Wall came down as a reporter. I was there when the promises were made to Gorbachev not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany. And of course, as you know, the Soviet Union had to acquiesce to the reunification of Germany. And that was the promise made. And I'm not defending the invasion, obviously, of Ukraine, but we certainly baited the Russians and Putin. But let's talk about Ukraine. I don't see how any military strategist seriously could think that in a war of attrition, the Ukrainians could dominate, but explain what's happening and then how you see if there isn't going to be a difference, how you see a difference in a Trump administration's policy towards Ukraine and Russia.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Let me say, first I was there too. I was special assistant to Chairman Powell, and the change that took place with the advent of Bill Clinton was absolutely disastrous, and I attribute to William Jefferson Clinton a lot of the problems we're living with today, including the violation, major violation of that promise not to expand NATO. That's a longer story, better enough for another time. I think what we're looking at in Ukraine vis a vis Trump, or Trump vis a vis Ukraine, is his—and I think Doug McGregor, for example, is right about this, I just watched him on Judge Napolitano's show—is his disdain for war. I think it's genuine. I don't think he likes war. I don't think he likes starting wars. I don't think he would be a president who... He'll go off and kill someone like the Iranian IRGC member or other people whom he's told are terrorists or whatever. But I don't think he wants war. [inaudible] war, and so he's willing to shut down Ukraine. Now there's another reason too. I think he detests NATO for different reasons than I. I don't like NATO much either. I think it's well beyond its sell by date. And he sees NATO as being—and he's right in this—as being an aider and abettor, Brussels is, of the war in Ukraine, as Washington is, led by that perfidious [inaudible]. And so he wants to shut that down. And I think his ultimate goal is to not abandon NATO per force, but he wants to get the United States out of its relationship with NATO, which he thinks we pay for everything we do, all the heavy lifting they do very little. Come back to the United States, as it were, and say you've got our nuclear envelope, but everything else you do because we're not with you anymore, and of course, save the money that that saves too. I think it was part of his first term, and he just didn't get to do it the way he wanted to do it. So those, I think, are the major reasons that he will be positive with regard to Ukraine. Because you're right, Ukraine is a disaster right now. Yeah, and most apparently, for Ukraine, they're dying by the dozens every day now, and they have no people left. They're having difficulty, they're having to impress young people, bring them into the military to get them to fight. And they're lucky if they don't desert within the first week, because either going over to the Russians or running away wherever they can go. It's a disaster. And we don't have generals in the Pentagon saying this. Now we have Lloyd Austin, he's right there with Joe Biden. But we don't have generals in the Pentagon, in my view, anyway, who are expressing these kinds of views that generals on the outside are expressing like David Petraeus and Barnes and other generals, who are saying, well, Russia is losing. They're lying through their teeth. They're lying through their teeth, either that or they're just stupid and incredibly dumb, really, not just stupid. So I think Trump would shut that down. And I'm looking forward to that. I hope he does. I hope he shuts it down forth with,

Chris Hedges  

Well, they should have read the history of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin would send out a million men who would either get captured or die, and then he'd just send out another million, kind of the Putin strategy.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

And people don't realize that the Wehrmacht—right after it invaded, really, the first 14 months—began to lose almost immediately, partly because of its repine as it moved along, it made enemies of everyone in its path, even Napoleon wasn't that stupid. And partly because they overextended and partly because the rule of thumb that Hitler thought would work, his food minister told him it would work, that all that food coming from Ukraine and the steps of Russia would feed not only the Wehrmacht forces going that way, but Germany, too didn't come true.

Chris Hedges  

Yeah, that's because the Russians destroyed everything, scorched earth policy, we can do another show on World War II, which I have an obsession with, but he also split his forces because of Stalingrad. Let's talk about the Middle East. What will be the difference between a Biden administration and a Trump administration vis a vis the genocide in Gaza, in Lebanon, the attacks in Lebanon, which I want you to talk about, because they're not going particularly well for Israel. And then this knife's edge we're sitting on between Israel and Iran.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

I could get very complicated and complex here and try to describe what I think is going on over there, and I've made as much of an effort as probably anyone in this country to keep up with it. But let me just say right now what I'm concerned about with Trump coming in. I'm concerned about something happening between the time that this is all consolidated, which won't be long, apparently, and the inauguration and what the Biden administration does this. 

Chris Hedges  

Let me just interrupt you, Larry, what do you mean by consolidated?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Well, there's going to be some court cases and other things, I'm sure, but it's going to be pretty quick. I think, because the margin of victory is so great. May look razor thin, but it's pretty great, from what I've seen, popular vote and electoral college. So all those things that the election task force I was a member of, for example, were worried about with a razor thin margin aren't going to happen. So we're going to get satisfied, and the votes to the Electoral College, and the process complete pretty quickly. I don't think the Democrats will be like the Republicans would be had it been the other way around. And I'm a Republican, so I can get away with saying that. I'm worried about what's going to happen because I think Bibi [Netanyahu] is still intent, and firing Yoav Gallant was indicative of this par excellence. He's still intent on going after Iran, but he's intent on the United States going with him. And the force deployments that we've made, the force deployments we're making right now, the number of troops we're sending actually to Israel right now, indicates to me that we are cognizant of this fact. We might not be yet ready to go along with it, but we are cognizant of it to the point where we're putting the forces in place that we think will be necessary. I think we're wrong. I think we're going to get our rear ends handed to us if we do what Netanyahu wants to do with regard to Iran, which is full bore war. We're going to find out how weak we are when we do it. If Iraq and Afghanistan weren't sufficient, this will certainly seal the deal. But I'm worried about this interim period, and what the Biden administration might actually do in this interim period, not just to do what Bibi wants them to do, and what I think Joe Biden is inclined to do, but to mess Trump up. I mean, what better way than for the inauguration takes place while we're involved in a huge war in the Middle East, and it would be a huge war if we go at it big time the way Bibi wants, and we discover immediately that we can't do what we think we're going to do in a short period of time. It's the old bugaboo again. You know, air power, air power, air power, air power is not going to defeat Iran. It is not going to stop their nuclear program, it's not going to defeat them. So you wind up with a choice, you either invade or you stop. And that's not much of a choice, very bad choice, as a matter of fact.

Chris Hedges  

So my understanding is the Pentagon was always reticent. They did not want, they blocked, I mean, there was a huge push in the interim between Bush and Obama to go to war with Iran and you know more about it than I do, my understanding is the Pentagon just said absolutely not.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

They are saying that now, but you wonder how long that resistance can hold up if the president the United States is intent on—and this is the one place where Trump really worries me—doing everything in his power for Israel. And Trump has made it quite clear that that's his policy, that's his belief, and I think he's being honest about it. Of course, there's the AIPAC business and the money involved, and Trump is, if anything, a transactional, "I want the money" man, but I think he's committed to it in a way that Miriam Adelson, for example, indicates in the amount of money that she gave.

Chris Hedges  

She's his largest donor, I think, $100 million, right? Well, what would be the difference, then, between a Trump administration vis a vis Israel and a Biden administration? Can't get any worse for the Palestinians in Gaza. What would be the difference?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

I agree with you, although there was, I think, and perhaps this is applicable on the other side too, but there was some political space opening up for Harris. I think she was made aware, vividly aware, of how much the Gaza policy, if you will, with regard to the Biden administration, had harmed them. I would say it probably lost them almost a quarter of the progressives that would have voted for them otherwise, particularly in some of the battleground states, key states. And that political space opening up, might have changed policy with her somewhat. I'm not saying it would be a [inaudible] but I am saying it might have been a more mellow policy with regard to Israel, and a harder policy on Netanyahu and a complicit policy—and we could do this if we wanted to—to get him out of there. We have the power to get him out of there if we wanted to use it. He's his own worst enemy in that regard. But we're not. We're not doing that. We're leaving him in there, partly because we know that those around him who might replace him would be just as bad as he, but with maybe a little bit better record and a little bit better outlook on things, especially getting the hostages back. And we've got some hostages that are left alive there too, so that political space would have given her room, I think to change policy somewhat, to meddle our policy a little bit. I don't think Trump will do that. I think Trump is in for a penny, in for a pound for Israel. And that's dangerous. I just was looking this morning at the meeting between the Saudi National Security Advisor, Blinken and Jake Sullivan and others, and very indicative of what's happening right now. The Saudis were very forceful about not making a deal until there was a Palestinian state deal that looked like it might have some viability politically, if not in reality. Now they are here, and he just inked the deal, so to speak, making a bilateral relationship go. Israel's not even in it, a security relationship. And this adds to the one we just did with the UAE, we just did with Bahrain. All of them are different deals, but they all amount to almost non-NATO major ally status. We just did one with Qatar, where  Al Udeid is, the biggest Air Force base in the world, and it looks as if the GCC, the Gulf Cooperation Council, is sort of being wedged aside and we're doing all these bilateral treaties, if you will, with these countries. They don't have the force of treaties, but they're executive agreements for defense cooperation and so forth, and so that means Mohammed bin Salman is now playing the typical Saudi game of "I like Russia, I like China, but the United States is my old haven, and I need the United States," so I'm gonna make a bilateral deal with them. If that's happening, they're worried about Iran, even though they're talking more with Tehran than they've done in the past, as are all the states, they're worried. They're worried about what might happen. They're worried about what Iran might do if Israel doesn't attack Iran's oil facilities, because Iran will wipe out all the oil facilities it can in the Gulf region, 20% of the world's oil supply. It won't make any difference that we're 22 million barrels a day now if they do that, because the price of oil will go to $300 a barrel, insurers won't insure and shippers want ship, then we'll have a real problem. And the Saudis know that, that's their nest egg, that's their future. They don't want to put that in jeopardy, so they're back with the United States. Now this is a very strange meeting, in my view, because the words were not there to support it, and then suddenly he's here doing this. I'm worried. I'm worried that we might be walking into a war that we cannot walk away from because of Netanyahu.

Chris Hedges  

But the Saudis, Qatar, they've all made it very clear that the US is not allowed to use these bases if there are strikes against Iran.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Well, the prime minister in Baghdad did too, but we went ahead and let the Israelis fly over Iraq. And I'm told that the King of Jordan said no. Then we did it anyway, and rather than looking like a fool, he said he had grudgingly given permission, so we don't seem to care about what they think. And if it comes down to it, as this visit has just testified to I think, if it comes down to it, and they have to choose, they're going to do what we want to do.

Chris Hedges  

I want to talk about what a war with Iran would look like. The Iranian Air Force, as I understand, is pretty decrepit, not very effective, outdated fighters, many going all the way back to the Shah. I don't know what their air defenses are like. Certainly it would start out as an aerial bombing campaign. Would it look like the bombing campaign that we carried out under the Clinton administration against Iraq during the sanctions? Well, what's it going to look like?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

It's not going to look anything like that. In fact, it's going to look quite different. And it's principally because of China, but more so Russia. I think the Israelis, in this last attempt, they're lying about it now, and I have that from very good sources, they're lying about it. They're propagandizing it. They didn't do any damage at all to speak of to Iran, and the reason they didn't was because they ran into a buzz saw of Russian provided air defense systems. They didn't know what to do. They didn't know how to read the radars. They didn't know how to jam the radars. Their suppression of enemy air defense, SEAD, did not work. They took a few out, but it didn't work enough to where the pilots thought they could go any further. So they launched all their missiles, as I think was the plan originally, for the first echelon. After the SEAD got through from outside Iran, they were deterred from going inside, and they would be deterred again. And there's every reason to believe that there might be some S400s, as well as S300s on the ground and the S400, sorry Lockheed Martin, sorry, Raytheon consumed by Lockheed Martin, is the best air defense system in the world. That's another thing that's happening right now that's disturbing our defense contractors, Chinese and Russian equipment is out doing in Ukraine and in the Middle East, American equipment, which is three or four times as expensive. One of the reasons India is back with Russia again for its armaments and such, despite what our protests are. So we're looking at a situation where we will think that aerial will be all we'll have to do, that is to say bombing. Israel is going to think that, Israel really can't do anything other than bomb Iran, ballistic missiles and bombing, air launched cruise missiles and such as that. It's not going to do it. It's not going to work. It's simply not going to work. There'll be some damage done. There will be some toll in Tehran and elsewhere, in the outlying territories where the nuclear facilities are and such. But it's not going to work. So what do you do then? I've war gamed this. I war-gamed it with the Lieutenant General in the Marine Corps who took great censure from his own buddies in the Pentagon. He was retired at the time, but he used to be my boss when I was down at Quantico War College, and he said we would lose. He ran the war game two times just to prove that the computers were not wrong. I think he's right. I think one of the things the Iranians will do is take out a US aircraft carrier, that's 5,000 US souls on the bottom of the sea or in the water. And incidentally, we now have so few escorts for our CVs, our aircraft carriers, that let's say there are 2,000 sailors in the water, we couldn't rescue them all because we don't have birth space on the escort ships. Interesting development there. We can't even man some of our ships because we're so short in terms of recruiting. I think it would be a disaster. And what do we do when we get into a disaster like that? It's America. We don't back away. We don't retrench. We don't check our six and look around and say, maybe we made an error. We double down. That's what we'll do, and then it will be a full fledged war. And if you like Iraq, and you like Afghanistan, Iran will top $10 trillion, take 10 years to pacify, if it's even moderately pacified and cost a fortune in blood and treasure. 

Chris Hedges  

You're talking about ground forces going in?  

Lawrence Wilkerson  

That's the only way you rid the country... 

Chris Hedges  

Yeah, that's true. But where do they go in from? Iraq?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Well, you'd have to sit down and do what we did in the Pacific when we were... I actually had the war plan for taking on the Soviets in Iran. You recall, we were very worried about them, looking for a warm water port around [inaudible] a typical Russian Empire thing to do, go back and check the history of the Russian Empire. We thought that was the case. So out in the Pacific, the force provider for all of this, we were war planning for fighting the Russians, the Soviets, inside Iran, in the Zagros Mountains and elsewhere. I know that terrain really well. It's not Iraq, very different country. Great strategic depth, 53% Persian. Great homogeneity amongst that 53% lot of problems around the periphery, but basically a homogeneous population, 10 years, $10 trillion and you still haven't solved what you wanted to solve, which was to defeat the nation anymore than...

Chris Hedges  

I'm just curious, where would the ground troops go in from? I have a hard time believing the Iraqi government, which is...

Lawrence Wilkerson  

We are illegal, illegal under international law and under our own domestic law. We are illegally present in Syria right now.

Chris Hedges  

That's true.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

We're there protecting oil going to Israel.

Chris Hedges  

Which Trump said, got him in a lot of trouble, but was an honest statement.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Yeah, and we would go through Syria without batting an eye.

Chris Hedges  

Yeah, let's talk about how it might start...

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Incidentally, when we were doing the war gaming out in the Pacific, our major invasion was amphibious. That'd be a little difficult today, we had a lot of amphibious bottoms. The ones we have today are broken. Ask the [inaudible] Marine Corps, and we don't have many.

Chris Hedges  

How would it start? So there would be an Iranian strike on Israel with significant Israeli casualties. What do you see as the trigger?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

The debate in Tehran is heated right now, I'm told. This is about 48 hours old, but Doug Macgregor sort of confirmed it this morning. The debate is between the different groups of security personnel in Tehran, the IRGC, The Guardian Council, the Ayatollah, the new president, so forth. Do we continue with our previous plan? And the previous plan was we're going to smack them and we're going to smack them really hard. Israel has seen nothing like what's coming. Much in the way they're seeing real casualties, significant casualties in Lebanon right now. The debate as to whether to go ahead and do that or not, because they don't want the new president in particular, doesn't want war with the United States. They got enough problems. They don't want war with the United States. I don't know how that debate is going to fall out, but if they decide, and Netanyahu wants them to decide this, I'm quite confident of that, to go back whole hog at Israel and do some really significant damage that his propaganda machine cannot hide, which he has done a lot of up to this point, like, for example, hiding the casualties in Lebanon. The casualties are enormous in Lebanon right now, for the IDF, they're enormous.

Chris Hedges  

Have you heard a figure? I have not. Have you heard a number?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

I've heard 4,000. And here's the kicker, modern armies do not show loss or win by KIA [killed in action], battle, tactical, operational, whatever. They show it by WIA [wounded in action] because they have such sophisticated battlefield surgery and such sophisticated hospitals that... look at our casualties in Afghanistan, what you have is high rates of WIA, the WIA is over 4,000. That's missing arms, missing legs, you know, whatever. So when you're looking at a modern army fighting on interior lines in Israel, it's very interior lines. No evacuation route, hardly at all. You look at the WIA, not the KIA and the WIA in Lebanon are screamingly high right now, particularly for the IDF. I think you'll see them leaving very shortly, you'll see them leaving or moving.

Chris Hedges  

They haven't moved very far. 

Lawrence Wilkerson  

No, not at all. 

Chris Hedges  

In terms of interior lines, they haven't gone very far into Lebanon.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

What they're doing is precisely what they do almost every time they encounter this kind of resistance, though they've never encountered this stiff resistance, they bomb the hell out of the cities and the infrastructure, right? They killed Lebanese,

Chris Hedges  

They got driven out in '82 and of course, that's the invasion that created Hezbollah. I remember Sy Hersh telling me a little while ago that the reason that Netanyahu wants the United States to engage Iran is because he needs the US to take out Iran's air defense systems, which seems to be in agreement with what you said. Would that be correct?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

I think so. But I think we are going to get a rude surprise too, when we lose F-35s, extended range F-15s, F-16s and other flights that will come out of Al Udeid and off carriers, F-18s and such. We're going to lose a lot too. The war game said 30% attrition.

Chris Hedges  

And is Israel's motive the same as pushing us to invade Iraq, which is Iran is a powerful center within the region that it wants to essentially cripple the way it crippled Iraq, is that the motive behind the Israeli push for a war with Iran?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

I think that's the major motive behind it. They see Iran as the last impediment to their hegemony in the region.

Chris Hedges  

Let's talk about Israel from a military perspective because you know so much more about this than I do. How do you look at Israel in the Middle East from a strategic point of view, as a US ally?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

As a total liability. A strategic liability of the first order. And right now, at this moment, right now, I would say Ukraine, notwithstanding, they're the greatest strategic liability we have.

Chris Hedges  

Explain why. Why?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Because there's no positivity to it. Everything is us, nothing is them.

Chris Hedges  

But we took out a lot of those missiles coming in from Iran.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

We did. We depleted our supplies to the point now where I'm not sure even if we decided we were going to do a major aerial attack on Iran, we wouldn't run out of munitions very shortly.

Chris Hedges  

And the genocide. I mean, I think we supply 68% at this point of munitions to sustain the genocide in Gaza. Is that correct?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

At least that much. If you look at the entire panoply of things we've given Israel, I'd say, Gideon Levy at Haaretz is right when he says, you share 50/50 responsibility for every death in Gaza and, for that matter, in Lebanon too.

Chris Hedges  

How do you see it playing out in Gaza? I've actually been in the Middle East quite a bit in the last year, in Egypt twice, spent much the summer in Jordan, was in Qatar, was in the West Bank. And everything I can glean, Israel, of course, wants to push them into the Sinai. In the Egyptian military, I was told by Egyptian journalists in Cairo, has just been adamant, has told Sisi that there's no way. A Palestinian is, in fact, according to them, if Israel attempts to push the Palestinians into the Sinai and Sisi accepts them, he's finished. That's what they said. But how do you see it playing out? We know what Israel's intent is, which is, of course, depopulating, annexing northern Gaza. They're largely towards that goal, creating a humanitarian crisis in the south, but eventually ethnic cleansing, these genocidal tactics are now increasingly being used in the West Bank. How do you see it going? The US must be completely aware of what Israel's intent is. But where do you see that developing?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

There are two sets of thoughts, I think, or beliefs, strategic goals in the US, and it depends on what body of people you're talking about. Are you talking about Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and a host of others, Lindsey Graham? Or are you talking about saner people, I would say, on the other side of the aisle, or even in the Republican Party. They think that Israel is doing our job for us, as Bibi Netanyahu is want to say if Israel was not killing or ridding the region of these Arabs, Palestinian or otherwise, and think about how MBS must think about this, we'd have to be doing it. And so he's doing us a great favor. He's doing our dirty work for us. He even has said that publicly. The other side says, No, Israel is our ally and our friend, and we have to stand by them no matter how heinous Bibi is. We'd like to get rid of Bibi. We'd like to put a different picture on Israel, but he's there, and he's in charge, and he's doing what he needs to do. And then there's the group that I belong to, I think, that says this is horrible, what we're doing. And we all warned about this in the military, we warned about this. David Petraeus even testified to Congress one day and let it slip that Israel was a greater liability than a strategic asset, and maybe we ought to think about rearranging the relationship. After that got out, of course, he walked those remarks back, as David is want to do, but the military understands how much a strategic liability Israel truly is, especially down in the ranks, where people have actually had a chance to look at it, to study it, to look at the history and to understand what's happened and understand the real history of it, which is often propagandized by the Israelis and the US for consumption by the public. But the military understands that history. The military understands [USS] Liberty, for example, they understand that those sailors were machine gunned.

Chris Hedges  

Now we should explain. That was the ship that the Israelis attacked and killed, was it 36 or something? I can't remember. 31 US sailors were killed.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Yeah, and a bunch wounded, and I don't think there's any question, having looked at some of the investigation and some of the obscuration of that investigation, there's any doubt in my mind that Israel did it intentional.

Chris Hedges  

That was the '73 war.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Yeah, I don't know whether it was because they thought we were picking up information that they were uploading an atomic weapon, or they thought we were sharing some of the information we were picking up with a very sophisticated spy ship, which Liberty was, with Moscow in an attempt to bring pressure on Israel. I don't know what the reason was, because they wouldn't let the investigators get into the real nitty gritty. President cut it off. But I do know that Israel knew what they were doing.

Chris Hedges  

Israel had carried out a series of massacres of captured Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai. That was one of the theories. And the ship obviously would have known about that.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Well, you remember in the London Times, I think it was reported. And then, when the London Times was a good newspaper, and it was reported by the BBC, on Panorama, by the I can't remember his name now, terrible short term memory. I was just reading his piece last night where he's having the conversation with Golda Meir. He sent her a dozen or two or three red roses every time before he went to Israel. And she really appreciated that. So she'd give him the first interview whenever he was there. This time, she wouldn't give it to him. She said, I have to give it to the Americans, I'm sorry. And he just sent her the roses and everything. Anyway, he did talk to her on the telephone, and he reported this in that article in the London Times and on Panorama. He asked her, point blank, would you use the Samson option? I don't think he used that phrase. He said, would you use a nuclear weapon if Israel's existence were in question? Without batting an eye she said, of course. And he said, you understand what that means? And she said, Yes. Now was that for public consumption so that people would understand that Israel was serious about winning this conflict, a conflict they started? The Egyptians didn't start the '73 war.

Chris Hedges  

Yeah, I know. That's another myth they peddled.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

But I do think that Netanyahu, if his back was to the wall and he were forced to do so, the big question, of course, that was being asked was, even if you knew you would be taking the world into a nuclear holocaust, would you still do it? Yes.

Chris Hedges  

I mean, how much damage do you think Iran can inflict on Israel? Israel's a small country. I think it has a population of 6 million. What does Iran have 90 million? I mean, I can't remember.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

If you're talking about between the river and the sea, about 14 million Israeli citizens. 7 million plus are Palestinian and 7 million, not quite as much, are Jews. Very small, not as small as Gaza, no bigger than the Greater London, or smaller than Greater London. Gaza is where they're dropping all that ordinance, just putting the military template on it and saying, how many casualties, how many casualties have been... that ordinance, that concrete, that rebar, those streets, those buildings, the template puts down on the terrain and says, with great accuracy, how many casualties? It's 200,000. Guarantee it's not 40 or 50,000. The template says it's well north of 100,000 and we'll not know, because you won't find some of these people, they're buried so deeply under rubble. If Israel were to really be attacked by the full weight of Iran, it would be a nightmare for Israel. It's becoming that way just with Hezbollah. You're never going to get those Israelis to go back to their homes. They're going to evacuate Israel eventually. I was told the other day by a friend in Tel Aviv that already, by his count, a million Jewish Israelis have departed.

Chris Hedges  

Since October 7, yeah, that's numbers they've hidden. But I've heard 500,000 but certainly a significant number have just left the country. And these are often the best educated, they tend to be the secular part of society.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Putin was exercising his prudence and strategic verve by offering any of the Russians who had immigrated to Israel: come back, we need you, you're our brain trust.

Chris Hedges  

Yeah. I mean, one of the things, just to talk about the Israel-US relationship, is that [Jonathan] Pollard who gave Israel all sorts of intelligence information, he gave them information on CIA and Russian assets, which allowed the Soviets to roll it all up but he gave it to Israel, and then Israel was giving it to the Soviet Union in exchange for the release of Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union. But it destroyed the, obliterated the intelligence operation of the US in the Soviet Union.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

And Pollard is now, I'm told, I learned this 24 hours ago, Pollard is now instrumental in and very important to Bibi's propaganda effort with regard to Gaza and Lebanon. A traitor, and we let him go, and Bill Clinton did almost as much damage as Trump in that regard with Pollard. Bill Clinton pardon Marc Rich as his last ignominious act in office. I think it was David Rothkopf, or someone, said that was the most ignominious use of the pardon power by the president in the history of the country. I think they were right.

Chris Hedges  

You should explain who he was.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Marc Rich really ran a company that, a huge company that sold, amongst other products, discounted price oil to Israel, and was responsible, in large measure, for Israel's economic success under the finance minister named Bibi Netanyahu, and then later, as he became prime minister, interrupted only by his fellow mate, Ari Sharon. Marc Rich made sure that Saddam Hussein's oil in the UN Oil-for-Food Programme was stolen and shipped to Israel. He also made sure that the pipeline in Syria, the one we were just talking about, was pumping to Israel. And he made sure that, eventually, the pipeline out of Kirkuk, out of northern Iraq, which has always had a problem with Baghdad, was shipping to Israel. So one of the reasons Israel's neo... what do you call their system of capitalism? It's not quite what ours is, but they have more billionaires per capita than we do. He made that happen with that discounted oil and now look at what Netanyahu has done. He had inked an agreement with Lebanon for the richest gas field in the Mediterranean thus far. That's abrogated, it's all belonging to Israel. Now there was a deal that Gaza had the second richest gas field in the Mediterranean for its own. That's gone, he's got that too. 30 years of the future needs of Israeli energy are contained in those two gas fields. He's got them both. Yeah, they're off the coast of Lebanon and Israel. That's an important point that's often missed in terms of the occupation of Northern Gaza, because they need the coastline. Let's just close by talking about the institutions themselves, the CIA, the Pentagon, which, and I mean, I'll characterize it, but you can correct me if I'm wrong, these institutions appear hostile to a Trump presidency, especially the intelligence community. How much can they damage, constrain, control Trump? That's an excellent question. First of all, the intent has to be there, and it has to be at some of the higher levels in order to do that. I'm not sure it's going to be particularly because he can take care of those levels if he wants to. But if it is there at the second echelon, so to speak, or the second, third echelons, it can be disturbing of anything that he wants to do as it could any president. It can falsify intelligence. It can lead the president astray with regard to serious national security issues. Right now, one of the most serious issues Trump's going to face, I think, I'm no economist, but I know a lot of economists, and they're telling me, the bond market right now is what we should be looking at, not the stock market. In fact, the stock market is euphoric and for the rich. The bond market is saying Trump is going to have one of the worst economic situations by midterm in our history. Our aggregate debt is also saying that. CBO released a report saying it's $50.2 trillion in a decade, decade and a half. The interest payments on that debt are already the defense budget equivalent, almost a trillion dollars, this year, almost a trillion dollars. By the end of that period, the CBO looked at about 10 to 12 years, and they think they're being optimistic, it's going to be 2 trillion. It's going to be the equivalent of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the defense budget combined. We cannot sustain that under anybody's rules of gerrymandering the financial system in the world or whatever, we just can't stand that. And when the American people understand some of this intuitively, and the crisis of confidence comes with that understanding, and many are saying it's going to happen on Trump's watch, he's going to have a real problem, and he's going to have to retrench majorly. I don't know what they're going to do. I don't know what we're going to do as a country when this comes to bear with full force.

Chris Hedges  

All right. Well, that was Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. I want to thank Diego [Ramos] Sofia [Menemenlis], Thomas [Hedges] and Max [Jones] who produced the show. You can find me at Chris Hedges.Substack.com.

A new report from Britain's Sky News provides details of Adnan al-Bursh's death by torture in Israel's Ofer Prison

News Desk

NOV 16, 2024

(Photo credit: CNN)

A Sky News investigation published on 16 November has revealed new details surrounding Israel's torture and murder of the famous Palestinian surgeon from Gaza, Adnan al-Bursh, at Ofer Prison in the occupied Palestinian West Bank last May.

A fellow Palestinian prisoner at Ofer told the British news channel that Israeli guards severely tortured Dr Bursh and then left him to die alone, naked from the waist down, in the prison yard.

The prisoner, who previously knew the doctor in Gaza, provided the new details in a deposition to lawyers from HaMoked, an Israeli human rights organization.

“In mid-April 2024, Dr Adnan Al-Bursh arrived at Section 23 in Ofer Prison. The prison guards brought Dr Adnan Al-Bursh into the section in a deplorable state. He had clearly been assaulted with injuries around his body. He was naked in the lower part of his body,” the prisoner's deposition states.

“The prison guards threw him in the middle of the yard and left him there. Dr Adnan Al-Bursh was unable to stand up. One of the prisoners helped him and accompanied him to one of the rooms. A few minutes later, prisoners were heard screaming from the room they went into, declaring Dr Adnan Al-Bursh (was dead).”

Bursh was widely regarded as one of the best-qualified and well-known surgeons in Gaza.

When Israel's war on Gaza began in October of last year, the renowned surgeon worked at Al-Shifa Hospital as the head of orthopedic surgery. He worked around the clock, performing surgeries on Palestinians injured by Israel's horrific bombing campaign.

When Israeli troops laid siege to Al-Shifa in November, the staff was forced to flee.

Bursh fled by foot to the Indonesian Hospital in Bait Lahia to continue serving wounded patients.

He documented his experiences on video, including when Israel shelled the hospital, killing 12 people.

He was then forced to leave the Indonesia Hospital as well and moved to the Al-Awda Hospital in Gaza's north, where he was abducted by Israeli forces.

After the soldiers surrounded the hospital, "They told [Dr Bursh] that if all men do not come down… they will destroy the Awda Hospital with all the women and children in it," a fellow doctor at Al-Awda, Mohammad Obeid, told Sky News.

After Dr Bursh left the hospital, Israeli soldiers “called his name out” and then “roughly” took him away, Obeid stated.

Bursh was then taken to the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp in the Negev Desert.

The facility became notorious this summer after prison guards, doctors, and former inmates gave testimony of prisoners being tortured and raped there.

Dr Khalid Hamouda, a former inmate at Sde Teiman, told Sky News that of the 100 prisoners in the section of the camp where he was held, at least a quarter were healthcare workers.

Dr Bursh was beaten severely at Sde Teiman.

“He thought he may have broken ribs,” Dr Hamouda said. ”He was unable to even go to the toilet alone.”

The doctor was then transferred to Ofer Prison in the Israeli prison system but was never charged with any crime or terrorism.

Since 7 October 2023, at least 43 prisoners have died in Israeli jails, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Society.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Today is October 9th and we’re having Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff talk about what’s going on in the Middle East. Richard and Michael, let me show you an article that shows the spending of the United States on the conflict in the Middle East helping Israel. It’s almost $22.76 billion. And in this graph, you’re witnessing that in 2024, if you look at this graph, it’s $17.9 billion. And directly to Israel and the rest would be the conflicts that the United States went to the Red Sea to help Israel and other operations in that region. And here is what Matt Miller said to the press when he was asked about this helping, this aid that goes to Israel.

SAID ARIKAT: Taxpayers paid for almost $23 billion in the last year alone – that’s almost $3000 for each and every Israeli. So we have absolutely no leverage, no pressure – you cannot tell them do this or not do this?

MATT MILLER: So, we made very clear to the government of Israel what we believe are the best outcomes along a number of different vectors in the region. But as you’ve heard me say before, they are ultimately a sovereign country and have to make their own decisions.

SAID ARIKAT: Yes, but I understand a sovereign country that received from American taxpayers $22 billion dollars.

MATT MILLER: Well first of all, that number is not correct, it conflates a number of different things. It’s not correct. I don’t have the exact number, but I know the number you are referring to.

MATT LEE: So what does the U.S. government think that it has given Israel since October 7th?

MATT MILLER: So we give them $3.3 billion a year and there was additional money that was appropriated in the supplemental. The reason it’s hard to answer that question definitively is…

MATT LEE: Like you don’t want to. That’s why it’s hard to answer.

MATT MILLER: No, there are different ways of looking at it.

MATT LEE: I know there are. I’ve been through all of this.

MATT MILLER: There’s money that is appropriated, there is money that is allocated and then not actually delivered for years to come.

MATT LEE: Look, there are private educational organizations that have come up with estimates. This building, at least, which is in charge of arms transfers – at least, many of them – hasn’t seen fit to come up with an update since July of last year.

MATT MILLER: Yeah, I just don’t have the update, I’m just telling you that number, you can look at that number and see how it conflates a number of things, including direct U.S. military spending to combat the Houthis attacking international shipping, which is included in that number, which is obviously not either.

MATT LEE: It can’t be that difficult to separate what has been given to them post- October 7th in terms of things that were not approved before then under the MOU. Stuff that went to them specifically for the Gaza operation, and now Lebanon.

MATT MILLER: So it depends how you look at it – is it the amount that’s been allocated to them, is it the amount that’s been delivered to them, is it the amount that is gonna be delivered …

MATT LEE: I’ll take any of them now.

MATT MILLER: No, but that’s the point is when you ask the question it’s a difficult one – I don’t have the numbers here at my fingertips, obviously. I’m just pointing out that the number that Said referred to …

MATT LEE: Someone’s got to have the number some place?

SAID ARIKAT: The numbers were Brown University’s numbers, not mine. But, you know, it doesn’t matter what the actual figure is, we give them a lot of money, we give them a great deal of leverage, you know, we give them obviously a great deal of political coverage in the U.N. and many other places and so on. And to suggest that this huge and lengthy partnership really does not exact any kind of leverage with the Israelis – don’t you question that?

MATT MILLER: That’s not what I said. The thing that I said is that we’re a sovereign country with our interests, they’re a sovereign country with their interests.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah. Richard, he’s saying that he doesn’t answer the question. He says that Israel is a sovereign country. What’s your answer to that question?

RICHARD WOLFF: Iraq was a sovereign country when the United States invaded it. Afghanistan was a sovereign country when the United States invaded it. Vietnam was a sovereign country when the United States invaded it. It didn’t give a damn whether that was a sovereign country or not. It didn’t respect its sovereignty for one second.

It just – as part of the war in Ukraine – seized $300 billion worth of Russian gold. Its sovereignty meant absolutely nothing. Come on. The answer to talk about sovereignty is a transparent fakery, as is all the mumbo jumbo about how to estimate the numbers. The question was about leverage, if you provide a lot of money.

The question was clear and it had nothing to do with quarrels about estimating the amount of money. This is a government that wants the freedom to do in the Middle East what it has always done, namely operate a colonial regime without telling the people of the United States anything other than fairy tales about respect for different religions, and the importance of Jerusalem, and other nonsense that future spokespersons at the State Department will no doubt repeat in the same mumbo jumbo style of Mr. Miller that we just saw.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, if Israel were a sovereign country, it would no longer be an American ally because the whole war that the United States is fighting, not only in the Near East, but also in Ukraine, is a war against sovereignty. That’s what this whole world war between the U.S. and NATO countries against the global majority – China, Russia and other BRICS countries – it’s a war to make a unipolar U.S. control to prevent the whole rest of the world being sovereign.

So the whole issue of sovereignty is silly – and obviously if you look at where the armaments of Israel are coming from – quite apart from money. These are American bombs being dropped on Gaza and on Lebanon. These are American ships that are supporting it. It is American money that’s also supporting it. And that doesn’t even account for the Israel bonds by non-governmental authorities. So the whole idea of sovereignty is irrelevant. You can look at this war against sovereignty, and especially against sovereignty – as Richard just mentioned – of Iraq and Libya, to use Israel as an American satellite to prevent the Near East from becoming sovereign, in control, not only of its own oil, but in control of the export money that it makes from this oil.

RICHARD WOLFF: Also, just an additional word. The United Nations allows Palestine to have a seat – I don’t remember exactly what the status is – but they have a seat to participate in at least some degree, and at least a large part of the world would assign “sovereignty” to the Palestinians based on all of the historic notions of what sovereignty entails. Clearly the United States does not respect the sovereignty of the Palestinians. So, once again, this use of the notion of sovereignty is extraordinarily selective. My goodness!

I mean, for me, the most impressive thing about the little clip you showed us was the fact that we live in a society where a collection of, what I assume to be, perfectly reasonable intelligent journalists sit there and ask such questions and don’t quarrel about the absurd refusal to answer. And they don’t quarrel about the absurd invocation of sovereignty. But they allow the conversation to absorb many minutes of quarreling about the details of the statistics.

Both Michael and I are economists. We work with statistics all the time. If you do, you know that they are loosely constructed numbers that have a million qualifications about them. And that if you don’t know the details of how they are gathered and how they are assembled and how they are edited, you really can do virtually anything with them.

You know, there’s an old statement among statisticians: “The statistics don’t lie, but the statisticians surely do.” Because they pick and choose which ones to gather, which ones to assimilate, which ones to edit.

This is childish manipulation, and the thing that most impresses me is that the journalists, they are complicit with this mumbo jumbo theatric. And they oughtn’t to be. They ought to have a bit more of a spine, a bit more of that part of the journalistic tradition which says, “ask the hard questions that these politicians are trained to evade and avoid.”

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Richard’s talking about the sovereignty of journalism. And I think we talked before about what John Kerry said at the World Economic Forum. He said, “Our first amendment stands as a major block to our ability to be able to hammer disinformation out of existence.”

Sovereignty for journalism is what WikiLeaks did, which is why its leader was imprisoned for so many years. We don’t have sovereignty of the Press anymore than nations have sovereignty, and you could look at the whole part of the American Cold War attempt to prevent other nations from having political sovereignty as the attempt to make sure that the U.S. has unique unipolar sole sovereignty over the narrative. Is the Middle East War, the Israeli War, all about the captives that were made October 7th, a year ago? I think there are now a few dozen. Or is it about the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians? Not a word about the Palestinians captive in Israeli jails.

Again, the narrative is all from a very strange perspective. It’s like the famous Hiroshige painting, a big tree in the foreground and the city far away in the background, the little tree in the foreground has priority over everything else. That’s the news that we get from the Near East, Ukraine and the rest of the world. Not sovereignty.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, can I ask a question? The main question right now in terms of what’s going on in the Middle East is the way that Netanyahu is behaving right now. And when you look at his behavior, what is Israel’s endgame under Netanyahu? How can we define that?

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, I must say with all regret and sadness, I will tell you what I have concluded watching all of this over the last, particularly this last, year. And I conclude by referring to a saying that has been raised by Israeli leaders, at least as far back as David Ben-Gurion.

And that is to say that the whole story can be summed up by saying that “the Jewish people, a people without land, were finally given a land without people.”

That’s a quote, I didn’t make that up. That’s a quotation repeated many times: From the Jordan to the Mediterranean, from the river to the sea, a people without land – i.e. Jewish people – were given a land without people. Notice the little move there, the move at the end to suggest that people were given something that no other people already had, even though everybody who’s taken five minutes to look at the history of that part of the world knows that it has been densely populated for thousands of years by a whole host of people.

So the reality was, it wasn’t empty. It’s a little bit like what I discovered when I was just beginning as a college teacher and I had occasion to talk about the early period of the American economy, when we were still a colony.

And I discovered that a significant percentage of my students understood the Europeans who came here to have discovered a land without people, which they then proceeded to inhabit, moving from the East Coast across, until they finally reached the Pacific Ocean in the West.

When I reminded them, well, it wasn’t empty, then yes, they remembered from their western movies that there were these “savages” who were around somewhere, but who became quickly disposed of.

Well, if you know the history, it took centuries before you could herd those native people that you didn’t kill into the reservations they still occupy in significant numbers across the United States. Okay, the Israeli story seems to me to be summarized and carried forward by Mr. Netanyahu as exactly what I said. They want to establish that the area we now call Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank are a land that had no people and is therefore now to be settled by a growing Jewish population. And the job of the Palestinians is to choose one of the following three options: leave or die.

Those are the options, and the Israelis become the agents of leaving or dying, and they’re trying both. And they’ll rely on either one of them to solve the problem, to fulfill the idea that it is a land without people that can now be settled by the people who don’t have enough land.

By the way, this notion of “land hunger” is a replication of what the Nazis called Lebensraum: room to live. The Nazis moved east in Europe to get it; the Israelis move west to get it. But that’s what this has become, and it will take a radical change of the mentality of the Israelis to change it.

Last point: when you’re an aggressor, and you’re also a settler-colonialism, which is what this is, nothing is more common than justify what you are doing on the grounds that you must do it, because the savages – that’s the people that are already there – are intent on doing that to you. And it doesn’t matter whether they are or not, you must tell that story because it justifies what you are doing. And I’ll illustrate it with a story, and excuse me if I told you this story before, but near where the University of Massachusetts is located is a town called Deerfield, Massachusetts. And it has an old part, which is the colonial houses that were built there back in the 17th and 18th century. And they have redone these houses to look in the way that they did in Colonial America. So it’s become a tourist attraction. It’s known as “Old Deerfield.”

And if you go there, as I have done, and you walk through the old village, and you look at the reconstructed housing, you will notice in front of each of them a plaque. And if you read the plaque, which tourists do, it says things like, here was the Jones family or the Smith family, and they came in 1702 and blah, blah, blah, and then on the night of the 14th of April, the savages attacked them. And I remember the first time I saw this. I said to myself, without thinking much, “what a remarkable thing – the Europeans come from thousands of miles away, they take the land, they take the coast, they fish the water, they attack the local people, they push them off the land. And they refer to them as the savages. What an amazing move! It’s the Europeans who were savage, who had the guns to be savage with. But you need to call them savages because what you are doing is so savage, it has to be justified as self-defense against savages. And so you call the other what you are. In psychology, this is so common, it’s called projection. And every psychological practitioner knows about it and tries to treat it.

But in our political discussion of Israel and the Palestinians, we all pretend we know nothing about any of that.

MICHAEL HUDSON: What Richard has just explained is what really was meant by a land without a people. What are people? They are humans. And the Israeli leadership, again and again, has said that the Palestinians are not human: they are sub-humans.That is exactly what the Ukrainians are saying about the Slavic people. The Slavic people are not humans; the Islamic populations are not human. In both cases, they are called sub-human and a different species. And this kind of thinking goes way back to the United States at the late 19th century. The U.S. leaders thought of America as creating a new civilization. And that new civilization, somehow in the 1930s they began to absorb Nazism. And it was as if the new countries with their ethnicity were evolutionary, biological, new species. And the Americans were a new species.

The Israelis are claiming to be a new species, exterminating the sub-humans, so that there won’t be inter-marriage, like there was between the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals 40,000 years ago. That treatment is exactly what was the feeling in the United States that I experienced in the 1960s. The Catholic Church sent me to New Mexico to discuss how to raise up the Indian tribes. There was an official from the Bureau of Indian Affairs who began talking about the “Indian problem.” And I jumped up and said to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, “the Indian problem is the problem that they are Indians.” And that’s how the Israelis and the Ukrainians think about everybody who’s not them. When we’re talking about a political group of settlers – or in America, of Empire builders – claiming to be a new species, cleaning out the biology of these inferior races. This is Nazism. And that’s really what the fight is all about.

That’s why we’re now in a civilizational fight between the NATO-U.S.-West and its allies of like-thinking people who treat their adversaries as sub-humans. Or, as Biden says, it’s Democracy against Autocracy. The Autocracy are considered to be sub-humans, a different civilization, and all this somehow has genetically become a new species. And what the rest of civilization – the global majority – is trying to say, is “No, we’re all humans.” Americans have said, like I said, “No, you’re not humans.” That’s basically the position in this Cold War II.

RICHARD WOLFF: You see it also in this very sad tendency: I cringe when I watch a video clip of the President of the United States, in this case, Mr. Biden, referring to the leader of the People’s Republic of China as a thug. What are you doing? What kind of childish behavior is this? Mr. Putin doesn’t refer to Mr. Biden as a thug. He doesn’t do that. One doesn’t do. You don’t see too many leaders, even in private – let alone in a public interview – doing such things. What is this demonization of the – here we go – it’s “they’re all savages?”

So if you disagree with the United States, if your idea of a European security architecture, which is what they’re actually trying to figure out, how are we going to be secure each in our national boundary without threatening one another? That’s what they mean by a “security architecture.”

How are we going to work that out? Russia has to feel secure. Ukraine has to feel secure. They have to be able to function. Okay, that’s a problem. We will have disagreements. We won’t see it the same way. We’ll have to make some compromise. But, suddenly: ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We are the good and the noble and the vanilla, and they are the terrible evil empire.’ What is this? This is not just a quibble about words. Behind these words lies what Michael was just talking about. This notion that, really, this is a war of good against evil and in the name of the good, you can do what?

Palestinians who know something about the Christian Bible like to remind us about all the times in the Old Testament especially, when there are all these discussions about God telling people to slay this group and kill all of them and murder the children and … whoa. There you have already the beginnings of a justification.

Yes, yes, I know the Bible is full of other contradictory sentiments about loving your neighbor and turning the other cheek and all the rest of it. But if you cherry pick, you can become the exponent of “I’m good, they’re evil, I am called to get rid of them” – literally. There’s a quote from an Israeli defense force person in the press recently explaining to a reporter how good he feels when he’s asked about bombing mosques and hospitals. He looks at the guy and he says, “But we’re winning, we’re winning.” Wow. He’s winning. He’s not asking what he’s winning – he’s just winning.

And that’s the struggle of good and evil when you think like that. In the name of that stuff, we have 5,000 years of slaughter and we’ll have more if we don’t outgrow it.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, here comes the question that how we can -with the situation that you’re having in Ukraine together with what’s going on right now in the Middle East and in my opinion, if Donald Trump wins, we’re going to have a big fight between the United States and China.

How can we make peace affordable for each and every player in this political arena or national political arena? Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON: The only way to solve the problem in Ukraine is by war. You can’t have peace without war.

Some people say that war doesn’t settle problems, but sometimes the only way of settling a problem such as the U.S. and NATO and Ukraine trying to attack Russia is by war. And that’s why you mentioned the costs of this war before, at the beginning.

I think that the whole idea of what’s happening in the Ukraine is the American planners said, “Look at what really broke the Soviet Union’s power – it was the war in Afghanistan. It drained Russia. They had to spend all of their economic surplus on the military and send their population to fight in Afghanistan. Finally, this created such austerity and poverty and impoverishment that the leaders of the Soviet Union themselves decided it didn’t work.” They somehow expect that if the war in Ukraine is supposed to go on as long as it can, not to be settled, but just to continue to drain Russia until its economic surplus is spent on fighting the war and the population says, I guess, what the Russians were saying in the 1980s: “We want to have blue jeans like the Americans have. We want a consumer society and we can’t because it’s a military society.”

So the American idea in Ukraine is to spend as much as it takes from our side to keep the war going as long as possible and outspend Russia until the discontent in Russia reaches a degree where you can bring in a new Russian Yeltsin [unclear]. Well, Putin is also strategizing and said, well, he is not in any hurry to just march in and end the war quickly in Ukraine by marching to the deeper and beyond. He’s willing to go slow because there’s something that he says that is beyond the short-term cost of the military budget.

And that is the longer the war in Ukraine takes, the more it’s breaking up Europe. You’ve seen the last three German elections where the anti-war parties beat the Christian Democrats and the social Democrats. You’ve seen last week’s election in Austria. Again, the anti-war party won and as we noted before, the anti-war parties today are on the right, not the left. But we’re seeing the idea of the real costs both from the American vantage point and the global majority’s (the BRICS) vantage point- the cost is going to be how is all of this going to end up? What is the structure of the world economy to be? And the fight in Israel and Ukraine is just a sideline, a particular chapter, venue, in this much broader war. And the real way of looking at the cost is, “Who is going to support what countries?” Will the cost of the Ukraine war essentially, as Putin believes, end up dividing Europe, breaking up the European Union and paving the way for – in 30 years, I think Putin said – for there to finally be a restoration of the German and the European linkage with Russia and the global majority by which time in his hope, the whole world will be under a unipolar rule of law. That’s how to think of the costs that we’re undertaking now and what the war is all about.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, let me come at this from a slightly different perspective that might be of interest to folks. Capitalism as a system has built into its structure an imperative to grow. Every capitalist understands that unless they can expand their business and thereby get their hands on bigger profits, they run the risk of being competed out of existence by somebody who can and will do that. And so they all have to grow. And we know that this has become internalized by the political leaders of all capitalist countries.

I’ll use the example that they teach in elementary school: If an economy is like a pie, and different people and different groups have different pieces, if you grow the pie, everybody’s piece can get bigger and we will all be happy.

If you don’t grow the pie, then a growth in some requires a diminution in the others and then we will be at each other’s throats. Very old idea, been around for centuries.

And in capitalism, that idea, together with the way capitalism works, means that countries with employers and employees and enterprises that produce and compete in markets have a drive to grow. That’s why it’s a national emergency if the statistics show the GDP isn’t growing fast enough. Oh my god, alarm, alarm.

Okay, now let’s stop and take a step back. For ecological reasons and climate change reasons, we now know we’ve got to stop growing – it’s threatening our survival. The people of the world have already figured it out because the birth rate of our planet is now zero. We’re not growing anymore. The United States, Asia. Only in Africa is there a net positive birth rate, and it’s shrinking there too. Okay, now we have a problem that a long-repressed part of the world, the global south, wants to have its standard of living be where it should have been two centuries ago. They’re not waiting anymore. So they are demanding a bigger piece of the pie. This, of course, threatens the United States because it can’t grow the way it wants to because it now has a serious competitor. China and the BRICS is already a richer entity than the United States and the G7. Okay, here’s then a solution. We question – don’t everybody yell – we question capitalism. Why don’t we change to a system that doesn’t have a built-in imperative to grow, because it’s killing us? It’s killing us ecologically, but it’s also killing us because the genuine and deserved demand of the global south for a place in the sun to raise their families, have an education, be decently cared for, medically and so on, is not going to be stopped – with or without a world war. All right, so let’s accommodate: Give them a bigger piece and rearrange – in the way that socialists have always advocated – to a much less unequal distribution of the resources of the world. That way we can stop growing, thereby meet our ecological danger and do away with the competition that threatens a war between a rising standard of living in the global south and a resharing that the rest of us here in the global north will have to undergo. But we do so because it saves our planet, and it saves us from war, and that’s worth it.

That’s a plan, but it requires the taboo be broken. Employer-employee is not the only way to organize the production and distribution of goods and services. It’s the capitalist way. It was what we got when we got rid of the lords and serfs, and masters and slaves – we replaced it with employers and employees. But we can do better than that and we are at a point where we have to. And so the issue of a socialism beyond capitalism comes right back on the agenda. It never really left, it just needs a little goosing from those of us who see it to make it become, again, what we’re all talking about and struggling to figure out how to achieve.

MICHAEL HUDSON: What Richard described is occurring on a number of planes. He talks about the drive of capitalism is to grow. Well, that’s certainly the dynamic of industrial capitalism, but somehow that hasn’t been the drive of the United States recently. Richard, how do you grow by out competing your rivals? You cut costs, you make things cheaper, or less expensively, and better. But the United States has been losing its race. It’s true. Last month the US GDP is going to grow and next month it’s going to really grow because the hurricanes hit South Carolina and now they’re going to hit Florida. That’s going to be a big jump in GDP. It’s not going to increase America’s dominance or competitiveness.

The American idea of growing today – I think certainly the neo-con idea, the Democratic and Republican idea – isn’t the kind of growth Richard is talking about capitalism. It’s a purely exploitative growth: America can only grow by arranging the international economic order in a way that siphons off the real growth in other countries – China, Russia, the global south – and taking their economic surplus and transferring it to itself.

This is not a growth of part of the production sector of the economy. It’s a growth of the circulation sector of the economy. Marx drew those two distinctions – production, circulation, which is part of the distribution. The American growth has been parasitic. The NATO-U.S. unity is like a parasite on the body of the global majority and they call that growth for the United States in Europe, but it’s parasitism. All of that, as Richard just said, we’re facing the overhead of global warming. How do you prevent it? Well, China has taken the lead according to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal in cutting way back carbon emissions, way back coal, and by taking the lead and creating solar power and atomic power. The U.S. position is to oppose the importation of Chinese solar panels because that’s not their philosophy. The oil lobbyists are now backing both political parties in the United States to make sure that any agreements – like the Paris Agreement that America signed – will not be followed in practice.

You have the United States and Europe pushing the growth and pollution. You have the green party in Germany saying that coal is the fuel of the future. It’s coal and cutting down the forests. It’s not oil, it’s not gas, it’s not power. It’s simply that. And you achieve this global fix-up by war.

Somehow the anti-war party is supposed to be a key precondition catalyst for all of this environmental change. You’re having this bizarre conflation of ideas in the U.S.- NATO, as opposed to the rest of the world, just as Richard has pointed out.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, do you want to add something?

RICHARD WOLFF: No, no.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Right now, Michael, in your opinion, when it comes to the Biden administration, it seems that they’re trying to put some sort of pressure on Netanyahu. But in your opinion, why are they not successful? Why are they not successful in their attempts to put pressure on Netanyahu?

Last time we talked here, you said that the United States is running the show. Richard, I want you to comment on this as well. I had some sort of division between the analysts like you and Richard and other analysts. Some of you are believing that the United States is running the show in the Middle East and the other ones are thinking that the Israeli lobby in the United States is running the show. Who’s running the show with these endless wars?

MICHAEL HUDSON: I think we talked last week about this very topic. Netanyahu is doing just what the United States wants. The dream of Netanyahu is the same dream of the US neo-cons: war with Iran. Because if you can conquer Iran, then you just close up everything between Israel and Iran. You take up Syria, Iraq; you move down into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. You take over the whole Near East.

Obviously, Netanyahu is doing what the United States wants, because the United States is giving it the bombs every week to drop, giving it the money every month so that it can continue.

So what we’re seeing is a good cop-bad cop pretending. The United States doesn’t want to be blamed by the whole-world abhorrence for what is happening in Israel. So it pretends to say, “That’s not us; we want to be the good guys; we told him to be gentle when he dropped his bombs and not kill anybody.” But he’s killing people. And we keep giving him bombs and telling him to be gentle with it. Well, what can we do? We don’t have control – he’s a “sovereign country” as you played at the beginning. So all of this is just a charade.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, I would argue very similarly. I don’t see this great struggle between the two as anything more than poorly staged theater that is not. Yeah, maybe for some people around the world, it’ll be convenient to believe that they can hold on. But I would look at it in a long-term strategic way, as follows: For many, many years now – for basically the post World War two period – this has worked very well, this alliance between the United States and Israel, for them. It has allowed Israel to go from a poor, largely agricultural backwater to an important modern economic power; to grow its population far beyond what it could have internally by itself. And it has allowed the United States to have – right in the middle of the Middle East – its own special agent dependent on it, loyal to it. I don’t want to go over all of the murky ways that Israel played strange intermediation roles when it came to the survival of apartheid in South Africa; when it came to the funding of the Iran Contras Central America. The hands of Israeli operatives are present in many of those – they were a loyal service. They operate a very good intelligence system in the Middle East, as the killings of Nasrallah and others have shown us. They’re probably better than what the United States could do, so that’s a service they can provide, that the United States either couldn’t or doesn’t want to be caught doing. So it’s all the Israelis who get the bad rep.

But here’s perhaps the most important: The Israeli economy is dead, it’s finished. It will take a long, long time to recover from what it is doing. An enormous portion of its adult manpower is busy in the military. They’re not working at their factories or their offices, or anywhere else.

Large numbers of people have left the country – that’s not reported on, but I know it to be the case – etc, etc. That Israel is going to be dependent on help from the United States economically, enormously, in the years ahead. So the United States has a proven, reliable agent who will need them in the future, and is therefore not in a position to deny the United States anything that it suggests it wants. I don’t see the United States having no leverage, as that journalist did.

The United States has plenty of leverage, and the reason it’s not using the leverage is there’s no reason to. Or let me put it differently: Where they’re using the leverage, we don’t know about it. Because they don’t want us to, and the Israelis dare not reveal the leverage if the Americans don’t want it, for all the reasons I’ve just given.

If there were no Israel, the United States would look for an alternative agent in the Middle East. And whoever you might imagine could play that role, they’ve decided that such an agent, if there is one, would be less reliable, less pliable, that you would operate less leverage than the one you have.

Does the AIPAC and the other domestic supporters of Israel inside the United States have influence? Sure they do. Professor Mearsheimer and his colleagues have demonstrated that for many years with countless studies. But I don’t think that would be enough, anywhere near enough, to explain what’s going on.

This is an alliance which has served the interests of those who run Israel and those who run the United States. And that’s why they preserve it. It’s not to have nothing to do with leverage. They have leverage. That’s why they preserve it. And the only thing holding back the Israelis, when they disagree with the United States, is the fact that they know that that leverage is there. They’re not going to take that chance. The biggest problem for the Israelis is the very large portion of Jews in the United States who do not support Netanyahu, who do not support the policies now.

And the way they handle that is to focus their foreign policy, not on the Jews in the United States, who are in the main, unreachable by that. But instead to go after the fundamentalist Christians, to build up the idea that Jesus is coming back, and that in order for him to come back, Jerusalem, the Holy Land, has to be in the hands of the Jews. The Bible says that somewhere. They fasten on that. And so that’s where the Israeli government has its film festivals and its exchanges and its tourism. I mean, that’s all dead. They’ve not earned any money on tourism for the last year, and none is likely to have happened. But those are Christians that are going over there hosted by the Jews in a very careful campaign, so that they get the support they need for Mr. Biden to do what he wants to do.

This is an agreed plan by both of them to maximize the freedom they have to do what they are doing. And the people who want to drive a wedge between the two of them, unless you have something very powerful, that’s not going to happen. There’s too much that pulls them together. You’re certainly not going to shame them by saying that “Mr. Biden doesn’t want you to invade…” and you invade it anyway. As Michael correctly says, this is a theater. This is a theater – that is how they manage the deal that they have.
It is like a good cop-bad cop deal, or any kind of deal where the two sides include in their deal the pretense they both contribute to, that that deal isn’t going on.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I agree with what Richard said.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah, recently we had finally – just to finalize this session – recently we had Emmanuel Macron finally saying something against war. And he said that we have to control the arms and aid going to Israel in order to put some sort of pressure on Netanyahu. And after that Netanyahu responded to him, “Shame on you” and “How you can say that,” and all of that.

How do you see the situation in the European Union changing toward Israel, or we are still having the same old policy toward Israel and its attitude?

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, let me speak a little bit to Emmanuel Macron and I’ll quote the American filmmaker Michael Moore who last night when asked about the election made the following sentence: “Donald Trump is toast.” That was Michael Moore’s statement. He did correctly predict that Trump would win in 2016, so people should be careful before they dismiss what Michael Moore has to say. I make no prediction so I’m not doing that. Mr. Macaroon, as my French family refers to him, as President Macaroon. He is, in other words, a cookie.

He is toast – there is no question – he is political toast. He was never a serious politician. He proved that before he became president and just in case anyone missed it, he proved it again while he was president. He had the distinction of being a sitting president when earlier this year the national elections in France, divided among the three major parties, and his party – the party of the sitting president – came in third out of three. That’s his achievement. Goodbye, Mr. Macron. But he is desperate. Everything he does is guided by the last minute desperation of someone who has no base. He is hated by the old conservatives. He is hated by the socialist party of which he was once both a member and a minister. The man was minister of education, if I’m remembering correctly, in the last socialist government.

He’s hated by all of them because he is such a flip-flopper, finger-in-the-wind to see which way the politics wind is blowing. So now he has his last desperate effort. He’s going to appeal largely to the people on the political right – who are against Israel’s position for a whole host of reasons – and the people that are on the left – who are against Israel’s position for a whole host of different reasons – and try somehow to attract them. But they already hate him. They do not trust him. There is no reason. I would like to remind you that less than a year ago Mr. Macron was the leading European politician advocating for European troops to land in Ukraine and fight alongside the Ukrainians against the Russians, prompting Mr. Putin to make one of his statements, that “if other leaders in the West were thinking along these lines, he wanted to make it crystal clear that this would be an attack on Russia which Russia would respond to with any and all means at its disposal.” You’d have to be dead not to understand what he was saying. Now, this man wants to stop killing people in the Middle East. It’s not serious, and to the chagrin, not just of Mr. Macron, but of all French people, no one is taking him seriously.

And in that he was helped, because Mr. Netanyahu not only chastised him for saying these things, but went on to say – and I didn’t make this up, I’m virtually quoting Mr. Netanyahu – that “on the side of Israel is civilization, and on the other side is barbarism.” Well that’s our conversation a few minutes ago. There we have it again: “Savages and the good people.” And Mr. Macron – in the mind of Mr. Netanyahu – just crossed over the bridge from the good guys to the bad guys, and next we’ll be hearing him referred to as “a thug.”

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON: What can I add to that? Richard’s described the situation perfectly. All I can do is paraphrase and that’s not much of a discussion.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Thank you so much for being with us today, both of you, and hope we can keep these talks and great pleasure as always talking with both of you. See you soon. Thank you.

RICHARD WOLFF: Thank you. Same here.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Bye bye.

Image by hosny salah from Pixabay

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, both re-elected with strong popular support, will soon meet. They are already discussing through special envoys. They resume their old relationship, except that now Russia is stronger militarily than the United States.

International relations are changing extremely quickly on several fronts at once.

The last two weeks have shown that Iran has abandoned its revolutionary ideal and distanced itself from its Sunni allies in Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and even Shiites in Lebanese Hezbollah, Iraqi Hashd al-Shaabi and Yemeni Ansar Allah [1]. These points are largely confirmed by the meeting during which Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated by the IDF "thanks" to Iranian information, the confusing statements of Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq, and the measures taken to prevent the assassination of Abdel Malek al-Houthi in Yemen [2].

Then, we showed that the BRICS, at the Kazan summit, affirmed their attachment to international law against the “rules-based order” of the Anglo-Saxons [3].

This week, Donald Trump’s landslide victory in the US elections marks the triumph of the Jacksonians over the Democrats, but also over the Republicans, although Trump was supported by their party. It should follow that the United States will cease its wars in Ukraine and the Middle East in favor of an all-out trade war.

On the European continent, we witnessed in the United Kingdom the fall of Rishi Sunak and his replacement by a member of the Trilateral Commission (i.e. support of US business interests), Keir Starmer. We expect, in Germany, the fall of Chancellor Olaf Schloz and, in France, that of Prime Minister Michel Barnier, without knowing who will replace them.

In the West, these events have the same meaning everywhere: neo-conservative ideology and woke religion are condemned in favor of the defense of nations. This is a revolt of the middle classes. These, who are not xenophobic, no longer accept being sacrificed, in the name of the specialization of the world imposed by Anglo-Saxon globalization.

Generally speaking, in the coming years we are moving towards abandoning both the imperialist will of the Anglo-Saxons and the anti-imperialist will of Iran. At the same time, we should see a strengthening of international law, although it is not recognized by the Jacksonians. However, they admit, in commercial matters, the importance of signatures. It is likely that Washington will push the Three Seas Initiative into Central Europe after forcing Ukraine to admit defeat to Russia. This will result in the rise of Poland to the detriment of Germany and a weakening of the European Union. The United States and BRICS will agree on the need to cooperate, but will clash over the reference status of the dollar.

These important changes are still hidden from us because we do not understand the way in which each of these actors think. We misinterpret what they say and do based on their place in the ancient world.

We are particularly blind towards the United States, which we continue to consider as our masters. We only know the neo-conservative doxa and we imagine that the United States thinks this way even though it has just freed itself from its rule. The election, or rather the re-election, of Donald Trump, his overwhelming victory for the White House as well as for Congress, marks the revolt of the US middle classes against the Western intellectuals who had all united against him.

Let us recall that Donald Trump, while a real estate developer in New York, was the first personality, on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, to question the official version of the supposedly Islamist attacks. Subsequently, he financed, within the Tea Party, the challenge to the legitimacy of President Barack Obama. Finally, he took over the Republican Party despite resistance from former Vice President Dick Cheney (who was a member of the “continuity government,” what Trump called the “deep state”). He campaigned in a new way based on observation of social networks and responding symbolically to the expectations of the middle classes. Upon his election and even before he took his seat in the White House, the Democratic Party launched a global smear campaign against him [4]. Throughout his mandate, he had to face his own collaborators who did not hesitate to lie to him and do the opposite of what he ordered them, then to brag about it. However, he managed, alone against everyone, to interrupt the "endless war" in the Middle East and the CIA’s military and financial support for Al-Qaeda and Daesh.

On the contrary, Joe Biden assembled his team from staff at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), the Rand Corporation, and from General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. He restarted wars in the Middle East, then started a new one in Ukraine.

We do not know whether Donald Trump will attempt to continue during his second term what he undertook during his first. He now knows the pitfalls of Washington and has put together a team that he was without the first time. The only unknown is what he had to concede to be able to win this time. His policy in the Middle East was to replace war with trade via the Abraham Accords. It was misunderstood because his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was responsible for implementing them, is deeply racist. He also moved the United States embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, implying that it was the capital of the only Jewish state. During his campaign, he accepted considerable donations from the widow of Sheldon Adelson, an unconditional supporter of the "revisionist Zionists". No one knows whether he is committed in return to supporting the State of Israel or the colonial project of Vladimir Jabotinsky.

Donald Trump’s victory will not end the clashes, but will move them from the military battlefield to that of the economy. Be careful, to analyze his policies, the political categories with which we have been thinking since the 18th century will prove ineffective. He does not intend to choose between protectionism and free trade, but between economic sectors: the products that he will defend with customs duties because they will not be able to compete with those of his competitors, and the products that are capable of flooding the global market. Donald Trump is not the friend of all entrepreneurs, far from it. He opposes those who live off the State by selling it bad products, as the American military-industrial complex has been doing for thirty years. The notions of right and left, interventionist and isolationist are all equally obsolete. What is happening today is of a different nature.

Does Donald J. Trump have an ideology, and what it is? The first part of the question is redundant: every individual has an ideology and if we believe that they do not have it, it is because it might represent an amalgam of pieces collected from various ideological frameworks that are rearranged, and thus hard to put a name on. But that does not mean that there is no ideology. The second part is a million-dollar question because if we could piece together Donald J, Trump’s ideology, we would be able to forecast, or guess (the element of volatility is high), how his rule over the next four years might look like.

The reason why most people are unable to make a coherent argument about Trump’s ideology is because they are either blinded by hatred or adulation, or because they cannot bring what they observe in him into an ideological framework, with a name attached to it, and to which they are accustomed.

Before I try to answer the question, let me dismiss two, in my opinion, entirely wrong epithets attached to Trump: fascist and populist. If fascist is used as a term of abuse, this is okay and we can use it freely. Nobody cares. But as a term in a rational discussion of Trump’s beliefs it is wrong. Fascism as an ideology implies (i) exclusivist nationalism, (ii) glorification of the leader, (iii) emphasis on the power of the state as opposed to private individuals and the private sector, (iv) rejection of the multi-party system, (v) corporatist rule, (vi) replacement of the class structure of society with unitary nationalism, and (vii) quasi religious adulation of the Party, the state and the leader. I do not need to discuss each of these elements individually to show that they have almost no relationship to what Trump believes or what he wants to impose.

Likewise, the term “populist” has of late become a term of abuse, and despite some (in my opinion rather unsuccessful) attempts to define it better, it really stands for the leaders who win elections but do so on a platform that “we” do not like. Then, the term becomes meaningless.

What are the constituent parts of Trump’s ideology as we might have glimpsed during the previous four years of his rule?

Mercantilism. Mercantilism is an old and hallowed doctrine that regards economic activity, and especially trade in goods and services between the states as a zero-sum game. Historically it went together with a world where wealth was gold and silver. If you take the amount of gold and silver to be limited, then clearly the state and its leader who possesses more gold and silver (regardless of all other goods) is more powerful.  The world has evolved since the 17th century but many people still believe in the mercantilist doctrine. Moreover, if one believes that trade is just a war by other means and that the main rival or antagonist of the United States is China mercantilist policy towards China becomes a very natural response. When Trump initiated such policies against China in 2017 they were not a part of the mainstream discourse, but have since moved to the center. Biden’s administration followed them and expanded them significantly. We can expect that Trump will double-down on them. But mercantilists are, and Trump will be, transactional: if China agrees to sell less and buy more, he will be content. Unlike Biden, Trump will not try to undermine or overthrow the Chinese regime. Thus, unlike what many people believe, I think that Trump is good for China (that is, given the alternatives).

Profit-making. Like all Republicans, Trump believes in the private sector. Private sector in his view is unreasonably hampered by regulations, rules, taxes. He was a capitalist who never paid taxes which, in his view, simply shows that he was a good entrepreneur. But for others, lesser capitalists, regulations should be simplified or gotten rid of, and taxation should be reduced. Consistent with that view is the belief that taxes on capital should be lower than taxes on labor. Entrepreneurs and capitalists are job-creators, others are, in Ayn Rand’s words, ”moochers”. There is nothing new there in Trump. It is the same doctrine that was held from Reagan onwards, including by Bill Clinton. Trump may be just more vocal and open about low taxes on capital, but he would do the same thing that Bush Sr, Clinton and Bush Jr. did. And that liberal icon Alan Greenspan deeply believed.

Anti-immigrant “nationalism”. This a really difficult part. The term “nationalist” only awkwardly applies to American politicians because people are used to “exclusive” (not inclusive) European and Asian nationalisms. When we speak of (say) Japanese nationalism, we mean that such Japanese would like to expel ethnically non-Japanese either from decision-making or presence in the country, or both. The same is true for Serbian, Estonian, French or Castellan nationalisms. The American nationalism, by its very nature, cannot be ethnic or blood-related because of enormous heterogeneity of people who compose the United States. Commentators have thus invented a new term, “white nationalism”. It is a bizarre term because it combines color of the skin with ethnic (blood) relations.  In reality, I think that the defining feature of Trump’s “nationalism” is neither ethnic nor racial, but simply the dislike of new migrants. It is in essence not different from anti-migrant policies applied today in the heart of the socio-democratic world, in Nordic and North Western European countries where the right-wing parties in Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, and Denmark believe (in the famous expression of the Dutch right-wing leader Geert Wilders) that their countries are “full” and cannot accept more immigrants. Trump’s view is only unusual because the US is not, objectively by any criteria, a full country: the number of people per square kilometer in the United States is 38 while it is 520 in the Netherlands.

A nation for itself. When one combines mercantilism with migrant dislike, one gets close to what US foreign policy under Trump will look like. It will be the policy of nationalist anti-imperialism. I have to unpack these terms. This combination is uncommon, especially for big powers: if they are big, nationalist and mercantilist, it is almost intuitively understood that they have to be imperialistic. Trump however defies this nostrum. He goes back to the Founders’ foreign policy that abhorred “foreign entanglements”. The United States, in their and in his view, is a powerful and rich nation, looking after its interests, but it is not an “indispensable nation” in the way that Madeleine Albright defined it. It is not the role of the United States to right every wrong in the world (in the optimistic or self-serving view of this doctrine) nor to waste its money on people and causes which have nothing to do with its interests (in the realist view of the same doctrine).

Why Trump dislikes imperialism that has become common currency for both US parties since 1945 is hard to say but I think that instinctively he tends to espouse values of the Founding Fathers and people like the Republican antagonist to FDR, Robert Taft who believed in US economic strength and saw no need to convert that strength into a hegemonic political rule over the world.

This does not mean that Trump will give up US hegemony (NATO will not be disbanded), because, as Thucydides wrote: “it is not any longer possible for you to give up this empire, though there may be some people who in a mood of sudden panic and in a spirit of political apathy actually think that this would be a fine and noble thing to do. Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go”. But in the light of Trump’s mercantilist principles, he would make US allies pay much more for it. Like in Pericles’ Athens, the protection will no longer come for free. One should not forget that the beautiful Acropolis that we all admire was built with gold stolen from the allies.   

I recently shared a list of 26 essential books about technology.

But there was an unusual twist to this list—none of these books were written by technologists. They all came from wise humanists, philosophers, novelists, and social thinkers.

This is quite unconventional nowadays—STEM rules everything and everywhere, while the humanities are in crisis. But these are the books I’d assign if I taught in Stanford’s entrepreneur program.

They would give techies a mind-expanding vision from outside the Silicon Valley echo chamber. These books would guide them to concepts and solutions that tech, on its own, will never deliver.

Back in August, I promised that I’d write about some of the individual books on my list.

Today I’m doing just that—offering a rapid-fire overview of some insights from Hannah Arendt, one of the deepest thinkers of the 20th century.

Hannah Arendt

As many of you know, I often study predictions made 50 or 100 years ago, and try to see how accurate they were.

I have done this in the past with J.G. Ballard, Arnold Mitchell, Chris Anderson, Paul Goodman, Oswald Spengler, and others.

Today I turn my attention to an extraordinary analysis from Hannah Arendt’s book The Human Condition (1958). It’s so accurate, it’s almost scary.

Arendt is a constant source of inspiration for me. In this book, she warns us about technologists who are dangerous becuse they are so completely out-of-touch with their humanity. She wrote this book in the mid-1950s, but you might think she was living in Silicon Valley today.

Here’s what she says about these dangerous individuals in the opening pages of her 1958 book:

1. On page one she says that people who are disconnected with the human condition are obsessed with outer space and want to “escape man’s imprisonment to the earth.”

2. On page two, she says that these people are “directed towards making life artificial”—sort of like virtual reality.

3. On page three, she claims that they will eventually want to create “artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking….we would become the helpless slaves…at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.”

4. On page four, she warns us that scientists have already shown (with the development of the atomic bomb) that they create dangerous things but are “the last to be consulted about their use.” So any prediction a scientist makes about the use of new tech is totally worthless—politicians and tyrants will decide how it is used.

5. On page five, she explains that in this kind of society, freedom becomes almost worthless, because people are deprived of the “higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.”

6. On page six, she says that the people pursuing this escape from the human condition are thus creating “modern world alienation.”

7. On page seven, she says that they inhabit “an ‘artificial’ world of things distinctly different from all natural surroundings”—so that their tech innovations will lead to an inevitable degradation of the environment, and a detachment from the real world.

I read all this in astonishment.

It sounds like Arendt had anticipated my recent article about Silicon Valley turning into a creepy cult—and grasped this potentiality more than 60 years ago.

In other word, she saw all this even before Silicon Valley had a name or a mission.

Arendt’s entire book is filled with insights. I won’t try to summarize everything, but I will share a few more of her provocative views.

Here are 12 more key passages from The Human Condition:

1. “Our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world.” [It sounds like she is describing scrolling on a smartphone but Arendt wrote this before the first integrated circuit was built!]

2. “The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy the world and things.” [Does that sound familiar?]

3. “The phenomenon of conformism is characteristic of the last stage of this modern development.”

4. “Large numbers of people, crowded together, develop an almost irresistible inclination toward despotism.”

5. “Society always demands that its members act as though they were members of one enormous family which has only one opinion….imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to ‘normalize’ its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.”

6. “Behavior has replaced action as the foremost mode of human relationship.”

7. “The mass phenomenon of loneliness…has achieved its most extreme and antihuman form. The reason for this extremity is that mass society not only destroys the public realm but the private as well, deprives men not only of their place in the world but of their private home, where they once felt sheltered against the world.”

8. “The loss of human experience in this development is extraordinarily striking. It is not only and not even primarily contemplation which has become an entirely meaningless experience. Thought itself, when it became “reckoning with consequences,” became a func­tion of the brain, with the result that electronic instruments are found to fulfill these functions much better than we ever could.”

9. “We have begun to live in a labor society which lacks enough laboring to keep it contented.”

10. “For mortals, the ‘easy life of the gods’ would be a lifeless life.”

11. “This does not mean that modern man has lost his capacities….although these faculties are more and more restricted to the abilities of the artist.”

12. “It is quite con­ceivable that the modern age—which began with such an unprece­dented and promising outburst of human activity—may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.”

Does any of that ring true today? Let me remind you that all this was written in the mid-1950s.

I will have more to say in the future about other books on my subversive tech reading list. But even this quick survey of Hannah Arendt’s worldview shows how much we gain from adopting a larger vision of technology from a wise and compassionate human standpoint.

During the period of the Wagner Group insurrection in the spring of 2023, the biography of the mercenary group’s founder and principal owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was spread far and wide. The fact that he had once served meals to Vladimir Putin prompted sniggering among our mainstream commentators. Just imagine that such a person could rise to the power, influence and wealth of Prigozhin! This was proof positive of the endemic corruption and distorted values of the ‘Putin regime,’ they opined.

However, my point in writing today’s installment is to demonstrate that upward mobility of those with great talent and imagination has long been and remains a competitive advantage of Russia. That was so under Peter the Great in the first quarter of the 18th century, it was certainly true in much of the Soviet period until the 1980s. And it revived very nicely in the ‘Roaring 90s’ when the hero of this piece, Sergei Gutzeit, restaurateur, vineyard owner, restorer of landmark buildings at his own expense, founder and chief benefactor of a lyҫėe for aspiring talents from the lower classes began his steep rise up the success ladder in the circle of another rising star, Vladimir Putin.

All of these issues came to mind this afternoon when my wife and I took lunch in Gutzeit’s first and still best earning restaurant Podvorye located in the Petersburg suburb of Pavlovsk where he has kept his primary residence and focus of his charitable works for decades.

Pavlovsk is named for the Emperor Pavel (Paul I), son of Catherine the Great and father of Emperor Alexander I, best known as the conqueror of Napoleon. Paul’s elegant and modestly sized palace is a ‘must see’ tourist destination for both foreign and domestic visitors to Northwest Russia, alongside the much larger and more demanding Summer Palace of Catherine in the town of Pushkin (formerly Tsarskoye Selo), 5 km away.

However, the success of Gutzeit’s restaurant opposite the palace park had little to do with location, location, location. Gutzeit opened the Podvorye in 1994 on an unpromising plot of land that the grudging city authorities offered him. It is wedged between the train tracks on one side and a busy local highway on the other. It was his unique architectural solution and his talents in hospitality services that won him a loyal clientele from among the top business and political circles of Petersburg after a very few years.

As for architecture, the Podvorye restaurant and the ensemble of outbuildings adjacent to it are made from immense stripped logs in a style that resembles the stage settings for 17th century or still earlier Russia as shown in Rimsky Korsakov operas in the Mariinsky Theater. The basic menu was built entirely around traditional hearty Russian cuisine that is very well turned out, in copious portions and priced very fairly. And on weekends it was the rule to regale diners with rounds of Russian folk songs by musicians who invited the children especially to join in.

Gutzeit’s fortune was assured in October 2000 when Vladimir Putin decided to celebrate his first birthday as president in…the Podvorye. The specially prepared meal for the presidential party remains on page one of the printed menu and is currently priced at 55 euros in ruble equivalency. In typical Russian fashion, the meal opens with a shock and awe array of eight different meat, fish, salted vegetable, marinated forest mushroom and other appetizers which invite rounds of vodka shot glasses, then moves on to a fish or meat soup followed by the mains of fried fish or meat. Fasting for a day ahead of such a meal is a good idea.

On the other hand, for normal dining, the out of pocket cost is much lower. By way of example, I mention that our favorite dish is half a roast duck served with stewed cabbage and a baked pear with lingonberry filling. One portion is more than sufficient to serve two and today costs the equivalent of 12 euros. Back in the 1990s, when Russian farming was reeling from the shock therapy administered at the advice of Western advisers, Gutzeit had to import his ducks frozen from France to be satisfied with quality and uniform portions. Then when relations with France soured, he shifted to frozen ducks from Hungary. Now chef assures me that they arrive fresh from farms in Rostov (Russia) and I assure you that the quality is superb.

But, to resume my story of Gutzeit’s rise: once word of the President’s visit got around, the Podvorye was filled daily to capacity. Back in the 1990s and early in the new century, the diners were predominantly foreigners whose reservations were made for them by the premiere hotels in St Petersburg where they were lodged. I recall how in about 2004 my wife and I spotted former British prime minister John Major at another table.

Those were the glory days when Gutzeit made a fortune that he immediately invested in other commercial ventures and also in charitable works, the first of which, was a free of charge soup kitchen for the poor run daily from a large, specially built canteen adjacent to the restaurant.

Nowadays the clientele is almost exclusively middle class Russians from near and far. They arrive as couples, as families with kids, and as groups of friends.

Aside from opening other restaurants in the region, Gutzeit created the ‘Russian Village’ in Upper Mandrogi, a Russian equivalent to America’s Williamsburg on a riverbank site jointly agreed with tour operators of cruises in the rivers and canals running north from Lake Ladoga that are very popular in the summer season. This venture provided work opportunities to artisans in traditional decorative handicrafts.

With the proceeds of his businesses, with his own money Gutzeit undertook the restoration of dilapidated buildings from the late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries in the Pavlovsk area. In one of these complexes he opened what I would call his most ambitious and far-sighted project which was inspired by the lyҫėe within the Catherine Palace which Alexander I created initially with a view to educate his younger brothers together with a small group of talented students from outside the royal entourage. Today it is best known as the school where the young Pushkin studied. Gutzeit’s vision was to help create a new patriotic but broadly educated and widely traveled elite to help guide the country’s future.

The school was named for Russia’s revered Foreign Minister in the second half of the 19th century, A.M. Gorchakov. Gutzeit directly oversaw the selection of the 18 candidates for the first class and following classes from among children of low income intelligentsia families. He oversaw the program of travel abroad in the West and domestically around Russia that the students were given gratis. The school is still going strong and I expect to hear more about its graduates when I meet with Gutzeit at the start of next week.

In reviving the tradition of what was called in Pushkin’s time the Tsarskoye Selo lyҫėe, Gutzeit was a good 20 years ahead of the Putin government. It is only now that a project to revive that school in the original Catherine Palace complex is being realized.

Meanwhile, Gutzeit never abandoned the love for fresh produce that directed him to cooking and restaurant ownership. Originally born and educated in Odessa (Ukraine), Gutzeit got his start in business in the food markets of the north where he traded in vegetables. The latter partly explains his decision early in the new millennium to buy a farming estate in the Crimea. His main crop there is grapes for wine, and he began well before it became popular for Russian arbiters of taste like Dmitry Kiselyov, director of all Russian state television news, to become a vineyard owner in Crimea. Gutzeit indulges in his gentleman farmer avocation in the south from late spring to autumn.

His most recent acquisition, agricultural land near the regional center Gatchina, brings together various interests. The location has its own logic: Paul 1 had his earliest palace in precisely Gatchina. On this farm, Gutzeit is now growing most of the fresh vegetables, herbs, fowl and dairy products that will be featured in Podvorye. With this latest accent on cooking mainly what you get from your surroundings and can personally control, Gutzeit’s restaurant is sure to vie for a star in the Michelin guide if and when sanctions are lifted.

That, in a nutshell, is my Exhibit Number 1 of a successful and wealthy benefactor of his society with outstanding vision who began, like Prigozhin, as ‘a waiter to Putin.’ When you care to scratch the surface, this country has a great many surprises that help you to better understand why it is now the fourth biggest economy in the world as measured by Purchasing Power Equivalency and likely has the number one army in the world.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. He chose this third career of 'public intellectual' after finishing up a 25 year career as corporate executive and outside consultant to multinational corporations doing business in Russia and Eastern Europe which culminated in the position of Managing Director, Russia during the years 1995-2000. He has publishied his memoirs of his 25 years of doing business in and around the Soviet Union/Russia, 1975 - 2000. Memoirs of a Russianist, Volume I: From the Ground Up was published on 10 November 2020. Volume II: Russia in the Roaring 1990s was released in February 2021. A Russian language edition in a single 780 page volume was published by Liki Rossii in St Petersburg in November 2021: Россия в бурные 1990е: Дневники, воспоминания, документы. View all posts by gilbertdoctorow

Suzuki Muneo.

Suzuki Muneo is straight-talking, a man’s man. He has spent his career in the Diet in Tokyo and has rubbed elbows with–and rubbed the wrong way–just about every powerful person in Japanese politics over the past forty years. The two descriptions are mutually reinforcing. Suzuki uses power; he doesn’t worship it. He remains as much an outsider now–a Hokkaido patriot in the political maze of Nagatacho–as when he entered the political road in 1983.

Suzuki is unpopular now, as ever, because he refuses to follow the political herd on, above all, the question of Russia. Suzuki, whose home island is Russia’s backyard neighbor, maintains close ties with Russia. This brings benefits to Suzuki’s constituents, but it also wins him few friends in the Japanese political world, or in the media.

In this, our second long interview with Suzuki (first interview here), we ask him about his most recent visit to Russia, and about the future of Japan. Suzuki sees many possibilities for Japan with Russia, but laments that there is no one in power now who can turn those possibilities into reality.

Interview and text by Jason Morgan and Kenji Yoshida.

Kenji Yoshida and Jason Morgan (K&J): How was your visit to Russia?

Suzuki Muneo (SM): It’s been ten months since my last visit to Russia in October of 2023. Moscow is peaceful and orderly. The people of Moscow are out until late at night, strolling through the city. Restaurants are filled with customers. Department stores and other shops are fully stocked with goods. There is plenty of fruit for sale. Plenty of fish and meat.

Not far from this unhurried Moscow scene a war is unfolding, but one would never know it from inside the city. In this, I felt the strength and stability of Russia.

K&J: The West repeatedly imposes sanctions on other countries. In the case of Russia, the West imposed sanctions in response to Russia’s incursion into Ukraine and tried to destroy the ruble. Those sanctions, though, appear to have had the opposite effect.

SM: Russia initiated its special military operation in February of 2022. In May of that year, President Biden imposed sanctions on Russia. Biden said that sanctions would lead Russia to give up within two months. Was President Biden correct in this pronouncement?

It’s been nearly two and a half years since then. In 2023, Russia’s economy exhibited a growth rate of 3.6%. The growth rate for this year is forecast to be 5%. Russia is the world’s biggest energy superpower. It was underestimated by the West, but it has proven to be a strong country. The West, including the G7 countries, made a mistaken assessment of Russia in this regard. Responsibility for this misreading falls heavily also on NATO.

The special military operation started February 24, 2022. In March [of 2022], Ukraine came forward with a peace proposal. On April 15, 2022, Russia was prepared to sign Ukraine’s peace proposal. However, it was Ukraine that then withdrew the proposal. The backdrop to this, we are told, is that then-UK prime minister Boris Johnson interjected himself into the proceedings and pressured Ukraine not to sign any peace deal with Russia.

I think this was a terrible mistake. The United States was apparently also involved. In the Ukraine situation, too, the tendency of the Anglo-Saxons to use force to get their way proved to be a mistake. The war could have been over. An armistice was within reach. But England and America sent everything in the opposite direction.

K&J: For more than a hundred years, the Anglo-Saxons have been using force of arms to impose their will on the world. They seem to believe that they are qualified to rule in this way. It’s arrogant.

SM: In the Ukraine war, Russia seems to have understood the nature of Anglo-Saxon power and decided to have a showdown with the UK-American way of rule. Looking at Russia’s recent alliance with North Korea and also its collaboration with China, India, and other countries, it seems as though Russia is trying, not just to deal with the Anglo-Saxons, but to end their rule. Russia seems to be not passively accepting the Anglo-Saxons’ way but trying to put an end to it.

I am thinking back to the Crimea incident ten years ago. At that time, the president was Barack Obama. Obama was saying that America was no longer the world’s policeman and no longer the world’s financial backer. He took a step back from the world’s affairs.

I think he was correct in his assessment. America had been the world’s leader in everything, but Obama was saying that the United States would no longer be involved militarily in every part of the world, and would no longer be throwing money around everywhere in the globe. Obama was forthright and upfront about this.

And yet, Biden has urged Ukraine to fight on, promising to send weapons and cash. Why?

It has been ten years since Obama said that America was no longer the world’s sole superpower. Biden seems to be operating under the impression that the United States remains the world’s champion nation. Biden has dropped out of the presidential race. But for three years now, I have been thinking that his mental faculties are off. Hence, the mistaken approach to Ukraine.

K&J: Is it only Biden? Biden is surrounded by neocons, and Washington itself has the same outlook as Biden.

SM: Yes, it’s true.

America and England are one thing, but France and Germany have their own reasons separate from the former two countries. And yet, France and Germany were pulled into the present war. I think this way of doing things is behind the times. I have some doubts whether France and Germany can see what is ahead.

The Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall came down. Germany was reunited. The Soviet Union collapsed and we now have Russia. History changed completely.

President George H.W. Bush told the world that NATO would expand no further east than the reunited Germany. Then-Secretary of State James A. Baker wrote as much in his book. Chancellor Helmut Kohl told Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO’s eastward expansion ended with the reunified Germany. Baker went so far as to say that he would not allow NATO to expand by a single inch. Gorbachev believed these statements and dismantled the Warsaw Pact arrangement.

NATO repeatedly said, year after year, that it would cut its presence. But the opposite happened. NATO expanded. It was Russia that took history as fact and faced the facts squarely. The West relied on sidestepping and deception. The West spoke of liberalism, solidarity. But behind the scenes it was plotting to weaken Russia. I don’t think this was fair.

K&J: Could it be that Obama laid a trap by appearing to retreat from the world’s stage?

SM: I think Obama made an honest and accurate assessment of America’s economic position at the time. America commanded a quarter of the world’s economic might. Today, that figure has gone down to less than ten percent.

I think Japan is making a mistake on this point. Japan is one of the G7 countries. When the G7 got underway, those seven countries accounted for some eighty percent of the global economy. Now, unfortunately, it’s forty percent.

K&J: BRICS has overtaken the G7 it seems.

SM: Yes. When you expand the G7 to take in the G20, the latter includes Russia, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, Indonesia, Kazakhstan [occasional guest at G20 summits], Argentina, Turkiye, and so forth. Now, the G20 accounts for eighty percent of the global economy.

The BRICS countries are in control of eighty percent of the world’s energy. Russia, Iran as of last year, Saudi Arabia, UAE–the world is moving to be carbon neutral by 2050 as part of the response to climate change, but for the next twenty-six years we will have no choice but to remain reliant on fossil fuels. Of the fossil fuels, natural gas is particularly important. The most abundant source of natural gas, and oil must also be included here, is Russia. It is essential to look at these facts dispassionately.

Russia is a superior country and is recognized as such worldwide. It is the world’s most important country in terms of energy resources, and also has a formidable might apart from this as well. Russia’s supremacy in energy resources is unwavering in the face of Western sanctions. I find it baffling in the extreme why the G7 and NATO countries do not comprehend this.

K&J: It seems there are many possibilities for Japan in a relationship with Russia. You have just visited Russia and seen for yourself. Are other Japanese politicians unaware of the possibilities that could be realized in dealing with Russia? Japan remains attached at the hip with the United States. Is this a sustainable arrangement?

SM: If America were as powerful today as it was thirty or forty years ago, then it would be understandable for Japan to be pulled this way and that by the United States. But now, even America is saying that America cannot remain the world’s sole superpower, that we have to take the rest of the world into account.

Ten years ago, Obama told then-prime minister Abe Shinzo that the United States would impose sanctions on Russia over Crimea. Obama asked Japan to cooperate. But Abe told Obama, clearly, “No.”

I heard this from Prime Minister Abe directly. He told Obama, “Japan and Russia are neighbors. There are issues between Japan and Russia that must be resolved. A peace treaty must be signed. The Northern Territories. Japan cannot survive if it takes the same position and adopts the same values as the United States. So, I will make an independent decision, for Japan.”

Abe said this straight out. He was correct in what he said. Obama, I am told, hung up on him.

The Foreign Ministry bureaucrats in Japan told Abe that President Obama would not attend the Ise Shima Summit that was being planned for the next year, 2015. The bureaucrats said that Obama also wouldn’t attend the Hiroshima peace memorial event to which he had been invited. The bureaucrats took a pessimistic view. But Obama came to the Ise Shima Summit.

[He also came to Hiroshima in 2016.]

This was proof that, at that time, a national leader with resolution and patriotism, and who had the mind of the people at heart, could expect to be understood. So I cannot understand, at all, why Prime Minister Kishida Fumio cannot do the same with President Biden. [As of September 27, 2024, Ishiba Shigeru is the new prime minister of Japan].

K&J: Russia’s relationship with North Korea has strengthened considerably as of late. The Japanese government has long entrusted to Washington the resolution of the abductions issue, wherein North Korean agents abducted Japanese civilians. But Russia’s influence over North Korea is, presumably, now considerable. What is the possibility that, if Japan were to ask Russia to intervene with Kim Jong Un and ask him concretely what his demands would be in exchange for allowing the abduction victims to return home, Russia would respond favorably?

SM: North Korea is a neighboring country, and is also a member of the United Nations. In light of these facts, it is highly unusual that Japan and North Korea have no diplomatic relations. Japan and North Korea ought to normalize relations immediately. Talks [between North Korea and Japan] must start with this.

Japan must not impose conditions before entering into talks, such as by insisting that North Korea acknowledge that it abducted Japanese citizens, or by declaring that the resolution of the abduction issue will take priority. The abduction issue is one to discuss after a summit meeting has been achieved and trust has been built.

No summit meeting is scheduled yet. Before we even get to that point, Japan’s imposing conditions will serve only to antagonize the other party. Japan will obtain nothing by doing so.

When Koizumi Junichiro was prime minister, he visited North Korea. The leader of North Korea at that time was Kim Jong Il, who admitted, before the world, to the abduction of Japanese citizens and apologized.

I think that this was an opportunity to make a fresh start. But Japan squandered this opportunity because the government, swayed by public opinion, advanced an intractable position. The Stockholm Agreement [of May 2014, in which North Korea promised to conduct investigations into the abductions issue] is one thing, but when Koizumi and Kim sat down together [in Pyongyang in 2002], they spoke with one another without any expectations. I think this was extremely important in building a relationship of mutual trust.

The six-party talks [started in 2003 and addressing security concerns in Northeast Asia, especially regarding North Korea] were underway around the time [North Korea and Japan were discussing the abduction issue]. The first chair country of the talks was Russia. The head of the Russian delegation was Alexander Losyukov [then Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs]. Losyukov was a diplomat I knew very well. I thought it would have been a good idea to ask Losyukov [to help broker talks over the abduction issue]. Russia and North Korea have, historically, a close relationship. Kim Il Sung, the grandfather of Kim Jong Un, used to be a soldier in the Soviet Red Army. Because of these good connections, I still think it would be good to have Russia help [with the abduction issue]. It would have been good at the time, too.

But then the Americans got involved, then South Korea, and then China. There were too many parties involved, and the talks broke down.

Still, though, the only one that can broker and advise on this is Russia. Former prime minister Abe understood my views on this and accepted them. Abe was strongly determined to resolve [the abduction issue] without asking [the United States], but now it’s become such that Japan can do nothing without asking the United States. Therefore, there is no progress made at all.

K&J: Was that not the point of the six-party talks from Washington’s perspective? Far from wanting to resolve the abduction issue, it seems, even now, that Washington’s objective is to draw the problem out for political advantage.

SM: I think that the abduction issue, at the most fundamental level, can be resolved only bilaterally, only between Japan and North Korea. And how to bring about that bilateral engagement is to ask Russia to help [open channels of communication]. That is the only way. But the talks were put at the mercy of the United States in many ways, and things went awry.

Next year will mark eighty years since the end of the Second World War. I think this should mark a turning point on a number of issues, such as for example, concluding a peace treaty with Russia. I think we’re also approaching the last opportunity to resolve the abduction issue.

One often hears in Japan that it was the Soviet Union that unilaterally reneged on the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact [in 1945]. But it was the Americans who incited the Soviets to do this at the Yalta Conference. President Franklin Roosevelt told Soviet leader Josef Stalin that Germany would surrender in May, and that the Soviet Union should attack Japan two or three months later. Stalin took very serious stock of the situation and made his move after the American atomic bombings of Japan.

Taking an objective view of history, I came to the conclusion that when Japan follows the United States Japan’s legs are swept out from under her.

K&J: I find it very difficult to understand why Nagatacho should still trust a Washington which has thus proven itself devious time and again.

SM: The current American ambassador to Japan is Rahm Emanuel. He is butting into the moral values and historical sensibilities of the Japanese people. This is unprecedented. I am worried to see that some people are being led along by him and can see nothing but the United States.

The bill always comes due. And it’s surely going to be a big bill.

K&J: The United States has recently set up a joint-command structure in Japan. The new joint force headquarters is under the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, but is based in Japan. I see this as Washington’s preparing to involve Japan in a major war, possibly over Taiwan.

SM: Japan is, in part, being used for America’s global strategy. Seventy-three percent of America’s military presence in Japan is concentrated in Okinawa. This is not a normal situation.

Russia is a major nation. If there were a Japan-Russia relationship on par with the US-Japan alliance, then Japan could expect to play the role of counterweight between Russia and America. I want there to be a leader in Japan able to make the decision to do this. As things are now, it’s all one-sided for America.

Abe worked well with Trump. He worked well with President Putin. I think that if Japan’s leader was smart about it, then Japan could [work with both sides]. Japan must be firm in its dealings with other countries. We are not nearly firm enough now.

Look at India. India is very strong, but it also balances Russia against the United States very well.

K&J: Is there anyone in the Liberal Democratic Party today that can be that strong leader?

SM: No. There is no one. And it worries me.

On history's repeating itself

Excerpts from the History of the Peloponnesian War

So revolutions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge.

To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings.

What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defense.

Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. To plot successfully was a sign of intelligence, but it was still cleverer to see that a plot was hatching. If one attempted to provide against having to do either, one was disrupting the unity of the party and acting out of fear of the opposition. In short, it was equally praiseworthy to get one’s blow in first against someone who was going to do wrong, and to denounce someone who had no intention of doing any wrong at all.

Family relations were a weaker tie than party membership, since party members were more ready to go to any extreme for any reason whatever.

These parties were not formed to enjoy the benefits of the established laws, but to acquire power by overthrowing the existing regime; and the members of these parties felt confidence in each other not because of any fellowship in a religious communion, but because they were partners in crime.

If an opponent made a reasonable speech, the party in power, so far from giving it a generous reception, took every precaution to see that it had no practical effect.

Revenge was more important than self-preservation. And if pacts of mutual security were made, they were entered into by the two parties only in order to meet some temporary difficulty, and remained in force only so long as there was no other weapon available. When the chance came, the one who first seized it boldly, catching his enemy off his guard, enjoyed a revenge that was all the sweeter from having been taken, not openly, but because of a breach of faith. It was safer that way, it was considered, and at the same time a victory won by treachery gave one a title for superior intelligence.

And indeed most people are more ready to call villainy cleverness than simple-mindedness honesty. They are proud of the first quality and ashamed of the second.

Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils. To this must be added the violent fanaticism which came into play once the struggle had broken out.

Leaders of parties in the cities had programs which appeared admirable—on one side political equality for the masses, on the other the safe and sound government of the aristocracy—but in professing to serve the public interest they were seeking to win the prizes for themselves.

In their struggles for ascendancy nothing was barred; terrible indeed were the actions to which they committed themselves, and in taking revenge they went farther still. Here they were deterred neither by the claims of justice nor by the interests of the state; their one standard was the pleasure of their own party at that particular moment, and so, either by means of condemning their enemies on an illegal vote or by violently usurping power over them, they were always ready to satisfy the hatreds of the hour.

Thus neither side had any use for conscientious motives; more interest was shown in those who could produce attractive arguments to justify some disgraceful action.

[… the search for truth strains the patience of most people, who would rather believe the first things that come to hand.]

As for the citizens who held moderate views, they were destroyed by both the extreme parties, either for not taking part in the struggle or in envy at the possibility that they might survive.

As the result of these revolutions, there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world. The simple way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society had become divided into two ideologically hostile camps, and each side viewed the other with suspicion.

As for ending this state of affairs, no guarantee could be given that would be trusted, no oath sworn that people would fear to break; everyone had come to the conclusion that it was hopeless to expect a permanent settlement and so, instead of being able to feel confident in others, they devoted their energies to providing against being injured themselves. As a rule those who were least remarkable for intelligence showed the greater powers of survival. Such people recognized their own deficiencies and the superior intelligence of their opponents; fearing that they might lose a debate or find themselves out-maneuvered in intrigue by their quick-witted enemies, they boldly launched straight into action; while their opponents, overconfident in the belief that they would see what was happening in advance, and not thinking it necessary to seize by force what they could secure by policy, were the more easily destroyed because they were off their guard.

Certainly it was in Corcyra that there occurred the first examples of the breakdown of law and order.

There was the revenge taken in their hour of triumph by those who had in the past been arrogantly oppressed instead of wisely governed; there were the wicked resolutions taken by those who, particularly under the pressure of misfortune, wished to escape from their usual poverty and coveted the property of their neighbors; there were the savage and pitiless actions into which men were carried not so much for the sake of gain as because they were swept away into an internecine struggle by their ungovernable passions.

Then, with the ordinary conventions of civilized life thrown into confusion, human nature, always ready to offend even where laws exist, showed itself proudly in its true colors, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything superior to itself; for, if it had not been for the pernicious power of envy, men would not so have exalted vengeance above innocence and profit above justice.

Indeed, it is true that in these acts of revenge on others men take it upon themselves to begin the process of repealing those general laws of humanity which are there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress, instead of leaving those laws in existence, remembering that there may come a time when they, too, will be in danger and will need their protection.

…

People always think the greatest war is the one they are fighting at the moment, and when that is over they are more impressed with wars of antiquity; but, even so, this war will prove, to all who look at the facts, that it was greater than the others.

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, late 400s BC

I’ve been writing about our world’s upheavals for more than three years now. Over that time one of the most personally significant conclusions I’ve come to is that no clean separation can be made between the “big” issues of our era – the ideological revolutions, the political turmoil, even shifting geopolitics – and the “little” struggles facing the individual human soul.

Cultural narcissism and societal atomization, gender divides and demographic malaise, political nihilism and violence… the many civilizational problems we see manifesting today increasingly seem to me to only reflect something gone tragically wrong at a much deeper level. Our societies feel more and more broken and mad because we are broken and mad, and we no longer seem able to keep a collective lid on it. The political is personal. So although I won’t be going full Faulkner and concluding that “the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself,” I do often find myself hungry for those discussions that manage to go beyond surface-level commentary of culture and politics to explore more lasting human truths beneath.

Which is why I’m particularly pleased to publish this extensive dialogue with
Freya India.

Freya is in my estimation one of the very best young authors writing today. Her talent is to combine a fearless personal honesty with a genuinely penetrating examination of the human heart—with all its anxieties, hopes, and sufferings—and then to trace seamless connections between our common struggles and the realities of our broader cultural and technological landscape. Most importantly, she does this with—as I think you will see here—a startling amount of what used to be described as wisdom. Exactly how such an old soul became trapped in a Gen Z girl, no one seems to know… It’s actually a little bit creepy to be honest.

Freya India

Freya writes with a focus on issues facing young women at her Substack GIRLS, which feels a bit like reading a Tolstoy or Jane Austen disguised in the aesthetics of a teenage glam magazine. Do subscribe.

GIRLS
Girlhood in the Modern World
By Freya India

We both wanted to try something a bit new and different here and allow back-and-forth written dialogue to flow naturally and delve into some important issues in a unique way. So what follows is not a typical interview, but something more like a podcast—except in print and not three hours of shallow banter. And I do think we succeeded in producing something somewhat special, because the dialogue manages to tease out some really fascinating connections. For which I largely credit Freya’s open and refreshingly un-ironic style.

Below, we dive into everything from why therapy culture and the cult of the self has been a disaster for the mental health of young women, and why the male quest for self-optimization can undermine human connection, to how moral judgements are needed to accurately perceiving reality and why the deconstruction of authority has disordered and demoralized society.

And in the best half, after the paywall: why our culture feels so utterly unsexy now, and why we all need to learn to be playful again; what men and women really want, and why we’re so divided; the nature of true love, and why love can rescue us from selfishness; why virtue is the only sure path to sanity; why we’ve both found ourselves drawn inexorably down a road to religious faith, and how we each try to grapple with that in our writing.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did, and that you’ll check out some of Freya’s other fantastic work.

(Notes: This post will be too long for Gmail, so click on the title to open online or in the Substack app. Freya’s quaint British misspellings have been left intact for affect, do not be alarmed.)

N.S. Lyons: You’ve written extensively on how social media appears to be contributing to skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and other mental health problems in our society, especially among girls and young women. The link seems well established, and the stats you’ve cited evidencing this are pretty crazy, such as the suicide rate for girls aged 10-14 increasing 138% between 2012 and 2019, after social media and smart phones became a thing. I encourage everyone to go read your work on this, on your own Substack and with Jonathan Haidt on After Babel. But I want to focus here on teasing out what I find to be a really intriguing thread running through your more recent writing, which hints that your thinking on these problems and their causes has evolved in some pretty important and interesting ways.

As I see it, this begins with your critique of “therapy culture,” which “pathologises normal distress, and presents therapy as the solution to all problems.” This is clearly completely endemic today. As you’ve pointed out, just about everything now—especially online, and perhaps especially among women—seems to be viewed through, talked about in, and marketed using the language of the therapeutic. Spontaneous romantic chemistry might actually be a red flag for past “trauma.” Relationship difficulties are probably down to “anxious attachment.” Constantly “opening up” online about your issues and medications is celebrated; an SSRI prescription is a form of “empowerment.” Getting a Brazilian Butt Lift is now sold as a “life-changing and empowering experience” of “resculpting your confidence” and becoming “your authentic self,” and so on… 

And yet individuals—especially women—and society generally only continue to become more depressed, anxious, and risk-averse. All the therapy and empowerment doesn’t seem to be working. If anything it seems to be having the opposite effect, serving to make people less confident, more fragile, and more emotionally immature. What do you think is going on here? What’s driving this turn to the therapeutic, and what is it doing to us?

Freya India: Well, firstly I think all the therapy and empowerment isn’t working because much of it is just a marketing strategy. Take the obsession with fighting the stigma around mental health. We are relentlessly reminded that mental health problems are stigmatised, that we need to tackle the stigma around medication, that we aren’t opening up enough, that we aren’t aware enough. This is just accepted as fact. Meanwhile the number of young people taking mental health medication is unbelievable. In the UK, antidepressant prescriptions for children aged five to 12 increased by more than 40% between 2015 and 2021. Five! We have girls self-diagnosing with anxiety disorders and OCD and Tourette’s. Young women putting their mental health diagnoses in their Twitter bios and Tinder profiles. There was even a study recently revealing that 32% of all adolescents aged 12 to 17 in the US received prescription medication, treatment, and/or counselling for their mental health in 2023. And it doesn’t seem to make any difference. At this point, I think it’s an insult to tell young people that stigma is our most pressing problem.   

It’s easy to forget that mental health has become an industry. And like any industry, it has profit incentives. It has to drive demand. It needs to expand its customer base. And “mental health awareness” has become a very useful marketing campaign for therapy and medication companies. I think two things can be true: girls are genuinely suffering in the modern world, but also, a major part of it is the marketisation and medicalisation of their normal distress. Their despair and disempowerment is making billions.

In terms of what it’s doing to us, I think, ironically, it’s making us mentally ill. People say therapy culture is stereotypically feminine and it harms men by expecting them to behave more like women, which I agree with—but I actually think it’s worse for women. Girls ruminate more than boys. Women are more anxious, on average. We tend to be more neurotic. And so it gets to me when I see girls being told to focus on their feelings, to take their thoughts so seriously, to search their lives for symptoms. That’s the worst advice we could give. It’s heartbreaking to see how many young women are so miserably stuck in their own heads now, and encouraged to go further and further inwards to find relief. Do the work! Go to therapy! Unpack your trauma! Reflect, analyse, ruminate! Their heads are spinning. Maybe I’m anxious all the time because I have ADHD? Maybe my ADHD is a trauma response? Wait—is it PTSD or a personality disorder?

I also think we get it backwards sometimes. People assume that Gen Z feel too much, that we’re all too emotional, but I’m starting to think the opposite is true. We don’t let ourselves feel anything. We immediately categorise and diagnose and try to control every emotion. I don’t even think we know how to open up properly. We’re all so lonely. Young people hang out with each other far less than previous generations did at the same age. Friendships are much more shallow and superficial. I don’t get the sense that young people are honestly opening up to each other. We talk to therapists. We join online forums. We open up on TikTok, or chat with mental health chatbots. When we do talk about our problems, we disguise it in DSM diagnoses and obscure therapy-speak.

And so the worst part is, therapy culture deprives young people of the language to talk about what’s actually happening in their lives. They can talk about their ADHD symptoms and anxiety disorders, but find it hard to get at anything deeper. Instead of saying oh, maybe I feel insecure because I’m in a situationship where there’s no commitment or expectations or even basic respect, we have all these young women worrying that they are anxiously attached, or have an anxiety disorder, or _relationship OCD—_and even getting medication for it.

I’m not convinced, then, that therapy culture even helps us open up; I think it shuts down our ability to talk about our problems. Maybe you’re not anxiously attached, maybe you want to be loved deeply! Maybe you don’t have social anxiety disorder, maybe you grew up with less face-to-face interaction than any other generation in history! Modern culture asks young people to accept and excuse more and more behaviour, to adjust to more and more change, and then diagnoses them when they can’t cope. So lately in my writing I’ve been trying to emphasise that it’s okay to be emotional. It’s understandable to feel anxious and insecure right now. That doesn’t make you mentally ill. We’re so determined to de-stigmatise mental health issues we’ve started to stigmatise being human. Having human reactions to things. 

Because yes, humans have emotions. Women are emotional! That seems almost offensive to say now, but I don’t see why. I actually think not properly expressing our emotions is what makes us neurotic. The way I see it, girls are getting two contradictory messages: open up, talk about your problems, but also, being emotional is bad. If someone calls you emotional it’s an insult. Strong independent women aren’t bothered, don’t care. If women do get upset or emotional they must have anxiety, or trauma, or some mental illness. That’s a cruel and confusing message for girls. And an absolute joke to call it empowering.

For most young people, I don’t think they have a disorder. I think they’re experiencing normal distress, and they do need to open up to each other. Girls shouldn’t hide when they’re really not alright. But they should be opening up face-to-face, honestly and vulnerably, in real communities, in meaningful friendships, in stable families—not on TikTok or Reddit forums or to some sketchy BetterHelp counsellor. And they need to use real words, not always couching everything in medical labels and therapy-speak. That’s what we should be encouraging.

Maybe it’s just me, but today there definitely does seem to be a deeply creepy top-down push to sever us from human connection, or even the human in general, and replace it with the digital and the unhuman. It’s as if there’s a growing suspicion of human interaction as something inherently messy and dangerous, while the virtual world is seen as cleaner and safer. We can envision this will, if taken to its maximum extent, deposit us in a “no contact society” like that which, for some reason, has been planned as a future for South Korea (with predictable results so far). Is it possible for us to disentangle the growing role of therapy culture from that of the internet and social media, or do you think these two forces have become inextricably linked in some way?

Of course the foundations for this therapeutic view of the self were laid a long time ago. Christopher Lasch, Philip Rieff and many others were writing about this in the ‘60s and ‘70s;

Frank Furedi

covered it excellently in the early 2000s.

But I think social media took things to a whole new level. Therapy culture mixed with social media is, in my opinion, a very damaging combination. Therapy culture encourages girls and young women to focus on themselves and their feelings; social media then not only spreads these messages but constantly reminds us that we are each a self. That we are the main character. That our selves are something to be endlessly managed and obsessed over.

Neither encourages actual self-improvement. Social media platforms reduce us to our identity labels or consumer preferences. Therapy culture distills us down into a diagnosis or collection of symptoms. Both fit us into neat categories. What actually matters—our character, our virtue, how we treat other people—is not something easily displayed online. Sure, people try—they tweet their political slogans and post about their activism, but that’s got nothing to do with their character. Says nothing about their private code of conduct. That, I think, is the most important thing about who we are, the most important thing for young people to work on and improve, but we can’t display it. So it holds very little value these days.

All this makes me think about how, from the outside, it looks as if young people are inundated with mental health advice. We have so much guidance! But the truth is, our culture has very little to say to anxious young people. So little to offer. We are too afraid to give actual guidance. There are no clear milestones or markers to follow to adulthood anymore. We stopped appealing to moral character. We got rid of anything more substantial—that was judgemental!—or anything to assure young people that they belong to something bigger—that was superstitious! All that’s left are endless empty platitudes. We tell young people whatever you want to do, do it! As long as it makes you happy! And if they say they feel crippling anxiety or insecurity, we don’t wonder if it’s this morally ambiguous world, the collapse of any real community, this feeling that they can’t rely on anyone but themselves. We don’t investigate further. We diagnose them and are done with it. We call this a culture of compassion, but I’d say that’s far from the truth.

While I’m saying all this, I can’t help but wonder whether young men and women even inhabit the same world now. From what I can see, young women are going further and further down the therapeutic rabbit hole—ruminating over “red flags”, obsessing over “trauma”, increasingly seeing the world and themselves through these psychological labels and terms. Do you see any of that happening with young men? Does therapy culture affect them?

Therapy culture definitely affects men, though I think in different ways. There are of course some men who adopt the feminine model of the therapeutic, becoming the soyboys of internet infamy. But increasingly the equivalent “rabbit hole” for men seems to be one of what we could call “self-optimization.” Instead of obsessing over trauma, we have young men obsessing over whether they’re doing enough. Whether they're waking up early enough to get in their daily stoic journaling practice, internet-sourced ideal workout routine, ice bath, macro-calculated meal prep, and nootropic supplement regimen—all before heading out to grind their underpaid day job while listening to Andrew Huberman podcasts and thinking about how they need to side-hustle more on their passive income scheme. Others obsess over trying to discover and capitalize on whatever laws of science apply to relationships and the female mind, so that they can potentially find a leg up in a ruthless dating market.

Frankly this is all probably still healthier than women’s tendency toward internal rumination and self-diagnosis, since it at least emphasizes personal agency and encourages taking action in the world (and so is also a healthier choice than that of the large subset of men who check out entirely and retire to a quiet life of video games and depression). But the self-optimizers’ is still an anxious response to exactly the same societal situation, in which as you say there’s been a “collapse of any real community” and the dominant feeling is “that they can’t rely on anyone but themselves.” It’s the frenzied behavior of atomized individuals adrift in a world without anything solid, reliable, or permanent to support them, in which they can’t be sure of anything except relentless competition with each other.

I also see the predicament facing both men and women as in large part rooted in our modern crisis of authority. By authority I mean that power which can tell you what to do and you will accept this decision as legitimate and trustworthy. Our egalitarian culture is basically allergic to the idea of legitimate authority, or at least moral authority and all its traditional sources. Today it tends to be associated with authoritarianism and oppression of the individual.

Without getting into a whole other rabbit hole, it’s worth noting that this negative view was imposed deliberately by the therapeutic state. After WWII, intellectual pioneers of the therapeutic worldview like Wilhelm Reich and the Frankfurt School’s Theodore Adorno fingered the “authoritarian personality”—and especially the patriarchal authority of the strong father figure—as the psychological root of fascism. As Philip Rieff summarized it, their conclusion was that the “revolution must sweep out the family and its ruler, the father, no less cleanly than the old [authoritarian] political gangs and their leaders.” So they set out, with the backing of the U.S. government, to destroy that authority figure and replace it with emotional management via professional therapists and educational bureaucracies. It seems obvious that they succeeded pretty wildly in this pathologization of the authoritative father figure. How many young men and women feel they must turn first to the internet for advice and direction, even if they are lucky enough to have a father present in their lives? The result is a kind of widespread infantilization that many people fail to ever grow out of.

Lecture of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at the 33rd Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp

• 27/07/2024
• Source: Cabinet Office Of The Prime Minister

Good morning Summer Camp and other Guests.

The first piece of good news is that my visit this year was not accompanied by the same kind of brouhaha as last year’s: this year we have not received – I have not received – a diplomatic démarche from Bucharest; what I received was an invitation to a meeting with the Prime Minister, which took place yesterday. Last year, when I had the opportunity to meet the Prime Minister of Romania, I said after the meeting that it was “the beginning of a beautiful friendship”; at the end of the meeting this year, I was able to say “We’re making progress”. If we look at the figures, we are setting new records in economic and trade relations between our two countries. Romania is now Hungary’s third most important economic partner. We also discussed with the Prime Minister a high-speed train – a “TGV” – linking Budapest to Bucharest, as well as Romania’s membership of Schengen. I have undertaken to put this issue on the agenda for the October Justice and Home Affairs Council meeting – and, if necessary, for the December Council meeting – and to take it forward if possible.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We have not received a démarche from Bucharest, but – to prevent us getting bored – we have received one from Brussels: they have condemned the Hungarian peace mission efforts. I have tried – without success – to explain that there is such a thing as Christian duty. This means that if you see something bad in the world – especially something very bad – and you receive some instrument for its correction, then it is a Christian duty to take action, without undue contemplation or reflection. The Hungarian peace mission is about this duty. I would like to remind all of us that the EU has a founding treaty, which contains these exact words: “The Union’s aim is peace”. Brussels is also offended at our describing what they are doing as a pro-war policy. They say that they are supporting the war in the interest of peace. Central Europeans like us are immediately reminded of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who taught that with the advent of communism the state will die, but that the state will die while first constantly strengthening. Brussels is also creating peace by constantly supporting war. Just as we did not understand Lenin’s thesis in our university lectures on the history of the labour movement, I do not understand the Brusseleers in European Council meetings. Perhaps Orwell was right after all when he wrote that in “Newspeak” peace is war and war is peace. Despite all the criticism, let us remind ourselves that since the beginning of our peace mission the US and Russian war ministers have spoken to each other, the Swiss and Russian foreign ministers have held talks, President Zelenskyy has finally called President Trump, and the Ukrainian foreign minister has been to Beijing. So fermentation has begun, and we are slowly but surely moving from a pro-war European policy to a pro-peace policy. This is inevitable, because time is on the side of peace policy. Reality has dawned on the Ukrainians, and now it is up to the Europeans to come to their senses, before it is too late: “Trump ante portas”. If by then Europe does not switch to a policy of peace, then after Trump’s victory it will have to do so while admitting defeat, covered in shame, and admitting sole responsibility for its policy.

But, Ladies and Gentlemen, The subject of today’s presentation is not peace. Please regard what I have said so far as a digression. In fact, for those who are thinking about the future of the world, and of Hungarians within it, there are three big issues on the table today. The first is the war – or more precisely, an unexpected side-effect of the war. This is the fact that the war reveals the reality in which we live. This reality was not visible and could not be described earlier, but it has been illuminated by the blazing light of missiles fired in the war. The second big issue on the table is what will happen after the war. Will a new world come into being, or will the old one continue? And if a new world is coming – and this is our third big issue – how should Hungary prepare for this new world? The fact is that I need to talk about all three, and I need to talk about them here – first of all because these are the big issues that are best discussed in this “free university” format. From another point of view, we need a pan-Hungarian approach, as looking at these issues only from the point of view of a “Little Hungary” would be too constricting; it is therefore justified to talk about these issues in front of Hungarians outside our borders.

Dear Summer Camp,

These are big issues with manifold interrelations, and obviously even the esteemed audience cannot be expected to know all the important basic information, so from time to time I will need to digress. This is a tough task: we have three topics, one morning, and a ruthless moderator. I have chosen the following approach: to speak at length about the real situation of power in Europe as revealed by the war; then to give some glimpses of the new world that is in the making; and finally to refer – rather in the manner of a list, without explanation or argumentation – to the Hungarian plans related to this. This method has the advantage of also setting the theme for next year’s presentation.

The undertaking is ambitious, and even courageous: we must ask ourselves whether we can undertake it at all, and whether it might be beyond our ability. I think it is a realistic endeavour, because over the past year – or two or three years – some superb studies and books have been published in Hungary and abroad, and translators have also made these available to the Hungarian public. On the other hand, with all due modesty we must remind ourselves that we are the longest-serving government in Europe. I myself am the longest-serving European leader – and I should quietly point out that I am also the leader who has spent the longest time in opposition. So I have seen everything that I will talk about now. I am talking about something that I have lived through and continue to live through. Whether I have understood it is another question; that is something we will find out at the end of this presentation.

So, about the reality revealed by the war. Dear Friends, the war is our red pill. Think of the “Matrix” films. The hero is faced with a choice. He has two pills to choose from: if he swallows the blue pill, he can stay in the world of surface appearances; if he swallows the red pill, he can look into and descend into reality. The war is our red pill: it is what we have been given, it is what we must swallow. And now, armed with new experiences, we must talk about reality. It is a cliché that war is the continuation of policy with other means. It is important to add that war is the continuation of policy from a different perspective. So war, in its relentlessness, takes us to a new position from which to see things, to a high vantage point. And from there it gives us a completely different – hitherto unknown – perspective. We find ourselves in new surroundings and in a new, rarefied force field. In this pure reality, ideologies lose their power; statistical sleights of hand lose their power; media distortions and politicians’ tactical dissimulation loses its power. There is no longer any relevance to widespread delusions – or even to conspiracy theories. What remains is the stark, brutal reality. It’s a pity our friend Gyula Tellér is no longer with us, because now we would be able to hear some surprising things from him. Since he is no longer with us, however, you will have to make do with me. But I think there will be no shortage of shocks. For the sake of clarity, I have made bullet points of everything we have seen since we swallowed the red pill: since the outbreak of the war in February 2022.

Firstly, the war has seen brutal losses – numbering in the hundreds of thousands – suffered by both sides. I have recently met them, and I can say with certainty that they do not want to come to terms. Why is this? There are two reasons. The first is that each of them thinks that they can win, and wants to fight until victory. The second is that both are fuelled by their own real or perceived truth. The Ukrainians think that this is a Russian invasion, a violation of international law and territorial sovereignty, and they are in fact fighting a war of self-defence for their independence. The Russians think that there have been serious NATO military developments in Ukraine, Ukraine has been promised NATO membership, and they do not want to see NATO troops or NATO weapons on the Russian–Ukrainian border. So they say that Russia has the right to self-defence, and that in fact this war has been provoked. So everyone has some kind of truth, perceived or real, and will not give up fighting the war. This is a road leading directly to escalation; if it depends on these two sides, there will be no peace. Peace can only be brought in from outside.

Secondly: in years gone by we had got used to the United States declaring its main challenger or opponent to be China; yet now we see it waging a proxy war against Russia. And China is constantly accused of covertly supporting Russia. If this is the case, then we need to answer the question of why it is sensible to corral two such large countries together into a hostile camp. This question has yet to be answered in any meaningful way.

Thirdly: Ukraine’s strength, its resilience, has exceeded all expectations. After all, since 1991 eleven million people have left the country, it has been ruled by oligarchs, corruption sky-high, and the state had essentially ceased functioning. And yet now we are seeing unprecedentedly successful resistance from it. Despite the conditions described here, Ukraine is in fact a strong country. The question is what the source of this strength is. Apart from its military past and individuals’ personal heroism, there is something worth understanding here: Ukraine has found a higher purpose, it has discovered a new meaning to its existence. Because up until now, Ukraine saw itself as a buffer zone. To be a buffer zone is psychologically debilitating: there is a sense of helplessness, a feeling that one’s fate is not in one’s own hands. This is a consequence of such a doubly exposed position. Now, however, there is the dawning prospect of belonging to the West. Ukraine’s new self-authored mission is to be the West’s eastern military frontier region. The meaning and importance of its existence has increased in its own eyes and in the eyes of the whole world. This has brought it into a state of activity and action, which we non-Ukrainians see as aggressive insistence – and there’s no denying that it is quite aggressive and insistent. It is in fact the Ukrainians’ demand for their higher purpose to be officially recognised internationally. This is what gives them the strength that makes them capable of unprecedented resistance.

Fourthly: Russia is not what we have so far seen it to be, and Russia is not what we have so far been led to see it as. The country’s economic viability is outstanding. I remember being at European Council meetings – the prime ministers’ summits – when, with all sorts of gestures, Europe’s great leaders rather hubristically claimed that the sanctions against Russia and the exclusion of Russia from the so-called SWIFT system, the international financial clearing system, would bring Russia to its knees. They would bring the Russian economy to its knees, and through that the Russian political elite. As I watch events unfold, I am reminded of the wisdom of Mike Tyson, who once said that “Everyone has a plan, till they get punched in the mouth.” Because the reality is that the Russians have learned lessons from the sanctions imposed after the 2014 invasion of Crimea – and not only have they learned those lessons, but they have translated those lessons into action. They implemented the necessary IT and banking improvements. So the Russian financial system is not collapsing. They have developed the ability to adapt, and after 2014 we fell victim to this, because we used to export a significant proportion of Hungarian food produce to Russia. We could not continue to do so because of the sanctions, the Russians modernised their agriculture, and today we are talking about one of the world’s largest food export markets; this is a country that used to have to rely on imports. So the way that Russia is described to us – as a rigid neo-Stalinist autocracy – is false. In fact we are talking about a country that displays technical and economic resilience – and perhaps also societal resilience, but we’ll see.

The fifth important new lesson from reality: European policy-making has collapsed. Europe has given up defending its own interests: all that Europe is doing today is unconditionally following the foreign policy line of the US Democrats – even at the cost of its own self-destruction. The sanctions we have imposed are damaging fundamental European interests: they are driving up energy prices and making the European economy uncompetitive. We let the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline go unchallenged; Germany itself let an act of terrorism against its own property – which was obviously carried out under US direction – go unchallenged, and we are not saying a word about it, we are not investigating it, we do not want to clarify it, we do not want to raise it in a legal context. In the same way, we failed to do the right thing in the case of the phone tapping of Angela Merkel, which was carried out with the assistance of Denmark. So this is nothing but an act of submission. There is a context here which is complicated, but I will try to give you a necessarily simplified but comprehensive account of it. European policy-making has also collapsed since the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war because the core of the European power system was the Paris–Berlin axis, which used to be inescapable: it was the core and it was the axis. Since the war broke out, a different centre and a different axis of power has been established. The Berlin–Paris axis no longer exists – or if it does, it has become irrelevant and liable to be bypassed. The new power centre and axis comprises London, Warsaw, Kiev/Kyiv, the Baltics and the Scandinavians. When, to the astonishment of Hungarians, one sees the German chancellor announcing that he is only sending helmets to the war, and then a week later he announces that he is in fact sending weapons, do not think that the man has lost his mind. Then when the same German chancellor announces that there may be sanctions, but that they must not cover energy, and then two weeks later he himself is at the head of the sanctions policy, do not think that the man has lost his mind. On the contrary, he is very much in his right mind. He is well aware that the Americans and the liberal opinion-forming vehicles they influence – universities, think tanks, research institutes, the media – are using public opinion to punish Franco–German policy that is not in line with American interests. This is why we have the phenomenon that I have been talking about, and this is why we have the German chancellor’s idiosyncratic blunders. Changing the centre of power in Europe and bypassing the Franco–German axis is not a new idea – it has simply been made possible by the war. The idea existed before, in fact being an old Polish plan to solve the problem of Poland being squeezed between a huge German state and a huge Russian state, by making Poland the number one American base in Europe. I could describe it as inviting the Americans there, between the Germans and the Russians. Five per cent of Poland’s GDP is now devoted to military expenditure, and the Polish army is the second largest in Europe after the French – we are talking about hundreds of thousands of troops. This is an old plan, to weaken Russia and outpace Germany. At first sight, outpacing the Germans seems to be a fantasy idea. But if you look at the dynamics of the development of Germany and Central Europe, of Poland, it does not seem so impossible – especially if in the meantime Germany is dismantling its own world-class industry. This strategy caused Poland to give up cooperation with the V4. The V4 meant something different: the V4 means that we recognise that there is a strong Germany and there is a strong Russia, and – working with the Central European states – we create a third entity between the two. The Poles have backed out of this and, instead of the V4 strategy of accepting the Franco–German axis, they have embarked on the alternative strategy of eliminating the Franco–German axis. Talking of our Polish brothers and sisters, let us mention them here in passing. Since they have now kicked our backsides black and blue, perhaps we can allow ourselves to say a few sincere, fraternal home truths about them. Well, the Poles are pursuing the most sanctimonious and hypocritical policy in the whole of Europe. They lecture us on moral grounds, they criticise us for our economic relations with Russia, and at the same time they are blithely doing business with the Russians, buying their oil – albeit via indirect routes – and running the Polish economy with it. The French are better than that: last month, incidentally, they overtook us in gas purchases from Russia – but at least they do not lecture us on moral grounds. The Poles are both doing business and lecturing us. I have not seen a policy of such rank hypocrisy in Europe in the last ten years. The scale of this change – of bypassing the German–French axis – can truly be grasped by older people if they perhaps think back twenty years, when the Americans attacked Iraq and called on the European countries to join in. We, for example, joined in as a member of NATO. At the time Schröder, the then German chancellor, and Chirac, the then French president, were joined by President Putin of Russia at a joint press conference called in opposition to the Iraq war. At that time there was still an independent Franco–German logic when approaching European interests.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The peace mission is not just about seeking peace, but is also about urging Europe to finally pursue an independent policy. Red pill number six: the spiritual solitude of the West. Up until now the West has thought and behaved as if it sees itself as a reference point, a kind of benchmark for the world. It has provided the values that the world has had to accept – for example, liberal democracy or the green transition. But most of the world has noticed this, and in the last two years there has been a 180-degree turn. Once again the West has declared its expectation, its instruction, for the world to take a moral stand against Russia and for the West. In contrast, the reality has become that, step-by-step, everyone is siding with Russia. That China and North Korea are doing so is perhaps no surprise. That Iran is doing the same – given Iran’s history and its relationship with Russia – is somewhat surprising. But the fact that India, which the Western world calls the most populous democracy, is also on the side of the Russians is astonishing. That Turkey refuses to accept the West’s morally based demands, even though it is a NATO member, is truly surprising. And the fact that the Muslim world sees Russia not as an enemy but as a partner is completely unexpected.

Seventhly: the war has exposed the fact that the biggest problem the world faces today is the weakness and disintegration of the West. Of course, this is not what the Western media says: in the West they claim that the world’s greatest danger and problem is Russia and the threat it represents. This is wrong! Russia is too large for its population, and it is also under hyper-rational leadership – indeed it is a country that has leadership. There is nothing mysterious about what it does: its actions follow logically from its interests, and are therefore understandable and predictable. On the other hand, the behaviour of the West – as may be clear from what I have said so far – is not understandable and not predictable. The West is not led, its behaviour is not rational, and it cannot deal with the situation that I described in my presentation here last year: the fact that two suns have appeared in the sky. This is the challenge to the West in the form of the rise of China and Asia. We should be able to deal with this, but we are not able to.

Point eight. Arising from this, for us the real challenge is to once again try to understand the West in the light of the war. Because we Central Europeans see the West as irrational. But, Dear Friends, what if it is behaving logically, but we do not understand its logic? If it is logical in the way it thinks and acts, then we must ask why we do not understand it. And if we could find the answer to this question, we would also understand why Hungary regularly clashes with the Western countries of the European Union on geopolitical and foreign policy issues. My answer is the following. Let us imagine that the worldview of us Central Europeans is based on nation states. Meanwhile the West thinks that nation states no longer exist; this is unimaginable to us, but all the same this is what it thinks. The coordinate system within which we Central Europeans think is therefore completely irrelevant. In our conception, the world is made up of nation states which exercise a domestic monopoly on the use of force, thereby creating a condition of general peace. In its relations with other states the nation state is sovereign – in other words, it has the capacity to independently determine its foreign and domestic policy. In our conception, the nation state is not a legal abstraction, not a legal construct: the nation state is rooted in a particular culture. It has a shared set of values, it has anthropological and historical depth. And from this emerge shared moral imperatives based on a joint consensus. This is what we think of as the nation state. What is more, we do not see it as a phenomenon that developed in the 19th century: we believe that nation states have a biblical basis, since they belong to the order of creation. For in Scripture we read that at the end of time there will be judgement not only of individuals but also of nations. Consequently, in our conception nations are not provisional formations. But in complete contrast Westerners believe that nation states no longer exist. They therefore deny the existence of a shared culture and a shared morality based on it. They have no shared morality; if you watched the Olympic opening ceremony yesterday, that is what you saw. This is why they think differently about migration. They think that migration is not a threat or a problem, but in fact a way of escaping from the ethnic homogeneity that is the basis of a nation. This is the essence of the progressive liberal internationalist conception of space. This is why they are oblivious to the absurdity – or they do not see it as absurd – that while in the eastern half of Europe hundreds of thousands of Christians are killing one another, in the west of Europe we are letting in hundreds of thousands of people from foreign civilisations. From our Central European point of view this is the definition of absurdity. This idea is not even conceived of in the West. In parenthesis I note that the European states lost a total of some fifty-seven million indigenous Europeans in the First and Second World Wars. If they, their children and their grandchildren had lived, today Europe would not have any demographic problems. The European Union does not simply think in the way I am describing, but it declares it. If we read the European documents carefully, it is clear that the aim is to supersede the nation. It is true that they have a strange way of writing and saying this, stating that nation states must be superseded, while some small trace of them remains. But the point is that, after all, powers and sovereignty should be transferred from the nation states to Brussels. This is the logic behind every major measure. In their minds, the nation is a historical or transitional creation, born of the 18th and 19th centuries – and as it arrived, so may it depart. For them, the western half of Europe is already post-national. This is not only a politically different situation, but what I am trying to talk about here is that this is a new mental space. If you do not look at the world from the point of view of nation states, a completely different reality opens up before you. Herein lies the problem, the reason that the countries in the western eastern halves of Europe do not understand one another, the reason we cannot pull together.

If we project all of this onto the United States, this is the real battle that is going on over there. What should the United States be? Should it become a nation state again, or should it continue its march towards a post-national state? President Donald Trump’s precise goal is to bring the American people back from the post-national liberal state, to drag them back, to force them back, to raise them back to the nation state. This is why the stakes in the US election are so enormous. This is why we are seeing things that we have never seen before. This is why they want to prevent Donald Trump from running in the election. This is why they want to put him in jail. This is why they want to take away his assets. And if that does not work, this is why they want to kill him. And let there be no doubt that what happened may not be the last attempt in this campaign.

In parenthesis, I spoke to the President yesterday and he asked me how I was doing. I said that I was great, because I am here in a geographical entity called Transylvania. Explaining this is not so easy, especially in English, and especially to President Trump. But I said that I was here in Transylvania at a free university where I was going to give a presentation on the state of the world. And he said that I must pass on his personal heartfelt greetings to the attendees at the camp and those at the free university.

Now, if we try to understand how this Western thinking – which for the sake of simplicity we should call “post-national” thinking and condition – came about, then we have to go back to the grand illusion of the 1960s. The grand illusion of the 1960s took two forms: the first was the sexual revolution, and the second was student rebellion. In fact, it was an expression of the belief that the individual would be freer and greater if he or she were freed from any kind of collective. More than sixty years later it has since become clear that, on the contrary, the individual can only become great through and in a community, that when alone he or she can never be free, but always lonely and doomed to be shrunken. In the West bonds have been successively discarded: the metaphysical bonds that are God; the national bonds that are the homeland; and family bonds – discarding the family. I am referring again to the opening of the Paris Olympics. Now that they have managed to get rid of all that, expecting the individual to become greater, they find that they feel a sense of emptiness. They have not become great, but have become small. For in the West they no longer desire either great ideals or great, inspiring shared goals.

Here we must talk about the secret of greatness. What is the secret of greatness? The secret of greatness is to be able to serve something greater than yourself. To do this, you first have to acknowledge that in the world there is something or some things that are greater than you, and then you must dedicate yourself to serving those greater things. There are not many of these. You have your God, your country and your family. But if you do not do that, but instead you focus on your own greatness, thinking that you are smarter, more beautiful, more talented than most people, if you expend your energy on that, on communicating all that to others, then what you get is not greatness, but grandiosity. And this is why today, whenever we are in talks with Western Europeans, in every gesture we feel grandiosity instead of greatness. I have to say that a situation has developed that we can call emptiness, and the feeling of superfluity that goes with it gives rise to aggression. Hence the emergence of the “aggressive dwarf” as a new type of person.

To sum up, what I want to say to you is that when we talk about Central Europe and Western Europe, we are not talking about differences of opinion, but about two different worldviews, two mentalities, two instincts, and hence two different arguments. We have a nation state, which forces us towards strategic realism. They have post-nationalist dreams that are inert to national sovereignty, do not recognise national greatness, and have no shared national goals. This is the reality we have to face.

And finally, the last element of reality is that this post-national condition that we see in the West has a serious – and I would say dramatic – political consequence that is convulsing democracy. Because within societies there is growing resistance to migration, to gender, to war and to globalism. And this creates the political problem of the elite and the people – of elitism and populism. This is the defining phenomenon of Western politics today. If you read the texts, you do not need to understand them, and they do not always make sense anyway; but if you read the words, the following are the expressions you will find most often. They indicate that the elites are condemning the people for drifting towards the Right. The feelings and ideas of the people are labelled as xenophobia, homophobia and nationalism. In response, the people accuse the elite of not caring about what is important to them, but of sinking into some kind of deranged globalism. Consequently the elites and the people cannot agree with each other on the question of cooperation. I could mention many countries. But if the people and the elites cannot agree on cooperation, how can this produce representative democracy? Because we have an elite that does not want to represent the people, and is proud of not wanting to represent them; and we have the people, who are not represented. In fact in the Western world we are faced with a situation in which the masses of people appearing with college degrees no longer form less than 10 per cent of the population, but 30 to 40 per cent. And because of their views these people do not respect those who are less educated – who are typically working people, people who live from their labour. For the elites, only the values of graduates are acceptable, only they are legitimate. This is the viewpoint from which the results of the European Parliament elections can be understood. The European People’s Party garnered the votes of “plebeians” on the Right who wanted change, then took those votes to the Left and made a deal with the left-wing elites who have an interest in maintaining the status quo. This has consequences for the European Union. The consequence is that Brussels remains under the occupation of a liberal oligarchy. This oligarchy has it in its grip. This left-liberal elite is in fact organising a transatlantic elite: not European, but global; not based on the nation state, but federal; and not democratic, but oligarchic. This also has consequences for us, because in Brussels the “3 Ps” are back: “prohibited, permitted and promoted”. We belong to the prohibited category. The Patriots for Europe have therefore been prohibited from receiving any positions. We live in the world of the permitted political community. Meanwhile our domestic opponents – especially the newcomers to the European People’s Party – are in the strongly promoted category.

And perhaps one last, tenth point, is about how Western values – which were the essence of so-called “soft power” – have become a boomerang. It has turned out that these Western values, which were thought to be universal, are demonstratively unacceptable and rejected in ever more countries around the world. It has turned out that modernity, modern development, is not Western, or at least not exclusively Western – because China is modern, India is becoming increasingly modern, and the Arabs and Turks are modernising; and they are not becoming a modern world on the basis of Western values at all. And in the meantime Western soft power has been replaced by Russian soft power, because now the key to the propagation of Western values is LGBTQ. Anyone who does not accept this is now in the “backward” category as far as the Western world is concerned. I do not know if you have been watching, but I think it is remarkable that in the last six months pro-LGBTQ laws have been passed by countries such as Ukraine, Taiwan and Japan. But the world does not agree. Consequently, today Putin’s strongest tactical weapon is the Western imposition of LGBTQ and resistance to it, opposition to it. This has become Russia’s strongest international attraction; thus what used to be Western soft power has now been transformed into Russian soft power – like a boomerang.

All in all, Ladies and Gentlemen, I can say that the war has helped us to understand the real state of power in the world. It is a sign that in its mission the West has shot itself in the foot, and is therefore accelerating the changes that are transforming the world. My first presentation is over. Now comes the second.

What comes next? It needs to be shorter, Zsolt Németh says. So the second presentation is about what follows from this. First, intellectual courage is needed here. So you have to work with broad brushstrokes, because I am convinced that the fate of the Hungarians depends on whether they understand what is happening in the world, and whether we Hungarians understand what the world will be like after the war. In my opinion a new world is coming. We cannot be accused of having a narrow imagination or of intellectual inertia, but even we – and I personally, when I have spoken here in recent years – have underestimated the scale of the change that is happening and that we are living through.

Dear Friends, Dear Summer Camp,

We are in a change, a change is coming, that has not been seen for five hundred years. This has not been apparent to us because in the last 150 years there have been great changes in and around us, but in these changes the dominant world power has always been in the West. And our starting point is that the changes we are seeing now are likely to follow this Western logic. By contrast, this is a new situation. In the past, change was Western: the Habsburgs rose and then fell; Spain was up, and it became the centre of power; it fell, and the English rose; the First World War finished off the monarchies; The British were replaced by the Americans as world leaders; then the Russo–American Cold War was won by the Americans. But all these developments remained within our Western logic. This is not the case now, however, and this is what we must face up to; because the Western world is not challenged from within the Western world, and so the logic of change has been disrupted. What I am talking about, and what we are facing, is actually a global system change. And this is a process that is coming from Asia. To put it succinctly and primitively, for the next many decades – or perhaps centuries, because the previous world system was in place for five hundred years – the dominant centre of the world will be in Asia: China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and I could go on. They have already created their forms, their platforms, there is this BRICS formation in which they are already present. And there is the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, in which these countries are building the new world economy. I think that this is an inevitable process, because Asia has the demographic advantage, it has the technological advantage in ever more areas, it has the capital advantage, and it is bringing its military power up to equilibrium with that of the West. Asia will have – or perhaps already has – the most money, the largest financial funds, the largest companies in the world, the best universities, the best research institutes, and the largest stock exchanges. It will have – or already has – the most advanced space research and the most advanced medical science. In addition, we in the West – even the Russians – have been well shepherded into this new entity that is taking shape. The question is whether or not the process is reversible – and if not, when it became irreversible. I think it happened in 2001, when we in the West decided to invite China to join the World Trade Organisation – better known as the WTO. Since then this process has been almost unstoppable and irreversible.

President Trump is working on finding the American response to this situation. In fact, Donald Trump’s attempt is probably the last chance for the US to retain its world supremacy. We could say that four years is not enough, but if you look at who he has chosen as Vice President, a young and very strong man, if Donald Trump wins now, in four years his Vice President will run. He can serve two terms, and that will total twelve years. And in twelve years a national strategy can be implemented. I am convinced that many people think that if Donald Trump returns to the White House, the Americans will want to retain their world supremacy by maintaining their position in the world. I think that this is wrong. Of course, no one gives up positions of their own accord, but that will not be the most important goal. On the contrary, the priority will be to rebuild and strengthen North America. This means not only the US, but also Canada and Mexico, because together they form an economic area. And America’s place in the world will be less important. You have to take what the President says seriously: “America First, everything here, everything will come home!” This is why the capacity to raise capital from everywhere is being developed. We are already suffering as a result: the big European companies are not investing in Europe, but are investing in America, because the ability to attract capital seems to be on the horizon. They are going to squeeze the price of everything out of everyone. I do not know whether you have read what the President said. For example, they are not an insurance company, and if Taiwan wants security, it should pay. They will make us Europeans, NATO and China pay the price of security; and they will also achieve a trade balance with China through negotiations, and change it in favour of the US. They will trigger massive US infrastructure development, military research, and innovation. They will achieve – or perhaps have already achieved – energy self-sufficiency and raw material self-sufficiency; and finally they will improve ideologically, giving up on the export of democracy. America First. The export of democracy is at an end. This is the essence of the experiment America is conducting in response to the situation described here.

What is the European response to global system change? We have two options. The first is what we call “the open-air museum”. This is what we have now. We are moving towards it. Europe, absorbed by the US, will be left in an underdeveloped role. It will be a continent that the world marvels at, but one which no longer has within it the dynamic for development. The second option, announced by President Macron, is strategic autonomy. In other words, we must enter the competition of global system change. After all, this is what the USA does, according to its own logic. And we are indeed talking about 400 million people. It is possible to recreate Europe’s capacity to attract capital, and it is possible to bring capital back from America. It is possible to make major infrastructure developments, especially in Central Europe – the Budapest–Bucharest TGV and the Warsaw–Budapest TGV, to mention what we are involved in. We need a European military alliance with a strong European defence industry, research and innovation. We need European energy self-sufficiency, which will not be possible without nuclear energy. And after the war we need a new reconciliation with Russia. This means that the European Union must surrender its ambitions as a political project, the Union must strengthen itself as an economic project, and the Union must create itself as a defence project. In both cases – the open-air museum or if we join the competition – what will happen is that we must be prepared for the fact that Ukraine will not be a member of NATO or the European Union, because we Europeans do not have enough money for that. Ukraine will return to the position of a buffer state. If it is lucky, this will come with international security guarantees, which will be enshrined in a US–Russia agreement, in which we Europeans may be able to participate. The Polish experiment will fail, because they do not have the resources: they will have to return to Central Europe and the V4. So let us wait for the Polish brothers and sisters to return. The second presentation is over. There is only one left. This is about Hungary.

What should Hungary do in this situation? First of all, let us record the sad fact that five hundred years ago, at the time of the last global system change, Europe was the winner and Hungary the loser. It was a time when, thanks to geographical discoveries, a new economic space opened up in the western half of Europe – one in which we were completely unable to participate. Unfortunately for us, at the same time a civilisational conflict also kicked down our door, with Islamic conquest arriving in Hungary, making us a war zone for many years. This resulted in a huge loss of population, leading to resettlement – the consequences of which we can see today. And unfortunately we did not have the capacity to break out of this situation on our own. We could not liberate ourselves by our own efforts, and so for several centuries we had to be annexed to a Germanic Habsburg world.

Let us also remind ourselves that five hundred years ago the Hungarian elite fully understood what was happening. They understood the nature of the change, but they did not have the means that would have enabled them to prepare the country for that change. This was the reason for the failure of the attempts to expand the space – the political, economic and military space – and to avoid trouble: the attempts to cut our way out of the situation. Such an attempt was made by King Matthias, who – following Sigismund’s example – sought to become Holy Roman Emperor, and thus involve Hungary in the global system change. This failed. But I would also include here the attempt to have Tamás Bakócz appointed as Pope, which would have given us another opportunity to become a winner in this global system change. But these attempts did not succeed. Therefore the Hungarian symbol of this era, the symbol of Hungarian failure, is [military defeat at] Mohács. In other words, the beginning of the West’s world power dominance coincided with the decline of Hungary.

This is important, because now we must clarify our relationship to the new global system change. We have two possibilities: Is this now a threat for Hungary, or an opportunity for Hungary? If it is a threat, then we must pursue a policy of protecting the status quo: we must swim along with the United States and the European Union, and we must identify our national interests with one or both branches of the West. If we see this not as a threat but as an opportunity, we need to chart our own development path, make changes and take the initiative. In other words, it will be worth pursuing a nationally-oriented policy. I believe in the latter, I belong to the latter school: the current global system change is not a threat, not primarily a threat, but rather an opportunity.

If, however, we want to pursue our independent national policy, the question is whether we have the necessary boundary conditions. In other words, would we be in danger of being trodden on – or, rather, being trampled on. So the question is whether or not we have the boundary conditions for our own path in our relations with the USA, the European Union and Asia.

In short, I can only say that developments in the US are moving in our favour. I do not believe that we will get an economic and political offer from the United States that will create a better opportunity for us than membership of the European Union. If we do get one, we should consider it. Of course the Polish trap is to be avoided: they have bet a lot on one card, but there was a Democratic government in America; they have been helped in their strategic Polish national goals, but the Poles are subject to the imposition of a policy of democracy export, LGBTQ, migration and internal social transformation which actually risks the loss of their national identity. So if there is an offer from America, we need to consider it carefully.

If we look at Asia and China, we have to say that there the boundary conditions exist – because we have received an offer from China. We have received the maximum offer possible, and we will not get a better one. This can be summarised as follows: China is very far away, and for them Hungary’s membership of the European Union is an asset. This is unlike the Americans, who are always telling us that perhaps we should get out. The Chinese think that we are in a good place here – even though EU membership is a constraint, because we cannot pursue an independent trade policy, as EU membership comes with a common trade policy. To this the Chinese say that this being the case, we should participate in each other’s modernisation. Of course, when lions offer an invitation to a mouse, one must always be alert, because after all reality and relative sizes do matter. But this Chinese offer to participate in each other’s modernisation – announced during the Chinese president’s visit in May – means that they are willing to invest a large proportion of their resources and development funds in Hungary, and that they are willing to offer us opportunities to participate in the Chinese market.

What is the consequence for EU–Hungary relations if we consider our membership of the EU as a boundary condition? As I see it, the western part of the European Union is no longer on course to return to the nation state model. Therefore they will continue to navigate in what to us are unfamiliar waters. The eastern part of the Union – in other words us – can defend our condition as nation states. That is something we are capable of. The Union has lost the current war. The US will abandon it. Europe cannot finance the war, it cannot finance the reconstruction of Ukraine, and it cannot finance the running of Ukraine.

In parenthesis, while Ukraine is asking us for more loans, negotiations are underway to write off the loans it has previously taken out. Today the creditors and Ukraine are arguing over whether it should repay 20 per cent or 60 per cent of the debt it has taken on. This is the reality of the situation. In other words, the European Union has to pay the price of this military adventure. This price will be high, and it will affect us adversely. As a boundary condition, the consequence for us – for Europe – is that the European Union will acknowledge that the Central European countries will remain in the European Union, while remaining on nation-state foundations and pursuing their own foreign policy objectives. They may not like it, but they will have to put up with it – especially as the number of such countries will increase.

All in all, therefore, I can say that the boundary conditions exist for independent nationally-oriented policy towards America, Asia and Europe. These will define the limits of our room for manoeuvre. This space is wide – wider than it has been at any time in the last five hundred years. The next question is what we need to do to use this space to our advantage. If there is a global system change, then we need a strategy that is worthy of it.

If there is a global system change, then we need a grand strategy for Hungary. Here the order of words is important: we do not need a strategy for a grand Hungary, but a grand strategy for Hungary. This means that up to now we have had small strategies, usually with a 2030 time horizon. These are action plans, they are policy programmes, and they have been intended to take what we started in 2010 – what we call national course building – and simply finish it. They have to be followed through. But in a time of global system change this is not enough. For that we need a grand strategy, a longer timeframe – especially if we assume that this global system change will lead to a stable long-term state of affairs that will last for centuries. Whether this will be the case will, of course, be for our grandchildren to say at Tusnád/Tușnad in 2050.

How do we stand with Hungary’s grand strategy? Is there a grand strategy for Hungary in our drawer? There would be, and in fact there is. This is the answer. Because over the past two years the war has spurred us on. Here some things have happened that we have decided to do in order to create a grand strategy – even if we have not talked about them in this context. We immediately started working on such a grand strategy after the 2022 election. Unusually, the Hungarian government has a political director whose job is actually to put together this grand strategy. We have entered the programme-writing system of President Donald Trump’s team, and we have deep involvement there. For some time researchers at the Magyar Nemzeti Bank [Hungarian National Bank] have been taking part in strategy workshops in Asia – particularly in China. And to turn our disadvantage into an advantage, after we were forced into a ministerial change, we brought into the Government not a technocrat but a strategic thinker, and we created a separate European Union ministry with János Bóka. And so in Brussels we are not passive, but we have set up shop there: we are not moving out, but moving in. And there are a number of such soft power institutions associated with the Hungarian government – think tanks, research institutes, universities – which have been operating at full throttle over the past two years.

So there is a grand strategy for Hungary. What condition is it in? I can say that it is not yet in a good condition. It is not in a good condition because the language being used is too intellectual. And our political and competitive advantage comes precisely from the fact that we are able to create a unity with the people in which everyone can understand exactly what we are doing and why. This is the foundation for our ability to act together. Because people will only defend a plan if they understand it and see that it is good for them. Otherwise, if founded on Brusselian blah-blah, it will not work. Unfortunately, what we have now – the grand strategy for Hungary – is not yet digestible and widely comprehensible. It will take a good six months to get to that stage. Currently it is raw and coarse – I could even say that it was not written with a fountain pen, but with a chisel, and that we need to get through a lot more sandpaper to make it comprehensible. But for now, I will briefly present what there is.

So the essence of the grand strategy for Hungary – and now I will use intellectual language – is connectivity. This means that we will not allow ourselves to be locked into only one of either of the two emerging hemispheres in the world economy. The world economy will not be exclusively Western or Eastern. We have to be in both, in the Western and in the Eastern. This will come with consequences. The first. We will not get involved in the war against the East. We will not join in the formation of a technological bloc opposing the East, and we will not join in the formation of a trade bloc opposing the East. We are gathering friends and partners, not economic or ideological enemies. We are not taking the intellectually much easier path of latching on to someone, but we are going our own way. This is difficult – but then there is a reason that politics is described as an art.

The second chapter in the grand strategy is about spiritual foundations. At the core of this is the defence of sovereignty. I have already said enough about foreign policy, but this strategy also describes the economic basis of national sovereignty. In recent years we have been building a pyramid. At the top of it are the “national champions”. Below them are the internationally competitive medium-sized companies, below which are companies producing for the domestic market. At the bottom are small companies and sole traders. This is the Hungarian economy that can provide the basis for sovereignty. We have national champions in banking, energy, food, the production of basic agricultural goods, IT, telecommunications, media, civil engineering, building construction, real estate development, pharmaceuticals, defence, logistics, and – to some extent, through the universities – knowledge industries. And these are our national champions. They are not just champions at home, but they are all out there in the international arena and they have proven themselves competitive. Below these come our medium-sized companies. I would like to inform you that today Hungary has fifteen thousand medium-sized companies that are internationally active and competitive. When we came to power in 2010, the number was three thousand. Today we have fifteen thousand. And of course we need to broaden the base of small enterprises and sole traders. If by 2025 we can draw up a peace budget and not a war budget, we will launch an extensive programme for small and medium-sized enterprises. The economic basis for sovereignty also means that we must strengthen our financial independence. We need to bring our debt down not to 50 or 60 per cent, but close to 30 per cent; and we need to emerge as a regional creditor. Today we are already making attempts to do this, and Hungary is providing state loans to friendly countries in our region that are in some way important to Hungary. It is important that, according to the strategy, we must remain a production hub: we must not switch to a service-oriented economy. The service sector is important, but we must retain the character of Hungary as a production hub, because only in this way can there be full employment in the domestic labour market. We must not repeat the West’s mistake of using guest workers to do certain production work, because over there members of host populations already consider certain types of work to be beneath them. If this were to happen in Hungary, it would induce a process of social dissolution that would be difficult to halt. And, for the defence of sovereignty, this chapter also includes the building of university and innovation centres.

The third chapter identifies the body of the grand strategy: the Hungarian society that we are talking about. If we are to be winners, this Hungarian society must be solid and resilient. It must have a solid and resilient social structure. The first prerequisite for this is halting demographic decline. We started well, but now we have stalled. A new impetus is needed. By 2035 Hungary must be demographically self-sustaining. There can be no question of population decline being compensated for by migration. The Western experience is that if there are more guests than hosts, then home is no longer home. This is a risk that must not be taken. Therefore, if after the end of the war we can draw up a peace budget, then to regain the momentum of demographic improvement the tax credit for families with children will probably need to be doubled in 2025 – in two steps not one, but within one year. “Sluice gates” must control the inflow from Western Europe of those who want to live in a Christian national country. The number of such people will continue to grow. Nothing will be automatic, and we will be selective. Up until now they have been selective, but now we are the ones who will be selective. For society to be stable and resilient it must be based on a middle-class: families must have their own wealth and financial independence. Full employment must be preserved, and the key to this will be to maintain the current relationship between work and the Roma population. There will be work, and you cannot live without work. This is the deal and this is the essence of what is on offer. Also linked to this is the system of Hungarian villages, which is a special asset in Hungarian history, and not a symbol of backwardness. The Hungarian village system must be preserved. An urban level of services also needs to be provided by us in villages. The financial burden of this must be borne by towns and cities. We will not create megacities, we will not create big cities, but we want to create towns and rural areas around towns, while preserving the historical heritage of the Hungarian village.

And finally there is the crucial element of sovereignty, with which we have arrived here on the banks of the River Olt. We have reduced this to a minimum, fearing that otherwise Zsolt might take the microphone from us. This is the essence of the protection of sovereignty, which is the protection of national distinctiveness. This is not assimilation, not integration, not blending in, but the maintenance of our own particular national character. This is the cultural basis of the defence of sovereignty: language preservation, and avoiding a state of “zero religion”. Zero religion is a state in which faith has long disappeared, but there has also been the loss of the capacity for Christian tradition to provide us with cultural and moral rules of behaviour that govern our relationship to work, money, family, sexual relations, and the order of priorities in how we relate to one another. This is what Westerners have lost. I think that this state of zero religion comes about when same-sex marriage is recognised as an institution with a status equal to that of marriage between men and women. That is a state of zero religion, in which Christianity no longer provides a moral compass and guidance. This must be avoided at all costs. And so when we fight for the family, we are not just fighting for the honour of the family, but for the maintenance of a state in which Christianity at least still provides moral guidance for our community.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

And finally, this Hungarian grand strategy must not start from “Little Hungary”. This grand strategy for Hungary must be based on national foundations, it must include all areas inhabited by Hungarians, and it must embrace all Hungarians living anywhere in the world. Little Hungary alone – Little Hungary as the sole framework – will be insufficient. For this reason I dare not give a date, because we would have to stick to it. But within the foreseeable future all the support that serves the stability and resilience of Hungarian society – such as the family support system – must be extended in its entirety to areas inhabited by Hungarians outside the country’s borders. This is not going in a bad direction, because if I look back at the amounts spent on these areas by the Hungarian state since 2010, I can say that we have spent an average of 100 billion forints a year. By way of comparison, I can say that during the [Socialist] government of Ferenc Gyurcsány, the annual expenditure on this was 9 billion forints. Now we are spending 100 billion a year. So that’s a more than tenfold increase.

And then the only question is this: When the grand strategy for Hungary is in place, what kind of policy can be used to make it a success? First of all, for a grand strategy to succeed, we need to know ourselves very well. Because the policy we want to use to make a strategy a success must be suited to our national character. To this, of course, we can say that we are diverse. This is particularly true for Hungarians. But there are nevertheless shared essential features, and this is what the strategy must target and fix on. And if we understand this, then we do not need compromises or consolidation, but we need to take a firm stand. I believe that, in addition to diversity, the essence – the shared essence that we must grasp and on which we must build the Hungarian grand strategy – is the freedom which must also be built inwards: we must not only build the freedom of the nation, but we must also aim for the personal freedom of Hungarians. Because we are not a militarised country like the Russians or the Ukrainians. Nor are we hyper-disciplined like the Chinese. Unlike the Germans, we do not enjoy hierarchy. We do not enjoy upheaval, revolution and blasphemy like the French. Nor do we believe that we can survive without our state, our own state, as the Italians tend to think. For Hungarians order is not a value in itself, but a condition necessary for freedom, in which we can live undisturbed lives. The closest thing to the Hungarian sense and meaning of freedom is the expression summing up an undisturbed life: “My house, my home, my castle, my life, and I will decide what makes me feel comfortable in my own skin.” This is an anthropological, genetic and cultural characteristic of Hungarians, and the strategy must adapt to it. In other words, it must also be the starting point for politicians who want to carry the grand strategy to victory.

This process we are talking about – this global system change – will not take place in a year or two, but has already begun and will take another twenty to twenty-five years, and therefore during these twenty to twenty-five years it will be the subject of constant debate. Our opponents will constantly attack it. They will say that the process is reversible. They will say that we need integration instead of a separate national grand strategy. So they will constantly attack it and work on diverting it. They will constantly question not only the content of the grand strategy, but also the need for it. This is a fight that must now be committed to, but here one problem is the timeframe. Because if this is a process spanning twenty to twenty-five years, we have to admit that as we are not getting any younger, we will not be among those who finish it. The implementation of this grand strategy – especially the final phase – will certainly not be done by us, but mostly by young people who are now in their twenties and thirties. And when we think about politics, about how to implement such a strategy in political terms, we have to realise that in future generations there will essentially be only two positions – just as there are in our generation: there will be liberals and there will be nationalists. And I have to say that there will be liberal, slim-fit, avocado-latte, allergen-free, self-satisfied politicians on one side, and on the other side there will be streetwise young people of nationalist sympathies, with both feet firmly on the ground. Therefore we need to start recruiting young people – now, and for us. The opposition is constantly being organised and deployed to the battlefield by the liberal Zeitgeist. They have no need for recruitment efforts, because recruitment happens automatically. But our camp is different: the national camp will only come out at the sound of a trumpet, and can only rally under a flag that has been raised high. This is also true of young people. Therefore we need to find courageous young fighters with nationalist sentiments. We are looking for courageous young fighters with a national spirit.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Why does the war in Ukraine continue? How will the war be stopped? To understand this, we must look to how political leaders think in Kyiv, Moscow, Washington and London. We need to understand the significance of the Ukraine War for these leaders. We have to start with the obvious, what everyone should know: The ABC of the Ukraine War.

A) From day one, Vladimir Putin said: Russia had been faced with a threat “to the very existence of the state”. He saw the war as “existential”. And Putin’s perception is no different from others in the Russian elite, then-US Ambassador to Moscow, William Burns, wrote to his secretary of state Condoleezza Rice back in 2008. Ukraine is only 500 km from Moscow. Western forces entering Ukraine would make any defense of Russia impossible. And U.S. leaders like former Secretary of Defense and Vice President Richard Cheney have said that they wanted to break Russia into pieces. To Moscow, it became necessary to deny the West military access to Ukraine in order to survive. If the U.S. would enter Ukraine, the West would pass the “brightest of all red lines”, to quote Ambassador Burns, current CIA Director William Burns from 2008. This would be “a declaration of war”, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel said. The most obvious provocation ever. Despite this, the U.S. continued its military buildup in Ukraine. The U.S. actually wanted to provoke a war with Russia in Ukraine – a war that Ukraine would never be able to win. Russia has a much larger industrial base than Ukraine. It produces several times more artillery shells than the Western countries combined, which is crucial in a protracted war. Russia has more than 140 million inhabitants, while Ukraine had only 40 and many of them have fled the country. Men from eastern Ukraine, in particular, are in hiding (4.5 million) and do not want to be part of the war (see Arestovich below). Ukraine will soon have a lack of troops. Rajmund Andrzejczak, former chief of the Polish General Staff, said “Ukraine is losing this war”. It was actually clear from the first day of the war. A country like Ukraine cannot win over the much larger Russia if Russia perceives the war to be “existential”. For those who knew anything about Russian military thinking, it was clear from day one: Ukraine would lose this war, and the more weapons the West gives Ukraine, the more soldiers will die. The question is just how many hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers will be killed before one is willing to enter peace negotiations.

B) From the 90s, Russia had one key demand: “a neutral Ukraine”. Since 2008, Russia has said that Ukrainian NATO membership would lead to war, but the United States with the support from the nationalist elite in western Ukraine still pushed for Ukrainian NATO membership. The 2014-15 Minsk Agreement gave Russia a “guarantee of a neutral Ukraine” and Russia was satisfied with that, but from 2019 Ukraine included its ambition to join NATO in the constitution in direct conflict with the Minsk Agreement, while Americans and Britons had been building up militarily in Ukraine. According to Russia, this was a violation of several agreements. Russia entered with a military force on 24 February 2022. At this very moment, President Putin said: “We have been treating all new post-Soviet states with respect […]. Russia respects the sovereignty of all post-Soviet states, and we respect and will respect their sovereignty. […] It is not our plan to occupy the Ukrainian territory”, he said. But Russia cannot accept a “[Western] threat from the territory of today’s Ukraine”. Russia demanded a neutral Ukraine. Ukraine’s chief negotiator from the talks with Russia in March-April 2022, David Arakhamia, said: Russia wanted a neutral Ukraine. “In fact, this was the key point. Everything else [was] cosmetic”, he said. President Zelensky's military adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych, who also attended Istanbul, said the negotiations were “successful. We opened the champagne bottle. It was completely successful negotiations”. Russia had no territorial claims, but British Prime Minister Boris Johnson travelled to Kyiv and said, according to Arakhamia, “We should not sign anything with them at all, and let's just fight”. After this, Russia lost all trust in a negotiated solution. When the West did not accept a neutral Ukraine as a buffer against Western military forces, Russia had only one option: to include the Russian-speaking Eastern Ukraine in Russia to secure such a buffer. However, Russia still demands a neutral “rest-Ukraine” and the longer the war continues, the more territory Russia will take.

C) In the U.S. leadership everyone knew that Ukraine would never be able to win the war and would never be able to retake lost land. For the United States, the war is not primarily about Ukraine. U.S. policy is to “fight to the last Ukrainian”, said President Bill Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of Defense, Ambassador Chas Freeman. Most important for the United States is to “weaken Russia”, President Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said. General Harald Kujat, former German Chief of Defense and Chairman of NATO Military Committee (2002-05) said that the U.S. is using the war in Ukraine to “weaken Russia” before the U.S. begins its war against China. For the United States, the war today is not about Ukraine, but Russia. One wants Russia to crumble. But how would the U.S. get the Ukrainian leadership accept a destructive war on its soil? To understand this, we must listen to Oleksiy Arestovych. He said back in 2019 that the best thing for Ukraine is “of course a major war with Russia and NATO membership as a result of a victory over Russia”. And he continued: “With a probability of 99.9 percent our price for joining NATO is a full-scale war with Russia”. The Americans and British had apparently told Kyiv to step up its war against the Russian-speaking Eastern Ukraine to trigger a major war with Russia in order to make NATO defeat Russia to open up for Ukraine to join NATO. It was all about provoking Russia into a war, but from the first day of the war, Western media claimed that “Putin wanted to conquer Ukraine”. Despite entering Ukraine with far too small a military force to occupy the country and despite that those Ukrainian leaders said that Putin wanted “neutrality”, not to conquer Ukraine, all Western media spoke about a “full-scale invasion”, “an unprovoked attack” and that Putin wanted to conquer Ukraine. The problem is that the longer the war lasts, the more territory Russia will take and the more Ukrainian soldiers will be killed. Ukraine could have had a neutral sovereign state if one had accepted the 2015 Minsk Agreement or if one had accepted its negotiated agreement with Russia from March-April 2022. But instead, they followed British advice not to negotiate with Putin, “the crocodile”, to quote Johnson. This is tragic.

When Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg argues that one should support the Ukrainians with more advanced weapons systems to make their hand stronger “at the negotiating table”, he hasn’t understood that Russia is not the United States. The U.S. can back out and walk away from a war when it becomes too costly. The U.S. walked away from the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, when the costs of these wars overwhelmed any prospect of success. But Russia would not enter such “a war of choice”. To Russia, the Ukraine War is considered to be “existential”. One will use every means necessary to win the war. Ukraine and not even the European states can win a war over a major nuclear power like Russia, and the U.S. is unlikely to attack Russia, for example attack the Russian Naval Base at Murmansk, because in that case Russia will attack the U.S. Naval Base at Norfolk (Washington), and with the present Russian development of hypersonic missiles, Russia is in no way weaker than the United States in this respect. On the other hand, Russia is not interested in conquering others. One just wanted a neutral Ukraine and to abolish threatening weapons systems at its borders in accordance with the UN Charter (Art. 2:4).

What if there simply is no alternative to America's permanent war party?

[The firing of an Iskander ballistic missile. Photo Credit: By Mil.ru, CC]

What if politics in America plays out not so much via presidential elections, but through a constant, if often obscured, struggle between the permanent war party (the hawks) and, well, everyone else?   If this is the case, then it is not going to be enough to just hold our breath and wait for a more peace-loving Trump to assume office on January 20, at which time, supposedly, the threat of WWIII will be called off.  Instead, a strategy must be devised that hard-headedly accepts that the permanent war party is not going anywhere, even after January 20, and therefore a strategy must be devised which accepts this tragic circumstance, while still giving us a chance to survive.  Such is the conceptual framework which political historian Victor Taki uses as his starting point for discovering a response to the Ukraine war. -The Editors

In the old Soviet anecdote, Radio Armenia is asked about the likelihood that a Third World War will take place. Upon reflection, Radio Armenia declares that a Third World War is unlikely, but it expects such a ferocious fight for peace that not a single stone will be left standing. This joke about Soviet-American relations at the time of the (first) Cold War acquires an uncanny relevance today, now that President Biden’s permission to Ukraine to use American missiles for strikes inside Russia has shifted the discussion from possible scenarios for building a stable peace to ways of avoiding WWIII.

Paradoxically, an ostensible willingness on the part of the nascent Trump administration to end the war in Ukraine has helped the globalist hawks to secure Biden’s consent to take this highly provocative measure. Its limited potential impact on the purely military aspect of the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation has long been emphasized by this policy’s opponents. After all, the Russians have already placed their bombers out of range of those few ATACMS missiles and launchers that Ukraine currently has. However, any analyst who attempts to describe the actions of the Ukrainian leadership and its Western backers in terms of purely military rationality will necessarily miss the intended political and psychological effects of those actions.

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For almost a year the theme of “permitting” Ukraine to use the ATACMS and Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles for strikes into Russia’s interior has served as clickbait to offset Ukraine’s steady loss of ground. It has helped create the impression that it is Russia’s and not Ukraine’s fate that hangs in the balance, and that the articulate representatives of smaller or bigger (East) European nations can decide this fate by convincing the American president to call Putin’s bluff. After the clearly disappointing results of the US presidential elections from the perspective of Zelensky and his American and European backers, this “permission” becomes the last trump card to be thrown on the table in a reckless attempt to thwart Trump’s announced pacification of Ukraine.

The move is Machiavellian enough. In view of Putin’s September announcement that “authorization” of such strikes would be tantamount to NATO’s entry into the conflict, it will indeed be difficult for the Russian leader not to retaliate without losing face once these strikes actually take place. Russia’s retaliatory measures will in turn make it difficult for Trump to continue presenting Ukraine as “Biden’s war.” Apart from the danger of nuclear escalation that this scenario harbors, it will surely bury the prospect of a stable peace in Ukraine, however much the returning American president and his unchanging Russian counterpart would like to see it happen. 

The desire of some to stop the war turns out to be what gives others the opportunity to continue it. Given this circumstance, the doves might have to focus on ways of keeping the conflict within acceptable limits and forsake for the time being the different peace formulas meant to bring the war to a rapid end. Even if some variant of the “Vance Plan” (i. e. Ukraine’s neutral and demilitarized status plus the [existing] frontline as the new de factor Russian-Ukrainian border) could ultimately be accepted by Moscow, last Sunday’s news demonstrates that the global war party will not step back and simply let such an outcome materialize. 

Conclusion 

When an escalating provocation becomes the only way for the sidelined hawks not to lose badly from a prospective peace, the doves might need to reappraise their attitude towards the conflict itself. Continued within certain limits, the conflict represents the lowest common denominator between the otherwise incompatible interests and stakes of the different parties involved. At the same time, once the conflict becomes routine, the logic of de-escalation is likely to eventually prevail, if only because of the implacable law of universal entropy.  

Taking this into consideration, the doves’ strategy should be the opposite of the strategy of the Sicilian aristocracy at the time of Risorgimento, which was famously expressed in Giuseppe Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard (1958). Lampedusa’s characters repeatedly state that “[i]f [they] want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” By contrast, today’s doves should realize that if they want things to change, things will have to stay as they are. This minimalist approach to conflict resolution in Ukraine might strike some as cynical in light of the daily losses of hundreds of soldiers on both sides of the frontline. However, a straighter road to peace contains the even deadlier traps that have been set by those who would rather flip over the grand Eurasian chessboard than admit their defeat.

A guest post by

Victor Taki

I am a historian interested in imperial Russia’s Balkan entanglements and the intellectual history of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. My latest book Russia’s Turkish Wars was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2024.

As a rule, no American election means as much as the shouting immediately afterward might lead you to think. Every four years, with a regularity that clockwork rarely matches, the supporters of the winning party pile all their daydreams of Utopia onto their candidate, while the partisans of the losing side howl that this time the jackboots and armbands will show up for certain. Then the new president is inaugurated, and something close to business as usual resumes.

These have been getting plenty of use since November 5.

This time, granted, the yelling is unusually loud. Some of that is an unintended byproduct of the losing side’s demonizing rhetoric during the last weeks of the campaign. Having convinced themselves (if no one else) that Donald Trump is literally Hitler, many Democrats are quaking in their shoes, sure that he must now act out the role they assigned him and throw them all into camps. Those camps have featured so relentlessly in recent rhetoric that I’m starting to think that the people who babble about them actually want to be flung into some such institution, where Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, will personally spank them with a riding crop or something. The return of the repressed really can take strange forms.

Then there’s the Twitter campaign now under way to encourage Democrats never to use Donald Trump’s name in speech or print. In one sense that’s a reflection of just how terrified they are of our next president—am I the only one who remembers how the cowardly characters in the Harry Potter novels were afraid to speak Voldemort’s name aloud?—but it’s also revealing in a deeper sense. It speaks of the Democratic establishment’s desperate longing to return to the world before 2015, before the working classes found ways to speak up for their own needs and interests, in place of those it was convenient for wealthy liberals to put in their mouths.

For a majority of Americans, on the other hand, November 5 was a very good day.

I’m beginning to wonder, though, if the current example may be the exception that proves the rule.  Get past the giddy excitement of the winners, the fainting fits and dismayed shrieks of the losers, whatever dubious longings might be shaping our national rhetoric around those vividly imagined camps, and the rest of it, and what remains is a sense that something may have shifted on a deep level in American life with Donald Trump’s comeback election. Partly, of course, he confounded the stereotypes by taking a commanding majority of the popular vote as well as a huge lead in the Electoral College.  Partly Trump and his inner circle are promising sweeping changes in some of the core policies of the bipartisan consensus that, in recent decades, has done so much to run this country into the ground.

To my mind, though, the most striking aspect of it all is the curious fact that Kamala Harris did everything she was supposed to do, according to the playbook of early 21st-century American politics, and still crashed and burned. She had armies of pundits and talking heads on her side. She had a glittering list of celebrities eager to shill for her.  She raised three times the money the Trump campaign did, and spent it so freely that her campaign ended the election millions of dollars in debt.  Nearly all the big corporate media venues bent over backwards to promote her campaign, to the extent of suppressing news stories that might reflect badly on her while flogging every available story that could be used to assail Trump. She had all these things lined up on her side, and yet she got a world-class drubbing once voters went to the polls.

And of course then there was that laugh.

Some of that, it has to be said, was the candidate herself.  I’ve never met Harris and have no idea what she’s like as a person, but the kindest label that can be applied to her political career is “undistinguished,” and she has an odd inability to speak coherently in public without a teleprompter telling her what to say. That might just be stage fright, but it does not give the rest of us any confidence in her ability to handle the pressures of one of the world’s most stressful jobs. Like him or not, Trump thrived in the high-pressure world of commercial real estate and handled his previous stint in the White House without undue signs of stress. At a time when the US is caught up in two intractable proxy wars and faces a rising tide of challenges around the globe, that in itself may have been enough to settle the matter for many voters.

Here again, though, I think there was more going on than this. All the way through the campaign, it felt as though the Harris campaign was off in a corner somewhere, talking to a small coterie of privileged liberals about issues that don’t matter to most other people, while the issues that do matter to most other people never entered the discussion  When people tried to bring up those issues in Democratic venues, furthermore, they got ignored, shouted down, or told to their faces that things they themselves had experienced weren’t real and they should believe what they were told by the Democrats and their media allies instead.  Meanwhile the Trump campaign was hammering night and day on the issues Harris’s people wouldn’t address.

According to Oswald Spengler, it’s always dissident plutocrats like Julius Caesar who lead the revolt against a dysfunctional kleptocracy. Behold our Orange Julius!

It’s heartening to note that some Democrats have grasped this.  Since the election, in fact, there have been a certain number of essays and talks in mainstream venues talking about why the Democrats lost, and bringing up some of the points just made. Social historian David Kaiser, in a post that ran through a litany of standard accusations against Trump, still took the time to notice that his rise was made possible because both parties had given up addressing the concerns of ordinary Americans in a time of increasingly serious crises. His was far from the only such sign of dawning insight among Harris supporters in the wake of her ignominious defeat.

Yet it’s the pushback fielded by such obviously sensible efforts that is, to my mind, the most revealing thing about our current political life. Nearly all that pushback has focused on finding something to blame for Harris’s failure other than the obvious fact that she never got around to addressing the issues that most Americans care about. Some of it has been predictably petty—I’m thinking here especially of the attempts by Harris allies to blame Joe Biden for what happened, and the corresponding efforts by Biden allies to push the blame back on Harris.

On a much higher level of discourse is this article by Michael Tomasky, which appeared in The New Republic on November 8. I encourage my readers to take the time to read it carefully before proceeding. As you’d expect from an essay in one of the premier liberal magazines in the country, it’s cogent, logical, and clearly written. It’s also stunningly obtuse. As with most examples of really high-grade cluelessness, its weakness lies not in itself but in the unstated preconceptions that underlie it, and the fact that Tomasky doesn’t appear to have questioned or even noticed these preconceptions is far and away the most fascinating thing about them.

The equivalent image in an Asian idiom.  Millions of people in east and south Asia have bought these, and burn incense to Trump’s image to make their businesses, families, etc. great again.

Tomasky argues that the real cause of Trump’s rise and Harris’s fall was the ascendancy of right wing media over the last few decades.  It was only when media venues began to slip free of the grip of the liberal consensus, he insists, that it was possible for a candidate like Donald Trump to attract any attention at all, much less the passionate mass support that saw him easily brush aside Republican rivals in two primary campaigns and spread his appeal widely enough to win the narrow victory of 2016 and the much more robust triumph of 2024.  It’s plausible at first glance. Like so many examples of catastrophic cognitive failure these days, however, it suffers from a peculiar defect:  it fails to ask the next obvious question.

How was it, after all, that the media venues that Tomasky lambastes as spreaders of right-wing misinformation clawed their way in from the fringes to become wildly popular among ordinary Americans? What caused people to listen to these insurgent voices? That’s not a question Tomasky addresses.  The right-wing media appeared, and hey presto!  All of a sudden, for no reason at all, people just started believing them.

There are good reasons why this attitude has become common in recent years.

The unnoticed ironies in Tomasky’s essay get an edge sharp enough to shave with when he proposes that back in the days when Edward R. Murrow was the most respected figure in broadcast news media, the rise of a figure like Donald Trump would have been unthinkable.  Here again, let’s ask the next obvious question.  Why was Murrow accorded the kind of respect that today’s media figures can only dream of having?  Two key factors come to mind. The first was the fact that in those days all broadcast media in the United States was subject to the Fairness Doctrine—the rule, imposed on them as a condition of being licensed to use a share of the broadcast spectrum, that they had to present both sides of politically controversial news stories. The second was that Murrow himself was known as a man of integrity who wouldn’t distort news stories to fit a preconceived agenda.

The Fairness Doctrine went whistling down the wind long ago, however, and so did the standards of journalistic ethics that gave Murrow the reputation he had. It’s a source of bleak amusement that some of the journalists who have been quickest to scream “misinformation!” have been involved in spreading and covering up misinformation on the grand scale. Do you recall, dear reader, when Barack Obama insisted that if Obamacare was passed, you would be able to keep your physician, and your health insurance premiums would go down?  Do you recall when Joe Biden insisted that once you got the Covid vaccine, you would not catch Covid?  Both those statements were false; both of them misled and harmed millions of people.

Sometimes it takes a long time for the obvious to sink in.

If Edward R. Murrow had still been around when those statements were made and disproved, he’d have asked all the hard questions our media avoided, followed up the story no matter what pressures he faced, and crucified the government officials responsible on a cross made of newsprint and radio airtime. He was not the kind of man who would cover up a scandal just because it might hurt the party he favored. His epigones in today’s corporate media, by contrast, lack the ethics and the backbone that earned Murrow his reputation.  They’ve earned a different sort of reputation, for which the phrase “partisan hack” will do as well as any.

Mind you, I freely grant there’s no shortage of partisan hacks in conservative media as well; the absence of the Fairness Doctrine and the collapse of journalistic ethics cuts both ways. Here again, though, we need to go deeper. Over the decades just past, conservative media venues have seen their viewership climb steeply upward, while liberal media venues have had their viewership plunge just as steeply downward. Tomasky never gets around to explaining why this happened. It’s as though he thinks that the mere appearance of right-wing media was all that it took to get voters to turn their backs on the wise and trusted pundits of the mainstream media and flock mindlessly to Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and ultimately Donald Trump.

Notice what’s being left out here. Nowhere in his essay does Tomasky appear to consider the possibility that ordinary people might have taken an active role in this process.  Nowhere does he wonder whether maybe, just maybe, voters compared the mainstream media to the alternatives and came to the conclusion that they had reason to choose the latter.  The idea that American voters might have agency is apparently alien to him. In fact, he ignores one of the most crucial details of the 2016 election in order to avoid dealing with the agency of the ordinary individual.

That first campaign — the First Meme War, as it’s called these days — has earned a legendary status in certain circles. “For a short while, Kek walked among us,” memed one participant. “And it was glorious.”

His article claims that the torrent of dank memes that sent the Democratic party reeling in 2016 came from the right-wing media. This is inaccurate.  Those memes were created by a loose and sprawling network of alienated young men linked by online imageboards, of which 4chan is the most infamous. It was there, in the crawlspaces of the internet, that enthusiasm for Trump’s brash antics built a raffish subculture that embraced Pepe the Frog as its mascot, the Euro-pop song “Shadilay” for its anthem, and Kek the Frog God for its half-serious deity.  This subculture flooded the internet with memes supporting Trump’s campaign and gave him a crucial boost. The rise of the “chans” was one of the most astonishing twists of recent political history—and it is quite literally unthinkable to people who share Tomasky’s views.

Here the bottom drops away and we plunge into very deep waters.

Back in 2002, the BBC aired a documentary titled The Century of the Self, which focused on one of the more dubious offshoots of Freudian psychotherapy.  Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, the central focus of the documentary, was the man who launched public relations as an industry. He insisted, based on his uncle’s theories, that human beings would respond like automatons if stimulated by the right words and imagery, and he claimed to be able to make this happen for his corporate and political clients.

Edward Bernays. He was always his most important product, and his self-marketing was no more honest than any other PR campaign.

I discussed that documentary in a post here a little more than two years ago. As I noted then, the most interesting thing about it is that the documentary never challenged Bernays’ claims. Rather, it took them at face value, despite the fact that the campaigns Bernays carried out were by no means as invincible as he claimed. (To cite only one of many examples, though Bernays was hired by Herbert Hoover’s reelection campaign in 1932, this did nothing to keep Hoover from suffering a thumping defeat.) I argued that the program was aimed, like most highbrow BBC documentaries, at members of the managerial class, and that it was an exercise in reassurance, meant to keep doubters believing that the corporate-bureaucratic system they served really did have the power to tell the restless masses what to think and how to feel.

Deficient as it was as an account of history, in other words, The Century of the Self accurately reflected the consciousness of the Western world’s privileged classes just when the corporate-bureaucratic system and its reigning ideology—call it “corporate liberalism”—were beginning their long slide down from the zenith of power.  It’s indicative that the same attitude was expressed at nearly the same time by a Washington bureaucrat (persistent rumors insist that the speaker was Karl Rove) who famously told reporter Ron Suskind, “When we act, we create our own reality. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

It’s one of the supreme ironies of our time that the heirs of the 1960s have turned into the establishment they once fought, and conservative populists are the new, hip, youthful counterculture.

Does this remind you, dear reader, of the ideas splashed across the mental landscape of our time by Rhonda Byrne’s pseudospiritual bestseller The Secret, or by thousands of less efficiently marketed New Age speakers and writers?  It should.  Across the whole sweep of elite culture in the Western industrial nations, and above all in the United States, a set of beliefs took root that treated the individual member of the Western world’s comfortable classes as the measure of all reality, and assigned to everything and everyone else in the cosmos the roles of painted marionettes jerked around by strings to play parts in some childish melodrama.

It’s far from inaccurate to label the era over which this ideology reigned the Century of the Self, because the ideas that gave Byrne, Rove, and her many equivalents their fifteen minutes of tawdry fame did in fact get their foothold a little over a century ago, as the subtler and more reasonable teachings of what was then called New Thought got simplified, distorted, and marketed to a fare-thee-well by figures such as Napoleon Hill.  The idea that we each create our own reality was a central theme in this ideology of the imperial ego, but inevitably it turned in practice into ideas like those marketed by Edward Bernays and his many heirs, in which the privileged call the tune and everyone else has no choice but to dance mechanically in step.

All along, there were alternatives to those empty slogans.

You can see the same thing reflected in the way that, during the Century of the Self, people in the privileged classes assumed as a matter of course that their peculiar subculture, with all its beliefs and prejudices and odd obsessions, was the natural goal of human cultural evolution, and that every person of good will would of course gravitate toward it once they were shown the error of their dissenting ways.  That’s the attitude that put classes in queer theory in universities in Afghanistan during the American occupation of that country, to cite only one tone-deaf absurdity among many, and it also explains the frantic hatred and rage flung against those who fail to fall into line. The ideology of corporate liberalism is so obviously superior to the alternatives, the logic goes, that only the deliberate embrace of evil can explain anybody’s refusal to buy into it. That, in turn, was the attitude that led Kamala Harris and her prodigiously funded campaign straight to electoral disaster.

Thus the change that we’ve just passed through can be described easily enough.  The Century of the Self is over, and the Century of the Other has begun.

All around the world, people who reject the values of the Western world’s privileged classes are in the ascendant. Russia, which shrugged off Western sanctions with aplomb and is nearing victory in the Ukraine war, is returning to its roots in Orthodox Christianity; across the Middle East and North Africa, traditionalist Islam is resurgent; further east, the ancient civilizations of China and India are rising to reclaim the preeminent role in the global system they had before the age of European world conquest. In Africa and elsewhere in the global South, one nation after another is throwing off neocolonial arrangements and establishing social and political forms relevant to their cultures and needs rather than those the liberal elite wants to assign them.

This is how corporate liberals liked to imagine the world — but that delusion has passed its pull date once and for all.

Around the globe, as a result, the Western elites who like to think of themselves as history’s sole actors now face intransigent Others who refuse to accept a role as bit players in someone else’s melodrama. Our would-be lords and masters are confronted by hostile and increasingly confident rivals who reject the values that corporate liberalism considers self-evident, and embrace visions of destiny that are antithetical to everything that corporate liberalism stands for.  The monolithic future imagined by the Western world’s privileged classes has thus shattered into a thousand glittering shards. What is rising in its place is a kaleidoscope of possibility in which the dreams of Harris and her allies are only one option among many.

In much the same way, Donald Trump united a wildly diverse coalition of supporters, embracing Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, midwestern factory workers, Amish farmers, Muslim immigrants, and much more, to bring about his victory. What drew these disparate interests together, more than anything else, was their rejection of the claim by the liberal elite that the reality it likes to imagine is the only one that counts. Harris’s campaign insisted that sky-high grocery prices and mass migration across the southern border didn’t matter, because it was inconvenient to her that these things should matter. To the voters, on the other hand, they mattered a great deal.

Thus the Century of the Other has dawned in the United States as well. The flailings of Democrat pundits as they try to respond to Trump’s election may actually be a hopeful sign, for these might mark the first step in the process of coming to terms with that reality. A principled liberalism of the kind Edward R. Murrow exemplified, one that can explain and defend its viewpoint in the public arena instead of shrieking abuse at those who won’t conform to its fantasies, has an important place in American public life.  Too many of today’s liberals have a long and difficult road to walk if they want to return to that standard, but I hope they make the attempt.

St Moses the Black, from the Damascene Gallery

You can describe the predicament that we’re in as an emergency … and your trial is to learn to be patient in an emergency.

Wendell Berry

One of my many problems as a human being is that I can’t quite shake my activist mindset. For many years of my life, as a younger man, I ‘self-identified’, to use a phrase we had never heard of, as something called an ‘activist.’ Activism comes in many political colours, but my particular shade was the left-green variety, which set out to save the natural world from the Machine’s toxic impacts. This was not a bad thing to do. Quite the opposite: in its aims if not always in its outcomes, it was a good and a necessary one. The problem was that it trained the mind to see the world in a certain way.

Thinking about it now, I see that perhaps this last claim is the wrong way around. Perhaps my mind always thought that way, and my ‘activism’ was a way of doing something with it. Or perhaps my society trained me to think like that. For I think it is safe to say that ‘activism’ is a child of the Western way of seeing. We are an ‘activist’ culture. We like to identify problems and then solve them. We like to generalise about particulars. We like abstractions. We exist to ‘save the world’ or to ‘fix’ it, or to offer ‘solutions’. It is never enough for us to live in this world, to be content with who and what we are, to accept God’s will. No, we have to improve things; remake them in our image. This is the activist mindset, and it has been elevated to the status of a grand moral cause. It is, I would say, the West’s reason to live: our Big Idea.

My two recent essays about what I called ‘the Void’ of Western culture were certainly the product of Western abstract reasoning. I was trying to get a handle on what had happened to ‘the West’ since its rejection of its founding faith. I suggested in part one that our present moment was not a time of ‘repaganisation’ so much as an empty ‘Void’ with no spiritual core to it at all. Then, in part two, I proposed that we were unconsciously replaying the Christian story in various secularised forms, but that this would not be enough to fill the Void. Some other spiritual force would come to inhabit our throne.

The problem with talking like this is that a logical question then arises: alright, then: what shall we do about this? Once you have offered a great big abstract idea about what’s wrong, you really need to follow it up with a great big abstract idea about how to put it right. This is how we got all the grand and terrible ideologies of the 20th century. My problem - again, one of my many problems - is that while I am still tempted sometimes to identify a Big Idea about what’s wrong, my faith in putting it right with another one has long since collapsed.

I used to believe in Big Movements and Big Ideas. I wrote whole books about them. Not any more. For a long time, I have believed something else instead: that if there is any world-saving to be done - if this notion is not in fact just hubristic and stupid in itself - then it is only going to come from the small, the local and, above all, the spiritual. And if there is no world-saving to be done - well, then our work remains exactly the same.

‘Our work’, in fact, is probably just another bit of generalising. Maybe I should instead just say ‘my work’ and stop trying to palm off responsibility for my own inquiries onto society as a whole. Because the question now, here in the Void, is probably the same one as we have always wrestled with: how, then, shall we live?

Once upon a time, I thought I knew the answer: we should get out there and ‘save the world’. Then, one day, I realised that Chesterton had the number on this way of thinking when he asked, ‘what’s wrong with the world?’ and concluded, ‘I am.’ Much later, I followed Chesterton along the unexpected path into the Christian Church, and now I have another, very different notion of what ‘our work’ is. Unfortunately, it is much harder than coming up with another clever Big Idea. It is also almost impossible to match the Christian solution to the secular problem - at least in the world’s terms. In the world’s terms, in fact, it makes no sense at all.

Rather like Christianity, in fact.

In my recent Erasmus Lecture for First Things magazine, I argued against one response to the Void that is growing in popularity: a certain type of ‘civilisational Christianity’, which sees the Christian way as a useful ‘story’ with which to ‘defend Western civilisation.’ This project seeks to use the ministry of Jesus to promote values which are directly opposed to those he actually taught us to live by. Some of the people pushing this supposedly ‘muscular’ brand of the faith are Christian, but many others are agnostics who see the Christian faith as a mythological prop with which they can support their favoured ideologies, be they liberalism, conservatism, capitalism, ‘the Enlightenment’ or whatever. Whether or not the Christian religion is true, in this argument, is less important than whether it is useful.

This is, in other words, just another breed of activism, and it is still at heart a secular project. It seeks to use an unworldly faith to achieve worldly ends, and it will fail for that reason. C. S. Lewis, who was apparently having to deal with the same thing seven decades ago, explained why:

Religions devised for a social purpose, like Roman emperor-worship or modern attempts to ‘sell Christianity as a means of saving civilisation’, do not come to much. The little knots of Friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it.

Lewis’s final sentence contains, to use activist language again, the ‘solution’ to the age of the Void. But what on Earth could it mean? And how could it ‘solve’ anything?

More than one person has approached me since my talk to ask if I was advocating ‘doing nothing’ in the face of all the bad things happening in the world. Christ’s clear instruction - ‘do not resist evil’ - is one of his hardest teachings, though there are many more we are equally horrified by: asking those who strike us to do it again; giving thieves more than they demand; loving those who hate us; doing good to those who abuse us. All of these are so counter-intuitive that they have the effect of throwing spiritual cold water into our faces.

But it gets worse. The most terrible teaching of all, at least for those of us who can’t shake off our activist brains, is the one that goes like this:

If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?

I seem to think about this almost daily. What does it imply? The same thing, it seems, as all the other terrifying teachings: that God turns the world upside down. That in order to ‘save the world’ - and indeed our souls - we must be upside down too. That this whole faith, this whole path, is a paradox. That when we do the thing we do not want to do - the thing we fear - it turns out alright. That trying to ‘save the world’ may destroy it, but that sacrificing yourself for the world may, in the end, save it.

Every fibre of our being screams out against this. Christianity is otherworldly, and we are this-worldly. We want our faith to confirm our human ideas. But it doesn’t, and every time we try to make it do so, we get something like civilisational Christianity or ‘conservative’ Christianity; or, from the other side, liberation theology or the ‘progressive’ Catholic reforms of Vatican II. All of these, from different angles, want the faith to serve the world, because this is what we want. We all have to live our lives, after all.

And yet, on each occasion, the faith is bent by the world instead, and weakened. Why do we see so many young people, especially men, coming into Orthodoxy and ‘traditional’ Catholicism now? Because they want a faith that has not been bent in that way. Because they have seen what Seraphim Rose saw:

Christ is the only exit from this world. All other exits - sexual rapture, political utopia, economic independence - are but blind alleys in which rot the corpses of the many who have tried them.

What a mystery. What a weird, frightening, exciting mystery: that only through death can we achieve life. That he who tries to save his life loses it, and he who sacrifices his life saves it. That God’s wisdom is foolishness to the world, and that Christ has called us out of that world, to a place where we will be hated precisely because we walked away from it. The more you meditate on this, the more impossible it seems. Impossible and ridiculous and obviously true. Sometimes this whole 2000-year-old faith seems like a living koan. Chew on this until you are enlightened. Keep walking.

Christ allows the authorities to kill him, without resistance. His helpless and agonising death sparks a global revolution which is still playing out.

St Anthony gives away everything he owns, runs off to the desert and holes himself up in an unused tomb. His certifiable behaviour creates Christian monasticism by accident.

Thousands of ordinary Christians allow the Roman authorities to burn them alive, feed them to lions, crucify or impale them in public. They do not resist their fates, and they often die smiling. Their sacrifice ends up Christianising the entire empire.

Other ordinary Christians share everything they own, give away the rest, and tend to the sick and dying even if it kills them too. Their sacrifice of love spreads their faith across continents, without the need for either missionaries or state support.

Later Christians, also everyday people, withstand the mass brutality of the communist empire. As they are tortured and persecuted, and as their churches and monasteries are bombed and shuttered, they refuse violent resistance and continue practicing their faith. Their strength gives their Church a strength that the weakened Western Church(es), so long in power, can only envy as they crumble beneath the onslaught of the modern anti-culture.

There are many more such stories, and they all illustrate that living paradox: that only through sacrifice does Christianity ever flourish. This kind of sacrifice is not ‘giving up’, and neither is it ‘doing nothing.’ Do we think that St Anthony or St Francis were ‘giving up’? On what? On the world, perhaps; but not on God or on humanity. Quite the opposite. By walking towards God they made themselves more fully human. They made themselves more able to serve the world than someone who is immersed in it.

What does any of this have to do with the modern Void? Well, all I can say is that my intuition points me hard towards all of these stories and many more like them. What is the ‘solution’ to our modern ‘problem’? For a start, it is to stop thinking like that, because that is Machine thinking. We do not have a ‘problem’ that can be ‘solved’ by politics or war or top-down civilisational projects. We just have a repeat of a very old and familiar pattern: a turning-away from God, and thus from reality. This ‘problem’ is only ever ‘solved’ by turning back again, and societies can’t do that. Only people can, one at a time.

Damn, activism was so much easier.

Still, activism and action are not the same thing. Nobody is called on to be inactive, as if such a thing were even possible. Jesus was so active in the world that he regularly needed to retire from it just to get his breath back. Sitting in a cave all day praying is certainly a form of action: try it if you don’t believe me. But most of us are ‘in the world’, and so the world will challenge us. It will bring us evils like this. What are we to do with them? Stand up for the truth in love. Practice what we claim to believe. Loving our enemies implies that we have enemies - and we have them because we stand for something. Being called out of the world tends to make you unpopular.

Christianity, now as ever, is a radical counter-culture, and the most radical thing about it is what the Orthodox call kenosis: self-emptying. Emptying ourselves of all our petty passions so that we are better equipped to take the world into ourselves. How can you love your neighbour if you can’t see him? How many of us can even see ourselves? Sometimes I get glimpses from the outside and I feel like hiding under the duvet for the next four days.

What, then, should a Christian response to the Void be? I can only offer that same, stumbling intuition; that it needs to be sacrifice. Total sacrifice. There are some who say that such a notion is ‘weak’ or ‘winsome’; that what we need is battle and the crushing of the enemy. They can take their complaints to Christ and all the martyrs. Me, I can’t think of anything stronger than walking towards death confident of God’s love. Are you strong enough to be eaten by lions for your faith? I’m not. Sacrifice does not mean weakness: it requires great strength.

More to the point, it is sometimes the only realistic path. Mythologist Joseph Campbell had some advice about the correct road to take at times like these:

Schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the disintegrating elements. Only birth can conquer death - the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. 

Campbell was no Christian, but he knew what the Void represented, and he knew too what had to be done when the end of a culture arrived:

Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified - and resurrected; dismembered totally and then reborn.

Activism is no good to me anymore. I have had to let it go. All I am left with is this exhortation to sacrifice, and I don’t really know how to do it. But I know it has to be done. And I know that it has been, so many times, the paradoxical path to renewal. Change comes through walking away, walking through - and thus walking into something new. Only by losing our lives do we save them. This applies to cultures as well as people.

This means, I think, that we have to walk into the Void with a smile on our faces, like the Christians walked into the Roman arenas. Like them, we will be carrying, concealed beneath our cloaks, little spiritual bombs which will, in the end, dismantle their whole edifice. The way of Christ is a spiritual bomb. It detonates under all of our worldly projects, be they from left or right or up or down.

I suppose this comes down to radical trust. I wouldn’t pretend that I have this trust very much of the time. But I do have this intuition, which probably I cannot justify in words: that we are in a desert time again. A cave time. That we need to be ‘dismembered totally, and then reborn.’ That we need to go back to the root and the heart of the matter.

Once there was a slave in Egypt, who worked for a government official. Suspected of murder, he fled his employer and became a bandit, roaming the deserts with a feared gang. He murdered many, and robbed many more. One day, pursued by the authorities, he took refuge in a monastery. The life of the monks affected him so much that he gave up his old ways to become a Christian. He took the name Moses as his new identity.

Moses did not find the monastic life plain sailing, though. He was a violent man, and he struggled with his passions all his life. It was the struggle, though, that gave him the insight he needed. The battle he fought in his heart each day allowed him, perhaps, to see the same battles going on in the hearts of others. Once, he was invited to a meeting that had been called by the Abbot of the monastery to decide what to to about the misbehaviour of another monk. Moses turned up with a basket full of sand on his back. There was a hole in the basket, and the sand was pouring out all over the ground behind him. What are you doing? demanded the Abbot. My sins run out behind me where I cannot see them, replied Moses, and yet I am asked to judge the sins of another.

Moses the Black, or Moses the Egyptian, or sometimes Moses the Robber, is a saint these days, and what I like about him is that he could never have imagined such a thing. He had a deeply inauspicious start, and in that he was just like the rest of us. He was prone to discouragement on his spiritual path, too. To help combat it, the Abbot once took him up on to the monastery roof to see the sun rise. Look, Moses, he said. Only slowly do the rays of the sun drive away the night and usher in a new day, and thus, only slowly does one become a perfect contemplative.

Moses met a fitting end, as he perhaps knew he would. When the monastery was attacked by robbers, he refused to flee. By this time Moses was Abbot himself, and he refused the requests of some of his monks to be allowed to take up arms against the attackers. If they wanted, he told them, they could run, but he would stay. Christ, after all, had told him that those who picked up the sword would die by it. Moses had picked up the sword many times. Now it was his turn to face it. And he did, like a Christian. We are still telling his story 1500 years on.

We are all like Moses. We are carrying our manifold sins and imperfections and passions around on our backs all day, while the Void roars around us. But there is no battling the world, only ourselves. I wish I could clean up all these paradoxes with my Western left brain, but they are not to be conquered. As Moses knew in the end, war gets you nowhere. Only by surrendering do you truly become powerful. Again, the world is upside down. Again, we are called to do the impossible. The impossible turns out to be the true path to victory.

Here we are, at the end of a culture, in the howling Void we have made by walking away from God. How could we possibly save ourselves? I suppose we do it by just being Christians. By following our orders. Paradoxically as ever, we might find that, as a result, a Christian culture is born again and flourishes, for this is the only way they ever emerge: not through the sword, but through the cross.

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Richard D. Wolff & Michael Hudson: US Next President Faces IMPOSSIBLE ODDS: Middle East & Ukraine
Dialogue Works • 1:19:25 •

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Today is Thursday, October 31st, and we’re having Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff with us to talk about the legacy of the Biden administration for the next president of the United States. And let’s start with Richard. How do you find right now [the] two important conflicts, one in Ukraine and the other one in the Middle East? We know that the next president of the United States should confront these two difficulties. And on the other hand, we’re going to talk about tariffs as well. But when it comes to these two conflicts, what’s your take on that?

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, I think like a number of what I would think of as the most important issues facing this country, the two candidates have little or nothing to say. So, as far as I can tell, there is a slight difference in the sense that there is speculation that Mr. Trump is not so eager to be persistent about Ukraine, and rather more eager to be persistent about Israel and bashing China.

On the other hand, the Democrats seem to think that their success lies in doing what the Republicans do, just not so quickly, not so harshly, but otherwise to take their cue. Therefore, I don’t think it’s going to make all that much difference on these two issues. What exactly happens when you add the social forces that are behind all of this, they will be more important in shaping what the president, whoever it is, does, than anything they say, in general, and anything they say during a campaign, in particular, when, kind of, they say whatever their polls suggest, will get them more votes.

So this is like so much about our elections. This is a theater. I like to call it the theater of democracy, because it’s a substitute for the real thing, which they do not want. Let me put this another way. In my view, what we are experiencing, what we are living through, the three of us plus everybody else on this planet, is the decline of the American Empire. And it takes a variety of forms, foreign and domestic, but I think in the end, the Ukraine War is a kind of gesture, a kind of shadow boxing, in which the United States is trying to convince itself, its allies and as much of the world as possible that it’s the global dominant power that it used to be.

And unfortunately, it is demonstrating exactly the opposite, although they don’t want to face it yet. They can’t allow it to be discussed. And so the two candidates say nothing like that; do not admit it, do not deal with it, do not suggest ways that the United States can rationally deal with the decline of its own empire. They are engaged in a combination of denial and desperate pretense.

And basically, I think that’s largely what’s going on in Israel as well. Israel is trying to hold on to an impossible situation, and the only country that gives it any significant support is the United States, because it has a vague notion that Israel will be its local leader in that part of the world, the Middle East, and is hoping to hold on to the fantasy that that’s actually possible. And it isn’t, in my judgment. I think that’s hopeless. But the desperation is causing a lot of people to die, and having the effect of mobilizing the alliances of Russia and China, of both of them and India, and of BRICS as a challenge to the West. It is accelerating what it was designed to stop. And they don’t see that either, so it’s full-speed ahead doing all of these things.

Now, I could be wrong, of course, but if you ask how I see all of this, that’s the framework within which I see it. You have two political parties who agree on all of the most important things: that Capitalism is the greatest thing since sliced bread; that there is no alternative that needs to be discussed; there is no option; and that the maintenance of Capitalism equals the celebration of Freedom and Democracy; and that everything the United States does in the world, it does to expand the realm of Freedom and Democracy against the evil alternatives that beset this Project.

They used to be called Socialism and Communism, and now they’re called Authoritarianism, but it’s the same game. It’s even got the same players that barely changed their uniforms, so we can all recognize who you mean. And the hypocrisy of it all is right on display, as it always was, and it’s overwhelmed by propaganda, and the two political parties do their part by being utterly silent on all of it.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I think Richard and I have been making this point through all of your shows, and I think that a lot of the American voters are in agreement. Certainly they’re in agreement that both presidential candidates are just front men for the deep state, or whatever you want to call it, Wall Street, and their financial backers. And the result of people finally catching on is that what’s coming up next Tuesday is a typical American election: Who are you going to vote against? The question is always the same: Who’s worst? And all that the Harris lady can say is, well, I’m not Trump. And Trump can say, well, I’m not Harris. And the Trump haters are going to vote Democratic, and voters who are disgusted with Biden and Harris are going to vote for Trump. But voters against Biden – two big wars – are going to try to vote for Jill Stein. And I’m sure when it’s all over, they’re going to find the margin of Trump’s victory over Harris (certainly in the swing states) is going to be less than the large, the Jill Stein/third party vote. And the Democrats are going to say, “Oh, we would have won if it wouldn’t have been a third party.” That’s the one thing we can never have in the United States. We have to make it even harder for there to be any real choice of a third party in the United States. There must be no alternative.

And the issue is all going to be personified – that Richard just described as the underlying forces. I think the Democrats are going to lose because Harris has come out as the war party candidate. And I guess you could say the election is going to be which war party, which war do you think is more important?

Harris is defending Ukraine, Trump is defending Israel, but basically the Democrats are the war party. And I think that’s what’s going to defeat her in Michigan, in Minnesota, and other key states, her war party stance. Yesterday in the magazine, The National Interest, General Hodges, (one of the big generals in the U.S.) and another national security general, gave a plea to American voters: You must vote for Kamala Harris, because otherwise Russia is going to march right through to recapture East Germany on its way to the Atlantic. We must stop Russia. This election is over… Wanna stop Russia, or not?

Whereas for Trump, he’s saying this election is over… You want to stop Chinese economic domination of the U.S. economy, or not?

In other words, pick your enemy. It’s the enemy that is defining the candidate because neither candidate has anything positive to offer the people. So all you can do is play on everybody’s resentment against the economy, and try to channel that resentment toward the opposite party. So it’s a purely negative kind of election. There’s no longer an election over what kind of parties you do want.

And I think as Jill Stein said on your show a few months ago, Nima, that she agrees with what Harris is saying, and what the left wing of the Democratic Party, such as AOC, is saying. A vote for Jill Stein, against the war, is a vote for Donald Trump.

And we’re okay with that because I don’t think there can really be any progress beyond the dilemma that Richard is talking about, as long as the Democrats are really in power to sort of pretend to be the alternative to the Republicans.

And I think that if this election ends the way I expect it to, and the Democrats will lose not only the Presidency, but the Congress and the Senate as well, that will mean that it’s not possible for them to win an election again without somehow moving away from their right-wing basis.

There have been some polls that the newspapers don’t talk about, and that is that Bernie Sanders was the most popular politician within the Democratic Party. Suppose that there would have been presidential primaries, like every other party has had for the last hundred years. Suppose people had earlier said, you know, Biden is really senile, we can’t let him run again. We’ve got to let the voters choose who an alternative will be. Harris could not have won a single state, just like in 2016. Bernie Sanders would have won. The Democrats said, we know that’s going to happen. We would rather lose with Harris than win with Bernie. Just as in 2016, they would rather lose with Hillary than win with Bernie. So that shows the rottenness of the choice that’s put before the American people. Because the election is not going to be about the problems of American militarism and the empire and the domination of Wall Street that Richard and I’ve been talking about on your show for the last few months.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Do you want to add something, Richard?

RICHARD WOLFF: Yes, I want to throw an idea out for you and for Michael to play with. And I’ll be blunt, so I won’t be able to develop the nuances of this. A very short time ago the head of Apple, Mr. Cook, went on a trip to China. He’s made many trips to China but more than one this year, but he recently made one. And it was crystal clear by the very warm reception he got, and by his own very enthusiastic, positive commentary on China, that – and here comes the jump – that there are sections of America’s most important, biggest businesses that do not want a war with China. They do not want this conflict. They have become the giant successes they have been because of what China enabled them to do. They know it. They don’t want to lose that. There is nothing to substitute for what they get out of China which, to be blunt, is cheap labor and the biggest expanding market on earth. To give those up is to risk their entire business operation.

Okay, now at some point – especially were Mr. Trump to win – these people are going to possibly begin to think like Michael just spoke. They’re going to say, These two parties are a disaster. They are involving us in one dead-end war, or conflict, after another. And while it may be good for the Military Industrial Complex, we are after all a bigger section of this economy than they are: we, the high tech industries; we, all the rest of the economy, other than the Military Industrial Complex.

At which point an immense conflict breaks out in the ranks of capitalists: Those who want to cut a deal with China and the BRICS work out how we live and let live with one another on this planet; who don’t want war and who don’t want nuclear war and who don’t want Jake Sullivan-type people playing around that problem – versus the Military Industrial Complex and those who are won over by them.

It will be a split, bitter conflict over which way American foreign policy goes. It will be decided in Congress. And so each of those two wings will begin to appeal to the public for mass support to their two different programs: go the way we are, sabre-rattling down the road, or go in the alternative direction: work out a deal with Russia, China, the Arab world, and so on – at the expense of the West, including Israel, Western Europe, and so on, no question.

Do we do that, or do we – and pardon my humor – have a capitalist – peace movement alliance which actually wins? Why? Because the peace movement can be the most popular base, and that wing of the capitalists will fund the creation of that base into a voting majority. If I’m right, that’s the next step of American political life which will burst on the scene because of the crazy things that are going to happen next in Ukraine and in the Middle East. No matter who wins, that will force the thing I’ve just described – which will either happen, or it won’t. But it is a possible scenario that has come into my mind, as I watch the lunacy.

And just one last thing. I know you mentioned we might discuss it. But if Mr. Trump has to carry through the notion of putting tariffs on everything (which is what he said he is going to do), with the uptick in inflation… (I don’t know if you saw it in today’s data, the inflation is back) but that’s nothing compared to what would happen if you actually did that tariff-stupidity.

And I also begin to think that the United States is beginning to recognize what somebody ought to call the Hegelian Moment of American Politics. And here it is: The culmination of the Cold War and the years since, that aimed to isolate Socialism, isolate Russia, isolate China, is reaching its peak, which takes the form of the isolation of the United States.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yeah, if you isolate everybody else, and you end up fighting them altogether, and you’re isolated – that’s exactly right. So this is a new kind of isolationism. In the past the isolationists were always against the war. Today, you’re saying…

RICHARD WOLFF: the opposite…

MICHAEL HUDSON: …the isolationists have led the war.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, because the war is a self-delusional gesture. It’s the person who is losing the battle who, well, I’ll give you an example from the Ukrainian war. The Ukrainians are losing, and they take their best troops and invade an unimportant corner of Russia. I mean, that’s pure symbolic gesture. That can’t work, and it is now coming to its pathetic end, as anybody who paid attention would have presumed it would. That’s an act of desperation, as would be sending missiles into the heart of Russia – which Mr Zelensky wants to do. He’s desperate, which I understand – that he’s desperate. And these are the behaviors of a desperate character, but they’re not to be taken seriously on their face value. He calls it a Victory Plan. That’s hysterical! A what?! You have no plans at all, let alone… your plan is how to get out of that country in time, when the troops arrive. That’s the only plan left for you.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, do you want to add something?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yeah, why on earth would Zelensky have invaded the Khursk area. The answer is, it’s all about the narrative. He didn’t invade to win the war. He invaded because he thought that that would convince – somehow – the egotistical, narcissistic American cold warriors that this enables a narrative to be said: Ukraine has fought back. Russia invaded us. We’re going to invade it. There’d better be a peace, and if there is a peace, there’ll have to be a ceasefire and Russia cannot continue to mop up, and continue the plan that Putin has announced of de-nazifying Ukraine and protecting itself against NATO.

So it’s the fight over the narrative and nobody… on this show, Richard and I naturally are saying, what is in the capitalist interest? What is in America’s interest? What is in foreign countries’ interest? And there are people who are not interested in America’s interest. They’re interested in their own interests. And to distract people’s attention from the American national interest – if there is an American election – they have to have a different narrative, a narrative in which they’re protecting the weak Democratic Ukrainians against the Authoritarian Russian invaders who are not going to stop at Ukraine, but are just going to continue to march West over the rest of Europe.

Somehow there’s a belief of the American cold warriors that they can create a narrative that will convince people to somehow find the fight between Good and Evil – as seen depicted by the CIA and the American military – more important and certainly confuse people [about] what the real world’s fight between Good and Evil, between Civilization and Barbarism, is. And I think the ideas that Richard and I have said on your show is that the new force of Civilization that is taking place – in isolation from the West – is the global majority in the BRICS. And Barbarism is the attack on the BRICS – the U.S.-NATO attacks – trying to preserve this defunct American power that is only predatory, not productive; only extractive, not productive, not leaving living standards; only polarizing, not democratizing. So I think that this is the military wars that are going on: wars between two narratives, and what is good and what is evil, what is black and what is white.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard and Michael, when it comes to these two conflicts in the Middle East and in Ukraine, we want to see what’s the difference between the Democratic Party and Republican Party. Donald Trump, in his recent interviews, he was just talking, I’m going to put an end to the conflict in Ukraine in 24 hours, as he put it out. And in the Middle East, he said, I’m not interested in a direct conflict, in a direct war with Iran. J.D. Vance, in his latest interview, he mentioned the same thing, that Israelis are trying to drag us into a war with Iran, but we are not interested in going to war with Iran.

This is one side of the story. On the other hand, Donald Trump is talking about Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, Tom Cotton, these people are going to be in his administration, if he wins. Here is what Mike Pompeo said on Fox News, specifically about the conflict in Ukraine. He says, Donald Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

[NEWS CLIP BEGINS]

MIKE POMPEO: I don’t know what he’s talking about. I do know that we were able to deter Vladimir Putin from doing precisely what he did, invade Europe. He’s killed innocent Ukrainian civilians. That didn’t happen on our watch. Putin takes a fifth of Ukraine under President Obama – not an inch while I was Secretary of State – and then goes at it again, as soon as we leave. So I’m convinced we could have convinced Vladimir Putin not to have done this. Putting it back in the box is going to require real American seriousness, real American leadership, the preparedness to help the Ukrainians do the things that they need to do…

[NEWS CLIP ENDS]

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah, put him back in the box. It seems that they can do whatever they just desire to do. Richard, jump in, please.

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, you know, this has deep roots in the United States. Very deep roots. Going back to our start as a colony, the Puritans, this way of thinking: that the world is to be captured by a great struggle between Good and Evil. This obliterates all the complicated relationships that make things happen. It reduces it. And they know that. They know that. But we don’t, we don’t tell our people what the issues are. We don’t explain. We have no history of it. We barely do it in the university with the tiny minority of people that even bother to go to the university, and the tiny minority of them who actually read and listen to what goes on. I spent my life in the university. I did the best I could, but I’m not crazy. I know what my students did and didn’t do.

And I learned what holds them back from learning. I’ll give you an example. There’s this need to demonize the enemy. Everything is about Mr. Putin. I got news for you. Like any other leader, he is very much shaped by the situation he’s in. He’s not some free actor, somebody like a devil, in the notion of God versus the Devil, somebody who has no constraints. Obviously, God, if he is all-powerful, should have gotten rid of the Devil. But he couldn’t. I guess something happened that made the Devil survive the God. And we know the stories. We can learn them when we’re little. And so we have these great actors who are acting out their intrinsic social role, but there’s no analysis of why they do what they do. So, everybody is free to define the devilishness.

So, for Mr. Pompeo – he’s not original in this, by the way, he’s not original in anything else either – he has picked up the story that Mr. Putin wants to march to the ocean. That’s right! Instead of Ukraine, he’d like to have a rebellion of the French and the British and the Germans and the Italians and the Scandinavians, altogether! He can try to, he can barely control Ukraine. What a joke that he could control the others, who are better armed, better equipped than the Ukrainians ever were! I mean, this is so silly that it works, and it works because it touches the good and the bad, the good and the bad. And when people reason like that, it never stops. That’s why Mr. Pompeo can then seamlessly go from the Bad Putin and the Good Us, to the Bad Us and the Good Us: the Bad Democrats and the Good Republicans. (We’re God. The Democrats are Junior Devil. That’s why they made a deal with the Senior Devil and…) This is childish! This is reading the comic book instead of reading the book about which the comic book was written. This is a childish substitute for real politics.

That’s why clowns like Pompeo… and Nikki Haley?? I mean, please, help us! There’s nothing there. Nothing. There’s a thing, you’re in the air… which way is the political wind blowing among the mass media… and takes her cue. And I don’t mean to pick on her. She’s no worse, or no better, than Mr. Pompeo. This is a game inside the United States: You paint your enemy as the Devil, for MAGA supporters…I don’t know… Kamala Harris, or the others, they’re devils. They talk like that! They’re at least honest enough. They talk like that.

And for the Democrats, you hear that Mr. Trump and all of his people are immense dangers to Democracy. Look at the language. That’s why you don’t hear much about this or that program. What’s the point? You can’t have an anti-capitalist program because then the media will destroy you in ten minutes. So you fasten on other issues where you’re allowed to say something, like abortion, or gun control, or immigration. And you pick that, and then what do you do? You picture your enemy as a devil. So the people who don’t agree with you on immigration are evil people abetting the invasion of the… that’s the way they talk!

But listen. As with any therapy, what we’re doing is we’re trying to understand what’s behind the language. There’s no point in dismissing the language. The language is our clue. The clue here is that you allowed yourself – and you had the luxury in the United States, by the very distance from Europe in the beginning, by the importance of the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean separating you – to cultivate a notion that you really are in God’s Chosen Country. That’s part of why there’s a vibration with Israel. They too think they’re God’s Chosen People and they’re in the Chosen Country, and the Chosen Book – the Bible – said it was their real estate, not all other people’s real [estate]… What is going on here?

And so you’ve had this way of thinking, and now the chickens are coming home to roost because this way of thinking – We are the Exception, you know, American Exceptionalism, God created us – our politicians have to be talking to God all the time. Politicians in European countries don’t do that. If they stood up and said, I’m talking to God, there’d be a paddy wagon come to pick them up and take them to the sanatorium! Nobody wants to hear this and these are countries that have the same Christian religions that you have here. But you can’t do it here because everything is infused, and now that the dénouement – the chickens coming home to roost – you’re killing yourself, you’re destroying yourself, by turning that language onto one another.

And now we are a country split, in which each side thinks it’s God versus the Devil. And they’re going to destroy each other. The Soviet Union didn’t disappear because another country overwhelmed it. The Soviet Union imploded. That should worry people as the politics of America becomes unlivable. Are we headed down that way? That’s a conversation we ought to have, but of course, we won’t. Each side will see the Devil in the other – not in the relationships – because if you understood that this is a language game, you’d have to ask the question, why are we playing the game? But the people that we’re talking about (Harris, Trump and all the others), they are so into that game, they can’t see it as a game.

The great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein understood, and wrote reams of material, about the games: “Language is a game.” And that metaphor is really helpful because you can then, maybe, take a step back and ask yourself, why are these language games so powerful? Or, to use Michael’s language, why is this narrative the one that’s embraced by people? That’s the first step to getting out of this hole, is to understand that you’re in a hole. Just like going to Alcoholics Anonymous, they require you to say, “I’m an alcoholic.” You have to begin recognizing where you are if you’re ever going to get out of there.

MICHAEL HUDSON: What does it mean to be a devil? It really means the Other. You mentioned the roots in American settlement itself. The Other, at that time, were the Native Americans. What did you do? You wanted to put them on reservations. So, I think the strategists – the neo-cons and the militarists at the top of the planning pyramid in the United States – may not take themselves as good and evil. That’s just to tell the religious sector of the voters. What they think of as the Other: the people who do not submit to us; the people who want to maintain their own autonomy. Just as you wanted to put the Native Americans on reservations, America’s policy is, in words that you almost said literally, put Russia back on the reservation. Isolate it. Put China on a reservation. When you put everybody on a reservation, you have a situation pretty much like when you put many of the Native Americans on reservations.

All of a sudden, they found that oil was under these reservations. All of a sudden, you found that they were very rich. What do you do with that? Well, all of a sudden, you want to grab them. I think the Koch brothers made almost (I’m told) all of their money stealing oil from the Native American reservations. They were about to be exposed by the government when President Clinton had the affair with his assistant, and her dress. So the deal was: Okay, we won’t impeach Clinton, get rid of him, if you don’t move against the Koch brothers. That was a turning point, certainly, in American politics.

Well, America has isolated almost all of the global majority. As we said earlier, we put it on a reservation; they find that they have oil; that enables them to be independent. They’ve also found that they’re immune from many of the Western laws, from the rules-based order, and can make their own international law and order. And I guess for the American reservations, we can have gambling casinos and clean up with the frustration of the Americans. I think the higher planners, who are really behind making this aggressive policy that you talked about, think the only thing that we can do is prevent [it]. This is a war against anyone who is trying to maintain independence from the American Unipolar World Order. Of course, that means everybody’s the enemy. Well, they’re not going to say this is their strategy to the American voters. They’re just going to say, this is good versus evil; us versus the foreigners.

And all of a sudden, what has catalyzed the recognition of (certainly) the global majority is exactly what’s happening in Israel; the fact that they say, God gave us this land and we must exterminate everybody, all the enemies: they’re all Amalek. And it’s a war for the Destiny of Civilization. And all of a sudden, the rest of the countries of the world saying, well, when the Americans are coming in and have the National Endowment for Democracy-sponsored regime change, and color revolutions, they’re going to try to get one of us to die “to the last Ukrainian,” to die to the last Georgian. (If they could have been able to overthrow the Georgian government – yet again – they would like Georgia to fight to the last Georgian against Russia. Who, which of the BRICS, can they pick on next to fight to the last of their citizenry against? America cannot fight militarily. It has to somehow convince one of its designated opponents to fight among themselves. This is the kind of crazy [lockstep] in diplomacy that we’re in.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, let’s add, just to take Michael’s point another step, to make sure people get it. The whole world is watching what Israel is doing in Gaza. Okay? Now, what Americans have to understand is what’s going through the minds of all of those people around the world. The United States is funding and arming what the Israelis are doing, in order to hold on to its influence – through Israel – in that part of the world. Everyone is wondering, will there be another country, a neighbor of mine, another Latin country, another Middle Eastern country, another Asian or South Asian country, another African country, that will be chosen by the United States to play that role over there? Will they be armed, and are we dealing here with the risk of this happening to us?

And they’re terrified by it. And they’re worried that the United States is, in its empire decline, going to reach out. If the BRICS keeps picking up more and more Muslim countries – it’s got most of them – if it’s going to pick up the remaining Muslim countries – and the United States is identified everywhere as the enemy of the Muslim countries – will the United States pick one of them, make that its ally, and have that be “the Israel” of another place?

And that is becoming part of the mentality of the United States, which is looking for those countries; was very upset when Niger, a small country in the middle of Africa, basically said, You have to leave, Americans… and brought in the Russians. Okay, this is for them a terrible sign of where things can go.

Like the election in Georgia, or a hundred other elections, or movements, or problems… And those countries are worried now, not only that this might happen, but the Israelis are showing them how far the United States is willing to go to protect its “friend” in the area. Whoa. That’s a little different from Ukraine. That’s another issue. Similar, but this is going into an area with a bunch of different countries, making one your bosom buddy and then enabling it to become dominant. Wow. Wow. And are there people in many countries who would like to play that role for the United States? You bet! Is that already happening? I would guess so.

And what that does to everybody else is to begin to do the worst nightmare of the United States, which is that the world decides that there is one Number One rogue country, and it’s the US. Not North Korea. They’re not endangered by North Korea. They’re endangered by the United States. And at that point, where are they going to go as there’s a burgeoning conflict between the United States, or the G7, on the one hand, and the BRICS?

You’re watching in slow motion the decline of an empire. When the Roman Empire collapsed, for a hundred years, the conversation in Rome was about “the Barbarians,” the language, I believe, Michael used a few minutes ago. You viewed the people moving in on the empire, the Frankish people (in what we call France now), the Gaulish people (another part of France), and so on. They weren’t barbarian, but they were for the Romans, because they were the manifestation of the decline of an empire that couldn’t stop the decline. We all read those books about the end of Rome. They are wonderful insights into what’s happening here.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah. You two mentioned that the situation in Middle East is far more complicated. Here is what the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia recently said about the conflict in Gaza, in the West Bank, and Israel.

[ALEKHBARIYA NEWS CLIP BEGINS]

FAISAL BIN FARHAN AL SAUD: The normalization with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is not just a risk, it’s off the table until we have a resolution to Palestinian statehood. But I would say more than that, I would say that it’s not just the issue of normalization with the kingdom that is at risk. I would say that the security of the region as a whole is at risk, if we do not address the rights of the Palestinians, if we do not find their way to a pathway that leads us to a Palestinian state, because that’s the only way we can ensure that we can focus on the future, that we can focus on co-operation, that we can focus on integration.

So I would hope that the leadership of Israel sees that it is not just the right thing to do, it is not just the moral thing to do, it’s not just the just thing to do to give the Palestinians their rights and their state, it is also in the security and strategic interest of Israel to do so. And that’s, I think, up to them to decide.

[ALEKHBARIYA NEWS CLIP ENDS]

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Do you see any sort of understanding in terms of, because when we talk about Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, we know how close they are to the United States right now. How do you find the way that he’s talking about the conflict in the Middle East, Michael? Do you think that it’s possible?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Ten years, or maybe thirty years, or 75 years too late. There is no way there can be a Palestinian state alongside Israel anymore. The way that Israel has structured the whole region is a prison camp. How can a state have its own authority, the power?

The only way you can have a Palestinian state is for Netanyahu to kill all the Palestinians, except maybe 200, and it will put these 200 on a reservation and call that the Palestinian state. There is no way in which Palestinians and Israelis can live because the Israelis say the Palestinians are not human beings. We have to make Israel for the human beings only. We can’t have non-human beings – or the barbarians – anywhere around us. This is a fight for the death for them. Certainly Pompeo says, “Yes, we’re all for that because when the fight is for the death, Jesus will come and he will take all his true followers up to heaven.” Pompeo is this religious nut, on top of all of his craziness. So I don’t think there’s any hope for a Palestinian state anymore. The question is, what are you going to do with the Israeli Zionists who live in Israel? How are you going to get them out of Palestine? They cannot live in Palestine if there is to be a Palestinian state, or if there are going to be any living Palestinians left. Where are you going to put the Zionists? Where can they go in the world?

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, the way I read his statement is the way I read what Saudi Arabia does in the world. And for me, it is a wonderful case. They are hedging their bets. First of all, Saudi Arabia is in the BRICS. So, we know that the United States is not encouraging anyone to become a member of the BRICS; it is encouraging everybody not to do so. Okay. I’m sure… I don’t know, but I’m sure that they encourage the Saudis not to do that.

Well, that didn’t work. The Saudis went ahead and did it. Every country’s leadership is now assessing what has to change in their foreign policy to take into account that the global economy is now split between a larger and a smaller group of nations. And I mean larger and smaller in terms of total wealth, or total output (GDP, or whatever you want to use). All right? The BRICS is now the larger of the two. It wasn’t before. The two lines crossed in 2020 and the gap between them is getting wider, each passing day. And that means if you’re a company, where you source your inputs has to be re-thought because you’re going to criss-cross this new global situation. If not directly, then indirectly, which can be just as devastating. You have to re-consider where your exports are going to go. You’re going to have to re-consider your credit situation. You’re going to have to consider who to insure with, what banks to use, how to split your accounts, so that you’re not maybe too much in one or the… Everybody is shifting, and in that shifting, the West loses what it had before and the BRICS gain relative to – more or less, and maybe some exceptions. And the Saudis are busy doing that. And there’s a dance here. And the dance is, don’t make the adjustment too quick because the United States might then do to you what is happening to Palestine, or Lebanon, or Syria, or Libya (or fill in the blank). So you can’t go too quick, but you better not not go either because that’s very dangerous, and becoming more dangerous with every step.

Yesterday, the United States announced more sanctions, a whole new bunch of sanctions, on companies and countries that are allowing other companies to function there because those companies also sometimes do business with Russia. Okay. Most of the countries on earth are doing business with Russia, and more of them will be in the years ahead. They’re facing sanctions. The United States ironically keeps forcing decisions that are going to go against them. So there’s a dynamic here that feeds on itself, and that cannot help the United States.

That’s why the word “rogue” nation, because the rest of the world is slowly coming to an awareness that out of its own desperation at being a declining empire, which is always hard for the empire that’s in decline… (It was terribly difficult for the British. It was terribly difficult for the Dutch before them. The French didn’t go quietly; you know, they’re still trying to hold on to bits of their empire. So it’s very hard.) But what the world is observing is that the American empire – partly because it was a global empire, more than anybody else, even the British, had achieved (the United States has those 700 bases around the world), it really was a global empire. Because that makes it that much harder, the United States, busy with its defensive gestures, is actually making the problem worse.

If I could pick a dangerous metaphor: If you’ve ever taught swimming, one of the lessons you teach a swimmer is if you’re having trouble swimming, don’t flail your arms around because it’ll make it worse for you; it’ll make it harder for someone to save you. Don’t do that. Someone ought to tell the United States, that’s what you’re doing. You’re going to go down faster, further because of your refusal to deal with what your situation actually is, and the desperate ways you’re holding on.

MICHAEL HUDSON: You mentioned the Roman Empire before, as it declined. There are a number of differences. Many of the Romans kept leaving the empire to join the barbarians because they thought the barbarians were more civilized. I can imagine American engineers, German engineers, others emigrating to Russia, China, the BRICS countries, where they want to do that. That’s one similarity. But also many of the Germans began to become the Roman empires. There were fights among rival Roman empires and they would hire the Germans as their troops, and the Germans ended up as the Popes.

The equivalent there would be if America expanded to China and Asia and the BRICS, if there was some kind of reciprocal investment here, that somehow the BRICS would invest in the United States, which is what the United States is trying to get Taiwan and other countries to do. I don’t see that happening because there’s so much of a hatred against the barbarians here that really didn’t exist in Rome. By about the fourth century, you had Roman philosophers saying, well, the barbarians have many qualities that are more civilized than are in our own country: They have a more balanced economy. They have mutual aid. They don’t have the kind of financial oligarchy. The Romans began to idealize an original society where people were equal and mutually supportive. Today we’d call that Communism. They began to try to develop that and that became, in a way, Christianity. But as that developed, the center of the Roman Empire moved northwards. It moved northward to Milan; then it moved up into the Germanic tribes. Finally, it moved to the new Rome – Constantinople. The whole center changed. I don’t know where the American Empire could somehow move its center to, certainly not Europe because part of the real fight against BRICS began with the fight of America against Europe – against Germany, and against any potential European industrial rival. Those parallels to Rome can’t exist: America has sort of boxed itself in. It can’t immigrate to, at least as a government, to foreign countries. If America were like Rome developing Christianity, it would develop Socialism.

As you put it at the beginning of the show, if politicians represented actual voters, of course, it would be good for the economy. Then this would become an ideal that would lead to a universal world. It will, I think you said earlier, there’s going to be a real crisis first. What you’re describing as a positive potential outcome will be triggered by the absolute disaster that’s going to be caused either by the Warmonger Harris, or by Trump and his tariff disasters and his economic libertarian disasters for the United States. It will somehow lead, you’d think, the large corporations to say, we’re boxed in here. We can’t go to the British countries because of the sanctions that have been spurred by this nationalist fervor against the Other. There’s nothing we can do except to create a new society. This, I guess, would be America’s version of Christianity. And, of course, that was poisoned soon enough, by the fifth century, by St. Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria (that completely destroyed the Christian feeling that came out of Rome), but that revulsion against inequality spread throughout the Near East. It spread to Persia. It spread to other Near Eastern countries. It was absorbed by Islam, that came up. So we’re going to see some kind of a transplantation of what was America into other parts of the world, but it’s almost impossible to see how this will occur right now, except beginning with a trickle of emigration of people who cannot live in today’s version of Rome, abroad.

But then it will lead, you’d think, to some powerful groups acting in their own self-interest, and at least the American power elite – not quite like the Roman Landlord Creditor class, trying to indebt the whole other country and impoverish it and lead to feudalism. And that’s really the question: Is the American economic model going to lead to neo-feudalism, or is it going to lead to something better that would actually be, in principle, the same kind of rules of civilization that the BRICS countries are trying to create?

RICHARD WOLFF: I think the very nature of this conversation is telling you: we are more evidence of a declining empire. We are beginning to grow up around for either historical models, or theoretical extensions of things we see now, to begin to imagine where this can all go. And that’s already a sign that people are looking.

There’s an enormous revulsion here in the United States against the level of inequality that we have. One of the reasons neither presidential candidate goes near there is because it is so dangerous. The tiny minority at the top are prepared and willing to spend a lot of money to keep that conversation bottled up, not public, not pervasive. They are very interested in not having that conversation go because they are so isolated at the top of the pyramid, with all that wealth. I mean, if you have $200 billion and most people, you know, living paycheck to paycheck, you’ve got a problem. You need to keep the lid on the ideologies of your people. You need to control the politics. Otherwise, the sheer numbers will overwhelm you. And I suspect we’re going to see all kinds of movements against the inequality, questioning the system in all kinds of ways, including a resuscitation of the old Marxian and socialist… That’s going to come back, as it has in the past. You know, the comment that that’s all behind us is silly. That deserves the same answer that the Mark Twain gave when he read his own obituary in the Hartford Courant. He wrote the letter to the editor saying, the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. You know, the same is true for all of these other ideas. You know, the worker co-op is not a new idea. It’s been around for thousands of years, but it is already having a renaissance in part because there is a concrete example, visible all over the place, of people who are getting together in an enterprise to produce a good or a service and not organizing it in the capitalist way – with an owner operator at the top and a mass of dependent servants (excuse me, employees) below. That’s being a problem now. And there are alternatives being groped around to see whether they might fit. But I think everything starts with understanding that we’re doing that.

If you ask that question, then you don’t have a war in the Ukraine. You don’t. You work things out. You take into account the security needs Russia says it has, the security needs Ukraine says they have, and work something out. That could have, and should have, been done. It had been done for years before. It could continue. We can work that out. And the same is true in the Middle East. I understand what Michael is saying. And I think the Israelis have made horrible mistakes in now creating a population: Whatever its animosity was before, can you imagine with me what the feelings of the Palestinian people must now be after a year of that kind of bombardment? I mean, it is beyond. So I understand why Michael can’t possibly imagine how these two people could live together, given what has happened now. And remember, every time the Israelis had a war with the Palestinians, they explained and justified the violence they used on the grounds that they had to do something that would prevent worse violence. Well, it didn’t work. We have that worse violence, much worse violence. And to say now it has to be done to prevent worse violence? You can’t do that anymore. You’ve run out of that one. That one’s dead. So you’ve got to come up with something else. The Israelis will have to face that one way or another.

And there are enormous divisions inside Israel. So it’s not as though there’s all unanimity about what they’re doing. It’s a very particular government. I understand the people have supported their government doing that, and there is no way around that. But there are also big splits and differences that also should be kept in mind in terms of what the future may bring.

But to go back to the way you opened today’s show, Nima, look at how many of the issues we’ve brought up, you, Michael, and me. And even if you don’t agree with all of them, of course not… but these are the issues that could have been, and should have been, raised as this country at this moment in its history chooses its leadership. What do you say about a country that can’t talk about, that we have one president who says I’ll end that war in a week? That’s not serious. That’s childish junk. What is that? That doesn’t solve anything. You’re not going to deal with, you know, even if you thought you could do it, the whole of European politics has been turned on its head by this war in Ukraine! The leadership, the center-right leadership of Europe, is committed to fighting in Ukraine. It will be looking totally ridiculous if Mr. Trump ends this war. And what’s going to happen then? The Left is already preparing to make this point in France, and they’re already the biggest party there. And, I’m talking, a Left that is old, well-organized, knows how to function, theoretically sophisticated, present throughout the society; and I could go on talking about the German, or the Italian, or even the British.

So you’re not in a position. You may think you are, “Mr. Trump-I’ll-end-the-war.” You can’t do that. It’s not available to you. The implications of this war will play themselves out. And you’ll be even less able than you might have been to shape it because you don’t even talk about it. You don’t even allow your society to engage in a discussion that might come up with some new ideas, that might come up with an idea, a plan for how to do it. We’re just three people. I really believe in democracy with a small d. I want more people involved in these conversations. And then we’ll get better answers, if we do that.

MICHAEL HUDSON: You’ve made a very funny comment, Richard. Suppose, indeed, that Donald Trump could make an agreement to say, well, the whole Ukraine war has been a mistake. Look, we’ve lost. Russia has absolutely wiped out most of the Ukrainians, not only population, but also society, and so let’s arrange some kind of peace. It was all a mistake.

Well, where does this leave Germany and the rest of Europe? This mistake for them is not reversible. A few weeks ago, Volkswagen said, we’re no longer really a viable company in the way that we’ve operated in the past. For the first time we’re going to cut back employment, we’re going to cut back sales. We’re not able to compete in electric cars with China, so unless we put huge tariffs on China, which will reverberate throughout the German economy, you know, we’re going under. The German industrialists, the small medium-sized firms, the “Mittelstand” German firms, they’re going out of business. And once the firm is out of business, it can’t be remade. If Volkswagen goes out of business, it can’t be remade. Putin has said that if any missile made by the German Rheinmetall firm ends up in Russia, Russia will not hesitate to bomb the Rheinmetall factory. So there are all of these.

America has created irreversibilities for Europe, while maintaining its own freedom of action. For instance, the grabbing of the Russian 300 billion foreign exchange, that was Europe grabbing it. Hardly any was in the United States, for the first time. Europe has cut its ties with all of these countries. We’ve talked about just America versus these countries, but Europe has been collateral damage in all of this. And I think you’re right. You’d think the hope would be the French Left, and Sarah Wagenknecht’s left-wing party that split off from Die Linke in Germany. But so far, it’s the nationalistic parties, not exactly the pro-Labor parties, that have been grabbing power in Europe. Any party that calls itself “socialist” is usually the far Right, whether it’s the British Labor Party, or Macron’s Party in France, or the other. So we’ve created a mess that looks almost inextricable.

How can you extricate yourself? I can’t figure out. And it is not foreseeable right now. It’s a quandary. A problem has a solution, but a quandary doesn’t have a solution. What is going to happen?

RICHARD WOLFF: I know we’re running out of time, but I would add that it isn’t surprising. I mean, since the Second World War, we’ve had this Cold War, or the legacy of the Cold War, that has systematically demonized the Left: The Communists are the great danger, the Socialists are fellow travelers of the Communists and therefore more or less equally dangerous, and on. So when the great consensus of the center Right – center Left begins to dissolve, when you don’t have yet another American election with a Democrat like George Bush and a Republican like Bill Clinton, but you have something odd, weird and different like Trump, it’s going to be from the right.

The people who are going to break this mold, this consensus that is now so stale, the people who have the idea, this is unbearable, are going to come from the right because that’s what we have, as a society, cultivated all this time. We expunged the Left, the Left were impossible. So the first breakthrough will be on the right. I think that’s not surprising. The Left will now have to understand that the time has come when you’re going to have to do on the left something like what the extreme Right has done on their side. And the middle, the middle, as the great British [Irish] Yeats said, doesn’t exist anymore. The middle is vanishing. The middle class we all know has been eviscerated. Now the middle perspective of politics is also on the way out. What you have is a vast mass, eighty or more percent of the people who feel cheated, who feel hurt. I could add to the story that Michael told about Volkswagen, the detail (which is no detail) that the largest union in Germany is striking Volkswagen. And that’s a bitter strike that’s going to (and I urge you to take a look at the Boeing workers who used to be very docile, who have been on strike and who have now rejected, by overwhelming majority, two of the contracts offered to them). Boeing is a member of that Military Industrial Complex big, big time. They can’t manage their problems.

By the way, the Chinese are producing lots of military aircraft. That too is going to become a serious problem for the United States. I think the Left, ironically, agreed to Kamala Harris. And here I’m talking about Bernie. They agreed because they saw what was happening on the right as a great threat. And they’re right, it is. But the answer to it should have been Bernie, not Kamala Harris. They should have understood that they need dramatic, powerful images of change. When Mr. Trump gets up and says to the suffering American working class, I’m going to protect you from the immigrants, and from the Chinese, that’s a ‘good,’ big image. In terms of economics, it’s silly. It’s a joke. It’s not serious. It’s fake. Well, who cares? What we need is Bernie to stand up and say, we don’t need billionaires. In ten minutes, we can pick 2,000 billionaires and announce to them there’s a wealth tax. Anyone over $10 billion, that’s it. You don’t have it anymore. It’s over. Comparable things like that would have given the people a chance to say, wait a minute. I am willing to desert the conventional parties. Like recent polls show, Americans are interested in third party, but Bernie would have then given them something on the left, comparable to “I’ll protect you from the immigrants:” I’ll protect you by taking the money from the billionaires, which they’re all jealous about anyway. I can do that and I can make a new deal. Here’s what it’ll look like. Everybody will have a job, as a right. That’s the drama that would have overwhelmed Mr. Trump.

Instead, she did the usual, left-of-center: I’ll do this. I’ll help working people there. Those are genuine, but they’re small, they’re old. They’re precisely the kinds of things that Democrats have always done, which is why they’ve never changed the basic trajectory of inequality in this society. But they didn’t understand it. They were hesitant. If Kamala Harris loses, it may be a very important time to make that point.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, this is the problem that I mentioned at the very beginning, when I said the Democratic Party’s role is to prevent the Left and to co-opt the Left. Two days ago, Bernie gave a whole attack on the American working class, an attack on the pacifists, saying you must support Kamala Harris. AOC, his popular follower, gave an attack on the working class, an attack on American Labor, an attack on the pacifists. You must support AOC. You must support the war in Ukraine. The function of the Democratic Party is quicksand that just absorbs these people, pretending to be weirdly alternative to the right wing. They will take the people who would like to be on the left like Bernie was when he joined the Trotskyists in 1962, and just sort of absorbed them and made a deal. They told Bernie, we will put you on some committees. You can do all the talking you want. You simply cannot act. We want you to talk. The more you talk, people will think that somehow the Democratic Party has a potential. By absorbing you, we were crushing the potential. People are now disgusted with you, Bernie. They’re disgusted with AOC. They’re disgusted with you supporting the war. They’re disgusted with you supporting Wall Street and supporting the Democratic Party through Harris and her right-wing, not center-left, party with a left-wing rhetoric, to prevent any Left from developing in the United States. So, in a way, the function of the Democratic Party is to sterilize the Left.

I think with the message that Jill Stein was given – she’s not only anti-war, she’s against the pretense that there is a two-party state, that there is an alternative, and that the Democratic Party is different from the Republicans in any way except for its trickster rhetoric.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Just to share with you, here is an article in Gallup that shows 63% of Americans are in favor of a third party in the United States, and that shows everything. But it’s not there, for the time being. Thank you so much, Richard and Michael, for being with us today. Great pleasure as always.

RICHARD WOLFF: Thank you very much, and I’m very glad to be part of this. I learn, and I appreciate it very much.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I think we’re redefining the quandary in a way that nobody else is really talking about.

RICHARD WOLFF: That’s our job.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Thank you so much. Bye bye.

Image by GreenCardShow from Pixabay

Mike Benz delivered this lecture at Hillsdale College reviewing the origin and structure of the "intelligence state," often referred to as "the blob."

Timestamps:
1:19: The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare
11:20: NSC 10/2 and the Plausible Deniability Doctrine
15:08: Diplomacy Thru Duplicity
16:04: Smith-Mundt Act, The CIA Media Empire
19:40: The Department of Dirty Tricks
20:36: The CIA As Servant Of The State…

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) September 24, 2024

Selected transcript:

MIKE BENZ: The "intelligence state" is a concept that implies that intelligence has taken over the state and that it has somehow gone rogue. Something has gone very wrong -- that intelligence, which is supposed to serve the state, has subsumed it. I will present the essential history of the intelligence state, but there is something beyond it that I think, beginning with, helps elucidate.

...

We'll sort of speed-run the essential history all the way up to the present, but we're going to start in the year 1948. This is the sort of "Year Zero" of the founding of the intelligence capacities of the U.S. government. Instead of learning what you'd find in an ordinary history book, we're going to start with a document that I'm curious if anyone has ever seen, called "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare."

Did you know that George Kennan, in 1948, wrote this memo called "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare"?

George Kennan is known as a godfather figure of American diplomacy and the Central Intelligence Agency. He was famous for this "long telegram" and was the chief strategist of the containment strategy against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

But before all that, when all of this was getting started, he penned this top-secret memo, which was not declassified for 60 years. It was declassified in 2005, and I think it helps elucidate the story as we're going to proceed here. We're going to go through this memo, but I want to give some context first. "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare" was written just 12 days after the Central Intelligence Agency did its first government overthrow operation, its first election-rigging event. That was on April 18, 1948, and this memo was written just 12 days after that.

The particular focus was what had just happened in Italy. Italy was having its first democratic election after World War II, and it posited a U.S.-backed candidate on one side and a Russia-backed candidate on the other. When the rules-based international order was being established in 1948, we had these coordinating bodies through the National Security Council. The very first memo, which I have on screen here, emphasizes how important it is for the U.S. to control the political affairs of Italy. You'll see National Security Council Memo 1-1 is titled "The Position of the United States with Respect to Italy."

Kennan wrote, "Italy is obviously the key point. If the Communists win there, our whole position would probably be undermined."

What happened in this case was that in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency was established under the National Security Act, and it was originally intended to focus on gathering and analyzing intelligence. But because of the key importance perceived by the U.S. State Department to influence the Italian election, the CIA developed a makeshift, ad hoc, thrown-together-at-the-last-minute, $250 million operation to swing that election in favor of the U.S.-preferred candidate. I have some statistics here and a little bit of context because we’re going to see this as a repeating theme.

About $250 million of U.S. taxpayer money was spent to prop up our preferred candidate. The CIA made use of off-the-books sources of funding to finance it. Bags of money were delivered to selected politicians to pay for their political expenses, campaign expenses, posters, and pamphlets. We threatened the Italian government that aid money from the U.S. would be withheld if the wrong person got elected. Newly created CIA proprietary media organizations like Voice of America Radio and Radio Free Europe set up a vast spawn of Italian news networks to create a surround sound inside that country to broadcast U.S. propaganda and messaging. We funneled aid money through churches and charity fronts to mafia and union street muscle. We worked with Hollywood to project Greta Garbo films and others into the country.

The reason I’m starting with this context is not just because it will help explain the rationale for the beast that was created six weeks after this memo was penned—also by George Kennan—but to help understand that this is the intelligence services co-opting all of these organizations. This means that when the U.S. government provides funding or assistance, suddenly the churches they were working with are no longer simply churches—they are instruments of statecraft. The nonprofit charities are no longer simply charities; they become instruments of statecraft. The media is no longer independent; it becomes an instrument of statecraft. Hollywood becomes an instrument of statecraft, and organized criminal mafias do as well.

The predecessor to the CIA, the OSS, together with our War Department (as it was called at the time), was working with criminal groups in Italy as well as with church organizations and others who were being prosecuted by Mussolini. They served as a sort of guerilla resistance to assist the U.S. Army and intelligence operations. We had that network established. It was unseemly but seen as necessary in a time of war, but it was maintained in times of peace for political warfare. Suddenly, organized crime becomes not a criminal offense but rather a sanctioned instrument of statecraft. To drive that point home, Miles Copeland, one of the founding members of the CIA, wrote in his own book that, "Had it not been for the mafia, the Communists would by now be in control of Italy."

Why was all this necessary? Well, in the eyes of the U.S. State Department, we would have lost the election if the intelligence community hadn’t rigged it. They assessed that 60% of the vote would have gone to the Communists -- but for CIA intervention.
I urge you throughout this to remember that when you hear "Communist" or "fascist" in the historical data points we’re going to go over, understand that in the post-2016 world, all of this infrastructure has been repurposed to take out populism. Every time you see "Communism," as much as we abhor that with every fiber in our souls, the biggest threat right now to the intelligence state and to the "blob" (as we’ll come to discuss) is domestic populism. This is actually the language they use.

When you hear them say "the Communists would have won," today they use the exact same language to describe stopping the rise of populism and stopping populist political candidates.

...

This is from George Kennan, April 30th, 1948, just the week before the Central Intelligence Agency had achieved this incredible win in Italy. George Kennan, the State Department, and the White House were so overwhelmed with delight about the world of possibility if we could simply scale the Italian operation.

But the problem was, it was very much against everything this country had stood for, for a century and a half before that. I'm going to read some of the highlighted items here. You’ll see the phrase "political warfare" dots this in a very deliberate way: organized political warfare by the U.S. government to further our national objectives, to further our influence and authority using means both overt and covert, including black psychological warfare and many other techniques.

George Kennan says here, "We have been handicapped, however, by a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war." You’ll see he actually crossed out part of the draft because, again, this is a top-secret memo that was written in 1948 and wasn’t declassified until 2005. The hard record preserves his own scrawls. You’ll see at the bottom, it says, "We’re hamstrung by this basic difference between peace and war, by our public’s yearnings." Then that’s crossed out, and it says, "by a national tendency to seek a political cure-all and a reluctance to recognize the realities of international relations."

Basically, he is saying, "Listen, we answer to the voters, the people, and they’re not going to like this. They don’t understand international relations. They think there’s a difference between peace and war." World War II is over; it just ended three years ago. But if we go into peacetime mode and do not continue political warfare, then we will lose the opportunity to dominate the 20th century.

You’ll see here references to the Italian elections, right? We had just engaged in the Italian elections 12 days prior. This political warfare has to be directed and coordinated by the Department of State. We’ll come back to that because, as we’ll see, the shape of the intelligence state extends far beyond intelligence—it’s really a tool of statecraft.

Here is an interesting and telling vision from this CIA godfather. It says, "We cannot afford in the future, in perhaps more serious political crises, to scramble into impromptu covert operations as we did at the time of the Italian elections." He’s saying, we did this. It was great. It was amazing. But we need this capacity everywhere. We need it in every country on earth where there might be a political crisis, where there might be a need to protect U.S. national interests, trade interests, financial interests, or security interests. We need the same network we had in Italy, working with everyone from cultural influencers to the media, to the churches, to the charities, to organized crime networks—even if we don’t use it, just in case we need it. So we don’t need to scramble if an opposition politician decides to go sideways against a U.S. national interest agenda.

I’m setting the stage with that before we go back in time and go through the history of this. Less than two months after George Kennan wrote "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare," saying, "Since 1789, we have never done this sort of thing in any organized fashion. The American people aren’t going to like it, but we have to do it." Less than two months after that, George Kennan sponsored the very act that would permanently change the structure of the American government and the way our country works.

This was National Security Council Memo 10/2. Now, for folks who are not familiar, the National Security Council (NSC) is called the "interagency." It coordinates with the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA -- everyone -- so that they are all working in a complementary fashion. It's in the White House and provides executive oversight of everything.

You’ll see this memo here, NSC 10-2, and it’s right here on the State Department website, under state.gov. What I’m about to read here sanctioned U.S. intelligence to carry out a broad range of covert operations, including propaganda, economic warfare, demolition, subversion, and sabotage. It was sponsored by George Kennan. He pushed for this right after he wrote "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare," but he would later say it was the greatest mistake he ever made because of the monster it created.

What NSC 10-2 did was give the intelligence community -- this burgeoning, newly created CIA -- and what we now have, 17 intelligence agencies plus the ODNI, not just spy organizations but lie organizations. What I mean by that is because of the phrase used in NSC 10-2, I'm going to read it, "All of these activities, which are normally illegal, can be carried out so long as they are planned and executed so that any U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons, and if uncovered, the U.S. government can plausibly deny any responsibility for them."

This is from 1948: "All covert operations, including sabotage, demolition, and controlling the media, are now legal as long as they are planned and executed so that any U.S. government responsibility is not evident to unauthorized persons." So, effectively, you are cast out of Eden. If you eat the apple from the tree of knowledge, you are not allowed to know, and they are not allowed to tell you. Their job is to lie to you. If they get caught, the U.S. government can then lie above the agency level, above the CIA. The State Department gets to lie to the world because the CIA had these covert links, and they could say it was not an officially sanctioned U.S. government operation -- something went rogue, someone wasn’t authorized, someone took it into their own hands.

I’m going to read this analysis that I think is a useful summary: "Plausible deniability encouraged the autonomy of this newly created CIA, which was created the year earlier, and other covert action agencies in order to protect the visible authorities of the government."

We’re going to come back to that as we discuss the power structure of all these different organizations. But I want to drive this point home immediately, which is that this was seen as a major growth opportunity because of how effective it was in the 1940s and 1950s to be able to take over the world through diplomacy and duplicity.

The problem with diplomacy through duplicity is that plausible deniability is the core doctrine that governs the interagency, which controls all major U.S. government operations on national security, foreign policy, and international interests. Because you lie to the outside world, you also need to lie to your own citizens to prevent the outside from finding out.

While the lies may help you successfully acquire an empire, you now have to permanently maintain an empire of lies, not just abroad but at home.

...

In 1948, when the founding fathers of the intelligence state were setting this all up, they were intensely aware of the monster they were creating. In 1948, Congress passed the Smith-Mundt Act, because, again, in 1948, as all of this was being established, the CIA was brand new, and NSC 10-2 had just come out. Congress said, "Okay, okay, listen, you guys are creating a monster here. We want to make sure that we don't build this empire of lies and that Americans are not being inundated with this sprawl of information control that you are conducting around the world in order to conduct organized political warfare on all countries on planet Earth."

Many folks in this room are probably familiar with what happened during the Obama administration, which repealed this essential safeguard, which had been with us since the moment all of this was created in 1948, with very little fanfare. It was tucked into an NDAA. It was really only discovered by the public after the damage had been done that the Smith-Mundt Act was modernized to get rid of that restriction. It was effectively amended, and the headline was, "U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News to Americans."

For decades, this anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government's mammoth broadcasting arms from delivering programming to American audiences. "Mammoth" is not a big enough word. After World War II, at this exact time in 1948, the UN Declaration for Human Rights came out and forbade the territorial acquisition of other countries by military force. Against these new international norms and standards, international law, you could not simply have a military occupation of the Philippines like the United States had in the early 1900s.

So, with hard power ruled out as the dominant means to have an empire, the U.S. transitioned to a soft power empire, dominated by agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, democracy promotion programs at the State Department, later USAID, and the whole swarm army we're about to meet. But even right out of the gate, the Central Intelligence Agency immediately moved into the media space to control the messaging that people around the world experienced.

...

One essential way to cut through how this is structured is to understand that there is a key distinction between the American homeland and the American Empire. We live in the American homeland, but the American Empire is everywhere else.

Today, even though all the major U.S.-domiciled corporations get the lion's share of their markets, revenues, and supply chain resources from everywhere else on Earth, we, as a country, pale in comparison to the globe. The issue arises when people on the homeland want to put their own interests first—they run up against the empire managers, and therefore against this blob apparatus, and, by extension, the intelligence state.

In this inauguration of organized political warfare, you see that even though the emphasis is on giving the CIA this capacity, the entire operation is coordinated by the U.S. State Department, which does not have a plausible deniability license. It’s supposed to be our official U.S. government policy, but secretly, the CIA answers to the State Department in all things.

...

What happened after 1948? There is a list of CIA regime change operations after Italy. The CIA orchestrated coups in 85 countries following the Italy operation that George Kennan and other State Department officials were so inspired by. They did achieve their goal of expanding this strategy to virtually every country, continent, and region on earth and building these networks, whether they were needed or not.

Fifty of these regime change operations took place during the Eisenhower administration between 1952 and 1960. By the early 1960s, this began to come home, leading to a chain of events that caused the first real structural change to the intelligence state. During that time, the intelligence state was targeting the New Left within the Democratic Party in much the same way it is targeting the populist right today. There was a new faction within the Democratic Party, made up of not necessarily limousine liberals but anti-war protesters, civil rights activists, and supporters of third-world people's movements. Many in the Democratic Party were socially, politically, and informationally aligned with countries targeted by the CIA.

The CIA was seen as a right-wing force because it was primarily targeting socialist and communist governments, aiming to privatize state-held industries. The agency began to do the same things against the left that they are now doing against the populist right.

Huge CIA operations were reported in the U.S. against anti-war forces. The CIA was bribing the National Association of Students and launched something called Operation Chaos, which was designed to permanently shape the composition of the Democratic Party by purging the popular populist leftist faction. Does that sound familiar? The intelligence state isn’t targeting George Bush, Mitt Romney, or John McCain—it is targeting one faction of the conservative wing of the GOP in order to purge that out.

The next image I have here on screen is COINTELPRO. This was on the FBI side, but it was done in tandem with the Central Intelligence Agency. The "COINTEL" refers to counterintelligence, which is basically when the FBI deals with threats from foreign countries using this foreign predicate. I’ll get to that a little more in a second.

Now, the first thing that forced the restructuring of the intelligence state into its current form was a series of scandals that led up to and ultimately culminated in what was called the Church Committee hearings. Also, there was the Pike Committee. On the left here is Frank Church. He was the Democratic senator who spearheaded those hearings. It was the first time the Central Intelligence Agency ever had congressional oversight. It had been around for 30 years, and members of Congress were not allowed to see what it was doing. There was no oversight, no accountability—no one was saying, "Hey, let me look at that." There was no gang of eight. It was only with the Church Committee that we created a House Intelligence Committee to allow a select handful of members of the House to conduct oversight. It was only then that we created the Senate Intelligence Committee to do the same on the Senate side.

This is Frank Church here on the left, holding up the famous "heart attack gun," which was in the CIA assassination guide and part of their research and development. They were assassinating world leaders, political dissidents all over the world, and were working on ever more extreme ways to kill people and get away with it, adhering to their government license for plausible deniability. The heart attack gun, which you can look up on YouTube, was discussed in an open hearing of Congress, with the director of the Central Intelligence Agency testifying. It was essentially a dart gun that induced a heart attack, making the cause of death appear natural.

On the right here is Christopher Pyle. He was one of the first whistleblowers to expose what was going on—not from the CIA, but from the U.S. Army. He provided very damning evidence that the U.S. military had active operations to survey and infiltrate any public meeting of 20 or more people in the United States, regardless of the group’s political affiliation—right, left, mothers’ knitting groups, religious groups, etc. He revealed troves of documents showing that the U.S. military perceived it was necessary to maintain political control over the civilian population to prevent any popular bills from getting passed or people from getting elected who might undermine the military agenda. This amounted to a basic usurpation of the concept of civilian-run government in a democracy.

At that time, many thought leaders within the targeted section of the Democratic Party began to realize, due to these disclosures, that almost everything around them was not real—their media, culture, and music were all being used as instruments of statecraft, often directly against them. On the left is a memo from the Church Committee hearing notes on the CIA's use of journalists and clergy in intelligence operations. The center picture is the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a giant network of CIA-funded and directed cultural and media institutions, primarily in Europe but extending globally. The CIA co-opted thought leaders in leading magazines, musicians, poets, and even hosted musical events to attract people in dozens of countries, aligning them with the U.S. State Department agenda.

Very famous figures were involved in this, including many from spaces you might not expect. For example, Gloria Steinem, the famous feminist, was funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. At the time, our State Department was using this as a means to win the Cold War by promoting feminism to oppose patriarchal structures in countries east of Germany.

Even in the 1960s, labyrinthine money laundering and hiding it from public accountability were already very robust. The Church Committee hearings popped off, and then Jimmy Carter won in 1976, coasting on popular resentment against the intelligence state. He was fiercely opposed by the intelligence state and conducted what became known as the "Halloween Massacre," where he fired 30% of the CIA’s operations division in a single night, dramatically cutting the agency’s budget. There was this brief moment of accountability and a rollback of these plausibly deniable octopus-like operations against the American people.

Then Ronald Reagan came to power. In 1983, he embarked on structural changes to the way the intelligence state worked in order to restore the powers the CIA had lost during the Carter administration, including signing into law the bill that established the National Endowment for Democracy, which is now today's premier CIA cutout. The CIA became less visible because of its previous scandals and diffused itself into a liaison role within a public-facing network of captured institutions. The intelligence state moved into the whole of society, embedding itself into cultural and media organizations, universities, NGOs, and other publicly visible sectors.

Fast forward to 2016, and I’ll wrap this up. As our NGO sphere, university centers, media organizations, union groups, and cultural groups developed a "favors for favors" relationship—this "you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours" dynamic—they would get grants from the State Department, USAID, or the National Science Foundation in exchange for cooperation. What we are up against is this network, this blob, this congealed structure where the intelligence state serves the public-facing functions of government. The CIA is simply a support agency for the State Department on national interest grounds and for the Pentagon on national security grounds.

When you see the CIA or the intelligence state do something, understand that it’s to serve a State Department official, a Pentagon official, or the stakeholders around them. It’s not a rogue agency in the sense that it answers to the State Department and does the dirty work.

Maybe I’ll close with a Sopranos reference. Tony Soprano runs a mafia outfit in New Jersey, and he has these goons, these enforcers who do the plausibly deniable dirty work so that the FBI can’t trace it back to him. There’s a character, Furio, who is the muscle, breaking into people’s homes, beating them up, and undermining their "democracy." If you are in that home and it’s your democracy being destroyed, your friends and family being arrested, you might say, "Oh, the CIA did that." But what’s gone rogue is something much deeper than just the intelligence state—it’s the entrenched forces in diplomacy and defense that the CIA is tasked with serving and doing the dirty work for.

Introduction

The following is an overview of the recent events and present state of the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War. We observe movement towards the end of the conflict in its present configuration and in two new directions simultaneously—a race to the final resolution of the NATO-Russia question. One direction consists of movement towards peace negotiations. The other is toward escalation into a open, direct NATO-Russia war likely to expand beyond the borders of Ukraine and far western regions of Russia. The race to resolution is on and it remains anyone’s guess whether peace or greater war will win the day.

Russia Proposes Diplomacy…Again

On June 14 Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed a roadmap for ending the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War during a speech at Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He called the “Ukrainian crisis” “a tragedy for us all” and the result not of a Russo-Ukrainian conflict per se but “of the aggressive, cavalier, and absolutely adventurous policy that the West has pursued and is pursuing.” He proposed what he called “a real peace proposal” for establishing a permanent end to the Ukrainian conflict and war rather than a ceasefire. Putin based his proposal on principles he has reiterated numerous times, most of which were agreed upon by Kiev and Moscow in Istanbul in March-April 2022; a process scuttled by Washington, London, and Brussels (https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1746596120971673766.html; see also https://x.com/i_katchanovski/status/1750362694949966291?s=51&t=n5DkcqsvQXNd3DfCRCwexQ). In particular, he has now offered “simple” conditions for the “beginning of discussions.” They include: the full withdrawal of all Ukrainian troops from Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhia oblasts as they existed as of 1991—that is, Russia would receive all the oblasts’ territories not just those now controlled by Russian troops. Immediately upon agreeing to this condition and a second requiring Kiev’s rejection of any NATO membership (Ukraine’s “neutral, non-bloc, non-nuclear status”), from the Russian side “immediately, literally the same minute there will follow an order to cease fire and begin negotiations” and Moscow “will guarantee the unhindered and safe withdrawal” of Ukrainian units. However, he expressed “huge doubts” that the West would allow Kiev to agree to this. If his offer is rejected, Putin emphasized that all future blood-letting in Ukraine would be the West’s and Kiev’s “political and moral responsibility” and that Kiev’s negotiating position would only deteriorate as its troops’ position at the front (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/74285).

To be sure, Putin’s offer was not made under the illusion that it would be taken up within the next few months and was certainly another effort to lay blame for the conflict at Washington’s, Brussels and, less so perhaps, Kiev’s doors. Nevertheless, Putin’s public offering before Russia’s Foreign Ministry personnel is a most authoritative and official statement of a specific proposal from Russia; one that included paths to both a ceasefire and permanent peace, if Washington and/or Kiev choose to take them as Ukraine continues to crumble at the front, in the political sphere, and economically throughout this year. The pressure from the Western and Ukrainian publics to negotiate with Moscow will continue to mount through the U.S. presidential elections, as Ukraine deteriorates and the risk of direct, open, full-scale NATO-Russia war grows. It is possible that if US intelligence concludes and reports to the White House that the Ukrainian front and/or army and/or regime will collapse before the November elections, then the Biden administration may be moved to open talks or force the Ukrainians to do so. 

Putin’s territorial demands are not likely to be static, as the territorial configuration changes rapidly on the ground. Russia seizes more territories beyond the four oblasts and Crimea, and the negotiating algorithm changes. Thus, the seizure of areas in Sumy and Kharkiv may not just be an attempt to begin establishing a broad ‘buffer zone’ to move more Ukrainian artillery and drones out of range. The Sumy, Kharkiv, and areas near, say, areas of Nikolaev and Odessa in the south can serve as trading cards to entice acquiescence to talks, as long as Russia makes no claims on those territories. In other words, the Ukrainians could have inferred and were perhaps supposed to infer that they could demand a request for the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces from Sumy and Kharkiv simultaneously with Kiev’s withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the four Novorossiyan regions. The incursions into Sumy and Kharkiv in May might reflect preparation then already for Putin’s official reiteration of the peace proposal in June. Putin’s call for Ukrainian withdrawal from the four noted ‘Novorossiya’ regions implies the ‘return’ of any and all other areas occupied by Russian troops. Continued refusal to talk with Moscow and any further Russian gains give Putin flexibility in enticing or threatening Washington, Brussels, and/or Kiev to the negotiating table. Refuse talks and lose non-Novorossiyan lands; accept talks and Kiev gets them back.        

Also, both subjectively (with Putin’s intent) and objectively (without Putyin’s intent) the proposal undermined Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy’s ‘disnamed’ ‘peace summit’ in Switzerland which was nothing other than an exercise in rallying support among supporters for the beleaguered Maidan regime. Tied to this issue is the Russian president’s assertions in the speech both Zelenskiy and the Maidan regime are illegitimate. Putin got mired down in some self-contradictions here. His assertion that the Maidan regime is illegitimate, since it came to power by an illegal “armed putch” – an absolutely correct one – contradicts his other claim that only Ukraine’s parliament or Supreme Rada is now a legitimate authority and representative of the Ukrainian people. According to Putin, Zelenskiy is not Ukraine’s legitimate authority according to the Ukrainian constitution and thus the Rada is, because Zelenskiy’s first five-year term expired without his being re-elected, but this is a plausible but debatable conclusion regarding a now extremely complicated legal issue. The key point here is that if the Maidan regime that arrived in power in February 2014 by way of an illegal coup is illegitimate, then the organs of power elected under it are equally as illegitimate, putting aside the issue of creeping legitimization by time (still too early) and international recognition. Indeed, it was a decision of the Rada on 21 February 2014 ostensibly impeaching the already overthrown (for all intents and purposes) President Viktor Yanukovych, without a quorum moreover, that gave a quasi-legal veneer of legitimacy to the Maidan coup, as Putin himself notes in his June speech (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/74285).

However, it should be noted that Putin’s raising of this issue is probably less driven by legalities than politics. Putin may be trying to drive a wedge between parliament and the Office of the President in order to strengthen any coup d’etat being planned in the wings by those such as former president Petro Poroshenko and former Chief of the General Staff Valeriy Zaluzhniy. In Putin’s interpretation of Ukraine’s “unique juridicial situation” as well as that of some Ukrainians, Poroshenko’s or Zaluzhniy’s legitimacy to rule is no less and indeed greater than that of Zelenskiy’s own.

It appears that Zelenskiy’s increasingly weak position at home, which I have discussed numerous times elsewhere, declining support for Ukraine abroad and most importantly in the U.S., Ukrainian forces’ dire situation all along the front and in the rear (lack of men and weapons to fight), the threat of a Russian summer offensive (see below), and Putin’s June proposals had their effect. As Zelenskiy arrived in Brussels on the eve of the NATO summit in Washington DC, a series of events confirmed the likelihood that Putin’s speech reflected developments in secret US-Russian talks, and Zelenskiy suddenly moved to suggest Kiev prepare (https://ctrana.news/news/467522-zelenskij-nameren-ustroit-perehovory-ob-okonchanii-vojny-chto-eto-znachit.html). In the days prior, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin telephoned Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov and supposedly discussed measures to prevent a US-Russian clash that could lead to war likely motivated by the ATACMs attack on Crimea that killed some ten beach-goers, including children, and wounded some 40. It seems almost certain that there was some discussion of negotiations on war and peace. This was followed by rumors that a Russian plane had departed to Washington DC on June 25th. Now, just days later, Zelenskiy said in Brussels that Kiev “must put a settlement plan on the table within a few months.” This followed a statement weeks earlier by Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmitro Kuleba and Office of the President Andriy Yermak that the next Ukrainian peace summit following the failure of early June’s session should lead to a peace agreement and include Russia directly or indirectly for the first time and lead to a peace agreement (https://ctrana.news/news/466816-kuleba-dopustil-prekrashchenie-vojny-v-ukraine-posle-sammita-s-uchastiem-rossii.html; see also https://ctrana.news/news/467121-v-kakom-formate-mohut-sostojatsja-perehovory-s-rossiej-na-novom-sammite-mira.html). This confirms my sense that the Ukrainian war will end one way or the other this year unless NATO intervenes directly with troops on the ground.

Moscow’s Military Plans: Reject Talks and War You Shall Have

Moscow’s military plans for the remainder of the year can be summed up as continuity in Ukraine and preparations for war beyond Ukraine against the West. Thus, in Ukraine Russia will continue its more offensive strategy of ‘attrit and advance’ upgraded from, an intensification of what Alexander Mercouris calls ‘aggressive attrition’ (https://gordonhahn.com/2024/02/02/russian-strategic-transformation-in-ukraine-from-aggressive-attrition-to-attrit-and-advance/). Under attrit and advance, Russian forces still emphasize destruction of Ukraine’s armed forces over the taking and holding of new territory. The attrition of massive, combined air, artillery, missile, and drone war supersedes the advances on the ground by armor and infantry in this strategy. Thus, territorial advance is slow, but personnel losses are fewer. The Russians do not have their eyes on Kharkiv and may not even be attempting to create a border buffer zone. The main military strategic goal of the Kharkiv, now Kharkiv-Sumy offensive likely is to stretch the frontlines and thus resources of the Ukrainian armed forces. Building a buffer zone is secondary and concomitant with the military-political strategy of attrit, advance, and induce Kiev to talk. Look south in summer or autumn for offensives or very heightened activity in Kherson and/or, perhaps, Zaporozhia. The goal of this will be to stretch out the length of the entire war front beyond that which is being accomplished by the attacks on Kharkiv and Sumy oblasts. The Russian strategy at this higher level is to stretch and thin out the Ukrainian forces’ already exhausted personnel, weapons, and equipment resources in the hope that a whole can be punched deep into Ukrtainian lines and the rear at some overstretched point, allowing a major, perhaps even ‘big arrow’ breakthrough aimed at some key Ukrainian stronghold or an encirclement of a large number of Ukrainian troops.

Despite the calls of some Russian hawks, Putin will never acquiesce to bomb Ukraine, no less Kiev ‘into a parking lot’ or ‘the stone age.’ For Russians, Ukrainians are a fraternal eastern Slavic people, with long-standing ties to Russia. Most Russian families have relatives or friends from or in Ukraine. Kiev is ‘the mother of all Russian cities’, and despite Russia’s possession of precise smart weapons, the risk of destroying Orthodox holy sites and other historical monuments in Kiev is too high. Russia’s overwhelming strength in weapons and manpower, despite Western inputs into Ukraine’s armed forces, could allow Russian attrit and advance to persist for many years—more than will be necessary to force negotiations or seize much of Ukraine.

Boiling the Russian Frog – Escalation by Any Other Name

There has been much talk about the US repeartedly stepping over Russian red lines. The most recent is Washington’s and Brussels’ (NATO’s) grant of permission to Kiev to target the territory of Russia proper (1991 territory) with Western-made weapons. The West itself has drawn many red lines that it said could spark direct war with Russia and, therefore, should not be crossed: offensive weapons, artillery, tanks, aircraft, various types of missiles, cluster munitions, etc., etc. Most recently, Washington crossed two red lines in rapid succession by approving Kiev use of U.S missiles, such as ATACMs to target Russian territory across the border in Kharkov and, presumably Sumy, where Russian forces have made a new incursion in order to develop a buffer zone so that Ukraine cannot target civilians as it has been doing in cities in Belgorod, send Ukrainian and Russian-manned pro-Ukrainian units across the border into Russia, and otherwise target Russian territory from northeastern Ukraine. It then expanded approval of the use of such missiles against any Russian territories from which attacks in Ukraine are being supported  (www.politico.com/news/2024/06/20/us-says-ukraine-can-hit-inside-russia-anywhere-00164261). Days later Ukraine fired 5 ATACMs (4 were intercepted) at Sevastopol which hit beach-goers far from any military target, wounding 46 and killing 3, including 2 children. The potential escalation of the overall war resulting from this Ukrainian target was compounded when on the same day jihadi terrorists attacked the ancient Muslim city of Derbent in Dagestan, long a hotbed of global jihadi terrorism in Russia. The terrorists, likely from Central Asia or Afghanistan’s ISIS-affiliated Islamic State of Khorosan, attacked an Orthodox church and a Jewish synagogue, killed several civiulians, 15 policeman, and cut the throat of an Orthodox priest. This attack will likely be conflated with the Sevastopol attack. Recall the jihadin attack on Moscow’s concert venue, Crocus City Hall, which Russian authorities immediately suspected to be one involvomng Ukrainians.

Russian President Vladimir Putin himself has drawn few if any clear red lines, but several have been implied. Cautious and cagey Putin has never explicitly promised a particular response to any particlar crossing of a red line. Instead, he has invoked Russia’s great military potential, including nuclear, as sufficient reason for rational leaders to cease and desist. The assumption – both Putin’s and observers’ – is that this is a spontaneous, gradual escalation, driven by panic over Kiev’s deteriorating military, political, and economic situation as Russia marches forward, expanding the war front. The likelihood is that this is not a spontaneous response to conditions at the battlefront but rather a calculated policy of ‘boiling the frog’, and the ‘frog’ is as much Western publics as it is Russian political and military planners. After all, it matters less to Russian military planners at least why NATO is escalating the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War than the fact that NATO is escalating, crossing red lines. For Western publics, however, the approach of war needs to go unnoticed until it is too late. Whether by hook or crook, a false flag operation or a provoked Russian overreaction, Western NATO leaders seem intent on expanding the war beyond Ukraine’s borders and that will require Western public support and thus a vaccum of public discussion of NATO actions and national interests. Even if the constant escalation is ‘simply’ a game of chicken, upping the ante to see if Putin blinks or if the war can be dragged out past the November U.S. elections, there are many in U.S. intelligence and other departments, who are itching for a war against Russia who may escalate or enable Kiev to do so, intentionally or not, such that one is provoked. Unintentionality comes in, as Kiev has been anxious to force NATO or at least NATO member-states into direct involvement in the war. Ukraine has achieved some success in this, but so far such Western involvement has been limited, intially, to secret injections of Western troops and mercenaries, and then to open advisory roles. The summer and fall of 2024 will be a dangerous window in which a spark can detonate the larger war that such mad men and women are playing with.

To the extent that the West remains intent on continuing the escalation of the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War, Moscow will engage in asymmetrical escalation targeting Western forces outside of Europe and prepare for possible full-scale war with NATO or NATO members in and beyond Ukraine. Putin recently noted that asymmetrical escalation would be Moscow’s choice should the Werst continue escalating against Russian in Ukraine. Many commentators have noted what such options might be: arming the Houthis with missiles or air defense, supporting Hezbollah and/or Hamas against Israel, arming terrorist groups in the Middle East to attack U.S. bases, say, in Syria, Iraq, or elsewhere. Given the thousands of U.S bases around the world, American and other Western forces are eminently vulnerable. Moscow only needs the will and networks for deploying its ample means in the necessary directions. Moscow has the will. It is building networks.

Towards a Eurasian Security Pact: Getting Ready for Direct War with NATO

With war with NATO now firmly in the cards, a distinct possibility, the Kremlin is intensely set on military and military-political preparations. The rejection of Putin’s next peace proposal was likely the last straw that will set in motion the next phase in Russia’s diplomatic offensive in tendem with China aimed it rallying the Rest against the West. This new phase will focus on developing military partnerships and alliances. This was signalled most notably in the same June 14th speech in which Putin made his peace offering, evidencing the connection between it, the West-Ukraine rejection, and Russia’s first diplomatic move in this security direction. 

For years, particularly after the Maidan coup, Putin has been conducting Russian diplomacy with the goal of creating a Great Eurasian and global alternative to the West’s ‘rules-based world order’, seeking to base a new, alternative international system of political, economic, financial, and monetary institutions on different rules written by all the great powers – the ‘Rest’ – rather than just the West. This ‘democratization’ or a certain ‘de-hierarchization’ or ‘levelling’ of the international system is to be organized on the principle of multipolarity and diversity for the world’s major civilizations. Putin’s model has come to mirror the ideas of the late Russian neo-Eurasianist Aleksandr Panarin in many ways. It has taken years for Putin to arrive firmly at the idea of an interconnected Greater Eurasia as the core of a global community of civilizations, preferably ‘traditional’ (i.e. non-postmodernist Western ones) as a kind of ‘Russian idea.’

However, in his February 29th annual address to both houses of the Russian Federal Assembly, Putin introduced the idea of creating a Eurasian security system. He reiterated his idea of “democratizing the entire system of international relations,” by which he means dismantling Western hegemony or ‘rules-based world order.’ However, he also proposed replacing it with a “system of unidivided security,” under which “the security of some cannot be secured at the expense of the security of others,” and gave marching orders to Russia’s diplomatic corps and other departments to what in effect would culminate in a Greater Eurasian security ‘architecture’ or pact (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/73585).

On June 14th, Putin declared the death, the “collapse of the system of Euro-Atlantic security,” and repeated his call for the international security architecture to be “created anew.” He instructed the government and foreign ministry to work out “jointly with partners, with all interested countries…their version of guaaranteeing security in Eurasia, proposing them then for a wide international discussion.” He revealed that during his May visit to China he discussed this with PRC Chairman Xi Jinping, and they “noted that the Russian proposal does not contradict, but, to the contrary, compliments and is fully in agreement with the basic principles of the Chinese initiative in the sphere of global security.” Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy responded to the summit by criticizing China for being Putin’s tool, contributing further to the anti-diplomatic dynamic and isolation of the West from the Rest (https://breakingdefense.com/2024/06/in-surprise-singapore-visit-zelenksyy-asks-for-asian-support-in-peace-talks-accuses-china-of-disruption/). China responded by declaring its geopolitical military solidarity with Russia. Nevertheless, in his June speech Putin stated that Russia “future architecture of security is open to all Eurasian countries,” including “European and NATO countries.” This Greater Eurasia security pact is thus also a mechanism for splitting NATO, particularly Europe from the U.S. This is to be achieved by networking and lobbying all the international organizations in Eurasia that Russia has been building for decades now: the Russia-Belarus Union, BRICS+, SCO, EES, CSTO, and the CIS—all specifically mentioned by Putin in his speech behind such a project—as well as “influential international organizations of Southeast Asia and the Middle East.” According to Putin, the “states and regional structures of Eurtasia should determine concrete sphers of cooperation in the area of joint security. Proceeding from this: that they themselves should build a system of working institutions, mechanisms, and agreements that would really serve the attainment of the common goals of stability and development.” In this regard, he supported the Belarus’s proposal “to work out a programmatic document: a charter of multipolarity and diversity in the 21st century” (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/74285). The Belarusian proposal was made by Minsk’s Foreign Minister in 23 October 2023 speech and envisaged what Putin discussed on June 14 but included the OSCE as a potential participant (https://ont.by/news/belarus-predlagaet-miru-razrabotat-hartiyu-mnogoobraziya-dlya-xxi-veka).

It is likely no coincidence that Putin openly supported Belarus’s idea of such a charter ten days before Belarus, with Russian sponsorship, was set to become a member of SCO on June 25th. Belarus’s membership in the largely Asian based organization founded by Moscow and Beijing places SCO’s flag farter west than ever before. This comes days after Putin’s visit to North Korea and the agreement to establish a de facto Russo-North Korean alliance. Thus, the gorwing network of theb Sino-Russian-organized networks of international networks based in Eurasia but extending globally through BRICS+5 to every continent is growing apace and now includes a robust security component.

         Putin suggested in his June 14th speech that building an “undivided system of Eurasian security” and in fact global security architecture would be a post-Ukrainian war focus, again implying possible inclusion of the West or elements thereof, in any such architecture. But the train of the Rest’s rejection of the Western worldview has left the station, and, with the danger of escalation in Ukraine, Israel, and elsewhere afoot, it seems more likely that the new Eurasian-South bloc will be an alternative to, possibly a foe of the West’s ‘rules-based world order’ rather than a partner (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/74285). 

Conclusion

         Again, the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War – the current war with militay combat confined largely to Ukrainian and far western Russian territory — will end this year or very early next year. However, a new broader war can take its place, if the peace fails or is never agreed upon. Such a broader war could be confined to the present war’s territorial parameters in Ukraine, while expanding to a worldwide proxy war led by Russia and its direct or indirect allies against Western foreigbn bases and/or spreading to western Ukraine as a result of a NATO military intervention across the Dniepr’s Right Bank. A NATO fighter jets, such as F-16s, based outside Ukraine, could make Romanian or Polish air bases or other facilities targets for Russian missiles and drones. A NATO or Russian no fly zone of one kind or another could lead to NATO-Russian air combat. A Russian shootdown of the U.S. intelligence drone Global Hawk could be the spark for such tensions in the air.

         The hope is that cooler heads will prevail, but the U.S. is in the midst of a deep and potentially explosive political crisis in which bureaucratic politics can become highly cryptic, conspiratorial, chaotic, and irrational, provoking new more dangerous conflict. Similarly, in Kiev a meltdown of the Maidan regime could be imminent and will likely come as a shot in the dark, unexpected by all. That could lead to the same kind of breakdown of bureaucratic, state discipline, and the rule of law – something far weaker in Ukraine than in the `U.S. – and lead to clandestine adventures of desparation, such as a false flag on a nuclear plat in Ukraine’s Energodar or elsewhere or ‘Hail Mary’ operation targeting a Russian nuclear or other strategic object, sparking a Russian overreaction and a full-scale NATO-Russian war. Worse still, state organizational (as opposed to territorial) breakdown in Ukraine could bring a complete political, economic, social, and state breakdown, with opposing Ukrainian partisan armies, warlords, and ultranationalist/neofascist formations fighting between themselves and carrying out guerilla and terrorist warfare against Russian and even Western occupiers. That Zelenskiy is now broaching peace talks with Putin is a reflection of the opportunity and dangers that are in the offing.  

NEW BOOK

EUROPE BOOKS, 2022

RECENT BOOKS

MCFARLAND BOOKS, 2021

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MCFARLAND BOOKS, 2018

About the Author – 

Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu

Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media. 

Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group.

Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed. It rested on an essential tenet of liberalism: the state-society, public-private distinction. The state-society distinction reached its apogee in the mid-twentieth century, when the triumph and challenges of the postwar moment clarified the importance of defending social freedom from state power, while ensuring that the public realm was not taken over by private interests. Over the last few decades, this distinction has been eroded and finally abandoned altogether. Like it or not, the West is now postliberal.

This is not the same “postliberalism” that we are accustomed to hearing about. Postliberal thinkers from Patrick Deneen to Adrian Pabst have exposed the conceptual problems inherent in liberal theory. Liberals justify the separation of the public realm from the private sphere by appealing to value neutrality. This notion of separation involves a certain moral and metaphysical thinness. The commitment to neutrality is thought to prevent states’ coercing belief through law and force. It protects the private sphere, so that individuals and associations can live out their creeds. Yet by promoting civic neutrality, liberalism socializes us to moderate our ambitions for public life. Against this view, postliberal thinkers argue that the liberal state’s rejection of a substantive vision of the good hollows out politics and civil society. Liberalism produces a state bent on driving tradition and religion out of public life, an atomistic society in which money is the only universally acknowledged good. Postliberal intellectuals contend that if our ruling classes relinquished their liberal commitment to neutral institutions in favor of a substantive vision of the good, we could renew our civilization.

The Brexit referendum and Trump’s election in 2016 revealed the extent of the West’s malaise. Eight years ago, the postliberal critique seemed exciting and relevant, even as liberal intellectuals mounted impressive counterattacks. But these disputations have little to do with how we are actually governed. Governments long ago breached the barrier separating the public and private realms. Nor is the state the only danger, for the supposedly liberal institutions of civil society have given up on neutrality. Cancel culture is ­corporate and academic culture. The financial and tech giants pry into the private lives of ­citizens and punish them for their words and deeds. For quite some time, a substantive vision of the good has already been ruling over both state and society.

Leftist intellectuals were among the first to recognize the collapse of the old liberal separation between state and society. In their view, neoliberalism was to blame. Under Reagan and Thatcher, the private sector began to take over the public one; corporate power took control of the state, and economics captured politics. But this analysis gets ­reality backwards. The state has not been suborned by economic interests. Rather, political interests have come wholly to dominate economic and financial interests, fusing state and society together.

The triumph of the political is most evident in the way today’s debates about liberalism proceed. They are invariably concerned about connecting liberalism to international politics, the postwar liberal international order. To save liberalism, centrist stalwarts call for America to defend the “rules-based” order set up after World War II. It’s a familiar story: In the aftermath of the war, international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were commissioned to establish the bases for an impartial system of economic competition. But because of communism, postwar liberalism had a limited reach. The fall of the Eastern bloc changed that. The end of the Soviet empire vindicated liberalism, and after 1989, liberal institutions could truly become international. Neutral, procedural mechanisms would coordinate divergent interests on a global scale. Now, however, Russia’s military aggression and China’s ascendancy are straining this globalized system. Populists undermine it at home. So laments the narrative.

Faced with recent events, liberal intellectuals allow that they were too optimistic about the prospects for global cooperation after 1989 and may have oversold the benefits of economic freedom. Many concede that the critics of neoliberalism are right, at least in part. Yet questioning the economic decisions of the past thirty years does nothing to undermine the mythology of a continuous postwar liberal international order. Accepting the neoliberal critique allows the stalwarts of the center to shield geopolitical ­decisions—­often their own decisions—from deeper criticism. Their modified narrative—­mistakes were made in implementing a universally acknowledged global good—conceals the fact that the liberal principles that centrist intellectuals urge us to defend had already been abandoned in the international realm.

The international situation tells the tale of postwar liberalism’s breakdown most clearly. Neutral institutions, particularly financial ones, have been weaponized to serve political ends. In this realm, the erosion of the distinction between state and society has been quiet and subtle, yet startlingly effective. The political transformation of world finance has driven domestic upheavals and reordered the way we are governed. It is the engine of the West’s great transformation from liberal modernity to something new—to actually existing postliberalism.

The first sign that we don’t live in the old postwar liberal international order is that the economic system underwriting it has long ceased to exist. In August 1971, Richard ­Nixon decided to suspend the convertibility of the dollar to gold. The change shattered the economic system established at Bretton Woods during the final stages of World War II. Nixon’s decision initially shocked the global financial system, but it laid the foundation for American financial ascendancy. The dollar replaced gold as the backstop of global finance. Thus, as the United States entered the first stages of de-industrialization in the 1980s, American economic and political power did not decline, as experts anticipated. Nor did anyone really comprehend the tremendous political advantages implicit in the transition from a gold standard to a global economy based on America’s fiat currency. The American political classes were, at least at that time, only dimly aware of their own capabilities. They were focused on other objectives.

On July 3, 1989, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Wall Street Journal affirmed its commitment to the following constitutional amendment: “there shall be open borders.” The surprise events of the following November provided the opportunity to implement this vision of a truly global economy committed to the free movement of goods, capital, and labor. But just as the Wall Street Journal editorial had opined that more minorities were needed to help Americans “acquire a renewed view of our own difficult past,” so openness meant advancing the spirit of anti-discrimination further than ever before. This imperative set the transatlantic tone for the next few years. In 1990, Congress raised immigration to unprecedented levels to boost economic growth. It also abolished much of the English-language testing for naturalization and made it easier for homosexuals to immigrate to the United States. That same year, the Schengen Convention proposed the abolition of all border controls within Europe. In 1991, Congress passed new civil rights legislation that cemented in place the doctrine of disparate impact. To abolish discrimination on the basis of sex, the European Court of Justice overturned national laws that prohibited businesses from assigning women nighttime shift work. Open borders, free trade, and the open society: It seemed that neoliberalism’s triumph was complete.

From the vantage point of the 1990s, it looked like the Americans and Europeans were using the opportunity presented by the collapse of the Soviet Empire to construct a genuinely liberal global system. Economic affairs would be liberated from statist, political competition, the crude power contests of the past.

Utopianism of that sort may have animated commentators such as Thomas Friedman, and it’s still the way the stalwarts of the center recall the moment’s aspirations. But this account downplays the political and economic anxieties of the period. 1989 had set off a discreet but decisive geopolitical contest within the West. The Europeans were using the opportunity of 1989 to take continental integration to unprecedented levels, laying the groundwork for the Euro. Led by the French, they dreamed of building a new continental powerhouse that could challenge the United States. German unification was set to be the cornerstone of a single sovereign Europe. Yet George H. W. Bush made American support for German unification conditional on the French and West Germans’ preserving NATO and expanding it into East Germany. It was a cunning move. By keeping NATO alive, Bush forestalled European geopolitical independence. As the Cold War ended, the rationale for military and economic dependence on the United States receded. Yet the first Bush administration engineered events so that American political and economic power over the rest of the West became greater than ever before.

After 1989, the United States enjoyed supreme military power. In the coming years, it would occasionally attempt to exert its influence through these means. These efforts bore mixed results. Bush Sr. would preside over the swift success of the 1991 Gulf War; he would ­also set in motion the events that led to the disaster of Mogadishu in 1993. Yet military misadventures did little to alter America’s role as global hegemon. American financial power became the true engine of dominion. The United States took charge of the globalized economy and turned it into a powerful weapon.

When Bill Clinton took office, he continued the pursuit of openness. In 1993, he ratified NAFTA and relaxed the ban on homosexuals in the military. However, he made it clear that the old liberalism was not enough. Eager to extend the reach of democracy and confront foreign enemies who stood in its way, his administration developed new tools to advance America’s global power. In September, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake outlined a new paradigm. His speech, “From Containment to Enlargement,” bespeaks a political revolution. It provided the blueprint not only for the foreign policy agenda of nearly every U.S. president since then, but for the convictions of every right-thinking person. Lake’s speechwriter was Anthony Blinken.

Lake began by denouncing neo-isolationism on the left and right. Its source, he asserted, lies in misguided economic anxiety. The speech contained the usual promises that global free trade would bring prosperity for all. But the economic benefit to American citizens was an afterthought. The speech focused on America’s new global political program. With the elimination of the “big, red blob” of communism, the United States would focus on expanding the world’s “blue areas” of market democracies—on regime change.

Yet the policy of enlargement was not just about using American military might to expand liberal democracy. Enlargement, Lake argued, had a second meaning. It was about developing and enhancing state-society partnerships. The Clintonians were learning from domestic politics. In that sphere, they were launching a revolution from “government” to “governance,” what Christopher Caldwell describes as the “great innovation of the Clinton administration.”

Borrowing from management theory, the Clintonians wanted government to expand to involve social actors. These actors were not held to the same rules of conduct as state actors were, and therefore could act much more effectively. By leaning on social actors, leaders could bypass state actors responsible to the electorate and could get good results. Domestic lessons set the precedent; after all, the civil rights revolution was conducted as a state-­society project. Court decisions had established the significant liabilities facing private organizations should they fail to be vigilant agents of anti-­discrimination. And private organizations learned to become very effective agents of this new political project. They had their vision of justice and wanted to achieve it. It was too important to leave that task to slow-moving governments. By the early nineties, there were now legions of NGOs, corporations, philanthropic associations, academics, entrepreneurs, journalists, and bureaucrats who expected to have a say in politics. They did not see themselves as bound by national loyalties, restricted by certain borders, or subject to rigid accountability structures. In the new era of “governance,” this dispersion of control was something to celebrate. It’s no surprise that Lake’s speech targeted “centralized power” as the enemy hindering the spread of the “blue” hue. Globalization’s interpreters, wedded to narratives about the obsolescence or privatization of the state, passed over the true significance of these changes. What was really happening was the deformation of the state.

The Clinton administration saw that achieving their foreign policy revolution would require looking beyond the state, just as the civil rights revolution had done at home. “We should pursue our goals through an enlarged circle not only of government officials but also of private and non-­governmental groups,” Lake argued, naming a range of social actors, from “private firms” to “­human rights groups.”

The Clintonians were offering the first theory of global management directed to geopolitical and moral objectives: a substantive vision of the good. State and social actors would be coordinated to fight the “intolerant energies of racism” abroad. They would confront what Lake called “backlash states,” isolating them “diplomatically, militarily, economically, and technologically.” Although he didn’t go into detail, Lake also portrayed America’s “financial” resources as “national security resources.”

Those resources were quickly put into action. As Clinton adviser James Steinberg said, “We succeeded in something that had been tried ­ever since the early seventies, which was bringing the economics into the heart of national ­security decision-­making.” Over the next few decades, the Clintonians and their successors would devise increasingly ingenious ways to put economics at the service of politics. They used America’s financial super-eminence to project political power abroad, imposing American aims without risking ­American lives.

The critics of neoliberalism recall the nineties as a time of idealistic, even naive commitment to economic cooperation. That criticism describes the peculiar American submissiveness toward China, but not much else. By the end of 1994, the Clinton administration had decided that Russia must be treated as a political competitor. “Neo-containment” was not mentioned publicly, but it was mentioned privately. Capitalizing on Moscow’s economic weakness, the Americans used their financial power to achieve their vision of enlargement; in this case, the NATO expansion that Mikhail Gorbachev had been assured in 1990 would not happen. “I think Russia can be bought off,” Clinton told Dutch prime minister Willem Kok in 1995. Under Clinton, the ­United States became Russia’s largest foreign investor. Ostensibly neutral international economic institutions were brazenly altered to serve American strategic ends. Seeing Boris Yeltsin as more moderate than the alternatives and fearing he might lose the 1996 election, the Clinton administration persuaded the IMF to give him a $10.2 billion loan, with few of the usual conditions. Yeltsin spent his way to victory.

These measures employed the carrots that American financial hegemony made possible. The sticks were even more inventive. When Yugoslavia fell apart in 1992, ethnic cleansing began, and the Serbians became the chief international pariah. In his last year in office, Bush Sr. had implemented several rounds of state-based sanctions. Clinton changed the paradigm, employing a public-private partnership that would become the norm. In April 1993 the U.S. began its first experiment with “smart sanctions.” The Clinton administration pioneered the move away from targeting states to targeting the individuals who governed the states, hitting their economic and social networks. Sanctions were imposed on Slobodan Milosevic and his entourage, freezing them out of the dollar-based international economy—effectively “unpersoning” them as economic agents. The objective was not just to try to change Milosevic’s behavior or signal moral disapproval of his actions, but also to undermine his popular support and his position as head of government. Smart sanctions looked like regime change on the cheap, changing the leadership of a national government without sponsoring bloody military operations.

The use of “smart sanctions” set a powerful precedent. Targeting individuals and their supporting institutions created new opportunities and fresh justifications for American policymakers to project influence around the world. As these uses of American financial power expanded, however, the liberal foundations of twentieth-century civilization crumbled.

Defenders of the old paradigm intuited that the new state-society partnerships could undermine the neutral reputation of America’s global economic leadership. Because of the dollarization of global finance, the credibility of the global financial system depended on international confidence in the impartiality of the United States Treasury. In the face of pressures from the American foreign-policy and security bureaucracy to act otherwise, Treasury bureaucrats tried to adhere to the liberal principle of state neutrality with respect to economic affairs. In the 1990s, the US intelligence community wanted Treasury to use its knowledge of the financial system to help disrupt the bank accounts of a terrorist organization then operating through Sudan. Treasury said no: The risk to America’s liberal credibility would be too great. The terrorist organization was al-Qaeda.

When George W. Bush entered office in 2001, he did so as a liberal. His signature initiative was supposed to be implementing capital and labor mobility across the whole continent. The summer 2001 Summit of the Americas drafted plans for expanding NAFTA, launching a “Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)” by 2005.

Bush may have dreamt of spreading liberalism more broadly than his father did. But his legacy is the opposite. Under his administration, the ­United States overturned the liberal financial system of impartial rules free of political manipulation. The apolitical neutrality of global finance slipped away. Financiers became willing instruments of U.S. foreign policy, reorienting themselves and their institutions to serve increasingly bellicose political objectives.

Globalization’s theorists often paint a picture of a global village, a decentralized community of relative equals. But globalization was always much more centralized and asymmetrical. Globalization is better understood as a hub-and-spokes arrangement, where emerging markets depend on established “hubs” to connect them to other markets. Because almost all transactions must pass through these hubs, they require the hubs’ approval. This is particularly true with respect to international finance. New York serves as the world’s most important financial hub, not just because of the size of its capital markets, but more importantly because the dominance of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, making access to the American financial system critical. The essential role of American financial institutions in the weal and woe of very nearly every major economic actor in the world confers on the United States government a vast power. Previous officials at the Department of Treasury grasped that power, but they shunned it in the name of liberalism. Under Bush, that would change.

Building on the Clintonian experiments in smart sanctions, some innovative officials working in Treasury agreed that traditional state-to-state policy coordination was inadequate to achieve the desired results. They discerned that private institutions, especially money-center banks, which financed and processed commercial interactions, could achieve the ends of state policy far more effectively than the traditional tools of statecraft. If private sector financial institutions cooperated with U.S. government agencies, great results could be achieved.

After September 11, 2001, the innovators were provided with a unique opportunity to put their proposals into action. To strike back at al-Qaeda, they banished the old liberal mentality and its hesitations about weaponizing the private economy. One of the innovators, Juan Zarate, said: “We realized that private-sector ­actors—most importantly, the banks—could drive the isolation of rogue entities more effectively than governments—based principally on their own interests and desires to avoid unnecessary business and reputational risk.” State actors started this process, but private actors did the essential work. “When governments appear to be isolating rogue financial actors, the banks will fall into line . . . Our campaigns leveraged the power of this kind of reputational risk.”

On September 23, two weeks after the attacks, Bush signed Executive Order 13224. “We’re putting banks and financial institutions around the world on notice,” he declared. “If you do business with terrorists, if you support or sponsor them, you will not do business with the United States of ­America.” The emergency executive order was broad. It enabled the targeting of financial supporters of terrorism, terrorist-owned companies or businesses, and those “associated” with them. Any bank that permitted dubious accounts or transactions to go through it risked having its American assets frozen by the U.S. government. In effect, it would be expelled from the U.S.-based international system, destroying its reputation as a trustworthy financial institution. The order created an atmosphere of ­liability for global financial institutions, just as civil rights laws had done for domestic corporations. A failure to be vigilant brought penalties. The purpose was to encourage banks to be proactive about assessing the risks associated with certain clients. The government was deputizing key players in the private economy to become its enforcers.

As its advocates anticipated, this approach to choking off funding for terrorist organizations was transformative. No bank wanted to get cut off from the U.S. banking system. Moreover, the Bush administration provided a legal framework that invigorated nongovernmental entities to target banks deemed insufficiently proactive. Banks were closely scrutinized for breaches of sanctions.

The Treasury also turned its attention to inducing international institutions to fight terrorist financing. Early on, the G7, IMF, and World Bank were brought into the sanctions regime. These measures, however, did not go far enough. To cripple al-Qaeda’s finances, the U.S. government needed information about bank-to-bank transfers. But this information is held in the databases of a private, obscure organization that serves as the switchboard for most of the world’s financial system: the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).

The U.S. had tried to get information from SWIFT in the past. Under Bush Sr., a team led by Robert Mueller tried to subpoena SWIFT’s messaging system. But they had no legal authority to do so. In accord with liberal principles, communications among market actors enjoy a presumptive right of privacy. The action produced no results. After 9/11, Treasury took a different approach. It simply asked SWIFT to cooperate and provide the U.S. government with access to its transactions. SWIFT’s CEO demurred. He stressed the organization’s need to remain apolitical and neutral. The system’s ­European clientele were particularly sensitive to invasions of privacy. But SWIFT and the U.S. government developed a workaround. In public SWIFT would proclaim its neutrality. In private it would collaborate, developing a clandestine program for sharing financial information with U.S. officials. To keep SWIFT on board, government officials had to concede to the organization a significant and ongoing role in the design and implementation of the program of monitoring all global transactions. This meant providing SWIFT with classified information about terrorist suspects and their supporting organizations. The public-private partnership became profound.

The Patriot Act provided the Treasury with another powerful tool. Section 311 gives the Treasury secretary the power to label an institution risky in view of suspected money-laundering. The vagueness was ideal for targeting financial institutions. The U.S. government did not need to freeze assets directly, something difficult to do when money-­laundering is only suspected, not proved. Private banks, by contrast, are not legally constrained in this way. They are free to cease doing business with whomever they choose. Section 311 provided a powerful incentive for banks to do exactly as the Treasury recommends, to offload any entity deemed an institutional risk.

New state-society partnerships, erected on a scaffold of post–9/11 legislation, executive orders, and secret SWIFT cooperation, enabled policy-makers in government to wage the wars that American soldiers couldn’t. Beginning in 2003, after the Bush administration had turned its attention to rogue regimes and had boots on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Treasury went much further. In the following years, banks in Syria, Belarus, Burma, and Ukraine would all be hit with the new publicly mandated, privately imposed sanctions. In 2005, a Section-311 action against a small bank in Macau that did business with North Korea, Banco Delta Asia (BDA), turned the institution into a financial pariah. By July 2006, even the Bank of China, concerned to protect its reputation, froze North Korean accounts related to BDA. The final years of the Bush administration saw similar tactics deployed against Iran. The U.S. cut dollarized transactions for Iranian oil out of New York; the European Union followed with similar actions designed for European banks.

In just a few years, the Treasury had moved beyond targeting terrorist suspects to going after financial institutions associated with national governments deemed enemies, to hitting the financial institutions of targeted governments themselves. The Bush administration marked the definitive end of the old liberal financial paradigm. The private sphere would never be the same. The tradition of bank secrecy has been a quiet but obvious casualty. Banks have changed the way they understand risk. Before, banks had given priority to client privacy. A bank that divulged information about its clients was deemed too risky to work with. How can you thrive in the marketplace when your competitors know all about your financial affairs? Now, banks were eager to expose their clients to scrutiny, at first only secretly in accord with demands by government officials, but soon also those of politically engaged organizations. This explains why “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) norms, or “socially responsible investing,” took off during the Bush years. The major banks that helped launch ESG described it as risk management, with risk now defined in political terms: national security, environmental responsibility, and social justice. By encouraging companies to expand their definition of risk, the Treasury accelerated these trends. Compliance with the law was not enough; the objective was to create and expand a new notion of good corporate citizenship. Incentives and liabilities were put in place to encourage the market itself to enforce the new consensus on what risk meant. Private actors might occasionally resist the politicization of economic life, but most often they accepted the new terms and promoted them as “good for business.”

The direction of financial means toward political ends could be accomplished only with the ­cooperation of banks and other private entities. Private actors in civil society did not oppose this cooperation. Rather than check the power of the state, as liberal theorists stipulate, the private sphere of global finance collaborated with the state. Far from limiting the state, private economic actors have enhanced its powers and extended its reach, all the while changing their own understanding of their mission, the requirements of corporate citizenship, and the contours of citizenship itself.

Barack Obama took the new paradigm further. When he made gay rights a cornerstone of American foreign policy, the strategy to ensure their spread relied on state-society partnerships. Hillary Clinton’s signature 2011 speech on gay rights promised to “support the work of civil society organizations working on these issues around the world.” Breaking from prior U.S. practice, these organizations could conceal the source of their funds, hiding their connection to the U.S. government in order to pretend that gay rights was a grassroots movement.

Contrary to his hawkish critics, Obama wasn’t fixed only on “soft power.” In 2011, American conservatives were mocking Obama for “leading from behind” in the Libyan campaign, criticizing his reluctance to use American troops. This criticism was myopic. His administration was setting aggressive new precedents. Using the state-society partnership the Treasury had pioneered, the U.S. froze $37 billion of Libyan assets—at the time, the largest sequestration of assets in history. It marked the first time these financial sanctions had been used with the explicit intention of toppling a government. In January 2012, the Obama administration decided to strangle Iran. It invoked Section 311 against the country’s entire banking sector, including its central bank. This was the first time the measure had been used against another country’s central bank. Soon after, SWIFT crossed a rubicon from neutrality to partisanship in international relations. It sanctioned an entire country, expelling Iranian banks from its system. The Obama administration pivoted to negotiate with Iran about its nuclear program, and the Iranians, under intense financial pressure, were willing to talk.

These years were the high point of sanctions diplomacy. It was far less visible and militaristic than the British Empire’s gunboat diplomacy, but it seemed just as effective. At one administration holiday party in 2011, the director of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sang “Every little thing we do is sanctions,” to the tune of The Police’s “Every little thing she does is magic.” The approach seemed invincible. With an array of state-society partnerships, the United States could get whatever it wanted.

In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea. Stunned, the U.S. leveled up its sanction regime, striking for the first time at a great power. The scale of what was required demanded close cooperation among U.S. agencies and across the European and American financial sectors. It was, to say the least, a messy moment. The Obama administration itself hesitated, troubled by the old liberal voice of conscience. Toward the end of his term, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew worried that the American politicization of the global financial system might turn more countries against it. Moreover, it was ­unclear whether sanctions were as effective as their enthusiasts thought. Though Russia’s economy weakened, this development probably had more to do with to the decline in oil prices. Russia certainly did not withdraw from Crimea.

From his use of tariffs to individual sanctions on International Criminal Court prosecutors ­going after American soldiers, Donald Trump’s foreign policy generated apoplectic commentary: He was destroying the liberal international order! Yet Trump did not invent these tools. His innovations were to use them extensively against China and bring the tools to bear as part of hard-edged diplomatic bargaining. Along the way, his administration was ready to treat hostile legal activists like corrupt oligarchs. That’s why more sophisticated critics of Trump didn’t reject the tools. They planned to use them better than he did.

After Biden was sworn in as president, his administration shelved a plan to overhaul sanctions policy. A consensus held that if the kinks of the past could be worked out, then the Americans and Europeans had all the weapons in place to launch a devastating financial first strike against their preferred targets. Planning began in the first year of the new administration, with Secretary Blinken’s State Department taking the lead. So by February 2022, just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine faltered, the arrangements were already in place. The strategic possibilities seemed limitless. Russia could be brought to its knees; Putin would follow in the ignominious footsteps of ­Milosevic and Gaddafi.

The execution of the strike was dazzling. The scale, especially the involvement of SWIFT and the targeting of Russia’s central bank, caught the Kremlin by surprise. It was ­Barbarossa for the twenty-­first century. Yet the first strike did not yield the promised results. Nor did the second, third, or fourth. Putin’s approval ratings soared, Russia’s industrial output increased, and its military continues to grind away at the Ukrainian army. Despite implementing nearly 6,000 sanctions in two-plus years, the euphoria of spring 2022 (let alone that of the holiday parties of 2011) is long gone. Although American policymakers have said again and again that they have mobilized a global coalition against Russia that has left the country isolated, that is not the case. The map of the countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia closely resembles the map of the countries that have legalized same-sex marriage. Economic warfare against Russia has exposed the limits of the global American empire.

Washington’s “geoeconomic,” sanctions-­driven strategy of “enlargement” failed, and the deep state knows it. In July, the Washington Post quoted a ­variety of active and former government officials who now criticize the excessive dependence on sanctions, including Obama’s deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes. The Post also revealed that the state–society partnership is faltering. The business world has overwhelmed the federal bureaucracy with inquiries about how to implement sanctions and against whom. Corporations are thus forced to make many national security–­related decisions themselves. And the crisis is not just operational. American officials now realize that no reasonable observer believes the American-­led global financial system is still neutral. As a consequence, many countries are building alternatives. In the long run, the rise of alternative financial markets and intermediaries threatens the dollar’s status as a reserve currency and thus the financial foundation of American power.

Does the failure of sanctions against Russia mean a return to the old liberal tradition of public-private separation? Evidence suggests that the answer is “no.” Rhodes sees the foreign-policy problem, but he doesn’t grasp the effects of these changes in the domestic realm. The fusion of political power with economic power seems likely to increase, and as the political friend-enemy lines get redrawn, the application will become more ruthless. In his speech for the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, George W. Bush declared:

We have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within. There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.

Whether the enemy is abroad or at home, whether they are al-Qaeda terrorists or domestic rioters, they are essentially the same, and must be confronted with the same security tools.

In February 2022, just before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, the Canadian government deployed the financial weapons of war against its own citizens. Canadians who had donated to the Truckers Convoy found themselves barred from accessing their bank accounts and savings. At least 76 bank accounts were frozen, assets totaling 3.2 million CAD. Many were aghast and placed the blame for “de-banking” on Canadian prime minister ­Justin Trudeau—guilty of a dictatorial misuse of the state of emergency, just like his father. But that is obsolete thinking. The measures the ­Canadian state invoked were successfully employed because they enjoyed the enthusiastic ­cooperation of Canadian banks. State and corporate goals had been fused together long before the 2022 Truckers Convoy. Like 9/11, Covid was an opportunity. It enabled states to perfect policies that they were experimenting with and which corporations were encouraging.

Actually existing postliberalism may have advanced furthest in Canada. Yet de-banking has become more and more common in the West. Tactics once employed against al-Qaeda are used against citizens deemed “children of the same foul spirit.” In 2022, the National Committee for Religious Freedom (NCRF) had its account with JP Morgan Chase closed. Chase said it might consider reopening it if NCRF divulged some of its donors’ names. Although Chase changed its story several times, the bank insists that it is complying with federal regulations on money laundering and terrorism. ­Fidelity Charitable has brought to bear similar pressures to break donor anonymity at the Alliance Defending Freedom. In June 2023, the UK bank Coutts and Co. suddenly closed Nigel Farage’s account. This decision was later exposed as politically motivated, as an internal dossier had concluded that Farage was “xenophobic and pandering to racists.” In the investigation that followed the scandal, the Financial Conduct Authority reports that UK banks are closing almost 1,000 accounts every day, a massive increase over prior years.

After the Farage de-banking scandal, British leftists observed that free speech isn’t the main issue; account closures disproportionately affect British Muslims. They have a point. De-banking is not new in Britain. It took off in 2014, when HSBC started shutting the accounts of well-known British Muslims without providing a reason. Just over a year before, in a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. government, HSBC had accepted internal monitoring to help the bank comply with money laundering and sanction laws.

Widely accepted changes in the domestic legal and financial order have banished liberal norms. As part of ever-­tightening anti-terrorist laws, governments require banks to monitor potential terrorist financing themselves. For banks, de-banking—the euphemism is “de-risking”—is necessary for responsible risk management and regulatory compliance, given present realities. Whether one strikes at conservatives, Muslims, those with ties to Brexit, or those with Russian names, there’s a pattern. Just as civil rights law allows corporations to enforce DEI ideology across the whole business world, so anti-terrorism law allows corporations to enforce political loyalty tests across the whole financial system. We are seeing in domestic life what has been happening at the global level since the 1990s. Civil society, especially its economic dimension, is being weaponized. Those who threaten the regime, or who give even the appearance of being the sort of person who might pose a threat, are at risk of being made non-persons.

As with so much in the era of actually existing postliberalism, the frankest description of its vision comes from Tony Blair. In 2006, then prime minister Blair said that the “traditional civil liberty arguments are not so much wrong, as just made for another age.” Soon after, his home secretary John Reid elaborated. The previous age—the postwar age—began in response to concerns about the threat the “fascist state” posed to individuals, Reid said. Today, the threat comes from “fascist individuals,” not fascist states. This new threat—that of bad actors among us—calls for a new state-society arrangement. “Effective security,” Reid argued, “now relies on the participation of a much wider range of ­actors—from governments and public bodies, to companies and people . . . networks of public and private organizations have a joint role in guaranteeing local, national and international security.” In short, liberalism was a product of the postwar moment. Its time has ended. After the conclusion of the Cold War, British elites traded on the glories of the postwar moment to purify the British people, removing the stains of xenophobia, ­Euroskepticism, and racism. But when pressed, these elites thought the postwar era offered little of lasting significance beyond antifascism. Indeed, according to the new Blairite standards, more enlightened Brits might come to conclude that the whole postwar era seemed like a rather dangerous time. How many fascist individuals had been walking about then? How much fan mail had Enoch Powell received? One shudders at the prospect. Better to trust Blair and his successors, all the way down to Keir Starmer, to lead us into a safer, purer age.

Some revolutionary epochs are beset by the illusion of change. As Alexis de Tocqueville saw, the architects of the French Revolution—the 1789ers—relied on the powerful tool of a centralized state and the freedom of action made possible by a hollowed-out civil society, both created by the old regime. By contrast, the epoch of actually existing postliberalism is beset by the illusion of continuity. Its architects—the 1989ers—came into positions of power and influence just as the Cold War was ending. They knew very little of the war itself and almost nothing of its beginning. But they justified their ambitious geopolitical projects by tracing a long line of continuity back through the Cold War to the Second World War. The West’s victories over communism, fascism, and racism could be stretched further and further afield, isolating and destroying “backward states” and “rogue actors.” On these terms, the ’89ers imagined that they were the next generation of defenders of a continuous liberal tradition. But their actions indicate otherwise. Their substantive vision of the good didn’t just run up against hard limits in the last few years. It devoured liberalism. The ’89ers reconfigured the whole international system away from the liberal principles they ostensibly cherished. In due course, the domestic sphere has been bent to this new order.

The central drama of the last three decades has been the fusion of state and society. The ’89ers ushered in actually existing postliberalism, a society in which governmental power, cultural power, and economic power are coordinated to buttress regime security and punish the impure. 1989 heralded not the triumph of liberalism but its downfall. However, many refuse to recognize—or cannot recognize—how profoundly the West has changed. Our task is to live in the world into which we are thrown, to see it accurately, and to push it in a better direction.

Nathan Pinkoski is research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy, Technology, and Politics.

Famous anarchist theorist, revolutionary and a renowned explorer of Siberia, Peter Kropotkin’s memoirs were published in 1898, written in Russian but originally printed in English in The Atlantic Monthly. They were later slightly revised and expanded, and this final version is what we currently have and which I have just read.

It is a very clearly and, I think, objectively written book. Kropotkin begins with his privileged childhood.  He was born into the house of Prince Kropotkin, one of the most influential aristocrats, close to the emperor, living in a palace in Saint Petersburg. Kropotkin tends to underplay the privileged environment into which he was born, but he does not deny it. The book then moves chronologically: his years at the elite page academy of the Court, decision not to go into the expected military service but to move to Siberia which he explored and about which he wrote several seminal geological and geographical treatises; and then onto the political activity, prison in Russia, escape to western Europe, forty years of life in exile… Since the book ends much before the October Revolution and even before the split between social-democratic and communist wings, these issues are obviously not treated. But the schism between the Marx-dominated faction of the First International and Bakunin’s anarchist faction is discussed. And attacks on state socialism, propagated by Engels and Marx (this was written before the codification of Marxism, so the two famous names are written in an unusual order) are sustained and frequent.  

Kropotkin returned to Russia after the October revolution. The role of anarchists in the Revolution was not negligible but their later fate was not pleasant. Kropotkin however was too old, and died in Moscow in 1921, just days before the Kronstadt rebellion. He was buried in Moscow and it was the last time that anarchists’ black flags were freely unfurled in the Soviet Union. Today, one of Moscow’s metro stations bears Kropotkin’s name.

Politically, the most interesting period treated in The Memoirs is the one after the Crimean War and emancipation of serfs in 1861. He writes about the contradictory nature of Alexander II who oscillated between being the Tsar—liberator and the Tsar—reactionary, and whose very death at the hands of Russian revolutionaries exhibited the conflicting strivings of his soul. Alexander was killed when, after the initial assassination attempt failed, he, alone among all, jumped out of his car to help the injured guard; that provided an easy target for the second assassin, and he did not miss.

Kropotkin’s descriptions of the revolutionary life in the Russia of the 1860s are hyper-realistic. But to the reader today, the entire Russian existence seems to be that of a land of wonders. The relationship between political offenses and punishments meted out is not only a product of arbitrariness (for which a nice Russian word proizvol’ exists) but the outcome of an almost infinite randomness.

To visualize it, assume that your political sin (emancipation of labor, printing of non-authorized literature, attendance of anti-government rallies, violent attacks on police, assassination of the dignitaries) is written on a piece of paper which is then put into an enormous machine that produces the sentence. The machine is geared to produce harsh sentences; sentences that are often written before the crime is committed. Next, let this piece of paper with your crime move to a second, attached, machine which is managed by a capricious God. That second machine revises the sentence; the sentence of exile can become one of being hanged, or, differently, of immediate freedom; it can lead you to a decade in jail or to be released and feted by liberal intelligentsia today. The first machine was described by Kafka in his Penal Colony (inspired by Dostoyevsky); the second is from Borges’ short story in which every individual passes through all possible positions in life, from a ruler to a homeless, entirety at the will of capricious gambling chance. Thus, the Russia of the 1860s, and perhaps the one of today, appears as a blend of Kafka and Borges. 

For a rational mind, it is very difficult to see not only how such punishments help the government, but not to notice that the capriciousness, randomness, and indeed sloppiness  with which punishments are executed become entirely counterproductive from the point of view of the rulers’ own interests.

Take Kropotkin’s case. He was followed by the secret police for “going to the people”, i.e., organizing lectures on socialism and anarchism among workers in St. Petersburg and several other cities in Russia. He would move from his home (probably dressed in the fineries), change into mud-stained boots, short coat (that we learn distinguished the workers from the rich), rough shirt, and move through dark St Petersburg alleyways until he reached a badly-lit warehouse where twenty or thirty workers and a couple of young intellectuals (camouflaged like Kropotkin in people’s attire) would meet to discuss George Berkeley, David Hume, Chernyshevsky, Jesus Christ and human freedom in general. Kropotkin was eventually arrested—but even that arrest had several unusual moments, including being foretold to the potential prey which led Kropotkin to hide and destroy all incriminating evidence; and where the arrest, perhaps because of his family background, needed a clearance from the top powers. Kropotkin is thrown into the infamous Peter and Paul Fortress, in a tiny cell (whose sketch is provided in the memoirs) where he is held for a year in solitary confinement: able to make eight paces only and to see a tiny piece of St Petersburg translucent Nordic-blue or entirely dark sky. But in such a room, he is, after a while, allowed to have his family send him food daily and is visited by the Grand Duke (the brother of the Emperor) who, according to Kropotkin, tries, through apparent amicability, to extract confession from him.

Kropotkin is afterwards, because of his loss of weight and general weakness, sent to a prison hospital that is so poorly guarded that he is able to plot his daring escape with a dozen of revolutionaries, some of whom are also in jail and others free. The plans are made and remade almost daily as if the plotters had access to the modern internet and were totally free to write and then revise various escape scenarios. Finally, in a rocambolesque way, Kropotkin escapes, and while the Klondike-like police chases him, he and his accomplices decide to spend the evening in the plushest restaurant of St Petersburg where police does not do razzias.

What was the crime for which he and his comrades, among whom women played an extraordinary important and brave role (as Kropotkin repeatedly mentions), were accused of? Creating a cultural revolution in the Russian countryside by telling the liberated but indebted peasants that they are no different from the nobles, that they have the right to a free life, and that they should rebel, burn the aristocratic estates and disobey the Emperor. The young educated people of St Petersburg and Moscow who went “to the people” (similar to those sent by Mao into the peasant communes a century later) numbered, according to Kropotkin, only some 3,000 individuals. They gave up all comforts of their previous lives. Many moved to villages, working there as ordinary journeymen or toiling the land, with the goal of bringing Russian peasants out of their millennial turpitude and teaching them how to be free. They, and again particularly so the women, did it with an unbelievable self-abnegation, dedication, courage and seriousness.  

They did not shy of “direct action”. While Kropotkin does not explicitly endorse assassinations, he underlines the reasons that lead to them. The line between the tyrannicide and terrorism was always thin. Kropotkin approves of the assassination of his own relative who was governor of Kharkov and enacted some harsh measures against the revolutionaries.

The West European part of the memoirs is interesting even if less exciting. It takes place after the suppression of the Paris Commune, in an atmosphere of police persecution, hangings, semi-legal printing presses, contraband of revolutionary tracts from Switzerland into France.  Kropotkin is most of the time, living (like Lenin later) in Switzerland, working on political agitation with the famous Association des Horlogers Jurassiens. He criticizes state socialism of German social-democrats whom he accuses of  aiming only at political power while disregarding moral transformation, indeed the cultural revolution, needed to save humankind.

Kropotkin’s ideas regarding the societal organization that would be built in concentric circles from the lowest to the highest level, would abolish the state, and organize production among the publicly-owned cooperatives that would not compete with each other but labor in free association and self-help looks irremediably naïve. It is not surprising that Marxists, and later Leninists, thought it was a fairy tale.

But perhaps that humans, at times, need visionaries, the selfless individuals who produce fairy tales and reading Kropotkin may be a way to try, at least for a moment, to believe in them. A young friend to whom I mentioned reading Kropotkin’s memoirs, and not expecting she would know of him, immediately replied: “We are reading him now to fight climate change and to help self-organization of society.”

The coverage of Israeli soldiers pushing three Palestinians off a roof in the West Bank town of Qabatiya – it's unclear whether the men are dead or near-dead – is being barely reported by the western media, even though it was videoed from at least three different angles and a reporter from the main US news agency Associated Press witnessed it.

AP reported on this incident some nine hours ago. Its news feed is accessed by all western establishment media, so they all know.

Yet again, the media has chosen to ignore Israeli war crimes, even when there is definitive proof that they occurred. (Or perhaps more accurately: even more so when there is definitive proof they occurred.)

Remember, that same media never fails to highlight – or simply makes up – any crime Palestinians are accused of, such as those non-existent "beheaded babies".

AP itself treats this latest atrocity in the West Bank as no big deal. It reports simply that it may be part of a "pattern of excessive force" by Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians.

That comment, without quote marks and ascribed to a human rights group, is almost certainly AP's preferred characterisation of the group's reference to a pattern not of "excessive force" but of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

AP makes sure to give Israel's pretext for why it is committing war crimes: "Israel says the raids are necessary to stamp out militancy."

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But it forgets yet again to mention why that "militancy" exists: because Israel has been violently enforcing an illegal military occupation of the Palestinian territories for many decades, in which it – once again illegally – has drafted in an army of settler militias to drive out the native Palestinian population.

AP also forgets to mention that, under international law, the Palestinians have every right to resist Israel's occupying soldiers, including "militantly".

Western governments might characterise Palestinians shooting at Israeli soldiers as "terrorism", but that's not how it is seen in the international law codes that western states drafted decades ago and that they claim to uphold.

It's also worth noting that the local Palestinian reporter who witnessed this crime had his report rewritten by "Julia Frankel, an Associated Press reporter in Jerusalem".

As is true with many other western outlets, AP copy is editorially overseen from Jerusalem, where its office is staffed mostly with Israeli Jews.

Western news outlets doubtless privately rationalise this to themselves as a wise precaution, making sure copy is "sensitive" to Israel's perspective and less likely to incur the wrath of the Israeli government and Israel lobby.

Which is precisely the problem. The bias in western reporting is baked in. It is designed not to upset Israel – in the midst of a "plausible genocide", according to the World Court – which means it's entirely skewed and completely untrustworthy.

It makes our media utterly complicit in Israel's war crimes, including when Israeli soldiers throw Palestinians off a roof.

UPDATE:

Very belatedly, the BBC has reported this atrocity on one of its news channels. Note, it adds an entirely unnecessary disclaimer that the footage hasn't been “independently verified” – whatever that means. There are now at least three separate videos, all taken from different angles, showing the same war crime. Even the Israeli military has confirmed the incident happened.

The BBC also assumes the three Palestinians are dead. There is absolutely no reason to make that assumption: it violates the most basic rules of reporting.

And the anchor, clearly nervous about how she should refer to the men being pushed off a roof, ends by observing that the footage is "another example of the tensions and the many fronts on which we see Israel fighting”. No, it’s another example of Israeli soldiers committing war crimes, and the media trying to deflect attention from that fact.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

“The situation there is more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.” This is how Khaled Mahajneh describes the Sde Teiman detention center as the first lawyer to visit the facility. More than 4,000 Palestinians whom Israel arrested in Gaza have been held at the military base in the Naqab/Negev since October 7; some of them have subsequently been released, but most remain in Israeli detention.

Mahajneh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, was initially approached by Al Araby TV, which was seeking information about Muhammad Arab, a reporter for the network who was arrested in March while covering the Israeli siege of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. “I contacted the Israeli army’s control center, and after providing them with a photo and an ID card of the detainee, as well as my official power of attorney document, I was informed that [Arab] was being held at Sde Teiman and that he could be visited.”

When Mahajneh arrived at the base on June 19, he was required to leave his car far away from the site, where an army jeep was waiting to transport him inside. This was “something I had never encountered on any previous visit to any prison,” he told +972. They drove for about 10 minutes through the facility — a sprawling network of trailers — before arriving at a large warehouse, which contained a trailer guarded by masked soldiers.

“They repeated that the visit would be limited to 45 minutes, and any action that may harm the security of the state, the camp, or the soldiers will lead to the immediate cessation of the visit. I still don’t understand what they meant,” Mahajneh said.

Soldiers dragged out the detained journalist with his arms and legs tied, while Mahajneh remained behind a barrier. After soldiers removed his blindfold, Arab rubbed his eyes for five minutes, unaccustomed to the bright light. “Where am I?” was the first question he asked Mahajneh. Most Palestinians at Sde Teiman do not even know where they are being held; with at least 35 detainees having died in unknown circumstances since the war began, many simply call it “the death camp.”

“I have been visiting political and security detainees and prisoners in Israeli jails for years, including since October 7,” Mahajneh noted. “I know that the conditions of detention have become much harsher, and that the prisoners are abused on a daily basis. But Sde Teiman was unlike anything I’ve seen or heard before.”

Khaled Mahajneh, a lawyer who visited Sde Teiman detention center. (Courtesy)

‘Even the courts are rife with hatred’

Mahajneh told +972 that Arab was nearly unrecognizable after 100 days in the detention facility; his face, hair, and skin color had changed, and he was covered with dirt and pigeon droppings. The journalist had not been given new clothes for nearly two months, and was only allowed to change his pants for the first time that day because of the lawyer’s visit.

According to Arab, detainees are continually blindfolded and tied up with their hands behind their backs, forced to sleep hunched over on the floor without any bedding. Their iron handcuffs are removed only during a weekly, minute-long shower. “But the prisoners began refusing to shower because they don’t have watches, and going beyond the allotted minute exposes prisoners to severe punishments, including hours outside in the heat or rain,” Mahajneh said.

All detainees, Mahajneh noted, face deteriorating health conditions due to the poor quality of the daily prison diet: a small amount of labaneh and a piece of cucumber or tomato. They also suffer from severe constipation, and for every 100 prisoners, only one roll of toilet paper is provided per day.

“The prisoners are prevented from talking to each other, even though more than 100 people are kept to a warehouse, some of them elderly and minors,” Mahajneh told +972. “They are not allowed to pray or even read the Qur’an.”

Arab also testified to his lawyer that Israeli guards sexually assaulted six prisoners with a stick in front of the other detainees after they had violated prison orders. “When he talked about rapes, I asked him, ‘Muhammad, you’re a journalist, are you sure about this?’” Mahajneh recounted. “But he said he saw it with his own eyes, and that what he was telling me was only a small part of what was happening there.”

Multiple media outlets, including CNN and the New York Times, have reported on instances of rape and sexual assault at Sde Teiman. In a video circulating on social media earlier this week, a Palestinian prisoner recently released from the detention camp said that he had personally witnessed multiple rapes, and cases in which Israeli soldiers made dogs sexually assault prisoners.

Muhammad Arab, a Palestinian journalist with Al Araby TV. (Courtesy)

In just the past month, according to Arab, several prisoners were killed during violent interrogations. Other detainees who had been wounded in Gaza were forced to have their limbs amputated or bullets removed from their bodies without anesthesia, and were treated by nursing students.

Legal defense teams and human rights organizations have been largely unable to counter these serious violations of prisoners’ rights at Sde Teiman, and most are prevented from even visiting the facility to prevent greater scrutiny. “The State Prosecutor’s Office said that this detention center was going to be closed after harsh criticisms, but nothing happened,” Mahajneh said. “Even the courts are rife with hatred and racism against the people of Gaza.”

Most of the detainees, Mahajneh noted, are not formally accused of belonging to any organization or participating in any military activity; Arab himself still doesn’t know why he was detained or when he may be released. Since arriving at Sde Teiman, soldiers from the Israeli army’s special units have interrogated Arab twice. After the first interrogation, he was informed that his detention had been extended indefinitely, based on “suspicion of affiliation to an organization whose identity was not disclosed to him.”

‘To take revenge on whom?’

In recent months, international media outlets have published several testimonies of released prisoners as well as doctors who worked at Sde Teiman. For Israeli doctor Dr. Yoel Donchin, who spoke to the New York Times, it was unclear why Israeli soldiers had detained many of the people he treated, some of whom were “highly unlikely to have been combatants involved in the war” based on pre-existing physical ailments or disabilities.

The Times also reported that doctors at the facility were instructed not to write their names on official documents or address each other by name in the presence of patients, for fear of being later identified and charged with war crimes at the International Criminal Court.

“They stripped them down of anything that resembles human beings,” one witness who worked as a medic at the facility’s makeshift hospital told CNN. “[The beatings] were not done to gather intelligence. They were done out of revenge,” another witness said. “It was punishment for what they [the Palestinians] did on October 7 and punishment for behavior in the camp.”

Members of the Keter unit, an Israeli prison service response unit, seen while detainees put their hands on their heads, at a prison in southern Israel, February 14, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

Since his visit to Sde Teiman, Mahajneh has felt deep frustration and anger — but above all, horror. “I have been in this profession for 15 years … I never expected to hear about rape of prisoners or humiliations like that. And all this is not for the purpose of interrogation — since most prisoners are only interrogated after many days of detention — but as an act of revenge. To take revenge on whom? They are all citizens, young people, adults, and children. There are no Hamas members in Sde Teiman because they are in the hands of the Shabas [Israeli Prison Service].”

In its response to queries for this article, the Israeli army stated: “The IDF rejects allegations of systematic ill-treatment of detainees, including through violence or torture … If necessary, military police investigations are opened when there is suspicion of unusual behavior justifying it.” The army denied Arab’s and Mahajneh’s accounts of deprivation, and insisted that detainees are provided with sufficient clothing and blankets, food and water (“three meals a day”), access to toilets and showers (“between 7 and 10 minutes”), and other amenities.

The army also added: “Since the beginning of the war, there have been deaths of detainees, including detainees who arrived wounded from the battlefield or in problematic medical conditions. Every death is investigated by the military police. At the end of the investigations, their findings will be forwarded to the Military Advocate General’s Office.”

Below Kanab Creek, Grand Canyon, 2003

A quick editorial note — lately, I’ve been referring to my work as ‘structural memetics’ — with the intent of expanding a concept of knowledge generation with memes along the same line as genetics — laying out general principles to follow about how humans generate knowledge. Much of this material has already been created on this blog, but I wanted to consolidate and summarize it in one place.

Bored, and seeking the never-ending references, I Googled up Melvin Conway, whose famous law serves as the backbone for most of my developed insights. Turns out he’s still alive — and on Twitter. So.. I tweeted back at him. And he responded, saying he’d take a look at my work.

Short version of a longer story — I hurried up with this post so he wouldn’t have to dig. I think it’s pretty complete. So, Mel — this one’s for you. Thanks for the origination thought. There’s a lot here. Check out the Topics Grouping/Readers Guide for the full extent of all of this. But these are the bones.

What is Structural Memetics? And Why Does it Matter?

As a scholar, I’ve spent my life studying things. Directly or indirectly, my profession (and the need to be a better teacher and designer – I’m a design engineering prof.) has fed my interest in reading all sorts of different types of information, or rather, knowledge. Internet resources like Wikipedia have made it possible as well for anyone to peruse any subject area. I love Wikipedia. Nowhere else on the Internet can you move so quickly between connected subject areas – or areas you might think are connected – with just a click.

But one of the interesting things I’ve noticed as I’ve gone about my escapades on Wikipedia, following philosophers, fighter aircraft, and military campaigns across the Asian steppes, is that there is precious little discussion on knowledge, or rather, the structure of knowledge, in any or all of it. There are isolated blips of understanding – things like Bloom’s Taxonomy are often used, for example, in educational work. People will allude to culture, literature, art, math or science.

It all sounds good enough – we’ve been raised to think in those terms, they satisfy, so we move on. But science, or culture, is a pretty big thing. None of it tells you how or whether you should believe it to be true. No one would argue that knowledge is created by groups of humans, though usually one gets the credit. But largely, most knowledge has no origin story that we’re aware of. We’re told someone is supposed to believe something because of ‘science’. Let’s stop a moment – I am a scientist, and I support the scientific method (whatever that is) in the face of a backdrop of blind faith. But with replicability crises happening across many different scientific enterprises – I’ve been immersed in the nutrition research lately, since I lost a lot of weight and been attempting to figure out how I got fat in the first place – it’s time to take a pause and realize that we have a very poor understanding of what knowledge is in the first place. Or what level of truth it actually represents.

People have more recently attempted to think of knowledge in terms of ‘memes’ – small fragments of information, typically with viral characteristics. There’s a relatively short, unhappy literature associated with the concept. Richard Dawkins is noted for coining the term, mapping it as an analog to a gene. And then he started using it to condemn religion for infectious, unaware acceptance of a veritable litany of concepts. The book Virus of the Mind, written by Richard Brodie, the inventor of Microsoft Word, and world champion poker player, maps the idea of memetics to ideas as infections. The idea of thoughts “going viral” has entered the vernacular of everyone with access to the Internet.

Not a very prosocial, nor hopeful understanding of how we think. Big thoughts get sidelined as anti-memetic and outside any understandable brain coding. Instead, the focus is on the pernicious exploitation of our lack of awareness. And if you ask most people what a meme is, they’ll likely tell you it’s a picture of Kermit the Frog, or a velociraptor, dressed up as a Philosoraptor, puzzling over life’s larger questions in some pithy text written on top of their face. Even one of the founders of meme-ology (for lack of a better term) Susan Blackmore, settled on defining a meme in the smallest unit of replicable information. If you were really mapping understanding to genes, why wouldn’t you want to understand the deeper patterns present in human, or generalized sentience? It’s more than a metaphor — information is information is information. There has to be larger patterns.

There have been exceptions to the ‘meme as a smallest unit of information’ club. Don Beck, of Spiral Dynamics fame, created the term ‘v-Meme’ to characterize value sets associated with different levels of societal development, which in turn map to social structures. But outside of this, work on memetics has essentially vanished. We’re left with Kermit the Frog, longing for a beer in the rain.

Why would such a promising idea – the idea that knowledge has replicable structure, with affinities vanish so quickly? The real problem is that we have no generalizable notion of how knowledge is created in the first place. The deeper reason below that level is what I’d characterize as a patently false belief — that we implicitly believe that knowledge is created by experts, and enshrined by culture – two things that we have little or no ability to challenge. And, for some reason, if the experts – people like Dawkins, and Blackmore, and a couple of others – say it’s game over, then we believe them. Give Don Beck credit – he knew better.

But there are problems when stringing more complex thoughts together. Namely, replicability problems, especially when all humans are considered to have the same neural hardware. We have convenient distinctions for how humans know. Most of these are involved with our educational system, granting degrees, and culture – all things outside an individual’s independent assessment. Others teach you – you don’t get to make decisions on truth yourself. Life experience, and the assimilation and synthesis of that experience into usable knowledge is only grudgingly accepted.

Enter Conway’s Law

One of the largest breakthrough thoughts on how humans construct knowledge came from a software pioneers – Melvin Conway. Conway is the inventor of many different types of software innovations, but his law is the thing relevant here. That is:

“organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”

What Conway stated was that design of a system (he was thinking about software) would map to the social system that created it. This idea has been empirically validated for software in a number of studies. But what is a design except an observable realization of knowledge? That led me to the notion of what I named the Intermediate Corollary.

Social Structure <=> Knowledge Structure <=> Design Structure

This fundamental principle opens up the door to a larger understanding of how we produce knowledge. And, as we’ll see, when combined with two things – Don Beck’s set of social structures, along with a deeper understanding of how people communicate, and importantly connect inside those knowledge structures – the synergy creates a new field that directly addresses the holes in memetics. We can now understand how knowledge itself is structured, in a transcultural fashion.

Let’s fill out the first category – Social Structure – first. Beck’s and Graves’ work on a generalized theory of human development, called Spiral Dynamics, outlined a set of eight social structures, relating to societal evolution, that are what we call a canonical set. A canonical set in this context is a set of social structures, each unique, with increasing complexity. Each of these individual social structures corresponds to what Beck originally called a value set. These value sets would cover the social dynamics inside a given social structure. For example, in an Authoritarian value set, the primary values in the value set would promote power and control. Status inside the pyramid would be the foremost driver of behaviors, and what the individuals in the stack would believe would directly be controlled by the individual above them in the pyramid. Legalistic hierarchies would, for example, be an evolution of an Authoritarian power structure, where rules would apply to individuals across the social system. The rules would vary dependent on rank or level, but the overall effect would be to remove the arbitrary nature of judgment of the individual that was above another in the hierarchical stack. Beck’s social structures are given by the diagram below.

One interesting point that needs to be made is to understand that for a given social structure, at a certain stage of evolution, lower value set social structures can be incorporated in a larger structure. A Tribe can have Survival bands affiliated inside it. An Authority-driven empire can be made up of tribes. And so on.

From Conway’s Law comes Knowledge Structures – “As we relate, so we think.”

Once we have a generic set of social structures, and understand the value sets inherent in creating these, we can map these to known knowledge structures humans historically have used. These are characterized by the dominant relational modes in each social structure, that sets the stage for the type of knowledge each must have mastery of to execute social function. As with the above social structures, as knowledge structures build, they incorporate lower level structures into higher level structures.

These are:

• Survival Band -> fragmented knowledge pieces, both temporally and spatially ephemeral.
• Tribal Order -> long-term origination myths that create shared identity.
• Authoritarian/Exploitative Empire -> knowledge fragments, whose truth is established by the authority of the person above another in the pyramid.
• Hierarchical Authority Structure/Legalistic Hierarchy -> rules and algorithms, coupled with the ability to feed information into rules and obtained transformed values.
• Strategic Enterprise/Performance-Goal-Based Organizations -> heuristics, incorporating lower-level knowledge structures, that rely on the independent decision-making ability of individuals (agency) to create coordination to reach goals.
• Communitarian/Social Network/People Driven Systems -> multiple, combined heuristics from different data sources, blended to recognize appropriate differences, along with maintaining larger system coherence.
• Systemic Flow/Process Oriented Second Tier Systems -> the first of what are known as ‘Second Tier’ systems, consisting of a larger leap of self-awareness, knowledge structures at this level and above consist of pruned heuristics, sculpted for balance of larger combined goals, with an awareness of individual bias in desired outcomes.
• Holistic Organism/Global Holistic Social Structures ->larger complex systems of combined heuristics, integrated with the surrounding ecosystem, giving rise to emergent, complex, and likely fractal knowledge systems.

The Role of Empathy in Social Structures, Leading to Synergy in Knowledge Structures

The role of evolving empathy is poorly understood in the dynamics of societal evolution, and as a consequence, its effects on complexity of knowledge. In fact, the very existence, outside this blog and a handful of other like-minded souls, seems to be ignored or discounted entirely.

Why this is so is likely due to the fact that the organizations we have tasked with creating greater understanding – our modern academic systems – are organized largely around low-empathy, authority-driven hierarchies. In an authority-driven hierarchy, it really doesn’t matter much who you are, or what you contribute. What matters is what you are, or rather your position in the hierarchical stack. You will be treated as your function demands you be treated, with little accommodation on how you might feel about that treatment. And these systems, by their very nature, create highly fragmented, disconnected understandings of most phenomena. The emphasis is typically on smaller and smaller fragmented units – be it units of matter, or subdivisions of ethnic classes.

Connection to your emotions, or your thoughts themselves is irrelevant. The dark insight that comes from this is that academics studying empathy are about the same as colorblind people studying color. They just can’t see what the big deal is – especially the connecting, synergizing nature of this deeply sentient phenomenon.

There are signs that the neuroscience is slowly waking up to this fact. In Prof. Matt Lieberman’s book, Social,(Lieberman is a professor of social neuroscience at UCLA) he says “In essence, our brains are built to think about the social world and our place in it.” This means that empathy, or more exactly, the level of development of empathy as the primary connecting function of our brains, actually creates the social structures, which are realizations of patterns of different level of human connection. As well as how we think about everything else. Our social relations, structured by our empathetic development, lay down the core memetic patterns in our brains, which then happen to get used for how we think about everything else.

As we move up the social structures, necessarily we also have to move up the empathy scale. Frans de Waal, the famous primate behavioralist, has split empathy up into levels, bottom to top, that map onto the three primary areas of the brain – the basal ganglia/automatic function part, the limbic/emotional part, and the prefrontal cortex/thinking and detailed processing part. Using simple language, that means empathy contains physiological, emotional, and cognitive functions. And similar (or rather, self-similar) to social structures, as well as knowledge structures, these empathetic functions incorporate lower level functions into higher level ones.

These empathetic functions also, to the degree they are developed, also calibrate time scales and spatial scales inside the brain. Automatic, physiological responses of empathy, like direct mirroring, are instantaneous. Emotional empathy and connecting to others’ joys and sorrows takes a little longer, and finally developed cognitive empathy allows more complex processing of consequences, as well as dramatically increased time and spatial scales.

These map into knowledge structures, with little overlap. Most importantly, when it comes to structural memetics, empathy is the primary factor in how fragmented, as well as coherent and synergistic, the knowledge produced by a given social structure is. The greater the empathy any given set of individuals possess, the more opportunity and dynamic to mix the individual knowledge of two people attempting to come to an agreement.

Practicing empathy is also dictated by a given social structure. If you’re the boss in an Authoritarian system, reading someone’s face as a data stream doesn’t mean much unless you’re trying to figure out if they’re going to kill you, and they damn well better do what you tell them anyway. But for a Communitarian, you’re likely attempting to achieve group harmony amongst a diverse range of individuals. You’d better pay attention to all those different facial gestures. So just as personal empathetic development matters, so also does the social structure that a pair of individuals are plopped into. You can take two highly evolved individuals and place them in a low empathy social structure, and while they’ll likely do better than people who haven’t climbed the ladder, the odds are that they may never even meet each other — because that’s just the way the social system works!

These two empathetic factors – personal development, as well as social structure — bleed over into the knowledge structures, making them more and more data- and independent circumstance-dependent as one moves up the ladder. At the Survival level, your data structures are where the watering hole is, or who brought donuts to the office. Mirroring behaviors of your co-workers as they drool might be all you need to know you want some of that sugary goodness. But higher level knowledge structures require more practice of empathy, and its twin, self-empathy. How can you choose paths in a given design heuristic if you don’t believe that an individual has a right to choose?

All this leads to a master diagram, which knits together the basic principles of structural memetics. Here it is below:

and then the final step, mapping the Value Set levels to Knowledge Structures, is below.

Implications

Social structures and personal development of empathy essentially create the brain that is receptive to more complex knowledge structures. This allows us to move our understanding of memes solely out of the world of Kermit the Frog longing for a cold one, and into an understanding of how communities of people can transmit complex knowledge from one person to another relatively quickly. There is no cultural hook required. Donald Trump and Kim Jung Oon merely have to be participating in a duplicate version of the same social structure to “grok” the other’s understandings. Because just like genes, memes can lock in complex sequences.

This leads us to the beginnings of a new field – structural memetics. And while there is much room for development, the beginnings are here. Because as we relate, so we think. And that means, with a combination of insights from Conway’s Law, social neuroscience, and Spiral Dynamics, we can directly lift the structural memetic patterns of knowledge from the social structures and networks sitting in front of us. No microscope required.