RT
It can appear puzzling why at certain times in history a government facing a looming crisis simply does not address it. The problems accumulate in plain view while little is done to actually solve them. The human imagination being what it is, this inaction is inevitably attributed to some mix of corruption, malfeasance, and incompetence. And certainly the road to any system-level crisis is strewn with missteps and short-sighted policies. But there comes a point when the horizon of possibility has closed and there is simply nothing a government can do without unleashing forces that could easily overwhelm it.
A glaring example of this is that Ukraine’s impending defeat at the hands of a superior Russian military has put Washington in an impossible situation: it has proven incapable of delivering on its promise of inflicting a strategic defeat upon Russia, but the path available to it – negotiating with Russia as equals or, heaven forbid, from a position of weakness – is simply incompatible with the paradigm in which Washington operates. No longer believing in victory, the US is not in any meaningful way helping Ukraine – nobody believes the recent aid package will actually change much. But a diplomatic solution could have the effect of laying bare America’s waning global influence and possibly even destroying NATO as a credible institution. With no good options, Washington is merely staggering along until events overtake it.
But Ukraine is hardly the worst of it. A crisis shaping up to be far more potent and deep-rooted is America’s rapidly deteriorating fiscal standing. And here again, policymakers seem paralyzed by their lack of scope to address what JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon thinks is “the most predictable crisis we’ve ever had.”
The crux of the matter is that the US government and economy at large had been overly dependent on a factor that, until quite recently, was taken for granted as being permanent: low interest rates and its corollary of low inflation. However, when interest rates moved higher, deficits suddenly mattered again. But the highly financialized US economy cannot easily be subjected to austerity to rein in the spiraling deficits. It is technically fraught, as we will discuss, even if it were politically possible. Meanwhile, the spending cuts that are possible are either a political powder keg or simply inconceivable to the ruling class.
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