No Plan B: The Western Elites Didn’t Plan for China, Russia and Iran Remaining Independent

It is now overwhelmingly obvious that the Western, and especially the US, elites suffered from an overwhelming level of arrogance and self-belief in the two decades following the Second Unipolar Moment that lead to colossal errors of judgement that have severely undermined the West’s ability to compete.

The mixture of arrogance and self-belief still persists within much of the Western elite, reflected in their continuing inability to correctly perceive current realities. The US elites have fundamentally weakened the US home front, while fostering the strength of their now greatest rival China.

The Beating Down of the American People

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, with full employment, the new aspirations of the at last emancipated slave descendant population, and the nation fighting a massive illegal war in Vietnam, the American population became too uppity. There was “too much democracy” as one elite courtier reported to Mr. Rockefeller’s new oligarch-coordinating think tank, the Trilateral Commission. Something had to be done, and that something was a decades-long beating down on the American people so that they would once again understand their proper place.

President Carter started the turn to what became called neoliberalism in 1978, as did the Labour government in the UK. By the start of the next decade, a full-blown depression had been created in both nations to produce the required mass unemployment that would tame the workers. In addition, Reagan fired the Air Traffic Controllers (who had actually endorsed him!) and Thatcher crushed the Miners Union (with the help of the Nottinghamshire scabs who were rewarded by the elites with pit closures) through an all-out state attack, including the restriction of basic civil liberties, coordinated with private interests.

Labour union law was also enforced in such a way that it became a parody of itself, facilitating the reduction of the level of unionization to that of the beginning of the twentieth century. Added on were vast changes in labour laws that made it much easier to hire and fire workers, and increased levels of illicit immigration that provided for a “reserve pool of labour” to keep employees in check. With the last bastion of unions being in the public sector, wave after wave of privatizations and outsourcing ensued.

This was not enough though, and with the addition of China to the global capitalist labour force (facilitated by the US opening up free trade with China), a massive outsourcing of manufacturing capacity ensued; firstly, to Mexico but then on a much greater level to China. India also helped out by providing English-speaking services people that everything from call centres to software development could be outsourced to. Adding insult to injury, the H1B immigrant worker (more like “indentured worker”) program was vastly over-exploited by universities, tech companies and others to drive down pay for American skilled workers.

After the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008, people started focusing on their real enemy – the US financial and other elites; with the Occupy Wall Street movement being a symptom at the anger against the bailing out of the financial system and the total lack of any indictments against the widespread law-breaking involved. Obama showed who his true constituency was by rescuing the rich and powerful and crushing OWS. After attempts to both ridicule and co-opt the demonstrations unsuccessfully, the demonstrations were crushed by the security services.

We see the same today with the massive demonstrations against the mass murder and other war crimes of Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. Interestingly, media coverage of “identity politics” greatly expanded after the crushing of OWS providing a class-blind intersectionality with which to divide and conquer the American people and take the focus away from issues of class and oligarchy. In the Gramscian sense, the hegemonic culture was reconstituted to take advantage of these new tools of oligarchy obfuscation and popular divide and conquer. Identity politics was captured for the benefit of the elites, while also providing cover to comprador minority and identity-utilizing elites and courtiers such as Obama, Oprah, Ellen, Hillary Clinton, General Charles Brown Jr., Robert Smith, Condoleezza Rice, Jay-Z, and Kamala Harris. Just because a person was rich and powerful did not mean that they could not identify as a victim! Racial inequality could be solved by simply having a few more Black billionaires and CEOs, while class relations remained the same.

The Extraction of Profit at Society’s Expense

In about 2006 I sat in Chicago O’Hare airport with a trader from England who could no longer contain himself and blurted out “they are so fat!” In the past decades the US has witnessed the utter crapification of its food system, as cheap food-like substances (with many chemicals that are banned in other countries) replaced real food, and actual food was filled full of chemicals (including xenoestrogens) and growth hormones (many banned in other countries). The majority of the food is now grown in dead soil that has to be repeatedly soaked with artificially produced nutrients and doused in dangerous chemicals to support the vast mono-cropping. The result is food bereft of many of the basic nutrients that it previously had, coated in dangerous chemicals, and even consisting of such ingredients as emulsifiers that are toxic to the human gut and high fructose corn syrup that increases liver disease, weight gain, diabetes. Then add the extensive lack of real public transport and urban planning designed to drive people into car use and away from walking, and you produce an epidemic of obesity, diabetes and many other ailments. The political and social dysfunctionality of the US is then shown by the “anti-fatphobia” campaigns, rather than a societal discussion on how to make the food system and the built environment much supportive of basic health and fitness. In the meantime, the food capitalists (agro-industrial complex) rake in more and more profits as they sell more and more deeply unhealthy (or to call a spade a spade, poisonous) products.

The video below if for my non-US readers, who may not quite understand how overweight Americans are. They even require scooters for some to make it around the mall!

Then we have the health sick care system which is built around profit maximization from monopolization and direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical adds (banned in every other country on Earth pretty much), with the US being the most medicated country in the world while also having the highest medical prices in the world. If someone wasn’t already fat and sick the pharmaceutical industrial complex will come to the rescue with massive over-medication and unexplored drug interactions. The latest profit maximizing beauty is Ozempic which, although quite dangerous, works to reduce a person’s weight while they gorge on the low-priced crapified food-like substances. It has known dangers and “unknown long-term use dangers”, all the better for pharmaceutical demand in the future! People are risking thyroid tumors, pancreatitis, changes in vision, hypoglycemia, gallbladder issues, kidney failure and cancer just so they can keep filling their face or get as thin as those manipulated online body images. If that fails, they can always get the fat sucked out while they have their face redesigned and their breasts augmented. Their heart surgeon may also tell them that they need a stent or heart bypass operation that is quite probably completely unnecessary, and may actually kill them; outside of an actual heart attack or significant chest pain there is no survival benefit! These are the most profitable procedures for US hospitals and heart surgeons.

A PBS documentary showing the much greater success of the “socialized” or “socially insured” medicine that the US elites are allergic too, because health care comes before profiteering – that’s why it’s cheaper!

Michael Moore’s Sicko is also still an excellent documentary about this:

Then add the public health US disaster called COIVD and now the ongoing state acceptance of repeated COVID infections and escalating cases of long COVID.

Outside the “food” and sick care sectors, we have the vast increase in the monopolization and oligopolization of the US economy, with rentier toll booths set up again and again to rake in excess monopoly profits. The sick care system is actually a classic such case, with monopolies and oligopolies at all levels of the system and a US state that has tied its own hands in regulating pharmaceutical prices. But we also see this with the “too big to fail” banks, the telecommunications giants, and even the newer google and apple app store toll booths taking their 30% skim off the top. As the majority of Americans have had their income pressured in the past decades, they have had their pockets picked by the rentiers; a process partially hidden by the manipulation of inflation statistics.

The US educational system has also become a vast profit-machine, enabled by massive government-enabled student debts required for ever increasing tuition, the neoliberal production of precarity within the academic staff, and the exchanging of academic excellence for positive student consumer outcomes. Last year at Yale, one of the elite US universities, 80% of students got an “A” grade to help those positive consumer outcomes (consumers who are paying tuition fees of over US$60,000 per year for a 4-year bachelors), while those elite universities abuse the H1B regime (under which they are exempted from quota limits) to keep access to cheap foreign indentured workers and work to replace tenured staff with low-paid post-docs and contract staff. The result is a much lower quality of outcome, as students are increasingly not taught by the professors, and those teaching them have their hands tied when giving feedback. The offshoring of the actual productive elements of US industries also increased demand for lawyers, marketers, financiers and lobbyists while reducing the need for an understanding of basic operations and labour with manufacturing skills. The end result is a hollowed-out US industrial sector, at the level of physical plant, skilled employees and the boardroom; displayed by the inability of the US MIC to ramp up war production when requested.

But, China, Russia and Iran did not become supplicants!

All of the above would have been fine for the US elites if they could also control the economics, politics and society of China, Russia and Iran, but those nations refused to become supplicants. Instead, they grew their own strengths (in Russia after Putin came to power) and did not engage in the home front destroying actions that were widespread in the US. The US is now very much a paper tiger with a humanity-destroying sting in the tail (its nuclear arsenal). It simply does not have the human and productive infrastructure ready to ramp up for a major war, as it did have in WW2. That capability now sits within China, the greatest manufacturing nation in the world, and to a lesser degree Russia and Iran; with the latter possessing extensive natural resources. The US had numerous chances to co-opt Russia and Iran but has instead driven them into a closer and closer alliance while greatly weakening itself.

The US worldview had not caught up to this reality as it carried out its failed attempts to crush Russia through the Ukraine provocations and extensive sanctions and foreign exchange theft. Now the Western commentators blabber on about Russian inflation risks in an over-heating economy! So much for the economic collapse.

Russia has now ramped up its war fighting production, outstripping the West within 18 months and building an armed-forces larger than those of the US; with a much smaller remit of protecting the integrity of Russia itself rather than being spread thin across the world. If calculations are done at purchasing power parity (PPP) and take into account the vast profiteering, corruption and incompetence evident in the US MIC and armed services, there may be very little distance between the Russians and the US. Iran has also shown itself to a potent manufacturer of military equipment.

At the same time the US shrivelled its right arm, Europe, to keep it within US control and domination. The destruction of Nordstream II and the Europe-hurting sanctions cut European industry off from the cheap Russian hydrocarbons that supported its energy-intensive industries, especially those of Germany. Energy-cost deindustrialization is now taking place, adding to the EV travails of the car industry and the increasing Chinese competition in the machine tools sector. While Italy struggles from one no-growth or contraction year to another, with its population shrinking and its youth streaming out to other nations in search of better opportunities. The US stumbling attempts at protectionism and industrial policy, while it maintains its access to cheap fossil fuel energy, are not helping Europe. Part of Germany’s response is to take the US path of offshoring (to both the US and China), and driving down wages through immigration and reductions in benefits; not good for national productive strength and social cohesion.

The UK is far ahead of Germany, pushing toward a Victorian (1800s) level of social divide, and extensive mental health issues while the elite-serving Conservative Party incrementally destroys a National Health System supported by the vast majority of the British:

At the start of WW2, the UK military felt the effects of such brutal social division as so many of its conscripts were far below the height and health requirements. In WW2, rationing actually improved the nutrition in the diet of many of the British people. Currently, only 23% of possible applicants actually pass the basic health, fitness and intelligence requirements of the US military; leading to major recruitment shortages which are made worse by the declining reputation of the US armed services. Reflecting this recruitment crisis, the USS mega aircraft carrier USD Ford has to operate with 500 less sailors than it was designed for.

Unlike the decaying US and its shrivelling European right-arm, Russia, Iran and China (RIC) are going from strength to strength, within the bigger BRINCISSTAN, with the US elites only slowly waking up to this new reality. Pride and arrogance have come before the fall, and all of the elite and MIC will not be able to put the US Empire back together again. The Chinese are in the fast overtaking lane, still only spending 2% of GDP on its military. That GDP keeps growing and therefore its military spending keeps growing; time is on their side.