Yarvin for Normies: Two American Empires
“Global leadership” and “world domination" are actually synonyms.
Many people today think of international relations as if the world of diplomacy was run like a model UN, however, this naive way of thinking ignores that there is a very real hirearchy in the international community and very few nations see eye to eye.
One can observe that since the 90s the US of A has enjoyed undisputed hegemony; they have the biggest economy, the strongest army and the most diplomatic prestige. This has led many intellectuals to call out their dominance as new form of imperialism.
Yarvin is one of them, but his critique is the complete opposite of what most people expect. When most people think of critics of US foreign policy, they think of Chomsky and a general left-wing critique of capitalist imperialism taking advantage of the undeveloped third world.
Curtis Yarvin, also known under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, could be best seen as an anti-Chomsky. He writes that the real problem with American foreign policy is that it believes that it is helping the world, but in fact, its apparent humanitarian and caring foreign policy, fostered by people like Chomsky, has resulted only in chaos and war. He argues that the US acts like unknowing arsonist that throws gasoline into every fire it can find because it thinks that the gasoline is actually water.
So, in this essay I will go over Yarvin’s main arguments on international issues in the most concise way that I can manage. At the end of this essay, I will give my own opinion on his ideas and list his main essays. Finally, I want to thank Parker Banks that helped me with the Yarvin quotes in the video version of this essay.
The Red Empire
Chomsky’s indignation is pointed square at self-interested American imperialism. According to this argument, imperialism has changed forms many times, form the openly colonialist conquest of the Philippines, to the Cold-War era support of Anti-Communist dictators like Pinochet and Diem for geopolitical interests. The most recent from is embodied in the different military investments that hoped to give the Bush administration a political boost under the guise of bringing democracy to Iraq.
For the purposes of this essay, we will call this type of American imperialism the “Red Empire”. It is called the “military-industrial complex“ by its opponents, but in real terms it is made up of the different branches of the Department of Defense and it is usually supported by the neocons in the republican party.
The arguments against the Red Empire leveled by Chomsky & co. is that its capitalist and imperialist opression of the “Global South” has led to millions of deaths caused by its puppet dictators and military interventions since the cold war. These feelings are also very common in western Europe and in the US itself.
Most of these critiques believe that the solution is to empower the opressed peoples to rebel against the Red Empire and to replace this system of opression with a policy where all problems will be solved through diplomacy by the international community. The problem with this perspective is that it is overly simplistic and its “First world bad, third world good“ approach cannot explain many historical events; here are 3 examples.
3 Historical inconsistencies
It is common sense that in the Cold War, the Americans backed serval dictators in their fight against communism, in cuba they supported Batista and the Soviets backed Castro, the same pattern was also present in China with Chiang and Mao, and in Vietnam Diem and Minh respectively.
However, this view of American foreign relations has a lot of little-known inconsistencies that it cannot explain, for example, in the Chinese Civil War (1945-49), we find that the US declared an arms embargo (1946-47) against Nationalist China which was supposed to be their ally. This happened when the Nationalists held the undisputed upper hand1 in the civil war, this was done to aid the Marshall Mission which wanted to arrange a ceasefire between the two factions.
In this ceasefire, the communist side gained in strength due to Soviet help and surrendered Japanese arms and started winning the civil war when it resumed in 1948. In that same year, the State Department also recommended that the US should recognize the new communist government in the China White Paper. It would not a total exaggeration to say that Mao could have never won without US intervention.
This pattern was again repeated in the Cuban Revolution where the US again imposed an embargo on their nominal ally, the Batista regime, which led to their defeat against Castro’s revolution. Furthermore, in 1959, three months after his victory (while thousands of dissidents had already been shot), Castro was warmly recieved at Harvard Law School where he gave a speech and answered questions from the faculty.
And finally, the pattern was repeated once again in the end of the Vietnam war when the US withdrew from South Vietnam in their strategy of Vietnamization, where the US promised it would help South Vietnam to fight on its own and evacuate their own troops. However, after evacuating their troops (1971-72), the US refused to support them, Congress passed the Case-Church amendment which prohibited the use of funds “to support directly or indirectly combat activities“ in South Vietnam.
Military aid was stopped after Paris peace accords of 1973 and economic aid was also reduced from $2.3B in ‘73 to $1.1B in ‘74 this demoralized the South Vietnamese, encouraged the North Vietnamese to invade, led to massive shortages in the ARVN as well as an economic crisis. It’s no wonder that South Vietnam collapsed.
These inconsistencies stir up some interesting questions that cannot be answered by the pure “America bad” narrative. So, why did the US indirectly help both Mao and Castro despite them being sworn enemies? Why did the US not help their ally, South Vietnam, when it needed it most? And why was Castro later invited to tour the US after winning a bloody civil war under the flag of revolution?
Well, Yarvin’s answer to these inconsistencies is that the US government does not act as one monolithic entity, instead that the diffent departments act independently with their own agendas and their own rivalries, not unlike the IJA and the IJN in WW2. Accoring to this hypothesis, parts of the US government opposed Castro while others helped Castro, that some departments wanted to help South Vietnam, while others wanted to abandon them.
Two-empire hypothesis
Yarvin’s explanation for these historical inconsistencies is the “two empire hypothesis” This hypothesis states that US government is made up of rival factions which compete with each other on the international stage. On one side we clearly have the Red Empire which supported Batista, Chiang and the Vietnam war, but at the same time, we can observe concrete efforts, such as arms embargos, that directly undermine the efforts of the Red Empire. But who is responsible for them?
In the case of the embargoes, they all were enacted by the Department of State2. The State Department and the military have long had a complex relationship and these three cases show that these two departments often undermine each other’s efforts.
However, the State department is not alone in opposing the military efforts of the Red Empire. If we take the example of the Iraq War, a Department of Defense adventure, we can also observe vehement opposition by international organizations such as the UN and the EU, but also from almost all international NGOs, from the humanities faculties in almost all universities, and finally from the international press itself. Curtis states that these institutions make up another international power; they call themselves “the international community”, but Yarvin calls them the “Blue Empire“.
Outlining the Blue Empire
Everybody knows the red empire because it exerts influence through military action, but the “Blue Empire” is much less obvious because diplomatic power is much harder to see than tanks and soldiers rolling down the street. Therefore, I think that it is important to go over what Yarvin defines as the “Blue Empire”.
The difficulty with the idea of a blue empire is that all of these institutions that oppose the Red Empire are nominally independent. There is no one controlling them all behind the curtains. But yet, there seems to be no real ideological disagreements between the US Department of State, the UN, the EU, the international NGOs (Amnesty, HRW, Oxfam, etc.), and the international relations faculties.3 All of these organizations share the same progressive worldview and work to further human rights.
This implies that despite there being no central committee, these organizations act as a block and together wield much international power. Yarvin argues that the reason that these organizations agree with each other is that the people that staff these organizations come from the same university faculties. The ideas that blossom in the international relations faculties are carried into all these institutions by each new generation of graduates. (This is essentially the Cathedral projected onto the international stage. If you want a more thorough explanation of the cathedral look at the first part of the Yarvin for Normies.)
If you agree with Moldbug’s analysis, we can establish that there is such a thing as an international progressive alliance, however, it is still unclear how this alliance of diplomats, aid workers, and human rights activists actually exerts enough power at an international level to be considered an empire.
One could certainly argue that today diplomacy is much more powerful than direct military action while also being less visible. Through diplomacy one can exert an incredible amount of soft power without firing a single bullet. This means that it is much harder to see the Blue Empire’s influence, but let’s try to make their existence more concrete, so, I will list some of the tangible powers of the Blue Empire today.
Economic power
The first important thing to notice is that the Blue Empire has great economic power. In a world where all developed countries depend economically from trade with one another, international diplomacy has great economic importance. The diplomatic relations between countries directly determine trade, investment, and economic stability. Therefore, diplomatic power can easily be translated into economic pressure though tariffs, embargoes, and sanctions.
The economic power of US diplomacy can be seen in the sanctions placed on the Russian economy after 2022. The only reason that the Russian economy has not collapsed is because of their oil trade with India and China and their relative self-reliance. The thing is that not all countries are as self-sufficient as Russia, that means that the US has the effective power to sink the economy of most nations around the world. This power does not even have to be used of the time to exert influence, the mere threat of being cut off is enough to persuade most.
Furthermore, when two countries, let’s say Georgia and Usbekistan, trade with each other they almost always trade using dollars, there are a couple of recent exceptions where dollars are not used, but the world economy spins around the dollar. Not to mention that almost all countries, US-friendly or not, have their monetary reserves primarily in dollars. This gives further power to the US since depriving a nation of their dollars will impact the amount of trade that such a nation can do.
International Institutions
One good example of the power of combined international institutions is the process of decolonization of both the British and the French empires. Despite the resistance of both empires in Suez and Algeria, they found themselves diplomatically isolated while their enemies (Nasser’s Egypt, the Algerian NLF) they were facing received diplomatic and military aid from both the Warsaw pact and the Western powers. With the power of diplomacy, the blue empire sealed the fate of both British and French empires.
Regime Change
But arguably the strongest weapon of the Blue Empire is ideological (or propagandistic, if you wish), it has successfully convinced most of the world that their influence is good, that they fight for human rights, peace, and democracy. Indeed, the institutions of the Blue Empire such as the UN are disliked, not because many people disagree with its ideals, but because they don’t do enough. As a result, most people around the world support the actions of the Blue Empire and, indeed, gleefully cheer for its expansion.
Expansion in this case is normally called “democratization“ or “regime change“. Of course, there are many recent successful examples of regime change; Libya, Ukraine, Serbia, etc. All of these changes of regime were remarkably similar, first the opposition to the government grew, then there were protests in the streets, the government panics and cracks down, finally, the government is condemned by the international community and either steps down, or is torn down, with help from without.
When looking at the section in Wikipedia about the Color revolutions it is written that the causes of these revolutions were “Authoritarianism, Electoral fraud, Human rights violations, Kleptocracy, and Political corruption“. So, it would be fair to conclude that the worse these get, the higher the likelihood of a revolution, but yet I do not really see any revolution brewing in North Korea. But then, why did Yanukovich and Mubarak get a revolution but not Kim, who is certainly worse?
Yarvin’s response is that the reason behind the Arab spring or the Color revolutions was not the authoritarianism and corruption of their governments, but the amount of American influence in their politics. Let’s imagine that you are young, ambicious, and you want power. In the DPRK, you have to suck up to the Kim family, there is simply no other way to political power.
If you are in Assad’s Syria, you can also suck up to the Assad Family and the Ba’ath party, but you can also appeal to the “International Community“ to be a friendly replacement for Assad, if regime change were to happen. Therefore, a rival power center forms inside of Syria’s educated class and this center is nurtured by a sympathetic international press. When the time is ripe, this rival power center is the vanguard of regime change. This was the exact same strategy that brought down the USSR and many other regimes since.
The balance today
You can prefer to call the Blue Empire something else like “the international community“, but I think that Yarvin is right to point out this very real structure that can exert very real power on the international stage. Indeed, I would argue that the Blue Empire has client states in the majority of Europe, in almost all of Latin America, it also has much influence in Africa and Asia especially through humanitarian aid. The countries in the sphere of the Blue empire are exclusively liberal democracies or anti-colonial movements.
On the other hand, the resulting defeats of their allies in Cuba, Vietnam, and China have cost the Red Empire valuable friends and much political power within the government. The result of these defeats (plus the more recent ones in Iraq and Afghanistan) is clear; the Red Empire today is just a shadow of its former self, and the military has lost almost all of its former prestige that it had in the post-war years.
As a result of a long string of lost wars, the Red Empire extends only to a few strategic allies with militaristic tendencies like Israel, Egypt, South Korea, and Taiwan. But it is nothing compared to their former power which lives rent-free in Chomsky’s head, I mean they cannot even intervene in Venezuela, in their own back yard!4
Influence from the Blue and Red empires are not mutually exclusive, for example, Ukraine is certainly in the spheres of both. However, most countries are more aligned with either the international community or with the department of defense. A rough map of the two would look like this:
A benevolent empire?
However, I think it is important to mention that the blue Empire does not see itself as an Empire because it is working not for its own interest, but for the sake of humanity. Its mission is to promote peace, democracy and defend human rights. The Blue empire sees itself as a universal enforcer of human rights, as a sort of universal charity with the mission of making the world a better place.
Certainly, I have met people who have studied international relations and many more who are genuinely devoted to promoting human rights. These people seemed perfectly sincere to me in their wish to make the world a better place, and one is really hard-pressed to look at the Blue Empire in a negative light, especially when one was born inside of it. At least in terms of PR it is really difficult to go against the actions and principles of the “international community“, I mean what is the alternative? Should I start simping for Khamenei and mourning Gaddafi? Is that what the Based kids do nowadays?
But even though the blue empire’s PR might be really good and its intentions pure, the real question that one must ask is if they actually make the world a better place according to their own mission? Do their actions actually promote peace, democracy and human rights?
Case study: The Arab Spring
Yarvin primarily focuses on the Arab Spring to highlight the contradictory altruism of the Blue Empire. Surely when the international community supported the revolutions across the Arab world, they had the best intentions in mind. The regimes that they brought down were certainly backwards and oppressive, and the international community expected that the result of these revolutions would be a surge of democracy and peace across the middle east.
Ten years later we can see that this did not really come to fruition. The best-case scenario, as seen in Tunisia, was the fall of President Ben Ali who had been in power for 23 years and open elections, however, Tunisia has since slid back into authoritarian rule under President Kais Saied. The worst cases, are better known because they are characterized by brutal civil war; Syria, Yemen, and Libya. (Sudan too, arguably)
The war in Syria is still ongoing after 11 years and has led to the deaths of more than 500,000 people, in Yemen we find something similar, an eternal civil war with around 400,000 deaths and the current risk of starvation. The 2 civil wars in Libya total some 50-60 thousand deaths, and not to mention that the rise of ISIS is also part of the aftermath of the Arab revolutions. (Arguably Sudan’s ongoing civil war too)
In the best case, the Arab spring led the country right back to where they started, in the worst it set off ethnic and religious fueled civil wars with over a million dead and no end in sight, but at least it was all done with good intentions right? There was no way that such terrible results could have been predicted!
Except that the results were entirely predictable, one must only look at the long standing and bloody struggles between authoritarian governments and Islamic militants in the Arab World. The examples are many, the Algerian Civil War (‘90-’02), the Mecca siege of 1979, the Islamic insurgency in Syria (‘76-’82), and of course, the successful Iranian Revolution of 1979. If one were to destabilize these authoritarian regimes, then one would expect their opponents, both ethnic and religious, to gain power and fight for supremacy, not the peaceful establishment of a liberal democracy.
So, we have two options, either the good-hearted humanitarians that represent the core of the blue empire are well intentioned, but stupid and their naiveté has lead to over a million deaths, or that they were neither innocent nor good-hearted. Which one is it then? Yarvin certainly has his own opinion:
When you are motivated by genuine charity, and your charitable efforts backfire and actually harm the recipient of your help, you feel guilt and sorrow like nothing else. You’re a witness to a horrific motorcycle accident. You run over to the man on the ground, pull his helmet off, hug him and give him CPR. Unfortunately, he would have been fine, except that you just severed his spinal cord. How do you feel? Is your reaction: “Oh well, at least I tried?”
How did the American people react when their Arab experiment didn’t go so well? I’ll tell you exactly how they reacted. “Oh well, at least we tried.” And then they changed the channel.
Mens Rea?
But what was the real motivation of the Arab spring? Why did the international community support it? Perhaps the average lib can be excused for naiveté, he just sees some good rebels and some mean dictator. Just like Star Wars!
However, I am not willing to accept that the diplomats of the State department and the international relations faculties are incapable of seeing the risk in encouraging revolutions in historically unstable countries. This leaves us with either sadism or Machiavellianism in those who are not naive, Yarvin argues for both:
(...) I’ll tell you what the real emotion behind the Arab Spring was. Actually, Beavis can tell you better. “Fire is cool,” said Beavis. Fire is indeed cool. Americans were bored and needed some better CNN. They wanted to see shit burn. Shit indeed burned, and is still burning. Which was cool. So they got what they wanted. Not too different from the crowd in the Colosseum, just less honest about how they satisfy their very simple chimp/human needs.
And it’s not just sadism that motivates callous altruism. Another source of venal satisfaction is that when you help people, or appear to help them, you become a patron. You gain ownership over them. When you help overthrow the dictator of Egypt, for example, you become in a sense the new government of Egypt.
Of course, this is a heavy accusation; that the good and caring people in the international community are in reality driven by the same things that motivated Atilla the Hun, namely lust for power and conquest, just with better PR.5
But it is important to mention that historically speaking almost all great empires have had some moral justification for their conquests. There have been few empires who have justified their wars simply on the merit of them having a bigger army, most wars have been declared in the name of self-defense, religion, or ideology.
The British Empire conquered a quarter of the world with the justification of bringing civilization to their native Savages, the Soviet Union submitted Eastern Europe in the name of the workers and the peasants, why should we expect the United States to be any different? Could the blue Empire not further its own power in the name of Human Rights and democracy?
This justification, just like its socialist counterpart, knows no borders, if the US decides that your country does not respect human rights, they will have the perfect justification to intervene diplomatically or militarily. This is the perfect causus belli because it could be effectively deployed against at least 90% of the world, could you name a country that is immune to accusations of human rights violations that is not a de facto US satellite?
An interesting example that come to mind is how the US constantly nags Saudi Arabia on its repression of the LGBT community. Secretary of State Blinken literally states that “I press Saudis on LGBTQI issues in every conversation“.
The Arsonist of the World
However, I think it would be disingenuous to compare traditional imperialism with a modern blue imperialism. A traditional Empire like the British or the Mongol Empire conquered others for its own direct benefit, much like a wolf hunting deer. However, blue imperialism does not work like this, what is America getting out of Libya after bringing down their previous rulers?
After the fall of the Gaddafi government the International Community declared Libya a democracy and forgot about them while Libya fell into an Anarchy that it hasn't yet recovered from. So, it would be fair to compare blue imperialism to an arsonist pouring gasoline over small flames, turning them into uncontrolled fires that consume whole countries, all done without any direct benefit to the Blue Empire.
Another controversial example of throwing gasoline over a fire was the American support of regime change in Ukraine. The removal of Yanukovych in 2014 would obviously trigger a war with Russia in which thousands of Ukrainians would die, this was obvious to any impartial observer. I can certainly understand why Ukrainians desire independence from Russia and why they removed Yanukovych, since he wasn't exactly a saint, but from hindsight the Maidan Revolution and subsequent war have been disasters for the Ukranian people.
If the International Community truly cared about the well-being of Ukraine, they would have supported measures for an independent Ukraine that would not have led into a predictable war with Russia, with dire consequences for the Ukrainian people.
Back to Westphalia
Yarvin, for all intents and purposes, is a very radical isolationist, isolationist specifically in the sense that he is against the propagation of American ideology throughout the world. His position is that the US should only really care for its own interests and not choose to take sides in foreign conflicts and disputes. In a real sense, this means that the US should not care if tomorrow the Brazilian military performs a coup d'etat and establishes a new regime, or if Morocco and Spain start fighting a war over Ceuta.
Essentially what he advocates for is to the return to the world of international relations after the Treaty of Westphalia where each nation cared first and foremost about their own interests and did not care what the neighbors did, as long as it did not affect them directly. However, this is contrary to the modern world of international relations, since if Brazil experiences a military coup tomorrow, the international community would use all of its soft power, economic and diplomatic, to bring down the new regime by all means necessary in the name of democracy.
This mentality, according to Yarvin, is the reason why Western Europe is no more independent than the members of the Warsaw Pact. They can do whatever they want as long as it does not involve changing anything that the Americans would not approve, such as their borders, their internal policy, their foreign policy, their political systems or ideology. This level of control that would be a transparent case of imperialism with any other ideology, the only difference between NATO and the Warsaw pact is that many today subscribe to the former’s ideology and few to the latter’s, not because Germany has more real autonomy than the DDR.
Yarvin argues for the complete end of this sort of democratic interventionism all across the world, in his opinion this would lead to the actual independence of most countries around the world since the only political forces that would be relevant would be local, instead of international. And that this would lead to more effective government and the creation of effective autocracies around the world, which Yarvin clearly favors.
A side effect of this isolationism is that there would be shorter wars, the argument for this is that today the international community attempts to mediate conflicts and stop any violence without actually addressing the political reasons for the war. If the world just let these wars play out, they would solve themselves. For example, when in 2023 Azerbaijan decided to invade and ethnically cleanse the region of Nagorno Karabakh of Armenians, the international community did not care and the result since has been… peace. The Armenians that were exiled from their homes have resettled in other places and Armenia has decided not to seek revenge since they know that they would lose such a war since the Azeris are better armed.
This situation is reversed in the Israeli Arab conflict where there is no possibility of there ever being peace since the international community guarantees an unstable status quo that guarantees an endless string of wars between the two. Yarvin suggests that if the world gave as much attention to the Palestinians as they give to the Armenians, then they would be forced to negotiate a peace with Israel or suffer the fate of the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh, either way the war would end and everybody would forget soon about it, the same way that the French have forgotten about Algeria (2 million expelled) and the Germans have forgotten about East Prussia (15 million expelled, including my great-grandparents). Of course, all these wars and mass expulsions are great tragedies, but are they preferable to +80 years of revanchist war? Difficult to say. To quote Moldbug:
We have simply observed that the old international law, generally perceived as brutal and bellicose, results in peace. And the new international law, generally perceived as civilized and humanitarian, results in war.
It’s all too easy to understand how irredentism and revanchism are the polar opposite of peace. Peace means accepting the results of history. Irredentism means the Welsh Liberation Front, demanding the return of London from those notorious human-rights violators, the Saxons.
My personal opinion
I personally quite enjoy Moldbug’s analysis of international politics, even when I disagree with him, I always end up exploring a new chapter of history that I previously did not know existed. But overall, I would say that, in my opinion, Curtis Yarvin is better at criticizing things he doesn't like, than arguing for the things he does want.
He can make a very interesting case for isolationism however I think that this analysis is incomplete because isolationism in the 21st century is as ambitious as flying to the moon in the 19th. The world is so interconnected nowadays that full isolationism is practically impossible without economically crippling one’s nation in the process, and even if the US did become isolationist as Curtis would desire, this would not mean that other nations would expand their influence all the way to your own borders.
So, even though I do disagree with many of his conclusions, I do believe that his geopolitical analysis is very interesting and I think that it illustrates the power of modern diplomacy and of the international community. I hope that you managed to take something interesting from this article, even if it was only historical anecdotes.
Sources
The main essays that Moldbug has written about international relations are the following. I recommend reading whichever interests you, just take in mind that Yarvin has an… interesting writing style that takes some time to get used to.
From the State department themselves:
“…at the time of the arms embargo, the Nationalists appeared to be overwhelmingly better armed and equipped than the Communists.”
Furthermore, the document swears up and down that the embargo was made to help broker come to a peaceful agreement since they must be impartial and cannot help only one side of the conflict. They do not mention that the Soviets were arming the Communists while the US was restricting arms to its allies.
I sincerely do not believe that the arms embargo was made to facilitate a lasting peace between the communists and Nationalists, such a peace is inconceivable and there have been no historical examples of two ideologically opposed rivals ending their civil war peacefully. Since the possibility seems so distant, I tend to think that there was another goal.
I would love to know if anyone has a good example of these organizations criticizing each other on an ideological basis.
“And there’s something else (…) that few of us notice about North Korea: it’s at war against the entire civilized world. At least, the entire civilized world would love to replace its regime, which is pretty much the definition of “at war.” If Washington doesn’t bother with the Korean equivalent of “Qaddafi must go” or “Assad must go,” it’s only because it doesn’t believe it can get itself obeyed.”
Yarvin also argues that this sort of foreign policy is nothing new and that it has a long history of terrible results with first the British empire (Greece, Latin America, Armenia), and then the US (Post-WWI, early Soviet Union, WW2). If you want more details read the articles linked at the end.
Another good example of a successful blue empire project is South Africa.
@copybookcourt Can I ask you something unrelated?