Nationalism vs Empire

Submitted by SAKOVKT (United States), May 31, 2016 at 08:09

Eternal trends are more useful for us, not in the know, in figuring out contemporary politics.
The drive for empire and power is eternal and always opposed by the nation state.
With every victory, the victor is confronted by more powerful enemies.
The end of this is empire.
If the empire offers a good deal, a collective security and economic arrangement without intruding too much on local autonomy, the empire lasts.
From the ancient Persian empire of Cyrus to the 19th Century British empire, this worked.
These empires failed when they became frivolous and oppressive with their imperial power. Same can be said of Lord North's government during the American Revolution.
Today's Left is Bolshevik in origin. "Workers of the World, Unite" is basically an imperial scheme.
Islam is also an imperial scheme.
No wonder, then, that the Jihad and Western Left are in collusion, no matter their ideological differences.
The Lust for Power has always superseded ideology.
Military necessity takes even less note of ideology.
That's why the "Democracies" of WW2 allied with Soviet Russia, a 180 degree turn on Red Scare of 1919.
Protestant, Catholic and even Muslim forces have found strange alliances throughout European history.
Israel is the "Jewish State". It's Nationalist.
So is Egypt.
IS and the "EurAbian" Multi-Cultis are Imperial. Turkey, Russia and Iran seem to be Imperial.
Until new empires are established, if they are, the Nation States are free to solve their own problems based on their own priorities in which security should supersede religious ideology.
Note that Russia and Iran are hardly ideological cousins but are allies.

Nationalism is also rising in the European Union because Brussels has violated the eternal rules of empire.

In America, the rise of Donald Trump, a Nationalist, is part of the same phenomena.

The post-1945 world order is collapsing.

The New Deal, Keynesian empire is bankrupt. It's socialist civil rights movement has become a caricature of itself.

The American Empire never looked like one because it was built on "foreign aid", or bribes, and a WhackaDoodle World Congress, League of Nations cum U.N.
But it did attempt imperial duties : collective economic benefits and collective security.
But it's gone.
We are in a period of dissolution, in which new alliances and new attempts at empire will occur.
It's messy and it's going to get a lot messier.
The idea of battening down the American hatches isn't a bad one.
Staying out of foreign politics as much as possible isn't a bad idea, either, since it has become even less predictable than it ever was.
And it may just be, that a major part of Israel's problem has been turning to America as a surrogate British Imperial Authority as an ally rather than running its affairs in its own region a genuine nation state.

Consider: Netanyahu insists that Israel is on the front line of the Western fight against terrorism. Well, most Muslim states see it similarly, as a Western Imperial venture, and that is largely their problem with it. Israel can't affect regional politics that much but its American ally can. Perhaps, with that ally removed, collective regional security will become the priority rather than the perception of Western imperialism.
One thing for sure, what we've done hasn't worked.
So, time to try something else!

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