… William S. Lind asks in this recent panel discussion (third speaker, just after 43 minutes in). “The foreign policy establishment, or the country?” The relevant thread of his argument: The aggressive foreign policy posture of the United States is counter-productively promoting global disorder, which eventually threatens domestic calamity. When the US fights a foreign state, Lind argues, it advances the chaotic “forces of the fourth generation” — a more formidable opponent than even the most obdurately non-compliant state is able to be. America’s “offensive grand strategy” — tied to a high-level of concern for the internal political arrangements of foreign countries — is sowing dragon’s teeth.

TNIO has been coaxing NRx onto a path of broadened geopolitical scope. There is an unavoidable irony here. The Old Right tends naturally to a preoccupation with hearth-and-home, so that its preferred policy posture (non-interventionism) is often accompanied by — or even buried within — a retraction of mental energy from distant questions. The Neoconservative synthesis of foreign policy activism and cosmopolitan fascination with foreign affairs is far more psychologically consistent, regardless of its errors. For anti-globalists to sustain a panoramic perspective takes work.

This work is important, if realistic analysis is the goal, because distant eventualities hugely impinge. The existence and fate of Neoreaction depends far more upon the great churning machinery of world history than upon the local decisions of its favored ‘little platoons’. To misquote Lenin: Even if you are not interested in the system of the world, it is interested in you.

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American higher education is “primed for creative destruction” notes The Futurist:

Student loan debt has tripled in a decade, even while many universities now see no problem in departing from their primary mission of education, and have drifted into a priority of ideological brainwashing and factories of propaganda. Combine all these factors, and you have a generation of young people who may have student debt larger than the mortgage on a median American house (meaning they will not be the first-time home purchasers that the housing market depends on to survive), while having their head filled with indoctrination that carries zero or even negative value in the private sector workforce.

A convincing big-picture overview from SoBL:

The Russians and Chinese have slowly been building the infrastructure for a non-dollar system as well as amassing gold. The tough thing is selling this system to others. Couching it in terms immediately for an end to the Ukrainian problem, which anyone in the know started the moment the Ukrainians wanted to sign one deal with the Russians, allows it to frame the Russians and unaligned nations as victims of US foreign policy aggression. This is a pretty easy sell to a world that has seen the US move from missionaries a century ago to airborne robots that bomb supposed targets today. It can also be an easy sell to big players in the dollar recycling system like the Saudis.

Unreported by big US media as Secretary of State John Kerry flew around the Middle East being rebuffed and insulted, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov visited the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to discuss the Middle East. The Saudis asked Bandar to step down recently, and this rapprochement between Russia and the Saudis feels light years away from Bandar’s threats to Putin last summer. To be a fly on the wall for Lavrov’s visit. This is after al-Faisal visited Sochi on June 3rd to meet with Lavrov and Putin. The Saudis spoke of a need to maintain the territorial integrity of Syria and the integrity of Iraq as a peoples. The Saudis could be more concerned with their regime stability now and do not trust the US. They are not a homogenous nation and witnessed what the US did with the Arab Spring. The Russians (and Chinese) might be able to offer the type of security the regime wants. Keep in mind the Saudis sent billions to the Egyptian military junta and the Russians are making friendly with them while the US still chastises the military leaders for being harsh with the Muslim Brotherhood.

… (the Middle East version):

Why can’t America be more like China?

(a) Stay out
(b) If you have to interfere, help whoever’s losing (but not too much)
(c) Recognize there’s an intricate theological argument going on that we can’t hope to understand:

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Richard Fernandez has written many brilliant things, so this might not — necessarily — be his greatest moment, but it’s the post most perfectly substituting for what this blog would want to have said. Discussing the prospect of impeachment proceedings against the POTUS, he speaks through the avatar of an imagined Republican senator, to say exactly what is needed:

And after we get rid of him, after a decent interval, aren’t we’re going to do again? This time with an historic Woman president, Asian president, Gay president? You really need never run out of Jonahs.

I say …

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Due to our rigorous aversion to partisan vulgarity, we couldn’t possibly comment on this:

The majority leader pummeled the airwaves, spending more than $5 million on the race, including a direct-mail piece that took a harder line against immigration reform than Cantor previously had advocated. […] In many ways, however, the show of force gave more oxygen to the little-known Brat, who had few resources and almost no outside cash funding his underdog effort. To Cantor’s millions, Brat raised only $200,000, and spent even less, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. […] Among those who advocate changing the nation’s immigration rules, Cantor’s loss seems likely to dash all hope that the House will act on any legislation to provide a citizenship path for some immigrants — as Cantor had once proposed. […] Many had expected the chamber could turn to the issue once primary season had ended and lawmakers no longer had to worry about protecting their right flank.

“At least they cooked that freaking duck …”

The Dark Dream scenario up to and beyond 2016 isn’t hard to piece together:
* GOP lock on Congress to ensure maximum obstruction.
* Tea-Party insurgency driving the GOP into right-wing extremism®.
* Secessionist ambitions spreading like a forest fire.
* A radical progressive Democrat in the White House, to keep a Cathedral clown-face glued onto the collapse.

Carry on.

ADDED: Jim.

ADDED: I like the cut of Zachary Werrell’s jib.

Eric X Li writing in the New York Times (!):

The fundamental difference between Washington’s view and Beijing’s is whether political rights are considered God-given and therefore absolute or whether they should be seen as privileges to be negotiated based on the needs and conditions of the nation.

The West seems incapable of becoming less democratic even when its survival may depend on such a shift. In this sense, America today is similar to the old Soviet Union, which also viewed its political system as the ultimate end.

History does not bode well for the American way. Indeed, faith-based ideological hubris may soon drive democracy over the cliff.

ADDED: The Nation is concerned.

ADDED: Caviar Cons are also noticing that democracy is cooked.

Has Obama Administration geostrategy been based upon a cunning (and secret) plan? Richard Fernandez makes the case that a covert American attempt to subvert radical Islam crested with the September 11, 2012, Benghazi fiasco. Employing a mix of infiltration, drone assassination (to clear promotion paths), and calculated regime sacrifices (Egypt, Syria), the objective was to reforge an international Jihad under covert US control. When the take-over plan went south, nothing could be publicly admitted. Cascading failure has continued in the shadows ever since, jutting into media consciousness as a succession of disconnected — even inexplicable — foreign policy setbacks.

The curious thing about September 11, 2012 — the day of the Benghazhi attack — is that for some reason it marks the decline of the Obama presidency as clearly as a milepost. We are told by the papers that nothing much happened on that day. A riot in a far-away country. A few people killed. And yet … it may be coincidental, but from that day the administration’s foreign policy seemed inexplicably hexed. The Arab Spring ground to a halt. The secretary of State “resigned.” The CIA director was cast out in disgrace. Not long after, Obama had to withdraw his red line in Syria. Al-Qaeda, whose eulogy he had pronounced, appeared with disturbing force throughout Africa, South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. Almost as if on cue, Russia made an unexpected return to the world stage, first in Syria, then in the Iranian nuclear negotiations.

Fernandez digs much deeper than Carney, but this is still worth adding.

Zombie proposes a key to contemporary American politics: White liberals despise black people and can’t admit it. This is smart conservative jiu jitsu rather than anything remotely neoreactionary, but as a wedge to lever things apart, it has some intriguing potential. The central claim of a carefully-elaborated argument:

White progressives believe that black people are too dumb to make rational decisions on their own and too uncouth to behave civilly. So the progressive urge is to heap rules upon rules to control blacks and render them harmless to themselves and others. At the same time, progressives are terrified of being perceived as racist. So they hit upon a solution: Make rules which restrict everyone‘s freedoms, even though the progressives are actually targeting African-Americans. The collateral damage in this cynical equation — law-abiding citizens of all ethnicities — erroneously assume that the intrusive rules are aimed at them. But they’re missing the point: Progressives don’t enjoy restricting their own freedoms along with everyone else’s, but can conceive of no other legal mechanism to deal with what they see as misbehaving blacks while still appearing to be race-neutral.

ADDED: PJM apparently going all-in with this meme — “But [Obama and Kerry] do — and here’s the irony in Obama’s case — have the traditional white man’s view of that same Arab world — to wit, Arabs are crazy and primitive.” We’re the true anti-racists!

A politically-incorrect short history of the Wild West. (Jim at his rough realist best.)