Ian Welsh

On October 23, 2025

As retired IDF general Yitzak Brick said:

We’re about 3 weeks into our annual fundraiser. Our goal is $12,500 (same as last year). So far we’ve raised $9,010 from 79 people out of a readership of about 10,000.

It is now over 20 years ago that I first wrote that Israel would either become a single, secular state, or it would ethnically cleanse or genocide the Palestinian. There were no other solution sets: the land is not actually large enough, nor does it have enough water to divide it into two states and in any case, it was obvious Israelis would never go for that.

Even at the time I figured genocide and ethnic cleansing was more likely, there’s a point where the depravity of a people becomes so pronounced (as it was for colonial North Americans) that no other solution is likely, given the means.

I don’t know how many of you have read bin Laden’s writings. (I don’t endorse him, but he was a smart man.) His fundamental point was that America must be defeated before various local evils, because America was propping them all up.

“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability. … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

The only way the Palestinians don’t get genocided and ethnically cleansed out of Palestine (the ceasefire/peace will be temporary, and has been violated multiple times by Israel even as they ramp up attacks on the West Bank), is if Israel can’t. And the only way Israel can’t is its economy collapses and takes the country with it, possibly with its neighbours opportunistically jumping in.

Fortunately Trump, with his escalating trade war, is working on it.

First we have the rare-earth export controls from China. Most weapons need rare earths, the West is ten to twenty years from being able to produce enough (always bet the under on China, and over on the West), and China’s controls include any use of rare-earths for weapons. If Trump doesn’t make peace with China, on their terms, the weapon flow to Israel will slow to a trickle. (It will be even worse for Ukraine.)

But there’s far more that China could do. A cursory search shows that it controls the majority of production of the following:

Graphite. US is 100 import dependent. China controls 90% of the processing. Used in batteries, EVs, lubricants and steelmaking.
Gallium. China does 98% of this. and the US is 100% import reliant. A lot seems to come in from 3rd parties, but China could shut that down. Used for semiconductors, LEDs, solar panels and radar.
Solar panels and wafers are about 80% China manufactured. 95% for polysilicon wafers.
Lithium ion battery cells and packs. China has about 80% of the manufacturing, and these things go in everything, including almost all consumer electronics.
Refined graphite anodes. China produces 90% and you need them for Lithium-ionC batteries.
Consumer drones. (Important for agriculture and the parts often used for military drones.) China controls about 80% of production. More, I’d guess.
About 80% of generic drugs are produced in China.
Legacy semiconductors (28nm+). As Europe is finding out, since China will no longer let Nexperia import them, and auto assembly is having to shut down as a result, China controls a lot of the manufacture of these items. Taiwan, etc… have moved on, but these are used in consumer electronics and autos in vast quantities and mostly supplied by China.
High Capacity transformers and inverters. (Can’t transmit electricity without them, and China has at least 70% of the manufacturing, probably more.)

Imagine if China put export controls on all of this?

The US economy would collapse. Nothing of significance can be manufactured in the US or Europe without Chinese components. It’s that simple. China would take a big hit, but they can tank it if they have to.

And, almost overnight, Israel would be without its suppliers. Plus, of course, they are reliant on US subsidies, and America wouldn’t be able to afford them. Europe wouldn’t be able to make up the difference, even assuming they didn’t get hit hard too.

Now I don’t necessarily expect this, it’s not a prediction, but it’s the only route I see left for any sort of relief for Palestinians. And if it does happen, I doubt Israel would survive.

It’s also worth running thru to understand just how precarious a position the West has put itself in with regard to China. More on that later.

Harvard Slashes Ph.D. Admissions

On October 22, 2025

Here’s a summary from Chris Brunet of the cuts:

Readers may remember the following chart. Bear it in mind.

According to the Crimson report, which quotes five anonymous faculty sources, the reductions are as follows:

Science PhD admissions slashed by more than 75%

Arts & Humanities cut by about 60%

Social Sciences reduced 50–70%

History down 60%

Biology down 75%

The German department will lose all PhD seats

Sociology will go from six students to zero

In addition to slashing PhD admissions, FAS has also instituted a hiring freeze for full-time staff, announced it would keep its budget flat for fiscal year 2026, and ceased work on all “non-essential capital projects and spending.”

These austerity measures follow a wave of layoffs across other Harvard schools, including the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Kennedy School of Government, the School of Dental Medicine, and the Graduate School of Design.

I urge you to read Chris’s entire article, but I’ll summarize part of it:

Harvard lost 113 million on operations last year BUT made 4 billion in its endowment, which stands at 56.9 billion.
2025 has so far been a record year for donations: 629 million, up from 528 million last year, and 2025 isn’t over yet.
Trump promised to restore 2.4 billion in frozen grants IF Harvard runs some trade schools for automotive plant, motors and engines.

Anyway, obviously Harvard can afford to make up its operating deficit of 113 million and doesn’t need to cut Ph.D. admissions. Making up for grants out of its own pocket would be harder, but not impossible, since 4 billion (its endowment gain) is more than 2.4 billion. The reason for the endowment is so that Harvard can, when times are bad, for whatever reason, continue to operate normally. Since the next administration may reverse Trump’s policies, it makes sense to just keep going for now. If it turns out that Trump’s policies are a bi-partisan consensus, then Harvard should make adjustments.

Harvard is, as Chris notes, acting very much as if it is an endowment fund with a university, and not a university with an endowment fund. Instead of using the endowment to protect the university, it is protecting the endownment with cuts to the university.

Now this is just Harvard. The Crimson article has this lovely quote:

The reduction in admissions slots puts a figure to FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra’s announcement in late September that the school would be admitting Ph.D. students at “significantly reduced levels.” Hoekstra cited uncertainty around research funding and an increase to the endowment tax — which could cost Harvard $300 million per year — as sources of financial pressure.

Hoekstra also wrote in her message that the FAS decided to continue admitting Ph.D. students only “after careful deliberation.” She noted that many peer institutions paused Ph.D. admissions altogether, suggesting the FAS may have considered a complete halt in line with its peers. (my emphasis)

Wait. A complete halt at many other universities? No new Ph.D. students?

So, OK, the US is DONE. DONE. OVER. OK? They’re mass cutting universities admissions and research at the same time as China is pulling away, funding its universities even more? This is some of the sheerest stupidity I have ever seen. Right wing ‘tards hate universities, so they’re going to cut America’s throat.

We’re about 3 weeks into our annual fundraiser. Our goal is $12,500 (same as last year). So far we’ve raised $8,610 from 76 people out of a readership of about 10,000.

I get also that we’re in a profoundly anti-intellectual, culture hating period where the idea that history, literature, languages and social sciences matter has given way to chants of “STEM, STEM, STEM!” but note, for example, that biology is getting slashed and that most of the research cuts and freezes are in the hard sciences. This as China has overtaken the US in biotech and is poised to overtake in pharma.

I cannot wrap my mind around how stupid and foolish this all is. It’s not that American universities don’t need fixing. If I were in charge I’d probably force them to keep faculty and student numbers up and reduce administrative bloat by at least half in 2 years. I’d also force every university to restore control to the faculty senate, and make it so that if you aren’t a faculty member (and teaching plus either writing or researching) you cannot have any actual authority. There’s also a question of research cost padding, but the solution to that isn’t wholesale cuts at the exact moment when one is in peer competition with a challenger.

But this sort of insanity, of reducing or outright cutting the pipeline of future scholars and scientists is outright deranged and self destructive to a remarkable degree.

As for Harvard, the people who run it are scum, who have lost sight of the fact that the endowment serves the university. I cry few tears for Harvard, the people it graduates are usually conformist careerists. But Harvard is the bell-weather for all US universities, if this is happening even at Harvard, what is happening down the chain?

America’s in trouble, and that trouble could be used to fix things. But all Trump is doing is tearing everything down, generally in the stupidest way possible.

The Personal Politics of Hopelessness

On October 21, 2025

We’re about 3 weeks into our annual fundraiser. Our goal is $12,500 (same as last year). So far we’ve raised $8,180 from 72 people out of a readership of about 10,000.

As I write this I’m eating a sub I bought from across the street. While it was being prepared I chatted with the young woman making it, and she told me about moving from the Canadian Maritimes to Toronto, to, in essence, get a job that pays a little more than minimum wage. Because out in the Maritimes she had trouble getting even that.

I thought to myself that her experience is one that politicians need to have. Many politicians, of course, have never ever had a bad job. They went straight to a good university and from there to a good job or internship. They probably worked hard for it, and think they deserve what they have, never really seeing all the people whose feet were never on that road, who never had the same shot they did.

Then there are a fair number of pols, though less and less every year, who will tell you about the lousy jobs they had as teenagers, or maybe in their early twenties. But in most cases something is different between them and many working class and even middle class folks.

They knew they weren’t staying there.

When I was poor and working in lousy jobs I used to look in the mirror and see myself at 50, or 60. I expected to still be working at grindingly hard jobs, being treated badly by bosses (because there is no rule more iron than that the worse you are paid the worse your employer will treat you), and still being paid little more than minimum wage. That was the future I saw for myself.

And when I was on welfare, after having failed to find a job for 6 months, and even being turned down by McDonalds (in the middle of the early nineties recession) I wondered if I’d even ever have a shitty job again. I ate cheap starchy food, turned pasty and put on weight. My clothes ran down. When my glasses broke beyond the point where tape would keep them together I literally had to beg the optometrist to make me his cheapest pair and I’d pay him later. (I eventually did.) My life was a daily grind of humiliation.

And that’s what I expected my life to be.

When politicians participate in one of those “live on Welfare for a week/month” programs I’m happy, but I’m also dubious. The difference is that they know they’re getting out in a week or a month. They know it’s going to end. Much as I applaud someone like Barbara Ehrenreich, who lived for months working at lousy jobs, again, she knew it was going to end. She knew that, if push come to shove and she became seriously sick, she could opt out. She knew that if she really couldn’t eat for days, that was her choice.

Living without that safety net, knowing that if something goes wrong, that’s just too bad, changes you. Living without any real hope of the future, knowing that the shitty job you’ve got now is probably about as good a job you’re ever going to have, changes you.

And it changes your sense of what hard work is, of what it means to be deserving. I remember working on a downtown construction site as temp labor, and I’d watch all the soft office workers with their un-calloused hands come out for lunch, and I’d wonder why they got paid two or three times what I did for work that was so much easier (and which, of course, I could do, even if I didn’t have a BA.) At the end of the day they might be stressed, but I’d go home physically exhausted from hard labor and so would my co-workers.

Of course, I got out of that. I’d say “I went back to university”, but even though that’s true, it’s not what got me out, since I never finished my BA. Instead what got me out is that I finally got a couple chances to prove what I could do—I got a temp job in an office, and was one of their most productive workers (they measured it.) Later I got invited to blog, and hey, I can write, even if I don’t have a BA. I got lucky. Like most people who get lucky in work, that luck involved a lot of hard labor, but it also involved luck.

But a lot of folks never get lucky despite the fact that they work hard. Perhaps they aren’t really all that bright (half the population, after all, is below average intelligence.) Perhaps they’ve got some personality issues or weak social skills. Perhaps there’s something not quite right in their brain chemistry. Or perhaps they just never catch a break because they aren’t lucky and their parents weren’t well enough positioned to help them get those breaks.

But still, most of them work hard and earn their money, whether it’s barely more than minimum wage or they did get a bit of luck and got one of the few remaining good blue collar jobs.

But when they look in the mirror, they know that the guy or gal looking in the mirror ten or twenty years from now is probably going to be doing the same thing. And they know that they’re one bad break away from losing even the little they have—one illness, one plant closure, one argument with their boss.

They don’t have a lot of hope for the future, except that it won’t get worse. The life they live now is the best it’s probably gonna get.

Living like that changes you. It makes you see people differently. You understand that there are a lot of bad jobs out there, and that someone’s going to be stuck with them. You know that most of those jobs are either hard or humiliating, and often both. You know that for too many people, a shitty job where they’re abused by their boss is as good as it gets.

This all comes to mind because of how Congress and other politicians have acted throughout the auto bridge loan debate. Folks who passed a bill giving their sort of people: wealthy people who went to good colleges, who work with their minds and not their hands in the financial industry, 700 billion dollars without any real oversight wanted to force a cram down of wages and benefits on auto workers. Journalists on TV who were sympathetic to the bailout, dripped with palpable contempt for the idea of “subsidizing unprofitable companies”, something that didn’t bother them when it was soft-handed professionals like themselves on the dole.

The narrative of the GI generation was “first person in my family to go to college”. They came up from poverty, they probably expected to live in poverty all their life, but when the world changed so changed their chances.

It was a generation of opportunity, but what has happened since them is the “closing of the American elite”. Every generation the odds of someone born poor making it into the elite decrease. At this point about 80% of the working class don’t get degrees. The US now has the least inter-generational social mobility in the Western world (it used to have the most). The elites have become self-perpetuating, and they never had to stare in a mirror and know that they may never have more than minimum wage job; that probably this is as good as it gets.

As a result they have no real empathy or understanding of the vast majority of the middle and working class. The elites know they worked hard to be where they are, what they don’t see is that their feet were put on the path from birth, and that every opportunity was given to them. Opportunities that were not so open to those below them, who have to virtually bankrupt themselves to go to university and whose schools were completely broken, even as the value of BA declines to multi-generational lows. Put yourself in debt for 20 years, and it may still not buy you the good life.

That existence, hand to mouth, with no hope, is something America’s elites have never experienced and don’t understand. For them there’s always another opportunity, always another chance: always hope. And what matters to them is when the “deserving”, which is to say, their own class, is in trouble. So they’ll bail out the financial sector, even though it hasn’t made any more profit than the Big 3 in the past 8 years, and unlike the financial sector, didn’t bring down the world economy, but they won’t help out the undeserving whom they don’t understand.

America has become the most class ridden society in the Western world, far worse than Britain. Congressional seats are passed on to family members and friends like corrupt boroughs in 18th century England. The rich are bailed out and ordinary people left to sink. Responsibility is enforced on the least in society while the privileged are allowed to skate. Sell a gram of pot, go to jail; but kill hundreds of thousands in an illegal war and it’s no big deal.

The elites don’t live in the same world as ordinary people. They have become completely disconnected from that world. This is entirely logical on their part, because for 30 years they’ve gotten rich, rich, rich at the same time as ordinary people haven’t had a single raise. When you’re sitting on the top it’s very clear that all boats don’t need to be lifted and that Americans aren’t all in it together. The elites have done just fine, for over 30 years, while the rest of society went to hell.

So there’s no empathy born of shared experience, of the knowledge that sometimes life sucks and no matter what you do, it’s going to suck, and that that’s the way many people live. And there’s no acknowledgment of a need to make America work for everyone, because for the elites, that’s simply not true: America doesn’t need to work for everyone for things to be good for them.

This then, is how they’ve acted. Plenty of help for themselves, for the people they see as part of their group. And very little help for everyone else. Because the elites aren’t like ordinary people, they don’t believe they have many shared interests with you, and they no longer have any real shared experience.

Expect to eat a lot of cake over the next few years if this attitude doesn’t change. The elites, of course, are wrong. At the end of the day a nation without a solid working and middle class always falls into steep decline.

But, as Adam Smith once said, “there’s a lot of ruin in a nation.”

Nonetheless, as many nations have discovered, that amount isn’t infinite.

This is a republished article from 2009. I think it’s worth putting some of these up occasionally, because most readers won’t have seen the original.

Has China Put America Into the pre-WWII “Japan Trap?”

On October 20, 2025

Most modern weapon systems require rare earths to manufacture, including expendables like missiles and drones. Rare earths are less mined than they are refined, and China controls over 90% of the refining capability. Rare earths are generally found in small amounts in other ores. For example, Gallium in Aluminum. To get Gallium, you have to refine mountains of aluminum. Gallium comes from Bauxite as part of the refining process.

Fifty grams of Gallium per metric ton of refined aluminum.

China produces 98% of it.

Now Canada used to produce a lot of Gallium, as a side benefit of processing a lot of aluminum. But Canadian aluminum wasn’t as cheap as Chinese Aluminum. And this is the problem, if you want to scale you need long term contracts not just for Gallium but the Aluminum. (Do you trust any contract underwritten by the US government? If so, many bridges are available for sale to you.)

Every rare earth has similar issues.

Now cast your mind back to pre-war Asia. Japan is kicking ass, especially against the Chinese. They’ve conquered Taiwan, Korea and South Manchuria. All of this requires lots of oil, and they buy that oil from America, primarily, which was the Saudi Arabia of the day. FDR (who hated the Japanese and was a Sinophile) cut off oil exports to Japan.

Japan had only so much in the way of oil reserves. It decided to use them to go to war, grabbing as much territory as possible, while they still existed. Some of their conquests: Burma, the Dutch East Indies, and Borneo, had oil.

The situation today isn’t identical. There’s no non-China rare earth production to seize. Everyone else is pretty much happy to sell to America, they just don’t have enough to matter.

We’re about 3 weeks into our annual fundraiser. Our goal is $12,500 (same as last year). So far we’ve raised $7,885 from 68 people out of a readership of about 10,000.

But what does matter is that if China’s rare earth ban continues, America loses the ability to make large volumes of advanced weapons. Every time I look into estimates of how long it will take to get rare earths production up and running the West, the optimistic numbers are at about ten years, with a median around twenty. China itself took about twenty years, in the 80s and 90s.

China is getting stronger over time. Everyone with sense admits that. Even before the rare-earth ban it was clear that the West is growing weaker. In ten years, let alone twenty, no one will be able to pretend America can win a war against China.

So the rare earths ban means that if the US wants war against China, it has to be soon. Within a year, I’d say.

Note that this isn’t just about China. The West supplies Ukraine and Israel, for example, with weapons which have tons (literally) of rare earths in them. The ability to keep doing this is being taken away.

Heck, forget arming proxies, the West won’t be able to produce enough missiles and drones and radar and so on for its own military needs, meaning its ability to project power and keep other nations cowed and in line will go way down.

(At this point many of you are thinking “and this is bad, how?”)

So this is fairly existential for America. Its ability to bully everyone is about to be reduced significantly for ten to twenty years, by which time all its enemies will be well supplied by the Chinese and Russians with weapons more advanced than American ones.

Use it or lose it. I suspect this may be part of the reasoning (by the few parts of American government capable of reasoning) around attacking Venezuela, for example.

But the reason that America officials are freaking out about the rare earth ban is it really does matter. That America and the West let themselves get into the position is insane, people (including me) were pointing out this vulnerability twenty years ago. But if there’s one thing the West can’t do any more it’s definitely think beyond three months or “but China’s rare earths are cheaper, so we can’t do anything!!!!!”

Assuming a war can be avoided, the best outcome here (but bad for most citizens of the West because there are a lot of civilian rare earth applications) is for China to just leave the restrictions on permanently.

Oh, and as a ray of sunshine. If the US can’t supply Israel with weapons and if Russia and China won’t, well… More on that later.

China’s finally flexing its muscles. It spent the last eight years, ever since Trump’s absolutely crazed and stupid Huawei sanctions, making sure it has all the trump cards and no significant vulnerabilities.

And it had done so. Goodbye (not) Pax Americana.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 19, 2025

By Tony Wikrent

On October 19, 2025

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 19, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

Trump not violating any law

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

Are We the Nazis Now? How do we meet this moment?

Joyce Vance, Oct 13, 2025 [Civil Discourse]

It’s hard to watch. People being treated like they are less than human because of their perceived immigration status….

In early October, federal agents with Border Patrol, the FBI, and ATF arrested 37 people in a raid on a Chicago apartment building at 7500 S. South Shore Drive. They banged on residents’ doors overnight, according to a report in the Chicago Sun Times, “pulling men, women and children from their apartments, some of them naked, residents and witnesses said.”….

Earlier this month, at West Loop Elementary School in Chicago, Illinois, ICE was forced to release two sisters it pulled out of their car at a school pick up, because they have legal status under DACA. But that didn’t stop the masked agents, captured on video by a quick-thinking teacher, from surrounding the car and smashing its windows before dragging the two out. One of the sisters cried out her name and where she lived to bystanders, an apparent effort to prevent being “disappeared” into ICE custody….

In Portland, Oregon, on October 5, ICE agents threatened to arrest and kill an ambulance driver. The incident is documented by witness reports filed with the ambulance crew’s employer and its union by different individuals, as well as 911 calls, dispatch reports, and emergency communications. The ambulance was called to the ICE office to treat an injured protester, but agents refused to let the ambulance leave once the patient was loaded….

A video filmed in September that recently went viral shows ICE firing on protestors and hitting Presbyterian minister David Black in the head with a pepper ball. The minister, who was injured, is now suing. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin tweeted that the shooting was justified because….

There are now so many of these stories flooding the country, and they come with such rapidity, that it’s impossible to keep up with all of them. In other words, these incidents aren’t the exceptions. They aren’t unusual. And there’s every indication that they are tolerated, even encouraged, by Trump’s machine.

Trump promised he’d deport violent criminals. Instead, ICE is going after legal residents and terrorizing children. The message: if you’re an American citizen, don’t exercise your First Amendment rights unless you want to become a target too….

Leak: Feds Think Protests Hide Terrorism

Ken Klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 10-15-2025]

WHY ARE US TROOPS OCCUPYING AMERICAN CITIES?

Seymour Hersh [via Naked Capitalism 10-16-2025]

…The Trump administration is playing another long game, or trying to, in the streets of US cities under Democratic Party governance, using existing presidential emergency powers to send National Guard, Army troops and ICE agents to hunt down and arrest suspected undocumented immigrants and detain and deport them, without the due process demanded by the Constitution. What’s happening now may be a trial run for the use of those forces to interfere on the behalf of the president and the Republican Party in states where the Democratic Party has a chance to win crucial seats in next fall’s Congressional elections. I’ve been told by someone with inside knowledge that planning for such action is now under way in the White House….

Inside the War on Antifa

Ken Klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 10-16-2025]

Open Thread

On October 18, 2025

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. You know the drill. Hup, Hup!

China Seizes The Master’s Weapon As It Makes Itself The New Hegemon

On October 17, 2025

I’d like to highlight something Matt Stoller (the anti-trust guy) recently wrote:

John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes believed that ideas, hospitality, travel, knowledge and science should move freely between nations. if a country could reasonably produce something physical it needed, it should. Trade should exist, but be kept to a minimum.

In May of 2020, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) declared its economic strategy, using the phrase “dual circulation.” Dual circulation meant fostering a domestic productive apparatus that is independent of foreign technology and finance, while making sure the rest of the world is dependent on Chinese control of key supply chains, whether it’s shipping, railroad construction, electric batteries, or solar panels. Chinese ‘grand economic strategy,’ in other words, is to operate as a giant monopoly on which the rest of the world must rely.

Matt says this isn’t about Trump, but notice it’s from 2020. It is about Trump: Trump in the first term, with his anti-Huawei sanctions. The Chinese realized they were vulnerable and the national effort became making sure they controlled all their own critical supply chains. Having seen how the US used financial sanctions and supplier boycotts, they regrettably decided to reverse the situation.

Now what one needs to understand is that after WWII American controlled most of the key supply chains outside of the Russian bloc. They had over 50% of the world’s industry. If you wanted something, you have to get it from them. Over time, this franchise expanded, first back to the Euros, as they re-built their industry, then to the Japanese, Taiwanese and South Koreans. All of these nations were firmly American vassals. Not allies, vassals with military bases in their countries.

The West, led by America and the USSR had all the advanced tech. In the 70s the USSR fell behind, they couldn’t manage the digital revolution happening, and then the USSR collapsed and the West, really America, ruled unchecked.

If you wanted any advanced tech: planes, cars, computers, weapons, etc… it had to come from America or one its vassals. The US effectively had “dual circulation”, especially since it also had full control of the international finance system and could lock anyone out at will.

This wasn’t theoretical, US sanctions on Iraq in the 90s under Billy Clinton killed at least hundreds of thousands of people. I once talked to an Iraqi oncological pediatrician from the 90s and her incandescent rage over all the children who died of cancer she couldn’t save because of American sanctions was so hot it blotted out the sun.

Once such sanctions had been rare (though there are cases back in the 50s.) The most notable is the multi-generation trade blockade of Cuba.

But from Clinton on use of these sanctions became routine, “Treasury’s Wars.” Millions died, many more were impoverished.

So, China has learned from the evil master. And it has decided that if there is such a weapon, it will have it and use it and no one else can have it.

Everyone who rages against this is correct. No country should have this power. Not America. Not China. No one.

We’re about 2 1/2 weeks into our annual fundraiser. Our goal is $12,500 (same as last year). So far we’ve raised $7,695 from 64 people out of a readership of about 10,000.

What should be the case is a trade regime where everyone makes most of what they need. Need medicine? Make it in your country. (Shut up about prices, if the supply chain is domestic then almost all that crap that MMTers go on about becomes true. Prices are irrelevant, it’s all in money you print.) To the largest degree possible, everyone makes what they need. Smaller countries will have a harder time, and trade-states like Singapore obviously can’t, but this is what a good world looks like.

This maximizes political autonomy, too. You can’t be blackmailed by other countries. Spread nukes around, and much military force goes off the table too. (And they are going to spread. The US has taught everyone that if you have nukes you’re safe, and if you don’t, you’re dinner.)

So. China is teaching the Western world the same lesson America taught China and Africa and Iraq, and Iran and Cuba. We: Europe, the Anglo countries, South Korean, Taiwan and Japan, were inside the bubble during the period when the US allowed its vassals decent lives. (Oh, they destroyed Japan’s tech and industrial lead, they gutted Britain after WWII, they forced Canada to destroy its world leading aviation industry), but overall, if you were on the inside of the “Golden billion” or, early, “the golden 500 million”, life was pretty damn good.

America used the whip, its vassals jumped to obey and everyone else was poor.

Then Americans got stupid and thought that China was like Japan, they could ship their industry there, makes lots of money and if necessary bring China to heel if it got out of hand.

Wrong. Morons. I and others warned about this for decades, how stupid it was, but no one in power listened. Probably a good thing, since it led to a billion people getting out of poverty, but it’s not going to be fun for those us living in the West.

So: the weapon is being wrested from the old hegemon’s palsied hands, and being wielded by the apprentice, the new master, the new hegemon.

Bow, insects, the new lord is here. And no, America isn’t going to get its hegemon status back, nor should anyone who isn’t American want it to.

The actual solution is Keynes solution. No one should have the weapon—the power—because every country should make, grow and dig as much of they need as possible, using trade only for what they genuinely can’t make or for luxuries they can do without in a pinch.