Nixon Predicts

[Valin]

Hoover Institution:

Charles Hill

April 08, 2013

 

“World order after Pax Americana?” As Virgil would say, ‘Horresco referens:” Telling it makes me shudder.

 

A few years ago the wise political columnist Bill Safire occasionally would interview Richard Nixon in Hell (there for having imposed wage and price controls). So let’s get the old master of strategy on the “hot line” and ask him about it.

 

RMN: “Sorry about the crackling noises on the line; I can hear you perfectly well.”

 

“Rome did not fall so much as it changed. My current successor in the White House has announced his goal of fundamentally transforming America, and he is doing it brilliantly, with the ‘opposition’ party falling in line.

 

(Snip)

 

“The Arab Spring, begun with youthful hope for a freer, better life, has been commandeered by the old military, Islamist, and political gangs.

 

“Let me be perfectly clear: the media boys have it all wrong. The US decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein, far from being the worst foreign policy decision in our history, will be seen in years ahead as one of the most courageously correct presidential acts ever. Our war in Iraq produced two major consequences: first, it ignited the flames of liberty in the hearts of young Middle Easterners, inducing the 2005 Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the 2009 Green protests in Iran, and the 2011 Arab Spring itself. Second, surprising everyone, it lifted the lid of tyrannical suppression to reveal what has become in one place after another a maelstrom of innumerable contending parties, a war of all against all which will have to burn itself out before the original Arab Spring generation – or the next – rises once more.

 

“Until that happens, which may take decades, the Middle East as a whole will become a ‘sphere of influence’ either under Iran or perhaps an Iran-Turkey-Saudi triumvirate. In either case, the region will not be part of world order but dangerously adversarial to it.

 

(Snip)

 

“So the international state system of the modern age will be replaced by a world of separated and rivalrous spheres of influence. But it won’t be that simple. Sometime in the next generation, China will collapse because it cannot continue half panda—the capitalistic economy—and half dragon—the communist party.

 

“Russia will not be able to manage its neo-Soviet empire as it devours itself in corruption and shrivels in demographic decline. The Middle East will be cannibalized by Sunni-Shia hatreds. And Latin America will be engulfed by racial-ethnic revolutions yet to come. The US will continue obliviously to imitate a Europe already long gone to its grave.

 

“By the middle of the 21st century the world will have returned to the Dark Ages.

 

“Thanks for calling. I look forward to seeing you soon down here.”

[Valin]

Highly Recommended

 

Trial of a Thousand Years: World Order and Islamism

Charlies Hill