THE PROBLEMS OF RUNNING AN EMPIRE

Kunstler never fails to amaze. First he turns into a goldbug. Now he is quoting Jim Willie regarding the toppling of our USD hegemony by the Russians, Chinese and other opponents. Next he’ll be quoting Ron Paul and going to NASCAR races.

It seems he doesn’t have as well behaved commenters as TBP.

 

Between a Rock and a Laugh Track


By Jim Kunstler

      After the British parliament put the kibosh on following the American punishment brigade to Syria, and then NATO, and the UN wrinkled their noses at the project, well, that pretty much left President Obama to twist slowly, slowly in the wind — washed, rinsed, and hung out to dry. It looks like a watershed moment in the USA’s increasingly klutzy career as the world’s hall monitor. International power relations are suddenly in flux. A phase change has occurred causing all that was solid a few days ago to melt into liquid.

The Iranians are having a good laugh, for now. Mr. Assad of Syria responded with a beaming smirk. However, any sentient observer can see this region of the world for what it is, a political demolition derby which, left to its own blundering devices, would blow up the whole arena when the last player sputters to a standstill.

First of all, it seems to me that extremists in the Republican-dominated US House of Representatives have been quietly searching for a pretext to impeach President Obama. Committing an overt act of war without congressional approval would have been a good case, legally, despite the fact that executive branch war-making has been absolutely the rule for decades in Washington. The British parliamentary move against the avid David Cameron pretty much begged the question for American legislators. The foggy part is whether they would actually come back to Washington from the fried dough alleys of their state fairs and mount a “debate” about whether it would be a good or bad thing to whack Syria for gassing more than a thousand of its own citizens.

Lately when America mounts a high moral horse about how other nations behave, we have gone into these places and smashed things up, bringing much more death and destruction than we anticipated. The hope is always that some surgical military operation can correct a political illness, but a cruise missile is not exactly a scalpel and once the patient is blown to pieces it is rather hard to patch up the body politic again. You’re just left, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a lot of bloody fragments fought over by political rats and cockroaches.

Syria is a real crossroads both for America’s policy in the region and for its position on the world stage. The region is in a state of destructive turmoil that is likely to lead to the further fall of regimes and the breakup of states. Many of these states are figment nations anyway, with boundaries drawn in the 20th century by the winners of the two world wars. The discovery of oil from North Africa to Iran and beyond has been catastrophic for everybody in the world, but most vividly for the exploding populations of these mostly desert states, which could not have supported so many people without the artificial support of petro-money. Now, faced with the specter of peak oil production, the whole region is flying apart from the stress of population overshoot, including countries like Syria which never produced much oil itself.

But the drama over the trade in the oil remaining only becomes more intense. For instance, the position of Saudi Arabia, pretending to sit quietly on the sidelines through all this, is curious. There are rumors, unverified, that the gas incident in Syria happened because Saudi Arabia sent canisters of Sarin to the Syrian rebels, who then mishandled them and gassed their own neighborhood. The world’s recent experience with so-called “intel reports” about weapons has made everybody skeptical of claims made by politicians that a particular country poses a danger to others.

Otherwise, there is a whole other strategic realm of concerns around the petro trade and its financing that is totally off the radar screen of the mainstream media. For instance, the sometimes erratic but brilliant blogger Jim Willie describes the larger struggle of Russia, Iran, China, and other interested parties to displace the US dollar dominance in oil trade — in particular a dollar based on increasingly sketchy US Treasury bonds, which has deformed global banking, roiled currencies, and made the settling of international accounts problematical for everybody else in the world. The opposition to the US, and its client / partner Saudi Arabia, the story goes, would replace the dollar with gold-backed oil trade and a logistical work-around based on a growing pipeline system from Iran and beyond, in Asia, to desperate customers in Europe. The implications are a collapse of the dollar (and the US bond market), a wedge between European and American interests, and a dominant partnership of oil-and-gas rich Russia with China — that is, a major power shift from west-to-east.

Who knows how much of this has informed President Obama’s decision process. The stall in the American whack-attack against Syria may itself be a symptom of the swirling new conditions in world finance and power relations. In any case, a great empire — which we have been — can’t afford to make idle threats. The outcome of the Syria melodrama may be that the US has been knocked down a big step in its ability to project power without terrible consequences to itself.

To posters in the comments section: Do not post YouTube videos. Do not engage in quarrels. Do not make stupid political puns. We are making an effort to combat the trolldom that has reigned here for a while. If you misbehave, you will be kicked off.

7
Leave a Reply

avatar
  Subscribe  
Notify of
Welshman

Sounds like JK is trying to be a “Hall Monitor” in his troll dorm.

Sawgill
Sawgill

I don’t think JK authored the last paragraph.

NickelthroweR
NickelthroweR

I’ve been reading Kunstler for years and I’m surprised that he has bothered to allow people to post to his blog given what most people there have to say.

Hollow man
Hollow man

Could be spot on. I womder why anyone would wish to join the military and obviously fight for bankers and their oil supply. We are so jacked up that the military personell are protesting. FUBAR.

Methodical Man
Methodical Man

JK and most boomers won’t see this thing come apart. They should be happy…

GilbertS
GilbertS

After Benghazi, why would ANYONE serve this govt with a resident who you KNOW will leave you hanging when the chips are down? The buck don’t stop there and we always leave a man behind now. I guess one good part of a depression is a steady stream of warm meat for the military to devour.

GilbertS
GilbertS

Could it be the libs were on target with their No Blood For Oil chants, but merely too early?

Discover more from The Burning Platform

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading