Ruling Class Finally Awakens to the Reality of America's Decline

Yes, I’m simply re-using Simplicius’ title—but for a reason. Simplicius is discussing Ben Rhodes’ article in Foreign Affairs. We referred to this yesterday in Thinking About China. Here is the link to the Rhodes article:

A Foreign Policy for the World as It Is

Biden and the Search for a New American Strategy

But Simplicius’ title gets closer to the reality of what’s going on here. The Ruling Class of the Anglo-Zionist—some of them, anyway—are awakening to the limits of American power. However, that does not mean that are awakening to the reality of the world as it is. It only means that they want to scale back their ambitions for the time being to rebuild a firmer base. An “updated conception of US leadership.” But there’s a key clue that shows how little the Ruling Class has learned, and that they’re still trying to build a house on foundations of sand.

The crisis of the West is the rejection of the West. What do I mean? The West in historical fact is Christendom. Christendom has been rejected—de facto at the Reformation but quite explictly, de jure if you will, by the EU. What we call the West is a corpse, or close to it, that lives off the almost completely expended intellectual and spiritual capital of Christendom. Whatever legitimacy our institutions retain derives from that historic past. For the rest, culturally, the West has embraced Nihilism, as Putin recognizes.

Therefore when Rhodes, in his article, speaks of "pivot[ing] away from the … Western-centric view that have caused [the Biden] administration to make some of the same mistakes as its predecessors" he gets it all backwards. The barbarian tribes of the West were never fully Christianized, and that is the problem. With the fracturing of Christendom tribalist nihilism, which had long simmmered under the surface, broke free with predictable results—for the West and for The Rest. Putin and Xi and sensible leaders are seeking a return to the order of tradition, away from “Western” nihilism.

Read this excerpt from Simplicius with that in mind. Rhodes announces that the “old rules-based international order” is dead. But wait. The “rules based order” isn’t the old order. The rules based order, in point of fact, was the nihilistic replacement by the Anglo-Zionist Empire of the true Old Order that derived from Christendom—the order of international law. International law is the law of human nature, the divine order of human nature, expressed in international relations. The rules based order is the nihilism of might makes right—as Simplicius puts it, the rules based order is the order of slavery, because it was the Anglo-Zionist Empire’s will to power that made, and remade, and broke the rules at will. The key to recovery for the West is a return to law, but that can only be convincingly accomplished by a return to the divine order. That, of course, is what Putin is attempting in Russia, and what he is advocating for the world order. But Rhodes is not advocating a return to international law. He’s only advocating a retrenching of our ambitions, our will to power. The Ruling Class isn’t about to recognize legal constraints yet.

Publications like Foreign Affairs are where the elite address not us, but each other, in the long-standing tradition of euphemism as secret-coded language of their ‘interior world’ of the deepstate and outlying political class. Here Mr. Rhodes adeptly navigates the nuances of this privileged cant when he declares that the Rules Based Order has fallen:

But lodged in the creases of his appeal are the keys to the game: why is the Order dead? He answers: because countries previously vassalized by strict obedience to the Hegemon are now, for once, acting independently and making—quelle surprise!—sovereign decisions. And thus is translated the secret message of the inter-elite argot: the ‘Rules Based Order’ was nothing more than a veil for line-toeing slavery, and it’s now finished forever.

He spells it out even more clearly in a fittingly titled section toward the end:

Again the laundered speech; allow us to translate: “Our primacy has come to an end because the world has woken up to our sham. All the current conflicts we’re engaged in—are ones in which we have no actual legal justifications to be involved. Now our gig is up and the world has seen our blatant hypocrisy and double standards, including our own citizens, who now refuse to die for our globalist greed!”

Finally, in the end comes his reasonable surmise:

None of this will be easy, and success is not preordained, since unreliable adversaries also have agency. But given the stakes, it is worth exploring how a world of competing superpower blocs could be knitted into coexistence and negotiation on issues that cannot be dealt with in isolation.

Did you hear that? That’s the ghostly death knell of the U.S. establishment tolling in the night.