Great essay, many thanks. I found myself thinking "this guy is a genius, he agrees with me..."
The implications of the analysis though are more intertesting and more speculative. In essence you are arguning that it will take a generation or more to shift [Western nations, or at least Western European nations] to a place where they can meaningfully engage in Realpolitik backed by credible kinetic power. That in itself has all sorts of risks and dangers. And my take also presupposes maybe that anyone who deems this a bad thing, will not seek to undermine any attempts to rebuild a military and MIC. Which they will. My initial view (after a decent lunch) is that WMD will come more into play, if only because that is the only credible counter-threat. Back to the early 1950's?
The broader implications in a non-polar world are even more interesting, and less easy to forecast with any sense of certainty. The "End of History" indeed, hubris is always followed by nemesis. I think I will live long enough to see this all unfold, but not have to endure the consequences. Thank God.
Great stuff up until the end. Why did he have to bring up his COVID beliefs? He knows it's divisive here in the comments.
I just wish he'd extend his usually critical eye to the medical industry. They are as profit-motivated/financialized/dominated by oligarchs as every other industry, and you simply cannot trust their "consensus-based" conclusions.
From the perspective of Zelenskii and crew, what matters is providing any narrative that keeps that sweet western cash flowing, since the easiest way to make money is to be close to the source of new money, and the only wealth creation in Ukraine is western largesse.
For that matter, this suits western arms manufacturers and politicians just dandy, even if they don't quite directly benefit from the outrageous and cynical corruption that they turn a blind eye to in Ukraine.
Here in Finland the politicians, and especially the president, run on cold war fumes - wanting to be now as tightly "west" as we were precariously impartial/finlandized before. Some atavistic fear, of course, being a small country next to a big and resourceful country. But having an aggressive stance towards Russia from position of weakness, like Finland and Estonia have chosen to do, is utterly reckless and verges on madness. Maybe the element of madness makes the current situation so difficult to understand, and so blood-curdlingly dangerous.
For years now in a much shorter form in comments to the "New York Times" and the "Wall Street Journal" I have made arguments as to how our military armaments are overpriced, under performing and lastly too difficult to maintain in a battlefield environment. Fellow commentators mostly wave their hands and rhetorically shrug their shoulders.
Too, what I have noticed evolve in my long (thankfully!) life is the lack of social cohesion that was present in the U.S. during WWII. During my childhood which started in 1953 it was hard to meet a schoolmate's father or mother who did not serve in either the armed forces or work in a war related factory. I was a middle class kid who attended a rather posh private school.
John Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." is not a line that can possibly resonate today. Frankly, JFK's own cohorts were walking away from such sentiment. Money, lots and lots of money, became the preoccupation and frankly the occupation of our educated classes.
For me, the overhanging anvil of climate crises and a stubbornly circulating pandemic make our foreign strategy of secondary importance. But our overlords screw up everything other than self enrichment.
The financialization of industry (why produce more when you can simply take on more cheap debt and buy back shares which were granted to upper management as bonus?), the parasitization of institutions by ideological operatives, and the corruption of social stability with massive influx of hostile immigrants, all point to a final decline.
After reading this I took a look at when GDP became the primary economic measure; developed in 1934 and adopted post Bretton Woods in 1944.
Perhaps the success of this abstraction has something to answer for too. It's never a great idea to collapse something complex down to a single number, or even a few numbers, however this is how things have drifted. The loss of focus on underlying components of an economy - and inability to distinguish between what is produced and the price paid for it - has enabled the hollowing out.
For example, at the onset of the war there were many statements to the effect "we're not afraid of an economy the size of Texas/ Italy". It's the kind of comment that shines a light on the PMC's mental model of the world. If people even want to start comprehending what a war economy is (which we haven't really seen since 1945 in the west), we probably first need to begin by understanding and measuring the economy from an utterly different starting point.
An American here. Not from the higher population density coastal areas, but I've been there and have family on both coasts and after working all over the lower 48 and some of Canada? I've some clues about the several regional "cultural variations".
Why yes, I front ran the concepts that the "post historical" unconstrained neoliberal/neocon bullshit&fuckery were A: Destroying whatever had made this place more than the mere sum of the real estate our polyglot empire sits on; and B: destructive to our REAL economies, no matter how good the phantom money consisting of 1s and 0s piling up in billionaire bank accounts & Blackrock et alia computer servers looked to managers handling all that filthy lucre for the (less capable) descendants of the robber barons who originally stole the seeds of those fortunes.
I'm pretty sure smarter people than I among management were WAY ahead of me in forming policies to deal with that.
"The more things change, the more they stay the same"
If one looks back to the late WWI days when the German Empire sent certain future leadership cadres of the Bolsheviks back to Russia via rail?
And then considers all the financial help some famous USA ur-oligarchs quietly gave those Bollsheviks to ensure they ended up in charge? And after that, the massive technology and precision machine tool transfers they provided from the 1920s right up to the opening shots of WWII to build the ex Russian Empire up into a credible persistent threat?
And further, consider that USA/NATO kept right on doing that kind of surreptitious enhancement of Soviet military capabilities right through the most backbiting and bitchy era of anti communist public rhetoric the NYT/WaPo/AP + their various journalistic camp followers and catamites could inspire?
One need hardly comment on the technology transfer to PRC & the massive infrastructure build out financed by the West after Nixon broke the ice with them.
Then we arrive at this decade, where the USA and Russian Federation/China are posturing, threatening and QUIETLY STILL TRADING WHAT APPEAR TO BE STRATEGIC MATERIALS AND EXCHANGING INFORMATION RE: VITAL NEW TECHNOLOGIES.
"The more things change, the more they stay the same"
Actual top managers of USA, post USSR Russian Federation and China found they ALL had some common problem: Too much peace + destructive oligarchies without any cultural restraints to stop them eating everything or enough natural predators to keep their populations in check. I do believe some crafty hands on managers longed for the good old days of nice, stable MAD...
Russia certainly tamped down on their oligarchs, made examples of several who apparently would not come to heel via flying lessons off tall buildings & etc.. Then the USA helpfully froze their exported wealth, impounded their yachts and such to help with realigning the survivor's priorities towards the motherland? Gee, what were the odds, USA is CONSISTENTLY strengthening the Russian Federation's civil rulers and economy! How ever does THAT kind of miscalculation keep happening???
China has exiled, imprisoned or just shot several "difficult" mega rich fuckers as well. And seems to be well into re-educating the masses in valuing certain traditional mores and pieties over personal profits at any & all costs? USA is helping that realigning out too, nothing like an external threat to consolidate the masses. So let's threaten them over Taiwan some more and say ridiculously rude things about their top leadership while they are visiting us as guests!
USA is doing our "less lethal" equivalent of oligarch hazing, anti trust & related lawfare are proceeding now against some prime targets. Once they conduct the show trials, break up Alphabet (and make some nouveau riche tech billionaires do perp walks?), the rest of those fractious self centered bastards might fall back into some kind of line instead of insisting on wagging the whole damn dog?
"The more things change, the more they stay the same"
Let's just all try to get through the era of realigning the great powers to our "traditional values" of miming being at (cold) war with each other, ideally with a minimum of dead people? Harm reduction is the best I'm hoping for at this time, we're running short on Skittles and the unicorns have gone extinct.
Thank you for your analysis of the moment. The assumptions that have led the US, the West, to the present predicament have long been visible if only through a glass darkly. I would like to think I have seen a bit more clearly. "The era of big wars is over." Perhaps not an exact quotation, but certainly the sentiment is spot on. I fully expected military service and did serve circa 1960. My son had to be talked into registering for the by then non-existent draft. My grandson to my knowledge has not registered for the still non-existent draft. He cannot imagine being required to perform military service, or being required to do anything not of his choice. And he is not a bad young man at all. He is very much of this post-modern generation and era.
Look back and see the enormous effort it required to transport US forces to the battle fronts of World War II, not the least being to neutralize or at least overwhelm with sheer quantity the submarine threat in the Atlantic and distance in the Pacific, before a shot was fired on land. That is flatly impossible today. The US has not the capability. The two continental powers we insist on irritating have the means to attrit, to severely attrit, any attempts to do so. This brushes aside the industrial, engineering, and workforce requirements and closes its eyes to the inability to recruit the people.
I recall losing myself in day dreams when I was young. All difficulties were dismissed as trivial or melted away before my awesome powers. That works wonders in fantasy land. How on earth did the US saddle itself with a cohort of politicians, military leaders, and "masters of the universe" who are so uniformly detached from reality, who live in the equivalent of my boyhood daydreams?
I think, I fear, that it will take some catastrophe, not necessarily military, to sweep these fantasists away, to render them irrelevant. And so, chin deep in the Big Muddy, we can learn to swim or drown.
"The more so, because politics is now explicitly divisive, pitting real and constructed groups against each other to gain power. I’m not sure that the vocabulary and the set of concepts intended to rally an entire society even exists any more."
I can think of one such "vocabulary and set of concepts", but that's another topic.
"Seeking good relations with Russia from a position of relative weakness was one possible strategy. Hostility towards Russia from a position of relative strength was another. But hostility towards Russia from a position of relative weakness was just stupid."
Yes, accepting to antagonise Russia as it gets the strongest army on the continent and was its strategical depth is probably Western Europe biggest and stupidest mistake at the beginning of this 21st century.
Great essay, many thanks. I found myself thinking "this guy is a genius, he agrees with me..."
The implications of the analysis though are more intertesting and more speculative. In essence you are arguning that it will take a generation or more to shift [Western nations, or at least Western European nations] to a place where they can meaningfully engage in Realpolitik backed by credible kinetic power. That in itself has all sorts of risks and dangers. And my take also presupposes maybe that anyone who deems this a bad thing, will not seek to undermine any attempts to rebuild a military and MIC. Which they will. My initial view (after a decent lunch) is that WMD will come more into play, if only because that is the only credible counter-threat. Back to the early 1950's?
The broader implications in a non-polar world are even more interesting, and less easy to forecast with any sense of certainty. The "End of History" indeed, hubris is always followed by nemesis. I think I will live long enough to see this all unfold, but not have to endure the consequences. Thank God.
Thank you Aurelien🙏
Great stuff up until the end. Why did he have to bring up his COVID beliefs? He knows it's divisive here in the comments.
I just wish he'd extend his usually critical eye to the medical industry. They are as profit-motivated/financialized/dominated by oligarchs as every other industry, and you simply cannot trust their "consensus-based" conclusions.
"as though it, and not Russia, was the weaker party".
I think you meant "as though Russia, and not it, was the weaker party"
From the perspective of Zelenskii and crew, what matters is providing any narrative that keeps that sweet western cash flowing, since the easiest way to make money is to be close to the source of new money, and the only wealth creation in Ukraine is western largesse.
For that matter, this suits western arms manufacturers and politicians just dandy, even if they don't quite directly benefit from the outrageous and cynical corruption that they turn a blind eye to in Ukraine.
Thank you for this sobriety!
Here in Finland the politicians, and especially the president, run on cold war fumes - wanting to be now as tightly "west" as we were precariously impartial/finlandized before. Some atavistic fear, of course, being a small country next to a big and resourceful country. But having an aggressive stance towards Russia from position of weakness, like Finland and Estonia have chosen to do, is utterly reckless and verges on madness. Maybe the element of madness makes the current situation so difficult to understand, and so blood-curdlingly dangerous.
For years now in a much shorter form in comments to the "New York Times" and the "Wall Street Journal" I have made arguments as to how our military armaments are overpriced, under performing and lastly too difficult to maintain in a battlefield environment. Fellow commentators mostly wave their hands and rhetorically shrug their shoulders.
Too, what I have noticed evolve in my long (thankfully!) life is the lack of social cohesion that was present in the U.S. during WWII. During my childhood which started in 1953 it was hard to meet a schoolmate's father or mother who did not serve in either the armed forces or work in a war related factory. I was a middle class kid who attended a rather posh private school.
John Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." is not a line that can possibly resonate today. Frankly, JFK's own cohorts were walking away from such sentiment. Money, lots and lots of money, became the preoccupation and frankly the occupation of our educated classes.
For me, the overhanging anvil of climate crises and a stubbornly circulating pandemic make our foreign strategy of secondary importance. But our overlords screw up everything other than self enrichment.
Ok, now I REALLY want to read what you have to say wrt the third possible outcome!
Excellent article, as usual, sir.
The financialization of industry (why produce more when you can simply take on more cheap debt and buy back shares which were granted to upper management as bonus?), the parasitization of institutions by ideological operatives, and the corruption of social stability with massive influx of hostile immigrants, all point to a final decline.
After reading this I took a look at when GDP became the primary economic measure; developed in 1934 and adopted post Bretton Woods in 1944.
Perhaps the success of this abstraction has something to answer for too. It's never a great idea to collapse something complex down to a single number, or even a few numbers, however this is how things have drifted. The loss of focus on underlying components of an economy - and inability to distinguish between what is produced and the price paid for it - has enabled the hollowing out.
For example, at the onset of the war there were many statements to the effect "we're not afraid of an economy the size of Texas/ Italy". It's the kind of comment that shines a light on the PMC's mental model of the world. If people even want to start comprehending what a war economy is (which we haven't really seen since 1945 in the west), we probably first need to begin by understanding and measuring the economy from an utterly different starting point.
An American here. Not from the higher population density coastal areas, but I've been there and have family on both coasts and after working all over the lower 48 and some of Canada? I've some clues about the several regional "cultural variations".
Why yes, I front ran the concepts that the "post historical" unconstrained neoliberal/neocon bullshit&fuckery were A: Destroying whatever had made this place more than the mere sum of the real estate our polyglot empire sits on; and B: destructive to our REAL economies, no matter how good the phantom money consisting of 1s and 0s piling up in billionaire bank accounts & Blackrock et alia computer servers looked to managers handling all that filthy lucre for the (less capable) descendants of the robber barons who originally stole the seeds of those fortunes.
I'm pretty sure smarter people than I among management were WAY ahead of me in forming policies to deal with that.
"The more things change, the more they stay the same"
If one looks back to the late WWI days when the German Empire sent certain future leadership cadres of the Bolsheviks back to Russia via rail?
And then considers all the financial help some famous USA ur-oligarchs quietly gave those Bollsheviks to ensure they ended up in charge? And after that, the massive technology and precision machine tool transfers they provided from the 1920s right up to the opening shots of WWII to build the ex Russian Empire up into a credible persistent threat?
And further, consider that USA/NATO kept right on doing that kind of surreptitious enhancement of Soviet military capabilities right through the most backbiting and bitchy era of anti communist public rhetoric the NYT/WaPo/AP + their various journalistic camp followers and catamites could inspire?
One need hardly comment on the technology transfer to PRC & the massive infrastructure build out financed by the West after Nixon broke the ice with them.
Then we arrive at this decade, where the USA and Russian Federation/China are posturing, threatening and QUIETLY STILL TRADING WHAT APPEAR TO BE STRATEGIC MATERIALS AND EXCHANGING INFORMATION RE: VITAL NEW TECHNOLOGIES.
"The more things change, the more they stay the same"
Actual top managers of USA, post USSR Russian Federation and China found they ALL had some common problem: Too much peace + destructive oligarchies without any cultural restraints to stop them eating everything or enough natural predators to keep their populations in check. I do believe some crafty hands on managers longed for the good old days of nice, stable MAD...
Russia certainly tamped down on their oligarchs, made examples of several who apparently would not come to heel via flying lessons off tall buildings & etc.. Then the USA helpfully froze their exported wealth, impounded their yachts and such to help with realigning the survivor's priorities towards the motherland? Gee, what were the odds, USA is CONSISTENTLY strengthening the Russian Federation's civil rulers and economy! How ever does THAT kind of miscalculation keep happening???
China has exiled, imprisoned or just shot several "difficult" mega rich fuckers as well. And seems to be well into re-educating the masses in valuing certain traditional mores and pieties over personal profits at any & all costs? USA is helping that realigning out too, nothing like an external threat to consolidate the masses. So let's threaten them over Taiwan some more and say ridiculously rude things about their top leadership while they are visiting us as guests!
USA is doing our "less lethal" equivalent of oligarch hazing, anti trust & related lawfare are proceeding now against some prime targets. Once they conduct the show trials, break up Alphabet (and make some nouveau riche tech billionaires do perp walks?), the rest of those fractious self centered bastards might fall back into some kind of line instead of insisting on wagging the whole damn dog?
"The more things change, the more they stay the same"
Let's just all try to get through the era of realigning the great powers to our "traditional values" of miming being at (cold) war with each other, ideally with a minimum of dead people? Harm reduction is the best I'm hoping for at this time, we're running short on Skittles and the unicorns have gone extinct.
"Nobody is going to die for the Eurovision Song Contest."
Douze Points!
Thank you for your analysis of the moment. The assumptions that have led the US, the West, to the present predicament have long been visible if only through a glass darkly. I would like to think I have seen a bit more clearly. "The era of big wars is over." Perhaps not an exact quotation, but certainly the sentiment is spot on. I fully expected military service and did serve circa 1960. My son had to be talked into registering for the by then non-existent draft. My grandson to my knowledge has not registered for the still non-existent draft. He cannot imagine being required to perform military service, or being required to do anything not of his choice. And he is not a bad young man at all. He is very much of this post-modern generation and era.
Look back and see the enormous effort it required to transport US forces to the battle fronts of World War II, not the least being to neutralize or at least overwhelm with sheer quantity the submarine threat in the Atlantic and distance in the Pacific, before a shot was fired on land. That is flatly impossible today. The US has not the capability. The two continental powers we insist on irritating have the means to attrit, to severely attrit, any attempts to do so. This brushes aside the industrial, engineering, and workforce requirements and closes its eyes to the inability to recruit the people.
I recall losing myself in day dreams when I was young. All difficulties were dismissed as trivial or melted away before my awesome powers. That works wonders in fantasy land. How on earth did the US saddle itself with a cohort of politicians, military leaders, and "masters of the universe" who are so uniformly detached from reality, who live in the equivalent of my boyhood daydreams?
I think, I fear, that it will take some catastrophe, not necessarily military, to sweep these fantasists away, to render them irrelevant. And so, chin deep in the Big Muddy, we can learn to swim or drown.
Good article. Thanks, Aurelian.
"The more so, because politics is now explicitly divisive, pitting real and constructed groups against each other to gain power. I’m not sure that the vocabulary and the set of concepts intended to rally an entire society even exists any more."
I can think of one such "vocabulary and set of concepts", but that's another topic.
In which the West, to its dismay, discovers that its spreadsheets no longer match the molecules.
C’est dommage …
"Seeking good relations with Russia from a position of relative weakness was one possible strategy. Hostility towards Russia from a position of relative strength was another. But hostility towards Russia from a position of relative weakness was just stupid."
Yes, accepting to antagonise Russia as it gets the strongest army on the continent and was its strategical depth is probably Western Europe biggest and stupidest mistake at the beginning of this 21st century.
And, yes, it should have been avoidable...