The West’s Very Fundamental Accumulating Contradictions
The West doesn’t have the financial clout to pursue global primacy – if it ever did.
The election has occurred; Trump will take office in January; many of the existing Party Nomenklatura will be replaced; different policies will be announced – but actually taking power (rather than just sitting in the White House) will be more complex. The U.S. has devolved into many disparate fiefdoms – almost princedoms – from the CIA to the Justice Department. And regulatory ‘agencies’ too, have been implanted to preserve Nomenklatura hold on the System’s lifeblood.
Pulling these ideological adversaries into new thinking will not proceed entirely smoothly.
However, the U.S. election also, has been a referendum on the prevalent western intellectual mainstream. And that likely will be more decisive than the U.S. domestic vote – important though that is. The U.S. has shifted strategically away from the managerial techno-oligarchy that took its grip in the 1970s. Today’s shift is reflected across the U.S.
Back in 1970, Zbig Brzezinski (who was to become National Security Adviser to President Carter) wrote a book foreseeing the new era: What he then called ‘The Technetronic Era’,
“involved the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society … dominated by an élite, unrestrained by traditional values … [and practicing] continuous surveillance over every citizen … [together with] manipulation of the behaviour and intellectual functioning of all people … [would become the new norm].”
Elsewhere, Brzezinski argued that “the nation-state … has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state”.
Brzezinski was plain wrong about the benefits of tech cosmopolitan governance. And he was decisively, and disastrously, wrong in the policy prescriptions that he adduced from the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 – that no country or group of countries would ever dare to stand up to U.S. power. Brzezinski argued in The Grand Chessboard that Russia would have no choice but to submit to the expansion of NATO, and to the geopolitical dictates of the U.S.
But Russia did not succumb. And as a result of the élites’ 1991 ‘End of History’ euphoria, the West launched war in Ukraine to prove its point – that no single country could hope to stand against the combined weight of all NATO. They said that because they believed it. They believed in the western Manifest Destiny. They did not understand the other options Russia had.
Today, the Ukraine war is lost. Hundreds of thousands have died unnecessarily – for a conceit. The ‘other war’ in the Middle East fares no differently. The Israeli-U.S. war on Iran
Article from LewRockwell
LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
