Bashar al-Assad. The last rational political leader left in the Middle East?

It’s almost exactly six months since my last post, but I’ve got a good excuse for being so dilatory.  I had to whip into final shape a massive book that I’ve been working on for more years than I care to admit.  But now that it’s finished and hopefully on the way to publication, it’s time to get back to the business at hand, which is charting the ongoing decline of the U.S. imperium.

What’s happened since last summer?  Well, for one thing, there were the curious events in late August when the Obama administration came within a hair’s breadth of bombing Syria, backing off only when the House of Commons staged a surprise revolt against military intervention.  But why should Washington have cared about a vote in faraway London?  One reason is that the U.K. is a crucial ally and the U.S. could hardly afford to embark on such an adventure with the support only of France.  But another is that with U.S. policy in the Middle East reaching the last stages of absurdity, it was obvious to all but a few die-hard warmongers that tossing a few hundred cruise missiles into the mix would only make matters worse.  After pledging to hunt down and destroy Al Qaeda, the U.S. had found itself on the same side as Al Qaeda in the battle to overthrow Bashar al-Assad.  If the effort had succeeded, the only result would have been to allow Jabhat al Nusra, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and like-minded groups to overrun Damascus, slaughtering Christians and Alawites and establishing an Al Qaeda state in the heart of the Levant.  It was a prospect too terrible even for the sleepwalkers in the White House, which is why Obama seized on the vote as an excuse to back down.

Reason prevailed, amazingly enough.  Since then, the administration has continued driving with one foot on the brake and the other on the accelerator, opposing Al Nusra and ISIS while at the same time putting out feelers to “moderates” such as the Islamic Front whose views are hardly less genocidal.  The White House still calls for Assad’s removal even though the consequences would be even more catastrophic than in South Sudan, another place where U.S. nation building has gone awry.  The administration meanwhile administration supports the Maliki government in Baghdad in its battle against Al Nusra and ISIS in Anbar province, but only on the condition that it not support Assad in his battle with the same forces on the other side of the border.  It is like fighting Hitler on the western front but refusing to back the Soviets fighting him in the east, an insupportable policy, in other words that can only lead to disaster the longer it goes on.

What else happened while I was laboring over my book?  Oh, yes, the federal government shut down in mid-October as it teetered on the edge of default.  The fact that the Republicans ultimately pulled back seems to have convinced a lot of people, including a number of Marxists, that the whole thing was for show and that, when push came to shove, there was never the slightest doubt that Congress would live up to its obligations with regard to the international capitalist system.  I more or less agree even though the possibility of the Republicans doing something truly crazy can never be ruled out.  Nonetheless, I think the episode is still worth taking seriously as an example of the growing stresses on the constitutional system as a whole.

Why?  Leftists often dismiss the “Repocrats” as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, bourgeois parties that are two sides of the same coin as far as loyalty to the ruling class goes.  This is true.  But while there is no doubt that the two parties are equally loyal to the bourgeoisie as a whole, they represents different wings of the ruling class that are locked in an increasingly poisonous struggle over political and economic strategy.  One wing is isolationist and authoritarian with a touch of the Old Confederacy about it, while the other is more sophisticated, “liberal,” and internationalist and hence more responsive to needs of global capital.  One party seems “progressive,” while the other seems more and more the personification of Sunbelt bigotry.  But what gives the debate an increasingly bitter edge is that neither strategy is really working.  What with military tensions in the East China Sea, economic stagnation in Europe, and a Muslim world that is on fire from one end to the other, Obama-style internationalism is in a free fall.  Yet the alternative, a retreat to some small-town Fortress America, is hardly viable either.  If France and Britain were able to stage an orderly retreat in the 1950s and ’60s, it is only because they could count on an even more powerful empire to pick up the slack.  But as the first – and hopefully last – global empire, America is all alone.  The instant it pulls back, a power vacuum will develop and disorders will erupt.  Who knows, for example, what would happen if the U.S. were declare the East China Sea a bridge too far?  Would war erupt between Japan, the two Koreas, and the PRC?  It is hardly farfetched, which is why the U.S. cannot afford to gamble.  The empire is grotesquely over-extended, yet has no alternative but to stick with the status quo.

This makes Obama seem not only more progressive but more practical, too.  But he’s not – he’s merely a deer frozen in the headlights, unable to move forward or back and therefore helpless before the coming onslaught.  The U.S. should be rethinking its foreign obligations at this point and, in particular, taking steps to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, which has the effect of inserting it ever more deeply in the affairs of an explosive Middle East.  Yet for any number of reasons, it can’t.  It has no choice but to stick with the current policy, disastrous as it might be.

Meanwhile, the economy remains awful for everyone but a small number of Wall Street investors while the political system grows creakier by the day.  The spectacle of a small number of Republicans shutting the government down in October was indeed appalling.  But when the constitutional machinery dates from the days of silk knee-britches and wooden teeth, one can expect it to seize up when under stress.  The system fairly cries out for an overhaul, yet thanks to an increasingly restrictive amending clause, the prospect is unlikelier now than it ever has been in the past.  Faced with all those antique pulleys and gears, Boehner & Co. couldn’t resist tossing a wooden shoe, or sabot, into the works the way striking mill workers used to in Belgium and northern France.  The result was no doubt a satisfying crunching sound as the mechanism ground to a halt just as it was for the original saboteurs.  Although they eventually had to pull it out, the Republicans certainly succeeded in demonstrating just how shaky and vulnerable the whole affair is.

But the GOP’s ludicrous tactics should not cause people to forget that the debt question is quite real.  Contrary to all the Krugmanites out there, the federal debt burden represents a growing danger from an imperial point of view.  Since the Crash of 2008, the federal debt load has risen from 68 percent of GDP to 99, nearly a fifty-percent increase.  To be sure, the cost of servicing the debt has remained stable thanks to the easy-credit policies of the Federal Reserve.  But you don’t have to be a Niall Ferguson to recognize just how easily the situation could change.  No one knows what the precipitating factor might be, a run on the dollar, a decision by the Chinese to dump U.S. treasuries, or whatnot.  But regardless of the details, the fact remains that the Fed can’t hold interest rates artificially low forever.  When it finally yields to reality by allowing them to rise, the cost of servicing the debt will go up.  What now seems to be a manageable debt load will suddenly grow unbearable.  The consequences will make 2008 look like a passing squall.

So the U.S. is caught between equally unpalatable choices in this regard as well.  It can’t not borrow because the economy would stall and it can’t borrow ad infinitum because a day of reckoning is surely on the way.  The only thing it can do is stick with the present course while promising to cut back at some later date, which of course never comes.  Sometimes, muddling through works; the British, after all, made it into an art form for much of the twentieth century.  But in this case, it is more and more obvious that it will not do.

The brinksmanship on display in October did have one positive outcome.  The disarray on Capitol Hill seems to have put to rest once and for all the ridiculous patter about the U.S. system of checks and balances being the greatest plan of government since the Garden of Eden.  So complete was the breakdown that, for a few days there, the blogosphere seemed to overflow with talk about the dysfunctional government bequeathed by the Founding Fathers.  “Our Broken Constitution,” Jeffrey Toobin’s entry in the field in the Dec. 9 New Yorker, was typically shallow and glib, especially since it wound by assuring readers that “the founders … left just enough room between the lines to allow for a continuing reinvention of their work.”  (Translation: readers can go back to sleep.)  But at least it makes clear that the perfection of the U.S. constitutional system is no longer one of those things that can be simply be taken for granted.  This is a small revolution in itself.

LSD manufacturer Owsley Stanley at his arraignment in 1967. Where is he now that we really need him?

In case you haven’t noticed, the Middle East is exploding.  Yes, I know, it’s always exploding, but this time is different.  In a replay of the fitnas that raged across the Muslim world in the seventh and eighth century, the Shiite-Sunni conflict is flaring from the Persian Gulf to the Nile, threatening to bring the entire region down with it.  Is an extremely ugly situation with no obvious way out.  So what should the United States do in response?  The only answer is to get itself out of harm’s way double quick.  Nothing it does will make the situation better and, in fact, will only make it worse.  So the only solution is to pull out before it finds itself badly singed as well.

But it is impossible to withdraw from the Middle East without addressing what got the U.S. involved in the first place, i.e. oil.  With per-capita consumption double or triple West European levels, America is far and away the heaviest major user of fossil fuels in the world.  Despite the recent uptick in domestic energy production, it remains massively invested in the Middle East, not only as a consumer but as the leader of a global economy that is highly dependent on fossil fuels as well.  The situation is grim, therefore, but not hopeless.  If only on a technical level, the solution is actually rather easy.  All the U.S. has to do to dig itself out of its hole is (a) institute a comprehensive program of carbon taxes and other reforms aimed at de-incentivizing fuel consumption and encouraging a shift to conservation and alternate energy sources and (b) re-jigger the tax code so as to preserve progressivity and insure that the burden does not fall on workers and the poor.  As any competent economist will attest, human beings are highly price sensitive.  Keeping prices artificially low creates the illusion that oil is cheap and abundant, no matter how much you tell them otherwise.  Taxing oil and eliminating a host of hidden subsidies such as free highways and free parking drives home the point that fossil fuels are actually highly expensive once the full range of associated costs – global warming, military expenditures, etc. – are factored into the equation.  Directing the resulting revenue stream to other forms of transport renders everything from trains and trolleys to walking and cycling more attractive and more competitive.  Americans may claim to love their SUVs, but all you have to do is change the price structure to see how fast tastes can alter.

So in the end it is rather simple.  All Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and John Boehner have to do is lay the problem out, come up with a plan that is both simple and effective, and then walk it through Congress.  No U.S. politician likes voting for a new tax no matter how many good causes it will fund.  But no U.S. politician wants to be ensnared in a nightmare like the one unfolding in the Middle East.  So once the situation has been explained, we can be confident that the people’s representatives in Washington will do the right thing by putting the country on the path to energy sanity.

Thank God for LSD, eh?  So much better than the dreary reality we all find ourselves in….

In fact, the chances of anything like this happening are absolute zero.  If Obama were to so much as whisper the phrase “carbon tax,” the Republicans would begin firing on Fort Sumter while the Democrats would head for the hills.  Not only does America’s superannuated political system render any such reform impossible, it makes it impossible even to think about it in a rational, comprehensive way, which is why no pundit who wants to be seen as practical and realistic would so much as pen an op-ed article on the subject.  Global warming is accelerating while conditions in the Middle East grow more dangerous by the day.  Yet both the White House and Congress are structurally incapable of doing anything other than burying their collective head in the sand.

This is an old story, admittedly.  But think what the consequences of such political paralysis will be.  While carbon taxes would lead to higher prices at the pump, the effect on the global oil market would actually be the opposite.  By putting the world’s most voracious oil consumer on a diet and inviting others to follow suit, it would send a message to producers like Saudi Arabia that the market for their sole export is shrinking.  The pressure on prices would be increasingly downward.  Not acting, on the other hand, sends a message that demand will continue despite the depressed capitalist economy.  Prices will remain strong, while profit margins will stay healthy.  Thousands of Saudi princes will rest secure in the knowledge that they can to continue blowing huge wads of cash on casinos, prostitutes, and Ferraris while arms will continue flowing to Wahhabist pro-Al Qaeda rebels in Syria.  Considering that Saudi Arabia already spends an astounding 13 percent of GDP on its military – nearly fifty percent more than what Israel spends – U.S. arms manufacturers will also have the satisfaction of knowing that generations of petro-sheiks will continue buying F-16s and other baubles.  But it will also means deeper involvement on the part of the Pentagon and a growing likelihood of American “boots on the ground” in Syria and elsewhere.

Mobil, Exxon, and Grumman will make out very well.  But more and more sons and daughters of the American working class will come home either in body bags or minus various organs and limbs, while the consequences for the masses of ordinary people in the Middle East will be even more horrendous.  In a 2009 cable made public by Wikileaks, Hillary Clinton confided to her fellow diplomats that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”  If so, then with crude currently at $105 a barrel and rising, higher in real terms than even during the oil spikes of the 1970s and early ’80s, U.S. energy policies enable them to donate even more.  The effect is to fuel terrorism even as Washington launches massive domestic-monitoring operations to supposedly combat it.  It’s the best of all possible worlds for militarists and authoritarians.

The deepening constitutional rot in Washington is thus not only a domestic problem but an international one as well.  Looking back across the decades, we’re often struck by how clever the architects of the post-war capitalist order were.  Instead of the renewed depression that everyone expected (the threadbare Oceania of Orwell’s 1984 is a perfect example of this mindset), they engineered a 25-year boom that remade the world.  They stumbled badly in Vietnam, but recovered sufficiently under Reagan and Bush I to vanquish the Soviets and impose law and order of a sort in the Persian Gulf.  But as the economy has crumbled, the instability has deepened.  Although Americans still think of him as a liberal do-gooder, Obama has done nothing to stop the drift to war.  In fact, with his ready resort to drone warfare, his subservience to the Saudis, Qataris, and Turks, and his sword-rattling in Syria, he’s done everything to exacerbate it.  The masses are sleepwalking over a precipice, yet so far there seems to be no way to wake them up.

I think I need another hit of that acid….