You know matters have gotten pretty bad when even stalwart admirers of the British Empire admit that the U.S. is collapsing. In a June 18 op-ed for the Free Press, Kissinger-lover and professional sophist Niall Ferguson has finally discovered that America is not quite what it used to be. The article’s kicker reads: “A government with a permanent deficit and a bloated military. A bogus ideology pushed by elites. Poor health among ordinary people. Senescent leaders. Sound familiar?”
Ferguson describes how he’s said that we’ve been in a new Cold War since 2018, with the Chinese as our main competitor, but that “it only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we—and not the Chinese—might be the Soviets.” He proceeds to go through a litany of elements of the collapse of American society, from economic productivity, to debt, to the health/mental health/suicide/drug overdose crisis ("deaths of despair"), to the overall cynicism and cultural malaise that grips seemingly all facets of the U.S. Ferguson even ridicules the current U.S. foreign policy (though from a particularly nasty geopolitical point of view), saying that it’s more about our status than a genuine interest in helping countries defend themselves. All the while he compares the U.S. to the final years of the Soviet Union.
