I agree that the world is a conservative place where radical shifts take some time to occur. But I would really take the decay of western powers a little more serious than you.
I think George Modelski and William R. Thompson were right in their book Leading sectors and world powers. They think that
- Political hegemony cannot be achieved without developing and controlling the most powerful technology of its time. Song China invented and harnessed paper and printing and revolutionised the dissemination of information; it invented and harnessed rudders and compasses and revolutionised transport technology; it invented and harnessed cast iron which cheapened the manufacture of metal objects; it invented and harnessed firearms and revolutionised and cheapened defence. Portugal developed ocean-going ships and an administrative system to keep them running. Holland revolutionised shipbuilding and developed the stock exchange to attract unlimited credit. England invented and exploited mechanical machinery in the textile industry, plus steam engines and railways. The US developed mass production of steel, cars, aeroplanes and consumer electronics plus companies big enough to do this. But today, China seems the most innovative power, with about half the world's patents every year.
- It is also not possible to have very stable political power – hegemony – without having something to offer other states. It has to be worthwhile for others to let the hegemonic power decide. Either in money or security. Something the United States was able to do after the Second World War, for example through the Marshall Plan, but now seems unable to do.
- Every hegemonic power comes to an end. After a while, its rulers tend to become attached to old, once successful, solutions to old problems. That is, they get stuck in old technologies, old organisational models and old ideas. Moreover – though Modelski and Thompson do not mention this – its capitalists eventually tire of complicated production and settle for managing (speculating in) money, or land. The time they did so in this case can be rather exactly pinpointed – about 1975-2000 (even if a few like RCA made a jump-start in 1968). Normally, hegemonies tend to last between a hundred and a couple of hundred years. Then new hegemonic powers emerge, based on even newer technologies and different organisational models.
In this light, it now looks like the US has its future behind it.
Modelski and Thompson, supported by many other observers, argue that the leading technology today is microelectronics. When the book was written, the US position there was strong. But it has eroded significantly; of the two companies that led the industry in 1996, Intel has faded and companies from East Asia, such as Samsung and TSM, have emerged in their place.
Nor does the US have much to offer other states. Getting the protection of the US nuclear umbrella now seems to mean economic ruin. Having currency denominated in dollars seems to put you at risk of being looted, and borrowing money denominated in dollars does too. Indeed, most states now seem to want to break away from dependence on a superpower and take a more independent stance.
Sure, it will take some time. But the BRICS+ have decided to build another, or a parallel financial structure for the world, and in some years' time it will probably be there. And losing one's financial monopoly is the last nail in the coffin, as Amsterdam once discovered.
US "nuclear umbrella" doesn't offer any protection. It just tells those under the umbrella, maybe, that they will be nuked in the next 30 min or so, rather than suddenly.
I’ve often vehemently disagreed with Jan but this is a strong comment. There is some pushback (the US is highly innovative) but the political paralysis and weaponisation of the US dollar will do more than anything to speed-up the desire to create payments and trade systems excluding the US and US dominance.
And not a single word about BRICS, which has been holding its summit, with new monetary plans being set, even as we read this article? BRICS has added several new members, and candidate members, some of which have long been at odds with one another. Seems pertinent to, yet missing from, this discussion.
"But what we can say, on the other hand, is that after several decades of preparation, certain elements of a future war in Europe were effectively fixed. It would be a war of alliances, since these already existed. It would be a war involving massive forces, because all continental European powers had instituted military service. It would be a war of massive artillery bombardments because the guns and the shells were already being produced."
Before WWI, a leading school of thought held that any general European war could last only a few weeks or months at most, as all sides would quickly run out of money (and munitions and everything else, owing to global shocks in trade).
These were not stupid people who reached this conclusion before WWI. And the thing is - they were correct, if the WWI combatants had continued to play by pre-war rules. Instead they simply jettisoned pretty much every aspect of the much-hyped Rule Of Law in order to keep the (pointless) war going. Professor Adam Tooze details this in "The Deluge".
To give a few examples, H.M. Exchequer forced the Indain government to lend its entire silver reserves (the rupee was silver backed) and take back gilts as collateral. They forced holders of high-grade US and Latin American securities to make forced loans to the Treasury, which used those securities as collateral for loans from U.S. banks. Germans and Austr-Hungarians drove themselves into national penury ("Gold gab ich für Eisen!" All whilst commiting mutual national suicide in an effort to prove once and for all that Mine Is Bigger Than Yours!
Never underestimate a european's need to show Master who the loyalest little lackey can be.
1. Quote: "events of September 2001 serving to decapitate the United States"
9/11 was the "catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor’1 needed to set the U.S. military intervention plans in motion. As revealed early in the game by General Wesley Clark: “In addition to Afghanistan we’re going to take out seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”2
2. Quote: "Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, a leading figure of the jihad in Iraq against the US occupation, but who also targeted the Shia community."
ISIS as is well established, was a creation of CIA and MI6, after failure of direct military intervention to implement the plan Wesley Clark mentions above.
Fundamental errors necessarily lead to erroneous conclusions. Following therefore are alternate projections:
1. Neoliberalism has destroyed the West, which will continue on its path of across the board irreversible decline, until such time that people of the West will manage to rid themselves of the parasitic financial elite that has controlled them for centuries.
2. "Two Worlds" will emerge, the Western Realm where poverty and ruthless democracies will reign3 and the Civilizational Sovereigntist states which will witness across the board development.4
9/11 was another Pearl Harbor and it was used to usher in a totalitarian police state by getting rid of the 4th amendment due process in the horrid Patriot Act that has been renewed by every stinking president since then. I hate the US government, they have been attacking us since the 90's with "domestic terrorism".
The US should have offered Russia a Marshal Plan in the 90's. Russia would have been a better ally than enemy and now the idiots in DC have driven them into the arms of the social credit score technocratic Chinese government that Western governments would love to emulate.
The West needs a Scary Enemy at all times, for two reasons:
1. To justify why we can't have nice things. Healthcare? Infrastructure? Education? We don't have time for that now, don't you know we gotta fight Saddam/Milosevic/Bin Laden/Saddam again/Ghadaffi/Assad/ISIS/Putin/Hamas/Houthis/ad nauseam.
2. To justify crackdowns on civil liberties. You and your namby-pamby Bill of Rights, you hate our freedom! What, are you on the side of the fascists/communists/Islamicists/Russians/ ad nauseam?
I like the long term tectonic plate analaogy, and to some extent buy into its premise of how things work. Yet history is replete with examples where sudden and unexpected fundamental shifts occurred, even though perhaps as in your WW1 example, the impacts of such shifts could have been predicted. What I think is difficult about predictions in the international sphere is that these involve human decision making in all its vanity, fraility and irrationality. And even decisions made by "bit part players" can have unknown knock on impacts and repercussions. And this is where I begin to despair of western politicians. I guess we get what we deserve, but our whole leadership seems to consist of clowns and charletons, incapable of cool calculation and quiet words, and full of fantastical schemes and available to be purchased. In such a system I would say the scope for a major FUBAR is high (Project Ukraine anyone?) and that as such the probability of unexpected shift changes is higher than we might think.
Thirdly, I think we’ll also see a relative democratisation of international decision-making mechanisms. Now once more, this process will, indeed, be relative and quite slow. But quite quickly now, we are going to find ourselves in a position where not all of the major decisions about the world are taken in western-dominated fora, and where, indeed, international players and actors may be in competition with each other. Some states may be members of competing organisations, and may in any case prefer bilateral contacts to multilateral ones.
-----------
I couldn't agree more, but I think that this is may be beginning to take shape with the BRICS and the number of people interested. It isn't there yet by any means, but it has the potential. We'll need to wait and see who bites if the new BRICS currency manages to get off the ground in a serious way.
I for one remember the inception of the Euro. I think that it went reasonably smooth. But I do remember some hiccups along the way and quite a bit of vitriol poured out.
The difference is that the people who matter wanted the Euro, and that meant that it was going to happen, regardless whether it made sense, much less whether the peons liked it or not.
1.) Does what the West about the proposed changes matter?
2.) What level of "matter" do the BRICS countries control?
From my point of view this doesn't too look good and I am hoping that the West can hold it together long enough for it not to effect me too egregiously.
Currency matters, but is not the only thing that matters. See Russian proposal for actions, look eminently sensible to me, and indicate the first salvo in a war of attrition against the West: https://www.rt.com/news/606245-brics-integration-putin-address/
“Slowly, and then all at once” is one mnemonic for this dynamic. The straw that broke the camel’s back. Avalanches follow similar logic - underlying conditions change almost imperceptibly until a cascade is triggered.
Relative power also has a spatial and geographical component, as you touched on. Logistics are a lot easier at short range ; the power projection of a naval superpower like the US or the British Empire depended on a kind of logistical overmatch. It isn’t necessary for China to equal US naval expeditionary capabilities for it to deny the US access to (say) Taiwan, because proximity works so much in China’s favor. Resupply is vastly easier for China than the US in that scenario, for example.
I think the west's next wars will look more like Britain's imperial wars in Kenya, Malaya or Yemen in the 1950's rather than the more recent "peace keeping" interventions. These all involved expendable proxy local forces, and now America is fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian, and wants to fight Iran to the last Israeli and China to the last Taiwanese, it's also used Islamic extremist proxies in Syria and the Caucasus. The first time I heard about the Uyghurs was the news several thousand of them had somehow appeared in Syria and joined the local branch of Al Qaeda. And Israel is simply repeating American tactics from Vietnam, genocidal race war by the air force, a rerun of Operation Phoenix by the security forces, while the army mills about taking losses, so by the time it runs into civilians its angry enough to go full My Lai on them, while the latest news is what remains of the population of Gaza will be herded into Strategic Hamlets guarded by CIA trained mercenaries.
Collapse happens slowly, and then very quickly. We can see the geopolitical trend accelerating, the world system is a complex entity and like all complex entities is capable of non-linear abrupt change between periods of stability. This was the process of the complex of Rome. The world system is conservative most of the time, but not all of the time. We are in the latter space.
Yes, there is inertia and things tend to change by accumulation (if the events go always in more or less the same direction). Yet there are still events that may things change much more rapidly than expected. These might be "external" (epidemics, meteorites, sudden floods or extreme and durable draughts etc) or internal: the same actors that don't realize they now don't have the power they had "inherited" from the past, might accelerate the decline by trying again and again to exercise that power they believe they are capable to execute but no longer are. The Ukrainian conflict has a lot of potential to accelerate the decline of the "Liberal West". I believe that "sudden" events, for instance the potential collapse of Ukraine, might make some pundits here and there realise that there is a power vacuum that they might at some point want to occupy... or might not. These have a potential as tipping points that accelerate events further. Aurelien: You give food for thought and you get digressions like this. Hahaha!
I agree with the statement that change is tectonic and takes time. But events arising from these changes are often entirely unpredictable to most people not closely implicated in them. I am often dumbfounded by events that change my perspective on the world order. And I am surprised by how often such events occur.
So glacial change interspersed with surprising events
The thousand cuts strategy which are design to proof BRICS economies in the first place but will have as a consequence the attrition of western economies, which are service oriented; and when fewer and fewer will ask for your services...
Take a lesson from Guanzhong's "Romance of the Three Kingdoms:" kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall. There's no way around that. Nothing lasts forever. Not even empires 🤣.
I agree that the world is a conservative place where radical shifts take some time to occur. But I would really take the decay of western powers a little more serious than you.
I think George Modelski and William R. Thompson were right in their book Leading sectors and world powers. They think that
- Political hegemony cannot be achieved without developing and controlling the most powerful technology of its time. Song China invented and harnessed paper and printing and revolutionised the dissemination of information; it invented and harnessed rudders and compasses and revolutionised transport technology; it invented and harnessed cast iron which cheapened the manufacture of metal objects; it invented and harnessed firearms and revolutionised and cheapened defence. Portugal developed ocean-going ships and an administrative system to keep them running. Holland revolutionised shipbuilding and developed the stock exchange to attract unlimited credit. England invented and exploited mechanical machinery in the textile industry, plus steam engines and railways. The US developed mass production of steel, cars, aeroplanes and consumer electronics plus companies big enough to do this. But today, China seems the most innovative power, with about half the world's patents every year.
- It is also not possible to have very stable political power – hegemony – without having something to offer other states. It has to be worthwhile for others to let the hegemonic power decide. Either in money or security. Something the United States was able to do after the Second World War, for example through the Marshall Plan, but now seems unable to do.
- Every hegemonic power comes to an end. After a while, its rulers tend to become attached to old, once successful, solutions to old problems. That is, they get stuck in old technologies, old organisational models and old ideas. Moreover – though Modelski and Thompson do not mention this – its capitalists eventually tire of complicated production and settle for managing (speculating in) money, or land. The time they did so in this case can be rather exactly pinpointed – about 1975-2000 (even if a few like RCA made a jump-start in 1968). Normally, hegemonies tend to last between a hundred and a couple of hundred years. Then new hegemonic powers emerge, based on even newer technologies and different organisational models.
In this light, it now looks like the US has its future behind it.
Modelski and Thompson, supported by many other observers, argue that the leading technology today is microelectronics. When the book was written, the US position there was strong. But it has eroded significantly; of the two companies that led the industry in 1996, Intel has faded and companies from East Asia, such as Samsung and TSM, have emerged in their place.
Nor does the US have much to offer other states. Getting the protection of the US nuclear umbrella now seems to mean economic ruin. Having currency denominated in dollars seems to put you at risk of being looted, and borrowing money denominated in dollars does too. Indeed, most states now seem to want to break away from dependence on a superpower and take a more independent stance.
Sure, it will take some time. But the BRICS+ have decided to build another, or a parallel financial structure for the world, and in some years' time it will probably be there. And losing one's financial monopoly is the last nail in the coffin, as Amsterdam once discovered.
US "nuclear umbrella" doesn't offer any protection. It just tells those under the umbrella, maybe, that they will be nuked in the next 30 min or so, rather than suddenly.
I’ve often vehemently disagreed with Jan but this is a strong comment. There is some pushback (the US is highly innovative) but the political paralysis and weaponisation of the US dollar will do more than anything to speed-up the desire to create payments and trade systems excluding the US and US dominance.
And not a single word about BRICS, which has been holding its summit, with new monetary plans being set, even as we read this article? BRICS has added several new members, and candidate members, some of which have long been at odds with one another. Seems pertinent to, yet missing from, this discussion.
"But what we can say, on the other hand, is that after several decades of preparation, certain elements of a future war in Europe were effectively fixed. It would be a war of alliances, since these already existed. It would be a war involving massive forces, because all continental European powers had instituted military service. It would be a war of massive artillery bombardments because the guns and the shells were already being produced."
Before WWI, a leading school of thought held that any general European war could last only a few weeks or months at most, as all sides would quickly run out of money (and munitions and everything else, owing to global shocks in trade).
These were not stupid people who reached this conclusion before WWI. And the thing is - they were correct, if the WWI combatants had continued to play by pre-war rules. Instead they simply jettisoned pretty much every aspect of the much-hyped Rule Of Law in order to keep the (pointless) war going. Professor Adam Tooze details this in "The Deluge".
To give a few examples, H.M. Exchequer forced the Indain government to lend its entire silver reserves (the rupee was silver backed) and take back gilts as collateral. They forced holders of high-grade US and Latin American securities to make forced loans to the Treasury, which used those securities as collateral for loans from U.S. banks. Germans and Austr-Hungarians drove themselves into national penury ("Gold gab ich für Eisen!" All whilst commiting mutual national suicide in an effort to prove once and for all that Mine Is Bigger Than Yours!
Never underestimate a european's need to show Master who the loyalest little lackey can be.
Some fundamental errors:
1. Quote: "events of September 2001 serving to decapitate the United States"
9/11 was the "catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor’1 needed to set the U.S. military intervention plans in motion. As revealed early in the game by General Wesley Clark: “In addition to Afghanistan we’re going to take out seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”2
Ref 1: https://archive.org/details/RebuildingAmericasDefenses
Ref 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Knt3rKTqCk
2. Quote: "Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, a leading figure of the jihad in Iraq against the US occupation, but who also targeted the Shia community."
ISIS as is well established, was a creation of CIA and MI6, after failure of direct military intervention to implement the plan Wesley Clark mentions above.
Fundamental errors necessarily lead to erroneous conclusions. Following therefore are alternate projections:
1. Neoliberalism has destroyed the West, which will continue on its path of across the board irreversible decline, until such time that people of the West will manage to rid themselves of the parasitic financial elite that has controlled them for centuries.
2. "Two Worlds" will emerge, the Western Realm where poverty and ruthless democracies will reign3 and the Civilizational Sovereigntist states which will witness across the board development.4
Ref 3: https://thecradle.co/articles-id/3612
Ref 4: https://fadilama.substack.com/p/the-emerging-multicivilizational
https://corbettreport.com/911suspects/
9/11 was another Pearl Harbor and it was used to usher in a totalitarian police state by getting rid of the 4th amendment due process in the horrid Patriot Act that has been renewed by every stinking president since then. I hate the US government, they have been attacking us since the 90's with "domestic terrorism".
The US should have offered Russia a Marshal Plan in the 90's. Russia would have been a better ally than enemy and now the idiots in DC have driven them into the arms of the social credit score technocratic Chinese government that Western governments would love to emulate.
The West needs a Scary Enemy at all times, for two reasons:
1. To justify why we can't have nice things. Healthcare? Infrastructure? Education? We don't have time for that now, don't you know we gotta fight Saddam/Milosevic/Bin Laden/Saddam again/Ghadaffi/Assad/ISIS/Putin/Hamas/Houthis/ad nauseam.
2. To justify crackdowns on civil liberties. You and your namby-pamby Bill of Rights, you hate our freedom! What, are you on the side of the fascists/communists/Islamicists/Russians/ ad nauseam?
I like the long term tectonic plate analaogy, and to some extent buy into its premise of how things work. Yet history is replete with examples where sudden and unexpected fundamental shifts occurred, even though perhaps as in your WW1 example, the impacts of such shifts could have been predicted. What I think is difficult about predictions in the international sphere is that these involve human decision making in all its vanity, fraility and irrationality. And even decisions made by "bit part players" can have unknown knock on impacts and repercussions. And this is where I begin to despair of western politicians. I guess we get what we deserve, but our whole leadership seems to consist of clowns and charletons, incapable of cool calculation and quiet words, and full of fantastical schemes and available to be purchased. In such a system I would say the scope for a major FUBAR is high (Project Ukraine anyone?) and that as such the probability of unexpected shift changes is higher than we might think.
You wrote:
_______
Thirdly, I think we’ll also see a relative democratisation of international decision-making mechanisms. Now once more, this process will, indeed, be relative and quite slow. But quite quickly now, we are going to find ourselves in a position where not all of the major decisions about the world are taken in western-dominated fora, and where, indeed, international players and actors may be in competition with each other. Some states may be members of competing organisations, and may in any case prefer bilateral contacts to multilateral ones.
-----------
I couldn't agree more, but I think that this is may be beginning to take shape with the BRICS and the number of people interested. It isn't there yet by any means, but it has the potential. We'll need to wait and see who bites if the new BRICS currency manages to get off the ground in a serious way.
I for one remember the inception of the Euro. I think that it went reasonably smooth. But I do remember some hiccups along the way and quite a bit of vitriol poured out.
The difference is that the people who matter wanted the Euro, and that meant that it was going to happen, regardless whether it made sense, much less whether the peons liked it or not.
I don't see anything comparable in BRICs.
I kinda-sorta agree. But what I wonder now is:
1.) Does what the West about the proposed changes matter?
2.) What level of "matter" do the BRICS countries control?
From my point of view this doesn't too look good and I am hoping that the West can hold it together long enough for it not to effect me too egregiously.
As Aurelien sort of points out, the question is whether BRICs can field a credible alternative.
I doubt they really want to, or could reach agreement on what that alternative might be.
Currency matters, but is not the only thing that matters. See Russian proposal for actions, look eminently sensible to me, and indicate the first salvo in a war of attrition against the West: https://www.rt.com/news/606245-brics-integration-putin-address/
Vague and good luck getting agreement even for that.
Implementation of Bretton Woods took from 1944 to 1958... Why you always have to jump the gun? So much so that you were barred from posting on NC...
“Slowly, and then all at once” is one mnemonic for this dynamic. The straw that broke the camel’s back. Avalanches follow similar logic - underlying conditions change almost imperceptibly until a cascade is triggered.
Relative power also has a spatial and geographical component, as you touched on. Logistics are a lot easier at short range ; the power projection of a naval superpower like the US or the British Empire depended on a kind of logistical overmatch. It isn’t necessary for China to equal US naval expeditionary capabilities for it to deny the US access to (say) Taiwan, because proximity works so much in China’s favor. Resupply is vastly easier for China than the US in that scenario, for example.
I think the west's next wars will look more like Britain's imperial wars in Kenya, Malaya or Yemen in the 1950's rather than the more recent "peace keeping" interventions. These all involved expendable proxy local forces, and now America is fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian, and wants to fight Iran to the last Israeli and China to the last Taiwanese, it's also used Islamic extremist proxies in Syria and the Caucasus. The first time I heard about the Uyghurs was the news several thousand of them had somehow appeared in Syria and joined the local branch of Al Qaeda. And Israel is simply repeating American tactics from Vietnam, genocidal race war by the air force, a rerun of Operation Phoenix by the security forces, while the army mills about taking losses, so by the time it runs into civilians its angry enough to go full My Lai on them, while the latest news is what remains of the population of Gaza will be herded into Strategic Hamlets guarded by CIA trained mercenaries.
Collapse happens slowly, and then very quickly. We can see the geopolitical trend accelerating, the world system is a complex entity and like all complex entities is capable of non-linear abrupt change between periods of stability. This was the process of the complex of Rome. The world system is conservative most of the time, but not all of the time. We are in the latter space.
Yes, there is inertia and things tend to change by accumulation (if the events go always in more or less the same direction). Yet there are still events that may things change much more rapidly than expected. These might be "external" (epidemics, meteorites, sudden floods or extreme and durable draughts etc) or internal: the same actors that don't realize they now don't have the power they had "inherited" from the past, might accelerate the decline by trying again and again to exercise that power they believe they are capable to execute but no longer are. The Ukrainian conflict has a lot of potential to accelerate the decline of the "Liberal West". I believe that "sudden" events, for instance the potential collapse of Ukraine, might make some pundits here and there realise that there is a power vacuum that they might at some point want to occupy... or might not. These have a potential as tipping points that accelerate events further. Aurelien: You give food for thought and you get digressions like this. Hahaha!
I agree with the statement that change is tectonic and takes time. But events arising from these changes are often entirely unpredictable to most people not closely implicated in them. I am often dumbfounded by events that change my perspective on the world order. And I am surprised by how often such events occur.
So glacial change interspersed with surprising events
Quite sensible comments, much appreciated.
In fact they very much align to some of the proposals/suggestions that Putin has just made in his address at BRICS: https://www.rt.com/news/606245-brics-integration-putin-address/
The thousand cuts strategy which are design to proof BRICS economies in the first place but will have as a consequence the attrition of western economies, which are service oriented; and when fewer and fewer will ask for your services...
This essay brought to mind Carroll Quigley's "Weapons Systems and Political Stability" -- I highly recommend it.
Take a lesson from Guanzhong's "Romance of the Three Kingdoms:" kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall. There's no way around that. Nothing lasts forever. Not even empires 🤣.
The usual italian translation here: https://trying2understandw.blogspot.com/2024/10/lacqua-sta-salendo-ma-lentamente.html?m=1
Thanks as always Marco!