Byzantium after Mantzikert just giving away the interior of Anatolia to the Turks, but even then that's not a good one because we're not trying to defeat a Kingdom of Normans in the middle of our country.
Alexios IV Angelos might be a slightly better comparison, beholden to foreign powers to take the throne who then betrayed him and carved up the Empire.
There isn't one. Normally by this point, a mad king's trusted advisors would be publicly explaining how dear leader accidentally stabbed themselves 90 times while shaving.
Brexit was sort of a mini-version. Not a great hegemonic power, not such a total defenestration, but certainly an act of large deliberate self-harm engineered by enemies foreign and domestic lulling the gullible.
We can't let the UK surpass us at anything. We built a better empire and a more powerful military, and now it's time to suck harder than any Brit ever sucked.
IR is such a US-coded discipline that you have loads of analysts and journalists with IR backgrounds still churning out wordcount about what Trump will do with US hegemony even as the geopolitical reality looks more and more like this:
Don’t we know from history that nearly all empires of the past have been diminished from within? How come we behave the same way after all the progress in predictive sciences and historical knowledge? Can AI come to the rescue? When will the scientific age arrive? (and replace the age of religion).
It's crazy that the French had a completely wild revolution at home and just stayed kicking ass internationally. Didn't expect that, did you, Francis II?
Seems Trump’s goal is no global hegemon, but instead great powers with spheres of influence where they do as they will. US would rule the Western Hemisphere through gunboat diplomacy & neo-colonialism. Russia will take Ukraine & China will take Taiwan.
Laziness. They’ve been recycling the same narratives for decades. Rethinking - even slightly adjusting - their worldview feels like too much effort for many.
On the plus side, the coming months will do a great job of separating the wheat from the chaff among IR scholars and commentators.
It feels like an awful lot of disciplines tasked with analyzing current events have been shoehorning stuff into ill fitting templates created in the 1990s that have never been updated
Yeah, as an American this is exactly what I’m frustratingly watching happen. I didn’t vote for this jerkoff once, but the three timer club is getting what they want I guess.
3x MAGAts are all, “finally we are getting the destruction of America we’ve been praying for all these years! Hallelujah! I can hear the trumps of Gawd already!”
Imagine trying, in 1985 or so, to pitch a novel in which the cold war just suddenly kind of peters out, then thirty years later Russia and the US each just cut their own throats for really no reason. I don't think anyone would buy it.
And just like that time I tend to think that predictions about the suicidal country in question being entirely off the board are off base. Nation-states can do a lot of stupid shit for a very long time, for better and for mostly worse
Rushsha n chyner r both in advanced decline. until old orange began rapidly dismantling government, USA was poised as last man standing. Rushsha heads rapidly toward post-imperial collapse & chyner already lost 15% previous population w/fastest-aging in the world. We could have kept going.
I've thought for ages that Putin's invasion of Ukraine was ultimately motivated by boredom. Boredom among rich, powerful men seems to be a very dangerous force. Normal bored blokes buy a motorbike rather than start a war or destroy the post-war International order.
Note: if you doubt that I’m a wishy-washy academic, see how I said “would argue” as if it was a possible argument I might make in some particular circumstance rather than just coming out and saying it.
This is going to sound a bit tinfoil hat, but can we take Elon Musk as representative of a new attempted prototype, the replacement of the nation state by techno-feudalism?
There's a list of European peasants revolts on Wikipedia. It's very long and some of them went on for years.
The peasants never actually accepted feudalism, and seen from the long perspective it was permanent warfare that eventually led to the development of modern government.
Even if they won it would be very bloody. And not over, just postponed for ten years (see the revolts on England that preceded and followed the civil war, including the Pitchfork Rebellion.
No, I haven't. I haven't read any Curtis Yarvin either. Or any Bronze Age Pervert. I suppose I should, given these utter midwits are the chosen thought leaders of our self-proclaimed better.
US elites realise the US is no longer the global hegemon it once was. Primarily due to China beginning to lead in tech and undercutting occidental nations exports. Hence the focus inwards to control the US domestic economy. With only 13.9% of imports contributing to GDP that's why tariffs⬆️
I don't think it's for no reason, though. We've seen the collapse of any shared reality or even truth, through the digital revolution (which AI is only going to celebrate), and that's what's driving the conflict. It's tech.
Weird to be in the timeline where Brexit is unlikely to be considered the prime geopolitical self-own of the early 21st century
+/- America indirectly drives Britain back to Brussels
It's also a result of empty consumerism replacing civil society and 50 years of concentrated far right propaganda being fed to half the country while industrialized education fails to produce a well rounded citizenry.
I was going to disagree about the boredom thing, but their election turnouts are so poor there has to be a degree of that. Maybe next time around - whenever that is - the Americans will be a bit more engaged.
Idk, y'all. I get what y'all are saying, but I feel like this falls within a constructivist framework pretty neatly. Also, frameworks typically taught in IR focus on a subset of Liberal/Realist frameworks, only ever described former status quo, and from a perspective of Capitalism and Realpolitik.
I am certain Hannah Arendt would not have been surprised by the present *banality of evil* that we're witnessing. Idk what Alexander Wendt thinks, but they idea that (IR) anarchy is what states make of it, is pretty on point here.
I have an ongoing theory that something which is important is, like, conservation of meaning, i.e. whenever things get too predictable, somebody comes along to be like, "nyaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh :ppppppppppppppp neener neener neener neener" and blow shit up
Maybe because you didn't went far enough on your geostrategical ruminations.
The reasons are clear. The hegemon ruined the marriage of the resource warehouse that is Russia with the energy starving EU. Now it will concentrate on ruining the marriage of Russia with China. Isn't that clear?
The US has levers beyond economic and military force -- central position in international payments (weaponized over the past 20 years, per @himself.bsky.social); arms that other countries own but can't maintain without help from US manufacturers.
Good point & even if Trump is replaced by someone committed to restoring relations, the prospect of that leader being replaced by another wrecker is becoming baked in.
This whole house of cards is built on one man. Trump. When he's gone, the whole thing collapses. Vance is already more hated than Ted Cruz or a dental drill.
The current crisis has been brewing for well over a decade, though. And if you think about it, the seeds for all of this started with Reagan. It's like Hemingway said about bankruptcy: slowly at first, then all at once.
The domestic grift/mafia family angle is a factor, layered over a christian fundamentalist social grab. I tend to think foreign affairs is still secondary to US politicians' aims.
The hegemon hates our virtues, loves the worst of our vices, and idolizes our enemies, while he is advised by people who want to tear down the hegemony for their profit, to emerge as king maggots from its corpse
Collapse of the USSR. it wasn't stabbing itself in the chest, but the final act of dissolution was just the outcome of decades of institutional and societal rot.
The Ming would have still kicked anyone else’s ass in a ground war; it was the sclerotic late Qing hundreds of years later that failed to match up to Brits with gunpowder
Plato would have pointed to the Athenians going off to attack Syracuse while still in the middle of a life-and-death struggle against Sparta. In fact, he based his rejection of democracy on that act of stupidity I think.
I wonder if it stems from the illusion at the top that everything will be just fine, the same way corporate executives do crazy things knowing all the people below them will keep things afloat. The US may in fact be historically unique in nurturing the illusion to this degree due to its prosperity?
Interesting. Usually takes a while. Have no coups ever gone really bad, though? Must be one taking over a going concern of a country or empire and imposing kleptocracy or the like.
How about French Second Republic declining into French Second Empire after Napoleon III’s coup? Nap III tried social reforms, which copied Bismarck, but then failed in wars in Italy and Mexico, then murdered 20,000 communards in any attempt to regain control of France, after the Prussians walked in
By the time the commune de Paris happened Napoleon 3 was already on the run after being captured by the Prussians. It's the 3rd Republic which crushed the commune.
Comments
On the plus side, the coming months will do a great job of separating the wheat from the chaff among IR scholars and commentators.
It feels like an awful lot of disciplines tasked with analyzing current events have been shoehorning stuff into ill fitting templates created in the 1990s that have never been updated
But much diminished, both in reputation and capability.
It's too short of an abbreviation for me to search it
Read to the end. Craig Unger is on Bsky. Get his opinion. @craigunger.bsky.social He pays attention to comments.
(And I only use the “qualifier” mainstream bc I’m a wishy-washy academic and can’t help myself.)
There's a list of European peasants revolts on Wikipedia. It's very long and some of them went on for years.
The peasants never actually accepted feudalism, and seen from the long perspective it was permanent warfare that eventually led to the development of modern government.
And what would happen to them if it did
It's the blueprint for exactly that return to feudality in the digital age.
Welcome to the New Middle Ages.
There's no precedent for *gestures at all of this*
+/- America indirectly drives Britain back to Brussels
Lots of people behaving in ways that's look after their short term interests with no belief in the state or the future!
The reasons are clear. The hegemon ruined the marriage of the resource warehouse that is Russia with the energy starving EU. Now it will concentrate on ruining the marriage of Russia with China. Isn't that clear?
Those will take years to unwind. But not decades.
The great idiot theory...
“wordcount”
as “wordc*nt”
and, well…
#dkpol