Tag: Clown World

A Futile Warning

As this lengthy article in Foreign Affairs suggests, some of the smarter clowns realize that BRICS isn’t going away, and that as long as Clown World continues to rule in such a shamelessly hypocritical and unbalanced manner, most of the unaligned nations of the global East and South will choose BRICS over subjugation to Clown World.

The technology competition between China and the United States may lead to the erection of a digital iron curtain and the emergence of two separate and incompatible technological spheres, which would make fence-sitting more challenging. Finding a common denominator in the grouping will become more difficult, particularly on sensitive geopolitical issues such as the war in Ukraine. Those differences might make the bloc less influential on the international stage, even as its efforts to advance alternative currencies to the U.S. dollar gather strength.

For the United States and other Western powers, the dynamics inside BRICS underline the necessity of taking the grouping—and the underlying dissatisfaction with the current order—seriously. It is entirely reasonable for rising powers such as Brazil to search for hedging options and to feel dissatisfied with how the United States has steered the existing system. Western powers should focus on not making things worse by, for example, trying to scare middle powers away from joining BRICS, which smacks of paternalism and quasi-colonial interference. In the same way, Western attempts to warn middle powers in the global South about being too dependent on China have proved ineffective.

Western countries can do more to not alienate those middle powers seeking greater space for maneuver and to ensure that BRICS does not become an anti-Western bloc. They should spell out more clearly how certain sanctions relate to violations of international law, and try to be consistent in applying those sanctions against all violators—not just against geopolitical adversaries. Countries in the global South want to escape the hegemony of the dollar when they see Western countries, for instance, freezing Russian central bank reserves in 2022 as a response to the invasion of Ukraine but receiving no punishment for similarly unlawful military interventions in the Middle East and Africa. Wealthy countries can also be better problem solvers for poorer countries, including by sharing technology and assisting with the green transition. And the West should make more genuine efforts to democratize the global order, such as by doing away with the anachronistic tradition that only Europeans head the IMF and only U.S. citizens lead the World Bank.

Such actions would build trust and undermine Chinese and Russian attempts to enlist the global South to an anti-Western cause. Rather than bemoaning the emergence of the BRICS, the West should court those member states that have a stake in making sure that the grouping does not become an overtly anti-Western outfit intent on undermining the global order.

It’s somewhat amusing that after admitting how all of the previous predictions of the inevitable failure of BRICS for the last 18 years have been wrong, the Foreign Affairs analysts point to the material signs of its success – more than 40 countries asking for permission to join BRICS – as evidence the expansion of the group’s membership and influence will somehow damage the international bloc by reducing the cohesiveness between the neutral faction (Brazil and India) and the anti-Clown faction (China, Iran, and Russia). This, of course, completely misses the point, which is that neither faction has any intention of submitting to, or obeying, the hypocritical and self-serving dictates of the so-called “neoliberal rules-based global order” that we call Clown World.

And the solution recommended is impossible at the present. By any and every standard of so-called “international law”, Israel should be as heavily sanctioned by the “rules-based world order” as Russia is. Israel is observably bombing civilians in Lebanon and engaging in ethnic cleansing in Palestine, while Russia is fighting a war to defend Russians living in historically Russian territory who were under attack for more than a decade by the foreign, Clown World-installed, Kiev regime. Every sanction that has been applied to Russia should, under any sane, rational, or fair standard, have also been applied to Israel. Even more egregiously, many of those anti-Russian sanctions have also been applied to Belarus, which hasn’t done anything at all to any of its neighbors.

Simplicius notes: Israel continues to pummel Lebanon, proving itself to be the only country in the world that can literally bomb and invade all of its neighbors at will without serious international consequences. Note I said consequences, not ‘condemnation’. There’s plenty of the latter to go around, but it doesn’t lead to anything tangible because all global institutions are co-opted, captured, and compromised by the Hydra, and as such only pay lip service to tragedies perpetrated by their clients and masters alike. Isn’t it interesting how—just to take one small example of many—the Chess world’s FIDE organization has banned not only Russia but even Belarus merely as offhand accomplice, yet Israel, for an actual holocaust it’s committing on its neighbors, has not been banned. The same goes for the Olympics, EuroVision, and other contests; it’s quite incredible when you think about it.

It’s not as if anyone doesn’t notice this. Regardless of how far you think Israel’s right to defend itself should extend, everyone around the world has seen that the rules of the “rules-based world order” are unjust and are applied unevenly, which is why they quite naturally no longer want any part of it. Because, obviously, if major powers like China and Russia can be sanctioned, how much more easily can smaller nations be subjected to the same treatment if they don’t submit slavishly to Clown World’s unending demands?

The rulers of Clown World have simply never understood that the king is not above the law, he is more strictly bound by the law than any of his subjects. And when he refuses to be bound by the law, he ceases to be legitimate and thereby loses the Mandate of Heaven.

Unless Clown World ceases to be what it is, the rest of the world will prefer the alternative, any alternative, that promises not to punish them for doing no more than pursuing their reasonable national interests. Which is why, I suspect, more than a few nations that are presently under the domination of Clown World will seek to free themselves from it, beginning with Turkiye, and followed soon after, one would expect, by Hungary and Switzerland.

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Putin Gives Clear Warning

If NATO assists in any long-range attacks on Russia, Russia will strike NATO directly. The problem is that the neoclowns desperately want the war between Russia and NATO to go hot because it’s the only path that might give them sufficient cover to permit them to escape the inevitable wrath of the West that they have abused and misruled for the last 40 years.

Some very consequential statements and movements today. The biggest — and most alarming — comes from Vladimir Putin. He minces no words — any attack inside Russia with Western precision missiles will be treated as an act of war and Russia will respond accordingly.

This should be setting off alarm bells at the Pentagon and USEUCOM (US European Command) and NATO. But, I think that the military lightweights infesting these various commands have persuaded themselves that Moscow is just blowing hot air. This is the kind of miscalculation that can lead to reckless decisions on the part of NATO and Ukraine.

While Putin is leaving no doubt about the position of Russia if such weapons are used, the reality on the ground in Ukraine is turning more dire for Ukraine with each passing day. Russia is announcing the capture of at least three settlements a day in the Donbass and is moving forward with determined lethality in the Kursk region. There is nothing that Ukraine can do, even with support from NATO, to alter the path to defeat

It’s not that the military lightweights in command have persuaded themselves, it’s the clowns giving them their orders who have told them that Putin wouldn’t dare to attack the NATO countries waging war on Russia. The fact that these are the exact same people who said Putin wouldn’t dare to attack Ukraine, that he was going to be thrown out of power, run out of ammunition, and die of cancer tends to strongly suggest that they are wrong.

Putin’s precise words were as follows:

“There is an attempt to substitute concepts. Because we are not talking about allowing or prohibiting the Kiev regime to strike at Russian territory. It is already striking with the help of unmanned aerial vehicles and other means. But when it comes to using high–precision long-range Western-made weapons, it’s a completely different story. The fact is that, as I have already said, and any experts will confirm this (both here and in the West), the Ukrainian army is not able to strike with modern high-precision long-range systems of Western production. It can’t do that. This is possible only with the use of satellite data, which Ukraine does not have — this is data only from satellites of either the European Union or the United States, in general, from NATO satellites. This is the first one. 

“The second, and very important, perhaps key, is that flight missions to these missile systems can, in fact, only be carried out by military personnel of NATO countries. Ukrainian servicemen cannot do this. And therefore, it is not a question of allowing the Ukrainian regime to strike Russia with these weapons or not to allow it. It’s about deciding whether NATO countries are directly involved in a military conflict or not. If this decision is made, it will mean nothing more than the direct participation of NATO countries, the United States, and European countries in the war in Ukraine. This is their direct involvement.

“And this, of course, significantly changes the very essence, the very nature of the conflict. This will mean that NATO countries, the United States, and European countries are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the very essence of this conflict, we will make appropriate decisions based on the threats that will be created to us.”

It’s clear that Putin and the rest of Clown World’s enemies are waiting for something. Russia, China, Iran, and Hezbollah are all being very patient and passing up numerous justifiable opportunities to respond to various provocation after provocation by the clowns. The Narrative insists that they are all afraid of the mighty US Navy and the IDF, but that doesn’t make any sense in light of what we’ve been witnessing for the last two years.

To me, it’s looking more like one of two things. Either they are waiting for something to happen within Clown World, such as a structural collapse or some sort of palace coup that they support, or they are going to hit in one massive simultaneous multi-front offensive that will cause Clown World to collapse in shock. It might even be a case of Plan A and Plan B; it would be very surprising if astute Sigma leaders like Xi and Putin did not have contingency plans, and contingency plans for those contingency plans, already agreed upon and in place.

Fortunately for those of us who are in, but not of, Clown World, it’s clear that both the Russian and Chinese leaders view military force as a last resort, and not a first one. Which is a good thing, because the Ukrainian strategy, such as it is, is total fucking amateur hour.

The West must guarantee to be prepared to get more involved by sending ground troops to certain parts of Ukraine to free up Ukraine’s manpower which could be sent to the front lines. Zelensky believes after this campaign Russia would be forced to retreat, at some point Putin’s leadership would be destabilized and replaced, with the new leadership signing a peace deal.

As I have repeatedly pointed out, any military strategy that relies upon the enemy leadership being “destabilized and replaced” is retarded, wrong, inept, and historically ignorant. It simply doesn’t happen in real warfare. The proposed victory condition is intrinsically expeditionary, and falls within the realm of spycraft, not war. What we’re seeing now is the difference between real war conducted by well-schooled general staff and expeditionary war conducted by intelligence agencies.

Zelensky said that in two days he will present Joe Biden with a “plan for victory over Russia.” The latecomer said the plan would be, in particular, psychological and political in nature.

In times of war, being clever with the word spells and the psychobabble is no substitute for industrial capacity.

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The Pragmatic Phase

The smarter clowns are now fully aware that history did not, in fact, end, and that the pendulum is rapidly swinging back in their faces. So they’re attempting to recapture all the centrists and conservatives that their globalist overreach cost them and stave off a complete collapse of their “neoliberal rules-based world order” by switching to their phase they describe as “pragmatic realism”.

The American public deserves a sober and realistic debate about the nature and salience of the U.S. interests at stake in Ukraine. The American electorate also deserves to be told the truth: that Ukraine is highly unlikely to succeed in expelling Russian forces from its territory, even with the continuation of strong support from the West. Trump’s readiness to seek a negotiated settlement is not capitulation: it is pragmatism.

Trump’s skepticism toward nation building and the promotion of democracy abroad also resonates with the isolationist posture of early America. To be sure, Americans from the founding era onward believed that they were embarking on a unique experiment in building republican government, an experiment that they were ultimately destined to share with the rest of the world. Yet the founders and their successors were appropriately doubtful of the United States’ ability to engineer political change abroad and therefore understood that they needed to spread democracy primarily by example. As then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams famously stated in 1821, the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

So, too, did successive U.S. presidents appreciate the need to operate in the world as it is, working with democracies and nondemocracies alike in the pursuit of U.S. interests. Even as President James Monroe warned Europe’s great powers in 1823 against any “future colonization” in the Western Hemisphere, he acknowledged and accepted Europe’s political preferences. It was the policy of the United States, he asserted, “not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government for us; to cultivate friendly relations with it.”

Trump took this ideological variant of isolationism too far during his presidency, exhibiting a fondness for autocrats such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jung Un while giving a cold shoulder to the leaders of allied democracies. But Trump’s approach to grand strategy does exhibit due caution to the promotion of democracy abroad. He correctly traced the United States’ overreach in the Middle East to the “dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interests in becoming a Western democracy.”

Trump’s brand of U.S. statecraft has deep roots in the American experience and, like the original version of isolationism, has something for almost everyone, giving it broad appeal across the American electorate. Democrats dismiss his “America first” agenda as strategic delusion at their own peril. Instead, they should preempt it by embracing its best elements.

Democrats need to find the middle ground between an expansive liberal internationalism that is no longer sustainable at home or abroad and the dangerous isolationist excesses that would likely accompany Trump’s return to the presidency. That middle ground entails standing by Biden’s multilateralism and his investment in old alliances and new partnerships, moves that have resuscitated U.S.-led collective action and restored the nation’s image as a team player. At the same time, the United States must avoid the bouts of strategic overreach, such as in Afghanistan and Iraq, that encourage the electorate to gravitate toward isolationist alternatives.

In Ukraine, that middle ground requires working to broker a cease-fire and focusing on ensuring that the 80 percent of the country still under Kyiv’s control is secure, prosperous, and stable. With Ukraine up against relentless aggression from a much larger neighbor, that outcome would qualify as a success by any reasonable measure. In the Middle East, Washington should seek to end the violence in Gaza and then lay out a pathway to Palestinian self-determination and normalization of Israel’s relationships with its neighbors. The United States should stand up to Chinese ambition, but also avoid unnecessary provocations that could lead to an irreversible geopolitical rupture. Washington should work intently to cooperate with Beijing to tame rivalry and advance joint efforts to tackle global challenges.

The United States cannot afford to run away from the world, as it did during the long era of isolationism. But it can no longer seek to run the world, which it has neither the power nor the domestic consensus to do. Instead, Americans need to learn to live in a world of ideological diversity and multiple conceptions of order, working alongside other centers of power, democracies and nondemocracies alike. Pragmatic realism should guide U.S. statecraft.

Clown World always seeks to control the entire debate. So, now that events have escaped their control, they’re resetting the boundaries of the public discourse in an attempt to permit the less dangerous ideas entry while continuing to prevent any comprehensive discussion of the real causes, problems, and potential solutions.

Notice, in particular, the assumption that Americans “need to learn” whatever it is that Clown World is preaching at the moment. Thirty years ago, Americans “needed to learn” that they had a responsibility for pushing democracy, free movement, and independent central banks everywhere around the world. Now, they are being told that they “need to learn” the limits of what they can do.

But what Americans really need to learn is that they are not free and that they do not need any foreign rulers telling them what to do.

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They Always Kill the Golden Goose

It’s truly amazing that more than 100 years after economists formally discovered the concept of declining marginal returns, the rulers of Clown World continue to insist on driving a nation’s most successful entrepreneurs out of the country.

Britain’s richest plumber has put his £12million London penthouse on the market as he prepares to flee Britain ahead of a mooted Labour tax raid. Charlie Mullins, who founded Pimlico Plumbers, has said he wants to have ‘no assets in the UK whatsoever’ and intends on not paying tax next year as he leaves the country.

The 71-year-old, who made £145million when he sold his firm in 2021, had moved into the property the same year after falling in love with the view over the River Thames. But now he wants to get rid of the flat, which neighbours an apartment owned by Tom Jones, insisting that his family would ‘go mad’ if they had to pay inheritance tax because of it.

The businessman said he is concerned the new chancellor Rachel Reeves will increase death taxes and is instead ploughing his money into property in Spain and Dubai… Henley & Partners, which helps wealthy investors to move overseas, estimates that Britain is on track to lose a record 9,500 millionaires this year

Of course, this seeming stupidity is probably much more accurately attributed to economically-informed malice. If destroying the nation is the objective, then impoverishing it and driving out the nation’s most successful entrepreneurs away is going to be viewed as a positive.

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Clowns are Falling

Sweden’s Foreign Minister unexpectedly resigned on the same day that the Kiev regime fired what seems to be about half of its cabinet.

Tobias Billstrom, who oversaw Sweden’s accession to NATO, has announced his resignation as foreign minister and retirement from politics, offering no reason for the move. Billstrom, 50, was first elected to the Swedish parliament in 2002 and was appointed foreign minister in 2022… As his biggest achievement over the past two years, Billstrom listed Sweden’s abandonment of its 200-year neutrality to join NATO “after a long and sometimes challenging process.”

I suspect the reason for his sudden resignation is that more Swedish “instructors” were killed in the recent double-Iskander missile strike in Poltava than have been reported. The number of KIA is officially 41, but Ukrainian locals are reporting up to 760 bodies in the morgue. To go from 200 years of safe neutrality to losing dozens of military officers in a single Russian strike is a catastrophe that the leading advocate of abandoning neutrality would have to be held responsible.

One hopes that the utterly deluded Swiss politicians who are so desperate to follow Sweden’s lead will learn from Billstrom’s example and abandon their insane campaign to sign Switzerland up for the same sort of military and economic devastation that is facing the NATO slave-nations.

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Clown World Knows No Law

The reason conservatives can never win or successfully resist Clown World is because they believe that the law is something real, and something material. Whereas, as literally every single lawyer will tell you, what the law actually is not the black letter words passed by the politicians or the policies of the regulatory agencies, it is whatever the judge of the relevant matter says it is.

Justice Alexandre de Moraes of the Supreme Court of Brazil has ordered the operations of X (formerly Twitter) to be “immediately suspended” and threatened draconian fines against anyone trying to sidestep the ban. De Moraes demanded that X censor several accounts that “spread disinformation” by criticizing him, but the platform’s owner Elon Musk refused.

On Friday, the judge ordered the platform banned in Brazil, giving Google and Apple five days to remove X from their app stores. He also threatened a fine of around 50,000 Brazilian real (approximately $8,874) a day for anyone using a virtual private network (VPN) to get around the ban.

On Thursday, de Moraes froze the accounts of Starlink, a subsidiary of Musk’s SpaceX, saying this was needed to ensure the payment of fines levied against X for failing to appoint a legal representative. Musk objected to the “absolutely illegal action” taken without any due process, pointing out that X and SpaceX are “two completely different companies with different shareholders.”

According to X’s Global Government Affairs team, de Moraes “threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts.”

We view this sort of thing as bad. But in Switzerland, the government broke multiple laws to prevent the failure of Credit Suisse from financially harming any of its account holders. Everyone, with the exception of a few shareholders and creditors who ended up getting the short end of the stick, thought this was a very good thing. But whether these things are considered good or bad is irrelevant, the point is that what everyone believes is “the law” is nothing more than a collection of general suggestions that the three branches of government will ignore in a heartbeat whenever they feel that doing so is desirable.

Nothing can be repaired or restored by so-called legal means when the authorities harbor absolutely no respect for what passes for the law. Any policy or distinction that depends upon “legality”, such as immigration or limits on legal speech, doesn’t exist in a practical sense so long as one is government by a government of men, not laws.

Nancy Pelosi just told Bill Maher that she plans to grant citizenship to every illegal immigrant and give them free housing.

See how easy it is to deal with a problem of illegality? One stroke of the pen, one judge’s order, and the problem is magically solved!

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30 and Counting

The Anti-Clown World Alliance is growing rapidly:

BRICS—originally made up of just Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—is going to need a new name. After not adding any new members for 13 years, the non-Western international group welcomed Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates last August. The floodgates have since been opened: In February, South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor claimed that over 30 nations now want to join the international group.

Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has been vocal about wanting to join the bloc, lobbying Russian, Chinese, and just this week, Indian officials about Malaysia’s application. Thailand also submitted a formal application to join the bloc last June, and officials hope that the Southeast Asian country will be able to join the BRICS summit in Russia this October.

BRICS, which traces its name to a Goldman Sachs report in 2001, has long struggled to find an economic or geopolitical purpose, as its member countries have little in common besides being large and non-Western. But in recent years, the bloc is increasingly trying to position itself as the voice of the so-called Global South, a term used to describe postcolonial developing economies. It’s an argument that’s picked up steam since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which brought geopolitics back to the fore and highlighted the power of the U.S. in the global economic system.

“For some countries, BRICS can be a counterweight against U.S. economic hegemony,” Rahman Yaacob, a research fellow in the Southeast Asia program at the Lowy Institute, says. Joining the bloc could also be a way to hedge politically, as the intensifying rivalry between Washington and Beijing risks splitting the world into two opposing groups.

Think about how awful the neo-liberal world order has obviously become, that dozens of nations around the globe are finding mutual purpose in helping each other resist its influence and control. The promises of “freedom” and “democracy” and “open societies” have turned out to be shamelessly satanic lies.

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Liberalism is Dead

All of its supposedly good points that justified it have been proven to be false. The so-called neoliberal world order turned out to be Clown World:

What remains of the supposed upsides of liberalism?

Human rights? You aren’t a Somali rapist facing deportation, you don’t have human rights

Freedom? Tell it to Sam Melia

Democracy? 20% of the electorate delivered Labour the 4th largest parliamentary majority in history.

And let’s not even get started on so-called “free speech”, which was nothing more than an attempt to replace Christian blasphemy laws with satanic blasphemy laws. It turns out that all of the supposed economic benefits of an open society were nothing more than the short-term benefits of a long-term debt bubble based on usury.

There is truly nothing new under the sun.

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Empire of Lies = Not the Good Guys

Andrew Anglin explains why he believes the Chinese – yes, the terrible Chi-Coms – are observably the good guys at this current juncture in the space-time continuum:

The Chinese are the good guys, but it’s important to note that they are not the good guys because they want to do charity for the world out of some spirit of niceness. It is a uniquely Western idea that a government would go around the world trying to help people out of the kindness of their hearts.

And we can all see that while the people in the US and EU are constantly talking about how good and moral they are and how they are on a mission to bring “democracy” and “human rights” to everyone on earth, the actual results are endless war and ridiculous poverty. They also bully people, because they claim they have established a universal moral order (based on nothing, by the way).

We can see, pretty clearly, that while some people might be stupid enough to believe that the Western governments are on a mission of love, this stance of “we are the most moral people in the world” is just a cover for corruption and violence.

Personal charity is a good thing and it’s actually a Christian moral directive. It’s good to help people when you can. It’s good to give a bit of money to someone who is struggling, if they’re not just going to buy drugs with it.

Organized charity, however, is virtually always a gigantic scam. I’ve written in some detail about the foreign adoption scam, where these groups (usually branded as evangelical Christians) go around the Third World buying babies from their mothers to sell for a profit in the US. There are a few good books on this (I recommend “The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption” by Kathryn Joyce, if anyone is interested in the topic – it’s sort of fascinating). Christian “adoption” agencies being literal human trafficking rackets is one of the more extreme examples of charity organizations being a scam, but they’re all basically like this, including the environmentalist groups.

When you have national governments claiming that their purpose is organized international charity, that is really obviously a scam. We know it’s a scam because we can see all these people do is start wars and sanction countries into oblivion. “Foreign aid” is a bribery scheme to pay off a group of criminals in a foreign government so they serve the interests of the US Empire. These interests include both military interests as well as agreements to sell off a nation’s natural resources to Western companies. No country’s economy has ever gotten better because they received foreign aid any more than a junkie has ever gotten clean because the government gave him clean needles.

China does not claim to be doing any of this for charity purposes. They don’t make claims to be ultra moral people going around saving the world from itself. The basic Chinese premise is that both war and interfering in another country’s domestic affairs through other means are both bad for business.

The Chinese vision of the future is one where peace is based on trade rather than enforced through violence. It’s also a future where a nation-state can make its own decisions about its internal affairs, because meddling in other people’s affairs is destabilizing and ultimately a form of warfare that often or even usually leads to violent warfare. The Ukraine is the perfect example: the US/Europe went in and did a revolution to overthrow the elected government in 2014, and this eventually led to a war. The Chinese policy is “everyone just relax, we’re going to sell you high-quality products at reasonable prices.”

The last time China was involved in a war was in 1979 when they sent troops to Cambodia to protect the Cambodians from a Vietnamese invasion. Think about that. How many wars and interventions has the US done since 1979?

When one contemplates the observable facts, it’s very, very difficult to dispute Anglin’s conclusion. There is absolutely no possibility anymore to attempt to claim that the USA, the US government, the US military, or even the US citizenry, are a force for good on the planet.

Even from my very limited personal perspective, I have to admit that the Chinese government has been courteous and respectful to me, while the US government and its proxy corporations have relentlessly persecuted my family members and put considerable effort into suppressing me as well as dozens of my acquaintances. I’m not banned from Tik-Tok, but I’m banned from YouTube. Chinese publishers are happy to work with me, while I’m blacklisted by US and UK publishers. US journalists write hit pieces about me, while Chinese state television welcomes my opinion on economic matters.

And it’s not the Chinese who are causing banks all around the world, including in the UK, to refuse to accept US clients. It’s long past time for US citizens to ask themselves, like that hypothetical SS officer in the comedy sketch, “are we the baddies?”

Now, obviously, not being a binary thinker, I don’t believe there are any good guys in the global geopolitical scenario. Not the Chinese, not the Russians, and not what passes for the various establishment Christian churches. But as should be completely and obviously clear to everyone by now, there are some particularly and especially and historically very bad guys who are active today, and regardless of whatever name one prefers to recognize them by, they have to be stopped by absolutely everyone who isn’t subject to them.

Whether we are good guys or not. Which, apparently, I am not, because, you know, skulls…

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Clown World Still in Denial

Foreign Affairs attempts to put a pro-Clown World spin on the way China’s support for Russia is supposedly weakening the world’s largest economy vis-a-vis the West:

A substantially more sanguine outlook dominates the discourse of China’s experts. They have noted that the Western response to the war has not produced the most catastrophic outcomes that many had predicted. The “most intense wave of sanctions [in] history,” scholars at Renmin University’s Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies concluded in a February 2024 report, “did not achieve the expected results, but instead brought a backlash and counter-sanctions” as Russia found lifelines for its currency and trade with China and other countries. Many Chinese analysts also contended that Putin has evaded truly damaging diplomatic isolation, citing his recent state visits to North Korea and Vietnam and that in July, he hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Moscow. As a headline from the Chinese edition of the Global Times trumpeted after Putin’s trip to Hanoi: “The West’s Isolation of Russia Has Been Broken.”

In this view, China has avoided paying any significant economic or diplomatic price for propping up Putin’s war efforts. Indeed, the war has created trends that may redound to China’s benefit. The Russian economy’s ability to weather Western sanctions has impressed many Chinese scholars. After a visit to Moscow in February 2024, Xu Poling, an expert on the Russian economy, remarked that the war in Ukraine “has injected a steroid shot into the lethargic Russian economy, making it stronger and more vigorous.” He even speculated that Putin “is not exactly in a hurry to end the conflict.” Other analysts have marveled at how the war has reanimated Russia’s languishing military-industrial complex, which, a Global Times analysis concluded, had been “in a state of insufficient investment and production.” Since February 2022, the analysis observed, it has “accelerated the acceptance of state investment and increased production capacity,” leading to a “comprehensive recovery of Russian military-industrial enterprises” and “significant progress” in the production of new tactical missiles, armored vehicles, and drones.

As the war drags on, Chinese analysts also believe that the West’s unity is fracturing. As Democrats and Republicans fight “fiercely against each other and as the [U.S. presidential] election approaches, [the] situation is getting more and more unfavorable for Ukraine,” the prominent Eurasian Studies expert Ding Xiaoxing wrote in February. Jin Canrong, a hawkish international relations scholar, predicted that a public “backlash” against support for Ukraine in European countries and the United States would eventually doom Kyiv’s ability to defend itself.

Many of these Chinese experts’ analyses are fair, even astute. But missing from the public-facing discussion in China is a true recognition of the costs Beijing has assumed as a result of its support for Putin’s war. Experts’ early assessments lingered on dramatic potential damage to China; now, they tend to ignore or underappreciate the serious costs Beijing has incurred. China’s relations with most European countries have degenerated, probably irrevocably. In the declaration following its July summit, NATO included an unprecedentedly sharp denunciation of Beijing’s behavior, calling China a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war effort—language that would have been unthinkable before February 2022.

Frustration with China is not limited to European policymakers. Europeans who were recently very bullish on Chinese-European relations—especially those with business interests in China—now hold a much dimmer view. A May survey of European CEOs by the European Round Table for Industry found that only seven percent believed that Europe’s relations with China would improve in the next three years. More than 50 percent saw future deterioration. In a July survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations that polled nearly 20,000 people, 65 percent of respondents in 15 European countries agreed that China has played a “rather negative” or “very negative” role in the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Although Western sanctions have not broken the Russian economy, the war in Ukraine has spurred further global economic fragmentation. For decades, Beijing has worked to build economic self-sufficiency; Chinese government planners stepped up these efforts around 2018 as they sought to prepare China for the splintering of globalization and the fracturing of supply chains. But China was not ready for the degree to which the war in Ukraine—coupled with growing national security concerns in many countries about technological dependence on China—hastened this fragmentation, prompting U.S. and European governments, companies, and investors to reallocate capital away from China and other geopolitically exposed markets. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine intensified foreign investors’ concerns about the Chinese market as it raised fears that Beijing could also face sanctions or economic repercussions because of its alignment with Moscow and its saber rattling toward Taiwan.

The war in Ukraine, and particularly Beijing’s decision to strengthen its strategic partnership with Russia, is also exacerbating the rifts in an already fractious U.S.-Chinese relationship. The Biden administration has repeatedly warned Beijing that the economic, technological, and diplomatic lifeline China is extending to Moscow works at cross-purposes with its stated desire for a stable bilateral relationship with the United States. But Beijing has continued to double down on its Russian gamble, including by launching a recent joint patrol with Russian bombers in the airspace just off the Alaskan coast. In May, Washington sanctioned over a dozen Chinese companies for their direct support of Moscow’s war effort. More sanctions are likely to come irrespective of the outcome of the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

The true recognition of the costs? What costs? To the contrary, China, like Russia and a number of other countries both in and out of BRICS, are beginning to recognize the true costs of engagement with Clown World. They see the degeneracy, they observe the material decline in morals, wealth, native birth rates, average IQ, and population demographics, and they rightly don’t want any part of it. What Clown World calls “freedom” and “democracy” is actually a slow-motion societal suicide. No matter what economic costs they might face, or foreign investments they might lose, no price is too high in exchange for removing themselves from the baleful influence of the Clown World cancer.

It’s not China that is in denial, but rather, the clowns of Clown World.

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