Time of Troubles

World war three seems to be cancelled. The collapse of western institutions and states not.

Photo by Pawel Janiak on Unsplash

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The collective West’s decline has been laid bare for everyone to see during the past two years. After struggling with sluggish (or rather negative) growth, mounting debts, a great financial crisis, an exponentially growing wealth gap and inflation for decades, the long descent of the West has finally reached its accelerating phase. What follows will make the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European block (1) look like a lovely little family picnic.

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It’s not that none of this could have been foreseen. If you are a long time reader of this blog, you already know that energy is the economy, and without it, there are no resources, no trade, no manufacturing, no nothing. You might be also aware, that the lavish lifestyle of Westerners — and an increasing number of folks in Eurasia — is still supported almost entirely by fossil fuels, and locally produced, intermittent electricity via “renewables” are no replacement for those. You might also know that the energy cost of oil and gas extraction — together with mining — increases in an exponential fashion. As rich, easy to produce deposits deplete and are being replaced with poorer quality harder to get ones, the required (increased) amount of shoveling drilling pumping etc. will consume ever more of our precious energy… Just to produce the same amount of copper, oil or sand. And if you are a truly devout follower of this blog (and the many other great sites around the internet on this topic) you are already aware that humanity is in the state of absolute ecological overshoot, over-consuming and over-polluting the only living planet known to it.

Global civilization, and especially its Western minority, has been living well beyond its means for centuries now. Europe has compensated for this issue by seizing more productive land around the world, then by relying ever more heavily on fossil fuels to make more food. First coal, then oil, and finally gas. With the help of real then fossil slaves, Western states have built empires to compensate for the lack of resources at home and to amass fortunes for the billionaire class. The process, however, has reached its logical endpoint. No civilization can live and grow forever by consuming a finite amount of stuff on a finite planet.

You see, all great cultures fall into the very same trap. Near the end of their respective lifecycles they tend to overdo everything. Over-expand. Over-commit. Over-exploit — both people and natural resources. In one word: they all end up in overshoot, consuming more nature and minerals which can be regenerated in a given year, and releasing more pollution which could be absorbed during the same time period. Overshoot comes with various symptom predicaments including, but not limited to, pollution of all kinds, extinction, climate change, resource depletion, wars and epidemics, imposing hard limits to both political and material expansion of human civilization.

Having burned through their countries’ own easy to get resources, and after outsourcing almost all of their manufacturing capacity, oligarchs running the western capitalist system have started to rely increasingly on financialization (over-inflating assets such as company stocks, housing etc.) to keep growing their wealth. Providing no value to civilization, such bubbles have resulted in an economy producing nothing it needs, except more billionaires vying for power, and a level of indebtedness not seen in ages. Despite the fact that resource and energy depletion are relatively slow processes (at their early stages at least), this dynamic has created an immediate existential threat to the Western capitalist system. As Tim Morgan explains:

There’s no reason why the material economy shouldn’t shrink at a relatively manageable pace, but there’s every reason to suppose that the financial system will stumble into chaos. Put another way, the financial system has been turned into a gigantic bubble, and Ponzi schemes can never be tapered.

Meanwhile, nations managing to escape western rule have developed their own financial system, trade routes, security, political and economic organizations. (Oddly enough, mostly due to fear of sanctions crippling their economies.) In order to back their new system, they have also developed a new range of nuclear weapons, hypersonic missiles, drones, advanced air defence complexes, electronic warfare capabilities and an industrial base able to sustain wars of attrition longer than any of the western states can… As a result, they have begun to neutralize the sea and economic power they have been fighting against for the past five hundred years (as for a cue look no further than the Red Sea). The “grand strategy” of the West (maintaining a cost-effective colonial footprint, while not letting anybody to consolidate hegemony on the Eurasian continent) is being defeated in front of our eyes.

“Every battle is won before it’s ever fought.” 

— Sun Tzu

Over the past decades, rising Eurasian powers have become immune — and thus a threat — to western hegemony. Being fully aware of the situation described above, and the fragility of the old economic order, BRICS countries are now busy building resilience and actively preparing for the West’s impending fall. Contrary to what most in European countries believe (or rather have been told), however, the Eurasian powers have not the faintest interest in conquering the old continent (2). Quite the contrary: they are more concerned with containing the crisis than expanding it, trying to prevent WWIII from escalating into a bloodbath all over the world. (For the record, such escalation arising from ongoing conflicts is in none of the West’s interest either, and thus will most likely be avoided together with nuclear war.) Be it as it may, one thing seems to be sure: the era of abundance and hegemony is now definitively over for the West, and a multi-polar world has already begun to take shape.

Judging by the relentless rise in political violence, ultimately stemming from rising inequality, economic hardship and a drastic erosion of trust in institutions, civil war and strife is what awaits us on both sides of the Atlantic. In the geopolitical arena, as the military crisis runs its course on Europe’s eastern front (shaping up to be a massive debacle for the West), NATO and the EU will become ever harder to hold together. Make no mistake: it will be tried as hard as possible, but the many internal contradictions of these institutions will simply tear them apart. With an eventual withdrawal of American forces and security guarantees, Europe will become a group of bickering nations once again, fighting each other over scarce resources while trying to decide who leads the block. 

Notwithstanding the many differences, America faces a similar fate and quite plausibly it, too, will fall apart during the process. What Joseph A. Tainter, American anthropologist and historian described in his book The collapse of complex societies — after thoroughly examining the causes behind the fall of civilizations — starts to increasingly look like a prediction regarding how things might unfold in the decades ahead.

“There is, first and foremost, a breakdown of authority and central control. Prior to collapse, revolts and provincial breakaways signal the weakening of the center. Revenues to the government often decline. Foreign challengers become increasingly successful. With lower revenues the military may become ineffective. The populace becomes more and more disaffected as the hierarchy seeks to mobilize resources to meet the challenge.

With disintegration, central direction is no longer possible. The former political center undergoes a significant loss of prominence and power. It is often ransacked and may ultimately be abandoned. Small, petty states emerge in the formerly unified territory, of which the previous capital may be one. Quite often these contend for domination, so that a period of perpetual conflict ensues. The umbrella of law and protection erected over the populace is eliminated.

Lawlessness may prevail for a time, as in the Egyptian First Intermediate Period, but order will ultimately be restored. Monumental construction and publicly-supported art largely cease to exist. Literacy may be lost entirely, and otherwise declines so dramatically that a dark age follows.”

Could such a fate be avoided…? Who am I to tell? I’m just an outside observer, located in a country caught between the East and the West. The writing is on the wall, however, for years now. Energy underwrites everything we do as a civilization. With a steady erosion of net energy per capita and a rise of an oligarchic elite, a growth in industrial output has been replaced with deindustrialization and financialization. Without a strong industrial base and an unrestricted access to minerals and energy, however, no superpower can hope to retain its standing. Especially not if it needs a disproportionate amount of resources to upkeep the high status of its citizens (at least that of the lucky few).

While the depletion of rich mineral and fossil fuel deposits knows no borders, Eurasian powers still use these resources more wisely and efficiently. They haven’t extracted everything in a rabid frenzy to increase shareholder value. Likewise they have spent much less of these vital inputs on frivolous consumption; instead they went on developing the industry, building power plants, railways and ports. Since all of the required high quality resources are finite in quantity and the demand for them can be expected to continue growing exponentially, Eurasian powers, too, will face the same predicament not so far down the line. Till that happens, however, they will continue to have the upper hand.

Europe is now all but out of energy, yet they are still busy cutting the last remaining ties to the rest of the Eurasian continent, a place they naturally belong. The US is close to experience a second peak in oil production, and due to the relentless rise in energy needed to obtain the next barrel of oil, soon no amount of drilling will be able to stop the impending decline in net production. Owners of corporations will not care, however. Their goal — maximizing profit — has been fulfilled. During the process, however, they’ve left behind a devastated landscape littered with abandoned wells, seeping oil into the groundwater and releasing methane in an uncontrolled manner. And while those wealthy elites have at least a chance to escape the ensuing mayhem, the remaining 99.9% of the population will have to contend with the outcome of collapse (most likely triggered by a financial crash of epic proportions). 

This event, however, will free up much of the resources currently channeled to the West from the rest of the planet, delaying the subsequent fall of Eurasia by several decades (3). The analogy between our global overshoot predicament and the fall of the Western Roman Empire — with its Eastern (Byzantine) counterpart remaining viable for centuries to come — is hard to escape here. What will happen next? Well, judging by recent events, civilizational inertia will take over from this point, creating rhymes in history which will be hard to miss.

Until next time,

B

Notes:

(1) Yours truly happened to live through the fall of communism in Eastern Europe as a teenager. I will never forget the worry on the face of my parents when discussing whether to pay for food, utilities or clothes this month. Trust me, I do not wish this to happen. Especially, knowing that no one in the West has voted to experience this… But it is what it is, and its coming. Yet, despite all the hardships it will not mean the end of the world. It is possible to survive such tough periods and find a new way of living. Being prudent, frugal, resourceful, flexible and open to new ideas will certainly help.

(2) Why would Eurasian powers want to control lands full of people who hate them, while holding no resources of any value? They are done with the West once and for all, and want nothing from them — as disappointing this may sound. When (not if) the current alliance system falls apart some of their countries will be allowed to join BRICS, but only if they deemed worthy of doing so.

(3) The collective West is currently responsible for more than 80% of excess consumption (above subsistence levels) while representing only 20% of world population. (Western nations are accountable for 92% of the world’s excess carbon dioxide emissions and 74% of excess material use.) This includes not only raw materials and commodities, but finished goods (coming from Asia) as well. The collapse of Western economies will thus inevitably cause a crisis in non-western manufacturing and resource producing nations, at least until new markets are formed to replace Europe and America. The coming escalation in the trade war (new tariffs, embargoes etc.) will, again, foster rather than foist these efforts aimed at shielding Eurasia from the subsequent fall of the western economic system, well before crisis hits.

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