Like LSD, which can convince people they can fly—causing them to jump out of windows—weapons can make people overconfident. Skewing their tactical judgment.
-Ng, “Snow Crash”
As the US flails about trying to maintain a dominance that’s already gone, it’s often difficult to analyze or predict US actions because they usually appear on their face so irrational. I generally view Washington moves on the world stage as akin to playing blocks with a two-year-old. Without their involvement, you might be able to meticulously build a well-planned castle, but the two-year-old when reengaged might topple it with the swing of a hand.
The takeaway: building is hard. Destruction is easy. And in the case of the US it’s the destruction of economies, societies, and the planet through mafia logic. The first goal is to profit through extortion and rent-seeking. Everywhere. When that fails, Washington quickly pivots to its backup plan: regime change. But even that strategy is running out of steam these days.
There is little to no chance of forcing Russia and China to bend the knee, and Washington has few options aside from mutually assured destruction—either economic with Beijing or the good ol’ fashioned variety with Moscow. The attacks (and years of economic warfare) have thus far failed to bring about regime change in Tehran, and next time Iran, the thinking goes, will be more prepared—perhaps with China and Russia at its side. The bleed over from the thrashing about in impotent rage against Russia now has the US once again doing its best to push India off the fence and into the embrace of China and Russia.
There are still fever dreams in Washington of using ethnic divisions and proxy forces to take down Tehran, of destabilization in Moscow once Putin eventually dies, of economic or demographic forces weakening China, etc., but these are all based on wishful thinking rather than any realistic plan. In its place we’re seeing more lashing out, more sanctions, weaponized tariffs, and more bombings with Trump on a record airstrike pace. It’s not working.
Many in Washington are still tempted to double down on sanctions and tariffs as a tool to force countries to decouple from China and Russia despite the fact it hasn’t worked yet. As even Foreign Policy admits:
Sanctions are conceived to be coercive tools, inflicting economic pain until a state changes its behavior. In practice, however, states resist sanctions, absorbing the costs while exploring ways around them. Rather than change state behavior, sanctions change markets and reshape economic relationships, redirecting oil into channels built around geopolitics rather than commercial logic.
Thus far the sanctions on more powerful states like Russia and Iran oil do little more than rework the global oil market, forcing those countries even closer to China. Beijing, meanwhile, continues on with its efforts to build a more interconnected world with itself at the center.
A study published last week by Christoph Nedopil in partnership with Griffith University’s Asia Institute and Fudan University’s Green Finance & Development Center found that China’s investments and construction contracts in Belt and Road Initiative countries during the first six months of 2025 soared to $124 billion, compared to only $122 billion in all 12 months of 2024.
And so the BRI marches on despite the years-long effort by the US to smear and sabotage it. What exactly is the plan to compete with it? Well, nothing, of course.
While the US warns against loans and infrastructure cooperation with China, what does it offer in its place? Precious little. As Nigerian Vice President Yemi Osinbajo explained a few years back during his March 27 remarks at King’s College in London:
In the arguments about the Chinese debt traps (as it is called sometimes) and the large amounts of loans to African countries, I think that what is clear is that the Chinese have proven to be quite responsible in the giving out of these loans. There are always arguments about whether you get the best deal all the time, but the real question of Africa and African governments is who else is offering these loans? Who else is offering the support? It is not a question of here or there, it is really a question of what is available and it seems to me to make sense to take what is available.
At the same time Washington is working overtime in a neverending job to peel countries away from Beijing, the US itself would collapse were it to do the same it is asking of these nations. The rare earths metals and magnets chickens are finally coming home to roost, threatening all America’s precious death machines.
And the US and the rest of the world are increasingly reliant on China for their pharmaceuticals and other types of necessities. These are not supply chain issues that can be corrected overnight, and will be challenging to change at all due to the neoliberal economic models in the west that prioritize finance over actually making stuff.
One could almost laugh at these American elites and all their incompetence if they didn’t leave a trail of destruction in their wake. They first hollowed out US communities by shipping the country’s industry abroad, primarily to China, so they could a yacht or private jet upgrade. Do they take ownership of the fatal mistake?
Of course not. Instead we have children knocking over blocks. And it’s difficult to argue with Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Lavrov’s recent assessment that they’re essentially crazy little Nazi children knocking over blocks (he was talking about the Europeans, but I see no reason it shouldn’t extend to the US as well).
And these children are capable of doing a lot of damage.
We see what that looks like in Ukraine and West Asia where the US and its vassals help carry out a genocide in Gaza and spill blood everywhere. And unless Arab regimes or China or Russia or somebody wakes up, we may well get a temporary victory for the Western Zionists there in the form of more land and more control over regional supply chains. How that changes the long term downward trajectory of the US-led western facism project is less clear.
US sanctions are still capable of killing a lot of people. As The Lancet pointed out in a July study, “sanctions were associated with an annual toll of 564 258 deaths, similar to the global mortality burden associated with armed conflict.”
And on average, half of those were children. To repeat, the US killing roughly 250,000 kids per year with sanctions.
Washington might not be able to put much of a dent in Moscow or Tehran, the think tanks in DC believe all those deaths are worth it because they help decimate smaller countries like Syria and others in South America and Africa and cause chaos in regions that are integral to other powers’ foreign plans.
The US can still weasel its way into foreign governments and spread like termites eating away at the foundation until all that is left is a failed state blowing up a region.
Take the example of the Caucasus, where under the cover of another Trump Nobel Peace Prize audition, the true aim is to inflame the region. It makes little economic sense for the people of Armenia and Azerbaijan. Perhaps it does for the ones calling the shots. Bribes and extortion work wonders for a time.
So does nurturing extremist ideologies. If we gander at a map one sees a wall of fire from the Baltic to the Black Sea (Nazism) that then branches Eastwards to the Caspian and beyond into Central Asia (neo-Ottomanism/pan-Turkism) and southwards to the Red Sea (Zionism and CIA Islam).
Even if these fanatics are unable to find success toppling governments in Russia, Iran, and other “unfriendly” states, they aim to prevent the goal of a secure, interconnected, and prosperous Asian heartland.
The goal is chaos. Destruction. There and elsewhere. This approach inevitably destabilises the global order and creates new risks, including for US interests.
While that might sound counterintuitive, have you seen how crazy US elites are?
Embracing the Breakdown
While the US cannot compete on a traditional nation-state board, on merit, by building things, or offering a vision of a better world, there is a belief held in high places that it is well-positioned for a world of fire and brimstone.
These accelerationists in the US who embrace the breakdown of society aren’t just keen on eroding state sovereignty at home but want to do it across the world where they believe they can build an empire-by-contractor where ruling clans do no more than oversee weapon systems, AI data centers, and mercenaries. Quinn Slobodian with a useful summary:
Right-wing accelerationists imagine existing sovereignty shattering into … a “patchwork” of private entities, ideally governed by what one might call technomonarchies. Existing autocratic polities like Dubai serve as rough prototypes for how nations could be dismantled into “a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.” These would be decentralized archipelagoes: fortified nodes in a circuitry still linked by finance, trade, and communication. Think of the year 1000 in Middle Europe but with vertical take-off and landing taxis and Starlink internet.
Oh, and there’s also boatloads of money to be made in the carnage, as Christopher Cook notes about the ongoing US-backed genocide in Gaza:
[United Nation’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca] Albanese lists dozens of major western companies that are deeply invested in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.
This is not a new development, as she notes. These firms have exploited business opportunities associated with Israel’s violent occupation of the Palestinian people’s lands for years, and in some cases decades.
The switch from Israel’s occupation of Gaza to its current genocide hasn’t threatened profits; it has enhanced them. Or as Albanese puts it: “The profits have increased as the economy of the occupation transformed into an economy of genocide.”
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the US remains the biggest exporter of weapons worldwide, delivering to a total of 107 countries between 2020 and 2024, and with a 43 percent share of global exports, that’s more than four times as much as the next-largest exporter, France.
Is it any wonder that the US embraces global warming, which is the great destabilizer?
She’s an icon
She’s a legend
And she is the moment✨ pic.twitter.com/MDkIj71JZf— U.S. Department of Energy (@ENERGY) July 31, 2025
Not only has the US given up on competing with China on “clean energy” tech, but the spooks at the National Intelligence Council sound almost giddy in their estimates of how states like Iran and China will be hit harder than the US and how this will present “opportunities.”
Washington doing its best to set the world on fire also means that other countries must devote more resources and attention to defense from the lunatic empire, which can mean less resources to deal with the fallout from global warming. That might have played a role in Iran where the government recently declared emergency public holidays in 18 provinces, including Tehran, as temperatures soared to nearly 50°C. From Unherd:
According to official reports, reserves in the capital’s main dams have plummeted to their lowest levels in a century, with a five-year drought and record-low rainfall cited as the main reasons. Despite repeated warnings from environmental experts, the government appears to have been unprepared for what it has referred to as “the worst drought in 60 years”.
What’s To Be Done?
As the US descends deeper into Dr. Strangelove territory and violence, decay, and lawlessness reigns supreme, the great question is where and how does this madness end?
Here are two options. The crazy elites in the US need to be stopped or they’re going to kill us all—either slowly through a mixture of climate catastrophe, breakdown capitalism, and genocide or there’s always the nuclear option.
Let’s not forget that a lot of these Silicon Valley accelerationists that are increasingly taking up roles in the government falsely believe they can ride out the nuclear holocaust or other major disasters and come out on top. That’s why they’re building their bunkers with pools and movie theaters. Nevermind that they’d probably only last a few weeks there before running into serious issues—and that’s if their servants or robots don’t kill them first—it’s all part of their vision of the world that doesn’t extend beyond themselves. As Douglas Rushkoff, who tech billionaires have called on for advice on how to survive the apocalypse, explains:
[It’s] the excuse for them to think through the fantasies they’ve had since they were little baby tech bros, to somehow create a digital womb around themselves that could anticipate their every need so they don’t have to deal with real people, and have nice little robots take care of them. It’s the dream that little boys and girls have being the last person alive and getting all the toys.
As they increasingly buy out and take up larger roles in government, they’re getting closer to being able to cause even more widespread destruction than they’re used to. And even if they’ll never really be able to enact their global digital womb, they might kill us all trying to. As Alastair Crooke has pointed out, the key nuclear allegation that started the war with Iran was coaxed from a Palantir counter-intelligence algorithm. So maybe the question we should be asking is: Do Palantir inputs believe those it deems worth living could survive a nuclear war and thrive?
It’s not like a lot of influential and well-funded “thinkers” in the US need a lot of convincing. As the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists points out, “many in the US defense establishment—the military, government, think tanks, and industry—promote the perception that a nuclear war can be won and fought.”
Add to the equation that if the US plutocrats have gone as far as Gaza, is there anywhere they’re not willing to go?
Add it all up, and it feels like we’re rapidly approaching that moment many have dreaded: decision time in America when the powers that be either give up on the dream of the Great American century or burn the whole joint to the ground. And the prospects aren’t looking good for elite American acceptance.
As just one recent example, here are the plutocrats’ court jesters in think tanklandia calling Russia’s nuclear doctrine “bluster” and that the Trump administration should not “fall for it.” The administration apparently agrees with its recent nuclear brinkmanship.
The calculation in their minds is simple: it is preferable to find out rather than accept a world that isn’t dominated by Washington.
What can the other powers like Russia and China do? They could start by locking down Eurasia.
That’s what they’ve been gravitating towards for some time. At the mid-July meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Council of Foreign Ministers in China Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi proposed the following for collective security and sovereignty:
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A collective security body to respond to external aggression, sabotage, and terrorism
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A permanent coordination mechanism for documenting and countering subversive acts
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A Center for Sanctions Resistance, to shield member economies from unilateral Western measures
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A Shanghai Security Forum for defense and intelligence coordination
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Enhanced cultural and media cooperation to counter cognitive and information warfare
Should the SCO—whose members’ industrial capacities dwarf NATO—forge such a bloc, it could greatly challenge the Western dreams of picking off countries one at a time.
That’s hard to do with US beachheads in Israel, Turkey/Armenia, the Philippines, and of course all of Europe, but economic forces are not on the side of Washington, and you can almost feel the US collapsing under the sheer weight of keeping up this global game of subterfuge, clandestine activity, bribery, and just plain old troublemaking. It does so while ignoring its own decay and when the other side makes more economic sense and offers more peace and stability.
Yet, here’s the rub. Even if an alternative currency project gets up and running, and even if Russia and China keep playing the long game and bleeding the US dry (China cutting off critical minerals to Western defense companies is a good start) and waiting for it to collapse, that does nothing to guarantee the crazies are kept away from the nukes—it probably makes the US using them more likely.
And even a cordon sanitaire around the US won’t prevent its elites from taking out their rage on US citizens. Ultimately, the responsibility for dethroning these spoiled Nazi children (and I’m talking more about Musks, Thiels, Andreessens, Karps and company than Trump or the CIA Democrat neoliberals in their service) and restoring some sense of humanity will fall to Americans.
When could that come to pass? It’s hard to say, indeed:
I have to think that having the least intellectually sophisticated ruling class in modern history will eventually redound to our advantage. But exactly when and how it is hard to say
— Erik Baker (@erikmbaker) August 3, 2025
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Ironically (or was it intentional?) Snow Crash is much beloved in Thielite and alt-right circles.
And yes, they really (IMO) do think they can build a jackpot/nuke -proof tech-heaven in Greenland and thrive as we all die.
The big idea: will sci-fi end up destroying the world? (Guardian):
In Snow Crash there’s something called “the Raft” – a collection of boats filled with infected, mind-controlled refugees headed for America’s west coast. It’s an image that recalls the viciously racist 1973 French sci-fi novel The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail, in which a huge fleet of Indian refugees destroy western civilisation. It’s had a far-right fandom ever since and has been referenced by former Donald Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon. It’s a particular favourite of Stephen Miller, Trump’s lead policy adviser and close friend of Musk (Miller’s wife, Katie, is the Doge spokeswoman
Reid Hoffman (ex-Paypal mafia and now LinkedIn boss): Snow Crash changed my life (Business Insider)
Brin and Zuckerberg also super-fans if the book.
It’s been interesting to watch Stephenson, the author of Snow Crash, develop his themes over time. In Snow Crash, the world described was intended to be dystopian. Later novels celebrated the ability to manipulate financial markets (System of the world) and neoliberal tech entrepreneurs (Cryptonomicon). By Seveneves, my sense was that he was celebrating a world catastrophe allowing a reset led by the most worthy and their robot minions in a depopulated world.
I was a fan, but I stopped reading him because to me, his early techno anarchism was morphing into something less savory. My guess is that the tech bros never stopped.
Agreed. Absolutely loved Stephenson thru the Baroque Cycle. He lost me somewhere in Anathem. Seveneyes made no impression and I’m not convinced I finished it.
Even Cryptonomicon favoured well-moraled ‘heroes’ who were willing to take matters into their own hands and “move fast and break things”. Easy to picture yourself as that, even if you’re actually a sociopath. Maybe especially if you’re a sociopath.
The early PayPal team worked well together because we were all the same kind of nerd. We all loved science fiction: Cryptonomicon was required reading, and we preferred the capitalist Star Wars to the communist Star Trek.
— Peter Thiel in his book Zero to One
I’ve also read (maybe in Chavkin’s biography of Thiel) that the pcs at PayPal had a World Domination Index running in the corner inspired by Cryptonomicon’s “f*** you money” counter.
[Edit: there’s a Hiro Protagonist joke somewhere here I wish I’d made]
“…we preferred the capitalist Star Wars to the communist Star Trek.”
I’d never heard that before it explains a lot. All my scifi friends are Trekkies and find Star Wars to be a bit shallow as far as that dichotomy goes, but of course real nerdboxes grok Dune ;) Thiel clearly wants to be Palpatine and probably rooted for the Borg.
As for Stephenson, I did like Seveneves. That may be due to my Clinton Derangement Syndrome as there was one character who bore a striking resemblance to Hillary and met a deliciously bad end if I remember correctly. The one I just couldn’t stand was Fall; or, Dodge in Hell. It started out OK but then devolved into several hundred pages of fantasy quest set inside some virtual reality. I kept waiting for it to tie into the earlier plot, and it just didn’t happen. Stephenson apparently just wanted to do his own version of LOTR but you can’t beat the original and that book has put me off reading any further Stephenson doorstoppers.
Re: Star Wars Shallowness: The recent show Andor is intellectually deep, maybe even literary exploration of what a revolution might look like from the inside; its causes, dangers, sacrifices of its members, and dubious morality of the leaders. Some take it as an anti-capitalist story. It is certainly anti-imperial in a real-world sense. The codes and catchphrases, even the fictional manifesto the show are informing protest movements around the world, as documented through reddit. I am shocked Disney allowed it to happen.
I thought Cryptonomicon was mainly about neoliberal startup culture with almost every conversation referencing the only goal being to maximize shareholder value. At the time, I thought the repetition signaled satire.
I borrowed from the library one of his more recent novels. I gave up, felt like I overpaid.
Snowcrash and the Baroque Cycle I’ve read multiple times.
Cryptonomicon was about that (Stephenson cast a broad net satirically) but there were also tech bro/crypto-anarchist elements to it, like the promised land being a libertarian/autocratic island regime fueled by a digital bank.
I thought Star Trek was post scarcity, so non-economic. But not surprise d to hear that was the view at Paypal.
Star Trek had no “good guys vs bad guys”, the preferred solution to everything was to understand the other guy and work out a solution that works for everyone.
Is it any surprise that it has no appeal to winner take all sociopaths?
That was TNG, and Roddenberry’s rotten (imho) vision of the universe. A lot of people, myself included, love DS9 because that universe is rotten–everyone has some bones, even if not whole skeleton, in their closet. There’s some conspiracy everywhere, with many powerful people pursuing some hidden agenda of varying shadiness. Yet, most people are also decent enough that the universe perserveres. But, for these reasons, I understand that many trekkies don’t care for DS9.
Roddenberry’s underlying message in Star Trek was that we can be better people if we want to be and he continued that message in “Genesis II’. DS9 at the time was sold to the producers as “Fort Laramie” – in space.
DS9 also kept the message going. Wven in the middle of a major war they still valued diplomacy above all else and did their very best to use those means first.
Everyone dreams of opening his/her own franchulate.
Deranged techbros are no exception.
Never had a taste for him specifically because first recommended by tech bro who “think they can build a jackpot/nuke -proof tech-heaven in Greenland and thrive as we all die.”
Also, IMHO, not a great world builder. Or character builder.
i read Anathem right after i found the rattlesnake in my library at that craphole house in town.
the snake prompted the building of a house out here(i needed physical therapy, anyways)…which entailed fixing this beaten up old trailerhouse first, as a homebase while building, as well as a new home for my Library.
once the Library was done, and i was resting from my labors in the shady cloister, i remembered that book…specifically the idea of a secular monasticism…i was by then reading Where the Wasteland Ends, and contemplating pretty much what we’re facing right now,lol.
so the Library and Environs…including, now, the Wilderness Bar and its new attached kitchen and processing area…are definitely conceived as a secular monastery.
thats what i took from that one Stephenson book…i can leave the rest.
i did watch, i think, snowcrash at some point…wasnt impressed.
but when i see these tech bros gushing about it, and others, it just confirms that they should be nowhere near as close to Power as they currently are.
Fie.
I actually loved Anathem even though most of it was the equivalent of wonkish conversations about nothing much between grad students. I like that kind of thing, it appears.
We have all heard the parallels between the US and Ancient Rome, but there is one other similarity that I was not conscious of until the past 18 months or so. A notable percentage of our “elites” are deeply disturbed.
There is a revelry and sheer joy in causing misery and death that I cannot explain other than people being on the spectrum of mentally ill to pathologically evil. Historically, the Anglosphere has had people in positions of power with abhorrent views. Various military figures such as “Bomber” Harris and Curtis Lemay come to mind, but their job is to be a hammer and view everything as a nail – not to excuse Dresden, etc. I also view Churchill on the spectrum of pathologically evil given his comments about starving Bengalis and his desire to repeat the mistakes of Versailles after WW II. The US of course has also committed abhorrent acts in the past, such as the massive civilian death tolls in SE Asia from 1965-1972.
That said, I struggle to find comparisons to Randy Fine and a host of other influential neocons and MSM figures (including NYT columnists) that either justify or openly cheer on mass starvation. I have read a lot about WW 2 and struggle to find similar public statements even from Nazi officials (perhaps other than Julius Streicher). I wish I thought those people were outliers. I don’t.
I am not sure how even an “empire” with all of the US’s natural resources will fare over the long term when it is effectively managed by psychopaths.
Lead in the pipes (as some blame for Roman insanity)? Or lead in our DNA?
I agree with most of the above but would say that it is business as usual for oligarchies throughout history. The difference now is that things like nuclear weapons have given those oligarchies much greater power of destruction with far less need of vast armies to do it. Perhaps the elites see AI as some kind of mental nuclear weapon with which to conquer the world.
But conquer is the goal rather than live and let live. And in that sense Israel, with its all purpose Holocaust excuse, serves as a kind of lab model of how the few can control the many. They don’t even have to feel guilty about it due to their “right to exist” (never mind other people’s right to exist). And so we see the Trump administration pushing “antisemitism” as their excuse for everything. They are jealous of the rationale.
Or perhaps they prefer Russiagate as their excuse which is why some of us question the revival of that well plowed story. In the larger picture Donald Trump should never have become president regardless of the dishonesty not to mention villainy of his opponents. He is very much a part of our crazy ruling class in general–and all that lead poisoning their brains.
We are making fine distinctions, but I would argue that past colonial abuses reflected cruel and utter indifference to others’ lives. What I see in certain US and other elites is absolute glee and pure sadism in others’ suffering. Compared to the Irish Potato Famine, Belgian Congo, and similar abuses, the consequences of current genocides may not be any worse, but I sense deeper pathologies now.
Lead? Only in Flint. Might be long-covid inanity, micro-plastics, and maybe a sprinkling of OTTSD*
(* Ongoing Trump Traumatic Stress Syndrome).
When I look at the headlines of the last 8 years, it’s no wonder my mind is shot and my heart is sick. I don’t remember the half of it.
By the way, Thank you Conor for such a great essay.
Lead in thr atmosphere from car enginers when a lot of these people were growing up and their brains forming.
The takeaway: building is hard. Destruction is easy.
What Conor Gallagher uses to start off may look like a simple set of short, self-evident assertions, but it is a great truth. We should repeat this constantly.
Given my many years in publishing and writing, I will also remind people that building things, making things, gives a great sense of satisfaction.
A reminder: This is also why the free-market fundamentalist slogan of “creative destruction” is such a crock. And what’s left after you pull the wings off the butterfly? Some shell of a company to unload on the public to pay for private excess.
I have a quibble, or two, though: First, the purpose of sanctions. The formulation by Foreign Policy is etiolated and bloodless. “Sanctions are conceived to be coercive tools, inflicting economic pain until a state changes its behavior. In practice, however, states resist sanctions, absorbing the costs while exploring ways around them.”
“A state”? Come on. In practice, sanctions hurt the populace directly. Ask Saint Madeleine Albright about the 500,000 dead Iraqi children. And as Conor Gallagher reminds us above, “To repeat, the US is killing roughly 250,000 kids per year with sanctions.”
A second quibble is the comparison to a child. As Reality Czar, I oversee a thriving complex of nieces, nephews, and godchildren (as their moral beacon). A two-year-old has a differing perspective, but as to irrationality, I’m not so sure. The willingness of a two-year-old to say no is often the best response.
So: What is the American ethic if it isn’t children having tantrums?
This excellent article by Erik Baker in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine proposes / revives social Darwinism. Also, note Trump’s stress on his infallible “instincts.”
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/07/trumps-darwinian-america-erik-baker/
(Who, I believe, is the same Erik Baker of the concluding twiXt)
Social Darwinism, in my not so humble opinion, is aligned with the dominant religion of the U S of A, which is Calvinism, a cargo cult passing for religious observance. One can have either the Beatitudes or Calvinism. U.S. culture in general chooses Calvinism.
Another is the strange U.S. idea that Americans can talk their way out of anything. That’s Trump. That’s the doofus in front of you in line in a restaurant arguing with the waitress to get a table when it turns out he hasn’t bothered to make a reservation. That’s all of this “it isn’t really genocide” bullshit. That’s Madeleine Albright’s famous response to Leslie Stahl about mass death being worth it. This “virtue” of Americans got nipped here in Italy. I was never successful at it back in the U S of A, but here in Turin, in Piedmont, where everyone cuts square corners, I once forgot a document. The woman at the box office gave me the eye and sent me home to retrieve it. End of story.
What is to be done? Recognize that the U.S. elites have no moral authority – and don’t try to play team sports by claiming that your Hillary Diehard stance has some magical validity. Be a leveler. Insist on grand juries, indictments, and prison terms (yes, even for alleged serial alleged rapist Bill Clinton, America’s Best Politician). Let justice be done even if the heavens should fall. Which, ironically, may mean setting free Saint Luigi the Adjuster.
Then, I’d argue, if it is true that the situation in the U S of A is one that the populace cannot vote itself out of, don’t mourn. Organize.
Because if Americans don’t get it together to do something, Gaza is a rehearsal for what will happen in the Homeland.
– “The takeaway: building is hard. Destruction is easy.”
Thanks for this comment, and to Conor for another eloquent overview of our condition. I was also going to start by highlighting this quote, because this is what makes our situation so dire. Destruction, destabilization, chaos, conflict, war – these are not the unintended consequences of US policy carried out by our bumbling clown-leaders, as they are so often portrayed. They are part of a global strategy – and *intentional*. It does not matter that these policies will fail or that they are destroying the material and ideological standing of the US itself. Our dominant institutions select for and reward the types of leaders who see the world in this way – petulant children who are maximally narcissistic, short-sighted, and sociopathic. As Conor rightly points out, while we might prefer boot-licking leaders who throw open their nations to us, we don’t hesitate to ignite the “wall of fire” against those who resist. Brzezinski advocated this precise strategy thirty years ago, as did the neocons who were marshaling their forces at the same time. They represent the “two sides” of our current foreign policy insanity that has become completely dominant today. And as Slobodian makes clear in the essay cited by Conor, we have now fully unleashed these psychopaths internally.
Great article and comment!
Making a jump from the USN to a very large aviation corporation in the mid 90’s was a bit of an eye opening experience for me. More than once things happen where someone would have gone to jail in my prior job (after all, the “rules” were Federal law), but corporate governance was pretty much anything goes as long as you didn’t piss off somebody in upper, upper management. From everything I now see, it sure looks like, feels like the Federal government has been completely and corruptly corporatized. America finally got that long desired CEO president.
I suspect that the BRICS nations will hunker down and survive this temper tantrum of Western elites. Russia will not pause the action in Ukraine to allow NATO to re-arm, China will not sell the rope which will be used to hang them to the West, and India will do what it wants with whatever oil it buys.
But I fear this will mean that American and Western elites will lean into what they do best – the further neo-liberal destruction of their own countries. Keep ignoring that this was what created the situation they are now enjoy (or not).
Always remember, when you find yourself in a hole – dig faster! /sarc
But maybe that’s an addendum rule to the other rules:
1) Because markets.
2) Go die!
Echoing those above, thanks for a great comment DJG, and my hearty congratulations to Conor for a fantastic, nail-on-the-head piece.
Indeed. This encapsulates everything I feel currently about the elite children steering the boat.
Completely agree with your comment, and would take it further – Americans believe a McGuffin always arrives last minute and saves the day. Students cramming after partying instead of studying, or believing somehow the US will leapfrog the Japanese and TV production will return to the US, or- well, our political election theater is based on this theory of the great man or woman (Captain America) to right the world, and yet things only get worse!
Thank you. All very well said.
Hard to disagree with any of this.
An interesting paradox though is that (at least until very recently) elites in much of the world have been besotted with the US. By this I mean: children attending elite US universities, executives wanting to transfer there within international companies, general adherence to US ideologies and so forth. The way that the whole woke ideology spread so rapidly into countries that had a very different context to the US is an example. Yes, much of this is driven by NGOs and US money. But not all.
It may be that this infatuation is changing under Trump, as measured by such metrics as declines in international visitors and students. But arguably US soft power at the “individual” level across much of the world has never been higher than it was in late 2024. The Trump effect may be a blip. Trump may be more obviously predatory than the post 1990 trend of US policy but this is in large part a style issue rather pure substance. Previous presidents typically did not dress down vassal state leaders to their face in public sessions but it was still obvious who was in charge.
A key question for me is whether elites across the world are systematically and “once and for all” losing their infatuation with the US. If so, then I believe that US power is in real decline. If not, then I am less certain.
It’s a sign of weakness. They didn’t have to be so upfront about it in the past as they had more power. Or at least others believed they had power. But thr thing about power is that the more it is used the less of it there is. Especially with failures like Iraq and Afghanistan. And then you get to the point where countries learn their is no point trying to placate America because they will just come back for more.
A fine roundup. Reminds me of debate in Zen thought about satori: sudden awakening or gradual enlightenment?
Bang or whimper?
As Master Yogi said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
A happier ending, or continuation, may come to better approaches to collective action problems. What might those be? Well,—oh, excuse me, a man from Porlock is at the door …
The USA has always relied on disruption for its aims.
The idea is that it can swoop in, hoover up any loose assets and walk away from the damage. Essentially they start fights and go through the pockets of the fallen.
This, however only works if you have more power than everyone in the vicinity. If there are other powerful entities they may stop the fight, scoop up the assets themselves or even punch the troublemaker.
At that point everyone will go through the troublemaker’s pockets.
Yes, “it only works if you have more power than everyone in the vicinity.” That is the folly of Ukraine proxy war. Russia may not have been fully prepared for the extent of NATO arms/reconn/intel to be arrayed against them, but they were fighting a ground war in their backyard–logistics are in their favor. And they have quickly regenerated their defensive/offensive hardware with astounding expedience; their army is now the best in the world! So much for power balance.
Russia, under Putin, has been re-organizing society to be determinedly self-sufficient in all that matters. The Oreshnik Moment was the exclamation point on Russia’s climb to the top of the power heap.
As some will know, I’ve had a go at this conundrum myself, with the proviso that I don’t think it’s limited to the US.
I continue to believe that we are seeing the replacement of a political generation which lived in a permanent state of adolescence by the children of that generation, for whom permanent adolescence was a model to imitate. Now, that permanent adolescence has many components, including extreme narcissism and expecting someone else to do all the hard work, but the important element here is hostility and aggression. The late 60s and early 70s, the formative period here, exalted rebellion against parents, institutions and tradition, and in mutated form we see this in the behaviour of political leaders today.
Importantly though, that generation and its children were brought up on the urge to destroy (not for nothing was “the urge to destroy is a creative urge” found everywhere on the walls of the Sorbonne in 1968.) Everything was slated for destruction: the family, the patriarchy, religion, institutions, the political and economic system. Some of this destruction was intellectual (with structuralism and post-modernism) some was practical as with the Red Brigades and various anarchist groups. And this influence has lasted: it’s not a coincidence that modern political movements are “anti” everything, rather than having any positive programmes. I read that the Democrats in your country are in trouble because they have no positive ideas, just existing on hatred of Trump and the desire to destroy him. That’s what you’d expect from a culture which for two generations now has prized exactly those modes of politics. And now, so far as I can see, that generation wants to destroy the US itself, and much of the world with it.
The US government is not alone, I concur. The comparisons to two year old or adolescents are both very apt, in my opinion, as describing people who don’t know where their limits reside and these will have to be dutifully shown one way or the other. In some cases it will come the hard way as a slap in the face which some do indeed need ASAP. I am not certain if this is only a generational thing in the sense that a lot of people from the same generation are real adults. It has also to do with the position and the culture of the PMCastes.
“As some will know, I’ve had a go at this conundrum myself, with the proviso that I don’t think it’s limited to the US.
I continue to believe that we are seeing the replacement of a political generation which lived in a permanent state of adolescence by the children of that generation, for whom permanent adolescence was a model to imitate…”
Indeed.
Just off-hand: I remember reading an article some years ago that had speculation that one of the effects of China’s one child policy could be males brought up as only children and maybe a tendency to “spoil’ them.
At the moment, I’m not daring the crappified internet search to find it…
I think underlying this in declining EROI and resources generally. Opec estimates that between now and mid century $16T in new investment will be required to replace depleting resources. (The analyst who shared this suggested that you need not trust Opec, other similar estimates have been made.) Not to mention scarcity of potable water.
There’s loss of broad optimism in ever rising living standards, and a scramble at the top to seize what’s left of a shrinking pie. What John Michael Greer has called out as early stages in the end of a civilization, broader than the fate of one or more nations.
“Importantly though, that generation and its children were brought up on the urge to destroy (not for nothing was “the urge to destroy is a creative urge” found everywhere on the walls of the Sorbonne in 1968.) Everything was slated for destruction: the family, the patriarchy, religion, institutions, the political and economic system.”
Oh, Aurelian, dear Aurelian, please don’t succumb to the “blame the hippies” trope that has been the favorite of lesser lights from Spiro Agnew to Rod Dreher, currently trying to hide from the 21st century in Hungary. It wasn’t that generation that was busy napalming children during our formative years. More recently, it was an often quiet Silent Generation guy (Biden, b. 1942) along with an X-er (Sullivan, b. 1976) and a border Boomer Blinken (b. 1962). What was it during Biden’s and Sullivan’s formative years that led them to spread violence to Ukraine, often risking nuclear consequences, and to keep the Israeli genocide machine humming along, even with a few bumps here and there.
The hippies, we should recall, were so about destruction that they couldn’t understand how spreading the war to Cambodia was so creative a solution to losing a war. (What did Kissinger experience in his formative years?) They warned of what Business As Usual was doing to the Earth, and many sought to carry out a non-consumerist alternative; some even succeeded. The hippies out at New Buffalo commune were anything but violent. It was violence that was visited upon them because they were easy, pacifist marks in a gun-toting society.
I do appreciate that your comment sent me looking for some comments from Theodore Roszak, author of The Making of a Counter Culture. What I found was a Roszak-friendly “revival” in The Nation inspired by viewing all those Tech Bros in the Rotunda:
I share your rejection of Aurelian’s recurrent “blame the hippies” rants. It is tiring. Not all of us from the 60s or early 70s turned out like Jerry Rubin on Wall Street. Some of us retained ideals and worked constructively for social change and peace. Clinton, Trump, Bush, Biden and Cheney epitomize the degenerate bunch of self-serving draft dodgers that matured into the elites that control the rotting western neoliberal “democracies” to this day. I’m not optimistic.
I think there is a false history of the 1960s that most boomers became hippies and most hippies supported revolution and the complete overturn of society by violent means. The reality was most boomers hated their hippie compatriots, to the point that until several years into the 1970s it was unsafe to travel in many parts of the US if you looked like the media image of a hippie; and anyway most hippies had no stomach for violence and were hoping (unrealistically) that some woo-woo peaceful means could be found to make society more humane and tolerant; and, further, most talk about revolution was cosplaying and led to zero action beyond (at the extremes) maybe some minor vandalism and shoplifting. The percentages of the population involved all down the line was small-smaller-smallest. Most boomers were conformists like their parents were and like their children ended up being. By the time punks were becoming the new threat to conformity, the conformists were starting to look more hippie-like because their favorite country music stars had (by then) adopted the long haired, bearded look. And by the mid 1980s you only saw youth who looked like hippies in the backwaters where they were beating up hippies two decades before.
Aurelien appears to focus on France a lot, so maybe it was different there. We had nothing like the nonsensical French Theory stuff that became popular with US academics decades later. I guess Angela Davis was high on Herbert Marcuse, but you would be hard-pressed to find any sizable number of boomers who even knew who that was, never mind had any acquaintance with his writings. Maybe among the Ivy Leaguers who spent a semester at Oxbridge or the Sorbonne that was more of a thing.
Well, this ignores many many volumes of thought in the selfsame 60s and early 70s by those “spoiled kids” attempting to articulate what they were for.
And neither the Red Brigades nor the autonomists in Italy (nor even the RAF in Germany) pursued violent methods for their own sake. (and while it shouldn’t be necessary to point this out, the actions of the assassins and street combatants of the Italian right during the Years of Lead were nothing reaembling peaceful.)
The same applies to the Tupamaros and a host of the similar formations in the Latin America of the same era.
Whatever the methodologies involved, they all involved trying to create an hegemonic alternative to capitalism which would not be subject to the problems that afflicted all of the models that laid claim to the bolshevik model. People were by no means running around being pure nihilists.
I would add to that observation the fact that the hippies of the 60s were far from nihilistic. There was a strong back-to-the-land and environmental component, as well as a movement toward artisan crafts and creative work that bypassed the often stifling gatekeepers. They were, by and large, looking for alternative ways of organizing society.
Whatever the results, I find the notion that they were somehow the precursors of Donald Trump and his cronies quite ludicrous. I don’t believe that becoming real estate magnates was among their ambitions.
I was a bit older than that generation and was out of the country during the first wave, but paid close attention and taught some of them in a tutoring school later on. Being older means that I remember the 50s all too well. I was in college then.There was plenty to rebel against.
As a side note, with all the justified expressions of outrage against the current supine behavior of the leading universities, I haven’t yet seen anyone relate it to their comparable acquiescence during the McCarthy years.
Here’s a Link that explores your side note:
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-08-06/why-are-americas-most-powerful-institutions-capitulating-to-trump
Interesting how the blame always stops at the “adolescent” generation and their supposedly spoiled children, as if rebellion, narcissism, and destruction just spontaneously erupted in the 60s. But let’s be honest: maybe they wanted to destroy the world their parents built because they saw what their parents had done in it.
It’s not like these kids grew up in a vacuum. In Germany, they watched as ex-Nazis quietly slid back into government, business, law enforcement, and education. Denazification was a cynical joke. In France, the state had no problem recycling former Waffen-SS into the Légion Etrangère for its colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria (Jean-Marie Le Pen did not get his SS dagger from a pochette surprise), or letting Vichy collabos occupy prominent positions (Does Maurice Papon ring a bell ?). Japan whitewashed its past too, with many wartime elites smoothly transitioning into postwar positions of power. And the message to the next generation was clear: forget, forgive and move on.
So when that generation started protesting, demanding change, sometimes violently but often pacifically, maybe it wasn’t because they were narcissistic, lazy or childish. Maybe they were trying, in the only way they knew how, to confront a system built on denial, silence, and moral cowardice.
Johann Chapoutot, one of the most important historians of Nazism today, has shown how fascist administrative culture survived the war and was quietly absorbed into postwar bureaucracies. And he points out that it’s no coincidence that the most intense radical-left violence erupted in Germany, Italy, and Japan. That wasn’t just random madness. It was a delayed reckoning with a past no one wanted to face.
So yes, the “urge to destroy” was real. But before dismissing it as adolescent nihilism, maybe ask what they were trying to destroy and why. Sometimes, when you inherit a house built on mass graves, tearing it down looks a lot like sanity.
P.S. : None of this is a defense of today’s Western elites or their failures. It’s just an attempt to set the historical record straight, because without understanding where this all came from, we’ll keep misreading the present.
What I think is scariest in all this is the sense of complete impunity in Western elites. I fear it will lead to some half smart Character – Netanyahu or Starmer or Trump or whoever letting slip the dogs of war.
Indeed I think it’s the core dilemma for team Russia- how to win today’s conflict without the collective west laun hing WW3 in a tantrum.
Could Russia completely neuter the UK with 4-5 strategically targeted Oreshniks? That might be the only way to ensure the wake-up call gets through: make an example of a country having great sentimental value to the Empire’s ruling class and not enough remaining military capability to defend itself. It’s hard to see anything but a demonstration of the Empire’s military inferiority causing the rulers to modify their behavior.
Speaking from U.K.: yes they could. In about four to five minutes.
I keep wondering why Akrotiri had not been taken out already, as an appetiser.
Now that US has stored nukes in Lakenheath, even my wife agrees we have to sell our beautiful holiday let home, only 40 miles away.
Whatever slap lesson were to be delivered, it would have to be publicised and publicised very loudly. That would be the only way for the current neonazis to be thrown out of the office.
People in High Street U.K. still live in fantasy land thinking that we make any difference or can influence anything other than burrowing deep into big lads knickers and causing grief that way. All day today the blurb on all MSM outfits here is telling us in most somber terms how President Trump is demanding, DEMANDING You Hear, his ceasefire from Putin, with severe, beautiful but severe, consequences to follow, but with none of the Wurlitzer plums mentioning that he is being ignored and laughed at by all those he threatens, as a toothless dumb fool that he is.
For godsakes, it’s been at least 10 years now and BBC is still bleating the same mind numbing propaganda about our government’s determined and very serious implementation of very harsh and forceful measures to deter the illegal invaders from taking the perilous journey from France, our brotherly safe country. Nobody still dares mention how 10 more years of succession of this kind of HM government’s treason of U.K. population will ultimately stop this land from ever regaining sovereignty and present us with a perpetual civil war between natives and invaders. I wonder what effect that will have on house prices in Surbiton.
But to keep the numbsculls in tow, “news” are aplenty, mainly about a pair of retards called Harry and Andrew. As long as we can laugh at them, we don’t need to worry about the big asteroid hurling our way.
So non-nuclear Oreshnik visits to Lakenheath, Cheltenham, Faslane, MI6 HQ, and the Bank of England—good enough to get the message across? Unless Hezbollah can reconstitute itself fast, Iran is probably on the hook for taking out Akrotiri.
Great article Conor
It’s Johnathan Cook
Seconded… a sordid summary, but cheers, for making it palatable Mr. Gallagher. I enjoyed it.
rule by Dunning Kruger
Re: At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Council of Foreign Ministers in China, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi proposed the following for collective security and sovereignty…”
Within the bullet points selected, I see more weapons and more surveillance.
Seems to be the way of the world. Within that framework, not too much out of step with many of US/Israel and associates’ views.
Then clicking on the link to the RT article about the event, I notice they make sure to include this point:
“On the sidelines, Lavrov held bilateral meetings with the foreign ministers of China, Pakistan, India, and notably, Iran. His talks with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi focused on diplomatic solutions to the nuclear issue and emphasized deepening strategic coordination.”
I recall the recent interviews with Helmer where a call between Putin and NuttyYahoo was discussed. I thought that within reported read outs about the conversation, there was a hint that the carrot in the conversation was Russia helping maintain tabs (or “diplomatic solutions”) on Iran’s nuke energy program.
And, thinking about the NC post from yesterday about Iran, I wonder how much of Russia and China’s current support comes with the caveat of no nuke weapons?
I read aong time ago an article by a foreign polocy expert claiming the North Koreans had nukes not to use against thr South, Japan or the US. But to make sure the China kept backing them or they could start a war that would drag China into it with horrific results.
What is to be done? Take the time to acquire a more complete understanding of one’s own motivations and the motivations of political opponents.
Get out of political silos and begin to have the courage to directly engage with those you consider your political enemies, not through partisan rants but through conversations about your local community, family problems. relationship issues, addictions of all sorts, feelings of powerlessness, loneliness, despair.
Try to find out, with as much patience and discipline as you can muster, whether deep down there are commonalities among supposed enemies or whether that famous Nazi opportunist, Carl Schmitt, was right when he said that politics is fundamentally about the intensity of the conflict between friend and foe, a dynamic which he fervently believed could never be overcome.
excellent comment, Gulag…and one part of the necessary corrective: talk to those whom you keep being told are your enemies.
it was relatively easy for me, as the demparty descended into madness…since ive lived in red rural texas for much of my life, and have been thus surrounded by right wingers(mostly the actually nonpolitical Ur-right wingers).
who else is there to talk to?
lol.
i did the flame wars against the bush2 agenda, of course…but my letters to the local editor were well recieved across the spectrum….all but the actual GOP party members(about 50 old folks, out of around 4500 total county pop)…righties thought i was a libertarian, centrist dems thought i was a radical lefty…and everyone else figgered i was what i said i was, a rationalist with a passion for getting all around an issue.
most of the non-dues-paying-members of both parties, locally, can be talked to…given the right set and setting. Feed store is still my go-to…
and if you get used to applying the Socratic Method…as i did in raising our boys…people can be brought out of the Cave, at least for a time. The trick is to first separate them from whatever herd they run with,lol.
Great article Conor. The “rules based order” really can’t stand it when others act with patience and deliberation and play by the rules. The US really does not like it when China sets up the Belt and Road and starts running all over the globe like Seabiscuit – clip starring Billy Bob Thornton as a petulant US.
I snuck into a dusty CIA archive with skulls stenciled on the doors to research what the core rules of the “rules based international order” might be. After much decrypting of top secret documents (and a few sacrifices to Cthulhu), I determined the most critical rules are as follows.
1. The most important rule of the rules-based international order: when we do it, it’s okay.
2. Freedom and human rights are all-important, but may have to be dispensed with during an emergency; an emergency is any circumstance that we say is one.
3. Government giving more money to the rich creates a vibrant and innovative economy and culture; government giving more money to the non-rich leads to a stagnant society of slothful, dependent idlers; if you say the reverse has proven to be the case in reality, you’re an evil Communist.
4. A government forced by populists to give money to the non-rich must then hire many bureaucrats to create complex rules that make recipients appear guilty of cheating; all other options are forbidden.
5. Democracy means having a choice between two different servants of the rich on election day; all other options are forbidden.
6. Freedom of speech means being allowed to repeat the approved opinions and stories as fact, with complete confidence; all other options are forbidden.
7. Any nation that objects to our putting military bases close to their borders is an aggressor that threatens our way of life; very likely its leader is “the next Hitler” also.
8. We reserve the right to attack you for any reason; if you offer resistance and try to defend yourselves and fight back, that makes you terrorists and a threat to the entire international order.
9. If you say that we’re projecting, when we accuse you of the very crimes we ourselves openly commit, we will dismiss you as a deranged conspiracy theory believer; just remember, our accusations are always proven facts and require no supporting evidence.
Addendum to rule 4: Small scale fraud and cheating is to be punished mercilessly and disproportionately. Large scale fraud and cheating is to be swept under the rug, or (as a last resort) retroactively legitimized with a settlement.
I really enjoyed this and think “All Other Options are Forbidden” is a great title for memoir – not sure who should write it yet. It has the spirit of the old movie Network, where Peter Finch says ‘I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell – ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore! ‘
i must have missed the Rushkoff interview when it was current, but thats one of the best things ive read on Current Affairs, ever.
lots to chew on, there.