Trump’s reelection has shattered the end of history narrative promulgated by Francis Fukuyama and the assorted coterie of neocons who plotted a perpetual American empire.

Former MI-6 military and foreign policy analyst, Alastair Crooke writes–“the U.S. election also, has been a referendum on the prevalent western intellectual mainstream. And that likely will be more decisive than the U.S. domestic vote – important though that is. The U.S. has shifted strategically away from the managerial techno-oligarchy that took its grip in the 1970s. Today’s shift is reflected across the U.S.

Back in 1970, Zbig Brzezinski (who was to become National Security Adviser to President Carter) wrote a book foreseeing the new era: What he then called ‘The Technetronic Era’, involved the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society … dominated by an élite, unrestrained by traditional values … [and practicing] continuous surveillance over every citizen … [together with] manipulation of the behaviour and intellectual functioning of all people … [would become the new norm].

Elsewhere, Brzezinski argued that the nation-state … has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state. Brzezinski was plain wrong about the benefits of tech cosmopolitan governance. And he was decisively, and disastrously, wrong in the policy prescriptions that he adduced from the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 – that no country or group of countries would ever dare to stand up to U.S. power. Brzezinski argued in The Grand Chessboard that Russia would have no choice but to submit to the expansion of NATO, and to the geopolitical dictates of the U.S.”

Back to yours truly. It’s funny how reality always has the last word when it comes to ideologies. And, that’s a problem presently as the US establishment unmoors itself further from reality. Its priorities are so inverted, so obscene, that the most appropriate response is disbelief or ridicule. Since the end of the Cold War the US and western intellectuals have controlled the meta narrative–the “end of history”, etc. and it went rather well as long as they could control the narrative, but they can’t control the narrative anymore. 

Hubris plays an oversized role in the notion of the end of history. The neocon intellectuals imagined a US that, like a colossus, stood astride the world. But, as I’ve discussed here, these same intellectuals were so blinded by their American exceptional ideology that they failed to understand that it’s not possible to maintain an empire with neoliberalism as the operating system. For the U.S. today faces its own internal structural contradictions owing to the off-shored manufacturing base. A recent report by the RAND Organization states starkly however, that the U.S. defense industrial base is unable to meet the equipment, technology, and munitions needs of the U.S. and its allies and partners. A protracted conflict, especially in multiple theaters, would require much greater capacity. The U.S., the RAND appraisal continues, could in short order be drawn into a war across multiple theaters with peer and near-peer adversaries – and it could lose. It warns that the U.S. public has not internalized the costs of the U.S. losing its position as the world superpower.

Trump, almost certainly is a symptom of the neocon hubris. When governing institutions pass a critical threshold of unresponsiveness to the people, the reaction of the people is a wish for destroying the institutions even at the cost of social upheaval. All segments of the American and wider Western public are dissatisfied with their so-called representative government and its policies. What’s ironic is that America’s Cold War victory, used to justify its imperial dominance, was “bound to fail”, because the hyper-globalization of capital US neoliberals undertook detached the working- and middle-classes of the Western world from an economic and political regime which impoverished them.

We should not lament the collapse of the “rule-based international order” the neocons constructed post 1989. The unipolar era produced endless wars, regime-change efforts and a voracious financialization of the Western economies. The multipolar world we have entered has the potential to save the US from its own excesses. Beset by confident rivals abroad, and by the disenchantment of their own voters at home, America will once again have to learn restraint. The post-Cold War order ultimately proved disastrous for everyone except the oligarchy and their pet intellectuals.

Unfortunately there is no interest in the American Empire for “peace” because the need by the oligarchs is to maintain and enhance their control over their subject populations. How else are they going to maintain the rule of the corrupt and the ideology of hedonism and radical materialism? War is the answer to all their dreams and peace the major threat to the Imperial regime. Trump may not want any war, but the Deep State and the neocon intellectuals want war.

And they believe they can get one.