The fight between Hamas and Israel may be an age-old, continuing feud over land, religion, and ancient cultural grievances; but for other nations such as China and Russia, this is part of the greater battle of rejecting American-led globalization and American power.
But first, a question: How do empires and civilizations fall? There tends to be a common series of events that lead to the collapse of a nation or empire. Beginning with the first empire– the Assyrian Empire, the end comes about due to a combination of the following things: delusional autocratic leadership and dysfunctional government, a loss of the tax base, demographic collapse (due to low birth-rates, disease, or plagues), a great divide between the rich and the poor, the military gets involved in too many wars, natural and man-made climate disasters destroy the arable land, they experience a breakdown in civil society (civil wars), they go financially bankrupt, they are invaded or attacked in a moment of weakness, and they collapse because of too much complexity.
Some empires can collapse and rise again multiple times (like Assyria, and Ancient Egypt), others disappear forever (like the Etruscans, Incas, and Aztecs), and some just shrink to become a modest state (Great Britain, the Mongol Empire, Spain).
Today there is one undisputed super-power in the world, the United States. No military or economy can truly compete—and that includes China. But it goes further than that. The world has been following the American blue-print of free-market economics, democracy, alliances with the United States, and inter-dependent economic connectivity all backed by American power (800 military bases in over 70 countries) since 1945. It is an Americanized global world order. The challenge to that (The Communist World) mostly collapsed in 1991. Even China became a capitalist power-house in the 1990’s. This was the third great era of globalization in history. It raised living standards, brought more peace and democracy than we have ever seen, and cut global poverty by more than 50%. Extreme poverty dramatically decreased, but it also created enormous divides between rich and poor, so that the middle class weakened in developed countries, and grew quickly in less developed countries like China and India. Most significantly to what is happening now, it led to new nations wanting to challenge and destroy the U.S.-led world order.
THE CHALLENGERS TO THE UNITED STATES
There are a number of nations and movements that really seek to end the so-called “American Century” since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
ISLAMIC FASCIST MOVEMENTS: The first overt challenge was Islamic Fascism and the world order alternative presented by Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Bin Laden and Al-Zwahari were very clear prior to the attacks about what their plan was. It was a trap: “Let’s weaken the United States by drawing them into a long war in the Middle East, forcing them to overspend, go bankrupt, and isolate from the world while making many enemies.” The American world order would be replaced by an Islamic Caliphate running the world. While that’s attractive to a small portion of Muslims, most Muslim youth around the world are bored by that and want to be atheists, soccer stars or rappers. But enough joined to grow Al-Qaeda (especially in Africa), and ISIS. Both Hezbollah and Hamas share a common hatred of Israel and the United States.
CHINA: Newly “wealthy” and powerful China has aggressively tried to create a Chinese world order to replace the American one. This is one where China gets to remain an authoritarian state accountable to no one, but practices Capitalism with the rest of the world (minus the American penchant for inserting morality into foreign policy). In other words: “We Chinese don’t care who we work with, as long as they make us money and expand our economic reach. They can be communist, capitalist, terrorists, nationalists, European, Latin American autocrats, African…anything.” China will support anyone and anything that allows it to make money and weakens the US world order.
China’s problem is that it is a house of cards, far more fragile than people realize. It’s leader Xi Jinping is deeply unpopular and incompetent, it’s economic success was a mirage built on debt, bad loans, and over-construction. Dishonest banking practices, manipulation of numbers and corruption hide the real truth. Today, its unemployment rate is high, it’s consumers don’t spend, there is a housing affordability crisis, there are far too many men and not enough women so birth-rates are dangerously low, the family is breaking down, there are too many pensioners and not enough workers, it has an untested and over-rated military and China is prone to regular pandemics, , natural disasters, and suffers from severe environmental degradation. Those are a lot of the things on the list of how empires fall. China is a fragile nation, pretending to be the next United States. But people buy into their projected image. In reality, China looks like France in 1900 and Japan in the 1990’s: nations that were supposed to become the premier global powers and peaked too soon.
RUSSIA: Russia has reached the point of no return as a country. It’s been called “Zaire with permafrost.” Aside from oil, some key natural resources and a low quality military that can only bomb and raze and commit acts of terrorism, its rusty nuclear weapons that may or may not work, are the only things that keep it relevant. Putin’s goal all along has been to restore as much of the Soviet Empire as he can. So far that has amounted to Belarus and from time to time, Kazakhstan being part of his newly-constituted “Eurasian Economic Union” which is supposed to compete with China, the E.U., India, and the United States. So far, it’s been a laughable failure because Putin is no genius. Putin’s second goal is to destroy the American World Order which means he will work with North Korea, China, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, or terrorist groups like Hamas if it hurts the United States. While no one is watching, he and the Wagner group have created chaos in Africa (removing the French and the government of Niger just last week), they are assisting a new war to come about between Azerbaijan and Armenia (while no one is watching), as well as in Malawi, Chad, and other regions. Russia is also buying political parties in democratic states, using troll farms and cyber-warfare on America and its allies, and as of this week, blaming the United States for the Hamas-Israel problem. Russia supports both Hamas, props up Syria, and supports the portions of Israel politicians that were starting a Civil War between the Israeli Jews themselves. In other words, Russia sowed many of the seeds of this current conflict by financing and supporting the two most violent rivals in Israel (hardline Jews and hardline terrorists). Russia understands it doesn’t need a strong military. It just needs to create dangerous fault-lines around the world that trip up the United States and the EU. This sadly works because disinformation campaigns work, bribery works, kompromat works, and people are very slow to stand up to a bully.
IRAN: Iran funds terrorism around the world. While the people of Iran are overwhelmingly young and in support of the United States (and hate radical Shiia Islam), the corrupt, theocratic mullahs of Iran have managed to maintain control of the nation since 1979 and are committed to causing problems for their 3 great enemies: The USA, Israel, and their Sunni Islamic rival, Saudi Arabia. The Hamas-Israel conflict is good for destroying Israel and weakening the US and Saudi Arabia, which they desperately want. Like Russia, their goal is to pay and supply terrorists but be removed enough to create plausible deniability: “Maybe they are using some of our weapons, and we’ve given them some money and advice, but we didn’t plan this thing.” Same tactic Russia and China are using (Chinese and Russian fingerprints will be all over this current Hamas terrorist attack, not just Iran).
SAUDI ARABIA AND TURKEY: Both are authoritarian nations that are fair-weathered allies of the United States. American military bases are in Turkey and Turkey (which recently changed its official name to Türkiye Cumhuriyeti) are part of NATO. But Turkey is run by a dictator who supports Islamic Fascism and genocide of the Kurds. He’s already come out in support of Hamas and protected Russia’s fleet in the Black Sea from the US Navy. Like Putin, Orban, Xi, and Netanyahu, Turkey’s President is all about weakening any institutions, judicial system, and legislative bodies that limit his total control. As for Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia gives the U.S. oil in exchange for security from Iran. Saudi supports Islamic fascist movements and terrorist groups around the world, including hardcore Islamic Fascist schools in Pakistan. But the US still depends too much on these two nations, both who have no real love for Israel or the United States. Both join Russia, China, and Iran in wanting a non-American world order.
EVERYONE IS TOO BROKE TO PAY FOR WORLD WAR III
Both China and the United States are technically broke (I’ve written about this extensively before on my blog). The world governments are currently carrying a debt of over $300 trillion, and more than 1/3 of that is American debt racked up since 9/11/2001. It’s over $500 trillion if you count corporate debt. In other words, countries like the USA can never pay back their debts. In fact, they cannot even afford the interest on the loans and its mathematically impossible to ever pay back the full debt. Basically, every major country from the UK to France, to Japan, to China is carrying unsustainable debt.
This is a huge problem for China and the rest of the world—and all were in bad shape financially before COVID forced them to spend trillions to prop up their economies during lockdown. Wars are expensive, pandemics are expensive, and no one has the money to pay for it. But here we are.
The US gets away with its high debts because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. This means the US has an extra 4th option that other countries don’t have. Option 1 is default and declare bankruptcy. Argentina does this pretty regularly. Option 2 is called “austerity” and means the government cuts back its spending on its citizens (pensions, schools, medical care, housing assistance, infrastructure, welfare programs). No government in a democracy survives that. The UK briefly tried it after the 2008 crisis and had to reverse course quickly as people’s anger mounted. Option 3 is a “Global Debt Jubilee” where the whole world decides to forgive each other’s debts and re-price everything. It requires tons of cooperation and there are big winners and losers. It’s a Biblical idea practiced by Ancient Israel, but hard to pull off in today’s complicated, integrated global economy. Option 4 is for the United States alone. Devalue your currency by printing money out of thin air. Artificially prop up the stock market, continually change the inflation markers, allow high inflation and high interest rates to slow the economy, let the value of the dollar shrink in real terms so that $100 will only buy $10 worth of stuff 10 years from now. This is the option the US is doing now. It’s an invisible tax that people are slow to notice or don’t notice at all. And this kind of extreme currency and market manipulation started with Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and went into over-drive after 9/11 and the dot.com bust around 2004. Every President since then, Democrat or Republican (W. Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden) has been trapped into spending money that the US doesn’t have because the Federal Reserve created a manipulated (and very ironically, socialist) controlled, economy. American capitalists are thus completely dependent on socialism (for corporations). Even the rich are getting poorer in the United States, but they can afford to get poorer because they have such an enormous advantage and own valuable assets the Middle Class and poor do not. The Middle Class and the poor in the United States have been in decline since 1971, but only started to figure out they were in decline after the 2008 financial crisis. Hence the Tea Part (conservative), Occupy Wall Street (liberal), and the rise of militancy, racism, and demagoguery. The blame that should go toward highly-sophisticated and manipulative banking and economic fiscal policy instead gets channeled toward immigrants, Blacks, Jews, Republicans, Democrats, city people vs. rural people etc. Demagogues rise, democracy suffers, trust-levels in society plummet. That’s the process that has really accelerated in the USA since 2012.
HAMAS-ISRAEL CREATES AN OPENING FOR AMERICAN DECLINE
While the US has long promised to defend Israel and Taiwan (notice how the Hamas-Israel war forces the US to take its eyes and military off of Ukraine and Taiwan), the American nation shows many of the signs of a collapsing empire: dysfunctional government, enormous divide between rich and poor, flirting with autocratic leadership, divided in two and on the brink of a form of civil war, a shrinking tax base, demographic slow-down, and an over-stretched military involved in too many long-term wars. For Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, and Islamic-Fascist terrorist groups, the United States is just as fragile right now as Israel. And their hope is the same as Osama Bin Laden’s prior to 9/11. They hope that the U.S. overcommits, makes a new set of enemies, goes to war, goes bankrupt and falls into civil war and autocracy.
While China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey all enjoy trying to destroy the American world order, they all have a huge problem: They are all super crappy at running their own countries and haven’t provided a succesful economic world order to compete with the American-led post 1991 globalization world order. Their populations (particularly all the young generations) do not want to be disconnected from the globalized world. They want i-phones, Zoom, remote work, travel, and Taylor Swift. Their living standards will get worse in a post-American World Order. Young people and talented people have left Russia in droves, China has had to put travel restrictions on its people because so many Chinese want to leave China and store their money in the West. Saudi has an enormous youth unemployment problem, Turkey was the 11th largest economy in the world before Erdogan and today it is an economic laggard, and Iran is filled with a mostly young population that is pro-West and hates Islam. These nations may destroy themselves or fall into civil war in their effort to destroy the United States world order.
Interestingly, every country mentiond (including China and Russia) have a large population of Muslims that can easily be radicalized. Both China and Russia abuse their Islamic citizens, so sponsoring terrorism against the United States and Israel will probably backfire horrifically on China, Russia, Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. It’s a be-careful-what-you-wish-for situation.
At some point in the near future, Americans will have to come together and fight a common enemy (like Israel is having to do literally overnight after being on the brink of Civil War before the Hamas attack), or the US will choose to withdraw from the world (which is not possible in an age of satellite communications that we are all dependent on), or begin a long-term decline. To survive and thrive, the US will have to reinvent itself (which it has done 3 times before) and come together very quickly. Just as Hamas trapped Israel last week, the bigger players on the world have been working to trap the United States for 20 years and are in the process of finishing the job. The USA will have enormously consequential decisions to make from here on out that will either extend the American Century or end it rapidly. Right now Americans are too busy fighting and hating each other to see the forest through the trees.
Since the 9/11 attacks, the ancient civilizations (and that’s what they are…not countries but civilizations) of Iran, China, and Russia have been playing 5 dimensional chess, while American leaders both Republican and Democrat have been playing Hungry Hungry Hippos. Can the United States avoid the fate of other nations and civilizations that reached this point? It has before, but each time it required a level of selflessness and sacrifice that comes hard for a nation of radical individualists whose instinct is to put their own needs ahead of a common greater good.
[In my 4th and final post, I will highlight the most important things to keep an eye on over the next decade. A new world order is being created–the question outanding however is will it be a more free and safe world order, or a more dangerous and autocratic world order].