Fukuyama warned that people would either accept this state of affairs, or, more likely, revolt against the tedium of their own existence.

Effectively since the Great Wars, but more particularly, “since the financial crash of 2008, across Europe and in the United States, there has been (to borrow a phrase from Frank Kermode) a “sense of an ending”. Liberal orthodoxies have fallen into radical doubt. Populist movements are arrayed against the political and economic order that has stood in place for the past fifty years. Electorates have leaped into unknown futures”, Jacobson concludes – linking this to Fukuyama’s prediction that Homo Economicus’ ennui ultimately would lead them to revolt.

Well, orthodoxies have indeed fallen into doubt – and, for good reason: The prevailing liberal construct, with its grand theory about bringing peace and economic prosperity to the world by pulling down borders and uniting mankind into a new universal order, is in serious disarray. It has lost its credibility.

Let us not tarry too long over its recent history: the faux recovery; the massaged statistics, the panglossian narrative, the bailout of the financial system plus the ‘austerity’ deemed essential to whittle down the overhang of government debt, precisely incurred in order to bailout the financial system – with all austerity’s substantial hurts, justified in the name of restoring European competitivity.

But, as former US Budget Director, David Stockman has noted, the idea to restore competitivity in this way, always was nonsense. Central Bank policies of quantitative easing (QE) – the ‘loose credit’ tsunami unleashed at ‘no cost’ interest rates, over the last couple of decades – landed the ‘60%’ with a high cost economy which exactly precluded competition: “The Fed [in co-ordination with other Central Banks] drove up costs, prices and wages at 2%, come hell or high water. You do that for two or three decades and, all of a sudden, you are totally uncompetitive. You have the highest cost structure in the world economy, and the jobs and production migrate to where companies can find lower costs and better profits.” 

So here we are (after all the talking up of ‘recovery’), with Italy’s economy shrinking again, and now, with the German economy, Deutsche Bank warns, drifting toward recession. (German factory orders posted in December 2018 their biggest year-on-year slump since 2012). Evidently ‘the grand theory’ has not worked. So what does all this spell for the future of Europe?

“The idle vassalage” into which the majority would sink, which Fukuyama foresaw (and lamented), was already in evidence well before 2008 in European states, including Britain. Slavoj Žižek wrote in The Ticklish Subject: The absent centre of political ontology (1999) that “the conflict of [earlier] global ideological visions embodied in different parties which compete for power” had been “replaced by the collaboration of enlightened technocrats (economists, public opinion specialists…) and liberal multiculturalists … in the guise of a more or less universal consensus”. Tony Blair’s notion of the “Radical Centre” was, Žižek notes, a perfect illustration of this shift.

And, infatuated with the clarity and intellectual rigor of their vision centred on the unification of Europe, the ‘liberal’ élites have come to view it not as one legitimate political option among others, but as the only legitimate option. The moral illegitimacy of Britain’s Brexit thus became the unrelenting theme for decrying the Brexit vote. Adherents of the grand theory now find it increasingly difficult to see any need for the kind of toleration for national, cultural self-determination they once permitted. Tolerance, like nationalism, is out; anger is in.

Where now, if Europe is stalling economically? What might be the political repercussions? Recall what occurred in Japan some years ago: Japan was also over-indebted, the stock market bubble had popped in 1989, and financial experts had forecast a massive collapse of JGBs (Japanese government debt). What happened then was that Japan found itself in an economic stagnation that has lasted for decades. Is this then the future? Is the whole world about to ‘turn Japanese’ where, having so much debt, we cannot somehow return to historical normal yields (historically around 5%)? 

The Japanese it seems just accepted the ‘tedium’. Does Europe too just move to a very low-yield, low-growth, stagnation – within a global paradigm of stasis – that persists until we get to the point where there is either some populist uprising, or some event that resets the system.

Maybe not: Japan was always a special case. Its’ debt was held almost entirely domestically, and growth was occurring elsewhere in the world – albeit not in Japan. Nonetheless Japan serves as a ‘canary in the coal mine’ of the deadening consequences of excessive debt loads. 

Were we, however, to enter into a period where the US and Europe see little growth, and China is down at 4% and struggling – and having to bail out its banking system, and India hasn’t come through as people thought it would, then perhaps ‘this time’ Japan may not be such a good guide.

The point here is that we are at the crux of our dilemma: ‘the enlightened technocrats’ not only have got it wrong, but they have ‘painted themselves into the corner’ of yet more austerity for the 60%; and of throwing fiat money (perhaps even helicopter money) at economies already zombified by debt overload. One expert, Peter Schiff, always expected this:

“The reason that I originally said that I did not expect the Fed to raise rates again, was because I knew that raising rates was the first step in a journey that they could not finish: that in their attempt to normalize rates, the stock market bubble would burst, and the economy would re-enter recession.”

“Normalizing interest rates when you’ve created an abnormal amount of debt, is impossible.”

“I knew all along that at some point, that would ‘be it’, you know: the straw that breaks the camel’s back. I didn’t know how many rate hikes the bubble economy could take, but I knew there was a limit. And I still knew that there’s no way they were ever going to get back up to normal or neutral (rate of interest). Whatever that number is – It ain’t 2%.”

“Everything that the Federal Reserve built up based on cheap money, was starting to implode as the cheap money was being withdrawn … The US economy is built for zero. It’s not working at 2% and you’re starting to see that.” (Schiff was speaking at the Vancouver Investment Conference).

Europe, it seems then, indeed is hovering at the cusp of debt-induced recession. And the Central Bankers have no response. But to speak about the first recession in 26 years, is also to speak about a Europe where the youngest generation has no experience – no concept – of what a recession is really like. What does that imply? Grant Williams, founder of the influential financial Real Vision Television gives one answer:

[This is one thing that I really wanted to be proven wrong on]. “And that is that for the last several years, I have predicted a dramatic increase in populism, social unrest, and violence. And a lot of people thought we were conspiracy theory nutcases. Now, Paris is on fire … There is the old joke about the difference between a recession and a depression: It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job and it’s a depression when you lose yours. That’s what I fear. I think that you’ll find that after ‘08 people understand a lot more about finance than they did before ‘08. They may not realize it, but I think they now understand bailouts, they understand how unfair bailouts are when they’re targeted at Wall Street, as opposed to Main Street. And I think that what you’re going to see, sadly, is the Fed and the government will do what they’ve always tried to do, which is bail out Wall Street to ‘save the system’.

If you have a bad economy and you have people feeling like they’re disenfranchised and you tell them, you know what, we need to do this to save the system, well, suddenly the reaction changes. And the reaction is to hell with it, let’s burn the system to the ground. And if we’re in that place, which, again, it feels like we are – when you have this chasm between left and right in politics, you have an economy that is running on fumes, you have a stock market that is potentially at all-time highs, and you have a moment in time where things like the national debt start to matter, I worry like you do that the only way people are going to be able to express this is the way they are doing it in France now. And that is going to be a very, very bad outcome for one and all.”

Here, Williams’ discourse intersects with Fukuyama’s attenuated Homo Economicus: What happens when the latter, guided now solely by the “rituals of consumption in a world of civic putrefaction and cultural torpor” (now disembedded from the sense of esteem that comes from being valued as a human precisely as member of a family, a culture, a history, a people, a spiritual tradition or, a nation), faces the abyss: ‘the void’ of recession. Fear thrives particularly in the empty construct of an homogenized universality – absent to values, such as truth, beauty, vitality, integrity and life.

Williams responds simply: “Europe fails”.

“Macron is interesting. Macron came out of nowhere. Here we have an ex-Rothschild banker who was put up as the alternative to the very unpalatable – to the establishment anyway – Marine Le Pen … Well, guess what? The establishment pulled Macron out of nowhere: Young, handsome, erudite, very much in the Obama mold, who … spoke well, he looked great, he was very presentable, he was stylish. And Macron was that in spades. The fact that he was an ex-Rothschild banker seemed to pass-by most of the people voting for him. And he got it. And the establishment breathed a huge sigh of relief.

“But, guess what? He’s turned out, again, to be an appalling President. His approval ratings are – I don’t know if I’m right in saying they’re below Hollande, but they’re down there with Hollande, which I thought would be a remarkably difficult thing to do – but he’s achieved it with some ease. So I think Macron, to me, represented the establishment’s last roll of the dice. You know, here’s a guy, we’re going to put him in there, we’re going to get him to say all of the things we need him to say, and he’s going to calm things down, and he’s going to help this whole thing blow over. And nothing of the sort has happened. I think that … this populist movement is not going to just go away, and be placated. I think what’s happened to Macron in France is the absolute embodiment of that. So the fact that he is struggling, the fact that he is looking as though – I mean, in years gone by he would have already stepped down. Back when politicians had some shame, he would have already stepped down and taken responsibility for the state of the country. But they don’t do that anymore.

“So a failure of the EU is [that] everybody has their own currency and everybody has a border again. Now, the key to this is going to be the euro. Because it is the monetary union that is creating the problems now. It worked great when interest rates were going in the right direction. It worked great for everybody. Now they’ve started to go in the other direction and the debts have started to matter and the pressure is on these countries … People don’t understand what the euro represents. [Yet] they know that they can’t make ends meet.

“And they know that an answer to this from a political standpoint is to go back to – I’ll use Italy as an example – is to go back to the lira, pay off all of your debts in lira – a massively devalued lira – and not be forced to maintain a budget deficit that is dictated by Brussels – and to be able to spend and help your country come out of a recession. That’s what’s going to happen. It was always going to happen.

“But the way the bureaucrats in Brussels treat everybody – because they have to toe a hard line, they have to use the stick and not the carrot to keep this thing together – is we’re going to be all Brexit”.

Writing in The American Interest as the virtual crackdown on Alex Jones was underway, Fukuyama argued that the usual suspects of the social media universe – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Apple, and all of their vast subterranean holdings – need to come clean by entering a two-step rehabilitation program where they must: (1.) “accept the fact that they are media companies with an obligation to curate information on their platforms,” and (2.) “accept the fact that they need to get smaller.”

I think we can safely skip the “need to get smaller” suggestion with a hearty chuckle and focus our attention instead on the question of social media being held to the same rules as those that regulate America’s squeaky clean media divas, like The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC.

The social media monsters argue that since they do not create original content, but rather mindlessly provide the clean slate, as it were, for third-party developers to post their own thoughts, opinions, news and of course wild-eyed ‘conspiracy theories,’ they cannot be bound by the same rules and regulations as the mainstream media, which must bear ultimate responsibility for its increasingly damaged goods.

“We’re not a media company,” the late Steve Jobs of Apple fame told Esquire in a rough and tumble interview. “We don’t own media. We don’t own music. We don’t own films or television. We’re not a media company. We’re just Apple.” On that note, Jobs reached over and switched off the interviewer’s tape recorder, bringing an abrupt end to the strained conversation.

Thanks to the provisions laid out in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, the social media platforms are granted immunity from liability for users of an "interactive computer service" who publish information provided by third-party users.

The act was overwhelmingly supported by Congress following the verdict in the 1995 court case, Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co., which suggested that internet service providers that assumed an editorial role with regards to client content thus became publishers and legally vulnerable for any wrongdoing (libel and slander, for example) committed by their customers. At the time, when alternative voices on the social media frontier had not turned into actual competition for the legacy media, legislators deemed it more important to protect service providers from criminal proceedings than to nip freedom of speech in the bud. Honorable? Yes. But I wonder if they’d have made the same decision knowing the powerful forces they had unleashed.

At this point, Fukuyama summarizes the plight regarding the social media platforms with relation to their independent creators, who wish to express their freedom of speech.

“Section 230 was put in place both to protect freedom of speech and to promote growth and innovation in the tech sector. Both users and general publics were happy with this outcome for the next couple of decades, as social media appeared and masses of people gravitated to platforms like Facebook and Twitter for information and communication. But these views began to change dramatically following the 2016 elections in the United States and Britain, and subsequent revelations both of Russian meddling in the United States and other countries, and of the weaponization of social media by far-Right actors like Alex Jones.”

Despite being a learned and intelligent man, Fukuyama jumps headfirst into the shallow end of a pool known as ‘Blame Russia’, while, at the same time, blames the far-Right for the “weaponization” of social media, as though the Left isn’t equally up to the challenge of waging dirty tricks, in a crucial election year, no less.

Next, he genuflects before the Almighty Algorythm, the godhead of Silicon Valley’s Valhalla, which, as the argument goes, was responsible for attracting huge audiences to particular channels and their messages, instead of the other way around.

“Their business model was built on clicks and virality, which led them to tune their algorithms in ways that actively encouraged conspiracy theories, personal abuse, and other content that was most likely to generate user interaction,” Fukuyama surmises. “This was the opposite of the public broadcasting ideal, which (as defined, for example, by the Council of Europe) privileged material deemed in the broad public interest.”

In other words, had Mark Zuckerberg and friends not toggled their algorithmic settings to ‘conspiracy theories,’ then the easily manipulated masses would never have given a second thought to well-known catastrophes based on pure and unadulterated evil, like the Invasion of Iraq in 2003, which, as the tin-foil-hat crowd constantly crows, was made possible by the fake news of weapons of mass destruction.

Here, Fukuyama lays on thick his extra-nutty academic drivel: “This is the most important sense in which the big internet platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have become media companies: They craft algorithms that determine what their users’ limited attention will focus on, driven (at least up to now) not by any broad vision of public responsibility but rather by profit maximization, which leads them to privilege virality.”

In other words, internet users are not inquisitive creatures by nature with fully functioning frontal lobe regions like the honorable Francis Fukuyama. They do not actively search out subjects of interest with critical reasoning skills and ponder cause and effect. And let’s not even mention the mainstream media’s disastrous coverage of current events, which led to the alienation of mainstream audiences in the first place. In Fukuyama’s matrix, otherwise normal people subscribe to ‘alternative facts’ or conspiracy theories because those damn algorithms kept popping up!

This ‘more righteous than thou’ attitude on the part of left-leaning Silicon Valley prompted hundreds of independent channels – the overwhelming majority from the right – to be swept away by a force known as ‘private ownership’ where brutal censorship has become the latest fad. Fukuyama, serving as the mouthpiece for both corporate and political interests, shrugs off this noxious phenomenon by arguing: “Private actors can and do censor material all the time, and the platforms in question are not acting on behalf of the U.S. government.”

Let’s give Fukuyama the benefit of the doubt. Maybe there really is no cooperation between the most powerful and influential industries for manipulating public opinion and the U.S. government. Yet we would do well to keep in mind some key facts that strongly suggest otherwise. During the two-term presidency of Barack Obama (2009-2016), Google executives met on average once a week in the White House with government officials. According to the Campaign for Accountability, 169 Google employees met with 182 government officials at least 427 times, a Beltway record for such chumminess. What is so potentially disastrous about such meetings is that Google, the chokepoint on news and information, which has the power to actually rewrite history, is fiercely Liberal in its political outlook as some whistleblowers who escaped the well-manicured campus known for employee neck massages and free lunches. What was discussed in the White House? Nobody really knows. However, there is already a treasure trove of publicly available information detailing the intimate relationship between US intelligence and Google (as well as the other usual suspects).

Fukuyama tries to conclude with an upbeat, happy message by saying “private sector actors…have a responsibility to help maintain the health of [America’s democratic] political system.” However, judging by everything in the article that preceded that remark, I would have to guess Francis Fukuyama would fully support yet more intolerance in the world of social media as a means of preserving America’s freedom-squashing status quo.

Yet this presumption of moral and superiority and ideological inevitability by the leaders of the United States, the European Union, NATO and the Group of Seven (G7) nations has not been confirmed by any verifiable hard evidence.

On the contrary, the US State Department’s own reports have remorselessly documented throughout the 21^st century that every nation where the United States intervened either directly, applying kinetic military power, or indirectly destabilizing existing governments and urging other players to rise up to destabilize existing governments – misery, not happiness has inevitably resulted.

Whether one looks at Ukraine, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, Somalia or Syria, the pattern is always the same. Per capita rates of human trafficking, including, the enslavement of children for sexual exploitation, organized crime, drug trafficking, per capita hard drug addiction rate, and the likelihood of violent death has soared after every such US and/or allied military intervention. Life expectancy and standards of living as well as recorded GDP have plummeted catastrophically in every case.

Even the creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on June 15, 2001 failed to dent Western paradigm blindness, arrogance and complacency about the true, future “Way of the World.” Now we see the same extraordinary complacency presented by the Western elites to the crucial accession of India and Pakistan to the SCO.

The geostrategic, world historical importance of this development cannot be overestimated. For 17 years since the founding of the SCO, the United States and its NATO and European Union allies have pressed ahead in one minor war of destabilization and aggression after another. Yet every one of those misadventures has been a strategic and even tactical failure. The United States and its NATO allies have proven all too adept at starting wars around the world. Through fear and the narrowest calculations of self-aggrandizement, tiny nations from Estonia to Georgia have flocked to their banner.

However now, at a single stroke, the two giant nuclear-armed nations of South Asia – India and Pakistan – have set aside their existential rivalries and suspicions and have both sought security and protection within the framework of the SCO. And more, these two nations are both English speaking democracies!

How can the United States and the United Kingdom in particular now claim to uphold the cause of democracy when the largest, most populous democracy on earth – a nation of almost 1.3 billion people, and another nation with an English-speaking democracy – Pakistan – with a population now in excess of 200 million have now joined the SCO?

How can the United States, NATO, the EU or the Group of Seven now claim to uphold democratic values around the globe when two democracies with a combined population of more almost 1.5 billion – double the population of all the 28 nations combined in the EU and almost five times the population of the United States – have now opted to join the SCO?

Why did Delhi and Islamabad both decide upon such a n epochal move? Clearly, they did so in large part because both nations fear the future potential coercive designs of the Western alliances against either of them.

Therefore despite US efforts at engineering Regime Change from Ukraine to Brazil, the accession of India and Pakistan to the SCO confirms the isolation of NATO in the wider world, shrinking the alliance's expansion into Eastern Europe to just the western end of Eurasia and the periphery of East Asia.

This therefore is the self-inflicted strategic catastrophe that the fantasy vision of global strategic engineering and a worldwide “crusade for democracy” has inflicted upon its perpetrators. Rather than isolating Russia, or China or both of them – an absurd goal if ever there was one – the half-baked failed neo-conservative and neo-liberal Hegelians of the Sub-Age of Francis Fukuyama have isolated themselves instead.

Just as the capitalist United States, the communist Soviet Union and the paleo-colonialist British Empire all eventually joined forces to crush the mutual threat of Nazism, the neocon and neo-lib fanatics of Permanent Global Revolution (PGR) – democratic – style – have expended trillions of dollars and set off wars costing millions of lives – only to succeed in isolating themselves.

The solution to this global catastrophe for the forces of the West w is actually very simple and practical. It is to end the policy of endless military interventions, to immediately end the remorseless expansion of NATO and indeed to permit any nation within the alliance to quietly and efficiently decide to leave it whenever it so chooses.

All NATO nations, led by the United States must also solemnly undertake to respect the primacy of international law and to implement and respect all decisions taken by the United Nations Security Council where the permanent veto power still welded by the United States and its allies the UK and France provide ample diplomatic and legal protection against their own coercive and expansionist tactics being turned against them.

This is what the leaders of the West should do. But of course they will not. For when did Fools ever willingly embrace Wisdom?

America now must learn the hard truth of it's global position during this period of the Trump administration and beyond: the days of the United States dominating the world in an arrogant, absolutist, heavy-handed fashion and dictating to other nations what they can and cannot do (in particular in other nations territorial spheres of influence and backyards such as the South China Sea) are over and the United States must come to realise this and make the required if painful adjustment. It is no longer the only superpower on the planet and the days of American unilateral leadership are over whether it be political leadership, economic leadership or military leadership. The European Union is just as powerful economically as the United States when you combine the EU27 GDPs or PPPs. Russia is resurgent on the world stage, in particular in the Middle East, and most likely will be the main broker of peace in Syria. China is catching up economically fast on the United States and will undoubtedly overtake it economically within a few years (if it has not already) to become the planets number one economy while the days of American extreme and reckless military and political interference in the Middle East and Asia have produced nothing but chaos, violence, death & destruction and should be heavily curtailed with the prime examples being Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Korea. 

With the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union some foreign policy intellectuals in the United States such as Francis Fukuyama spoke of a period of World Affairs reaching the «end of history and the last man» with the triumph of American style democracy, American style free-market capitalism and American style politico-military interference, intervention and dominance. For a brief period of time under the Presidency of Bill Clinton during the 1990s this appeared to be the case. Yet it was a fleeting moment in time. The world has reverted back to a 19th century/early 20th century state of global geopolitics with no one power strong enough to completely dominate the entire planet. Indeed the state of international relations and global power politics in 2017 resembles what Europe was like on the eve of World War I with many rival and competing powers vying with one and another, none of them strong enough by themselves to exert total control and dominance. If this can be managed correctly with an emphasis on multilateral cooperation, mutual collaboration and mutual respect among these diverse Great Powers of 2017 then that is a positive development in World Affairs and World History rather than a unipolar Pax-Americana. 

There are other models of democracy rather than just the American (or indeed for that matter British) system such as the Chinese model of «consultative democracy». There are other forms of capitalism rather than just the American model of laissez-faire, free-market fundamentalism such as the German social market or the pragmatic Chinese Deng Xiaoping blend of state socialism and free enterprise. There are other schools of international relations rather than the Bush-Blair American militaristic hyper-interventionism such as global multilateral alliances dedicated to fighting Climate Change like the EU-China partnership or Russian diplomacy circa 2011-2012 re Syria rather than invading countries and engaging in «regime change» or whipping up opposition groups into a frenzy of violence without thinking matters through and understanding what one is interfering with. There are other philosophical traditions for underpinning ones society such as the supremely wise and enlightened Chinese philosophical tradition of Confucianism (which places paramount emphasis on harmony both internally within the self and externally within the collective community) rather than the American emphasis on extreme individualism and extreme competition which inevitably leads to conflict and individual/societal breakdown.

As with every country and every individual there is a great amount of good and bad. America is an amazing country with many great qualities, achievements and attributes. It is one of the greatest countries on the planet. But it is not the only one. Thus, this concept of American exceptionalism must be jettisoned once and for all. The immortal line of Charles Dickens «A Tale of Two Cities» rings so true regarding America and for that matter many other nations: «It was the best of times…it was the worst of times». There are a few simple steps American foreign policy can take to correct itself and set itself on a much healthier and harmonious course. Firstly, the United States should butt out of and back away from the South China Sea and stop interfering in that part of the world. Quite frankly, the South China Sea is really none of America's business and it should stop interfering in matters and whipping things up which are none of its business or in reality its actual concern. How would the United States feel if Asian countries started conducting «freedom of navigation» and «freedom of overflight» operations off the coast of Florida or off the coast of California? We all remember how the United States reacted when Cuba began basing Soviet missiles on Cuban territory. 

So no more double standards and no more unnecessary and counter-productive interference and intervention in the waters of the Asia-Pacific, specifically the South China Sea. Secondly, if the United States had listened to Russia in the early days of the Syrian conflict when it started in 2011 the situation may never have gotten so out of control, become so violent and dragged on now for six years. Ergo, the United States should listen to and respect Russian interests in the Middle East or NATO's role in Eastern Europe just as the Americans constantly lecture Russia to take account of American interests. Thirdly, the United States should back the Franco-German axis as the inner core of EU leadership and should back strongly deeper EU political, economic and military integration and give its blessing to an EU army. Fourthly, the United States should cease all arms shipments, military aid and CIA politico-military interference in Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia. Indeed, it would be best for everyone involved – the Arab states, Israel, the United States, Europe, everyone – if the United States effectively pulled out of the Middle East and dismantled its military bases there and a few other of its 1000 military bases scattered around the world and used these resources instead to focus more on putting the American house in order domestically.

In combating asymmetric threats, we have to ask ourselves, on which side of the asymmetry do we sit? Typically and almost in a cliché manner, we depict our side as superior – we have the technology, we have the equipment, we have the on-going development capabilities. But do we really have the money for such high-end, extended, near-endless military campaigns?

Consider the defensive action by USS Mason in the Red Sea in October 2016. Its response to a rebel attack compels us to rethink the cost factor involved in defensive measures, and how we popularly interpret the costs of war and national security. A few short seconds of fending off a Yemeni rebel attack cost the United States NAVY (USN) an unsettling $8 million. Cost of the rebel attack: $500,000 or less than 10 percent of USS Mason’s reaction.

In this article, we advocate a realignment of security and defense debates to position them in the context of what it means to wage high-tech war in the twenty-first century. The asymmetry of warfare has never been more evident than in the material costs of warfighting.

America’s wars of the twenty-first century against non-state soldiers or non-state militants seem to require high and higher-tech weapons. They will include machines necessary for fast and effective transportation, weapons that kill and do not kill, personal equipment as part of soldiers’ combat uniforms, “unmanned” or remote equipment, anytime/anywhere communications technology, robotic platforms, global surveillance and instruments like the Low-Cost Imaging Terminal Seeker (LCITS), and a turn to non-petroleum fuels. The costs associated with these requisite weapons and equipment are staggering.

It is necessary for states to consider the dissonance between low-tech attacks and high-tech defensive responses. As it stands now, high-tech states, due to their military preferences and strongly embedded high tech warfare cultures, have not really considered the options for low-tech response. War, or just simple security for that matter, has been reconfigured by states, with their advanced and technological weaponry, to become high-cost. In contrast to asymmetric enemies with much cheaper systems, this raises the question: What response options are available to countries like the United States if NSAs pursue cost-effective approaches to combat and the West. What are the potential ramifications of lost-tech/low-cost warfare against high-tech/high-cost security/defensive measures of states? It is unlikely that the United States can sustain such a war. U.S. military action against the Islamic State (IS) costs American taxpayers well over $600 thousand per hour. The cost of war in Afghanistan by the latter half of 2016 stood at $750 billion and $819 billion for combat missions in Iraq that could alternatively be funneled toward other more critical military and nonmilitary (i.e., statebuilding) projects.

The costs of U.S. military action, either offensive or defensive, stand at around $1.5 million for just one medium to long-range subsonic cruise missile like the Tomahawk. A single air-to-ground (AGM-114) Hellfire means an injurious cost of some $115 thousand. The shoulder-rocket named the Javelin costs some $150 thousand each. The APKWS II is about $28 thousand per unit. Our departure from bombs and embrace of precision-guided munitions (PGMs) and smart weapons generally has come without clear and constant consideration for the fact that precision has its costs. “Cheap” laser-guided weapons can have a price tag of up to $250 thousand attached to them.

One glaring flaw inherent in these weapons is their lack of deterrence. If they are to be used for security, there ought to be a purpose in their non-use; however, their non-use fails to deter the principle threats in a not-so-state-centric international realm.

We are confronting a similar friction observed after decades of spending trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons of all sorts, the nuclear-powered aircraft, anuclear-powered cruise missile (PLUTO), as well as a nuclear torpedo called ASTOR (otherwise referred to as “underwater insanity”) designed to be used against submarines. In the latter, the use of such a torpedo would have meant the destruction of the submarine that launched it as well as the target.

The idea of war is to cause destruction or damage to the enemy with the least possible damage to oneself, if any at all. That logic fails us in the case of ASTOR and serves as a metaphor for security and defense logic today in considering the weapons being designed and developed to guard against and pursue rebels like those who launched their rickety old rockets at a billion-dollar U.S. warship, which in-turn spent, a disproportionate sum to prevent that attack.

We should be alarmed at the potential reduction in the human costs of war if we are moving toward increasingly robotic warfare, and with this, the possibility of warfare becoming entirely economic.

Military leaders have an amazing ability to develop strategy but if they fail to take into account the economic costs, their strategies could become inherently unviable and unsustainable. To what extent is society willing to put up with wars that are foremost robotic and primarily economic?

We often think of our military capabilities as one that allow us to dominate the battlefield, to achieve full spectrum dominance and enemy/threat enclosure. Turning to “unmanned” systems, or (small) drones, such technology could start a new era of warfare in which actors with lesser-economic possibilities, not just capabilities, can seize upon the opportunity to expand the space of the battlefield to their benefit, namely through the use of simple drones, loaded with explosives. In this, actors would exploit different avenues or new ways (for them) of attacking their enemy.

This sort of scenario can be played-out along the lines of IS sending bomb-loaded drones against the Kurdish Peshmerga, or a terrorist trying to fly small-scale drones into the U.S. Capitol. It is pertinent to consider how this kind of approach to warfare and technology will evolve.

For the first time, technology actually seems to favor those with lesser possibilities but perversely presents more opportunity. Generally, technology has favored the actors who have the money to pursue the research and defense (R&D) side of warfare and warfighting, but now actors who do not have it can benefit in due course. Have we been too unmindful of how warfare has become foremost economic once again? Now actors with limited means actually possess the means to act beyond their material capabilities and limits and conduct strikes beyond their (limited) horizon.

This has hit the U.S. military at a relatively late point in the War on Terror and in context of the radically changing nature of the modern military landscape/character of war. But in a way we are still moving full-tilt down a path where we develop the means to attack ants using elephant guns. We tend to adhere to the idea of over-kill in a way that goes relatively unnoticed on our own side. During the Second World War, we sought to defeat the enemies of democracy and our self-styled freedom by dumping thousands of tons of bombs on Germany’s Kassel, Hamburg, Dresden, and Cologne, and Japan’s, Kagoshima, Tokushima, Fukuyama, Tokyo, and Yokohama (among many others.)

Today, we overkill the enemy using expensive technology and weapons that we mistakenly perceive to be produced at bargain prices. Comparing what the United States spends on defending against extant threats to what terrorists and insurgents spend presents a shrill contrast. It is as effortless as taking a stroll to a gun market. The going price for an American-made M-16 is $200, $400 for a Chinese- or Russian-made AK-47, and $150 for a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) at a gun market in Somalia. Obtaining the requisite small arms necessary to cause widespread panic and casualties on and off the battlefield is like sifting through used clothing at a flea market – no permission, no identification, no papers, no checks required; you just choose your weapon, pay, and be on your way to attack whomever you like. A standard suicide bomber belt costs just $150.

Perceptions of contemporary security and defense have to align with the costs associated with rebel attacks, the current economic climate, and the idea that abstaining from the purchase of a single $1-1.5 million cruise missile would enable the United States and others to purchase less-technologically sophisticated alternatives capable of achieving near-similar ends.

The debate about national security and military effectiveness should not be solely conducted within the existent framework. Economic perception and reality must be discussed too.

nationalinterest.org

I’ll never forget the irony of sitting in a conference listening to the British Liberal Democrat spokesperson for foreign affairs, a certain Baroness Falkner, condescendingly regaling the audience with her tales of a trip by a British parliamentary delegation to China and how she lectured her Chinese political hosts on the superiority of British democracy and the Westminster parliamentary system compared with the one party socialist state political system of the People’s Republic. It occurred to me Baroness Falkner was hardly the best person to espouse the virtues of democracy to the Chinese. After all, here was a British politician who was unelected and unaccountable to the voting British people. The Baroness owed her position in the unelected, undemocratic House of Lords to the cronyism of party political patronage. She had not been elected democratically and sat in an institution which represents the apex of the English class system and is thoroughly undemocratic. I’m sure the irony was not lost on her Chinese hosts as well, who probably had a good chuckle and took it all in their stride.

The democratic political system places elections at the heart of its model. Multiple political parties, some with radically different world views, policies and ideologies – have to appeal to a myriad of different interest groups and constituents in order to get elected. They have to adopt positions, espouse rhetoric and vote for legislation in line with their constituents wishes. If they don’t, then they won’t get elected and if they break with the platform they stood on, once in Parliament, they probably will be chucked out at the next election. Very few Western democratic politicians actually demonstrate real leadership. Instead they spend a great deal of time and money with focus groups and pollsters trying to figure out what it is that people want their politicians to do – what will get them elected – and then tailor a marketing strategy to reflect back upon the public the voters’ wishes and desires. Once elected they spend most of their time preparing for the next election, especially in America, with its two year terms in the House of Representatives. A permanent election campaign exists revolving around the single objective of getting oneself continually re-elected and keeping favour with their local voters and special interests rather than doing right in the wider and much bigger national and global interest.

Then there is also the huge amount of money one has to raise to pay for the ever increasing eye watering sums that political campaigns in democracies cost. Therein lies a problem for democracy as well. Who do democratic politicians really represent? The regular voter or the big moneyed donor? What do donors get in return for the fat cheques they write? Cash for access? Cash for influence? The nexus that exists between donations whether from wealthy individuals, large corporations, lobbyists, outside organisations et al., raises serious questions regarding whether democratic institutions adhere to a single standard of representation or whether the democratic system is based on layer upon layer of double standards. The US Supreme Court ruling of Citizens United in 2010 removed any limit on the amount individuals or other groups can donate to political campaigns leading to the flourishing of Super PACs. Tickets at Political fundraisers in America are now sold for as high as $35,000 far more than the average years’ salary for most Americans. The amount of money the British Conservative Party raises from bankers and hedge funders in the City and the opposing Labour Party raises from Trade Unions leaves many wondering who actually makes policy in both main parties?

Then there is the power of interest lobby groups who distort the democratic political process through massive war chests. There is no better example of this than the National Rifle Association in America. It is clear for any rational and sensible thinking person that there is a massive gun problem in America and that the gun laws need significant tightening up. But despite gun massacre after massacre in the US heartbreakingly underscored by the tragedy of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in December 2012, the Obama administration’s push for common sense gun safety regulations fell flat on its face in the US Congress. Not even in the Senate, which the President’s own party controlled at the time, was there any movement towards enacting stringent new legislation such as back ground checks. This was due to the might of the NRA which is a major funder of many politicians’ campaigns in America – Democrats as well as Republicans. The NRA puts the fear of god into many American politicos due to its ability to make and break aspiring and incumbent Congressmen and Senators. The only politician to seriously challenge the NRA in recent memory, Mrs Clinton, can do so because of the counter weight of her own prodigious fundraising machine. These powerful interest lobbies have row upon row of offices in and around democratic legislatures such as Capitol Hill. It has been well documented the outsized power and influence on the American democratic process of such groups such as AIPAC and Noraid, lobby groups that exists to champion the political issues of foreign groups which have nothing to do with direct, sovereign American interests.

The UK referendum on the EU is a classic example of the deep flaws that exist in democracy. When asked by Christiane Amapour of CNN on the morning of the Brexit result, why this referendum was held in the first place as to much of the outside world it looked like a needless, self-inflicted wound, the then Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond responded as if it was a no-brained: «But we are a democracy.» What appeared out of Hammond’s intellectual capacity was the fact that if Britain truly were a democracy then the referendum result would have been discarded due to the closeness of an almost split decision of 52% vs. 48%. On the basis of a 4% majority the entire country, including the significant 48% of Brits who opposed Brexit, will now be ripped out of the EU and plunged into an extremely uncertain and precarious campaign. And it was a horrible campaign with the Leave camp tapping into and exploiting the politics of ignorance, intolerance, xenophobia and latent racism much the same way as Donald Trump has been doing in America. Thanks to democracy, the United Kingdom is the most un-united it has ever been, for all the world, both friend and foe alike to see. What Hammond failed to grasp is that of all the Western democracies, the UK is the most undemocratic. There are more unelected members of the British Parliament than there are elected with the House of Lords now the largest Upper Chamber of any supposed democratic legislature in the world. Furthermore, the democratically elected MPs are not full time MPs. Incredibly, they are allowed to hold multiple outside jobs. When I worked for the Conservative MP – who at the time was the Shadow Chancellor, the Tories chief economic and financial policy maker – he was also employed by Rothschild bank as a part-time employee. Think of it: the chief financial affairs policy maker and spokesman for a major political party and aspiring Government in waiting working simultaneously for a major international investment bank and drawing a salary! Conflict of interest?

Democracy itself is no bulwark or guardian against totalitarian dictatorship. Some zealots of democracy like those in the Henry Jackson Society always point out that no two democracies have ever gone to war against each other. This is too simplistic an analysis and overlooks the fact that it was democracy – in one of the most democratic states ever designed – Weimar Germany that facilitated the growth and eventually rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. People often forget or overlook the fact that Hitler was brought to power through a democratic election. Just as a majority of British voters rejected the post-WWII project of European unity and integration with Brexit, so too decades ago, the German people embraced the promises of Nazism, in many ways just as so many alienated and feverish voters in America are embracing Donald Trump. Perhaps it is time to stop worshipping and fetishizing Western electoral parliamentary democracy and start to learn from other political systems that do contain democratic elements but are not beholden to multiple political parties with their basis of support derived from identity and grievance politics trapped within the media and elite manipulated perpetual cycle of election after election which only serves to undermine stability, cohesion, efficiency and wise public policy making.