I do not know anyone who was not shocked by the lightning speed with which Damascus fell to expensively armed jihadist militias last weekend.

I know very few people who do not understand that another domino has just fallen in the “seven-front war� Benjamin Netanyahu has boasted this year of waging across West Asia. I know very few people who do not recognize that terrorist Israel is well on the way to establishing itself as a dictatorial hegemon across the region.

I know very few people who do not understand that the longstanding project of the Zionist neoconservatives, who have more or less controlled U.S. foreign policy for decades, i.e., “remaking the Middle East,� is the design behind all that has occurred since the Israelis launched their attack on Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023.

I do not know anyone who has achieved the age of reason who does not recognize the U.S. hand in the stunning sweep through Syria of Hay`at Tahrir al–Sham, long-recognized as a terrorist organization. All one needs to grasp this is a little history.

But I know of no corporate or state-funded medium on either side of the Atlantic — the major dailies, the broadcast networks, NPR, PBS, the BBC — where you can read or hear about any of this.

Blinding Us

Mainstream media are doing exactly what they did as the U.S.–led “regime change� operation in Syria began in early 2012 at the latest and probably in the final months of 2011: They are making sure the events now unfolding in Syria are not quite illegible but nearly.

It is again a question of knowing the history. In the case of Hay`at Tahrir al–Sham and the other jihadists who knocked over the Assad regime as if it were made of Lego blocks, it is another exercise in dressing up a monster in a suit and tie.

The corporate press and broadcasters are now resolutely recasting the murderous fanatics who have seized control of Syria as legitimate “rebels.� Rebels, rebels, rebels: This is the approved terminology.

I see they have left off describing these Sunni zealots as the “moderate rebels� of yesteryear, that phrase having been hopelessly discredited last time around, but the drift is the same: These are civilized people out there trying to do the right thing.

My favorite in this line appeared in The Daily Telegraph several days before the Assad government collapsed: “How Syria’s ‘diversity-friendly’ jihadists plan on building a state.� I had to read this one twice, too.

Nowhere but nowhere in the West’s mass media can you find even a mention of the U.S.–Turkish-and-probably–Israeli support that made possible the swift sweep of Hay`at Tahrir al–Sham and its ever-bickering allies from its seat in the Idlib governorate through Hama and other cities to the center of Damascus.

This is, like the earlier years of the Western-backed terrorist attacks on the Assad regime, and like the proxy war in Ukraine, and like the Saudis’ U.S.–supported war against Yemen, and like the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, and like the Israelis’ attacks in Lebanon, sponsored military aggression we are not permitted to see without considerable effort to transcend official representations of reality.

Understanding Who the Americans Are

What happened, what is happening, what will happen: I do not know anyone who is not asking these questions, too.

We must go back and back and back further to understand what has just occurred in Syria and to understand why, and finally to understand who Americans are and who they have been for all the decades since the 1945 victories.

It is logical to begin this pencil-sketch of the past with the famous coups of the 1950s. These occurred in Iran, where the C.I.A., working with MI6, deposed Mohammed Mossadegh as Iran’s prime minister in August 1953, and in Guatemala, where an agency operation forced Jacobo �rbenz from the presidency a year later.

It is striking today to consider a few of the features of these operations. Stimulating various social and economic antagonisms to foment public unrest and an appearance of political disorder was key in both cases. Both coups removed popularly elected leaders and installed repressive puppets.

There was violence in both cases, but by later standards these operations were something close to surgical. Mossadegh withdrew to his farm in the Iranian countryside; �rbenz, a Swiss pharmacist by background, spent his last years wandering dejectedly through Europe.

An appearance of propriety was important back then. Most Americans were unaware that the C.I.A. had engineered the events in Tehran and Guatemala City. And in the Iranian case, something to note: Removing Iran’s first elected prime minister set in motion a wave of blowback that continues to break over U.S.–Iranian relations; in Guatemala it led to a civil war that endured for 36 years.

The C.I.A. considered the coup in Iran a useful model – Guatemala its next application. But in 1965 the agency began to do things very differently when it organized the coup that brought down Sukarno, independent Indonesia’s charismatic founding father and its first president.

The Jakarta Model

Vincent Bevins, a seasoned foreign correspondent, got this down better than anyone in The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (Public Affairs, 2020). With the Cold War approaching its worst years, the Indonesian coup was the first, as Blevins’s subtitle indicates, to submerge an entire nation in prolonged violence.

There are various figures for the number of deaths that resulted as the agency installed the dictatorial, bottomlessly corrupt Suharto in the presidential palace in 1967. Blevins puts it at a million or more. Along with the deaths, the nation’s previously lively political culture was extinguished until Suharto fell 32 years later.

The Jakarta Method was subsequently applied in various other circumstances, notably but not only in the 1973 coup that deposed Salvador Allende in Chile and installed Augusto Pinochet, a vicious dictator in the Suharto mold. Nine years later Zbigniew Brzezinski put a modified version to use in Afghanistan.

Blind to US Support for Jihadism

As Jimmy Carter’s relentlessly anti–Soviet national security adviser, Brzezinski persuaded Carter to back the mujahideen then fighting the Moscow-backed regime in Kabul. The result was the well-armed, well-financed force named al–Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden.

And so we come, via the campaigns of mass violence in Iraq and Libya and the proxy war in Ukraine, to the Syrian operation. People who rely on mainstream media still have a hard time accepting that the U.S. and its trans–Atlantic allies backed al–Qaeda’s Syrian forces, the Islamic State, and their heinous offshoots in their war against the Assad regime.

LONDON—

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…�

Alot of us are familiar with these lines from Yeats’s thoroughly anthologized and often-quoted The Second Coming. How can they not come to mind as the French government of Emmanuel Macron, the centrist par excellence, falls in a heap of high-handed hubris?

Everyone in Paris is blaming everyone since the Macron government’s energized opposition in the National Assembly forced Premier Michel Barnier from office with a vote of no confidence last week. The truth is that Barnier is a casualty of his own political camp — an arrogant “center� that is not, in fact, the center of anything. It is composed of neoliberal ideologues who hold themselves as high as falcons above voters, refuse to hear them and wage war to remain in power even when they are voted out of it.

What is unfolding now in France is unfolding one or another way across those Western powers that form the walls of the neoliberal fortress. You see variants in Germany, Britain and, understood properly, in the United States. The center is not holding but the center insists on holding. Neoliberalism, after decades during which it has prevailed without effective challenge, is now critically threatened on all sides. And its defenders are fighting a ferocious battle to preserve its ideological primacy.

In effect, the Emmanuel Macrons and Michel Barniers of the Atlantic world are destroying what remains of democracy in the name of defending it. It is important to understand this in the clearest possible terms, given what is at stake. It cannot lead anywhere other than some form of authoritarianism unless the Macrons, the Barniers and their kind are turned back or otherwise subdued. Isn’t this already evident? It can lead, to look at the question another way, to what could easily turn into political anarchy, and this will not be so “mere� as Yeats imagined a century and a few years ago.

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Macron, a former merchant banker, “president of the rich� as the French call him, is a laboratory specimen for his imperious insistence on the neoliberal orthodoxies. He decided to risk snap elections last summer after his Renaissance Party was trounced in European Parliament polls. Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National won 30 seats, with 31% of the vote. La France Insoumise, France Unbowed, Macron’s leftist challenger, took nine more seats. Renaissance went home with 13 seats, 14.6% of the vote. Macron, ever out-of-touch, calculated that snap legislative elections would restore the balance of power in his favor.

In the National Assembly elections last June and July, Macron was outdone once again. The Nouveau Fronte Populaire, a leftist alliance formed just weeks before the polls, won 188 seats, Le Pen’s National Rally 142 and Macron’s centrist alliance 161. In sum, no party had the 289 seats required to achieve a legislative majority in the 577–seat Assembly. The leftist front was the surprise winner, and National Rally had the most votes of any single party. Both then demanded, altogether rightfully, the president name a new premier from their ranks.

So did Macron’s anti-democratic defense of French democracy begin — or continue more pointedly, better put. He refused for two months to name anyone to Matignon, the prime minister’s residence and office. And his eventual choice of Barnier, a conservative dedicated to neoliberal austerity and the European Union’s technocracy, was an in-your-face rejection of last summer’s election results.

It is interesting to consider what Macron charged Barnier with accomplishing. In the Assembly he faced hostility to Macron’s centrist regime over both shoulders — either from the left (the Nouveau Fronte Populaire) or from the populist right (Le Pen’s Rassemblement). Barnier’s job was to navigate this stony political terrain while sustaining Macron’s neoliberal economics. I would have called this a mission impossible, a fool’s errand, given the two opposition blocs held 330 seats between them. But it is difficult to overstate the arrogance of a president who operates with so profound an indifference to his electorate.

The inevitable moment of truth came when Barnier had to present a budget. He did so on Oct. 10. After a lot of performative bargaining with his left-side, right-side adversaries, during which he, Barnier, made a few minor compromises that left intact what was a budget obviously hostile to the Assembly’s majority. It called for — past tense here, as the proposal is now dead —€60 billion in tax increases (70% of the total) and spending cuts (30%), most of which would fall on working people and the French middle class.

Barnier’s efforts to dress up these aggressive numbers are worth noting if only as a case study in the kind of political chicanery we all know well. He drew the direst possible picture of France’s finances before presenting the budget — a tiresome resort to “There is no alternative,� the ruse Margaret Thatcher made famous. And he prettified the figures by including in them €12 billion in taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals — but with the proviso these fair-at-first-glance levies were temporary and would be cut in the course of the 2026–27 fiscal year, at which point bingo, ordinary French men and women would bear all the burden of fiscal adjustments favoring said corporations and the wealthy.

The interesting thing about the Macron–Barnier standoff with … with the majority of French voters is that everyone knew well in advance that their budget would not pass. And everyone knew in advance that Barnier would then push it through the Assembly without a vote, a legal peculiarity in the French system but one that usually prompts outrage when invoked. And everyone knew Barnier would then face a vote of no confidence, lose it and be forced to resign.

And now all sides condemn the other side for this national debacle. Le Pen described Barnier’s budget as “violent, unjust, inefficient,� which holds up well to scrutiny. In a widely dismissed speech last week, Macron charged his opponents with “choosing disorder,� which holds up well only if you are an orthodox centrist who equates order with neoliberal primacy. “I will never shoulder the irresponsibility of others,� the grossly irresponsible Macron saith.

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The French case is easy to read for the openly belligerent conduct of its protagonists. Macron is a remote figure who speaks to the French public with dignity but whose contempt for the people to whom he speaks rarely fails to come through by way of the various “reforms� he imposes or attempts to impose. These may be a rise in the retirement age, cuts in the health care system, increased fuel charges, or higher taxes: It is always the same. France’s fiscal position is weak, but the burden of repair must fall on the electorate, not the various elites above them. Macron the centrist, to put this point another way, is at bottom a “trickle-down� man, a Reaganesque supply-sider.

And what unfolds in France as we speak — Macron says he will shortly name a new premier — is a variant of what we witness across the neoliberal world, if I can suggest this term. Democratic process is to be sacrificed at the altar of power.

With his shocking presidential pardon of his son Hunter, announced Thanksgiving weekend, when the maximum number of Americans would be watching football games and consuming potato chips, Joe Biden goes out just as he was the whole of his tatty career as a politician — a self-serving fiddler, indifferent to democratic process, ever going against his word.

Peter Baker, that inimitable (thank goodness) clerk The New York Times posts as its chief White House correspondent, tells us in Wednesday’s editions, “We don’t really know how history will remember Joe Biden. It’s too early to say, obviously.�

Actually, we really know at this point. Obviously.

Much has been made of Biden as the family man torn between his duties as president and his compassion for an errant son as the victim of perverted justice. The Times unfolded a singular line of argument on Tuesday.

“President Biden was deeply concerned,� Katie Rogers and Glenn Thrush reported, “that legal problems would push his son into a relapse after years of sobriety, and he began to realize there might not be any way out beyond issuing a pardon.�

No other way out. Here we have Joe Biden pimping the helpless suffering of his son’s addictions (to alcohol and crack). It is of a piece with Biden’s very regular references, always for similar political advantage, to the death of his other son, Beau, and the earlier deaths of his first wife and daughter.

The Rogers and Thrush piece now passes for news reporting Americans are invited to take seriously. It is one among countless others of its kind and quality that are together a measure of how the corruptions of the Bidens, father and son as well as others, have deepened an already severe crisis in American media and turned public discourse into bad afternoon television.

The reporting on the pardon has been defective since the White House released the Executive Grant of Clemency, along with Biden’s official statement, last Sunday. The Times, The Washington Post, the other major dailies and the broadcast networks all reported as if in unison that Joe Biden’s motivating concerns were the guilty verdicts Hunter Biden faces on gun-possession and tax-evasion charges.

Hunter was scheduled to be sentenced later this month. Biden père has told the nation his intent was simply to protect Hunter from a judicial system that political antagonists had unduly politicized.

From the president’s statement:

“The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election. Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the court room—with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases.

No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong.�

You read a statement such as this and you have to wonder whether Joe Biden is capable of speaking truthfully in any circumstance bearing upon his personal interests.

The plea deal, negotiated in the summer of 2023, was indeed carefully negotiated — by Hunter’s attorneys and corrupt Justice Department prosecutors acting to keep the president’s son out of prison. The agreement collapsed not due to political pressure — there was none — but because an un-beholden judge with a commitment to the rule of law, Maryellen Noreika, read it and threw it out of court.

The feature of the plea bargain that moved Judge Noreika to put an end to the negotiated arrangement was its stipulation that Hunter would be immune from further prosecution not only for the matters then tried — the gun and taxes charges — but for any other crimes he may have committed. Preposterous, Noreika rightly concluded.

Special Treatment

Was Hunter Biden singled out as his father asserts? Not as his father asserts, but yes, singled out. He had made a mess of his life, breaching various laws while doing so, and was singled out for special treatment in a judicial system that plainly leaves elites and their families above the law.

This context is essential to understanding why Joe Biden decided — and one strongly suspects this was not, as reported, a decision Biden considered and took over the Thanksgiving weekend — to grant his son clemency in the manner he did. The operative language in the official document, the raison d’être of the case, is this:

“Be It Known, That This Day, I, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., President of the United States, Pursuant to My Powers Under Article II, Section 2, Clause 1, of the Constitution, Have Granted Unto ROBERT HUNTER BIDEN A Full and Unconditional Pardon For those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024, including but not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted (including any that have resulted in convictions)…�

As is easily discerned, President Biden has reinstated, not quite verbatim but nearly, the terms of the plea agreement thrown out of court a year and a half ago — the agreement he defended in his official statement as fair and reasonable. He has granted his son precisely what Judge Noreika found objectionable — open-ended immunity for crimes “he has committed or may have committed or taken part in.�

The dates are what matter in this language. Hunter Biden assumed his infamous board seat at Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas supplier, in March 2014, a few months after the beginning of the period his father’s pardon covers. Years of bribe-taking, extortion schemes, and various other financial machinations involving Burisma and other foreign clients followed.

The tax and gun charges, to put this point another way, were all along minor matters next to the far graver allegations leveled at Hunter Biden. This is why guilty verdicts on the lesser infractions went through. They were effectively displays intended to demonstrate prosecutors’ integrity and seriousness as they ignored or otherwise quashed compelling evidence of grand-scale corruption.

As has been widely remarked, Hunter’s attorneys were almost certain to argue successfully for very light prison time, or none, during the sentencing hearings due this month. The gravity of the foreign business dealings allowed for no such prospect. Not only did these yield Hunter, his business colleagues, and his uncle, Joe’s brother James, tens of millions of dollars; the evidence implicating Joe Biden — “the Big Guy,� as Hunter referred to his father — is hard and plentiful.

It is possible, providing one has followed various investigations into Hunter Biden’s influence-selling schemes, to read the terms of Hunter’s pardon as Joe Biden’s upside-down admission of his son’s guilt.

Is it all right to be happy over a holiday that has “Happy� in its name?

The genocide of a long-suffering people to which our purported leaders have made us accomplices, a senile president who leaves us living with the danger of a nuclear conflict, fear and want and disorder everywhere you look: Can we allow ourselves happiness? Can we permit ourselves merriment in a few short weeks? And the most pressing query of all: What are we supposed to do? We must act, but how?

As another holiday season begins, I merely repeat questions many millions among us have asked for more than a year now. I know this because I recently conducted an extensive survey indicating that the world as we have made it leaves us, we Americans and other dwellers in the Western post-democracies, a chronically troubled people.

I made sure the poll covered a wide geographic spread: I surveyed my household; the respondents were two, including myself. So let us not argue: The results are unambiguously representative. I found frustration at a record level, and there must be a record somewhere. I found suggestions of anger and despair. I found that the questions just noted were posed not quite incessantly, but nearly. The survey’s margin of error is zero.

We are a perplexed people apart from everything else we are. And our questions are the very most right questions a troubled and perplexed people ought to ask as 2024 draws to a close and year-end holidays are upon us.

In mid–December a year ago, we were guests in the home of one of my kindly editors. This was in the village of South Egremont, at the southern end of the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts. There was a tree at the foot of the stairs, the fire was lit, there were drinks on the coffee table. The kindly editor, the KE, stood before the tree with a glass ornament in her hand. We were about to begin the decorate-the-tree ritual.

Then the KE paused and turned. “Should we be doing this?� she asked. I vividly recall the unsettled look on her face. “Should we be celebrating?�

Israel was then several months into its sadistic barbarism in Gaza, and the government that is supposed to represent us but no longer does was profligately sustaining the Zionist regime’s terrorizing troops. There was no misunderstanding the KE’s question.

“Yes!� I replied with alacrity and not much reflection. There are moments when you understand your thoughts only when you speak them to others. And so I continued, “We must insist on honoring the feasts that matter to us. Celebration: We can’t surrender it. We owe it to ourselves to refuse the temptation of learned helplessness and despair.�

I paused. Then: “But that’s not the most important thing. We owe it most of all to the people of Palestine. It is for them we must demonstrate that the human spirit lives despite all, and that humanity’s shared capacity for joy is not extinguished.�

The KE nodded. I seem to have brought her around.

The KE’s son, a 30–something with a lightning wit and a quick, acute intelligence, considered the point carefully. His name is Stephen. After a moment Stephen said, “Yes, but a conscious ‘Happy’ and ‘Merry.’ A knowing ‘Happy’ and ‘Merry,’ a ‘Happy’ and ‘Merry’ that are fully aware—that refuse to avert their eyes, refuse to lose sight of anything.�

It was the best thing anyone said that evening. We decorated the tree just as these things always and wonderfully go: Put that silver bulb here. No, up a little. Now to the left. The pine cones should be in the front. The big red one goes on that side….

Stephen’s thought has stayed with me ever since. In a certain way I have lived by it.

â– 

In 1934, Dorothy Day began to keep a diary. Day had by that time made her now-famous commitment to Catholicism and social action and was no stranger to street demonstrations, picket lines, hunger strikes, and jail cells. She was also an accomplished journalist. A year earlier she had founded The Catholic Worker—a newspaper, I am pleased to report, that still comes out bimonthly. Day kept her diary until her death in 1980. She called it The Duty of Delight. Marquette University Press published a hardcover edition in 2008.

Dorothy Day knew all about the violence, disorder, and suffering that seem always rampant in modern life. She spent her life countering injustice of all kinds, and she is widely remembered today for her exemplary dedication. Her journal is, if I do not unduly simplify, the story of her struggle never to let the ugliness and pain defeat her. Let me try that again: never to forget all that is fine or of enduring beauty. Maybe she would say, never to fall from grace. And here’s the thing: Dorothy Day kept a diary because this was a daily struggle, and, as she well understood, it was essential to the biggest struggle of all, the struggle for the human cause.

Craig Murray published a piece in Consortium News last August under the headline “We Are the Bad Guys.� In it he recounted his gradual awakening, beginning while he was serving as a British ambassador in Central Asia, to the world as we have it. After some years Murray explained, “I have now finally shed the last of my illusions.�

He then elaborated:

I am obliged to acknowledge that the system of which I am a part—call it ‘the West,’ ‘liberal democracy,’ ‘capitalism,’ ‘neoliberalism,’ ‘neo-conservatism,’ ‘imperialism,’ ‘the New World Order’— call it what you will, in fact it is a force for evil.�

The shedding of illusions, for anyone who has any and most of us do, is an essential first step on the way to living a responsible life. It is when we are “dis-illusioned,� it seems to me, that we become capable of acting in ways that have meaning. Acting is essential if we are to keep our souls alive—and if we are to celebrate consciously, as my friend Stephen put it, or to fulfill our duty to delight, as Ms. Day put it.

A lot of people, to put a very obvious point as mildly as I can, do not want to lose their illusions. They are, indeed, highly dependent on them. And in this they are incessantly encouraged, mauled daily with illusions, by those who pose as our leaders and by the clerks and secretaries in the media who serve these poseurs. These kinds of people, illusioned people, are pretty good at celebrating. But there is no honoring or respecting them. There is no pretending their souls are still alive.

“We resist our own governing systems, or we are complicit,� Ambassador Murray wrote in that Consortium News commentary recounting his awakening. Ten words: I do not think our shared circumstance can be described any more plainly than this. And as if he anticipated the question this thought instantly raises, the “how� question, Murray put this to his readers this at the end of what amounts to a confessional essay:

The paths of resistance are various, depending where you are. But find one and take one.

It has been clear since the terror attacks in New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001 — the date I choose to mark a great turn in the global order — that America’s abdication of its postwar hegemony was to rank high among the 21st century’s defining events.

The questions from that day onward have been how the policy cliques in Washington would respond to such a change in America’s place in the community of nations and what they might do — how great the risks they would take — to avoid, or at least forestall, this world-historical shift.

How chaotically or otherwise, to put this question another way, would the arrival of a new, post–American world order prove?

We have just witnessed a week’s worth of shocking provocations as the U.S. and Britain escalate their proxy war against Russia under the pretense of defending Ukraine in a war that is already lost.

Washington and London — the latter with the former’s assent — have now authorized the grossly irresponsible regime in Kiev to fire American– and British-made missiles into Russian territory.

The Ukrainians wasted no time doing so. The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) launched a volley of U.S.–made ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) missiles at Russian targets last Tuesday. A day later the AFU fired a similar barrage of British-made Storm Shadow missiles into Russian territory.

The degree of planning and coordination behind these attacks seems to me self-evident. Nobody in Washington, London, or Kiev is commenting on the targets hit, but these, too, were without question chosen after careful consultation.

Moscow has responded just as it said it would weeks ago. It now considers itself at war with the Western powers and, last Thursday, attacked a Ukrainian target with a new-generation hypersonic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.

The message could scarcely be clearer — providing, I must add, one is capable of reading it accurately.

So we now have answers to the above-noted questions.

It was never difficult to foresee that those planning and executing U.S. foreign policy, lacking all imagination and anything remotely resembling courage, would prove incapable of an orderly transition to a multipolar world order.

After the Sept. 11 events, a continued commitment to American primacy was ineluctably going to prove a commitment to one or another degree of disorder.

The Biden regime’s latest escalation of its proxy war in Ukraine indicates the limits of this commitment: There are none.

We are now on notice that the world — bitter to write this — is condemned to unceasing chaos and violence so long as the American imperium’s ideologues are capable of mounting a resistance against against the world as it struggles to be.

We know now the risks those devoted to prolonging the imperium’s final phase will take in defense of the no-longer-defensible: All risks are acceptable as they cling to power. They will risk another world war; they will risk nuclear annihilation.

We hear a lot these days about the Israeli doctrine known as the Samson Option, whereby the Israelis, if they thought themselves under an existential threat, would use their nuclear arsenal to bring the world down with them. Those freak-show terrorists running the Zionist state, you might say: Who or what could be more diabolic?

It is a reasonable question. But there is no longer any pretending as to the unique perversity of terrorist Israel and its Samson Option. America in its post–Sept. 11 phase — fearful, viewing itself as threatened by history itself — has just proved equally perverse, equally diabolic, equally given to contempt for the human cause.

There is a greater and lesser way to understand the U.S. decision to authorize the use of Western-supplied missiles against Russian targets. It is partly a matter of passing politics, this is to say, and partly a question of the dynamics of late-imperial ideology. Let us consider each.

It is certainly so, as Joe Lauria pointed out in Consortium News last week, that the immense recklessness of the U.S. decision to authorize the use of Western-supplied missiles against Russian targets reflects a failed president’s spiteful determination, on his way out of office, to undermine President-elect Trump’s announced intention to end the war in Ukraine.

I do not see how giving Kiev permission to use Western-made missiles (with Western military operating them) against Russia will do anything to alter Trump’s intentions. The only way such a gambit could work is by provoking Russia into a vastly expanded, vastly more dangerous war. This goes to my previously made point: No risk is too great if taking it will prolong the long U.S. assault on Russia in the name of American preeminence.

There is also Joe Biden’s pitiful desire to preserve his “legacy.� Biden was foolish beyond words when he settled on the subversion of the Russian Federation — is “subjugation� my word? — as the project that would engrave his name in the history books.

This is another lost war: Biden’s “legacy� lies in ruins even before he leaves one behind. The Man from Scranton will go down, as measured by the failures, dangers, and messes he leaves behind, as the worst-performing president in postwar American history.

We can fairly mark this down to Biden’s native ineptitude: Any careful review of his career reveals him to be — no apology for my word choice — very stupid. His declining mental state, which has received so much press in the months since he was forced to withdraw his bid for reelection, is a case of incapacity piled atop incompetence.

A little while back the Russians began referring to “the collective Biden� to take account of the reality that there is no way of knowing who makes the judgments and policy decisions commonly attributed to “the president,� or “Mr. Biden,� or “the White House.�

You might think it unbelievably irresponsible of the Democrats, and the whole of Capitol Hill along with them, to leave the United States without a capable president, but I propose a reconsideration:

While it is certainly irresponsible to leave the Oval Office vacant for many months, if not years, it is perfectly believable given the extent to which the Deep State (the national-security state if this makes you more comfortable) now runs U.S. policy — this not quite but nearly out in the open.

So far as one can make out, to dolly in on this point, Secretary of State Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and a very few others form an inner circle that has been directing U.S. policy for much of Biden’s presidential term, either autonomously or by way of his nodding (literally) assent.

An outer circle, with input at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue but less operational authority, would include such figures as Samantha Power, who directs the Agency for International Development, Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

This is “the collective Biden� — so well coined, this phrase. Look at its members, and there are many more I have not named. These are the imperium’s praefecti, procurators and consuls. They have no interest in politics and want nothing to do with the citizenry. The empire is their ideology, and they are dedicated solely to extending its power.

And it is these more or less remote apparatchiks who form the collective Biden and who are yet more indifferent to the taking of unconscionable risks than the weak figure behind which they manage the empire’s affairs.