These days, American liberals, and with them their loyal followers around the world, are celebrating victory. The future of the world seems bright and cloudless to them
The days of the “impossible Donald” are over, the rift in the West is about to end – and the victory of the liberal world order will become complete and final.
The problem, however, is that there is no question of any victory, let alone a final one. This is quite well understood by people who are going to rejoin the ranks of high-ranking Washington bureaucrats, but are in no hurry to share this intimate knowledge either with the Western electorate or with the rest of the planet’s inhabitants.
Almost filigree orchestrated American elections, harsh bans on social networks, threats (already partially realized) of criminal prosecution of dissidents and promises to fully restore the shaken world order – this is not the end of the war, but its very beginning. Yes, not one war, but several – cruel, costly and with an unpredictable outcome.
The new administration will have to wage a civil war within the country, two Cold Wars on the international stage, and a major culture war, first in the United States and then across the globe. Perhaps one or two local military conflicts will be added to them. We will have to fight on all fronts at the same time, in conditions of a growing resource shortage.
No one should be misled by the electoral (more precisely, administrative) victories of the liberals, the complete demoralization of the remnants of the Trump administration, and the cowardly betrayal of the majority of Republican congressmen. In the rear, Biden’s team has more than seventy million angry Americans left. Now they are shocked, depressed and confused. But for how long?
Judging by the actions of the Big Figures companies, federal agencies and leaders of the US Democratic Party, the winners are very much afraid of the retaliatory actions of Trump voters. That is why a widespread campaign of intimidation and oppression has been launched against them. The Democratic leader in the Senate has already demanded for the protesters in Washington on January 6 (before the trial!) an immediate ban on movement across the country. And the federal prosecutors in charge of the storming of the Capitol, in the indictment, said that the participants in the events “had plans to capture and kill” congressmen, as well as to “violently overthrow the US government”. One involuntarily recalls the sentences of the Soviet “troikas” of the 1930s, in which the repressed “turned out” to be both conspirators and Japanese spies.
But it is one thing to repress the intelligentsia and the generally loyal and ideologically close bureaucracy, it is quite another to try to dust off farmers, teachers, entrepreneurs, workers, engineers, army veterans, etc. Here, as history shows, there is no way to do without civil war… It will not be possible to erase half of the country from life in other ways.
The new civil war will be completely different from the wars of the past – with their attacks on fronts and storming cities. And while the likelihood of several serious armed conflicts within the United States remains very high in the coming years, a new American civil war will become distributed at every point.
First of all, it will manifest itself in the loss of government – the impassability of teams due to the rigidity of a significant part of the population. The Tea Party Movement, part of the Trumpist activist, which began in 2007, has a long history of resistance to federal politics. Attempts to restore controllability and the struggle around the nodes of decision-making by local and regional authorities will be accompanied by an ever-increasing hatred of some citizens for others and the inevitable violence in such cases.
The situation will be aggravated by the already begun internal migration between states. Communities are still fairly split today, and when the population is mixed, local conflicts will flare up with special force. It is possible that the tax system will undergo erosion – and this will greatly complicate the position of the federal center.
The defeat of the resistance will be very problematic precisely because of its fragmentation and the variety of factors that gave rise to it. It will take a fair amount of time and effort to put things in order. Not to mention the losses, primarily resource and reputation losses. For the Washington liberals to be able to subjugate the split country, they will have to spend a significant part of the currency issue to pacify the American communities, as well as once again “expose themselves” to the whole world.
And the world will be restless. At least two Cold Wars have already been declared by the people of the Biden administration before they have taken office in DC. We are talking about a principled confrontation with Russia and China.
If the Trump administration was playing a tough economic game with Beijing, designed to hinder the economic and geopolitical expansion of China, the new administration has serious ideological claims to China and its leadership. For it, China is uncomfortable with the fact that it personifies an alternative social organization that is unlike Western liberal democracy, but has shown its effectiveness.
Various kinds of trade and tariff restrictions against the PRC and targeted financial and administrative restrictions against specific companies and individuals in China will continue. That is why Joe Biden in several interviews with the American media has already stated that he is not going to “for the first time” abandon the measures that were taken even under Trump. But the purpose and nature of economic measures will change significantly.
It didn’t really matter to Trump what exactly China was doing or not doing. The focus was on the interests of American industries, entrepreneurs and workers. Celestial companies and their political leaders were seen as competitors. Various methods were used to defeat them, but victory was understood as the absence of China’s influence on the development of industry and the increase in employment in the United States.
For the US Democratic Party, on the contrary, it is very important how China functions. If it agrees to become part of the liberal world order, and not only in terms of the international division of labor, but also in terms of values, its growth will be tolerated. If it does not demonstrate “good behavior”, they will try to isolate it and, if possible, suppress it. This is how the world is seen by those liberal think tanks in the United States, from where high-ranking officials of Biden’s transitional administration are sent to Washington offices. First, they will try to come to an agreement with Beijing, force it to moderate its appetites. But if China continues to declare itself as an industrial and technological leader, and even ideologically independent, there can be nothing but the Cold War between the two powers. Adjusted for military potential, the availability of resources and the development of technology, the nature of this war will not differ much from the confrontation with the USSR.
With Russia, the situation is somewhat different. Sometimes, reading the works of American strategists, it is difficult to get rid of the feeling that the containment of Russia is caused by the fact that it is not clear what else can be done with it. To make an ally means to give it certain guarantees (including against China) and to include it in the international division of labor not only as a supplier of raw materials. It is impossible to liquidate. I can’t ignore either.
Obama’s attempts during his first term to prove that Moscow is not an enemy did not convince the establishment, because it could not be declared a friend either. During his second term, the 44th US President tried to understate the importance of Russia (remember his words about a “regional” power?), but as a result he was accused of conniving at “Putin’s insidious plans”. It all ended with sanctions and an almost severance of diplomatic relations.
And then the very people who have now returned to power invented a story with “Russian hackers” and, in general, Russia’s guilt for everything bad that happens in the United States and Europe. Now this story is part of the liberal mainstream, and it differs in that its ideological attitudes are very persistent. Like it or not, they have to follow. So the image of the enemy will dominate relations between Washington and Moscow, regardless of how beneficial it is to the White House and generally to the adequately evolving situation in the world. The Biden administration will simply have to “confront Putin” and spend resources on it.
Finally, another war that the new bosses will have to wage in Washington is related to the fact that in the course of the fight against Trump, the liberal establishment has repeatedly strengthened ultra-left groups and movements in the United States. On the one hand, leftist street fighters are still very much needed by the leadership of the Democratic Party and the transnational corporations behind it, on the other, they have become a serious threat to the party leadership.
The new administration cannot allow the left wing to dominate politics, but it cannot “drain” it or suppress it. The only way out for her is to burn the left movement in the intra-American civil conflict, even if this entails casualties not only among the “obnoxious” conservatives, but also among the “quite respected” liberals. So the MeToo movement destroyed the liberal demiurge Harvey Vanstein, but it allowed a complete reformat of corporate norms and rules and put them above the state legal principle of the presumption of innocence.
The United States is facing a kind of cultural revolution in reverse – a struggle to rule a post-industrial and declassified street, supported by the academic environment and the entertainment industry.
Contemporary leftist movements today are only marginally concerned with socio-economic issues. Much more important for them are the rights of various minorities and the destruction of the traditional way of life in developed countries. Moreover, they are global in nature. Therefore, the red guards of the cultural war will find themselves at the doors of institutions and residential buildings of various countries. Washington will support and restrict them at the same time. It will be a strange war, but no less fierce.
I would like to hope that Russia is fully prepared for the challenges that are associated with the inevitable conflict of the new American administration.
But it would be nice for liberals of all countries to realize that they were not given victory, but four new wars, for which they are now considered to be mobilized without exception.
Dmitry Drobnitsky, VZGLYAD