The Emperor Has No Brains

America's post-electoral military escalation might amount to nothing, or it could be the last act of an empire gone mad. On ATACMS, ICBMs, and more nuclear poker

One more time, maybe the last, Joe Biden stared through sunglasses and angrily delivered a speech written to be uplifting. “The Amazon is the lungs of the world!” he??at the G-20 summit in Brazil, before loping off with an unsmiling half-wave, like a man leaving a restaurant with lousy service. The President of the United States disappeared into trees.?

Aides said the jungle?exeuntwas planned, but who knew? In an all-time awkward moment Monday, G-20 leaders waited and finally took a group photo?, absent for “logistical reasons.” It was like taking a holiday portrait at the mall without Santa. When Biden reappeared the next day, a reporter shouted, “Mr. President, why did you change your mind on Ukraine shooting long-range missiles?” Biden said nothing, so other heads of state had to speak for him. “I had an excellent conversation with President Biden, he’s a friend and ally,”??Canada’s Justin Trudeau, through a nervous smile. “We talked about a lot of different things.”

Who’s calling the shots for NATO? On the heels of??that U.S.-built ATACMS missiles were fired into Russia,?-made “Storm Shadow” missiles were shot into the town of Marino yesterday in Russia’s Kursk region. Reportedly, French SCALP missiles??the next Western long-range weapons deployed. But that’s just the beginning:

Our just-commenced sixty days of nuclear chicken appear also to include this week’s cutting of an undersea Internet cable linking Finland and Germany, an act German Defense Minister?.” Another Baltic Sea cable??was cut the day before. CNN’s Jim Sciutto said American officials are “extremely concerned” about both incidents, though the Pentagon insisted, “We are not at war with Russia.” Finally there was today, Thursday, when the Ukrainian Air Force released word that Russia fired the first ICBM in the history of war,??of Russia to the Ukrainian city of?:

An unnamed American official??this was no ICBM but an “experimental medium-range ballistic missile.” Others said it was an “intermediate-range ballistic massile,” or IRBM. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said otherwise in a post on Telegram: “All characteristics — speed, height — point to an ICBM,” he said, while Ukrainian army officials said they were “95% certain” it was an ICBM. Russians offered no comment, but?Moskovsky Komsomolets??the missile may have been an R-35M, which was once believed to give Russia first-strike capability and nicknamed “Satan” by NATO. The Russian daily added:

If the information about the launch of an ICBM is confirmed, this will become a clear signal to Kyiv: a nuclear warhead may arrive next.

No historical analog to this situation developing in Ukraine and Russia could possibly exist. Humanity approached World War before, but never like this, without a clear idea of who the decision-makers are. This is the logical conclusion of an argument we first heard after Biden’s shaky debate performance?on June 27th: yes, the White House matters, but the actual president is an afterthought. Former Biden video producer Chris Strider tweeted then, “” (causing partner-in-crime Walter Kirn to note, “”). Democratic fundraiser Joe Cotchett told the San Francisco?Chronicle?the party’s “bed wetters” needed to get over themselves and elect a “‘.” Added?The View’s?Joy Behar: “.”

When polls plummeted Democrats abandoned the line, and Biden backers knifed him for the good of the congregation. A big blow was?(“I consider him a friend… But…”), then?(time for Biden to “pass the torch”), then?(give the party’s “deep and talented bench” a shot), then?. Who made the final call on removing Biden remains a mystery, maybe by design. The original?cri de coeur?of the administration was the “.” Unlike a Trump administration, we were told, people like Tony Blinken and Avril Haines and Jake Sullivan could mind the store even if the chief began jousting with??or shaking??. The “adults” need to know who’s making decisions, but we don’t, just like we don’t need to know who’s dealing the next hand of nuclear poker.?

“?” was asked by the RNC in August, after a photo of Biden sleeping on a beach was released. What little information we’ve gotten since about our still-President has been scattershot. After the election, Biden offered a few remarks to “bring down the temperature,” before assuming a “noticeably quiet” posture. Former Obama advisor David Axelrod channeled poet Robert Herrick, suggesting the lamp of heaven was setting over our President. “His race is over,” Axelrod?. “His day is done.” That was fine, but then came Sunday’s announcement in the?New York Times:?“.”

Biden!?News that our sunbather-in-chief “authorized the first use of U.S.-supplied long-range missiles by Ukraine for strikes inside Russia” was delivered by unnamed “U.S. officials” to the?Times, which was content to pretend in print that zombie Joe Biden actually made this decision. The story came out just as he arrived in Brazil to freeze before the shaking of ceremonial instruments:

Whichever NATO geniuses cooked up the missile scheme, their endgame appears to involve landing the Ukraine war in a sweet spot between survivable chaos and Armageddon before the White House must be handed to the Trumpian gorgon. Who made the call??, who arrived for vacation in Hawaii as the first ATACMS exploded. One can imagine Blinken or Jake Sullivan or Lloyd Austin thinking it amusing to welcome Trump back by leaving this colossal geopolitical dump on the floor, but what’s Europe’s motive? British author Anatol Lieven?:

The raises the question of why, after worrying obsessively about the risk of a Trump administration “abandoning Europe,” the British and French governments want to stick their countries’ necks out in this??just before Trump actually takes power. After all, Trump’s supporters?Biden’s move as a wholly illegitimate pre-emptive strike… to wreck the President-elect’s future Ukraine policy and bequeath him a deeper crisis with Russia, and they see the British and French as Biden’s accomplices in this.

In the last 30-40 years the major political controversies in America have mostly been marked by the same unease over a leadership class that’s seemed more interested in expanding imperial influence than governing a country. From NAFTA to the Battle in Seattle to Iraq to Trump’s election (a mirror of the Brexit/Leave movement) to Covid and this new pair of dangerous and unpopular wars, the schism kept widening. The battle lines have been between those who want elected officials focused at home, and those more interested in making sure America remains a world leader at the helm of international institutions like NATO, the UN, the IMF, the WTO and WHO, etc.?

Who makes up that latter group? TED talkers, Davos visitors, CEOs, politicians, Hollywood stars. The rich, basically. Wealth is a nation unto itself now, and the major problem of the last 25-30 years in America is how easy it’s become for people with money to live in archipelagoes where national problems don’t reach. It took a bizarre stunt for the immigration crisis to briefly?. The Hamptons barely noticed inflation because residents were too busy enjoying??of??during the pandemic. For the “able to work remotely” set, lockdowns meant more time with the kids and many of those people never returned to work at all, allowing the high-earners who did go back to enjoy?, and so on.

The last election was an obvious referendum on Wealthistan residents. At some point America’s rich decided?noblesse oblige?was a net minus and seceded both from the cities Trump called “shitholes” (exodus of the affluent?c) and the rural areas where “white rage” was said to live. They settled in dots of exclusive suburbs that use??to keep multi-family housing out and single-family prices high. They then planted “Hate Has No Home Here” signs on lawns and sent their kids to preposterously expensive resort-like colleges, with giant natatoriums and jargon-packed goofball curricula designed to further alienate offspring from the rabble. As a Victorian gentleman had more in common with a Tsarist prince than a Yorkshire miner, Americans from this bubble feel more at home in Geneva than Tulsa or Deland.

It was easy to predict that voters would eventually revolt as national governance withered, but the curveball was how much this governing class let itself go. By the time Trump came along, they were too dumb to do anything?well. When being rich meant being fabulous and oversexed the poor and middle classes tended to look up in awe, but upscale America wolfs down censorship and idpol fads and its idea of fun is throwing soup at a Van Gogh over the climate. They refuse to produce likable politicians or non-shitty movies because that would require mixing, even for mercenary reasons, with deplorable (read: geographically American) culture. Their self-isolation from conventional life is so total, even?tits?coded as right-wing in 2024. They won’t do journalism, long an employment program for the incompetent rich, because it requires sharing common truth with undesirables.?

This exclusive culture is failing everywhere — the??is the latest sign of apocalyptic social change — but anyone paying attention in the last weeks noticed a lack of alarm. With the election over, Wealthistan culture is finally free of any obligation to pretend to care about mass appeal. Now it can be the exclusivity religion it always was. Members believed in moving power from nations to corporations and international bureaucracies like the Fed/ECB, the G20, the WTO, the Five Eyes, the EU, while mostly paying lip service to national governance. Now they can stop bothering with the lip service. Biden’s blank stare in this sense is a powerful symbol. They kept this helpless mannequin in office as a message, as an expression of contempt for our desire to be kept in the loop. You want to know what’s going on? Go ahead, ask Joe. Or check the sky for missiles. Also, fuck you! And Happy Indigenous Conquest Day.?

What craziness. Let’s hope it all cools down in the next days. Can we Make America Boring Again??

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