January 2020: the Fatima Century takes shape

January 2020 has sealed its mark as the month that the Fatima Century assumed definitive shape. Events involving the United States, Iran, China, and Russia are coming to a head in such a way that the trajectory of both Eurasian and American geopolitics for at least the next two generations is emerging with clarity. Namely, the seventh capitalist regime, Chimerica (2010-2050), is observing the dawn of its breakout second decade (2020-2030); its impetus, in turn, is already being fueled by the gathering undercurrent of its successor, the eighth capitalist regime, Fatima (2050-2090).

The assassination by US President Donald Trump of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani on January 3 in Baghdad has marked a point of no return in Washington's confrontation with not only the Islamic Republic, but with the entire Shiite Muslim world. This clash will play out over the coming decade and more, yet even now, its outcome is already little in doubt: Iran and its powerful Eurasian friends will prevail, while the United States and its Western partners will be marginalized or even expelled from the region.

The true backdrop of the sudden and dramatic uptick in instability in all three of the most important countries of the Shiite Crescent - Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran itself - during the final two months of 2019 was the abrupt entry of China's game-changing Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) into the very heart of the Middle East. A $10 billion oil-for-reconstruction deal signed between Baghdad and Beijing last fall posed an existential threat to US influence in the entire region, as it opened the prospect of an unbroken economic corridor from Iran to the Mediterranean greased with Chinese cash, goods, and infrastructure. Almost overnight, the Trump administration found its dominant position in post-ISIS Iraq compromised; much worse, its plans to curb Iranian influence in the country and region also took a shocking blow.

For it was as though China, conscious of US hostility to its economic relations with Tehran - especially its oil imports, which it had sharply reduced from the theocratic regime since airtight sanctions were applied the previous spring - decided to flippantly skip over the American proscriptions by throwing a lifeline directly to Iran's Shiite expansionist efforts in Iraq, on through Syria, all the way to the golden shore of the eastern Mediterranean. That unbroken land bridge from Tehran to the Syrian coast - hugging the middle Euphrates valley - had first been cracked open in mid-2017, at General Soleimani's direction, in the fight against ISIS; now in late 2019, China was essentially endorsing it as a "Shiite economic belt" with ominous geostrategic implications for America and its allies in the region.

This proved too much for the Trump administration to swallow: the Iraqi insult had to bear a severe price for that country's Shiite-majority government, but not before an attempt was first made to knock out Hezbollah's grip on Lebanon. The reason that anti-government demonstrations popped up first in that small Levantine country - before moving on to Iraq and then finally Iran - is that the US and Israel, enlisting the financial firepower of Saudi Arabia and its sway especially over Lebanese and Iraqi finances, is that Hezbollah has always been correctly perceived as the tip and vanguard of the Shiite regional spear. If it could be broken, the entire Crescent would suffer disproportionately from the loss of its coordinating and animating principle for the rest of the coalition; much as the sabotage of a missile's warhead would render its entire body along with its launch and flight systems useless.

But the Lebanese protests failed - despite best covert efforts by American and Israeli intelligence and their operatives on the ground in Beirut, in conjunction with Saudi banking sanctions on the government which first forced it into overnight austerity measures that hammered the ordinary populace - to produce a unified and resilient "anti-Iranian" front and hence insurrection in the sectarian-mixed country. The unsurprising ouster of PM Saad Hariri only opened up a vacuum into which it was clear, in the end, that only the best-armed and most internally coherent faction - far and away, Hezbollah - would decisively rush into, once the chips were really down and the nation really plunged into total socioeconomic meltdown.

So next came Iraq: the administrations of Trump and his fervent regional ally, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, determined to threaten the functional strength and integrity of the Shiite-majority government of PM Adul Abdul-Mahdi - with the intent not to remove him or end his governing coalition, but simply to force it, with financial pressure applied by the Saudis and other Gulf monarchies, to revoke its new Chinese BRI contracts. But this also proved harder than expected: knowing that the US military presence in Iraq was already unwelcome among so much of the Shiite populace, Iraqi officials balked at Trump's blackmail, and in fact the escalating - though still yet secret to the world - standoff between Washington and Baghdad only hastened the latter's drive into Beijing's economic and financial orbit.

The Saudis, it turns out, were themselves rapidly becoming a Chinese client: in the runup to the massive December IPO of state oil firm Aramco, Beijing's quiet pledges of liquidity and valuation support were sufficient to shield Riyadh from American pressure to turn up the heat further on Iraq. Not only that, the Chinese overtures also seemed to have played a significant role brokering a progressively thawing truce between the Saudis and Iranians themselves, at least in their proxy war in Yemen. All this left the US in the unenviable position of having to apply financial and economic pressure on the Iranian-aligned government of Iraq more directly and singlehandedly - and even then, it had to capitalize quickly on the surge of austerity-fueled discontent with Abdul-Madhi's parliamentary coalition to force its point home. This directly set off the series of progressive deteriorations in US-Iraqi relations from November onward that finally culminated in the drone attack on Soleimani and his chief Iraqi lieutenant, Shiite militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, outside Baghdad international airport in early January.

For unlike in Lebanon, protests in Iraq found much more fertile ground for anti-Iranian actions and goals. Ever since the 2003 US invasion that removed Sunni Arab strongman Saddam Hussein, the country had been politically dominated by its nearly two-thirds Shiite majority - over which Tehran always exercised a disproportionate influence. In the wake of the defeat of ISIS' territorial caliphate in 2017-18, the return to the default post-Saddam Shiite clerical-led order had triggered an unprecedented new groundswell of discontent, especially among younger Iraqis - many of them secular Shiites themselves - who understandably had little faith left in their religiously inclined civic institutions and leadership. After all, these only seemed to reinforce and entrench a steep and incurable corruption of kleptocratic state administrators and their attendant patronage-based - as opposed to meritocratic - support and beneficiary networks. When this latent dissatisfaction was conveniently combined with the sudden inflationary effects of fiscal austerity, the tinderbox of "anti-Iranian" unrest ignited quite instantaneously and spontaneously both in Baghdad and in Shiite Arab strongholds of the south, such as Najaf and Basra.

The problem was that - perfectly in keeping with character - neither the US nor the Israelis seemed to have any contingencies in place besides a quick capitulation by Abdul-Mahdi's government to their core demands on China and the BRI. When the government's crackdown on protesters turned bloody in early-to-mid November, it was first seen as further pressure on the Shiite parliamentary coalition to make nice with the American overlords - restoring not only their job security but, far more tellingly, their financial perks for being compliant functionaries of the occupying Western powers. But the very fractiousness of said bloc - so fervently taken advantage of by Trump and Netanyahu - turned into an even bigger liability when their ideal scenario failed, which it did almost as rapidly as the upheaval began.

For the official Iraqi legislators were still practically a rump: real power and control on the ground remained in the hands of the clerical and even quasi-tribal hierarchies from whence they came. This meant that, once a violent repression of the so-called "Iraqi spring" began, there was no way to keep the bloodshed from spiraling out of control - that is, before it claimed many additional lives the Americans and Israelis actually needed, i.e. to install a new, pliable regime of secular liberals, once the existing Shiite theocratic government was removed. It was a bit of Western imperialist cognitive dissonance at its classic finest: try to take out a mirage adversary, arouse a real reprisal, and watch from the sidelines as one's own pawns get decimated. Even considering the illustrious history of "color revolutions", this Trumpist imitation set a new bar for sheer competence.

But no matter: if you can't cut off the serpent's tail or chop it in two at the midsection, why not just go for its venom-spewing head outright? That's what Trump and Netanyahu did next, when as November progressed, demonstrations against fuel hikes in Iran held the prospect of major civil disobedience against the Islamic republic itself. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei even personally warned the swelling ranks of protesters to, in effect, "not try anything." In other words: the regime knew what was really going on, and was prepared to take the kid gloves off to deal properly with it - even if the scale and severity of its response would shock public opinion at home and engender more than the usual "human rights" outcry from the West abroad.

When, ultimately, the Ayatollahs temporarily suspended internet connectivity in Iran and killed upwards of an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 protesters, they apparently gave the Trump administration a face-saving exit: he was allowed to tweet about Tehran's awful treatment of its own people without any reprisal from the regime that would expose the leading covert US role in stirring up the unrest. When this olive branch only invited further backhanded bullying by the White House, however, the Iranians publicly identified and arrested dozens of suspected spies coordinating the anti-government demonstrations on behalf of the CIA and Mossad, primarily via illicit Western social media tools.

By early December, then, not only had the US-Israeli campaign to destabilize and ultimately dismember the Shiite Crescent utterly failed, it had produced a horrific, exact opposite intended effect: strangled by US dollar sanctions or the threat of them, the governments of Beirut, Baghdad, and Tehran turned to Communist China and the BRI scheme for help. Though this offer from Beijing had been on the table for some time, only now did the Iraqis and Lebanese - without whom the Iranians (and by extension, Chinese) literally had no way to connect Central Asia to the Mediterranean - consider it a necessity. They had been loath to upset the Americans by drawing into the Chinese orbit, but now that Trump had forced their hand by his own arrogance and imperiousness, those earlier reservations were moot.

This understandably enraged the volatile US president even more. As 2019 drew to a close, his private attitude towards the Shiite world grew from one of mere hostility to outright violent aggression. He thus became easy prey for his friend Bibi Netanyahu's more extreme proposals: in hindsight, these included a major increase of the US military presence and activities in Iraq that were to be arrayed not to help liquidate the remnants of ISIS, but to contain and harass the pro-Iranian Shiite militias which were the integral link in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps' "land bridge" via Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean. This was the red line for Iran and its proxies that directly led up to the eruption of hostile exchanges in the last days of December, when on the 27th the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) rocketed a US base near Kirkuk, killing one American contractor; resulting in a massive reprisal airstrike on both Iraqi and Syrian Shiite militias that killed 25 of the former; triggering the PMU assault on the US Embassy in Baghdad just before New Years' - which, in turn, finally led to the drone strike on Soleimani and Al-Muhandis in the wee hours of January 3.

It appears that Soleimani and his IRGC did make - and pay for - a strategic miscalculation: they were wrong to think that the US military presence in Iraq could be confronted head-on, i.e. that their Shiite but Arab brethren in Lower Mesopotamia were as yet ready to see the exit of American coalition forces which were still an insurance policy against ISIS. This for sure meant Soleimani's demise: as Trump himself has admitted the general was already marked for termination, with only the pretext of loss of American life missing until the Kirkuk attack. But the broader geopolitical - that is, regional and even global - blunder was far and away Trump's and not Iran's: in one fell swoop, he gave his principal adversary, China, just the added pretext in Tehran and enhanced legitimacy in Baghdad that, over time, would render the loss of Soleimani and Al-Muhandis small potatoes.

Indeed, it's worth emphasizing from here on out just how badly the Trump administration is misrepresenting the actual state of play in the Mideast: few American representatives and policymakers - forget the general public - have any idea that their country's escalating mutual vitriol with Iran is actually about China. In the whirlwind of aftershocks of Soleimani's assassination - culminating in a retaliatory Iranian missile strike on a US airbase in Iraq, along with an accidental downing of a Ukrainian jetliner over Tehran - it would be hard not to get lost tallying the same old opposing scores, i.e. hardliners versus reformers within Iran, or Iran versus its "Great Satan" adversary. And it definitely is a temptation to reduce Trump's - and America's - conundrum with the Islamic republic to the mere imperative to secure a better nuclear deal than the 2015 JCPOA accord.

No, the world is already moving on. As economic and hence geopolitical power continues its irrevocable shift from West to East, it will dawn on even an increasingly provincial and inward-looking United States - Trump or not - that a catastrophe of monumental proportions is already unfolding for not just the liberal democratic world, but the very security of Western Judeo-Christian civilization itself. There's just no turning back now: the autocratic Eurasian nexus of China, Russia, and Iran will not permit the Anglo-Zionist imperium to emerge unscathed from the blunder of a "clash of civilizations" - one made only the worse by the complete ignorance of the very nature of this struggle that its instigators, Washington and Jerusalem, have unwittingly (even largely unknowingly) committed to.

There is no great "Arab spring 2.0" coming in Iraq - no more than there's some "Persian spring" sweeping Iran. It's now the Twelver Shiism of the Imams - of the children of Ali and Fatima and their son, Hussein - against the Protestant European offshoots of the Roman Catholic Church, alongside the latter-day reincarnation of the Jewish Nation of Israel. Sunni Islam will remain largely an observer but also act as mediator for its Shia brethren; just as Orthodox Russia may perform such a role for its Anglo-Zionist cousins. But China - the great "Middle Kingdom" - now holds all the real winning cards: the Celestial Emperor in Beijing will not so much choose the winner of the gathering clash as opportunistically ride its crest to commanding Eurasian heights only once before seen in history, with the Mongol Empire of the Great Khans.

A mere three decades after "history ended", it's already returning with a vehemence and vengeance that will shock even its apparent beneficiaries. The world in the early 2030s will be virtually unrecognizable from the one today: it will mark the dawn of a Chinese hegemony even more remarkable for its sheer unrivaled scope as was that of America's short-lived "unipolar moment" four decades earlier. For America herself will no longer even register so powerfully as the unified, Anglophone, federal constitutional republic it's been since 1776: its structure will remain, but with its Northwest European cultural core so relatively diminished that the entire hemisphere's Latin, i.e. Central and Southern components will have overtaken it in vitality. That, too, will mark the onset of the Age of Fatima.

A brief history of the seven capitalist regimes

In the history of modern capitalism (1770-present), there have thus far been seven regimes, with an eighth to come in the future. Each regime has lasted 40 years - an orthodox Biblical generation, that is. And each regime has ended and given way to its successor via a process of regime change - in some aspects organic and natural, in other aspects wrenching and violent - but with the one constant that each old order is in fact comprehensively and irrevocably displaced and supplanted by each new one.

Pursuant to this, there have been six capitalist regime changes - one every four decades - that have taken place to date.

1810: From Revolution (1770-1810) to Industrialization (1810-1850)

The first capitalist regime, Revolution (1770-1810), gave way to the second, Industrialization (1810-1850), at around the height of the Napoleonic era (1799-1815). This shift witnessed the coming of age of the modern middle class, or bourgeois per Marxist lingo, across a Western European civilization still politically dominated by either monarchy or landed aristocracy - to include the lower-ranking gentry of Great Britain and the southern plantation lords of the United States.

It was the upstart middle class which dominated the new processes of repeatable production in the primitive manufacture of textiles and other basic goods, which soon expanded greatly upon the introduction of the steam locomotive for mechanical transportation and the subsequent development of advanced iron working for early railroad systems, as well as the new metal and concrete urban infrastructure of the commercial-industrial boom towns they linked together. The industrial revolution thus ushered in not just a new era, but truly a new epoch of civilized human activity: the species transitioned from principally agricultural, or primary industry, to manufacturing, or secondary industry.

While the influence of the hereditary classes remained, it was steadily eroded as they themselves increasingly had to keep up with the exploits of a new, far more dynamic group within their midst, with a much greater penchant for harnessing at scale the new forces of technology and marketization. Unlike in earlier eras of large guilds in the main European cities, the new bourgeois merchant caste now had direct access to the lucrative mass labor of uneducated peasants that had formerly been the effective property of the landed nobility - essentially sealing the latter's terminal decline and eventual extinction as a distinct sociopolitical agent across the entire expanse of Europe.

1850: From Industrialization (1810-1850) to Modernization (1850-1890)

Industrialization gave way to the third capitalist regime, Modernization (1850-1890), when the old sociopolitical structures of hereditary land ownership were finally swept away on the European continent around the midpoint of the 19th century by the maturation of the first stage of the bourgeois-industrial mode of production.

Whereas in Great Britain and especially America (with its vast Western territories open for brand-new settlement and cultivation) the new merchant caste was already an integral part of the political sphere, in continental Europe it still relied heavily on collusion with archaic aristocratic and clerical institutions inherited from a bygone era of agrarian feudalism. The imbalance and tension this caused, between bourgeois and aristocracy alike, with the masses of menial labor toiling for their profit finally erupted in the Revolution of 1848.

Thus, all subsequent generations of Western (and eventually non-Western) industrialized nations would each have to grapple with the same fundamental question that has persisted to the very present day: how to maximize the mobility of the working class, or proletariat, into the dynamic middle one, the bourgeois - and what polices and institutions would best facilitate this systemic societal transition by consistently expanding both the political franchise and the economic welfare.

1890: From Modernization (1850-1890) to Progressivism (1890-1930)

The regime of Modernization enjoyed phenomenal success in Western Europe and America owing to the continual evolution and dynamism of free markets and liberal representative government - to the degrees that were afforded each particular nation - which would underpin an unprecedented acceleration and explosion of scientific and technological advancement in the second half of the 19th century. By 1890, with the closing of the American frontier and the onset of deeper European colonial forays into Asia and Africa, Western civilization had thus attained an all-time peak of dominance of any single civilization over the others in the entire recorded history of humanity.

About this same time, however, it became clear that the inherent nature of the bourgeois mode of industrial society required a special dedicated discipline of distributive management, not only to correct the vast imbalances of wealth and well-being that seemed to inevitably accumulate from unbound commercial and technological activity, but also to proactively improve and optimize the socioeconomic makeup and equation as a whole. While in theory laissez-faire, or "hands-off", was an ideal mode of dealing with the market's natural operations, in practice there was steadily shrinking pretense that the profit motive alone could simply be assumed to produce the best or even essentially neutral moral and social results.

Progressivism, the fourth capitalist regime (1890-1930), was thus born as a quasi-ideological system of administrative-managerial science and application, enabling primarily corporations and businesses at first, but steadily followed by non-commercial entities, both private (such as labor unions) and governmental (such as state and local councils or associations), to better care for the interests of their clients, stakeholders, and participants. While regulation of disproportionately powerful corporations by government was introduced for the first time, this was but a means to an end: that of ensuring fair and healthy market competition unencumbered by abusive rent-collecting monopolies or cartels. However difficult it could prove, consensual collaboration and compromise, both between and within the ever expanding and diversifying public and private sectors, were seen as the hallmarks of a dynamically functioning and responsive laissez-faire polity - with the minimal amount of refereeing by the invasive state authority seen as the optimal one.

1930: From Progressivism (1890-1930) to Keynes (1930-1970)

The Progressive regime liberated the mass potential of the capitalist marketplace to reach even greater heights: by the onset of the First World War (1914), it had already produced incipient if highly rudimentary social safety nets in the most advanced industrial states, which had by then established highly sophisticated transport and communications networks that linked large geographic areas into ever more tightly and instantaneously integrated markets. It had also increased efficiency and productivity at scale in traditional heavy industries, i.e. metals and mining, to the extent that more attention and innovation could be brought to bear on the newer, lighter manufacturing ones: hence the urban consumer product revolution took off and effected a rapid rise in living standards, even for normal wage earners who were still a generation or two away from home ownership.

Tellingly, the First World War not only did not derail this whole process, it arguably even accelerated it - by catapulting the well-insulated United States to a position of economic primacy over its erstwhile transatlantic master. However, new strains developed under the veneer of ever headier good times in the latter Progressive era, i.e. the "roaring twenties": the new consumerist economy was fueled by an unprecedented explosion of mass credit and attendant financial speculation, notably in the stock market. The financial and corporate managerial elite were largely unprepared to absorb such a rapid influx of middle class participation in their previously privileged domain, just as the middle class itself came under additional pressure from the continued ascent of the working class and the early pangs of industrial automation.

All this came to a head in the great Wall Street crash of 1929 and its aftermath. Initially, there was little to suggest that the downturn was anything more than a routine if more drastic change of the business cycle; governments on both sides of the Atlantic accordingly tweaked and augmented their Progressive-era regulatory regimes in an attempt to stir recovery in investment and production, mostly by incentivizing banks to lend and factories to run. But it soon became clear that a more fundamental problem was at hand: the interests of private firms, owners, and investors simply didn't match up anymore with the new public imperative to divide up the economic pie much more evenly, as opposed to merely expand their own proceeds from its growth. The private sector did its best to reignite the economic engine, but the challenge at hand was now too great for it to shoulder on its own. Unfortunately, responding largely to popular sentiment and impatience, governments then made the precarious situation even worse by heavier-handed interventions in the market, which froze a portion of its normal operations altogether - sending recession into depression.

Within a few years from the stock market crash, then, the surge of sociopolitical extremism unleashed by sudden hard times - both from radical socialist and communist movements aligned with the Soviet Union and also from the right-wing reactionary backlash of fascism in central and eastern Europe - spurred Western democratic governments to unprecedented new measures to play an active role in their market economies. The era of laissez-faire was seemingly at an end, as rigorous wage and price controls were introduced for the first time at a broad systemic level via policies like those of the New Deal. The great economist John Maynard Keynes - whose studies since the Great War had demonstrated the necessity and hence legitimacy of direct government participation in the marketplace - now became the standard-bearer for a brave new world of merged public-private collaboration to centrally administer the industrial capitalist system, via targeting of its outputs, as never before. The fifth capitalist regime, Keynes (1930-1970), now took shape.

1970: From Keynes (1930-1970) to Friedman (1970-2010)

Not coincidentally, the most popularly referenced innovation of the Keynesian era - that of establishing the government sector as a de facto "buyer of last resort" for industries which otherwise found private sector demand alone insufficient to sustain a recovery of sales, or "pump-priming" - came into its own during the single greatest public economic endeavor possible, a Second World War considerably larger than the First. But in fact, the Keynesian system was a more ambitiously comprehensive one of long-term demand-side management: the lasting achievement of the New Deal, for one, was the enshrinement of government's role in providing a basic income and welfare cushion for unemployed and retired workers - with the express purpose, of course, of firming up the floor on demand for basic consumer goods.

Because the Second World War was succeeded in short order by the Cold War, the structural composition of public-sector, notably military and defense-related, demand within Western economies remained elevated throughout the first postwar generation. Critically, this meant that it was government spending - so maligned by free-market ideologues both then and now - that fueled research and development of the nascent computer processing and communications revolutions in the 1950s and 60s. The US-Soviet strategic (nuclear) arms and space races ensured the highest national priority for industrial integration to enable and facilitate a large national defense force and support infrastructure.

Even so, private industry and innovation continued to flourish independent of the public sector's significant role: pro-business policies, where implemented, enabled the US economy to shed some of the more stifling aspects of the New Deal era so far as growth and investment were concerned. The net effect of this synergistic combination of high public demand with high private investment was what could easily be thought of as the zenith of American industrial might: the quarter-century between the end of World War II and the Apollo moon landing.

Indeed, whilst later supply-side fundamentalists would much malign the lower GDP growth rates of the 1950s, these criticisms see only one side of the coin: the quality as opposed to quantity of growth was high, more concentrated as it was in secondary industry (manufacturing and construction) than it would be in the latter 20th century (when tertiary industry, i.e. services, became predominant); and thus enabling well-paying jobs as well as moderately priced consumer-durable goods (cars and housing) that underpinned the liftoff of the postwar "American Dream." Labor unions were at their strongest at any point in US history; wage-suppressing immigration into the country remained strictly limited; moreover, Washington's fiscal condition was at its all-time peak and its dominance of the global financial system unparalleled via the gold-backed dollar per the late-World War Two Bretton Woods monetary agreement. All of this meant the best fruits of the 1930s New Deal were only truly harvested for the American worker and family two decades later.

Of course, not all was well - and this became increasingly apparent as the 1960s progressed. With the birth of the military-industrial complex came a new form of rent-seeking corporate power that could largely be blamed for the unsuccessful long US involvement in the Vietnam War. America's NATO allies in Western Europe, having been rebuilt by the Marshall Plan, were finding it difficult to phase out their postwar provisional supports. While the American economy continued to boom with the growth of the services sector and new innovation, the strain of an existential global ideological struggle with communism would finally prove too much for the Keynesian regime: by the late 60s, the US fiscal deficit had ballooned largely owing to the faltering Vietnam conflict, and the Bretton Woods gold-greenback standard began breaking down (it finally was abandoned by Nixon in 1971). Despite the triumph of the moon landing (1969), America had bumped up against a solid wall which demanded a new paradigm shift to move forward. This would come in the form of the supply-side revolution and the new, sixth capitalist regime it would usher in: Friedman (1970-2010).

2010: From Friedman (1970-2010) to Chimerica (2010-present)

The supply-side revolution of the 1970s and 80s is the foundation upon which all economic discourse up to the very present has been built; even today, with the so-called "neoliberal" consensus arguably standing on its last legs, it continues to frame debate and discussion of economic issues in the democratic West between incumbent and insurgent modes of thought and analysis. The immediate impetus for the Friedman regime, however - after the dominant economist of the late 20th century, Milton Friedman - was the struggle to find new footing as the great postwar boom finally petered out at the start of the 70s, to be replaced by the infamous "stagflation" era all the way up to the early 80s.

In hindsight, it was clearly the emergence of a new postcolonial equilibrium, no longer dominated by the West, which brought this shift about: with the rise of Communist China as a second superpower and indeed rival to the Soviet Union in the socialist sphere, for the first time in the modern era the vast continent of Asia - traditionally home to most of the world's population - enjoyed essential parity in its dealings with nations of European extraction. Both NATO and Eastern Bloc states, on either side of the Atlantic, now found they weren't the only game in town - the Asia-Pacific was not only a new rival center of political power, but also of economic dynamism and competitiveness. Those corporations and governments in the Euro-Atlantic zone which grasped this new reality adapted quickly and reaped the benefits; those that lagged found they were soon in unprecedented danger of being commoditized and marginalized by their own elite and ruling class, in a new global economy with multinational supply chains of ever expanding scale and scope.

Thus, in an atmosphere of irrevocable creeping East-West integration - the era of détente (1970s) -technological innovation became paramount in the private-sector, consumer-services economy of the West: the old brick-and-mortar industries were now all ripe for offshoring to Asia and nearer Latin America. While principally this was Japan followed by the smaller "tiger" Asian economies of South Korea, Thailand, and the like, inevitably it would eventually incorporate the big one, China herself - primarily through "Sinosphere" intermediaries, i.e. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the overseas Chinese diaspora of Southeast Asia.

Hence, the geopolitical event at the crux of the transition from the Keynes to the Friedman regimes was the Sino-Soviet rift: its early cracks developing ever since the "de-Stalinization" period of the late 50s, tensions between the communist giants finally broke into open hostility by 1969-70, with a border war and major arms race along their Far Eastern frontier that led Chairman Mao to enter a quasi-alliance with erstwhile nemesis Washington (the Nixon-Kissinger opening, 1971-72). Needless to say, this US-China nexus in the second half of the Cold War sealed the fate of the Soviet Eastern Bloc: initially it cushioned American defeat in Vietnam, but by the early 80s it came to redefine the entire Eurasian strategic equation into one that fundamentally favored the capitalist West over ailing socialist Moscow - whose antics in Central America and Afghanistan, not to mention formidable nuclear arsenal, could scarcely mask a steep internal decline on both its European and Asian flanks, triggered by the collapse of oil prices not quite a decade after the US "petrodollar" became the basis of Washington's post-Bretton Woods financial hegemony.

It unsurprisingly follows that, although the Soviet empire collapsed in 1989-91, the real winner of the Cold War may actually have been China, not the US. If one takes the view that the Friedman regime's seemingly unrestrained pursuit of financial and corporate profits ensured that any attempt to sequester China over "human rights abuses", notably the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, was pure fantasy - indeed, the West had already overlooked immeasurably worse Chinese Communist atrocities to enter a coalition with Beijing against the USSR nearly two decades earlier - then it becomes much harder to continue to profess shock at the speed and manner in which the first two decades of the 21st century have turned decisively against the free world and its so-called "sole superpower" guardian, the US, in favor of an unprecedented new autocratic colossus, the People's Republic of China.

The 2008-09 global financial crisis and its chaotic aftermath, the 2010-11 Eurozone peripheral debt crisis, was thus a watershed already decades in the making: economic and financial power had already been swinging from West to East for quite some time, for the simple fact that the giant multinational banks and corporations headquartered in New York and London had already literally "oriented" their operations towards an industrializing Asia-Pacific and away from a deindustrializing Euro-Atlantic. Where contemporary Western populists might point to China's accession to the WTO in 2001 as a strategic blunder committed by their leaders, the real fix was already in much earlier than even the prior tumult of 1989.

Indeed, as the seventh and current capitalist regime, Chimerica (2010-2050, prospectively), enters its breakout second decade of the 2020s, everything is becoming clearer the more it recedes into the rearview mirror: the sheer collapse over the last decade of the defunct Friedman regime's neoliberal or "Washington consensus", i.e. of unregulated financial profiteering in the name of "free markets", was only the natural process of yet another capitalist regime change - nothing more, nothing less. That prior accord has already in effect been replaced by a neosocialist "Beijing consensus" of central financial and economic planning and execution - one that even the West is begrudgingly beginning to subscribe to.

The trade war between the US and China actually says it all: it is the former which has now lost faith in free trade and unfettered capital markets, whereas the latter rightly sees these as its allies - provided it can still control them just enough.

Regime change is never pleasant for those on the receiving end of the stick. And hence, as it has already so clearly borne out in the Trump-Brexit era, Chimerica's displacement and dissolution of Friedman isn't proving to be any different.

The Eight Capitalist Regimes (1770-2090): A Historical-Dialectical Theory

First Capitalist Regime: Revolution 
1770-1810 - From the American Revolution to the Napoleonic Wars
Emergence: 1770-1780; key events: American Revolution (1775-76), James Watt's steam engine
Breakout: 1780-1790; key events: US Constitution (1787), French Revolution (1789)
Zenith: 1790-1800; key events: George Washington's presidency (1789-97), French Reign of Terror (1793-94)
Maturity: 1800-1810; key events: Napoleon's rise (1800-05), Peninsular War (1808) and subsequent upheaval in Latin America

Second Capitalist Regime: Industrialization
1810-1850 - From the Napoleonic Wars to the Revolution of 1848
Emergence: 1810-1820; key events: War of 1812, Napoleon's defeat (1814-15)
Breakout: 1820-1830; key events: first commercial passenger railroad (1825)
Zenith: 1830-1840; key events: Second French Revolution (1830), Samuel Morse's invention of telegraph (1837)
Maturity: 1840-1850; key events: Mexican War (1846-48), repeal of Corn Laws (1846), Revolution of 1848

Third Capitalist Regime: Modernization
1850-1890 - From the Revolution of 1848 to the Closing of the American Frontier
Emergence: 1850-1860; key events: Great Compromise of 1850, first transatlantic telegraph (1858), Franco-Austrian War (1859) and Italian independence
Breakout: 1860-1870; key events: American Civil War (1861-65), Austro-Prussian (1866) and Franco-Prussian (1870) Wars, Meiji Restoration (1868), transcontinental railroad (1869)
Zenith: 1870-1880; key events: formation of Standard Oil Company (1870), Panic of 1873, end of Reconstruction (1877)
Maturity: 1880-1890; key events: Scramble for Africa (from 1885), Interstate Commerce Act (1887), Sherman Antitrust Act (1890)

Fourth Capitalist Regime: Progressivism
1890-1930 - From the Closing of the American Frontier to the Great Depression
Emergence: 1890-1900; key events: Panic of 1893, Spanish-American War (1898)
Breakout: 1900-1910; key events: Boxer Rebellion (1900), Russo-Japanese War (1905), creation of FDA (1906)
Zenith: 1910-1920; key events: World War I (1914-18), Russian Revolution (1917)
Maturity: 1920-1930; key events: League of Nations (1920), Fascism in Italy (1922), Stalin's rise to power (1924-28), Wall Street crash (1929)

Fifth Capitalist Regime: Keynes
1930-1970 - From the Great Depression to the Sino-Soviet Rift
Emergence: 1930-1940; key events: Smoot-Hawley Tariff (1931), Hitler's rise to power (1933), Social Security Act (1935), Stalin's Terror (1935-39), start of World War II (1937 in Asia, 1939 in Europe)
Breakout: 1940-1950; key events: World War II (thru 1945), Chinese Civil War (1945-49), start of Cold War (1949-50)
Zenith: 1950-1960; key events: Korean War (1950-53), hydrogen bomb (1952), Sputnik (1957)
Maturity: 1960-1970; key events: Berlin Wall (1961), Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), Vietnam War (from 1964), Cultural Revolution (from 1966), Sino-Soviet border war (1969), Moon landing (1969)

Sixth Capitalist Regime: Friedman
1970-2010 - From the Sino-Soviet Rift to the Eurozone Debt Crisis
Emergence: 1970-1980; key events: end of Bretton Woods (1971), Nixon's opening to China (1972), détente (from 1972), OPEC oil embargo (1973), Islamic Revolution in Iran (1979)
Breakout: 1980-1990; key events: Reagan Revolution (early 80s), Star Wars (1983), Plaza Accord (1985), Tiananmen Square (1989), fall of Communism in Eastern Europe (1989)
Zenith: 1990-2000; key events: fall of Soviet Union (1991), China trade opening (early 1990s), dot-com and hedge fund boom (late 1990s), Mideast peace process (from 1993)
Maturity: 2000-2010; key events: 9/11 attacks (2001), US invasion of Iraq (2003), global financial crisis (2008-09) and subsequent Eurozone sovereign debt contagion (2010)

Seventh Capitalist Regime: Chimerica (incipient)
2010-2050 - From the Eurozone Debt Crisis to the ??
Emergence: 2010-2020; key events: Fed QE (2010-12), China infrastructure boom (2010-2012), post-Arab spring (2011-12) Mideast upheaval (including ISIS), Russian seizure of Crimea (2014), Brexit and rise of Trump (2016), global trade war (2018-present)
Breakout: 2020-2030; TBD
Zenith: 2030-2040; TBD
Maturity: 2040-2050; TBD

Eighth Capitalist Regime: Fatima (proposed)
2050-2090 - From the ?? to the ??
Emergence: 2050-2060; TBD
Breakout: 2060-2070; TBD
Zenith: 2070-2080; TBD
Maturity: 2080-2090; TBD

Turkey calls America's giant Mideast bluff

The worsening US diplomatic and geopolitical dispute with longtime Middle Eastern NATO ally Turkey looks set to spiral increasingly out of control as the summer of 2018 draws to a tumultuous conclusion, and will more likely than not accelerate the decline and ultimate fall of American power and influence in the entire region.

The fundamental error that the Trump administration is making with respect to the Turkish government of president Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the assumption that the latter has not already carefully assessed the costs and benefits of ending its seven-decade security partnership with Washington - now increasingly obviously an antiquated relic of a Cold War that ended over a generation ago.

To date, Trump's ratcheting up of threats and actual penalties against Ankara has betrayed this smug assurance: that Turkey at the end of the day has no choice but to submit to American demands because its prosperity and security depend on American goodwill. In fact, as of the July 15, 2016 putsch that nearly ended Erdogan's rule in a sea of bloodshed, this was already no longer the case; today it is even less so. Many illusions are being exposed by the US-Turkish riff, and over time these will be thoroughly shattered - leaving the Middle East and indeed much of the rest of the Eurasian supercontinent in a brand-new geopolitical era in which the noticeable feature will be the virtually complete marginalization or even absence of the United States from the most prominent decision-making processes and fora.

First and foremost, the further consolidation of Turkish political power in the single person of Mr. Erdogan will more than offset any short-term advantages Trumpian Washington thinks it gains with the tanking Turkish economy and financial markets; these will continue, but almost certainly will be contained well above a level that seriously threatens the sitting Ankara administration. In the meantime, the buoyant strength of the domestic US economy that Trump and his supporters endlessly brag about will be increasingly revealed to be a hollow instrument for exerting influence and pressure in Mideast hot spots where US military might is already demonstrably overrated as an arbiter of national destinies.

Secondly, Turkey already gains less from its residual partnership with America than it potentially stands to gain entering into a more formal and permanent security and economic alliance with Russia and China. The latter two are geographically closer and socioeconomically much more proximate to the domestic Turkish situation than is the US; they see far more eye-to-eye with Ankara on its critical national and security interests in its immediate neighborhood than does Washington, whether under the Trump administration or formerly Obama's.

Third, despite protestations which the White House might make to the contrary, the US military presence in Turkey still constitutes a major component of American power and prestige in the Middle East - one that it would be loath to relinquish when push really came to shove. Especially if it were to end in such a drastic manner as in a bilateral tit-for-tat of sanctions and reprisals, it would mark a major defeat of US strategic objectives which would reverberate far beyond the region itself. Under these circumstances, there is little reason to expect the Erdogan administration to hold its fire on further hostile and punitive actions against Trump's perceived bullying - if the Turkish leader reasonably feels that his authority is beyond challenge come hell or high water for his nation's economy, he stands to gain and not lose politically with a harsher stance on Washington, knowing that the final ace in the hole of American military bases in the country belongs to him and not Trump.

And last but not least, all this is unfolding in a broader international environment of growing backlash against the blatantly nativist and protectionist stance of the Trump administration in its second year in office; as a US trade war with China heats up even as the multilateral European Union belatedly tries to rescue the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Iran nuclear deal, the space for American diplomatic maneuver to improve Washington's own comprehensive strategic position has shrunk considerably. That means time is not on Trump's side, but rather on that of his various opponents - and if this is the case when the US economy is clearly outperforming all others, how much more will this be so when the vaunted boom loses steam, which it inevitably will.

In conjunction with the Iranians, the Turks are thus calling America's giant Mideast bluff - the bluff of presuming to continue to dictate the region's will even as the current White House pretends that it has the option to simply pull out if it cannot do so, given that it now has energy independence. The cold hard reality for the US is palpably becoming more and more unsettling to the point of downright alarming: it must assert its imperious will with ever greater vehemence yet simultaneously ever smaller efficacy, because to do otherwise would be to admit that, for all its president's bluster, the erstwhile unchallenged superpower hasn't been made "great again."

Back to Jerusalem: what the US Embassy move truly signifies

Today, May 14, 2018, the US Embassy has opened in Jerusalem to the deadly protests of Palestinian Arabs across the Holy Land and diplomatic condemnation of nations across the Islamic world. For an event of such epochal significance, nothing less should have been expected.

But to truly appreciate the profundity of this development, let us consider just how we got here and, in light of that journey, what point we have arrived at.

The entire modern age - which dates roughly to the 15th century - can be thought of as a roundabout quest by the self-identifying people of God, that is to say Israel, to reestablish themselves in their appointed holy city, Jerusalem.

During the Middle Ages, it was the loss of pilgrimage access to the great City of David that triggered an entire war between civilizations - as European Christendom sought to recover the treasured land of its Savior either by forcing the Islamic caliphates out or compelling them to reinstate the previously free routes from the Western Mediterranean via Asia Minor into the Levant.

Quite tellingly, it's important to recall that this cycle of events was triggered not by the original Arabs or Persians who built up the magnificent early Islamic empires, but by aggressive nomadic upstarts from much further east: the Turks of the steppe lands of Central Asia, who had in the second part of the first millennium split off into two main groups - an eastern one that essentially conquered and reunited imperial China, and a western one that eventually found its way across the vast Central Asian plains all the way to the doorstep of Western Latin Christendom by defeating its Eastern Roman cousin, the mighty Byzantine empire, in the Greek Orthodox Christian domain of Asia Minor, which fittingly later came to be known as Turkey.

Thus, the Crusades which began at the end of the 11th century were already a general clash between East and West - not merely between Islam and Christianity - but over the course of this ultimately unsuccessful two-plus century endeavor of the Western European kingdoms and the Roman Catholic papacy to recover the prize of the holy city and its attendant Holy Land, not only did the key directive of mastery of the Near and Middle East become enshrined as the goal for all of Western civilization, but several contemporaneous developments underpinned the manner in which the attainment of this goal would play itself out in the subsequent modern era:

1. The imperative to integrate all advanced knowledge which Latin Christendom had been newly exposed to on a systematic scale from its militant forays into the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, namely the ancient Greek philosophies of the age of Plato and Aristotle recycled and merged with the more outright Eastern wisdom of both the Islamicized Arab-Persian civilization and its tenant population of Talmudic Judaism, which in this period underwent a systematic migration from a primarily Muslim into a primarily Christian host society.
2. The need to eventually unify and integrate the Eastern, or Greek Orthodox, and Western, or Latin Catholic, churches, which had been increasingly divided in the latter part of the first millennium and formally separated in the East-West Schism of 1054 AD; as the old Byzantine or Eastern Roman empire which embodied the Greek Orthodox communion continued its decline towards ultimate extinction in the face of Islamic and Turkish assaults, its late northern offshoots in the Slavic and Scythian cultures of the vast steppes of modern-day Ukraine and European Russia became more central in East-West unity considerations.
3. The increasing urgency to outflank the powerful Turkish-Islamic caliphates altogether by establishing an all-water route to the Far East - in order to be able to trade without middlemen with the powerful Oriental empires of China and the Indian subcontinent, the largest and most dynamic and technologically developed economies of that period.

It was to the last of these three ancillary missions of Western European Christendom - finding the fabled sea passage to the riches, splendors, and geopolitical might of the Far East - that the pioneering Christopher Columbus devoted his entire energies and imaginations upon as he sought to parlay the newfound ambitions of the Italian and Western European Renaissance of the late 15th century to the opening of an entirely new horizon to recover the long-sought prize of Jerusalem: a horizon in literally the other direction - west instead of east - that would put America on the world map for the first time in world history.

Half a millennium later, America is indeed laying formal claim to Jerusalem; in the intervening epoch, this is essentially what has transpired according to the apparent original design and script of the Master of History Himself:

The quest for the true East in order to master the more proximate east didn't quite go as Columbus intended, but his loss was Western civilization's gain: instead of directly attaining China and India, European Christendom gained an entire new hemisphere - America - which propelled it to towering heights not only above its fearsome Islamic rivals, but indeed over the envied and coveted Oriental legends of China and India too. Thus did the discovery of America trigger a 400-year ascent of European Western civilization to an apex of dominance of other civilizations and a degree of penetration of even the distant corners of the globe hitherto unprecedented and in fact inconceivable; this was the final prize for Columbus' bold venture into the expanse of the western ocean in a giant leap of faith which challenged all prior norms and conventions - the sea itself, which for all humanity had until then been a psychological no less than physical boundary of the limit of the species' activity, was transformed into the springboard for the rise to universal worldwide dominion of the Judeo-Christian God.

The opening of America afforded the peoples of the nations of Western Christendom an invaluable whole New World as a testing ground for the practical societal and institutional developments and innovations which were destined to grow out of the Judeo-Christian conception of the individual's absolute sovereignty before the Almighty Himself; over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, this built up, expanded, and matured to the point of giving birth to the crown jewel of the New World, the model of constitutional representative governance and rapid innovation-driven free-market economic development that is the United States.

With religious liberty and individual conscience secured by firm rule of Common Law as the foundation, the United States of America has essentially, from its very conception, operated and acted on a mandate from Heaven itself to disseminate a God-given idea and ideal of freedom as the basis of all just and true human activity; it achieved this mission of promoting capitalism and democracy in two distinct stages.

In the 19th century, as she rapidly industrialized and expanded westward to fulfill her "Manifest Destiny" on the North American continent, the United States internally resolved the twin conundrums of human bondage and national unity in the absence of a coercive central authority through a bloody civil war; she thus confirmed that even violence and bloodshed are just instruments in pursuit of the higher cause of human equality and universal dignity and progress unhindered by lineage and background - underpinning a continual unshackling of stultifying ancient and medieval hierarchies back in the Old World through natural cultural diffusion, but accentuated especially by a series of follow-on upheavals on continental Europe in the wake of the original twin of the American Revolution, the 1789 French Revolution. This chipping away of the monolith of hereditary privilege America accomplished in concert with the heyday of her self-reformed aristocratic cousin and ancestor, the British empire, which in the 1800s established the first truly global system of common intercourse between nations based on an established universal set of rules and principles of exchange.

In the 20th century, as the industrial revolution matured and gave way to the consumer and media revolutions, America - now having been made complete by a fusion of freedom- and opportunity-seeking immigration from all over Europe, Jewish as well as Gentile - took this mantle from Britain through two world wars: both with their ultimate origin in the explosion that was finally inevitably unleashed by the ever-growing tension between tradition and modernity in the Old World, especially the further eastward one went on the European continent. The conflagration of atavistic nationalism that was the Great War of 1914 ignited the greater cataclysmic eruption of the Russian Revolution in 1917, establishing Marxist socialism - or communism - as the great antithesis of Judeo-Christian individual conscience and thus Western capitalism and democracy, as this deeply reflective ideology similarly had its roots in the great, disproportionately Jewish bourgeois diaspora of Western Europe and America, ever hounded by the sectarian-religious persecution and destructively tribalistic national and ethnic conflict which were the consequence of the erosion of the residual social and religious ancient regimes of the east.

The world wars were thus a watershed for the Western modernity America had set in motion by emerging into history over the previous centuries: that modernity now required direct American intervention back in the Eastern hemisphere from whence she first sprang to preserve a balance between the old that was worth preserving and the new that was too powerful to resist. Yet the United States was initially reluctant to take up this calling - retreating to its own Western hemisphere after the initial foray of the Great War exposed how deep the costs would be of enforcing a new international order based on democratic sovereignty of nations and ethnicities, with no more recourse to the antiquated feudal and aristocratic modes of organization that had been drastically overturned by war and insurrection in the old central and eastern European empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Turkey, and Czarist Russia.

This created the great tension of the interwar period, as American-style free-market capitalism and representative politics faced its first serious worldwide challenge from the communist expansionism of the Soviet Union, which in turn generated a reactionary backlash in the form of more virulent, militarily predatory, and even racist and anti-Semitic nationalism epitomized by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The failure of Anglo-American international capitalism - by now already popularly associated with an international Jewish Zionist conspiracy - in the 1930s Great Depression was thus the trigger point for the global catastrophe of the Second World War and its attendant genocidal Holocaust of European Jewry by the reactionary nationalist element of Germanic fascism.

Thereafter, the world found itself split into the two economic and political blocs that triumphed over German-Japanese fascism and Nazism: the West led by the capitalist United States and the East led by the communist Soviet Union dominated by Russia. Though the heart of this contest between the rival poles was central Europe, particularly Germany - where Western Allied and Soviet forces partitioned the former Nazi Reich - in the immediate postwar period the two key Asiatic fronts in this global ideological struggle also emerged: the Middle East, where America and Russia respectively threw their support behind the newly resurrected Jewish State of Israel and the post-colonial Arab states; and East Asia, where Japanese war-ravaged China fell to its own communist revolution, originally imported from Soviet Russia, upon completion of a generational civil war that forced the American-supported Nationalists to flee to the island of Taiwan.

Thus, in the four decades between the Korean War of 1950-53 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989-91, the Cold War was as much the struggle of traditional non-European Oriental societies such as China and the Arab-Islamic world to emerge into their own from the shadow of two centuries of globe-spanning European domination - yet using methods and ideas ultimately sourced from the West, whether directly or via the Eurasian land bridge of Russia - as they were the more conventionally Western- and Soviet-interpreted political-ideological competition between capitalism and socialism per se.

America gained the decisive upper hand about midway through this big game by securing the geopolitical coup of the century: opening communist China in the 1972 détente between Mao and Nixon; in the subsequent decade, deft US late-Cold War diplomacy secured not only China but also the hitherto Soviet-leaning Arab states - now critical for the role their massive oil wealth played in a new global monetary system built upon the US dollar's monopoly in international petroleum settlements (the "petrodollar") - under Washington's wing, effectively sidelining Moscow well before the Soviet empire itself crumbled and finally failed. By expanding the net of its inclusive free-market, free-trade regime to unprecedented levels of favor for newcomers such as the Arab oil producers and the East Asian industrial exporting powerhouses, America won what appeared - in the "end of history" late 1980s and 1990s - to be a final triumph over any purported alternate form of human development and societal order straying from its prescribed democratic and capitalist path.

Except the "end" has since really turned out to be a new beginning of the old: a rediscovery by the proud non-Western societies and cultures of the Eurasian landmass of their traditional identities upon the maximum practicable importation and adaptation of the upstart Western European project which so thoroughly ran a full circle around them by opening America in the Age of Discovery and establishing the US within it upon the successful application of the subsequent Enlightenment.

The Chinese communist crackdown on the pro-democracy movement at Tiananmen Square in 1989 was thus a harbinger for the generation hence: what increasingly appears to be a comprehensive and systematic retrenchment by the non-Western world in opposition to Western democracy and capitalism. The dramatic failure of the Arab Spring has only been the most telling such instance of this: it was already preceded by the massive letdown of the US effort to transform Iraq into a model Arab democracy upon ousting its erstwhile ally and proxy Saddam Hussein, and from 2014 on has had close competition with the troubling reversion of even semi-Western Russia into authoritarianism and revanchist military adventurism in Ukraine.

But it has been the 2016 election of Donald Trump to the US presidency - a shock outcome now broadly acknowledged as having been brought about with some manner and degree of Russian collusion - and more to the point the drastic contrast he has positioned the entirety of his administration into as against that of predecessor Barack Obama, that underscores just what this incendiary move to open the Jerusalem embassy today is all about.

In no uncertain terms, Trump is basically declaring "Mission over": America's great mandate to civilize and - to the relevant extent, Westernize - the rest of the world in its own progressive image has pretty much run its course, at least in its longstanding formulation dating to the global US expansion and proselytization flowing out of last century's world wars. In the Obama era, so this line of thinking goes, the United States has already fundamentally shed its most intimate and core Judeo-Christian identity, and hence doesn't really have any authentic treasure left to share with the world at large, anyway: it has perverted the whole notion of freedom and rights to mean the evisceration of all long cherished conceptions of family and sexuality - the erasure of the distinction between objective liberty and subjective license - leaving in its wake a moral and spiritual anarchy that it foolishly continues to promote as some universal ideal for traditional non-Western societies who now have every reason to be repelled by what American "pop culture" seemingly stands for.

It is high time for America to return to its proper origins - the quest for a final homecoming of Western Christianity to Jerusalem, in the full splendor and glory of the coming reign of the King of Kings, the Lord of Israel. The United States' special relationship with the Jews - perhaps even more so than its own deepest identity as home for all Christian sects and churches that made the pilgrimage to the New World in search of an unfettered domain to seek the blessings of Providence - points the way. There is no point any longer denying that while the appeal of the Divine truths deemed "self-evident" in her founding document may be universal, its roots are highly particular: the United States of America has its true origins in Israel, just as Israel's great glory of the modern age is the United States of America.

That could well mean resigning the entire Middle East with the exception of the Holy Land to a great rival civilization and creed - Islam - and digging in for a new competition or even clash with the latter, now increasingly centered on a resurgent Persian-Babylonian empire emanating from contemporary Shiite Iran; just as it could mean doing so with the even greater challenge of a rising China wasting not a beat trying to surpass the Western barbarians which upended her imperial supremacy from 1500 to 1900 - ironically in the search for herself; and all this with the ultimate allegiance and orientation of everyone else - Europe, Russia, India, Africa, Latin America - in flux even if increasingly apparently predisposed to settle in either an Eastern or Western, or indeed mixed, cultural and institutional bearing.

The end of history may have returned, after all: the true end of it - that is to say, its permanent return at the conclusion of one age and the dawn of another. That is what the opening of the US Embassy in Jerusalem truly signifies.

Iran, not Russia, will make US pay for hitting Syria

As the United States plans and executes a coordinated response with its allies to the latest chemical weapons attack on civilians in Syria, it is already painfully apparent that no military strike against the regime of Bashar al-Assad will herald the start of a new effort to topple him in the seven-year-old civil war that has claimed over half a million lives. As such, the Trump administration is essentially gambling that it can come up with an attack that's at the same time crushing - even overwhelming - yet limited. Difficult as this would be in itself, the even greater risk is that it would trigger some kind of retaliation that would open the possibility of a wider and longer conflict - even if none of the nations involved actually want one.

That's because Iran, not Russia, is now the true swing factor behind the Assad regime in any US-led coalition action: and with the 2015 nuclear deal on the ropes since last fall, the US and its European and regional Mideast allies have already spent the entirety of 2018 clutching at straws for any kind of lever of remaining influence over Tehran's ambitions and behavior on the ground in Syria. They may thus find themselves with very little leverage and maneuver room to stop Iran from striking back on behalf of its client in Damascus in a way that Russia will not.

This is why the recent blowup of Western relations with Russia is so dangerous for the region: whilst Western capitals tend to see Moscow and Tehran as acting in tandem in boosting Assad and nefariously advancing the anti-liberal and anti-democratic agenda in the Levant, the facts have always been more nuanced. The Russian intervention in Syria in late 2015 was largely meant to prevent Damascus from becoming a Shiite-run satrap of the new Persian empire on the Mediterranean, but while Russia has clearly succeeded in saving Assad and even preventing a complete sectarian disintegration in the western core of the country, its diplomatic efforts to piece Syria back together whole have also flatly failed - with the result that a de facto partition is already occurring, even if highly favorable to the old Baathist regime.

Since late 2017, then, the situation both militarily on the ground and also diplomatically within the country has significantly tilted in Iran's favor at the expense of Russia's; while residual Russian airpower continues to give Assad his most important battlefield advantage over his rebel and jihadist adversaries, Iran has opportunistically rushed into the strategic gaps that Moscow has inevitably left as its deescalation-cum-peacemaking framework fell apart amidst renewed fighting on all fronts in tandem with a more general deterioration of its relations with the West and the US.

The critical turning point was in early February, when a massive US airstrike decimated a sizable detachment of Russian mercenaries in eastern Deir ez-Zor province along the middle Euphrates. In hindsight, the whole incident may have been deliberately engineered by Iran - whose advisers are typically in charge of pro-Assad forces in various sectors - to force Moscow to drastically toughen its Syrian stance against the US and Israel. The incident convinced Russia that the US planned to permanently occupy the eastern bank of the Euphrates with its Kurdish proxies, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and hence there was a price Washington and Tel-Aviv had to pay: namely, they would have to get used to a beefed-up Iranian proxy presence south of Damascus, between the Syrian capital and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Indeed, just days after the Deir ez-Zor fiasco, for the first time an advanced Iranian drone penetrated Israeli airspace, prompting an Israeli retaliatory airstrike that ended with an F-16 downed by Syrian antiaircraft fire after it had already crossed back over into friendly airspace; not only did this indicate a breach of earlier rules of engagement, it also unleashed a larger wave of Israeli strikes that inflicted substantial losses on Syrian air defenses and some Iranian assets, including an anti-US and anti-Zionist Shiite militia that had recently been brought in from Iraq.

It was later reported that only a direct intervention by Vladimir Putin stopped Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu from ordering an even larger third wave of Israeli airstrikes which Moscow determined could have triggered a new Arab-Israeli war that would have sucked in Lebanese Shiite powerhouse Hezbollah in addition to the Syrian army and its allied, including other Iranian proxy, militias and paramilitaries. If so, that means Russia had laid down its red line for Israel: the Jewish state's air activities against the Syrian regime and its Iranian allies would only be allowed to reach a certain threshold before Russia could well turn its own formidable S-400 surface-to-air missile system on Israeli jets.

But in a broader sense, the aforementioned events of the first half of February both confirmed and further advanced the trends which by now have become ominously solidified, even if the US and its European allies now at the forefront of the threatened extraregional retaliation against Assad are blithely unaware of it. Namely, it is no longer Russia but Iran which holds the active retaliatory and escalatory cards against the US-led coalition still seeking to undermine Assad's rule even if it can't end it; this dangerously exposes Washington to Iranian options for tit-for-tat provocation and escalation when US leadership is wrongly focused far more intently on Russian reactions.

We cannot say whether Putin and the Kremlin were previously tipped off to the Syrian regime's - that is to say, Iran's - intent to shoot down an Israeli F-16 and trigger a risky cycle of escalation; but it's beyond doubt that once said cycle began, Russia was content to see Israel's desired level of punishment cut short. Thus Iran already has reason to think that should push come to shove, Russia will step in to block even the Americans from responding with overwhelmingly superior firepower to its counterpunches on behalf of Assad - after all, Moscow can in such a scenario absolve itself of any accusations of stirring the pot, because it would merely be intervening, even refereeing in a sense, a spiraling clash between Washington and Tehran.

Thus, the hour is late, and the chips are coming down: the grave danger now dangling over the Middle East and well beyond as Trump mulls his response for hitting Assad is that even short of intending to start a new phase of the Syrian war, it will force an Iranian retaliation against Israel. If the US ends up lobbing a few hundred as opposed to a few dozen cruise missiles at Syrian regime targets, the Ayatollahs may well determine that launching a few dozen rockets at Israel is a proportionate response - a warning that anything more will never at any point in the future be tolerated. All bets may then be off if Israel demands another round of more intensive US-led strikes: Trump will be loath to refuse an embattled Netanyahu, but neither will Iran back down because it may even double down on its rockets - not only in southern Syria but possibly Hezbollah's massive arsenal in Lebanon will by then come into play - in the knowledge that Russia will cap the American escalation with the threat of World War III.

Iran, not Russia, will make the US pay for hitting Syria hard in the mistaken belief that it can be done with impunity.

America's "Suez moment" is already here

As the first quarter of 2018 ends, America under Donald Trump finds itself in an awkward situation reminiscent of the "Suez moment" that confronted the postwar empires of Britain and France more than six decades ago, in the 1956 crisis that saw their former colonies in the Arab Middle East rise up to evict the residual Western European influence in the region: the US today similarly faces a potentially existential crisis for its longstanding statu as supreme arbiter of the affairs of not only this most geopolitically pivotal  part of the world - the cradle of civilization - but well beyond.

This weekend, China has basically launched a formal bid to dethrone the US dollar as the undisputed global reserve currency by initiating a long-term switch from greenbacks to its own currency, the yuan or renminbi (RMB), as payment medium for oil imports. If successful - and it is quite likely to be, given sufficient time and a generally contained level of global economic volatility or indeed instability - this will mark a historic shift of economic power from West to East that concludes half a millennium of Western supremacy and primacy.

Indeed, it is the sheer speed and scale of this presently unfolding realignment that underscores its monumental significance: it is quite literally taking place far faster and at a far broader and deeper dimension than virtually the entire Western elite and Western world as a whole is able to grasp or, in the latter's case, even notice.

Back in 1956, when ambitious young Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser declared his intent to nationalize the Suez Canal, the initial reaction from London and Paris reeked of nothing less than racist arrogance founded upon a quite morbid brand of ignorance: for so long, the old-line Western imperialist powers had had their way in the Arab world with their diktats and edicts so seamlessly executed and implemented by their local puppet rulers that they couldn't have conceived of the level of hostility they had stored up for a colonial order they had imposed and even at that point sought to maintain.

Indeed, as the subsequent history of the Middle East conclusively demonstrated, there was still plenty of political leeway in the region for the interests of the traditional European powers: all the post-colonial Arab regimes assiduously cultivated and maintained relations with their former bosses to the extent they deemed practicable and profitable, even as their main patrons and benefactors shifted to the rival pair of the US and USSR in the height of the Cold War; yet the paradigm shift that occurred in 1956 was undeniable and epochal in that, from thenceforth, Old World Europe would once more be a marginal player in the heart of the Islamic world, which it had not been since the onset of the modern era in the late 1700s catapulted it far ahead of its millennial civilizational rival to the southeast.

As such, there is an even greater and more enduring significance to the unfolding decline and oncoming fall of the postwar US empire throughout the vast expanse of Eurasia - a development that the presidency of Donald Trump has first forewarned (with his shock election) and is now actualizing in terms of real political events and trends: this could well be the end of any hard Western influence in the Eastern Hemisphere once and for all - a moment that will be remembered for centuries and even millennia hence.

Ever since Barack Obama's fateful "red line" on the use of chemical weapons against civilians was crossed with little penalty by Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war in the summer of 2013, it has become painfully apparent that the world's so-called "sole superpower" for the entire post-Cold War era was no longer capable of acting with decisive force to create or even duly influence the course of events in the Middle East. In the four to five years since - but most dramatically since the November 2016 election of Trump - it has also been revealed just how deeply this loss of relative military and diplomatic might has been rooted in a more fundamental transfer of economic and commercial strength and vitality away from the long-dominant West.

At heart, this is because the Anglophone-led West has now become an essentially permanently post-industrial economy and even a nascent "post-family" society: its structures of sociopolitical authority and even its more organic basic bonds of communalism and fraternalism have become so dissipated by generation upon generation of growing cultural individualism - fostered by technology-driven consumerism that ever less and less subtly atomizes each and every person into an isolated unit of material expenditure - that the very advancement of socioeconomic "progress" measured by standard indicators of wealth and income is no longer conducive to national strength and expansion, but rather national weakness and even contraction through self-discoordination.

Of course, the Trump presidency is in its very self a backlash against this very real American and Western emasculation - but it is quite naturally a significantly lagging one. Both the "America First" and "Make America Great Again" banners essentially presuppose and assume that what must be recovered is not primarily soft or ideological power, but hard military and economic muscle: in other words, their underlying premise is that America's crisis of identity is caused by its loss of power and influence, not the other way around.

And so, even as Trump drastically scales back reconstruction aid for Syria, he will be loath in the coming days and weeks to actually end the US military presence there altogether, despite his impulsive declaration that with ISIS all but defeated, there's no purpose left for American troops in the country.

Indeed, if the pullout of the British and French from the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s is any guide, some US military and intelligence presence in countries like Syria and Iraq is almost guaranteed to remain - if only because Washington must at least feel it still retains some say or perhaps veto over policies by local actors that are blatantly tailored to harm or reduce American equities in the region.

But even so, by thus speaking his mind unfettered from the US defense and diplomatic communities, Trump has himself acknowledged that America's "Suez moment" has indeed arrived - not just in the Middle East, but more likely throughout the expanse of Eurasia.

"Let other people take care of it" - said of Syria - can just as well be said of the Korean peninsula and the Eastern European periphery of Russia, i.e. other Eurasian regions where American military and economic might are no longer nearly the decisive let alone dominant factors for friend and foe alike as they would've been not that long ago.

Whether Trump yet grasps the magnitude and gravity of what he's openly recognizing with his gut - a development that probably undermines his own platform of renewed American greatness more than the cerebral reasoning of his mind has yet cared to or is perhaps even capable of processing - will only serve to underscore how all new facts and realities, however disruptive to the still enshrined but already in fact crumbling status quo, are simply not incumbent upon anyone actually heeding them to become the inexorable movers of the wheels of history anyway.