Since at least the 1940’s the globalist wing of the U.S. capitalist elite has been predominant, reflected in the post-war settlement driven by the U.S. to make it the dominant centre of the “free” Western world and ring-fence the communist challengers to that dominance. From that period the U.S. has striven for continued global dominance, through an endless series of U.S, driven political assassinations, coups, “colour revolutions”, economic blackmail, and outright military interventions. With the fall of the Soviet bloc and the opening of China in the 1990s it seemed that the U.S. had achieved its goal of becoming the dominant “indispensable” power within an increasingly liberal capitalist world.
The addition of half of the human population to the global capitalist workforce through the end of the Indian Licence Raj, together with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the opening of China and the North American Free Trade Agreement provided the U.S. capitalist elite with a one-time profit-making extravaganza of wage arbitrage. The previous destruction of the Latin American nationalist economic policies through the 1980’s debt crisis, and U.S. driven coups, had also fully opened up that continent to their exploitation. They could replace high paid U.S. and other Western workers with much lower paid ones in Latin America, Eastern Europe and especially China, while at the same time forcing down domestic real wages. In addition, they could buy up huge amounts of profitable assets at cheap prices, facilitated by extensive corruption. In the 1990s the West went to war with the remaining European socialist nation, Yugoslavia, and successfully rent it apart into smaller exploitable chunks. For four decades this has been the focus of the U.S. and Western elites, with increasing levels of personal debt utilized to maintain the consumption levels of their populations while the real incomes of the domestic masses declined.
After four decades the long-term costs of the massive short-term profits are becoming evident. The ability of the U.S. and Western masses to take on more and more debt to maintain consumption levels is now severely limited, with the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the 2020 Global Financial Crisis (covered up through the COVID epidemic response) requiring massive printing of new debt-based currency and zero interest rates. In addition, the capabilities of the U.S. workforce and manufacturing plants has been substantially destroyed as core skills and machinery have been outsourced to goose short-term profits. With incomes falling or static for many important professions the youth of the U.S. have stayed away from them, preferring much better paid positions as financiers, business consultants, and lawyers. This has created severe path-dependency as it will be impossible to reconstruct the capabilities that the U.S. had in 1980, not just the physical plants are gone but also the workers with decades of training and experience. The result is a glittering profitable core of perhaps 20% of the population, surrounded by a declining 80%, with the former completely dependent upon the continued growth in the indebtedness of the domestic masses and their ability to control global supply chains and financial networks.
In their response to the 9/11 attack, the U.S. elites took their eyes off the ball and in an exuberance of arrogance and hubris declared an endless “war on terror” dreaming that they could change the world at will. The result was the joint disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan while it was assumed that Russia and China would dutifully accept their subaltern roles within the magnificent US “rules-based order” under US “protection” while US elites took over the commanding heights of their economies. In the first decade of the new century, Russia and China did not follow their assigned scripts. In Russia, Putin slowly rebuilt the strength of the state and his nation’s sovereignty. In China, the elites maintained a low profile as the exponential growth greatly aided by Western outsourcing lifted it from the ranks of the poor nations to that of the middle-income nations. By the end of the second decade it had become evident that both Russia and China had grown into significant global powers that were allied in their resistance to the “rules-based order”. The reaction of U.S. and Western elites was one of exasperation and anger, how dare these nations reject Western suzerainty? They responded by attempting to subvert Russia, “overextending and unbalancing” it as a 2019 Rand Report put it, and to limit the further development of China through sanctions and direct attacks upon its leading technology corporations. But the proverbial horse had already bolted, making attempts to close the barn door useless and possibly self-defeating.
The presidency of Donald Trump may have forestalled the use of Ukraine, which had been placed under U.S. control through the 2014 coup, as a battering ram to destroy Russia. As the Trump first term wound down, and then the globalists fully regained power with the 2020 election dominance in both houses of Congress and the Presidency, the plans to destroy Russia were put back in motion. A colour revolution was attempted in Belarus but failed, another was tried in Kazakhstan but also failed. The war of the Ukrainian state against its own citizens in the Donbass, utilizing a military fully rebuilt, retrained and reequipped by NATO, was intensified; with the aim to provoke Russia into actions that would expose it to debilitating sanctions. As the Ukrainian shelling of the Donbass ramped up, Putin recognized the Donbass republics and assured them of Russian defence. The “sanctions from hell” immediately kicked in, with the U.S. and Western elites assuming that the Russian economy would soon collapse. Instead, the Russian economy was much more resilient than assumed and the rest of the world much less ready to jump on the Western bandwagon than expected. The refusals of Brazil and India to sanction Russia were especially surprising to the globalists. In addition, a Russia with now nothing to lose launched a military offensive to nullify the Ukrainian threat. The Russian military far exceeded the assumptions of U.S. and Western “experts” taking territory that represented 80% of Ukraine’s GDP and then initiating a brutal process of attrition that kept Russian casualties to a minimum while destroying tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops and massive amounts of equipment. Instead of a second Russian “Afghanistan”, the Ukraine was turning into a second Western “Afghanistan” after the 2020 Western retreat from that nation after 20 years of expensive failure.
Under the Trump presidency, sanctions had been placed on China and some of China’s leading technology companies directly attacked financially and legally. As with Russia, the U.S. elites did not understand that China had much greater capabilities than they assumed. It was no longer a nation copying Western technologies, but one developing its own technologies. In addition, it was the workshop of the world that kept the prices of consumer goods within the grasp of the struggling U.S. and Western masses, as well as providing critical components to Western global supply chain behemoths such as Apple. It would not accept its anointed position as a supplier of production facilities and cheap labor to Western corporations; instead it strove for national sovereignty supported by the domestic control of the commanding heights and domestic technology capabilities. Since the sanctions were put in place, China has continued to outgrow the U.S. and its trade surplus with the U.S. has grown, while its powerful position with respect to new technologies has continued to advance.
The Trump MAGA elite coalition is made up of predominantly domestic and extractive capital, from real estate, domestic-oriented finance, fossil fuel extraction and mining, and the petit bourgeoisie. For them, the health of the domestic economy and the ability of the masses to support domestic consumption is critical. In addition, even the pathetic climate change policies of the globalists create an existential risk for fossil fuel extractive capital – making both domestic and even some globalist fossil fuel extractive-corporations part of this coalition. The huge jump in domestic fossil fuel production from shale oil and gas has significantly increased the position of this part of the coalition. This group has no love for the masses, happily slashing their own taxes, removing regulations, cutting “entitlements”, and busting unions; they are neoliberal to the core. They want a docile workforce and state, with the former blinded by cultural issues such as abortion and the teaching of a “prosperity gospel”. Their focus is on a China that they see as a direct threat to the U.S. domestic sphere, undermining their ability to regrow the core manufacturing strengths that support domestic consumption. As noted above, it is a fool’s errand, whose time has long passed and whose success is fundamentally undercut by their own ideology, but they will try. They had very little part in the looting of the Soviet-bloc and seem to have little love for the “free-riding” Europeans, so view a co-habitation with Russia to allow for a full focus on China as an intelligent short-term compromise. This is anathema to the globalists, who the MAGA coalition increasingly see as needing to be rooted out from their positions of power within the state; especially after the obstructionism and outright rebellion of many of the globalist state functionaries during the Trump presidency.
The globalists have been in power for nearly a century, during which they have built up much hubris and many skeletons. These two trends may have escalated during the Obama presidency with the drone war massively expanded, the destruction of Libya, the attempted destruction of Syria, and most of all the coup in the Ukraine and its transformation into a NATO-trained and equipped anti-Russian battering ram. As the exploits of Biden’s son attest to, Ukraine was also the ultimate playground for outright corruption and Western extortion. Biden’s usage of his VP position to bully the Ukrainian administration into firing the anti-corruption officials getting a little too close to the Burisma Holdings that munificently rewarded his son, is an example of the sheer arrogance of the Obama administration when dealing with other nations. The globalists expected to win the 2016 election easily, backed up by an overwhelming media campaign against Trump; they assumed that things would continue as before. Their reaction to that loss is indicative of both shock and deep-seated worries that skeletons would start to emerge. Their victory in 2020 rapidly turned into a debacle, as they once again betrayed their promises to the masses (they are as neoliberal as the MAGA coalition), declared a culture war on much of the U.S. population, allowed a rapid rise in inflation that is further reducing the real income of the masses, and allowed the placing of a religious-reactionary judge on the Supreme Court when they had majorities in both houses of Congress that facilitated the rejection of Roe vs. Wade. The recent speech by President Biden, full of ominous tones and threats supported by red lighting and a militaristic backdrop more reminiscent of fascist framings, represents a doubling down of the intra-elite war. It also very much parallels the wording used by G.W. Bush to define a segment of the global population as terrorists that must be fought without mercy and assigned no rights. Combined with the sudden student debt-forgiveness plan, and the highly questionable raid on Trump’s Mar-El-Lago property, this represents a desperate attempt to forestall Republican majorities in both houses after the November mid-term elections; resulting in detailed investigations of numerous senior globalist politicians and state functionaries that may start to unearth those skeletons. In addition, severe restrictions may be placed upon U.S. actions with regard to the ongoing support of Ukraine. The tens of billions of dollars sent to Ukraine (actually mostly sent indirectly to the Military Industrial Complex to enhance their profits) may be curtailed.
With the globalists not able to put Trump in jail or find a way of removing him from politics or silencing him, their only reaction seems to be one of doubling down. They also understand that Trump’s death would create a martyrdom that could be easily exploited by the likes of Tucker Carlson to lead the MAGA coalition to victory. They could easily produce their own victory by passing policies that benefit the masses, but this is not an option for a party just as dominated by neoliberal capitalist elites as the Republicans. So instead they have to intensify the domestic war with the “MAGA Republicans” that Biden has now likened to domestic terrorists and ramp up foreign wars to discipline the domestic population. Biden’s speech has served to enrage those that voted Republican in 2020, over 70 million citizens, and may backfire spectacularly. It will also intensify the intra-elite conflict, at a time when elite internal alignment is very much required. Such levels of conflict will make foreign policy highly dependent upon domestic considerations and also increase the possibilities of mistakes and over-reactions. Neither the globalists nor the MAGA coalition have the answers to what ails the U.S., as their ideological beliefs and neoliberal capitalist elite control remove the very policy options required, but they both fully believe in and are committed to their current courses of action. The best option for Russia and China is to as much as possible not produce a cause celebre which would allow for a short-term coming together of the elites against a common “enemy” and instead facilitate the U.S. elite implosion as deftly and subtly as possible.
Some commentators have questioned whether the 2024 election will be allowed to take place by the globalists, a possibility that I have dismissed up to now. With the recent events, I now consider that possibility to be increasing. If a MAGA coalition across the board victory in 2024 becomes increasingly probable, the security state may decide that it has no other option than to forestall such a victory by any means necessary. The Mar-El-Lago raid which seems to have turned out to be an embarrassing dud, and Biden’s recent speech, may appear tame a year or two from now.
This is very good. I agree with Doug's comment and have nothing to add.
Thank you for a phenomenal article, a dense yet accurate summary of the inexorable degeneration and collapse of American Empire concurrent with the failure of debt-finance, fascist capitalism, now exposed under the glaring spotlight of Ukraine. Those whom the gods would destroy are first driven mad. Criminal madness has now terminally metastasized within "elite" Western leadership. It is clearly beyond recovery and redemption.