Despite the sometimes intense instability of coalition governments, I generally have a view that the more political parties there are in a system the better. While it is true that there are often broad and predictable coalitions, the mere possibility of surprise single-issue or bloc based re-alignments can do a lot to combat complacency. To imagine how this would work in the current American system picture a world where the Greens and Libertarians have enough pull in Congress to sway close votes. They might side with one big party or another in a predictable fashion on economic or regulatory policy, sure, but both would likely throw their weight behind whoever was the opposition when issues related to foreign policy or surveillance came up. Trump’s current attack on Due Process would be opposed by both, for example, tipping the scales away from the Republican government. Likewise, Democratic efforts to sabotage diplomacy (a la Cuck Schemer on Iran or Adam Schiff on Russia) would also see both Greens and Libertarians ally with Republicans to overturn such knee jerk platitudes.
This does not mean, however, that more is always better. I can think of one arrangement where less parties is better than more: And that is that one Party is probably better than two. At least in times of intense partisanship in the media.
This seems a strange position to take. I do not take it in defense of one party states, which I generally oppose unless a state is newly founded (see Kemalist Turkey or post-unification Vietnam). I take this position because two parties is just so unrelentingly awful.
The reason two can become worse than one is that it effectively functions as a single party state in that the broad consensus keeps ticking on unchallenged while the pantomime of free choice is pushed front and center. Picked up by a media both pliant and partisan, the most inconsequential of differences are held up as vital decision points. This has the bizarre effect, as we see all around us today, of radicalizing the ignorant in ways where their radicalization actually supports the establishment of both parties. Any cultural flashpoint or nakedly partisan example of corruption is held up to be the end all be all, while the machine of private contractor grifting and surveillance creep expands at an ever growing clip. The relatively minor differences between the parties creates a yawning cavern of difference between voters too dumb to see they have more in common with the opposite-party rubes than they do with their own leadership.
Reverse partisanship is another bizarre aspect of this phenomenon. In just the past decade (and ignoring all the many examples prior to that) we have seen two party systems across the world basically reverse entire positions almost overnight simply because an upset in the other party triggered their oppositional defiance disorder. The focus of the neoconservative movement went from Republican to Democrat in about two years as preparation for what they saw as an inevitable Hillary Clinton Presidency. Choosing negotiation over reflexive war and sanctions was once a strongly Democrat coded position, but now that Trump exploited the neoconservative realignment to take over the GOP it is the Democrats who come across as the party of Freedom Fries. Meanwhile, the Democratic embrace of Clintonian neoliberal economics led to a (utterly false) GOP pivot towards claiming the mantle of populism…but now that The Big Beautiful Bill is passed and that claim is exposed as utterly hollow, one expects another reversal for both parties around austerity. The tariff issue has really driven this home for both parties recently, with people contradicting their views on trade multiple times in the same month.
As mentioned before, these pivots do nothing to challenge the bipartisan establishment, but they do make the populace more stupid. How many extended family members or second tier friends do you have that parrot talking points they would have been adamantly opposed to just a few years ago simply because their party-coded media has reversed position? In most instances they seem incapable of even acknowledging this if it is pointed out, with uncomfortable silence standing in for their utterly hollow engagement with the pantomime of partisanship. It is a confession of nonsentience. The regime rules through the endless dance, the dittohead serves as its thuggish yet cowardly enforcer in the public sphere.
One of the weirder things you will notice when traveling to a state that bans parties or has only one is that, in general, the average person is much more in touch with reality. There may be things they cannot say in public, and they may long for a viable opposition, but there is a certain honest cynicism from the government supporters that they back the regime because they personally benefit from it. Likewise, the opposition to it shares a kind of inclusiveness and solidarity that they are all in this together. Distrust of canned media narratives are, I find, far higher in these societies than in my own. There is almost a reflexive private trend to disbelieve all official sources. Though this obviously comes with its downside, it is a preferable state of being for the cultivation of critical thought than those who mindlessly parrot the media of who they imagine to be their co-ideologues. That they imagine themselves as free and rational while doing so makes it all the more galling.
Compared to two party states, one party states are total amateurs when it comes to nullifying opposition and setting unquestioned media narratives.
Satoshi Kon’s Paranoia Agent is still the best send up to postmodern correlationism ever made.
Sure, everyone hates postmodernism now. But that wasn’t always the case. From the 80s until just a few years ago, the ultimate experiment in German Idealist philosophy merging with French pretension and Anglo-Protestant moralism was regarded as not only serious, but became the dominant intellectual framework in numerous parts of the world’s academic establishments. This percolated down via midwit linguistic turns to indirectly influence media discourse. It became fashionable to state that the world could not exist outside of human perception and that relativity ruled over all. It made one seem worldly.
The key word here is “seem”.
Those rooted in materialism, from actual Marxism to speculative realism and everything in between, we stood strong against this. But our internally diverse camp was the outlier. The unfashionable. The heretics. This could be heard in universities themselves, with postmodernists dismissing ideas for being old, rather than on their merits or lack thereof, as if longevity was a net negative. An ironic position for anyone young enough to have missed the Summer of 68, considering the specifically Boomer roots of postmodernism, but I digress.
Postmodernism, despite its many pretensions to radicalism, was anything but. It was the left wing of neoliberalism. Its cultural posturing against the liberal hegemony was, like their view of culture itself, entirely performative and superficial. They, like the CIA-backed modern art projects of the Cold War, were effectively an anti-establishment coded pro-establishment movement. A quest to give the illusion of radicalism to something that would never challenge financial or political power and would always, ultimately, serve as cover for the actual lack of choice on offer. A grand show to defang and disarm actual radicalism by betting, correctly, that many reformers were just as dumb and easily distracted by culture war as the conservatives they criticized.
It claimed to break old meta-narratives and to question archaic values, but in practice it was always a new form of Protestantism: strident, moralist, and, ironically, obsessed with building the very monoculture it claimed to be combatting. So-called punks demanded censorship to protect the feelings of the aggrieved, diversity impact statements became humiliation rituals to enforce group loyalty, all while diversity of thought was cast out in favor of a missionary project. Christian slave morality reborn under a rubric of cutting edge social justice. A post-structuralist inquisition charged with rooting out heresy.
Postmodernism did its job. It destroyed the capacity of recovery for an already structurally crippled opposition be it the left, scholarship, protest movements,journalism, the antiwar movement, and it did so under the guise of bringing about a bold new future. It did bring a future, but for Silicon Valley Neofeudalists. The Man could hardly have asked for a better ally. This was entirely predictable to those of us who were not postmodernists, but missed by its true believers so eager to call us unfashionable old timers. Neoliberalism believes that the human race is made up of autonomous individual units as its most important component, as does postmodernism. But this claim has never, ever been true. It can only be believed by ignoring all of archeology, anthropology, and history. The community has always ruled, and communities are divergent based not on ‘social construction’, which comes as an after the fact justification rather than a primary mover, but by geography, ecology, and historical circumstance. Things no individual, and often even no group, have control over.
If more scholars had been open to ignoring anthropocentrism and studying humanity more like we do other animals, they would have skipped this awkward phase of correlationism (the goofball belief that human consciousness is the ultimate arbiter of reality) and instead treated us like the very real biological species that we are. As John Gray stated:
“In denying that the natural world exists independently of our beliefs about it, postmodernists are implicitly rejecting any limit on human ambitions. By making human beliefs the final arbiter of reality, they are in effect claiming that nothing exists unless it appears in human consciousness.”
This is anti-nature and anti-reality. It is, ironically, a resurrection of the moralism and protagonist syndrome-fueled pathos of the Abrahamic religions. The world is nothing but a playground for our moral journey, the correlationists claimed. It is positively evangelical.
It should be obvious this is a weird and contradictory position for a relativist to take. And this brings me to my key point: Postmodernism got almost everything wrong, from politics to education to how power works, but the thing it is most criticized for now that it is no longer popular- its cultural relativism- was actually the one thing it got right.
Or perhaps more accurately, would have gotten right had they been consistent about it.
Once you accept that humanity’s strength is adaptability, and this is what has fueled the species’ expansion, it becomes obvious that it is because we are adapting to new places as much if not more than adapting them to us. Ecology and geography rule the day. Those things are not universal. Migrating peoples, be they conquerors or refugees, are more likely to be assimilated by a new home than to make the new home a perfect copy of the old, even as they change it. The impact of physical reality is absolute and real, but the ways in which people adapt to its differing variables is divergent and will remain so going forward. Culture, as the outgrowth of this adaptation, is by necessity relativistic. They are all moving and changing, yes, but along different paths. Sometimes some merge with others or split from others, but the process is Taoistic, of eb and flow, not one of linear progress. Physical reality, which exists regardless of our opinions about it, is not one Platonic unified whole but rather a sea of churning probabilistic chaos which is in a cultural sense polycentric. It has truth, but that truth contains no universal moral values.
Postmodernism, ironically, claimed to uphold this but in actuality hated it. Seeking to suppress any heresy from its quest to serve the neoliberal drive of the autonomous global individual, it came to advocate hostility towards any non-liberal order or view that would make those trained by the professional managerial class’ values ‘feel unsafe’. It ended up rejecting the only thing it ever was right about- moral relativism. All while doubling down on solipsism as a world view.
Meanwhile, the equally stupid backlash to the recession of the postmodern era, that of the (in denial) postmodern right has also got everything backwards, possibly in an even more terrible way. To the right (in Abrahamic cultures anyway) morality is absolute and unwavering, but real life is relativistic. The assumption is that the real world can be bent around morality. Similar in practice to the postmodern left’s obsession with culture forming, this version does not even admit the fungibility of values. In other words they will try to shape a real world that exists independently of human thought around non-material concepts that exist only in their mind.
Spoiler alert: It will fail, just as it has all the previous times it has been tried. For every push of the needle towards something they want, there will be an equal or greater pushback building continuously in reaction. A society may fall to theocracy only to see its people leave religion in droves (like Iran or post-reformation Europe) or racial or imperial chauvinism only to see its neighbors bandwagon against a drive to supremacy, leaving it contained (Spain, the Axis).
This is because for all the yearning for an unreal ideal that marks the greatest flaw of humanity, there will always be a yearning to escape other people’s ideals. The problem is ultimately self-correcting.
So if there can be some primary takeaways from the intellectual dark age of the past few decades I see it as this: relativism only works with culture, and to be consistent and useful it must have limits, specifically geographic limits but also an understanding that cultures can and often should change themselves- but in doing so they will not merge with others but rather add to the medley of an ever-expanding natural selection. Relativism should be a partner, and not a foe, to the sciences, and it should never fall into the correlationist trap of claiming variable perceptions can shape material reality on their own. After all if there is one thing, aside from correlationist fantasies themselves that truly seems to unite all forms of idealist thinking, it is that of being useful idiots to whatever fad Silicon Valley and financial elites are dreaming up at the moment. And it is the rule of the nerds that must end, regardless of if they are fashionable nerds or not.
So postmodernism joins the ranks of all the other idealist philosophies it claimed to be breaking from: its obsession with critiquing power ignored that the actual root of power is material. It is force and it is logistics deployed to defend or increase one’s control over material factors. People and eras may have preferences one way or the other as to the purpose to which it is used but It is ultimately an amoral process with no universal model nor basis in the ideal. So in the end what really matters is not ideas, but hard physical reality. Realism wins again.
Which is good, because the last place one ever wants to be trapped is inside the mind of middling Oberlin professor with a writing style designed to obfuscate rather than elucidate.
Today is the 50th Anniversary of the Liberation of Saigon and the reunification of Vietnam after almost a century of colonial and great power meddling. It was the first full blown American military defeat since Red Cloud’s War over a century before and the culmination of wise long term strategy on the part of the Vietnamese. The human cost was immense and the danger was not yet over, as the Sino-Soviet Split was about to go hot in Southeast Asia. Within almost no time at all Vietnamese forces would be ejecting the Khmer Rogue from power in neighboring Cambodia, toppling what had to have been the worst (adjusted for population and size) government of the 20th Century in the process, and incurring a retaliatory and ultimately ineffective limited invasion by the Chinese in 1979 (tacitly backed by a bitter US).
The Sino-Soviet Split preceded these events by about a decade, and Nixon and Mao’s diplomacy was basically a sealant on the end of the Cold War’s ideological phase. Vietnam, fighting what was always first and foremost an anti-colonial struggle, already knew this. The proximity and domineering attitude of the Chinese always meant that the USSR was a superior partner (this was the reverse of most communist states’ interests, showing the importance of geographic proximity), and that the security concerns of Chinese power projection could not be ignored. First was driving out the French and the Americans, then came dealing with a diplomatic assertion of independence in the near abroad. Sovereignty is not just ejecting foreign dominion, but asserting a ‘clear field’ over ones autonomy of action in diplomacy, similar to the difference between an actual planet and a dwarf planet, one isn’t all the way there if the baycenter of its orbit with a moon lies outside the primary central mass.
So Vietnam served as an obvious example of small state realpolitik in action. Less by actively seeking to be part of the preexisting Sino-Soviet Split and more by ignoring it entirely as it focused on more pressing matters. The world responded accordingly after Vietnam took action. More importantly, this was not just a part of the war of independence, but rather a hint of what was to come. Both Vietnamese and Chinese diplomacy dropped all pretense of being anything but national interest-based after this. Vietnam sought diplomatic connections with many abroad regardless of regime type, while China focused on anti-Soviet activities for the remainder of the Cold War. This even included support of the Afghan Mujahedeen. With the loss of its great power patron in the fall of the USSR in 1991, Vietnam immediately began to pivot to normalizing relations with the United States, something that would occur at the end of the decade. Since that time, maudlin Boomer tears for the doomed mafia-like client state of South Vietnam aside, the two countries have largely had positive relations. The U.S. has even worked to redirect offshoring away from China and towards Vietnam for reasons of obvious mutual benefit.
This has not meant that Vietnam has pursued hostile relations with the Chinese. Far from it, it attempts a kind of cautious neutrality and guarded openness to its giant neighbor. Something currently paying dividends as Hanoi becomes targeted by an erratic and undirected US trade policy. The true lesson of the Cold War, something the Vietnamese learned that the Americans and Russians often did not, is that globally-focused ideology in foreign policy is a leash. The smaller the country, the shorter the leash.
Despite having the formative events of its modern state tied up with the Cold War almost like no other state around today, Vietnam serves as an example of keeping grand political projects localized and non-universal. The freedom and security of their nation and their diplomatic autonomy always came first. They would have their own path to sovereignty, divergent from others. This is, after all, the point of independence and national unity.
Ho Chi Minh was scorned at Versailles by the imperious universalist Woodrow Wilson, but maintained an admiration for George Washington, one of the preeminent examples of turning an independence war into a diplomatic posture of non-alignment. This was the correct path as the war that Americans were told was necessary to maintain world order, which they were willing to kill millions to keep going, ultimately didn’t matter. The two countries live with each other and have largely constructive relations. Vietnam had no global capacity or ambitions, and the United States, so used to both itself and the Soviets, had to be reminded that sometimes all politics really are just local. And yet if you go to Vietnam in person in the 21rst Century, as I have, you’ll find nothing but water under the bridge. The world moved on. Geopolitics is always in flux. And in a world where constant rebalancing, entropy, and changing circumstances reign supreme there can be no universal principle save adaptability. Those who embrace this reality can outperform those who refuse to.
Vietnam didn’t just beat France and America, it beat the idea of a Cold War itself. In doing so it ensured its own success. This is worth remembering today when modern people try to tell us we live in a world of ‘freedom vs authoritarianism’ or ‘a new Cold War’. Any state that engages with the rest of the world as part of some kind of Platonic/existential struggle will meet only disaster, while the agility of the practical and situationally positioned states will run rings around them.
But lest you think I have only negative things to mention about the failed experiment of South Vietnam, check this out:
On the fourth of April it will officially be the 10 year anniversary of this blog. If it was another 10 years older backdated in time it would have been called part of the ‘Blogosphere’. Thankfully, that did not happen. I will be traveling on the fourth of this month, however. So instead I am going to upload this at a time when much of the world is in April Fool’s Day. It seems fitting. In that 10 years there have been 223 posts, well, now 224 I suppose. Not a bad clip.
My original purpose with this site was to serve the following purposes:
Practice for policy idea writing.
Working through issues I wasn’t sure about yet. A first testing ground so to speak.
To provide a repository for all the articles I either did not want to publish through someone else due to needing a custom tone or could not get published elsewhere (a formerly much more common arrangement).
To be funny and casual about stuff treated with way too much seriousness elsewhere.
Once I began publishing externally much more frequently, the amount of analysis on foreign policy decreased massively, with domestic and philosophical posts growing, and even a few fiction pieces too. Aside from this though, the original 5 points seem to have largely stayed intact.
A lot has changed since Spring of 2015. Otherkin no longer rule the internet, replaced by a medley of domestic terror-coded ideological otherkin. A global pandemic ran rampant and unleashed the contradictions of late neoliberal breakdown. A carnival barker became President twice in a nonconsecutive manner, the first since Grover Cleveland to do so. In the interregnum between these terms a vegetative fossil held the presidency, but since much of the media liked him there was a coordinated conspiracy to pretend that this was not so. Greater multipolarity in world affairs, something that was basically inevitable from the Great Recession onwards, went from the primary world issue in the background to very much the forefront. The failure to establish a left populism, undone by postmodern moralism and puritanism and tied to the rotting corpse of a liberal establishment, led to the rise of a right populism which is far dumber than the left that should have been born from Occupy but wasn’t.
And then came signalgate to really ram home one consistent theme I have always hammered on this site: it is not primarily malicious competence that is responsible for so much of what you see, but a kind of autopilot incompetence. Notice too how a scandal that should be overwhelmingly directed against Mike Waltz in particular seems to be intentionally obscured by the very media that broke the story, likely because they find his uber-hawk establishment positioning the most palatable of anyone in the government and fear his replacement. Freedom of will? Human consciousness directing the species through rationality? These are the most overrated concepts in all of the humanities. We do not assign this special status to other species, and it makes our observations of their behavior far more objective.
So on the surface everything changed. But if you were paying attention nothing really unexpected happened at the macro scale. The empire was in decline when I started, it still is now. The planet is suffering under incredible loss of biodiversity and conditions of accelerating climate destabilization, same as it was then. Neoliberalism was a discredited force everywhere but finance and the media 10 years ago, and now its often even discredited there too. These things were always going to happen no matter what individuals or even specific countries were wielding the most power, though the rate of the change might differ between variables. Trump is an accelerant.
But just because real life is fatalistic doesn’t mean its predictable! Far from it. This site has the name it has because of my fascination with trickster figures in mythology. They remind us that the murky reality of moral ambiguity that we live in is random and fun in at least equal proportions to its more dire and tragic elements. To quote Dasha Nekrasova from before her podcast went fully unbearable: “Stay alive- something retarded might happen.” These are words to live by.
I would like to think that in these 10 years I have been consistent. Always willing to admit when I make a bad call (Russia won’t invade Ukraine outside of the Donbass/Crimea areas, Hillary will pull out a squeaker in 2016, Syria won’t fall to foreign states-*though in my defense I always carved out a Turkish exception to that one as a hedge, which sadly turned out to be correct). Want to dunk on me, those predictions are all still here. You can search for them. But I have had a greater number of correct calls too in the same time frame (A second Karabakh War with advantage this time for Azerbaijan, the always lingering dangers of the Israel Lobby on crafting viable foreign policy, US recognizing Moroccan rule over Western Sahara, the increased importance of Panama and the Arctic for geostrategy, other countries invoking their own form of R2P to justify war-no longer leaving this as an Atlantic only causus belli, and the missionary/military uses of social progressivism, to name just a few).
If there is one criticism anyone can rightly lob at me which I will proudly accept as true it is that I am a geographic determinist. I am. And if I am doing my job, other people will see why this apparently reductionist position is the pinnacle of material philosophical rigor and policy planning priorities. When accepting geographic determinism, people can virulently disagree on policy but still do so rationally and respectfully, knowing at least that all sides share a common physical reality. The animal is made by ecology.
So with a decade on here passed what are my favorite entries and which were the most popular?
Most popular is easy to prove as I have access to the data:
Considering that there are hundreds I can choose from for my personal favorite I am just going to go with what hits the memory banks first as entries I am personally most proud of. These would be:
As for the future? I publish more often off this site than on it these days, but there will always be things that need a personal touch or that cannot be fiddled with by editors, things that fill the liminal spaces between clear cut genres and acceptable discourse, and books no one else wants to review. So long as that is the case, I will be here.
In a poll that should surprise absolutely no one, most republicans support the right to protest- unless it is Israel. Claims from the party of Freedom Fries that they were now the defenders of free speech were obviously idiotic of course, but the clash of the idea of American First with the reality of Israel First has to be the most jarring, if hardly unexpected.
While the neo-McCarthyism of Russiagate was the most famous aspect of that odious and deeply stupid era, I think the worst aspect about it is that there was in fact a foreign nation that pupeteered the GOP all along- it just wasn’t Russia. But the Democrats are almost as compromised by the Israel Lobby as the Republicans are, meaning they could not have brought this up without facing a similar scrutiny themselves.
Strategic rivals have very little influence over a (powerful) states’ domestic politics. Recognized as a threat, their agents are monitored and tracked. This is not so with allied states, who are the true media savvy juggernauts of foreign policy discourse. Rivals may spend as much or more, but their payoff is far less. Closely interlinked nations on the other hand get away with almost anything. Alliances themselves become lucrative intuitions and develop a certain existence independent of their constituent countries. One of the reasons that George Washington warned against overly close attachments with foreign nations is because people tend to romanticize and become too invested in their destinies to the point where it overrides their interest in their own country, creating dangerous commitments and contradictions.
This brings us to another and seemingly unrelated phenomenon of the post-Cold War Era: the Dittoheads. The term is now hopelessly archaic, to the point where I’m surprised I even know of it. It was on the way out before I was even conscious of anything on the news that wasn’t related to Joe Lieberman trying to cancel my beloved games. It described the average Rush Limbaugh listener. A mindless compliant who would call in to agree with everything The Pig and his previous callers had spouted out beforehand. Limbaugh was a product, and his audience mindlessly consumed it.
I think one of the reasons we no longer use the term ‘dittohead’ is because it is so specifically linked with Limbaugh, but he really was a pioneer for the entire media’s eventual fate in the 21st Century. This style of mindless repetition in service of narrative creation rather than critical thought went mainstream with Fox News, and then was copied by the other cable news networks and even what was once (painfully) called the ‘blog-o-sphere’ until it became the messaging apparatus of a two party system in general. The explosion of social media’s popularity in the 2010s at first broke this partisan monopoly but then would go on to reaffirm it in stranger and more unhinged ways. This would culminate in nakedly gamed and astroturfed platforms such as reddit and increasingly ””””””’X””””””’.
Now we live in the postmodern utopia all of the most naïve people I went to grad school with so badly wanted to come true. People choose their own truth out of brand loyalty rather than critical thought. Its called being a good fucking person, you Islamosexual Communazi. It basically doesn’t even matter anymore which of these self-contained echo chambers someone is in, they are all dittoheads. They signal group loyalty and wear their inability to engage in nuanced thought as a point of pride. If you disagree with them, you are assumed to be a diametric opposite of all they hold dear, even if that is far from true.
These are the easiest people in the world to manipulate. Now, who do you think realizes that aside from the usual suspects of political culture warriors and profit maximizing corporations?
I would hazard to guess foreign lobbies. Specifically allied foreign lobbies with media connections and cultural cache. Israel is the big one, but I also (to bring it back to Russiagate) suspect Britain, and possibly in the future a South African diaspora trying to pull a Miami Cuba 2.0. And this isn’t even to bring up the entire mess that is the western-based Ukraine fanboys.
This isn’t new. The pro-France contingent of American politics in the 1790s was so strong it took a major diplomatic incident, an undeclared naval war, and an invasion scare to remove their influence from policy. But I will refrain from talking too much about that now as I will have multiple future publications that go into great detail into the topic, both in book chapter and article form, so stay tuned.
The dittoheads are waiting to be sent their instructions, and as many foreign as domestic actors know of their pliability and narrative shaping abilities. They will advocate against civil liberties at home to protect their beloved proxy-countries abroad. They are fools who vicariously fight battles for a sense of meaning in their little plebian lives. If they are catered to they will drag us all down with them.
You do not have to be the biggest fan of how the Trump Administration negotiates. You can, like myself, see the blustering towards Canada and Mexico in particular as extremely counter-productive, to say nothing of the clownish (and possibly dangerous) Gaza proposal. But the Europe stuff…come on, that’s fucking hilarious.
Vance scolding them in both just and right ways as well as ways reminiscent of the liberal internationalists he rightly despises served as a wakeup call that the End of History was over. It had never really begun, of course, but certain parts of the planet (Canada, Northern Europe, American media liberals) had bought into this self-flattering fiction because it centered the deindustrializing parts of the world as still, somehow, the primary drivers- perhaps even protagonists- of history. But when someone finally said this was not true out loud, the self-vassalized classes of Europe publicly wept. The American elite may be a cynical, fractious, and even ignorant bunch, but they have a theory of governance and diplomacy. Europe, so used to being a satrapy, has seen its once more accomplished elite become complete colonial recruit subalterns. Their best and brightest, the people allowed into power, genuinely believe this post-power politics shit. They weep when the mirage crumbles.
Frankly, its pathetic.
Were I European I would find this both funny and disturbing. I would immediately demand people who actually know about how the world works represent me, and appoint people to the foreign policy apparatus accordingly. I would castigate all the trendy postmodernists (closet liberal ideologues) and hard-constructivists (also closet liberal ideologues) for what dogs to America they really are and their role is gutting training for actual honest and forthright policy makers. The failure to prioritize a regional Europe over global ideological crusades has harmed EU countries at least as much as it has the US. Arguably more considering the backwash of the refugee crisis from Libya, Iraq, and Syria.
But since I am not European I merely need to sit back and watch, appraising how fast a society high on 30 years of pure ideology goes through the stages of withdrawal and grief.
I previously mentioned how (northern) Europeans in particular have a strange smug entitlement and unearned sense of self-importance when their only real impact on the 21rst Century seems to be outliers of enshittification to domestic political realignments. This might be worse than that, though. The pathetic Chamberlain-at-Munich analogies and blind faith in a bill of goods the US is (thankfully) no longer selling reflects an inability to even think of a future, only a romanticized and ahistorical past. Statecraft isn’t about bringing into being the hideous undulating many-tentacled beast of German Idealist philosophy, where human thought creates reality through a mystical immaterial process yet to be explained, it is about medium term solutions to immediate problems while understanding permanency is fleeting. It cannot be a playground for navel gazing. People have clashing interests. Always have, always will.
The Age of Discovery and the subsequent Age of Victorian imperialism is long since over. Coasting along as ducklings in America’s wake somehow enabled many in Europe to believe that they had transcended history and were still vital global actors. But the unlearning of statecraft actually meant they were stumbling in to being its victims.
The world today resembles not the dreams of the 90s, but the pre-Discovery balance of power. The great civilization-states of the east are back and growing their influence. Europe, meanwhile, has reverted to its older position of being the western peninsula of Asia. The faster the Europeans can grow up, the faster they can adapt to this new reality.
One of the things that initially surprised me after I wrote Woke Imperium, was that so many more left wing people wanted to engage affirmatively with it than right wing people. A big part of it was because it was they who had first seen their causes taken over by the easily manipulatable moral panic-types. The easiest people to drive to support needlessly aggressive policies around the world are human rights activists, after all. But another element of it, I think, was that many right wing people read it and correctly had their warning bells go off. I compared The Great Awokening to the Reformation to start, particularly the Puritan experience in early American and 17th Century British history (an analogy I am quite fond of), declared it to be a direct successor of the Reagan-Bush Jr Era Moral Majority, and implied that such moralistic impetuses to sell imperial expansion would likely evolve into a post-woke and possibly even anti-woke sequel.
Regular readers of this site know I have been a constant critic of postmodernist social justice since the start and long before it became the cool thing to do. This even predates the blog itself, dating back at least to Kony 2012 if not even before, with my teenage undergraduate disdain for what is incorrectly called ‘critical theory’ and elaborate and obfuscatory language used to ’empower’ (make the writer sound smarter than they are) that did anything but. They will also know that none of this collective cultural insanity of the past decade plus has ever once tempted me to become conservative or to throw my left-populist economic views under the bus. In fact one of my persistent critiques of wokery was that the longer it went on the more obnoxious the inevitable right wing backlash to it would be. People with a progressive/whiggish view of history seem incapable of understanding that all things come in cycles rather than ascend some linear path.
The desire to become a moral majority is hardwired into American culture, be it left, right, or center. And all present in effect the same danger. The triumph of slave morality in the service of the suppression of dissent. The sterilization of public space to avoid psychological discomfort. The fear, quivering in the shadows, that ones own faction does not have a monopoly on ethics. ‘Just Be a Good Person,’ can be easily swapped out for ‘Just Be a Normal Person,’ etc.
One can simply disavow moralism, adopt an amoral power-based view of the world that reflects polycentric reality, and be done with such fears entirely, but I digress.
Currently, I am busy with other longer-term projects, but I am also on the side paying attention to certain trends with the assumption that I will in the future be writing another examination of moralism in the service of neconservatism. This time, I suspect, it will be about the right. We have also seen a discussion, if one can call it that, online of what the ‘Woke Right’ is. Usually and laughably this entails a conservative old guard lashing out at younger conservatives who take a dim view of Israel and are increasingly interested in class politics. This is some opposite-world territory, as it comes from the faction attached to a sentimental and identity/grievance politics based world view where the U.S.-Israel security arrangement is viewed as a positive and even necessary feature of global stability. This is also a faction that believes that identity (in the form of Christianity, ‘based-ness’ or whatever) is more important than class and logistics. That is quite literally a copy/paste of left-wokeisms priorities, if for ostensibly different purposes. It is the Republican Boomer establishment that is actually the Woke Right here. The difference now is that the evangelical phase of the 80s-2000s was so loathed and backfired so badly once it went down with the Bush Ship that it will be quite some time, if ever, that Jimmy Reptile and all his friends are back in the driver’s seat.
This leads me to begin (without yet coming to firm conclusions) to speculate as to what exactly the right-wokeness will be. I can tell you this much, it will be a compromised merger of multiple trend, as no single one of the following has anything remotely approximating popular or institutional support. The goal of the right-moralists will be to create what they will inevitably and pretentiously refer to as a ‘Hegelian Synthesis’ out of a variety of these trends. They will most likely fail to establish this as official policy, but they will absolutely create a kind of virtue-signaling side economy of Crusader Pepe profile pic approved ‘alternative’ media that people are expected to show deference to if they want to be in the club.
The Catholic Convert Inquisition
For many Millennials and Zoomers, and especially that most cursed demographic of those between the two, converting to Catholicism is all the rage. All hipsters become Catholic, after all. That need to moralize while also being part of a community is creating a seething underbelly of young fogies ready to RETVRN to before Vatican II. Seemingly utterly oblivious to the contradictions of joining a ‘universal church’ that is meant to spread across all the cultures of the Earth while simultaneously railing against globalism is a self-contradictory position, but it is no different from the woke left’s fantasies that one day they would take power (Ha!) and replace the bad rapacious capitalist American Empire with Socialism’s True Children.
This cannot become a dominant faction on its own because the majority of Catholics (i.e. not recent converts) do not share any of the bizarre fixations this new group has and largely sees them as an unwelcome imposition.
Anti-Woke Media Kulturkampf
Because wokeness was so obnoxious and invasive, and embraced by so many corporate and government actors, it made a very easy target. An entire right wing griftosphere arose where some of the dumbest midwits on this planet were able to make bank embodying the principle that a stopped clock can be right twice a day. They infest social media and youtube, giving the most superficial and warmed over takes possible and whining that they are somehow an opressed class because the establishment that once courted them hates them now. Even as our Silicon Douche overlords pivot away into courting the right, they will still trot out this talking point for a year or two to come.
This cannot become a dominant faction because they are utterly dependent on those they criticize to even exist. As wokeness continuous to decline back into its pre-Tumblr migration status as a holding tank for mentally ill shut-ins and losers, all of its cultural cache and any pretense of punching up against the establishment is gone. Big tech kissed the ring. The era of the coding pronouns-in-email gendergoblin is over, the new era of the neofeudal techno-popes has arrived. Thus, in time, the anti-woke will be seen as the woke content creators are, tools of an establishment and dupes of fashionable trend chasing.
Israel
While Israel is hemorrhaging support across the public’s ideological spectrum, the fact that left wingers mostly come out hard for Palestine means that the reflexively anti-woke knee-jerkers often have to double down into a Boomer-style love of Israel and performative philosemetism. North Atlantic Jewish communities become a kind of pet cause of such people in the way that (a monodimentional image of) African-Americans became The Elect of the left. Censorship and cancelling have been perfected by AIPAC-aligned actors in a way the cultural left could only dream of achieving anywhere outside of Reddit and Bluesky.
This cannot become a dominant faction because the younger people are, the less infatuated they tend to be this foreign state whose interests, we are constantly told, must be placed before our own. But the bipartisan support for treating this strip of land in the Levant as sacrosanct is strong enough that The Olds will hang on as long as possible, and make their funding contingent on continuing such policies.
Zoomer Moral Panic
I have talked about this one before so I will keep it brief. If there is one thing Gen Z loves, its setting up arbitrary guard rails to creative expression, public policy debate, and cultural output. When their brood mother, Tipper Gore, shat them out her foetid womb she began to suckle them from the Teet of Cancellation, whispering in their ear all the while that to be made psychologically uncomfortable was literal violence and stochastic terrorism. This attitude is not simply a left-wing and female coded affect, as it is in the (equally cringe but for different reasons) Millennial generation, but pretty standard across the ideological and gender spectrum of Gen Z.
This cannot become the dominant faction because Zoomers are a smaller and poorer generation than any other. They won’t be buying their way to the heights of lobbying without help. But they are pulling from a long and recurring American tradition here, so they will find help if they seek it.
…
I believe the key to predicting the longer-term trends of the Right Wing Turn will be found in a merger point between the above factors. It is too early in this process for precise soothsaying, but for now I will venture this: the common point that all of the above factors share is moral sanctimony and virtue signaling in service not of social justice and equity as we are so used to these days, but for a nostalgic dream-cosmos of ‘normality’, which truly meets the definition of Nostalgia For an Age That Never Existed. It is an attempt to force a type of cultural conformity which has given up actually appealing to the masses but rather seeks to dictate the terms of public expression in the vain and ultimately doomed hope that politics is downstream of culture, rather than the opposite. It will appear to succeed for a few years as the hangover of the Woke Dark Age still lingers and we all settle our scores with the cancelers of yesteryear, but will inevitably inspire rebellion and became an equally poorly dating experiment as the one it sought to replace.
In this way I view it as The Hays Code 2.0. When Will H. Hays took on the job to ‘clean up’ film for the sake of 1920s WASP America he saw himself as fixing a problem that was existential. He succeeded to an immense degree, with interracial couples and foreign cultural practices heavily censored, and even married couples being forced to be depicted as sleeping in separate beds. Jokes about the clergy were haram, as was fictional violence towards children. One could state that film in this era still had some bangers, and it did. But compared the experimental breakouts of the early 20s and the true golden age of cinema (so far as I am concerned) in the 70s and 80s, its pretty weak stuff on the whole. Most of the best films from the Hays Era came from outside of America for a reason.
Despite this apparent success, in the end, Hays was directing all his energies towards a non-issue while the totally unrelated structural forces of the economy were barreling towards an unprecedented collapse. So too will the right wing culture warriors of today ignore environmental devastation, rising inequality, and the dangers of elite overproduction in order to score some cheap points and easy clicks. The future they are building is one of spectacle and distraction, not of serious policy. A set of priorities that unites all culture warriors in a poststructuralist consensus moderated through clickbait Catholicism. The modern right may be in denial about this, but it is every bit as postmodern as the post 1968 left became. And therefore every bit the useful idiot of establishment tastemakers, surveillance advocates, and warmongers.
As for when the Hays Wokes and their Postmodern Right turn their glowing eyes towards actual hard policy- especially foreign policy? This may well be a topic for something more serious, professional, and substantial in the future. I certainly have some ideas. If you come across any especially interesting examples, feel free to send them my way. I am starting a collection. I suspect that ‘defending Christendom from the Muslamic Hordes’ will be a big part of it.
Those who are easily scandalized, regardless of their ideology, are the easiest to manipulate and build consensus around. What could be of more use for an increasingly neofeudal society than to keep neighbors at each others throats rather than teaming up against their lords? The more things appear to change, the more they actually stay the same.
In 2018, Angela Nagle, a public intellectual who had released the book ‘Kill All Normies’, and once had been a fixture of left-commentary, was cancelled. She was labelled a cryptofascist, a Trojan Horse out to poison the purity of a supposedly ascendant left, and the usual formulaic denouncement of a political faction ruled by a puritanical mob. The reason for her cancellation? She made a left-wing case against open borders, pointing out, rightly, that mass immigration undercuts workers’ wages, the social stability of working class neighborhoods, and, is in fact, a libertarian proposal to unleash capital over state and local community sovereignty. She also had the gall to appear on Tucker Carlson (the man who might have helped stop a war with Iran– quelle horreur!) to not only promote this argument, but also, later, to mock the most pathetic display of political activism ever seen in the 21rst Century. Yikes sweaty, abelist. Cancelled.
Leaving beside the obvious point that no socialist or even social democrat government that ever survived for more than 3 months ever abolished prisons, the police, the army, borders, or, most importantly, its own geographically rooted sense of sovereignty, Nagle’s point then was correct. Bernie Sanders, before the AOC-human resourcesification of his second campaign, spent decades making this point. It was once considered a standard talking point of unions and the hard left that open borders was a neoliberal scam. Woke NAFTA. These days, as we emerge from one dark age of histrionics and reactive moralism into what could be its inverse mirror, more and more people are coming around to Nagle’s point. Canada, under the Trudeau government, has proven her tragically correct. The current fight on the American right over H1B visas shows how pertinent the issue is. Even the Democrats, finally, are starting to realize that a criticism of mass immigration policies is not automatically something rooted in racism and may, in fact, have many solid economic roots. Trump won every demographic except for more affluent college degree holders in the last election, with a more and more diverse group of people which includes the foreign born turning against open border policies. It can be very unpopular to be right before the tides shift. The tides always end up shifting eventually, though.
How could so much of commentary gotten so many issues so wrong for so long? I would contend a major part of the moralism-censorship complex is tied up with a specific world view, that of Current Year.
The ruminations of what would become Current Year arguably date back to the early 2010s, when a formerly esoteric and countercultural internet became more and more gentrified by the increased arrival of smartphones and ‘normies’ going online and becoming offended by things outside their previously cable news defined parameters of existence. These trends would later become hyper-intensified under Covid lockdowns and the general Great Awokening of 2020. Agoraphobic shut-ins became a part of discourse, leading to an adverse socialization that poisoned everything it touched and was hostile to nuance or even conceptualizing civil society as anything aside from some kind of cosmic battlefield of the forces of light and darkness. Revenge of the nerds, the left-evangelical edition. While far past peak now, this process still continues in many communities like a circular firing squad operating on inertia.
But the best summary of this blinkered and ahistoric world view comes from 2015. Specifically it was people noticing that all of progressive-beloved John Oliver’s arguments seemed to boil down to stating what the date was. Don’t you know it’s the Current Year? We have certain opinions in the Current Year? What are you, living in a past year?
Everything wrong with both complacent liberal centrism and activist left world views can be so perfectly summed up by this attitude. There is the assumption that history is linear, rather than cyclic. That newer ideas must be automatically better than older ones by virtue of novelty, that a great End-of-History style convergence is upon us. Fukuyama no longer as a ‘science’ but as a desperate declaration of faith. The Elect speaking in tongues before the promise of a moral universe. But, as I have gone into detail about before, there is no right side of history, nor an end to history. There is only competing interests, often moving in totally divergent directions. Gains are rarely permanent, and when one region or field gains often another loses. People gain strength by opposing trends as often as they do supporting them.
Think of the Current Year argument used in other historical contexts to see how foolish it really is. “Got brain problems, time for a lobotomy! What do you mean its dangerous? The experts agree that’s misinformation. Its the Current Year!” “In the Current Year we practice progressive hygiene via the proven science of eugenics.” “Don’t you know the South Vietnamese yearn for our protection, they are literally dying! Its a global battle out there in Current Year, not some halcyon day of isolationism!” “Globalization will lift all boats, stop stalling and pass NAFTA- its the Current Year!”“How dare you oppose our glorious Pharaoh Akhenaten’s war on the Old Gods and singular devotion to the sun, its the Current Year!”
It goes without saying that all this Current Year stuff has done in the long run is lead to unprecedented gains for the right across the developed world while a once surging left now seems to be a pathetic punchline, all while the liberal center continues its long slow entropic decline. Whose inevitable right side of history is this anyway?
I won’t dispute that the conservative tendency of waxing nostalgic for the past and trying to resuscitate dead and dying worlds is a doomed and misguided enterprise, but a blind faith in the present or future is just as reactive and prone to thought-terminating clichés. It is this dedication to presentism that poisons so much of discourse, prevents people from engaging in proper policy critique, and attacks cogent critics such as Nagle and countless others for doing the important work of daring to question whatever the fad of the day might be.
Now that we seem to be entering the twilight phase of this form of Current Year, it might be easier for more people to say this. But this too shows the danger of Current Year Thought. A new Current Year could arise at any time, probably right-coded now, waiting to corral critical thought into a herd mentality. “Its 2025! Time to make Curtis Yarvin National Thought Leader. Come on, aren’t you aware the Current Year?”“Ramaswamy says in Current Year we’re reconstituting feudalism and banning fun, time to get with the times!”
If you want a solid simple argument for why the humanities are important it is this: Every generation has an idiot cohort that thinks they are the protagonist of the human experience. This group of mid-wits is often over-represented in established commentary. They are always, without fail, proven wrong time and time again in their presentism assertions. Sometimes, their moral certainty in teleology damages greater society as a whole. It often leads to attacks on what turn out to be prescient critics of its blind spots. Even a little historical knowledge can prevent more people from falling into the destructive cult known as Current Year. Perhaps this is why academia was the first to be targeted and gravely wounded by the Prophets of the Present.
Garni Temple, for the cult of Mithra, built by Tiridates I in the 1rst Century CE. During this period Armenia was a mostly neutral buffer state precariously balanced between Rome and Parthia. The royal family came from the Parthian Dynasty but the succession had to be approved by Rome.
I just came back from a trip to Armenia to present at the Yerevan Dialogues, a conference about the changing nature of foreign policy in a post-unipolar moment. I had prepared these following remarks, which I ended up not using because they overlapped too much with another presenters topic. Rather than force everyone through repeats, I elected to just wing something else instead. But I am going to put my original prepared remarks here anyway so they don’t go to waste.
The general trend of our work at The Institute for Peace and Diplomacy has been to prepare people for the inevitable reality of the return of the multipolar world. This world is a return to normality to over 99% of human history, so why does it require so much effort to conceptualize?
The answer is that it does not- for most people around the world, who have lived in a reality of hard-nosed great power politics continuously. Nearer the imperial core of the North Atlantic, however, those of us who still see this reality remain a minority, however, albeit a growing one.
This creates a disconnect with many weighty states on the world stage living in a nostalgic fever-dream, albeit one they seem to be ever-so-fitfully awakening from. In the meanwhile, we are constantly subjected to narratives about the ‘New Cold War’ or other obsolete reference points to periods of history irrelevant to the current realignment.
One of the largest trends which we at IPD have identified has been the rise of the Middle Powers. In a world where there are basically three global powers of diminished capacity and increasing capability for regionally anchored middle-tier nations, the name of the game is polycentrism. This is the opposite of hegemony and far from anything resembling the Cold War. Stronger countries with regional-but not fully global- ambitions will become the equals of the superpowers within the realm of their own near-abroad. This restricts the sway of the global powers, locking them out of regional domination
To many around the world who tire of American hubris or the globalization of conflict, this sounds like a welcome improvement. It will be- for some. But the smaller states located in less geopolitically stable regions now face possibly heightened dangers. A regionally dominant middle power, or even worse, multiple regionally potent countries vying for dominance over their near abroad, could spell an increase in danger for these smaller countries whose core imperative is to survive before any other concern.
This is especially true in West Asia, a region prone to so much conflict and great power rivalry. What possible path could the more vulnerable countries of this region take in order to maximalize their chances of avoiding conflict with their sovereignty intact? I would argue that while we are far away from it right now, the only direction with any long term feasibility is one of neutrality and nonalignment between regional and global powers alike, where the declining influence of the globals is leveraged against the rising influence of the locals. The superpowers may yet have a constructive role to play in the saga of small states- and in doing so they can retain some credibility in a world of resurgent middle powers.
Balance of Threat for the smaller states
This brings me to the other side of the polycentric world, the one that both accepts the reality of the rise of the Middle Powers while also understanding the security concerns of the smaller states around them. What path forward is there for states who fear the growing influence of their regional powers? One path stands out to me, a neutralist accommodation occupying a guaranteed space between both the regional and the global powers.
Global powers might be consumed with concerns over the Balance of Power, but the smaller a nation’s world profile it is, the less relevant this concern becomes. What matters more to the smaller nations of the world is Balance of Threat. Rather than looking at a state’s overall potential for danger, balance of threat theory dictates that a country will seek to balance its security against other nations whose potential for revisionist behavior directly affects them, regardless of how powerful those nations may or may not be on the world stage. With the declining ability for great powers to directly intervene, smaller states should not plan on being able to rely on alliance style security guarantees from outside nations, however. This poses the question of what kind of policy to pursue.
The global powers may no longer have hegemony over entire regions outside of their neighborhood, but they are still the world’s most important actors. Smaller states now have an opportunity to engage in sovereignty-affirming balancing behavior. The idea should be to become useful business partners in a way that does not threaten the regional powers nor requires the traditional subordination of smaller states to the great powers.
A hypothetical example of how this would work would be as follows:
1. A small state in a region of high competition between regional powers makes clear its intention to seek neutrality between all parties. It does this by simultaneously appealing to the region and the relevant global powers.
2. In order to gain the regional leverage needed to have its position respected, the smaller state prioritizes the global power’s recognition for this new stance. It can do this by appealing to the global power as being a secure and reliable trade, regional resource, or finance hub partner that would be politically oblivious to regional-power-imposed sanctions and hardened against external disruptions. A country that is always open for business is a country that can maintain relationships with distant nations.
3. The smaller country’s military is only for defense, and it disavows joining large global alliance networks. It does, however, maintain a strong enough military to serve as deterrence to conventional attack by revisionist regional powers. By maintaining friendly if unaligned relations with the great powers, it also increases its options to introduce qualitative advantages to its forces. This can be done without formal security arrangements.
4. Should a country be successful in achieving the above deterrence, its odds of having its desired status of achieving neutrality greatly increase. Should this happen, the ability to attract investment from multiple regional powers could further bolster the country’s status and security.
Neutral and Buffer States
Buffer states are often famous for when they fail, such as Belgium in 1914, but there are many success stories too, including Belgium itself for generations before that fateful date. Some other examples exploited natural geography to further reinforce the natural borders already in place. Nepal, between the British and Qing empires and now modern China and India, is an example of this. Austria in the Cold War, with the victorious powers of World War II all agreeing to a mutual military withdrawal, is another. Perhaps the longest and most surprising of such states to modern observers is that of late-nineteenth through mid-twentieth-century Afghanistan. Not wanting to rule the unprofitable and warlike territory itself, the British Raj nevertheless was consumed by the specter of a Russian invasion through the territory during the height of Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia, often referred to as “The Great Game.” After a succession of fruitless wars there, it was agreed to draw the boundaries of Afghanistan in such a way that Russian and British imperial interests would not directly collide with each other. The arrangement would bring a surprising amount of stability for the tribalistic nation, and only collapse when a series of coups and internal upheavals opened the way for a Soviet invasion in 1979 and subsequent Pakistani and U.S. intervention.
Lest it be assumed that a long-term successful stint as a buffer nation can only come about from circumstances of comparative stability, the experience of Uruguay offers one of the more remarkable transformations from instability to long-term success. Contested for centuries between the Portuguese and Spanish empires, the early independence of Uruguay was rocked with trouble. Both Argentina and Brazil attempted to dominate the country, and internal factions fought each other on the domestic front, sometimes in open civil war. These contests even helped spark South America’s deadliest war, the War of the Triple Alliance, which further seemed to relegate the region’s smaller countries to domination by their larger neighbors. And yet it was the cost of that war, coupled with the desire to maintain some kind of balance in the region, that ensured Uruguay would be able to harness its natural agrarian bounty and access to ports in order to become one of the most developed and, eventually, peaceful Latin American countries. When Brazil and Argentina could both openly admit that they feared the space between them being dominated by the other, it became possible for them to mutually agree that neither would absorb the country into its security arrangements.
The Two Big Boys of Western Asia
Now let’s look a bit closer in space to where we presently occupy, West Asia. Ever since the fall of the Achaemenid Persian Empire and the subsequent collapse of the Alexandrian and Seleucid Empires that toppled it, the region’s history has been dominated by perpetual great power rivalry from a state based in Anatolia and a state based in the Iranian plateau. Rome and Parthia, Rome and Sassanids, Rome and the Caliphate. The subdivision of the Seljuks of Rum with the rest of their empire, the Ak Qoyunlu and Qara Qoyunlu Empires, Ottomans vs Timurids, Safavids, and Nader Shah. And today, Turkey and Iran.
Then a third player entered the game. The political falling out of the Golden Horde with the Ilkhanate in the late 13th Century in a battle over grazing lands in modern day Azerbaijan was a precursor to Russia’s entry into regions south of its homeland. It would eventually be this new player, starting in the 18th Century and culminating in the global power projection of the Soviet Union, that would turn a two player game into a three player one. For a time, Russia was by far the biggest player of all of these, but what we are seeing now is a proportional reversion back to the traditional Anatolian and Iranian regional powerhouses- just with the addition of Russia. Moscow as a global power, Ankara and Tehran as growing regional powers.
For now, the dynamic is that Turkey is allied to the NATO bloc and Iran is allied to Russia. This seems to replicate the traditional Cold War alliance structure that I spoke of as obsolete before…but we are in a time of rapid transition. Russia and Iran share mutual enemies, but not many constructive interests outside of Syria and some defense cooperation. Russia still has many dealings with Israel and across the Gulf region. Turkey, meanwhile, has taken the most independent of NATO course possible in regard to both Ukraine and the Red Sea, positioning itself as a pivot power that has the protection of the North Atlantic alliance while also acting blatantly in its own interests.
There is thus no inevitability to smaller nations being perpetually subordinated in this fluid situation, but I do think there are a few different factors at play today that could bode well for attempts to move in a neutralist direction. Colonialism is out these days, and not primarily because it is ‘wrong from a moral perspective’ but rather because it no longer pays. An intractable occupation of a people with their own culture and loyalties is expensive and inefficient. Trade can be a much better and cheaper method of achieving similar goals. Most importantly, great power allies can no longer trust the subservience of their regional power partnerships, and so need to diversify their investments. Smaller countries provide this failsafe.
Regional and great powers alike fear more relative loss to other powers, rather than the autonomy of smaller states. A small state, using the Westphalian system of sovereignty that we have decided to conduct most international relations within the present is much better at keeping foreign domination at bay so long as it can balance the regional powers enough that all except the neutral country as a buffer and reliable nonpartisan meeting point. Due to the variety of deeply held territorial disputes and grievances in this region, especially those held between smaller neighbors, the odds of being sucked into a regional power alliance network are high. But all this just means to me that if there is any region that needs to explore small state neutrality and the potential windfall it can offer, it is here. If it can work in this region, it can work anywhere.
The danger I see here is not that the smaller countries won’t see this opportunity, I am sure most do. Nor is it even so much the inevitability of power politics between Ankara and Tehran over places like Lebanon, Syria, and other parts of their near-abroad. No, what I see as the first problem comes from my side of the ocean- the inability of Washington DC and perhaps also Moscow to recognize that neutral buffer states are in its own interests. Failed attempts to enact regime change in Syria and Libya have greatly destabilized the region, while the flexible nonalignment of many members of the Gulf Cooperation Council show the first stirrings of moving away from global binaries (and perhaps global oil price stabilization). Should the opportunity ever arise for Lebanon to become a fully sovereign and neutral state, it would be better for everyone save perhaps Israel if it did so. Iranian and Russian influence over countries like Syria and Iraq has only grown due to the aggressive and Manichean nature of US policy towards those countries. Meanwhile, false narratives of ‘the west’ vs the rest, or ‘axis of authoritarianism’ prevent North Atlantic policymakers from recognizing that rather than supporting maximization of their own influence in each and ever country, they should be working towards helping countries opt out of alliance networks entirely, creating a far more stable web of non-aligned nations whose business is open to all and whose sovereignty is open to none.
The interesting thing is that China seems to get this on a level the other world powers do not. There is no political engineering there so far, only a desire to do business. As of this moment, they have the advantage in courting the smaller states. They would be wise to keep up this approach, as it is the sober statecraft of the polycentric future.
The middle powers, likewise, must recognize that they are in a bidding war, and will be looked at more favorably by their neighbors if they can reign in the revisionism towards smaller countries. The first middle power to offer a more benevolent offer to its near abroad is the one who receives more trade opportunities and constructive engagement in turn.
So we have two dynamics here: the middle power who can get along with smaller countries makes more friends at home, and the great power who in turn can tolerate the rise of the middle power prevents the unchecked growth of other rival great powers abroad. This is a model for potential future stability, and it could start in regions where the smaller countries are looking for opportunities in a dangerous multipolar world. While distant from today’s immediate reality, it also represents a possibility for greater regional stability in West Asia.
Look, I know there is a deluge of unthought pieces all jumping on the post-election fallout train. So out of respect for your time and mine I will keep this extremely short and to the point. There will be no flowery exhortations or attempts to make some greater point about existentialism or transformative moments or whatever.
German style fascism or 19th Century American eugenics this is not. I have my concerns with another Trump administration and will vocalize them when they become relevant, but racial and identity politics is over for the left and liberals alike. They are hemorrhaging everyone demographically. No one likes to be constantly lectured by an upper class of HR managers. Trump is making gains across the board with minorities, Democrats lose everyone without a college education. The PMC doubles down while everyone else jumps ship.
Stemming from that point: Harris didn’t lose because she was a racially diverse female. She lost because she was a terrible candidate untested by a primary in this cycle, who had badly lost an amazingly well funded primary last cycle. She, along with being unable to to see American interests as distinct from Israeli ones, will go down as Biden’s biggest mistake. Harris could have differentiated herself from Biden’s ever more unpopular administration once she had it in the bag too, and refused to do so. A primary would have likely removed her and had someone more capable of running at the national election.
Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib won their reelections by a comfortable margin. The largest concertation of Arab Americans in Dearborn Michigan voted for Trump and heavily for Stein. While I am not going to say most elections are foreign policy elections, it plays a much larger role than the chattering classes think. It may have been the geographically decisive element of the 2016 election when considering that counties in swing states with high War on Terror casualty rates broke for Trump even when they had been for Obama before, and absolutely underlined the 2008 blowout. Candidates perceived as more hawkish have lost continuously since 2008 onwards.
Before the 2016 election Chuck Schumer said: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” The party has never moved on from this mindset. Which is insane considering how much it has already cost them. When Bill Clinton killed the party of FDR in 1992 he replaced it with a party of Patrick Batemans and the cast of The View. This meant no one was looking out for working class interests. Are the Republicans going to? Of course not. But they can signal that they are and embrace some trade protectionism to help domestic industry, and this tiny rhetorical concession comes across as preferable to many than Democratic waffle and outright disdain for everyone who doesn’t live in a media-saturated metro area. Meanwhile, many popular poverty-alleviating policies were phased out recently, leading to a massive increase in child poverty. All while defense budgets continued to balloon and Harris not only received the endorsement of Dick and Liz Cheney but actively touted and campaigned with it. This was a promise of more stupid wars of choice, funded possibly by austerity at home. We might still get that with Trump, but he didn’t promise it on the campaign trail.
The American elite desperately needs a foreign policy reality check. Elections and parties pale in comparison to diminishing industrial and economic capacity compared to so many proportionally growing states around the world. The age of liberal hegemony is over. Its legacy is ruined lives at home and abroad, a massive privacy breaching surveillance state, offshoring of industry, global instability, and a Pentagon that can not even be audited. The more one runs to defend this rotting system, the more one will be punished for it electorally. Voters may not know what to do about the problems, but they know they are there. This puts them ahead of most of the media and financial elite. The more centrist candidate has lost every Presidential election in the 21rst Century with the possible exception of 2020 (and that one had Biden tied in with unions at least in a break from typical Clintonian trends).
Who even was the President the last few years? In actuality? It was obvious to everyone outside the lib-media bubble that Biden’s brain was not functioning as early as the last election. The rapidity of the decline only grew. Up until it became undeniable in the most impactful Presidential debate in history the media denied this was the case before suddenly about facing and saying it was obvious there was a problem. Has Jake Sullivan been ruling us the entire time? Or has the system just been chugging along on auto pilot?
All of these points save the last one were made in the aftermath of 2016, including by myself. Libs refused to listen. Their media echo chambers cast all contradictory information as either false or simply deny it exists. And they have the gall to still pretend they are the most informed and best educated people in society. They are in fact as indoctrinated as any megachurch parishioner. The American people and the world at large may deserve better than Republican chauvinism, but the Democratic coalition is not better overall and significantly more out of touch with people outside of their immediate social circle. They have shown, time and time again, an utter inability to learn and adapt. I am already expecting a doubling down of everything they did before. Blaming voters, blaming minorities, blaming foreign countries. Everyone but themselves. But they have only themselves to blame.
And you know what? It works for a lot of them. NGOs fundraise more when Trump is on office. The media secretly loves him as more people watch dying legacy networks and consume legacy print when he is their bogeyman. They profit directly from ‘resisting’ him. Every bit the reality show actors that Trump is, the loyal opposition has an opportunity to fundraise like never before. I’m sure there are some of them who even like losing, it being so lucrative and without the dangers of having to take responsibility for policy failures.
Just remember that politics is local before its national, and systemic before it is partisan. You can work with your neighbors to make life better near you more effectively than voting at the national level will ever deliver something. And in international politics America’s fading protagonist syndrome should not blind us that systemic trends continue onwards independently of what voters think. In my own small way I remain working towards envisioning a foreign policy of realism and restraint which can benefit the average citizen and reign in an out of control establishment. I have and will work towards that goal regardless of the figurehead party in power.
My somewhat controversial take in realism and restraint circles was that Harris would be better for us, as her inevitable failures would drag both the Democratic establishment and the neoconservative Republicans down with her, whereas a Trump Administration causes opposition to further rally around neoconservatism, and while it might adopt our rhetoric but escalate in the Middle East, making us look like fools. I trust none of these people and you shouldn’t either. So this is not ideal for me. I can only hope Vance influences Trump to keep Lina Khan in the government. She is the one genuinely good thing in American administrative governance in the past decade. If she ran for high office I would support her.
Anyway, I never had a strong read on this election or how it would go. Under duress I made a prediction: Harris wins electoral, Trump wins popular. If my prediction was wrong I had to post some 2016-2020 lib cringe. So here, my penance:
P.S.
Deep down inside you know Hillary is secretly happy, and Meatball Ron is utterly devastated. If politicians can be cynically calculating, why can’t voters? Play the long game everyone, opportunities always abound. Look for them wherever they may arise in the chaos of events
The Trickster's Guide to Geopolitics 