In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway, described how one went bankrupt–gradually, then suddenly.

It’s the same with empires. One day they’re fit as a fiddle, then the next day multiple crisis’s reveal a brittle shell.

The US is undergoing one of those moments, where the collapsing proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, failure to halt Ansar Allah’s Red Sea attacks on commercial shipping, and active backing of the Israeli genocide have exposed the rot at the core of the empire.

And now the Hur report, where the prosecutor declined to bring charges against President Biden because he’s suffering from dementia, made worse by Biden’s disastrous press conference where he stood revealed as an angry old-man yelling at clouds. Special counsel Robert Hur released a 388-page report last Thursday that concluded Biden “willfully” retained classified documents but cleared Biden of any wrongdoing. The report also featured details about the 81-year-old’s memory and recall, describing the president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” 

Inquiring minds want to know who’s minding the nuclear launch codes, given what we now know about the state of his cognitive decline?

Biden senility is emblematic of the decline of the American empire, but at this point we could have a bag of pretzels as president and it would look the same. Presently the US is struggling to manage the multiple crises, and compartmentalize issues: Ansar Allah’s Red Sea blockade is one thing; attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria, an unrelated another, the catastrophic proxy war in Ukraine something different. But all know that such separateness is artificial. All of these crises represent things falling apart.

William Butler Yeats was prescient when he wrote the Second Coming, following World War I.

“…Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity…”

Veteran British diplomat and MI-6 analyst Alastair Crooke, describes the ramifications of such developments. “Do not imagine this ‘turn’ is lost on others – on the Iraqi Hashd al-Sha’abi, for example; or on the (Palestinians) of Jordan; or on the mass foot-soldiers of the Egyptian army; or indeed in the Gulf. There are 5 billion smartphones extant today. The ruling class do watch the Arabic channels, and view (nervously) social media. They worry that anger against the western flouting of international law may boil over, and they will be unable to contain it: What price the ‘Rules Order’ now since the International Court of Justice upended the notion of a moral content to western culture? The wrongheadedness of U.S. policy is astonishing…”

What’s ironic is that the rapid decline of the American empire has been precipitated by the original decision to back Israel’s use of overwhelming violence by indiscriminately bombing Gaza’s civilians, ostensibly to defeat Hamas. It has turned the region and much of the World against the US empire, for obvious reasons. What’s worse is that there’s recognition that Israel was intended as a colonialist outpost, (“our land based aircraft carrier”) from the very beginning to control the fabulous petroleum resources of the Middle East, that fuels the American empire.

It’s not crazy to argue that Israel exists as our 51st state.

Yet, where is Biden’s limit: Support for Israel in a Hizbullah war? And were it to widen, support for Israel in an Iran war too? Where is the limit? And, judging by Biden’s senility, maybe that’s the wrong question. Where is the deep state’s limit?

And this brings us to the heart of the matter. We have a shallow and incapable ruling class that are confronted with a series of subtle changes in the way the international political and economic system works, some linked, some not, that require the sort of careful analysis and thoughtful reactions of which they are increasingly incapable. The upshot is that Washington is showing itself to be intellectually incapable of understanding what is going on, or adjusting in ways in which to keep the American empire on track.

All of this confirms Lenin’s axiom that–“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”.