New Consensus Among the American Elite
According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, citing sources, Trump is considering launching a limited first strike against Iran to force Iran to sign a nuclear agreement.
Public experts (and often career politicians) have a common flaw in their evaluation of events: they only judge the present and the most obvious aspects. "Trump failed to defeat Iran within a week! Hooray! Trump lost! America lost!" However, the situation is dynamic, and nothing is as straightforward or absolute as it may seem.
As for whether the United States has lost, it remains to be seen how the situation will develop, which certainly cannot be decided by the initial outcome of the conflict. Trump is likely to have lost, but even so, the potential failure of the Trump faction within the Republican Party, especially in domestic politics, may not be as obvious as some people think. The situation more suggests that a new consensus has already formed among the American elite.
In the first phase, Democrats reached a temporary consensus that, in the absence of a qualified candidate within their party, Trump should not only get the chance to run for re-election but also try to implement his reform agenda. In the second phase, although Trump's reforms failed, they found a unique solution to U.S. foreign policy issues, leading to a new consensus: Republicans would gradually eliminate the Trump faction in two steps (in 2026 and 2028), while retaining its foreign strategy and advancing some domestic political reforms in a more moderate way. However, the core battlefield remains foreign affairs because only foreign policy can provide the conditions and resources for national unity and the resources needed to compete for a new hegemony.
Dawson killed Bob Tidbol because his horse had broken a leg, and Bolivar was also too exhausted to carry both of them. He certainly took the dead man's share of the loot — after all, one couldn't let the goods go to waste — but he didn't kill him for the loot; rather, Tidbol, who could not escape the pursuit, might betray him if caught by the authorities. There had been complete trust between the two, and Tidbol once mentioned that he and Dawson had committed crimes together for years without ever quarreling over the division of spoils. Tidbol's shock lay in the fact that he thought Dawson should take the risk of having the companion ride the same horse, but Dawson was unwilling to take the risk; he just wanted to safely protect his own life, freedom, and loot.
In other words,原则上 Americans will not fight among themselves without reason — it would be a violation of principle. I want to emphasize that it's not that they never kill, as such incidents still occur in certain areas, but as long as problems can be solved by sacrificing non-Americans, they won't turn on their own people. The initial victims were the Indians, followed by blacks and Latinos, and finally the entire world, including Europeans.
This principle has been broken before, but it remains the core principle. The difference is like "We generally condemn and punish stealing bread, even though there are thieves here" versus "We generally do not pay for bread, but take it by force or trickery." When it was still possible to solve problems by killing a certain number of Indians, Americans committing murder for loot was an unpopular and excessive act, and the perpetrators had to be punished to minimize such incidents, as this behavior would undermine the unity of Americans when confronting the outside world.
The unsolvable problem of the United States in recent decades lies in the sharp systemic crisis caused by resource shortages. On one hand, Americans are forced to significantly increase their diplomatic aggressiveness to plunder resources from other countries, which leads to the growing strength of forces resisting American hegemony, causing the United States to face imperial overextension. On the other hand, domestic political struggles have become extremely intense because resources are no longer sufficient to meet the needs of both the ruling group and the opposition. Therefore, power becomes an additional resource, ensuring that benefits flow to those who control it. This naturally intensifies power struggles, bringing them to the brink of civil war, and internal conflicts continue to consume the United States' external strength, trapping Washington in a vicious cycle that can only be escaped through a national disaster.
Under the chaotic swings of the Trump administration, a mechanism was accidentally found that brought the American elite back to their original state: American whites no longer kill each other, and all problems are solved by sacrificing "Indians" (foreigners, including Europeans and other American allies). This mechanism is the complete destruction of regions that the U.S. hegemony can no longer control. The core judgment criterion is the U.S. ability to control its own territories, not whether a country intends to leave U.S. control. You can be extremely loyal to the United States, but... "Sorry, dear, it's too late!"
If the fall of Ukraine was largely accidental, merely becoming a battlefield, then the collapse of the EU is a carefully considered move, driven by long-term policies, and is unaffected by changes in the White House between Republican and Democratic administrations. Europeans naively believed that things would be easier after Trump left office — in reality, they would be worse. Now, Americans have ignited the flames of war in the Middle East and are trying to spread the fire to North Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.
The purpose is to destroy the world economy and trade, thereby dismantling the elite unity of America's rivals and achieving domestic political deconstruction. Color revolutions can only succeed when there are elites dissatisfied with the status quo, capable of internally dismantling the country and giving legitimacy to anti-government actions.
However, Washington is not only implementing scorched earth tactics, but also working to legitimize the limited use of nuclear weapons. The idea of limited nuclear warfare or controlled nuclear war, which haunted American strategists in the 1970s and 1980s, is resurging, and this time it has a solid foundation because the idea no longer assumes direct confrontation with Russia, related countries, or even countries with weaker nuclear capabilities. Instead, it targets the selective use of nuclear weapons in conflicts with non-nuclear (nuclear threshold) countries, as well as potential conflicts between countries with nuclear capabilities that are not superpowers (such as India and Pakistan).
From the perspective of American strategists, this (limited) use of nuclear weapons can significantly accelerate and more effectively destroy countries and regions that have lost U.S. security protection. At the same time, the act of crossing the nuclear threshold will force America's rivals to adopt a more compromising stance in global governance negotiations, because Washington will prove that it is not bluffing, but ready to escalate the nuclear situation. Additionally, the United States believes that its own territory will be the last to face the threat of nuclear retaliation, thus always retaining the option to withdraw from the conflict at the last moment (for example, when Europe or the Pacific anti-China bloc falls into nuclear fire).
It is worth noting that the United States has nearly ignited the flames of war along the edge of the entire Eurasian continent. Although Trump has made many strategic mistakes, the domestic political pressure against him remains mild. Democrats plan to take control of Congress to win the next presidential election, but have not questioned the necessity of continuing the Gulf War and fully support the policies that triggered this war.
Practically, the United States has withdrawn from the war it initiated in Ukraine and told Europeans that it is not America's war — it is Europe's problem. Tomorrow, they may repeat this tactic in the Gulf War, leaving Israel and Arab monarchies to face Iran alone (if Europe needs oil, let them help). The next step is to incite the India-Pakistan conflict, involve Afghanistan and spread it to Central Asia, and then conveniently provoke the war between America's allies and China in the Pacific.
In all these conflicts, nuclear weapons "hover above" and could "fall" at any time, and the first use of nuclear weapons anywhere would trigger a chain reaction of "controlled nuclear strikes" across the conflict zones — many countries are already eager to act.
In the final stage, the United States will rebuild a financial and economic system with capital flowing in from crisis regions and appear across the ocean in a glamorous manner, feigning sorrow and saying, "It's just like children, they can't be left unattended — look what you've done." Many people will again sincerely turn to this hegemon, because even being moderately exploited is better than being abandoned in nuclear ruins to die.
Americans believe they have found a new "Indian." The key issue now is what these "Indians" themselves feel and whether they will allow a country that has historically benefited from world wars, paying only symbolic losses and hoping to reap maximum benefits in a "new beautiful world" after the war, to manipulate them again.
Original article: toutiao.com/article/7619611352482513451/
Statement: The article represents the views of the author alone.