Hi Nel, thank you very much for the rigorous and step by step explanation and analysis as always. I always finds it intriguing that your worldlined really start from concept and then delving into one limited and/or specific aspect of the bunker state mechanics.
To join the conversation, I agree fully on the fact that it is a misconception to divide opinion into “flawless masterplan” and “no plan at all” where it is very very clear that the truth is always in between.
As usual, I will directly share the condition in my country. Here, in Indonesia, it is very apparent that foreign NGOs and funds are starting to conduct their usual playbook of infiltration and fragmentation. People can simply check the BBCs, NYT, Guardians, etc. The country is suddenly being a hot topic from a backdrop.
Ironically, as you also explained, the depiction is always either of the two : that the griefs and protest inside the country is a CIA plot (alternative media), or that the government is absolutely corrupt and is a failure and Indonesia needs reform (foreign MSM such as BBC).
In reality, the government is indeed corrupt, oligarchs are powerful, most of the citizens live paycheck to paycheck lines, mid-upper incomes being short on slipping back to low income, classic developing country post colonial conditions. So to call the protests, griefs, etc., as purely CIA plot is delusional. But to say that it is purely organic right now also does not make sense. In reality, there is indeed some foreign funds flowing into these organic protests from the citizens.
Now the question goes back to the big topic, what should be done then? Can a massive sustainable protest that turns into political movement frees itself from political agendas flowing inside the capital needed to keep the protest and movement going? In the end the protest itself IS a process of continuous planning and revision.
There are many actors at play. An Open Society Foundation financed Indonesian org (Kurawal) first targeted Jokowi and then his successor. Apparently Soros' cum suis taste buds are so extremely refined they only suffer the most exquisite democratic delights:
Soros’ OSF helped stir Indonesian rebellion, leaks reveal
[This reply got a little long, sorry, i hope it is readable] Thank you so much Thomas for speaking of Indonesia. It is quite amazing that alt medias keep celebrating what looks like JCPOA 2 - with Iran abandoning all leverage, how to secure anything ? - while Bangladesh, Nepal, Cambodia to some extent, Syria, Venezuela, Hungary(, Chile in a different style) have fallen in the last couple of years. And now Indonesia is under increasing threat with seemingly no serious opposition to the Empire there
Regarding the question « Что делать ? » i hope to write a counter masterplan draft, inspired by recent developments. The main objective in my view is to try to develop cohesion, similar to what Lenin did, but based on the theory built up in the intervening period, in particular i think that mathematical modeling is important: using the whole arsenal of modern science, in particular the (most) common language of modern scientists. This is fundamental on several accounts:
1 economies of scale, generalization, transfer learning, reusing common structures to the utmost, knowledge bootstrapping
2 internodal/individual/groupal/partial/institutional/... coherence, in particular insisting on emotional and general cognitive empathy - a notion central to Ali Khamenei's thought
The reasoning is that our crucial defect as a group is a lack of reflexivity, self-consciousness, of existence as an antiimperialist collective: efficiency is what allows building self-reinforcing feedback loops; so that we can become an exponentially efficient organism, whose processes are fluid, robust, powerful
[This harkens back to the usual level/stage/spatial decompositions of cognitive/complex adaptive systems: Piaget, Maslow, Kegan, Kohlberg, Erikson, Loevinger, McLelland-Murry,... as well as to the time-wise decomposition of cognition, starting with at least Thomas Aquinas, and then with the modern sociologists Parsons, the managerial view with Burnham, Becker, or the policy process Lasswell. The idea is that developing new processes - enabling new control - is done iteratively, in an embedded way. One can also cite Herbert Simons on modularity, "the architecture of complexity". And for a last piece of name-dropping, Weber on antipositivism, the difficulty of social sciences is the chaotic nature of their process: because the scientist is its own subject - via introspection/phenomenological process - and because its science is so directly applied to his interests, it is very hard for social scientists to express, to make social sciences in a stable, unbiased way - chaos is often defined as sensitivity to initial conditions]
As Nel describes, organizations typically reach such "state of flow" through iterations and multiscale learning - in particular cultural learning, a generalization of Elias' civilizational process
The mathematical modeling need not be formal, fully rigorous: Nel or Warwick Powell brilliantly show how informal mathematical/physical notions can guide and strengthen sociological reasoning
Regarding Indonesia in particular i think that at this point there is little we can do directly. But if within alternative and social medias we become really conscious that the Empire is waging a war against us and we must organize in response then a serious resistance narrative could reach Indonesia and help counter the Washington-led one. The priority is to discipline our cognitive centers, alternative medias: demand that they promote critical thinking, favor quality thinkers like Nel, and a diversity of views, rather than falling for the usual customers, who just repeat propaganda slop, thereby degenerating into clickbait propaganda outlets - as they have. The boot-up phase will be the hardest, so we need to encourage ourselves - especially as we are headed to hard times
Good question. But I think it rests on a misunderstanding of what I'm actually arguing.
First, we need to decouple planning from utopian outcomes. Planning is simply an activity that societies, organizations, and institutions engage in to manage complexity, resources, and tasks, and to project into the future. From the Babylonians and the very first emergence of cities, every society across the globe has engaged in it. Every era and region develops its own specific 'planning culture' that evolves over time. Planning is a universal organizational activity. So when I say "the empire plans," I am not saying "the West is uniquely good at planning." I am saying: look at the planning culture it has, and recognize it for what it is. That's simply a descriptive claim.
Second, and this is the crucial point: why things are going down is actually explained by my Bunker State framework, which is the larger argument this essay slots into. During the Cold War, Western planning culture had a specific goal—improving social welfare, raising living standards, building infrastructure for the common good. This wasn't out of benevolence. It was forced by systemic competition with the socialist bloc, which had exactly that planning goal and was visibly achieving it. The West had to offer something, or it would lose legitimacy.
What I argue in the Bunker State thesis is that we are living through a shift in planning culture. With the socialist alternative gone, the goal of planning in the US-led imperial core is no longer the improvement of society. It is the maintenance of imperial hierarchy. In practice, this means everything is subordinated to hybrid warfare. Infrastructure is repurposed for dual use. Citizens become objects of security rather than bearers of rights. Their wellbeing is no longer the metric of success. A great deal of suffering is imposed—not as an intended outcome, but as an acceptable externality of keeping the militarized machine growing and containing the Global Majority.
So when you see things crumbling—crumbling public services, unaffordable housing, energy poverty, political polarization—you are seeing the content of the current plan. The goal is the survival of the imperial apparatus. And from that standpoint, a deindustrialized, immiserated, polarized population that is too exhausted to organize is a managed and welcome condition.
That is the grim part. The hopeful part—if there is one—is that planning cultures can shift again. They shifted once, under Cold War pressure. They can shift again, under different pressure. But only if we understand the machinery well enough to contest it.
Thank you very much, Nel. The presence of such minds as yours among Resistance is reassuring: we still have a fighting chance in this century
What is worrying though is: there is still an immense margin for degeneration and metastasizing: along the lines you propose, the bunkerization, the hollowing out of societies under the pretext and KPIs of security, in favor of a orwellian-kafkian techno-bureaucracy, still has centuries to go, if left unopposed
Those of us who follow financial markets are nowadays struck by how far deep imbalances are driven by narrative and narrow interests, before the market adjusts, the bubble pops, the Ponzi scheme unravels; and those markets deal only with relatively strategically shallow, simple systems. Economic and imperial bubbles can expand for much longer, through a larger reservoir
As long as voices like yours are not the alt mainstream, our outlook is indeed grim. To end on a positive note though: the People of Iran is still teaching us lessons, showing its will to survive, to defeat its antidemocratic currents. The Ghalibaf+Araghchi+Pezeshkian triumvirate is starting to feel the heat. I really hope the People will pull off a new miracle, as that of the Ramadan War
So this is actually the massively relevant question. And the answer is that the act of planning often deviates, by a lot, from the prescribed process. Major culprits would be petty organizational rivalries and first-class principal-agent misalignment. In both cases, the tactic is to sabotage the prescribed planning process, sometimes force thru policy changes that should never have been approved, by intentionally (and counterproductively) creating situation of limited time or limited information. The classic which we see far too often is the "Schmittian Emergency/Exception", or perhaps more mildly, "no crisis goes to waste" a-la EC/EU. Sometimes it's the organizational rival-power-dynamic of equilibrium-of-veto's. Powers do indeed fall from greed and hubris, and organizational dysfunction is a big part of how. See "Iron Law of Institutions" -- principals will prioritize their internal power and well-being within the institution even (and actually more often than not) at the expense of the power and well-being of the institution with respect to the external world it inhabits.
Nel asks, "Do you notice this nearly invisible imperial infrastructure in your own daily life, operating as quietly and persistently as a municipal zoning board?"
No. I know what a government planning department looks like. Likewise, corruption within those buildings.
What I see operates in plain sight. Unabashed. Openly contemptuous. But that's just Canada. The land where Governments know no one reads the Constitution. Where politics as a spectator sport has been ingrained into the national psyche. Where those who dare protest more strenuously than crying in their beer soon mend their ways as soon as the Federal or Provincial Brown Shirts are dispatched. It's the land where the City of London's Oxford Alumnus turned The Donald's trolling of Trudeau into an 'Elbows Up' troll of the Canadian electorate. Thus to establish the evolving Empire's new Albert Embankment HQ in Ottawa.
While the world remains mesmerized by the mercurial character of POTUS - is he a genius, a senile psychopath, a Crime Family Don, the Ass by which Israel Wags the Dog, or just the ever resilient TACO Man? - The Carnival Barker, The Stalking Horse Carney Prime Minister of Canada, 'IAGO', openly tours the globe on a quest to build the trade deals, secure the resources, build the networks that will extricate The Empire from its current state of overreach. Hardly a day goes by without the PMO boasting the facts on its website. He, Carney, Iago, is the one preparing the Empire for its regrouping OVER HERE. Behind the Moats. And does it with a work ethic that even allows him time to intrude into European "security" affairs; like the Ghost of Churchill, provoking European insensibilities towards Russia. Working tirelessly to ensure Proxy NATO (sans America and Canada) continue to attrit Russia while Canada and America safely muster their resources OVER HERE. Funny [in the most disturbing sense of the word] how "world wars" always seem to leave North America untouched... without any need to insert the modifier, 'relatively', we should add. Moats. Oceanic moats.
Just as the more youthful Cabinet of Justin Trudeau (several of whom were also Oxford Alumni) took up the slack on the international stage during Demented Biden's interregnum, Canada's Iago is sweeping up the mess Trump's venality has created for The Empire. The Empire can do without Trump. But at this juncture, it cannot do without Iago (aka The Carnival Barker, aka The Stalking Horse Carney Prime Minister of Canada). So, stop fixating on Trump and START PAYING ATTENTION TO WHAT CANADA IS DOING. Canada is the international face of those focused on dealing with the friction created by Trump.
All very true, but there is a difference between making a plan, and having the competence at all required levels to successfully carry it out. The US military and even more so many complete European governments appear to have lost this ability. The US educational system has been extensively downgraded and technically trained workers are at a premium, while industrial capability in the US has been vastly reduced. A plan is all very well, but if you don't have the capability it's difficult to implement any plan.
You are pointing to something fairly uncontroversial here, and although it's helpful to say it out loud it doesn't instigate much reaction in me.
Perhaps it's helpful to do some historical framing and some comparison between different systems of planning. In particular I am currently fascinated by the new Chinese planning and production methods. Comparison with the Western model of production might provide a contrast.
The stakeholders concerns are a fairly recent expression of community engagement and often billed as democracy in action, for example. Earlier mass mobilisations and relocations of swathes of land for dam construction exemplify a different imperative of land use change vs continuous improvements of city planners and infrastructure upgrades, for example.
What makes reporting worthwhile is exactly the mapping process of what works, or fails, in relation to changing circumstances. This reiterative front, where interested parties volley back and forth over various privileges and or rights or necessary sacrifices, set against a background of environmental constraints and changes forms a reporter's substrate and cognitive, as well as physical, mapping of topology... Of ideas, of will, of execution and so on. Whether a writer focus on synergies or incohesion as something to be supported or undermined defines pertinence and relevance for readers, who in turn respond and react according to their subjective interests as part of a cause, or as individuals.
Reiterative cycles stack all the way down/up to infinity.
Arguing against binary positions, conspiracy theory and other simplistic intellectual malpractice born out of ignorance or low intelligence is a fools errand. Choice is not always an advantage. Simple instructions for simple minded people are easier to communicate and practice. Democratic engagement has developed into a form of disempowerment through distraction in details in some places. A way to slow progress through deliberation. Lengthening response time and diluting agency and effectiveness. History shows how emergency powers suspend democratic processes in favor of fast and unified response ability. Agility, and other buzz words begin to degrade the debate towards the language of HR and promo flyers and actual changes slow down as staff learn to work around the questionnaire and performance metrics.
You see how I am writing towards meaningless drivel here? On and on it can go...
Asymmetry of information provides advantage, only if it can be used by the reader. The rest is dopamine feeding and telepathic sleaze. Or snooze inducing policy booklets about stakeholder engagement as you so eloquently point out.
These orgs are way more dysfunctional, and consequently less coherent, than their process manuals would have it. Ranging from petty rivalry and "iron law of institutions" to outright principal-agent misalignment in which corporates and third party nations plainly sabotage the imperial position to their own ends. In the corporate world at least, one of the essential ladder-climbing skills is being able to sieze up or misdirect the planning machinery, and contrive situations where decisions do get made out of view of the interests of the "larger whole". A vague tendency does of course survive, such as a collective agreement on "this portion of the other shall be our enemy of choice for the next 5 years", but so much of what we see I think is actually a manifestation of dysfunction.
First I would like to say thanks! This is very useful analysis. I only hope my comments contribute to constructive dialogue that you are looking for here.
I have some questions about your conclusions, though:
> The question is whether we are willing to do the equivalent work on our side: to build our own institutions, our own planning capacity, and our own long-term strategic horizons. Not to passively cheer for other countries, but to organize across borders. Not to wait for the empire to collapse, but to actively make it obsolete.
This is a very provocative statement which I think needs some comments.
The first thing I think about is legitimacy. In Western societies the left does not have legitimacy. Our societies are dominated by oligarchy, and organizing to challenge their dominance is "always already," as they say, illegitimate.
This is to say that any successfully organized entity on the left will face vicious attacks on its legitimacy, and there's a good, if not 100% chance of being targeted by the state.
Oligarchy is very happy with the way things are, how are left institutions going to form and collect power in this state of society?
Yes, to organize is necessary. But often I'm left with the impression it's being talked about on the left as of it's the first time. We must begin again, from the roots. Yet another stale "eternal return," so to speak. The goal is to have a new paradigm that finally is the one that works.
What I see in these moments is a failure to reckon with the enormity of why previous paradigms have failed in the past. There is a vast wreckage of failed institution building on the left, and any reflection on these failures seem to be relegated to obscure academic books. I think they should be front and center.
What about the Black Panthers, as an example? Despite their reasonable and worthy theory, what went wrong with their practice? How can those wrongs be guarded against? Those or thorny issues that still plague social movements today. How to guard against infiltrators and saboteurs, for instance; how is it we are to maintain legitimacy of our institutions against the onslaughts of the oligarchy?
Jeremy Corbyn seems a fitting lesson here. He rode a leftist tide to the head of the British Labour Party, but then was crushed by the manufactured antisemitism scandal. From the outside it looks like Labour decided to lose over allowing Corbyn to become Prime Minister.
And what has happened to the UK left since? They tried "Your Party," Corbyn very much at the forefront, but it self-imploded before it even got out of the gate. I don't know the intimate details of this bit of history, and please correct me if my impression is wrong. But if a political faction cannot even clear its own hurdles, let alone those which their enemies, how can any institution be build to not only survive, but out-compete those who seek its burial?
Here's my final question: the October Revolution succeeded because the the political situation of dual power: the Provisional government vs. the Soviets. Today there is no such dual power. When there is no alternative to official legitimacy, how can alternative institutions be built?
Like empires, the design and organization of a city's institutional ecosystem matters immensely.
The following passage is from "The School History of Worcester" (1899) by Caroline Van Deusen Chenoweth, page 134:
"The mayor and aldermen, together with the common council, constitute the legislative power. Worcester is divided into eight wards. The more important of the city departments include the board of assessors, collector of taxes, treasurer, auditor, city. clerk, city solicitor, city marshal, school board, fire department, engineers' department, police department, health department, water commissioner, water registrar, super-intendent of sewers, commissioner of high-ways, park commissioners, superintendent of public buildings, trustees of the city hospital, and overseers of the poor, and this by no means completes the list." And from page 138: " will condone the irreparable loss sustained in the destruction of buildings such as this. The story of Worcester as a city, is the story of to-day, and has but little place upon these pages. Material prosperity is everywhere apparent, and abundant educational advantages are freely offered. Clark University, the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the State Normal School, the College of the Holy Cross, Highland Military Academy, Worcester Academy, several excellent private schools for girls and boys, and a splendid array of buildings actively devoted to public school purposes, are worthily ministered to by the Worcester Public Library; the priceless library of the Ameri-can Antiquarian Society, and the library of the Society of Antiquity; as well as by that later educational influence, the Worcester Art Museum."
I can't imagine that anyone had the idea that there was one 'static' plan to deal with Iran, as Mike Tyson said,"Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face.", at that point there are new plans being made to deal with the new situation.
I do have to push back a little on the “rumination” label, though! This piece is actually quite short compared to my usual work. It’s meant to be a sort of “intervention”, a direct challenge to how people usually misunderstand geopolitical “plans.”
The TL;DR is this: People tend to think the US either has a flawless, secret masterplan (or a shadowy cabal that controls everything or at least the direction) or is just flailing around in total chaos and desperation. Both are not exactly true in my reading. The system actually builds its plans through boring, everyday bureaucracy. It works step-by-step, tweaking and repeating the same processes over and over until it gets the result it wants.
I use a few examples in the text to prove this. The shift in US policy toward Iran was a predictable, step-by-step pipeline. I also point to NATO’s own training manuals, which read exactly like boring corporate handbooks. There are no smoke-filled rooms, just budgets, committees, and paperwork.
Hope that helps frame it! The actual mechanics matter.
My academic training was in IR as you know, and so love the long reads, which I tend to do on the weekends, away from my day job. And appreciate your take esp from the pov of a geographer and sociologist. My time in IR grad school was more the traditional views and training- you know, PEIR (by Bob Gilpin) for IR 101. / I had Gilpin for an advanced course, and he was a great guy, very calm friendly.
Tricky indeed. I use the LLMs but won’t use them for Nel’s work. Doesn’t feel right, esp with me being an IR guy. / Will just plow through it myself- deep work (Cal Newport) requires that you sweat a bit, I reckon.
"... because the terminal objective remains entirely unchanged: neutralizing Iran as a sovereign, autonomous entity." - the Empire's objective may remain unchanged, but it's ability to attain that objective may have changed or at the least have been seriously impaired. Michael Hudson argues that the US-led empire is not in decline, but in a state of "collapse" - https://substack.com/@professormichaelhudson/note/c-278149926?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=nd04h. If I understand his argument correctly, it revolves around the financial infrastructure supporting the petro-dollar, and his assertion that the destruction wrought upon the GCC states has done irrevocable damage to this mechanism. This would in turn suggest that the empire's core financial architecture, and thus its ability to achieve its objectives, has been seriously damaged. So the planning process may still be "humming away in the background" but if this damage to the empire's financial architecture is indeed critical, then surely its ability to adapt to obstacles and push-back will be seriously and perhaps critically impaired?
I love Hudson's take on many issues but in this case he may well be overly "optimistic". On one side the USA has lost or stalemated nearly all imperial wars since Korea and yet it survived as Empire. On the other side, if you accept that the true goal of this war has been not the declared ones (several variations but all about crushing Iran) but rather to reduce the oil/gas/nitrates global output in order to cause "unequal forced degrowth" and concentrate oil/gas/nitrates availability to that produced by the USA and its vassals in the Atlantic region (from Venezuela to Norway, from Canada to Angola), then the USA actually won and only loses maybe (???) if they have to relax the blockade and allow, at least for some time, free market restoration in the Gulf (although it will take at least a year to get back to pre-war production, if at all).
The problem with many pundits is that they focus all too much on US references such as the price of the gallon and inflation (which Trump wants and demands, mind you), while ignoring how it compares with other countries and regions and very especially Asia, the worst affected area. If the USA loses 10 and the rest of the world loses 100, then the USA wins, because they're not even selling anything anymore: they don't need markets, they need that others (notably China) lose markets. It's not about global prosperity and absolute size of the slice but about global misery and relative size of the pie. Not so much about how much you get but about how little your rival gets.
I can certainly see a kind of twisted logic to this strategy, and I certainly wouldn't put it past the imperial managers to want to do this, despite the misery it would/will cause (obviously they don't care a fig for that). But would the petro-dollar survive this tectonic upheaval? I suppose we need to assume that countries will still need to rely on the US for their access to energy, so the infrastructure propping up the petro-dollar would be shifted - partially? - from the Gulf region to the USA and the Atlantic region as you suggest. It seems to be an audacious plan with many moving parts that could go wrong. Does the US still have the hard force capability to make this shift happen without breaking the structure which underpins it's debt-laden economy?
US access to internal energy resources is a relatively short-term capability. Especially through fracking, of which costs are inexorably rising and sources diminishing. Of course other oil and gas deposits are being found, but 99% of those are more difficult and expensive to extract than previous ones, and this trend will continue.
So I guess the question is: how significant/severe and how irrevocable is the damage the US-led empire has inflicted on its own petro-dollar infrastructure. If this attack on Iran has been planned out and gamed and strategised for decades then presumably they have already looked at this exact (worst-case for them?) scenario and have counter-moves lined up. Are the GCC countries, as some seem to be suggesting, no longer a vital hub for the petro-dollar infrastructure? From what you say about the inherent instability and short-term capability of US based energy resources, then surely that would mean that the GCC states *are* still vital to the US petro-dollar system. In which case, 1. how does the US keep the GCC states from "defecting" so to speak, and 2. how do they incorporate Iran's new relative strength in the region into the whole structure? And how do people assess and understand Michael Hudson's claim that this is a "crash" for the US-led empire, and not a "decline"?
I think the question is: how seriously does the 'US Empire' take the inevitability of the ending of technological civilisation. I'm not saying that this is an inevitability, but it is a fact that we live on a planet with limited resources. Oil, gas, metals etc. exist only in specific quantities, and are getting more and more difficult to extract. In the last 150 or so years we have used immense quantities of these un-renewable resources. Even if re-cycled, there are always small irrecoverable losses. Glass-half-full types predict infinitely lasting solar energy and fusion energy plus resources from asteroids etc. but the viability of this is extremely questionable. If they are thinking ahead at all, this is what they should be thinking about. But I doubt that they are - the US is the home of 'boosterism' and downbeat stuff is discouraged.
But if they are only concerned with short-term matters, then we have already seen how that goes. As the last in a long string of military fiascos and defeats, Trump has had to recognise (at least temporarily) another defeat - so not very good planning involved there. See my comment below for more on this.
Something important is that US (and Canadian) oil/gas production is expensive (fracking, tar sands) and needs a relatively high price to be profittable (I remember that it used to be $60 years ago and the price was at $59 before the war). Another key issue is the "petrodollar", i.e. the reliance of the USD as international hegemonic currency on oil being sold in that divisa, which explains much of US imperialism in the last decades.
So, considering all that, I think that such a strategy of squeezing the oil market (with some control: war-deal-war-deal-war) does work for the USA, especially for the Big Oil sector (which may well be much more important than the Zionist Lobby in driving this and other wars). It's not a coincidence in this scenario what happened to Venezuela in January (a very well planned coup) but it smells fishy that they suppossedly tried to do the same in Iran and failed miserably... just because the plan was bad and they lacked a plan B (all of which sounds most unlikely). After what happened in Syria I find hard to buy the narrative of "the Resistance won", really. Those Anglos always have a cunning plan or a dozen and are just too good at winning.
It looks like you think about a lot of things that I think about. You might be interested that they recently dug up some graves and found they died of a different form of bubonic plague. These are people before agriculture. They didn't think it existed back then and was something that happened due to rats but apparently woodchucks or groundhogs also can kill you. And of course the thing that separates humans is the bow and arrow which might be effective for hunting these smaller animals. So when we tried to leave Africa something interesting may have happened involving bubonic plague. Something kept killing all humans who tried to leave. We know this because Europeans have a great deal of Neanderthal genes and Asians have in addition Denisivans, but we all have human mitochondria DNA. That means that males of these groups had children with modern humans and it must have been them that raised the surviving offspring that then had immunity?
This is more of a response or Counter-Thesis that tiptoes around the core dispute, the viability of Big Picture analysis, and then buries it in a level of details that is not exactly germane to the question. It's telling that you start by assuming the Big Picture dimension of the plan is handed down from on high before (Cheney backroom) before explaining that planning isn't conducted in smoky backrooms. Begging the question: is the Big Picture iteratively determined or not? The argument around erraticism, accelerationism, ultimately irrationality from their own perspective is that when the Plan in that sense becomes unviable -- ie it is murky how to maintain the cornerstones of their edifice on every level from conceptual to on the ground -- then everything else including the gears of planning start to come unstuck. It is also has a very different prescriptive content as a result eg you don't don't "study their plans" (some of which is wishful thinking but always reactive to the resistance they face) to organize resistance to the Genocide. The fact that sober analysts saw disastrous military adventurism coming miles away (years in advance) really needs to be addressed within the framework you're elaborating. Planning is complicated..but what about Politics?
Hi Nel, thank you very much for the rigorous and step by step explanation and analysis as always. I always finds it intriguing that your worldlined really start from concept and then delving into one limited and/or specific aspect of the bunker state mechanics.
To join the conversation, I agree fully on the fact that it is a misconception to divide opinion into “flawless masterplan” and “no plan at all” where it is very very clear that the truth is always in between.
As usual, I will directly share the condition in my country. Here, in Indonesia, it is very apparent that foreign NGOs and funds are starting to conduct their usual playbook of infiltration and fragmentation. People can simply check the BBCs, NYT, Guardians, etc. The country is suddenly being a hot topic from a backdrop.
Ironically, as you also explained, the depiction is always either of the two : that the griefs and protest inside the country is a CIA plot (alternative media), or that the government is absolutely corrupt and is a failure and Indonesia needs reform (foreign MSM such as BBC).
In reality, the government is indeed corrupt, oligarchs are powerful, most of the citizens live paycheck to paycheck lines, mid-upper incomes being short on slipping back to low income, classic developing country post colonial conditions. So to call the protests, griefs, etc., as purely CIA plot is delusional. But to say that it is purely organic right now also does not make sense. In reality, there is indeed some foreign funds flowing into these organic protests from the citizens.
Now the question goes back to the big topic, what should be done then? Can a massive sustainable protest that turns into political movement frees itself from political agendas flowing inside the capital needed to keep the protest and movement going? In the end the protest itself IS a process of continuous planning and revision.
There are many actors at play. An Open Society Foundation financed Indonesian org (Kurawal) first targeted Jokowi and then his successor. Apparently Soros' cum suis taste buds are so extremely refined they only suffer the most exquisite democratic delights:
Soros’ OSF helped stir Indonesian rebellion, leaks reveal
https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/soros-osf-helped-stir-indonesian?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=474765&post_id=200866769&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=6mos7&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
[This reply got a little long, sorry, i hope it is readable] Thank you so much Thomas for speaking of Indonesia. It is quite amazing that alt medias keep celebrating what looks like JCPOA 2 - with Iran abandoning all leverage, how to secure anything ? - while Bangladesh, Nepal, Cambodia to some extent, Syria, Venezuela, Hungary(, Chile in a different style) have fallen in the last couple of years. And now Indonesia is under increasing threat with seemingly no serious opposition to the Empire there
Regarding the question « Что делать ? » i hope to write a counter masterplan draft, inspired by recent developments. The main objective in my view is to try to develop cohesion, similar to what Lenin did, but based on the theory built up in the intervening period, in particular i think that mathematical modeling is important: using the whole arsenal of modern science, in particular the (most) common language of modern scientists. This is fundamental on several accounts:
1 economies of scale, generalization, transfer learning, reusing common structures to the utmost, knowledge bootstrapping
2 internodal/individual/groupal/partial/institutional/... coherence, in particular insisting on emotional and general cognitive empathy - a notion central to Ali Khamenei's thought
The reasoning is that our crucial defect as a group is a lack of reflexivity, self-consciousness, of existence as an antiimperialist collective: efficiency is what allows building self-reinforcing feedback loops; so that we can become an exponentially efficient organism, whose processes are fluid, robust, powerful
[This harkens back to the usual level/stage/spatial decompositions of cognitive/complex adaptive systems: Piaget, Maslow, Kegan, Kohlberg, Erikson, Loevinger, McLelland-Murry,... as well as to the time-wise decomposition of cognition, starting with at least Thomas Aquinas, and then with the modern sociologists Parsons, the managerial view with Burnham, Becker, or the policy process Lasswell. The idea is that developing new processes - enabling new control - is done iteratively, in an embedded way. One can also cite Herbert Simons on modularity, "the architecture of complexity". And for a last piece of name-dropping, Weber on antipositivism, the difficulty of social sciences is the chaotic nature of their process: because the scientist is its own subject - via introspection/phenomenological process - and because its science is so directly applied to his interests, it is very hard for social scientists to express, to make social sciences in a stable, unbiased way - chaos is often defined as sensitivity to initial conditions]
As Nel describes, organizations typically reach such "state of flow" through iterations and multiscale learning - in particular cultural learning, a generalization of Elias' civilizational process
The mathematical modeling need not be formal, fully rigorous: Nel or Warwick Powell brilliantly show how informal mathematical/physical notions can guide and strengthen sociological reasoning
Regarding Indonesia in particular i think that at this point there is little we can do directly. But if within alternative and social medias we become really conscious that the Empire is waging a war against us and we must organize in response then a serious resistance narrative could reach Indonesia and help counter the Washington-led one. The priority is to discipline our cognitive centers, alternative medias: demand that they promote critical thinking, favor quality thinkers like Nel, and a diversity of views, rather than falling for the usual customers, who just repeat propaganda slop, thereby degenerating into clickbait propaganda outlets - as they have. The boot-up phase will be the hardest, so we need to encourage ourselves - especially as we are headed to hard times
Here is a chain of threads i wrote on the case of Iran: https://x.com/plm203/status/2067546483319099519
Thank you for reading
My headspace is reliving Teddy's 1903 and Lyndon's 1963 simultaneously, feels like low budget Nolan's Tenet
If we’re so adept at planning, why is everything going to shit?
Good question. But I think it rests on a misunderstanding of what I'm actually arguing.
First, we need to decouple planning from utopian outcomes. Planning is simply an activity that societies, organizations, and institutions engage in to manage complexity, resources, and tasks, and to project into the future. From the Babylonians and the very first emergence of cities, every society across the globe has engaged in it. Every era and region develops its own specific 'planning culture' that evolves over time. Planning is a universal organizational activity. So when I say "the empire plans," I am not saying "the West is uniquely good at planning." I am saying: look at the planning culture it has, and recognize it for what it is. That's simply a descriptive claim.
Second, and this is the crucial point: why things are going down is actually explained by my Bunker State framework, which is the larger argument this essay slots into. During the Cold War, Western planning culture had a specific goal—improving social welfare, raising living standards, building infrastructure for the common good. This wasn't out of benevolence. It was forced by systemic competition with the socialist bloc, which had exactly that planning goal and was visibly achieving it. The West had to offer something, or it would lose legitimacy.
What I argue in the Bunker State thesis is that we are living through a shift in planning culture. With the socialist alternative gone, the goal of planning in the US-led imperial core is no longer the improvement of society. It is the maintenance of imperial hierarchy. In practice, this means everything is subordinated to hybrid warfare. Infrastructure is repurposed for dual use. Citizens become objects of security rather than bearers of rights. Their wellbeing is no longer the metric of success. A great deal of suffering is imposed—not as an intended outcome, but as an acceptable externality of keeping the militarized machine growing and containing the Global Majority.
So when you see things crumbling—crumbling public services, unaffordable housing, energy poverty, political polarization—you are seeing the content of the current plan. The goal is the survival of the imperial apparatus. And from that standpoint, a deindustrialized, immiserated, polarized population that is too exhausted to organize is a managed and welcome condition.
That is the grim part. The hopeful part—if there is one—is that planning cultures can shift again. They shifted once, under Cold War pressure. They can shift again, under different pressure. But only if we understand the machinery well enough to contest it.
Thank you, Nel - a great article, and this reply a timely reminder to me of your Bunker State thesis.
you just blew my mind. what an elegant and usefully predictive explanation!
Thank you very much, Nel. The presence of such minds as yours among Resistance is reassuring: we still have a fighting chance in this century
What is worrying though is: there is still an immense margin for degeneration and metastasizing: along the lines you propose, the bunkerization, the hollowing out of societies under the pretext and KPIs of security, in favor of a orwellian-kafkian techno-bureaucracy, still has centuries to go, if left unopposed
Those of us who follow financial markets are nowadays struck by how far deep imbalances are driven by narrative and narrow interests, before the market adjusts, the bubble pops, the Ponzi scheme unravels; and those markets deal only with relatively strategically shallow, simple systems. Economic and imperial bubbles can expand for much longer, through a larger reservoir
As long as voices like yours are not the alt mainstream, our outlook is indeed grim. To end on a positive note though: the People of Iran is still teaching us lessons, showing its will to survive, to defeat its antidemocratic currents. The Ghalibaf+Araghchi+Pezeshkian triumvirate is starting to feel the heat. I really hope the People will pull off a new miracle, as that of the Ramadan War
An example of your argument maybe. Being an American I could wish for a little sympathy for the former world hegemon.
https://youtu.be/fj0tE2wwTVM?is=1U0XhU-tMia2robx
Plan on treating the cause instead of the symptoms? That would be nice. Who has jurisdiction over the “goal”?
So this is actually the massively relevant question. And the answer is that the act of planning often deviates, by a lot, from the prescribed process. Major culprits would be petty organizational rivalries and first-class principal-agent misalignment. In both cases, the tactic is to sabotage the prescribed planning process, sometimes force thru policy changes that should never have been approved, by intentionally (and counterproductively) creating situation of limited time or limited information. The classic which we see far too often is the "Schmittian Emergency/Exception", or perhaps more mildly, "no crisis goes to waste" a-la EC/EU. Sometimes it's the organizational rival-power-dynamic of equilibrium-of-veto's. Powers do indeed fall from greed and hubris, and organizational dysfunction is a big part of how. See "Iron Law of Institutions" -- principals will prioritize their internal power and well-being within the institution even (and actually more often than not) at the expense of the power and well-being of the institution with respect to the external world it inhabits.
Nel asks, "Do you notice this nearly invisible imperial infrastructure in your own daily life, operating as quietly and persistently as a municipal zoning board?"
No. I know what a government planning department looks like. Likewise, corruption within those buildings.
What I see operates in plain sight. Unabashed. Openly contemptuous. But that's just Canada. The land where Governments know no one reads the Constitution. Where politics as a spectator sport has been ingrained into the national psyche. Where those who dare protest more strenuously than crying in their beer soon mend their ways as soon as the Federal or Provincial Brown Shirts are dispatched. It's the land where the City of London's Oxford Alumnus turned The Donald's trolling of Trudeau into an 'Elbows Up' troll of the Canadian electorate. Thus to establish the evolving Empire's new Albert Embankment HQ in Ottawa.
While the world remains mesmerized by the mercurial character of POTUS - is he a genius, a senile psychopath, a Crime Family Don, the Ass by which Israel Wags the Dog, or just the ever resilient TACO Man? - The Carnival Barker, The Stalking Horse Carney Prime Minister of Canada, 'IAGO', openly tours the globe on a quest to build the trade deals, secure the resources, build the networks that will extricate The Empire from its current state of overreach. Hardly a day goes by without the PMO boasting the facts on its website. He, Carney, Iago, is the one preparing the Empire for its regrouping OVER HERE. Behind the Moats. And does it with a work ethic that even allows him time to intrude into European "security" affairs; like the Ghost of Churchill, provoking European insensibilities towards Russia. Working tirelessly to ensure Proxy NATO (sans America and Canada) continue to attrit Russia while Canada and America safely muster their resources OVER HERE. Funny [in the most disturbing sense of the word] how "world wars" always seem to leave North America untouched... without any need to insert the modifier, 'relatively', we should add. Moats. Oceanic moats.
Just as the more youthful Cabinet of Justin Trudeau (several of whom were also Oxford Alumni) took up the slack on the international stage during Demented Biden's interregnum, Canada's Iago is sweeping up the mess Trump's venality has created for The Empire. The Empire can do without Trump. But at this juncture, it cannot do without Iago (aka The Carnival Barker, aka The Stalking Horse Carney Prime Minister of Canada). So, stop fixating on Trump and START PAYING ATTENTION TO WHAT CANADA IS DOING. Canada is the international face of those focused on dealing with the friction created by Trump.
Thank you Nel!
All very true, but there is a difference between making a plan, and having the competence at all required levels to successfully carry it out. The US military and even more so many complete European governments appear to have lost this ability. The US educational system has been extensively downgraded and technically trained workers are at a premium, while industrial capability in the US has been vastly reduced. A plan is all very well, but if you don't have the capability it's difficult to implement any plan.
An article around this subject is at:
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/21st-century-schizoid-man
You are pointing to something fairly uncontroversial here, and although it's helpful to say it out loud it doesn't instigate much reaction in me.
Perhaps it's helpful to do some historical framing and some comparison between different systems of planning. In particular I am currently fascinated by the new Chinese planning and production methods. Comparison with the Western model of production might provide a contrast.
The stakeholders concerns are a fairly recent expression of community engagement and often billed as democracy in action, for example. Earlier mass mobilisations and relocations of swathes of land for dam construction exemplify a different imperative of land use change vs continuous improvements of city planners and infrastructure upgrades, for example.
What makes reporting worthwhile is exactly the mapping process of what works, or fails, in relation to changing circumstances. This reiterative front, where interested parties volley back and forth over various privileges and or rights or necessary sacrifices, set against a background of environmental constraints and changes forms a reporter's substrate and cognitive, as well as physical, mapping of topology... Of ideas, of will, of execution and so on. Whether a writer focus on synergies or incohesion as something to be supported or undermined defines pertinence and relevance for readers, who in turn respond and react according to their subjective interests as part of a cause, or as individuals.
Reiterative cycles stack all the way down/up to infinity.
Arguing against binary positions, conspiracy theory and other simplistic intellectual malpractice born out of ignorance or low intelligence is a fools errand. Choice is not always an advantage. Simple instructions for simple minded people are easier to communicate and practice. Democratic engagement has developed into a form of disempowerment through distraction in details in some places. A way to slow progress through deliberation. Lengthening response time and diluting agency and effectiveness. History shows how emergency powers suspend democratic processes in favor of fast and unified response ability. Agility, and other buzz words begin to degrade the debate towards the language of HR and promo flyers and actual changes slow down as staff learn to work around the questionnaire and performance metrics.
You see how I am writing towards meaningless drivel here? On and on it can go...
Asymmetry of information provides advantage, only if it can be used by the reader. The rest is dopamine feeding and telepathic sleaze. Or snooze inducing policy booklets about stakeholder engagement as you so eloquently point out.
These orgs are way more dysfunctional, and consequently less coherent, than their process manuals would have it. Ranging from petty rivalry and "iron law of institutions" to outright principal-agent misalignment in which corporates and third party nations plainly sabotage the imperial position to their own ends. In the corporate world at least, one of the essential ladder-climbing skills is being able to sieze up or misdirect the planning machinery, and contrive situations where decisions do get made out of view of the interests of the "larger whole". A vague tendency does of course survive, such as a collective agreement on "this portion of the other shall be our enemy of choice for the next 5 years", but so much of what we see I think is actually a manifestation of dysfunction.
First I would like to say thanks! This is very useful analysis. I only hope my comments contribute to constructive dialogue that you are looking for here.
I have some questions about your conclusions, though:
> The question is whether we are willing to do the equivalent work on our side: to build our own institutions, our own planning capacity, and our own long-term strategic horizons. Not to passively cheer for other countries, but to organize across borders. Not to wait for the empire to collapse, but to actively make it obsolete.
This is a very provocative statement which I think needs some comments.
The first thing I think about is legitimacy. In Western societies the left does not have legitimacy. Our societies are dominated by oligarchy, and organizing to challenge their dominance is "always already," as they say, illegitimate.
This is to say that any successfully organized entity on the left will face vicious attacks on its legitimacy, and there's a good, if not 100% chance of being targeted by the state.
Oligarchy is very happy with the way things are, how are left institutions going to form and collect power in this state of society?
Yes, to organize is necessary. But often I'm left with the impression it's being talked about on the left as of it's the first time. We must begin again, from the roots. Yet another stale "eternal return," so to speak. The goal is to have a new paradigm that finally is the one that works.
What I see in these moments is a failure to reckon with the enormity of why previous paradigms have failed in the past. There is a vast wreckage of failed institution building on the left, and any reflection on these failures seem to be relegated to obscure academic books. I think they should be front and center.
What about the Black Panthers, as an example? Despite their reasonable and worthy theory, what went wrong with their practice? How can those wrongs be guarded against? Those or thorny issues that still plague social movements today. How to guard against infiltrators and saboteurs, for instance; how is it we are to maintain legitimacy of our institutions against the onslaughts of the oligarchy?
Jeremy Corbyn seems a fitting lesson here. He rode a leftist tide to the head of the British Labour Party, but then was crushed by the manufactured antisemitism scandal. From the outside it looks like Labour decided to lose over allowing Corbyn to become Prime Minister.
And what has happened to the UK left since? They tried "Your Party," Corbyn very much at the forefront, but it self-imploded before it even got out of the gate. I don't know the intimate details of this bit of history, and please correct me if my impression is wrong. But if a political faction cannot even clear its own hurdles, let alone those which their enemies, how can any institution be build to not only survive, but out-compete those who seek its burial?
Here's my final question: the October Revolution succeeded because the the political situation of dual power: the Provisional government vs. the Soviets. Today there is no such dual power. When there is no alternative to official legitimacy, how can alternative institutions be built?
Like empires, the design and organization of a city's institutional ecosystem matters immensely.
The following passage is from "The School History of Worcester" (1899) by Caroline Van Deusen Chenoweth, page 134:
"The mayor and aldermen, together with the common council, constitute the legislative power. Worcester is divided into eight wards. The more important of the city departments include the board of assessors, collector of taxes, treasurer, auditor, city. clerk, city solicitor, city marshal, school board, fire department, engineers' department, police department, health department, water commissioner, water registrar, super-intendent of sewers, commissioner of high-ways, park commissioners, superintendent of public buildings, trustees of the city hospital, and overseers of the poor, and this by no means completes the list." And from page 138: " will condone the irreparable loss sustained in the destruction of buildings such as this. The story of Worcester as a city, is the story of to-day, and has but little place upon these pages. Material prosperity is everywhere apparent, and abundant educational advantages are freely offered. Clark University, the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the State Normal School, the College of the Holy Cross, Highland Military Academy, Worcester Academy, several excellent private schools for girls and boys, and a splendid array of buildings actively devoted to public school purposes, are worthily ministered to by the Worcester Public Library; the priceless library of the Ameri-can Antiquarian Society, and the library of the Society of Antiquity; as well as by that later educational influence, the Worcester Art Museum."
I can't imagine that anyone had the idea that there was one 'static' plan to deal with Iran, as Mike Tyson said,"Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face.", at that point there are new plans being made to deal with the new situation.
What is the TL/DR, please? Nel, love your stuff, but for us working stiffs you need to have an intern/kid summarize you longer ruminations.
Thanks for reading and for the support!
I do have to push back a little on the “rumination” label, though! This piece is actually quite short compared to my usual work. It’s meant to be a sort of “intervention”, a direct challenge to how people usually misunderstand geopolitical “plans.”
The TL;DR is this: People tend to think the US either has a flawless, secret masterplan (or a shadowy cabal that controls everything or at least the direction) or is just flailing around in total chaos and desperation. Both are not exactly true in my reading. The system actually builds its plans through boring, everyday bureaucracy. It works step-by-step, tweaking and repeating the same processes over and over until it gets the result it wants.
I use a few examples in the text to prove this. The shift in US policy toward Iran was a predictable, step-by-step pipeline. I also point to NATO’s own training manuals, which read exactly like boring corporate handbooks. There are no smoke-filled rooms, just budgets, committees, and paperwork.
Hope that helps frame it! The actual mechanics matter.
My tl;dr: would be that steering a large ship involves many course corrections. Knowing where you are supposed to be headed is a prerequisite.
But redundancy in the system lets some subnets be bypassed and, of course, there are these pesky systemic disruptions that just happen to come along.
With increasing regularity CF G Agamben.
Tks a was just kidding of course!
My academic training was in IR as you know, and so love the long reads, which I tend to do on the weekends, away from my day job. And appreciate your take esp from the pov of a geographer and sociologist. My time in IR grad school was more the traditional views and training- you know, PEIR (by Bob Gilpin) for IR 101. / I had Gilpin for an advanced course, and he was a great guy, very calm friendly.
I dont think it can be summarised by the creator as the summary would become larger not shorter.
But... no matter how much i dislike the use of AI, in this case an AI may make sense for creating a summary.
Feed an AI you dare to trust the url to this page and ask it to write a summary.
Its tricky... but if you really need to cut that corner that may do the trick.
Tricky indeed. I use the LLMs but won’t use them for Nel’s work. Doesn’t feel right, esp with me being an IR guy. / Will just plow through it myself- deep work (Cal Newport) requires that you sweat a bit, I reckon.
"... because the terminal objective remains entirely unchanged: neutralizing Iran as a sovereign, autonomous entity." - the Empire's objective may remain unchanged, but it's ability to attain that objective may have changed or at the least have been seriously impaired. Michael Hudson argues that the US-led empire is not in decline, but in a state of "collapse" - https://substack.com/@professormichaelhudson/note/c-278149926?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=nd04h. If I understand his argument correctly, it revolves around the financial infrastructure supporting the petro-dollar, and his assertion that the destruction wrought upon the GCC states has done irrevocable damage to this mechanism. This would in turn suggest that the empire's core financial architecture, and thus its ability to achieve its objectives, has been seriously damaged. So the planning process may still be "humming away in the background" but if this damage to the empire's financial architecture is indeed critical, then surely its ability to adapt to obstacles and push-back will be seriously and perhaps critically impaired?
I love Hudson's take on many issues but in this case he may well be overly "optimistic". On one side the USA has lost or stalemated nearly all imperial wars since Korea and yet it survived as Empire. On the other side, if you accept that the true goal of this war has been not the declared ones (several variations but all about crushing Iran) but rather to reduce the oil/gas/nitrates global output in order to cause "unequal forced degrowth" and concentrate oil/gas/nitrates availability to that produced by the USA and its vassals in the Atlantic region (from Venezuela to Norway, from Canada to Angola), then the USA actually won and only loses maybe (???) if they have to relax the blockade and allow, at least for some time, free market restoration in the Gulf (although it will take at least a year to get back to pre-war production, if at all).
The problem with many pundits is that they focus all too much on US references such as the price of the gallon and inflation (which Trump wants and demands, mind you), while ignoring how it compares with other countries and regions and very especially Asia, the worst affected area. If the USA loses 10 and the rest of the world loses 100, then the USA wins, because they're not even selling anything anymore: they don't need markets, they need that others (notably China) lose markets. It's not about global prosperity and absolute size of the slice but about global misery and relative size of the pie. Not so much about how much you get but about how little your rival gets.
I can certainly see a kind of twisted logic to this strategy, and I certainly wouldn't put it past the imperial managers to want to do this, despite the misery it would/will cause (obviously they don't care a fig for that). But would the petro-dollar survive this tectonic upheaval? I suppose we need to assume that countries will still need to rely on the US for their access to energy, so the infrastructure propping up the petro-dollar would be shifted - partially? - from the Gulf region to the USA and the Atlantic region as you suggest. It seems to be an audacious plan with many moving parts that could go wrong. Does the US still have the hard force capability to make this shift happen without breaking the structure which underpins it's debt-laden economy?
US access to internal energy resources is a relatively short-term capability. Especially through fracking, of which costs are inexorably rising and sources diminishing. Of course other oil and gas deposits are being found, but 99% of those are more difficult and expensive to extract than previous ones, and this trend will continue.
So I guess the question is: how significant/severe and how irrevocable is the damage the US-led empire has inflicted on its own petro-dollar infrastructure. If this attack on Iran has been planned out and gamed and strategised for decades then presumably they have already looked at this exact (worst-case for them?) scenario and have counter-moves lined up. Are the GCC countries, as some seem to be suggesting, no longer a vital hub for the petro-dollar infrastructure? From what you say about the inherent instability and short-term capability of US based energy resources, then surely that would mean that the GCC states *are* still vital to the US petro-dollar system. In which case, 1. how does the US keep the GCC states from "defecting" so to speak, and 2. how do they incorporate Iran's new relative strength in the region into the whole structure? And how do people assess and understand Michael Hudson's claim that this is a "crash" for the US-led empire, and not a "decline"?
I think the question is: how seriously does the 'US Empire' take the inevitability of the ending of technological civilisation. I'm not saying that this is an inevitability, but it is a fact that we live on a planet with limited resources. Oil, gas, metals etc. exist only in specific quantities, and are getting more and more difficult to extract. In the last 150 or so years we have used immense quantities of these un-renewable resources. Even if re-cycled, there are always small irrecoverable losses. Glass-half-full types predict infinitely lasting solar energy and fusion energy plus resources from asteroids etc. but the viability of this is extremely questionable. If they are thinking ahead at all, this is what they should be thinking about. But I doubt that they are - the US is the home of 'boosterism' and downbeat stuff is discouraged.
But if they are only concerned with short-term matters, then we have already seen how that goes. As the last in a long string of military fiascos and defeats, Trump has had to recognise (at least temporarily) another defeat - so not very good planning involved there. See my comment below for more on this.
Something important is that US (and Canadian) oil/gas production is expensive (fracking, tar sands) and needs a relatively high price to be profittable (I remember that it used to be $60 years ago and the price was at $59 before the war). Another key issue is the "petrodollar", i.e. the reliance of the USD as international hegemonic currency on oil being sold in that divisa, which explains much of US imperialism in the last decades.
So, considering all that, I think that such a strategy of squeezing the oil market (with some control: war-deal-war-deal-war) does work for the USA, especially for the Big Oil sector (which may well be much more important than the Zionist Lobby in driving this and other wars). It's not a coincidence in this scenario what happened to Venezuela in January (a very well planned coup) but it smells fishy that they suppossedly tried to do the same in Iran and failed miserably... just because the plan was bad and they lacked a plan B (all of which sounds most unlikely). After what happened in Syria I find hard to buy the narrative of "the Resistance won", really. Those Anglos always have a cunning plan or a dozen and are just too good at winning.
It looks like you think about a lot of things that I think about. You might be interested that they recently dug up some graves and found they died of a different form of bubonic plague. These are people before agriculture. They didn't think it existed back then and was something that happened due to rats but apparently woodchucks or groundhogs also can kill you. And of course the thing that separates humans is the bow and arrow which might be effective for hunting these smaller animals. So when we tried to leave Africa something interesting may have happened involving bubonic plague. Something kept killing all humans who tried to leave. We know this because Europeans have a great deal of Neanderthal genes and Asians have in addition Denisivans, but we all have human mitochondria DNA. That means that males of these groups had children with modern humans and it must have been them that raised the surviving offspring that then had immunity?
Great article.
This is more of a response or Counter-Thesis that tiptoes around the core dispute, the viability of Big Picture analysis, and then buries it in a level of details that is not exactly germane to the question. It's telling that you start by assuming the Big Picture dimension of the plan is handed down from on high before (Cheney backroom) before explaining that planning isn't conducted in smoky backrooms. Begging the question: is the Big Picture iteratively determined or not? The argument around erraticism, accelerationism, ultimately irrationality from their own perspective is that when the Plan in that sense becomes unviable -- ie it is murky how to maintain the cornerstones of their edifice on every level from conceptual to on the ground -- then everything else including the gears of planning start to come unstuck. It is also has a very different prescriptive content as a result eg you don't don't "study their plans" (some of which is wishful thinking but always reactive to the resistance they face) to organize resistance to the Genocide. The fact that sober analysts saw disastrous military adventurism coming miles away (years in advance) really needs to be addressed within the framework you're elaborating. Planning is complicated..but what about Politics?