Theme: Civilization

THE THEORY OF WESTERN DEMISE IS OVERSTATED: US GEOSTRATEGY IS OBVIOUS: WITHDRAW WITHOUT CREATING AND OPPORTUNITY FOR EVIL.

1) Prior to the world wars, the USA considered Europeans in particular, but empires in general to be a threat to world peace and prosperity. This is why the USA was both isolationist and concerned about capturing the continent – and keeping the European empires out of the continent.

2) Empires are a product of agrarianism, where the only means of increasing state revenue is to increase the quantity and quality of agrarian territory that could be taxed to support elites, the military, a bureaucracy, and the institutions necessary for administration of production, transport and trade.

3) When empires expanded, particularly during the age of sail, they sought to lay claim to territories for resources that could be brought home and used in production, then sold out to the less urbanized or developed regions or countries.

4) This means empires try to evade market forces at the expense of their people in order to achieve something between independence (autarky) and power for defense and additional conquest.

5) A such empires, their territories, claimed territories, and colonies functioned as competitively in the early age of the agrarian, commercial, financial, and proto-industrial production, by demand for conquest as they had under agrarianism – just on a larger scale with greater complexity and a larger number of competitors.

6) The US, having created a federation, loosely imitating the Holy Roman Empire of the German Peoples, but with Anglo Common Law and Institutions updated to formally written American Natural Law, treated the post world war period as the end of empires, the emergence of nation states, the reciprocal guarantee of independence of those nation states, and a free (as much as possible) market between those states.

7) The idea that trade creates peace and interdependency and raises people out of poverty is at least as old as Adam Smith in the post-medieval body of thought, but the general understanding is ancient.

8) In other words, the USA sought to end the age of empires, bring about the age of nation states, and establish incentives that would drag mankind out of poverty – and largely it worked.

9) However, the USA, itself a product of english, germanic, continental, and the ‘western way of war’ failed to achieve victory on the enemy’s terms – and chose the American terms, meaning, the European tradition under which one monarchy would seek reach settlement somewhat as do industrialists today – and move on.

10) So the USA failed to complete the destruction of empires by constraining MacArthur in China and Patton in Russia. Without China and Russia the world would have been spared it’s experiments with communism. And without Russia the Iranians would not have had the need for the Shah to resist communism, nor the consequential islamist revolution, and Iran’s attempted restoration of a caliphate (empire).

11) So, while the USA have managed to create a world of largely free trade, vast institutional networks that assist countries to develop, and medicine and technology that have made it possible, by not ending the empires we have brought about their restoration – perhaps a dying gasp, perhaps a trend – and the USA and the west in general no longer had population, demographic composition, cultural homogeneity and cohesion, so that other than our legal system which defends voluntary cooperation investment, production, and trade, we can no longer police the world against the rise of empires.

12) Americans had faith in the progress of mankind until the episodes in the middle east convinced them that europeans and perhaps east asians are only capable of peerage, and that our hopes for them and for mankind were mere christian optimism. So Americans are ‘going home’. The difference is that they are trying to ‘go home’ without leaving such a strategic vacuum that the opportunity for restoration of empires and conquests and evasions of the market leads to escalating conflicts resulting in yet another world war that might resolve the question of empires vs sovereign states for the next millennium.

13) Americans are not terribly concerned with the end of free trade in the world. America is energy and resource autarkic, only needs Canada for resources and Mexico for labor, and it’s legal, finance, and treasury system almost guarantees capital flight to the USA the more uncertain, fragmented, poorer, the world becomes. Or stated differently, while it may affect the bloated financial sector prices that are the product of a boomer generation capital peak combined with the government’s inflationary policies, and while it may cause some rather stressful employment restructuring, the net result is that the USA *Benefits* from chaos in the world. In fact the only real risk to the USA is the immigration program and the success of the radical left in America, have brought the country to the point of civil war – which those of us who study such things expect to escalate rapidly sometime during the next five and at most ten years. The world can fall apart, and the worst that happens to the USA is ‘going home’ and writing down a lot of foreign investment.

14) It certainly appears that at least the Anglosphere, or what remains of the British Empire, are reforming from a shared language and institutions, to shared intelligence (Five Eyes), to shared geostrategic and military alliances – the only question is whether we add our dear friends the Japanese and south Koreans into this otherwise english speaking network.

15) As for Europe, while France remains dedicated to the extradition of the USA from European affairs, it is not for the continent’s interest – which would be better served by Germania and Poland, but France’s long standing attempt to dominate Europe despite that no one other than France desires such a thing. meanwhile we wait for Germany to retake her historical position as the core of Europe despite french unearned and undo egoism. However, Germany, Italy, and Russia are in demographic collapse that is unrecoverable – just in time to determine if the AI revolution has ended the need for the rapid expansion of white collar labor since the beginning of computer automation.

16) India is going her own way – at least until she must face off with China and Pakistan over territory, resources, and water.

17) The middle east will need another century but the internet has done more for the region than any other intentional policy in our history.

18) Africa, aside from the population problem – a problem that will become ever more of europe’s problem, and the muslim expansion problem in the north – a cancer everywhere in the world – the rest of Africa is a bright spot if for no other reason than they lack the bad institutions and bad religions and bad traditions that impede the continued evolution of better ones.

19) While china is in a demographic collapse that is irreversible, it will take longer to play out than germany, italy, and russia. And with such a large population, with that IQ distribution (the smart fraction of the population is larger than europeans) it’s quite literally impossible to compete with them. Additionally authoritarian governments can act far more like venture capitalists (which is what the western government models need to adopt) rather than leaving the economy entirely to the private sector as we do in the states, or the opposite, having the state run industries which turn into low returns on capital, corruption, and low innovation.

20) So the idea that we can maintain the status quo, is a rather nonsense obsession of the finance and commercial sectors. It’s rather obvious to the geostrategic sectors that the outcome of demographic and development shifts will produce deterministic outcomes, meaning another conflict between authoritarian and free peoples, and between empires and federations of nation states, will return, and with it the poverty that is normal throughout our history, as the wealthy get a bit poorer and the not wealthy much much much more so.

Apologies for a text wall.
Hope someone found value in it.
Affections
CD