Cutting the ties that bind

The decline of the American Empire

E-3G Sentry airborne warning and control aircraft deployed to Saudi Arabia from Tinker Aair force base, destroyed Saturday by an Iranian drone strike. Iran fired ballistics missiles at Israel and Iranian Houthi allies struck Israel from the south. (Image: @OSINTdefender via X)

A story surfaced last week, left over from Trump 45.

An old story but people covered it as if they were learning it for the first time.

Donald doesn’t do briefings.

Doesn’t read.

He gets videos of usually around two minutes that show things blowing up.

Donald doesn’t do briefings because Donald doesn’t do details.

Donald’s job is details.

Complexity.

One thing leads to another.

If this, then that.

Subtlety.

Nuance.

Donald doesn’t do any of those things.

That’s a problem.

A mismatch.

Complicated job meets simple mind.

Donald doesn’t do thinking.

Donald doesn’t think.

He reacts.

Donald surrounds himself with people who run their own game to curry favour with Donald and also play out their own agenda. His top advisors are a swirling pool of conflict.

Conflict of interest.

Conflicting views.

Conflicting goals.

Conflicting mental ability.

Donald says whatever pops into his head.

American news media - which includes the Americanized media in Canada - report his words as if they were not random, even as someone pointed out last week a single speech in which he said obviously contradictory things literally every few seconds. Couple of minutes at most.

That’s why there is what soldiers call a clusterfuck in the Middle East.

Not SNAFU.

Not TARFU.

Not FUBAR.

They are whatever is out beyond BOHICA.

Not just around Iran.

Everywhere.

If there are Americans, there is a G.O.A.T. rodeo.

Clusterfuck of the mongolian variety.

The Donald slapped tariffs on Canadian aluminum in 2025. Canada shifted aluminum sales to other parts of the world. Americans started buying aluminum from the Middle East. The Donald attacks Iran. Iran shuts down the narrow waterway that allows ships carrying oil, aluminum and lots of other things from Gulf states to the world. American gasoline prices spike. The Donald lifts sanctions on both Iranian and Russian oil to keep American prices down. Don’s MAGA stooges in the American congress welcomed Russian parliamentarians to Capitol Hill last week while the Russians flew satellites over American and Israeli targets like the Saudi airbase with the AWACS on the tarmac and kept feeding the information to the Iranians so they could kill Americans Israelis and destroy the AWACS, parked on a tarmac without any protection.

You could not make this stuff up.

American military power is in rapid decline.

Not just 45’s and 47’s fault.

Longer term.

Donald Trump’s stupidity just exposed what many have known for some time. The Americans are in deep trouble.

Donald criticized American allies for not doing enough. Fools in Canada and Europe took Donald’s whining as fact and not just the deflection it is. The same as his shit-talk about NATO not coming to the Gulf now is really about his own bungling and failure.

The Americans line up their airplanes across the Middle East like they did in the United States. Like they did at Pearl Harbour. Neat rows. In the open. They set up headquarters in buildings with no protection. Looks pretty. But makes for easy targets.

Like the Russians.

The Iranians hit the Americans all on the first day, kill untold many and forcing the Americans to shift their command units as far from Iran as possible. The Canadian Forces did not tell anyone that the Canadians at Middle Eastern bases got hit too. The Americans lied about it just like they lied about their carrier. Their brand new carrier Not damaged by a linty fire but by Iranian fire. Drones and missiles. Donald shits on the British carriers but he is just mad about his own crap. His own stupidity. His own incompetence.

But not just his, personally. The whole American military apparatus. Grown bloated and arrogant and stupid. An American general, Chris Cavoli tells Congress a few years ago that he doubted the Ukrainians could handle Patriot because it is so technologically advanced that the same people who have invented a whole new form of warfare with radio-controlled drones, computers, fibre-optics, signal detection, and frequency, the guys who shut down the Russian navy with remote-controlled speedboats or who hid drones in trucks and shipped them across a continent to blow up long-range Russian bombers that killed Ukrainians and last week shut down 40% of Russian gasoline refining might not be able to follow instructions delivered in cartoons for his soldiers and fire a missile.

As in the army, so in the navy.

The United States Navy in the late 1980s and early 1990s was considerably larger than its current version, almost twice as large in fact. There were six more carriers than there are now and those carriers divided the time on operational duty among them more evenly than now. Six American carriers at home. Only two in the Middle East. A Marine unit, the only deployed outside the United States, had to redeploy from Japan to invade Iran, leaving its replacement to steam from the United States to replace it. There are no prepositioned ships any more, loaded with equipment, berthed in safe ports like the soon-to-be former British base at Diego Garcia, that just needed people.

The result is less capability available when needed and lots of activity at home reported faithfully by conventional media and by the web of informal reports tracking ship and airplane movements, all of it reported in near-real-time to the Iranians. This invasion, when it comes will have far fewer soldiers and Marines than it needs, no matter what the mission and the Iranians have had since the start of the attack to get ready. Seizing Kharg island was a leaked target the first or second week as things bogged down and Hormuz is also a known target. The few thousand soldiers, far fewer pointy-end people than that big number read in a briefing, cannot do the Big Job in Iran. Full stop.

Americans have been claiming victory since before they fired the first shots at Iran this latest time. Ripple-firing numbers of targets hit. Brrrting that the Iranians are decimated and yet they still fight. Still hit hard. Actions always speak louder than words and the Iranians are very good at backing their words with actions.

Like claiming to hit an American carrier. Turns out they did it. The problem for the Americans is that they lied about it. Denied it in the beginning, but the truth came out, from the lips of Donald himself in one of his demented, babbling speeches recorded, and sent around the world in seconds by social media. He described not the events but the pictures he got from the video briefings like it was all a video game.

Trump who won the first time on a media campaign that was much more sophisticated than the arrogant onlookers assumed. Who won the second time because conventional media in the United States – also a shadow of their former selves - simply missed everything that was important.

But now, Bloated Donald the Bluff, Donald the Bluster, beaten.

Bested by supposed barbarians more sophisticated than his barbaric backers. The real barbarians, clamouring for the Apocalypse. The slobbering sociopath Hegseth. Lickspittle Lindsay, 47’s version of 45’s Risible Rudy but without the hint of Sylvester the Cat every time he opened his mouth. Mendacious Mario. Bullshit Barbie.

They are just the outward and visible sign of an inward, deeply rooted collapse. Again. The navy. Like the Space Cadets and the army and air force. Hooked on Big Projects with Big Budgets and High Tech where the careerists can punch tickets on the ladder to the top where they ring the bell and cash out to Big Pensions and new jobs working for the companies delivering the Big High Tech Projects that are easy to defeat.

The biggest change in the navy is the loss of smaller ships, like frigates and minesweepers, that do the dog work not just of protecting aircraft carriers but of protecting bulk carriers, crude carriers, and the other ships of the commercial fleets of all nations. The ships simply do not exist in the United States Navy any more like they used to. By choice.

Donald Trump says lots of things but every so often words come out that are real, that mean something. Outside the White House one day, Frustrated Donald told reporters that “We don’t use the strait. We don’t need it. Europe needs it. Korea, Japan, China. A lot of other people. They’ll have to get involved a little bit.”

That wasn’t just about a moment when, with the Straits of Hormuz closed thanks to Trump’s attacks on Iran, the global economy took a catastrophic hit and Trump tried to blame the Europeans and others for not helping him. This was not just Trump’s inability to see the aluminum connection or the helium connection, needed for microchips, or the gasoline connection. This was about a longer trend that lines up the decline of the United States Navy’s basic capabilities with what was happening in the Persian Gulf.

The United States Navy is not just out of the carrier-protection business. It does something else. It is out of the commerce protection business, which means it is out of the power business. The US Navy has abandoned Alfred Thayer Mahan’s belief that the ability to control sea lanes in order to protect global trade is the basis of power and prosperity. The Americans are also abandoning trade. Tariffs survive. The Jones Act, the one that strangles American shipbuilding stays, as an insular, isolationist, head-up-own-asserica weakens every relationship it has. Mahan believed in trade. Trump and his ilk belief in the idiocy of autarky. Of complete isolation and self-sufficiency, Enver Hoxha Albian style.

Military force has its own grammar but not its own logic.

The collapse of the Untied States is so plain now that Mark Carney was just the first to say the words that Singapore understands too.

“The US is now a revisionist power,” foreign minister Vivian Balakrishnan told Reuters recently. “For 80 years, the US was the underwriter for a system of globalisation based on UN Charter principles, multilateralism, territorial integrity, sovereign equality. It actually heralded an unprecedented and unique period of global prosperity and peace.”

Singaporeans understand the value of trade and free markets. “The story of Singapore, with a per capita GDP of 500 US dollars in 1965,” Balakrishnan explained, is the story of trade since the middle of the last century. “Now, [it is] somewhere between 80,000 to 90,000 US dollars. It would not have happened if it had not been for this unprecedented period, basically Pax Americana and then turbocharged by the reform and opening of China for decades. It has been unprecedented. It has been great for many of us. In fact, I will say, for all of us, if you look back 80 years.”

“But now, whether you like it or not, objectively, this period has ended. There is no point trying to assign blame or pejorative adjectives. That is not helpful. Basically, the underwriter of this world order has now become a revisionist power, and some people would even say a disruptor. But the larger point is that the erosion of norms, processes, and institutions that underpinned a remarkable period of peace and prosperity… that foundation has gone. What you are seeing now, whether you watch the war in Ukraine, in the Middle East or elsewhere, including in Asia, to me these are symptoms of the underlying tectonic rupture. Big powers and even lesser powers have a more narrow definition of national interest.”

Donald Trump’s shambolic second administration makes the decline of American power plain, naked, hard to ignore. Trump and his goons have added their own twist to the fall. “It is hard to convey the gloom that has overtaken Washington,” the noted historian Lawrence Freedman wrote after spending last week in Washington. “All the structures that are vital to crisis management have either been attenuated or disbanded. There is hardly anyone left on the National Security Council staff. A friend described an empty State Department where you could hear your own foot steps. Marco Rubio is involved in the decision-making but he has neglected to acquire the professional staff assessments that should inform such decisions (see this from Dan Drezner).

The military part of the Pentagon still functions, but the civilian part has been purged. At its head is Pete Hegseth who puts effort into looking charismatic and brings the perspective of a disgruntled junior officer to everything he does, waging his own war on ‘woke’ which in its latest version involves striking out the names of two black men and two women for promotion to general. Some satisfaction is taken that figures such as Elbridge Colby, who were supposed to be providing the intellectual heft to security policy, are now stuck defending exactly the interventions they were pledged to avoid.

And then overseeing this President Trump appears to inhabit an alternative reality which he shares regularly on Truth Social or whenever a reporter gets a microphone close to his mouth, which is quite often. His utterances have become increasingly incoherent, with contradictory statements following quickly one after the other, and frankly delusional claims.

Trump and his gaggle have left themselves with few options. This is just his chaotic, incoherent way. Gutting the civilian side of the Pentagon and putting the sociopathic buffoon Hegseth in charge means that the military with all its insitutional flaws dominates. They easily dazzle the arrogant and naive. No wonder, then, that the world saw flawed assumptions in the opening weeks as the Americans hit things that were important to them but unimportant to the Iranians. All air and no brains. All fluff and no goal. Some bravely venture that it looks like the clowns are making up the routine as the go but that is the truth others outside the United States see and can admit.

There are no Jedi left.

Trump “can take an off ramp,” Freedman concludes, “but … at this point the result of this operation will be to leave the US less respected and trusted than before and allies grappling with a problem not of their making. As things stand, this counts as a defeat.”

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