Tag: decline and fall

The Turning Point

As I’ve been pointing out for the last few years now, the USA is no longer a global superpower. It’s now been demoted to major regional power, which is very far from nothing, but its pretensions at pursuing elite interests in the name of playing global policeman are observably over:

Last week’s Trump-Xi summit produced no dramatic declaration or historic treaty – yet its importance may prove far greater than any immediate deliverable. What happened in Beijing was not a breakthrough in policy but a breakthrough in recognition: the United States openly acknowledged China as an equal center of global power. That alone marks a historic turning point.

For decades, American administrations approached China from the assumption that Beijing was either a manageable challenger or a state that would eventually integrate into a US-led international order on American terms. The summit suggested something fundamentally different.

US President Donald Trump appeared compelled to recognize that China is no longer simply a rival great power but a central pillar of the emerging world order – one that Washington can neither isolate nor overpower. This was the true message of the summit.

Neither Washington nor Beijing expected immediate breakthroughs. The summit was never realistically supposed to solve structural tensions overnight. Its purpose was to stabilize relations between two powers which are increasingly aware that prolonged escalation has become prohibitively costly. The talks reflected the reality that the US now needs stable engagement with China as much as China needs stable engagement with the US. This mutual dependency is perhaps uncomfortable, but it is also unavoidable – neither full confrontation nor full separation is sustainable anymore.

For years, the Americans described China as a revisionist actor seeking to overturn the international order. But the Beijing summit demonstrated something more consequential: the international order itself is already changing. Many countries have begun treating China not merely as a competitor to the US, but as a parallel – and in some respects superior – center of global gravity.

The post-WWII international order is now over. Clown World is still scrambling to control what it can, but it is in disarray. Which means these will continue to be interesting and tumultuous times.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Lost America

From a discussion at SG about Boomers and their destruction of the American way of life.

It’s hard for the younger generation to even conceive of what the generations that preceded the Boomers were like. I am speaking of the USA. Let me try to give you a taste. They loved their families, they were a cohesive civilized team, willing to put significant skin in the game to make things better. They wanted their kids to do better than they did. It was a common motto. They did try to actively curb the worst tendencies of the Boomers until they died off. You can see this in the cultural decline acceleration around 2005.

Any adult anywhere, as a member of the societal team, could and would correct me or any child when badly behaved. If you accidentally dented someone’s car you left a note, as examples. High trust, universally known unwritten rules. Everyone knew the shared history and traditions. It felt like One Great Extended Family rowing the boat together. As Gen z (and the younger generations) you very likely have not even know the experience of your own family as a team, from which experience you might imagine what a unified and cohesive broader society was. Gen X got to experience the discontinuity with in their own families, in most cases, and within society. It was a sudden mass plunge for many. Working Moms, latch key neglect, mass divorce, single parenthood, abortion. We had an apples and oranges comparison that was not subtile. Gen X suffers the grief of having lost something phenomenal that we were unable to stop and are unable to reverse.

What broke can not be fixed but maybe something that rhymes can be rebuilt. To try to do that, the Boomers need to be out of the way and the younger generations need to know what can be from what was.

The preceding generations did a lot of good, and you can be sure that their hearts and minds were in the right place even when they were spectacularly wrong. This you can easily forgive. They were human. They did their best. You loved them and they loved you.

If you want to get a taste of what it was like, look at the old cover art by Norman Rockwell, watch the old Captain America, Casablanca, anything by Frank Capra, anything with John Wayne. Look at the old Bugs Bunny cartoons and know that Bugs was the average American, modeled after Clark Gable, particularly in “It happened one night”. And we did NOT think of ourselves as a “nation of immigrants”. We were NOT full of rootless recents that only have this slogan as some common touch point. We were Americans, with both national and ingrained, globally dominant culture. Before USA USA was a “MAGA chant” it was just normal. Blue jeans were American and were like dollars. You could trade them anywhere in the world for almost anything. We also had regional dress, dialects and traditions because people were here in one place long enough for that stuff to be there. Assimilation in most places meant you weren’t “us” until the third generation, where the second married a townie and had kids. The kids were us. We didn’t think about anywhere else besides the the US much, if at all, but we did have some decorations modeled on the 17th century we used for Thanks Giving that included Indians as we knew them going back over 500 years, and I don’t mean the hyphenated come lately people named by the East India Company. It’s baloney to say we didn’t have a culture. We had a culture and national identity that was so globally dominant, so coveted that the dress and speech of the entire globe has been impacted to reflect

DISCUSS ON SG

Can it Get Worse?

I’m pretty sure that if the champions of the printing press were given the opportunity to see how their magnificent new device would transform the written word into a means for women to write about their sexual fantasies involving demons, monsters, and the dead, they would have burned every last one of them.

One of its principal attractions was that it had the potential to democratise knowledge. In the past, the high cost of manuscripts had meant that only the well-to-do could afford them. Now that books could be produced in large numbers, however, printed volumes could be sold for much lower prices, making them available to those of lesser means for the first time. As Bussi remarked, it was possible for even the poorest to build a library of his own and for learning to become accessible to all. Excited by the prospect, some of those associated with presses began writing texts explicitly targeted at furthering the spread of knowledge. In 1483, for example, Fra Iacopo Filippo Foresti of Bergamo (1434–1520) published his Supplementum chronicarum. A sort of ‘bluffers’ guide’ to world history, this was expressly designed to make available to the masses knowledge which had previously been restricted only to the few.

As many observers recognised, this had a range of knock-on benefits. For some, the most important of these was permanence. According to the Florentine humanist Bartolomeo della Fonte (1446–1513), printers could ‘confer eternity’ on whatever they produced. Since printing put more books into circulation, he reasoned, it would ensure that ancient texts were less likely to be lost, and it would crown modern authors with certain fame. Others believed that the ‘flood’ of new books would lead to moral enlightenment. There was some justification for this. Recent research into domestic life has revealed that books of hours were by far the most commonly owned texts; and, as Caroline Anderson has argued, the fact that these books were often kept in the camera (bedchamber/dayroom) suggests that they were read on a daily basis, including by women. It was hence only reasonable to assume that, as printing spread, so virtue would also grow. For the Franciscan friar Bernardino da Feltre (1439-94), God had shed ‘so much light on these most wretched and dark times’ through print that there was no longer any excuse for sin at all.

But not everyone was so enthusiastic. Others, for whom novelty and progress were far from synonymous, regarded printing with open hostility. Of these, none was more vehement than Filippo de Strata.

Like many of his contemporaries, he did not have any particular objection to books as physical objects. Although he is almost certain to have preferred manuscripts, he does not seem to have thought that printed works were, in themselves, unworthy of being read. Printers, however, were another matter. Much like his contemporary, the historian Marcantonio Sabellico (1436–1506), he reviled them as much for their ‘plebeian’ ways as for their foreign origins. To his mind, they were beggars and thieves who had no appetite for work but were always hungry for money. They had come to Italy, babbling in that ugly language of theirs, with no other goal than to put scribes out of a job. What was worse, they had no sense of propriety either. Drunk on strong wine and success, they were hawking books to every Tom, Dick and Harry. In doing so, they were not democratising learning — as Bussi and Foresti liked to believe — but debasing it. Whereas, in the past, the expense and scarcity of manuscripts had ensured that great care was always taken over the preparation of texts, the ease with which books could now be printed — coupled with the intense competition between presses — had led to all manner of rubbish being churned out. These days, Filippo argued, you could hardly open a volume without it being festooned with errors. This clearly did immense damage both to classical scholarship and to education. By putting such defective texts into the hands of the masses, he claimed, even those who could barely speak the vernacular would feel qualified to teach Latin. But since printers were interested only in making a quick buck off such ‘unlettered’ fools, they had no incentive to do any better. All that mattered was getting a new edition on the market as quickly as possible, irrespective of its quality.

For much the same reason, Filippo also believed that printing was a threat to public morality. If printers had sold nothing but religious works, it might not have been so bad; but because they were interested only in profit, they were trying to attract new readers by appealing to their baser instincts. All manner of bawdy and unsuitable volumes were being produced: from the torrid love poetry of Tibullus and Ovid, to the worst kind of modern filth. Given how cheaply such books were sold, it was inevitable that vice, rather than virtue, would flourish.

As an avowed champion of textual AI, it is more than a little sobering to observe how the skeptics of past technological innovations have not only been proven right, but proven right beyond their wildest imaginings.

DISCUSS ON SG

Immigration and IQ Matter

Here’s why IQ matters.

Look at the percentage of problem causers vs problem solvers in a 100-avgIQ group vs 85-avgIQ.

Imagine MOST of your population is problem causers, a tiny sliver is problem solvers, and no geniuses? A place like that would look like, well, like somalia or india.

Then imagine a place where most people are maintainers, and you have more midwits and problems solvers than problem causers? Well, that would look like America (30 years ago before we let in india and somalia)

HoeMath is absolutely correct. I addressed this very issue eleven years ago in Cuckservative. It’s interesting to see how some of the concepts, and even some of the terms, have now permeated the mainstream discourse. That’s encouraging for the state of discourse ten years from now, when for some reason that no one will be able to explain, no one believes in evolution anymore.

The fundamental challenge is that neither midwits nor maintainers are capable of seeing problems coming from down the road. Their perspective is always a limited one of the last 15-20 years. If something hasn’t caused a problem yet, that means it never will. The maintainers ignore everything but their day-to-day responsibilities and the midwits devote themselves to aggressively attacking every problem solver or genius who is concerned about the problems the midwits can’t yet perceive.

Here’s a genius-level future problem for you: explain why PZ isn’t being actively suppressed.

Think that one through if you want a sleepless night or two. Although it could be worse. If it gets featured by any of the major book reviews, or appears on The New York Times bestseller list, and I start getting requests for puff-piece interviews, Houston will definitely have a problem.

DISCUSS ON SG

Civilizational Erasure

The White House warns the European politicians that their long-term course is suicidal on a grand scale:

Europe is facing potential “civilizational erasure” as the continent’s policymakers encourage censorship, crack down on political opponents, and turn a blind eye to mass immigration, the new National Security Strategy released by the administration of US President Donald Trump warns.

The landmark and strongly worded document released on Friday says that while the EU is showing worrying signs of economic decline, its cultural and political unraveling poses an even greater threat.

The strategy cites EU-backed immigration policies, suppression of political opposition, curbs on speech, collapsing birthrates, and “loss of national identities and self-confidence,” warning that Europe could become “unrecognizable in 20 years or less.”

One of Washington’s key goals is “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations,” the paper adds.

Trump’s strategy notes that the rise of “patriotic European parties” offers “cause for great optimism,” in a reference to growing bloc-wide support for right-wing Euroskeptic parties calling for strict immigration limits.

It’s not exactly a mystery what’s happening when on the one hand, they’re encouraging assisted suicide and sexual self-mutilation and sterilization in the public schools and mass immigration on the other. The only thing that is remarkable is how many people are too stupid and short-sighted to admit what has been happening right in front of them for years, if not decades.

But they’ll fail, sooner or later. They always do. It’s only a question of just how messy the whole thing is going to get before stability is restored. China went through it. Russia went through it. Now it’s the turn of the West to do the same.

The tragedy is that so many people take civilization for granted despite having no concept on what is necessary to maintain it.

DISCUSS ON SG

Let Experience Be Silent

When Reason anticipates it by more than 21 years:

Fact check true but it’s worse than people inside the bubble know when you talk to real Americans outside the wicked snow globe of Washington DC.

Myself and many of my colleagues came courageously roaring into 2025 with legislation that matched the 2024 electoral mandate only to be totally sidelined by Johnson under full obedience of the WH.

Executive orders are temporary, Q memes have not and obliterated the deep state, and my colleagues constantly trying to pass loyalty tests instead of demanding what is right won’t help Americans pay their rent or stop corporations from buying up homes, buy their groceries, provide good paying jobs and stop foreigners with visas from stealing their jobs, stop American tax dollars from funding foreign wars and causes, or rebuild the value of the dollar.

Passing effective legislation that gets signed into law is permanent and actually solves Americans problems.

Now that House members are switching gears into campaign mode and will be fighting for their lives, our legislative majority has been mostly wasted. Our best shot was the first 6-9 months. And when Republicans likely lose the midterms it will become total and complete political war and gridlock once again.

The Uniparty always wins no matter which way the political pendulum swings leaving the American people empty handed.

It’s not that Rep. Greene is wrong, it’s that there was no need to send her to Washington DC to discover what I was already pointing out publicly in 2004. Because you can’t fix a corpse.

Any last vestiges of hope in the Republican Party have been shattered by the current regime, wherein a Republican President, Republican House, Republican Senate and Republican-nominated Supreme Court have demonstrated that they have zero interest in the timeless vision of America’s founders. Supporting them in the hopes that they will revive American liberties is akin to hoping that shock paddles will suffice to revive a month-old corpse. American freedom is not only dead, it has been rotting for some time.

Republicans fixed nothing and restored nothing when they had complete control of the government two decades ago. So, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that they did very little this time around.

Representative democracy is entirely incapable of reigning in a rogue ruling elite. More and more people around the world understand this; the Japanese people are merely the latest to learn that no matter how you change the “representatives”, the will of the people will not be heard, much less obeyed. Which is why it is obviously and observably impossible for the American people to vote their way out of the collapse of the United States, as Clown World is neither capable of giving up its control nor restabilizing the situation.

Remember back in the 1980s and 1990s when the innocent Clown Worlders used to believe that education, diversity, and calling white people racist was somehow going to make things better? Thirty years of relentless downward spiral later, and that’s still their only solution to the problem, although they’ve apparently improved it by substituting antisemitic for racist.

Is there one single solitary individual anywhere in the United States who can still assert with a straight face that continuing the Clown World program is going to prevent the United States from collapsing of the weight of its political, economic, demographic, and philosophical incoherencies?

DISCUSS ON SG

A Civilizational Collapse Model

There is an interesting link suggested between the observed AI model collapse and the apparent link between urban society and the collapse of human fertility.

The way neural networks function is that they examine real-world data and then create an average of that data to output. The AI output data resembles real-world data (image generation is an excellent example), but valuable minority data is lost. If model 1 trains on 60% black cats and 40% orange cats, then the output for “cat” is likely to yield closer to 75% black cats and 25% orange cats. If model 2 trains on the output of model 1, and model 3 trains on the output of model 2… then by the time you get to the 5th iteration, there are no more orange cats… and the cats themselves quickly become malformed Chronenburg monstrosities.

Nature published the original associated article in 2024, and follow-up studies have isolated similar issues. Model collapse appears to be a present danger in data sets saturated with AI-generated content4. Training on AI-generated data causes models to hallucinate, become delusional, and deviate from reality to the point where they’re no longer useful: i.e., Model Collapse…

The proposed thesis is that neural-network systems, which include AI models, human minds, larger human cultures, and our individual furry little friends, all train on available data. When a child stubs his wee little toe on an errant stone and starts screaming as if he’d caught himself on fire, that’s data he just received and which will be added to his model of reality. The same goes for climbing a tree, playing a video game, watching a YouTube video, sitting in a chair, eating that yucky green salad, etc. The child’s mind (or rather, subsections of his brain) are neural networks that behave similarly to AI neural networks.

The citation is to an article discussing how AI systems are NOT general purpose, and how they more closely resemble individual regions of a brain, not a brain.

People use new data as training data to model the outside world, particularly when we are children. In the same way that AI models become delusional and hallucinate when too much AI-generated data is in the training dataset, humans also become delusional when too much human-generated data is in their training dataset.

This is why milennial midwits can’t understand reality unless you figure out a way to reference Harry Potter when trying to make a point.

What qualifies as “intake data” for humans is nebulous and consists of basically everything. Thus, analyzing the human experience from an external perspective is difficult. However, we can make some broad-stroke statements about human information intake. When a person watches the Olympics, they’re seeing real people interacting with real-world physics. When a person watches a cartoon, they’re seeing artificial people interacting with unrealistic and inaccurate physics. When a human climbs a tree, they’re absorbing real information about gravity, human fragility, and physical strength. When a human plays a high-realism video game, they’re absorbing information artificially produced by other humans to simulate some aspects of the real physical world. When a human watches a cute anime girl driving tanks around, that human is absorbing wholly artificial information created by other humans.

If there is any truth to the hypothesis, this will have profound implications for what passes for human progress as well as the very concept of modernism. Because it’s already entirely clear that Clown World is collapsing and neither modernism nor postmodernism have anything viable to offer humanity a rational path forward.

DISCUSS ON SG

Immigration + Anti-racism = Terrorism

That’s not rhetoric. That’s not an exaggeration. That’s exactly what has been happening for the last ten years in Minnesota, as it has been revealed that the largest source of funds for the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.

The Somali fraud rings have sent huge sums in remittances, or money transfers, from Minnesota to Somalia. According to reports, an estimated 40 percent of households in Somalia get remittances from abroad. In 2023 alone, the Somali diaspora sent back $1.7 billion—more than the Somali government’s budget for that year.

Our investigation reveals, for the first time, that some of this money has been directed to an even more troubling destination: the al-Qaida-linked Islamic terror group Al-Shabaab. According to multiple law-enforcement sources, Minnesota’s Somali community has sent untold millions through a network of “hawalas,” informal clan-based money-traders, that have wound up in the coffers of Al-Shabaab.

According to Glenn Kerns, a retired Seattle Police Department detective who spent 14 years on a federal Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), the Somalis ran a sophisticated money network, spanning from Seattle to Minneapolis, and were routing significant amounts of cash on commercial flights from the Seattle airport to the hawala networks in Somalia. One of these networks, Kerns discovered, sent $20 million abroad in a single year. “The amount of money was staggering,” Kerns said.

Kerns’s investigation eventually expanded to Minnesota, where he realized the same thing was happening. “I worked on it for five years,” Kerns said. “We had sources going into the hawalas to send money. I went down to [Minnesota] and pulled all of their records and, well shit, all these Somalis sending out money are on DHS benefits. How does that make sense? We had good sources tell us: this is welfare fraud.”

Kerns then investigated the hawalas in Somalia that were receiving the money transfers. He determined, primarily through human sources, that significant funds were being sent from America to Al-Shabaab networks in Somalia. Whether the money was intended for Al-Shabaab or not, Kerns said, they were taking a cut.

A second former official, who worked on the Minneapolis JTTF, confirms the story’s general structure. This former official, who requested to remain anonymous, worked on two terrorism cases that intersected with Minnesota’s Somali community and has studied the flow of funds from Minnesota to Somalia.

“Every scrap of economic activity, in the Twin Cities, in America, throughout Western Europe, anywhere Somalis are concentrated, every cent that is sent back to Somalia benefits Al-Shabaab in some way,” the former official said. “For every dollar that is transferred from the Twin Cities back to Somalia, Al-Shabaab is . . . taking a cut of it.”

A third source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the close links between the Somali-American community in Minnesota and Islamic terror groups abroad. Ten years ago, the source was recruited as an “independent contractor” for a three-letter agency investigation into the “Minnesota men” who had joined, or attempted to join, ISIS. That year, a Homeland Security task force report found that Minnesota led the nation in the number of Americans who had joined, or attempted to join, ISIS. Of the 58 Americans who had done so, nearly half came from Minnesota.

Scott Johnson, who has covered these and related stories for years, attended several of those men’s trials, reporting on them for City Journal. He noted that the Minnesota men “gave the outward appearance of American assimilation”—including being “sophisticated users of social-welfare benefits.”

The relationship is ongoing. “This is a third-rail conversation, but the largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer,” the third source said. “There is an issue here that is real, and if there is ever an event that is traceable back to these funds, or to people from this area, then this situation will take on a whole new set of optics.”

If, at this point, you still believe in civic nationalism, mass immigration, or human equality, there is no excuse for you. You’re just being willfully retarded and clinging to your outmoded Enlightenment values while keeping your eyes firmly closed to the obvious consequences of your beliefs.

Intelligent people only need to see a conclusive proof or a solid falsification once in order to grasp objective reality. What does it say about the intelligence of educated, well-informed people that they continue to deny the obvious and the observable repeatedly over a period of decades?

Every single Enlightenment value is inverted. The democracies actively work to thwart the will of the people. Equal rights are used to justify transfer payments from natives to foreigners. Posterity is redefined to benefit everyone except the actual Posterity. It would be maddening if we didn’t know exactly where all that inversion is coming from.

The proof is there, but it takes courage, both moral and intellectual, to look at it long enough to accept it.

DISCUSS ON SG

Why Conservatives are Irrelevant

Conservatives, liberals, and Jews alike are all loudly lamenting the election of Mayor Mamdani and wringing their hands about how it was possible. Of course, the answer is both a) obvious and b) beyond their intellectual integrity to admit.

The result of the mayoral election was not only inevitable, it was one of the primary objectives of the architects of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act. This is exactly what those who hate America, hate Christianity, and hate Western Civilization have sought to accomplish since the turn of the 20th Century. Note the steep 25 percent decline in a decade after 1965.

This is the intended result of the so-called “Melting Pot”. It always was. And as New York City has gone, as Minneapolis has gone, so too will go the rest of the United States if Americans do not take control of their country back from the foreigners who have usurped their right to rule themselves.

And contra the New and Improved Nickles Fuentes, an American is not anyone who was born inside the geographic boundaries of the United States, or who was given a piece of paper by the federal government, but rather, the legitimate Posterity of the American revolutionaries for whom the Constitution was written.

Conservatives conserve nothing. They couldn’t conserve America. They couldn’t even conserve the definition of “American”. Which is why conservatism is not, and cannot be, part of the solution.

DISCUSS ON SG

Cold War 2.0

The strategists of Clown World have belatedly realized that the neocons are not only lunatics, but rank amateurs when it comes to assessing military capabilities and are attempting to establish some sort of Cold War-style detente with China before the asymmetric warfare of the last 25 years goes hot. A 100-page report offers some principles and initiatives conceived to replace the outmoded idea that the US military can simply enforce the will of its masters with regards to the Middle Kingdom. (PDF)

Several broad principles can guide efforts to stabilize intense rivalries

  • Each side accepts that some degree of modus vivendi must necessarily be part of the relationship.
  • Each side accepts the essential political legitimacy of the other.
  • In specific issue areas, especially those disputed by the two sides, each side works to develop sets of shared rules, norms, institutions, and other tools that create lasting conditions of a stable modus vivendi within that domain over a specific period (such as three to five years).
  • Each side practices restraint in the development of capabilities explicitly designed to undermine the deterrent and defensive capabilities of the other in ways that would create an existential risk to its homeland.
  • Each side accepts some essential list of characteristics of a shared vision of organizing principles for world politics that can provide at least a baseline for an agreed status quo.
  • There are mechanisms and institutions in place — from long-term personal ties to physical communication links to agreed norms and rules of engagement for crises and risky situations — that help provide a moderating or return-to-stable-equilibrium function.

Six broad-based initiatives can help moderate the intensity of the U.S.-China rivalry

  • Clarify U.S. objectives in the rivalry with language that explicitly rejects absolute versions of victory and accepts the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party.
  • Reestablish several trusted lines of communication between senior officials.
  • Improve crisis-management practices, links, and agreements between the two sides.
  • Seek specific new agreements — a combination of formal public accords and private understandings — to limit the U.S.-China cyber competition.
  • Declare mutual acceptance of strategic nuclear deterrence and a willingness to forswear technologies and doctrines that would place the other side’s nuclear deterrent at risk.
  • Seek modest cooperative ventures on issues of shared interest or humanitarian concern.

I think it is at least 15 years too late for any sort of meaningful rapprochement between China and the Clown World West, because the Chinese now understand what we have also learned in the interim: there is an ancient and malevolent evil that is not limited by human reason or timeframes that is the motivating force behind Clown World. Any compromise with it will eventually result in submission and destruction.

I am not the only one who is skeptical. Simplicius, too, has serious doubts about the ability of the Western states to change their course, as well as the probability that the Chinese will be convinced to alter their own.

It’s clear that RAND is trying desperately to make US policymakers abandon their obsolete and blinkered world view centered on the idea that any challenger must by its nature represent the selfsame kind of hegemonic exceptionalism cultivated by the US itself for over a century. The US views the entire world as a threat in the same light that a thief mistrusts all those around him—it is past guilt sublimated into national suspicion and Machiavellian subversiveness.

The US, being the pernicious by-blow of the late British Empire, has inherited all the hawkish trappings of its former parent. RAND here attempts to ween the US political culture away from this perpetually adversarial and hostile approach to foreign diplomacy because, as it has become apparent, the people ‘behind the scenes’ have slowly recognized not that confrontation with China will lead to some kind of global war, but rather the much barer reality that the US simply isn’t what it once was, and does not have the sheer overwhelming capability to bully the world’s foremost ascendant power. Thus, this RAND call to action is not—as they would have us believe—some kind of de-escalatory peacenik measure, but rather a desperate attempt to stave off the US from a historically fatal humiliation and geopolitical defeat at the hands of China.

I tend to agree that this attempt at establishing a new detente is nothing more than the desperate flailings of a failing power to avoid its now-inevitable decline and fall.

DISCUSS ON SG