• For a little over a decade the US has been granted a reprieve from Peak Oil. After world conventional crude oil production peaked in 2005-6, shale oil, especially in the Permian Basin, took over. But now there are voices in the energy industry timidly venturing that shale oil is also approaching its peak, perhaps as early as 2025. What this means is that the US will once again be forced to become a major oil importer — but this time will scarcely have the funds to pay for expensive imported energy. What this implies is that any plans to reindustrialize the US will be dead on arrival.

• Perhaps the worst of it is the level of US government debt, which now amounts to something like a third of global GDP and expands by a trillion dollars every time you blink. Interest payments on US federal debt are exceeding one major category of federal spending after another: they surpassed defense spending earlier this year and are getting ready to surpass Social Security spending. Things that can’t go on forever never do.

Clearly, the American system is in need of reform, and urgently so. But what if it can’t be reformed? What if it is, by now, a fully evolved system incapable of further evolutionary change? The metaphor of a biological species is an apt one: a species generally evolves to a point where just about any mutation in its genome is either harmful or fatal; past that point, a species loses the ability to adapt and goes extinct. Sabre-toothed tigers don’t devolve into house cats. Tyrannosaurus rex does not shrink and go back to catching insects.</

But there is no need to wax metaphorical. All empires collapse (and the US is indeed an empire with increasingly frustrated global aspirations). When they do, they are generally replaced with something smaller, simpler and much poorer. Of the two great 20th-century empires, the USA outlasted the USSR by some 35 years. Had the USA collapsed first, as it very well could have, then perhaps the USSR would have outlasted it by some 35 years. The point is, in the final analysis, they will have both collapsed; there are simply no other alternatives for empires except to collapse.

If you are old enough or have studied a bit of history, then you probably know the meaning of the Russian word “perestroïka.” It was the name of the campaign of reforms instigated by Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. His initiative was initially greeted with great enthusiasm at home and abroad. Abroad, the enthusiasm for him never waned, especially in the US and in Western Europe, as people watched the fearsome USSR go down on its knees and expire in pain. There were lots of tisk-tisking and crocodile tears over the plight of the poor Russians in the US in particular. At home, Gorbachev went from being most loved to being most hated in just five years as the economy fell apart, the people lost their livelihoods and their savings, the country disintegrated into a large set of corrupt little fiefdoms and anybody who could do so fled abroad in search of a better life.

The USSR was still great and powerful at the time Gorbachev took over. People in Russia and the other Soviet republics were living better than ever. They had stable jobs with good career opportunities, good housing with central heat and running hot and cold water, excellent public transportation, free and excellent education and medicine, free summer camps for the children — all the basics and lots of extras. What was missing was unimpeded access to luxury consumer goods. What’s worse, the communist party functionaries had such access but the proletariat which they ruled did not. Enough people found this situation so absolutely intolerable that they felt that the Soviet system had to be reformed.

It’s the usual problem with needs and wants: needs are finite and the Soviet system met them in spades; wants are infinite and no system can provide them to everyone. In a capitalist system, needs go unmet due to lack of money, and a person’s lack of money is easily explained: the person in question isn’t a big enough scoundrel and thief. But in a socialist system everyone’s wants need to be met or the system isn’t considered socialist enough. What a predicament!

Which is to say, not all problems have solutions and not all systems can be reformed. As Gorbachev went ahead with his reforms, not really understanding what it was he was reforming, the system simply broke. Strangely enough, it broke in all sorts of wonderfully resilient ways. There was still electricity, heat and running hot and cold water in the homes, nobody got evicted, public transportation kept running, children went to schools, hospitals continued to perform operations and a great many government-owned enterprises continued to function at some level even when they couldn’t pay the employees. But shelves in stores were mostly empty and many people had to resort to growing their own food — never mind luxury consumer goods!

This obviously didn’t look anything like what Gorbachev had promised and so Gorbachev was out, the USSR was broken up and Yeltsin was put in charge of Russia (which amounted to most of it). Yeltsin was little more than an American puppet (his first phone call after signing the papers that broke up the USSR was to George Bush Sr., the US president at the time) and he ushered into power a clan that swiftly privatized (i.e., stole) much of Russia’s public wealth. On his watch, Russian society deteriorated to the point where there were ethnic mafias and mobs running illegal businesses in most of the major cities and there was a low-intensity civil war (with pockets of high-intensity action) in many places. Eventually Russia was able to rebuild itself as a capitalist society with a strong federal center and a large role for the government in the economy. This model seems to suit Russia well given its size, climate and historical traditions.

Whether the United States will be able to go through a similar cycle of death and rebirth remains an open question. Russia is a historical multi-ethnic state, one of the oldest in Europe, with its own language, culture and a thousand-year history of statehood preserved through unmatched military valor. Moreover, it has a distinct tendency to periodically burn down and rise from the ashes like the mythical phoenix, growing bigger and stronger each time: Kievan Rus, then the Novgorod Republic, then the Kingdom of Muscovy, then the Russian Empire, then the USSR, and who knows what the future holds for the Russian Federation. The United States, on the other hand, is a former colonial possession of the now extinct British Empire with a borrowed culture, borrowed religions and a borrowed language — not the genuine article by any stretch of the imagination. Will its lapidary motto “E PLURIBUS UNUM,” (out of many, one) that it prints on its money, still hold in the future? Perhaps it will need to be changed to “E PLURIBUS NADA”? Only time will tell.

What are the chances of American Perestroïka actually working out? Just imagine that the military-industrial complex will cheerfully accept a huge haircut and major layoffs, that the crooked doctors and pharmaceutical companies will voluntarily embrace health care reforms that will turn them into lowly public servants, and that the three-headed beast that is the Federal Reserve, the US Treasury and the US Congress will be gently persuaded that they should suddenly start living within their means while paying down public debt? Not a chance!

If so, we need to consider the second Russian word in the list: “perestrelka”. It means “the shootout.” There seems sure to be a bit of a civil war. Certain public figures would get shot; it would be highly traditional to start by shooting a Kennedy. (Americans are by now conditioned to shrug their shoulders and wave their arms helplessly when a Kennedy gets shot: nobody ever knows who did it except the damned conspiracy theorists.) But at some point the people might start to organize against this federal reign of terror. Certain states would attempt to secede and a low-intensity civil war, flaring up to high-intensity in certain places, would commence.

This could go on for years, but all things, especially very bad things, have to come to an end eventually. Evil is just the absence of the good, and once there is nothing good left at all, then there is, by definition, nothing left. At some point enough people on both sides get shot to make further shootouts unprofitable and an uneasy truce is gradually established. By then it will be time for the third of the three Russian words: “pereklichka.” It means “the roll call”: figuring out who is still left alive in order to try to salvage what can still be salvaged and to rebuild what can still be rebuilt. Even if there is nothing left to salvage and nothing can be rebuilt, the survivors can find each other and be miserable together; misery loves company.

If what is about to happen is really the Second American Revolution (and it doesn’t seem like it can be avoided) then certain rules about revolutions would apply. The first of these is that revolutions eat their children; thus, the slate of candidates for important federal positions that have been proposed may not survive their tenure and neither may their leader. The second is that revolutions are hard to start but once started are impossible to stop. What tends to follow is a period of revolutionary terror followed by a counterrevolutionary terror followed by a counter-counterrevolutionary terror, each with its own bloody excesses and waves of destruction. There is typically a complete lack of clarity as to what happened or why. For example, did Stalin execute too many people, or not enough? This question can be argued either way.

Fully two decades ago, in 2005, I published an article: “Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century.” Some Americans found it quite funny at the time — but now they no longer do. But the lessons still apply — more and more with each passing day.

[…]

Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/d6856766-c718-4c3d-985e-9215f8356b24