I think we are, and I'd argue big geopolitical realignments already happened over the past three years, and the effects of the realignment will become increasingly more apparent over the coming years.
I think the economic devastation Germany after WW1 has an analog in the USA of today. The evidence we can see for now includes the failure of sanctions, the deindustrialization of the West writ large, the rise of BRICS, the emergence of alternatives to the WTO and World Bank, the falling rate of profit, the rising cost of living, China issuing bonds in USD...
The antagonism between Germany at that time and the USSR has an analog in the relationship between the USA and China today. That antagonism is very different in its particulars, especially since China has adopted policies, strategies, and positions that were quite deliberately designed to reduce antagonism, but we still have the historical foundations of that antagonism, and we see in the diplomatic moves of China that they do not feel the need to be conciliatory anymore, except in so far as they will not give the USA any reason to activate its military reactively.
For a very long time I have been of the opinion that the fascist formation of the USA has learned from history and has chosen the path of incremental fascism at the slowest pace we've ever seen globally. We should see acceleration towards fascism as a signal that the conditions of the USA are fast approaching the conditions of a failed state and depending on the speed of that movement towards open fascism we may even be able to retrospectively understand the point of no return.
In other words, political formations are superstructure and the emerge from base, and we can see open fascism as a result of material conditions that present no other opportunity for maintenance of the status quo. In that light, your hypothesis that big geopolitical realignments have already happened is well supported and in fact would be further evidence for the economic changes to be bigger than most analysts acknowledge and potentially past the point of no return for maintaining empire.
This, I think, is how we get weeks with decades in them.
I very much agree with all of that. I’d also add that there’s the factor of the manufacturing base, which has been severely eroded in the US and much of the rest of the West. As far as I can tell, this is an unprecedented situation where an empire is so utterly dependent on its adversaries for basic necessities.
While there is a lot of talk about reindustrializing and reshoring, the reality is that the fundamentals of the current system are not aligned with that happening. The incentives for private businesses to bring industry back simply aren’t there, and the only way it could happen would be through massive government intervention. However, the political environment in the U.S. makes intervention on that scale impossible.
There would need to be a significant level of political reorganization to facilitate such a shift. Furthermore, even if this effort could be started, it wouldn’t bear fruit overnight. It would take many years, or even decades, to train workers, create supply chains, build factories, and so on. For example, it would require creating incentives for people to pursue specific types of education, such as trades and engineering, and then wait for them to go through these programs. There would also need to be a stable political environment to allow such policies to be executed in a sustained fashion over many years. It appears that the ruling class in the US is starting to understand at least some of these problems, but I have yet to see any sort of coherent proposal on how to address them.
It’s going to be very interesting to watch how this all develops in the coming years.
I would say that it's impossible for reindustrialization efforts to save the West for several reasons.
Foremost among those reasons is the shifting of innovation from the West to Asia, particularly China. Any effort at industrializing the West will necessarily involve copying Chinese infrastructural and manufacturing innovations and this will become more and more true as China dominates high tech research globally. The areas where the US has an innovation advantage are not collectively large enough to solve the economic problem.
Second is the lack of industrial knowledge and skill in the West. It's been multiple generations since workers, engineers, and architects in the West were committed en masse to productive industry. When we look at the demographics of industries even as essential as construction we see that there are entire realms of expertise where 70% of that workforce is retiring within 10 years. This is literally an unsolvable problem and may be one of the reasons why the Western oligarchs are so invested in AI - they know they can't solve this problem demographically so they are trying to solve it technologically.
Third is that there will be severe reaction to creating industry anywhere in the USA due to pollution of all kinds. Putting it where settlers live will create massive political repercussions and politicians will protect their personal interests. Putting it where the indigenous live will require massive amounts of infrastructure to be built and will cause greater resistance from the indigenous and create reaction among the more radical elements of the settlers that will ally with the indigenous. All of this will require violence to turn inward more substantially and create greater reaction domestically. The only way to solve this in the short term is a return to violent nationalism, which is what the USA is currently doing.
Fourth, even if the USA creates industry, it will be competing against global prices where it will struggle to compete while it ramps up its production. It will need higher quality to compete against prices elsewhere, or it will need a compelling sanctions regime. Sanctions are becoming less and less an option since they so publicly failed against Russia and China. And quality will be difficult if not impossible to handle as China's headstart likely puts it in a position to increase quality and retain a lower price than the USA could develop in the next 25 years.
I think the only solution available to the US is to destroy the productive capacity of other states.
Exactly, all these factors preclude the US from actually being able to reindustrialize in a meaningful way. The observation that the US is doubling down on AI to address the trained worker shortage is interesting. I haven't really thought of that, but now that you mention it that makes perfect sense. It is a misguided tactic as I don't actually see AI becoming advanced enough to handle such tasks in the near term. However, even if that was possible then it wouldn't give the US an edge over China where this tech is being developed just as rapidly. In fact, I'd argue China is in a much better position here because of its large population which provides larger data sets to work with. China also has the advantage of already existing advanced automation that can be coupled with AI systems the likes of which have no equivalent in the west.
We can already see the US destroying the productive capacity of Europe, and I'm sure that will extend to other vassals as well. However, the US won't be able to do that to China or Russia short of starting a nuclear holocaust. So, a likely scenario might be that the US retreats from being a global hegemon, and retrenches around parts of the globe where it still has strong influence. This is in line with Trump's quips regarding Canada, Greenland, and Panama Canal incidentally. He's basically drawing a line around the sphere of influence that the US sees as its core interest.
Yeah, I keep looking for the strategic nuclear angle in Greenland, but the shipping angle and the natural resources angle might be the stronger ones.
Panama is obviously a naked attempt to control trade in their sphere of influence.
Canada is just another Europe that the US won't let fall into the Chinese sphere of influence. And if that's the best it can do, then that's all the proof we need that the USA is cooked
is it just me or does it really feel like now we're on the brincs of something big?
It's been quite the decade this week.
Looks like freagle beat me to it.
🥁🥁tss
I think we are, and I'd argue big geopolitical realignments already happened over the past three years, and the effects of the realignment will become increasingly more apparent over the coming years.
I think the economic devastation Germany after WW1 has an analog in the USA of today. The evidence we can see for now includes the failure of sanctions, the deindustrialization of the West writ large, the rise of BRICS, the emergence of alternatives to the WTO and World Bank, the falling rate of profit, the rising cost of living, China issuing bonds in USD...
The antagonism between Germany at that time and the USSR has an analog in the relationship between the USA and China today. That antagonism is very different in its particulars, especially since China has adopted policies, strategies, and positions that were quite deliberately designed to reduce antagonism, but we still have the historical foundations of that antagonism, and we see in the diplomatic moves of China that they do not feel the need to be conciliatory anymore, except in so far as they will not give the USA any reason to activate its military reactively.
For a very long time I have been of the opinion that the fascist formation of the USA has learned from history and has chosen the path of incremental fascism at the slowest pace we've ever seen globally. We should see acceleration towards fascism as a signal that the conditions of the USA are fast approaching the conditions of a failed state and depending on the speed of that movement towards open fascism we may even be able to retrospectively understand the point of no return.
In other words, political formations are superstructure and the emerge from base, and we can see open fascism as a result of material conditions that present no other opportunity for maintenance of the status quo. In that light, your hypothesis that big geopolitical realignments have already happened is well supported and in fact would be further evidence for the economic changes to be bigger than most analysts acknowledge and potentially past the point of no return for maintaining empire.
This, I think, is how we get weeks with decades in them.
Stay safe, comrades.
I very much agree with all of that. I’d also add that there’s the factor of the manufacturing base, which has been severely eroded in the US and much of the rest of the West. As far as I can tell, this is an unprecedented situation where an empire is so utterly dependent on its adversaries for basic necessities.
While there is a lot of talk about reindustrializing and reshoring, the reality is that the fundamentals of the current system are not aligned with that happening. The incentives for private businesses to bring industry back simply aren’t there, and the only way it could happen would be through massive government intervention. However, the political environment in the U.S. makes intervention on that scale impossible.
There would need to be a significant level of political reorganization to facilitate such a shift. Furthermore, even if this effort could be started, it wouldn’t bear fruit overnight. It would take many years, or even decades, to train workers, create supply chains, build factories, and so on. For example, it would require creating incentives for people to pursue specific types of education, such as trades and engineering, and then wait for them to go through these programs. There would also need to be a stable political environment to allow such policies to be executed in a sustained fashion over many years. It appears that the ruling class in the US is starting to understand at least some of these problems, but I have yet to see any sort of coherent proposal on how to address them.
It’s going to be very interesting to watch how this all develops in the coming years.
I would say that it's impossible for reindustrialization efforts to save the West for several reasons.
Foremost among those reasons is the shifting of innovation from the West to Asia, particularly China. Any effort at industrializing the West will necessarily involve copying Chinese infrastructural and manufacturing innovations and this will become more and more true as China dominates high tech research globally. The areas where the US has an innovation advantage are not collectively large enough to solve the economic problem.
Second is the lack of industrial knowledge and skill in the West. It's been multiple generations since workers, engineers, and architects in the West were committed en masse to productive industry. When we look at the demographics of industries even as essential as construction we see that there are entire realms of expertise where 70% of that workforce is retiring within 10 years. This is literally an unsolvable problem and may be one of the reasons why the Western oligarchs are so invested in AI - they know they can't solve this problem demographically so they are trying to solve it technologically.
Third is that there will be severe reaction to creating industry anywhere in the USA due to pollution of all kinds. Putting it where settlers live will create massive political repercussions and politicians will protect their personal interests. Putting it where the indigenous live will require massive amounts of infrastructure to be built and will cause greater resistance from the indigenous and create reaction among the more radical elements of the settlers that will ally with the indigenous. All of this will require violence to turn inward more substantially and create greater reaction domestically. The only way to solve this in the short term is a return to violent nationalism, which is what the USA is currently doing.
Fourth, even if the USA creates industry, it will be competing against global prices where it will struggle to compete while it ramps up its production. It will need higher quality to compete against prices elsewhere, or it will need a compelling sanctions regime. Sanctions are becoming less and less an option since they so publicly failed against Russia and China. And quality will be difficult if not impossible to handle as China's headstart likely puts it in a position to increase quality and retain a lower price than the USA could develop in the next 25 years.
I think the only solution available to the US is to destroy the productive capacity of other states.
Exactly, all these factors preclude the US from actually being able to reindustrialize in a meaningful way. The observation that the US is doubling down on AI to address the trained worker shortage is interesting. I haven't really thought of that, but now that you mention it that makes perfect sense. It is a misguided tactic as I don't actually see AI becoming advanced enough to handle such tasks in the near term. However, even if that was possible then it wouldn't give the US an edge over China where this tech is being developed just as rapidly. In fact, I'd argue China is in a much better position here because of its large population which provides larger data sets to work with. China also has the advantage of already existing advanced automation that can be coupled with AI systems the likes of which have no equivalent in the west.
We can already see the US destroying the productive capacity of Europe, and I'm sure that will extend to other vassals as well. However, the US won't be able to do that to China or Russia short of starting a nuclear holocaust. So, a likely scenario might be that the US retreats from being a global hegemon, and retrenches around parts of the globe where it still has strong influence. This is in line with Trump's quips regarding Canada, Greenland, and Panama Canal incidentally. He's basically drawing a line around the sphere of influence that the US sees as its core interest.
Yeah, I keep looking for the strategic nuclear angle in Greenland, but the shipping angle and the natural resources angle might be the stronger ones.
Panama is obviously a naked attempt to control trade in their sphere of influence.
Canada is just another Europe that the US won't let fall into the Chinese sphere of influence. And if that's the best it can do, then that's all the proof we need that the USA is cooked
That's my line of thinking as well.