I keep waiting for a Greenspan moment from a prominent neocon where he admits that he has found a flaw in his ideological model. According to the wayback machine–in the wake of the 2008 Wall Street Crash, Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, conceded that the global financial crisis has exposed a “mistake” in the free market ideology which guided his 18-year stewardship of US monetary policy.

The problem for the neocons is that they failed to factor in the unbridled greed of their neoliberal fellow travelers. The neocons missionary zeal to extend Pax-America into ever corner of the world ran headlong into the neoliberals propensity to off-shore, outsource and ultimately financialize the US defense base, with Boeing being the the poster-child of this arrangement.

Because if there’s anything that symbolizes the pernicious effects of neoliberalism, it’s the door blowing off a 737 MAX, sucking a boy’s clothes out, and falling into a schoolteacher’s backyard. And that’s just the latest incident. The 737 MAX has crashed itself twice, killing hundreds, blown out doors midair, and the engine can melt itself if the pilot isn’t careful. These are not isolated problems, they are simply the malign effects of late stage financial-capitalism.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that we have an outsourced-empire, where looters can take advantage of unlimited military spending with zero oversight. The military/industrial/complex (MIC), along with other sectors is characterized by a high degree of monopoly, a high degree of rent-seeking in the sense that the MIC, for example, essentially relies on vast government contracts, which are risk-free in which they get to mark up costs as much as they like. The upshot is that the US produces high-tech weapons that often prove to be overly complex and fragile when actually deployed in combat, as the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is demonstrating.

It is grim picture of corruption, financial and, most importantly, intellectual rot within the US military and foreign policy establishment. But, the neocons never noticed, or more likely because of the Atlanticist triumphalism that took root after the end of the Cold War, they viewed it as a “free market” triumph. I’ve become convinced that they really bought into the arms merchant’s sales pitch, of American technological wonder-weapons that would vanquish all before them.

A large part of the problem lies with the ideology of the US as the most technologically superior nation, relying largely on air power to maintain its military dominance. This worked when the US was attacking Third World nations lacking comprehensive air defense but has been exposed as a paper-tiger against a peer adversary, like in Ukraine, where superior Russian air defense has prevented the US from establishing a “no-fly-zone”. Furthermore, thanks to advances in cheap drones and missiles, Yemen is showing how a so-called third rate military can effectively bankrupt the US empire.

The neocons urging Biden to attack Iran are math challenged. Iran has more missiles, drones and rockets than Yemen. If little Yemen is doing this to the US, just imagine the havoc Iran could cause?

While any sane or sensible person would examine the evidence and make changes in their behavior, the neocons are anything but. When they make mistakes, and boy do they, they simply double-down. In fact that exactly what we’re seeing now as several neocons have taken to the pages of our most influential media to demand an escalation of the violence and that the United States help Israel strike not just Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon but Iran as well.

Of course, it’s not at all uncommon for the feral-elite of failing imperial powers to succumb to ideological pathologies in the last years of their power. 

Anyway, while it’s good for a laugh, pretty sure we won’t see a Greenspan moment from the neocons, whose motto is–if first you don’t succeed, fail, fail again.