The World Crisis: An Explanation
What is happening, why, and what it means for the future
The world crisis sparked by Israel’s war on Iran has begun to hit home.
The collision of reality with the narratives supplied by the Trump administration is reshaping global power. The pause in the war has revealed that the shock to the global system may be permanent.
Should the war continue, as it most likely will, the crisis will get worse.
This report is intended to explain some of the causes and effects of the war.
Part One explains how the 20th century has ended and why. It is a 5 minute read.
Part Two explains the crisis and what it means for the future. 10 mins+ to read.
CONTENTS
Part one (Essay): Losing an Argument with Reality
Part two: The Why, What, Who, How and What Next of the Crisis
Why is this happening?
What is happening?
Who is in charge?
What will happen next?
How could things get worse?
How could things get better?
What will happen if the war resumes?
Conclusion: Forever War has ended our Forever Way of Life
Part One: Losing an Argument with Reality
“The truth does not matter anymore”.
Power is always part performance. Military power is threat plus capability. Political power is the power of belief in the promises you make.
The US has issued many threats but is incapable of carrying any out apart from the most significant one: the total destruction of Iranian civilisation.
Mr Trump has this power but he does not have any other it seems. This is dangerous, as this is precisely the power the Israelis seek to use.
Trump’s political (domestic) and military (foreign) decisions are effectively taken from the Israeli playbook, and the culture of the US from the top down has changed accordingly.
The promises of security and prosperity, to make America Great Again, cannot be carried out now. Neither can the promised “regime change” in Iran, nor even a military victory in the region.
The US has lost its diplomatic and military position in the Middle East, can no longer guarantee the passage of seaborne world trade, and has broken its long standing “alliance” (which was dominance) with Europe and the Anglosphere.
To the literally minded Mr Trump has gone bonkers. He has been consumed by sin in fact, which is destructive to a man in every state in life.
He has been impelled into the creation of mass destruction by pride, vanity, vainglory, greed and dreams of adulation, and tempted into this by appeals to his appetite for all the above. The war is evil, it is doing evil to the world, and Mr Trump and his America are rightfully despised for what they have said and done to us all.
The US has lost the war and cannot admit it as this would be devastating to Americans generally and Trump in particular.
This will inevitably be obvious anyway in a matter of time. So far, a performance in the media has contained this impression, which is simply “flooding the zone with shit”, as advised by Steve Bannon a decade ago, and as adopted openly by Netanyahu’s media chief last week.
Eli Hazan, the latest director of Netanyahu’s media ‘poison machine’ says:
“The truth does not matter any more. The facts do not matter anymore”.
Political power in the US and Israel is following this formula. Its power is in contest with the truth, with the facts, with reality itself. This is vital to understanding the state the world is in, and how we get out of it.
Hazan continues:
“I fabricate fake news as a response to them”
He explained “I wasn’t like this. Only the truth guided me.”
So what changed him?
“I came to the conclusion that we need to be Trump”.
Hazan’s statement is significant beyond Israel, whose stated policy is to “police the planet” through its “eighth front” of war: via media control, censuring critics as antisemitic, and corrupting the picture of reality received by the global public.
This shows the true unifying principle of power between the putatively Christian United States and the secular, now religious anti-Christian Zionism which rules Israeli and now American political, military and media culture.
It will say anything it must to get what it wants. It is an argument with reality, just as liberal utopianism is an argument with reality. It replaces facts with falsehoods, stultifying the population into compliance with evil. This works until it doesn’t, which is when it can’t anymore, and that is now.
The facts do in fact matter and cannot be contained by lies. This happens when the conditions produced by your actions exceed your power to persuade people they do not inhabit them, when in fact they do so.
This is the same crisis faced by the nightmare of the competing faction of Western power, namely “liberal globalism”, and it is why they are both doomed regardless of the outcome of this war.
Mr Trump refuses to suffer the truth about himself, his motives, his actions and their effect on the world. This means he will not learn and therefore cannot improve. This is the way all foolish men refuse wisdom.
It is likely this crisis finishes him actually as well as figuratively, as he is the hunter become the quarry like Actaeon, who was slain by his own hounds. Silenced by a power he cannot command, to speak the truth is also fatal.
There is no way out of the woods for Mr Trump and no escape for the hungry pack which dogs him. This is the meaning of the Furies, unleashed by the inescapable actions of men limited by what and who they are.
What made Trump is what unmakes him, his belief in himself and his power to transmit it. This is all he has left, and soon no one will believe in him at all. Not even Mr Trump. Nothing is as it is stated now, from Christianity to the causes and conditions of this terminal crisis. The sacred is profaned, life vulgarised in the defence of a now universal evil with lies. What we are sold is not what we are told, and no one is buying it anymore.
The poverty of our mass culture is not only in meaning and in spirit - it is about to get real in the way most men comprehend. It will destroy the right to buy, which is the fundamental right of the political economy which ruled us into this mess.
You can summarise Trump as the closing-down salesman of the 20th century.
If you would like to know more about how we got here, I wrote a series predicting the predictable disaster of the war. Here is one part:F
PART TWO - THE WHY, WHAT AND WHAT NEXT OF THE WAR
Why this is happening
We have been supplied many reasons for the war and they all come from the Israelis. In brief, the Israelis want to become the dominant regional power and do this Iran must be conquered by one form of regime change or another.
This includes the destruction of Iran as a functioning society.
What is happening?
The war has not changed the Iranian regime in the intended way. It has consolidated the power of the hardline IRGC in a nation which would most likely have liberalised had it been left alone.
The war has seen shipping insurance suspended, which halts all cargo traffic out of the Straits of Hormuz where not guaranteed by Iranian conditions.
Trump has made repeated threats to use military power to force a conclusion in his favour. These have all failed. The latest idea is to blockade the Straits of Hormuz. This too has failed, as Chinese ships agreeing passage with Iran will not be halted by the US navy without the risk of war.
Iran has now said that collapse of the ceasefire agreement would trigger the closure of Suez, too. This would further choke off global trade, and may end the world economy in weeks.
The longer the war continues the more it will destroy our world.
Israel began bombing water desalination plants, oil and gas refineries and civilian infrastructure following its “Dahiya Doctrine” of causing maximum damage to the material fabric of social order. The US has adopted this strategy.
The US has also adopted the religious framing, media strategy and financial corruption culture of the Israeli regime, largely shaped by the career of Benjamin Netanyahu.
I explained the Israeli-US State Religion of destruction here:
Netanyahu is the chief architect of the decades of regime change wars which account for the moral and financial bankruptcy of the United States.
The regime that has changed most is ours, in the West. It has changed from something to nothing but profit from the power of destruction. We are debt slaves now, which is one price we have paid in the general subtraction of meaning and value from our lives under the business model of regime change.
Who is in charge?
Mr Netanyahu is in charge. If he remains in charge little else will.
He shaped the case for war, and the war was decided late last year. He misrepresented the efforts of his own Mossad chief David Barnea to convince President Trump regime change would be swift. A matter of days.
Instead, the US lost its military footprint in the desert sands of the Gulf, and its actions have now caused a global crisis which can only get worse the longer the war goes on. The resumption of the war seems inevitable, as it is the goal of the Israelis to create precisely the sort of Armageddon scenario that will permanently destroy the global economy should Israel restart the rounds of destruction it initiated towards this end.
I explained how Armageddon is the strategic goal of factions of power in the US and Israel here:
4. What will happen next?
Mr Trump will continue to make things up to soothe the markets, which are nonetheless realising that makeup does not make up reality.
Trump, his movement, his Vice President, the American Empire and likely its petrodollar are all finished. The Western consensus is finished, with repeated signs intensifying that the rift between Europe and the US is not a trial separation but a permanent estrangement.
This is one dimension of the big picture, which has been brought into focus by this war. This picture is the recognition of reality, which means real events have dissolved the false consensus which provided the international economic, military and diplomatic alliance formerly known as “The West”.
In brief, the world after this war will be significantly different to the world before.
How could things get worse?
The Israelis are selling their Armageddon by saying they wish to reroute all oil and gas in the region through Israeli territory.
In reality they seek to destroy the region’s economic and civilian infrastructure to rule over the ruins. There is serious pressure on both the Israeli and US governments, and the reason is the same: the loss of power.
I explained this as the “"Economic Samson Option” here:
Netanyahu, like Trump, will lose the coming elections. The Netanyahu regime knows it is short on time. When the wars stop, Netanyahu’s ongoing trial will see him jailed for corruption and abuse of public office. There is a separate trial going on concerning his National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir over his effective use of the police as a private militia, in tandem with the armed militants he leads in the West Bank.
These are known in Western media as “settlers”, but are described in Israeli media as “Jewish terrorists”.
The murder, arson and expropriation of Palestinians (including Christians) in the West Bank will continue. It is likely Israel’s latest invasion of Lebanon will continue, too. Its goal is not “security” for Israel’s northern population but aims at the annexation and permanent settlement of Lebanon south of the Litani river.
This policy has been announced by Bezalel Smotrich, Finance Minister and champion of the “Greater Israel” plan to collapse neighbouring nations and expand Israel’s borders into their former lands.
Israel sees Turkey as a regional competitor and repeatedly signals that Turkey is next on the war list.
The decline of US regional and imperial power means opportunity for the Israelis, who see in the degradation of US military capability to secure the region a sign that they will not be restrained in their ambitions.
The war is the work of the Israelis, towards their goal of becoming a regional and then world power. The inability to recognise such a destructive and wicked campaign, which will destroy the world as we knew it, is a legacy of liberal rule.
The false god of equality, promoted by a century of the political technique of liberalism, makes men blind to basic difference.
It makes it impossible to see that the Israelis do not share “our values”, whether they be the fake ones of the liberal-global order in its fantasies of international law and human rights, or the values of the recognition of reality in the defence of the dignity of human life, the preservation of order against disorder, truth against lies, civilisation against barbarism and basically the acknowledgement that Good is better than Evil.
How could things get better?
Things could get less bad at best, as things are very bad now and it has taken a very long time for reality to break through the collective delusions by which the West is governed. These delusions are the phantasms sold to the population to permission the equalisation of the world under a single “liberal” economic order.
At last, market worshippers have realised the markets are the map of their faith in the wisdom of markets, which has been shown to be folly against hard reality.
Real oil is scarce and costs a fortune. Market oil is manipulated by whatever Mr Trump makes up on the day.
Secondly, the diplomatic reality has struck the West alongside the serious potential of famine conditions in much of the developing world.
This reality is simply the recognition of what the Israelis are like, that they are unlike us in significant ways. It is horrifying to realise what they are really doing, as what they are doing in reality is unthinkable to all reasonable people outside their sphere of sponsorship, assassination, blackmail and media hypnotism.
The destruction may be contained by the recognition, late but not yet too late, that the world faces a crisis caused by this war which would effectively end the world as we knew it - and that this is in fact the strategic goal of Israel.
If the West outside American can cohere into a hard and formerly forbidden consensus of serious opposition to Israel we may see a future in which some order is restored, and after years of repair, a return to some form of global food and fuel security.
States would be wise to seek maximum autarky in energy, agriculture and reskilling and restructuring towards domestic manufacturing, as the guarantee formerly offered to the global system by the US navy has expired.
How could things get worse?
If there is no serious and coordinated effort to restrain the Israelis outside the captive mechanism of the White House then the destruction will resume and the world economy is finished.
This would include currency collapse, food and fuel shortages in the West, mass migration on a scale hitherto unseen and a permanent and sharp downward revision of living standards for those alive today.
Israel is likely to restart the Lebanon war, whose ceasefire is a condition for talks between Iran and Israel via its US proxy.
Should Israel succeed in seeing the electricity and desalination plants in the Gulf destroyed in a round of retaliatory attacks which it seeks to produce, perhaps 60 million people will flee the Gulf States overnight. It is impossible to survive a few days in the desert without water and air conditioning if you are unused to the exceptional hardship of the Bedouin lifestyle (which I have witnessed in person).
The critical shortage of fertiliser chemicals whose supply is halted by this and the war in Ukraine affects the US as well as every other nation. It means next year’s harvest will be less productive in temperate climates and will almost vanish completely in the semi-arid regions of Africa and Asia.
The resulting collapse of food production will very likely drive tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of migrants into the West, overwhelming their borders and exhausting their already strained domestic supplies of food, fuel as well as essential services such as housing, health and of course the maintenance of public order.
Conclusion: Forever War has ended the Forever Way of Life
The world faces an existential threat in this war. The realisation of this reality has come late, as the effects of the previous rounds of “regime change” in Israel’s targeted nations came after the bombing had stopped, and so did not appear to be caused by or even connected to the wars themselves.
Both wings of the political elite in the West are financially and politically invested in the causes and effects of regime change, being the wars abroad themselves and its industry, and the partner business of mass migration causing demographic and social change at home.
Permanent war on civilisation, here and everywhere, is the business of the regime change regime.
The “Right” sells the wars as the muscular defence of civilisation, the “Left” sells their effects as the compassionate defence of our civilised values. Both are destroying civilised life, at home and overseas.
These are in fact neither “Left” nor “Right” but two elite factions pursuing the replacement of civilisation with their own agenda. Market worship for Israel versus the world as a standardised marketplace. The signs on the battle standard differ, the result is the same: destruction as progress towards each respective aim.
This is a business, our politics whether “right” or “Left” are produced by economic nihilism, and that is why both factions make a desert and call it peace. A place roamed by nomads, in which only the hardiest and meanest of men survive, and without any of the customs of hospitality and regard for life which rule men better than laws in all states of remote adversity and relative prosperity alike.
We have forgotten the habits of civilisation. The Leader of the Free World threatens to destroy them. There is no “Western alliance” any more. There is a struggle for survival, and what and who survives is as open a question today as to how - and what for.
“Everything was forever until it was no more” is the excellent title of a bad book about the end of the Soviet Union. This is the same verdict on our own economic system, which has run out of everything it used up to wage a war on reality.
I am writing notes towards a political economy to restore our civilisation on this SubStack, and will continue this on Monday. On Fridays I will produce summaries of the world crisis to help you understand what is going on.
You can pay me to do this work if you like here:
Do not despair. The effort was not without product, and the results towards the recognition of reality far more promising than was at first expected.
The light has not gone out. Foster the light.
I think this kind of analysis is helpful to provide some clarity in an otherwise murky information battlefield. Most have no grasp of what is going on at any level.
I have to say the prospect of hundreds of millions coming to Europe is a sobering thought. One that ought to focus minds.
I love your work, Frank! Another awesome insight. Thank you 🙏