The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or John Robb. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is John Robb. John is a returning guest. In fact, he’s been on the show so many times, I can’t even count how many. He’s one of our go-to folks on military intelligence and strategic stuff. Those who want to follow John and learn more about his thinking, check him out on Patreon and Substack.
I’ve been a subscriber to his Patreon since the thing was put up. And I got to say, it’s well worth the $5 or whatever hell it is I pay to him these days. So, if you want to help John, you want to learn more, go subscribe to Patreon or Substack. So, welcome back, John.
John: Hey, Jim. Thanks for having me back.
Jim: Well, the reason I reached out to John this time, it’s always something, is I got in my inbox a new essay that he wrote called What Went Wrong with America. Generally, I am pretty suspicious of single cause arguments that X caused all this to happen. But I got to say, this case, John makes a reasonably good argument.
But before we get into the argument of how, why don’t you recap as you did in the essay where, where we are, why do you think that we need to address what went wrong before we talk about what went wrong?
John: Yeah. We’re urging from crisis to crisis, perma-crisis situation. And underneath that, if you dig a little bit, you’ll see that we have suffered extreme amounts of damage to core pillars of our society. We’ve lost a lot of our cohesion. We fragmented politically polarized, become fractious, and that we’ve lost a lot of our coherence, our ability to make decisions, ability to identify what’s a fact and what’s not a fact and agree on that.
And that’s in part driven by a loss of cohesion because when we get online and we see somebody say something, we immediately try to parse as whether or not they are in the enemy camp or not.
Jim: I’ll give you an example, but meaning to write an essay on it, but I’ve been too lazy about knee-jerk stupid tribalism that even smart people fell into it at staggeringly high rate. That was when the assassination attempt on Trump occurred. Well, I have friends on both sides, even out into the extreme, it was pretty far.
I got foamers on the left, foamers on the right and everything in between. And anybody from about the 25th percentile to the left or the 25th percentile to the right, both hopped to two different obviously wrong theories about the Trump assassination. On the left, they were saying, “It’s staged. It’s staged. This has to have been a staged event by the Trump campaign to get sympathy for Trump.”
And then, on the right, it was, “Oh, this is the deep state. This is the deep state.” I think Jordan Hall, our friend, mutual friend ran a poll on Twitter and something like 40% of the people that follow him, which lean to the right these days said, “Oh, it’s the deep state,” when the obvious answer was low nut. And how do we know this?
Because when you want to say, “How do I…” Of course, you don’t know, but how do you reduce the probabilities of either deep state or staged to very low? We had one fact at the time, and that one fact was all we actually needed, was he was shot in the ear. Nobody would shoot somebody in the ear from 150 yards as a staged event.
Even the shooting instructor for the Navy SEALs wouldn’t guarantee that he wouldn’t fuck up that shot. And then, the second data point was, well, it obviously wasn’t the deep state because he’s not dead. If it was the Navy SEAL shooting instructor or the Marine Corps sniper instructor, it would’ve been a center of body mass with a 300 wind mag and he been a dead.
So, the only data point that we knew almost instantly essentially ruled out both of those theories, yet quite smart people on both sides leapt to that. And many of them stayed stuck on that absurd tribal lens view for weeks.
John: And they stayed stuck on that view. That’s the key. Even after more evidence appeared and we processed it, we talked about it, they still wouldn’t relent on that perspective. So, it makes our ability to think through problems collectively as a society pretty hard. If you can’t trust your senses, which are basically all of us collecting information and perception, how can you make decisions? It’s like can’t trust your eyes and ears, you lose your ability to decide what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s here, what’s there.
Jim: Yeah. I would go one step further and say that, and I’ve been warning about this for years, people always ask me, what are your theories on social collapse? I had numerate climate change, comets, EMBs, blah-blah-blah. Here’s the one I would put the biggest stack of chips on, is a comprehensive breakdown in our collective sense-making.
This data point was the highest watermark I’ve seen so far that shows that we are down the road fair far, where a event that has a factual anchor that rules out most of the crazy shit, nonetheless, something like at least 25% or maybe more. It could have been 30% of the populist quickly gets anchored on the crazy and can’t get off of it. A society that gets much crazier than that probably won’t be able to function.
John: Yeah. And the third thing, we have cohesion, coherence, and then the third thing I noticed was legitimacy. And if our institutions aren’t making good decisions, decisions that we trust, providing results, providing the prosperity and everything else that we expect from them, they’ve lose legitimacy. And we’ve seen that in the government. We’ve seen that in the media. We’ve seen that in academia. All of them have lost legitimacy and that’s going to make it very hard for a society to function, for our culture to function.
Jim: Yeah. And again, talking about things just recently happened, the bald faced lying by the Democrats about Joe Biden being a suitable person to be president for four more years. Even people I know that are center left and will end up voting for Kamala Harris were talking about voting for Trump because of the fact that they’d been gaslighted by the Democrats. They just were blatantly lying for months. And how in the world does that instill confidence in our institutions? It doesn’t.
John: Yeah. In fact, the last one to relent on that lie was Kamala. She was right up the last like, she lied to everyone right up the last vote.
Jim: One of the things that set my wife over the high side was Kamala’s commentary right after the debate, she’s going, “Is she insane or is she lying?” There are only two possibilities after having watched that debate with our own eyes.
John: Yeah. So, my thinking was is that we see all these individual problems that are cropping up and they were getting a lot of those, but we have this deep damage. And if this deep damage doesn’t occur overnight, there isn’t any single factor, single event that we could point to that says, “Okay, this causes our single person.” It’s not all Trump, it’s not all Biden, it’s not all Obama, it’s not a Bush.
Jim: It’s not even Jim Rutt and John Robb, unfortunately.
John: Right. It has to be something bigger because I look at a lot of problems, a lot of strategy from the decision-making angle. You use Boyd’s OODA loop and other things to analyze what went wrong. And from my perspective, it was a series of very bad decisions that-
Jim: Before you actually get to the punchline, I want you to take a minute to talk about Boyd’s OODA loop.
John: Okay. John Boyd, I consider America’s best strategist or was, he has a simplified decision-making model that I find very useful. He looked at most conflicts as a conflict of minds. That was his approach to strategy and warfare in general. His decision-making model is called OODA, observe, orient, decide, act, four steps, very simple.
You observe the environment, you orient yourself, you make sense of that information and you determine where you’re going and what your goal is, and then you decide. It’s basically the logistics, the thinking and the planning and the models that you’re using to decide between various smaller choices. And then, you act, you execute on that plan that you developed.
And that the feedback from your actions is the new observation, and that if you’re competing minds in warfare, it’s the OODA loop that’s better and faster that wins. And that if you go really fast while maintaining quality, you get inside the opponent’s decision making and they’re dead before they know they’re dead. It’s like the dinosaur problem. By the time they find out that their legs are gone, and their brain finds out that their legs are gone, they’re-
Jim: Yeah. And of course, I’ve used the OODA loop as an analogy at least on how little lean startups can defeat multibillion dollar companies. Their OODA loops are just so much faster. You watch the message go from the sales force to the CEO and back to some action in the product group, it might take six months. While at a startup, it might take six hours.
John: And it’s a lot of focuses on, and Boyd is partly to blame for this is that focus on the speed. But I think the quality is actually more important. The most important step in improving the quality of your decision making is that orientation phase. And orientation says it is your sense-making. How do you make sense of the observations? And then, determining where you want go as a goal.
Those are really the two major axis on it. And that that process requires all of your training and education, all your cultural experience, your upbringing, everything comes into that, and it informs it and it constrains it. And that if you get your orientation right, everything is quite easy. If you get it wrong, it’s like picking a wrong destination on a map.
When you’re trying to go across a forest, you pick going through the swamp and everything else, and even if you speed it up, you’re still going in the wrong direction. You’re making decisions faster in the wrong direction. The key is to get your orientation right, get focused on the right goal, make sense of the information in the right way.
The more progress you make on that path, the better your decision making and easier your decision making is in the future. So, it has this accelerating or accruing returns as you move along that correct path.
Jim: Yeah. It’s also an interesting thing when I try to explain the OODA loop to people. It’s the one people have the hardest time understanding, observe, decide, and act pretty straightforward. But orient, which I 100% agree with you, orient is the real secret sauce. Most organizations are okay at acting. Some are okay at deciding, many are okay at observing, but orient is the harder one.
John: Yeah. That’s why CEOs, at least successful ones in the big companies always say they’re focus is on culture. That’s all they could do. And that culture is a big piece of… That corporate culture is a big piece of orientation. In our personal lives, orientation or reorientation, going from one environment to another, here’s a good example of that is that say you’re at successful executive, you’re working 16-hour days, da-da-da-da-da, you’ve been successful in terms of your position, and status, and ability to make money, and then you retire, you turn it off.
And then, you have to reorient to this new environment, and people have a big problem reorienting, and coming up with that new path and new goal. There’s heart attack spike in that first year. People just can’t seem to be able to make that transition well, but orientation, if you get it right, you could be successful in that new space.
Jim: Interesting. I actually made that transition totally successfully, laid down my sword in 2001, my business sword at the top, one of the more successful midsize tech company CEOs and for that senior executive at major corporations, all that, all the usual happy horse shit. But I was so bored with it. I had no desire to do that ever again.
But I also, though I had retired “twice” previously, once for two days and once for two months, both times got sucked back into the Borg. And so, I actually spent a few months before I knew when I wanted to retire to make sure that I had something that could reorient my life, my intellectual life and my execution life with sufficient power to, it’s funny, in retrospect, I think back I under-goaled the thing, but my goal was to find something to keep my attention for two years.
So, two days, two months, two years, duh, a brainless progression. And I came up with understanding complexity, particularly the joining of evolutionary theory and decision making. And by making that decision, the whole series of weird things happened. I ended up at the Santa Fe Institute, not initially, but soon, and met all kinds of people. And it was a totally changed why I got up in the morning completely and I never turned my head back, not once. So, there’s an interesting example.
John: Yeah, exactly. This is amazing example. Reorienting on big ideas and thinking through big ideas and tackling it.
Jim: Yeah. It was quoted in the New York Times as describing the life of a CEO is a mile wide, and an inch deep, and I was ready to turn that around, and go an inch wide and a mile deep. That was a lot of that. So, anyway, we’ve talked about John Boyd’s famous OODA loop, focused on orientation. So, now we’re up to the punchline. And this is why I said at the outset, even though I’m generally skeptical of single cause stories, this was a little more persuasive than most. What’s the single cause?
John: An orientation failure or more specifically, a reorientation failure. So, the only thing that could cause damage at the level that we’re seeing today, that cohesion, coherence and legitimacy among other things is a series of very bad decisions. Each decision doing more and more damage, accumulated damage. And typically when that happens, it’s usually due to an orientation failure.
That people are, even if they execute perfectly, they’re going in the wrong direction, and the losses accumulate, and the defections accumulate and the damage accumulates to the point where they eventually fail. And I look back and I found that the big orientation reorientation that we had was at the end of the Cold War. We came off the Cold War, but purportedly won it, we survived it.
And that the orientation we used for making decisions during process, fighting the Cold War was the correct one. The containment process, the strategy that Kennan kicked into motion of not trying to roll back Russia and China, but to contain their aggression and focus on success, economic success and success of our society. That worked.
And then, we got to the end of the Cold War and there weren’t any foes in the world. We had Russia as a fledgling democracy. China was still a communist country, but relatively backward, and we had no pressing threat environment that would force us to adopt a specific type of orientation.
So, we had to make it up, and what we ended up doing is that instead of reverting back towards becoming a normal country, a country, a nation, and America’s historical role as a nation that led by example, by our economic and social progress, and technological advances, and the like that didn’t focus on war and the rest of the world, but focused most on improving ourselves, is that we made the choice to orient on globalism. So, we had nationalism, and globalism, and we chose the global path.
Jim: Let’s make this clear for the audience. That we were in a global strategy prior, the Cold War was a global strategy, and even World War II was a global strategy, and you make the point in the essay, it’s harder to change an existing orientation like that that has all this longevity. And we’re talking about pregame show, all kinds of vested interests get built up. The military industrial complex, the political lobbyist industry, all these things that provide viscosity to the system make it difficult to change.
John: The Cold War strategy was actually more than that. Even you go back to the early Kennan essay is that you adopt a global strategy in terms of the military power and foreign policy, but you also had to have a domestic policy to protect you against encroachment from socialist messaging. And so, you didn’t end up with insurgencies on unrest that unraveled you.
And so, you had to actually have prosperity domestically, and so you had this cohesion was really important in order to survive the Cold War. After the Cold War, we only stuck with the global aside, and we gave up that whole need for cohesion, and need for social progress, need for economic prosperity, focusing on citizens and improving their lives, making it possible for them to pursue happiness in the best way possible.
And we didn’t think we needed it, and doubling down on the globalist stuff and giving up on the domestic stuff set us on a path that you’ll do all these bad decisions. And it wasn’t like one day everything was adopted that way, but it was one thing after another. It was like, okay, making the little decision in the mid-90s to expand NATO, do what? Contain Russia. But Russia is a fledgling democracy. Why are we doing that? Well, to keep it going.
Jim: Well, we did offer Russia the opportunity to join NATO.
John: No, they asked to join NATO and we said no. It was exactly opposite.
Jim: Really? Okay.
John: Yeah.
Jim: It always struck me. That would’ve been the obvious. Well, I’m pretty sure I heard that somebody offered them the opportunity, but if not, it was a missed opportunity.
John: Yeah, no, no. They asked to join NATO and we said no because it was essentially there to contain Russia because we never thought they would be a true friend and they kept the arms business going, the whole military industrial thing of, and then we did it again in 2000 when we decided that we were going to take a communist country, a dictatorship and convert it using capitalism by bringing China into WTO and opening our trade system to them.
Again, little bit by little bit, and the accumulated thinking, and social orientation on this yielded less and less focus on domestic prosperity, and more and more focus on global issues and global micromanagement. And that had grown and grown over time, and done more and more damage to our society as that it proved over time that we’ve actually ended up in the wrong place.
That the beliefs we had or the orientation we have is not solving the problems that we’re confronted with and the attempts to do so or is causing more and more damage. If you think about it, what kind of logical rational process got the Biden administration to go towards an open border, the fact it was an open border right now? What rational process got us to that point?
The only thing you can think of is that, hey, we have a global orientation and borders. If we’re focused on global citizens versus American citizens in the nationalist orientation is that that borders are not really necessary.
Jim: Well, I go further, the Wall Street Journal and the rich boy crowd has always been for open borders. Why is that? Cheap labor. So, we have a stick to beat American labor with. You want more, a dollar an hour more, hell with you. I’ll just hire some Guatemalans. And people don’t realize that traditionally, the country club CEO business round table right has actually been the ones most in favor of open borders, and Biden of course, both a bit on the left, but he’s also always been the pockets of the big banks.
John: Oh, definitely, it’s a mix of those who wanted cheap labor and those who don’t see a difference between an American citizen and a global citizen. Everyone is a global citizen and they deserve the right to travel across any territory.
Jim: And there’s even a third class, I think is the most pernicious of all, which is ones who hate America hate our own culture and want to dilute it or destroy it, and they see this as one path to do that.
John: Yeah. Well, part of deciding on a global path is that you have to minimize nationalism and nationalism has increasing become a dirty word. You could even see it the way we focus on democracy now, the process of democracy, not on the good of America or American democracy, it’s just democracy. We’ve denigrated or minimized American history, called it problematic, and brought with problems, and that it didn’t have any meaningful trajectory.
It was tactic and the tribal narrative that gives us the cohesion that we used to experience used to enjoy is that the cohesion that we have or used to have as American citizens is that it was built on this tribal narrative. Is that where we came from, what we did together, where we’re going, why this all is good and that it’s ennobling, and it’s enriching, and that you can trust other people to accept that story.
When you destroy that, that cohesion layer, that fictive kinship evaporates, and you get rid of that American citizen cohesion and you end up with different identity groups becoming more important. Which faction are you part of? Which ethnicity, which religion, which whatever? That becomes more important than whether or not they’re American or not.
Jim: Yeah. And in fact, when you come up with this racist neo tribalism, one of the ways they’ve pushed it forward is to attack the American credo so that, oh, this group was in some way disadvantaged by some historical event. Of course, almost every group has been disadvantaged by some historical event, but when you make that the focus of this woke neo racist tribalism, you essentially have everybody attacking the narrative, and of course the narrative breaks. I would say that’s the third rationale for open borders is to get more little tribes so the tribes could play neo racism and attack the American credo. Right?
John: Yeah.
Jim: Let’s go back and do a little history here. I love to get your thoughts on this. Think about 1992, Cold War has been won. The guy that came second in the Republican primaries was Pat Buchanan, and he was absolutely about reorienting our politics to the national and away from the global. And as you predicted, they just dumped all kinds of on his head.
John: He was called all sorts of names and he was basically squeezed out. He really wasn’t that extreme. If you really look at his stuff, it was something that people would’ve been comfortable with back in the early ’80s for the most part.
Jim: He just had a very inflammatory style and he also, he was having so much fun. I got to chat with him one time and I think the thing that came through was that he just loved the game, and he loved selling his ideas, and he knew he was a little over the top, which was kind of a shame. But then around the same time, Clinton comes out, which is a new kind of Democrat bought and paid for by the money power, who’s going to do NAFTA, et cetera, and Bush as well, classic White shoe banker family back generations, et cetera.
Then we get this guy, Ross Perot who comes out and he also is trying to refocus back on a national focus, at least. I’d say that’s one way to think about it. What do you make of that as another thing that’s happening around the same time?
John: Yeah, that Ross bro thing, Ross was that he probably would’ve become president if he had run. He completed his campaign, but they took him out hardcore.
Jim: I don’t know. I think he took himself out, unfortunately. I think he was nuts because remember, he quit because they were insulting his daughter’s wedding or something. But then he came back and he still got 19% of the vote, but at the time that he pulled out, he had like 35% of the vote. He could have easily have won. But did he go nuts? I’d love to know the real story of that somehow.
John: Yeah. I think there were some threats made. Hey, who knows? If he hasn’t disclosed, he hasn’t disclosed.
Jim: Well, he’s dead now, so unless we find some written records. Now, next thing we go back in historical record is I would argue a kind of unstrategic response to 9/11. We certainly needed to do something and we did a very clever thing, which was using mostly Special Forces, put the Northern Alliance over to overthrow the Taliban, and I said, we could have gone there maybe for nine months to back them up.
And then, when we leave, we should have left after nine months, nailed a sign to the door of their legislature saying, “We don’t give a what you do in your own country, but if any of your terrorists come back to the United States, we’re going to blow your up again.” And then, give the Northern Alliance guys $2 billion a year in cash delivered in pallets once every three months and said, “Have a nice day.”
But nope, we couldn’t resist trying to turn a medieval theocracy into Sweden and what a stupid ass idea that was. And then, we compounded it with an even more insane thing, which was to get into this fight with Iraq. It was more or less on our side against the Islamicists, and then another 10 years shit show. So, how about that as a demonstration pivot point in history?
John: Yeah. Going towards a national orientation of US national security, we’ve focused on cutting the budget, taking advantage of the opportunity to save a ton of money. And 9/11, if it did happen, US focused on its actual core security would’ve been responded to with special ops, and special programs, and law enforcement deals across the world. That would’ve been it.
It’d been over, but what ended up happening is that because we had this global orientation on, we still were thinking in terms of micromanaging the world security system, maintaining a global presence, maintaining high levels of defense spending. It immediately became an embarrassment that we were leveraged into an opportunity to, by the worst elements like the neocons, those guys were quacks, insane.
Hijacked by groups of people who were focused on micromanaging global security situation and doing so in such a infested way that it ended up costing us tons of money and doing more damage to the global security system than it was in place before they started toppling Libya. Granted, Gaddafi was a pain in the ass, but now it’s like a haven for the Libyans and for Europe now because it’s a conduit for migrant flows.
There’s slavery going on now and things like that. And then, toppling Syria about backing ISIS and having ISIS blow up after the conflict was lost. And Iraq of course, and Afghanistan, and nation building, and toppling regimes spending $2.5 trillion on Afghanistan on this crazy idea that we were building, like you said, a Sweden in Asia is that.
And then, to not recognize that we’re actually doing the wrong thing because of this globalist orientation is that it prevented us from actually fixing the problem. You could even see the national security consequences of continuing to expand NATO, and then we got to the point where we made a big push the year before the Ukraine invasion to get Ukraine into NATO, to punish Russia, punish Putin for interfering in our elections.
And that blew up, and if you look at it, it was a kind of inevitable process. Kennan wrote about this back in the ’90s, said this will eventually in 20 years or so turn Russia into an enemy, and what kind of rational process would get us to a Cold War again 30 years after we won it? And potentially, not only with Russia, but also with China because we’re on this process of creating a full on Cold War with China too.
Again, this globalist orientation now focusing on trade, and economic success, and technological success, and focusing on treating every single other nation as a potential trading partner that we will trade fairly with mutually beneficial arrangements, so we could both improve playing weird political games for micromanaging perspectives and alignment.
Jim: Let’s turn briefly to where we ended up after all this with respect to global economics. You have a nice little section on that. Where did this actually bring us after this was supposed to have been the great end of Cold War windfall, and I will say Clinton did cut the defense budget spectacularly, therefore a while, but old George W. couldn’t help himself if he ramped it back up and further than it had been before. Then as you said, the opening to China was really dumb and naive. Where does that left us from a global economic perspective with the United States today?
John: Well, we let China ravage our manufacturing sector, and now we are heavily dependent on China for almost all our manufactured goods and that if you walk down Walmart or Costco or whatever, you look at the goods, they’re all coming from China, and that we have a massive deficit. It’s in the $35 trillion at this point, I think is the latest figure, and its headed north of that.
We’ll end up with 50% of the revenue that we take in just used to pay interest and that that’s unsustainable. And that if we do end up in a Cold War with Russia and China, and we have two separate trading systems, we’ll probably lose because China is the number one trading partner almost all countries in the world.
Most of Europe knows that they’re also dependent upon them and that they’re unlikely to join us in any kind of embargo of China. Did I miss anything out of that description of the economic problem?
Jim: Yeah. The one thing that you had in your economic section was that we are now become extremely dependent on using sanctions to enforce our will or attempt to enforce our will, usually unsuccessfully.
John: Yeah. Part of that whole global micromanagement thinking in this orientation has led us to using inclusion in our system as a weapon of war, and so we’re out sanctioning everybody and that’s why if China… That kind of thinking will get us immediately into trouble with China if they take Taiwan because we’d immediately opt to do a full-on embargo, 100% embargo. And we’ll get Japan and a couple other countries to join us, but we’d be by ourselves disconnected.
Jim: Though fortunately, China is in a really bad strategic position. All their commerce goes by sea and our attack subs could shut them down entirely at no risk to us.
John: I don’t think direct military confrontation with China as direct military confrontation with Russia is in the cards because they have really ramped up their nuclear capacity and that US troops firing on Chinese nationals wouldn’t play. There is a weird grave zone now we have with drones. There’s a tendency to think that if drone does it, it doesn’t really count.
We have Ukrainian drones now hitting strategic early warning systems in Russia, and somehow that doesn’t count as a provocation that could cause a nuclear war and that there’s US Navy admiral threatening to send drones into the Taiwan straits and undersea drones to stop the invasion, at least give them black eye. That could potentially get us into problem areas.
Now, I think a direct confrontation isn’t likely. What’s more likely is proxies. If we do end up in two different trading systems, the US trading system and the Chinese trading system, and where we can’t attack each other directly is that China will ship drones like the Houthis. Houthis are providing an excellent model for this is that even a small amount of drones, they’re able to shut down trade going through the Red Sea.
That section of the Indian Ocean and the West from all accounts is a parking lot now. There’s nothing going through. They’ve been able to effectively shut it down, and even though with the US Navy fighting one of its most intense engagements since World War II, it’s not been able to reverse it or slow it down. Even US naval ships are under attack almost every day now.
And imagine China doing that with Venezuela, and Cuba, and all sorts of countries all around the world, and each of those countries selectively applying trade embargoes to the areas next to their territory for air, land and sea.
Jim: Yeah. Of course, they are more vulnerable even than we are though because again, we can cut off. It’s like we do it with drones. We got the Philippines to do it with drones. They are really fucked. All their oil comes through the states of Malacca, 75% of their oil. I don’t know if they want to start that game because we have a whole series of nice counters there.
John: Yeah, I know. Well, in terms of proxies, I think that might be better off than we are, but in terms of drones, they produce what, 95% of all drones, we’d have problems producing 100, at least military level, 150,000, 200,000 in the first year. They’re going to be producing tens of millions.
Jim: I don’t know about that. I just had a guy from Ukraine on my show whose company makes the leading cluster control software for clusters of drones so that one operator can fly up to 100 drones. And he says that other sources I’ve checked on that Ukraine will probably make 600,000 drones this year, make them themselves. And if little should ask, Ukraine can make 600,000 drones in a year. How many drones can big ass United States make? You’re probably 5 million easily.
John: Yeah, those are the little tactical drones.
Jim: Yeah, they’re a mix of all kinds of things, but Taiwan Strait is only 100 miles wide, so these things don’t have to be very long range. Sea drones are real cheap, particularly ones go just below the surface, very hard to stop. I think what we’ve done here, I’ve talked about this with CMO Boria, is we may have well reached a time in history like World War I, where the strategic defensive has way more power than the strategic offensive. And so, we may see nobody able to do anything basically.
John: Potentially, it does appear to be that defense is more.
Jim: Russians aren’t making much progress on the ground despite outnumbering Ukraine, what, about six to one. And I think the Chinese would be very foolish to try. Well, if they don’t do it in the next two years, they’d be very foolish to try a cross straits invasion of Taiwan because by that point, Taiwan will have turned itself into a hedgehog, and I don’t care how many-
John: Exactly.
Jim: Just as happened in the US Civil War with a mini ball changed the dynamics from the Napoleonic era, smart missiles, asymmetric exchange ratios. I use a $200,000 rocket to sink your billion dollar cruiser, all point to a big swing towards defense having an advantage, and that’s probably good.
John: Yeah. So, there’s a timer on Taiwan, so it’s two to three years before they have enough drones to defend themselves, yet we decided to make it a strategic imperative for China to invade Taiwan by going to with this chip and basically saying, “You can’t have all the Nvidia graphics chips you need for AI development because we’re not going to let you.”
And if they want those chips, they have to take Taiwan semiconductor, and it’s basically saying that there are all their AI programs and a lot of their high-end development is going to be put on hold until they match that in five to 10 years. So, if they want to compete technologically at the high end, they’re going to have to take Taiwan.
Jim: Yeah, it’ll be interesting.
John: Yeah, I know. But the global orientation is forcing us in this direction towards this confrontation, and we’re not thinking through what it means. Say China does take Taiwan, what does this environment look like when we don’t have access to high-end chips anymore? It’s just gone. We have to vet everything from scratch again. That’s going to take a while and we’d fall way, way behind.
It’s a failure of imagination on a big scale. It’s like exactly what happened with Russia and expanding NATO was you could see how Russia was responding defensively to all these encroachments. But again, this global orientation is getting us into a lot of problems across all the areas, and it’s dug deep into things that kept us stable.
Jim: Let’s dig in a little bit to this China thing. What would a national strategy look like with respect to China and Taiwan?
John: A national strategy would’ve meant that we weren’t dependent on Taiwan to begin with. Okay. We would’ve forced them early on to start moving more of their factories to the United States or at least balance it out. So, as many chips that are produced inside Taiwan that came to the United States, they would be producing here.
Remember what happened to Japan during when they were killing our auto industry in the ’90s? And Baker went to Japan and said, “Hey, here’s your cap. You could sell this many cars, or this amount of product, or you can buy more of ours, you offset that, but that’s as much of a deficit you’re going to be able to run, so figure it out.”
And the car industry revived itself and was able to… It was going out of business, it was getting crushed, and we have a car industry in the states as a result of that. Well, in their early thoughts, we got dragged in by the neocons and others into the Middle East, which is a strategic nonentity now for us or US national security, and we totally neglected this whole China trade thing.
We neglected all of the national implications that letting them take away so much manufacturing capacity, and letting Taiwan, and South Korea, and Japan take away so much of our hard work capacity. What would’ve been a national policies? We wouldn’t have been dependent.
So, if they took Taiwan, it wouldn’t have been, we could have said, “Oh, that’s terrible. You shouldn’t have done that.” Maybe be more wary of them in the future and less likely to do trade with them due to the expansionary policy, but we wouldn’t go into a full-scale world war in an inferior position.
Jim: Let’s take through our chain of argument, which is the root cause of a lot of our problems is a incorrect orientation in the John Boyd observe, orient, decide, act cycle, and that error of orientation is according to John Robb, a globalist orientation rather than a nationalist orientation, which we flip to more fully at the end of the Cold War. What are the prospects for flipping back to a national orientation, and is that even possible at this point?
John: I don’t think there’s a rational process that will get us there. The political challengers that have a nationalist orientation are constantly weeded out. All the discussions are still within the context of a globalist orientation. What will probably happen is that we fail hard. We fall into that war with China and that scenario where we become economically destitute.
And a lot of people assume that we’d actually fight it, that we would rally to fight it. We have zero cohesion. It’s very possible that there would be a huge group of people that would say, “This war is stupid. We shouldn’t be fighting this.” And refuse to participate or try to negotiate around the government that was trying to embargo.
So, that collapse could cause a force reconciliation, which would lead to more of a national focus where we’re focusing on cohesion, we’re focusing on coherence, we’re focusing on legitimacy of our institutions and delivering this high quality prosperity and improvement in the American’s quality of life, making American citizenship worth something.
And it’s not like shutting off the borders with immigration, becoming able to rational immigration process and getting back to that kind of rationality. There’s nothing that will force you to reorient faster than defeat and getting your face shoved in the dirt. It’s like getting punched in the face, that old Mike Tyson thing. It’s like, yeah-
Jim: Yeah. Have all the plans you want until you get punched in the face, right?
John: You get punched in the face. You’ll start figuring out what reality is and what isn’t because right now, we’re living in fantasy land. The globalist dream that we’ve been headed towards, that goal is utopia, but it’s a false utopia. It’s not possible. It requires a ton of sacrifice from Americans, their citizenship, their national story, their finances, their success, everything has their identity, the loss of identity that’s been damaging Americans, all that has to be sacrificed for this utopia.
Like most utopias, it’s just illusionary, and we got to get rid of that. We got to just dispense with it. Do you see any kind of process that will get us there? I just don’t see any rational actors emerging in this environment to argue it.
Jim: Yeah. I don’t see in the short term. And as we talked about before the show, the continuing trend of reduced capacity for collective sensemaking makes it even less likely. So, if there’s going to be a turnaround, the first thing that has to be turned around is a society-wide improvement in our collective sensemaking capacity, not what we currently seem to be in, which is further decline.
So, I would be looking for that as the precursor to perhaps getting to this flip, but looking at the inertia in the system today, you may well be right. It’s just too hard of a lift. There’s too many vested interests vested in the decline of collective sensemaking in a globalist perspective, and it may be that we can’t turn until we collapse. Maybe we’ll find a way, but I don’t see one.
John: Yeah, it’s depressing. I had a lot of arguments for doom in the future. It was always hard to actually see a path where the US actually did go through a hardcore collapse. I didn’t think that a new Cold War was possible four years ago. How stupid can we be to stumble into a new Cold War? It defies my imagination that we come up with a rationale that would be popular to enter a new Cold War and expand that Cold War to a level where we potentially could lose it.
It definitely is very depressing and I hope we come to our senses. But you know what? There is some glimmer of light is that if the protests against immigration going on in Vienna, and Scotland, and Ireland, and the UK right now pick up enough steam and become legitimate because their size has the potential to actually change things, but I suspected they’ll just be crushed, and marginalized and jailed, even though the strategy to get around being jailed is to increase the size of the protest to the point where they can’t jail everybody.
They can’t add two or three million people to the jail system like Martin Luther King did. And there’s more authoritarianism going on in the United States now because of this loss of control, this hollowness of governance that’s going on. Just revelation is now that Tulsi Gabbard has put on a terrorist watch list now and being followed. They did it at Scott Rader the other day, the FBI raided his house.
Harsh critic on US policy, but the guy is just a Twitter guy and a podcaster, and here he is being rated by the FBI. And what Kennedy is, Robert Kennedy is complaining about how they were trying to censor him and trying to control. The government being used as a weapon against political opposition that doesn’t agree with them, that bodes poorly for the future as well.
Jim: I want to thank John Robb for first, his wonderful essay, and then this great conversation to elucidate upon it.
John: Thanks, Jim.