Looking Into the Abyss: Where Is the American Hegemon Really Going?

So, the entirety of the Western Empire from the European vassals to the US itself, are urging Iran not to respond to the criminal provocation of Israel's attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus. Several questions arise from this situation.

Has the ruling class achieved the successful culmination of a longstanding plan laid out in numerous think tank reports, such as the Brookings Institute's "Which Path to Persia", where they specifically call for a provocation against Iran in order to elicit an Iranian response which itself can be used as justification for initiating a wider war against Iran?

Or, is the US seriously hoping to avoid a direct conflict with Iran due to a correct understanding that there is no viable military strategy for defeating Iran and that the effort itself would be catastrophic for the global economy and to the US national interest?

I think the answer to these two questions lies in the observation that "it's complicated". If we recall that the ruling class is composed of a large number of factions and sub-factions that have overlapping as well as competing economic and political interests, the two questions above become much harder to answer. At any given time, especially in a crisis, the major factions may have clashing or competing strategic and tactical priorities. 

Also, if we remember that the "official government" including the President, the State Department, the Intelligence Community, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, do not in and of themselves decide policy and instead are beholden to the innumerable special interest groups which compete with each other for influence over actual policy, it becomes clear that thinking in terms of liberal governance (where the national interest is solely determined by our elected representatives) is a foolish analytical paradigm to adopt.

Democrat megadonor and uber Zionist Haim Saban, part of the Hollywood billionaire mob.

In other words, there is no such thing as "the national interest". Rather, there are competing opinions and perspectives regarding what the national interest is. Some oligarchic factions and players (like Haim "I am a one issue guy and that issue is Israel" Saban) put Israel as their top priority and are happy to subordinate all other considerations of morality, justice, and the "national interest" to the protection and "defense" of Israel. There is a popular sect among Christian evangelicals that advocates the same thing.

Other influential factions, however, have no interest in risking or sacrificing US hegemony to further the interests of one particular vassal state. These folks would prefer (if they had the influence to do so) to force their vassal into a compromise that it would otherwise refuse to make.

What seems obvious however is that if there were any rational factions still existing within the ruling capitalist establishment, factions that would be OK with peaceful imperialist decline and a very difficult but necessary and rational transition from unipolarism to multipolarism, they are becoming increasingly marginalized and sidelined in favor of a growing demand for action and calls for violent resistance.

So, the chicken-hawks (who are always in fashion in some way, considering the US is after all a virulent empire) are once again empowered and seizing the initiative in response to the existential threats that reality is imposing on their class interests. It looks more and more likely that the establishment will end up choosing continued escalation and the proliferation of chaos instead of the painful compromises which they tell themselves can be avoided entirely if they play their cards right. But they have no winning cards to play. There is no political or military maneuver that they can pull off, no hidden trick which could slow down the trend towards multipolarism. In fact, the opposite is true. Their efforts will only hasten their own decline while unnecessarily causing death and destruction on a global scale.

The truth is that the ruling Western establishment is not agile enough. It is not organized well enough to manage, much less save, a crumbling empire. Sure, it can wreak havoc, it can sow destruction, it can reap misery, it can double down on failure, avoiding and projecting responsibility onto others for the humanitarian catastrophes that result from its own policies, but it can’t build anything worthwhile or develop and prosecute a plan that seeks to turn all the current losses into wins. They are too fractured, they are too incompetent, there is too much chaos, there are too many independent interests and centers of power that are too adamant (and selfish) in the violent pursuit of their own narrow interests, for any sensible or rational plan to congeal.

“The crux of the cruxes” wrote someone much smarter than myself (Paul A. Baran), is the contradiction between “the identity of the material interests and needs of a class with… REASON’S criticism of the existing irrationality.”