The western empire, which has dominated the world for hundreds of years, even before the industrial revolution, is now failing, and its death throes are threatening to take the world down with it. This is the empire’s ‘Sampson option’ – a term usually associated with Israel’s threat to take the world down with them if they appear to be strategically defeated. The empire, a naval power first centred in the UK, and now continued in the US, had long sought to control the heartland of the world in order to prevent the rise of land land power competitor. This was done by controlling client states in sensitive regions around potential rising powers, in order to perpetually raise tensions, create flash points for conflict, and destabilise regions around states of concern. For instance, Israel was envisaged for this purpose decades before the Balfour declaration or the actual creation of the Jewish state through terrorism and destruction. This has worked for centuries, since its inception with Halford Mackinder in 1904, but that strategy is now collapsing.
All wars are bankers’ wars, but the mechanisms for this are poorly understood. Bankers need control over collateral. They need to be the ones to fund projects in order to create assets on their balance sheets that can then be used to leverage further gains through further loans. The clients do the heavy lifting to implement the project, but the bankers always profit, in return for creating currency from thin air, and if the project fails to pay the interest on the loans, they claim the assets as well. They require the ability to use force, but don’t possess this themselves, so they must co-opt powers that do possess this capacity. As such, empires do not belong to the countries they inhabit, they merely use them to perform functions that the bankers cannot perform by themselves. The result is the concentration of wealth in the hands of bankers and their associated elites in specific geographical locations, in this case the West. Host countries are parasitised by empire, and their populations extracted from and exploited in order to amass wealth for the banking cartels which currently rule the world. Host elites benefit from empire directly, and populations might temporarily (just long enough to be lulled into a false sense of superiority and security), but the long term impact on imperial populations is invariably negative.
The current iteration of empire is failing. The debt level has become unsustainable, the ability to successfully project power at a distance is increasingly being seen grossly exaggerated, and fewer vassals states are prepared to both pay for empire and comply with its dictats. There have already been significant failures of imperial strategy envisaged to prevent this decline. The engineered pandemic was intended to lead to the impositon of a comprehensive control grid, but people woke up too early and prevented it from taking hold. The attempt to frighten people with a ‘climate emergency’ supposedly requiring strict control measures has also failed. The empire thought it could use Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia in order to rapidly force it to balkanise into controllable portions, but the result has been a newly self-sufficient Russia that is far more powerful than before the war, and which has already defeated the collective West. Russian and Ukrainian resources will not now become Western bankers’ collateral. Now the Iran project is failing, due to gross under-estimation of Iran’s ability to prepare for conflict, and not only resist it, but to gain considerable leverage against the empire in the process. Now the empire is trying to gain naval control of global choke points for trade, but it lacks the naval assets and firepower to be able to achieve this more than at most temporarily.
The American military industrial complex builds weapons for profit, not for winning wars. It’s weaponry is over-complicated, far too fragile, far too expensive, and lacks manufacturing surge capacity. Trump’s attempts to have industrial outfits such as car manufacturers convert their facilities to weapons production are far too little and far too late. In the few weeks of the war with Iran, the US has already used up some 50% of its interceptors and missiles. It cannot rearm and cannot sustain the conflict, unlike Iran, which has been planning for a long war of attrition for decades. The US cannot tolerate casualties, while Iranian culture is grounded in a narrative of martyrdom as a direct route to heaven. Young people gather in the streets around potnetial targets, ignoring the likelihood of being bombed. This would never happen in the individualistic West. Cultural solidarity is a powerful weapon in itself, and Iran has undoubted escalatory dominance.
