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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Robert Zubrin’s intense (and appalled) discussion of Alexander Dugin’s revolt against the New Atlantis climaxes:

In short, Dugin’s Eurasianism is a satanic cult.

Despite inevitable NRO simplifications, it’s a gripping read throughout.

(Much of interest also in the obstreperous comment thread.)

ADDED: Gregory Hood on Zubrin on Dugin.

‘Dark Enlightenment’ describes a form of government as well as ‘Enlightenment’ does, which is to say: it doesn’t at all. On those grounds alone, George Dvorsky’s inclusion of DE among twelve possible “Futuristic Forms of Government That Could One Day Rule the World” is profoundly misguided. This is not to say the list is entirely without interest.

Its greatest value lies in the abundance of mutually inconsistent political futures, few if any of which will happen. It therefore provides the opportunity for negative thoughts, and more particularly for systematic negative idealization. Which futures are most deserving of prevention?

This blog has no doubt. The epitome of political disaster occupies fourth place in Dvorsky’s list (among a number of other hideous outcomes): Democratic World Government.

Dvorsky seems to quite like it:

We may very well be on our way to achieving the Star Trek-like vision of a global-scale liberal democracy — one capable of ending nuclear proliferation, ensuring global security, intervening to end genocide, defending human rights, and putting a stop to human-caused climate change.

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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.

… there’s something happening that might even be bigger than Project Idaho.

With two weeks left to go before electoral results are in, the world’s largest democracy seems set to veer hard right, to an extent unprecedented in its modern history. There’s a leftish but informative briefing on the ideological stakes at Quartz.

NRx has nothing to teach me about hats.

NRx tends to be quite insular, often out of semi-articulate principle, so nobody (other than enemies) seems to have paid much attention to this yet. That’s odd, upon reflection, because the Modi BJP seems to be juggling Trichotomy issues of a familiar kind within its Hindutva platform, which glues together a quasi-stable raft of religious, ethno-nationalist, and capitalistic elements into an explicitly reactionary-modernizing coalition. When the 21st century is allotted to Asia, it’s for a reason. The West’s vague premonitions are urgent practicalities there.

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Richard Fernandez on current geopolitical mind-games:

Putin is daring [Obama] to over-extend; to tread upon the European ice, which he knows in his heart will cave in under Obama. Fighting an all out sanctions battle would force Obama to rely on the EU, which Putin calculates will abandon him. In the resulting debacle, not only would NATO be shattered, Obama would be too. [… ]

One reason why Putin has made a special effort to humiliate the president is that his profilers may have pegged Obama as suffering from narcissistic personality disorder. Putin the secret policeman must be thinking: how do you get a narcissist to melt down? Answer: by personally and publicly shaming him, thereby provoking a narcissistic rage.

That rage can take either of two forms: a reckless act or a withdrawal into a fantasy in which the narcissist remains invincible in some universe of his own.

Either would suit Putin.

Related from Fernandez here, and here. For those who can’t get enough of that ‘back to the 1930s‘ feeling there’s WRM (sensible but lost) and Paul Johnson (lost), but both picking up on the real rhythm.  It’s a mess (and it’s going to get a lot worse).

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Nouriel Roubini has a short article up at Project Syndicate on The Changing Face of Global Risk, replacing the top six dangers of recent years with an equal number of new ones. There’s nothing remarkably implausible about it, but neither is it irresistibly convincing.

This type of forecast, were it reliable, would be of inestimable value. To some considerable degree it is simply inescapable, since there must always be default expectations (of the kind occasionally formalized as Bayesian priors). When specific probability-weighted predictions are not made, future-sensitive agents do not fall back upon poised skepticism — such Pyrrhonism is a philosophico-mystical attainment of extreme rarity. Instead, presumed outcomes are projected out of sheer inertia, whether as perpetuation of the status quo, or the mechanical extrapolation of existing trends. It takes only a moment of reflection to recognize that such tacit forecasts are at least as precarious as their more elaborate alternatives. Their only recommendation is an irrational mental economy, which would find in the least-effort of cognition some analogy with the superficially equivalent (but in this case informative) principle in nature.

Large-scale forecasting cannot be eschewed, but there are obvious reasons why it cannot be greatly trusted. It has no definite methods (relying for its credibility on hazy reputational capital). Its objects are complex, chaotic, and — once again — poorly defined. It has a restricted time frame, appropriate to gradually emerging developments constrained (to some degree) by historical precedent, but necessarily inadequate to radical innovation and to sudden, rapidly evolving events. The combination of these various blindnesses with a high-impact chance event produces the nightmare of the forecasters — (Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s) black swan.

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Pat Buchanan asks: Is Europe Cracking Up? His tour of disintegration takes in Ukraine, France, Britain, Belgium and Spain, but …

… the most startling news on the nationalist front last week came in Venice and the Veneto region, where 89 percent of a large turnout in a non-binding referendum voted to secede from Italy and re-establish the Venetian republic that vanished in 1866.

The proposed “Repubblica Veneta” would embrace five million inhabitants of Veneto. Should it succeed in seceding, Lombardy and Trentino would likely follow, bringing about a partition of Italy. Sardinia is also reportedly looking for an exit.

Buchanan’s preferred term ‘nationalism’ is ambiguous in this context, since it can mean either integration or disintegration. After all, it was Italian ‘nationalism’ that built this self-dismantling monster. Increasingly, it’s the fissile aspect — nationality as ethnic splintering and escape from something larger — that’s driving the process. How many micro-nationalities remain as yet undiscovered?

ADDED: A (libertarian-secessionist) voice from Italy.

Readers of Nietzsche, or of Eugene Rose, are already familiar with the attribution of a cultural teleology to modernity, directed to the consummate realization of nihilism. Our contemporary crisis finds this theme re-animated within a geopolitical context by the work of Alexandr Dugin, who interprets it as a driver of concrete events — most specifically the antagonization of Russia by an imploding world liberal order. He writes:

There is one point in liberal ideology that has brought about a crisis within it: liberalism is profoundly nihilistic at its core. The set of values defended by liberalism is essentially linked to its main thesis: the primacy of liberty. But liberty in the liberal vision is an essentially negative category: it claims to be free from (as per John Stuart Mill), not to be free for something. […] … the enemies of the open society, which is synonymous with Western society post-1991, and which has become the norm for the rest of the world, are concrete. Its primary enemies are communism and fascism, both ideologies which emerged from the same Enlightenment philosophy, and which contained central, non-individualic concepts – class in Marxism, race in National Socialism, and the national State in fascism). So the source of liberalism’s conflict with the existing alternatives of modernity, fascism or communism, is quite obvious. Liberals claim to liberate society from fascism and communism, or from the two major permutations of explicitly non-individualistic modern totalitarianism. Liberalism’s struggle, when viewed as a part of the process of the liquidation of non-liberal societies, is quite meaningful: it acquires its meaning from the fact of the very existence of ideologies that explicitly deny the individual as society’s highest value. It is quite clear what the struggle opposes: liberation from its opposite. But the fact that liberty, as it is conceived by liberals, is an essentially negative category is not clearly perceived here. The enemy is present and is concrete. That very fact gives liberalism its solid content. Something other than the open society exists, and the fact of its existence is enough to justify the process of liberation.

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