Nuclear Armageddon to Cover Economic Decline?

You can find "The Destruction of Sodom" by Camille Corot in the Open Access collection of The Met.

Last Sunday, Ukrainian drones penetrated deep into Russian territory, destroying at least ten strategic bombers across multiple airbases—some located over 2,500 miles from the Ukrainian border. The precision strikes targeted aircraft capable of carrying nuclear weapons, the backbone of Russia's strategic deterrent. While Ukrainian officials initially claimed to have hit over 40 aircraft, U.S. intelligence assessments put the actual damage at around 10-13 destroyed bombers—still a significant blow to Moscow's nuclear-capable fleet.

But the numbers matter less than the implications. Such an operation, reaching targets thousands of miles inside Russia, would have been impossible without sophisticated NATO intelligence, satellite guidance, and logistical support. The United States claims it received no advance warning of the strikes, yet the technical complexity speaks for itself: NATO and the US are now active participants in what used to be a proxy war, leading us all straight into WWIII. We cheer now, pretending to be masters of the universe, but Putin has not responded yet. Our laughter will become hollow when he does.

As if this existential threat weren't enough, the very leaders who should be managing this crisis have descended into public chaos. Just 48 hours after the latest nuclear escalation, Donald Trump and Elon Musk—who last week stood together proclaiming their lasting partnership—erupted into a spectacular Twitter war that wiped $150 billion off Tesla's market value and accusations of Trump being on the Epstein list.

The alliance had started so promisingly. Many Europeans watched with envy as Musk's Department of Government Efficiency began tackling the bureaucratic bloat that has strangled Western productivity for decades. Mass layoffs of federal employees, the shuttering of redundant agencies, a genuine attempt to break the cycle of waste that has made government synonymous with inefficiency. For a brief moment, it seemed possible that America might actually reverse the institutional decay that has been eating away at Western civilization.

But decline doesn't bend to wishful thinking. The underlying forces that create institutional rot, fiscal irresponsibility, and strategic blindness cannot be solved by cutting a few thousand jobs or tweeting about efficiency. They are symptoms of something far deeper: a civilization that has lost the capacity for long-term thinking, for genuine self-reflection, for the kind of hard choices that require admitting fundamental mistakes. Instead, we are governed by a political class obsessed with point-scoring, legacy protection, and partisan theater. Whether it's Trump's ego-driven feuds, Biden's last-minute pardons for family members, or European leaders who mistake moral posturing for strategy, the pattern is identical: leaders who prioritize their own political survival over the survival of the systems they claim to represent.

This transcends party lines entirely. It doesn't matter which political movement you choose—left, right, or center—the underlying rot remains the same. Our entire political system now selects for the wrong qualities: media savvy over competence, ideological purity over pragmatism, the ability to mobilize tribal loyalties over the wisdom to build sustainable solutions.

The very fact that two men capable of reshaping the global economy are now publicly destroying each other over budget disagreements while nuclear powers edge toward confrontation reveals the true nature of Western decline. It is not a problem that can be fixed with better management or more efficient bureaucracy. It is a crisis of knowledge, of wisdom, of the basic competencies required to govern complex societies in an interconnected world.

This is not the first time a great power has faced such a moment. The parallels with Rome's final centuries are striking—not because of external barbarian threats, but because of the internal collapse that made those threats decisive. Rome didn't fall to superior armies; it fell to fiscal insanity, bureaucratic paralysis, and leaders who chose endless wars over addressing fundamental structural problems.

Like Rome's emperors, Western leaders increasingly use foreign conflicts to distract from domestic failure. A proxy war in Ukraine conveniently shifts attention from crumbling infrastructure, unsustainable debt, and the collapse of domestic production. But this strategy carries a fatal flaw: while attention is diverted abroad, internal struggles only escalate.

The United States now owes $36.8 trillion—a debt that grows faster than the economy that supports it. This astronomical burden depends entirely on global confidence in the dollar, yet that confidence is precisely what America's hostile policies are undermining. China, holding over $3 trillion in dollar reserves, has begun systematically dumping U.S. Treasury holdings while converting to gold and alternative currencies. Each round of sanctions, each escalation, each act of financial weaponization drives more nations toward Beijing's alternative systems.

The West isolates itself through moral superiority and warmongering, but you cannot feed a population on righteousness. Every dollar spent on weapons in Ukraine is a dollar not invested in productive capacity at home. Every economic sanction pushes trading partners toward competitors while impoverishing Western populations. Every threat of financial exclusion accelerates the construction of parallel systems designed to bypass Western control entirely.

China and Russia don't need to attack. When hunger finally gnaws at Western bellies, when the bills come due and the dollar loses its privileged status, internal destruction will follow naturally. The greatest military in history means nothing if you can't afford to feed your own people.

And so we arrive at the ultimate absurdity: humanity's potential extinction not from cosmic disaster or natural catastrophe, but from the wounded pride of aging politicians who cannot admit their failures. The path to survival is blindingly obvious—immediate diplomatic engagement with Russia, a realistic assessment of Western limitations, and the political courage to choose peace over the illusion of dominance.

But such a course would require something our leaders seem incapable of: swallowing their inflated egos and accepting that their grand strategies have failed. It would mean acknowledging that NATO expansion was a mistake, that economic sanctions have backfired, that the proxy war in Ukraine has brought us closer to nuclear annihilation than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The tragedy is not that we lack the knowledge or capability to step back from the brink. The tragedy is that we may lack the wisdom to do so. Every day that passes without serious diplomatic engagement increases the likelihood that Putin will respond to Western escalation in ways that leave no room for de-escalation. When nuclear powers begin targeting each other's strategic assets—even through proxies—the margin for error approaches zero.

How bitter it would be if humanity's story ends not because we faced an insurmountable challenge, but because we had too many leaders whose egos were bigger than their brains. The greatest civilizations in history have fallen not to superior enemies but to their own hubris. We seem determined to add our names to that list, leaving future archaeologists—if any survive—to puzzle over how a species capable of splitting atoms and exploring space managed to destroy itself over matters of pride.

The choice is still ours. For now.

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This analysis will be continued in my upcoming book about the knowledge crisis and the decline of the West, examining how decades of institutional decay and educational failure have brought us to this precipice. Within the next two weeks, I'll be publishing "Coddled Children: Surviving a World Without Adversity"—exploring what kind of society emerges when we eliminate all hardship, all standards, and all meaningful challenges.