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A tiny note on the war
In the previous thread, I got some pushback for suggesting that not only did the US strike the Iranian school in Minab, killing 170 children or something like that, but perhaps it did so intentionally (or at least without remorse for the possible consequences of erroneous targeting). I admit that wasn't fully sincere. I realize that, even morals aside, there is no perceived military value in bombing children, at least not for the US (I do think Israelis may target children of IRGC officers out of their usual Bronze Age blood feud sentiment, Oct 7, Gaza and all, seen enough of their remarks to this effect; but then again they don't operate Tomahawks).
Well now the question on it having been an American strike appears settled. As for the intent – it's not so straightforward:
Does it matter if there was no intent if the United States, as of now, also has a revealed preference to not bother with minimizing such risks, in favor of «lethality» and some zany Judeo-Christian nationalism courtesy the power-tripping macho TV host Pete Hegseth? I believe it does, but marginally; about as much as those girls matter to Lethal Pete. I rest my case.
More to the point. It's remarkable that there's so little discussion of contemporary historical events on here. I won't criticize anyone, be the change you want etc.; but what we are seeing is pretty astonishing from the culture war standpoint. Could someone like Pete be imaginable as the Secretary of War – no, Defense – in 2023? 2019, even? 2016? It looks as if the politically dominant culture of the United States changed overnight. Does everyone just like it too much to find the change worth commenting on?
There are an amazing number of people responding with, essentially, "shit happens in war", seemingly with giving any further thought to questions like "can we make shit happen less in war?", "does what we're trying to achieve justify this shit?", and "should the fact that shit happens in war make us more cautious about going to war?"
Christ
I risk sounding like a broken record here but that old Clemenceau quote is relevant again: "America Is the Only Country That Went from Barbarism to Decadence Without Civilization In Between".
When you look at things through this lens everything explains itself perfectly. The Americans as a nation have never been properly civilised, their national myth includes things like the Frontier man and the taming of the wilderness, but in one of those rather all too common twists of irony I'd say the wild has transformed Americans far more than they have ever transformed it.
Once you realize that America as a country has never had civilisation in the sense a European, a Chinese, or even dare I say, a Persian, would understand it, (I mean as a country, many many Americans are perfectly civilised people, the problem is not All Americans, the problem is Enough Americans) everything starts falling into place and making sense.
The way to deal with such a country is to treat it like it is: rather than trying to support the US or help them in their war against Iran out of some misguided gentlemanly obligation, Europe now has an excellent opportunity to twist the knife and extract huge concessions from the US on Ukraine and tariffs in return for them being allowed to use European bases to run their war. And make your demands and the concessions you get public as red meat for your domestic base. It's no different to what the Americans would have done to you had the shoe been on the other foot.
Does it? Lazy justifications (and, indeed, enthusiasm) for brutality seem to be a pervasive disease of human thought. Certainly, 'civilized' cultures have never struggled to commit superlative acts of barbarism.
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That's a nice free-form contentless rant, and like Dase I know you love sneering at Westerners, and Americans especially, as hard as we will allow, under the cope of speaking from a delusional sense of superiority. But do tell me: in what sense are Americans not (or ever) "civilized"? Non-rhetorically. Step up. What do those words mean?
Because under every definition with any non-rhetorical meaning, this is simply nonsense. It's a snarky pseudo-elite bon motte with no significance beyond the performative revulsion, the affected contempt.
What you actually mean by "civilized" is "has a culture I like and behaves in ways I approve of." And sure, everyone is entitled to like their own culture and think it is better than other cultures. You can disapprove of America and wish we were more like you all you want. But if you want to start trading cheap sneers about respective cultures and how "civilized" we are and aren't, you sure would not want us to take the mod guardrails off when talking about Pakistan, or Muslim culture writ large.
Whenever I see you toss these haughty sneers like you're an aristocrat curling your upper lip at the revolting peasants, I am just astounded at the sheer arrogance. Not offended, but genuinely astounded that you can be so lacking in perspective and awareness.
I actually found myself nodding along with him. America has never been fully settled, such that it's occupants are forced to turn viciously on each other in red status games. Americans have always had PVE as an outlet, as a way to foster trust and self-regulation and prosocial behavior. We're built for PVE, and we're so good at it and it's so rewarding that when we try our hand at guild war PVP, we roflstomp.
Compare that to a "late stage" civilization like China or India or Persia where the only way to get ahead is to screw over someone else. There's only so many spots in the civil service, so every Chinese kid who makes the cut necessarily means another doesn't. This creates an environment where being good or competent in an objective sense is less important than outperforming peers. To them, we look like little kids who haven't internalized tiger mom knife-fighting.
To us, they look like savages stabbing themselves for pitiful loot because they don't grok "trust".
Or at least, that's the rough sketch of an idea that's been kicking around in my head for a few weeks.
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It's just a bit that he enjoys doing. And I suspect that he enjoys it because it never fails to get a bunch of responses. He's kind of like Kulak in that way. Kulak used to annoy me until I realized that his tough guy schtick was just a character he played online to get engagement. When you switch to analyzing the performance instead of the (thin) content of the argument, these characters become much more interesting and enjoyable to read. Unlike Ilforte/Dasein, they at least appear to be having fun. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
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You deserve so much more, with your obscene sense of entitlement to boomered-out superficiality.
But for the record, I not only believe that Americans are civilized, but that they're distinct enough to merit classification as a civilization unto itself, separate from the Western one, more dynamic, with greater passionarity. Some don't like it, well too bad for them.
Maybe we can talk of Amero-Israeli civilization, or just Israeli civilization, in the vein of Hebraic Conservatism with offshoots – a very mainstream and respectable idea in America, despite it looking like insane sectarian gibberish to most Westerners! But I'd still say those, for now, constitute two distinct successful non-Western civilizations.
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Replying to both you and @Shakes:
I'm not saying America has no achievements (obviously it does, and listing them like Shakes did doesn't refute the point). Nobody denies America has produced extraordinary things, half the things I use on a daily basis were made by them, and that's probably an underestimate (though I'd add that a lot and an increasing proportion of this is from immigrants who became Americans or their near term descendants, rather than "founding stock"). The telephone, jazz, the moon landing etc. etc. are yes, all real, all impressive. But a catalogue of inventions and monuments is not what civilisation means in the sense I'm using it, and people should get that from my post.
What I mean and what Clemenceau meant (however priggish you may call him) is something closer to what you might call institutional depth and cultural continuity: the slow accumulation of norms, restraints, and social trust that make a society self regulating rather than dependent on raw dynamism (which is something that Americans seem to prize above all else, even when it's the wrong tool for the job, hammer and nail come to mind). Europe didn't get that from being clever. It got it from centuries of catastrophe and making mistakes and importantly learning from them. The point isn't that Europeans are better people (I wouldn't even agree, even though I'd probably choose to spend an evening with a randomly chosen European over a randomly chosen American, never mind that they might not even speak English). The point is that the European political tradition, through sheer painful experience, developed a certain instinct for restraint, compromise, and institutional preservation that the American tradition never prioritised in the same way and is likely to very soon come back and bite it in the ass. America's founding myth is about breaking free of those constraints, not building them. That's not an insult, it's a description.
And the "civilised Americans exist, the problem is't All Americans but Enough Americans" line was doing work you both skipped past. I'm not painting 330 million people with one brush. I'm saying the political culture, the median and especially the current leadership of the country, trends in a direction that makes America an unreliable partner and that Europeans should act accordingly rather than sentimentally. Think Mark Carney, but with more spice.
Which brings me to the part of my post that was actually the point, and which neither of you addressed: the strategic argument. Forget whether Clemenceau was rude. Forget whether I'm being snobbish, I won't try and justify that further as I know it won't work (and no, Spengler didn't put me up to this). The question on the table is simple: should Europe give America unconditional support in its Iran campaign, or should it use its leverage: basing rights, logistics, diplomatic cover, to extract concessions on Ukraine and tariffs? The "American" would say "use the leverage", the European might say "we're all gentlemen here", except that that's no longer true, so might as well give them a taste of their own medicine.
The argument that America "pays for European defence" cuts both ways. If European bases are so essential to American force projection that Spain's wobble caused a crisis within days (which it's still not allowing to my knowledge despite what the Americans are saying), then those bases have price, and Europe is a fool not to name it.
The claim that America could walk away tomorrow and it would be Europe's problem, not the Americans well right there you're making my argument for me. If that's how America sees the relationship, then Europe has no obligation of loyalty either, and should negotiate accordingly. You can't simultaneously say "we do this for you" and "we don't need you." Pick one. The cakeism is very "American".
Brings to mind a good Substack article I read the other day: https://open.substack.com/pub/samkriss/p/youll-regret-it
Most European countries have already had one or several acutely manic phases in their past, the kind of energy that drives you to burst out into the world and do whatever you please until you’ve got a damn empire.
We might have had one or two in the US already, surely when we conquered the whole west from sea to sea, another when we came in and destroyed the axis powers and unleashed the greatest weapon ever deployed onto the planet.
But we’re still a juvenile culture and we’re currently in one of those manic phases of adolescent grandiosity. We can do anything!!! Just you fucking watch and try to stop us.
I don’t know if age always fully quiets down these impulses. Some pretty old cultures also get the itch from time to time. But we do have a radically smaller library of experiences to draw from as a culture and that might shape our behavior in meaningful ways.
We also suffer from a sort of rich kid who never faces consequences syndrome. Due to our privileged geography, we’ve pretty much never had our ass truly kicked or even realistically threatened by a foreign culture, like most other countries have. The only true at home ass kicking we’ve ever had was one we did to ourselves. A basic trauma that essentially all global cultures know intuitively, we just have no experience with.
I do think the cultural memory of these experiences ends up being important in shaping the psychology of a nation. And the US, we just haven’t lived enough to learn certain lessons that other cultures have.
There’s good and bad things about that, just as there is with the psychology of youth and maturity in individual humans.
I, uh, don’t think that’s a very good model.
First: the historical limit on an empire wasn’t ambition. It was logistics. You sprawled out until you hit a natural barrier (steppe, jungle, ocean) that was wider than your baggage trains could handle. Or until you made eye contact with a neighbor strong enough to stake out its own borders. Transport tech changes that first limit; military and economic tech pushes the second.
Second: it’s not like having those phases ever taught any nation anything! Look at 19th century France. Look at the interwar period. Look at today’s Russia. If the logistics and industrial fundamentals aren’t present, the best you’re gonna get is one generation. Then the revanchists will wrangle enough support for another round.
Third: what do you mean, a smaller library of experiences? There’s no Dune-style genetic memory. Institutional inertia is a joke and a political liability. Our President has more information available than anyone in history, and this is what he chose to do with it.
I do think historical experiences affect a cultures outlook and subsequently behavior.
Modern Chinese politics is meaningfully affected by the century of humiliation.
The tone of Slavic cultures is shaped by repeated wars, famines, and massacres.
Turkish politics is influenced by memories of the Ottoman Empire.
There’s certainly a forgetting curve. We probably shouldn’t study Charlemagne in order to understand what Emmanuel Macron is likely to do tomorrow.
(Edit: Then again, Charlemagne looked back to Roman emperors, was himself relevant to how Napoleon behaved, the French Revolution drew from ideas from the Roman republic, and modern France has dim recollections of all of this built into its cultural identity as well as experiences from both victory and defeat in the world wars. Part of the founding mythos of being French includes empires and revolutions and it gets reflected in French behavior, such as a penchant for frequently protesting and rioting in the streets. Just as the American frontier is long gone but still affects our culture).
Continuing where I earlier left off…
But I do think there’s some historical continuity that gets built up. Having had all your cities razed, suffering a famine, conquering half the world, having an empire crumble, I think all of these things have influences on a culture that ripple across centuries.
Americans today always talk about how we are so optimistic while Europe is just this museum society. But basically all of those cultures had periods of floridly mad optimism in their history at different points, usually coinciding with when they built those structures.
Maybe we are just a uniquely optimistic and exuberant culture and will remain that way forever. But we haven’t even existed for long enough to know the other side of the coin, we’ve never even had the experience of being bested by a rival for example. And although it’s tempting to believe that we’re uniquely ordained by God or fate to never suffer such a disgrace and will never see the other side of the coin (like from the article, god is an Englishman, we invented the modern world and have its largest ever empire ffs), I’d say our time in the sun has its limits just as it does for all world dominant cultures. (Possibly coming soon if you believe Ray Dalio’s model). And after having experienced both the rise and fall, we’ll end up being a somewhat wiser or at least more mature culture which might naturally temper subsequent bouts of mania.
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No, that's completely wrong. "Raw dynamism" is a very American cultural myth that Americans like to tell themselves, and it's kind of weird to see you repeating it just because it sounds like an "A-hyuck! A-hyuck!" cowboy stereotype.
America has a great deal of institutional depth and continuity. For all that we fancy ourselves to have reinvented ourselves from whole cloth in 1776, the "American project" very obviously was both something unique and designed, and something that drew on the entirety of English Common Law and Western civilization. The Founding Fathers didn't just pull the Articles of Confederation and then the Constitution out of their asses; they had as much education and "civilization" as their European contemporaries did. That America was something relatively new and different at the time does not mean it was some strange savage MMORPG environment dropped onto North America.
America has institutional norms, restraints, and social trust. Arguably, those are being hollowed out right now. Arguably, so are Europe's. Arguably, a major reason for that is... well. People who do not share those institutional norms, restraints, and social trust.
This may be true, but it's also both an observation very much of the moment (all governments change, and some governments change radically and catastrophically) and has nothing to do with whether or not America is "civilized."
Sure, that's a question Europe needs to answer, and I would expect Europe to weight European interests above American interests. But Europe has its own dysfunctions (which is a large part of the reason we're here) and is hardly in a position to be sniffing at Americans and how "unreliable" (or "uncivilized" forsooth) they are.
@Shakes is more interested in the "Europe versus America" question. I don't really care about that. I'm peering at your "civilization" quip and still trying to figure out what the hell you think you mean by it. You haven't described anything America doesn't have, just political decisions America is making that you don't like.
You say America has institutional depth and continuity, and that the Founders drew on English Common Law and the whole Western tradition and I agree. I never said otherwise and I'd have been stupid to. The US Constitution is a remarkable document (worth reading even as a non-American), the Federalist Papers are some of the best political thinking ever committed to paper, and the early Republic was built by men who were as educated and sophisticated as anyone in Europe, there's no argument to that.
But I think you're collapsing a distinction that matters: there's a difference between having institutions and having the deep cultural substrate that makes those institutions self repairing. England didn't develop parliamentary norms because someone wrote a brilliant constitution. It developed them over centuries of messy, bloody, often accidental practice until they became so embedded in the culture that violating them felt viscerally wrong to enough people to make it politically suicidal. That's what I mean by institutional depth: not the documents, not the structures, but the thickness of the cultural root system underneath them.
And you've actually conceded the key point yourself when you say they're being hollowed out right now. My reply is simply: how fast and how easily? Because that speed is itself diagnostic. If American institutional culture had the depth it lacks, what's happening right now would be much harder to do. I agree that European institutions are under strain too, especially from the hard right and parties like AfD and Reform here in the UK but they're harder, the damage is slower and meeting more resistance at every level. See how Europe managed to co opt Meloni in Italy into a standard right wing European party from the far right. Orban's getting kicked out very soon as well just to give you another data point. Europe is able to deflect and absorb the attacks to its institutions in a way the US hasn't shown any signs of doing.
Instead what we're seeing over there is that a single administration with a sufficiently bloody minded approach can hollow out norms that were supposedly two and a half centuries deep in what, a year and a half? The US has a proper full constitution and an extremely strong supreme court which could block all this with ease but it has folded like a marzipan deckchair. That's not what deep roots look like. That's what a brilliant structure built on shallow cultural soil looks like when someone finally decides to test the foundations. It sinks at the first real challenge. Compare to the UK where we don't even have a written constitution and parliament is technically sovereign and a majority can do anything they want, including reinstating slavery if they so wish and yet our institutions mean that even a government with strong support from its MPs can't do whatever it wants (as Boris Johnson found out with Brexit).
To put it differently: the Constitution told Americans what their institutions should be. What it couldn't do, because no document can, is make Americans feel that violating those norms is unthinkable rather than merely illegal. The "we don't do that" instinct, the one that in a deeply rooted institutional culture makes norm-violation politically radioactive even when it's technically possible, that's the thing I'm saying is thinner in America than Americans believe. And I don't think that's a controversial observation at this point. You yourself seem to agree the hollowing is happening. We're just disagreeing about what it reveals.
So to your final challenge "you haven't described anything America doesn't have, just political decisions you don't like" I would say that I've described exactly the thing America is currently demonstrating it doesn't have enough of. The decisions I don't like are the evidence, not the argument.
And briefly, since I've already made this case and don't want to repeat myself: this is precisely why the leverage question matters. You don't extend unconditional trust to a partner whose institutional immune system is failing this visibly. You negotiate. That's not sneering, it's prudence.
I think a lot of this is compelling, and it's true that Europe has been much more institutionally resilient and stable over recent years than the US has been.
I don't think that civilisational depth and the accumulation of norms is, however, the most parsimonious explanation for why this is the case. Australia, for example, is younger than America and has been more institutionally resilient over the past few decades of populist headwinds than Europe has largely been.
The real reason the US is falling faster towards institutional dysfunction and is more prosaic: its institutions are not well designed. That unified party control across different branches of government would still let each branch effectively check the excesses of the others was a naive theory at best. Instead political will flows through the channels of least resistance and carves them deeper.
One of the Westminster system's better features, which has achieved its final perfected form in Australia, is by explicitly not tying the political ambitions and fates of would-be political leaders to that of whoever sits in the chair at a given moment. If there's no real way to self-correct a year into the term, everyone is sink-or-swim through any insanity.
I love my country, but I’m a strong critic of our constitutional structure.
I believe the assumption was that Congress would be jealous of its own power, in the way that the House of Commons was jealous of its own power in comparison to the King and the Lords, but the issue is that the elected Presidency created a countervailing center of political legitimacy, and blame, that’s independent of and largely unaccountable to Congress. The framers thought impeachment would be a sufficient counterweight, but failed to take account of the fact that removing a President would be a traumatic and partisan exercise, more akin to revolution against a king than the removal of a minister.
After centuries of experience with elected assemblies, it’s now clearer that the means of survival for democratic parties is ensuring that blame for anything that goes wrong rests on the opposition, not in delivering results. As a result, all blame and accountability for anything that happens politically rests on the President, who is quite impotent to accomplish reform, while little to no power actually rests in individual Congressmen.
So people who want to wield power don’t go into Congress, and Presidents are eager to expand their power by any means necessary. The checks and balances fail. I suspect the American system is designed almost for an inverted Whig revolution, where the executive has every reason to accumulate power by taking it from the legislature.
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You're contradicting yourself and backtracking on every point that you initially used as evidence that America lacks civilization. I will just repeat: America didn't spring out of a vacuum. We had institutional depth from the beginning (albeit many new institutions had to be invented) because even the earliest colonists were not tribes wandering into the New World across the Bering Sea.
I sincerely doubt this. Maybe not about Europe resisting right-wing Trump-like movements, but that's not the only kind of change we observe.
Trump is not the first, nor the worst, challenge American norms and institutions have faced. The Civil War was not even the first time the government faced a severe challenge to its credibility and stability (nor was it the last). I have argued with other Motters because I think the probability of Trump actually destroying the Republic is low, but non-zero, and my lowball estimate is higher than they think is realistic. But it's not the first time there has been a non-zero chance of the American experiment ending.
Europe has not exactly been a continuous steady state of reliable governance for the past two and half centuries either.
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Not only does this not make sense but it doesn’t explain anything. America has: the telephone, the light bulb, the computer, the airplane, eggs Benedict, jazz, cell phones, hamburgers, the Washington Monument, the skyscraper, speakeasies, brunch, baseball, Constitutional Democracy, mass education, social security, the automobile, Hollywood, the Golden Gate Bridge, Supreme Courts, southern food, basketball, Detroit, New York, California, Texas, television, the nuclear bomb, the nuclear bomb!
What are we talking about, am I being baited, did Spengler put you up to this? America has no civilization? America invented the modern world! Every country in the world that attempts to look down on us is using criteria America INVENTED. Europeans get more degrees? America invented mass education with the GI bill. Travel and leisure? We invented airlines, the five day work week, paid vacation. Democracy?
We have a beautiful civilization, Times Square, the Chicago World Fair 1893, the National Mall, Route 66, the Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, apple pie. Many things are in decline to the point that we’ve forgotten how the White House was decorated in the Gilded Age and misremembered it as a ranch home aesthetic but America is a beautiful place.
We went to the moon! The moon!
Clemenceau is a priggish French asshole (whose pride at Versailles gave us World War II) of the worst type of French snobbery for which we forgive them anyways because we admire the French and respect their contributions to America. But what do they know! They are sitting in the corner watching while America remakes the world in our own image and the best they have now is to reinvent the definition of civilization with fake word games.
What is the idea that America is destroying Tehran out of some sort of civilizational jealousy? Or that we don’t understand the world so that we lash out at it? No it’s Europe that doesn’t understand it’s Iran that doesn’t understand. There are no concessions for you to extract. America is the world power because we have a spirit that nobody else in the world has even if I prefer French bakeries and Spanish wine. Wha are we talking about? Europe has no concessions to extract because America pays for their defense and in exchange they put tariffs and trade barriers up against us while proclaiming that their civilization is superior. Ok, try it, it will go as well as it went when Spain tried denying us our bases a week ago, what are you have no power to extract anything. This whole military operation is a favor to you because we’re not the ones who get screwed if the straits of Hormuz close, we could close down all our bases tomorrow and it would be your world in chaos, not ours.
What’s the thanks we get? To be lectured on how we don’t understand anything because we don’t have a real civilization and are just barbarians who need red meat? The civilization-wreckers are the barbarians in Tehran who want to bomb everyone and the loafers in Europe who believe in their own superiority but refuse to do anything to maintain it. Decadence? Europeans want to shut down their nuclear reactors, buy all their oil from Putin, then complain that America wrecks everything it touches. That’s decadence!
I didn't knew that Otto Von Bismarck was alive in 1946 ...
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America still has some of the residual vitality of Western civilization, and that's just so cringe.
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Europe has fuck all leverage due to lacking the upside of America atleast producing something and being absolutely weighed down by an infinite supply of net-negative foreigners who at absolute best might be able to find some fake zero-sum makework to briefly mask their inability to actually create a productive society on their own terms. The US might be clumsy and lurching but atleast they stand for something at some level.
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