Western civilization, the pinnacle of world historical development, materially and morally, is facing two foreign totalitarian threats: the People’s Republic of China and Islam. The PRC is the secular paradigm of authoritarian statism, an Orwellian nightmare world of total control (China Represents the Existential Threat of our Time—and the Democratic Party is an Enabler). Islam, not quite the threat the PRC represents, is nonetheless the most aggressive form of clerical fascism in the modern period, its doctrine of subordinating all of society to God plagiarized from the worst of ancient Western Asian ideas, maintaining the cruel grounds its sources, Judaism and Christianity, long ago departed. Collapsing the profane into the sacred and the backwardness that ensures, and without effective Western opposition, a substantial proportion of Islam’s 1.8 million adherents is ripe for incorporation in the Middle Kingdom’s sphere of influence.
Considering these threats, especially in light of the global order Western transnationalists have sought for decades, this conjuncture, a gathering historical moment that appears as an unfolding, could not have come with a worse US president. Jimmy Carter and his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski began this debacle in the 1970s—allowing Iran to fall to the Islamists (Who’s Responsible for Iran’s Theocratic State?) and building up Islamism in Afghanistan, the later ultimately producing the Taliban and preparing the way for al-Qaida to establish a base of operations (Sowing the Seeds of Terrorism? Capitalist Intrigue and Adventurism in Afghanistan), so it is in some sense expected that Biden should be installed to finally betray the Afghan people—and the world.
The seriousness of the threat makes telling people “told you so feel” feel cheap and petty. But there is truth in there: the Democratic Party is aligned with the transnationalists managing the decline of America and the West; the consequences of Party hegemony is predictable.
Biden is compromised by his decades-long association with Chinese Communist Party (“Dear Hitler…” or Joe Biden is the Neville Chamberlain of Our Time). But he is not the only one who desires the rise of the PRC. Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, who advised Biden as Vice-President and Hillary Clinton as Secretary of the State, is on record as not only encouraging the PRC’s rise but creating “an environment more conducive to a peaceful and positive-sum Chinese rise.” The rhetoric of cooperation with the totalitarian People’s Republic comes with the expressed desire to gently push the PRC is a democratic and liberal direction. As if that is possible under totalitarian communism. As if the West hasn’t fallen down on its commitment to either value. If it was hard to detect two years ago, the ensuing two years made it plain that the CCP model of social control was one of the PRC’s major exports.
The managed decline of America is an integral part of the transnational project to shift global hegemony eastward as a step towards materializing the dream of a one world corporatist government—the realization of which requires cancelling the Enlightenment (The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones). Hence lockdowns and vaccine passports, Black Lives Matter and critical race theory, and the postmodernist rejection of scientific truth and objectivity (what Brown University economist describes as “identitarian epistemology”), all of which I have blogged about extensively on Freedom and Reason. Full of the hubris that a life disconnected from reality and money-power intoxication bring, and dismissive of the Thucydides Trap, the transnational elite appear to believe they can finesse the decline of America and the West. If so, then their derangement threatens humanity. But there’s more to it than conceit and ignorance (See Why Did The West Build Up China? America at a Crossroads: Corporations Poised to Take Control of the Republic.)
What is the Thucydides Trap? Harvard political scientist Graham Allison coined the term to describe the dilemma the United States faces with a rising China. Based on his analysis of sixteen cases over 500 years in which twelve resulted in Kinetic war, Allison warns that the likely result of a situation where a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one is military conflict. The dilemma gets its name from the Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” It is not always possible to escape a process with military conflict as its apparent terminal point, but it should be obvious that the strategy of managed decline of the ruling power coupled with building up the rising power is precisely the wrong strategy if one wants to avoid war—unless the goal is to incorporate what remains of the former into the latter. In concrete terms, that would mean dismantling democracy and liberty and assigning the peoples of the West to the role of serf in a global neo-feudalist order governed by transnational corporations (see section three of Mao Zedong Thought and the New Left Corruption of Emancipatory Politics; see also What the Flag Officers 4 America Letter Gets Wrong). Of course, the other option in avoiding war is to stop building up the rising power.
One only needs a handful of facts to understand this existential problem. I will use one to illustrate: China’s control over the means of the Third and Fourth Industrial Revolutions.
Under cover of global climate change, Western elites are transitioning their economies from gasoline-powered vehicles to electric vehicles. The batteries that run electric vehicles depend on rare earth minerals (REMs). Leveraging US and Europe’s pension funds and other money-capital to fuel the rapid development of its high-tech sector, the establishment of free trade zones, and expansion of PRC-controlled infrastructure around the planet—Western finance pumps hundreds of billions of dollars of direct investment into China annually—the CCP now effectively controls most of those regions where REMs are found. China alone is responsible for nearly two-thirds of the world production of REMs. China produces three-quarters of the world’s lithium-ion batteries and half of its electric vehicles. Afghanistan is one of the richest countries in terms of REMs. Last year, REMs in Afghanistan were estimated to be worth between 1 trillion and 3 trillion dollars. Biden has just effectively handed Afghanistan to the CCP.
Beyond Afghanistan’s resources, Biden gave the CCP the greatest gift a world power could give: the abandonment of the Afghan people signals to Xi Jinping that the US will likely not intervene when Taiwan falls to the PRC. Taiwan is the center of advanced chip design and production. Controlling advanced chip manufacturing is to the Third and Fourth Industrial Revolutions what fossil fuels were to the Second Industrial Revolution. (Without mentioning China, the Party of Davos, i.e., the World Economic Forum, tells its audience what’s at stake in this article: “The Fourth Industrial Revolution: what it means, how to respond.”) The nation that dominates in this area will control the economic—and political and military—power in the world. When the United States under Trump limited Huawei’s ability to outsource its chip designs to the Taiwanese chip foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the CCP threatened to retaliate. The CCP understands what is at stake. Deprived of these foundries, US consumer and defense industries would be set back at least several years (see “The Chip Wars of the 21st Century”).
The progressive left screams “Western imperialism!” when one expresses concern over the loss of control over the global means of production. But the question is what sort of world do you want to live in? One in which the people are governed by a democratic republic with a bill of rights focused on individual liberty? Or one in which a centralized state governed by corporate power controls every aspect of human affairs? What sort of world do you think the rank-and-file Chinese want to live in? The United States is the paradigm of a nation founded on individual liberty and human rights—proving its validity by realizing its founding ideals in history by ending the slave trade, abolishing chattel slavery, recognizing universal suffrage, and granting equal rights to all regardless of race and sex. The secular nation-state our founders established is a blueprint for people around the world to adopt in building more equal and just societies. Why are Western elites giving up on these values?
Establishment ideology tells us what progressives elites have in store for us. Its followers live in a dream world where the West is evil and those outside it are the enlightened ones. To speak of American and Western exceptionalism is “ethnocentric” and “nativist.” To criticize cultures that do not recognize the ideals democracy and liberty is “racist” and “xenophobic.” In the eyes of progressives, and this is explicitly articulated in the rhetorics of critical theory and thirdworldism, the West is a vehicle for white supremacy and patriarchy. There can be no progress here—the system merely periodically reconfigures itself to sustain race and sex privilege.
In their deep loathing of America, and fetishization of simulacra of the exotic, progressives pine for a mythical world beyond experience and knowledge—a world where people live simple uncomplicated lives. The brutal truth is that the world outside the West is a world where men own women and girls and throw homosexuals from towers. It’s a world of total surveillance and control. Islam erases the line between government and religion, asserting only one true God and doctrine, casting everybody into a hell on earth. Chinese communism is a religion where the Party is God—and that God promises an earthly heaven, what the Chinese have long referred to as the Middle Kingdom. Our enemies don’t think in terms of months and years. They think in terms of decades and centuries.
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