The Disintegrated States of America

Andrei Martyanov's new book on imperial decline features a devastating indictment of US political mediocrity

Having lost the arms race and every single war it unleashed in the 21st century geoeconomics is essentially a “euphemism for America’s non-stop sanctions and attempts to sabotage the economies of any nation capable of competing with the United States.”

The United States cannot win wars. Inflicting hybrid war is another matter entirely, as in creating “a lot of misery around the world, from effectively starving people to killing them outright.”

Martyanov also feels compelled to update what he’s been excelling at for years: the fact that the arrival of hypersonic missiles “has changed warfare forever.” The Kinzhal, deployed way back in 2017, has a range of 2,000 kilometers and “is not interceptable by existing US anti-missile systems.”

The 3M22 Zircon, a scramjet-powered maneuvering anti-ship hypersonic cruise missile, “changes the calculus of both naval and ground warfare completely.” The US lag behind Russia in air defense systems is “massive, and both quantitative and qualitative.”

The book qualifies as a critique of the post-modernist phenomenon that’s responsible for the current social re-engineering of the US, in tandem with an oligarchy that, “realistically, is not very bright, despite being rich.”

Assuming the US avoids complete disintegration into “separatist territories,” Martyanov stresses that the only way for the American “elite” to maintain any kind of control “over generations increasingly woke, or desensitized by drugs,” is through tyranny. Actually, techno-tyranny. And that seems to be the brave new dysfunctional paradigm further on down the road.