The Iran War: The End of Imperium (Globalism in One Country?)

By Wayne Allensworth

In the Iran War, we are observing the American Empire — drunk on hubris, bereft of any humility or sense of limits, overstretched beyond its means and in the decadent stage of imperium — in its death throes. Our “leaders” live in a bubble of their own making inside the Washington, D.C., beltway, while the people also reside in digital echo chambers, a fantasy world constructed by technology. This state of affairs only breeds fanaticism, and when fanatics are challenged they rush toward the cliff like the Gadarene pigs.

The decadence of our country has been a long time in the making. Modernity strips away everything decent and good built on millennia of human experience, leaving individuals naked and vulnerable, afloat in a sea of abstraction, grasping for anything to give them some sense of meaning and purpose. As noted in this space many times, Western civilization eroded itself with a linear, narrow, literal mode of thinking that resides in the Left-brain hemisphere, one that, while blocking the broader view of the Right Hemisphere, becomes controlled by ideology, fanaticism, and loss of a genuine sense of the sacred. Empathy dies on the vine.

So here we are. A large part of the country can’t or won’t distinguish between man or woman or boy or girl, seems bent on self-destruction, and views unrestricted abortion as a sacrament. The other side of the coin has distorted its sense of the sacred to worship a militarized, regimented march to war fueled by a pseudo-Christianity that is as far as one can imagine from the Prince of Peace’s call to take up one’s cross. One side does not hear the silent screams of the unborn. The others justify bombing and killing civilians as “collateral damage.” Yet on the continuum of madness, their differences are largely ones of degree not kind. Both think America is an abstraction. Both would dispense with the everyday virtues in favor of a blasphemous Messianic universal mission. They are not as different as they imagine.

The big gap between the smug followers of managerial bureaucracy and the rule of experts and that of MAGA’s hard core is one of class. Class resentments explain a lot. If one issue represents a gulf between the two, it is gun rights. Both sides have their flags — the rainbow banner, and the Stars and Stripes — and their celebrity leaders who have descended into self-parody in a society that no longer has any standards of decorum. But that, too, is the result of the egalitarianism both have assimilated as modernity has levelled out society, and destroyed every barrier between the individual and Leviathan, which is no longer merely the state, but a mass, a Blob of overlapping, transnational public and private monopolies, institutions, and bureaucracies. Thus, MAGA super patriots are more than willing to expend American blood and treasure to defend another country, Israel. The most fanatical among them even welcome the expansion of the war and the risk of nuclear Apocalypse because it would end the agony of living in a world in which they no longer have a future. For its part, the far left is more than ready to annihilate mankind to “save the planet.” Both extremes are nihilistic cults, again, a sign of a society in its death throes.  

In our managerial system, elites — “left or “right” or “liberal” or “conservative” — aim for techno-authoritarianism. The Davos Politburo tells us we will own nothing and be happy living in our 15-minute communities. If our jobs disappear because of robotics and AI, not to worry, we will receive Universal Basic Income and an Internet connection. Like the inhabitants of Huxley’s Brave New World, medications and a Matrix-like fantasy world will pacify the herd on its way to the spiritual slaughterhouse. Techno conservative Peter Thiel, who backs President Trump and is one of Vice President J.D. Vance’s mega wealthy patrons, says that those who oppose AI are the Anti-Christ, blocking America’s universal mission to better the world. Thiel is, as they say, a piece of work. Like all false Messiahs, he is determined to bring on his own version of the millennium. As more than one observer has noted about Thiel, a member in good standing of the “Epstein class,” one could be excused for seeing him as the Anti-Christ and his digitized, encoded world as the Mark of the Beast. Thiel is a trans-humanist, seeing man as transcending his own nature not through spiritual growth but via technology. Just what distinguishes him from the Davos crowd and the techno-atheists?

If one needs reminding, the original neocons were Trotskyite leftists who were mugged by reality — and actual muggers — in the 1960s. The New Left was riotous and scary. So, the Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristal crowd sought greener pastures in the GOP. But they did not abandon their revolutionary sensibilities. As spiritual descendants of Leon Trotsky, they preached that the “liberal democratic” revolution had to be universal or none of us would be safe. This fit the universalist bent of the Cold War ideological battle of the “Free World” against Communism. The neocons were largely Jewish and sympathetic to Israel, which also fit with the Cold War alignments of the time. The overlap between neo-cons and Zionist conservatives, notably evangelical Christians, is not accidental. But Americans of that time were not quite ready to abandon traditional patriotism for universal revolution. The universalist Wolf would wear patriotic clothing.

Allow me to digress. Leon Trotsky and his permanent revolution doctrine were at odds with Joseph Stalin for control of Bolshevik ideology and its power structures. Trotsky prioritized socialist revolution abroad. Eventually, one of Stalin’s agents assassinated Trotsky in Mexico as the Man of Steel consolidated power in Soviet Russia. In the meantime, Stalin, foreseeing the possibility of another war, used brute force, as Peter the Great had centuries before, to modernize the country through forced industrialization, collectivization, and an assertion of totalitarian bureaucratic controls. Stalin called his doctrine “Socialism in One Country,” that is, building a socialist superpower as the base of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. His rivalry with the old Bolsheviks, many of them Jewish, prompted Stalin to Russify the Bolshevik party. He dispensed with the radical sexual agenda of the Bolsheviks. He could not, after all, build a great power if future workers were aborted and easy divorce broke up marriage. He also turned to Russian history and its moments of greatness to rally the core population. Soviet films of the Stalinist era celebrated great victories of the past, such as the victory over the Teutonic knights depicted in Aleksandr Nevskiy. And when the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa, Stalin carefully rehabilitated the signs and symbols of the Old Russia, including loosening restrictions on the Russian Orthodox Church for a time. Russians responded to the old banners, and the intelligentsia hoped that great sacrifice of the Russian people in that cataclysmic war would herald a thaw in the Stalinist system.

It did not. After the war, Stalin planned new purges. The Stalinist noose tightened around the collective neck of the people.

I think the parallels are obvious. Ironically, the neocons and Ziocons are borrowing a page from Stalin’s playbook. Neocons, Ziocons, and technocons saw that Trump was the best vehicle for their plans. He was going to win the presidential election in 2024 and they acted accordingly. They targeted wokeness and waved the bloody shirt of past American military victories. They even brought back the names of streets and military bases the Left, in a fit of anti-American wokeness, had rechristened. And they trotted out the evangelical preachers to play up a brand of pseudo-Christianity that fit their warlike agenda. Out with the Prince of Peace and in with their God of War, who, as the demented Pete Hegseth recently remarked, would bless their giving no quarter to the enemy, the Amalekites of their twisted testament.

Yet the universalist egalitarian language of the false right echoes that of the left. America is an oxymoronic “universal nation,” not a real place and people with concrete interests. Humility is out, the radical individualism prevalent in our society, so evident in our sports heroes’ taunting opponents and acting as mercenaries with no loyalty to team, is in. Self-realization, not a life of family and community, is the goal. The sexual revolution is largely accepted even among “conservatives.” They don’t mind sisters, daughters and even mothers killed in war. We argue about which trimester is the proper one for killing unborn children and fiercely argue that parents must agree to having their children mutilated in “gender-affirming” care. And Epstein-class politicians play their Kabuki theatre games.

The powers who back Trump and the Iran war imagine they will usher in their new world of techno-tyranny and consolidate the moribund American Empire as a base of operations by destroying BRICS and challenging China, Russia, and, of course, Iran. While the Zionists are already apparently looking for new patrons as American enthusiasm for Israel declines, they will try to drain every last bit of blood and treasure from America. In the end, economic, social, and political crises will wrack and wreck America. But the powers-that-be will still have the technology of the surveillance state that Theil’s Palantir is developing. Digital currency, tracking us on our iPhones and automobile GPS systems, instituting a social credit system like that in China, and surveilling us with cameras and online are still possible and in an increasingly chaotic, heterogenous post-war country will likely be used by whoever rules us to maintain “order” and “stability.” 

And we might end up with “Globalism in One Country” no matter who wields power.

Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of  The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.

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