Patrick Lawrence: Imperium: Decline on the Way to Fall

I just read a most remarkable piece in The Seattle Times—remarkable for its bluntly nihilistic candor. The headline atop Ron Judd’s August 2021 essay for The Times’s Pacific NW Magazine gives a good idea of the writer’s point: “The decline of American civilization.” And the subhead: “There’s more bad TV than ever; it’s available everywhere; and it’s making us fat, lazy, selfish and stupid.” 

News sometimes seems to travel slowly in these parts, but never mind that. If Judd’s observations were pithy three years ago, they have the gravitational pull of Jupiter as we read them today. Here is Judd bringing home his thesis:

Based on our current state of national dysfunction, cultural warfare and garden-variety public psychosis—more on this after a few commercial messages urging you to ask your doctor about a new wonder drug, Byxfliptaz—it’s undeniable that the mainstream American today possesses all the crisp, mental faculties of a Jell–O salad left too long out in the sun at an August picnic at Marymoor Park.

Now does not seem the time for bad TV or brains gone to Jell–O. In consequence of a rapid succession of events, none appearing related to any other, the collapse of America’s seven and some decades of hegemony is dramatically accelerating. Some astute observers now think the “international rules-based order,” as the policy cliques call the projection of American power, is already done for. I suppose the choice lies between accepting this reality and watching bad TV, and O.K., the latter proves tempting to a surprising many. 

Awake, O sleepers, and arise from the dead! 

On the eastern flank of the Atlantic world the imperium’s managers have lost a war they were confident they would win when they started it with the coup they arranged in Kiev a decade ago. The West’s wild miscalculation in Ukraine leaves Russia the victor, and it would be hard to overstate the consequences of this blow for American power and prestige. 

Added to this, the policy cliques’ years-long effort to isolate Russia, cripple its economy and destroy the value of its currency has manifestly failed. As measured by the growth rate of gross domestic product, the Russian economy is handily outperforming America’s and Europe’s. With ruble-denominated trade increasing at a startling pace, the currency is stable. Moscow is now a leading force as the non–West, a.k.a. the Global South, coalesces behind a multipolar order based on legally binding principles of sovereignty, the U.N. Charter and other multilateral documents and declarations. 

Some readers may have taken little notice, but the new leaders in Niger, who came to power in a coup against the nation’s pro–Western president last July, have just 86’ed the U.S. military, which has long maintained a $250 million outpost in northeastern Niger that the Pentagon considers essential to Washington’s effort to project power across West Africa and the Sahel. So much for the “full-spectrum dominance” of the neoconservatives’ turn-of-the-century dreams.

Saving the worst for last, the United Nations Human Rights Council just received a 25–page report and a 12–minute video summary from its special rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, titled “Anatomy of a Genocide.” You can read all the blurry New York Times apologias you want about the Gaza crisis. It remains that in the eyes of the world’s majority, the U.S. is sponsoring a mad-dogs regime as it exterminates an entire people. The price the imperium will pay for this in years to come will be steep.

Turn off the tube and think about these developments. To take them together, as we should, they tell us two things. One, a new world order composed of multiple poles of power, however strenuously Washington seeks to undermine it, is breaking out all over and gains momentum as we speak. Two, Washington’s policy cliques, stupidly unwilling to accept 21^stcentury realities, are likely to act with increasing desperation as U.S. primacy finally gives way to a global order worthy of the term. If you thought the past couple of decades have been violent, chaotic and destructive, brace yourself: There is almost certainly worse to come.   

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However long the Biden regime goes on saying the war in Ukraine is “at a stalemate,” and however faithfully our corporate media repeat this nonsense like ventriloquists’ dummies, if the Kyiv regime is losing ground daily and there is no realistic hope of regaining it, the word we are looking for is “lost.” The question it is time to ask: What will the U.S. and its European vassals do when the make-believe wears out and defeat, while never admitted on paper, is too obvious to deny? 

Nothing good. As a negotiated peace on any terms acceptable to Moscow is out of the question, and as subverting “Putin’s Russia” remains the objective, the U.S. is likely to intensify the sorts of covert ops and “hybrid warfare” that have been on Washington’s menu for decades. This stands to get very dangerous very fast. Did we have a preview of messes to come with the shocking attack on the concert auditorium and shopping arcade near Moscow on Mar. 22? This is my read. 

The U.S. “intelligence community” was quick to make public an “assessment”—a flimsy term that commits no one to anything—that the attack was the work of a group of militant Islamists and there was no evidence Ukraine had anything to do with it. Soon enough an offshoot of the Islamic State, ISIS–Khorasan, claimed responsibility. President Putin, who had been cautious from the start about assigning blame, eventually declared that Islamic terrorists were indeed culpable for the deaths of 137 innocent Russians and for setting the Crocus City Hall ablaze.

Identifying ISIS–K as responsible is a complicated business, we must bear in mind. After the collapse of Washington’s client regime in Kabul three years ago, many members of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, finding themselves suddenly homeless, joined ISIS–K as shelter from the storm. These were CIA–trained intelligence and counterinsurgency operatives, and they reportedly went over in considerable numbers. There were subsequent reports, never verified,  suggesting that the CIA was using unmarked helicopters to supply ISIS–K with weapons and matériel. A year ago last week, Foreign Policy described it as “arguably the most brutal terrorist group in Afghanistan.”

Moscow, perfectly aware of these connections, now concludes that the CIA, along with Britain’s MI6, were behind the Crocus Town Hall attack, with the Kyiv intelligence agency, the SBU, playing a supporting role on the ground. The chief of Russian intelligence unpacked all this last week as he outlined Moscow’s findings. “We think the act was prepared by the radical Islamists, but, of course, the Western special services have aided,” Alexander Bortnikov, the FSB’s chief,  asserted. “And the special services of Ukraine have a direct hand in this.” 

There is too much circumstantial evidence supporting this case to dismiss it. The CIA’s “assessment” assigning responsibility to ISIS can be taken as perfectly true but only half the story. The same day Bortnikov spoke, Russia sent a hypersonic missile—the kind that eludes standard air defense systems—to destroy the SBU’s headquarters building in Kyiv. This is what I mean by things getting very dangerous very fast.

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It is hard to say what Washington will do now that Niger has declared that the 1,000 U.S. troops stationed there are “illegal” and ordered them removed. It is easier to say what the U.S. will not do, unfortunately. It has given no indication whatsoever that it has any intention of withdrawing its troops and shutting their base. 

A spokesman for the new government in Niamey, elaborating on the official statement on Mar. 17, asserted the U.S. presence “violates all the constitutional and democratic rules, which would require the sovereign people—notably through its elected officials—to be consulted on the installation of a foreign army on its territory.” 

That may sound like boilerplate, but it is exceedingly important Niamey cast its expulsion order in such terms. Addressing the Nigerien statement at a press conference, the State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, brushed it off as if it were dandruff on his lapels. Let us watch as the master of the international rules-based order now demonstrates—just as it did in the Iraq case a few years ago—that the rules and the order have nothing to do with respect for the sovereignty of other nations or the democratic principles the U.S. wears gaudily on its sleeve. 

It is unlikely Niamey will be able to force the U.S. out, just as Baghdad couldn’t when it ordered all remaining U.S. troops out a few years ago. Do you think the rest of the world is watching bad TV and will take no notice as American soldiers stay on in the Nigerien desert? The extent the U.S. succeeds in defying another host nation’s order will be the extent of another loss of credibility, prestige, and respect. 

You’re seeing a few commentators these days who are looking at these various developments—the lost war in Ukraine, the West’s failure to isolate Russia, mounting hostilities to the U.S. in West Africa, the ineluctable rise of a new world order—and taking them together as a measure of the imperium’s accelerating collapse. 

The American Conservative published a piece last week headlined, “The ‘Rules–Based Order’ Is Already Over.” If Dominick Sansone overstates his case, which focuses on the West’s confrontation with Russia, it is not by much. “Moscow has insulated itself from Western ostracization, thus changing the entire balance of power in not only Europe, but the world,” he writes. “The ‘rules-based’ economic and political order has been irreversibly altered.”

In another piece that appeared last week, Moon of Alabama, the widely read German website, argued that the defeat in Ukraine announces the end of “military hard power superiority” as the West’s most effective “instrument of deterrence.” It must now find “a new tool that allows it to press its interest against the will of other powers.” 

And then, turning to the Gaza crisis, this disturbing conclusion:

It found that tool in demonstrating utter savagery.

The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide. That it will do everything to prevent international organizations to intervene against this.

That it is willing to eliminate everyone and everything that resists it.

To me the Moon of Alabama piece is chilling precisely to the extent what it has to say is plausible. We are now invited to consider whether the West supports the Israelis’ barbarities in Gaza because barbarity is now policy. I cannot dismiss this argument. 

“Those nations who commit themselves to multipolarity,” the piece concludes, “should steel themselves for what might be visited on them.” The comfort to be taken here, cold as it may be, is that the non–West knows all about bracing itself against the imperium and the former colonial powers. And the Russians have shown them these past few years that it can be done.