Like LSD, which can convince people they can fly—causing them to jump out of windows—weapons can make people overconfident. Skewing their tactical judgment.
-Ng, “Snow Crash”
As the US flails about trying to maintain a dominance that’s already gone, it’s often difficult to analyze or predict US actions because they usually appear on their face so irrational. I generally view Washington moves on the world stage as akin to playing blocks with a two-year-old. Without their involvement, you might be able to meticulously build a well-planned castle, but the two-year-old when reengaged might topple it with the swing of a hand.
The takeaway: building is hard. Destruction is easy. And in the case of the US it’s the destruction of economies, societies, and the planet through mafia logic. The first goal is to profit through extortion and rent-seeking. Everywhere. When that fails, Washington quickly pivots to its backup plan: regime change. But even that strategy is running out of steam these days.
There is little to no chance of forcing Russia and China to bend the knee, and Washington has few options aside from mutually assured destruction—either economic with Beijing or the good ol’ fashioned variety with Moscow. The attacks (and years of economic warfare) have thus far failed to bring about regime change in Tehran, and next time Iran, the thinking goes, will be more prepared—perhaps with China and Russia at its side. The bleed over from the thrashing about in impotent rage against Russia now has the US once again doing its best to push India off the fence and into the embrace of China and Russia.
There are still fever dreams in Washington of using ethnic divisions and proxy forces to take down Tehran, of destabilization in Moscow once Putin eventually dies, of economic or demographic forces weakening China, etc., but these are all based on wishful thinking rather than any realistic plan. In its place we’re seeing more lashing out, more sanctions, weaponized tariffs, and more bombings with Trump on a record airstrike pace. It’s not working.
Many in Washington are still tempted to double down on sanctions and tariffs as a tool to force countries to decouple from China and Russia despite the fact it hasn’t worked yet. As even Foreign Policy admits:
Sanctions are conceived to be coercive tools, inflicting economic pain until a state changes its behavior. In practice, however, states resist sanctions, absorbing the costs while exploring ways around them. Rather than change state behavior, sanctions change markets and reshape economic relationships, redirecting oil into channels built around geopolitics rather than commercial logic.
Thus far the sanctions on more powerful states like Russia and Iran oil do little more than rework the global oil market, forcing those countries even closer to China. Beijing, meanwhile, continues on with its efforts to build a more interconnected world with itself at the center.
A study published last week by Christoph Nedopil in partnership with Griffith University’s Asia Institute and Fudan University’s Green Finance & Development Center found that China’s investments and construction contracts in Belt and Road Initiative countries during the first six months of 2025 soared to $124 billion, compared to only $122 billion in all 12 months of 2024.
And so the BRI marches on despite the years-long effort by the US to smear and sabotage it. What exactly is the plan to compete with it? Well, nothing, of course.
While the US warns against loans and infrastructure cooperation with China, what does it offer in its place? Precious little. As Nigerian Vice President Yemi Osinbajo explained a few years back during his March 27 remarks at King’s College in London:
In the arguments about the Chinese debt traps (as it is called sometimes) and the large amounts of loans to African countries, I think that what is clear is that the Chinese have proven to be quite responsible in the giving out of these loans. There are always arguments about whether you get the best deal all the time, but the real question of Africa and African governments is who else is offering these loans? Who else is offering the support? It is not a question of here or there, it is really a question of what is available and it seems to me to make sense to take what is available.
At the same time Washington is working overtime in a neverending job to peel countries away from Beijing, the US itself would collapse were it to do the same it is asking of these nations. The rare earths metals and magnets chickens are finally coming home to roost, threatening all America’s precious death machines.
And the US and the rest of the world are increasingly reliant on China for their pharmaceuticals and other types of necessities. These are not supply chain issues that can be corrected overnight, and will be challenging to change at all due to the neoliberal economic models in the west that prioritize finance over actually making stuff.
One could almost laugh at these American elites and all their incompetence if they didn’t leave a trail of destruction in their wake. They first hollowed out US communities by shipping the country’s industry abroad, primarily to China, so they could a yacht or private jet upgrade. Do they take ownership of the fatal mistake?
Of course not. Instead we have children knocking over blocks. And it’s difficult to argue with Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Lavrov’s recent assessment that they’re essentially crazy little Nazi children knocking over blocks (he was talking about the Europeans, but I see no reason it shouldn’t extend to the US as well).
And these children are capable of doing a lot of damage.
We see what that looks like in Ukraine and West Asia where the US and its vassals help carry out a genocide in Gaza and spill blood everywhere. And unless Arab regimes or China or Russia or somebody wakes up, we may well get a temporary victory for the Western Zionists there in the form of more land and more control over regional supply chains. How that changes the long term downward trajectory of the US-led western facism project is less clear.
US sanctions are still capable of killing a lot of people. As The Lancet pointed out in a July study, “sanctions were associated with an annual toll of 564 258 deaths, similar to the global mortality burden associated with armed conflict.”
And on average, half of those were children. To repeat, the US killing roughly 250,000 kids per year with sanctions.
Washington might not be able to put much of a dent in Moscow or Tehran, the think tanks in DC believe all those deaths are worth it because they help decimate smaller countries like Syria and others in South America and Africa and cause chaos in regions that are integral to other powers’ foreign plans.
The US can still weasel its way into foreign governments and spread like termites eating away at the foundation until all that is left is a failed state blowing up a region.
Take the example of the Caucasus, where under the cover of another Trump Nobel Peace Prize audition, the true aim is to inflame the region. It makes little economic sense for the people of Armenia and Azerbaijan. Perhaps it does for the ones calling the shots. Bribes and extortion work wonders for a time.
So does nurturing extremist ideologies. If we gander at a map one sees a wall of fire from the Baltic to the Black Sea (Nazism) that then branches Eastwards to the Caspian and beyond into Central Asia (neo-Ottomanism/pan-Turkism) and southwards to the Red Sea (Zionism and CIA Islam).
Even if these fanatics are unable to find success toppling governments in Russia, Iran, and other “unfriendly” states, they aim to prevent the goal of a secure, interconnected, and prosperous Asian heartland.
The goal is chaos. Destruction. There and elsewhere. This approach inevitably destabilises the global order and creates new risks, including for US interests.
While that might sound counterintuitive, have you seen how crazy US elites are?
Embracing the Breakdown
While the US cannot compete on a traditional nation-state board, on merit, by building things, or offering a vision of a better world, there is a belief held in high places that it is well-positioned for a world of fire and brimstone.
These accelerationists in the US who embrace the breakdown of society aren’t just keen on eroding state sovereignty at home but want to do it across the world where they believe they can build an empire-by-contractor where ruling clans do no more than oversee weapon systems, AI data centers, and mercenaries. Quinn Slobodian with a useful summary:
Right-wing accelerationists imagine existing sovereignty shattering into … a “patchwork” of private entities, ideally governed by what one might call technomonarchies. Existing autocratic polities like Dubai serve as rough prototypes for how nations could be dismantled into “a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.” These would be decentralized archipelagoes: fortified nodes in a circuitry still linked by finance, trade, and communication. Think of the year 1000 in Middle Europe but with vertical take-off and landing taxis and Starlink internet.
Oh, and there’s also boatloads of money to be made in the carnage, as Christopher Cook notes about the ongoing US-backed genocide in Gaza:
[United Nation’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca] Albanese lists dozens of major western companies that are deeply invested in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.
This is not a new development, as she notes. These firms have exploited business opportunities associated with Israel’s violent occupation of the Palestinian people’s lands for years, and in some cases decades.
The switch from Israel’s occupation of Gaza to its current genocide hasn’t threatened profits; it has enhanced them. Or as Albanese puts it: “The profits have increased as the economy of the occupation transformed into an economy of genocide.”
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the US remains the biggest exporter of weapons worldwide, delivering to a total of 107 countries between 2020 and 2024, and with a 43 percent share of global exports, that’s more than four times as much as the next-largest exporter, France.
Is it any wonder that the US embraces global warming, which is the great destabilizer?
She’s an icon
She’s a legend
And she is the moment✨ pic.twitter.com/MDkIj71JZf
— U.S. Department of Energy (@ENERGY) July 31, 2025
Not only has the US given up on competing with China on “clean energy” tech, but the spooks at the National Intelligence Council sound almost giddy in their estimates of how states like Iran and China will be hit harder than the US and how this will present “opportunities.”
Washington doing its best to set the world on fire also means that other countries must devote more resources and attention to defense from the lunatic empire, which can mean less resources to deal with the fallout from global warming. That might have played a role in Iran where the government recently declared emergency public holidays in 18 provinces, including Tehran, as temperatures soared to nearly 50°C. From Unherd:
According to official reports, reserves in the capital’s main dams have plummeted to their lowest levels in a century, with a five-year drought and record-low rainfall cited as the main reasons. Despite repeated warnings from environmental experts, the government appears to have been unprepared for what it has referred to as “the worst drought in 60 years”.
What’s To Be Done?
As the US descends deeper into Dr. Strangelove territory and violence, decay, and lawlessness reigns supreme, the great question is where and how does this madness end?
Here are two options. The crazy elites in the US need to be stopped or they’re going to kill us all—either slowly through a mixture of climate catastrophe, breakdown capitalism, and genocide or there’s always the nuclear option.
Let’s not forget that a lot of these Silicon Valley accelerationists that are increasingly taking up roles in the government falsely believe they can ride out the nuclear holocaust or other major disasters and come out on top. That’s why they’re building their bunkers with pools and movie theaters. Nevermind that they’d probably only last a few weeks there before running into serious issues—and that’s if their servants or robots don’t kill them first—it’s all part of their vision of the world that doesn’t extend beyond themselves. As Douglas Rushkoff, who tech billionaires have called on for advice on how to survive the apocalypse, explains:
[It’s] the excuse for them to think through the fantasies they’ve had since they were little baby tech bros, to somehow create a digital womb around themselves that could anticipate their every need so they don’t have to deal with real people, and have nice little robots take care of them. It’s the dream that little boys and girls have being the last person alive and getting all the toys.
As they increasingly buy out and take up larger roles in government, they’re getting closer to being able to cause even more widespread destruction than they’re used to. And even if they’ll never really be able to enact their global digital womb, they might kill us all trying to. As Alastair Crooke has pointed out, the key nuclear allegation that started the war with Iran was coaxed from a Palantir counter-intelligence algorithm. So maybe the question we should be asking is: Do Palantir inputs believe those it deems worth living could survive a nuclear war and thrive?
It’s not like a lot of influential and well-funded “thinkers” in the US need a lot of convincing. As the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists points out, “many in the US defense establishment—the military, government, think tanks, and industry—promote the perception that a nuclear war can be won and fought.”
Add to the equation that if the US plutocrats have gone as far as Gaza, is there anywhere they’re not willing to go?
Add it all up, and it feels like we’re rapidly approaching that moment many have dreaded: decision time in America when the powers that be either give up on the dream of the Great American century or burn the whole joint to the ground. And the prospects aren’t looking good for elite American acceptance.
As just one recent example, here are the plutocrats’ court jesters in think tanklandia calling Russia’s nuclear doctrine “bluster” and that the Trump administration should not “fall for it.” The administration apparently agrees with its recent nuclear brinkmanship.
The calculation in their minds is simple: it is preferable to find out rather than accept a world that isn’t dominated by Washington.
What can the other powers like Russia and China do? They could start by locking down Eurasia.
That’s what they’ve been gravitating towards for some time. At the mid-July meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Council of Foreign Ministers in China Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi proposed the following for collective security and sovereignty:
A collective security body to respond to external aggression, sabotage, and terrorism
A permanent coordination mechanism for documenting and countering subversive acts
A Center for Sanctions Resistance, to shield member economies from unilateral Western measures
A Shanghai Security Forum for defense and intelligence coordination
Enhanced cultural and media cooperation to counter cognitive and information warfare
Should the SCO—whose members’ industrial capacities dwarf NATO—forge such a bloc, it could greatly challenge the Western dreams of picking off countries one at a time.
That’s hard to do with US beachheads in Israel, Turkey/Armenia, the Philippines, and of course all of Europe, but economic forces are not on the side of Washington, and you can almost feel the US collapsing under the sheer weight of keeping up this global game of subterfuge, clandestine activity, bribery, and just plain old troublemaking. It does so while ignoring its own decay and when the other side makes more economic sense and offers more peace and stability.
Yet, here’s the rub. Even if an alternative currency project gets up and running, and even if Russia and China keep playing the long game and bleeding the US dry (China cutting off critical minerals to Western defense companies is a good start) and waiting for it to collapse, that does nothing to guarantee the crazies are kept away from the nukes—it probably makes the US using them more likely.
And even a cordon sanitaire around the US won’t prevent its elites from taking out their rage on US citizens. Ultimately, the responsibility for dethroning these spoiled Nazi children (and I’m talking more about Musks, Thiels, Andreessens, Karps and company than Trump or the CIA Democrat neoliberals in their service) and restoring some sense of humanity will fall to Americans.
When could that come to pass? It’s hard to say, indeed:
I have to think that having the least intellectually sophisticated ruling class in modern history will eventually redound to our advantage. But exactly when and how it is hard to say
— Erik Baker (@erikmbaker) August 3, 2025
