By Andrew Tanner
Ain’t nobody ready for the blowback that has been unleashed by the colossal failure to stop Russia from invading Ukraine. And it’s regular people who are set to pay the price. As usual. Some of us with cash, others with their lifeblood. America is done. Canada seems set to get dragged down with it too. The future will be interesting times indeed. War brings out the hypocrite in leaders. At the same time US and UK leaders yammer about defending democracy in Ukraine, they’re also too afraid of Russian nukes to back up their words with more than small arms that won’t save Ukraine in the end. Russian President Putin talks a big game about how Ukraine isn’t a real country and Kyiv is full of Nazis seeking nuclear weapons, but his “demilitarization” operation is slaughtering civilians. How this squares with Russian-Ukrainian Slavic brotherhood is beyond logic, more proof that all powerful groups, whether American, Russian, or Chinese, lie to achieve their aims. Nationalism and patriotism are, simply put, evil. Americans are being treated to a war-show. Conflict as entertainment, mass death transformed into a CNN narrated sporting event designed to keep us all fixated on the whims of the powerful while they stomp around destroying people’s lives. What the media and politicians and experts won’t tell you, because they are self-aware players in this evil drama, is that it’s all a humongous scam. Borders, States, International Law all of it a cruel deceit only privileged scholars actually believe is real. A smokescreen used by the high and mighty to cover up for the simple truth that they’re all parasites, rent-seekers, and pyramid scheme architects who keep power by promising the rest of us that we can someday be an exploitative oppressor too, provided we go to the right schools and parrot the correct partisan beliefs. Nothing makes me hate America more than watching its pundits lie about war. I’m from a military family, and I’ve served myself. I understand war and warfare better than almost everyone in this country. And I know with absolute certainty that most Americans are utter cowards, made that way by their pathetic country’s education system. They express the beliefs of the powerful people they hope to affiliate with, everyone fighting their way to the top of America’s ancestral caste system that sets wealthy Anglo-Saxons above the rest even other “white” people. Always been that way, and so it will remain until the false unity of America is finally revealed for the self-destructive sham that it is, a creature of the two party brands and their wealth obsession. This country is not a true democracy, it is an anocracy with a two-party theater act commissioned by the rich to keep Americans giving money to hacks who do not care about anything but climbing the ladder, securing their own career. Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden they’re all the same. Brands, not people. Hypocrites who prey on all Americans’ hopes and fears to make $$$. I say this as someone who actually believes Ukraine should be directly defended from Russia’s assault as every independent place should be defended from attack. If any power player is allowed to commit this kind of violence in the world system, the whole thing is doomed to degenerate into a kind of mob rule where everyone pays tax dollars to a protection racket, as Charles Tilly argued. Which is, in point of fact, what States and empires always are, down to their core. They claim to offer protective services, but when asked to do their job they always find an excuse not to fear of a wider war is the typical excuse, even when history shows that this usually one day happens thanks to the twisted logic of power. America’s talk a big game about following a “rules-based international order” but any thinking person who pays attention can see this is nonsense. No such thing exists, not after 20 years of War on Terror and the hundreds of thousands slaughtered in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and all the other broken wastelands created by American bombs. Truth is, as long as an opponent of America has nukes, they’re golden. American leaders are too terrified of what happens if there ever is a nuclear exchange, knowing this will completely break Americans’ faith in their imperialist federal government that fields thousands of these awful weapons despite there being no good reason to anymore. Most nuclear powers make due with a few hundred weapons on submarines, a hedge against being directly attacked. America’s nukes are instead on permanent high alert, aimed at, paradoxically, Russia’s nuclear arsenal, setting the stage for an exchange that doesn’t hit cities which would lead to a nuclear winter, but still unleashes an unprecedented tragedy on millions of people and the landscapes that will be contaminated. Americans’ hypnotic fixation with trying to prove through speech alone that they’re on the right side in everything has primed this false nation for collapse. Americans believe in myths about their own country, fed absolute lies by bigoted teachers using racist stories that don’t admit the truth about America since it became an empire in the Spanish-American war. As in the individual, self-delusion in a country is ultimately fatal. Empires are all the same. Their people all believe themselves to be special, but they are wrong. People are the same everywhere and haven’t changed in thousands of years and this is a good thing. In their natural state with enough resources they need to feel comfortable, most people are predictably chill. There are always exceptions, but all in all humans are cognitively, even biologically tribal. No one is an island, and no group has a monopoly on truth or morality. Believing otherwise is the basic social delusion that drives conflict. A self-delusion leads inexorably to one end: collapse and division. The silent taboos of the American the media avoid talking about this simple historical process and so blind Americans to the truth of the fragility of their alleged nation. It isn’t profitable to admit America must change and reform or die Americans are willing to donate billions of dollars to politicians who tell them it’s the other side responsible for all the ills of their life. Left, Right, and Center the harsh reality of America is that each ideological pole has degenerated into a profit-seeking engine feeding its backers hate and bigotry, liberals almost as bad as conservatives any more. Americans on the Right hate gay and trans people, fear Antifa and Black Lives Matter coming for their guns. The Center is terrified of populists, which they seem to define as anyone who dares to comment on politics or policy without having an advanced degree and a position at a university or think tank. And the Left of course likes to push itself into a frenzy about Right-wing rural people with guns, clinging to a strange fantastical belief in history magically arcing towards justice. Nobody wants to question their own ideological BS, because that risks being ast out from the tribe. And exclusion in America’s caste system is always an excuse for exploitation. The fact anyone still talks about American unity is a clear sign of the rot running too deep to cut out. They’re just repeating sacred homilies, consoling themselves with their moral superiority as they sit in ideological bunkers launching rhetorical nukes at their enemies.
So America will fall pretty much as I’ve been predicting for years. Heck, I even wrote a 900,000 word sci-fi saga with America’s collapse at its heart. I embedded a decade’s worth of scientific understanding into it. I drew conclusions about America’s likely future trajectory based on real-world data. And so far things are actually going worse than I imagined. The collapse is accelerating faster than I expected, because people’s imaginations are running ahead of real-world events and driving totally deluded reactions based in fear. The war in Ukraine is set to blow back on America so hard it’s just sad. Worse, it will harm most of the world’s poor, too, and even worse. Here’s why. Energy is the ultimate source of all meaningful economic value. Dollars, crypt ocurrency, gold these are social constructs, abstractions built on top of the real material flows that make the world go around. People estimate how much they think their stock of these abstractions are really worth, then real world events prove their bets to be good or bad. Economics is all about expectations and behavior. Everyone is rational, though in their own way, and you can’t always see the real drivers. Yet deep down all human social organization is rooted in energy flows. What we call “civilization” is simply groups of humans figuring out that dense nodes of energy bring greater returns on investment. Developing agriculture allowed communities to amass food stores which led to rapid population growth. This led to technological development, as the need to efficiently use a landscape creates incentives for cooperation and improved scientific understanding of the natural world a basic lesson of the field of Political Ecology. Eventually people work out how to store biological energy by grazing animals on fields and using these to help work fields, where they also provide fertilizer. Ancestors all across Earth learned to store and use mechanical energy from moving water and winds, and this plus reliable food surplus helped specialized occupations develop that furthered science. Eventually, they discovered that the magic of geology plus time condensed millions of years of dead plants basically congealed solar energy stored and made dense underground into something that can easily burn. This led to the development of engines that can transform oil into usable energy and, sadly, to the carbon emissions now radically altering the planet’s climate. Oil is the heart of the global economy because it is a uniquely energy-dense substance that can be easily transported. The price of everything is bound up to the price of oil in a globalized world and will be until an alternative transportation fuel source is developed, whether electric or hydrogen. Oil shocks lead to economic turmoil, usually recessions, because of how embedded cheap fuel use is in the global economy. Rising energy prices reflect the increasing scarcity of high quality oil sources, now being replaced by much more inefficient shale oil exploitation. The price of food is partly driven by the price of oil because it is more efficient, globally speaking, to grow massive amounts of food in the places most suited to agriculture. Unfortunately one of those places happens to be Ukraine and southern Russia, home to a huge fraction of global wheat production. Food prices are skyrocketing because of this, impacting the developing world first. The last time this happened, a little over ten years ago, countries all over the world collapsed. The Syrian Civil War broke out as part of the Arab Spring revolutions that degenerated into the Arab Winter of repression thanks to the involvement of foreign powers like America and Russia. Unless a miracle happens and a ceasefire is negotiated in Ukraine, this is set to be an awful year around the globe. And a sign of times to come, as the primary impact of climate change to worry about is not extreme weather making life difficult in rich cities but the global food supply. Raw shortages are not an immediate problem, because global agriculture produces enough calories for about 12 billion people a third of that is wasted. Earth can support ten billion people if agriculture is done right, trouble is that prices for food are impacted by both input costs, like fuel, as well as global investor expectations about food prices and farm land values. Famine is no longer caused by nature, but by broken human distribution systems. You can blame capitalism if you like, but most ideologies find a way of causing these kinds of problems. Science is subordinated to ideology everywhere because there exists no impartial scientific authority capable of enforcing obedience to truths and can never be, lest science stagnate into religion. And something people in rich countries don’t seem to get is that when the price of things like food and fuel go up, the poor suffer first. And because basic needs must be met or people start looking for alternative solutions, this leads to massive social unrest that further impacts prices. You think this won’t impact America? You must not have bought your own gas or groceries lately! Half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck without adequate savings to handle an emergency. Thanks to America’s caste system that makes profit-mongering a social virtue and asking for help a sin, all people have left is protests, conspiracy theories, and violence. Trumpism emerged from the toxic intersection of fears of future poverty mixed with profit-seeking by the wealthy. Most people are racist or bigoted to some degree I for example do not and never will trust Evangelical Christians after a lifetime dealing with the bigotry inherent in the way they practice their faith but bigots don’t usually act out in public unless incited, thinking they can get away with it. Americans desperate to believe there is only one explanation for Trumpism, whether entrenched rural racism or class antagonism, miss that most social processes are driven by multiple critical variables. You don’t get Trump without America’s latent history of bigotry, but you also don’t get him without the real anger felt by a huge number of Americans at a system that is and stays broken while the same political hacks yammer year after year about fixing it if only people will vote for them. Biden is desperate to salvage his own and his party’s dim and diminishing political fortunes, but he is failing. Badly. And what’s sadder, predictably. The conventional wisdom is so strong in the Biden Administration it is utterly blind to the fact it’s dealing with one exponentially-worsening crisis after another with linear responses. The exact pattern predicted by the flavor of Systems Theory I work most with that precedes the collapse, and why Biden’s polls refuse to recover. To respond correctly to a change in a system’s state of operation, you have to adapt your strategy. Boomer leaders, brainwashed over a lifetime to think America is eternal, blessed by God, and indivisible, are proving incapable of making the cognitive shifts required, instead doubling down on failed strategies that only make the conflict worse. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is unlikely to end soon or well for anyone. American media war cheerleading is covering up the real damage Ukraine’s military is suffering every day. Open source intelligence types tracking each side’s equipment losses and casualties show Russia and Ukraine losing up to 10% of their fighting force over the past two weeks of fighting. Yes, this means Russia is suffering more casualties overall, but Ukraine has fewer personnel to lose. The longer fighting continues, the harder it will become for Ukraine’s forces to resupply themselves, never mind taking back territory. And the American media is badly over-stating Russia’s military difficulties as part of this country’s toleration of Russophobic bigotry. Plan A, a quick invasion culminating in regime change, was ridiculously risky and could only have worked under perfect conditions, which is why I and most military-savvy analysts thought Putin would focus the initial attack on the east, not go wide from day one.. So Russia is moving to Plan B, treating Ukraine like Syria. Putin won there, remember and unless Ukraine receives a substantial influx of major military aid it will be ground down. A partitioned Ukraine permanently at war with the Russian-occupied east is now very likely, and my read on Putin is that he’ll accept a forever war because it entrenches his power in Moscow and offers numerous opportunities to escalate against NATO if he chooses. Few people overthrow a leader when they are at war with a foreign country. So I can’t see a way, barring Ukraine agreeing to the harsh terms of losing Donbas and Crimea forever and remaining an armed neutral without NATO or EU protection that this war is likely to conclude any time soon. Which means the global economic recovery is now in serious danger. And any hope the Democratic Party in America has of surviving the Midterms still holding the House is close to zero, despite both sides’ aggressive gerrymandering. There is almost no chance of the global complications of the war in Ukraine resolving in a matter of months or even a year. For all of 2022 Americans will very likely see prices for food and fuel rising fast, and real GDP could even decline, throwing the country into a recession. While unemployment is historically low the labor force participation rate has not recovered, indicating a large portion of the American workforce has exited it entirely, likely older workers more vulnerable to Covid. So labor costs will go higher because of that, and because wages have to rise if workers are going to survive rising prices. This wage-price spiral will be hard to tame for years, especially as the global economy looks to be on the verge of fragmenting. And while you’d think this is good news for labor, it isn’t, because America’s caste system means white collar types base their wage rates in part on those of people below them on the ladder. Professional college educated types will do fine young people? They’re stuck working at Starbucks for wages that don’t keep up with the cost of a cup of coffee. Everything I know about political dynamics leads to one conclusion: Republicans will take the House, and possibly the Senate, in November. Biden will be a lame duck, likely flooded by House investigations into every single one of his foreign policy choices, very possibly revenge-impeached, though not convicted. In 2023 Trump will announce he’s running. It appears that Harris is finally being groomed to replace Biden, given real foreign policy gigs, but I doubt he’ll resign, preferring to remain in the White House as a centrist lame duck on the pretext of “securing the election” or some such. So Harris won’t be able to credibly claim she’s turning the page on the Biden era, while Trump will retain a big enough plurality of Republican voters now that he’s their new Reagan to take the nomination. 2024 will make 2020 look like a freaking cakewalk. Now that the Democrats have decided they’re the only party that cares about democracy and the Republicans have embraced the idea that democracy is only real if they win, there’s simply no way out of the trap. So the stage is set, and the actors are assembling: the spectacular collapse of the United States of America as a coherent political entity will be America’s last act as a nation. Not even World War 3 could save America now it would only divide the country even more. Game over, America. Game over. And frankly, good riddance. Whether the West Coast goes independent or the Northwest joins Canada or its Blue regions become Cascadia or the indigenous rise up to reclaim what is theirs across these colonized lands, I don’t really care anymore. America is dead. Its leaders killed it.
