These times they are a changin’. They are also quiet interesting. Perhaps the Chinese have been wishing that very hard on us here in America?
In any case, welcome once again to an occasional musing from The Partisan.
Current events in Afghanistan keep bringing me back to an idea implanted in my mind years ago from a very wise anarchist. She said the trajectory of the USSR and US were similar. They were born in idealistic revolution and structured along similar lines. They would therefore end similarly: unable to manage the weight of the world they created while pretending it was the one they intended all along.
9/11 was our Chernobyl - the moment we clearly had no idea what we were doing anymore. Doubt that? Recall George W. Bush’s face the moment he was told planes had hit the Twin Towers.
We were fucked from the word, “Go.”
Afghanistan, I note with some amusement, is our Afghanistan. Since my birth in the early 1980s, that country is 2-0 against superpowers. Think about that extraordinary fact. The two greatest empires humankind has ever seen laid low in the mountains of that Central Asia nation.
Well played.
Now we turn to our leadership over the past 13 years. The Soviets enjoyed a parade of decrepit, stupid old men absolutely incapable of solving their system’s challenges. Gorbachev was too little, too late. What has the United States gotten? Obama and Trump are two sides of the same crooked coin. Biden? He’ll likely drool his way into the grave.
That leaves us with Kamala Harris. The only thing worth looking forward to with her is the dark solace of a Werner Herzog documentary. Maybe he’ll bring her sweets, too.
Nevertheless, I see hope. Like my hero Buenaventura Durruti said: “We carry a new world, here, in our hearts.”
I work with some amazing people that hail from former Soviet countries. They are everything I was brought up to be, all those years ago. I’ll be over in that part of the world before long.
Gonna ask a lot of questions. See how it went for them. Find out if we can’t see what’s coming for ourselves.
Stay tuned.
Dropping a thought here for the record.
What if Trump is our Gorbachev?
The US and USSR always had more on common than either cared to admit. Both were, for good or bad, defined by large bureaucracies and institutions. Both were disruptive powers interested in exporting their ideological belief in their own goodness to a world they just knew would be better off if only other countries could be more like them.
Where things become radically different starts with their geography and strategic interests that grow out of that. If you look at a map of Russia's 9, yes I said 9, time zones, you notice that all their rivers run the wrong way from a trade standpoint and are often frozen in Winter. That translates to an enormous amount of resources and centralization of authority simply to get good to market, let alone export them. They suffer from all the trade deficiencies Sparta did before them. Most of their cities are not designed for trading purposes along navigable rivers. Most like Petersberg were built as military outposts designed to slow the next invasion.
America is in the opposite position. With the Mississipi connecting to the Gulf and plenty of rivers running east and west to the ocean, we are a natural exporter and the Athens of our time. Our cities are designed entirely around economic necessity with no military purpose since we have 2 Oceans and the two longest peaceful unprotected borders in the world. As a result, we can afford capitalism, an enormously profitable and wasteful system that makes sense when you have an over abundance of resouces to waste in order to maximize profits. It's not a mistake that the US has no use for Communism and in the Soviet Union everyone almost starved when they experimented with capitalism. It's also not a mistake that with our extra resources we can afford to fuck with almost anyone with no risk to our strategic imperatives. The USSR needed all it's resources simply to achieve it's strategic imperatives and lacked the productivity to afford and maintain them for long after WWII.
All this is a very long way of saying that for good or bad, America can fuck up on a level no one else in the world can fuck up and still survive. I honestly don't see America become a less dominate country, even if I think the world would be better off if we did, because there is currently no one there to replace us even if there was a shock big enough to cause such a shift.
Think what Britain needed to go through before power transferred to the US. By the early 1900's US output was greater than Britain and by the end of WWI The world financial market in London had shifted to to NY. Despite this, it took another 30 years to include a depression and WWII to firmly establish the US as the new hegemony in the world as the US took over all of Britain former naval basis in exchange for military help. the Brenton Woods Accords only solidified that position and no one, not even China is close to replacing that despite all our fuck ups and the intrusive disaster we have become across the world since the end of WWII. We screw with people with almost no moral hazard attached, which is not a good thing.
It brings me no joy to admit this, but I don't see things changing for the foreseeable future. Even if I wish they would.
Enjoy Eastern Europe. It's my favorite part of the world.