Notes on gilded carrots and sticks

Tyrants cannot be appeased. The US is a tyrant in the process of losing its hegemonic power and becoming untethered from a moral system, with name-calling, slander-politics, and foreign policy liberally speckled with lies.

So far their options are:

• Work like hell to maintain the dollar financial system. Hence, there are inane announcements that BRICS is dead.
• If it does not work to some extent, shoot for a position in a multipolar world, ideally first among equals.
• We have discussed the chaos policy, “Order From Chaos,” which is loosely based on the Latin phrase “Ordo Ab Chao,” translated as “Out of Chaos, Comes Order.” This policy is often regarded as a means to impose totalitarian control over society, first by creating chaos through various forms of subterfuge and then using this as an excuse to institute order. In reality, it is Order over Freedom.

As Jeffrey Sachs clearly states, the US does not intend to sit at the losers’ table.  In addition, they do not intend to pay one moment’s restitution for their evil empire and the horrors that they’ve caused over many years now in our world.

This moment of clear transition to a different world structure, truly multi-polar, has its many smaller fights.  This obscures the real moves and the positioning to be global players.  The hybrid positioning for power in a new world will continue for a time, until we have stability again.  Israel is positioning for power in the region.  Turkiye is positioning for power.  In the LAC we see such positioning although the zeitgeist in the supportive countries is more one of sharing than an all-out power struggle

We will live with a duststorm constantly shifting in this full-out hybrid move across our world. Let’s name it: propaganda, dollars, creating chokepoints for trade, sanctions, denial of access to technology, containment of maritime routes, denial of belt and road world development, containment of China’s wallet, regime change when possible, carrot for Russia, stick for China, and others. The stick has just come down on Canada and Mexico by way of tariffs.

1877 Vanity Fair caricature of The 9th Marquess of Queensberry. The caption reads “A good light weight”

We are in a bare-knuckled fight with no Queensberry rules.

We can see this very easily if we keep the trajectory in mind, and this trajectory so far includes threats to Greenland and Panama, new chip sanctions on China, and the trilateral alliances—Japan, South Korea, the US, Australia, the UK, and the Philippines.

Trump and his people are not going to disengage.  The process is disengagement, where it is not profitable (Ukraine), and engagement, where it seems that profit can be gleaned (the smaller countries, now Mexico and Canada).

In his inaugural address, Trump explicitly stated that he sees America as one that “expands its territory.”  Is territorial expansion a real threat or just rhetoric he is using to shake down opponents in trade negotiations? It’s both. Trump is using these threats to gain better access to markets for American goods, and he’s flexing his imperial desires.

This has not changed:  “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

The president was asked how he would buy Gaza, as he had initially proposed. “We’re not going to have to buy,” he said. “We’re going to have Gaza. We don’t have to buy. There’s nothing to buy. We will have Gaza.”  “Mr. President,” a journalist asked, “take it under what authority? It is sovereign territory.”  “Under the US authority,” the president answered, as if that was enough.

The foreign policy is clear. The strategy is quickly revealing itself.  None of the basic lineaments, i.e., ‘we’re the empire and for that fact we prevail’, are changing.  The methods change if we are consumed by noise.  The carrot and the stick, though, are not changing, although they may be gilded today.   We can write essays on Europe, on Ukraine, on the end of the war, which Russia will do in their time and according to what is in their own best interests, and on the extreme noise generated, in my view, to obscure the strategy.  No, we are not looking at a kinder and gentler empire.  We’re looking at pretending, today called gaslighting.  As Pepe Escobar said:  The new Great Game has started.  My litmus test is Gaza and the Palestinians.  If the care for our world and our people is as demonstrated in Gaza and for the Palestinians, none of the pretense toward a kinder and gentler empire can hide the glimmer of a gilded carrot or stick, hiding the same old rotten empire.

A 1630 sermon by John Winthrop is now famous mainly for its proclamation that “we shall be as a city upon a hill.” Beginning in the 1970s, Ronald Reagan placed that line from that sermon at the center of his political career. Tracing the story of America from John Winthrop forward, Reagan built a powerful articulation of American exceptionalism—the idea, as he explained, “that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage.” In 2012, American exceptionalism—as summarized by the phrase “city on a hill”—became an official plank in the platform of the Republican party.

US Says, EU Does…

▪️Despite baseless hope the US has chosen “peace” over the pursuit of primacy, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, publicly reading off policy drawn from Project 2025 in Brussels earlier this month, laid out a “division of labor” in which Europe would continue Washington’s proxy war with Russia in Ukraine while the US pivots to another war of encroachment and aggression with China in the Asia-Pacific region;

▪️Following a week of theater in which the US administration berated, mocked, and belittled Europe, with Europe likewise stomping its feet and holding its breath, the EU finally and FULLY complied with Secretary Hegseth’s directives to raise vast amounts of money to continue the Ukraine proxy war;

▪️The accompanying clip demonstrates the US directive and Europe’s obedient compliance with the distracting theater that took place in between edited out to make it clear how this process actually works.

https://t.me/brianlovethailand/3730