It was Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States president Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, who coined the “Evil Empire” epithet on the Soviet Union in the 1970s and plotted to help it implode. Long before another former US president, Ronald Reagan, reached the stage, Brzezinski trapped Moscow in the Afghanistan quagmire to give the Soviets a taste of America’s Vietnam experience. The approach was successful as an empire of chaos emerged with the assistance of extremist fundamentalists who, it was naively believed, would only support Afghan mujahideen fighters and then disappear.
The Soviet Union collapsed, but the triumph that propelled the American political elite into nirvana — that the Cold War was won by the surviving superpower — turned out to be shortsighted.
Reagan planted the seeds of the renewed empire even if his policies initiated a steady decline and, notwithstanding the interlude by former American president Bill Clinton, was followed by the erroneous George W. Bush/Dick Cheney visions about American global domination, which lay the seeds of future chaos.
Where all of these leaders failed was in believing that their triumphant moments would last forever, unaware that chaos is never manageable, or that a candidate for president like Donald Trump would rise to build on catastrophes to complete the prophetic decline many fundamentalists harboured in the depths of their souls.
Of course, Trump intends to “Make America Great Again”, though he seldom bothers to explain how the empire of chaos could accomplish it. By pursuing isolationist policies, Trump will now have the opportunity to transform the US, just like the Soviet Union was a quarter-century ago, into an entity in which “greatness” can no longer be fulfilled.
Beyond the “Evil Empire” and in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, Washington embarked not just on the management of chaos, but guided it towards the heartland by pursuing a post-Constitutional governing structure that witnessed an unprecedented expansion of the national security state to proportions that are incomprehensible. Even worse, what US President Barack Obama along with the entire establishment embarked upon, was the establishment of mega-surveillance programmes that, and this is worth repeating, intended to manage chaos to keep Americans safe from evil, even if the term evolved into “terrorism” and now “extremism” in the mouths of less-elegant sycophants.
Bush and Obama liked the national security state they created and though they pretended that American institutions acted as safety valves, the heart of American political life was now gifted with a state-within-a-state, which both of them preferred to pesky legislative and judicial branches that needed to be tamed.
As stated above, where this project encountered its first opposition was in the continued presence of unmanageable elements — let’s call them fundamentalists, which ought to include the 99 per cent of American workers who fed the 1 per cent establishment that pretended to care — and who refused to go away.
Where the Bush/Obama establishment failed monumentally was in how they neglected the basic needs of most. Politicians cozied up to financiers as they only know how to do, and while Obama excelled in his negligence — his presumed successor, Hillary Clinton, could not detach herself from his letdowns. She could not articulate a message that connected to ordinary people because neither she nor anyone else among the elites considered it worthwhile to explain their secrets. American and global financial gurus made cameo-appearances with the revelations of The Panama Papers, but the topic was quickly removed from our front pages and from television screens, which raised admiration for the management of that chaos.
Instead, everyone had to endure stories about the thousands of e-mails and WikiLeaks materials that surfaced according to a medicine-drop schedule that made Aldous Huxley’s “Alphas and Betas won’t make any more plants grow than those nasty little Gammas and Deltas and Epsilons down there” in his classic Brave New World, look like prophecy. Epsilons were given pills to be “happy” in 1984, and we, at least most of us, have been taking “managing chaos”, “protect us from evil”, and “Make America Great Again” pills as docilely as possible.
Of course, the liberal world — represented by leading Western powers — will retain its significant advantages and may yet undergo counter-revolutions against the three-decades-long assault on it. What is unclear is whether the empire of chaos that will now be strengthened by the Trump presidency will record any significant gains or, on the contrary, produce major catastrophes. When it comes to global affairs, few ought to be surprised to see the rise of right-wing nationalist movements throughout Europe that will not be the last nails in the liberalism coffin. Make no mistake about it, we are witnessing the end of a certain era and embarking on a period of unprecedented disorder. The good news is that it will be televised and we will all tweet our decline!
Dr Joseph A. Kechichian is the author of the just published From Alliance to Union: Challenges Facing Gulf Cooperation Council States in the Twenty-First Century (Sussex: 2016).