Political Captagon: on the Far Right and Far Left’s addiction to Assadism in the 2010s

 

I.    Introduction: Why write on Syria? 

For decades, men of our political persuasion have paid scant attention to Syrian politics. We were not that concerned, because Syrians are Arab and for the most part Muslim; and Syria belongs to what Spengler calls the Magian Culture – the civilisation that first sprang up in the Middle East and one that is primarily Jewish, Muslim, and Christian – whereas we belong to the Faustian or Western or Occidental Culture. We are mostly concerned with our own destiny, for our worldview is particularist, not universal, and it does not pretend to apply in all times and all places; and the amount of our emotional investment in any war involving Syria matches that of any war involving the Congo. Contemplating the possibility of war between America and Russia, Yockey writes in 1949 that ‘Europe is no more interested in this projected war than in a struggle between two negro tribes in the Sudan’.

That indifference vanished in the 2010s. Following the Arab Spring uprisings, a number of Arab rulers – most of whom had been in power for decades – were forced to stand down or make concessions, and in the three most backward of the Arab states – Libya, Egypt, and Syria – the rulers attempted to brutally suppress the uprisings; and in two out the three, the rulers dug in, refusing any concessions and preferring instead to plunge their countries into civil war. But whereas the Libyan War ended after a few months, the Syrian War ended after thirteen years, and whereas the West felt no compunction towards the ouster of Ghaddafi, it felt squeamish towards an ouster of Assad. And so, Assad lingered throughout the 2010s, and in a bizarre turn of events, wound up becoming a hero to certain prominent sections of the Far Right and the Far Left; many of those on the political fringes – including some of my comrades in good standing – became heavily invested in the survival of the Assad regime.

At this point I will digress and stop to remark upon the Syria after Assad’s ouster. I want the new Syria to do well, for entirely selfish reasons that I shall soon relate; and to the friends of the new Syria – and many of those friends disagree with my politics – I recommend but one course of action. I will detail it in the below paragraph, which should be skipped by those who want to read about the politics of the 2010s.

In 2025, Syria can extricate itself from its difficulties if it straightens out its money. A weak currency means a weak State, and monetary disorder leads to political disorder, and conversely; for how many regimes and how many empires have perished because of debased currencies, and how many civil wars have been fomented by inflation, currency weakness, and economic turmoil? Syria’s haphazard monetary regimen contributed both to the fall of Assad and to the sectarian and ethnic conflicts of 2025; and given that, the central bank of the new Syria must end fluctuations. The Central Bank of Syria ought to adopt a currency board arrangement, in which the pound is fixed to the euro at the rate of, say, £SYP15,000 to €EUR1, and in its day-to-day operations, the currency board would work as follows. If you present €EUR1 to the Syrian Central Bank, you get £SYP15,000 in exchange, and vice versa, with the Syrian Central Bank adding or subtracting pounds in circulation with a view to maintaining the fixed rate. For the intellectual underpinnings of this arrangement, read this Wall Street Journal editorial from fifty years ago, one that draws upon the ideas of Nobel-winning economist Robert Mundell (the architect of the euro) and Art Laffer (of Laffer curve fame); it justifies fixed exchange rates and by extension currency boards. I will forestall objections by pointing out that Syria already labours under a fixed exchange rate regime: the value of one pound in Homs, for instance, equals the value of one pound in Daraa; by taking up a currency board, Syria will only be doing what it already does, but more effectively. And such are the advantages of fixed exchange rates that all the Levant is best advised to adopt a common currency, and Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria ought to dispense with (what Mundell would have called) their junk currencies. But such a wish, for now, is a pipe dream.

To return to Alt-Right politics. Up until 2011, our side of politics largely ignored any happenings in Syria; and after 2011, it took an interest. That occurred for two reasons. The first was that the Assad regime launched a well-crafted and brilliantly executed propaganda campaign that portrayed Assad as a moderate Muslim and Arab leader, one who had been tasked with protecting Christians and minority Muslim sects such as the Alawites, whom in the Assadist narrative were being persecuted. The second reason was that, as often happens to a country embroiled in a civil war, Syria was partitioned, like Poland in the 18^th century; other powers who were stronger and more cohesive intervened; Turkey, Iran, the US, Russia, and the newly formed Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) all took their cut; and as to why this carving up mattered to the Far Right and Far Left, we need look to Russia, which in 2015 threw its weight behind the Assad regime; thanks in no small part to Russian arms, Assad in the second half of the war saved his rump state, the political centers of which were located in Damascus and the coastal province Latakia; and in the eyes of the Far Right – and Left – Assad had been anointed by Putin, and that counted. In the 2010s, one on the Alt-Right or Left could have devised complex intellectual arguments on behalf of the Russian intervention, and one could have justified support for Russia by declaring that Russia was anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, or whatever; but in the last analysis, what mattered to the Far Right and Far Left was that the Putin regime conveyed strength; brute force carried the day.

An eventful year, 2015 saw significant developments. In the Republican primaries, Trump declared that the US should team up with Assad, ‘destroy ISIS’, and make friends with Russia. Trump was not departing all that much from the establishment line, for Trump’s doctrine hardly differed from Obama’s: the Obama administration, by 2015, wanted to crush ISIS, and to that end, it supported the Kurds, who were to be used as a club to beat ISIS into submission. The anti-Assad rebels were not to be selected for such a purpose; for these rebels were routinely castigated as ‘jihadis’, and many of the Western elite looked down their noses at these bearded, scruffy, and narrow-minded insurgents; and many sections of the Far Left favoured the Kurds because the Kurds were progressive, the ‘jihadis’ reactionary.

Also in 2015, the Trump campaign closely watched events in Europe, events that were exploited by Trump with great success. Merkel brought over a million Muslim refugees, mostly male, mostly of fighting age, and mostly Syrian. Merkel did so out of ill will: she transported these men into Germany to cause as much inconvenience, pain, and misery to the Germans as possible. She succeeded, and within a short time, Syrian man won notoriety. The Syrian refugees, who numbered in the millions, had already become a thorny political problem in Turkey; and if Syrians behaved badly in Turkey, a Muslim nation, one could only imagine how they would behave in Germany.

               

Why would Merkel and other members of the European power elite make such a decision, one that would lead to such disastrous consequences, consequences that could be easily foreseen? The answer is simple: hatred. Suppose that some misanthropic mayor of a small town in America’s Pacific Northwest had decided to release 200 starving grizzlies: he would be acting in the spirit of malice, clearly enough. But in his own mind, he was only doing what was right; for his compatriots deserved to be punished; the townsfolk needed to be scourged. And as to what motivated him, perhaps it was religion and a belief that he was meting out divine justice. Regardless, the mayor knew how to cover his tracks, and he urged the townsfolk to accept the aggressive and marauding bears; he remonstrated with his constituents to place the welfare of beasts of prey, starving, needy, and aggressive, above their own. In the same spirit, Merkel made the slogan ‘Wir schaffen das!’ (‘We can do it!’). To understand the mentality, we must delve deep into Merkel’s lizard-like brain, and after returning from our exploration of the depths, we shall conclude that the Merkels saw Syrians not as human beings but as pawns on a chessboard, and as walking bioweapons.

               

Merkel’s million-man invasion put Syrians on the map, and not in the manner that the advocates of a free Syria would like. And of course, the Far Left was not disturbed by the violence – even the sexual violence – of Syrian man in the slightest. The reluctance to condemn can be proven by asking the Marxist: are there any circumstances, any whatsoever, in which these men should be deported? Each time, the Marxist will answer: none.

               

Thanks to Merkel, those of our political persuasion were forced to confront Syria; but even if Merkel’s million-man invasion had not occurred, would a study of Syrian and Middle Eastern politics have been worth it? I argue that the answer is yes. An acquaintance with Syria, the Syrian question, and ‘Third World’ politics, benefits us, for it can supply interesting perspectives. Take, for example, the phenomenon of Syria’s prisons. The Assads imprisoned tens of thousands, and these political prisoners were held in jails that were among the worst in the Middle East. Up until 2024, this state of affairs was considered by the prisoners and their relatives to be immutable; but within the space of a few days in December 2024, the structure was transformed, negated. One day, a jailer represents the mighty Syrian state; the next, he is some random fellow who owns a key to a room with some people locked inside. After Assad fled Syria, the jailer fled his jail, and the rebels broke down the doors and freed the prisoners, some of whom had been locked up for decades (and some of the women prisoners, raped by guards, had given birth to children who were now teenagers). A political scientist could write a thesis on the change of status and loss of legitimacy of the jailer, and the thesis would raise serious philosophical questions: is legitimacy real, or is it the product of a fiction, a sort of game played between the ruler and the ruled?

               

When discussing these subjects, we are stepping outside the confines of white nationalism, dissident Rightism, ‘Neo-Nazism’, etc.; but sooner or later, we must return to the subject of race. And it is here we shall begin.

 

II.           The Levant, the Arab character, and ‘Arab socialism’

 

So, who are the Arabs, and in particular, the Arabs of the Levant – what is their culture, what are their customs, values, practices, ways of going about things?

As part of a fact-finding mission, you can watch this 15-part documentary on the Lebanese civil war, in which prominent Lebanese, Jordanian, Palestinian, and Syrian personalities – many of them big names in Levantine politics – are interviewed and combat footage is featured. From this remarkable piece of history, we can deduce a number of truths.

One of these truths is that the Levantine Arab shows two faces. As we can see from the documentary, the Levantine expresses himself warmly, floridly – the Arabs are a theatrical people – and with a degree of grandiloquence; and that attracts Westerners. In the 1970s and 1980s, many left-leaning Westerners were drawn in; for Arab political activists, even the guerrillas, insurgents, and terrorists, always do a splendid job selling themselves.

   

On the other side of the ledger, when sifting through the footage we find a different Levantine, one who is instrumentalist, rationalist, cruel, and ruthless; one who thinks nothing of exterminating an entire family because it belongs to a different faith or different sect within a faith. When, in the documentary, the Levantine admits to crimes, the atmosphere turns cold, and we are shaken awake. The Arab warmth, fellow-feeling, and sentimentalism disappears, and the Western viewer is disconcerted by the sudden shift – by the turn to a brutal frankness and an indifference to suffering.

The Levantine mentality pits ‘us’ against ‘the world’ – but who is the ‘us’? In Lebanon, it is the powerful families – the Jumblatt, Gemayel, Chamoun clans, each led by a charismatic patriarch – who dominate Lebanese state and society. The same model is replicated in Syria, where powerful families stand at the head of religious and ethnic communities. Like those of our pious European forefathers five hundred years ago, religious and national groupings abide by Carl Schmitt’s Friend / Enemy distinction: that is, they constitute themselves as political units.

The two attributes – the elevating of charismatic leaders and the forming of political units along sectarian lines – make up a composite. The third attribute can be found whenever one community interacts with the other, and that attribute is a gift for intrigue. The Arab politician, whether he be a guerilla leader, a religious leader, or the leader of a state, excels in deal-making, treachery, and back-stabbing; and in the quest for power, Levantine politicians, being political in the Schmittian sense, always turn to war as the last and first resort. Carefully and over time, the Levantine political actor builds up a militia, and to strengthen it and himself, he builds relationships with foreigners. He never considers himself above making alliances with foreign powers; going back at least forty to fifty years, Levantine militia leaders have entreated the Soviet Union, the Iran of the Mullahs, the Iraq of Saddam and Ba’ath, etc.; which is why, in the second half of the Syrian Civil War, we were presented with the spectacle of one Syrian army wholly controlled by Turks, another by Americans, another by Iranians and Russians, and so forth. Perhaps only ISIS and Al-Nusra / HTS stood for a truly sovereign Syria.

               

All the above characterises the political side of the Levantine aptly enough but does little to convey the Levantine’s physiognomy. The members of all High Cultures, according to Spengler, moved, spoke, gestured, in ways that were peculiar to their Culture: they run, swim, dance, fight, etc., in a unique fashion, and unique expressions alight upon their countenances. But because all High Cultures at some point – usually after 2000 or 2500 years – perish, the historian in nearly every instance will never experience the peoples of a Culture as a living reality; the ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Peruvians, Romans and Greeks vanished, leaving behind nothing but monuments and ruins. And as for the ancient Chinese and Indians, who is to say that they and the inhabitants of today’s China and India are the one and same people?

               

Fortunately for the purposes of study, the Muslims, Jews, and Christians who belonged to the Magian Culture are still with us; Spengler believed that the Magian Culture’s decline and dissolution were comparatively recent; an insufficient amount of time had passed for the remnant peoples of the Culture – the fellahin – to disperse like dust in the wind. The consequence is that we can see, thanks to the mediums of film and TV, how the Levantine deports himself in his natural habitat.

               

A handful of instances, recorded on TV news, give us insight. Recall from the Lebanese civil war documentary the Palestinian soldiers who were standing in uniform at the Beirut docks, at the time of the PLO’s expulsion from Lebanon; the scruffy, ill-dressed, bearded men, trying to put a brave face on it, treated the event as a celebration and fired their Kalashnikov rifles in the air, thereby wasting precious ammunition. And then, forty-two years later, we were treated to the scenes of the jubilant Syrian populace cavorting and dancing in the street, the Syrian women ululating, after the Assad regime was overthrown. The two spectacles accentuate the differences in conduct and bearing of the Arabs and the Germans, particularly the Germans of the old Reich (Second and Third); and they prove the falsity of the equivalence, so beloved by American conservatives, of the Arabs – especially the Arabs who belong to Hamas and other jihadi organisations – with the ‘Nazis’.

               

Equally enlightening is the TV footage of that other Levantine people – the Israeli Jews. As an amateur ethnologist, I am captivated whenever Israelis appear; the differences in physiognomy between them and Europeans become readily apparent, as do the differences in motion; when the Israeli Jews dance their Jewish dances (in celebration, for instance, of returned Israeli hostages), and clap hands, sing, bounce up and down, gesticulate, they deport themselves in a most un-Western manner, which is to say, they caper like the Levantines that they are.

               

In this context, Israel matters for reasons geopolitical as well as racial. It is the presence of the Jewish State that helped create our attitude towards Syria; otherwise, little exists in Syria to attract us. A peripheral theater in WWII, it along with Lebanon was invaded by the British, the Australians, and the Free French in 1941. In 1946, Syria won its independence from the French, but its elected government – a rarity in the Middle East – was overthrown in a military coup in 1949, and after that, Syria went through more coups than an African republic.

In this period, a legend was born: the legend of Germans (former ‘Nazis’) taking refuge in the Arab post-colonial states and plotting with Arab governments to destroy Israel. You can read about the myth in The Beast Reawakens: Fascism's Resurgence from Hitler's Spymasters to Today's Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists (1997) by Martin E. Lee, who was a liberal antifascist (the book reads as though it were written by some hack at the Southern Poverty Law Centre). One man more than any other bears responsibility for loosing this conspiracy theory upon the world, and that is the late British airport novelist Frederick Forsyth, whose The Odessa File (1972) undammed a flood of imitations.

             

But as Hitler and the Third Reich moved further away in time, great ideological changes occurred, in both Syria and Germany.

After the 1963 coup in Syria, Ba’athists took power. The Ba’athist ideology, one of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, was conceived by Arab intellectuals in the 1930s, whom had been at least partially influenced by the example of National Socialist Germany. I would not make too much of this – we must not fuse, as many American conservatives do, the ideology of the Arabs and ideology of the ‘Nazis’; for Hitler’s influence in the first half of the 20^th century was as inescapable as Napoleon’s in the first half of the 19^th; and in the first few years after 1945, the influence lingered; Yockey writes in The Enemy of Europe (1953): ‘After the Second World War, the opponents of the Hero [Hitler] of that War were still dominated by his compelling personality’ and ‘Either they took up his ideas and declared them their own, or they continued to fight against him’; Yockey asserts, ‘Of a new Idea, independent of that Hero, there was not a trace’.

Yockey died in 1960; had he lived until the end of the 1960s, he would have recognised that the mood had shifted. After Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 Arab Israeli war, Nassar’s star had fallen, and Arafat’s – and that of the PLO fedayeen – had risen. In 1966, a palace coup in Syria had steered Ba’athist rulers closer to the Far Left; the old Arab nationalist faction of Ba’athism was usurped, a new ‘Neo-Ba’athist’ faction, heavily influenced by Lenin and Mao, taking its place. In 1970, after yet another palace coup, Hafez al-Assad seized power, and he transformed the ideology of Syrian Ba’ath into something called Assadism. One year later, Nixon abolished the gold standard and the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, and with disastrous consequences; and so, the tumultuous decade that was the 1970s began.

               

At this turning point, we see a 20^th century divided into halves, the divide being summed up by the contrast of Arafat and Nasser. 

The suave and debonair Nasser, who dresses like a man of the 1940s and 1950s, is set off against the scruffy and bearded Arafat, who wears combat fatigues – like Fidel Castro or Che Guevara – and the keffiyeh, which is today worn by pro-Palestinian demonstrators the world over. Clearly, the ‘Nazis’ belong to the first half of the century, the Nasser half, whereas the children of the ‘Nazis’ – the members of the pro-Palestinian Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang, for instance – belong to the second, the Arafat half. It is the visual, the aesthetic, that determines the difference. By the late 1970s, the Palestinians and certain elements of the New Left had become associated with international terrorism; and the seventies terrorist, perhaps following the theory of Guy Debord and the Situationists, sought to make a spectacle of himself, projecting his theatrical feats and crimes through the media across vast distances, as the British literary critic John Sullivan points out; the terrorist, Sullivan observed, had accomplished what Heidegger called ‘de-severance’, that is, a shortening of the distance between himself and others, the stunt being performed by electronic means.

               

What happened to Syria in this period? After the 1970 coup, Hafez had in effect crowned himself king; and for all intents and purposes, Syria, Libya, and Egypt had become monarchies.

Superficially, Syria was treading a ‘left’ path; it took on the mantle of repressive and progressive states such as communist Cuba, North Korea, and Romania; it became more and more isolated, like North Korea – a hermit kingdom, but a hermit kingdom of the Arab world. And in another significant development, one most pertinent to the Syria of forty years later, Syria under Assad militarised to an extent that was unusual for a poor Arab and Muslim country. To give one example: in order to shoot down Israeli jets, Syria and Egypt acquired enormous quantities of anti-air missiles in the lead-up to the 1973 Arab Israeli war, the stockpiles exceeding those of NATO and the Warsaw Pact; the Levant had become the most militarised place on Earth.

After its defeat – which was a narrow one – in the 1973 war, Syria was embroiled in Arab crises; Lebanon was splitting apart at the seams, engulfed in sectarian violence; and so, the rulers of Lebanon invited the Syrians in.

The Lebanese crisis broke out at the same time as the capitalist crisis. By 1973, markets belatedly recognised that the US’ departure from gold was permanent, not temporary, and so collapsed; and inflation overtook the world. The inflation led to an extraordinary rise in commodity prices (including oil prices) and the enrichment of the Arabs of the Gulf states. In movies, TV shows, and novels, Arabs were portrayed as greedy gougers with too much money, and as men of great power who were backwards, sexually depraved, cruel, and worst of all, infected by anti-Semitism (whatever ‘Semitism’ is). In Western popular culture, the Arabs of the Gulf and the Levant were depicted as loathsome, and the Jews of Israel as brave, indomitable.

By the early 1980s, the image of Israel and the Jews had changed, as had the relations between the economies of the West and the Middle East. In a stunning reversal, commodity prices, including gold and oil, fell and fell hard; and the countries that made a living out of exporting commodities – countries such as Chile and Australia – suffered the most. The effect of the deflation was compounded in Third World countries, especially those that made a living out of selling oil; and as a result of economic strain, Iran and Iraq went to war. In Lebanon, the civil war took a turn for the worse, and the Maronite Christian government invited Israel into Lebanon in the hope that the Israelis would extirpate the Palestinians, rout the Syrians, and entrench the Maronites. In Lebanon in 1982, Syria and Israel fought their last conventional battle, and Israel won after a brief fight; and afterwards, military victory turned into political defeat.

Even though the Arabs committed most of the notorious atrocities – the Sabra-Chatila massacre, for instance – of the Lebanon war, Israel’s wanton and destructive campaign, including the siege of Beirut, led to left-wing world opinion turning against the Jewish State. Arab terrorism of the spectacular variety continued into the mid-eighties, but the symbolic character that was the jet-setting, jet-hijacking terrorist, who had a romantic and horrifying aura, gradually faded out of consciousness and went the way of disco and bellbottoms. And a new image of Israel sprang up: Israel the cruel, Israel the strong, Israel the occupier, Israel the oppressor – Israel, always lavishly equipped with the latest in US weapons and equipment gratis.

Or perhaps that unstinting US military aid and diplomatic support did cost Israel something: increased scrutiny. In the meantime, Hafez al-Assad’s Syria lived on in the dark. A Muslim Brotherhood revolt shook Hafez’ hold on power in the early eighties, and Hafez punished the rebels of the city of Hama by turning Hama into rubble and massacring thousands? tens of thousands? of its inhabitants without the world, for the most part, noticing and condemning.

By 1990, the Lebanon civil war had ended, and by 1993 – after the signing of the Oslo Accords – an uneasy peace reigned in the Levant, for in the West, economic conditions had improved, and the beneficial effects made themselves felt worldwide. The gold / US dollar price stopped bounding up and down, and for the next two decades it stayed within a more or less fixed band; and the US stock market staged a remarkable recovery. By the late eighties, communism in the US – and in other Western countries – had shrivelled up and all but breathed its last.

Appropriately enough, Hafez al-Assad – that Cold War relic – died at the start of the 21^st century. Power passed on to his son, and now Ba’athism, ‘Arab socialism’, would face its biggest challenge.

 

III.          The Syrian Autumn, 9/11, The Arab Spring, and the Syrian Civil War

 

Wrongly, as it turned out, many believed that Bashar, the new ruler, would reform Syria and do so because of his youth and his cosmopolitan, ‘Europeanised’ outlook. A new age dawned – the ‘Syrian Autumn’, which was precursor to the ‘Arab Spring’.

             

To understand this false dawn, one must understand the zeitgeist, which shall explain why it is that the West – and the Syrians – were taken in by the fresh and youthful Assad.

I have long argued that to know an epoch, you must know its popular culture. For example, if you want to know the 2000s, watch 2000s television – particularly American daytime television (for in this period, as America went, so the world went). In these productions, Americans are clean, well-dressed, smart, well-groomed, stylish; admittedly, some Americans who are obese put in a showing now and then (and oddly enough, Syria, like the US, had become one of the most obese countries in the world); but by and large, most Americans made the effort to look healthy and attractive. And the décor of their homes, cafés, restaurants, and bars pleases the eye; Americans lived well; you detect an air of crispness and stylishness; to grasp it, compare TV shows of the 2000s to those of the 1970s, which was the ‘decade that taste forgot’.

               

Hafez belonged to the 1970s, and Bashar to the 2000s – or so it seemed.

 

Bashar, who speaks French and English and has a British-born wife, was said to have "inspired hopes" for reform, and a "Damascus Spring" of intense political and social debate took place from July 2000 to August 2001.[18] The period was characterized by the emergence of numerous political forums or salons where groups of like minded people met in private houses to debate political and social issues. The phenomenon of salons spread rapidly in Damascus and to a lesser extent in other cities. Political activists, such as, Riad Seif, Haitham al-Maleh, Kamal al-Labwani, Riyad al-Turk, and Aref Dalila were important in mobilizing the movement.[19] The most famous of the forums were the Riad Seif Forum and the Jamal al-Atassi Forum. The Damascus Spring ended in August 2001 with the arrest and imprisonment of ten leading activists who had called for democratic elections and a campaign of civil disobedience.[20]

 

The ‘Damascus Spring’ ended on a sour note, but one could not fault the Syrian liberals for holding high hopes. In the early 2000s, the main American capital markets – the DJIA and the S&P 500 – were situated on the tail-end of the late nineties economic boom, an expansion that had been unprecedented. In the Levant at the turn of the century, the American success of the 1990s reinforced the lesson, partly drawn from Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ thesis, that any socialism whatsoever – even Arab socialism – needed to be abandoned. And so, in this spirit, it was hoped by the modernisers that Bashar would usher in ‘free-market reforms’; and economic liberalism leads to political liberalism, or so the argument goes.

               

Then 9/11 happened. Overnight, US geopolitics changed.

When assessing this era, we on the dissident Right can say that Bush 45, when responding to 9/11, made two mistakes.

The first of these was to refrain from doing a Trump and failing to introduce – right after 9/11, when the time was perfect for it – a ban on all Muslims entering the US. Hardly any American of consequence would have opposed such a ban, but Bush 45 failed to strike while the iron was hot; and paradoxically, Muslim immigration only increased after 9/11.

Bush made a second mistake by invading Afghanistan and Iraq. One could understand why the US invaded Afghanistan; for Bush, along with most of the world, believed that Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda perpetrated 9/11. At the time, I and many others on the dissident Right were unconvinced; but we could not explain incontrovertibly what had happened and who the guilty parties were; and besides which, we inhabited the fringes, and our opinions carried no weight. In the weeks after 9/11, Americans were adrift; reeling in shock, America, on the eve of the invasion of Afghanistan, found itself in the same position as Austria-Hungary after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. We will recall that after the assassination, Serbia refused Austria-Hungary’s demands, which were quite reasonable, and the result was that Austria-Hungary invaded. Like the Serbs in 1914, the Taliban in 2001 proved to be intractable; the Taliban refused to hand Bin Laden over, for the Taliban valued loyalty to Bin Laden, a fellow jihadist, above the well-being of Afghanis; and so, the US invaded.

               

In the weeks after 9/11, America enjoyed the world’s sympathy, a sympathy that Bush squandered. As the 2000s progressed, the Taliban and then the Iraqi Ba’athists became folk heroes to the anti-war Left and Right, and Bush the world’s most hated man. In the first weeks after 9/11, Assad saw a political opportunity and exploited it:

 

During a state visit by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Syria in October 2001, Bashar publicly condemned the United States invasion of Afghanistan in a joint press conference, stating that "[w]e cannot accept what we see every day on our television screens – the killing of innocent civilians. There are hundreds dying every day." Assad also praised Palestinian militant groups as "freedom fighters" and criticised Israel and the Western world during the conference. British officials subsequently described Assad's political views as being more conciliatory in private, claiming that he criticised the September 11 attacks and accepted the legitimacy of the State of Israel.[77]

 

Bashar fitted into the third of Bush’s biggest mistakes: the pursuit of a ‘War on Terror’ without clear objectives and the prosecution of the war using methods that would tarnish the US’ reputation.

 

Following the September 11 attacks and during the early stages of the US-led war on terror, "Syria had emerged as one of the CIA's most effective intelligence allies in the fight against al-Qaeda,"[78] with "the quality and quantity of information from Syria [having] exceeded the Agency's expectations."[78] Syria closely cooperated with the CIA's detention and interrogation program of people deemed "illegal enemy combatants"; Syrian prisons were a major site of extraordinary rendition by the CIA of alleged al-Qaeda members where they were tortured by Syrian interrogators on behalf of the CIA.[79][80][81] According to a 2013 report by the Open Society Foundations, Syria was one of the "most common destinations for rendered suspects" under the CIA's program.[82]

 

We can say ‘Homo homini lupus’ – ‘Man is a wolf to man’ – and paraphrase: ‘Arab is a wolf to Arab’. Assad, along with Ghaddafi and Putin, managed to play all sides off against the other; and the three adopted the pose of the progressive, the friend of the Arabs, the champion of the Third World against Western imperialism, colonialism, racism, etc.

These conflicts – between the West and the Muslim world, the West and the Arabs – revived the Far Left. The Stop the War marches and the activism against Israel accomplished little; but to the Far Left, the agitation served as a shot in the arm.

              

Left-wing activism was directed against US foreign policy – what of the domestic? US capital markets started the decade strong, and then declined, in real terms – that is, terms adjusted for inflation, which by the end of the decade had increased dramatically. In 2000, gold cost $USD250 an ounce; in 2008, $USD1000. By the late 2000s, the US dollar was losing value, as was many a loan portfolio held by many a bank; and markets sagged as lenders began to realise that borrowers, because of deteriorating economic circumstances, would be unable to repay loans. And suddenly and without warning, the inflation came to an end: towards the end of 2008, the dollar appreciated, commodity prices (including the gold price) fell and fell hard, and a deflationary episode ensued, one resembling that of the early 1980s; and almost overnight, liquidity dried up, and banks were unable to repay borrowings from other banks. Hence the global financial crisis, which affected not only America but Syria. The world financial crisis, in conjunction with a Syrian drought, pushed Syria to the brink and helped turn the populace against the Assad regime.

               

I now come to the Arab Spring, and I will preface my comments by pointing out that when dealing with it, we are dealing with certain elements that are unquantifiable. The Arabs had put up with the Ghaddafis, the Mubaraks, the Assads, for a long time, and had experienced a great deal of economic hardship; but they had never cracked – until 2011. What drove them to this point? Furthermore, at what juncture does a ‘revolutionary’ leader such as Ghaddafi pass from being ‘young’ and ‘fresh’ to ‘old’ and ‘sclerotic’? How and when does a leader become a symbol of stagnation and decadence? Political science cannot answer.  

               

With that in mind, let us narrate how the Arab Spring played out in Syria. If you want a recounting of the first few weeks, turn to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which provides this timeline. Given that the Syrian War went on for the thirteen years, I will not reproduce Britannica’s summary; it is enough to say that the Arab Spring presented all the rulers of the Levant – Assad included – with a dilemma. You are faced with a rebellious populace, and if you want to hang on to power, you need to accommodate. But being the men that they were, the Mubaraks, Assads, Ghaddafis, lacked the ability. Assad responded to the protests by sending in the SAA (Syrian Arab Army). And as could be expected, the SAA shot up ‘soft’ targets: it used machine guns, mortars, tank cannons, and artillery against crowds of civilians, crowds that were much like the crowds of Palestinians queuing outside aid centres in Gaza in 2025, the crowds that were shot and shelled by the Israeli army. Consequently, the Syrian civil protest became militarised. And China and Russia made that possible: for they saw how the US and Europe, equipped with UN Security Council resolutions, had acted against Ghaddafi, and they made sure to stymie any efforts to oust Assad.

In 2025, the war is a historical curio, meaning that we may discount its importance; but we should understand that, at the time, many on the Far Left – and the Far Right – took it seriously.

Those on the ‘extremes’ of politics interpreted the war in two ways. The first school of thought believed that the protests and the riots against Assad were a contrivance – the work of the CIA, Mossad, and the Soros Foundation – and it opined that the Syrian masses were puppets dancing on a string, puppets manipulated by masters in Tel Aviv and Washington, DC.

In opposition to this view, some on the Far Left welcomed the Arab Spring, venerated its martyrs (including the boy Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, who was tortured to death by Assad’s security forces), and saw in the Arab Spring an Incipient Arab revolution, one that would perhaps turn communist. This faction of the Left understood it was being divisive, but it pressed on regardless, because Marxism of any sort thrives on division; siding against Assad and the ‘anti-imperialists’ (that is, Iran, Russia, and China) invigorated the faction; and the Syrian war, which dragged on without, apparently, an end, gave it plenty of fuel.  

In the 2010s, the Syrian war provided much fodder because the war was not resolved: for the West did not want to resolve it. The Libyan civil war finished quickly, thanks to Western intervention, and it finished before the West had time to take stock of the Libyan rebels; in the dramatic days of 2011, the Western powers assumed – vaguely, hopefully – that the rebels were aligned with them ideologically – that the rebels wanted liberal democracy and free and fair democratic elections, held in the best Jimmy Carter-approved tradition. Events proceeded at such a dizzying pace that the West could be forgiven for failing to gauge the rebels accurately; but in the case of the Syrian war, Western policy makers and intellectuals – including Marxist intellectuals – had more time to take the measure of the ideological content of the Syrian revolution. And the West did not like what it saw. True, the anti-Assad Syrians, perhaps influenced by libertarian and anarchist theory, carried out a decentralised and grass-roots rebellion; but all the same, the rebels who came to fore adhered to Islam and a coarse jihadi brand of Islam at that. For the first time, distinctions were drawn by opinion makers in the West between good and bad Islamic sects; Assad belonged to the Alawite sect, and that made Assad, in the words of Mike Enoch, the most ‘civilised’ actor in the conflict. Prominent thinkers on the Far Right and Far Left agreed on the importance of being ‘civilised’, as did the US, UK, and European political establishments, which grudgingly supplied some rebel groups – the ‘decent’, ‘vetted’ ones – but not nearly enough; the Kurds, who were suitably progressive, reaped the lion’s share.

Looking back on the war, we can make a number of observations about the Levantines. One observation is that Levantines possess a genius for forming small but active fighting organisations: in the course of the Syrian war, we encounter a bewildering alphabet soup of miniature armies, forming, splitting, and re-forming, and even a Syrian keeps track of it all with difficulty. The Levantine jihadist who formed a new organisation was entering a crowded and competitive market; and the question he posed to himself was, ‘How can I distinguish myself from my rivals?’. From its first appearance, ISIS overcame the hurdle of market differentiation in a startling and effective way.

Another observation that arises is that Syria is composed of multifarious groups that deeply dislike one another, and this phenomenon gives the lie, perhaps, to any notions of Syrian unity and nationalism. We see it in the vitriolic discourse on social media after the fall of the Assad regime; the Alawites, the Druze, the Kurds, etc., are locked in combat, and none of them appear to want Syria as such to do well. It goes without saying that these tensions were exacerbated in the 2010s; Assad, fighting for his survival, turned Syria into a sectarian state; but Assad did not invent these contradictions – they dwelled underneath the surface well before the war, and after the war, they broke out into the open.

In the course of the war, we in the West were instructed by Assad and his Russian sponsors in the differences between good and bad Islam, good and bad jihadism; Hezbollah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and pro-Assad Islamist militias (drawn from various Islamic countries) were considered good, and ISIS and anti-Assadist Islamists bad. This had consequences: Hezbollah helped the Russians, Iranians, and the SAA lay waste to towns and cities, and by doing so, Hezbollah damaged its reputation irreparably. In 2006, Hezbollah had fought Israel to a standstill and had become heroes in the eyes of the Arabs; but after 2011, Hezbollah set to work repressing the Arab Spring and the anti-Assad rebellion, and earned the enmity of the Arabs who had come to see Assad as a pariah.

This brings us to some of the peculiarities of the war that may be of interest to the political scientist who prioritises technical elements. In the battle for Syria and Lebanon in WWII, a front line separated the two belligerents, as was standard; and in the battle for Syria in the 21^st century war, we see not neat front lines but blobs that appear, expand, and contract behind enemy lines, sometimes adjacent even to Damascus. The ebb and flow recalls that of the insurgent wars of the 20^th century, but in Syria, the belligerents battled not for the possession of ‘hearts and minds’ but for the possession of cities – charming old cities, the oldest in the world – and the highways connecting them.

 

End of Part I.

Death of an Empire: the Trump crash, gold, and the destiny of USA and Europe

 

I. Trump and the Latin Americanisation of politics

In the last century, two Latin American populist and socialist heads of state – Juan Perón and Salvador Allende – were overthrown in coups, in Argentina in 1955 and Chile in 1973 respectively. Opponents of the two men will not deny that the coups violated the existing constitutional order; and they will not deny that the coups represented what Carl Schmitt calls an exception; instead, they will make the argument that both men were unworthy of office, and they will ask us to keep in mind a fine distinction, which is this: just because a politician is elected to office in a free and fair election, is venerated by a large section of the people and is despised by the country’s elite, and is overthrown by the elite, does not entail that he is a good leader – far from it. 

After 2020, we can see how that line of argument applies when debating the rightness or wrongness of Trump. All three men – Perón, Allende, and Trump – made a habit of demagoguery and rabble-rousing; all three, being brilliant politicians, won the undying allegiance of fanatical men – and women, remember Ashley Babbitt – who were willing to die for their cause; all three earned the undying hatred of certain sections of the elite, sections that included the Deep State; all three were accused of leading their countries to economic ruin; and all three were conspired against and ousted by the elite.          

                                             

Now, the respectable conservative who is lukewarm to Trump and MAGA – the sort who writes for the National Review and the Daily Wire – will balk at my contention that Trump was overthrown in a Latin American-style coup in 2020; so will even the conservatives who write for Trump-friendly publications such as Breitbart, Townhall, Red State, PJ Media, Twitchy, Hot Air. But if we are to study US electoral history, we can detect patterns; and certain truths, absolute principles, emerge. One such principle is this: since 1984, any presidential candidate who has won most of the bellwether seats goes on to win the presidency; Trump won 18 out of 19 of the seats in 2020. Another principle is that since 1928, if you are the presidential candidate of the incumbent party, you can win re-election easily, in a landslide even, if you increase your party’s popular vote and at the same time win the bellwether states of Ohio, Florida, and Iowa. In 2020, Trump accomplished this feat. And yet, the respectable conservative tells us, Trump ‘lost’, as does the mainstream press. Indeed, the mainstream journalist insists upon doing this, to a degree that is almost comic: he affixes, like a religious believer reciting a holy catechism, unequivocal statements such as ‘these are baseless claims’, ‘Trump gave no evidence for these claims’, whenever Trump declares that he won 2020. And we understand why: if you deny Biden’s legitimacy, then you deny the legitimacy of the entire American electoral order. The idea that the powerful men of Biden’s electoral base – which compromised the media, disgruntled Deep State apparatchiks, left-wing radicals, and washed-up Hollywood celebrities – installed a barely-functioning, senile candidate who did not sign his own executive orders, ought to induce horror in the American traditionalist; for clearly, American institutions had failed. To their lasting shame, the judiciary, the police, the FBI, and other institutions tasked with upholding the constitutional order did nothing but look on while the coup took place; in 2021, only the J6 protestors defended democracy. The existing order was violated, and Biden broke with history, precedent, tradition; he failed to win most of the bellwether seats, he failed to win Ohio – and the candidate who wins Ohio wins the presidency, as we see in 28 out of 30 presidential elections that were held from 1900 to 2016. 

But the respectable conservative tells us tradition and history in the 2020s no longer mattered; we must believe that Biden won and that he won 81 million votes – more votes than Roosevelt, Nixon, and Reagan. In reality, that did not happen: the American Left, which follows the rule ‘always accuse your opponent of what you yourself are doing’, overturned an election result and mounted a coup, the result of which was that Americans saw the introduction of a new form of government: rule by journalist. And it was a poisonous and resentful species of journalist that ran the show: we all know the type, one which we can subdivide  – one type of journalist, who writes for The Nation, Salon, Raw Story, The New Republic, and other left-wing periodicals, is snide, obnoxious, and impoverished; the other type, who works for CNN and the other TV networks, is snide, obnoxious, and a multi-millionaire. 

Four years after, the electorate knows what the consequences of the Biden ‘victory’ were; and so why, one may ask, did the American electorate permit it. The answer lies in the American electorate’s agreeableness, its desire to get along. One could look at what happened on election night 2020 as insurrection, treason; or one look at it as an instance of the electorate exercising unusual forbearance. Throughout all of Trump’s first term, a small but powerful minority hated Trump to such a degree that they lost all sense of reason and objectivity. The electorate, seeing this, felt something akin to pity; and it decided to give the anti-Trump fanatics a chance, after it understood that the party of that minority – the Democrats – could not hope to win a free and fair election. 

And after four years, did the electorate regret its decision? The evidence shows us that the answer is yes; and history will judge the Biden presidency to be the worst of modern times. The result of the Biden debacle is that the Democratic Party and its controllers in the media have, in 2025, used up all their points; the slogan of ‘resistance’ that gained traction in 2017, and even possessed some popular appeal, now in 2025 seems hackneyed, lifeless – as aged and withered as Schumer and Pelosi. And none of that bodes well for the Democrats in the mid-terms. One of the reasons why the electorate in 2024 gave the House and the Senate to the Republicans – albeit by a small margin – was that the electorate understood that the Democrats would use a majority in either body to go on another pointless and costly impeachment crusade; and going by the past record, the electorate knows the Democrats will undertake the same course of action in 2026, if given a majority.    

But – and here I am making the same distinction as the Argentinian and Chilean coup-d’etatists – none of this entails that Trump is a good president. In a recent article, ‘Donald the Great Disruptor’, white nationalist Wolf Stoner muses that ‘All in all, Trump is steering the American state-ship towards disaster’. 

Europe is in disarray; Ukrainian public mood is undermined; Russia is emboldened; China has smelled blood in the water. Whatever the future actions of Trump’s administration are to be, the consequences of what already happened will negatively reverberate for a long time, with unpredictable results.

It must be clearly stated: all hopes of Trump and his handlers to create some kind of a new global security arrangement are delusional but the damage they did is real.

 

Analysing the war in Europe, Stoner writes: 

There will be no second chance in Ukraine. If the West loses it now, the whole NATO alliance would rapidly unravel. If it happens, the American global position will crumble as well… 

It is unpredictable what could happen if Russia takes the whole (or even a greater part) of Ukraine. In this case, the capture of Moldova would take only a few days. After this, the Baltic crisis is sure to come. The only defense of the Baltic states is the NATO security guarantee. But if NATO credibility has fallen, there is little else that could stop Russia from invading this territory. In real military sense there is a very small military potential that NATO has put into Baltics; a token force. The only real commitment so far is the German intention to put a 5000 men strong armor brigade into Lithuania. But it will achieve its operational readiness only in 2027.

The present force composition of NATO in Baltics is far from enough even for a few days of fighting. Baltic states’ air defense is almost non-existent at the moment. It could be rapidly suppressed and the whole theater of operations isolated by Russia. If the Baltic states are taken in a short military campaign, the West will not endeavor any kind of Normandy-style amphibious landing or even a prolonged air-bombing campaign deep inside Russia. The whole affair would end up in a lukewarm stalemate with eventual political arrangement, once again surrendering Baltic nations.

All military-political experts clearly understand this situation. It is why the war in Ukraine is so important. Too much is tied to its outcome.

For NATO and Europe, ‘even a limited military defeat on the battlefield will be enough to plunge the whole West into social chaos’. And ‘when it happens, China will simply swallow the whole of Pacific and Africa; the rest of Asia and South America will be compelled to bend to Chinese will as well’. Alas, ‘there will be no place in this new arrangement’ for either America or Europe. ‘China needs neither Europe nor America, nor Russia’. But: 

There is yet one possibility that must be accounted for: a violent removal of Trump from power. The probability is very low but not excluded. Yes, there was no such precedent in American history but in the last few years America had seen many events that have never happened before in this country. Everything comes once for the first time…

If I were an American general, I would seriously consider such an action against a deranged ruler. I am sure there are discussions of this sort somewhere behind closed doors.

 

And so, we return to the path that Argentina took in 1955 and Chile in 1973. It should be kept in mind that the collapse of the Chilean economy under Allende came about because of extraordinarily high inflation and tariffs; we will be seeing both under Trump – and this is one point of similarity between Trump and Allende. And parallels can be drawn between Trump and Perón, between America in the 2020s and Argentina in the 1970s. A contemporary of Allende’s, Perón nearly met the same fate as Allende after the Argentinian economy imploded in the early seventies. Like Trump, Perón staged an extraordinary comeback after he had been deposed, and like Trump, he pulled off this feat when he was aged nearly eighty. In 1973, Perón made a triumphant return to Argentina after an exile of nearly twenty years, and he ran for office. Being a brilliant campaigner like Trump, he won the election in a landslide; but his story did not end happily – he died barely a year afterwards. The presidency was assumed by Perón’s wife, forty years his junior, the former exotic dancer Isabel Perón. And then disaster struck. After Nixon abolished the gold standard in 1971, all the world’s currencies lost an enormous amount of value against gold within a short amount of time; inflation broke out across the globe, and this only exacerbated political and social discord in Chile and Argentina. Militias representing the Left- and Right-wing factions of Perónism waged irregular warfare against one another, and to put an end to the chaos, a military junta overthrew Mrs Perón and ushered in what became known as the Dirty War. 

At the time of the 1955 and 1973 coups, Perón and Allende had won the enmity of the United States, which was part of the reason why both were overthrown and replaced by Washington-friendly regimes. But herein lies the difference between Trump, Perón, and Allende: the US is a great power, a superpower, and Chile and Argentina are not and never were; to paraphrase Breaking Bad’s Walter White, the US is the ‘one who knocks’. The internal policy of Argentina and Chile can follow that of the USA’s; all three nations may experience a similar economic and social decline – and all three did in the 1970s; but the three may never experience a similar decline in the sphere of external policy, because Argentinian and Chilean foreign policy means little, and American foreign policy, a great deal. 

In coming years, the US shall provide an interesting case study in what happens when a great power abnegates itself. The US has rarely, if ever, voluntarily walked off the world stage, no matter how dire its internal state of affairs; at the beginning of the Cold War, for example, we see the US engaging with the world, even though the period of the late 1940s and early 1950s was one of straitened circumstances. Because of post-war scarcity and rationing, and because the Great Depression had not ended (WWII had only interrupted it), the US found itself in a state of privation and poverty in the late 1940s; but this did not prevent the US, under the leadership of Harry Truman, from taking up cudgels against the Soviet Union and defending American possessions in Europe and Asia. 

II. Trump, gold, stocks

To understand the current state of affairs, we must understand gold – and the role it plays. 

Rightly understood, gold is money and has been for thousands of years; it serves as a unit of account, a medium of exchange, and a store of value. As did every economist of the Classical school, Karl Marx understood these propositions; we moderns have forgotten them. 

Today, the price of gold bounds up and down – mostly up; and so, we are easily misled into thinking that the value of gold is not stable and fixed, because certainly, gold’s US dollar price is not stable and fixed.

We can better understand this relation – between gold’s value and its US dollar price – if we consider one pivotal event in the US nearly a hundred years ago: Roosevelt’s devaluing the dollar against gold. Before 1934, the Federal Reserve had kept the dollar’s worth in gold fixed at $USD20.67 an ounce, and after 1934, $USD35. In 1934, it took more dollars to buy the same amount of gold, which is to say, the dollar was devalued against gold. And this leads us to an insight that was commonplace enough in the 1930s: gold is the constant, the dollar the variable. Roosevelt wanted to make the dollar cheaper, worth less, in terms of gold; and in doing so, he and his economists were motivated by a theory that is popular today in the Trump administration: a devalued or degraded dollar, one which buys less of gold and foreign currencies, will cheapen US exports; the US sells more exports and thereby ‘creates jobs’. And devaluing the dollar produces another beneficial effect: inflation, rising prices across the board; as many important economists will tell you, inflation leads to economic growth and hence ‘job creation’. 

Nearly a hundred years later, the US dollar gold price has moved far from $USD35 an ounce. At the start of the 2010s, gold touched $USD1000 an ounce, and at the end, $USD1500. That sounds bad, but if we are to compare the gold price throughout the 2010s to that throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, the US dollar seemed to have settled. 

Where, then, do we find ourselves in 2025? The price of an ounce of gold has risen from $USD2000 to $USD3400 within the space of four months; and almost certainly, it will go higher. This does not bode well; Steve Forbes writes: 

Gold maintains its intrinsic value better than any other commodity—as it has for over 4,000 years of recorded history. It remains our best barometer of monetary trouble. A sustained price rise signals inflation ahead; a price decline indicates deflation—a shortage of dollars.

When gold's price fluctuates, it's not the metal's value changing but the currency's. This distinction is crucial yet completely lost on the Fed and most economists and central bankers.

The advancing cost of gold, unless stopped or reversed, indicates future inflation by demonstrating the dollar's declining value. Yet the Fed ignores gold in its monetary policy decisions.

Even before COVID hit in early 2020, our central bank was undermining the dollar. Gold rose from $1,200 in late 2018 to around $2,000 by early 2020. A serious surge of monetary inflation was already in place when the lockdowns began.

The Federal Reserve is repeating this error. Gold has climbed over 60% since mid-2023, during the very period when the Fed claimed to be fighting inflation through interest rate hikes.

Forbes’ answer? The Fed should, in effect, return to the gold standard: ‘The Fed should start by establishing a target price range for gold—around $2,900-$3,100—and adjust monetary policy to maintain that level’.

As to what will happen if this advice is not followed, Nathan Lewis, in ‘Another Round of Inflation on Deck’, calculates, roughly, what the new price level will be and concludes: 

Doesn’t seem like much fun, does it.

This is why we say “you can’t devalue yourself to prosperity.” No country ever got rich with a weak currency. They get rich with a stable and reliable currency, which means: a currency of unchanging stable value.

You would have to increase your nominal income by 141% just to break even. Maybe more than that, on an after-tax basis. Even if we do accomplish this, eventually, what it would mean is that we broke even, over a period of perhaps ten years. Instead of getting richer over ten years, we just made it back to flat. In other words, stagnation. This is basically why the Latin American countries never get anywhere. They are always just catching up to the chronic depreciation of their currencies.

Vlad Signorelli, the third supply-side doyen to sound the alarm, considers the political implications and looks at how past currency devaluations bear upon those of the present: 

Since Trump’s inauguration, the dollar has weakened sharply against gold, the timeless benchmark of currency value. On January 20, 2025, gold was $2,700 an ounce; today, it’s $3,084—a 14% devaluation in just over two months. The dollar trade-weighted index (DXY) mirrors this slide, dropping from 109 to 104 year-to-date.

This isn’t a blip; it’s a warning.

In the 1880s, the U.S. wielded tariffs effectively because the dollar was tied to gold, fixed at roughly 1/20th of an ounce, providing a stable anchor regardless of tariff policies. Today, with a floating dollar and no such guardrails, the upcoming "Liberation Day" tariffs on April 2 may even be encouraging the dollar’s weakness at the margin—potentially amplifying investor concerns over trade disruptions and economic uncertainty. Already, the dollar’s decline—evidenced by soaring gold prices—hints at monetary inflation looming ahead.

History reinforces this: a dollar crumbling against gold often precedes broader weakness, especially in commodities and foreign currencies. The 1970s, when Nixon’s devaluation sparked stagflation, loom as a stark reminder. Pursuing a weaker dollar now risks repeating that mistake.

A weaker dollar drives up costs for imports and commodities such as oil, instantly hiking prices for gasoline, groceries, and everyday goods. This slams working-class voters—who fueled Trump’s victory—the hardest, eroding their purchasing power despite policies pitched as their lifeline. The Federal Reserve, seeing clear evidence of rising inflation will necessarily raise rates, tightening credit and slowing growth even more. A weakening dollar doesn’t deliver economic strength—it delivers more pain to America’s economic backbone.

Trump’s team might nod to the 1880s, when tariffs paired with prosperity. But the key difference is the gold standard, which kept the dollar steady then. Today, with no such anchor, the weaker dollar—confirmed by soaring gold prices—threatens stability. 

The three supply-side analysts would agree that the depreciation of the US dollar against gold has caused the extraordinary market turmoil that we saw in April 2025. Usually, Americans wait until the mid-terms to deliver their verdict on the president’s performance, but this time they are, through the medium of the market, getting their vote in early; only four months into Trump’s second term, the markets are deteriorating rapidly and plumbing depths not reached since the meltdown of March 2020. 

To see why this matters, consider the following analogy. Suppose you start up a small business worth $500,000 – which is not much these days, alas. You make a down payment of $40,000 and borrow $460,000; and the addition of the two sums gives you an asset that is worth $500,000. The ‘equity’, or what you own after all your debts have been paid off, is the $40,000. Those who are mathematically inclined will see that a fall of 8% or more in the value of the asset will wipe out the equity. But even when your $40,000 has been reduced to $0, you will still need to pay off your $460,000 in debt: welcome to the world of double-entry bookkeeping – and capitalism. 

Now, if you to divide that equity into a million shares, the worth of share will only be $0.04. We can assess the true worth of that four cents a share by seeing how much of an ounce of gold the four cents will buy. Likewise, if we put together an index of, say, a thousand companies of a similar capitalisation (that is, of equity worth around $40,000 each) and divide the number of that index by an ounce of gold, we will arrive at an accurate assessment of the true worth of the companies. 

Using this method, we can see how the value of the Dow Jones, which is comprised of America’s 30 biggest companies, rose and fell over the course of the past fifteen years. The Dow, divided by an ounce of gold, started the 2010s at a low point – 9.33 ounces in January 2010. In the Obama years, the DJIA slowly recovered, and after Trump’s election in 2016, it entered bull market territory, reaching a peak of 22.36 ounces in September 2018. 

After the collapse and recession of 2020, the gold DJIA bottomed at 13.40 ounces in July 2020, and it is below that level now. As we can see from the graph, the gold DJIA had recovered in 2021, but in early 2024, had begun to sag – around the time that the US Federal Reserve began devaluing the US dollar against gold. The DJIA rallied sharply in November 2024, after Trump had won – and then it fell quite dramatically. The shape looks like that of a horseshoe: 

The S&P 500, which is worth far less than the Dow, followed the exact same trend: 

Markets move quickly; I hope that by the time of publication that the markets will have fully recovered, the gold price will have dropped to $USD2000 an ounce, and a bull market will have gotten underway; I much prefer a bull market to a bear; some on the dissident Right believe that ‘worse is better’; but I believe that one should not add to one’s existing burdens. 

So, those of us who want to live decent lives need to ask why it is that the markets are falling and falling so sharply. Most analysts blame the tariffs, but as the above supply-siders explain, even though the Trump tariffs do not help – at all – they do not bear sole responsibility; if anything, the Trump tariffs, the last straw that broke the camel’s back, operate at what economists call the ‘margin’, the point at which change – big change – takes place. We can say that Federal Reserve drew the DJIA to the edge of the cliff, and the tariffs nudged it over.  

In this story, Trump’s tax cuts, or lack of them, should be accorded the same status as Trump’s tariffs. In the hours after Trump’s win in 2016, markets rallied on the understanding that Trump would most likely implement a series of supply-side tax cuts; that Trump would cut taxes on income, and on the profits of corporations and small businesses; that the Trump tax plan had been designed for him by two venerable supply-siders, Art Laffer and Larry Kudlow, both of whom had worked for the Reagan administration. Flashing forward to 2024, Trump campaigned on no taxes on tips, social security, and overtime – and on retaining the tax cuts of 2017, which are by now nearly ten years old; barring one or two additions, Trump’s tax plan was firmly rooted in the past, unlike the tax plans of Coolidge or Reagan when the two presidents were running for re-election – these campaigning presidents built on the momentum of their first terms and promised more reforms. In 2024, Trump refrained from that strategy, and so, in 2025, Trump’s tax plans have hardly set the world on fire. 

Having said that, Trump did make intriguing hints on the campaign trail. In asides, he let it be known that he was prepared to abolish income taxes altogether and impose higher tariffs in order to make up for lost revenue: that, in other words, he would revert to the formula adopted by America a 150 years ago. 

Supply-sider Nathan Lewis agreed with the idea and suggested that a 15% value-added tax (VAT) would, along with uniform tariffs, perform the service of substituting for the abolished income tax and providing a depoliticised alternative; in his view, governments use the income tax to reward some behaviours and punish others. But in the days and weeks after his inauguration, it became apparent that Trump had been side-tracked by the tariff question and that all his energies had been devoted to it; the House Republicans, meanwhile, worked on a bill that would keep the 2017 tax cuts and deliver on the campaign promises – of no taxes on tips, etc. – and not expand upon the campaign hints; in other words, without direction from the president, the campaign suggestions were never taken up. The lack of ambition on the part of Trump helped contribute to a sagging in the markets. Steve Forbes has made some excellent suggestions as to what Trump and the Republicans should do on taxes, but now only a dramatic intervention can ensure that the advice of the likes of Forbes is heeded. 

Phillip W. Magness has written a good article (‘The Nonsense of the “Tariff Men”’) that identifies the main factions in the Trump administration behind the tariff push and summarises the arguments of each. Perhaps, to save his presidency, Trump will be forced to fire Navarro, Miran, Lutnick, and Hassett. 

Powell, the head of the Federal Reserve, needs to go too, and somewhat reassuringly, Trump agrees; he may not understand monetary policy, gold, exchange rates, but he knows that something has gone wrong. It could be that Trump’s calls for a turnaround at the Federal Reserve show us that Trump’s famous political instincts are now kicking in.   

III. Geopolitics

Ultimately, the rise in the gold / US dollar price bears the blame for the Trump bear market; the decline in the value of the US dollar caused the decline in the US – and world – markets, because whenever the US dollar goes down, the euro, the yen, the pound, etc., go down with it. And this ought to cause alarm, because a study of history reveals that economic weakness is nearly always accompanied by political weakness, and vice versa. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the position of sole superpower was handed to the US, which, by the late nineties, enjoyed both a strong currency and strong economic growth.  Economic strength and political strength went together, and in the nineties, the US had gained enormous power, and without really trying. By the end of the century, the US led by example, and most other countries, including the America’s competitors Russia and China, sought to follow the American economic model. 

The same does not hold true some thirty years later. Who now, especially after the past few months, wants to emulate the US? We can observe countries drawing away because the US pushed them away; and the first signs of this distancing emerged after Trump signalled that the US would not come to Europe’s defence. In the event of a war between Europe and Russia, the US would not stand up to Russia; and perhaps, Asian and Australian observers wondered, in the event of a war between Taiwan and China, the US would not stand up to China. Would Taiwan be abandoned, and military aid be cut off, at a crucial moment? The two vatnik Senators J.D. Vance and Rand Paul managed to strangle aid to Ukraine in the first six months of 2024, when Ukraine was most vulnerable; and as a result, the Russians made some minor advances in the Sumy region. After the Sumy offensive, as could be expected, Russian soldiers – the ‘ziggers’ – stole, raped, and killed as they went, just like their grandfathers and great-grandfathers in WWII. In 2025, history repeated itself: US military assistance was removed just at the right time for Russia. The last dribbles of Biden military aid were cut off, satellite reconnaissance was taken away, and the radar-jamming capability of the American F-16s bequeathed to the Ukrainians was switched off; and at that moment, Russia succeeded in pushing Ukraine out of most of the Kursk region. After a few days, the aid was restored, but the damage to the reputation of the US had been done. Portugal and Canada were no longer interested buying F-35 jets; for what if war broke out, and Trump, wanting ‘peace’, were to switch off the planes? 

The question is why the US is acting in such a manner. At first sight, the answer is easy: Russian influence. Throughout 2024, Trump surrounded himself with vatniks: Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, J.D. Vance, Elon Musk. In 2024, this line-up portended a vatnik government, like Orbán’s in Hungary and Fico’s in Slovakia. 

But looking deeper, we must remember that the subject of Russia makes even the best minds stupid; vagueness abounds whenever the subject of Russia is brought up. In 2017 and after, Russia was blamed for ‘meddling’ in the 2016 election; but one could never get an explanation of how Russia meddled and how it catapulted Trump into the presidency; even so, an enquiry into ‘collusion’ was launched, and some Americans went to jail. Moving forward to 2022, Russia’s defenders insist that Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine in the 21st century was ‘forced’: ‘Putin’s hand was forced’. But how exactly? Did Ukraine stand on the threshold of joining NATO in February 2022? And even if it did, do any of Putin’s defenders in the West seriously believe that NATO at any time was about to invade Russia, as Germany did in 1918 and 1941? 

We must consider, then, the stupefying effect of Russia – Russia’s clouding men’s minds – and treat any accusations of foreign influence, collusion, and the like, with caution. In the article ‘How to ruin a country: A step-by-step guide to Donald Trump’s destruction of U.S. foreign policy’ by Stephen M. Walt (of Mearsheimer and Walt fame), Walt writes: ‘To be clear: I don’t think Trump is acting on behalf of a foreign power or that he consciously wants to make the United States less secure and less prosperous; he is just acting as if he were’. 

A professor, Walt teaches International Relations. Walt is said to belong to the Realist school and Trump, the Isolationist; but is Trump Isolationist? I argue that the origins of the bizarre and perplexing conduct in 2025 of Trump and his foreign policy troupe – Vance, Hegseth, Walz, Witkoff, Rubio and the rest – cannot be found in the doctrine of Isolationism, as can be seen in Trump’s actions in the Middle East, none of which attest to the supposed Trumpian transactionalism. 

As the leaked Signal discussions reveal, Vance and his colleagues believe that the bombing of the Houthis, which according to Vance supposedly had been carried out in the defence of shipping to Europe, constitutes another example of Europeans leeching off Americans. The real scandal of the discussions lies in the exposure of Vance and company’s hatred and resentment of Europe. That, combined with a multitude of diplomatic incidents, indicates that the US now has removed itself from European – and Western – affairs. 

To see how extraordinary that is, consider the history of the past hundred years. In the post WWI era, European states such as France, Germany, Italy, and the UK existed as sovereign entities, albeit greatly weakened ones; and US, Russia, Turkey, and Japan existed as sovereign entities as well – ones that were greatly strengthened by the outcome of the war, in the estimation of Francis Parker Yockey. Moving forward to mid-1945, Germany, Italy, France, the UK, all the great old powers of Europe, had been knocked out of the game, perhaps forever; and the US had conquered all Western Europe and half of Central Europe. And some forty-five years after, the US, adding success to success, took all of Central Europe and Eastern Europe without firing a shot. By the mid-nineties, the US reigned supreme. Naturally, one would think that the US would not part with its European acquisitions without a fight. 

So, what makes 1995 Europe different from that of 2025 Europe? Yockey defines politics as an activity related to power; and in 2025, in Europe at least, the struggle for that power has come to an end. Under the second Trump administration, Europe has been relinquished, and the battlefield has been vacated. 

Normally such a retreat occurs after a long and gruelling war. Since 1950, American wars have followed a pattern: the US launches an offensive – or counter-offensive, in the case of Korea – and administers defeats to the enemy; and then, the US becomes tired and bored once it understands that the war will be a drawn-out grind; and after that, the US loses interest, pulls out, and yields territory to its opponent. That sequence fits the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq (who won the war in Iraq that began in 2003?), and perhaps, future wars in Yemen and Iran. History is replete with examples of great powers which, showing prudence, walk away from the battlefield after suffering grievous wounds. But in Europe, the US is not the losing side, the US is not being forced out by a stronger or more persistent enemy: the US is surrendering power of its own accord. 

By giving up power, the US is renouncing its role as protector. In a chapter of Imperium (1948), ‘The Law of Protection and Obedience’, Yockey writes: 

The purpose for which the great political thinker Hobbes wrote his Leviathan was to show the world once more the “Mutual Relation between Protection and Obedience,” demanded alike by human nature and divine law. The Roman formula was protego ergo obligo. To him who supplies protection also goes obedience. It will go either voluntarily, as the result of persuasion, or as the result of force…

This organic law is again a description of an existential reality. Without the relationship of protection in one place and obedience in another, there is no politics. Every political organism exhibits it, and the extent of protection and obedience describes the territorial frontiers of the organism. 

The example of the law in action that immediately sprung to Yockey’s mind was the Allied and Soviet partition of Europe:

Once more the words protection and obedience have also been used with an entire absence of any moral content. Thus “protection” can mean unlimited terror by military means, and “obedience” may be a reflection of the alternative of the concentration camp. The condition of occupied Europe under extra-European armies is protection within the meaning of this organic law. Even though these extra-European armies are starving and torturing the populace, nevertheless they are protecting that part of Europe from incorporation by another political unit. America protects its half from Russia and Russia protects its half from America. Thus the word is neutral vis-à-vis the disjunction of altruism-egoism. Protection is not kindliness, it is acquisition of power. Obedience is not gratitude, it is political submission from whatever motive.

To our ears, such an arrangement sounds like feudalism, and Yockey agrees. But another, less noble, example can be found in the old gangster movies, and that is the protection racket. Gangsters extort from victims in the gang’s ‘territory’, and the gang is ‘protecting’ the victims – not from the gang itself but from any rival that seeks to ‘muscle in’ to the gang’s ‘territory’. 

An exhausted and unhealthy state, perhaps one that has suffered a series of military defeats, will abandon territory:

The existential nature of the Law is also shown by the fact that if a State is unable to protect an area and population within its system, that area and population will pass into the system of another State that can protect and has the will to protect. The passing may be by revolt, it may be by war. It may be by negotiation, particularly if the protecting State allows a quasi government to exist in the protected area, which can make a private understanding with other powers to deliver to them the population and territory.

This describes perfectly what happened in the Baltics in the years 1989 to 1990: the USSR made a cursory attempt to bring the Baltics to heel and prevent them leaving the Union, but it was too sick and exhausted to put up much of a fight. Does the US in 2025 find itself in a similar condition? Clearly not: in the 2020s, the US was not as respected and powerful as it was in the 1980s and 1990s, but one could not say that the American system like the Russian in the 1980s had become outmoded. And in the 2020s, Europe still sought friendship with the US, whereas by 1989, no European nation sought friendship with Russia. 

 

IV. The Destiny of Europe

Central and Eastern Europe is rearming itself and so has attracted criticism from the mainstream conservative press – and the dissident Right. 

The peasants, having been abandoned by their baron, are arming themselves and preparing for war. An outcome such as this, which suggests itself inevitably if we are to agree with Hobbes, is not related to the ideological complexion of the peasants, who have been left unprotected: the peasants could be conservative, communist, fascist, environmentalist, or whatever ideology that you may choose.

Even so, in some writings on the Right, we can discern the outlines of a new doctrine, which is that a European nation such as Germany should not defend itself against a Russian attack; Germany, in this view, lacks all rights to self-defence. The implied reasoning is that Germany should only be defended if it is nothing less than perfect. And Germany, along with the other Central European states, falls far short of perfection. 

But so does Russia, and this is a truth that is often overlooked. This piece criticises Germany – and Ukraine – for mobilising men but says nothing about Russia’s mobilising; soon, 160,000 ‘mobiks’ – mobilised Russians – will be joining the ‘ziggers’ at the front, to be used along with North Koreans for endless ‘meat wave’ assaults. 

Amusingly, the piece quotes a very concerned nonagenarian who compares Merz to Hitler – as if that were a bad thing. Germany in the 20th century went to war against Russia twice in Ukraine and three times in the Baltics, military feats that would have been impossible without conscription, which in the 20th century put millions of Germans into uniform. One must wonder about the ideology of the authors: are they as Far Right as they claim? Are they ‘National Socialist’? We cannot conceive a German National Socialism – or a revival thereof, which is what ‘Neo-Nazism’ is supposed to be – without millions of German lads marching in uniform and blowing up and killing Russian soldiers. 

The question raised by these ‘Alt-Right’ polemics is this: is Germany and the rest of Europe worth defending? But the question ought to be reversed. Western intelligence has estimated – and if you dislike these figures, do some research and come up with your own - that the Russians have taken 900,000 casualties and that of these casualties, 200,000 to 250,000 of them are deaths. Were these deaths, and this war, one which was waged for the sake of Russian expansionism, worth it? Yes, perhaps, if the Russians were fighting to preserve a way of life that is good; but Russians live in squalor, poverty, and misery, hence the below 4Chan meme of Russia, ‘Nigeria of the snow’.

Germans – and Americans – live much better than Russians; hence, German and American values are so much superior to Russian values, whatever they may be. 

The use of the picture of a Lada in the bottom right refers slyly to the practice of awarding Ladas to parents who have lost a son in the war. But not all parents are awarded Ladas: others may win different prizes: 

As you can see, parents may receive a meat grinder, their son having died in a – meat grinder. Who said that Russians lacked a sense of humour? 

A picture is worth a thousand words, and 4Chan meme on Russia is worth more than a thousand words; these memes allow us to peer into Russian society and culture, and once having done so, few of us will like what we see of Russkiy Mir, ‘a Kremlin-promoted geopolitical concept with amorphous parameters that broadly encompasses Russian language, culture, Orthodoxy, and media’.

Considering what the national character of Russia is, we can begin to speculate as to how hard a nation would fight to be free of Russia – how badly would one non-Russian state work to prevent, in Yockey’s words, its ‘area and population’ passing into ‘the system of another State’ such as Russia. Would a nation resist? The history of Georgia, Ukraine, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland in the years 1918 to 1922 gives the answer, as does that of Ukraine in the years 2014 to 2025. 

In the past, the US sympathised with that struggle, but now no longer. We are presented with the phenomenon of a changing of the guard, one that is quite natural; it is politics itself. 

To understand this process, we need recourse to Yockey again. The metaphor of the plenum is used by Yockey, more than once, to conjure up the image of the reverse of a vacuum: the plenum is a space that is filled completely. Politics exists in a plenum, and to Yockey, if a political organism (such as the USA) sheds power, another state will soon scoop it up. 

Yockey wanted to bring about a pan-European confederacy, and he pinned his hopes for it on a forced departure of the USA from Europe. Perhaps, Yockey theorised in The Enemy of Europe (1953), the Soviet Union would invade Europe, conquer it, and expel what he called the ‘Culture-Retarder’ America. Afterwards, Yockey speculated, the Soviet Union, having taken all Central and Western Europe, would not hold onto power for long. I shall not reproduce Yockey’s argument, which is long and complex; suffice to say, Yockey believed that in time Europeans would regain control of their continent, first from the Americans and then the Russians. In this struggle, the European leadership that had assumed power would comprise what Yockey calls the ‘Culture-bearing stratum’ – what we today would call the ‘neo-fascists’, or more mildly, the ‘Far Right’.

We must keep in mind that Yockey wrote the book not even ten years after the end of the war. Memories of the war lingered, and plenty of former ‘Nazis’ and ‘fascists’ were strutting around Europe; and so, Yockey could be forgiven for thinking that the ‘democratic’ politicians that the Allies had installed in the West of Europe would not be around forever. Indeed, Yockey argued, time was running out for them; after all, the Allies had merely dusted off and restored the conservatives and social democrats from before the war, many of them – De Gaulle and Adenauer, for example – old men.  

In Yockey’s view, world history, or the World Spirit – to use one of Hegel’s terms – had reach a turning point after Hitler and what Yockey called the ‘Revolution of 1933’, that is, Hitler’s ascent to power; and while history took a step backwards in 1945, in doing so, it was still treading the Hegelian and dialectical path: to paraphrase Lenin, European history took ‘two steps forward, one step back’. So, what explains the endurance of the old guard – the De Gaulles and Adenauers – and their ideas? 

Two theses emerge. The first is what I call the ‘boot on the neck’ theory – that the Allied occupation had placed a boot on the neck of the European nations, Germany in particular, the result of which is that Europe could not act as it normally would. The other thesis is that the European nations have decayed, and the Allied occupation had nothing to do with this decline: Europe is ‘pozzed’, thoroughly ‘pozzed’, in Alt-Right parlance, and cannot be redeemed. 

We can find plenty of evidence to support the latter thesis – that Europe is permanently ‘pozzed’ and ‘cucked’. After all, the US, England, France, gradually withdrew their armies from Germany in the decades after 1945, and the Allies no longer sought to impose their will on Western Europe; in short, after the period of ‘denazification’ had elapsed, the Allies left Europe to its own devices. It is true that the Allies, or rather, the US, the supreme power behind the Allies, watched warily and expected the Europeans to play up now and again. But as events showed, no European politician would ever dissent sufficiently enough to make a break from the American line; no European politician would ever contest the Allied accusation that the Germans in WWII gassed one million Jews in a secret and giant underground gas chamber in Auschwitz. 

Part of the social contract that was made between the Germans and the Americans in the immediate post-war years was this: if you Germans admit to the gassing of the Jews and pay reparations to Israel and the Jews, we Americans will allow you the good life. And so, the Germans, in the 1950s, cut their taxes, kept to a stable currency, accessed markets all around the world, and enjoyed a rising standard of living. But the prosperity was made possible by the second condition of the German and American agreement, one which guaranteed protection: the US and NATO would protect Germany, and all Western Europe, from Russia. 

We know that the terms of the agreement changed by the turn of the century. After 1971, Germany, along with most of Europe, was forced to take up the euro after the US abolished the gold standard and the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates; and by the nineties, deep tax cuts had become a thing of the past. But all the other elements of the post-war social contract remained in place, and what held true for Germany held true for all the other nations in Europe. 

But in 2025, Trump and the US, in the space of a few weeks, went back on the agreement. The US broke a promise that was made in the post-war years, which was this: the US would protect, and Germany – and Europe – would obey. 

In the aftermath of Trump 2.0, the burden of the defence of West is being shouldered by the likes of Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer. One should not take this as an endorsement of the two men: remember that the Law of Protection and Obedience is not a moral judgement. Indeed, any observer would find it ironic that is men of the stature of Macron and Starmer that are leading the charge; but then, history is full of irony, as Yockey knew when he wrote of De Gaulle sixty-five years ago: 

De Gaulle is not a great man, but if he is able to gain French independence, he will immediately find himself the spiritual leader of all Europe, pygmy though he is. De Gaulle is a cretin, but people will follow even a cretin if he embodies their deepest, most natural, instinctive feelings. De Gaulle’s driving force is a vanity of super-dimensional extent. Even Churchill, the embodiment of the Idea of Vanity itself, was still content to be a Zionist executive with a front position, a big office, and a resounding title. But De Gaulle wants more: he wants to be equal to the masters who created him and blew him up like a rubber balloon. Because of the spiritual force upon which he has accidentally alighted—the universal European desire for neutrality—he may even succeed. An idiot might save Europe. History has seen things as strange.

In 2025, it appears that the goal of Yockey and De Gaulle has been fulfilled, and that, accompanying this, American power is winding down, perhaps to the point of extinction. We are confronted with the possibility that the American story is at last reaching a conclusion; and now that we are nearing the final chapter, we can perhaps make a definite judgment of the worth of America. That is, was America good, evil, or in-between? 

Your answer to the question depends on your politics. The leftist would say that America is fundamentally evil, subscribing, as he does, to the theses that America does nothing but bad and that everything that goes bad in the world goes bad because of America. In contrast, the neutral, who in the sphere of International Relations perhaps belongs to the Realist school, believes that the US is neither good nor bad, it simply is; one must make a ‘value-free’ judgement. On the other side dwells the traditional American conservative: a rare breed these days, he thinks of America as a force for good that, in the spirit of generosity, chooses to share its goodness with the world. 

One can accuse the conservative of naiveté and excessive optimism, and ignorance – especially ignorance about what really happened in WWII. But in 2025, after the extraordinary vacillations of Trump, Vance, Rubio, Witkoff, and the consequent downgrading of America’s reputation, I have come to appreciate the flattering and idealising portrait that the conservative has painted; when sincere, patriotism and idealism always appeal.

If America is dwindling, and if the conservatives are right, then something that is good is leaving Earth. In 2025, it is appropriate, then, at the beginning of the American decline, which is economic, geopolitical, and perhaps spiritual, to lament the passing of a great nation.