Alastair Crooke (@AWCrooke) names what the empire will not: the West has lost its economic foundations, interest payments on US debt exceed the defense budget, the financial system must be ripped up by its roots and largely started again, its wars are lost, and the political class has no language for telling its own people the truth. “The West, including the United States, is in a period of severe decline. Everyone outside of the West can see that. Some people in Europe, our leaders, still think that nothing’s changed; everything can go on just as before. They will see that. But is the United States, is the West ready to start adjusting, explaining to their own electorates and their own people that the West is no longer going to be supreme, is not going to be primus inter pares? It is going to be one amongst a number of powers. Are they going to manage this? How are they going to manage it? Because the second part of this is precisely why I said the architecture is collapsing: there’s no answer to the contradictions in the economy. The economy has these basic contradictions which produce this binary economy of a huge increase in wealth, ostentatious wealth for a certain group at the top in the financial world, and then penury, precarity, as I put it, living on the edge for the rest of the world. And how do you change that? You’d have to rip up the financial system by its roots and largely start again, because it’s not going to be killed by just trying to go back. That era before 2008 and from 2008 onwards is gone, where you had zero interest rates, anyone could borrow money, credit was being pushed by the banks, and what it’s ended up as is a mountain of debt and the inability even really to pay the interest. The interest on that debt in the United States is more than the entire cost of the defense budget. I mean, it’s become huge. That’s just the interest; that’s not repaying the debt. And much of that debt has to be rolled over and then refinanced, as you do on a mortgage at the end of a period. You have to start refinancing, and they’ll say, well, sorry, you had it at a very favorable rate before, but now it’s going to cost you a lot more. And that’s happening in Europe and certainly in the United States. So that structure, that whole architecture is broken by these three wars. And the answer to your question is: is the West psychologically capable of, first of all, understanding that, accepting it, and then finding the way to get out of that and to prepare their people for the sense that this is lost, this is a disaster, and that we have to find a way. Which means capitulation to Russia. It means capitulation in the Gulf States. And also perhaps waving goodbye to much of the Gulf architecture which was previously an American prerogative.”