I Wanted To Be A Superman...

You know like a real deal, with all those super-powers--you can fly both in the air and space, you can lift some things like railroad engines or Boeing-747 with no effort, you can see girls' boobs through clothes and other wonderful things you could do with your super-powers. But, by the tender age of 40 I finally figured out that Superman movies were actually all a Hollywood fantasy and I got depressed. It came about the same time I recognized that Santa Claus doesn't exist. My dreams of super-powers, together with dreams of Jeannie, when Barbara Eden was still drop-dead gorgeous  (my wife still doesn't know about that), were dealt a crushing blow and I had to reconcile myself to a reality, where I reside, with a different level of success, even today. 

But my dreams of super-powers, especially mental ones, couldn't have come more useful than today, when navigating an opaque Mississippi of pseudo-academic BS filling this mighty river through numerous tributaries streaming from the American political "science" universe and publications which sell this mental ejaculation as a valid scholarship. But, as I stated above, I long ago reconciled myself with the fact that I will never gain even a minute percentage of Superman's powers, which, as it turned out, is not the case with US geopolitical "thinkers" who are still active in casting their spells, which are as effective as those cast by infantile participants at numerous Comic Con conventions, where they go to exorcise any symptoms of unfolding maturity in order to remain children before going on the social security. Enter a couple of esteemed political "scientists" who, in no less than Council of Foreign Relations very own rag, Foreign Affairs, arrived to this conclusion:

Multiple signs point to a crisis in global order. The uncoordinated international response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the resulting economic downturns, the resurgence of nationalist politics, and the hardening of state borders all seem to herald the emergence of a less cooperative and more fragile international system. According to many observers, these developments underscore the dangers of U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America first” policies and his retreat from global leadership. 

My immediate quarrel with these two is not even this passage, however detached from reality it is (I will elaborate), but with the title of their piece itself: How Hegemony Ends. The Unraveling of American Power. My quarrel with it is the tense in which the title written because American "hegemony", much of it self-proclaimed, ended quite some time ago. So? the proper title should be How Hegemony Ended. It is difficult to precisely pin-point this moment but, and I wrote extensively on that, the first real manifestation was a double whammy first in Crimea and second--Syria. Signs of America's power unraveling were registered even earlier. Now back to quotation. I don't know what "global order" those scientists are talking about but the truth of the matter is extremely simple: the United States could have been in the position of some sort of a global game warden--I omit, for now, the issue of the United States not having resources for that from the inception--if it knew its limitations, and even Russia and China would probably be OK, more or less, if the US would have recognized that. But no. Instead of an order, the United States, due to lack of resources and largely faked own 20th century military history, created one hell of a mess. 

Moreover, it is one thing when when it is a mess outside, but the US cannot govern itself properly. The terms democracy and human rights when used by US side at any international platform create ironic smiles at best, a Homeric laughter--at worst. There is nothing more pathetic than Barbara Jean Trenton trying to relive her 16-mm large screen glory in the times of fast internet and CGI. The US is Barbara Jean Trenton, unsuccessfully, trying to attract young lovers with her wrinkled face and disfigured by arthritis fingers, even with some rings with large diamonds on them. But then again, where are those certificates of authenticity for those stones? Did they ever exist? Not everything that shines is gold or a diamond. To the credit of the authors, they find this proposition erroneous: 

Some analysts believe that the United States can still turn this around, by restoring the strategies by which it, from the end of World War II to the aftermath of the Cold War, built and sustained a successful international order. If a post-Trump United States could reclaim the responsibilities of global power, then this era—including the pandemic that will define it—could stand as a temporary aberration rather than a step on the way to permanent disarray. 

Good for them, but even in debunking these ridiculous a-historic parallels, they arrive to a rather timid retort:

Today, those same dynamics have turned against the United States: a vicious cycle that erodes U.S. power has replaced the virtuous cycles that once reinforced it. With the rise of great powers such as China and Russia, autocratic and illiberal projects rival the U.S.-led liberal international system. Developing countries—and even many developed ones—can seek alternative patrons rather than remain dependent on Western largess and support. And illiberal, often right-wing transnational networks are pressing against the norms and pieties of the liberal international order that once seemed so implacable. In short, U.S. global leadership is not simply in retreat; it is unraveling. And the decline is not cyclical but permanent.   

They, same as John Mearsheimer (my first chapter in the last book addresses his last treatise) do not understand not only a fundamental crisis of "liberalism", a euphemism for financial capitalism, and that "seeking of alternative patrons" came about precisely that instead of order and stability the United States provided for warfare, atrocities, violence, destruction and all that is endemic in the system which now begins to eat itself from the inside. I leave a "largess"  argument for others to ponder--we didn't even start to count how many trillions of dollars this "largess" cost to such countries as Iraq, Serbia, Ukraine, Syria, Libya or Afghanistan, to name a few, in lost lives, destroyed infrastructure, stolen national treasure to name a few effects of this "liberal" order. What they don't understand is that if not for the Soviet Union saving what commonly is addressed as West by defeating European Nazism and Fascism, no serious talk about "liberal order" would have been possible. That is why Russia holds every year Victory Day Parade--not only to honor her fallen, but to remind this very West who and how defeated its very own demons. That is why Putin, in an interview to...ahem...The National Interest stresses this. 

However, the League of Nations dominated by the victorious powers of France and the United Kingdom proved ineffective and just got swamped by pointless discussions. The League of Nations and the European continent in general turned a deaf ear to the repeated calls of the Soviet Union to establish an equitable collective security system, and sign an Eastern European pact and a Pacific pact to prevent aggression. These proposals were disregarded.

It was Russia who bore the brunt and that is why Russia builds state-of-the-art weapons and armed forces. Today, any talk about "democracy", "liberalism", and global "order", unless it is done by a completely brainwashed people--not an uncommon feature among Western "scholars"--cannot and will not hide anymore attempts by Western financial oligarchy, led by US "elites", who think themselves as heirs to Superman's powers, to put a whole world under their control. Including by means of rewriting a history or, on many occasions, just making it up.

Thus, claims as such:

China and Russia are not the only states seeking to make world politics more favorable to nondemocratic regimes and less amenable to U.S. hegemony. As early as 2007, lending by “rogue donors” such as then oil-rich Venezuela raised the possibility that such no-strings-attached assistance might undermine Western aid initiatives designed to encourage governments to embrace liberal reforms.

Are made by people who are either lying through their teeth or, which is equally probable, dumb as stumps. "Liberal reforms" is a euphemism for total deregulation and privatization of national treasures by Western oligarchy. Ukraine is having a blast with those "reforms". While authors continue to bloviate throughout a meandering piece about how US "patronage" collapsed and how international "networks" are being reconfigured, I will repeat myself. They could have spared the space in the magazine and the time for reading by simply stating two basic facts:

1. US lost, with a humiliating score, economic race to China;

2. US lost, with a humiliating score, arms race to Russia.  

These two facts alone explain why the US never was a "superman" and why most of its "superpowers" turned out, such as magic wands of Harry Potter cosplayers at Comic Con conventions, to be as effective as a treatment of the fourth stage cancer with a hydrocortisone topical cream. And here is what I wanted to repeat, considering an infinitesimally small probability that these two "professors" will ever read this: throw your degrees in political pseudo-science into trash bin and start learning real economy and real military balance. Only that may help to regain some connection to the reality and maybe dispose off delusions about super-powers, which were never there, other than of a big screen in movie theater or on TV, especially in the country which cannot defend its sacred symbols, such as monuments, and history against the crowds of radical thugs and their enablers at the very political top. But yes, I dreamed once of being a Superman...and about Barbara Eden when she was Jeannie.  

Inception.

In Christopher Nolan's outstanding 2010 flick Inception, main protagonist, Dom Cobb, played ably by undeniably talented Leo DiCaprio, was using the so called totem, to have an idea if he was dreaming or was inside reality. If the totem toppled--Cobb wasn't dreaming. 

Totem was this Ariadne's thread allowing not to lose connection to the reality even in the dream. You may ask why I am waxing here Siskel-Ebertish in mostly geopolitical and military blog? The answer is simple: I allow myself once in a while go to Foreign Affairs publication by the Council on Foreign Relations site to get a gander on the state of America's allegedly most super-pooper, most sophisticated and most powerful minds behind what passes in the US as a foreign policy. Needless to say, that in the last few years those visits are increasingly rare, not least because I cannot tolerate American political "scientists" pseudo-intellectual newspeak--same phenomenon as economic lingo which is a newspeak covering the nature of the institutionalized robbery which passes in US as "economy" (see Michael Hudson's writing on this issue), plus, as I already stated not for once (hey, forget about me, many people stated this, such as Daniel Larison yesterday) I am not interested in wasting my time explaining a systemic delusion which is being presented as a viable "science". But today I ran into Richard Haas' (CFR's biggest honcho) piece about.... blah-blah-blah, yada-yada-yada accelerating something something history, something something to look intellectual and profound  etc. It is not profound, because Haas obviously doesn't know the real history of the 20th century and he is both energy, military and economy blind, using Arthur Berman's definition, but then something caught my eye and I took a screen shot:

Forget Haas' bloviation about WWII or WWI--drawing (pseudo)historic parallels is a fool's errand, not to speak of the fact that actual history of interwar period, not to speak of the realities of WWII is generally beyond the grasp (or is not allowed to be properly exercised in analysis) of US foreign policy "elite", most of which knows "strategy" and warfare from a white board abstracts in their Ph.D theses written away from warfare realities, any warfare. But it was so symbolic to see to the right of the Haas' "text" an image of what in Inception was Cobb's only connection to the reality--a rotating totem. Even in the closing moment of Nolan's masterpiece we are not given direct answer to the state Cobb and his reunification with his children are--is it still a dream or is he finally able to hug his children in a real world? 

I am on the record that far from experiencing any real respect to US foreign affairs establishment, I seriously think that these people live in a dream, in which the modern United States still can be compared to an industrial colossus, unscathed by horrors of 20th Century wars, which is capable (or at least it thinks so) to guide the world to a better future, dispatching its "finest fighting force in history" to remote shores and that it is just the matter of "selling" (that means outright lying) US foreign policy to Americans. Obviously Haas, being preoccupied with geopolitical and pseudo historic "profundities" doesn't use a single number to grasp a reality that the United States in China and Russia alone look at combined GDP and military capability which dwarfs that of the United States (Europe is not even an asset in all that) and is completely capable to deny the US access to Eurasia other than the US being incorporated as one among big equals into the new world order. But for Haas and CFR to really grasp the reality, albeit even he admits that the business is usual is pretty much over, he must wind the totem at the image to the right of his article and wait until it ether topples over, thus indicating the state of residing in reality, or will continue to rotate, indicating the most likely outcome of still dreaming, or residing in the dream in which cause and effect are not connected. But then again, ignoring causality is what makes the present state of the United States and her "elites", who should know better, but don't, so precarious. But I am sure we all know what it is to know about "exceptionalism" and how it destroys the nation which refuses to take a look at the rotating totem.          

What A Coincidence!

By now many of you know me in terms of most of my views. If you follow my writing--articles, books, this blog--you cannot fail to notice that I don't take kindly to all kinds of social, political  science and national security "studies" academe. First: political "science" is not a science and it used to be known as political history of the world. Secondly: geopolitics as it used to be known in times of its founding fathers, notably Halford Mackinder, is pretty much irrelevant today for a simple reason that it cannot exist without serious, very high academic level, understanding of the warfare. Modern warfare requires very serious knowledge of, both through academic training and experience, increasingly complex technology and the way it interacts with military and political institutions. One needs good level physics and things of such nature as weapons integration and operations theory to get some grip on it. They DON'T teach that in political "science" courses, nor classic geopolitics, born in the times of slow propeller driven bi-planes and main caliber guns of battleships shooting at the distances in excess of 30 kilometers, is applicable in the time when modern supers-sonic and hyper-sonic missiles have ranges in excess of 1,000 kilometers and receive targeting from satellite (among many other methods) recon systems. My book, which is about to hit the shelves, is precisely about it. My first one was also about it to a large degree.

Well, surprisingly, here are opinions at TAC.

For decades, international relations scholars have increasingly worried that American foreign policymakers aren’t buying what they’re selling. From the Vietnam war to NATO expansion to the Iraq war, the Beltway foreign policy elite has frequently ignored the work of academics who study those subjects, often at great cost to the nation. Why do foreign policymakers so rarely pay attention to scholarship on the regions they are bombing and seeking to dominate?Michael C. Desch, political science professor at the University of Notre Dame, lays blame at the feet of the academy. In his new book, Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security, Desch writes that “the privileging of complex methods and universal models over engaging substantive issues…reduced the policy relevance of the work of many academic defense intellectuals.” In other words, by moving toward abstruse ontological questions (“Sovereignty and the UFO” comes to mind) or complex statistics or formal modeling (coefficients or Greek letters), incentives inside the academy have shifted the field in the direction of policy irrelevance.

It became irrelevant because it was irrelevant from the inception, because specifically in the West this field couldn't established simplest causalities--relations between cause and effect--because:

1. Western approach to history, as recent events so dramatically demonstrated, is about feel good, not about looking facts in the face and their proper arrangement which satisfies these very cause and effect. The problem here is deeper, it is in metaphysical view that truth is really unknowable--but that is grossly inaccurate, to say the least;

2. One can not develop policy (or strategy) when one operates on a delusion and profound ignorance of warfare, which defines human history. United States as a society has no experience with that in modern times 20-21st centuries. Hence, as Justin Logan (the author of the piece) motes:

In a country as powerful and secure as the United States, elites can make policy built on shaky foundations. Eventually, the whole thing may collapse. Scholars should focus on pointing out these fundamental flaws—and thinking about how they might help rebuild. 

Removing all this pseudo-academic BS such as "ontological", "epistemic" etc., it all comes down to this: unless one has a serious background in military, one shouldn't be getting into modern warfare, especially with a "method" which distorts grossly a picture of military balance, operational art, tactics, technology, which, as we all witnessed in the last 20 years, is a road to hell. I write about this non-stop for years, especially after it became very clear that the view of war, military history and of real geopolitics Western political "science" produced in the last 30 years is nothing short of a disaster, which unfolded upon encountering global realities, and, with some very few and, frankly, minor exceptions, is mostly a trash. In even simpler words--political "scientist" needs to understand how real geopolitical balance forms, before any of those scientists decide to bless the world with their "wisdom"--a skill long ago lost in the West in "academe" because they don't teach it properly, if at all. 

Another One.

This time it is about Robert Kagan who passes, for some unknown reason, as a "scholar" in the US and here is what stuns me from article in The American Conservative: 

As a writer and public intellectual, Kagan has skillfully crafted historical narratives and strategic assessments supporting his overarching neoconservative vision for U.S. foreign policy.

In a single phrase there are two major symptoms of America's intellectual collapse. 

1. Long ago, the term intellectual in the West turned into a description of somebody who is proficient with manipulating data, facts, knowledge etc. In other words, intellectual has to be "sophisticated" even when he(she) is wrong--a dominant characteristic of present American intellectual field. You see, skillfully crafted narratives suddenly matter more than the truth which is knowable. But look at me, I am skillfully crafting narrative that Robert Kagan is dumb as a stump (as, for the most part, are neoconservatives in general) and I can prove it, that is present it as truth, the thing Kagan, on the other hand, will not be able to do to counter....

2. Because he is dumb and has degree in history "as taught in US universities" he cannot craft strategic assessments since he is neither qualified for doing so, nor has any clue on any basic model of power balance since they contain things of which he never heard about.  

So, basically, he is a person who "can't handle the truth" because the truth starts beyond the limits of Robert Kagan's competencies and this truth is based upon military power as a function of a nation-state, that is its economy and international real weight. Even non-neoconservative American strategic assessments suffer dramatically from ignorance and, as a consequence, exaggerations, in Kagan's case, most what he preaches for is built around a complete delusion of a pretentious mediocre writer who is utterly out of his depth whenever he tries to pretend that he has something of substance to say on the issue of global power shift--he doesn't. People who create narratives usually do not have time for a serious business of geopolitical analysis, Kagan doesn't have this time. In the end, the author of the article about Kagan's latest book states himself:

Instead of a careful consideration of American interests and a tight and specific argument about how certain means meet those ends given today’s threat environment, we get general arguments about the need to be tough, to pay costs to uphold milieu goals, and ominous imagery about a jungle overcoming our nice but unnatural garden.

I think people like the author of the piece, William Ruger, himself a former US naval officer, should learn by now--the price for American folie de grandeur must be paid by anybody but Kagan's cabal of demagogues who concoct their pseudo-academic ideas in the comfort of their offices and restaurants in D.C., far away from battlefields and all misery and suffering American spreading of "democracy" and "liberal order" brings to people.       

Nicholas Gvosdev Loses The Nerve.

As I wrote not for once, I stopped treating American geopolitical theorists as serious scholars a long time ago. Most of what passes in contemporary US as a "national security studies" is a pseudo-academic sophistry revolving around the United States as one and only "best thing ever" which ever happened or will ever happen to humanity. The only work, as in set of the ideas, which came out of the US and which still has some relation, however limited, to reality is Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, and even this influential work turned out to be filled with misconceptions, pop-history and all other traits of what is commonly known as Political Science. In general, contemporary American geopolitical  "thought" is still defined by Fukuyama's scandalously stupid and delusional, to put it politely,  failure of The End of History. 

Most taxonomies of the American geopolitical thought, such as realists, neo-realists, neocons, liberal interventionists, globalists, you name it, make absolutely no sense since do not realistically describe American doctrine-mongering in any sensible way. There is very little difference between, say John Mearsheimer, who passes in US as "offensive realist" or whatever is hip and cool any given day, and, say Robert Kagan, who is a certifiable war-monger and pseudo-academic. Views of both originate from the same starting point and differ only in minute details. This starting point is American exceptionalism and strong belief that US is economically and militarily omnipotent. Enter Nicholas Gvosdev, whose bio, apart from naming some of his places of employment, including him being "professor" of national security studies in Naval War College, is rather foggy. For years this guy presented himself as a geopolitical "realist" (or whatever) but lately he finally dropped this BS mask and exposed himself for what he is--a classic American exceptionalist who has very little grasp of the subject of his "study" (evidently he has his Ph.D in it)--Russia. 

The issue here is not a complete mental breakdown in Gvosdev's latest piece in, where else, The National Interest, no, the issue is, as it is an overwhelming case with US "academe", a loss of any touch with the reality. I wrote a lot on this issue and not for once I stated that people in US who write on Russia's economy should really abstain from regurgitation of therapeutic self-medicating ignorant mantras on Russia's economy since they will spare their own nerves and avoid parading themselves as amateur fools most of them are. It is not enough that most of American "economists" continue to live in a delusion, such as former Reagan's budget director David Stockman:

 

And as for Russia, pulleese!

Its entire GDP of $1.5 trillion is less than that of the New York metro area, and only 8% of the US economy as a whole. The very idea that it’s a military threat to America is just flat out ludicrous; and that is in no way changed by Putin’s recent hints that Russia has developed a new class of non-ballistic strategic weapons that are not vulnerable to US ABM defenses.

Being an ignorant hack on Russia he certainly doesn't understand how actual economy (I will omit here his total ignorance on any military-technological issue) works and measured but that is expected from the former Wall Street shyster whose understanding of any serious industry is limited by methodology of fraud. For a man with degree in....theology, among many other "useful" backgrounds he boasts, it is expected not to have understanding of basic mathematics. Enter Gvosdev, who teaches, among many other things, Economic Geography. So, unlike ignorant Stockman, in his nervous-breakdown manifesto he comes up with a new wet-dream  "measure" of Russia's economic "weakness". Get this: 

It’s time to part with illusions. For too long, the U.S. national-security community has oscillated in its assessment of the Russian Federation, swinging between viewing Moscow as the country’s number one geopolitical threat to dismissing the challenge of a nation whose per capita GDP equals that of Portugal.

 

Initially when I read this I was startled. I thought Gvosdev followed Stockman's method of comparing NYC "economy", most of it based on Wall Street speculations with snake oil and air, to Russia's, but then I read "per capita". A-ha, I thought, Gvosdev is certainly smarter than so many of his Russia's "expert" colleagues who continue to spread various economic BS about Russia. The reason for this thought was simple--indeed, current Russia's GDP per capita is somewhere in the vicinity of Portugal's which, if Gvosdev didn't know is not the richest but by far not the poorest nation in the European Union with surprisingly robust economy for such a small country. The question thus is this: how Russia's per capita GDP, which only fifteen years ago was in her death throes and had a completely destroyed economy and livelihood of tens of millions of Russians, is bad?  If anything, Russia's per capita GDP was growing steadily and this comparison with Portugal far from reinforcing Gvosdev's thesis of Russia's economy being weak, actually debunks it. 

Nor Gvosdev's statement such as this:

The second illusion is that Russia’s trend lines are negative. This is true—with predictions about Russia’s relative economic size and military power by 2050 showing radical diminishment.   

has anything to do with reality, especially projected against the background of US being now at the precipice of economic and military global irrelevance. But, Gvosdev's piece is just another one in a non-stop hysterical reaction in the US on own and accelerating departure from, largely self-proclaimed, omnipotence. Russia has become an ultimate enemy and it seems that always weak US "academe" awareness of Russia is either completely lost or is reduced to a set of irrational reactions based only on emotions. These are the signs of a mental breakdown and are the heralds of a collapse, no, not Russia's. Desperation always drives increased illusions of own omnipotence and disregard of reality. It is one of the manifestations of one of (which one is for you to decide) the stages of Kubler-Ross Grief Model.  Saker thinks that these are first two stages simultaneously--I agree. These are now denial and anger, with bargaining, depression and acceptance coming at some point of time and, hopefully, without anyone in US deciding to do the unthinkable thus taking human civilization as a factor out of the history of our rather small planet. Pseudo "academic" exercises such as Gvosdev's piece or Stockman's pretentious ignorance are not helping in containing a massive geopolitical turbulence which we all are facing now. I will omit elaborating on political points here completely: I said many times, I will repeat it--American "Russian Studies" field is a sewer.