There are reports that DOGE is going global as the tech industry and other oligarchs the world over use their politicians to reframe austerity and privatization through the lens of innovation. Countries like Germany, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India either already have their iteration of DOGE or are looking at creating it. Musk, the world’s richest man and libertarian government contractor weirdo at the center of DOGE has also cultivated close ties with governments in Hungary, Italy, Israel, and is inserting himself along with the US government into the politics of South Africa, Brazil, and other nations.
The conservative-DOGE-tech alliance might put up the appearance of opposition to the grating virtue signaling of the liberal Davos cabal, but they’re two sides of the same coin. Samuel Huntington, who came up with the label “Davos man”, argues that members of this global elite “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations”.
As the dust settles on Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, there are arguments that this plan has little to do with boosting American manufacturing and more with extorting better deals for US-based oligarchs in the neoliberal trade model, hurting China, and “shock therapy on a civilizational scale.” The administration is reportedly already in negotiations with countries like India, Israel, and Vietnam over “deals.” Maybe nowhere are the administration’s intentions more clear than in the fact that hours before the announced tariffs Trump and Musk gutted the program that aids American manufacturers.
We’ll see where “Liberation Day” leads, but if DOGE marks the next stage of global neoliberalism (according to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, the future belongs to authoritarian capitalism), it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the world is embracing DOGE much the same way it did when US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher legitimized neoliberalism nearly a half century ago.
As DOGE helps reconcile US elites, can it also lead the march towards what Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu says is a future belonging to authoritarian capitalism across the world?
Exploitative Success Stories
Any regular reader of this site will need no reminder of how decades of neoliberalism has shredded the American social fabric. We can list almost infinite economic statistics, but maybe nowhere is it more evident in Americans’ increasing belief that they don’t belong, that they have no community, and there are no values holding the country together. That’s unsurprising when anything and everything is justified in pursuit of the almighty dollar and “learn to code and/or move” is the credo of the party that used to at least feign representation of the working class.
On the bright side, a lack of community is easily exploitable. And all the social harm goes hand in hand with obscene benefits for the wealthiest. That is the great selling point among the global elite as they’re called who do seem to have a strong sense of community.
Part of the ineffectiveness in countering them is the identity politics that has infected the politics at the same time of neoliberalism’s explosion.
Consider the following article I came across recently: “Split Apart: How Unchecked Capitalism and Integration Divided the ADOS Community.” It’s from Lineage First Magazine and is co-written by AI, but it describes how the civil rights era opened doors to advancement but that predatory capitalism fostered the exploitation of the marginalized while enriching a few.
Essentially, a small percentage of African Americans were allowed to enjoy the riches of American capitalism while the rest continue to toil in poverty, and the US called it a success and a day. This isn’t too dissimilar to the “success” story Vice President JD Vance peddles about his rise from poor white Appalachia.
In many ways these American rags to riches stories are reminiscent of US imperial strategy as DOGE goes global. Europe is a fine example with its overreliance on the US and seemingly limitless number of compradores in leadership positions.
They all seem to know that even if they lay waste to Europe, they can follow in the path of former World Economic Forum Young Leader, British Prime Minister, and war criminal Tony Blair. After he left government he began “operating a dizzying, and often overlapping, web of charities, firms, and foundations that have catapulted him to the status of one of Britain’s wealthiest people .”
He travels around giving interviews warning against the dangers of populism and free public services – a task that is no doubt more difficult with Jeffrey Epstein’s “Lolita Express” no longer offering him free rides.
There are plenty of other examples of EU officials following in Blair’s footsteps.
Former EU Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton quickly became an advisor at Bank of America, getting a waiver to bypass a rule that requires a two-year waiting period before starting lobbying jobs. David Cameron recently joined Jeb Bush’s private equity firm.
Zelensky and company in Ukraine are maybe the best case study, however. Here is Dmitri Kovalevich writing at Al Mayadeen:
The Ukrainian political elite has always been famous for its skills in mimicry. Many started out as Soviet functionaries, then became pro-Russian politicians. Today, most are flirting with far-right Ukrainian nationalism and neo-Nazism. More than coincidentally, Zelensky is a mimic and comedian by profession. The dictionary definition explains that “a comedian is someone who entertains audiences using many techniques, one of which is mimicry and impression.”
Ukrainian publicist Serhiy Datsyuk says the Ukrainian elite has done nothing but plunder the country’s people and resources for the past 30 years, and Ukrainians are beginning to recognize this across the board. He writes, “It is very difficult to destroy half of the country’s population in 30 years, but we managed. This shows that we Ukrainians don’t need Ukraine, and therefore no one else needs it, either. Our elite has robbed the country of resources and infrastructure and did not give a damn about the people.” In his opinion, it is pointless to ‘save’ Ukraine under Western tutelage because the country is in freefall and there is nothing left to save in such a format. The creation of external enemies, that is, the ‘Russians’, has been just another excuse for the authorities to relieve themselves of responsibility.
In January, a statement by Vitaliy Portnikov, a well-known Ukrainian journalist and a columnist of the US-funded Radio Liberty, emphasized the class division of society which has only intensified during the war. His words resonated widely in Ukrainian society. According to him, the very essence of a Western-inspired ‘democratic’ society is that the poor should perish while the rich should prosper.
Despite her disastrous time in office, German Foreign Minister and coincidentally another former WEF Young Leader like Blair, Annalena Baerbock still provided one of the finest summaries when she explained why she doesn’t listen to Germans’ concerns over job losses or freezing. Her real concern is Ukraine by which she means those looking to profit off the slaughter.
With elites like this, what’s to prevent the duplication of Ukraine elsewhere? Professor Sergey Karaganov, honorary chairman of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and academic supervisor at the School of International Economics and Foreign Affairs Higher School of Economics in Moscow writes the following:
Sending Ukrainian cannon fodder to slaughter, they are preparing a new one—Eastern Europeans from a number of Balkan states, Romania and Poland. They have begun to deploy mobile bases, where contingents of potential landsknechts are trained. They will try to continue the war not only to the “last Ukrainian”, but soon to the “last Eastern European”
Why might the Russians want a “deal” even though they’re winning in Ukraine? The prospect of many more years fighting to subdue Eastern Europe (again) could be one reason.
There are potentially others.
Dystopian Multipolarity
Russia is not fighting for much of a different vision of societal organization, nor is China. As Michael Hudson has explained time and again, the true battle being waged is between financial oligarchy on behalf of the Davos crowd and a mixed public-private economy in places like Russia, China, and elsewhere in the global south. In simple terms, they are what the US was before the neoliberal revolution, but Hudson also recently commented on The Duran on how neoliberalism is what’s taught at Chinese universities and is conquering the world.
Do Russia and China simply want to build up their countries using mixed economies like the US did in order to settle into a seat equal to Washington at the global neoliberal table?
Fiorella Isabel, Vanessa Beeley, and others are contemplating how a Russia-US detente will herald a new carving up and exploitation of West Asia while cementing some of Greater Israel’s designs on the region. China, by most accounts, is in the lead in the race to replace human labor. And both countries purchase and use Israeli surveillance and population control tech. As Antony Loewenstein documents in his book The Palestine Laboratory, companies like Any Vision developed a system for mass surveillance of Palestinians, and now operates in over 40 countries, including Russia, China, and the US.
To be fair, China and Russia are more willing to play by international rules, are agreement-capable, and currently fear tearing their social fabric apart — all statements that cannot be made about the US.
China isn’t afraid to cut oligarchs down to size, although for what reasons isn’t exactly always clear. In Russia, Putin recently announced healthcare for the homeless. The US appeals to greed and has no concern for any potential destabilization that impoverishing country will create.
But while the opposition to American hegemony and win-win deals championed by Moscow and Beijing are welcome, they are often for the elites of countries and not necessarily workers or for the environment. Both China and Russia are seeing rising levels of economic inequality.
So what is the fighting with Russia and confrontation with China really about?
VP Vance provided a neat summary recently when he explained how he (and his tech overlords) want other countries trapped at the bottom of the value chain.
While talks with Russia currently appear to be taking the long train to nowhere, we can see what the US is after: mineral deals, infrastructure, a deal to weasel its way into a reopening of the Nord Stream pipelines. In other words, US plutocrats are after rent-seeking opportunities.
It’s similar with China, although a taller order as it involves keeping China down, but the U.S.-China Phase One trade agreement during Trump’s first term helps show us. From Foreign Policy:
At the time, [Trump] lauded the “historic” agreement as “righting the wrongs of the past.” He was proud of securing China’s commitment to purchase at least $200 billion worth of U.S. goods and services over a two-year period. The agreement went even further, obligating China to strengthen its intellectual property regime, curtail technology transfer requirements, lift barriers to U.S. agriculture exports, and refrain from currency manipulation. China lived up to most of these commitments but fell short on its purchasing obligations.
Now Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the US is engaging in economic warfare against China to lure Beijing to the negotiating table. Negotiate over what exactly?
This could include demanding more in terms of intellectual property protection, agriculture, and technology transfer while adding new areas of focus, such as cloud computing. Lessons could be drawn from the first go-around regarding purchasing commitments: making targets more realistic, conducting more regular progress monitoring, and realigning products of interest with what the U.S. private sector is ready to sell.
…U.S. negotiators should try to curb China’s use of subsidies and financial assistance and address the factors leading to excess production, such as limited domestic demand. But they shouldn’t be surprised if these efforts don’t gain traction. Washington might also consider an accommodation aimed at limiting U.S. imports of unfairly traded Chinese products. Rather than imposing unilateral high tariffs, this could be accomplished by setting quantitative limits on select Chinese exports, like batteries
…an agreement with Beijing must also consider its growing investments in third-country markets, particularly in the automotive and electronics sectors. Strengthened anti-circumvention measures, stricter rules of origin, greater operations transparency, and even export bans on specific Chinese companies would concretely address U.S. concerns about these investments.
That’s, umm, a lot, and would basically assure that the US gets to pump the brakes on China’s rise, which Beijing isn’t likely to accept, and so China’s ambitions are beyond what US plutocrats can stomach. And Putin mostly remains a villain because he put an end to Western-directed shock therapy in Russia.
If we take a step back from the “great game,” however, we see that whether deals are ultimately worked out or the conflicts continue, the spoils are increasingly pieces of a pandemic-ravaged, labor-decimated, climate-collapsed world. Altering that trajectory requires more than a changing of the guard.
Thank you Conner. Excellent piece of journalism.
“Musk, the world’s richest man and libertarian…” A libertarian who became a self made man sucking off the family blog of government socialism.
Correct.
“Neoliberalism” is used to mean “the worship of markets.” Yet when examples are given, what you actually see is the use of government intervention to favor one group over another. How is that the worship of free markets??
If neoliberalism is just an ideological construct, then you can just blame everything bad on it, which is what this author does. It’s a rant masquerading as analysis.
Hayek introduced Ordoliberalism to forward the “Markets before Society” agenda.
Free Markets is a reference e.g. free from rents and all the other ills …. Neoliberals and adjacent bastardized it to mean just the opposite i.e. profit before all other considerations.
In Europe the discussion seems, for what I have read, confused. DOGE which is, IMO, looting of public services, and , probably with intention, confused with legislation complexities which is indeed a thing that should be treated in the EU, but not to be confused with DOGE. There are indeed libertarians in Europe who see DOGE with envy, yet I believe that, hopefully, they do not have enough political support to succeed.
To my great surprise, in my corner of EU, the talking heads on television are actually talking about debt not being “a bad thing” and that retaining the welfare society is the first line of security. “People need a society they want to defend”, I recall one economist saying aloud. Even if we have to most right-wing government since WW2, “balancing the budget” in the most neoliberal ways possible..
While it may be a minor difference, I think that both in China and Russia the criteria for a productive investment is not solely a finance capitalist, they are also given an aspect of societal function, too. Of course, the reasons, aims and methods are totally different in those two countries.
Neo-liberalism, unchecked capitalism … which by its nature must be authoritarian … is the ultimate predator. Its agents are the so-called elites with their unexamined urge, their gluttons appetite to own everything like the dragons of European folklore sitting atop a hoard for which they have no use.
Here’s what DeepSeek says about dragons as a metaphor for predatory feudalism:
“As the dust settles on Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, there are arguments that this plan has little to do with boosting American manufacturing and more with extorting better deals for US-based oligarchs in the neoliberal trade model, hurting China, and “shock therapy on a civilizational scale.”
“….but Hudson also recently commented on The Duran on how neoliberalism is what’s taught at Chinese universities and is conquering the world….”
Indeed. That multipolar neoliberalism I could sense as well.
With the list of criticisms acknowledged and pondered about EU, USA, Russia, and India, something now stands out about China.
“China, by most accounts, is in the lead in the race to replace human labor. ” (with links provided).
What does that mean for the urban/rural divide? (Also a condition in most countries in the world).
They built all those cities to house urban workers and a nearly disastrous property bubble…for what again?
A belt and road initiative for the benefit of who again?
Just questions about a country that often gets rave reviews for planning…
Thank you for this excellent article even if I get somewhat depressed realizing there’s very little we could do to stave off this onslaught on what might still be called western civilization.
Should our default expectation be to just let it all burn down? Let the lucky and the strong survive? Darwinian madness.
Or should we at least give a flicker of hope in things like what Claudia Sheinbaum is doing in Mexico?
https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-fourth-transformation/
I can’t see countries like China and Russia making too great an accommodation with the west simply because the west covets their resources too much. Look at Project Ukraine. The ultimate goal of this was to break up the Russian Federation into several dozen mini-Statelets that could be ransacked, pillaged and looted by the west. Does anybody seriously think that the west has given up on this dream and will not try again at first opportunity? Same with China. The west wants China wrecked as being so big and powerful, they prevent the neoliberals doing everything that they want. The western nations only want countries around that they can either bully or bomb. Anything else is not to be tolerated. So for them this version of China has to go. It needs to be set back to the 1940s again.
Right now, the main plan in effect seems to be to beggar the consumers that contributed to China’s rise.
Now China has spoken of building up internal consumption.
This with the expectations from some that China is going to work out all this out and help develop the Global South and check USA military manuevers.
“The ultimate goal of this was to break up the Russian Federation into several dozen mini-Statelets that could be ransacked, pillaged and looted by the west.”
This has also been the plan for:
1) Iraq: cut it into Sunni, Shiia, Kurdish, Christian statelets;
2) Iran: cut it into Baloch, Kurdish, Azeri, Arab, and Persian statelets;
3) Syria: cut it into Sunni, Druze, Alawi, Christian, Kurdish statelets;
4) Lebanon: cut it into Sunni, Druze, Shiia, Christian statelets.
There was some success with Libya — at some point it had separated into two zones in the East and West constantly at war with each other, a Tuareg realm, and a Tubu realm.
The real triumph is of course Yugoslavia, split into no less than seven statelets, one of which is further subdivided into 2 or 3 parts (Bosnia-Herzegovina).
There is one thing though that one must keep in mind: this kind of balkanization is not an invention from the PNAC or the neocons. It was actually the SOP in colonial times. In India for instance, large kingdoms and empires (e.g. Moghul) were dismantled turning the Raj into a mosaic of statelets (led by Maharadjas) and directly administered “British overseas provinces”. Reservations and the arbitrary assignment of “tribes” to them was the practice not just in the USA and Canada, but also in French New Caledonia and in Australia.
So this idea has quite a pedigree.
“So for them this version of China has to go. It needs to be set back to the 1940s again.”
You probably mean back to the 1920s. That is when China was split into numerous territories under the control of mutually antagonistic warlords, plus those under the control of the central (Kuomintang) government, plus those under the control of the CPC, plus the foreign concessions (UK, France, USA, Italy, Belgium, Japan, USSR, and the international ones).
i recommend asking the people who survived the time of “split” (i’d call it a civil war) what they do think about the result. You might be surprised.
New borders are not necessarily bad.
indeed. divide et impera is an old idea, proven often enough.
Humans haven’t changed, states haven’t changed, empires haven’t changed, and what happens when empires fail hasn’t changed. Weapons have.
Regards, Uwe
Oh yes. I have come to suspect that if the U.S. endures for long in this extremely violent and hyper-predatory state, civilization as we know it will not.
Sadly, I think civilization as we know it is done for in any case:
1. The US will not go willingly and will need to be forced via war. Either though internal, external or a combination of both. But in any case, very disruptive to the already overloaded environment.
2. The US continues on its current course and drags everyone one down with it; i.e. neoliberalism dominates. No hope for positive change in the environment on that path.
The only real question is: how badly did climate theories misread the tipping points and their ultimate position? The runaway greenhouse theory that once predicted Earth could turn into Venus fell out of favor. Maybe it shouldn’t have.
As neoliberalism seems like the ideology that refuses to die, perhaps it is more like a phase that every empire goes through when they reach their decline phase. Europe is awash in neoliberalism through the EU, and now it is dying within, and the US is also in a moribund state that it is unlikely to recover from yet neoliberalism is still going strong in both of the major US political parties.
With the ascent of China and Russia, will their leadership also embrace neoliberalism in the future leading to their downfall as well? This also raises the chicken-and-egg question of does neoliberalism cause the decline of a country leading to its leadership to cling to it even more at the expense of its citizenry, or does the waning of a country’s general health cause its leadership to look into neoliberalism when it senses trouble on the horizon, with it becoming the go-to solution for everything from then on?
Neoliberalism seems like an ideology that cannot be killed once it takes root in a host country and may indeed be part of the life-cycle of all modern nations at this point.
Thanks for the spot on post. However I’d say the answer to the question in the headline is no. The two things we know about power would be that power corrupts and for the powerful “too much is never enough” and that is always their downfall or the downfall of their ideas if they don’t outlive them. Netanyahu is destroying Israel, not saving it, and Musk is destroying his business if he alienates all his customers. Contra Thatcher there is such a thing as society and that is the thing that allows us to live in our advanced cities rather than swinging from trees. The Atlas Shrugged people are merely indulging their most primitive impulses and then rationalizing that this makes them “stable geniuses.”
So if the techies ever did realize their dream of a world of rich people and robots they would soon turn on each other because even social solidarity among the elites matters little to sociopaths. Meanwhile revolutions do happen. And when the inevitable finally comes all those neoliberals may be asking what happened to their heads.
And in many respects the global establishment is still trying to navigate the fallout from what started in 1914.
I’m about a third through “Conjuring Hitler” which is an interesting re-write of the “sleepwalking” narrative regarding WW1. That narrative erases deliberate UK setting up of Russia and Germany for war through deliberate misrepresentations of multiple, secret treaties.
The intent was the logical application of Mackinder’s “The Geographical Pivot of History” from the British World Empire perspective, with the same aim as now embodied in the NeoLiberal thought collective of resource extraction and hierarchically imposed division of labor Trump and Vance are advocating.
The UK didn’t directly sponsor Hitler, but at every opportunity it advanced policies diplomatically and through the Americans after Versailles to ensure what they anticipated would be a weakened Germany eventually going to war against a Soviet Union they likewise did much to keep weak and in power in the East. I agree with Carolinian these power-mongers will be the victims of their own success as their inability to internalize any model of “cultural reproduction” inevitably leads them to policies accelerating the metabolization of their civilizations into the NeoLiberal maw that, with a fiat Midas touch, converts everything to money, finally a social construct that will lose any value by the monetization of the society that created it.
Not sure I buy into this theory, at least not very strongly. It makes the UK out to be 4D chess masters when I doubt any such thing was occurring.
The UK, and other “winners” of WWI, were intent on making Germany pay, pay, and pay. Concerns over German stability were given little thought. You don’t need complicated theories on why things went the way they did. They wanted their pound of flesh, plain and simple.
That’s not to say this approach didn’t provide opportunities for other policy goals. But to imply they were forward thinking enough to believe Germany would eventually attack the USSR through their manipulations seems fanciful at best. And it’s hardly like the UK was the only player in the game.
Read the book.
Wonderful essay. This summarizes everything: “If we take a step back from the “great game,” however, we see that whether deals are ultimately worked out or the conflicts continue, the spoils are increasingly pieces of a pandemic-ravaged, labor-decimated, climate-collapsed world. Altering that trajectory requires more than a changing of the guard.” Another world is possible, but more and more it looks like it will have to be post-apocalyptic Those of us who imagine a better world may have to content ourselves with rolling rocks up hills. There is some nobility in that.
Bulls eye! Excellent concise piece.
Thank you Connor. Thank you Comments for rays of hope.
Dystopian Multipolarity rests on quick sand as Michael Hudson and others make it clear. As neoliberalism morphs into its extreme Techno fascist form, the assumption is that the serfs will simply passively fall in line. Elon Musk’s uncharismatic personality, muddle public declarations won’t allow that. Zionist oligarchs who’ve pushed for Gaza genocide and have saddle the country and world with the Israeli problem won’t be allowed to proceed. The oligarchical move to limit first amendment rights in colleges and universities is a bridge too far. In a matter of weeks, families in this country and across the world will react to the untenable cost of living.
Can anyone imagine BlackRock’s LarryFink in charge of “rebuilding” Ukraine? If what he’s done to the US is an indication?……
It has the feel of a last hurrah for the Golden Billion Grewsaders, who so cleverly held sway for some 5 centuries-no mean feat.
But you feel drastic change is afoot, what exactly and how it transpires is open to conjecture.
“Altering that trajectory requires more then a changing of the guard.”
Does it have something to do with our compulsion (no matter what our politics) to render the world controllable?
Thought-provoking piece and comments, but I don’t necessarily think that JD Vance actually said that he wants other countries trapped at the bottom of the value chain. Rather, he maintains that neoliberal/neocolonial labor arbitrage has resulted in technology/innovation transfer and a double-squeeze that has upended the value chain. Full remarks found here: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-vice-president-the-american-dynamism-summit
Vance appears to be laboring under the hallucination that they can put the neoliberal global labor arbitrage genie back in the bottle by closing the borders. I’ve worked blue-collar jobs and even if Vance achieves the goal of removing the competitive advantage of 7 billion potential workers versus the Golden Billion, the U.S. lacks the capital and has lost the know-how necessary to re-shore manufacturing and industrial production. The adminstration are deluding themselves that there is no need to articulate an industrial policy and that simply closing the borders to imports will drive “innovation” and investment in a country that lost its mojo long ago.
Neoliberalism has indeed “won” and global conflicts are the whirlwind it has conjured.
Good post. Vance can certainly bring more coherence to the subject than Trump. The critical piece–for me–is in your last lines: Without a considered, carefully articulated set of labor policy reforms, subject of real consensus and some new pact between labor and capital, re-industrialization is a cruel joke. Protect some ag to build back food security; re-build shipbuilding (good luck, but). . . Spend billions, deepen harbors, etc. go for it. Trump doesn’t want to have a conversation, only to engage in a kind of global WWE wrestling match that can assuage his sense of wounded narcissism and deep inadequacy for two seconds before he’s on to the next thing. There will be some successes here, though, it’s important to recognize. Every time a Vietnam capitulates it will be trumpeted; every time an Australia deepens ties with China (etc.). . . well hell, not even our corporate news will have the wherewithal to track. . . And it’s not like the Dems are busy coming up with considered counter-proposals.