Spec. No 2 Clueless in Gaza,
Freedom Boy Updated, The YouBeautalist, Poem of The Week
Spec is a weekly with commentary, news and criticism, out every Thursday morning (from now on), and occasionally in between
(Apologies for any posting glitches. We are evolving)
Putting the Bandung Back Together?
Trump and Musk are destroying a half-century of US soft power, and compromising alliances. Will they re-unify a post Cold War ‘third world’, allied against them?
Just my luck to start a substack in a fortnight when nothing happens! We’re really scratching for a story this week, apart from the President of the US upending their national and our global order…The uh, my God. My God.
Trump’s first two weeks of power, and above all his unclassifiable Gaza proposal, have prompted a revival of the art of Kremlinology - who’s up, down, holds the influence, what's this really for? But there’s an added Penn and Teller twist: the magic is all being done in the open, the full chaos, or apparent chaos on display. The very visible takeaway is that Trump is enacting the programme of Project 2025 slavishly, a hybrid of anti-government libertarianism for social services, enforced traditional values by strong government action, and government spending where required to project US power abroad. Vast sections of the post-WW2 big state are being handed over to the private sector, which increasingly becomes the manager of areas of social life. Were this a genuine root and branch examination of state spending and programmes, then at least some of it would, or were should* be supported by the left. The massive money giveaways in sectors such as agriculture, the military, services tendering, support a state bloated in all the wrong places.
But Trump appears to have been perhaps so eager to please his sponsors as to overshoot, offering the entire federal civil service of a nuclear armed superpower, redundancy buy-outs, an offer quickly withdrawn. This was beyond the fairly mild libertarianism that US power elites process to, and was well on the way to what US libertarian subculture calls ‘minarchism’ - the drive towards the smallest state possible. To suddenly hollow out federal government is the nightmare of power libertarians, but the fantasy of minarchists, and draws on a mass and underground culture from the 60s, spanning both right and left, from Rand to the yippies by way of Heinlein and others. Though this movement, as supercharged by Team Trump, long ago attached itself to capital as a cultural vanguard, it expresses the ecstatic hopes of the radical 60s as much as it does grim propetarianism. It’s a strategy that channels the residual energy of a revolutionary society, the place that courted anarchy, and then built an empire. Having military bases in 70+ countries,and then offering everyone in the CIA a payout is quite the strategy.
Were team Trump and its DOGE expression, really tackling ‘the swamp’ they'd go after said megadepartments. Instead they are going after USAID, a tiny department, whose true purpose is the extension of US soft power, entwining the US in so many social and cultural situations overseas that oppositionality to America is undermined by dissolving the boundary between the US and the recipient nation.
However, the prosecution of that goal has, in the Obama-Biden era, been put in the hands of progressives, for whom exercising such soft power is the extension of current progressive values - on gender, culture, globalism etc - to the world. Some of the clean out of this one can agree with, because this is not empire but Empire, the extension of a whole approach to life (biopolitics as we say) enforcing ideas of the body, sexed being etc, arising from a hitech society (and one in cultural crisis), to drive out more parochial, localised, embedded, traditional cultures.
Yet, deliciously, this attack on USAID is doing the work of America’s enemies for them. Soft power works, and costs a fraction of other measures, military, developmental etc. China realised long ago that it could not compete with the US’s linguistic and mass culture advantage in projecting power. So it spent many billions on infrastructure as a competing good. The US now appears to be quitting the field, as regards soft power.
This is but one of several acts within a fortnight that appears to have damaged years or even decades of long standing alliance and soft power extension. Bullying Colombia and Mexico is turning the US back into the ‘old gringo’ state, enforcing anglo order on a Latin world. Turning the Canadian public, fractured culturally-politically, into a unified anti-American force. Trump is not wrong that the US gets a raw deal from many one-way individual tariffs. But such asymmetry, access to the US market, is another part of soft power. Such advantage has turned national independence movements into talking shops, with no mass support, as locals welcome market access.
This has all been done with the maximum of caprice and an apparent minimum of forethought, the pinnacle (to date) being the extraordinary Gaza announcement. It fuses the long term aim of Zionists inside and outside the US, for the annexation of Gaza, with a Trumpian version of it, which has the businessman’s nihilism and lack of imagination. Why wouldn’t these people want a deal? Go somewhere nice? Gaza as a new ‘Riviera’ gives the game away. Who under 70 remembers the French Riviera as an expression of luxury and ease? Who but a man both disdainful and ignorant of history could imagine that the US could occupy Gaza, in the creation of such, of what is really a new Dubai? Trump’s ignorance of history - his belief that it isn't actually real - means he sees Gaza through the early years of his property empire, clearing historically rich part-blocks in Manhattan to build towers. If he were with the Likud programme, he would endorse the standard geopolitical idea of pushing the Gazans into the Sinai as one unit, with Egypt bribed hugely, to take them. The idea of parcelling them out into what, in Trump’s imagination, a series of condo developments tells you it’s all his own work (his mental model might be central Florida, where a vast retirement complex of complexes, ‘The Villages’ has been developing for decades, and is now larger than a state. Trump is essentially retiring the Gazans).
People's initial reaction to Trump is, he’s stupid. Then his Ivy League (Wharton) speech and business wiles convince you to think again. Then something like Resort Gaza happens - or his first term speculation that injecting detergent might cure COVID - and you realise no, he’s magnificently ignorant. The Gaza Riviera thing has thrown his supporters into damage control, with Greg Sheridan going full Bobo the Jesus Clown Mode, to explain that it’s a mad idea that just might work…
What Trump has done in these first two weeks, is something that radicals have been trying to achieve for years. He has put down a first payment on re-unifying the ‘third world’, as a political force. This is a ‘third world' ( not a passive global South) without the anti-imperialism of an earlier era, no determination to bypass capitalism. It seems development and allies. But Trump is making the US so capricious in its actions, that allying against it, or at least in face of it, becomes a rational course in terms of interests. If the essential feature of an ally is consistent and rational action over time, Trump is putting the US at the bottom of the list. China, India and Russia, all B-list choices, become a lot more attractive. Belief in the swaggering individual dominance that Trump imagines the US once wielded, is a product of his knowing of the last century only from movies. If he is determined to proceed with it, his impact will be something his now skittish supporters haven't yet foreseen: he’ll put the Bandung back together, and history will take a different direction than that which now presents itself. Lookee there! Something happened!
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At the Movies
The Youbeautalist
Three hour architecture film The Brutalist has met with such success that an Australian version is planned for Stan. Spec has obtained a script:
Rich man something: Mr Wossname, your design is unbuildable! This soaring modern pile of raw concrete, stopped by a ten storey cross made from negative space is a folly! I will not build it!
Architect: Yeahhhhh, ok.
Rich man something: I insist that - sorry what?
Architect: Nah, lose the cross. It was mainly to have something VCAT could knock off. Let’s whack eighty one bedroom apartments in there.
Rich man something: Eighty, one bedroom apartments?
Architect: OK a hundred. Well, studios with a curtain. Japanese style living for the young urban professional. Futon in a cupboard, toilet in the shower…
Rich man something: But this raw passionate challenging brushed concrete-
Architect: Yeah we’ll cover that with something
Rich man something: Inflammable cladding?
Architect: Inflammable? Yeah, ok, sure.
Rich man something: I see a richly coloured beacon of hope-
Architect: Yep 120 studioettes in gray and brown
Rich man something: Only those colours?
Architect: There are other colours? Wow. I should have gone to class.
Rich man something: Meanwhile, I am still waiting to see signs of your ineffable genius
Architect: (leans in close) If you sell these 180 semi-studioettes to your own shell company and lease it back to Airbnb it, you can negatively gear, and tax deduct the rent as a business expense, at the same time…
Everyone: Oh my God he’s a genius! Etc etc
Credits roll
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News
What Timmy Did Next
Freedom Boy went from MP to RMIT PHD candidacy. Has he been double dipping?
Having recently spoken to North Brighton Rotary on ‘Is there life after politics?’, former Goldstein MP and IPA soldier, Tim Wilson appears to have decided the answer is ‘no’. He's running again in the Bayside seat. Last defeat he famously ‘crawled into a fetal position’ for a few days. God knows what will happen if he gets the quinella, but he should sell tickets in advance to it, which would clear his campaign debts.
In the interregnum, Wilson returned to study, starting a PHD at RMIT Uni’s Blockchain Innovation Unit. This is a weird little unit headed by Wilson’s former IPA comrade Chris Berg, and including ancient free marketeer Sinclair Davidson, who loves everything about the private sector, except depending on it for a living. It’s essentially using the resources of a public university to explore a stateless model of currency that would make a public sector impossible.
Well free inquiry and all that. Meanwhile, the Zoe Daniels campaign might want to ask about this PHD. Did it attract a scholarship? If so, is it being acquitted properly? An Australian PHD scholarship would barely pay for a pair of oxblood brogues, but nevertheless, we would want to be sure that Tim’s mates didn't just park him there, while he came back to life.
It’s also high time a better resourced outlet took a look at how this ‘centre’ and RMIT Uni are divvying up the intellectual property arising therefrom. Are taxpayers subsidising a start-up? We’re sure they are not. Thus, from blockchain, to Goldstein, or Tim hopes.
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Poem of the Week
Kim Serca
At the Grammys
All hail to Bianca Censori
Elegant as
Who showed our na
tion
In all its glory
Save for Tas
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Till next week!
GR