Donald Trump had entered office a second time promising “reform”: inoffensive, even desirable, to most workers in the federal bureaucracy. The US government, after all, is one of the biggest organizations in all of human history; the idea that nothing needed fixing was held by absolutely nobody. But as police tape went up around the GSA building, it soon became clear that this wasn’t really “reform”. It was more like an American version of China’s cultural revolution: a social frenzy, a moral panic, a bureaucratic power struggle — all rolled into one. Folk devils come and go, yet the advent of modernity has done very little to rid humanity of the witch-hunter’s instinct. China under Mao declared war on “reactionaries”, while Stalin’s USSR denounced “wreckers” of all kinds: the need to identify and then attack an internal scapegoat is as old as society itself. Now, the same drama was playing out in America.

It is in this context that Michael Lewis’ latest book is so useful. Dispensing with the historical sweep, Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State sets out to give a ground-level view of how the nine-or-so months of the DOGE revolution played out for the people cast as the ancien régime: the ordinary bureaucrats who suddenly found themselves part of the “deep state”, and who, like Mao’s “reactionaries” or Stalin’s “wreckers”, were accused of holding the country back from its destiny out of pure spite.

More from this author

Pete Hegseth: America's secretary of death

By Malcom Kyeyune

Blockers starts by covering the story of the man in charge of security at the US Peace Institute, and his doomed struggle to keep control of his building. From there, it profiles the people affected in more famous parts of the US bureaucratic machine, like the IRS and US state-directed research, areas which ended up seriously mangled by DOGE. If more analytical work is surely also needed, there’s an obvious benefit to Lewis’ bottom-up approach. The DOGE project — much like Mao’s call to “bombard the headquarters” of the Chinese state — was never some dry and analytical process. Rather, both phenomena were basically emotional explosions, in which the bottled-up contradictions and resentments of their respective societies were allowed completely free expression with no regard for whether the targets actually deserved it.

Unlike its Chinese analog, of course, DOGE wasn’t violent. But one should also remember that the massive violence of the Cultural Revolution was largely bottom up, rather than ordered from the top. The danger of these kinds of manias is that they are inherently hard to control. This is particularly true when the revolution’s hatchetmen are young and inexperienced, attacking bureaucrats and functionaries many decades their senior, usually without any real inkling of what their targets do or why their work is needed. Even in cases where nobody died, young Red Guards subjecting their professors or doctors to public “struggle sessions” led to lasting scars on Chinese society, ones that took decades to truly heal.

Indeed, what stands out in the American case is just how thoughtless much of the destruction really was. For the famous “what did you do last week?” email, sent out to every federal employee, there was actually no capacity at DOGE to read what was sent in. One bright person suggested simply having an AI read all the emails and decide for itself whether the  employee in question had justified their own salary. Unfortunately, the mailbox people were supposed to send their reports to quickly became, and full and stopped accepting new emails.

In another case, the people deployed to “clean up” the government of waste and corruption were shocked to learn that the departments they had been sent to by and large worked quite well, while officials actually believed in public service. The IRS, despite still using faxes, actually managed to do its job with incredibly low overheads. The Department of Veterans Affairs, despite its various troubles, still offered cheap and competitive health care. There just wasn’t as much waste in the system as the DOGE people had imagined.

All the while, DOGE itself was soon swamped by graft, as Elon Musk himself seemed intent on using his new role in order to benefit his own companies, while lackeys in his orbit saw their chance to secure government jobs they would otherwise never have been qualified for. One man, Jeremy Lewin, had taken the lead on shutting down USAID, and then leveraged that into becoming an under secretary in the State Department. His only qualification was that he knew a guy who knew a guy at Tesla. As another ex-employee put it, DOGE was in practice just “a glorified temp agency for software engineers”.

For future historians trying to understand the fractious and chaotic era we’re living through today, Blockers is likely to become an invaluable source. The war that was unleashed on America’s own wreckers and reactionaries forms a part of a process of social and political erosion. Certainly, America is less attached to its small-r republican ideals today than it was before DOGE happened, and the situation is likely to only get worse over the years ahead.

What makes Lewis’ book even more interesting, though, is that the “DOGE moment” itself is so unquestionably over, with few today even willing to mention it. Musk himself has publicly forsworn any further desire to be a part of government — even if he’s spent $366 million on supporting Republican candidates and causes in this midterms cycle. As for Trump, he’s no longer speaking about government reform either; like the idea of balancing the budget, it has been shoved behind the proverbial sofa, as the White House focuses on fighting its new war with Iran. DOGE itself has been closed down with little fanfare, and it won’t be revived.

Suggested Reading

Why DOGE will fail

By Oren Cass

The organization’s flash-in-the-pan existence can probably be chalked up to the fact that political time is now moving so incredibly fast. In 2026, gas and diesel prices are now at record highs; the world is heading into a gargantuan economic crisis; the US military has seen its teeth broken and its bases destroyed in the Middle East; and Trump has gone on to destroy his legacy by starting the one war he promised voters he would prevent. In that context, the drama of a bunch of 20-something engineers subjecting people older than their parents to struggle sessions at the IRS now seems almost quaint. Even the graft that came with DOGE can feel like small fry. In the year since, Trump’s circle has outdone itself when it comes to corruption and self-dealing, with the President himself having tripled his income in just one year since returning to the White House.

But the speed at which things move today — the speed with which dramas like DOGE are so quickly forgotten — should counterintuitively push us to study these events more rather than less. When reading about previous periods of historical upheaval, whether the French Revolution or its Chinese equivalent, it’s tempting to imagine events as a compressed reel of dramatic set-pieces, a discrete rollercoaster people could feel themselves getting on then getting off. But, in reality, something like what happened in France at the end of the 18th century only makes sense as the “French Revolution” in retrospect. The people debating the royal finances in the late 1780s hardly knew they were part of a revolution; the delegates to the National Assembly a year or two later were equally ignorant about how history would come to view them.

Far larger dramas than DOGE have already transpired in the eight months since the start of the Iran war. Yet that strange summer of denunciations and struggle sessions, of blind firings and public humiliation rituals — all of it was a natural, and perhaps even required, stepping stone on the path of our own great upheaval. Yet unlike the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which was a purely internal affair, the great MAGA revolution looks eerily similar to the French Revolution, or else the lead-up to the First World War. The entire global order is now clearly collapsing, and the rules that governed our planet, militarily, socially, economically, politically, are being destroyed in front of our eyes, with no replacements visible on the horizon. Just like the French in 1792, none of us know where the rollercoaster will end. All we can do for the moment is hold on for dear life. In this sense, we’re all experiencing something approaching what the “blockers” themselves did.

He may now lead one of the largest and most complex institutions in all of human history, after all, but Hegseth’s own career in the US military was broadly a story of failure. Rising no higher than the rank of major, he likely commanded no more than a single platoon. Just as striking, he was red-listed on account of his crusader tattoos — sometimes associated with the far-Right — and therefore banned from participating when his National Guard unit attended Joe Biden’s inauguration. Ironically, that helped Hegseth transition into what always seemed his real calling: political punditry and entertainment, with retribution-by-livestream just the latest example.

Still, Hegseth’s lack of formal qualifications for the top job at the Pentagon wasn’t seen as a total negative when he was confirmed in 2025. Clearly, the US military couldn’t go on with business as usual, so maybe a real outsider candidate was the solution? Recruitment, for one thing, had been a disaster for years, with institutions like the Army War College sounding the alarm that the military was incapable of fighting a real, protracted war. Procurement of new equipment was an even bigger problem, with the Army failing to secure basic artillery shells, and the Navy and Air Force stuck using rickety ships and planes. America still had 11 nuclear aircraft carriers, but, by late 2024, the generals and the admirals knew that if a major war started, the world would soon figure out the truth: that the mighty American lion, so impressive from a distance, was actually suffering from a severe case of arthritis.

Unfortunately, the changes Hegseth did pursue have all been of the wrong kind. It’s important, here, to understand just how common lying is inside the US military. Since the turn of the millennium, falsifying reports, hiding losses and costs, and defrauding other levels of the Pentagon and the US taxpayer more generally, has grown into an epidemic. Junior officers mislead senior officers, who mislead their flag officers, who mislead the politicians. Much of the ordinary day-to-day functions of the US Army or the Navy literally can’t happen without lies to serve as proverbial grease in the wheels.

The proximate cause for this epidemic of dishonesty isn’t hard to grasp. The officer who refuses to dissemble about the readiness of his troops, or the state of his unit’s maintenance backlog, embarrasses his superiors and risks being passed over for promotion. For their part, serial truth-tellers may soon find their careers destroyed. One perfect example of what this means in practice came in the mid-2010s, from the US Navy’s 7th Fleet. Based out of Japan, increasingly desperate captains warned their superiors they were being sent on missions with incomplete or undertrained crews; with equipment that didn’t work; and with critical maintenance that was being left undone. The response from the admirals was simple: just do what you’ve been told, or else. When this predictably led to US Navy’s worst peacetime disaster in decades — the USS John S. McCain and USS Fitzgerald both collided with civilian ships, leaving 17 sailors dead in total — the Navy immediately blamed the captains themselves.

Of course, none of this is unique to the US. Indeed that’s rather the point — the cultural malaise now infecting the Pentagon also assailed the late Soviet Union and any number of doomed Chinese dynasties. It’s a discontent that ultimately stems from the basic mismatch between the expectations of the political class and the actual reality on the ground. In the minds of American politicians, the US military is essentially invincible, always at the cutting edge of technology, and 10 times larger and more lethal than any of its rivals. There, at least, is something the octogenarians Joe Biden and Donald Trump can both agree on.

More from this author

The twilight of America's sky knights

By Malcom Kyeyune

How did things end up this way? To answer that question would probably fill several books — but one aspect is surely the fallout of America’s so-called “Vietnam syndrome”. The war in Indochina nearly broke the country’s body politic, but it also smashed the Army as an institution. After Vietnam, the “small-r” republican tradition of the citizen-soldier was no longer tenable. How could it be when rich kids dodged the draft and the poor were sent off to die in far-flung imperial adventures? The solution was the creation of a smaller, radically different kind of military: one that would henceforth rely on hyper-advanced weaponry and tactics far more than mass and scale.

In practice, that meant wars like Afghanistan or Iraq could go on for decades without most people in “normal” America really noticing that their nation was at war. This separation of the military from the mainstream currents of American life turned soldiers into a kind of alien class. Whereas politicians in the first half of the 20th century either personally went to war, or had family and friends who did, Congressmen today tend to see the military in roughly the same terms as a customer might view a DoorDash delivery driver. Structural problems are irrelevant: someone else is doing the fighting, and anyone who brings bad news can easily be replaced.

Still, when Hegseth entered the Pentagon, he was presented with a choice. He could either usher in an era of tough choices and lowered expectations — or take the easy path and keep the whole show shambling along for just a little longer. In a very real sense, his plan for a livestreamed execution reveals which path Hegseth chose. Rather than addressing the military’s myriad structural problems, from procurement to maintenance, Hegseth has largely focused on culture-war stunts. His recent slogan of “no more trannies, just training”, or his push to make the Pentagon pay for troops’ testosterone supplements, is testament to a worldview in which American power is seemingly only limited by a lack of machismo. Listen to Hegseth, and the US military was never in decline: it was just beset from all sides by pinkos, trannies, and Islamo-communists.

Suggested Reading

How military schools warp American manhood

By Jasper Craven

In the event, of course, those structural problems didn’t vanish — indeed the Iran war has only brought them into sharper relief. The weapons are running low; the bases that were vulnerable to being destroyed have now been smashed; the stand-off munitions that were supposed to be used for a Taiwan contingency have now been swallowed up in the Gulf, and all with no victory in sight. Even Hegseth’s seminal achievement, supposedly halting the collapse in military recruitment, is likely to be undone by the Iran war, just as brutal Navy deployments could spell disaster for retention.

And if this is bad news for America’s geopolitical position over the years ahead, Hegseth is hardly safe either. If the US military has survived for so long on dishonesty, why not add one more falsehood: and blame the Iran debacle and everything that led to it on the Secretary of War himself? That story would be awfully convenient for the US military establishment — and Donald Trump — because it would free them from the need of thinking about their own roles in the debacle. Given his famously confrontational manner, meanwhile, Hegseth has hardly done himself any favors in terms of likability.

After Hegseth has fallen onto his sword, or anyway been prodded that way by the White House, might American politicians finally abandon the can-kicking and put a more serious reformer in charge? One good candidate here is Elbridge Colby, currently the assistant secretary of war for policy, and who’s made it his life’s goal to finally escape the Middle Eastern quagmire. The sad reality, though, is that it’s likely too late for real change. The weapons and interceptors are spent; the maintenance schedules are shot; the country itself is all but broke. As for Hegseth itself, it’d be grimly ironic if he ended up remembered for little more than livestream executions. His style, after all, may be far more abrasive than his predecessors’ — but the substance is much the same.

Compared to the election of 2026, the difference is like night and day. Though 2006 was, in essence, a true watershed election, one that ended an entire political era, the political rhetoric of the day hardly reflected it. Back in those days, the campaign saw genuine debates about the policy differences between the major parties, as the Moderates, restyled the “New Moderates” by their then-leader, angled to make the case that Sweden’s old social-welfare model had become stultified and unresponsive, and that the Social Democrats themselves, so used to automatically gliding into power every election, were unwilling to reform. The most famous Moderate slogan from that election was “Det Nya Arbetarpartiet” — literally branding themselves as Sweden’s new (and only) working-class party.

Today, by contrast, elections in Sweden bear increasing resemblance to the electoral process of the United States, right down to the political rhetoric used by both sides. In 2026, after all, both political blocs were eager to dub this election the most important, most critical, most life-and-death election in history. If the evil Right-wingers won, fascism and darkness would descend on all and sundry, and there wouldn’t even be a Sweden left come 2030. If the crazed leftist Islamo-Marxists won, meanwhile, tens of millions of immigrants would descend on the country; no election would ever be winnable again due to changed demographics; being heterosexual or white would soon be punishable by death; and Sweden would shortly become Europe’s first Islamic emirate.

More from this author

The death of middle-class luxuries

By Malcom Kyeyune

Of course, the problem here is that the “evil Right-wingers” have been in power for the last four years. Despite some internal drama, the four parties that make up the so-called “Tidö government” — the Moderates, the Liberals, the Christian Democrats and the Sweden Democrats — have ruled the country largely without incident, and certainly not with jackboots sounding in the distance. Some things, like food-price inflation, have certainly got worse, but it’s hard to blame that on any specific policy. Meanwhile, big planks of the 2022 election, like massively expanding Sweden’s fleet of nuclear power plants, have quietly been thrown overboard in the last few years. But, again, there is no reason to think anything would have been different had the so-called “Red-Green coalition” been in power instead.

Certainly, it’s unsurprising that electoral participation actually plummeted this time round. The figures, with turnout in the eighties, would, of course, be impressive in many other countries. But for ultra-democratic Sweden, this is one of the lowest figures since the Second World War. The point, of course, is these figures hit up against the electoral rhetoric. If the future really was at stake, and this really was the last election before migrants or fascists destroyed the state, why did fewer people than ever bother to vote?

The answer is probably structural. In Sweden, just like in America, the louder the pundits’ voices, the less elections actually seem to matter in terms of hard policy. Nobody talked about the looming end of the Swedish democratic system or nation in 2006, but the choices on offer were actually meaningfully different. Today, though, those meaningful differences are becoming rarer and rarer. Consider the American example: as the Trump campaign put it in the lead-up to the 2024 election, a vote for Kamala Harris was a vote for sending America’s sons and daughter to war against Iran, and a vote for ruinous price inflation and unaffordable gas at home. To be fair, that description is probably true as far as politics under a Kamala Harris presidency would have turned out. Unfortunately, the idea that Trump was against these things turned out to be a huge lie. No matter which side you picked, the end result was the same.

This dynamic seems to have spelled the end of the current Tidö government. It came into power with much fanfare, promising a drastic reduction of immigration. Yet critics are today quick to point out that little has changed in terms of migrants granted citizenship. And, indeed, even as a government of the Right looks slated to be replaced by a government of the Left, the chances of anything meaningfully changing in the other direction look very slim as well. The number of granted asylum applications may have diminished, after all, yet other forms of migration — for family reunification or labor — have picked up the slack. Other policy differences between the political blocks, notably attitudes toward Natos, have been retired too. One way or another, business as usual looks set to continue.

One doesn’t need a crystal ball to make that prediction in 2026: the general trend in Europe is that little will change whoever you vote for. Once again, that’s clear on demographics. Boris Johnson promised to cut down on immigration: what he delivered was the “Boriswave”. Giorgia Meloni, the current Italian prime minister, belongs to a party that traces its history back to the Italian fascists. Yet despite these august credentials, Meloni’s tenure in power has seen her quietly increase migration. The structural reasons for this aren’t hard to understand: Italy’s demographics are terrible and the country has long been plagued with financial woes. No matter how much Meloni might rage against immigration rhetorically, her deeds aren’t particularly different from anyone else. Perhaps a figure to Meloni’s Right — such the former army officer Roberto Vannacci — would finally change course if voted into power. But the question one has to ask here is simple: why didn’t Meloni do it?

Perhaps our political classes have simply given up because the problems are too intractable. It wouldn’t exactly be shocking if that was the case, and it would mean that America and Europe are in the same boat. Consider the fact that, less than two years ago, the second Trump presidency promised to fix the deficit, reindustrialize America, and cut huge amounts of waste from the budget. Back then, DOGE was at the top of the news cycle, for good and for ill. Today, that organization no longer even exists. Americans, after trying to fix the national debt or stop the forever wars in the Middle East, simply gave up. It was too hard to change anything meaningful. The same might be said of the Europeans and migration: trapped by the remorseless logic of globalization and with native birthrates that simply refuse to go up. Amid these seemingly intractable challenges, why not grant another few thousand visas? Voters are perhaps to blame here too, unwilling to countenance much change, whatever they might claim in vox pops.

Suggested Reading

Will Sweden build the Bomb?

By Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski

Whatever the cause of this malaise, in it we can spot the paradox of European politics in the 21st century. We can all clearly see that monumental, historical changes are happening. Wars and energy shocks rage all around us, deindustrialization and demographic problems keep getting worse and worse, and yet everyone seems too afraid to do much beyond shouting, with the rhetorical temperature seemingly rising in inverse proportion to actual policy solutions. But as the American economist Herbert Stein put it, things that cannot go on forever simply won’t. If fixing pensions or finding a new geopolitical strategy or addressing the deficits is too hard for anyone to make the attempt, there will eventually come some sort of crisis that forces the change that politicians have been avoiding.

Unlike 2006, the election of 2026 was heralded the most important Swedish election of our lifetimes  — if not the most important election ever. Every election these days seems to be the most important election ever, of course, and just as in America or the United Kingdom, the more important an election is, the less anyone expects anything to actually change. But as the Middle East burns and an energy crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Seventies approaches, the age of business as usual may be ending sooner than many people think.

Indeed, the war has already claimed its first casualty in this field: the US budget airline Spirit, which went bankrupt at the start of the conflict. It’s true that Spirit had been plagued with problems for a long time and wasn’t exactly a healthy company, so the massive increase in fuel costs was only the final nail in the coffin. Then again, most airline companies aren’t very healthy. During the Covid pandemic, much of the global airline industry had to be bailed out by national governments in order to avoid collapse. In the US alone, Congress authorized roughly $54 billion in direct payments to the big carriers; many more billions were spent in Europe and elsewhere by governments intervening to save their own flag carriers from fiscal ruin. Beyond the pandemic, however, there lurked a real and serious issue with the airline industry itself. Over the years, commercial air travel has become harder and harder to run at a profit, mostly for reasons that are out of anyone’s hands.

The decline of affordable air travel may herald a far greater historical and economic shift: the decline of the Western middle class itself. Not that long ago, even a humble Swedish or British working-class family might have found the occasional charter trip to Mallorca or Ibiza affordable. In 2026, those kinds of luxuries are growing more distant.

There is, of course, no rule that human society must have a middle class to begin with. Indeed, most societies throughout history have consisted of farmers and laborers at the bottom and a thin slice of rulers and nobles at the top. Clerks, bureaucrats, merchants, crafters and artisans formed tiny minorities in and around the towns and manor houses, usually with very little in the way of cultural, social, or political power. The state of affairs that we consider normal today is really anything but.

Only in the 20th century did the West experience the rapid growth of the first truly majoritarian middle class in human history. Consider John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel, Grapes of Wrath. The Joad family in that novel are certainly not part of the middle class — they are poor, uneducated tenant farmers without indoor plumbing, who are made homeless by economic forces far beyond their control. But indoor plumbing and higher wages were coming even for the Joads. The integration of Tom’s children into the post-1945 American middle class is essentially a foregone conclusion before Steinbeck’s novel even begins. 

This massive social transformation was only made possible thanks to the rise of what we can call “technologies of mass affluence”. Luxury, of course, is as old as civilization itself. But until the 20th century, practical limitations meant it was enjoyed only by the few. Ice cream was eaten in the Middle Ages, and various recipes for sherbet go back thousands of years. But until the advent of modern refrigeration, getting fresh ice in the middle of summer involved cutting out a huge block from a suitable lake during winter, before stuffing it in a purpose-built, insulated cellar, where it would then melt slowly enough to still be intact half a year later. A medieval duke who wanted to impress his dinner guests might press-gang enough peasants to perform the massive amounts of labor required to serve iced desserts. But few others could. With the advent of the freezer, though, what was once an impossibly decadent luxury became accessible even to the poor.

Commercial air travel is one of the youngest technologies of mass affluence. The Wright brothers flew their first successful prototype airplane in December 1903, but it would take until after the Second World War for the aviation industry to start truly flourishing. Boeing’s iconic 707, the first “modern” commercial jetliner, appeared in 1957. In the four decades that followed, air travel and international tourism would go from being the preserve of the very rich to something even a working-class family could save up for.

Suggested reading

Benidorm is England’s id

By Cosmo Adair

Today, however, that picture looks set to change. Many oil refineries across the Middle East have been shuttered or hit with missiles, and the Strait of Hormuz is likely to remain closed for the foreseeable future. Many European airlines are already hiking ticket prices or grounding planes and cutting capacity. But again, the airline industry’s woes did not start with the Iran war, nor with the Covid pandemic; this is an industry that has been structurally weak and hard-pressed to make decent profits for years. 

The primary culprit here is energy. It’s not just that planes require fossil fuels to fly, though that is certainly a part of it. On a societal level, the more energy there is available, the easier it will be to perform most kinds of economic activity. The airline industry saw its golden period of explosive growth in the United States during an equally explosive growth of per-capita energy production and consumption. But that period of growth is now over. US production of conventional (read: cheap) oil peaked in the Seventies. The much-touted shale revolution has brought the total level of US oil production back to where it was 50 years ago, but it has done so by replacing cheaper and better grades of oil with worse grades that cost many times more to extract from the ground. And regardless, the shale revolution itself is now ending, with US unconventional production set to peak in the very near future. 

More dramatically, the total amount of energy produced and consumed in the United States has actually been stagnant since the turn of the millennium. But because the population of the United States has naturally continued growing since then, energy per capita has begun to decrease. If we’re talking purely in terms of access to energy, the last time the average American grew richer was sometime in the Seventies; since the 2000s, people have been getting significantly poorer with every passing year.

This is an economic shift with huge implications, but its effects on people have been surprisingly easy to hide from view. Like most other parts of Western society, the way the airline industry dealt with this reality of stagnant or shrinking energy availability was by becoming vastly more efficient. Once, the list of major airplane manufacturers included names like Convair, McDonnell Douglas, Vickers-Armstrong and Fokker. Now, the civilian industry is essentially down to two big survivors: Airbus and Boeing. Similarly, the airlines themselves have undergone a big process of consolidation, cost-cutting, and efficiency-maximizing. The big trend in plane design ever since the Seventies has been to chase fuel efficiency and cost savings above all else. But as with every process of slow starvation, there comes a time when the body actually runs out of fat, and all that’s left to consume is muscle.

For airline companies, and for the two big remaining aircraft manufacturers, the slow-rolling economic crisis unleashed by the Iran war looks akin to a perfect storm. Consumers around the world are already struggling to deal with increased prices on everything from groceries to rent to energy. They have very little spare capacity to pay higher ticket prices, even as airlines themselves are facing much higher operating costs. Nor can they meaningfully cut costs, as the low-hanging fruit in that department has long since gone; Spirit airlines was the best cost-cutter on the American market, and it was also the first airline to go.

The aircraft manufacturers, for their part, can barely justify making new models of planes anymore. The costs of trying to launch a new plane are astronomical, meaning that even a single model with bad sales — like the Airbus model A380 — puts you at serious risk of bankruptcy. And even if you do well, the airplane industry had truly atrocious profit margins to begin with; Boeing currently struggles to make a net profit at all.

Air travel is also expensive for the state. In 2025, the US saw its worst aviation disaster in more than two decades, when a military helicopter crashed into a regional jet approaching Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Though the investigation found that the helicopter had used to a dangerous route, the major contributing factor in the accident was plain overwork: too much traffic, too few air traffic controllers to handle the workload. This story is becoming increasingly common at airports in the US: last year, much of the equipment at Newark Liberty Airport malfunctioned, leading to massive delays and problems but thankfully no accidents. The FAA, though it has acknowledged there is currently a huge lack of air traffic controllers, recently slashed its recruiting targets by nearly 10%, justifying it by saying that modern data-driven tools allow fewer people to work more than was previously thought possible (or safe). Given the current economic situation, with Europe rapidly deindustrializing and America edging closer to bankruptcy, chronic underinvestment in airport infrastructure will likely grow worse in the years ahead.

The commercial airline industry is in some sense a microcosm of our broader cultural moment. The economic gravity that traps the airline industry is unrelenting, and it is basically unsolvable: for how are you supposed to keep offering more and better services in a world where resources are not, as it turns out, infinite? Today, we drill for ores that contain just a fraction of the metal content that earlier generations were used to; the really good ores were all depleted decades ago. So were most of the good and cheap deposits of oil, meaning that for every year that passes, we have to drill a bit deeper and pay a bit more just to get the same amount of oil out of the ground. Like Alice trapped by the Red Queen’s mirror, it takes more and more running just to stay in one place. Today, we hear innumerable stories of families approaching exhaustion, forced to borrow increasingly unsustainable sums of money to buy a car, to afford education, or just to pay for their groceries. But rarely do people stop to consider that entire industries, like the airline industry, are also stuck in the same miserable trap: that Boeing and JetBlue and Spirit Airlines have also been reduced to metaphorically maxing out all their credit cards at the end of the month just to make it to next payday.

This is not a problem that can be solved by voting for socialism, fascism, nationalism, or conservatism. Nor is it the end of the world. At the tail end of the current global economic crisis, what remains of the airline industry will pick itself up from the ground as best as it can. Tickets will still be sold, though they’ll be even more expensive; airports will still be open, though they’ll be more grimy than before. As the number of people who can still afford to travel slowly shrinks, the economics will keep getting worse, leading to higher prices, and so the vicious circle will continue. Fewer people will consider air travel to be something normal or expected, and life will simply move on. More than 1,000 years ago, an Englishman, reflecting on the woes of his own time, wrote thus:

Nearon nu cyningas ne caseras
ne goldgiefan swylce iu wæron.

“Today there are no kings, nor Caesars / nor gold-givers as there once were”. In time, the children of today’s children might write similar poetry: lamenting, or maybe celebrating, the demise of annoying charter tourists and globetrotting baby boomers.

History is the mass grave of foolhardy peasant rebels who crumble the moment they meet serious military power. Yet the Czechs were lucky. For as it turned out, they started their revolt at the same moment as one of the most key pivot points in European history. Almost by accident, the Czechs would become the first people on the continent to successfully use gunpowder weapons. Once they did, the underlying math of military strength changed quickly and forever. The European knight, though he tried to cling on, would spend the rest of his days sliding into irrelevance.

Six centuries later, a similar scene is playing out before our eyes. The United States, long used to proclaiming itself the greatest military power mankind has ever seen, just rode out to crush the Islamic Republic of Iran. Almost everyone expected this war to be a quick affair too, for more or less the same reasons as the knights did in 1420. In our age, it is the professional pilot, flying a $100 million fighter, who represents the gold standard of military accounting. In this regard, Iran is just a modern version of Bohemia. Having been sanctioned into the ground for 40 years, with almost no international allies, Iran could never hope to field much of an air force even if it wanted to. By dint of necessity and desperation, Iran’s weapons in this war are cheap and mass-produced, mostly made domestically. Yet they still bite; over the weekend, the country’s “non-existent” defenses shot down an American jet, triggering a huge rescue operation and even more losses.

America still has 11 aircraft carriers, and Iran has zero; all the reports indicate that the Trump administration initially expected the fighting to be over in days, if not hours. Yet as we begin the second month of this quick and easy three-day war, with fresh reports that the world economy is about to crash down on our ears, it might just be time to ask if we’re not living through another pivot point in history.

Despite their superficial differences, after all, the American pilot and the German knight are very much the same kind of creature. They both inhabit a hallowed place within their respective militaries; they both consume an extreme amount of resources; and they are both the central figures in a huge project of cultural and military myth-making. It’s therefore useful to understand the history that produced the modern hero-pilot and the equally heroic medieval knight, and the way in which military history tends to shift from favoring big and costly weapons to cheap and mass-produced ones.

Suggested reading

America's new doctrine of Empire

By Aris Roussinos

Before Europe had its medieval knights, it had the Roman Empire. Institutionally, Rome never cared all that much for cavalry, which it often sourced from its allies or auxiliaries. Instead, the foundation of its might lay in the legionnaire, a heavy infantryman wearing standardized and mass-produced equipment. Rome’s greatest strength was that it was both big and organized, and so had the power to bring an almost infinite number of well-trained, well-armed men to bear. An individual Gaul or Briton might have been a better warrior than the Roman legionnaire, but the legionnaire was always a better soldier.

When the Roman Empire collapsed, Europe decentralized. Tax bases shrunk; state capacity degraded; large armies became impossible to field. It was this new reality that produced the knight. Over time, Europe’s new lords realized that a cheap and effective source of military power, in lieu of a state strong enough to train and equip armies on its own, was simply to offer land and tax benefits in exchange for soldiers. Frälse, the old Swedish term for the nobility, loosely translates into those who are exempt: by offering the king a certain number of mounted cavalry in times of war, families attained the right to avoid taxes and other obligations.

The early-medieval nobility of Europe were therefore essentially military contractors. Over time, they grew into a discrete social class, with their own political interests. And just like any other social class, the knights were supremely interested in making sure their position was never truly challenged. Their arms and armor were extremely expensive — a well-made suit of plate in 15th-century England cost almost three years of an archer’s wages — and their warhorses were too. Altogether, then, it often took the labor of whole villages to support a single knight. And, to be fair, the knight was very effective in combat, just as long as he wasn’t put up against an organized, well-trained enemy sporting effective weapons. Given the economic and political limitations of early medieval Europe, he almost never was.

The contemporary American pilot flying missions against Iran, by contrast, is the product of a somewhat different collapse. Air power did not exist before the First World War, and only hit its stride from 1939. But despite the hype, both world wars were still infantry wars. The three million Germans who invaded the USSR in 1941 were mostly organized in infantry divisions, relying partly on horses for their logistics. During both world wars, states equipped millions or even tens of millions of soldiers. The Americans, the Soviets, and the Germans; they all fought like the Romans once did, relying on their mass and scale and standardization.

This kind of mass warfare is gone, and it will not return in our lifetimes. The US Army in 2026 sits at approximately 450,000 active-duty personnel, which is only slightly more than the number of deaths that same army sustained from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima.

For many reasons — not least the challenges of instituting a draft during a time of political fragmentation — America, alongside pretty much every other industrialized country, has undergone a collapse in its ability to field mass armies. That’s shadowed by an even more dramatic collapse in their ability to produce weapons and ammunition at scale, as Western countries have deindustrialized and moved production abroad. It is in this era that the idea of the military has come to completely revolve around airplanes and air power. The rise of the American pilot has coincided with the collapse of its infantry.

As this military shift has happened, our culture has shifted too. Where the industrialized West once thought and acted like the Romans, venerating the ideal of the dutiful soldier, our culture is now increasingly geared toward the cult of the warrior, where victory is achieved by noble and heroic individuals. For a Napoleon or a von Moltke, the height of military accomplishment was the faceless infantryman. In today’s culture, the ideal is Tom Cruise in Top Gun, or a burly member of Delta Force. Perhaps the most iconic example of this shift is Pete Hegseth, the self-styled “Secretary of War”, who embodies a kind of hyper-aggressive machismo completely out of step with the institutional Pentagon. The older generals are dour soldiers, but Hegseth seems to view himself more like an epic Norse warrior, and even has the tats to prove it.

And just as medieval warriors had their armor and horses, so too do pilots have their steeds in the sky. The cost of a modern fighter jet is easily north of $100 million, but with out-of-control inflation across America’s decaying military industrial complex, that figure is constantly rising. Besides, the sticker price pales compared with the enormous cost of keeping planes operational and effective. It takes hundreds of people to enable a single pilot: an US aircraft carrier requires some 3,000 crewmen just to operate the ship, and an additional 2,500 to enable an air wing of 50-to-70 planes. But many more are engaged in fixing and supporting planes stateside, including the contractors who don’t show up in the numbers.

Just like the medieval knight, the American pilot is nearly invincible as long as he isn’t put up against an organized, well-trained, and well-armed enemy. In Vietnam, this turned out to be quite the problem. But after that bitter experience, America made a point to only pick fights with the likes of Panama, Grenada, and the Taliban. Moreover, at the time when US planes were truly at the cutting edge of military technology — that is, 50 years ago — computers were still in their infancy, long-range rocketry was inaccurate and expensive, and modern drones and satellite imagery were still a way off.

In those days, the weapons needed to destroy a fighter jet on the tarmac from hundreds of miles away were orders of magnitude more expensive, putting them well outside the range of poorer countries or terrorist groups. As mass warfare collapsed, meanwhile, conflict crept toward becoming a game for a tiny cadre of military elites. And though mechanized infantry and armored brigades were heavily involved in the Gulf wars, it is the pilots and the airpower that are remembered today. They have become mythological heroes, and their reputation today is that of an elite and unbeatable force. But as the knights in Bohemia learned to their costs, such reputations do not last forever.

As it happens, the Czechs in 1420 turned to gunpowder out of sheer desperation. Gunpowder wasn’t exactly new in Europe, but the slow and unwieldy nature of early firearms meant they were rarely used, and only then in specific situations. But gunpowder also had significant advantages. For one, it took almost no training to learn how to use a gunpowder weapon. For another, the damage they inflicted came from the chemical energy stored in the powder itself, meaning even women and children could use them effectively, punching through plate armor with ease. Early handguns were essentially just metal tubes at the end of a stick, meanwhile, making them cheap and easy to produce. Once the Czechs figured out reliable tactics that could compensate for the drawbacks of early guns — such as the very long reload time — the cream of Christian knighthood stopped being such a threat. Soon enough, the Bohemians would defeat several crusades against their homeland.

Today, the miniaturization of electronics is having the same revolutionary effect that gunpowder once did. The technology that allows you to stream movies on your iPhone can also be used to provide extremely accurate terminal guidance to an inexpensive suicide drone; strap a grenade to a Chinese toy drone and it becomes a nightmarish anti-infantry weapon. In the Seventies, the ability to precisely target American airbases from the air was something out of reach for many states. Today, an Iranian Shahed-136 can be bought at a significantly lower price than a 2026 Honda Accord, allowing any middle-class family to theoretically afford top-shelf precision airpower. Just recently, one such drone was used to totally destroy an American E-3 sentry aircraft on the runway, a plane that America doesn’t produce anymore but cost hundreds of millions of dollars when it did. One of Iran’s primary air-defense missiles is the very innovative 358 missile, rumored to be especially cheap owing to its use of off-the-shelf electronics.

Ballistic missiles are, of course, rather more expensive, and probably out of the reach of most private citizens. Yet they are still cheap enough to present a massive problem for American military planners. All the while, the same challenges that long afflicted America’s small-arms manufacturing sector are now impacting its fighter planes. For instance, the Air Force recently looted an aging KC-135 from the junkyard, and may now bring it back into service. This specific machine was delivered to the Air Force back in 1959, meaning it technically qualifies for social security. Hardly ideal: but American airpower is now so expensive that even America struggles to afford it.

In the collective imagination of the West, the American pilot remains a warrior-knight par excellence, capable of charging into a battle and defeating dozens of enemies on his own. In the much grubbier reality of today’s war, the American pilot is now flying an aircraft that might be 30, 40, or even 50 years old. He is up against an enemy armed with weapons designed in the 2010s and the 2020s, often leveraging technologies that didn’t even exist 10 or 15 years ago. Meanwhile, America’s pilots operate on a military doctrine that the Pentagon itself concedes is outdated and ill-suited for an age of cheap precision weaponry.

All this is now causing panic in Washington, as well as a curious form of cultural schizophrenia. Officially, America’s pilot-knights are flying into battle and utterly crushing their enemies. Iran now has no formal military, apart from the parts that are still blocking the Strait of Hormuz. Their missiles and drones are almost all gone, apart from the ones which aren’t, which is why American satellite companies are being asked to stop offering pictures of the damage they’re not inflicting. Most stunningly of all, the Iranians have been left with absolutely no functional air defenses — apart from those that just shot down several American aircraft.

More from this author

America’s military humiliation

By Malcom Kyeyune

That brings us to the most interesting part of the war so far: the recent felling of an American F-15 over the skies of western Iran, and the vast rescue mission that followed. The stranded airman was saved, but the operation still resulted in the destruction of perhaps half-a-dozen American aircraft in total, making it the worst day for the Air Force since Vietnam. In the official narrative, however, this was all a stunning success, full of pluck and heroism; President Trump called it “one of the most daring search and rescue operations in US history”. What country, other than America, could pull off something like that?

In a sense, the details of the story are beside the point. What matters is just that: the story. That this operation was both hugely costly and advanced no strategic goals is almost certainly true, but it is also irrelevant to how America now thinks of itself. This was once a society of soldiers; now it has become a society of warriors, and its entire self-image increasingly subsists on these kinds of tales.

But how long can they last? Once people stop believing in knightly prowess and valor, once they no longer think that the bold few can vanquish the peasants, whether they’re armed with guns or IEDs or Shaheds, their entire reason for existing disappears. And if people wake up one day and wonder why they’re paying hundreds of millions of dollars to train and support some hotshot pilot, when an ugly plastic drone running on a motorcycle engine can do the same job a quarter as well at a millionth of the cost, the American military will stop being the world’s most powerful military. Instead, it will become a sad and ridiculous anachronism.

That day has already arrived in many parts of the world, as more and more military planners watch what’s happening in Iran and Ukraine. But it has not yet arrived in America. And that is why there’s a blackout on satellite images, why the military is so cagey about reporting on casualty numbers, and why America’s increasingly limited resources are being spent on flashy rescue operations that achieve very little in the way of strategic objectives, even if they do look very cool. That is why the very last stockpiles of long-range, standoff weaponry have to be brought over from Asia to fight against an enemy that has already been defeated. It is why Americans are being told they will have to embrace a round of truly vicious austerity, as the most powerful military in the world gobbles up another $500 billion to support a war it is in fact handily winning with its eyes closed.

As this war that was theoretically won in the first 48 hours grinds on and on and on, America’s self-proclaimed Secretary of War has come under increasing criticism for his conduct. With his crusader tattoos, and his erratic behavior — asking God for “overwhelming violence” to smite “those who deserve no mercy” — there are those who wonder whether Hegseth is really fit for the job. But who other than him, with his big Jerusalem cross and the even bigger chip on his shoulder, is a better fit for this next pivot point in history? Who else but he could lead the very finest knights that all Christendom has to offer, out on their final, glorious charge?

There are at least two odd things about the idea of a “Trump-class battleship”. The first is that naming ships after sitting presidents isn’t really supposed to happen according to the commonly accepted naming conventions of the US Navy. More strange, however, is calling a ship in 2026 a battleship to begin with. Battleships are intimately connected with military doctrines and concepts that simply aren’t relevant to modern navies: the battleship is a descendant of the ship of the line, a concept belonging to a time when navies quite literally arranged their ships up along battle lines and fired broadsides at each other. Today, cannons are simply obsolete as premier ship-to-ship weapons: they’ve been replaced by missiles that are orders-of-magnitude superior in terms of range and accuracy. Missiles and torpedoes are also so powerful nowadays that putting heavy armor on ships no longer makes sense; modern producers of high-grade naval armor are about as common as modern blacksmiths capable of forging full suits of gothic plate armor.

The last US battleship was completed in 1944, and no other country in the world considers them to be even remotely relevant in the modern age. Yet even so, America is now supposedly gearing up to build a whopping 15 to 25 of these massive ships, essentially overnight. What explains this sudden about-face? The answer to that question is not really military in nature. Rather, it has to do with the ongoing collapse of the political process inside the American system itself. Simply put, these ships will never be built. In fact, it’s more accurate to say that they cannot be built. Above anything else, these imaginary battleships are yet another descent into an increasingly overt hyperreality, where the words and pictures coming out of the official bureaucracies have less and less to do with what is actually going on in the reality, and where the staid bureaucratic processes of the American empire are breaking apart.

So why won’t — or can’t — these ships actually be built? Well, on the most basic level of legal and bureaucratic proceedings, money hasn’t actually been appropriated for this ship program. This is a much bigger problem than it might appear at first blush. Money isn’t just necessary to build a ship; it takes a lot of time and money to produce a workable design that is detailed enough for a shipyard to use. The Navy’s previous attempts at designing new ship classes all involved some sort of bidding and planning process; this does not seem to have happened here. Given that the recent history of the US trying to launch new ship classes has been a history of constant, unceasing failure, trying to repeat that process without even appropriating money for the design process itself is all but guaranteed to end in frustration. The reason this hasn’t happened is likely to be very simple, however: if appropriating money for a Trump-class battleship was put up to a vote, it would almost certainly be voted down.

More from this author

ICE theatrics are getting real

By Malcom Kyeyune

And the White House’s prospects are unlikely to improve, for the Democrats are likely to retake control of Congress in the midterms. To add even more insult to injury, the US government looks headed for another shutdown of some kind, in the wake of the fatal shooting of Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti. After that point, no money will be available for this white elephant that, lest we forget, bears the name of the Democrats’ most hated political enemy. But even if the White House could somehow find the money, there would be nowhere to actually build the ship. The US has very few shipyards of the size necessary to build a battleship-sized hull, and the two or three that do have that capacity are already busy with carriers. Getting them to build new battleships means making them stop building carriers, which is nonsensical at a point where the Ford-class program is already many years behind schedule. The US could of course always build new shipyards, except for the slight problem that it is completely broke, borrowing completely unsustainable sums of money every year just to keep the lights on.

Finally, the Trump-class battleship is built around several weapon systems that, strictly speaking, do not actually exist. This includes a 32-megajoule railgun, as well as very high power laser weaponry for shooting down drones. Both of these concepts have a very long way to go before they can be reliably weaponized; for now they exist only as experimental research projects. In the former case, the Navy spent almost two decades trying to make this kind of railgun design work, only to finally concede that the physical challenges were just too hard. Yet suddenly, without any resumption of a Navy railgun program, the Navy is now slated to build a new ship class with a working railgun system by the mid-2030s. Has the Navy actually been given any money to help it finish the research on this wonder weapon in fifteen months, after it tried and failed for fifteen years? No, of course not.

To sum up the state of play: Trump has announced a massive, glorious new era for the Navy, promising a new ship named after himself that no one ever asked for and that lacks any funding. The design itself essentially doesn’t make any sense from a doctrinal standpoint, it can’t actually be built without seriously compromising the US Navy’s capabilities for a generation, and it sports a series of weapons that, in operational terms, don’t exist. Throughout this entire process, Navy brass have all nodded and smiled politely, talking about how we need to free ourselves from “cognitive biases in our brain” regarding the whole affair, while swearing up and down that the ships will almost certainly be “badass”, and so people should just have a little more faith in the whole process.

It’s useful to understand how and why this is happening. It would be simple enough to conclude here that Donald Trump is becoming some sort of tyrant or dictator, and that these strange and doomed projects which he names after himself are merely the natural result of his own hubris running amok. Yet that is a very superficial explanation, and one that fundamentally misdiagnoses the root of the problem. Yes, it’s becoming clear that the American political system is experiencing a collapse of basic legal and procedural norms. The Trump-class battleship illustrates a curious paradox here: even as Trump gets increasingly more “hands on” — wielding more and more power that used to be outside of the prerogatives of the Presidency — the actual power of the United States seems to be waning. Strangely, personal rule and political weakness seem to go hand in hand.

But this isn’t actually all that strange. History is, after all, full of all manner of dictators, tyrants, and God-Kings. What usually defines these figures, however, is that their ascent to power is tied up with the creation of new bureaucracies and methods of rule. Pre-revolutionary France was a mind-boggling patchwork of competing feudal claims and rights; the revolutionaries ruthlessly burned that old system to the ground and put in new, hyper-rationalistic laws and institutions. It was this work of destruction and renewal that Napoleon leaned on to conquer almost all of Europe. The Nazis didn’t destroy the entire German bureaucracy, but they still overhauled it massively. Rather than cutting all the departments they didn’t like, they simply created new, alternative ones: inaugurating a system of constantly warring bureaucratic departments locked into a Darwinian struggle for money and influence. It was this dynamic that allowed the Nazi Party to assert a greater degree of direct control over the German state than had been possible during the Weimar era. In China, the Kuomintang and the Communists rebuilt the shattered state apparatus while fighting against the Japanese — and each other.

Donald Trump did promise something similar to a bureaucratic revolution, that much is true. But that revolution struggled to get off the ground, and it has already failed. DOGE no longer exists, and all attempts to balance the budget or prevent the US from collapsing under the weight of its growing deficits have been abandoned. Instead, Trump is busy looking for new ways to expand the American empire — including by threatening violence against his oldest allies — even at a point where many observers are talking about the rapid decline of the US empire in very honest terms. And while Trump’s political opponents constantly accuse him of engaging in various shocking and illegal power grabs, the nature of these power grabs, with the one exception of DOGE, is almost invariably just a result of the decay of the American state. They take the form of laws that exist on the books no longer being followed — the most egregious example of this is probably the Hatch Act — or unstated rules and norms of small-r republican government — such as the independence of the Federal Reserve — which are increasingly being ignored or outright violated. These accusations are often true, yet they are in some sense also unfair. Donald Trump wouldn’t have been elected if American voters did not strongly feel that the American system was broken and no longer worked for their benefit; him trying to preserve all the legal and small-r republican niceties of this broken system would in the end represent not just a betrayal of his own voters, but also a kind of a societal and political dead end. Change was coming no matter what: Trump was arguably just the man that happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Far from being a 20th-century fascist or an ancient Greek tyrant, Donald Trump is increasingly looking like America’s own Charles I. Like Charles I, Trump finds himself stuck at the head of an executive apparatus whose relationship to the legislature has, for all intents and purposes, completely collapsed. The second Trump administration has entirely failed at pushing any kind of legislative agenda even when compared to the fairly dismal record of his first term; it has by and large given up on even trying to get new laws passed. Rather, it constantly pushes new legal arguments, asserts executive powers no previous president has ever claimed, and uses its control over the Department of Justice to harry recalcitrant bureaucrats to go along with its edicts. This growth of executive power and assertiveness is actually an acute sign of weakness: the executive can no longer cajole the legislature to pass or amend the laws, and so it increasingly finds itself living outside the law entirely.

Suggested Reading

America's new doctrine of Empire

By Aris Roussinos

When Charles I could not or did not want to face Parliament, he revived various long-dead and quaint institutions, and twisted others far beyond what they were ever intended to do. He made the failure to attend his coronation a finable offense for any man who earned £40 or more; he began demanding ship money — originally a feudal levy imposed on seaside communities to pay for the Navy — from all of England, even without an actual wartime emergency. When Trump imposed tariffs against the entire world on 2 April, he claimed extremely broad powers of taxation for himself, citing a narrow legal authority that delegated some congressional authority in cases of emergency. Just as with Charles I during his 11 years of personal rule, every day was now redefined by Trump as an emergency, and the only person who got to decide what was and wasn’t an appropriate use of emergency powers was Donald Trump himself. Many of Trump’s more shocking actions during his second term in office follow this basic pattern: some half-forgotten legal doctrine or executive power is dug up and used to justify things that haven’t really been done before. DOGE was originally created by President Obama, as the US Digital Service, but it was Trump that transformed it into a tool of bureaucratic warfare. ICE was born during the tenure of George W. Bush, but Trump has expanded its budget more than tenfold and changed what was once a low profile, mostly plains-clothes agency into an army of heavily armed, masked gunmen driving down American streets like the Marines once did in Fallujah.

Of course, things didn’t turn out all that well for Charles. His constant expansion of executive power was at first tolerated, then chafed against, and then violently opposed. When he was finally forced to call another Parliament, it immediately began passing laws constraining his powers. Emboldened and nursing a slew of grudges built up over a decade of personal rule, Parliament soon began prosecuting Charles’ friends and allies: sentencing the Earl of Strafford to death for the crime of high treason. From there, the situation deteriorated further, and England soon found itself in the midst of civil war.

Is it possible to imagine that Congress, after a period of being ignored by the American executive while nursing various political grudges, might begin to act to constrain Trump’s powers? That it will act to limit, hinder, or even impeach the people around Donald Trump, triggering an increasingly acrimonious divorce between the different parts of the American state? The answer to that question is that imagination isn’t even necessary: the proceedings have, for all intents and purposes, already begun. The Trump administration is already trying to prosecute the head of the Federal Reserve to get that institution under control, and it’s only a matter of time — and a Republican defeat in the midterms — until the people doing the prosecuting find themselves the targets of a fresh round of political persecution. Meanwhile, the chronic inability to actually settle on a budget, which recently culminated in the longest government shutdown on record, is set to get worse. As in the run-up to the English Civil War, the basic ability to pass legislation and fund expenditures is rapidly degrading. Yet the worse things get in that regard, the more Donald Trump will be tempted to dig into obscure, quasi-legal prerogatives. The more those prerogatives are exercised, the stronger resistance will become.

When suns run out of fuel, they begin to physically balloon in size. When a president or a king loses strength, when the political system they sit at the top of begins to crumble, they tend to respond by claiming more and more power. Trump’s science-fiction battleship — like his grand ambitions towards Greenland — does not herald a new era of unlimited American power. It is, like the personal rule of Charles I, merely a swansong: a final farewell to a system ready to come apart.

The fans of wrestling want to get “worked”; they want to believe the spectacle is real, even though they all know that it is not. The way to get the fans to open up their wallets is to get them sucked into the fictional world of performances and rivalries, and so the companies and actors try very hard to make it all stick.

In contrast, a “shoot” is when the wrestling performance goes far enough that something actually crosses over into reality. As a wrestler, it is possible to “work” yourself into a “shoot”; to have the act you’re playing go so far as to take on a life of its own, outside of your control. A fan could begin stalking you, or could even attack you for things you did to the babyface in the ring; a fake rivalry could turn into a real one.

Today, a very similar dynamic has sunk its fangs into American society itself, and the consequences are becoming increasingly deadly. When Trump began his second term in office, he came in promising a far-reaching revolution in the basic assumptions that underlined American politics. In area after area, the status quo was to be overturned: industries would be onshored rather than offshored, US allies and enemies alike would be brought to heel by tariffs, and the results of decades of mass immigration would be upended through a titanic deportation effort. Having promised his voters the moon, Trump and his administration have struggled to actually deliver. Reindustrialization has turned out to be a bust, for US manufacturing employment is actually contracting. The trade war against China is de facto already over, resulting in only limited changes to the status quo but still causing huge damage to American farmers.

Centrally, the new project of mass deportations has also struggled to get off the ground. While the number of deportations are high in historical terms, they fall massively short of the goal of one million deportations per year that Trump set for his administration. The White House has found it tougher than expected to change the reality of slow enforcement, limited resources and the often glacial pace of legal proceedings. To make matters worse, there are a number of contradictions baked into the idea of massively expanded deportation efforts, and these contradictions don’t have a neat solution.

From the very start of his second term, the various parts of Trump’s coalition have been at loggerheads with each other about the direction and goal of the administration’s immigration policy. 2025 began with a bitter conflict between the “tech bro” wing and the broader Republican base over the need for, and scope of, the H1B visa program, a conflict in which Trump actually sided with the tech bros. On top of that, Trump has consistently wavered on the question of going after employers, even going so far as talking about extending some form of amnesty for illegals working on farms: an idea that the now-late Charlie Kirk warned could break the MAGA coalition. Like Saint Augustine, who supposedly cried “Lord, give me chastity and continence, but not yet!”, the Trump administration is caught between wanting to make good on its promises to ordinary voters, and the basic economic and political reality of having very wealthy donors who don’t actually care about any of that. This contradiction is nothing new in American politics — in fact, it’s been the status quo for the GOP stretching back decades. The GOP has long been the party of voters who are sick of illegal immigration and the employers who want more of it and in fact rely on it to maintain their profit margins. Historically, this awkward marriage has generally produced a politics that is heavy on the rhetoric and very light on the actual follow-through. Trump has not actually managed to transcend this fundamental contradiction; what he has done is come up with a very novel way in which to handle it.

More from this author

Trump is continuity Biden

By Malcom Kyeyune

If you can’t meet the goals you set out for yourself when it comes to actual mass deportation numbers, and your political coalition includes business interests who risk losing serious money if they can no longer access cheap, illegal labor, then what can you do? Well, you can turn it all into wrestling. ICE agents — who tended to keep a low profile and work mostly in plainclothes — now ride around in the open, heavily armed and wearing masks, with massive WWE-style media blitzes announcing their arrival. Until recently, ICE generally took some pains to avoid announcing their presence, particularly in blue states where they were known to be unpopular. But all that has been replaced with heavily promoted and hyped-up ICE “campaigns” in blue areas; campaigns that invariably lead to protests, clashes with governors and mayors, and recalcitrance from local law enforcement. All of this of course makes the process of actually finding and deporting illegal immigrants much slower and more dangerous than it would otherwise be. But that isn’t really the point: just like in wrestling, the administration is in the middle of a “work”; building a story and a hyperreality that their “fans” can make themselves part of.

On one level, the administration is truly pushing the envelope: Trump talks regularly about sending in the uniformed military to police Democrat cities, either to solve crime or to simply arrest all the dumb liberals who have supposedly ruined places like Chicago or Los Angeles. But when you actually dig into the details, these plans and suggestions for military deployments are almost entirely hot air, often involving dozens of soldiers for cities of hundreds of thousands. When deployments do happen, like in Washington, D.C., they go on only for a short while before they are quietly rolled up. Just like in wrestling, what matters is the storyline: actions like these are calculated based on what will move the media cycle and on what sounds impressive to the base. As with wrestling, the point isn’t actually to be real; the point is to feel real.

To millions of Americans, what is happening right now is starting to feel very real indeed. Republicans cheer as masked officers finally take off the kid gloves and roughhouse their political enemies. Democrats increasingly feel that the country is becoming lawless, and that the talk about having marines and Army soldiers use their cities as “training grounds” for future military conflict might just be real after all. And even if the actual mass deportations are fake, even if Trump ends up deporting fewer people than Barack Obama or Joe Biden, even if the plans to send in the military to “clean up Chicago” fall apart under even the faintest scrutiny, it doesn’t actually matter. The rocks and snowballs being thrown by protesters right now are real; the tear gas and the batons and the bullets are real. Slowly, surely, the work is morphing into a shoot.

On 7 January, the city of Minneapolis saw a “shoot” happen in the most tragic and literal sense of that word. Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother with no previous criminal record, was fatally shot in her car after being stopped by ICE agents. There is a great deal of footage available of the scene and the shooting itself, taken from multiple angles; the reader is thus free to make up his or her own mind about the incident. Yet whatever conclusion you draw about the details, the reality is that the details actually do not matter. They do not matter in the slightest, because before the body of Renee Good had even cooled, Donald Trump had already taken to social media to denounce her as someone who had “viciously” attempted to kill ICE agents. The US Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, minced no words either, going so far as to essentially declare Good a domestic terrorist.

This kind of rhetoric is fantastically irresponsible, but it’s also not surprising. Rather than compelling people to tone down their rhetoric and back away from the brink, Good’s death immediately became another part of the hyperreality; in death she was transformed into another stereotypical, villainous heel for the crowd to boo and jeer. Pundits on Fox News immediately began talking about how this now-dead woman had written her pronouns — she/her — on her social media profiles, and that she apparently was in a lesbian relationship of some kind. At the same time, angry crowds in Minneapolis began pelting retreating ICE agents with jeers and snowballs, as videos of Good’s crumpled body spread like wildfire. One half of America had a new babyface, the other part got a new heel. Republicans could cheer that another dangerous and potentially terroristic liberal got what she deserved; Democrats received further evidence that the fascists in jackboots really were coming to kill them all.

America is busy weaving a great and terrible fantasy; one where the country is slowly inching toward civil war. Trump is talking about defeating the “enemy from within”, Steve Bannon is warning that Republicans will go to jail if Democrats win the midterms. Social media is increasingly filled with shrill talk about how the other side is dangerous and cannot be reasoned with, and polling indicates that a very large number of Americans are now worried about the risk of democratic decline and even civil war itself. People have already died as a result of this fantasy; even worse, their deaths rapidly become the fuel the fantasy needs to keep growing stronger and more believable. As the story grows in urgency, it is drawing in more and more people, making future confrontations and further deaths all the more likely. Neither side in this conflict has anything even remotely resembling clean hands. Before Renee Nicole Good, there was Ashli Babbitt. Before Donald Trump dismissed his own countrymen as seditious radicals and terrorists, Joe Biden and his party did much the same thing.

Suggested reading

How MeToo finally came for WWE

By Sarah Ditum

Increasingly, this kind of wrestling-like dynamic seems to be applied everywhere. The now almost entirely abandoned trade war between America and the rest of the world, going even further than the trade war with China, was one great big spectacle from start to finish. Massive, business-destroying hikes to tariff rates got announced through late-night social media posts. Trade delegations of important allies like Japan, upon visiting the White House to try to work out new trade policies, found themselves part of what turned out to be mere photoshoots: the Americans were neither prepared for nor particularly interested in actually settling on the details of some new agreement. In his various feuds with countries like Canada and Denmark, Trump has strayed far beyond geopolitical norms; but the feuds are reminiscent of Trump’s own history inside the wrestling world. Indeed, Trump has the rare honor of being the only president in American history to have been inducted into World Wrestling Entertainment’s coveted hall of fame, engaging in fan-favorite feuds such as the “Battle of the Billionaires” match between him and WWE co-founder Vince McMahon, the outcome of which led to Trump shaving McMahon’s head inside the ring.

But acting out the fake wrestling version of an incipient civil war is fantastically dangerous. The level of dehumanization, cruelty and bloodthirstiness one now sees on social media is already reaching a boiling point. Without some kind of reconciliation — which there appears to be zero interest in — more people will die, and the fantasy will slowly begin to turn into reality. America already has all the prerequisites for dangerous levels of social unrest and internal violence. The national debt is exploding, internal dissatisfaction with the state of the economy keeps rising, and the growing AI bubble is looking increasingly unstable. On top of that, it is engaged in multiple simmering conflicts over the world: trying to strong-arm Venezuela, guard against China, counter Russia and Iran, while also antagonizing all of Europe and threatening to annex Greenland from Denmark, a Nato ally. It has few friends and a growing list of enemies, forcing an increasingly overstretched and under-resourced military to try to be everywhere all at once. Historically speaking, the combination of social and economic crisis at home, and overstretch and wars abroad, is a dangerous one.

Moreover, America’s recent spate of high-profile assassinations should put to bed any lingering delusions — popular in the Joe Biden era — that a domestic conflict would be neat, easy, and containable. The US military, for all that’s impressive about it, cannot actually do much against the kind of internal violence that would be relevant here. Even Donald Trump himself, a man one of the most expensive security details in the world, was an inch away from losing his life to an assassin’s bullet only recently. If a concerted outbreak of political violence happens, very few people will be safe.

But that outbreak of concerted mass violence has not yet arrived in America. All talk of dealing with “the enemy within”, of sending in the troops to clean out Chicago, of calling in the National Guard to defend against Trump’s fascism, of “communists” or “fascists” about to take over the country and kill your friends and family: it’s all just fake. It is made up, it is a story. Yet people have already begun killing each other over that story, and as things stand nobody seems inclined to stop. As the late wrestling legend, Hulk Hogan, would have put it: sometimes, when you work a work, you work yourself into a shoot.

To that piece of wrestling wisdom, we could perhaps somberly add: if the work you’re working is about how dangerous enemies of the republic lurk around the corner, and how every political enemy is a domestic terrorist, a bloodthirsty communist, or goose-stepping fascist, it’s usually only a matter of time before the shooting starts.

Written by the British political philosopher Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism made a fairly simple and convincing argument: after the collapse of real socialism and the fall of the Berlin Wall, there no longer existed enough imagination inside the West to actually bring about meaningful political change. Evidence of that thesis was hardly in short supply back then, either: the bankers on Wall Street had just broken the economy, and the only “solution” on offer by president Barack Obama and his European counterparts was to bail the bankers out with taxpayer money so that they could go on doing whatever it is they had been doing. Nobody went to jail; the banks were “too big to fail”, and even Obama himself seemed to have no clue what to do about it. Some rules were put in place to try to prevent similar risky behavior in the future, rules that have either been or are in the process of being dismantled today. A more permanent fix was never in the making.

If anyone back then thought that the inability to come up with systemic fixes in America was simply down to the personal failings of Obama himself or the people around him, the Euro crisis that followed in the wake of the Great Recession would soon put such thoughts to bed. European politicians all faced the same conundrum of a structurally flawed economic and political system, and like the Americans, all they could think to do was to kick the can down the road. To fix the Euro would have required deep overhauls to the entire structure of the EU, and that was simply too much work. Instead, European politicians bailed out the bad banks and left the bad banking system in place, fully aware that in doing so they were simply guaranteeing even worse problems down the road.

All of that was part of the ethos back in the late 2000s and early 2010s; we had the perfect system, there was no other alternative, but the system was also breaking apart and nobody had any idea what to do about it. The horizon had closed, the debates were over, and we now lived at the end of history: that might have been an exhilarating thought to an older generation watching the Berlin Wall fall down and the Iron Curtain finally part, but to the millennials some 20 years later, it was nothing but stifling.

And it wasn’t just stifling to the Left, as it would turn out. Mark Fisher, waging a long-term battle against depression and other mental health issues, would end up dying by suicide in early 2017. In an ironic twist, his death came at precisely the moment in history that a dark horse candidate in the 2016 Republican primary — an erratic showman and real estate mogul by the name of Donald J. Trump — would upend the entire American political establishment precisely by saying all the things that nobody else would or could. The Iraq War was stupid; US globalist economic policy had destroyed the American working class and hollowed out the country; of course, he also talked about Mexico sending “rapists” and criminals as well, which only further polarized the debate.

More From This Author

Trump’s Gorbachev moment

By Malcom Kyeyune

The entire American political class of 2016 agreed: there was no alternative; the way we had been doing things was the only way to do them. Yet Trump, in an electoral coup that nobody believed was even possible, boldly stood up and called their bluff, and his voters absolutely loved him for it. The era of capitalist realism was over; rather than shirking from or cautioning against an active political imagination, Trump and those around him now invited people to dream, and to dream big. Less than 10 years after Fisher wrote Capitalist Realism, the book had been rendered obsolete: for the generation of young intellectuals on the Right who flocked to the banner of MAGA in 2017 and thereafter, the future promised nothing but freedom and opportunity.

Eight years into the Trump era, the ghost of TINA, “There Is No Alternative”, is if anything even more distant than it was in 2017. Americans today are invited to imagine pretty much anything: mass deportations of tens of millions of people, a no-holds-barred war against the administrative state, a wholesale effort to “Make America Healthy Again”, a total revolution in geopolitics, economic policy, and so on. We now speak of building cities on Mars, or abolishing income taxes entirely, or of boldly going back to the economic patterns and policies of the Fifties or, even, 1890s. Such scandalous dreams would have been utterly unthinkable during the dour Obama years, where a minor fix here and a minor nudge there — all overseen by properly vetted, apolitical “experts”, of course! — were hailed as the only practical mode of governance.

Having said all that, there is actually an obvious contradiction built right into the Trump era that replaced the capitalist realism that Mark Fisher criticized. If one looks at the past eight years — with power passing first from Obama to Trump, then from Trump to Biden, and then from Biden back to Trump — and looks underneath the hype and the rhetoric, the actual political story is one of subtle continuity. Rhetorically, Trump and Biden always agreed on one thing: that they were like night and day, completely opposed to each other, and the choice between them was the choice between two radically different sets of policies for America.

But this is simply not true if one actually looks at the evidence. Take the idea of tariffs: many would say they represent the most central feature of what makes Trump “different” from his predecessors. Yet in reality, tariff policy has been an area of remarkable political continuity since 2016; it is only in the world of political rhetoric that a conflict between two different, distinct “sides” actually exists.

To illustrate this, Trump originally broke from political consensus in his first term in order to slap tariffs on China, a policy move that Biden loudly ridiculed as idiotic and counterproductive. But when Biden replaced Trump in the Oval Office, he did not abolish Trump’s tariffs at all. Quite the opposite: he spent his entire administration furiously iterating and expanding upon them. Fast forwarding to 2025, and Trump’s shocking “liberation day” tariff announcements were at first greeted as a sui generis bit of policy; an idea so radical, far-reaching and/or stupid that it couldn’t have been dreamed up by anyone other than Trump. But in reality, Trump’s tariffs were themselves an iteration of earlier Biden policy. Biden’s White House had spent the years since the Ukraine war devising a new economic model where countries would be divided into friendly, neutral, and unfriendly “spheres”. The older, Clinton-era model saw economic globalism as both a means and an end unto itself; the more free trade there was, the better off America would be. Against this discredited model, Biden, as well as national security advisor Jake Sullivan, proposed tying trade access to America much more tightly to both national security concerns and to the economic health of America’s middle class.

The Biden attempt to fuse national security, geopolitical brinkmanship and re-industrialization at home was then given practical shape in the various semiconductor tariffs and regulations that Biden launched during the second half of his term. Biden much preferred import and export controls over blunt tariffs, but the goal was clear: isolate China, and use the large economic heft of the United States to bring geopolitical allies into closer alignment.

To put it plainly, the tariff policies of the second Trump administration simply continued where Jake Sullivan left off. The goal was unchanged, but they now merged with Trump’s long-standing obsession with tariffs. Of course, rhetorically, neither side would ever admit to any overlap whatsoever, and partisans of Trump would say that his tariffs are all about bringing back blue collar manufacturing jobs. But that is clearly just an excuse, and an unconvincing one at that: Trump and his administration are constantly declaring that being on America’s side, or agreeing to geopolitical concessions, will be the only way to access the American market going forward. Moreover, the tariff rollout was never coordinated with American industry. Nor does there even seem to be anyone inside of American industry willing to defend them. Indeed, why should they? Once you declare that you can’t make a trade deal with Canada if they recognize Palestine, or that Brazil will have to eat massive tariffs unless the corruption charges against former president Jair Bolsonaro are dropped, you are no longer doing industrial policy; you are using tariffs as a tool of geopolitics, carving out “friendly” and “unfriendly” trade zones just as Sullivan and Biden had hoped to do more fully in their second term.

The same criticism can be levied against the Ukraine war, and Trump’s strenuous declarations that this war is actually “Biden’s war”. In point of fact, the Ukraine conflict is the collaborative project of both Trump and Biden, with a minor assist from Barack Obama’s second term. While Obama’s state department famously supported the Maidan coup of 2014, Obama himself was an opponent of funneling arms to Ukraine thereafter, reasoning that Ukraine was very far away from the US and very close to Russia. It was under Trump’s first term that the official buildup of Western weaponry inside Ukraine began, and when Biden assumed office, he simply continued where Trump had left off, furthering the project of building up Ukraine as a bulwark against Russia. Biden might have been the one to actually eat the cake of the Ukraine war, but it was Trump who warmed up the oven.

Of course, the same pattern is now repeating itself yet again: the drawdown in arms deliveries to Ukraine that Trump is now bragging about actually started under Biden, simply because the US was running out of more weapons to send. Conversely, the strategy of trying to strangle Russia, or at least force it into a peace settlement through the application of tariffs that Biden devised, has not been abandoned by Trump. Instead, it has been scaled up to levels that Biden himself was unwilling to contemplate. Biden considered secondary tariffs on India to be far too geopolitically reckless — India being an important potential ally in any future showdown against China — and so it took Trump, the supposed “anti-war” candidate, to implement the policy that the “warmonger” Biden wouldn’t sign off on. Indeed, the joining of China, India and Russia together into a loose alliance against American bullying is a geopolitical disaster of the first order. None other than Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan himself, has recently been seen in Indian media bemoaning Trump’s destruction of America’s diplomatic standing. Similarly, after spending the entirety of Biden’s term attacking him for being far too aggressive and quick to use military force, Trump has now authorized more military strikes in the first year of his presidency than Biden did in his entire four-year term; has massively ramped up the war against Yemen (only to then surrender in the face of growing ammo deficits) and now banging the war drum against Venezuela.

Trump promised “mass deportations”, but in his first month, the number of deportations wasn’t even up to the level of Joe Biden and is no better than Obama’s. Trump promised to fix the deficit, only to then immediately return to business as usual. Trump promised an end to DEI policies, but has arguably acted to expand the bureaucratic and NGO apparatus he inherited from his “woke” predecessors; all that Trump has changed is that this apparatus is now focused on very intrusively policing antisemitism and/or criticism of Israel.

The above list might naturally appear as just another partisan litany of complaints aimed against the sitting president. But none of this is actually meant to be a criticism of Donald Trump. Logically, if there’s no difference between Trump and Biden, or between Biden and Trump, then both candidates have failed to do what they promised their voters. Biden told the Democrats that a vote for him would be a step away from Trump’s fascist mania; Trump boasted that once he became President again, the woke insanity and globalist policies of Biden would be things of the past. In the days of Obama and Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism, the problem was that there was only one door, one alternative, one way to do things. Now, there are a million different doors, each one more fantastical and colorful than the last, yet somehow they all lead to the same place in the end. The depression Fisher pointed to is gone, now replaced by white-hot anger, yet the policies still do not change. How much of an improvement is this really?

Indeed, at the time of writing this, rumors are now swirling of yet another direct continuation between Joe Biden and Donald Trump: that of failing health, and underhanded attempts to cover that situation up. Trump, just like Biden, has been dogged by an increasing number of minor health issues: swollen ankles, visible bruising on his hands, the occasional moment caught on camera of dragging one leg or seemingly having trouble walking straight. Taken on their own, they amount to very little, but they have been the topic of an increasing amount of gossip as of late. After being missing in action for three days for undisclosed reasons — leading to a rapid acceleration of the rumors around his health — Trump was pictured golfing.

Suggested Reading

How Biden channelled his MAGA spirit

By Matt Huber

What is so telling about this tide of rumors about Trump’s health has very little to do with whether Trump is or was genuinely sick or not. Rather, it is the sense that even here, nothing in politics actually seems to change between the parties. The shameful and genuinely destructive coverup of Biden’s failing health was attacked viciously (and for very good reason!) by Trump and the Republican party; yet it seems like a foregone conclusion that most or all who did so would be ready to close ranks and defend their guy doing the same thing. If Joe Biden did it, why can’t we?

Far from standing on any principles, or being concerned with real, material change, the political battle inside America — and to a great extent the rest of the West as well — has become unfathomably bitter at the same time as it has become increasingly imaginary. Trump’s supporters may just be ready to fight just as viciously on behalf of a medical coverup as they once fought against it, and if one looks at the Epstein affair, the MAGA movement has shown an ability to perform impressive heel turns: from considering the release of the Epstein files a huge priority to bemoaning it as a “democrat hoax”. Regime change wars might have been what led America down its current downward spiral; but after a decade of railing against those wars, Trump’s defense secretary now refuses to rule out another one against Venezuela. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Where partisanship is concerned, reality no longer seems to matter much. As the amount of people employed in American manufacturing continues to fall — US manufacturing has now actually been contracting for six months straight! — the White House’s official X account is putting out AI-generated pictures of blonde, rugged construction workers, boasting about the ongoing “blue collar boom!”. Supporters of Trump cheer this wholly imaginary boom; opponents point to the real-world numbers only to be quickly shouted down. Of course, the day the shoe ends up on the other foot, it will be Republicans’ turn to talk about real world numbers, and the Democrats’ turn to shout them down. Inside the imaginations of both sides, a great war is being fought for the future of the country, with stakes that have never been higher. Outside of that imaginary battle, the empire haltingly plods along like it always has, seemingly powerless to reform or change course. Far from being a product of Trump or Biden’s personal flaws, this state of affairs seems unlikely to change no matter what candidate ends up being thrust into the Oval Office. Congress is simply too sclerotic, America is simply too broke, and the bureaucratic state itself is too slow and lacking in capacity to really make things happen. China spends a few years to build a science fiction-esque maglev train line; America spends a decade to replace old Amtrak trains with new ones that are somehow still slower than the old ones.

The reality of decline is increasingly hard to escape at this point. In fact, the more each side resorts to populism and scapegoating, the worse the decline seems to be. Political polarization and the aggressive scapegoating of the other side now looks like the political equivalent of “empty calories” — a deeply unhealthy non-solution that just makes you worse off the more you indulge in it.

Mark Fisher’s dour, colorless age of capitalist realism is now decidedly over, though the man himself never lived to see it. Today, in the age of fake numbers, endless AI slop, and rabid partisanship shorn of even the slightest pretense of principles or intellectual honesty, that fact seems less like a blessing than it once did. After realism, we now live in an age of disconnected fantasy; yet for all that has changed, true political alternatives seem as elusive as ever.

Unfortunately, many of the critics of this new war are also stuck in the past. We therefore hear plenty of arguments that Iran will be the new Iraq, the new Syria, the new Libya. Regime change won’t work; occupation will be too expensive; Iran might collapse into a civil war and cause a new refugee crisis in Europe. All these arguments are now being used by critics of a war with the Islamic Republic.

But, in 2025, these arguments seem more than a little presumptuous. Times change, and neither the US economy nor the vaunted US military is equal to what it was when the tanks rolled across the border into Iraq back in 2003. America now faces a far bigger problem than figuring out just how it’ll screw up the aftermath of a blitzkrieg campaign: unrest or even mutinies inside the US military. As the single most dangerous thing that can happen to an unpopular political system, mutinies helped topple the French monarchy and the Berlin Wall. Now, it may be America’s turn — with terrifying consequences for the Republic’s future.

To understand why mutiny is now a very serious threat, we must first examine the broader geopolitical context. In the Nineties and early 2000s, when America began those unfortunate wars of choice now glibly compared to Iran, the world looked very, very different. Prince Sultan Air Base — the big installation in Saudi Arabia now filling up with military hardware — is akin to the quip about the lightsaber in Star Wars: it is, in fact, a relic of a more civilized age. Prince Sultan, like pretty much every other US airbase, was built in a time when America’s enemies simply lacked the resources to shoot at it. In those days, bombing someone from the air required advanced jet planes; planes that are still so expensive that only a few countries can hope to own them in significant numbers.

Critics of US involvement in Iraq or Afghanistan would often wring their hands about the unfairness and inhumanity of the American way of fighting, given that the US effortlessly blew up its enemies from thousands of feet up in the sky without the victims ever being able to do much about it. These days, however, the ongoing mass adoption of ballistic missiles makes that sort of lament rather moot. The missiles raining down on Tel Aviv show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you no longer need jet fighters to do a “bombing campaign”. The citizens of Tel Aviv, for their part, are just as helpless in the face of an incoming missile as the goat herders of Afghanistan once were.

More from this author

America’s military humiliation

By Malcom Kyeyune

Yes, the Israelis have bunkers. But the IDF’s extremely expensive missile defense offers only threadbare protection: interceptors are rare, slow to manufacture, and are now at risk of running out. More advanced hypersonic missiles usually can’t be intercepted at all. Planes, for their part, have become older, harder to maintain, and tactically less flexible. In fact, given advances in anti-air technology, the primary weapon of most combat planes today is actually just a long-range ballistic missile, small enough to fit on an aircraft and fired from a safe distance. During the Vietnam War, America lost over 10,000 airplanes and helicopters. Today, planes and pilots have become so expensive that replacing them in large numbers isn’t actually feasible. Thirty years ago, Israel could blow up Iranians without the Iranians ever shooting back. Now, though, both sides can throw punches.

For the American military itself, this means that it now has to prepare itself for something it isn’t very good at: being bombed from the sky. This is a huge problem, and not just because American airfields lack hangars capable of withstanding missile strikes, or a doctrine adapted to enemy missile fire. Much more critically, the US Army is now so understrength that it relies on National Guard troops to man its various outposts and bases in the Middle East. These people are part-time soldiers who live and work as civilians until they are called up. This also means the military is extremely hard-pressed to deal with actual battlefield casualties; there simply aren’t that many troops available to serve as replacements.

Few people sign up for the Oklahoma National Guard because of a desire to travel halfway around the world in order to fight against Iran, but unless America goes back to the draft, this is what will happen. But the status of the National Guard might be about to change; flying mostly under the radar, a popular movement calling itself Defend the Guard is working on introducing legislation across dozens of states that would prohibit the deployment of National Guard troops to foreign conflicts without a formal declaration of war by Congress. There are problems with this kind of legislation — including questions about how it would impact funding for Guard units — but the direction of travel is clear. Americans in and around the National Guard are increasingly tired of it being used as just another reserve pool of soldiers to commit to various foreign lands. The problem, however, is that America’s military posture would collapse overnight if it could no longer rely on the Guard.

Then there’s America’s political system — which, as everyone will tell you, is utterly incapable of dealing with significant military casualties. The American public simply doesn’t like seeing flag-draped coffins flown back home, especially when these coffins come from wars that nobody really wanted to begin with. That is why the discussion of war is so fixated on the concept of “boots on the ground”. This fixation is natural, but it is also completely out of step with the times. The way it used to work was that American soldiers had to be physically deployed to a hostile country for the enemy to shoot and kill them. But this is no longer the case, just as Iranians no longer need to be anywhere near Tel Aviv to destroy its homes and trap Israelis beneath the rubble. Of course, even without these proverbial boots, a war with Iran is already incredibly unpopular. The conflict is essentially being forced down the throats of Americans, shattering the political coalition that got Donald Trump elected in the first place.

Yet if all this is fairly well known, the morale of the soldiers themselves is almost never mentioned. For historical reasons, everyone in America, from Left to Right, simply assumes that their soldiers will stoically follow orders, no matter what happens, no matter what those orders are. Throughout history, however, an uncountable number of governments have collapsed because everyone assumed that the soldiers would always follow orders — until they didn’t. When the Cossacks sent in to beat up demonstrators refused to follow orders, the Russian monarchy collapsed. The Berlin Wall protests became a regime-ending crisis because the military and police were ordered to crack skulls and stop the protestors from tearing down the wall, but then refused to do so.

How likely is it, then, that Trump will give an order to his troops (who are required by law to obey him) only for them to refuse him, revealing another political system at the end of its rope? It’s probably far more likely than most people realize. For one thing, wars often don’t go as planned, and in this particular case the Iranians can actually shoot back in a very significant way. Nor can the US replace casualties without heavily relying on mobilizing part-time soldiers and reservists. How eager will these people be to don their old uniform and fill the shoes of someone who was just killed by an Iranian missile?

This was the problem faced by King Ferdinand VII in 1820, when the Spanish king tried to send another batch of soldiers to the various South American colonies vying for independence. Ferdinand VII was already incredibly unpopular, and the trip to the jungles of New Spain was almost guaranteed to be a one-way affair. Once a large group of soldiers gathered at the port city of Cadiz learned that they were the next in line to be mobilized, they revolted. This soldier’s revolt quickly spread, sparking a massive political crisis that smashed the absolutist system. Trying to send teachers and mechanics from Wisconsin and Oregon to some desert killing field could yet spark something similar.

Trump himself has exacerbated these tensions. The various feuds he has pursued against Democratic governors and states — most notably in California — has already led the White House to mobilize the National Guard and the US Marine Corps to fight protestors rioting over his immigration policy. Judging by some of the reporting, morale is not exactly great among the Guardsmen and Marines being used in this way. Partly, the dissatisfaction comes from the shambolic way in which these troops were deployed to LA (the Department of Defense failed to complete the necessary paperwork in advance to actually pay the troops), but the bigger problem is that soldiers really aren’t supposed to involve themselves in the political process. It is probably a matter of when, not if, Trump’s war policy sparks protests and riots too. Unlike Trump’s harsh immigration measures, however, here he won’t have much in the way of support among any section of the public. And if the police are unwilling or unable to contain the protests, the National Guard may once again need to be mobilized. Once again, they are fully capable of either refusing the call to muster or simply joining the demonstrators. Anti-war protests are not the only vector for riots either: the US economy is in such a parlous state that ordinary Americans are now borrowing money to pay for groceries. Even without a looming war, the US is already unstable, and the political system is breaking down. It will not take much to push it, and its soldiers, over the edge.

You could make the argument that, in the end, America will be safe: its soldiers are just too disciplined. This might have been true at some point, but not today. Moreover, the current all-volunteer military was specifically created because the Vietnam War produced so many cases of ill-discipline, mutiny and even “fragging” — a slang term for soldiers murdering their own officers, where fragmentation grenades chucked into tents became a favourite method of execution.

Americans in uniform have historically been very capable of unruly or rebellious behaviour. Apart from the systematic murder of officers during Vietnam, the so-called 1932 “Bonus Army” — made up of dejected veterans from the First World War who gathered by the tens of thousand to demand early cash redemption for their service certificates — contributed massively to the electoral loss of Herbert Hoover that same year. Of course, both Vietnam and the First World War were fought using conscription, and the US today has a professional military that is supposed to be resistant to rebellious behaviour and breaches in discipline. But professional soldiers are not robots; they can and have historically engaged in mutiny and disobedience. Guardsmen, being part-time soldiers, also live in a world closer to that of reservists in non-US countries that do maintain conscription.

In recent years, due to various failures of the bureaucracy as well as the ballooning budget deficit with which the US is grappling, the payment of various bonuses to both Guardsmen and regular military have become increasingly erratic. Sometimes, enlistment bonuses aren’t paid out, other times it might be cost-of-living adjustment checks fail to arrive on time. These problems with payment also contribute to flagging morale. In a real national crisis, the lack of regular or mandated pay could be another aggravating factor pushing Americans in uniform towards disobedience or mutiny.

More from this author

Trump’s Gorbachev moment

By Malcom Kyeyune

More to the point, unrest is brewing inside the US military right now. In fact, the latest news is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to remove a colonel from his position because he was posting, semi-anonymously, extremely venomous remarks against Israel. These remarks included calling Israel a “death-cult” and saying that American soldiers were being made to serve “Netanyahu and his Judeo-supremacist cronies”.

The fact that attitudes like these now exist at the highest levels of the US military, before the fighting has even started, means that they will also be extremely common at lower levels. The US military will no doubt try to ferret out dissenters, but it only takes a few colonels, majors, or captains to listen to the discontent of their men, and then give it an outlet, for a chain reaction to spread. Once one unit refuses to deploy or follow orders, others are far more liable to do the same, and suddenly the state has lost control of the one thing it needs to survive: the monopoly on violence.

Moreover, one only has to look at Trump’s own military parade, held literally when Iran’s missiles were hitting Tel Aviv, to realize that the US military is now deeply unwell. Trump no doubt expected what most people his age expect: that a showing of America’s military would be an impressive, well-coordinated spectacle. But the soldiers that cloudy day in Washington didn’t even know how to march properly, and many of them clearly looked like they didn’t want to be there in the first place. The entire parade was sparsely attended; one got the distinct impression that nobody, either inside or outside the Army, cared about it enough to put in much effort. That’s unsurprising. Some of the soldiers in the parade were drawn from Fort Bragg, a base with a truly sinister reputation for suicides, drug use, and even gangland-style murders. Four years ago, one soldier stationed at Bragg went missing. His headless body washed up later, on Memorial Day, and he wasn’t even the only soldier to be murdered at the base that year.

It seems clear, then, that quite aside from the National Guard, the uniformed military these days is not very reliable either. Enlisted men are restless, suffering from low morale, low pay and an ongoing suicide epidemic. This crisis is in reality far worse than the already grim statistics would indicate; every soldier that takes his own life has a very significant impact on the rest of his unit. The officers, for their part, are jaded, used to dysfunction, and acutely aware of the many military weaknesses that civilian elites either don’t know or care about.

Up to and including Vietnam, most of America’s wars relied on the draft. This meant that politicians always needed to make sure battles didn’t fall too far out of public favor. After Vietnam, where the military nearly fell apart as a result of failing discipline and general political polarization, the all-volunteer model was adopted instead. This has made various “forever wars” in obscure parts of the world politically possible for America’s leaders: civilians have simply detached themselves from the bloodshed. But the result of this is that it has allowed ordinary Americans to increasingly treat their own soldiers as faceless automata, as distant, obedient servants who will always jump to it, who will always give you the victory you asked for, regardless of how miserable the conditions become. But soldiers, too, have a breaking point.

To bewail the stupidity of regime change in Iran is one thing. But to call up teachers and bus drivers from Wisconsin and Oregon, and expect them to cheerfully march into what already looks like the most unpopular war in all of American history, is quite another. The US’s shrinking circle of regime change enthusiasts might be surprised at how close they are to getting what they ordered. Unfortunately for them, it’s in Washington DC, not Tehran, where the powers that be ought to fear America’s soldiers.

This weekend, the city that bears George Washington’s name will witness something different. On Saturday, Donald Trump will oversee a large military parade through the streets of DC, commemorating both the 250th birthday of the US Army and the 79th of Trump himself. The spectacle isn’t entirely unprecedented — the end of the Gulf War also saw an ostentatious military parade through the streets of the US capital. Yet, as the comparison with the 18th century implies, it is not exactly central to the American tradition either.

No wonder, then, that the parade, with its thousands of troops and hundreds of tanks and aircraft, is causing a noticeable sense of unease in America — not least because it is unclear exactly what it is meant to celebrate. If there is anything central to the self-conception of the military, after all, it is that it is different and better compared to the rest of the world, an institution that stands above and apart from the rest of society. Large military parades to celebrate the birthday of the Dear Leader are fairly common elsewhere, but never in the land of the free. Now, though, those old republican certainties are slipping away, implying a military that’s less the guardian of liberty and more the tool of a coercive state. Dovetailed by Trump’s actions elsewhere, notably around deploying the National Guard in California, and the United States suddenly feels very far from Washington’s ideal.

It’s easy to attack Trump’s parade on practical grounds. After all, it comes at a moment where America’s finances are a mess, and the military itself is declining. The Navy recently announced that it is scaling back plans to purchase new ships, cutting its shipbuilding budget for the coming years by nearly half. The hope is that Congress will find supplementary money somewhere to make up for these cuts, but it’s a signal that things are still going in the wrong direction, and that the US is in fact losing readiness in the Pacific theater rather than gaining it. All that obviously makes Saturday’s $45 million festivities hard to justify, especially when DC isn’t built to handle the massively heavy M1 Abrams tank, potentially damaging the city’s roads.

More from this author

America’s military humiliation

By Malcom Kyeyune

In truth, though, the real impact here is theoretical. As George Washington so vividly showed, America has always prided itself on its soldier-citizen ethos, where service inside the military was a civic duty that transcended party or faction. In this, the US modeled itself on Rome. The Roman Republic, just like its American successor, was proud of keeping the generals out of politics. In the Roman case, that ethos was slowly undermined from within, as the growth of the city’s nascent empire caused the military to shift in both size and social makeup. The Marian reforms, meant to make the Roman army more effective, also had the effect of making military service a career for a certain social strata of Roman society rather than a civic duty for every citizen. Thus transformed, the military quickly became just another tool to be used by ambitious politicians like Caesar, who used legions personally loyal to him to overthrow the Republic.

The risk of following down the same route occupied the minds of America’s Founding Fathers, and they had a healthy distrust of standing armies as a result. Well, America’s military has now undergone the exact same transformation that Rome’s military once did: starting as a small, ad hoc citizen-soldier militia, then growing in size to deal with larger and larger battles, only to become a permanent institution staffed by career soldiers with very little understanding of the vicissitudes of civilian life.

Thus, rather than being a simple celebration of America’s vaunted military, the parade being planned for this weekend is a source of some cultural unease. That the Founding Fathers themselves wouldn’t have liked it all that much is probably a foregone conclusion, but the fact that it coincides with the President’s own birthday further blurs the line between the Republic and the leader at the top of it. It’s ominous, too, that the anti-Trump protests being planned to coincide with his parade are now billing themselves not as being against wars, or against the US military, but against the coming of any American kings.

Here, too, there is a resemblance between Rome and America. Rome, in its early days, saw a rejection of kings as one of its most foundational aspects; to be a true Roman was to be a member of a republic, not merely a member of an ethnic tribe on the Italian peninsula. The same sort of identification has been equally important to Americans: to be an American monarchist is a contradiction in terms, in a way that an Italian or Serbian monarchist wouldn’t be. As Republican senator Rand Paul recently put it: “We were always different than the images you saw from the Soviet Union or North Korea. We were proud not to be that.” Now, though, as political polarization increases, and Americans lose trust in their own institutions, these once obvious differences seem to be vanishing.

None of this is helped by the military’s actions elsewhere. That’s especially true in California, where anti-ICE riots have led the President to nationalize parts of the state’s National Guard, taking away control from Governor Gavin Newsom. Even more strikingly, the White House also announced that it would both deploy thousands of Guardsmen to the streets of Los Angeles, to be joined by active duty Marines.

To say that this is controversial would be a massive understatement. It’s long been accepted convention that the National Guard shouldn’t be deployed over the heads of sitting governors. The last time this happened was roughly 60 years ago, at the height of America’s desegregation crisis, when President Eisenhower used the military to enforce school integration. And even then, civil rights represented a truly monumental political crisis. That’s in stark contrast to the unrest in LA — which doesn’t appear serious even compared to the George Floyd protests. No wonder Newsom has taken to the airwaves, essentially saying that the constitutional order of America is being broken by Trump’s arbitrary use of America’s military, and suggesting that the country is now devolving into tyranny.

These are heated words, to be sure, but they do get at something real. There is, after all, something quite strange about the way in which these troops are being used. Quite aside from the lack of historical precedents, the actual riot in the City of Angels doesn’t seem to be especially severe. After being theatrically mobilized, California’s guardsmen are now sitting about doing nothing: the Pentagon couldn’t handle the paperwork needed to actually pay them. The 500 Marines, for their part, were called up in equally dramatic fashion. But then they failed to even appear in LA, pending several days of extra training. In a sense, that’s unsurprising. Marines are combat troops, unsuited for domestic policing. Yet, rather than sending out a detachment of military police, Trump instead went with the bruisers.

Just like in Rome, then, what were once America’s citizen-soldiers are now increasingly becoming mere pawns for grubby power plays. And if Trump’s antics have sparked a political storm, with other Democratic governors signing an open letter in support of Newsom, what’s to say Trump won’t employ similar tactics elsewhere? With the anti-ICE protests spreading to New York and other cities, and Texas already calling up its own National Guard to deal with its own protests, using troops to settle domestic law enforcement issues is about to become the new norm.

More from this author

Trump’s Gorbachev moment

By Malcom Kyeyune

That matters — if nothing else for the Army’s own character. One of the strongest political traditions inside America is the very clear line between the military and partisan politics. That line is clearly being blurred by these deployments, and they’re not the only example. In a recent visit to Fort Bragg, for instance, Trump gave a speech to an audience of soldiers where he managed to whip up audible boos against Governor Newsom. At first, this might have appeared as a completely organic show of support, a sign that the troops were so exhausted of liberal politicians that they were willing to break decorum.

But as journalists reported later, the entire event was in fact a stage-managed ploy. Internal memos from inside the 82nd Airborne show that Trump’s audience was screened in advance. People who, for whatever reason, didn’t agree with his policies were told to talk to their unit commander, and request to excuse themselves from participating. Fat soldiers were apparently also banned from participating, presumably because they didn’t look photogenic enough. In ordinary times, a soldier cheering or booing a politician for any reason would be harshly punished: the Pentagon has long-standing rules against that sort of thing. The fact that indiscipline was not only indulged by encouraged is therefore remarkable, particularly given Trump was accompanied to Fort Bragg by a vendor hawking MAGA merchandise to the assembled troops.

Unsurprisingly, that in and of itself broke many internal Pentagon rules aimed at preventing open displays of partisanship. But once again, the real shift is in mindset. To anyone unfamiliar with the US military, soldiers cheering, jeering, and booing a politically partisan speech might not seem like a big deal. But the US military, and especially its officer class, was — until recently anyway — sincerely proud of its detachment from politics and its dedication to civil service without fear or favor.

To be fair, Trump isn’t the first president to try to entangle the US military in partisan political fights. Joe Biden did so too, delivering a fiery speech in late September 2022, attacking Donald Trump as a budding authoritarian while flanked by two Marines in dress uniform. But those Marines, at least, were mercifully silent, while Republican criticisms of Biden’s actions were scathing. Today, less than three years on, Trump himself is now envisioning a role for America’s servicemen that goes far beyond what Biden ever dreamed of. Combined with Saturday’s parade, one thing is clear: America’s traditional relationship with its own military is slowly crumbling. What that means for the future of Washington’s republic is anything but good.

Inevitably, the squabble played out on social media, where both parties proceeded to denounce each other in increasingly rabid terms. Musk accused Trump of being a hypocrite, a man who pretended to care about the US budget deficit while conspiring to make it worse. He said that Trump ought to be impeached and replaced by his vice president, JD Vance. Trump, meanwhile, hit back saying that the real problem with federal deficits was all the unearned subsidies and corporate welfare that Musk was leeching from Uncle Sam. And Steve Bannon piled on calling for Musk to be deported back to South Africa and have his citizenship revoked. By now, the love-in on the White House lawn, with Trump advertising Tesla and Elon expressing devotion, is but a distant memory. Bridges have been burned; there will be no reconciliation.

Though the level of vitriol and undignified childishness of the bickering between the President and the world’s richest man has been shocking, nobody can say that they didn’t see it coming. For weeks, the media has been reporting on the growing discord between Musk and the administration, primarily over the trade war. And other parts of Trump’s coalition — including billionaire and megadonor Bill Ackman — have made their dissatisfaction with the economic policies increasingly clear.

But the “big, beautiful bill” was the final straw. After spending a hundred days talking about fiscal responsibility, the danger of the exploding deficit, and suffocating levels of debt, Trump and his Republican Party made one of history’s greatest political U-turns and endorsed a bill that made all of these problems spectacularly worse. Adding insult to injury where Musk is concerned, the budget bill terminates nearly all ongoing subsidies for EVs, while leaving the corporate welfare handouts for internal combustion engines in place. Clearly, no good deed in Washington ever goes unpunished: after sacrificing his own reputation on the Trump altar, Musk has been rewarded with a knife slipped between his precious Tesla’s ribs. Some Democrats, sensing opportunity, are already calling for Musk to return to the fold.

More from this author

DOGE has devoured Musk

By Malcom Kyeyune

But the dramatic collapse of a part of Trump’s political coalition isn’t just the result of two narcissists’ clashing egos. It signifies a deeper shift. Washington, after all, is intensely transactional; if you donate large sums of money to a party, you naturally expect to get something in return. Given how incredibly spendthrift Elon Musk has been, it is extremely noteworthy that he would end up being denied access to the pork barrel. This is not, however, a sign that Congress has decided to reject corruption — the existence of the big, beautiful bill is proof enough that the swamp has only gotten worse. No, the messy divorce is a sign that the political process — even the process of ordinary political corruption — is starting to break down.

Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, are getting queasy because the bill essentially represents a capitulation in the face of looming fiscal disaster; a resolution to simply sail the Titanic straight into the iceberg. The Trump administration sold itself as the last chance to try to steer the ship to safety before America’s state finances collapsed. But instead of changing course, Trump and the GOP actually decided to throw more coal into the boiler and go full speed ahead.

This time around, their fiscal profligacy has not been without consequences. The bond market is already wobbling, as weakening demand for more dollar debt slams head first into a state that is poised to gorge on even more unsustainable borrowing. Combined with a capricious and almost arbitrary economic war against the rest of the world, weakening America’s internal economy while alienating allies and making them less willing to bail America out from its fiscal irresponsibility, and you see the makings of a perfect storm.

The parallels between this crisis and the one that triggered the French Revolution of 1789 grow ever stronger. Elon Musk has played out his role as America’s Jacques Necker to its conclusion; he has gone from rockstar technocrat enjoying widespread popular support to spurned sidekick whose attempts at reform were frustrated and blocked by the very people who brought him in in the first place. The French monarchy did actually try quite hard to escape its looming bankruptcy during its last years in power; but, just like with DOGE, those reforms became more and more chaotic and even tyrannical or illegal towards the end, as the political system slowly collapsed into acrimony and infighting.

Meanwhile, in America, as the “big, beautiful bill” kills off even the pretense that Trump is working to forestall financial disaster, and with Congress so gridlocked and the political system so polarized and dysfunctional, there’s only really one politics left that still works: the politics of executive fiat. With Trump taking the same path as Louis XVI, will he suffer the same fate?

Certainly, his administration is going to go down fighting; as it loses many of the battles it began this term by initiating (the trade war, peace in Ukraine and the Middle East), it is simply picking more. Trump kicked off this term declaring war on illegal immigrants and the federal bureaucracy, and even though neither has gone well, he’s also declared war on Harvard University. Perhaps, though, this impulse to constantly pick new fights is perhaps less irrational than it appears. America is going broke, Congress no longer works, laws can barely be passed, and the bureaucracy itself is slowly failing. The only way to cut spending in that environment is by resorting to semi-tyrannical executive action.

Suggested reading

The decline and fall of MAGA

By Ross Barkan

While the official rationale behind the war on institutions like Harvard, or research funding more generally, often cites issues such as antisemitism, or wokeness, or DEI, it’s increasingly clear that the money withheld will never be restored. While this stand-off between Trump and the institutions could be described as a culture war spun out of control, or a distraction from other failures, it is also, in truth, a sort of improvised bankruptcy proceeding. When the Soviet Union slowly went to pieces, the same thing happened: at first, the money simply stopped coming, and only later did people belatedly realize that this was the new normal, and the money would not be coming back. In truth, there is no other way to even attempt to cut spending in America right now; Congress is simply incapable of doing the job.

Perhaps, five months ago, it was possible and indeed reasonable to talk about Trump’s administration in terms of “will they fix it or won’t they?” There was momentum and DOGE held a threatening promise. But today, the man who embodied that reform is now openly denouncing his former political allies and the system has proved resistant.

The President, meanwhile, is openly threatening some of America’s most dynamic companies, because of personal animus. Tesla and SpaceX, whatever their flaws, still represent an area of genuine industrial innovation in America, at a time when deindustrialization has devastated it. Destroying Tesla out of pique or petty revenge won’t do America any good, but one gets the sense that “doing good for America” is not really on anyone’s agenda any more.

In fact, in response, Biden authorized not one but two military campaigns. The first was Operation Prosperity Guardian, which aimed to combine US naval power with a coalition of willing states to protect shipping and break the blockade. That fast turned into an embarrassing debacle, as most of the coalition partners walked away and ships kept getting hit by Houthi missiles. And so, in January 2024, Operation Poseidon Archer was launched, which involved British as well as American aircraft attempting to bomb the Houthis into submission. Here again, the operation was unsuccessful, doing almost nothing to dent Houthi attacks or open up the Red Sea to shipping. But even then Biden was blamed; the mighty US military was being held back somehow. Thus, the natural conclusion was that once Trump was in office, the gloves would come off.

Biden’s critics were actually half right. Once Trump came in, the gloves did come off. Operation Poseidon Archer was followed by Operation Rough Rider, in March of this year, which attempted to show a new, much more muscular American military response against Houthi targets in Yemen — for all of six weeks. For six weeks, US warplanes pounded Yemen around the clock, with rare and expensive stealth bombers flying missions out of Diego Garcia in support of carrier-based aircraft. Yet once those six weeks were up, Trump proudly announced that Yemen had “surrendered” and that there was no more need for the US to keep up the bombing. A ceasefire had been brokered by Oman. This was trumpeted as a glorious victory for the US military, with the Houthis finally promising to not attack US ships anymore, and America graciously returning the gesture.

Of course, Trump didn’t mention the terms of the “surrender”. The Houthis only had to stop attacking American ships in exchange for America stopping the bombing; they were free to continue blockading the Red Sea or firing missiles at Israel. America, in other words, had given the Houthis carte blanche to carry on the behavior that was the reason America had gone to war in the first place. Thus, to call this deal a surrender was entirely appropriate; it’s just that it wasn’t the Houthis hoisting the white flag.

It is very commonplace to blame reversals and even defeats in America’s various wars of choice as merely a matter of lack of will. If America really wanted to win, it would win, the story goes; the failure of the US is just one where it never commits the force necessary to finish the fight. But today, that excuse rings hollow. Trump’s Operation Rough Rider, unlike Biden’s operations, utilized many of America’s most limited, expensive, and advanced weapons to try to bring the Houthis to heel. And still it surrendered. The lessons here are thus quite bleak. America’s preferred and increasingly only viable method of warfare — aerial warfare — is no longer cost-effective nor practical. But the US has no alternative modes of warfare to fall back on, which means that its days as a military hegemon are probably coming to a close.

To understand just how big a mess the air war against the Houthis has turned out to be, it’s important to understand a very basic rule to US military inventories. For while, on paper, America has 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, an impressive figure that far outstrips any other country on the planet, that top line figure is barely relevant in practice.

Suggested reading

The fantasy of British defence

By Aris Roussinos

For comparison, look to the United Kingdom. The UK has two large aircraft carriers, putting it near the top of the international leaderboard when it comes to the ability to project military force. But as anyone with any familiarity with the Royal Navy can tell you, that number does not tell the real story. The number of carriers the UK can actually deploy is far lower, a number which is fairly close to zero. For while the ships exist, the Royal Navy lacks the crew, the planes, the escorts, and the logistical capacity to actually put them to use for any length of time in a real war. The UK Navy has become something of a Potemkin village, where superficial on-paper strengths hide a catastrophic reality of deferred maintenance, insufficient budgets, and lack of personnel.

Though the situation for the US Navy isn’t quite as dire, in practice, the problem is the same: it cannot realistically put more than two to four carriers to sea at any given moment. The ability to surge capacity in times of crisis is limited, because the various reserve components of the US armed forces have catastrophically atrophied. If you discount the American carriers that are slated for the scrapyard, or those currently lacking a functional nuclear reactor, or those which are tied up in deep maintenance, the number of active, usable carriers is roughly a third of the on-paper number. Half of those carriers were being used against the Houthis.

But carriers are not the only example we ought to look at. For Operation Rough Rider, the US Air Force contributed some six B-2 Spirit stealth bombers, arguably the most advanced (and by far the most expensive) airframe in the US arsenal. At first blush, this seems like only a fraction of America’s power, because it has some 20 such bombers in its inventory. But a closer look at these planes suggests that those six used in Rough Rider very likely represent the entire working inventory of US stealth bombers. Because B-2s haven’t been built for decades, the only way to keep them operational is to cannibalize other B-2s for spare parts: as a result, a large number have been functionally scrapped and cannot ever hope to fly again. Only half of US bombers even qualify for so-called “mission capable” status on an average day, a status which doesn’t actually mean that the plane works; it simply means the plane isn’t completely broken and inoperable. Only two thirds or fewer of those mission capable planes can hope to qualify for what the US military instead classifies as “full mission capable” status. “Full mission capable” is your standard Pentagon-speak; it means the plane is in working order, has nothing broken that’s really important, and can realistically be used for what it was built for.

From carriers to stealth bombers, the pattern here is fairly clear, and it is further corroborated by testimonies from inside the Pentagon itself. America essentially pulled out all the stops to attack the Houthis, waging an extremely expensive and intensive air war against a militia controlling most of Yemen, the fourth-poorest nation in the world. The cost to operate a B-2 stealth bomber is extremely high on a per-hour basis; and their fragile stealth coating is not particularly fond of the warm, salty sea air at Diego Garcia. You don’t send in all of them unless you really mean business. America also committed roughly half of its active carriers, spent a fortune in land attack and air defense missiles, and it even cannibalized ammo stores and air defense systems from the Pacific theater of operations for the sake of the operation.

Suggested reading

Europe needs a new Great Power

By Edward Luttwak

But as the stories of the campaign start leaking to the press, it’s clear that none of this effort did anything good. The US couldn’t establish air supremacy, meaning it couldn’t risk flying its older, non-stealth planes for fear of losing them. This itself might seem like proof that America was once again just not trying very hard; for what kind of war is it when you’re not ready to accept losses? But the problem is, America can’t afford to replace planes that get lost and pilots that get killed. This is not a problem of cowardice, but of force generation: even if the US military suffers zero losses due to enemy fire in the years ahead, it is still slated to shrink precipitously. This shrinkage and loss of capacity is just due to America’s planes and ships wearing out, with not enough workers, dockyards, engineers, and dollars to replace them. As America burns through its massive military inheritance bequeathed by Ronald Reagan and the Eighties arms race, there is no plan to replace it. For the US military, avoiding casualties is not a matter of caution or cowardice; it is the result of a total inability to replenish the force.

The result of this American Achilles’ heel has been an extremely expensive reliance — when it has come to defending the Red Sea — on so-called “standoff” weaponry; cruise missiles, for example, that can be launched from far enough away that anti-air fire won’t be a threat. But even then, there were problems: according to leaked reports, even the vaunted F-35 stealth fighter had to dodge incoming anti-air missiles on at least one occasion. In Operation Rough Rider, the US deployed many of its most rare and bespoke weapons, such as the AGM-158 JASSM (Joint Air-To-Surface Standoff Missile) as well as heavy, specialized bunker-buster bombs. Again, by all accounts, this had little effect. Partly, this was because the US kept losing so many of its MQ-9 reaper drones, which come with a price tag north of 30 million dollars apiece, and which were supposed to provide the intel to ensure the bombing campaign found its targets.

When Biden first lost interest in defending the Red Sea against the Houthis, people were aghast. Not doing enough was akin to telling the entire world that the US was too weak to keep the Suez channel open. But Trump, after berating his predecessor, has also walked away, and de facto recognized the Houthi’s control of the channel. It would seem that the US doesn’t actually have many cards to play.

Trump could have sent another carrier to the region in support of his operation, bringing the total up to three. But this would hardly have made much difference to the air campaign because the problem with this offensive wasn’t lack of deck space or fighter sorties — US planes were too wary to go anywhere near Yemen’s air defense, and even stealth jets were reportedly not entirely safe. The problem was the lack of standoff munitions which can be deployed from a point of relative safety. But these are so expensive and so limited that there is no budget to replenish them when stores are depleted (a single JASSM with a 450 kilogram explosive warhead comes in at slightly under a million dollars). Wargames show the US running out of most or all such critical munitions in a matter of weeks or even days in a real conflict against a peer enemy such as China.

Even worse, much of the US military’s most advanced weapons systems are dependent on components and materials such as rare earths from China, which has already started imposing harsh export restrictions in order to slowly choke the life out of the US military industrial complex. In practice, the US does not have the economy to produce the weapons used for aerial warfare at any sort of scale, and this has only been hidden from full view because the military has coasted along on an aura of invincibility.

As the appetite for ground warfare has waned, the allure of quick, cheap and easy air campaigns has grown. But air warfare is no longer what it once was. Operation Rough Rider was supposed to be a decisive show of force against an under-equipped, internally divided third-world nation. Instead, it ended up looking like the last hurrah of a truly antiquated form of warfare, unable to cope with cheaper and better anti-air weapon systems.

All of these limitations make the current talk about a new bombing campaign against Iran utterly surreal. Iran is far bigger than Yemen, with a much more robust air defense network. Moreover, the distances involved are such that carrier-based aircraft, even when launched from the very shores of the Persian Gulf, can’t actually reach places like Tehran and return on a single tank of fuel. Fighter-bombers will need aerial refueling over the Iranian interior, and tanker planes are slow, easy to spot on radar, and pretty much defenseless. Even attempting to destroy the Iranian air defense network will take huge amounts of precision standoff weaponry, which the US cannot practically replace, even if it weren’t struggling with a massive fiscal crisis and soaring bond yields. The critical parts of Iran’s nuclear program are kept under hundreds of feet of solid mountain; the US, using the heaviest and most advanced weapons in its entire arsenal, did not succeed against the much shallower Houthi bunkers and missile storage facilities in Yemen. All of the problems that forced America’s tacit surrender of the Suez canal would be writ large — and be far more lethal — in any campaign against Iran.

With exploding deficits, a growing internal political crisis, and a slowly collapsing military, America is a leopard that lacks the wherewithal to even attempt to change its spots. The generals know that the jig is up: the old model is broken, there is no new model coming, and nobody has the energy left to do much about it all. And so, this massive crisis of US military power is playing out in the vein of Ernest Hemingway’s comment about the course of his own bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly.

Once upon a time, there was always a bigger plane, a more advanced high-tech future weapon, yet another trick up the Air Force’s sleeve that you could point to in order to silence the doubters. But those days are over. The gravity of what happened in Yemen will only assert itself once the political class is ready to deal with the new world we are now living in: one in which the US has no new military rabbits to pull out of its hat, and those that it does have simply aren’t enough to get anywhere close to victory.

The world of federal employment in America is almost a separate society. It has its own culture, its own acronyms, rules and concepts that appear foreign and opaque to those outside it. At a time of massive demographic shifts, of illegal immigration and the importation of guest workers — which have conspired to radically alter the workplace for both American blue- and white-collar workers — the federal workforce appears almost as an anachronism. Outside this walled garden, to be a worker or an employee in the year 2025 is to be an economic unit, a cog in a machine, one that can be replaced or fired at will. When a company in the private sector lays off its workforce and replaces it with foreigners, that is simply shrewd business management: it is replacing one human widget with a cheaper one in Bangalore. But even as these crass economic forces ravaged much of America, the federal workforce has managed to (mostly) stand apart.

Partly, the good fortune of federal workers comes down to the sheer inertia of the system and all the rules that protect them. But another factor is a matter of a widely held and genuine belief: a worker in the private sector may only be measured in terms of economic value, but in the public service things are different. To work in public service is to be a civil servant: it is to maintain and fulfill the grand republican experiment America started some 250 years ago.

Replacing an American coder with one from Bangalore is one thing; replacing an American civil servant with a foreigner or a computer is quite another. Once you reduce a society to numbers and cents, you no longer have a society. Among federal workers, this is the common refrain: you might not get paid nearly as much as somebody in the private sector, but you will be a part of something else, something you can’t really put a dollar value on. Until, that is, DOGE entered the picture.

When DOGE fires people, it deploys at least two distinct methods. The first is by its nature both wide and sweeping, with very little distinction made between useful workers and the “dead weight”. Essentially, it is the mass firing of those on probationary status, meaning that the usual job protections do not apply to them. In theory, these workers seem like a pretty natural place to start if one wants to “cut the fat”, but in practice it’s both awkward and destructive. It’s not just new workers who are on probation, but others too for various reasons — those who have been recently promoted, for example.

More from this author

Trump’s Gorbachev moment

By Malcom Kyeyune

It is these untargeted mass firings — done simply because of a quirk of the legal system that regulates federal employment — that have led to the many cases where DOGE has had to apologize and walk back their decisions. Air traffic controllers weren’t fired by DOGE because they were all “woke”, or because they were all “unproductive” or surplus to requirements. They were fired, rather, because someone on the other side of the country hit a few buttons on a keyboard. No human judgment is applied: the useless woke DEI hire is arguably much more likely to be spared from DOGE than the Trump-voting hard working conservative, simply because the latter might have recently been promoted.

There is, however, another kind of DOGE activity, one that does have the personal touch. This I witnessed first-hand during my stay in Washington, over at the GSA, when the DOGE boys moved into the top floor of the building and did the cull in person. The entrance was covered up in police tape, and employees had to pass through a security checkpoint manned by a dozen armed guards, emptying out their coffee cups and putting their coats in trays for the x-ray machine, all ostensibly to prove they weren’t carrying bombs or other weapons. This was billed as a measure to protect DOGE as they went about their work, clearing out a fairly obscure agency staffed by accountants and legal clerks.

To grasp what makes DOGE’s “on-site” activities so peculiar, it’s useful to understand the basic laws and norms regulating mass layoffs inside the federal government. These layoffs fall under what is called a “RIF”: short for “Reduction In Force”. Under normal circumstances, agencies that are hit by an order to reduce their headcount by a certain number — say 30% — are supposed to list all their employees in a spreadsheet, where each employee is “scored” according to veteran status, length of employment and performance reviews. Once personnel has been listed, the agency heads then work up from the bottom until they reach the so-called “cut line”. If that’s our hypothetical 30%, that means that the worst-performing third of all employees must go. There are some quirks and exceptions — in some cases employees might be able to accept a reduction in salary rank in exchange for staying on — and departments will always try to make sure that institutional experience is still retained, avoiding situations where everyone with a certain function gets fired all at once.

In theory, RIF can accommodate even extremely large government cuts: it is designed to preserve talent and make it easy for the show to go on. But what DOGE has done at the GSA, the OPM (Office of Personnel Management) and other specific agencies where Elon Musk has taken a personal interest is quite different. Instead of caring too much about the total force reduction, DOGE has been firing all workers within particular areas of different departments. This can be done pretty easily by arbitrarily redefining people doing a certain job as being part of a discrete “competitive area”, and then setting the cut line at 100%.

This assault has almost nothing to do with the story that was sold about DOGE: getting rid of waste, fraud and abuse, and fighting the woke deep state. Indeed, the General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management both stand a decent shot of being the least woke agencies in Washington. They are both fairly obscure and concerned with boring, practical work; they also enjoy markedly low social status within the federal hierarchy, unlike the arrogant high-rollers in places like USAID.

More from this author

MAGA's divisions can't be healed

By Malcom Kyeyune

So why pick the GSA rather than somewhere more “woke”, somewhere more traditionally associated with the so-called deep state? Well, because this is where one goes if one wants to asset-strip the federal government. Shortly after DOGE moved into the GSA, and started firing pretty much everyone, the GSA posted an extraordinary list of buildings they had supposedly identified as “non-critical”. This list (which was later revised, and then taken down entirely) actually included close to half of all properties owned by the federal government, including buildings like the FBI headquarters and the Department of Justice building. The GSA added that it was now open to “creative solutions” to go along with these sales, including the idea of leasing back these properties once they had been sold.

Of course, when DOGE itself wants to talk about its big accomplishments, this clumsy attempt at Yeltsin-style looting of public property is not even mentioned. Instead, its social media posts are filled with claims that it’s rationalizing procurement.

The other departments that Musk has taken a personal interest in follow a similar pattern. Rather than homing in on targets that look “woke”, Musk and DOGE have been concerned with the most boring and least prestigious areas of the federal government, those that have to do with things like Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request processing and federal contracting. Musk’s interest in the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and his targeted firings of employees there coincided with a public attempt to try to get the Administration to assign a $2.7 billion contract — previously awarded to the telecom giant Verizon — to his own Starlink company. Similar controversies were reported involving federal contracts for Tesla-made cars, most bizarrely an attempt to get the State Department to spend some $400 million on bulletproof cybertrucks as consular vehicles. Given that the kinds of countries where bullet-proof consular cars are in demand tend to be located in the developing world, the idea of splurging on armored electric vehicles is quite odd: Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo are not known for having many charging stations.

In most cases where DOGE has arrived in person to try to cajole or strong-arm people into looking the other way, the end result has ultimately been failure. The GSA had to dump its initial attempt to sell off good federal property at fire-sale prices; the FAA couldn’t just give a preexisting contract to Starlink; and the cybertruck deal was abandoned when journalists started getting hold of the story. And therein lies the problem: while it might be relatively easy to cut federal benefits for the elderly or the disabled, messing with federal contracts is a whole different ball game. The armed guards at the GSA building weren’t there to protect the DOGE employees, so much as to prevent fired people from returning to the building in order to transmit any sort of institutional knowledge to those that were still left. It looks like, in these instances, DOGE has waged a coordinated and surgical campaign against the accountants and white-collar janitors employed at the various agencies who control who gets the money and the contracts.

Elon Musk, though the world’s richest man, presides over a commercial empire that is sick and ailing. In this sense, he is just like so many others in the tech oligarchy that has become so central to Trump’s second term in office. Had the fire sale of federal property at GSA gone through, these are the people who would have bought all those federal buildings for cents on the dollar, lending them back to the government for a reliable permanent source of revenue. Tesla, Musk’s flagship company, is now in very serious trouble, and it’s an open question whether it even has a future if subjected to the pressures of the market. Tesla sales inside the EU are collapsing: a result of the rapid geopolitical polarization that the Trump administration has leaned into with its various attacks on traditional US allies. At the same time, competitors in China are eager to gobble up its market share. Musk’s other companies — Starlink, the Boring Company, SpaceX — either have relatively low revenues or are structurally dependent on money from the US government.

With DOGE, Musk had a tool that could potentially not just save America from the “woke mind virus” and the “deep state”, but also leverage his position in government to help his own companies. Alas, things haven’t worked out quite how he might have hoped.

What became obvious as I talked to federal employees was the genuine reason they felt bewildered, angry or depressed — and it wasn’t really to do with people being fired. Bill Clinton fired people, Obama fired people; many of those I talked to even admitted to having been cautiously optimistic or even welcoming of DOGE. The federal government had problems, there was waste and fraud; anyone who lifted a finger to address these issues was welcome in their book. What people expected, even hoped for, was a painful but necessary spring cleaning of the federal government, firing the unnecessary and getting rid of the dead wood. But what people actually got was something akin to China’s cultural revolution.

The advent of DOGE kicked off a period of chaos and uncertainty, the willful destruction of old rules and norms. Emails would land in certain workplaces saying that everyone was fired; only to then say that nobody was fired; only for another email to arrive two hours later saying that everyone was fired after all. These emails usually wouldn’t even be signed; bosses would be just as ignorant as their workers. Orders would come, be countermanded, then counter-countermanded.

I interviewed one person who had, in his own words, “gotten out” — that is he had accepted the offer to quit in exchange for severance pay made in Musk’s “fork in the road email” sent to every federal employee. Working at the US Patent and Trademark Office, this person should have been the last person on the list to feel the wrath of DOGE: not only do USPTO workers in his position not get paid unless they do work (USPTO is funded entirely through user fees), the Office itself is often a net contributor to the federal budget. In other words, these people make money for the US government, so any “efficiency” initiative or “reducing the deficit” attempt shouldn’t have anything to do with them. Yet the mood among this person’s coworkers was the same as everyone else: fear and uncertainty, and a constant barrage of ominous, often anonymous messages, presumably from Washington, about how they were next on the chopping block and would possibly get fired in the near future as scroungers and traitors to the republic.

What this particular ex-employee found most galling, however, had very little to do with DOGE itself. Rather, it was the feeling that, on a dime, people who he thought were his friends and ideological compatriots on the American Right could just instantly turn on them as yet another “enemy”. Stories like this are now fairly common, with many posted daily to the r/fednews subreddit, a place that’s become an impromptu gathering place for bewildered civil servants. At first, the subreddit’s rhetoric involved people hoping that “fraud, waste and abuse” would be targeted. But as time went on, the radical project of slashing the government has escaped all such boundaries.

But if DOGE was once the focal point of these radical cuts to the federal government, today that is arguably no longer the case. More and more departments are now falling victim to “traditional” mass layoffs, handled by their department heads and supervisors rather than by the young men from DOGE. The US Department of Agriculture; the Department of Health and Human Services; the Department of Veterans Affairs — even the Internal Revenue Service is now threatened with mass layoffs. At the same time, the Republican Party is trying to fire the people who bring in tax revenue to the government, while also promoting massive tax cuts. All this is happening amid rising spending on the military. While destroying its own fiscal position at home, in other words, the Trump administration has also set out to destroy the entire postwar system abroad.

Like so many other revolutions before it, the one that is now happening in America is beginning to devour its own favorite children. Elon Musk may have thought he was saving both his country and his own business empire by throwing himself into these purges and mass firings. But these days, he too is on the way out. The revolution inside the federal bureaucracy that he helped to spark has been followed up with a total revolution in trade. Trump’s tariff war is likely to have huge consequences for the US economy. For Musk in particular, it might just spell doom for Tesla. Unsurprisingly, the billionaire has been out in public picking fights with members of the administration — especially Peter Navarro, the most hardline pro-tariff member of Trump’s team — and advocating for a tariff-free zone between the US and the EU. Trump, in turn, has gone from doing Tesla advertisements on the White House lawn to saying that he only keeps Musk around because he likes him; he certainly doesn’t need him. Navarro, for his part, has fired back at Musk, accusing him of being not a manufacturer of cars but a mere assembler. Tesla, because it still needs to import some components from outside America, is in danger of failing the purity test.

When I started interviewing federal workers back in March, my first impression was that Musk was a cynical thief, trying to loot the American state in order to shore up his own companies. But far from being some sort of mastermind, he increasingly looks like a naive, even tragic, victim of a social upheaval far bigger than anyone could have foreseen just six months ago. While Musk was useful for selling the idea of making the government more efficient, it’s increasingly clear that the firings inside the government have now abandoned that pretense. The amount of money DOGE hopes to save is now down to some $150 billion a year: barely enough to counter the announced boost to the Pentagon’s budget. At any rate, the fact that even the world’s richest man is not capable of shielding himself from the fallout of breakdown of the political order should be a warning to the rest of America.

In an ironic reversal of the Gorbachev situation, Trump is trying to turn a globalized, free-market America into a more controlled and locally-based economy. Like Gorbachev, Trump has gone so far as to translate that demand into harsh economic reality: stop importing things right now, or get crushed by tariffs. But the companies now expected to do their patriotic duty for Uncle Sam have absolutely no support from the state.

When push came to shove, Gorbachev didn’t really want much in the way of actual markets; he wanted all the market efficiency while still maintaining Soviet top-down control of the economy. Not able to handle the pull from these radically two different directions, the USSR economy broke apart, and soon the USSR itself went with it.

If Trump were on course to make his program work, he would be mimicking the way the Chinese government supports businesses that are affected by changes of policy. If the CCP were to decide that aluminum imports were suddenly unacceptable, companies using aluminum would be told where a new mine would be opened, which banks would lend capital to that project, which company would be in charge of construction, and when these companies would have to switch to being entirely domestically sourced. If they do not perform their patriotic duty, or if they actively harm the social stability of China, companies can indeed be destroyed or taken over by the state.

Suggested reading

DOGE is not radical enough

By Malcom Kyeyune

But there is still a social contract there: a deal in which both parties have duties and responsibilities. Trump has now suddenly and violently duplicated all the duties that companies in China might have toward their country, but he has done nothing to assume any of the responsibilities of the Chinese state. The result is a halfway house of sorts; one that is likely to simply destroy much of the American business community unless there is an immediate change of course.

America needs reform — who inside the country would even deny it at this point? On a purely abstract level, there are very few Americans who would oppose the idea of their country rebuilding its manufacturing capacity. But the current execution is akin to trying to do a sharp fighter jet turn while flying a slow and fully laden passenger plane. Whether due to a lack of time, energy, or care, Trump’s reforms are all being made with the chainsaw rather than the scalpel. Reforming the government bureaucracy has turned into firing tens of thousands of workers almost at random, leading to many mistakes and more inefficiency rather than less. Reforming America’s structural trade deficits, on the other hand, now looks like a Khmer Rouge death march for companies that are even partly reliant on components or raw materials from abroad. If you’re an American manufacturer, you should just buy American bauxite from an American bauxite mine, and then send it to an American aluminum smelter. If you cannot (the US currently has no operational bauxite mining) and your business collapses, then that’s not Trump’s fault, that’s your fault.

The practical details here — the fact that it takes 20 years to build a mine, but you’re somehow supposed to have it ready in 48 hours — are treated like they basically do not matter. In this way, Trump’s reforms clearly go way too far: the things he is asking American industry to do cannot be done. You can’t just impose huge penalty fees on a system of trade that America depends on to get its food and medicine and electronics and expect it to work out, and the end result of this policy is likely to be empty shelves and shortages: yet another parody of the late-stage Soviet Union. The systems we depend on have become too complex for us mere mortals to grasp; Trump seemingly neither has the patience or inclination to even try to understand them before transforming them utterly.

When asked what he thought of the ongoing stock market crash as a result of his tariff announcement, Trump recently said that, while he didn’t like the market going down, sometimes you simply had to take “medicine”. The Gorbachev years had its own, similar term: the USSR was to be saved through the application of “shock therapy”. Trump’s “medicine” here is just an inversion of Gorbachev’s own mix of totalizing reform and lethal indecisiveness. It’s an interesting choice of words, nevertheless: most kinds of medicine are just as capable of killing as they are of healing, if administered at the wrong dosage or the wrong time. The Soviet Union learned that lesson the hard way in the Eighties; now it may just be America’s turn.

But changing American industry is actually only a part of what Trump now wants to accomplish. His surrogates are starting to talk about the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency as a problem in and of itself. By tariffing everyone at the same time, and essentially taking a sledgehammer to the entire global trading system, Trump could conceivably end the dollar’s reserve status fairly quickly. But this is a truly monumental change that would touch upon the life of every person on the planet. What the effects of doing that would be, though, nobody really knows.

Even more stunningly, Trump is also planning on upending the infrastructure of trade itself, even as he’s declaring a tariff war on the rest of the planet. In just over a week, the US is now set to implement an incredibly radical change: ships that are made in China, or belong to companies who own a ship made in China, will now have to pay large penalty fees whenever they dock at a port in America. Ostensibly, this money will be used to re-create an American shipping industry. There’s just one problem: that industry simply doesn’t exist at present, and more than half of all the world’s ships are now made inside China.

None of what I’ve said is in any way an argument that America shouldn’t have tariffs, or that it cannot be reformed. It is only to say that these tariffs will not do what they’re supposed to do, and that these reforms will end up pushing America toward the very dissolution that people are trying to avoid. But America is now so hopelessly stuck in negative polarization that making such an argument is almost impossible. Right now, people are either for Trump or against Trump, and no more nuance than that is really in demand. To be against Trump but for tariffs, or for Trump but against these tariffs in particular, is to piss into the wind. Towards the end, the USSR was similarly polarized: the ability to discuss things across the social divide slowly dwindled, until all you could do was to simply pick a side.

Suggested reading

How DeepSeek triggered a tech tantrum

By Malcom Kyeyune

Unfortunately for America, the part where everyone simply starts picking sides has only just begun. If one considers the issue of Trump’s 2 April tariffs in terms of American domestic politics, it’s clear that the way in which they are being handled is a constitutional ticking time bomb. According to the constitution, issues of tariffs and taxation belong to Congress, not to the president. Congress has delegated power over tariffs to the president, but this delegation of power was meant to handle emergencies. Trump is of course claiming that the chronic trade deficits of America constitutes a sort of global emergency, but the critical point here is that this argument sits at the razor’s edge of what is even reasonable. One could easily make the argument that by deciding — as a single individual! — to change the entire world economic order and impose massive new de facto taxation on Americans, Trump has now taken the step from being a duly-elected president to being a sovereign and unaccountable king. Ominously, there’s probably quite a few Americans who would be fine with that idea.

Equally ominously, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, recently made noises about how his state might want to simply negotiate a separate trade arrangement with Asian economies rather than go along with Trump’s plans for American autarky. What Newsom is saying here is in fact openly seditious and completely unconstitutional, but to many opponents of Trump, his ideas are now far from unthinkable or even undesirable. It probably doesn’t even need to be said that the issue of tariff nullification played a significant part in the lead-up to the American Civil War. In fact, Newsom’s loose talk actually shows us that there now exists a viable, well-ordered path toward some sort of breakup of America. During the height of the Covid crisis, the federal government essentially lost control over the states, which ended up forming various ad-hoc regional organizations to coordinate their responses. These ad-hoc organizations at the regional level aren’t regulated in the constitution and are probably quite illegal, but in the heat of the Covid panic, none of that seemed to matter.

If the end result of these various dramatic Trump reforms is to break parts of the American economy, the pressure on Newsom and other blue state governors to do something will become increasingly urgent. If that happens, then it is not at all unlikely that blue states will once again come together into ad-hoc “confederacies”, which will then coordinate their policies, and even set their own trade policy vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Sure, this would be completely illegal; sure, the founders of America wouldn’t like it at all. But what does that even matter when you can say the same thing about the mad king trying to wreck the global economy? Nobody thought the Soviet Union could break up either, until one day it simply did.

Once a young nation, America is now old. Once the home of optimism, America is now despondent. The 250th anniversary of the great American Revolution is just a year away, but who knows whether there’ll be anyone left in the mood to celebrate. There is actually a non-zero chance the entire country might be in some form of bankruptcy or technical default on its debt before then; in fact, all of Trump’s reforms up until this point have only made the deficit situation worse, not better.

Given all this gloom, it is hard to fault Trump for flipping over the table. But in doing so, he’s not truly treading new ground. Today, just as happened a generation ago, a controversial man is suddenly upending an imperial system that has become too slow, too divided, and too indebted to survive for much longer. Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it — and Donald J. Trump has never been a man to care much about dusty old books.

To supporters and detractors alike, the Department of Government Efficiency promises to remake the republic. Already, the media is stuffed with lurid stories of teenagers accessing the US Treasury Department’s archaic payment systems, even as swathes of the bureaucracy have already been defunded. Given USAID alone boasted an annual budget of $40 billion, it’s clear change is coming, and that’s before Elon Musk’s outfit gets to the $500 billion of government spending supposedly “unauthorized” by Congress.

Yet if the Right heralds the demise of the pen-pushers, and their liberal opponents fear the rise of an American Caesar, the truth is far less impressive. Whatever the sluggishness of DC’s civil servants, DOGE barely scratches the surface of government spending. And besides, worrying about waste, let alone fantasy projects abroad, ignores the real problem — that US democracy is fundamentally broken, that Congress is incompetent, and that none of the country’s basic challenges, from immigration to jobs, can be solved by its exhausted class of ancien régime failures.

In basic terms, DOGE is Trump’s attempt to assert wider control over the way the government handles its finances. This flies in the face of well-established American norms. The US Constitution clearly states that the federal government is supposed to operate on a division of powers: appropriating money is meant to be the prerogative of the legislature in the form of Congress. It is Congress that decides what the government will spend money on, how much money to spend, and when to spend it. The role of the president is simply to handle implementation.

More from this author

What revolutionary France can teach Elon Musk

By Malcom Kyeyune

Trump and Musk argue that the discretion the president has in implementing the decisions by Congress should include the right to defund government agencies — if, that is, the president deems they’re not doing their job properly. Certainly, that’s the argument Trump’s lawyers are busy making, even as their claims wobble between acceptable political maneuvering and an unconstitutional power grab. Just a few weeks in, Trump and DOGE are unsurprisingly drowning in court challenges, injunctions, and other legal headaches. An increasing number of Trump’s supporters are getting impatient, clamoring for the day when he simply tells the judges to take a hike. As Andrew Jackson once said of a Supreme Court justice: “Marshall has made his decision, now let’s see him enforce it.”

At the surface, this feels like a very serious drama. The world’s richest man, an erratic and unaccountable billionaire, has been set loose on the federal government — boasting undefined powers to wreck the republic. The reality, though, is rather more mundane. To understand this, you must appreciate the scale of DOGE’s sweep. Yes, it’s easy to mock USAID for schemes such as the $70,000 spent on a “DEI musical” in Ireland. Yet when placed next to the full size of the national budget, Musk is conducting the administrative equivalent of scrambling about for change behind the sofa.

After all, the government today runs a deficit close to $2 trillion a year. To fund this deficit, it borrows roughly $10 billion each and every day. It’s important to realize here that while most countries do have some kind of national debt, the size and trajectory of America’s deficit is different. In 2000, the national debt was some $5.7 trillion dollars. In 2017, when Trump first took office, it was $20 trillion. Now, it’s over $36 trillion, putting unsustainable pressure on defense and social welfare costs. Even the most generous accounting of what Musk and Trump have achieved so far boils down to a few hours of US debt. And that’s if they can defend it all in court, and make it stick — and there’s no guarantee of that.

DOGE, in short, is a gimmick. Any meaningful control of US government spending can’t be attained through bureaucratic jiu-jitsu or legal trickery. To really cut the deficit, Trump would either have to literally crown himself king and abolish the Constitution, or else go to Congress and get them to actually do the job the Founding Fathers gave them. But Trump can’t do either of these things. If he simply ruled by decree, a polarized nation would explode into civil war. Yet, as bleak as that sounds, it might actually be more realistic than having Congress appropriate the funds. The legislature can nowadays barely pass the stop-gap, temporary funding measures it uses in lieu of actual budgets to prevent government shutdowns. The last time Congress passed all its required bills on time was in 1996, and over the last 40 years it has only managed to complete the appropriations process a grand total of four times.

Where, then, does that leave the president? In a word, trapped: in a political system collapsing round his ears. To take one practical example, consider the so-called “mass deportations” Trump promised pre-election, with his supporters hoping that once he assumed office, decades of illegal immigration could be upended in an orgy of raids and detentions. To a lot of Trump’s followers, deportation almost seemed like a matter of willpower: as long as you simply wanted it hard enough, anything could be done.

Yet once Trump was finally sworn in, nothing much happened. The administration initially promised to publish the daily number of arrests and deportations. Soon enough, though, people realized that Trump wasn’t doing a much better job than Joe Biden, let alone Barack Obama. The administration’s deportations are hitting a “wall” as the limitations of funding, facility space, and personnel become ever more acute. But the hype must go on: The Guardian even discovered the White House was gaming Google search results to create the illusion of activity, with old press releases given 2025 timestamps.

Eventually, the administration simply stopped talking about mass deportations. The stories that now do come out are mostly bad, and Trumpworld is back to doing what the President himself attacked Biden for: letting arrested illegal immigrants go free because of a lack of detention capacity. That gets to the heart of the problem. Building a detention center is less an act of will, and more about planning and resourcing. But the US government simply does not have the capacity to fulfill these dreams of “mass deportations” in the medium term. That would require additional officers and cells and aircraft, none of which the country ultimately has.

There are other examples here, too, from the Mexico border wall to reshoring jobs. All these projects require the legislature to cooperate, to pass laws and appropriate funds. But, again, it’s an open secret that what the Trump administration most dreads is having to abandon executive orders — which give the appearance of strength — and wrangle enough votes in the House and the Senate. When that happens, Trump’s mirage of strength will vanish.

In theory, of course, he could get Congress to find the cash to build his camps and finish the wall and bring the factories home. That, certainly, is what the legislature is there for. But, at this point, everyone knows Congress has become too broken to do the job, and its failures since 1996 are merely the start. First, consider the question of polarization. With politicians ever more focused on painting their opponents as evil, actually working together has become near-impossible. Then there’s that ballooning deficit. At this point, the threat of Weimar-style hyperinflation, or else a government default, hangs over Congress like the Sword of Damocles, as an increasing share of the federal revenues are gobbled up by debt servicing. At the moment, over 25 cents on every dollar that the federal government makes goes towards paying interest on its debt, leaving precious little for other things.

Add to that a gaggle of special interests — healthcare, for one, uses lobbying and campaign financing to keep state spending high — and America’s ledger remains grimly in the red. Like cutting the deficit, of course, Trump could simply stage a coup, placing a crown on his head and declaring that the wall will be funded and the factories built. But, once more, that’s not actually possible: most of the state apparatus would refuse to go along, to say nothing of how ordinary citizens would react.

Combined with the hopelessness of Congress, Trump’s recent obsession with tariffs, like DOGE, must therefore be seen as a sign of weakness. At first blush, that seems counterintuitive: someone constantly threatening to destroy Canada’s economy seems like someone positively drunk with power. Well, given the Constitution, Trump can’t raise taxes or appropriate money directly — but what he can do is impose tariffs on Ottawa, as long as he fibs and pretends it’s for national security reasons. That is one of the few remaining ways to raise cash now left to the man who claims to be the most powerful on earth.

More from this author

Hurricane Helene is America's Chernobyl moment

By Malcom Kyeyune

The US allies trying to parse Trump’s muddled messaging — “Is he angry about fentanyl? Does he want to annex us?” — are anyway overthinking things. America is broke, politics has frozen, and the system can’t function as the Founders envisioned. No less striking, paralysis is spreading through the whole government apparatus. By all accounts, the Republicans are having an extremely tough time crafting even a temporary spending bill that the party can agree on. A deal with Democrats, it goes without saying, is increasingly unimaginable.

All the while, the deficit is only rising. Even if Congress weren’t such a mess, a massive fiscal crisis is approaching, and Trump seems destined to be president when it arrives. This isn’t exclusively his fault, though he did very little to turn the ship around during his first term in the Oval. Rather, these crises are the result of decades of systemic mismanagement, with bickering politicians and special interests burrowed deep.

Even more worryingly, we’ve been here before. In 1788, France was also drowning in debt, and also had an executive desperate trying to correct the tailspin. No less striking, the Ancien Régime also had a legislature too broken to find solutions — but not so broken it couldn’t spend its time blocking attempts at reform. As for today, future historians won’t remember the squabbles around USAID: that just isn’t the story of our age. What matters instead is a financial system in ruins, a political class out of ideas, and the inevitability of a 1789 moment sooner or later.

Known as DeepSeek, this open-source model was released to the entire world for free, with pretty much anyone able to run their own DeepSeek server. That’s surely a positive development in the tech landscape, yet, as the news hit, it caused shock, then consternation, then a growing sense of panic. The certainties of the tech oligarchy were being shaken. The floor had fallen out of the bottom of their new economic model. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, so the saying goes — but in a supreme bit of irony, the Chinese, by releasing a product that was in fact free, caused one of the most expensive stock market disasters in living memory.

Nvidia, which up until recently was mostly known for making graphics cards for computer gaming enthusiasts, lost a whopping $600 billion dollars in market capitalization when the market opened on Monday. That’s the single biggest loss in human history. Nor was it the only company to suffer: stock market value far in excess of the entire Canadian economy was swiftly obliterated, all on the news that someone in China had managed to invent a slightly better chatbot. No wonder Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was miffed that China had copied his homework.

In truth, though, the tech market’s travails are only one piece in a grander geopolitical chess game. One of the reasons that AI has come to dominate so much of Western discussion is that, in the minds of many, it represented the last, best field where the West (and America especially) maintained a big lead over China. Insecurity over China’s rising industrial might can be found in every corner of Washington. With America slipping in so many other areas of this new cold war, AI was supposed to be their one definite trump card.

More from this author

MAGA's divisions can't be healed

By Malcom Kyeyune

Several factors helped build this narrative of Western AI dominance. To begin with, much of the technology and IP involved has traditionally been found inside the West, with China having to play catchup. In this regard, AI actually represents a sort of technological rearguard. After attempts to limit Chinese semiconductor manufacturing, and prevent them from dominating the telecom and 5G markets, production of graphics processing units (GPUs) remained an area where the US and its allies had a significant lead. In the final days of the Biden administration, then, America imposed severe export restrictions on these GPUs, conscious too that they’re the backbone of AI processing.

The problem, as it turns out, was that these limitations only made China stronger. DeepSeek’s main innovation is that it’s made incredible strides in economizing on GPUs and processing power, producing equivalent results to Western AI models at a fraction of the cost. This innovation, while in theory good for everyone, not only serves to level the playing field, but also undermines the West’s idea of how the future of AI would look: massive, hugely expensive data centers, soaking up more power than a small city, costing so much that only a few giants could afford to enter the market.

The other advantage the West was supposed to have here was innovation. In the common think-tank tale, regularly repeated KKKK, China was just too rigid, too controlled, too lacking in free thinking to ever invent something truly revolutionary. The Chinese could copy us, the story went, but true innovation was supposedly beyond their grasp.

With DeepSeek, that narrative is dead. KKKK.

Suggested reading

Will we embrace AI fetishism?

By Wessie du Toit

And if this model presages further Chinese transformations from KKKK to KKKK, it isn’t only in the realm of geopolitics that the new President has cause to worry. For Donald Trump, the launch of DeepSeek comes at an important time domestically. With the silicon valley billionaires now inside his tent, Trump has made a colossal bet on this de facto oligarchy, in the hope that they represented the economic and technological future of the country.

More to the point, Trump has made a point of embracing the promise that AI can save America, recently launching, with Altman, a new artificial intelligence firm. Stargate   was meant to unify America’s biggest tech giants behind a $500 billion AI infrastructure investment program — precisely the kind of infrastructure that DeepSeek now threatens to make completely redundant. Trump’s alliance with other tech giants, notably Elon Musk, is also well known, even as the chief executive has filled important bureaucrat posts with figures from SpaceX and Palantir. 

While that bet now looks far less safe, it also exposes another risky economic gamble. For decades, America’s industrialists have been increasingly loath to invest in factories, job training, or expanded production: it is simply more lucrative to plow revenues back into the stock market, buying up stocks and bolstering share prices. Certainly, that’s clear from the numbers. KKKK. And right now, a small number of tech companies — called the Magnificent Seven — make up a massive share of the entire US stock market, with valuations that are clearly indicative of a very serious stock market bubble. If that bubble bursts, the fallout risks derailing the entirety of Trump’s second term in office.

To understand America’s challenge here, compare it to one of its rivals. Russia’s Gazprom has half a million workers and countless facilities across the world. Nvidia, by contrast, has less than 30,000 employees. In theory, Nvidia is more valuable than Gazprom — not because of the value of its factories or staff, but because everyone believed it would become valuable sometime in the future. Looking to China, meanwhile, NVIDIA alone is worth over half the entire Shanghai stock exchange. Again, this “value” is only down to future expectations, derived from little more than hopes and dreams. 

What can Trump do? Probably not much. The nature of stock-market bubbles is that they eventually pop. More generally, though, AI represents only the latest in a failed defensive line held against China. America tried to go after Huawei, and though sanctions and export controls did serious damage to the company initially, the telecom giant adapted. Rather than crushing the Chinese telecom sector, indeed, America’s attempts to destroy the free trade system has only triggered more technological innovation. Semiconductors tell a similar tale, with China developing its own domestic chip industry at the expense of Taiwan. America keeps on getting beaten at its own game, only to stamp its foot in the unfairness of it.

But attempting to hold off the threat posed by a nation of 1.4 billion people, with an ancient culture and millions of Stem graduates, was always likely to fail. The problem facing the West today is not that it lacks the tools to “win” — it clearly does, given the ambition of its innovation — but that no one knows when the game is won. So all Washington’s political and economic energy is being channeled into increasingly expensive and desperate moonshots. AI was meant to be the trump card — until one day it was cloned.

In the end, of course, none of this is actually about AI itself. No matter how useful the technology, that’s distinct from the irrefutable logic of America’s financial bubble, a logic now more stark than before the Great Recession. If, or rather when, this bubble bursts, the political and social fallout will be immense. Obviously, the tech oligarchs are lashing out petulantly: China steals technology; China can’t really innovate; China is somehow “cheating” in the tech race — failing to see the irony that they too harvest data to build and improve their products. Essentially, though, the West’s problems have very little to do with Beijing, and more to do with our own systemic imbalances. 

In tying his fate so tightly to the tech sector, the President, has made himself and the country he leads, hostage to a literally huge fortune. Consider Nvidia. Even after its recent troubles, the firm sits on a market capitalization about the same size as the entire UK. Is this situation actually sustainable? No, it most definitely isn’t.

At the heart of this growing rupture are the two figures who just a short while ago were feted as genius reformers by much of the MAGA Right: Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk. Though Trump has always displayed an uncanny ability to walk away from controversy pretty much unscathed, the same cannot be said of Vivek and Elon. And while neither actually started this controversy, both have chosen to jump into the fray to become principal spokespeople for the pro-H-1B Silicon Valley set, thereby confirming the fears on the MAGA Right that Trump is about to “sell out” on immigration.

To say that this is a serious conflict is an understatement. In truth, the use — and abuse — of H-1B visas is about as hated by the Republican voting base as America’s tacit acceptance of illegal immigration as a way to dump working class wages. Musk and Ramaswamy are happy to regale us with stories about H-1B visas being crucial in order to draw in “the best and brightest” to America so that it can compete with China. But neither will publicly acknowledge the H-1B program’s most important and beguiling feature for American employers.

Because the key feature of the H-1B visa is not that it offers American employers and companies such as Tesla and SpaceX a chance to attract the world’s best and brightest. In fact, that function is already being fulfilled by the O-1 visa, which specifically exists to do just this job. The O-1 offers individuals with “extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics” a chance to work inside the United States; unlike the H-1B, the O-1 has no element of lottery to it, nor is it capped.

But the O-1 visa is meant for individuals; it can be used to bring over Nobel Prize winners and computer geniuses, and to secure one, you (or your employer) has to actually demonstrate that you possess some sort of extraordinary ability. H-1B, by contrast, offers access to a far larger number of far more ordinary workers. And these workers, once they arrive inside the United States, have almost zero bargaining power with their employer, because their visa is tied directly to their employment. An American programmer who is asked to work unpaid overtime cannot be deported from the country for saying “no”. A programmer brought over on a H-1B visa can; this makes him a far less demanding person to employ.

Suggested reading

The MAGA battle over foreign workers

By Lee Fang

This is not a big secret. As far back as in 2015, the way in which the H-1B program was being used to essentially replace American workers with indentured foreigners was well known. To take just one example, tech workers employed by Disney came to work one morning to find that they were all going to be fired. Their last task was to train their replacements, brought over courtesy of the H-1B program. So much for “best and brightest” rhetoric. When Wernher von Braun or Albert Einstein came to America, they did so because they were the trainers, not the trainees.

As the H-1B controversy has intensified, many Silicon Valley grandees — such as megadonor and billionaire David Sacks — have tried to defuse it by appealing to the idea of a grander common interest. Sure, maybe Silicon Valley and MAGA Main Street can’t actually agree on H-1B visas, but that has nothing to do with the issue of illegal immigration. But this framing is a sleight of hand, because both sorts of workers are essentially the same: functionally indentured servants, with very limited economic and political rights. And it is the end product here — the destruction of American living standards through the growing use of indentured foreign labor — that people are actually fed up with, not the legality or illegality of that process.

The real question here is not “does America need Einstein?” The actual core contradiction that is now tearing apart Donald Trump’s fusion of Main Street, middle-class populists on one hand, and billionaire CEOs on the other, can more succinctly be put as: “Does America need indentured labor?” Indentured labor force already exists for blue-collar work, which is why the Republican Party has never shown much interest in cracking down on large institutional employers of illegal immigrants. Now, the time has come for white-collar workers to be subjected to similar competition.

The tragedy is that the pro-H-1B faction is arguably correct, at least from their own point of view. If “America” really wants to “compete with China and Russia”, and if it really wants to “win against China”, H-1B visas are probably necessary. In this view, the expansion of all manners of legal or illegal channels of labor arbitrage is all but inevitable, and the deterioration of founding-stock American living standards is not just unavoidable, it is in fact necessary. It is necessary, because what is meant here by “America” is not a country for or by the American people. The “America” that can only “win against China” through large scale labor importation is not America the people: but America the empire.

And America today truly is an empire. If you put all the foreign military bases of China, Russia, India and Iran together, the sum total barely reaches two dozen. America, by contrast, has between 700 and 800. But it is visibly struggling to maintain those bases: its ships are rusting, its military recruitment is collapsing, its industrial base is rotten, and its finances are spiraling out of control. This effectively means that, in the natural lifecycle of empires, America is now firmly in the decline phase. That shouldn’t be controversial, especially because the amount of people who would protest that characterization — at least off the record — inside Washington itself is very visibly dwindling.

More from this author

What revolutionary France can teach Elon Musk

By Malcom Kyeyune

Thus, America finds itself in the same situation as pretty much every other empire on the decline, where it becomes increasingly necessary to cannibalize the very population that served as its original creators. Take the Roman Empire, which was carried by Roman martial virtue in the beginning and ended with half-barbarian generals commanding mostly barbarian soldiers, fighting to keep “Rome” going. Stilicho, the last effective general Rome had, was executed in 408. By 410, Alaric I and his Visigoths had sacked Rome. Of course, just a few years earlier, Stilicho and Alaric had been comrades in arms inside the Roman army.

The reasons the Romans trotted out for needing Alaric were more or less the same as what you’ll find being said in America nowadays. Rome had a recruitment crisis; Romans no longer had a proper work ethic; Rome needed to attract the best and brightest (or at least the strongest and toughest) if it wanted to compete in the world. The Roman people were a spent force; to keep “their” empire going, the actual Roman people were slowly replaced piecemeal until they essentially ceased to exist.

In the same way, the Ottoman Empire collapsed in large part because the Turks felt they were being bled dry in order to defend a sick and decrepit order that would replace them all in a heartbeat if that’s what it took to keep the state going for a bit longer. Before he was assassinated, in 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to what was once just called the Austrian Empire, planned to save it by transforming it into a sprawling federation in which the Austrians would just be a minor group among many. Talk to a Russian nationalist today, and it won’t take much cajoling to find that their most common cause of resentment toward the Soviet Union was how it — at least in their view — would put ordinary Russians last to prop up a global imperial project. No matter how far back we turn the clock, the story is always the same. Now, the time has come for the Americans.

One of the most aggressive preachers of this message — that the time has come for Americans to wake up and smell the coffee — has been Vivek Ramaswamy. He was, at one point, seen as a dutiful lieutenant to the broader MAGA movement; now he might have become its most loathed bête noire. In a very long post on X, Ramaswamy said the time had come for the American people to stop watching reruns of Friends, hanging out at the mall, and sending their girls to sleepover parties. No, such frivolous activities were no longer sufficient in today’s competitive world: if America wanted to “beat China”, the American people would have to become more Asian themselves, working far longer hours and subjecting their children to study regimens similar to Japan or South Korea. The fact that these cultures have collapsing birthrates and are essentially going extinct from stress and overwork did not earn much consideration from Ramaswamy; presumably, once that happens in America, the difference can simply be made up by even more immigration.

Even if this H-1B visa controversy blows over, it won’t solve the basic conflict within the MAGA coalition. For their slogan “Make America Great Again” represents an essential contradiction: there are at least two “Americas” being talked about. If, on the one hand, you mean the American people, then replacing these workers with Indians, or sending US military helicopters to the Middle East, instead of dispatching them to North Carolina for disaster relief, is anathema. If, on the other, you care about the survival of the American empire, then the demands of “legacy” Americans really do come across as increasingly petty: these people won’t even sign up for the military anymore, and yet they have the gall to complain at the idea of bringing in foreigners to serve as replacement legionnaires in their stead?

Sure, “Make America Great Again” is a great political slogan. But it is also one that Donald Trump and many people may come to regret, because it has long masked what is now exploding out into the open. There were always two Americas, two conceptions of the future hidden beneath those words. Today, each side in this fight is increasingly finding that the other’s conception of “America” is not just offensive, it is completely irreconcilable with their own. That, too, is a very old human story. These kinds of basic, definitional disagreements about the purpose or nature of a polity should be taken very seriously: they are, at the end of the day, why civil wars actually happen.

Yet on Monday, with Democrats still reeling after their unimagined electoral loss against Trump, they woke to the astonishing news that Biden had broken his promise. But should anyone have been surprised by the volte-face? In many ways, this was just the final flourish in the disastrous failure that has been his entire presidency.

Biden was a political no-hoper even before he got to the White House. He only won the presidency thanks to two outsiders unbalancing the political system: Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. As the 2020 presidential election loomed, the Sanders campaign emerged even stronger and more organised than in 2016. And, for a short while, it seemed like the progressive outsider might genuinely run away with the nomination. At this point, facing both Trump in the White House, and an insurgent from inside their own party, Democrats closed ranks and essentially crowned Biden their champion.

More from this author

What revolutionary France can teach Elon Musk

By Malcom Kyeyune

Yet faced with the nightmare of Trump to their Right, and Bernie to their Left, Democrats started rewriting the past. Biden was the father of the nation, the successor to George Washington and Abe Lincoln; he is a visionary the likes of whom hasn’t been seen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt with the reforming zeal of Lyndon B. Johnson. Never mind that Biden’s extreme pettiness, vengefulness, and covetousness were extremely well-known on Capitol Hill as far back as the Nineties and that even Barack Obama once quipped that you should “never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up”.

The political Left of the Democratic party — which hated and openly ridiculed Biden in 2020 — was passed a new hymn sheet. And then even Obama started singing from it. All of this was a lie, of course. But people couldn’t cope with the truth: America was burning.

The idea that Joe Biden was the man to put out the fire — that he would restore America to its former glory — was always a madness. All the same, it’s extraordinary to see how he has fanned those flames. The things he was elected to “fix” have simply got worse. Consider foreign affairs. It’s certainly true that the world is exhausted by the shambling corpse of the “rules-based” international order. But by his own action, Biden has made America’s diplomatic position worse by its action in Ukraine, the Middle East and over Nord Stream.

He’s also screwed the American economy. His inflation reduction act was supposed to combine muscular action on national security with concern for America’s working men and women, all in the form of re-shoring industry and greening the economy. But the IRA has proven to be yet another costly boondoggle, filled with roads and bridges to nowhere and subsidies that never seem to pay out. Like at the State Department, meanwhile, the fundamentals at the Fed make for bleak reading. Inflation is up, re-shoring is down, while the US military becomes ever more dangerously dependent on Chinese manufacturing.

Obama was right: never, ever, underestimate Joe Biden’s ability to fuck things up. But all these failures pale in comparison with a secondary much more subtle, almost spiritual failing of his presidency.

Ever since 2016, the sickness eating away at the American body politic has been cast in openly moral terms. Donald Trump is a bad, evil person, and it is his personal failing that’s slowly corrupting the land. This was always a dangerous fantasy: far from being the cause of the country’s problems, Trump was merely its symptom. Yet between his vulgarity and his vindictiveness, it was easy for liberals to blame the former businessman’s personal conduct for the slow unravelling of the American Empire. The lawfare against him during his first term, and the attempts to keep him off the ballot after 2020, all assumed that the Democrats were simply morally superior.

As a parting gift, Joe Biden has finally crushed this shallow morality tale. The forgiveness he’s shown his son is arguably the farthest-reaching pardon in all American history. The closest parallel is the pardon Gerald Ford offered to Richard Nixon — but even that only spanned the years Nixon was in office, rather than the entire decade bequeathed to Hunter. No less important, Nixon was actually president during Watergate, and could potentially be excused for thinking that the illegal things he did were legitimate exercises of power. It’s clearly much harder to make that case for Hunter Biden, a private citizen condemned for drugs and guns. Even worse, the start date of the pardon — 2014 — coincides with the time that the Biden clan got really involved in very shady dealings inside Ukraine. The fact that he is immunising his son from corruption charges that he himself is deeply tied up in is partly an act of Joe Biden pardoning himself.

What the Biden clan has accomplished here is banana republic-style corruption, pure and simple. Moreover, after using lofty rhetoric about how democracy was on the ballot, Trump was an evil fascist, and the future of America itself was imperilled, we now know that Biden went deliberately out of his way to sabotage the Kamala Harris campaign — out of sheer bitterness. So, either Biden never believed any of the stories he was selling, or he wilfully sought to doom America out of sheer meanness. Whatever the case, the upshot is clear: the Biden hagiography won’t survive even half a year of him being out of office, and people will need to reckon with the ashes of its political culture. Perhaps, finally, they’ll grapple with the idea that their problems can’t be blamed on the powers that be. The failures are too systemic for that.

Suggested reading

How Biden channelled his MAGA spirit

By Matt Huber

Unfortunately, root and branch reform now looks unlikely. The temptation to conjure fantasies and blame the moral failings of the enemy is too easy to resist. And it applies to both sides of the political divide. For just as America’s problems could not be fixed by attacking Trump or his supporters, the problems with the US military cannot possibly be solved by launching a crusade against “the woke”. Nor yet can the impending US sovereign debt crisis be prevented simply by skewering only the programmes that liberals are fond of.

Though it seems like Biden himself either did not believe in (or care about?) the rhetoric coming from himself and his party — that democracy was on the ballot, that the republican values of America were being destroyed, and that another Trump win could usher in a new era of political dysfunction — it’s not necessarily true that these were all just fantasies. The Trump years did see a massive loss of small “r” republican virtue in the US, though it’s very much up for debate whether Trump was the perpetrator or the victim of that process.

From 2016 to 2020, it’s quite easy to say he was the victim, but will that hold true for 2024 to 2028? With all the lawfare, the internecine fighting inside the US bureaucracy, and the general lack of trust and growth of polarisation, Republicans may be more interested in revenge than reconciliation. And revenge can be very, very seductive, especially when you’ve given up on actual reform: if you don’t believe that the US budget deficit can be closed, or the Empire can be saved, at least you can have some fun seeing your enemies suffer on TV.

The question for Democrats, then, is what they will do now that they’ve temporarily been shorn of their moral self-righteousness. But this applies to the Republicans, too. Will the incoming Trump administration be strong enough to resist the tempting morality tales that so bewitched the Bidens? Will the Republicans, now that they are faced with almost insurmountable structural problems, fall for the quick expedient of simply blaming them on the moral failings of the other side? We probably won’t have to wait very long for our answers.

For just as Trump seems to have hit upon Elon Musk to solve America’s woes — self-made, South African, and co-head of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — so too did the French monarch hit upon his own outsider: Jacques Necker. At first glance, clearly, the portly Genevan economist, with his frockcoats and earnest Enlightenment morality, seems about as different from Musk as you can imagine. But in both his personal story, and too his final inability to tackle France’s deep, systemic problems, Necker may yet offer lessons for his New World successor.

More from this author

Hurricane Helene is America's Chernobyl moment

By Malcom Kyeyune

Whatever way you look at it, the US has a laundry list of challenges. Quite aside from the issues beyond its borders — from Nato to China to the bloodbath in the Middle East — that’s clear enough domestically. From massive political polarisation to a military whose recruitment has collapsed and whose budget is shrinking or stagnant when adjusted for inflation. Then there’s that vast and growing number of Americans who simply feel like the country is going in the wrong direction. On top of that, America is flat-out broke, with the government forced to borrow increasing amounts of money just to keep the lights on. Two years ago, around 10% of total federal revenues were being spent on interest payments. Today, that sum hovers around 23% — representing nearly a quarter of the federal government’s total revenue, a figure that’s rising all the time.

To get a sense of just how dangerous that last issue is, consider what happens to someone suffering from terminal cancer. Over time, healthy and functional cells get replaced with nonfunctional, malignant alternatives, and eventually the body simply gives up and stops functioning. But no human being has ever had a body consisting entirely of cancerous cells: death happens far before the disease gets to that point. In fiscal terms, money going to interest payments can be understood in these terms: every dollar spent on paying creditors is a dollar that can’t be used on the military, or roads or bridges or schools. Throughout history, many governments have entered the same sort of debt spiral the US is currently in the middle of; none have ever gotten anywhere close to spending 100% of their total revenue on interest payments.

It’s against this backdrop that we should understand Trump’s appointment of Musk: a phenomenon we might call “the cult of the rockstar technocrat”. In him, after all, an increasing number of Americans seem to be placing their hopes of economic salvation, this one Great Man whose professional and entrepreneurial background supposedly gives him a unique ability to wade into a gridlocked bureaucracy and start cleaning up. From solving the debt crisis, to firing 70% of government workers, the dreams imputed onto Elon Musk are only growing. The system, in short, may be broken. But if the talent of driven, private sector champions could only be harnessed, perhaps the gordian knot of American dysfunction can finally, finally be hacked away.

In truth, though, the fact that DOGE is being taken even remotely seriously is in itself a cause for concern. Trump, as part of the executive branch, has very little power to tell the legislature what it can or even should do. Whatever (minimal) authority he may enjoy leading a department named after a cryptocurrency and an online meme, Musk is at most empowered to make non-binding suggestions. Moreover, if he wants his “department” to actually receive any funding, it is Congress, not Trump, that secures it. The fact that the US state is split into three branches, each with their own remit, is something American children learn very early on. Neither Musk, nor his new boss, have the power to upend this division of power, nor fix problems outside the executive branch of government.

But what’s most interesting with American narratives of the sainted, singularly reformer is that they’re far from new. When France descended into gridlock and dysfunction, the same saintly aura and the same illusory hopes were then assigned to Jacques Necker. That’s clear enough even if you examine that earlier rockstar’s upbringing to his Tesla-founding successor. Born into an upper-middle-class family in Geneva (read: Pretoria), Necker moved to Paris (read: Palo Alto) early in his career and started working as a clerk at a local bank. Before long, he amassed a fortune through smart trading and commodity speculation, and was quickly made a partner. His career only flourished past that point, and he quickly made the jump from private enterprise to government service, becoming director general of the Royal Treasury in 1777. That essentially made him the finance minister of one of Europe’s great powers.

It’s not really necessary to go into the details of Necker’s sojourn in government, but suffice it to say that his attempts at reform earned him a lot of enemies: enemies who increasingly conspired to have him sacked. Eventually, they succeeded, and Necker left his post in 1781. After that, France lurched from crisis to crisis, and eventually it became clear that it simply couldn’t go on. It was broke and could borrow no more money; the crisis was at hand, and someone had to solve it.

Enter — once again — Jacques Necker. Because he’d built up such a reputation of being a genius and a financial wizard, once the terminal decline of the French monarchy truly began, around 1787, people began clamouring for his return. Only Necker could save France, or so many people thought. This time, when he came back into government in 1788, he not only became the equivalent to the minister of finance, but also chief minister to the king himself.

In the end, though, Necker didn’t save France. In fact, he barely lasted a year in office the second time around. This wasn’t really Necker’s fault: it was more that one man, no matter how clever, could never hope to solve such an intractable set of problems. France in its time was also a major power, and like America today it had a sprawling political system, rife with infighting and backbiting, leavened by a terminal case of administrative gridlock. No matter which smart reforms Necker came up with, in the end it didn’t matter: the French political system had simply lost all ability to reform itself.

Elon Musk, like Necker, enters the stage at a point where the US is rapidly going broke, where the political system has seized up, and where everyone can see the storm clouds gathering. Just like Necker, meanwhile, there are dreams of putting him in the executive to solve this or that issue. The point, though, is that the heart of American dysfunction is not in the executive, but in the Congress. In any case, and unlike with Necker, there’s no equivalent in the US to a job like “chief minister” — and it’s unclear whether he’d even want such a job anyway (Necker really, really wanted the job).

More from this author

The Trump cult has finally arrived

By Malcom Kyeyune

Our contemporary obsession with rockstar reformers is understandable, not least given where America finds itself today. But it’s not a particularly hopeful sign for the future. In 1788, Necker entered France as a hero. By 1789, he left as a footnote. Does that mean that individual “rockstars” are an impossibility in politics? Certainly not. Just a year after Necker returned to Geneva, a man named Lazare Carnot became minister of war. Carnot is often given credit for being the man responsible for all the military reforms that made Napoleon’s domination of Europe possible. Between introducing mass conscription and reforming tactics, he created a new type of army. Carnot is often called “the architect of victory” for a reason: he almost single-handedly took a broken French military and turned it into the greatest land army the continent had seen since the Mongols.

But Carnot was not Musk. When he really got started on reforming the French state, the country had already collapsed into bankruptcy and extrajudicial slaughter. The reforms he led helped kick off an extremely bloody and brutal civil war inside France’s borders, and the way his government typically dealt with dissent was by chopping the heads off dissenters. In revolutionary France, there was not even the possibility of political gridlock, or parliaments blocking necessary reforms. In revolutionary France, whoever tried to stand in the way of progress was simply killed. To put it slightly differently, it’s precisely because Necker couldn’t save pre-revolutionary France that Carnot could actually carry out the work of long-reaching reform.

That, if nothing else, feels like a relevant lesson for today. Put your hopes in Elon Musk and other rockstar reformers at your peril. If you do, a future where you just end up disappointed is probably the best you can hope for. It’s the future where one or two men actually do gather all the political power necessary to genuinely sweep away the rotting old regime that you really should look out for.

Back home, Tucker had some good things to say about Putin, as well as some bad things. But it was the streets and shops of Moscow that really “radicalised” him. The West likes to paint Russia as poor, miserable and oppressed, but Tucker described a perfectly ordinary modern society. The discrepancy between what Tucker had been taught to expect and what he actually saw in Russia didn’t just unnerve him — it made him angry.

Of course, one might point out that Moscow and St Petersburg are Potemkin villages of sorts, covering up the reality of deep poverty in much of the rest of the country. But none of this is ultimately a matter of facts. The conflict between the West and Russia today is now seen as ideological and existential, just as the conflict between communism and capitalism once was. To say something nice about the Russian enemy is to take his side; to say something nice about him that also happens to be true is seen as even more treasonous. Communist Russia was rife with stories about American workers being treated like dirt, toiling under truly awful living standards. After all, America was capitalist, and a capitalist society could never be a good place for a worker to live.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the epic tension that had built up over the decades between the US and Russia fell apart rapidly. Russians queued up to eat at McDonald’s or to buy blue jeans, and they also emigrated to America in droves. Some of them wanted a more stable place to raise their children than the dystopian nightmare that was Nineties Russia, others saw in America a more agreeable form of culture and ideology, and others still just wanted to make money. In 1980, the number of foreign-born Russian speakers in the US numbered less than 200,000. In 2011, that number had hit 900,000.

More from this author

Hurricane Helene is America's Chernobyl moment

By Malcom Kyeyune

Since then, however, things have changed a great deal. The US is no longer the Mecca of foreign talent it once was, as it dives deeper into a geopolitical showdown with Russia, China, and the Brics more generally. The West is faltering both militarily and economically; the US empire is overstretched, practically insolvent, and facing growing exhaustion and disillusionment at home. To complicate this, the West’s own ideological tenets about freedom of speech and respect for human rights ring increasingly hollow. Even Westerners are losing faith in the American project.

While Tucker Carlson’s trip to Russia was a one-off, there has been a small but growing trickle of news stories in Western media featuring Americans deciding to brave the Iron Curtain in the other direction. The reasons they give are eerily similar to the ones heard from dissidents in the past: the political system in the West is broken and the politicians have lost the plot; the ruling ideology is out of touch with ordinary people; the standard of living is falling and the cost of living too high. Mostly, the reasons given today have to do with politics rather than economics: in this telling the West is just too “woke”, too materialist, and too sclerotic. Russia, for its part, seems eager to offer “political asylum” to any Westerner with a big enough bone to pick with their home country.

It’s easy to dismiss what’s going on here as an irrelevant fringe phenomenon, but that might turn out to be a very grave mistake in the decade ahead. The ideological angle to these stories — that Russia is engaged in some fanciful or vain project of sheltering the “unwoke” out of some kind of humanitarian concern — is nothing but a fable. It is a velvet glove, hiding a far more calculating economic fist.

The truth of the matter is that Russia — like many other Brics countries now preparing their collective challenge to the West — has been struggling with the question of immigration for quite a long time now. After slowly recovering from the runaway brain-drain that hit it in the Nineties, the Russian state has cautiously moved to reform and rationalise its immigration system, particularly with an eye towards streamlining new channels for highly-skilled migrants. In other words, just the kind of migrants who tend to be in short supply and high demand worldwide. The fact that the Russians are entering into this competition decades late is certainly not lost upon them. During the unipolar moment, the West monopolised the pool of skilled migrants available, while also retaining all the high-value labour created at home. In the dawning multipolar world, however, the West appears not just as a competitor to be bested, but also as a potential goldmine from which an increasing number of migrants can be sourced.

It is only when one understands that the West could potentially become a victim, rather than a beneficiary of future brain drain that recent policy changes within Russia can begin to make sense. To wit, Russia recently announced that anyone living in a Western country “opposed to Russia” shall have access to a special, expedited visa process, exempt from all ordinary immigration requirements. There are no quotas for this kind of immigration, no tests on language skills or knowledge of Russian law, and all the other aspects of this visa process are tailored to be as generous as possible. Applicants only have to demonstrate that they wish to move to Russia due to a disagreement with their home country’s policies that contradict “traditional” Western or Russian values. Even if you’re not interested in Russia, Russia is now interested in you.

Law and consultancy firms that offer help to clients looking to move to Russia aren’t exactly new, and there are a decent number to choose from. This new push toward “Shared Values Visas” from the Russian state, however, is notable in that it coincides with far more sleek and ideologically savvy new ventures into the market. A good example of this trend is “ArkVostok”, the company behind the website movetorussia.com. With the founders having mostly Western educational backgrounds as well as experience working inside Western consultancy firms, the pitch offered here is clearly tailored to appeal precisely to the sort of feelings that Tucker Carlson has recently given voice to. Tired of culture war and DEI? Worried about national debt and unsustainable pension funds? Paranoid about bugs in your burger and GMO-food slowly poisoning your body? Whatever you’re in the market to buy, Russia is in the market to sell.

It is tempting to dismiss this out of hand. What kind of traitor would ever contemplate leaving our glorious Free World ™ to shack up with the enemy, all for the worldly promise of a flat 13% tax rate? Unfortunately, the answer to that question, as history has borne out time and time again, is almost always “more people than you’d think”. While ideology and righteousness are always comforting things to have, consider this quote from Tucker Carlson himself on his experience inside that Moscow supermarket: “Everybody [in the film crew] is from the United States … and we didn’t pay any attention to cost, we just put in the cart what we would actually eat over a week. We all [guessed] around $400 bucks. It was $104 U.S. here. And that’s when you start to realise that ideology doesn’t matter as much as you thought.”

Suggested reading

Putin is no longer Russia's saviour

By Ian Garner

One can say that you can’t put a price on freedom, or morality; that the privilege of living in a free society cannot be measured in something so vulgar as dollars and cents. That’s a nice sentiment, but the reality of the human condition is that these things do have a price. Moreover, this price is often much lower than most of us would like to admit. Communists in the USSR, lest we forget, used to think that no human being would ever abandon socialism just for a pair of blue jeans. If we in the West want to ignore recent history and instead cling to the hope that nobody will ever switch sides just because someone floats an offer of better schools, safer streets, cheaper apartments, and lower taxes, we do so at our own peril.

Besides, to try to minimise the danger presented here by criticising Russia or attacking Putin is to catastrophically miss the point. Though the Shared Values Visa programme tries to present itself as a fairly niche culture war phenomenon, its true nature is not cultural or ideological. It is driven by a ruthless economic logic that is much bigger than Russia itself. Even if Russia’s various attempts at wooing Westerners end up being unsuccessful, it is merely the first vulture to start circling overhead. Many more scavengers are likely to appear before long, each one with a bewitching song of higher real wages, cheaper groceries, and lower taxes.

There are at least two big economic reasons that force this development. First, skilled immigration is simply a good deal. If you can poach a highly educated person of prime working age without paying for his education, you have secured a very expensive and limited resource without having to pay any of the costs involved in training, childcare, and healthcare. This is the main reason that brain drain as a phenomenon has been consistently popular inside the West, even as it has long been hated everywhere else: one side pays all the costs, the other side reaps all the benefits.

The economic logic behind the Shared Values Visa is more ominous, however. It’s often said that Russia has terrible demographics, and in many ways, this is true. Russia’s total fertility rate is around 1.4 children per woman, which is far lower than the replacement rate. Unfortunately, this is actually a completely normal fertility rate in 2024. Very few countries in the EU have fertility rates that are much better than this, and a good number of them are significantly worse. This is not an unknown problem in the West, and the hoped-for solution has long been immigration, preferably of the more highly-skilled kind. Without sufficient immigration, European social welfare systems risk collapsing under the weight of too many old people dependent on taxes levied onto too few young workers.

All this means that Europe is highly vulnerable to the poaching of workers. And indeed, because of how our welfare systems are set up, any outmigration cannot help but trigger a very destructive chain reaction: as people migrate due to high taxes, there’s less workers, meaning taxes will get higher, meaning the push factors to emigrate become even stronger. In this environment of stagnation, an extremely vicious game of musical chairs is likely to dominate, as all countries face the pressure to steal workers from somewhere else, in order to ease the tax burden on the workers that already have citizenship. With an extremely low public debt of around $300 billion and an income tax rate that tops out at 15%, Russia is far better prepared for this kind of competition than most people seem willing to admit. For comparison, America pays three times that amount in annual interest on its whopping $35 trillion debt.

This threat is real, and it is much closer than many think. In fact, the UK in particular is already in a slow-rolling brain-drain crisis. Education is getting increasingly expensive, the population is ageing, and real wages are no longer keeping up with inflation. For now, the main actors trying to poach talent are other countries inside the Western bloc, with America as the principal looter-in-chief. That order of affairs might not last for much longer, however, and America might find itself vulnerable to the same kind of asset-stripping before long. It’s hard to see how brain drain can possibly work out as a net benefit to the West in the years and decades ahead: the great majority of Western countries are now stuck in the same sort of malaise as the UK, with economies entering what now looks like a phase of almost permanent stagnation due to the energy crisis. There is no light at the end of the tunnel: opinion polls instead show an increasingly catastrophic loss of faith among the public in their parties and political institutions.

Brain drain often has ruinous effects on the countries that fall victim to it, even in cases where there’s not a looming demographic crisis threatening to upturn all welfare systems. Russia might be using honeyed words as it tempts people with family values and GMO-free burgers, but those Westerners who now glibly mock the velvet glove might end up bitterly regretting not taking the iron gauntlet hidden underneath more seriously. All of this is strictly business: it is the groundwork being laid in order to loot the West of talent the moment a crisis or moment of weakness strikes, leaving hollowed-out economies and dying communities in its wake. After all, the Russians probably figure, it’s only fair: we did the exact same thing to them.

In Appalachia, one of the poorest regions in the country, the common belief is that the mountains protect the locals from storms. Unfortunately, this is true only up to a point: when a hurricane like Helene hits — bringing once-in-a-thousand-years levels of rainfall — the mountains become a curse rather than a blessing. Helene has brought the mountains down, triggering mudslides and rockfalls that have destroyed entire towns and obliterated almost every road in a vast radius.

When the lowlands flood, that is bad enough: in 2005, New Orleans stopped being a vibrant city and turned into one big, murky lake. But with storm surges and flooding, you can often navigate much of the disaster area by boat. Up in the mountains, it is the earth, not the water, that becomes your worst enemy. With the roads gone and bridges smashed, driving is impossible, travel by foot is next to impossible: isolated settlements can often only be reached via helicopter. Those I have spoken to in North Carolina describe a disaster of “biblical dimensions”. The only thing that comes close to it in recent history is the “Great Flood” of 1916 in North Carolina, but Helene has easily beaten the river gage measurements from back then.

The death toll of Helene is currently inching closer to 200, already making it the second-deadliest storm after Katrina. But this number will rise and then rise again in the coming days. In truth, with the reality of unnavigable mountain terrain, an obliterated road network, and massive power, cell phone and water failures, nobody knows how many are dead. Without sufficient rescue efforts, more Americans might end up succumbing to the lack of water in the wake of the flood. But despite all of this, and despite the fact that the clock is ticking for many Americans trapped without food, water, or means of communication, coverage of Helene has been strangely muted. This silence has, in turn, masked a far darker problem: the lack of resources and manpower going into the rescue effort.

Suggested reading

The tyranny of Columbine

By Matt Feeney

Bush’s response to Katrina was criticised at the time for being lumberingly slow and ineffective. But the relief effort being mounted now is a pale shadow of what was done a mere 19 years ago, and that makes the silence around this disaster even more ominous.

In 2005, significant planning and resourcing was being carried out days before the storm even made landfall. Ten thousand members of the National Guard had gathered from several states to deal with the damage Katrina was about to cause. The final number who helped with the effort measured closer to 20,000. But those guardsmen did not stand alone: the US Army was preparing to assume overall command of the entire rescue effort through US Northern Command, where its battle staff coordinated response forces over various state lines. The regular Army helped too, including forces from the 82nd Airborne Division and the Army Corps of Engineers.

This time, things are very different. At the time of writing, fewer than 7,000 guardsmen are helping with Helene disaster relief, and there was no equivalent preparation before the storm actually hit. US Northern Command, which can only assume responsibility if it is asked to do so by other government authorities, is not coordinating the overall effort. During Katrina, more than 350 military helicopters were involved with the rescue efforts. This time, in a mountain disaster zone where many more helicopters are needed than in a coastal area, well below 100 helicopters have currently been committed.

The Katrina response had its fair share of problems. But the criticism it attracted had less to do with a lack of helicopters and more to do with the bureaucratic inertia that dogged the relief effort. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) proved to be slow, inflexible and often hostile to efforts to circumvent red tape or unrealistic rules in favour of things that were practical and simply worked. In one case, the supplier of bottled water that FEMA had on contract failed to turn up on time. Local rescue crews then went to pick up water from local Wal-Mart stores, which could track every litre of water entering and leaving its stores. The water was right there, sitting on the shelves; people needed immediate help, so why not distribute it now and have the government simply pay Wal-Mart for it later? Wal-Mart was more than happy to go along with this arrangement, but FEMA was horrified that someone had circumvented their own chosen contractor. Grudgingly, they accepted the deal already struck, but then acted forcefully to shut down future ideas of dangerous and unauthorised innovation.

So while it can be said that Bush’s administration fumbled parts of the Katrina relief efforts, they at least did so in the context of America as it existed back then. The planning wasn’t always good, but there was planning. The helicopters didn’t always go to the places they were most needed, but at least they were there in large enough numbers. This is worlds apart from the reality of America in 2024. Today, the institutions are weaker, the deficits are bigger, and the US empire itself — then at the height of unipolarity — is critically overstretched. There aren’t enough helicopters, nor enough troops. A decent portion of the Tennessee National Guard, rather than helping rescue Americans in their own home state, are currently deployed to bases in Kuwait. In 2024, the only way for the US military to source enough men for its various far-flung bases and military commitments is to lean heavily on the National Guard. The Guard is supposed to be the primary muscle when it comes to domestic disaster relief, but as the regular Army is falling apart, there simply aren’t enough resources available anywhere in the system anymore.

This means that even though the victims of hurricane Helene have found themselves stranded within a stone’s throw of some of the US military’s more significant military bases — Camp Lejeune and Fort Liberty are both located in North Carolina — very little help has been forthcoming. There remains a belief in the West that, despite various recent reversals and losses, the US military is a machine with near-godlike powers: if it really wanted to, it could fill the sky and blot out the sun with an uncountable number of helicopters and planes, whenever and wherever it wants.

Almost a week into the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, those endless helicopters have failed to appear. And as America readies to surge more troops to the Middle East to potentially fight Iran, it’s clear that they can’t appear, at least not without seriously breaking something somewhere else. Troops and aircraft busy in Tennessee or North Carolina can’t be deployed to Jordan, Iraq or Syria. In theory, the US military exists to protect the lives of Americans — that’s why it falls under the Department of Defence. In practice, Americans have largely been left to fend for themselves, 50 miles away from their own military bases, just in case those soldiers and helicopters are needed on the other side of the world.

Trying to get a sense of the attitude in Washington, D.C. about the very worrying state of the Helene relief effort, I asked friends there to tell me what people were saying about it. Without exception, the response from everyone turned out to be the same: there was no talk. Helene wasn’t even on the radar; it was, after all, just a storm. Besides, hadn’t the situation already been handled? There were 6,000 guardsmen on the scene; that ought to be more than enough.

All of this is becoming eerily reminiscent of Chernobyl — and the accident that in many ways defined the last days of the Soviet Union. That too was just a minor accident that at first seemed like nothing more than a blip to the complacent authorities in Moscow. Only over time did people start to realise that this was truly serious. Chernobyl has since come to be seen as one of the proximate causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union, though the reason why has often been misunderstood. Chernobyl wasn’t actually that lethal: approximately 30 people died as a direct result of the reactor explosion, with maybe 4,000 people dying years or decades later from illnesses related to radiation exposure. Hurricane Katrina, by contrast, led directly to 1,392 fatalities.

The real reason Chernobyl looms so large in stories about the last days of the Soviet Union was because of all the lying, the governmental incompetence, and the shared sense that the Soviet Union itself was a senile construct that no longer had any real point. A healthy society, one in which people still feel a sense of purpose and common belief, could have endured far worse disasters than Chernobyl. But by 1986, the Soviet Union was a place where neither the rulers nor the ruled believed the system still had a reason to exist. By the end, talk of socialism, Karl Marx and historical materialism seemed like nothing more than an absurd joke.

What happened to Russian Marxism, is now happening to American patriotism. Consider the lyrics to “Over There”, one of America’s more famous military-themed songs:

Over there, over there,
Send the word, send the word over there
That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,
The drums rum-tumming everywhere!
So prepare, say a prayer,
Send the word, send the word to beware! –
We’ll be over, we’re coming over,
And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there!

Twenty years ago, in the aftermath of 9/11, a song like this would have been the embodiment of American patriotism and martial pride. Then, the song had real meaning to it; people felt it. Don’t mess with our proud America, the song warned — if you do, we’ll come over and make you regret it.

More from this author

America will have to dodge the draft

By Malcom Kyeyune

If you were to sing those words today to a mother stranded without water in North Carolina, or a Tennessee guardsman in Kuwait who still doesn’t know if his parents back home are even alive, the lyrics will appear like a particularly cruel joke. Indeed, that guardsman won’t come back to help Tennessee, not until “it” is over, over there in Kuwait. What that “it” is, nobody yet knows. The yanks are coming, the yanks are coming: they’re coming to bases in Iraq or Syria, they’re coming to Romania, to Bulgaria, to Poland, to Korea. They’re coming to endless gruelling deployments overseas that the US can’t afford, that talking heads in Washington insist are the most important thing in the world even as America slowly falls apart.

When Iraqi militias fired missiles that killed three servicemen stationed in Jordan, the reaction from most Americans was not patriotic fervour and hunger for revenge: it was exhaustion. Why are they even there? Why can’t they just come home?

Contrary to popular belief, Hurricane Helene is not “just a storm”, in the same sense that Chernobyl was not “just an accident”. Beyond all the destroyed roads, the flooded towns, the ruined electrical networks and the stranded American families, Helene is also an indication that the US political system, followed by its military, is very close to the point of moral and physical exhaustion.

Appalachia has always been forgotten; the people there are used to being treated like dirt. Talking to locals whose families were still stuck in the disaster area, the common refrain was that the help wasn’t arriving because the elites simply hate the people now in need of help. Talking to people in D.C., however, quickly dispelled that notion. What is going on right now isn’t malice, it’s somehow even worse: it’s senility. People weren’t enjoying the suffering of fellow Americans; they were simply so oblivious and zoned out that they couldn’t even notice a problem.

Currently, a hurricane disaster that is significantly more challenging than Katrina is being serviced by something like a third of the resources that Louisiana called upon. And yet few people in Washington even think this is a problem. At the same time as Congress has borrowed another 10 or 20 billion dollars to hand over to Ukraine and Israel, presidential candidate Kamala Harris has announced that the victims of Helene will be able to apply for $750 in relief assistance to help them get back on their feet.

As Chernobyl was, Helene is now becoming: a point at which the sheer absurdity and uselessness of the machine becomes too obvious to ignore. Looking at the disaster unfolding in Appalachia, the winners of the Cold War are now starting to ask the same question that eventually brought down the Soviet Union: what the hell is even the point of all of this anymore?

But almost all discussion of conscription today falls into a standard narrative, a just-so story that is both simple to grasp and seductively credible. America could have a draft if it wanted to, the story goes: no doubt it would work and be effective. The problem, however, is that people have grown too self-absorbed for such harsh measures. Previous generations worked hard and sacrificed willingly, while kids these days just want to play videogames.

Such a narrative is increasingly dangerous. The fatal issue with a potential draft is not that people would get very angry about it — though it’s fair to say that they probably would. The entire reason America abandoned the draft in the Seventies was because the Vietnam War was slowly tearing society apart, leading to protests, riots, and an epidemic of enlisted soldiers murdering their own officers. Any attempt to reinstate conscription would likely bring with it a “Vietnam syndrome” far worse than the original one. But in some ways that is beside the point.

Right now, even if America wanted a draft, the entire administrative apparatus required to actually implement it no longer exists. Just as Rome eventually forgot how to muster its legions or maintain its roads and bridges, so too has the US government forgotten how to quickly gather hundreds of thousands of men under arms. The systems necessary to do so have been destroyed through decades of malign neglect, and they probably can’t be brought back at all, let alone repaired on short notice.

To understand just how impractical a draft is, it’s necessary to understand how it might work. Eligible Americans, upon reaching the age of 18, are supposed to be registered in the Selective Service System (SSS) database. Once a draft happens, the draftees chosen by lottery could then be sent notices, ordering them to report for service. When they have been given the chance to appeal or seek deferments, the remainder would report to the US military, which would train them and send them to war.

Today, every piece of this chain is broken beyond repair. The first step — the registration of eligible candidates — seems like it would be the easiest to get a handle on. But nothing could be further from the truth, for the simple reason that no single federal agency even attempts to keep an up-to-date record of every American’s actual place of residence. Take it from the horse’s mouth: according to the Chair of the House Armed Services Committee himself, “absolutely nobody” bothers to notify the SSS when they move.

Moreover, the SSS doesn’t even know whether the names they have on their lists are eligible Americans in the first place. As a result, it’s forced to rely on borrowing information from other federal and state agencies to figure out where young Americans live. But not only are states not required to keep address information up to date, but people who cannot be drafted, such as those with student visas, get included in these rolls. Moreover, several states, such as California, refuse to be a part of this system. Other states offer Americans the choice to put an “X” in the gender field on their driver’s licence, which excludes them from SSS data collection.

All of this might seem like a minor technical quibble, but it’s really not. The inability to actually keep track of where citizens live doesn’t just mean that people might be slow to show up to basic training — it would completely undermine the government’s ability to actually prosecute anyone for draft-dodging in the first place.

Suggested reading

Who will win a post-heroic war?

By Edward Luttwak

To pursue these draft-dodgers, the federal government would have to clear a legal bar that is essentially impossible to reach unless the draftee decides to wilfully self-incriminate. To wit, the government has to prove three things beyond a reasonable doubt: that it sent the notice to the correct address, that the draftee actually read the notice and understood its meaning, and finally, that he made a conscious decision to refuse to show up for service after having fully understood his responsibilities. Today, a majority of Americans are essentially immune to being prosecuted without any intention on their part: they’ve simply moved away from their parents without notifying the SSS, and now the government has no idea where they are. But even when the government does, it’s not a crime for parents to rip up induction notices. And if that doesn’t work, they could claim that the mailman hid it, or their dog ate it. The ability for the federal government to prove otherwise is essentially nil.

All of this was already a big enough problem during the Vietnam era, where the government could only manage to convict some 8,000 people for draft offences, out of a total caseload of nearly 600,000. The idea of today’s administration doing any better is laughable. In 2021, the SSS made almost 250,000 referrals to the Department of Justice for failures to comply with registration laws. The response from the DOJ was to announce that it had no intention of actually enforcing these laws, and that the SSS should stop asking them to.

But even putting the issue of sending draft notices aside, does the US military have the institutional capacity to absorb and train hundreds of thousands of recruits on short notice? Can America produce the additional equipment that would be needed to actually give the sons (and perhaps daughters) of America a fighting chance? Does America still have the ships and planes to transport all those draftees to where they would theoretically be fighting in, say, Asia? The answer to all of these questions is no.

More from this author

Why the West will refuse to fight

By Malcom Kyeyune

The idea that everything is possible as long as you will it to be so is seductive, but it doesn’t match up with reality. To organise a draft, or repair a bridge, or build a fighter aircraft, you don’t just need a can-do attitude: you need institutional knowledge, you need money and resources, and you need people. For smaller countries such as Sweden, which already uses a draft, this is much less of a problem: there, the government hasn’t yet lost the institutional capacity to keep track of its citizens. But in America, that ship sailed years ago.

Indeed, even if the federal government were to try and force a draft into existence, the result would be disheartening. Inevitably, the burden would fall on local sheriffs and police departments, and trying to push through a blatantly illegal and unconstitutional draft would almost certainly guarantee that several states would refuse to comply. From that point, it would only take a handful of them to declare this new “streamlined” draft illegal, and offer up their own territory as safe havens from “federal tyranny”, for the US to descend into a constitutional crisis.

American pundits, think tanks, and government apparatchiks can complain all they like that the young aren’t conscientious enough to support a draft over Iran or Taiwan. But this is little more than projection. To truly understand why conscription is a non-starter, they need only look upon their own mighty works — and despair.

Today, the blockade is stronger than ever, and the American military has given up on trying to lift it. Just a fortnight ago, faced with a deterrent bolstered by zero US aircraft carriers, the Houthis managed to board a Greek-flagged oil tanker, plant some explosives, and chant “Death to America! Death to Israel!” as the vessel went up in flames. Last week, the Pentagon quietly admitted that the tanker is still on fire and now appears to be leaking oil.

This should probably be huge news: one of the most important trade routes in the world is now blocked by a rag-tag group of militants, and the US Navy has thrown its hands up in defeat and sailed away. And yet, we just don’t want to talk about it.

The reason for this seems to be fairly straightforward: more than just sharing a sense of growing embarrassment, we no longer know how to talk about what’s going on. After all, America’s Navy is supposed to be the most powerful Navy in the world. As every war film of the past two decades has insisted on reminding us, all it takes is a single aircraft carrier to force a developing nation to its knees. America might not be great at “nation-building”, but boy does it know how to bomb things until all resistance stops.

Of course, Yemen is where these narratives collide with reality. Unlike Afghanistan or Iraq, the attempts to unblock the Suez do not really represent some sort of wasteful “war of choice”, one that we can simply walk away from when we grow bored. If the blockade holds, it will mean at least two things. First, the entire world will receive dramatic evidence of the growing military and political impotence of the West, which will have real-world consequences for Western diplomacy in regions like the Pacific. Second, and possibly more importantly, the Suez Canal is one of the most important trade routes in the world, and forcing container ships to go around it will manifest itself in supply crunches and structural inflation, particularly for European economies. Europe is already contending with the dual disease of anaemic growth and an energy crisis; a blockade of a major trade route is the opposite of what we need.

This is, however, exactly what has happened, and this time around, the US clearly doesn’t know what to do. In December last year, the US Navy and US Central Command first launched Operation Prosperity Guardian, which was supposed to safeguard shipping traffic against Houthi missile strikes. In January, when this mission began faltering, it launched Operation Poseidon Archer, designed to bomb the Houthis into submission and deter them from further attacks on trade. The result has been underwhelming in the extreme: months later, Yemeni casualties have amounted to “at least” 22 dead, while the US has lost several expensive MQ-9 reaper drones to Houthi anti-air missiles and two Navy SEALs who drowned while trying to impound a shipment of rocket components bound for Yemen.

At first glance, the low casualties would suggest a simple lack of American will; the problem, many would say, is that the US is simply playing with the kid gloves on. But this isn’t really the case. The US has, to the best of its ability, attempted to accurately identify and target Houthi weaponry and launch sites inside Yemen, but there’s just one problem: it can’t. In this era of drone warfare, mobile launch platforms, and advanced tunnelling infrastructure, the US simply lacks the ability to identify and blow up the majority of drones or missiles before they are launched. This problem is not exactly new, either: “Scud-hunting” was problematic enough during the first Gulf War, and Scud launchers were huge, lumbering things. Today, with the new drone and missile technology, finding a drone launch platform inside a mountain range is like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Suggested reading

How the West can stop the Houthis

By David Rundell

And there’s a more obvious problem, too: the drones are cheap, and American interceptor missiles and precision guided bombs are extremely expensive. Added to this, the way in which these bombs are delivered — manned jet aircraft — adds another layer of expense, because jet fighters can cost upwards of $100 million in flyaway cost, and far more when pilot training (at least $10 million for basic competency), maintenance and infrastructure are factored in. In other words, the more America fights the Houthis, the more they will lose.

Underlying this strategy is what could be called a modernised approach to Second World War-era practices. Today, the planes are faster, the aircraft carriers are bigger and use nuclear propulsion, and the destroyers are outfitted with missiles rather than guns — but the rationale behind their deployment is entirely backward-looking. The use of manned aircraft for long-distance bombing once had a central role because there was no alternative; if you wanted a big ball of explosives to land accurately via the air, a human had to be up there to guide it. That, of course, is no longer the case, and yet a combination of prestige, complacency and the absence of a functioning industrial base all conspire to make the US military increasingly irrelevant.

The result of this can now be witnessed in the Red Sea. If the US Navy cannot even lift a blockade by Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world, the idea of lifting a blockade around Taiwan is a complete fantasy. If the US cannot compete with the arms production of Iran, then the notion of somehow out-competing China should be put to bed immediately.

But this is also why the Red Sea defeat will be met with silence. More than any other conflict raging today, it highlights the crisis within the West’s military organisation, as well as the fact that there is no real way to fix it. To admit our powerlessness is to admit that the era of Western hegemony is already over. Faced with little alternative, we will continue to let the Houthis blow up our ships — and then pretend that none of it really matters.

From the start, the investigation was a textbook cover-up. The Swedish government rushed to secure evidence, citing their putative rights under international law, consciously boxing out any sort of independent, UN-backed inspection. Of course, after gathering all the evidence, the Swedish authorities studiously did exactly nothing, only to then belatedly admit that it actually had no legal right to monopolise the information in the first place.

The Germans, for their part, were also supremely uninterested in figuring out who pulled off the worst act of industrial sabotage in living memory against their country. In fact, over the course of a year-long non-investigation, we’ve mostly been treated to leaks and off-the-record statements indicating that nobody really wants to know who blew up the pipeline. The rationale here is bluntly obvious: it would be awfully inconvenient if Germany, and the West, learned the true answer.

Thus, the recent revelation that the true mastermind behind the ongoing deindustrialisation of Germany was none other than a Ukrainian by the name of “Volodymyr Z.” must have come as an unwelcome surprise. For not only is the idea that the authorities have suddenly cracked open the Nord Stream case not credible in the slightest, but the sloppy way in which the entire country of Ukraine is now being fingered is likely not an accident. Indeed, at the same time as the ghost of Nord Stream has risen from the grave, the German government announced its plans to halve its budget for Ukraine aid: whatever is already in the pipeline will be sent over, but no new grants of equipment are forthcoming. The German government is hunkering down for increased austerity, and so it is cutting Ukraine loose.

Germany, of course, is hardly alone. Even if there were enough money to go around, Europe is increasingly not just deindustrialising but demilitarising. Its stores of ammunition and vehicles are increasingly empty, and the idea of military rearmament — that is, creating entirely new military factories and supply chains — at a time when factories are closing down across the continent due to energy shortages and lack of funding is a non-starter. Neither France, the United Kingdom nor even the United States are in a position to maintain the flow of arms to Ukraine. This is a particular concern inside Washington DC, where planners are now trying to juggle the prospect of managing three theatres of war at the same time — in Ukraine, the Middle East and the Pacific — even though US military production is arguably insufficient to comfortably handle one.

And so, in an effort to save face in this impossible situation, Ukraine is now being held solely responsible for doing something it either did not do at all, or only did with the permission, knowledge, and/or support of the broader West. This speaks to the adolescent dynamic that now governs Western foreign policy in a multipolar world: when our impotence is revealed, find someone to blame.

Suggested reading

How will the Ukraine war end?

By Aris Roussinos

The war in Ukraine, after all, was already supposed to be won, and Russia was supposed to be a rickety gas station incapable of matching the West either economically or militarily. Yet here we are: our own economies are deindustrialising, our military factories have proven completely incapable of handling the strain of a real conflict, and the Americans themselves are now openly admitting that the Russian military remains in a significantly stronger position. Meanwhile, Germany’s economic model is broken, and as its economy falls, it will drag many countries such as Sweden with it, given how dependent they are on exporting to German industrial firms.

10 years ago, during the 2014 Maidan protests, the realist John Mearsheimer caused a lot of controversy when he began warning that the collective West was leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and that our actions would lead to the destruction of the country. Well, here we are. At present, our only saving grace is the continuing offensive in Kursk — a bold offensive that will surely be remembered as a symptom of Ukraine’s increasing desperation.

Indeed, a far better guide of things to come can be found in the fingering of “Volodymyr Z.” as the true culprit behind the Nord Stream sabotage. Here, rather than accept responsibility for the fact that Ukraine was goaded into a war it could not win — mainly because the West vastly overestimated its own ability to fight a real war over the long haul — European geopolitical discourse will take a sharp turn towards a peculiar sort of victim-blaming. No doubt it will be “discovered” that parts of Ukraine’s military consisted of very unsavoury characters waving around Nazi Germany-style emblems, just as it will be “discovered” that journalists have been persecuted by oligarchs and criminals in Kyiv, or that money given by the West has been stolen, and that arms sent have been sold for profit to criminal cartels around the world.

All of these developments will duly be “discovered” by a Western political class that will completely refuse to accept any responsibility for them. Far easier, it seems, to calm one’s nerves with a distorting myth: it’s the Ukrainians’ fault that their country is destroyed; our choices had nothing to do with it; and besides, they were bad people who tricked us!

***

Now watch UnHerd‘s interview with the journalist behind this month’s revelations:

It’s thus quite ironic that actual proof of a “Trump cult”, at least in a manner of speaking, is slowly beginning to surface now, at a point where it simply doesn’t matter anymore. Today, the US has so many problems — with more seemingly on the way — that discussing minor unsavoury details about Trump simply doesn’t elicit much of a response. But even so, a very minor and soon-forgotten civil war among many of his online supporters might be worth dwelling on, for the simple reason that it reveals that Trump might not be all that he used to be. When all is said and done, tales of his political invincibility might end up being just tales.

The online spat in question began last week, when Kyle Rittenhouse — the young man who killed several men during the series of riots following the police shooting of Jacob Blake — posted a selfie together with the retired libertarian politician Ron Paul. Rittenhouse explained that Trump wasn’t strong enough on the Second Amendment, which isn’t particularly outlandish as far as political viewpoints go in 2024 America. He then added that he was writing in Ron Paul for the presidential election, thereby implying that he wouldn’t be voting for Trump.

What followed was a veritable explosion of hatred and rage, a picture-perfect example of a “rabid Leftist” cancellation, except it was coming from the Right. People took to denouncing Rittenhouse as a lowly backstabber, a Judas in the flesh, guilty of betraying Trump. They didn’t stop there: they mocked his appearance, his weight, intimated that it would have been better if Rittenhouse had actually been shot that night in Kenosha, and that nobody should ever listen to him. Rittenhouse, who was probably quite shocked at such sheer vehemence, swiftly published a letter of apology, in which he dutifully denounced everything he’d just said and promised to be a good boy and vote for Trump.

The idea that a voter owes loyalty to a politician (and should thus simply shut up if the politician is weak on the issues the voter cares about) is a strange one to have in an electoral democracy. But the mildness of Rittenhouse’s criticism — that Trump had been weak on the Second Amendment — together with the fierceness of the anger directed at him speaks to something fairly significant: it reveals a growing sense of weakness and panic on the American Right.

The energy of 2016 is mostly gone at this point; many people I know who were quite into Trump eight years ago have now mostly checked out. And it’s not exactly a great mystery why: many of the guest speakers at the Republican National Conference were divisive, to put it mildly, and in general there’s just a sense that Trump is older and slower at age 78 than he was at age 70. More problematically, Trump’s penchant for surrounding himself with people who undermine what he’s doing — or at least undermine what many voters think Trump should be doing — does not seem to have improved over the years.

Criticisms of the kind that Kyle Rittenhouse voiced — before being forced to ritually denounce them in an online Maoist struggle session — sting today because they hit at something real. Behind every lurid tale about how Trump is going to deport a hundred million illegals over lunch break while also lowering the price of hamburgers, there lurks a growing sense of aimlessness, desperation, and fear: fear that things in America are rapidly breaking apart, that more pointless forever wars loom on the horizon, that nobody — not even Trump — will actually captain the ship. Faced with this insecurity, we can see the emergence of a growing “Trump cult”, one that exists not as a casual slur but a genuine social phenomenon.

But what, you might ask, about Kamala Harris? Surely, there’s something fairly similar going on among Democrats? The answer to that question is both yes and no. Harris appears less as the leader of a cult of personality than a very odd kind of American Gorbachev. Because Biden’s re-election campaign was an almost farcical exercise in cult-like behaviour — with grown adults repeating the obvious lie that the man was “sharp as a tack” up to the point when he was forcibly removed — Harris’s ascendancy truly does represent a form of glasnost and perestroika for Democratic voters. No longer do they have to pretend that the obviously incapable 81-year-old is the best presidential candidate in the history of the country; now they only have to contend with a politician who is merely unpopular and incompetent. After being forced to subsist on tree bark and coal shavings for more than a year, the Democratic coalition now seems quite happy at being treated to bread and water.

Suggested reading

Kyle Rittenhouse could still tear America apart

By Park MacDougald

On the American Right, by contrast, it’s important to note that the growing “Trump cult” is not a product of Donald Trump himself. It’s not a top-down scheme to trick people or string them along. Rather, it is a bottom-up phenomenon, and very likely a short-term one at that.

After the Second World War, the tribal Melanesian islanders created cargo cults and built improvised runways in the hope that the American planes would be convinced to return. For many of Trump’s voters today, the choice now is to either give up hope of significant improvement, or to try to meme the good old days of 2016 back into existence, while treating anyone who risks piercing the bubble with increasing hostility.

But for every person screaming at Kyle Rittenhouse and telling him to repent, you will find two or three people whose hopes for improvement through the political system have diminished substantially over the past eight years. Trump or no Trump, the MAGA Right is starting to lose its grip. Despairing at the black storm clouds on the horizon, they are desperately trying to keep the flame of faith alive, even if the tools to do so take them uncomfortably close to the Left they purport to hate. Fans of Harris, on the other hand, have already learned to live with disappointment and hopelessness. On both sides, then, in very different ways, Reagan’s promise of “Morning in America” has never felt so distant.

To say that this is an unprecedented situation risks underselling the uniqueness of the current moment. Not only are we in very strange territory electorally (given the announcement’s proximity to the party convention), but there is also a sense that something has gone seriously wrong with the political system itself.

As I write, there is growing concern — bordering on paranoia — that Joe Biden might not actually have signed his resignation letter. Comparisons between the letter’s signature and those on previous executive orders are being circulated, and other curious details, including the absence of an official White House letterhead, are also being poured over. And whatever the merit of these conspiratorial claims, the basic fact remains that this is a resignation communicated by social media, through an account that Biden himself does not control, while the man himself is still nowhere to be seen. Last night, the White House still hadn’t published official plans for Biden to address the nation. Is he sulking? Is he physically incapacitated? The fact that these questions are even being asked — that there exists any degree of uncertainty about any of this — is momentous in and of itself.

Has America just experienced its own version of the 1991 coup in the Soviet Union, where Mikhail Gorbachev was confined to his dacha, with all lines of communication cut, and pressured to sign a letter declaring a state of emergency? Did the staffer who published the news of Biden’s resignation act on orders from Biden himself? Or did someone else make that call? Every hour that Biden doesn’t publicly dispel these rumours adds to the feeling of unreality. Needless to say, this is not exactly a healthy state for the “world’s greatest democracy”.

But whatever the details, one conclusion has been reached: Joe Biden is out and Kamala Harris is in. This is currently being met with a fair degree of celebration among many on the American Right: Harris is a notoriously weak candidate, one who is prone to gaffes and was completely unable to make headway in the 2020 Democratic primary. But counting your electoral chickens before they hatch is never wise, and certainly not in these extraordinary times. Biden himself was also a notoriously weak candidate (having tried to run for president several times and failed spectacularly every time), even more gaffe-prone than Harris, and only became the 2020 Democratic nominee as part of a concerted insider plot to stop Bernie Sanders. Neither Harris nor Biden could ever hope to win even a remotely competitive Democratic primary if their lives depended on it. But as we learned in 2020, a basic inability to win a primary race does not mean a candidate can’t then go on to win the presidential race.

And yet, 2024 is not a year that lends itself to easy predictions. In the space of just over a week, the US has seen one presidential candidate shot, and the other step down under murky circumstances. The idea that Trump now has an automatic path to victory reeks of the same complacency that saw him lose in 2020, and that spurred so many hopes for a massive “red wave” in the 2022 midterms.

But while it might be impossible to confidently call the outcome of the election in November, the very near future is quite easy to predict: more political chaos, paranoia and uncertainty. Biden’s decision to remain as president even as he now concedes he is unfit for the job of campaigning for re-election is not at all tenable. Already, more and more Republicans are stating the obvious: if you aren’t healthy enough to run for president, you clearly aren’t healthy enough to be president. Chances are that a real battle to remove Biden from his perch inside the Oval Office is about to commence — either through convincing or coercing him to “voluntarily” step down, or by invoking the 25th Amendment. The latter would be an entirely unprecedented watershed moment, but unprecedented watershed moments seem to have become a dime a dozen in America of late.

More from this author

How Joe Biden should abdicate

By Malcom Kyeyune

There exists an old African proverb: when the elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled. It is tempting to analyse these large, chaotic movements inside the American political system simply in terms of the political rat race: what, one might ask, would it mean for large donors if Biden had continued to run? But while that might still be interesting, the wider context to all this chaos is more important. Who is even in charge at this point? Is it Barack Obama, or Nancy Pelosi? Is it Joe Biden himself, despite all the signs to the contrary? Or is nobody in charge?

Few seem to be able to answer these questions in an authoritative manner, and it seems increasingly unlikely that the election will solve this fundamental brokenness. A Trump win is unlikely to calm the paranoia that has seeped into the walls of the American political consciousness; a Harris win, especially at this point, might not be accepted as legitimate by a very large number of Republicans.

So, while America isn’t quite yet at the same level of crisis as the Soviet Union in 1991, even acknowledging that is to damn the US with some very faint praise indeed. It’s true that renditions of Swan Lake aren’t yet playing on an endless loop on CNN and MSNBC, urging the Soviet citizens of America to remain calm as the tanks roll up Pennsylvania Avenue. But faith is surely starting to wane. Some may say that Biden’s departure is proof that America’s political system is working. But just as the past few months have proved the opposite, don’t be surprised if the next few do the same.

The hippies are mostly gone now, but the old hippie saying now has a new air of relevance about it. For what goes for LSD and magic mushrooms also goes for political polarisation and violence.

Even as many now celebrate Trump’s miraculous luck, and see his survival as a sign from God, such enthusiasm seems badly misplaced. The bullets destined for Trump ended up killing a completely innocent person sitting in the bleachers, and severely wounding at least one more; this was hardly the work of a merciful guardian angel. Still, there’s a surreal quality to the photos of Trump standing defiant, blood streaking across his face. Had they been part of a work of fiction, they’d have been dismissed as too on the nose, too unrealistic. In America’s ill-fated 2024 election cycle, truth has become stranger than fiction.

When one looks at the sombre reactions to this assassination attempt, it’s hard to avoid a certain sense of absurdity to it all. The shock, grief and dismay at what has happened is very real, and it is extremely bipartisan. Yet nobody can really pretend to be surprised. In fact, this shooting is singularly unsurprising: America has spent the last eight years warning about the unique evil of Trump; the Democratic Party’s re-election slogan is literally that “democracy is on the ballot”, and that if Trump were to win, a new era of fascism and darkness is sure to descend on the country. Thousands, tens of thousands, maybe millions of marginalised people’s lives are supposedly at risk; what then is an assassin’s bullet or two, given the enormity of the stakes?

It is no wonder, then, that the mood in America at this point is one of despondency and depression. Having already bought the “ticket”, people are becoming immensely uncomfortable with the way the “ride” is going. The same people who — either jokingly or seriously — talked about how someone needed to put a bullet into Trump now recoil in horror at the reality of political violence, like a kid playing too many violent video games and foolishly thinking this means he knows what real violence is like.

For a short while, most people in America are likely to try to back away from the brink, to dial down the rhetoric, to cool the talk about how the sky is falling and the other side is out to destroy everything you hold dear. And this seems to be exactly what is happening right now, on both sides of the aisle. Joe Biden himself has called for calmer tempers and cooler rhetoric: in America, differences should be settled with ballots, not bullets. Trump himself seems eager to play along: a recent Axios article laid out just how much this brush with death seems to have changed Trump’s thinking. His speech at the Republican national convention has been completely reworked in the aftermath of the failed assassination: apparently it is now aiming at trying to preach a message of political unity rather than further division. For now, both sides of America are talking about peace, love and understanding. It is their first time doing so in many, many years.

But as much as people would like this new era to last, it can’t — and it won’t. Political division isn’t merely a product of bad thoughts; often, they are the surface level symptom of much deeper issues within a society. And the sad truth about America today is that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump — as well as every other actor in the political system — completely depend on this kind of rhetoric. They cannot make do without it for very long, no matter how much they would wish to turn a new leaf. The real problem in America today is that the political system has simply been hollowed out; it is no longer capable of delivering solutions to either side of the partisan divide.

Suggested reading

The shot that created a martyr

By Lionel Shriver

Biden himself now has historically low approval ratings and a supermajority of Americans think he is mentally unfit to serve another term. The only tool left in his toolbox is to talk about the other guy; without doing so, without stressing just how dangerous the enemy is and how thin the margins are, he has no chance. But the same goes for Trump. None of his voters really believe that he can drain the swamp, or reform the system, or somehow halt America’s very dangerous drift into insolvency and economic chaos. For them, too, all that’s left to talk about is the evil of the other side, and how sweet revenge will be.

In truth, for a well-functioning society, a bit of violent rhetoric here and there really isn’t a big deal. It is only when the political elites lose control of the situation — when they can no longer maintain the military, fix the roads and bridges, keep the economy running and manage the state in such a way that it doesn’t drown itself in an ocean of unpayable debt — that such rhetoric leads to violence and blood in the streets. But America’s elites have lost control of the situation, and now they are waking up to a nightmare they’ve unwittingly created. There is not a single American politician today who even pretends to have a plan — much less a solution — for the massive fiscal time bomb located at the heart of the current system. Social unity is completely incompatible with economic bankruptcy: when things truly fall apart, political elites can either admit that the entire political class has failed and needs replacement, or they can try to blame the other guy. Unity is a luxury; one that the American political class can no longer afford.

One can certainly sympathise with the deep, profound sense of regret and sadness that is now visible among the American political class and punditry. But political violence and psychedelic mushrooms follow the same rules in the end: there are no takebacks, no mulligans and no refunds. Once you buy the ticket, you have to take the ride all the way to the end. All you can do, no matter how bad things become, is to sit back and try to endure.

It is for this reason that the current political crisis playing out in the United States might end up being one for the history books. As far back as the 2020 election, there had been whispers about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. Since then, supporting evidence continued to mount — until 27 June, when the President’s house of cards came crashing down.

A fortnight after that wretched debate, the Democratic Party has passed through a stage of shock, then grief, only to now arrive at a determination to push Biden out. Polling is now showing that an increasing number of Americans believe Biden is too old to stand; party donors are in revolt; and senior Democrat lawmakers are publicly urging the President to resign. As the trickle of leaks from the White House increasingly turns into a deluge, the picture that emerges is one of a collapsing administration.

Yet the real crisis at the heart of the American political system is not the punctured pretence of Biden being able to run things. Rather, the problem is almost the opposite: it’s now become clear that nobody is doing the job for him. Protected in the White House by his disgraced son-turned-gatekeeper Hunter, and powered by the conviction that the presidency is his God-given right, Biden, somehow, is still the one calling the shots.

This shouldn’t really come as a surprise: in America, the President is the head of the executive branch of the government, the only person with the authority to give orders to — and coordinate with — every branch of the executive apparatus. If he does not do this job, nobody else has the formal authority to step in: the Treasury Secretary, for example, cannot simply decide to give orders to the Pentagon.

Nor is this a situation lacking in historical precedent. In 1848, the Austrian Empire faced an incredibly serious set of crises, after a string of revolutions in Italy, Hungary and even Vienna threatened to tear apart the entire empire. The Emperor of Austria, Ferdinand I, was severely disabled since birth, and couldn’t be expected to navigate this crisis. Beyond his mental infirmity, simple day-to-day activities would trigger extremely serious epileptic seizures. In 1831, after Ferdinand was wed to Princess Maria Anna of Savoy, he suffered five seizures as he tried — and ultimately failed — to consummate the marriage.

But because the Emperor was the head of the Austrian state, his inability to do his job led to the various people underneath him picking contradictory policies and fighting factional battles against each other. As Prince Klemens von Metternich and Count Franz Anton von Kolowrat-Liebsteinsky — the two most notable members of the government at the time — attempted to increase their dominions, Austria see-sawed dangerously back and forth between one set of incompatible policies and another, even as the crises continued to fester. Armed struggle was breaking out in Italy, the Czechs were talking about independence, the Hungarians were clearly moving towards breaking free from Habsburg rule, and the streets of Vienna were filled with demonstrators and barricades. An impotent Ferdinand could do nothing about any of this, and the people who were supposedly running Austria on his behalf were too busy feuding to notice.

More from this author

Will Biden share Bannon's fate?

By Malcom Kyeyune

So how was this resolved? Finally, in December 1848, as Austria’s situation finally became too desperate to ignore, Ferdinand I was pressured to abdicate. Everyone agreed that the factional power struggles inside the state apparatus had to be alleviated; and everyone knew that required a fully capable Emperor. Thus, after a few dynastic tussles within the Habsburg family, all potential claimants were eventually convinced to abandon their claims and clear the way for the 18-year-old Franz Joseph I, who actually turned out to be a very good choice. He would become one of the longest-reigning monarchs in the history of Europe.

When compared with today, what gives this story a suitable twist was the pivotal role played by the ambitions of a single woman. In 1848, that woman was Princess Sophie of Bavaria, mother to Franz Joseph I. Her plans to finally place her son on the Austrian throne had been well known long before his accession, and it was through her hard work that Franz Joseph’s coronation became possible. Indeed, occasionally described as “the only man at court” in Vienna, it was through her work of cajoling, coercion, and persuasion that the rest of the imperial family finally got on board.

Today, the woman in question is Dr Jill Biden, who is clearly the most forceful voice urging her husband to continue with the presidential race, no matter the cost to the country. But she is far from acting alone. For many in Biden’s inner circle, their own fortunes are completely tied up with the man himself: if he falls, so will they. In this way, the entire American political system has essentially become hostage to one political family, whose interests are increasingly not in line with anyone else’s. One common reaction to the presidential debate was to call it a form of “elder abuse”: many viewers recoiled at the spectacle of an old man forced to perform a role for which he was clearly no longer capable of, when he should be spending his last years relaxing. But what is the health of an individual man, compared to dynastic ambition? We shouldn’t be surprised when such calls fall on deaf ears.

And yet, at this point, the pressure from donors, party operatives, and down-ballot candidates has probably passed the point at which it could be stopped: not removing Biden now will probably cause greater damage to the party’s credibility than forcing him out will. And that’s before we face up to the damage to the credibility of America at large.

Suggested reading

Why Joe Biden must save himself — and quit

By Edward Luttwak

Just as Austria was unable to deal with crises abroad in 1848 due to its domestic dysfunction, so is America trying to keep a lid on the Middle East, prevent Ukraine from losing, and keep Beijing at bay in the South China Sea. It is arguably failing in each of those theatres, and this current crisis is unlikely to change that.

More important, however, is revealing to the Americans themselves that the people who rule them no longer have a plan. At this point, nobody in America believes their senile leader can do the job of president for four more years, and most have stopped trying to argue that he can. But even so, even with disaster so clearly visible ahead — whether it comes six months or a year from now — Biden is pressing on, openly taunting the Gods themselves to intervene to stop him.

And perhaps this is where the 1848 analogy should give way to another. America might not be particularly interested in classical Greek tragedy, by and large. But as this disaster slowly unfolds at the heart of the US political system, it appears Greek tragedy has become interested in America.

Steve Bannon is expected at some point today to report to a US prison to start serving his sentence for contempt of congress. His four-month sentence is not in itself the end of the world for Bannon, but there is perhaps a greater symbolism at play. In the early days of the 2016 Trump presidency, Bannon was often seen as the political visionary behind the operation, with many on the Right looking to his heterodox mix of issues and reforms.

For him to go to prison might, therefore, be seen as the end of an era in American politics. We are talking about a period of around half a decade, starting a bit after Trump descended that golden escalator. It was the era of people enthusiastically trying to reform the US political system from the right. Like mushrooms after rain, the success of Trump’s outsider campaign gave birth to a whole ecosystem of organisations and ventures intending whether to capitalise on or assist in the sea change that was surely about to take place. From organs such as American Compass and American Moment, to media ventures such as The Realignment podcast or American Affairs magazine, the early years of the first Trump administration had, at least for the Right, a real sense of “springtime in America”. This was the time where senators such as Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio talked a big game about the Republicans now being a “multi-racial working-class party”; Bannon might have been one of the first people to see a new dawn of opportunity opening up in the wake of Trump’s surprise presidential bid, but many, many others followed in his footsteps.

It is for that reason that Bannon’s trip to prison serves as a convenient bookend for an era that is now well and truly dead. All the hope of reform that existed in 2016 and 2017, the talk of “draining the swamp”, or reindustrialising, or putting an end to new and stupid “forever wars” — all of it ended up amounting to very little in the end. The factories did not come back, the swamp was not drained, and Trump’s administration got bogged down fighting a two-front battle against sabotage from within the state apparatus on one hand, and then its own dysfunction on the other.

To therefore say that 2024 lacks much of the energy and optimism of the 2016 election would be a massive understatement. Eight years ago, Trump publicly humiliated all of his Republican primary competitors by pointing out that, as politicians, they were essentially for sale, ready to decide American policy based merely on who paid them the most. Today, by contrast, Trump has been reduced to the most high-profile beggar in all of the United States; he is reportedly in negotiations with the widow of Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson for a cash injection of around $100 million, in return for supporting future Israeli attempts to annex more of the West Bank.

Many commentators today seem convinced that the various attempts at lawfare against Trump have amounted to nothing but failure, but the truth is probably a bit more complex: while his polling numbers are still robust, the financial strain Trump has been placed under has in many ways turned him into a very conventional politician. Increasingly, the role of many of his supporters — including politicians such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, as well as Bannon himself — has become one of trying to explain that the King himself is a very good man, but one surrounded by evil and feckless ministers; if only the King wasn’t tricked and led astray by those around him, things would be fine. But this narrative can only survive for so long before people truly start losing faith.

Beyond the failures of the Trump administration, there is now a dawning sense that America itself might be fundamentally unreformable. The debt is skyrocketing, and nobody seems to have a plan to address it. The reality, of course, that unpayable debt can only really be dealt with in one of two ways: either defaulting on the debt entirely (which will never happen), or destroying the value of every individual dollar in the system to the point where any debt denominated in dollars becomes worthless. Such a situation would be a true social, political and financial apocalypse, throwing the country into chaos and destroying the savings and buying power of hundreds of millions of Americans. But nobody has an alternative; the problem is now simply too big to solve. Thus, American pundits and elites sit around discussing future plans, like opening new shipyards or colonising space, even as they all know that the system is bankrupt, both literally and figuratively.

Suggested reading

Why Joe Biden must save himself — and quit

By Edward Luttwak

Elsewhere, if Trump’s biggest “sin” in 2016 was denouncing the Iraq war (an act of sacrilege which was rewarded mightily by a grateful electorate), in 2024 he seems unable to really articulate a strong resistance to the next war that many in Washington DC now see as inevitable: a battle with China over Taiwan. With the shrinking of the fiscal horizon, the American political system is reverting to autopilot, hoping that more sanctions, more trade embargos, and more warfare will restore some semblance of control. The era of dreaming of meaningful reform is now mostly over. From Left to Right, there is a sense that the ship is sinking, and that it is simply too late to try to do anything

But another era in American politics is also coming to a close, one that in some sense ties together the future fates of both Joe Biden and Steve Bannon. That is, the era of small-“r” republicanism in the United States.

As far as Bannon is concerned, the partisan lawfare that has led to his prison sentence is merely a small piece of a much bigger resurgence of using the courts and the judicial system as a political weapon. America once had very powerful norms against this sort of thing. Trump may have violated those norms in spirit when he nodded approvingly to chants of “lock her up!” regarding Hillary Clinton, but when he ascended to the presidency, he quickly changed his tune: trying to go after political opponents would simply risk destabilising the entire democratic system, leading to a vicious cycle of tit-for-that prosecutions. Trump respected this basic taboo in deed if not always in word, but this clemency would not be repaid during Biden’s tenure. Lawfare and counter-lawfare, trying to imprison one’s political enemies only to be imprisoned in turn as they return to power, is a lethal kind of poison to any sort of republic or democracy. It is, however, simply the ordinary mode of business in corrupt oligarchies around the world.

Suggested reading

California has surrendered its streets to assholes

By Matthew Crawford

Which brings us to Biden. If one considers his atrocious performance during the debate against Trump, and the near-unanimous consensus that the man simply isn’t lucid enough anymore, there’s only really two ways the Democrats can go from here. Either they let Biden stay in the race, at which point it’s merely natural to ask: who will really pull the strings here? Or they dump Biden and pick another candidate just before the Convention in August, but this too leads to the very basic question: is this really much of a democracy anymore? The Democrats conspired to prevent there being a real primary and railroaded Biden through the process; now they are suddenly discussing railroading Biden out and getting someone else to take his place.

Once upon a time, Benjamin Franklin famously replied to a question of what kind of system he and his companions had created for America with “a republic, if you can keep it”. And, despite some ups and downs, the American republic has had a pretty good run. Now, however, it seems very doubtful that anyone is really interested in the “keeping it” part. Neither Trump, nor Biden, nor anyone else inside the American political system can be bothered to play anymore. The game, it seems, is over.

Out in the real world, the way to combat the paralysing effects of normalcy bias is through training and preparation. If people do their fire drills before a fire breaks out, they are much more likely to be able to spring into action; the brain can simply act on what it already knows. Similarly, learning from history is a sure-fire way to prevent normalcy bias. The only problem is that few recognise this: most people believe history has nothing to teach us about the modern day.

Still, with America’s great divisions only getting greater, let’s assume it does for a second. If we tried to compare the position of the United States today with that of France on the eve of the great revolution of 1789, how would the former hold up? Is it in a more stable position than the France that collapsed into revolution, or is it actually worse?

Let’s start with the domestic and political situation. France in the late-18th century was bitterly inegalitarian. Economic inequality coexisted with social inequality — the old feudal caste system was starting to chafe against the realities of the early modern economy — and the political system itself had basically stopped functioning. Everyone knew reform was badly needed, but passing actual legislation was impossible. Special interests had the ability to veto every change, no matter how necessary, and as 1789 approached, total political gridlock became the order of the day. The French Revolution happened not because it was inevitable, but because the political system proved completely incapable of curing its deficiencies.

Does this seem a bit familiar? It should, because that is precisely the situation in the United States right now. An unequal political system has essentially seized up and stopped functioning, and is now stumbling towards election between the most unpopular president in modern history and the next-most unpopular president in modern history. One of those men is clearly fading rapidly, prone to slurring his speech or forgetting where he is; the other just became the first president to be convicted of a felony. Just as in France in the 1780s, violence, protests and disenchantment seem the likeliest conclusion.

But how is the economy doing? France in 1789 was famously bankrupt; in fact, the bankruptcy of the French Crown was the proximate cause of the entire revolution. It borrowed heavily to fund foreign wars and domestic spending, and before long, it had to keep borrowing even more money to pay off the interest on its old debt, only to borrow even more to pay for those loans, and so on. Finally, France could borrow no more, and the crisis began in earnest.

And yet, when it comes to fiscal impropriety, 18th-century France simply can’t compete with modern America. The US is by far the most indebted nation in the world today in absolute terms, gorging as it does on some $1 trillion in additional debt every three months. And unlike in revolutionary France, when public pensions and social welfare simply didn’t exist, America has a supplementary “shadow debt” of around $175 trillion, representing its commitments for future welfare.

On top of this already miserable situation, the US has to contend with another problem not faced by early modern France: deindustrialisation. On the eve of revolution, France was remarkably self-sufficient, which is why it could so easily go from a political and economic basket-case in 1789 to dominating most of Europe in 1812. By contrast, America in 2024 is not self-sufficient; the old industries that allowed it to dominate following the Second World War have now been sold off for scrap, and the US today is dependent on exporting dollars and importing physical goods in return. If demand for dollars drops, those physical goods cannot be quickly replaced. A much more painful period of economic readjustment will have to be undertaken in the US, while France in 1789 essentially only had to rationalise the resources it already possessed to become powerful again.

So, the social and political situation in contemporary America is at least comparable to that in France in 1789, while the economic situation is actually a fair bit worse. What about the military situation?

Well, in 1789, things didn’t look particularly good. France faced at least two big problems: first, its military was suffering from low morale and high levels of dissatisfaction. This partly had to do with the intractable divide between commoners and nobles, and partly with a series of disciplinarian reforms that were very unpopular. The second had to do with foreign policy. In 1787, Prussia invaded the Netherlands, which was supposed to be part of France’s rightful sphere of influence. Many French people wanted their leaders to defend the country’s honour against the Prussians, but Louis XVI declined — for the simple reason that France was too broke to afford a war. This failure to act like a great power didn’t just have domestic consequences; it convinced other great powers that France was becoming the sick man of Europe.

Suggested reading

Trump's conviction is an assault on democracy

By Michael Lind

While these weaknesses shouldn’t be underestimated, they are in an order of magnitude less serious than those faced by the current United States. If you wanted to draw a comparison, the French Army’s disciplinarian reforms probably caused about as much discontent as the US military’s Covid-vaccine policy; not exactly a good spot to be in, but not life-threatening either. The US military, however, has significantly more pressing problems: the recruitment crisis is now so bad that it is undermining the combat readiness of entire formations. “Ghost units” — that is, units that should technically exist but practically don’t because they have no men — are now slowly proliferating across the US Army. Meanwhile, the Navy has a massive problem with chronic sleep deprivation, because there simply aren’t enough sailors to crew the ships to their full compliments. On top of these problems, the US military is increasingly unable to source ammunition for its weapons, and the Navy cannot build enough ships to keep itself from shrinking, nor can it now really perform scheduled repairs on the ships it has.

In other words, the French military had a crisis of internal culture, while the American military has a crisis of internal culture and a massive recruitment crisis and a massive logistics and sustainment crisis. On top of this, the US military is tasked with several orders of magnitude more work than the French: it has almost 1,000 bases across the world. The French failed to show up in the Netherlands in 1787 because they didn’t have enough money to pay for it; America, by contrast, has tried and failed to wage proxy war against Russia over Ukraine, and tried and failed to stop the Houthis from blockading the Suez Canal. In April, the US Army built an aid pier in Gaza as a sort of show of force, an illustration that the US military — whatever else one might say about the rest of America — was still up to the task. On Tuesday, the pier fell apart and was washed away.

Taken together, then, it seems that the position of the US in 2024 is much worse than that of France in 1789. Does this mean a revolution will happen?

It’s always easy to come up with a reason for why things will continue like they always have. That is simply how our brains work: if you’ve done your fire exercises over and over again and you suddenly smell smoke, your brain’s first reaction is likely to be “A-ha! Fire! Time to head for the fire exit!”. If you don’t know where that exit is, if you’ve never really thought about the possibility of a fire, your brain is very likely to respond to the sight and smell of smoke with an “ah, well, it can’t be that bad, right?”.

And perhaps, you might say, that is indeed the correct attitude to have today. Perhaps things really aren’t “that bad”. To which I would respond: but things are worse than were in France in 1789. All that remains to be seen is whether that simple, incontrovertible fact about our current moment leads to something or not.