Forward to the Past - Walking Back From History redux

It has been two years and eight months since Trump became POTUS and I have to confess that I still do not understand him. A well-heeled larrikin. A High Street hustler. An ‘outsider’ who’d rather do business than war. He promised détente with Russia, an end to the Middle East quagmire, and questioned the usefulness of NATO. So how did he manage to become the CEO of War Incorporated? Could it really have been through a monumental cock-up? (As much as I'd like to believe that his populist anti-war message resonated with a majority of workers, I still take it for granted that US presidents are selected, not elected.) Or does this speak to some sort of factional infighting among the ruling elites? Not the parties - two party politics is a distraction, and not a useful tool for analysis. The Democrats became the party of finance under Clinton, dismantling what was left of the welfare state while still pretending to speak for black and brown voters and women. The GOP now seems to represent white workers. Whatever. They both pursue the same punishing social, economic and foreign policies.

Julian Assange will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars for, among other things, revealing how the DNC conspired to set Trump up as a pied piper candidate in the 2016 election. It's no secret that Trump is a long-time friend of the Clintons. It is entirely plausible that he was put up to lose the election to Hillary, and that this might have been the real election meddling in 2016. But despite the influence of the Clinton machinery, it looks like any chance Hillary might have had was knocked on the head by the Pentagon Chiefs, who were tired of losing wars, and saw her as dangerous and unhinged (remember Benghazi?) and the prospect of simultaneous war with Russia, China, Iran and North Korea as INSANE. So the elites played a wild card. Maybe. Who knows?

Has Trump kept his promises and stuck to his platform? Well he hasn’t started any new wars, yet. And there’s the North Korea situation, the optics of which certainly seem to play in his favour. But he has sold $110bn worth of arms to the Saudis while they've escalated their genocidal war on Yemen, and according to one source he’s dropped more bombs than Obama. So it’s six to half a dozen whether he’s really the ‘peace president’, or whether it’s just business as usual; whether he represents a change in tack by the US ruling establishment, or something else altogether - perhaps some kind of new-money insurgency.

After WWII the US became the guardian and custodian of not just the British Empire, but basically of all the colonial assets of Belgium, France Japan and the Netherlands. If we frame this according to MacKinder’s thesis, (or Orwell’s 1984), it became the custodian of ‘Sea Power’; the guardian of the global imperium.

The US was seeded with Old Money from the mercantile families of 17th and 18th century Europe, the Rothschilds, Warburgs etc. It was part of the world’s first global empire, an Empire of global finance capital fashioned after the East India Companies of Britain and the Netherlands. But geographic reality soon asserted itself, and after a proxy war involving Britain, France and Russia, it broke its tether and became a republic. From here we see the emergence of a counter-current; a new class of land owners; a new nobility - the resource-wealthy Rockefellers and Carnegies etc. From here develops a sort of Koch Brothers/Waltons vs Wall St paradigm of industrial vs finance capital, which perhaps corresponds to the broader divergent currents of economic nationalism vs globalist imperialism. Obviously nationalists don't benefit from international wars, which could explain why Trump appears to be trying to de-escalate tensions, at least in some theatres.

As I’ve written elsewhere, when it comes to factional infighting among the ruling class, it scarcely behoves us as socialists to choose a side. But if imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism as Lenin argues, and if Trumpism represents imperial retreat as Anthony Monteiro suggests, then does Trump also represent a type of capitalist retreat? In other words, is the multi-polar movement inherently anti-capitalist? While this is probably drawing a long bow, certainly the colonised people stand a better chance of liberation when imperialism is not permitted to feed. So how will the US adapt to this re-ordering of global affairs? Will there be a renewed respect for sovereign and independent nations? Or will multipolarity turn out to be just a rebranded imperialism?

Tony Blair was the public face of the globalist neoconservative agenda which specifically called for “a new, post-Westphalian doctrine of the international community”, while at the same time the CIA sock puppets al Qaeda were calling for the replacement of the centuries old system of nation states with an eternal Islamic Caliphate. Two sides of the same coin. The reality which has asserted itself since then appears to be neither globalist nor nationalist, but rather a return to the spheres of influence model which emerged out of the 30 years war. It has been roughly 30 years since the relatively stable paradigm of post WWII Cold War politics was replaced by a brief period of Western imperial hegemony, and roughly 30 years since the spectre of Islamist terrorism became the bogey man used to justify a new wave of US imperialist wars across the colonised world. But the locus of global political and economic power now seems to be shifting away from western financial elites. The position of the US dollar as international reserve currency is being questioned at the highest levels. China has a brand new trade policy and is making inroads into Africa. Russia is now pursuing its own balancing strategy in the Middle East, and while Trump may appear to be backing away from wars in the region, he has ramped up the ferocity of US attacks on central and South America in an apparent return to the Monroe Doctrine.


"Thus we may see", quoth he, "how the world wags".


With Bolivia sitting on top of the worlds largest lithium reserves - the 'fossil fuel' of the fourth industrial revolution, and Venezuela controlling the worlds largest oil reserves - the transition fuel, not to mention enormous reserves of water, land and labour, I think we have a clear picture of where things are currently headed. Forces seem to be aligning now with a kind of historic inevitability, and I suspect geographic reality is about to assert itself again. It would not surprise me if the globalists attempt to mount some sort of last gasp counter coup, and the current Davos-backed climate alarmism ruckus certainly seems to be a Trojan horse for this, with the timing of Trump’s impeachment and the Brexit shenanigans creating something of a perfect storm. But it may be too late now for such a strategy. It may be that the western imperial project has simply proved too ambitious and expensive to manage - certainly too wasteful and inefficient for a business head like Trump. Perhaps what we are seeing unfold is not the end of imperialism itself, but imperialism in its present, globalist configuration; an inevitable convergence of economic and geographic determinism which has its historical parallel not so much in 1914; but rather 1648.