The West doesn’t have the financial clout to pursue global primacy – if it ever did.
The election has occurred; Trump will take office in January; many of the existing Party Nomenklatura will be replaced; different policies will be announced – but actually taking power (rather than just sitting in the White House) will be more complex. The U.S. has devolved into many disparate fiefdoms – almost princedoms – from the CIA to the Justice Department. And regulatory ‘agencies’ too, have been implanted to preserve Nomenklatura hold on the System’s lifeblood.
Pulling these ideological adversaries into new thinking will not proceed entirely smoothly.
How an Economy Grows a...
Best Price: $1.99
Buy New $7.20
(as of 11:05 UTC - Details)
However, the U.S. election also, has been a referendum on the prevalent western intellectual mainstream. And that likely will be more decisive than the U.S. domestic vote – important though that is. The U.S. has shifted strategically away from the managerial techno-oligarchy that took its grip in the 1970s. Today’s shift is reflected across the U.S.
Back in 1970, Zbig Brzezinski (who was to become National Security Adviser to President Carter) wrote a book foreseeing the new era: What he then called ‘The Technetronic Era’,
“involved the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society … dominated by an élite, unrestrained by traditional values … [and practicing] continuous surveillance over every citizen … [together with] manipulation of the behaviour and intellectual functioning of all people … [would become the new norm].”
Elsewhere, Brzezinski argued that “the nation-state … has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state”.
Brzezinski was plain wrong about the benefits of tech cosmopolitan governance. And he was decisively, and disastrously, wrong in the policy prescriptions that he adduced from the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 – that no country or group of countries would ever dare to stand up to U.S. power. Brzezinski argued in The Grand Chessboard that Russia would have no choice but to submit to the expansion of NATO, and to the geopolitical dictates of the U.S.
But Russia did not succumb. And as a result of the élites’ 1991 ‘End of History’ euphoria, the West launched war in Ukraine to prove its point – that no single country could hope to stand against the combined weight of all NATO. They said that because they believed it. They believed in the western Manifest Destiny. They did not understand the other options Russia had.
Today, the Ukraine war is lost. Hundreds of thousands have died unnecessarily – for a conceit. The ‘other war’ in the Middle East fares no differently. The Israeli-U.S. war on Iran will be lost, and tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese will have died pointlessly.
And the ‘forever wars’ too, that were expected by the Supreme Commander of NATO in the wake of 9/11 to topple an array of states (first Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran), not only did they not result in consolidating U.S. hegemony, but they have led instead to Kazan and to BRICS, with its long tail of aspirant members, ready to face down foreign colonialism.
The Kazan summit was cautious. It didn’t project a flush of solutions; some BRICS states were hesitant (the U.S. election was scheduled for the following week). Putin’s comments to these latter states were carefully calibrated: Look at what the U.S. can do to you, should you fall foul of it, at any point. Protect yourselves.
All that the BRICS President (Putin) could say, at this juncture, was: Here are the problems that [we have to solve]. It is premature to set up a full alternative Bretton Woods structure at this time. But we can set up the core to a prudent alternative for working in the dollar sphere: a settlement and clearing system, BRICS Clear; a reference unit of account; a re-insurance structure and the BRICS Card – a retail payment card system similar to AliPay.
Perhaps a Reserve Currency and the full Bretton Woods paraphernalia will prove unnecessary. Financial technology is evolving fast – and providing that the BRICS clearance system is functional, a multitude of fin-tech separate trade channels may ultimately be what results.
But a ‘week is a long time in politics’. And one week later, the western intellectual paradigm was upended. The Shibboleths of the last fifty years were rejected across the board in the U.S. by voters. The ideology of ‘undoing’ the cultural past; the casting aside the lessons of history (for, it is claimed, ‘wrongful’ perspectives) and the rejection of systems of ethics reflected in the myths and stories of a community, have themselves been rejected!
It is ok again to be a ‘civilisational state”. The radical doubting and cynicism of the Anglo-sphere is reduced to one perspective amongst many. And no longer can be the universal narrative.
Well, post the U.S. election, BRICS sentiment must be turbo-charged. Notions that were not thinkable last week, just became possible and thinkable a week later. Historians may look back, and observe that the future architecture of modern global finance, modern global economy may have struggled to be born at Kazan, but is now a healthy infant.
Will it all happen smoothly? Of course not. Differences between BRICS member and ‘partner’ states will remain, but this week a window has opened, fresh air has entered, and many will breathe more easily. If there is one thing that should be clear, a second Trump Administration is unlikely to feel the need to launch a ‘war on the world’ to maintain its global hegemony (as the 2022 National Defence Strategy insist it should).
For the U.S. today faces its own internal structural contradictions to which Trump regularly alluded when he talked about the evaporated American real economy owing to the off-shored manufacturing base. A recent report by the RAND Organisation states starkly however, that the U.S. defence industrial base is unable to meet the equipment, technology, and munitions needs of the U.S. and its allies and partners. A protracted conflict, especially in multiple theatres, would require much greater capacity [– and a radically increased defence budget].
Trump’s industrial recuperation plan, however, of painfully high tariffs ringing American manufacturing; an end to Federal profligacy and lower taxes suggests however, a reversal into fiscal rectitude – after decades of fiscal laxity and uncontrolled borrowing. Not big military spending! (Defence spending, by the way, during the Cold War relied on top marginal income tax rates above 70 percent and corporate tax rates averaging 50 percent – which does not seem to accord with what Trump has in mind).
Professor Richard Wolff comments in a recent interview that the West as a whole is in deep trouble financially, precisely as a result of such unrestrained government expenditures:
5-Minute Core Exercise...
Best Price: $3.13
Buy New $6.50
(as of 08:07 UTC - Details)
“For the first time, a couple of years ago, bondholders were unwilling to continue to fund the deficits of Great Britain, and [the UK government was thrown out]. Mr. Macron is now heading right down that same path. Bondholders have told the French that they are not going to continue to fund their national debt.
Here’s how it works. Bondholders are telling the French, you have to rein in spending … The bondholders are saying, you have to stop running deficits. And, as every undergraduate knows, the way you would rein in deficits could be to cut spending. But there is an alternative: It’s called taxing. And it’s called taxing corporations and the rich because the others don’t have any more for you to tax – you’ve done all you can [do with taxes on ordinary French citizens].
[However] taxing corporations and the rich … somehow, is not only ‘not doable’, but not debatable. It can’t be put on the table: Nothing. (or, something so minuscule that will never deal with the deficit). We now have too much debt. And it turns out that the government, like the American government, is facing the next few years where it will have to spend as much on servicing its debt as it is on defence. And that doesn’t leave very much for everybody else. And everybody else is saying: no, no, no, no, no, no.
And now the bondholder gets worried, because one way to resolve this would be to stop paying the bond holders and that, of course, must never be. So you’ve got two absurdities. You can’t stop paying the bondholders (when, of course, you can, but with dire consequences). And you can’t tax corporations and the rich. And, of course you can. I think we are reaching a point in which these contradictions have accumulated. You don’t have to be a Hegelian or a Marxist to understand that these accumulating contradictions are very profound, very large, and very fundamental”.
They tell us that on the one hand that the world does not accept the western vision as being of universal application – and on the other hand, the West doesn’t have the financial clout to pursue global primacy – if it ever did: Zugzwang.
The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.
