Common sociopath slop from the Masters of War (i.e. Anduril, Palantir) and lazy lemmings. Every accusation...

Histories of Decline
Politics and economics in American “declinism”

“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith once reassured his compatriots at a moment of British defeat.1 But how much? American elites have wondered this periodically for most of the last sixty years. At irregular intervals, voices from the left and right of center raise the question of American decline. What can we learn from this march of failed predictions? Will the doomsayers always be wrong? Or just early?

In the Winter 1988–1989 issue of Foreign Affairs, political scientist Samuel Huntington attacked the question as the world stood on the precipice of the new unipolarity. Despite the impending Cold War victory, this was an anxious period for American capitalism. The malaise was summed up by Democratic presidential candidate Paul Tsongas: “The Cold War is over; Japan and Germany won.”2 Huntington rejected this defeatism. He deflated contemporary fears by reminding readers that similar decline panics had recurred since the 1950s in a series of waves symbolized by Sputnik, Vietnam, the energy crisis, and now, in the late 1980s, Japan.

In each instance, the foretold decline failed to materialize. In hindsight, we see their fantasies and projections for what they were. Who now remembers bestsellers like The Coming War with Japan?3 But Huntington, while rejecting the decline thesis, refused to condescend to the declinists—even misguided fears were worth taking seriously, he maintained. True, the US had survived countless supposedly terminal diagnoses. But even a hypochondriac might benefit from regular visits to the doctor. Would the imperial republic have endured without the recurring panics? Could a hallucinatory discourse (Khrushchev will bury us) actually produce its own reality (continued American primacy)?

This is just what Huntington concluded. American structural power had endured not despite, but because of the doomsayers. In his words, “the declinists play an indispensable role in preventing what they are predicting.”4 This pattern held across the waves of post-Sputnik discourse. It also gave rise to a slyly confident prediction: “The United States is unlikely to decline so long as its public is periodically convinced that it is about to decline.”5

This is what Plato might have referred to as a noble lie. In order to win their backing for policies to prompt renewal, American voters needed to be persuaded of the possibility of US decline. To whom would it fall to mislead the public for their own good? In the immediate sense, the declinists would do the persuading. But behind them there had to be someone capable of consciously inflating the crisis discourse. This sounds cynical, but it is appropriate when reading Huntington, who once wistfully reminded readers that Truman “had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers”6—a rare admission of the sources of political power in the American Century. A radical who wrote the same sentence would be crucified for crudeness.

Call it cynical or reductionist, Huntington’s point of view has long been common in Cambridge, Manhattan, and Washington. Similar quotes, from men more powerful than Huntington, could be reproduced endlessly. One worldbuilding investment banker, the National Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) pioneer Ferdinand Eberstadt, said that “the country was always run by crises.” He added: “if one was not evident, it had to be created to get things done.”7 Such strategies became the stuff of banter among insiders. In March 1950, one New England congressman told Secretary of State Dean Acheson that Cold War rearmament could not be sold “without some domestic crisis.” In the event that “Stalin did not come through with his assistance in precipitating crises,” Acheson should “not hesitate to create the crises himself.”8

(...)

Huntington’s anatomy of declinism was passed like an heirloom from one generation’s best and brightest to the next. Until relatively recently, US elites turned to Huntington as a source of reassurance. In 2014, former Obama National Security Advisor Tom Donilon observed that recurring declinism was “in our DNA, and it helps drive our renewal.” He quoted Huntington’s Foreign Affairs article directly: “The United States is unlikely to decline so long as its public is periodically convinced that it is about to decline.” Any real challenge—the weak recovery from 2008, the Tea Party, Piketty, China—could be handled by homeopathic doses of crisis rhetoric. 28

But just over two years later, Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 Presidential election to Donald Trump, and the limited purchase of this view of American resilience became a generational problem for elite politics. The shock was extreme. Coupled with the surprise primary challenge of Bernie Sanders, the Trump victory was understood as a legitimacy crisis for liberal capitalism and, in particular, its globalized variant. Jake Sullivan, the hawkish Clinton protege assigned to dive into the wreckage, concluded that Trump’s victory “reflected the exhaustion of a post-Cold War economic model,” as if there were no warning signs. 29 (...)

Corrupted by Absolute Power
In an interview, Marc Lynch discusses his new book decrying the post-1990 U.S.-dominated order in the Middle East.

We like to think in Washington that we are the only thing standing between the region as it is and something even worse. I used to write policy reports and opinion articles trying to make things a bit better. But I think at some point after 35 years, we should acknowledge that we bear considerable responsibility for the sad state of the region. So, the catharsis I suppose came from stepping back and taking an honest look not just at one policy gone wrong, but at an entire structure built to sustain domination and the immiseration of the region. And it’s really striking if you think about it: For the most part, everyone knows this. They just choose to not take the kinds of actions that might change it.

Part of it is simply that primacy is generally bad. You remember Lord Acton’s saying, to the effect that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely? I think that applies in the Middle East—to the United States and Israel alike. They are accustomed to acting with impunity, standing outside the rules and demanding that their self-interest take priority over anything else. And what that means is that even if Palestinian, Syrian, Iraqi, or Lebanese suffering is sad, it’s not important enough to them to warrant changing policies. It really only matters if it can be weaponized to justify action against an adversary; if our friends do it, we look the other way. And in the absence of real external costs or peer competitors forcing policy change, our policy tends to be locked in place in ways that are not responsive to what’s happening on the ground.

My book is in large part about the triumph of structure over agency, in political science terms. Every single American president since Bill Clinton has come into office promising to change U.S. policy and draw down from the region, and every one of them has ultimately been drawn back into the same set of unpleasant policies. However they start, they all end up ignoring democracy and human rights, promoting Arab normalization with Israel while ignoring Palestinian rights, putting pressure on Iran, and waging wars on terror. And that’s partly because they work in terms of protecting self-defined interests. Think about Biden officials arguing that their policy in Gaza was a success because we supported an ally, didn’t lose any Arab allies, and didn’t allow China to make any inroads. That’s all true on its own terms, but it completely ignores the almost unthinkable human costs and the degradation of international order.

~300 million dead

The sleep of reason produces monsters: goons vs. scholars

JD Vance’s Top Donor Suggests Pope Leo XIV is Tool of Antichrist
Peter Thiel says he’s urged Vance to ignore the pope on moral questions — and simply pray for him.

America’s ailing one-trick pony
Trump’s excessive faith in military power is squarely within the US tradition

Epic Fury is no departure from American tradition. When Trump was a young man pulling strings to escape military service in Vietnam — a privilege he shared with other future US presidents, including George W Bush — the Pentagon announced regular “kill ratios” of the number of enemy dead versus American. The Tet Offensive in early 1968 was heralded as a major US victory since so many Vietcong insurgents had been killed. In reality, Tet delivered a crushing political defeat to America since it conveyed the enemy’s iron will.

The Pentagon did not see it that way. Pete Hegseth, the US “secretary of war”, is a very different figure to Robert McNamara, the then secretary of defence. But his playbook is similar. In crude terms, success is judged by how many things and people America can blow up. Hegseth’s favourite words are “precision” and “lethality”. The similarity between Lyndon B Johnson’s Operation Rolling Thunder and Trump’s Epic Fury is almost exact. Just as LBJ used carpet-bombing of North Vietnam to prod elusive concessions in negotiations, Trump’s missile threats are wasted on Iran. As the Taliban used to say during the two-decade US military operation in Afghanistan: “America has the watches, we have the time.” The Taliban regained power five years ago.

Trump seemed to grasp the limits of America’s one-trick ponies better than most US presidents. His denouncement of Bush’s Iraq war was a key propellant of his 2016 hostile takeover of the Republican Party. The irony is that he is now riding that pony into the same old quicksand. Trump can run the gamut of America’s greatest hits in the same interview. One moment he is proclaiming mission accomplished as Bush did at an early stage of the Iraq war. The next he is dangling peace with honour, as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger branded America’s retreat from Vietnam. When his blood is really up he demands second world war-style unconditional surrender.

But his only way out is via sustained diplomacy on multiple fronts. On Monday he called off the next wave of strikes on Iran scheduled for Tuesday. He wanted to give the Pakistan-mediated talks another chance. At the forefront of Trump’s mind is that he must do better than Barack Obama did with his 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Nowhere in his mind, apparently, is the recollection that it took Obama’s negotiators 20 months to nail it down. The idea that much less knowledgeable US officials could do better in a few days is delusional. That Obama could have pulled off a serious agreement without once threatening to bomb Iran is inconceivable to him.

The lesson from Epic Fury is the same one that Obama drew from Iraq. Diplomacy should always be the first resort. There is no need even to mention US military power, still less to brag about it daily. To paraphrase a maxim, the military that fights best is that which fights least. The comforting take is to blame Epic Fury on Trump’s unique recklessness. But he is no aberration. Once you screen out his uniquely self-defeating verbal incontinence, you discern a Washington traditionalist. His approach is the reductio ad absurdum of one lost US war after another preceded by strings of victories on the battlefield.

As the world googles Thucydides and digests the emerging G2 China-US reality, the question is whether Washington is capable of reinventing itself. Better informed US figures than Trump are calling on him to “finish the job” in Iran. Had they learnt from the recent or distant past, they would be revising their advice. But that would require thinking. Good strategy is the product of intellectual humility. Trump’s lack of it puts him in plentiful company. 

Establishment NYT leads the charge (for 'the world') with the next round of sinophobia/anti-communism

 ColdMiser wrote:
Trump will claim "victory" no matter what happens. The greatest victory of all time. The biggliest!

 rgio wrote:
I fully expect China to be the main player in the end of Operation Epic Trifle. They will emerge as the grown up in the room and be the ones that get the strait opened and will be the biggest beneficiary of that. They win big in this debacle without firing a single missel. Question is whether or not they allow Trump to slink away with something he can hang a Victory sign on. 

 R_P wrote:
Made America weaker, alienated allies, gave Russia and China leverage, and proved to Iran they have more control than they would have ever believed possible.

A historically stupid war with no plan to achieve any goals. 

The war on Iran will likely end in American retreat
The American empire cannot win the war against Iran at acceptable financial, military, and political costs.
By Jeffrey Sachs and Sybil Fares

The war against Iran that the United States and Israel launched on February 28, 2026, will likely end in an American retreat. The United States cannot continue the war without producing disastrous consequences. A renewed escalation would likely lead to the destruction of the region’s oil, gas, and desalination infrastructure, causing a prolonged global catastrophe. Iran can credibly impose costs that the United States cannot bear and that the world should not suffer.

The US – Israel war plan was a decapitation strike, sold to President Donald Trump by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and David Barnea, the director of the Mossad. The premise was that an aggressive joint US–Israeli bombing campaign would so degrade the Iranian regime’s command structure, nuclear programme, and IRGC senior leadership that the regime would fracture. The United States and Israel would then impose a pliable government in Tehran.

Trump seems to have been convinced that Iran would follow the same course as had occurred in Venezuela. The US operation in Venezuela in January 2026 removed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in what appears to have been a coordinated operation between the CIA and elements inside the Venezuelan state. The US won a more pliant regime, while most of the Venezuelan power structure remained in place. Trump seems to have believed naively that the same outcome would occur in Iran.

The Iran operation, however, failed to produce a pliant regime in Tehran. Iran is not Venezuela, historically, technologically, culturally, geographically, militarily, demographically, or geopolitically. Whatever happened in Caracas had little relation to what would take place in Tehran.

The Iranian government did not fracture. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), far from being decapitated, emerged with a tightened internal command and an expanded role in the national-security architecture. The supreme leader’s office held; the religious establishment closed ranks behind it; and the population rallied against external attack.

Two months on, Trump and Netanyahu have no Iranian successor government under their control, no Iranian surrender to close the war, and no military pathway whatsoever to victory. The only path, and the one the US seems to be taking, is a retreat, with Iran in charge of the Strait of Hormuz and with none of the other issues between the US and Iran settled.

Several reasons explain America’s disastrous miscalculations and Iran’s successes. (...)

Rubio's Red Scare Redux

NextGen Rambos/Death Squads

The American-Israeli attack on Iran was more than a bad idea; it has turned into a watershed in the decline of the American empire. Some might prefer the word “hegemony” to describe the world order the United States leads, since its flag does not generally fly over the lands it protects or exploits. But the rules are the same: Imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends. And with the Iran war, President Trump has overextended the empire dangerously.

A Middle Eastern military misadventure is one of the last ways a casual observer would have expected Mr. Trump’s presidency to go wrong. The problems he alluded to in all three of his presidential campaigns had mostly resulted from our leaders’ governing beyond their means. At home, proponents of wokeness underestimated the costs and difficulties of micromanaging interactions between groups. Abroad, the mighty American armed forces proved to have no particular talent for democracy promotion, and there was the recent debacle in Iraq to prove it. Overextension was a danger that President Joe Biden contemptuously dismissed. “We’re the United States of America,” he used to say, “and there’s nothing we can’t do.”

Mr. Trump, people thought, would be different. For all the grandiosity of the expression “Make America great again,” Trump voters did not expect him to take on new problems. The greatness would be mostly atmospheric — braggadocio, not adventurism. The United States could become greater even if it withdrew to a less expansive sphere of influence. When he proclaimed an updated Monroe Doctrine, refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere, retrenchment was what most people thought they were getting. In last November’s National Security Strategy, he added, “The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.”

This was a logical, even an admirable, foreign policy plan. Just as important, history showed it to be workable. Britain had to surrender its far-flung system of colonies and protectorates after World War II. Letting go was often awkward and sometimes left violence in its wake. But except for its ill-fated attempt to join France and Israel in seizing the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, Britain did not try to hold territories it could no longer afford. It wound up on reasonably good terms with its former colonial possessions. Its disengagement was a success, though this can be hard to see because what was being managed was decline. Mr. Trump had a chance of pulling off something similar.

The assumption in Washington over the past decade has been that the world is engaged in a game of geostrategic musical chairs and the music is about to stop. China may soon overmatch us not just in military-industrial capacity but also in information technology. The world will harden into a new, less favorable geostrategic configuration. This is the last moment to reshape it in America’s favor. (...)