America - Learning Nothing and Forgetting Nothing

What is that cliche about the Bourbon restoration - learned nothing and forgotten nothing?  This certainly applies to American policy wonks who were trying to work out what was to be done after the Afghan fiasco. The result would appear to have been another fiasco in the making over in the Eastern bloodlands of Europe. The insistent political ambition of the American elite to engage in ideological intervention overseas at the expense of their own taxpayers remains dominant regardless of past errors (an ideological mind-set shared by many in our own British political elite and now infecting Europe at its highest levels). And yet dreadful domestic problems continue to rot the US just as the social democratic consensus in Europe collapses under the pressure of liberal economics. Poverty, lack of healthcare, poor education and collapsing infrastructure, guns out of control (which makes the FT's insistence that Russia is lawless look stupid to say the least). American foreign policy incompetence adds to domestic disenchantment and foreign doubt. It feeds populism by the back door.

Exactly what is America's game here? The cynical view is that its upper middle class political leaderships have abandoned their own people because growing empires require constant expansion and increasing asset values for its upper middle class clientele is all that matters in American politics. The fraying theory, of course, remains that the rich 'trickle down' wealth to the poor. The 'trickle down' of the alleged benefits at home was supposed to be sufficient to retain power in democracies fixed by party machines and big money. This, of course, looks a highly problematic strategy at the moment. Russia, far from isolated, has turned to a receptive China that has a ready ear for its own anti-imperialist narrative across Africa and Latin America. Multipolarity is becoming a fact this year rather than just the propaganda fantasy of the Kremlin. Constant market and asset expansion was to be enabled by building up equally neglectful and narcissistic upper middle class elites elsewhere in the world yet these elites have developed the same resistance to being patronised by the West as the working classes within the West. Markets are shrinking and not expanding. Perhaps those 'fixes' can continue for quite some time - but what happens when the money runs out?

 

With recession on the way we can already see a class war looming where the asset holders will want the system they think they own to ease up on interest rates and allow more inflation. Yet the intelligent part of the elite understands that their rule may collapse on sustained high inflation because it hurts the asset-poor (the majority of voters) far more than high interest rates hurt the asset-rich. The asset rich are relying on the asset poor to remain 'stupid' and disorganised which is why they so deeply resent the arrival of politicians like Trump who organise far from stupid people using only apparently stupid political tropes. A less economically cynical view, however, is that middle class politicians in the West simply have nothing to say to their own masses any more. Their culture is simply different. They only want to talk to people like them who they can nurture in foreign climes ... they had hoped that a nice liberal middle class would emerge in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Kabul, one that would construct the institutional forms that would require no concern for the 'damned of the earth' except as beneficiaries of aid, 'trickle down' and 'culture' from on high while the ownership of the assets around them remained theirs. When a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (now removed) can effectively abandon his own constituency and become de facto Member for Kiev Central in Parliament, then you know this propensity for class internationalism has reached its most decadent phase.

As to the official American strategy in relation to Ukraine, it is simply a sign of weakness ... pouring funds into the Ukrainian money pit, evading the use of hard power, promoting an economic war that is undermining the West itself and dying to the last Ukrainian with weaponry whose use only enriches the major arms manufacturers. Apparently there are 40,000 committed Ukrainians in eight brigades (or whatever) armed to the teeth by the West just waiting to enter the meat grinder without perhaps realising that any victory will be Pyrrhic - their land and assets are already assigned to Western private capital as the only means of getting the finance for reconstruction. Blood and soil is not going to mean much when the blood of the most fit leaches out onto the soil and that soil belongs to some corporation listed on the NYSE or operating from a headquarters in Berlin or Tokyo.

But do Japan and South Korea (or Taipei) really believe that the US will do anything much more than they have done for Ukraine (prolong a devastating war at the expense of a people and a land) if China moves against Taiwan? I doubt it - it will be moral posturing once again, psy-ops directed at the homeland suckers and rhetorical gestures. Even the moralising American middle class know that they will be the losers if a strategy that largely hurts the poor, the young and the developing world ever became a real war. Those assets will eventually become cinders. Fortunately, the Chinese almost certainly have no intention of going into Taiwan with military force in the short to medium term - they are hoping the opposition Kuomintang will do that job for them. We should perhaps hope that they are right.

As for legislatures of 'hawks' getting involved in international relations, little makes me more scared - whether Congress, the Duma (which has to be restrained by the Kremlin as much as used), the UK Parliament or the greatest ineffectual moral posturing organisation in the world, the European Parliament. Congress is scariest of them all because Congress is at the heart of the most terrifying war machine the planet has ever seen and the most excitably irrational. The Taiwanese situation had been significantly worsened by Pelosi's blundering into it. Just as bad, here in the UK, Parliamentary hawks in the Tory Party, copied slavishly by one of the intellectually weakest Labour leaders in its history, have set the agenda for the nation. Their policies have resulted in 10% plus inflation, actual shortages and rising interest rates. It is not much better in Russia where nationalist expectations almost certainly limit the ability of the Kremlin to cut any reasonable deal with the comedian who runs Ukraine. Zelensky, in turn, is trapped by the nationalists on his own side and his need to keep on trucking to ensure he gets what he really needs - huge tranches of post-war reconstruction aid and support to rebuild his military as cat's paw for NATO in the East. Really, we 'ordinary folk' in all countries need to start standing up to the political class before they destroy us all. We need alternatives and we need them fast.