Photo by Frames For Your Heart

Were the acts undertaken by the US in recent years to be listed without national or political party affiliation they would appear to have been drawn from the geopolitical catastrophes of the twentieth century. Ethnic genocide for resources and territory? Check. Bloody wars of attrition where millions die as pawns in proxy conflicts? Check. Raw imperialist regime change operations to seize the resources of foreign nations? Check. The creation of a global gulag system with which to contain inconvenient humans? Check.

While the Treaty of Versailles explains a lot in terms of the causes of WWII, so does the Great Depression. Is it accidental that the global move to the political right accelerated with the Great Recession? It was obvious in the early days of the Great Recession that fascism would be the choice. The US followed the Weimar playbook to perfection: deny culpability on the part of capital, rebuild a purer form of the extractive finance that created the crisis, and use national resources to revive the economic fortunes of the rich while leaving the 99% to rot.

By the time of the GFC (Global Financial Crisis), the US had been through four decades of policies seemingly intended to destroy the nation. For better or worse, the US was built on industry. Its prior dalliance with finance capitalism resulted in the Great Depression. This was why I (and many others) claimed that reviving Wall Street was a wrong turn. Wall Street had proven itself to be the problem, not the solution. But America chose the Weimar resolution anyway, forgetting that it had launched amongst the most tragic histories known to humans.

Scapegoats of convenience were identified. One party blamed never-explained ‘elites’ and immigrants while the other blamed foreign nations and the Americans who didn’t accept their explanation of the world. Grievance economics became a thing. Donald Trump’s petulant child like explanations of ‘bad people’ and ‘losers’ personalized the impact of political decisions made decades earlier. Through the regularly occurring disasters of finance capitalism, room was opened up for Trump’s crackpot economic theories.

The US is now in the process of winding down as a nation. The question of the next decade is will the denouement be fast and ugly or long, drawn out, and ugly? It doesn’t have to be ugly at all. Rational solutions are both possible and workable. So why are only the stupid and unworkable ideas floating to the surface? Because these are the policies favored by the oligarchs. AI is making possibly one hundred insiders wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. But guess who gets to clean up the mess when the effort implodes?

US plans for global military dominance made by agencies of the Federal government at the end of WWII are being undone by deindustrialization and financialization. Despite having the largest military budget in the world by several orders of magnitude, the US is reportedly out of offensive and defensive missiles with which to continue its vanity war against Iran. This currently has Donald Trump threatening the use of nuclear weapons for the benefit of Israel. That Russia, an ally of Iran, and China, also an ally of Iran, also have nuclear weapons is apparently unknown to Mr. Trump. Perhaps Testosterone Barbie (Pete Hegseth) could explain this to him.

The sleight-of-hand now being put forward is that China is America’s economic enemy. But China had nothing to do with the passage and implementation of NAFTA, the shift of the US economy from making things to financial gamesmanship, or the decision made by self-described geniuses to roll our collective dice on AI. AI is currently looking more like a planet-sized wrong turn than the path forward. Unfortunately for the US, AI is all that there is.

In spite of bitter disputes on both the American Right and Left over US foreign policy, the policies being implemented today were chosen by unelected officials at the end of WWII and again in the 1990s. Here is retired US General Wesley Clark stating in 2001 that the US plan was to ‘attack seven countries in five years.’ These seven countries (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran) were subsequently either destroyed by the US or are currently in the process of being destroyed by the US.

Author Stephen Wertheim wrote Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy in 2020, providing documents from the 1940s suggesting that the US exited WWII with a plan for global military dominance. On the one hand, American leaders perceived a role for the US as a benevolent hegemon. On the other hand, World Wars I and II were imperialist wars to control economic resources. The Americans, Brits and French even had Expeditionary Forces in the USSR in an effort to reverse the Bolshevik Revolution.

The point is that enthusiastic back-and-forth over US foreign policy in the present requires explanations that transcend current politics. The problem is the temporal logic. If current wars are the product of recent........

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