“Trump is a consequence of the last quarter-century of liberal internationalist politics, not its cause, and to attribute changes in the direction of American foreign policy to an individual would be wrong,” reads a key sentence from an essay by Sumantra Maitra, one of the rising stars of American posh independent thought. A man a generation younger than Curtis Yarvin, but comparably educated and sophisticated.
Failure to understand this is one reason why the anti-Trump opposition is so desperate and powerless. It still has enormous resources at its disposal, and all it has been able to do so far is attack electric cars. They are powerless because they do not understand the situation. They reassure each other that their world was fine, could go on, and one man broke it all – evil psychopathic Trump (or evil psychopathic Musk or evil psychopathic Putin). If you don’t understand the real causes of what’s going on, you can’t mount an effective counter-action.
As Maitra shows, America’s assertion of liberal hegemony has done enormous damage, especially to the United States itself. That a million people somewhere were killed in the process is a secondary issue from an American perspective. Worse, America could no longer bear the damage. The current course has led not only to the collapse of imperial ambitions, but also to the collapse of the United States as a state. If Trump had not come along, someone else would have had to make the change.
For us, this means that we cannot expect a return to the Biden-Blinken-Harris-Nuland policy. America is simply no longer capable of that, regardless of other developments there.
