Saturday Commentary and Review #181

Syrian Collapse Reverberates in China, Post-Liberalism and the Merging of State and Economy, European Pessimism/US Declinism, Frankfurt School in Napoli, Kickboy Face

Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

The last time that we spent some time together here Bashar Assad was still in power in Damascus. “Stunning” has to be the best word in the English language to describe the chain of events that began with HTS making a run for the suburbs to the immediate west of Aleppo and that ended with al-Jolani entering the Syrian capital as a liberator (of sorts).

All of us should have seen this coming and many of us did expect the US-led anti-Syrian coalition to use Russia’s diverted attention, Hezbollah’s tactical defeat, and Iran’s embarrassing loss to Israel as an opportunity to settle some scores. What is by far the most shocking is the speed with which the regime fell. I am reminded of how Adolf Hitler argued that “with one swift kick” the USSR would collapse. The Soviets didn’t, but the Syrian Ba’athists most certainly did.

I have been following the events very, very closely, but I have also been keeping my powder dry because it is a monumental event that is reverberating around the world, with its significant impact still not fully understood as of yet. That powder will be used tomorrow when I publish a long essay covering the events of the past month in Syria, and within a larger historical and geo-political context. It should be a good one.

It would be remiss of me not to permit a bit of discussion about the collapse of the Syrian government in this weekend’s SCR though, which is why I am using this report about the threat posed to China emanating from Turkestani jihadis who took part in the offensive that ended Bashar Assad’s rule:

China’s concern stems from credible reports of the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) fighting alongside HTS. The TIP, also known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), is a Uyghur separatist group with origins in China’s restive western province of Xinjiang and deep ties to al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups.

It is seeking an independent Islamic state in Xinjiang called East Turkestan. TIP was designated a terrorist organization by China and the UN, and up until 2020, also by the US. The militant group was founded in Pakistan but has since established a foothold in neighboring Afghanistan. In recent years, the group’s influence in Afghanistan and Pakistan waned under Chinese pressure.

In a surprising turn of events, many of the militants and their families took refuge in the Syrian rebel stronghold of Idlib. By 2017, then-Syrian ambassador to China Imad Moustapha claimed that there were as many as 5,000 Uyghur militants in Syria.

Turkey backed the TIP’s relocation to Syria, a gambit that effectively killed two birds with one stone. Turkey is sympathetic to the plight of its oppressed Turkic brethren and it was able to take the Uyghurs under its wing in areas under its influence in northern Syria.

“….and up until 2020, also by the US.”

TIP is a jihadi group that is a potential destabilizer in China’s Xijiang Province (also known as East Turkestan). It would play a role similar to that of the Mujahideen in Chechnya after the First Chechen War, whereby it would work to spark unrest in a minority Muslim region, invite harsh retribution to radicalize the local population, and result in condemnation of China, and potentially spark a rebellion. This group is closely managed and supplied by NATO ally Turkey.

Chinese Major General Jin Yinan has claimed that the TIP is fighting in Syria to draw attention to the Uyghur cause and to gain combat experience so that they can one day use those fighting skills against Beijing.

The claim was confirmed when the Emir of the TIP, Abdul Haq al-Turkistani, called on Uyghurs from around the world to join the fight against the Assad regime – and China. “Today, we are helping our brothers wage jihad in Greater Syria. Tomorrow, the soldiers of Islam must be ready to return to China to liberate Xinjiang from the communist occupiers.”

Beijing claims that the TIP carried out terrorist attacks in China in 2008, 2011, 2013, 2014 and 2015. Attacks included ramming vehicles into pedestrians, stabbings with knives in public areas, car bombs, and suicide bombings.

It is difficult to verify if the group was behind all of the claimed attacks. Some were probably carried out by lone wolves disgruntled with the social-economic inequality in Xinjiang.

Nonetheless, Beijing blames the group for all of the attacks and has implemented restrictive measures, epitomized by huge detention facilities, in the Uyghur’s home province in response. These strict measures will not likely keep a lid on the unrest forever, with clear signs it continues to bubble just beneath the surface.

As the USA lumbers toward its “Pivot to East Asia”, the temptation to use such a militant group will be too tempting to overcome. Recall that just prior to the breakout of COVID-19 there was a concerted propaganda campaign about “genocide in Xinjiang” from your usual US State Department-backed outlets. If these accusations begin to flow once more, then TIP surely can’t be too far behind either?

Naturally, China is worried:

Indeed, in 2022, China’s Permanent Representative to the UN claimed that TIP-related violence was resurgent in recent years, saying, “the TIP is not only launching attacks in Syria, but is also using Syria as base to recruit and train militants to launch attacks on China and Central Asia.”

To tackle the reemergent threat, Beijing vowed to “coordinate with Syria and other relevant parties to combat TIP terrorism.” The statement was made amid reports that TIP participated in an attack that killed 112 people at a military academy in Homs last year. What the statement meant in actual practice, however, remains unclear.

…but still has not directly intervened on the ground in Syria:

Despite TIP’s supposed rising threat to China’s national security, Beijing has remained steadfast to its decade-long modus operandi of non-intervention. It has been content so far to freeride on other countries with boots on the ground in Syria.

The only meaningful action Beijing took was to hold high-level talks with Damascus to share intelligence on the TIP’s movements on a monthly basis beginning in 2016. This intelligence stream will discontinue with Assad’s fall from power.

China’s apparent inaction sends a message that while Beijing is concerned by the fact that if battle-hardened TIP militants – known for fighting like “lions” in Syria – make their way back to China in sufficient numbers, it will face an insurgency many times stronger than the previous one it does not believe this will happen as it is unclear the TIP can and will return to China.

Central Asia as a springboard into Xinjiang?

Beijing is worried that while China itself remains out of reach, TIP militants will once again settle in neighboring Afghanistan and Pakistan. That’s a high risk as the two countries have become safe havens in recent years for various terrorist organizations, including ISIS-K, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA).

Indeed, there has been an uptick in attacks on Chinese citizens and assets abroad in recent years, especially in Pakistan. Despite the lack of available evidence, Beijing believes these attacks stem from the TIP’s collusion with ISIS, al-Qaeda and the BLA to undermine China’s overseas interests and investments.

Therefore, should battle-hardened TIP militants return to Pakistan and join forces with the TTP, BLA and others, as Beijing claims is already happening, it would pose a serious threat to China’s strategic interests as its flagship project – the Belt and Road Initiative – runs through the country.

My contention has for a long time been that one of the main reasons that the USA stayed so long in Afghanistan was to facilitate and support raids into Xinjiang through Afghanistan and possibly Kygyrzstan as well. Also note how Chinese infrastructure projects have been taking hits in places like Pakistan. The Americans have repeatedly stated that they won’t let such a project be completed without a few difficulties popping up during the course of construction.

There are a ton of spin-off effects resulting from the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, and this is one of the more significant ones. We’ll tackle these in tomorrow’s essay.

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Public-private partnerships sound neutral to most ears, as the assumption is that the two come together for the benefit of the common good in that one can help fill in a need for the other when necessary to do so. There are certainly quite a lot of examples of such partnerships being beneficial as intended.

Ideally, such partnerships are limited in that the domain of one does not cross over into the other. To paraphrase Christ: Render unto the state the things that are the state’s, and unto the private sphere that which is private. Unfortunately, this neat division has long ago been abrogated…..something that all of you are already aware of and something that has best been exemplified via how Big Tech colluded with the government to censor people’s opinions on social media not too long ago.

In the old days, liberalism not only meant a tolerance for differences (including that of opinion), but also that personal liberty should be maximized so long as society at large was not negatively impacted by said liberties. The fly in the ointment was “society at large”, an exception that has in recent decades experienced a significant expansion in and transformation of its meaning. In western societies, intolerance was for a long time considered to be the preserve of the conservative and those further to the political right, but nowadays it is the mainstream political liberal who is much more visibly intolerant of different opinions in particular (even though they perceive themselves as the more tolerant ones, and as being its standard-bearers).

The “illiberal liberal” has managed to weaponize the entirety of society (or “whole of society”, as per the Obama era) to more easily shape their own country to best resemble the ideal form that it should take. This has permitted them to do “end runs” around procedure and bypass national constitutions. It has a bipartisan history, especially in countries like the USA, but its roots are entirely liberal, or better yet, post-liberal, as Nathan Pinkoski argues in this brilliant essay:

The state-society distinction reached its apogee in the mid-twentieth century, when the triumph and challenges of the postwar moment clarified the importance of defending social freedom from state power, while ensuring that the public realm was not taken over by private interests. Over the last few decades, this distinction has been eroded and finally abandoned altogether. Like it or not, the West is now postliberal.

What does Nathan mean?

This is not the same “postliberalism” that we are accustomed to hearing about. Postliberal thinkers from Patrick Deneen to Adrian Pabst have exposed the conceptual problems inherent in liberal theory. Liberals justify the separation of the public realm from the private sphere by appealing to value neutrality. This notion of separation involves a certain moral and metaphysical thinness. The commitment to neutrality is thought to prevent states’ coercing belief through law and force. It protects the private sphere, so that individuals and associations can live out their creeds. Yet by promoting civic neutrality, liberalism socializes us to moderate our ambitions for public life. Against this view, postliberal thinkers argue that the liberal state’s rejection of a substantive vision of the good hollows out politics and civil society. Liberalism produces a state bent on driving tradition and religion out of public life, an atomistic society in which money is the only universally acknowledged good. Postliberal intellectuals contend that if our ruling classes relinquished their liberal commitment to neutral institutions in favor of a substantive vision of the good, we could renew our civilization.

In short, Postliberals (Nathan’s spelling) are pragmatists, or even utilitarians, in that they happy to use to the newly-crafted weapons at hand to create their perceived better society even if it upends old, core liberal traditions like neutral institutions. This is very interesting!

Some history:

Leftist intellectuals were among the first to recognize the collapse of the old liberal separation between state and society. In their view, neoliberalism was to blame. Under Reagan and Thatcher, the private sector began to take over the public one; corporate power took control of the state, and economics captured politics. But this analysis gets ­reality backwards. The state has not been suborned by economic interests. Rather, political interests have come wholly to dominate economic and financial interests, fusing state and society together.

The triumph of the political is most evident in the way today’s debates about liberalism proceed. They are invariably concerned about connecting liberalism to international politics, the postwar liberal international order. To save liberalism, centrist stalwarts call for America to defend the “rules-based” order set up after World War II. It’s a familiar story: In the aftermath of the war, international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were commissioned to establish the bases for an impartial system of economic competition. But because of communism, postwar liberalism had a limited reach. The fall of the Eastern bloc changed that. The end of the Soviet empire vindicated liberalism, and after 1989, liberal institutions could truly become international. Neutral, procedural mechanisms would coordinate divergent interests on a global scale. Now, however, Russia’s military aggression and China’s ascendancy are straining this globalized system. Populists undermine it at home. So laments the narrative.

and

The international situation tells the tale of postwar liberalism’s breakdown most clearly. Neutral institutions, particularly financial ones, have been weaponized to serve political ends. In this realm, the erosion of the distinction between state and society has been quiet and subtle, yet startlingly effective. The political transformation of world finance has driven domestic upheavals and reordered the way we are governed. It is the engine of the West’s great transformation from liberal modernity to something new—to actually existing postliberalism.

The American Greenback freed from being tied to the gold standard actually made the USA increase its global power:

The first sign that we don’t live in the old postwar liberal international order is that the economic system underwriting it has long ceased to exist. In August 1971, Richard ­Nixon decided to suspend the convertibility of the dollar to gold. The change shattered the economic system established at Bretton Woods during the final stages of World War II. Nixon’s decision initially shocked the global financial system, but it laid the foundation for American financial ascendancy. The dollar replaced gold as the backstop of global finance. Thus, as the United States entered the first stages of de-industrialization in the 1980s, American economic and political power did not decline, as experts anticipated. Nor did anyone really comprehend the tremendous political advantages implicit in the transition from a gold standard to a global economy based on America’s fiat currency. The American political classes were, at least at that time, only dimly aware of their own capabilities. They were focused on other objectives.

Economic liberalism was paired with social liberalism to spread the Gospel of Liberalism worldwide in the wake of the collapse of the Berlin Wall:

On July 3, 1989, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Wall Street Journal affirmed its commitment to the following constitutional amendment: “there shall be open borders.” The surprise events of the following November provided the opportunity to implement this vision of a truly global economy committed to the free movement of goods, capital, and labor. But just as the Wall Street Journal editorial had opined that more minorities were needed to help Americans “acquire a renewed view of our own difficult past,” so openness meant advancing the spirit of anti-discrimination further than ever before. This imperative set the transatlantic tone for the next few years. In 1990, Congress raised immigration to unprecedented levels to boost economic growth. It also abolished much of the English-language testing for naturalization and made it easier for homosexuals to immigrate to the United States. That same year, the Schengen Convention proposed the abolition of all border controls within Europe. In 1991, Congress passed new civil rights legislation that cemented in place the doctrine of disparate impact. To abolish discrimination on the basis of sex, the European Court of Justice overturned national laws that prohibited businesses from assigning women nighttime shift work. Open borders, free trade, and the open society: It seemed that neoliberalism’s triumph was complete.

From the vantage point of the 1990s, it looked like the Americans and Europeans were using the opportunity presented by the collapse of the Soviet Empire to construct a genuinely liberal global system. Economic affairs would be liberated from statist, political competition, the crude power contests of the past.

Utopian!

Note:

Utopianism of that sort may have animated commentators such as Thomas Friedman, and it’s still the way the stalwarts of the center recall the moment’s aspirations. But this account downplays the political and economic anxieties of the period. 1989 had set off a discreet but decisive geopolitical contest within the West. The Europeans were using the opportunity of 1989 to take continental integration to unprecedented levels, laying the groundwork for the Euro. Led by the French, they dreamed of building a new continental powerhouse that could challenge the United States. German unification was set to be the cornerstone of a single sovereign Europe. Yet George H. W. Bush made American support for German unification conditional on the French and West Germans’ preserving NATO and expanding it into East Germany. It was a cunning move. By keeping NATO alive, Bush forestalled European geopolitical independence. As the Cold War ended, the rationale for military and economic dependence on the United States receded. Yet the first Bush administration engineered events so that American political and economic power over the rest of the West became greater than ever before.

Let’s skip ahead a bit to get to the meat of his argument:

When Bill Clinton took office, he continued the pursuit of openness. In 1993, he ratified NAFTA and relaxed the ban on homosexuals in the military. However, he made it clear that the old liberalism was not enough. Eager to extend the reach of democracy and confront foreign enemies who stood in its way, his administration developed new tools to advance America’s global power. In September, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake outlined a new paradigm. His speech, “From Containment to Enlargement,” bespeaks a political revolution. It provided the blueprint not only for the foreign policy agenda of nearly every U.S. president since then, but for the convictions of every right-thinking person. Lake’s speechwriter was Anthony Blinken.

Lake began by denouncing neo-isolationism on the left and right. Its source, he asserted, lies in misguided economic anxiety. The speech contained the usual promises that global free trade would bring prosperity for all. But the economic benefit to American citizens was an afterthought. The speech focused on America’s new global political program. With the elimination of the “big, red blob” of communism, the United States would focus on expanding the world’s “blue areas” of market democracies—on regime change.

Yet the policy of enlargement was not just about using American military might to expand liberal democracy. Enlargement, Lake argued, had a second meaning. It was about developing and enhancing state-society partnerships. The Clintonians were learning from domestic politics. In that sphere, they were launching a revolution from “government” to “governance,” what Christopher Caldwell describes as the “great innovation of the Clinton administration.”

Borrowing from management theory, the Clintonians wanted government to expand to involve social actors. These actors were not held to the same rules of conduct as state actors were, and therefore could act much more effectively. By leaning on social actors, leaders could bypass state actors responsible to the electorate and could get good results. Domestic lessons set the precedent; after all, the civil rights revolution was conducted as a state-­society project. Court decisions had established the significant liabilities facing private organizations should they fail to be vigilant agents of anti-­discrimination. And private organizations learned to become very effective agents of this new political project. They had their vision of justice and wanted to achieve it. It was too important to leave that task to slow-moving governments. By the early nineties, there were now legions of NGOs, corporations, philanthropic associations, academics, entrepreneurs, journalists, and bureaucrats who expected to have a say in politics. They did not see themselves as bound by national loyalties, restricted by certain borders, or subject to rigid accountability structures. In the new era of “governance,” this dispersion of control was something to celebrate. It’s no surprise that Lake’s speech targeted “centralized power” as the enemy hindering the spread of the “blue” hue. Globalization’s interpreters, wedded to narratives about the obsolescence or privatization of the state, passed over the true significance of these changes. What was really happening was the deformation of the state.

The Clinton administration saw that achieving their foreign policy revolution would require looking beyond the state, just as the civil rights revolution had done at home. “We should pursue our goals through an enlarged circle not only of government officials but also of private and non-­governmental groups,” Lake argued, naming a range of social actors, from “private firms” to “­human rights groups.”

The Clintonians were offering the first theory of global management directed to geopolitical and moral objectives: a substantive vision of the good. State and social actors would be coordinated to fight the “intolerant energies of racism” abroad. They would confront what Lake called “backlash states,” isolating them “diplomatically, militarily, economically, and technologically.” Although he didn’t go into detail, Lake also portrayed America’s “financial” resources as “national security resources.”

Things should now be clicking in your mind: suspended bank accounts a la the Canadian Truckers, the hyperinflation of sanctions regimes that have been implemented worldwide, the complete weaponization of finance, and especially how business and government have worked hand-in-hand to help the USA pursue its foreign policy objectives.

This is one of the best essays that I have read in 2024, so do yourself a favour and read it in its entirety.

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I have grown increasingly bullish on US prospects these past two and a half years, with the rapid collapse of the Syrian government only reinforcing my position. Turbo America continues to (slowly) gain popularity among the chaterrati, even if many refuse to even consider it as today’s reality.

Much of what I write about it entails understanding reality, leading to many unfortunately confusing the descriptive for prescriptive. I try to do my best to constantly re-assess my priors in order to grasp reality as firmly as possible, whether it leads to optimism or pessimism.

French sociologist Emmanuel Todd has a new book out entitled “The Defeat of the West” (not yet available in English) in which he grapples with reality through his own lens and arrives at Point Pessimism. A noted contrarian, he has in the past gone from “America is enemy #1” to “only America can save France and Trump just might do it”, to only return to the beginning, as he became disillusioned by Trump’s failed first term in its inability to escape “Neoliberalism” and boost both manufacturing and the working class at home.

The following review of “The Defeat of the West” that was recently published in American Affairs has lots of fun stuff in it:

Emmanuel Todd’s latest book, La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West), begins by listing the many surprises of the war in Ukraine. First, the war erupted in Europe, the paradise where history was supposed to have ended for good. The second surprise is that the war in Ukraine has relatively little to do with Europe; the decisive actors are Russia and the United States. Another is the resistance of Ukraine itself, which was perceived by many in both the West and the East as a failed state. The Russians did not expect that defeating Ukraine would be so difficult. Western societies, for their part, were astonished to see a nation find its raison d’être in the struggle for its own survival.

Russia’s economic resilience has also been met with disbelief. Mos­cow has developed an immunity to sanctions, while Western industrial weakness is increasingly on display. According to Todd, Europe’s geo­political and economic passivity has also been starkly evident. Moreover, he argues, the war exposed the ideological isolation of the West. The illusion of an integrated world under American hegemony has burst, revealing the final truth that the French thinker wants to impart to us—the defeat of the West.

No need to mention my view that the ‘defeat of the West’ is not happening anytime soon.

Whether we believe that Europe imprudently disregarded the possibility of war in Ukraine for ideological reasons, or simply lost the industrial capacity to prepare for it, Europe’s passivity stems, according to Todd, from the Maastricht Treaty. Maastricht, he argues, marked the ascendance of several related trends: the moment when elites enclosed them­selves within an intellectual bubble, the beginning of deindustrialization, and the loss of economic sovereignty for European nations, which has instilled a sense of permanent pessimism on the continent.

According to Todd, the triumph of the euro was not only the rise of a transnational currency but ultimately the victory of a surrogate reli­gion. Maastricht messianism appeared in the specific context of the dis­integration of collective beliefs; the grand narratives that allowed indi­viduals to form a community had vanished. Todd points out that history provides many instances in which a crisis in religious beliefs trig­gered people’s desire to find security in the worship of money.

Yet faith in the euro does not necessarily translate into hope for the future. In his 2020 book Luttes des classes en France au XXIe siècle, Todd argues that the single currency, embodying the ideology of the oligarchy, led to a loss of faith in the future among the French people. In addition to continually declining living standards in France, Maastricht messianism has led to depressive resignation among much of society. After 1992, it is not narcissism, as described by Christopher Lasch, that has prevailed, but “passivism,” as analyzed by Alain Ehrenberg in The Weariness of the Self. People have stopped rebelling because they don’t believe that tomorrow can be any different from today. Apathetic indi­viduals create an apathetic society incapable of real political conflict.

I think that Todd is spot on in his analysis here in that Europe is now a largely passive actor with events passing it by. I will also agree that “passivism” is a fair characterization of much of Europe these days, albeit with a continually growing anger from certain segments. This passivism is not yet in danger of turning into fatalism, something that is deadly to any organism, thanks to the angry cohort that is making itself heard through the vehicle of populism.

This is also an excellent indictment of Europe today:

Meanwhile, European elites have yielded to what Todd calls the anti-ideology of “Europeanism.” It is an anti-ideology insofar as it does not allow for any active political community to emerge: the upper classes have been captivated by the belief that nations should not exist. In this respect, Europeanism is very similar to Anglo-Saxon ultraliberalism, which also dismisses the nation as a pernicious fiction. According to Todd, this belief manifests in various ways, primarily through efforts to abolish nations via European integration or to fragment them by geo­graphically separating minorities, ultimately increasing atomization in the name of multiculturalism.² Without a shared moral compass, society disintegrates “into isolated bubbles, confined to their own problems, pleasures and pains.” In this condition, the governing establishment constitutes nothing more than another “autistic group,” says Todd, with the only difference being its greater visibility.³

At a more practical level, the abandonment of the national framework in economic thinking has led to many policy mistakes that have weakened European states. Alternatives to liberalism have been stamped out, reducing economic policy exclusively to making the labor market more flexible or to cutting public spending. Another consequence of rejecting the concept of the nation is the neglect of demographic issues.

To Todd, France no longer matters as it gave up a large chunk of its national and economic sovereignty to the EU, meaning Germany. He considers France to be a satellite of Berlin and Washington. What we do not learn from this review is what Todd thinks of Germany’s rapidly sinking economy.

An interesting side note:

The U.S. nullification of Switzerland’s historic banking secrecy became a watershed moment, according to Todd, after which Euro­pean elites would have to park their money in tax havens subject to U.S. control.¹¹ According to researchers, “the US law enforcement authorities managed to coerce the transformation of Swiss banking secrecy regula­tions against the preferences of Switzerland’s government and financial sector.”¹² Swiss secrecy, which benefited the continent’s richest people, was unilaterally pierced by Washington. From the beginning, Americans framed the issue as a legal matter, thus avoiding politicization. The atmosphere after the financial crisis was conducive to such arbitrary actions. Washington hollowed out Swiss secrecy using the principle of extraterritoriality, and Switzerland alone could not stand up to a country with the world’s deepest financial markets.

On American Declinism, a school that Todd has reluctantly returned to:

Todd’s pro-Trump optimism has since given way to a belief in the almost certain decline of America. Todd writes that the United States has transitioned from being the world’s factory to its largest consumer, and despite Trump’s nationalist rhetoric, seems unable to reverse course.

With the outbreak of war in Ukraine, the West is sinking into a “false consciousness.” Having destroyed its own industry and working class, it is trying to prevail in a war that requires industrial might. Viewed through List’s prism, the United States is vulnerable, having lost its industrial base and instead placing its faith in the illusion of “infor­mation highways,” through which flows, in the parlance of Xi Jinping, spiritual opium.¹⁹

Within the United States itself, life expectancy for the poorer popula­tion is plummeting, and the hypertrophy of finance has turned politics into a pastime for the rich. The rest of the globe, Todd asserts, views the West not as a bearer of democratic uplift but rather as a constellation of liberal oligarchies holding the poor in contempt.²⁰ The “Global South” prefers Moscow and Beijing to Washington. Future historians, he says, will be astonished by the West’s narcissistic blindness to this fact.

Even in the realm of technology, the U.S. advantage no longer seems as formidable as Todd previously argued. While China may not yet be at the cutting edge in semiconductors or aviation, it has made remarkable progress in other areas. Chinese EVs pose a serious threat to European legacy firms, and their dominance in this sector has enabled them to overtake both Germany and Japan in car exports. In clean tech, China’s grip on the solar supply chain makes it hard for any observer to envision the “greening of the European economy” without Chinese involvement. As Dan Wang notes, China has a technological momentum of its own and retains considerable strengths, largely independent of its slowing economic growth or demographic challenges.²¹ Its strength lies in its workforce, which continues to advance in manufacturing complexity.

When it comes to another technology likely to mold the future econ­omy and warfare—AI—the U.S. lead may be temporary, if not already lost.²² Moreover, American STEM education is in deep crisis.²³ China produces more than twice as many PhDs in STEM fields annually as the United States. Washington’s technological hegemony is no longer unas­sailable, especially as China has become the greatest manufacturing power in the world.

Perhaps the last redoubt of American strength is its control of the global financial system. In La Défaite de l’Occident, however, Todd suggests that the dollar is America’s own resource curse. The United States has fallen into the habit of creating currency, which is easier than producing, say, machine tools. One can argue that this continuous injection of money into the global economy is precisely the reason why America will not be isolated anytime soon. Nevertheless, efforts to undermine the dollar’s dominance are gaining strength.

I strongly disagree with the argument that the Global South prefers BRICS to the USA…..they might prefer it in some ways (like the reluctance of the latter to lecture them on domestic issues), but they overwhelmingly prefer access to the US consumer market and the US Dollar.

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We’re already at 5,500 words after only three segments of this weekend’s SCR, so I’ll cut this one short. The Frankfurt School has left a notorious legacy not only in political philosophy, but also history and politics in general. In this slice of history, we visit them visiting Napoli in 1925, and how that sojourn made them “rethink modernity”.

Martin Mittelmeier’s “Naples 1925: Adorno, Benjamin, and the Summer That Made Critical Theory” (Yale), translated by Shelley Frisch, is a kind of intellectual history by way of Vitamin D synthesis. He examines how this group of thinkers was changed by the Italian environment. Although they had projects planned (Mittelmeier gives a rundown of the vast personal libraries they lugged along), they could not anticipate how Italy would operate on them. Coming from Germany, one of the most advanced industrial countries in the world at the time, Adorno, Benjamin, and the others witnessed a society that stubbornly resisted modernization as they knew it—or, as they came to feel, that found its own way through. “The experience of the city of Naples became an essential checkpoint for the analysis of modernity,” Mittelmeier writes. His book claims that the landscapes and the peoples of Naples and Capri are the forgotten “source code” for some of the most influential diagnoses of modern life.

Southern Italy was indeed a “foreign place”:

The “Naples” essay set off a lively competition among Benjamin and Lācis’s circle for who could write the best essay about southern Italy. Bloch, one of the more mystical members of the group, produced an account of his time in Naples and its environs in which there are stirrings of his later concept of “simultaneous non-simultaneity,” the idea that people—including Neapolitans—could live in different temporalities in the same place, at the same time: seventeenth-century social life but with telephones. He, too, was impressed by the porousness of life in the south. Watching a group of Neapolitans arrive at a restaurant and effortlessly enter the conversations already under way, he said, was “a true lesson in porosity; there is nothing aggressive about it, rather all is friendly and open, a diffuse, collective, gliding.” (One cannot help thinking that the observation reveals more about Germany than about Italy.) Adorno, in his own writing about his time in Italy, was more sensitive to the kind of willful projections his countrymen were making onto the place, which was already overrun by tourism. There was a Capriote fisherman named Spadaro, who had been photographed so many times for postcards that, Adorno wrote, “he himself has been symbolically lit up . . . [and] made the sea and stars unnecessary.”

Click here to read this in its entirety.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with a look at French enfant terrible Claude Bessy aka “Kickboy Face” and his partner of many years, Philomena. Here is the only introduction to Kickboy Face that you will ever need:

Claude, whose poison pen reviews in Slash were signed with the unassailable pseudonym, “Kickboy Face,” is a profane French chain-smoker who is utterly contemptuous of any kind of hipster canonization of punk or any other music form. When “Decline” director Penelope Spheeris asks, “Does Kickboy have a lot of enemies?,” he practically spits out his reply: “I should hope so, otherwise I am wasting my fucking time.”

As a co-founder of Slash, Claude’s partner Philomena “Philly” Winstanley does not often get her due. Alice Bag wrote of Philomena, “Even though she is reticent and extremely modest about her involvement, her importance to the L.A. punk scene should not go unrecognized.”

Close to the beach, the couple’s Santa Monica house became THE party spot and home-away-from-home for visiting musicians, from the Screamers to Nick Cave and Madness.

Gradually, the line between work and life began to blur. Exhausted, Philomena decided to leave L.A. and return home to London. Claude followed, eventually finding work at venerable label Rough Trade, and then at the legendary Manchester club The Haçienda as a video DJ. Through it all, his take-no-prisoners attitude about music remained intact and as refreshingly acidic as ever.

Eventually, they grew tired of their peripatetic lifestyle, and decided to settle in Barcelona. That’s where they stayed until Claude succumbed to lung cancer in 1999.

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