At the United Nations this past week, the figurehead of the US Joe Biden talked about a “remarkable sweep of history,” which was somehow not referring to a descent into a WWIII hellscape but an optimistic vision of the future world led by the US.
It was a fitting final UN address for Biden who has put an exclamation point on the US’ decades-long run as chief planetary scourge — from NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine and the ongoing encirclement of China to the support of Israel’s genocidal rampage across the Middle East to the endless coups, assassinations, drone attacks, and the never ending global war on terror.
Is there any hope for change? Aurelien has an engrossing piece asking what lessons might be learned in the West from the impending loss in Ukraine. In the US at least, where learning lessons that don’t involve more conflict is mostly verboten, it’s hard to see it.
Think tanks, those buzzing plutocrat-funded shadow government hives, are week after week pumping out content on how to tinker with the lumbering leviathan. Most of these tweaks to existing strategy involve the recycling of old ideas, e.g., Ukraine is the new Afghanistan for Russia/USSR, revive the Kennan containment strategy, etc.
But what would some lessons be that the US could learn from Ukraine and the neverending wars from the past few decades if it were so inclined? How should the US adapt to the multipolar world in a way that doesn’t involve the crazies doing their best to hurtle us towards global catastrophe in a quest for hegemony?
With none of the think tanks paid to do any real thinking, it felt like a good time to look at some potential solutions — no matter how romantic they may seem at a moment when the US seems dead set on igniting WWIII. As literary critic Fredric Jameson wrote: “Utopias are non-fictional, even though they are also non-existent. Utopias in fact come to us as barely audible messages from a future that may never come into being.”
Utopia is a stretch, but it might seem like it if the US would do what Biden promised on Tuesday at the UN that it will not do: retreat from the world. Here are a few more (it’s a far-from-complete list, so please let me know what I’m forgetting in comments):
Look Backwards, Not Forward
Before charting a course forward, the US first needs to finally deal with at least its recent past and weed out all its war criminals and other neoconservative fanatics.
In contrast to former President Barack Obama’s admission that the US “tortured some folks,” but it’s better to “look forward, not backwards,” the US should fully investigate and prosecute enablers of Israeli war crimes and other US wars of aggression — either directly or through proxies.
It should then finally begin going after the architects of its global torture regime. A friendly reminder that the Justice Department still has the tools to do so:
Multiple federal statutes supply the Justice Department with authority it could use to hold accountable those who used or authorized torture and abuse. These include:
- The federal torture statute, which makes it a crime to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering on another person with specific intent if the conduct takes place outside the United States. The statute also criminalizes conspiracy to commit torture.
- The war-crimes statute, which criminalizes violations of the Geneva Conventions, including torture and cruel or inhuman treatment.
- Section 804 of the Patriot Act, which provides federal jurisdiction to prosecute crimes such as murder or assault committed by U.S. nationals in certain locations overseas, including U.S. military bases.
- The federal conspiracy statute, which supplies independent authority to prosecute those who entered into agreements to commit federal crimes, such as like murder or assault, so long as at least one member of the conspiracy acted to further the conspiracy.
Liability for federal crimes also extends to those who aided and abetted the crimes or counseled, commanded, induced, procured, or willfully caused another to commit the crimes. If officials endeavored to cover up torture in order to evade oversight, other criminal statutes — such as those relating to making false statements or obstructing justice, for example — may be implicated.
While some of the abuses took place a decade ago, the statute of limitations has not run out on many of the most serious crimes. Most importantly, there is no statute of limitations under the torture statute when the abuse risked or resulted in serious physical injury or death. There is no statute of limitations on war crimes that resulted in death. The federal conspiracy law’s five-year statute of limitations runs from the date of the last act taken in furtherance of the conspiracy; the last act can include an effort to conceal the conspiracy. There would be no time bar to a prosecution for any crime committed in connection with efforts to impede the Senate Committee’s investigation.
As a show of contrition and to reaffirm its commitment to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the US should also offer up offenders to The Hague for prosecution. And Washington should fund a new wing at The Hague that will almost certainly be needed to hold all of them.
Apologies, financial settlements, and other forms of repentance to all victims and their families should follow. In addition to the prosecutions of torturers, the US should perform transparent investigations into all its dirty wars of at least the past quarter century. This, along with the following steps, would be a good start at convincing the rest of the world that the US is no longer a threat to the world.
Abolish the CIA
After all the convictions for torture and other crimes, get rid of whatever is left of the CIA. It has no place in a supposedly democratic society.
Purge the State Department of Neocons.
Any who somehow escape a war crime conviction should be shunned and treated like the international pariahs that they are.
Reject War as a Tool of Foreign Policy and Commit to International Treaties
Add an amendment to the Constitution that forbids war as a means for the settlement of international disputes. Throw in something about support for international organizations and working with them to further such ends.
For instance, the US should immediately sign international treaties like the Geneva Conventions, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Basel Convention, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, Ottawa Treaty (Mine Ban Treaty), Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Convention on Cluster Munitions.
That’s to name a few. And Washington should get to work on improving them and helping with their enforcement.
Exit NATO, Cut Israel Loose, and Close US Bases Overseas
NATO is an aggressive alliance that spreads violence and misery and exists primarily to enrich arms manufacturers. Let’s allow Paul Keating, prime minister of Australia from 1991 to 1996, to describe it:
NATO’s continued existence after and at the end of the Cold War has already denied peaceful unity to the broader Europe, the promise of which the end of the Cold War held open.
And besides, the Europeans have been fighting each other for the better part of three hundred years, including giving the rest of us two World Wars in the last hundred.
Exporting that malicious poison to Asia would be akin to Asia welcoming the plague upon itself. With all of Asia’s recent development amid its long and latent poverty, that promise would be compromised by having anything to do with the militarism of Europe – and militarism egged on by the United States. Of all the people on the international stage the supreme fool among them is Jens Stoltenberg, the current Secretary-General of NATO. Stoltenberg by instinct and by policy, is simply an accident on its way to happen.
Former Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte who takes over for Stoltenberg starting October 1 will no doubt perform the same role.
Washington should also end all support for Israel and instead be leading the charge to isolate the pariah state.
Find Ways to Work With Russia and China.
The US as the world’s second largest economy could still play a major role in the world, but the steps outlined above would mark the official end of the Project for the New American Century and the acceptance of multipolarity.
As part of that acceptance, Washington should seek ways to cooperate and build ties with Moscow and Beijing.
Maybe the US could solicit advice from Putin on how to get its oligarchs under control. Maybe China could help the US build some high speed train lines or retrain some of the American workforce in actually building stuff — skills and knowledge lost over the years as the US plutocrats dismantled US industry and moved it to China.
There are a lot of opportunities.
Washington and Beijing could team up on climate change to launch a new Marshall Plan + Belt and Road Initiative with the US leaning on its strength (finance) and China on its dominant position in clean technology. [1] Even Russia could be brought in with its expertise in the nuclear field. The US is instead fighting China’s successes in cleantech commercialization and wants to control the clean energy future while shifting the focus to favored technologies of fossil fuel companies like geothermal, hydrogen, and carbon capture. Nonetheless, here’s Adam Tooze explaining how such a Marshall Plan 2.0 might work:
There is huge demand for American financial assets. So, if America wants to fund a dollar credit scheme, it does not need to be “earning dollars” through exports. It can fund a substantial Marshall Plan 2.0 by selling debt and then recycling the proceeds. This would not be a net flow of funding from the US to the rest of the world, but a recycling of dollars within the dollar-system managed by the new Marshall Plan authority. Think of it as a sovereign private equity fund. On a gigantic scale, this is how America’s balance of payments operates anyway. Foreign inflows to the US invested in safe assets like US Treasuries, off-set the purchase of riskier and higher yielding foreign assets by US investors. On balance, the US does very well out these flows.
This all starts to go above my paygrade, but it does seem that such a scheme could help reestablish faith in the dollar system — although that’s not necessarily a desirable outcome for Americans — following its increased weaponization in recent years, and all the spending could serve as a potential replacement for the trillion in annual military spending as surely the US deficits could be put to better use.
***
Why is it that all the plutocrat-funded think tanks and plutocrat-owned politicians are always charting new foreign policy paths forward that are remarkably similar to the old path forward? A big part of the problem likely stems from the fact that US capitalism on steroids unsurprisingly leads to imperialism in a never ending quest to spread freedom for capital. A logical conclusion is that US foreign policy is a tool of its plutocrats who own the government and want to use all its tools to protect and grow their profits across the world. If that is accurate, then American capitalism makes it unlikely that US aggression will stop unless it is completely defeated (which gets us to mutually assured destruction) or the plutocrats are somehow made to accept limits. That could be forced upon them as the amount of the world they can plunder shrinks due to the rise of other powers and the increase of military parity among even smaller actors, the US empire continues to field expensive ineffective weapons, suffers from recruitment crises, and foreign countries become less inclined to act as cannon fodder for American goals.
Is there another way?
It All Starts at Home
I recall a piece from the “progressive, independent think tank,” the Century Foundation titled “A Bolder American Foreign Policy Means More Values and Less War.” Its central argument is that the US must “recenter values” like “multilateralism and human rights that are core to its identity.”
But it never stops to ask if those are actually American values or myths. Consequently, it might be even more disconnected from reality than the neocon scribes arguing for a multi-front war against Russia, China, and Iran. Because if the American value of money crowds out everything else, how would more of that benefit anyone other than a select few?
While the above foreign policy proposals are modest, it’s impossible to bring any of them about without changes at home, and that would require reorienting American values — or taking control away from those who force the vast majority to live by those values if they want to survive.
There exists belief that Americans view “themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” That might be true for some, but there are also communities all across the country filled with people looking out for their neighbors and willing to give the shirt off their back.
So while there are “embarrassed millionaires” there’s also plenty of evidence in America today supporting research showing that commoning is ‘natural’ for humans and that selfishness, competition, and fear are values that must be instilled.
Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
That’s Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring speaking in an interview at Nuremberg. What avenues exist for building US society not run by modern-day American Görings? Here are just a few (again, far from exhaustive):
A great first step would be to wrest control of the US government from the plutocrats? Naked Capitalism offers a good start there with its Skunk Party manifesto.
There could also be US experiments with the very values we identify as American.
Malcolm Harris in “Palo Alto” advocates for a return of the city to indigenous populations that would be able to establish a system that is essentially the opposite of what Palo Alto (and Stanford) is today. Overly optimistic? Maybe. But repeated efforts need to be made to “develop, practice, and deploy new modes of production, distribution, and reproduction – social metabolism” free from “capitalist gangsterism.”
On the individual level there’s evidence that a transition from blood-stained capitalism to a more egalitarian existence is plenty possible. Whip Randolph, a former defense industry (and regular NC reader), who came to terms with his role in spreading death and destruction and went looking for a different way of life, writes about his experiences in his book “One Disease, One Cure.”
He ended up spending time in an Ashaninka village in Peru that practices real direct democracy on a smaller, manageable scale and lives in reciprocity with the environment. Long ago this used to be commonplace:
In The Dawn of Everything (2021), Davids Graeber and Wengrow explain (among many other things) how after the Agricultural Revolution, at least 4000 years passed before the first hierarchical urban developments. During this period, early farming communities developed technologically (e.g. metallurgy, leavened bread, basic mathematics, sailing, the potter’s wheel), but without kings, centralised control, hierarchy or bureaucracy. Archaeological evidence from what is now Kurdistan and central Turkey shows large settlements with no centre, and in which all houses were more-or-less the same size (and of high-quality), and no special burial sites containing lots of treasure.
This pattern was repeated in places as far apart as China and Peru. There were, for example, large, non-hierarchical settlements of people in Peru, 4000 years before the Incas; and in the Indus Valley and Ukraine, the very first cities show no evidence of monarchs or rulers.
Randolph provides a reminder that history isn’t a one-way street. Among other examples, he points to the Zapatistas in the southern Mexico state of Chiapas who fought for more self-rule and have been enacting a project built on respect for one another and the earth. In practice that means The Assemblies of Collectives of Zapatista Autonomous Governments coordinate decisions, resource sharing, and defense at the highest levels, but these groups also have no authority and depend upon collectives who depend upon the village governments. It’s certainly not easy. The Chiapas project is continually under threat from miners and drug cartels.
But it adds weight to Malcolm Harris’ call for new zones to experiment with different “social metabolism.” Let people choose which they’d prefer to live in.
Americans might prefer a different option. Currently with all of capitalism’s gifts delivered right to our doors, we remain some of the unhappiest, unhealthiest people in an “advanced” economy.
There are signs Americans are waking up to that fact, although a bit more directionless than communities imagined by Harris and Randolph. More and more Americans are leaving the workforce as part of the ongoing Great Resignation.
More Americans are living as nomads. As of 2022, 3.1 million Americans live full-time in vans, RVs, and other motorized transportation converted into homes—a number that’s risen 63 percent in just the last couple of years. Some are part of the newly christened “digital nomads” who work from the road, but many others are early retirees, young people, families in search of a healthier lifestyle, the seasonal working poor, and those seeking affordable healthcare across the border.
Head to Bureau of Land Management areas of the US southwest during the winter and you’ll find a sort of American version of the Ashaninka. Hunters with Trump flags waving alongside hippy types with portable greenhouses to grow organic vegetables and other plants. There isn’t official democratic structures but there are written and unwritten rules and most of all, community.
And many are like Randolph in search of something better than what our ruling class has prescribed. As Randolph writes:
I don’t know everything I learned. I’m still figuring it out. But I know this: people can live differently. We can treat each other well. I know it is possible, and I will never doubt it again because I saw it with my own eyes.
If Randolph can go from the defense industry to an advocate for the overhaul of American society, maybe there’s hope for us all — even a few of the plutocrats.
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I stopped reading when I read the first word in the title – “Rethinking” – because we all know that is something Western leaders never do ********* ok just joking. Your article goes to roots of policy reform. Adopting it or any part of it will mean lost profiteering for those who control our government policy and also involves leaders going against their own interests such prosecting and imprisoning themselves, example – “As a show of contrition and to reaffirm its commitment to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the US should also offer up offenders to The Hague for prosecution. And Washington should fund a new wing at The Hague that will almost certainly be needed to hold all of them.” For this reason and others, I currently am of the opinion nothing fundamental will change, because we have reached the point of no return meaning the governed have lost the tools to affect policy change, and so until there is a violent overthrew of the government nothing fundamental will change, something that may never happen (or will) and likely never happen in my lifetime.
I have at times bouts of insomnia, sometimes triggered by various unsettling thoughts. this time it was the memory of reading on the internets about the fact that Nassralah was killed, according to an unnamed Israeli official, because he would not consider removing the issue of Gaza and ceasfire in Gaza, as a condition of settling things with Israel.
But in the past year I have been more serene, almost welcoming the idea of a faster and more destrctive global warming – the first chapter of “The Ministry of the Future” is horrifying, but the emergence of the Sons of Kalki, as a terrorist organization killing culprits gave me shivers of pleasure.
Also, a nuclear war doesn’t look that bad either – because I really see that the survivors’ many first acts after the dust settles would be to rip into pieces the main perpetrators and then send those pieces in all the corners of the world, for public display and rememberining.
These thoughts, as horrific as they are give me some measure of peace… The above Utopias are really not on the cards. As Churchill used to say, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, only after they’ve tried everything else.”
We haven’t tried everything else (bad) yet…
This is even more delusional hopium than you see with the Climate Moderates.
It is better than what one finds in A Canticle for Leibowitz…
And vengeance is a powerful drug, look at Israelis…
Regarding the theory that no one would survive nuclear war, I don’t know, I live really far away down here in Uruguay. Most of the bombs will be concentrated in the northern hemisphere. If there’s survival anywhere on Earth, then it’ll be down here.
Churchill’s “right thing” that the Americans supposedly inevitably do was clearly whatever would benefit the British Empire — not some native expression of spontaneous common good. As in Lend-Lease, and getting involved in world wars as a gleeful profitable participant, and spreading the disease of colonialism and extractive renter capitalism across the planet.
Pays to examine carefully the true import of sonorous pronouncements of mass murderers, especially the ones who retire from a life of looting and murder to painting and other gentle arts.
I agree, the Churchill quote displays his open hypocrisy. Any honest look into his past would reveal that. Also, my response to any UK folk criticizing the US: “where do you think we got it from?” “and how is the UK any different?” US/UK: two bloodthirsty hypocritical imperialist nations separated by a common language.
On the other extreme, W.C. was an elitist, imperialist, blood-soaked racist who was almost always very drunk. Some might admire him for that. He could be very humorous though: “Mr. Churchill, you’re drunk!” Yes madame, but I’ll be sober in the morning, but you will still be ugly”. A complex figure indeed.
He was no beautiful oil painting himself.
But FDR and most of his people were not onboard with Churchill clinging by the fingernails to his empire. Then Truman bought into Churchill’s Cold War for continued dominance.
No republic without virtue and we’ve had some lousy leaders–some getting there by accident.
And while some thanks for the above there was an article just linked on this site saying that notions of hunter/gatherers and their supposedly peaceful nature are distorted by the tendency of stone weapons not to survive archeologically. In fact they still warred with other tribes even if less hierarchical within tribes. in other words there is no other way other than to accept the truth of a human nature that does indeed have “only interests” even if it may be on a social rather than strictly personal level. Now that the fate of all humans is threatened let us all act accordingly. Roosevelt was for this, Churchill not so much.
The fundamental problem is that we share a common ancestor with the chimpanzee, and their social hierarchies are very brutal and they are constantly going on lethal raids to eliminate rival chimpanzee groups. The grim truth is that these dominance and power-seeking behaviours seem to be baked in the cake that is the human brain as it was shaped by millions of years of evolution as these behaviors were once very useful as a mating strategy. Now we are stuck with them despite how self-destructive they are with modern weapons.
History is shaped by one empire being toppled after another as rising empires grow powerful enough to take on the big players and the cycle repeats with they themselves being destroyed. In the case of revolutions, most of them either fail, or the new leadership wastes no time in proving to be just as authoritarian and corrupt as the leadership that it overthrew.
The book A Mote in God’s Eye portrayed the moties as being stuck in endless population growth and collapse cycles. The human race I think is stuck in its own inescapable cycles of power-seeking and territorial hierarchies that are constantly reforming again immediately after one falls. I do not see any way out of this as this seems to be innately tied to how our species thinks and operates and you cannot change instinctive drives that are hard-wired into our bains that easily
In some cases, I think some schools of political realism might be right after all as nation states and their leaders seem like they cannot help but try and increase their power at everybody else’s expense across the world the moment they have the opportunity and means to do so.
Hoping maybe Russia is the exception, but so much depends upon a Red president glazed with holy water beside the wild children…
You have it right, and these realizations do not inspire any optimism about our future, as a species. Everything about us, with our “expanded consciousness,” is at odds with the modus operandi of every other life form on the planet.
Before ending the reading i thought of an additional measure that could be taken: stop (or modify) the weaponizing of the economy and monetary system(s) via (unilateral) sanctions.
Aurelien has an engrossing piece here:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/09/this-maniac-must-be-stopped-netanyahu-condemned-over-massive-beirut-bombing.html#comment-4107879
The responses/rebutals to his comment are even more engrossing.
Yeah, he accuses folks of being naive, but it is Aurelian who is naive. The ethnocentric, Orientalist hypocrisy surprised me. Victim-blaming and hypocrisy is part of Western Civilisation Inc. but I didn’t expect so much of that reflected in the comment.
I read this piece by Connor (thanks!!) as a response to Aurelian’s worldview. If we cannot imagine a non-military global transition to multipolarity – only the ants will thank us.
The problem is that US leadership pays statistically zero attention* to the public’s views. Sadly, this means change will only arise when a pro-multipolar faction of the US oligarchy (the US neutered Europe by subsuming its policies under NATO) wins over the neocon-infested, hegemonic, US oligarchic faction that consolidated power over the last decades.
IMHO, the transition is unstoppable (barring nuclear war) – in a decade, China’s manufacturing will be double the West’s).
The big question is whether this plays out by politics and lawfare or armed internal struggle (historically more likely, especially considering the American love of guns) once shocks hit. Meanwhile, the global adults are trying to maneuver the elephant in the china shop from blundering through a load-bearing wall. My SWAG is a global preference for internal war and fragmentation to prevent dreams of a US return to (military) hegemony.
WW1 was just such a competition between various oligarchic factions in Europe.
I would like to quote the last line of Kipling’s poem The Lesson**, guiding Aurelian’s piece, but not quoted:
“We have had an Imperial lesson; it may make us an Empire yet!” A call to learn from the defeat how to continue the global exploitation (How many Indians died for the wealth of the British crown? How many trillions were stolen?) – a 500-year global power imbalance during the age of colonialism with its seas of blood – that already has ended.
IMHO, the real lesson is that diplomacy needs to be primary (backed by a strong military to be serious) – NOT diplomacy by military-backed dictates. The peaceful transitions that are occurring, like the Belt and Road Initiative or the Asian Investment Infrastructure Bank, are the hard work of diplomacy and are replacing the post-WW2 global system (created to prevent a recurrence of WWII’s horrors), which was hijacked to support unipolarity with the collapse of a bipolar world in 1990-1991.
Today we are seeing echoes of decisions made after that momentous event.
** https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_lesson.htm
* https://pnhp.org/news/gilens-and-page-average-citizens-have-little-impact-on-public-policy/
Aurelien has often expressed here on NC, what I consider a very British view towards ‘Orientals’ and ‘Arabs.’ They are simply ‘not like us.’
I remember when he was commenting at NC as ‘David,’ and I, in my naivety, called him out on these views. Then I became aware that he was an upper class British ex-civil servant/diplomat/academic, living in France and, thus, far more accomplished that I in education and experience.
I subscribe to his Substack, and have learned a lot from his excellent essays, especially from his insider descriptions of NATO bureaucracy and diplomatic meetings. Not everyone is ‘perfect.’ Not everyone has the same world view as I do. I take what I consider the excellent parts of his essays and mostly perspicacious comments and realize that others will gently chide him on his Euro-centric views, as I once attempted to do. Maybe I am still naïve.
And, a belated thanks to Conor for his post: we need people to jump in and begin to imagine a multi-polar world.
Something of a complementary piece by Jeffrey Sachs today:
Beyond Hegemony
“The West is bemoaning its loss of relative status—the ability to dictate to others—not any real military insecurity.”
https://scheerpost.com/2024/09/29/jeffrey-sachs-beyond-hegemony/
I don´t share his faith in the UN though. (In the second half follow recommendations for a reform).
“(…)
Herein lies the essence of the Ukraine war, and many other global conflicts as well. The United States and its allies want to expand NATO to Ukraine. Russia has firmly said no. Both Washington and London were ready to fight a war with Russia over NATO enlargement to protect Western hegemony (specifically, the right to dictate security arrangements to Russia), while Russia was ready to fight a war in order to keep NATO away. In fact, Russia is prevailing on the battlefield over Ukraine’s army and NATO’s armaments. This is not surprising. What is perhaps surprising is how the West completely underestimated Russia’s capabilities.
In broad terms, with the changing global order, including the rise of China and the rest of East Asia, the military and technological strength of Russia, the rapid development of India, and the growing unity of Africa, the Western-dominated world has been brought to an end, not by a tumultuous collapse of the West, but by the growing economic, technological, and therefore military, power of the rest of the world. In principle, the West has no reason to fear the rise of the rest, as the United States and Europe still maintain an overwhelming deterrence, including nuclear deterrence, against any military threat from the outside. The West is bemoaning its loss of relative status—the ability to dictate to others—not any real military insecurity.
Nothing is going to restore Western hegemony in the coming years—no military victory, technological advance, or economic leverage. The rise of advanced military, technological, economic, and financial capacities to Asia and beyond, is unstoppable (and of course should not be stopped, since it signifies a world that is fairer and more prosperous than the preceding Western-dominated world). Yet, the end of Western hegemony does not mean a new Chinese, Indian, or Asian hegemony. There are simply too many power centers—the United States, the EU, China, Russia, India, the African Union, etc.—and too much capacity and diversity to enable any other hegemon to replace the Western-led world order. We have arrived, after centuries of Western dominance, to a world beyond hegemony.
This new world, beyond hegemony, should be the starting point for the Summit of the Future. The United States, UK, and the EU should come to the Summit not in a vain attempt to sustain their hegemony (as Boris Johnson fantasizes), or equivalently, to protect America’s self-declared “rules-based order”—a vacuous expression that envisions the rules as determined by the United States alone. They should come as part of a new multipolar world looking to find solutions to profound ecological, technological, economic, and other challenges. The new order should be based on multilateralism and international law under a suitably reformed UN Charter.
(…)”
From our own past, courtesy of decent people living under the impacts of boom-and-bust Robber Baron cycles:
“The Hobo Ethical Code of 1889: 15 Rules for Living a Self-Reliant, Honest & Compassionate Life.” https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/the-hobo-ethical-code-of-1889.html
One wonders at the community and ethical structures of the many nodes of street drug addicts, sharing hits and needles… https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SwlIAjcYypA
Ha! Being American means never admitting mistakes or saying your sorry.
Without Americans and Israelis, it would be impossible for most mortals to reach Heaven. Don’t worry, I’ve been told that there’s plenty of Walmarts down there.
To add to Ignacio’s comment above:
Return the Fed to the lockbox in which it used to reside. At the moment, the Fed is used to increase the indebtedness of people who can least afford it, and to increase the value of assets held by the wealthy, funneling wealth ever upwards. Rather than maintaining employment, the mandate of our current central bank seems to be maintain unemployment — full precarity for all (except for the few), thus obliging them to accept any wage. If the Fed can’t stabilize prices and acts only on behalf of Wall Street, it needs new management and new limits.
Return the power of government to the people. End or reverse “Citizens United” protections. No single SCOTUS decision has brought about more division, corruption. Why is this so hard? Tie this reform with public funding of elections for national office and limit the time over which candidates can actively campaign. If people want to donate to campaigns, they can do so through a general fund, no earmarks, no choosies.
Extrapolate our current course: it’s not sustainable.
I thought this was all from Project 2025. Kidding!
It’ll have to be pretty bad before the meek inherit the earth…after all the dog-eat-dog folks have killed each other off. The truth never triumphs, its opponents simply die off. Science advances one funeral at a time (Max Planck)
Unfortunately, there’s a Gresham’s dynamic at work in state leadership now. The most vicious, unprincipled opportunists rise to the top, often pushing aside more competent leaders. You’d think vulnerability to COVID, never mind the planet-threatening awfulness confronting us now, would at least make these leaders humble…but not yet, anyway.
The meek get eaten.
Thank you Conor, this is an incredibly key piece and I think we should actively work towards this. I would add, I think the US won’t achieve any of the above until it separates government and politics from corporate and financial interests, which should be a goal as well. There should not only be separation of church and state, but also finance and state. For all governments worldwide. The history of the last few hundred years demonstrates why.
I wonder if latest developments in AI could make it possible to reduce government solely to automated logistics and resource planning, a la Mike in Heinlein’s Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Hrm.
Re Adam Tooze’s “there is a huge demand for USA financial assets”
Some of that demand may come from foreign belief that they have to invest in the USA and its financial assets to stay on the good side of the military bully.
Historian Walter Sheidel has described the events that lead to real change ( decreased inequality in his discussions).
As I recall the events are world wide wars, great plagues, revolutions and financial collapses.
As I recall, Sheidel did not find “internal, peaceful reform” in the historical record but maybe ancient debt jubilees are close.
Edward Snowden’s revelations were important to the USA’s power structure as it learned the distracted USA population did not much care about Snowden’s evidence of mass surveillance.
I suspect it will be business as usual in the USA until one of Sheidel’s events leads to real change as too many livelihoods are tied to the current order.
The USA elite are doing well, accumulating financial assets and avoiding jail.
“It All Starts at Home”
I wish moral repugnance, or conversely, moral affirmation were enough but absent a credible risk to survival or serious material deprivation resulting from the current course, I don’t see much incentive for change being initiated by the beneficiaries of global hegemony, which at this time still includes a significant proportion of citizens within the belly of the beast. See, for example, this previously linked at this site: Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy Nature Communications.
The dilemma set to music: Imagine on the one hand, The Man’s Too Strong on the other.
The world obeys the U.S. because if you disobey the U.S., you will be treated badly. That is all. If you take the military and the CIA out of the U.S., there is nothing left. Imagine a world where all international issues could be freely discussed without fear of U.S. retaliation. Everyone would condemn the U.S. and immediately start treating it as a pariah state.
If the U.S. military and CIA suddenly vanished, a hundred other bunches of people (nations, movements) with their own agendas would start maneuvering against each other for power. At the end of it what emerged would probably not be better than what we have now, almost certainly not for people living in the U.S. Like so many commenters here, you imagine that the U.S. is uniquely evil. It isn’t. We’re just playing the same game as everybody else throughout history. For a while we were better at it, but that’s fading and we’re in line to be replaced. Whoever does will have their own plans, and yours and my well-being will not be part of them.
I agree with you that the US isnt uniquely evil. The problem is that your well-being and mine are not part of the plans of American elites either.
The U.S. is not alone in being evil, but evil is inseparable from its status as world hegemon. Mongolia under Genghis Khan conquered Eurasia with its barbarism. Having lost its wickedness, Mongolia is now just a small Asian nation. This is undoubtedly a good thing for the world, but the Mongols are nostalgic for their former glory. The “fair” United States will be relegated to the status of a regional power. Will Americans be able to stand that treatment?
Us future looks depressing to me. Granted, better than many countries, say in Central America, explaining the border problems. But short term thinking seems to me more and more prevalent, and not just the corp world’s myopic concern with this q… funding ukr is to kick the can and the surrender past the election. Israel is not so malleable, they’re not as willing to pretend, as is the us, that a ceasefire has any attraction because they don’t fear, and may prefer, that trump wins the election, and certainly don’t give a fig who wins MI. Or the ukr war.
Imo many critical areas are getting worse, not just our shooting in the foot foreign policy. Education, healthcare, politics, surveillance, censorship… we are copying China’s worst features and none of their better ones.
Holy deficit Bat Man! And “Release the river” Gandalf. I love this Conor. I’m an old woman and I haven’t had the chills in decades – but you just gave me the chills with this one. We can certainly spend our way to survival in a world worth surviving for. This is the outline for our mental liberation and new way of life to follow.
Sounds good Conor, I’d vote for the Skunk Party ticket all the way. (write-in)
The uniparty Bipartisan Consensus (representatives of oligarchy) avoid talking about serious issues, just personality, emotional hysteria, and other distractions. Plus they all support genocide, so let’s not “vote” for the D/R lesser stink nonsense.
“…Head to Bureau of Land Management areas of the US southwest during the winter and you’ll find a sort of American version of the Ashaninka. Hunters with Trump flags waving alongside hippy types with portable greenhouses to grow organic vegetables and other plants… ”
I live in a rural area of Northwest California, known as “The Emerald Triangle” and it is the same here all year round (although it rains a lot in winter), just fewer DT flags and more of the hippy types growing “other plants”. The hunters know to steer clear of the hippies, cause they have guns too. It’s not so fun when they shoot back.
In the original Aurelian piece Conor refers to, Aurelien states:
“There is nothing like a really crushing military and political defeat to concentrate the mind and force the learnings of lessons.” He goes on to say that what is involved in concentrating the mind is a:
(1) willingness to accept you have been defeated
(2) recognition of the nature of the defeat
(3) preparedness to consider doing things differently.
There is little to no evidence of this type of psychological adjustment currently taking place and that is one major reason why things appear so dangerous and out-of-control.
“There is nothing like a really crushing military and political defeat that the establishment is held accountable for to concentrate the mind and force the learnings of lessons.”
Fixed that for you all.
The rich are not going to voluntarily surrender their power nor the wealth they stole from the world. That’s the fundamental problem.
Unfortunately this assumes that the rich are open to learning and trying to work with the world. They aren’t. Ths whole situation is because they are greedy. They wanted to keep hegemony, steal Russia’s natural resources, and implement neoliberal economics.
It could very well take a collapse on the scale of the breakdown of the USSR to end this.
Even after the collapse, the rich will spend their resources on trying to keep their wealth, or like the UK elite currently does, trying to restore their empire / give some sense of relevance to their ego.
For the recommendations of this post to take place, it will require that collapse I noted and a radically different government to be the successor state. It will also require removing the power and wealth of the rich. Even with a USSR like collapse, that will be a very tall order. Its a job well worth doing, but the obstacles are going to be enormous.
This is a nice fantasy, but nothing in the history of the USA suggests that it’s willing to admit error on anything like the scale envisioned here, or is even capable of doing so.
A full reckoning of the sins of the past and the way they continue to find expression in the present would be nothing less than a national identity crisis. Given how much emotional capital is bound up in that identity (the pageantry of empire, patriotic displays and the like) I see very little hope of it ever happening. Perhaps generational change will help – the younger generation obviously has a very different view of America – but even then I’m not optimistic. It would need some kind of catastrophic unignorable shock, like the Black Ships for Japan or WW2 defeat for the Nazis. The global financial crisis in 2008 wasn’t enough, and neither was Covid.
“A full reckoning of the sins of the past and the way they continue to find expression in the present would be nothing less than a national identity crisis.”
It’s more insurmountable than that. It would have to be an admission that John Quincy Adams was wrong in saying that the US is ‘the last best hope for mankind’.
Absolutely impossible! There is zero chance that those reforms and changes in culture could come about. Power is power and the powerful have it. You want to mess, fundamentally with that power? Anybody in the highly corrupt “Justice” Department would not dare to indict anyone in the CIA for anything no matter what they did. Any serious reform of government, at this time, can’t happen even if the vast majority wanted it to happen. Interlocking networks of oligarchs, their factotums, and thugs would never allow that. Our system is too corrupt at the core, including the majority of citizens, for anything to happen any time soon.
However, it is worth considering these ideas to show others that we could live in a more convivial society if we really wanted to. People need to understand how badly they’ve had their resources diminished for the comfort and power of the network of oligarchs that profit from the incredible corruption at every level, in almost every institution. That realization would eventually become part of popular culture–then there might be a chance for change but not any time soon.
The UK was not hegemonic in 1815. It was one of several great powers, which considered that European stability would best be achieved through regular consultations on issues of mutual interest – hence the ‘congress’ system, which worked satisfactorily for a while, albeit by dint of the major European powers having a shared desire to roll the clock back to 1788 (at least to some extent).
What was clear in 1815 was that France was not, and could no longer aspire to be, hegemonic. France was permitted to play its part in the congress system. This was not so much an act of benevolence as a recognition that France was too important to be ignored, and also too important to be unduly constrained. Moreover, all of the European powers felt obliged to assist the Bourbons to prevent a recurrence of 1789-91 or 1814.
For France read the US, albeit that the latter has not been comprehensively defeated in the field like France. Would it not be better for the leaders of the US, China, Russia, India and perhaps Brazil/Indonesia/Nigeria (or their respective emissaries), after the fashion of the congresses of Castlereagh, Hardenberg, Metternich, Pozzo di Borgo, Talleyrand, etc., to meet or converse every week or so in order to collaborate on issues of common interest? Having met they could then lay down the line of the major powers in their respective spheres of influence, not by coercive means, but by way of encouragement. For the US this would entail the abandonment of strategic hegemony, with its assorted privileges, but would also result in liberation from the burden of many foreign entanglements and the cost of preserving a system of worldwide bases.
One final point: it is not just the State Department which needs to be purged of neocons, but the entire US Government, together with the shadow government of think tanks, MSM and consultancies. And not merely in the US, but in the EU and UK also. The bully pulpit could be used, for example, to declare that the Administration (and all federal agencies) will not award any contract to any firm which advertises in any newspaper, gives work to any consultancy, etc. which professes any neocon sentiments. Although the neocons are incredibly tenacious and shameless they could by degrees be frozen out of the political economy of the West.
“The UK was not hegemonic in 1815…”
Splendid account.
That was preceded by Alexander’s army marching down Champs d’Elysee and the Battle of La Belle Alliance. We are going to need T-90s rolling down the Pennsylvania Ave followed by the remnants of USN sunk by the Chinese for something analogous to 1815 to emerge.
Nothing big enough to clearly and unambiguously break the facade of US invincibility has yet tsken place and probably won’t take place, if ever, for decades. I imagine anything short of that would work–current crop of US leaders are at least as arrogant as Napoleon with none of his many talents.
My mother taught me that if I don’t have anything nice to say, I shouldn’t say anything — but I must ask, who pray-tell is going to carry-out the above outlined prescriptions? Are the elite perps simply going to wake up one fine morning and prosecute themselves?
The French were pretty comprehensively defeated in 1871 after the Seige of Paris and the crushing of the Commune. Then France endured the defeat of 1940 and four long years of a brutal occupation and collaboration marked by torture, murder, and deportation (to be tortured and murdered elsewhere). Their elites have apparently learned precisely nothing, with Macron today hubristically attempting to play a younger, skinnier, version of MacMahon and Pétain.
My only hope is that that Geriatric Genocidal Joe can be dissuaded from his delusional game of nuclear Russian roulette until January 20…
You know, MacMahon remained popular enough after 1871 to become the first elected president of the Third Republic, defeating Adolphe Thiers, the provisional president after Napoleon III abdicated. I don’t see Macron pulling that off.
Aurelien’s point seem to me to be that the defeat must be crushing enough to force the change in thinking and behaviour.
In this case, I think the US is experiencing multiple defeats on multiple fronts – militarily, politically, diplomatically, economically and societal.
It is being defeated abroad as it is imploding domestically, and few Americans seem to understand the true extent of its slow motion collapse.
Closing overseas military bases has crossed my mind, i wonder at how the people garrisoned there would react to all of a sudden not having a “mission” to focus themselves on and being turnt out on an unsuspecting US citizenry.
I asked my friend, (currently discharged Army/Nat’l Guard though considering a new contract patrolling the border nearby a certain geopolitical hotspot in the um “over there”) a while ago whether he thought mass base closure and redeployment would lead to civil/not so civil unrest stateside, and he seemed pretty adamant that it wouldn’t.
I have my doubts, having heard some of his stories. Despair can do funny things in the mind of the fragile, directionless, weapons-trained, oorah man child. So while i self-identify as a pacificist, and certainly struggle to see the point in… “all that,” i can’t keep my mind from wandering wondering.
Since Conor has thoughtfully woven the theme of utopia into this article, invoking one of its most compelling contemporary advocates, may I add: R.I.P., Fredric Jameson, who left us on the 24th, just this past week.
Who will do all this? Purge the neocons for instance! We need to see a credible third party emerge for starters .
Also neocon mindset prevails amongst the citizenry as much as Hamas’ world view probably would among Gazans. American exceptionalism is the mindset among neocons and source of these forever wars . Most Republican and Democratic voters share this. I was watching a movie the other day and the line in it was ” the boy’s dad was a good guy-an ex Marine”. This sort of image building of the armed forces was done over decades. The equivalent is not done against War.
This comment stinks of spam. Why is there a misrepresented link to a site selling ammunition? Why is there a link to a site selling anything, for that matter?
Thanks! Done.