Globalism's end: The cracking up

APPARENTLY someone at the State Department put out the fire in John Kerry's magnificent head of hair, because he has stopped declaiming (for now) on the urgent need to start World War III over Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula. In my lifetime, there has never been a more pointless and unnecessary international crisis than the current rumble over Ukraine, and it's pretty much all our doing.

After all, we kicked it off by financing the overthrow of Ukraine's elected government. How do you suppose the U.S. would feel if Moscow engineered the overthrow of the Mexican government? Perhaps a little insecure? Perhaps even tempted to post some troops on the border?

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has engaged in a nonstop projection of power around the world with grievous results in every case, except in the breakup of Yugoslavia. The latest adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been the most expensive - at least a trillion dollars - and mayhem still rules in both places.

And the fundamental question is: Why does anything about Afghanistan really matter to the U.S.? How many years will it take for us to get over the fact that Osama bin Laden ran a training camp for jihadists there? Right now you can be sure that somewhere between Casablanca and East Timor there are training camps for religious maniacs and thousands more casual meet-ups among aggrieved young men with testosterone boiling in their brains and nothing else to occupy their time but playing with guns. Are we going to invade every land where this goes on?

One part of our ever-evolving reality is that the global economy is in the process of cracking up. Globalism was not a permanent installation in the human condition. Rather, it was a set of transient economic relations brought about by special circumstances in a particular time of history - namely, 100 years of cheap energy and about 50 years of relative peace between the larger nations. That's all it was. And now it's dissolving because energy is increasingly non-cheap, and that is causing a lot of friction between nations utterly addicted to high flows of cheap oil and gas.

The high-energy-addicted nations have been trying to offset the rising cost of their addiction, and the absence of conventional economic "growth," by borrowing ever more money; that is, generating ever more debt. This ends up expressing itself in "money printing," that range of computerized banking activities that pumps more and more "liquidity" into "advanced" economies. The result of all that is the mispricing of just about everything (including especially the cost of borrowing money), and an increasingly antagonistic climate of currency war as all players vie for the supposed advantages of devaluation - most particularly the ability to dissolve their own sovereign debts via inflation.

The global orgy of cheap goods and bubble finance is ending. Nations and, indeed, regions within nations are going to have to find a new way of making a living on the smaller scale. This is sure to include new arrangements for governance. The breakup of nation states is well underway and is moving from the margins inward to the political center - from the hopeless scrublands of overpopulated nations that will never "develop" to the increasingly sclerotic giants.

The U.S. is exhibiting pretty severe signs of that sclerosis in the demented behavior of its leaders in episodes such as the current unnecessary, manufactured fiasco over Ukraine to the physical deterioration of our towns, roads, bridges and all the plastic crap we managed to smear over the mutilated landscape to the comportment of our demoralized, mentally inert, drugged-up, tattoo-bedizened populace of twerking slobs.

In short, it is self-evident that Russians have an abiding interest in the Crimea and we have none, while both the material and cultural life of the U.S. is in shambles and much more worthy of our own attention.