The Obama interregnum is drawing to a close and eight years of follies, shrunken influence and impotence with it. So, will it be Hillary Clinton who mires the Oval Office in more of the impotent same, plus legal woes and scandals? Or is it the candidate who has torn up the campaign rule book?
The 2016 presidential election will determine how the United States responds to the most decisive challenges for more than a century to its wealth, strength, and security. But none of the presidential aspirants have yet to outline a coherent strategic policy. With one exception, Hillary Clinton, all the candidates oppose the actions and policies of the incumbent president but all have accepted the overt and covert agendas of that same discredited president. These include supporting the wrong side in Syria, the demonization of Russia and insufficient attention to China’s irredentism.
The Democratic nominating process is about the top-down imposition of its preferred candidate, and thus the superdelegates who are expected to deliver the pre-determined outcome of Hillary Clinton. If Mrs Clinton falls by the wayside, due to her escalating legal problems or, perhaps, a convenient health issue, then a similar establishment figure will be injected into the process. In its nomination procedure, the Republican Party has produced a couple of candidates who have promised that it won’t be business-as-usual but who have yet to articulate a long term vision, beyond generalities.
Why so much foreboding? Food is at the lowest price in human history, energy is now also cheap, poverty around the world is at the lowest level ever, and technological and medical advances continue apace. Those things are well and good, but two conflicts are going to crash the civilizational party. The first is the war of Islam on the rest of the planet, an offensive that is well underway. An early report on it is the “Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001”, 28 pages of which remain classified. No doubt the content of those 28 pages is embarrassing, so much so unsophisticated readers might get angry should they be exposed to their revelations.
At least one official declaration of war came years later. On January 15, 2016, the authoritative and influential cleric Sheikh Abu Taqi al-Din al-Dari delivered the Friday Sermon inJerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque. In short, the sheikh said that the Muslim world must adopt the traditional teachings in the Koran on the perpetual war between the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. In the way the Muslim world is structured, this is a declaration of war on the West. There have been many similar declarations before and this one won’t be the last, but it is the most influential to date.
The West is aware that there is a problem but has refused to face up to the fact it is engaged in an existential clash of civilisations. To do so would require an adjustment of its belief system – that all cultures are equally good and that there is nothing inherently wrong with any group of people or culture. Just at the moment the pain of the permanent state of emergency in France, for example, is preferable to the effort involved in seeing the world as it really is. Not that France and neighbouring Germany are blameless. Through the EU they made their own attempts at imposing their beliefs on the rest of the World, with Kulturkampf via EU edicts such as penalties on carbon dioxide emissions far beyond their borders. The EU’s attempt at world domination on the cheap requires a stable world to have a chance of working. The world is no longer stable, so while we will not be spared the edicts of Brussels they will be transcribe in the ink of impotence.
The solution to the problem of Islam is simple: don’t have anything to do with it. This solution had its first run after the 9/11 attacks when the Bush Administration restricted the number of visas issued to Saudi nationals. One of the current presidential aspirants has called for barring all Muslims from entering the United States. If put into effect, this policy would significantly reduce the number of terrorist attacks on the US at no cost in to itself. In fact this policy is necessary to shield the US from the fallout that can be anticipated from the ultimate collapse of the Muslim world.
