Curtis Yarvin returns to discuss the logic of the “empire of love” and the possibilities of an American “perestroika.” He calls on Washington to shutter its foreign embassies, withdraw from the UN, and dissolve the transatlantic relationship. Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to stay updated with the latest episodes! *The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
Curtis Yarvin returns to discuss the logic of the “empire of love” and the possibilities of an American “perestroika.” He calls on Washington to shutter its foreign embassies, withdraw from the UN, and dissolve the transatlantic relationship.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to stay updated with the latest episodes!
*The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:53] Peter Slezkine: I'm Peter Slezkine, Director of the U.S.-Russia-China Trialogue project at the Stimson Center. Since the middle of the 20th century, relations among the United States, Russia, and China have had an enormous impact on each country separately and on the world as a whole. The purpose of the Trialogue is to better understand this extraordinarily complex and consequential relationship by directly engaging with experts from all three countries.
In this show, guests from across the political spectrum and from every corner of the globe share their views in their own voice. While the Stimson Center seeks to provide access to a wide variety of perspectives, it does not endorse any particular position. We leave it to the listeners to judge the validity and value of the views expressed by the guests. I hope you enjoy the podcast.
My guest today is Curtis Yarvin, whom The New Yorker recently described as one of America's most influential illiberal thinkers and an engineer of the intellectual source code for the second Trump administration. Curtis Yarvin is a key figure in the current moment, both because he is personally close with important members of the Trump Coalition and because his writing over the course of almost two decades has anticipated and, perhaps, shaped some of the major political trends of the present day.
In part one of this interview, which we released a couple of weeks ago. We discussed Curtis' personal background and his theory of governance, among other subjects. In this episode, we focus on the fate of the liberal order and the American Empire.
Curtis, welcome back to the podcast.
[00:01:36] Curtis Yarvin: Peter, it's a pleasure.
[00:01:38] Peter Slezkine: How would you define and describe the American empire?
[00:01:41] Curtis Yarvin: I have a sexy name for it, actually, that I've been promulgating, and I call it the Empire of Love.
[00:01:47] Peter Slezkine: Well, that's a poetic definition.
[00:01:49] Curtis Yarvin: A poetic definition. And so, this organism, which concerns itself with every square inch of territory on the globe, and I'm sure there is someone in the State Department whose job it is to worry about Antarctica, he's like the Antarctica guy, and then when you have some Antarctica issues, they're like, “Oh, let's call him.” I don't think it rises to the point of a desk, maybe, but I'm fairly sure, somewhere within the bowels of the Truman building, there is the guy who is the Antarctica guy.
But that's part of this huge archipelago of institutions and roles and responsibilities. And, like, there's a desk for here, there's a desk for there, there are embassies, there's staff. And, like, the relationship of this whole apparatus to anything that could be described as the interests of Americans is very obscure and very historical.
[00:02:46] Peter Slezkine: So, there presumably is an outer limit to American influence or a gradient where American influence becomes lesser the farther you go. So, is there, like, a physical perimeter of the American empire? Are there components of the Washington system that are more central to the exercise of imperial power? Where? If one goes looking for the American power on the map and in Washington, where does one find it?
[00:03:12] Curtis Yarvin: Well, certainly, the State Department feels that it runs the world very much. And the Trump administration feels that it runs the State Department, but that's a matter of some debate. I think that's a tension which is in the process of being worked out. But the State Department is, of course, very familiar with these tensions, I would say.
[00:03:33] Peter Slezkine: But why the State Department? We're always told that the Pentagon is more powerful and that beneath it all are the intelligence agencies that control everything. Is that a caricature?
[00:03:41] Curtis Yarvin: First of all, there's a lot of legend to disentangle there. In a way, if you look at the caricature of the Pentagon acting across purposes to the State Department, which is what you really mean when you're like the Pentagon is, you know… sort of, power you don't like is always framed as evil; whereas, power you like is not even framed as power.
If you came up to, let's say, someone whose name is literally “Power,” let's say you walked up to Samantha Power, and you say to Samantha Power, “What is the difference, Madam Power, between world domination and global leadership?” Because it's clear that the State Department is providing global leadership, but it is also clear that we don't do world domination. And so, essentially, for me, the difference between world domination and global leadership, some people would say hard power versus soft power. I would say monarchical versus oligarchic, or authoritative versus institutional power.
And I would say that the form of that power basically comes in the difficulty of deviating from the path of that power. And if anyone believes that the international community and the State Department are two different things, you, sort of, have to find, okay, let's look for historical conflicts between the international community and the State Department.
And so, in a way, when we say international community or Empire of Love, if you will, you're listening to this chorus of institutional responders to this orchestra in Washington. And one way to say, well, how is this orchestra conducted? Because it doesn't clearly have… it's not an authoritative hard power monarchical structure, is, what would it take to silence the orchestra? In a way, when you're asking, what is this thing's address, really, what you're asking is, like, what would it take to kill it?
I think that, certainly, for example, withdrawing from the UN would be a huge step. But there are even a number of ways to structure that step. So, if you essentially say, “We're withdrawing from the UN,” that's one thing. But then if you're just like, “Actually, we're destroying Turtle Bay,” like, you have to leave. You cannot do this here anymore. If you want to keep doing it, find somewhere else to do it. The probability of them finding somewhere else to do it would be… in some ways, it would have the energy of trying to get Warsaw packed back together.
[00:06:22] Peter Slezkine: So, you're saying the UN is a vehicle for American power?
[00:06:28] Curtis Yarvin: Well, the UN is a symbol.
[00:06:28] Peter Slezkine: Because obviously, there are parts of the economic system, Bretton Woods, IMF, and so on.
[00:06:31] Curtis Yarvin: Sure, [crosstalk 00:06:33].
[00:06:33] Peter Slezkine: [crosstalk 00:06:33] American Power. But the Security Council General Assembly was neutralized immediately by the Cold War, ignored by the U.S. at various moments. Being the UN ambassador hasn't seemed to carry much political stature in, I don't know, my entire lifetime. So, you think getting rid of the UN or pulling out of the UN would significantly impact the way the U.S. acts in the world?
[00:06:59] Curtis Yarvin: So, actually, the UN is an organization of very little significance. So, there's some charity programs run under the UN as a matter of, like, diplomatic significance or anything like that. I'm old enough that I remember when the UN was relevant. You remember Hans Blix? Hans Blix, from that Classic America movie, which only gets better with time, Team America: World Police, right? You've no doubt seen Team America: World Police.
[00:07:28] Peter Slezkine: Of course.
[00:07:28] Curtis Yarvin: I mean, the empire of love was funny 20 years ago, right? An empire can't be funny. Like, that's not right, you know. And so, you're like, okay, you shut down the UN. That is a huge symbolic step of basically saying the world is no longer traveling toward this utopia. Actually, like, what's really telling is that, if you turn this thing off, nobody's going to have the energy to recreate it.
[00:07:54] Peter Slezkine: And the point is that the international community is “fallacy,” an illusion that we are living, according to… and dispelling that mirage would set us on a different path, even if the mirage doesn't seem to have much impact on our trajectory.
[00:08:10] Curtis Yarvin: That's right. And so, you're taking a huge symbolic step. You're taking another huge symbolic step if you basically say… I think the correct way to do this in a bureaucratic structure is to reverse the merger that created the foreign service because the foreign service was created by the merger of the diplomatic service in the consular service.
So, there may be other creative ways to solve the need for consular services, but it's a thing. Embassies, not so much because you could just Zoom. And diplomats were necessary before the telegraph. But ever since then, their role has been… other than that, they're basically communicating connections in each other's elites, rather than facilitating communication. You know, they're not, like, ministers’ plenipotentiary anymore. And so, actually, by saying no foreign policy can be conducted on a government-to-government level purely electronically. That's, sort of, an update of Wilson's open agreements openly arrived at.
[00:09:14] Peter Slezkine: And not just government to government, it's already government to government, but capital to capital.
[00:09:16] Curtis Yarvin: Capital to capital, right. And so, you're basically saying, “Hey, we have a channel to talk to Paris. If we have anything we need to talk to Paris about, you know who to email,” like, mercury and their wine or I don't know, something could come up. But it probably does not involve a French invasion of the U.S. or a US invasion of France, right?
And so, actually, when you shut down that machine, you're essentially shutting down all of the things that get turned into the kind of pressure that's being applied to, say, the AFD today. And so, the way to bring down the empire of love is to make your quizzlinks feel like you really don't have their backs anymore. And they're used to you having their backs. They're used to having this, sort of, wind from above. They generally don't realize that they're quizzlink’s off, and they think they're, sort of, in advance of the U.S. in terms of its progressivism. They may even think that American ideas are, like, their ideas. Their anti-Americanism is all imported from America.
[00:10:16] Peter Slezkine: But you think that embassies in their various local appendages are the physical arm, the power source of the United States?
[00:10:25] Curtis Yarvin: Embassies are on a power source because they basically… and it's not just… you know, the embassy is just first among equals, sort of, in a sense of, like, NGOs, right? Actually, there's, sort of, no huge difference between public and private. This is why so many of these authoritarian regimes have been like, “Let's kick out the NGOs,” right? Because the NGOs actually have much more flexibility than the embassies. But what they're doing is they're basically cementing a pro-American elite by holding groups of people together. And it's the internal cohesion among those ruling elites that basically, sort of, works. And so, if you're expressing the wrong kind of anti-American ideas, like, actually opposition to American values, rather than a general feeling that your values are more American than America's, then you will be basically thrust out of this elite without, really, any action by even America itself. It's just like you make yourself clearly somebody who's not acceptable in this group of people. And that's what soft power does.
And so, essentially, the feeling that these, sort of, Americanized governing classes have is that they're the natural and inevitable and permanent rulers of their countries. Au pouvoir de luxe, right, is the feeling of all oligarchy. And these populace are generally lower class people who get by in lower class votes. And the goal of the state is really to, sort of, exterminate these people as quietly as possible without arousing too much resistance too soon.
[00:12:12] Peter Slezkine: The so-called restraint crowd in D.C. focuses mostly on military interventions, overseas bases, and so on, the hard power element. And when they talk about retrenchment, they're focused on that dimension. You seem to be more focused more on soft power, the State Department embassies and [crosstalk 00:12:36].
[00:12:36] Curtis Yarvin: Yeah, I’m talking about retrenching soft power.
[00:12:37] Peter Slezkine: So, first of all, do you believe that the U.S. empire needs to retrench? And then give me your practical playbook for how far the U.S. should retrench from where and starting with what.
[00:12:51] Curtis Yarvin: Sure. Well, there's an old witticism in the State Department about someone getting appointed an ambassador and he goes in to see, like, “This is probably apocryphal,” like, Dean Acheson or someone like that. And he's a political appointee. He studied in his country. He's very proud of all of that. And so, he goes into the secretary's office and the secretary shows him a globe and is like, “Point at your country on the globe.” And he points out, like, lower Togo or whatever it is. And the secretary, to his amazement, is like, “No, you're actually wrong. Here's your country.” And he spins it around and points at the United States.
And so, yeah, I think that, actually, establishing that the U.S. government is an agency intended to benefit its citizens and it is not a global missionary organization can't be, sort of, stated too often. We hear this rhetorically. We hear exactly this, for example, in today's announcement, that we're pulling out of UNESCO for what I think is only the fifth time, actually.
[00:13:55] Peter Slezkine: So, you think that the soldiers follow the missionaries? That the missionaries go in first, the soldiers come in second, and if we pull back the “missionaries,” then the soldiers will come back naturally?
[00:14:06] Curtis Yarvin: The soldiers are…
[00:14:07] Peter Slezkine: Close the embassy and then the base will go.
[00:14:09] Curtis Yarvin: Yeah. Well, you want to close the embassy and the base at the same time. The soldiers aren't really doing anything there. They're not actually defending us against the Nazi plagues, right?
So, yeah, like, America's a hard power empire is mostly just a, kind of, money spending effort. Its goal is to spend money on stuff. And it does indeed spend money on stuff. It has long since stopped creating its own problems like the State Department will give it a bone to solve occasionally. So, the, sort of, perfect self-licking ice cream cone for the Empire of love was, of course, Afghanistan, where both sides of the empire managed to spend about a trillion dollars turning Afghanistan into Afghanistan.
[00:14:54] Peter Slezkine: Both sides, meaning the State Department in the Pentagon? You used two placeholders.
[00:14:59] Curtis Yarvin: Yes, yes. And so, Afghanistan created an enormous amount of resume padding activity. People got their tickets punched by going. They got combat infantry badges essential for a career in the Pentagon. People at State got to do all sorts of things. I don't know how many Americans outside the military were in Afghanistan, but it's got to have been in above 10,000. Like, incredible numbers of human beings, all of whom have to consume food. And this costs money. The food costs money off. And the food was flown in, right?
And so, shutting down Afghanistan was a really significant achievement, which I think is… there was the personal work of both Biden and Trump, honestly. Best thing Biden ever did in his whole career.
[00:15:46] Peter Slezkine: What ails the American Empire? Is it overextension given limited resources? Is it a total disconnect between what the U.S. does in the world and what its citizens might actually want? And if the U.S. is ailing, how does it heal itself by changing its foreign posture?
[00:16:03] Curtis Yarvin: I think that, in terms of protecting us from foreign hard power, I would say, first of all, the conquest of space is very, very important because it's one of the last technical advantages that we have.
[00:16:17] Peter Slezkine: You mean outer space, literally?
[00:16:19] Curtis Yarvin: Yeah, I mean orbit. And orbit is, sort of, a single place. Right now, we have this amazing constellation of communication satellites in orbit, but it's completely crazy that this military high ground has been left for these, like, peaceful starling satellites to graze like sheep. Whereas, actually, if you can get that many satellites into space, you can accomplish… the essential goal of military action is territorial denial. And so, basically, what we need in space is actually a system that literally is just going to take anything that tries to get into space that doesn't have a permit and just blow it up automatically without asking questions, right? This is, you know, a modernized version of essentially Brilliant Pebbles, an SDI concept from the ‘80s. Then you also need this system to defend itself, which it can do very effectively by launching a whole bunch of tungsten telephone poles into orbit. Basically, this is, again, Project Thor from the 1980s.
And so, actually implementing these basic ‘80s technologies updated by 40 years and conquering space leaves the United States in a situation where now it really doesn't have to worry about anything. And so, first of all, as a grand strategy perspective, we have this lead in heavy launch capacity. I would do, basically, a Manhattan project of space conquest, because what's China going to do? Are they going to nuke us? Are they really going to nuke us? Like, they can take Taiwan, like, tomorrow just by saying, “Hey, no flights into Taipei. Surrender, please.” And they haven't done that yet. So, I think they're pretty cautious. Is Russia going to nuke us? If you're, basically, at the same time, as saying this, you're just saying, like, “Actually, we just genuinely do not care about your conflicts. We're just trying to make sure that there's no space war by conquering space. But if you want Paris, you can have Paris.”
[00:18:12] Peter Slezkine: So, what is the sequencing? So, while you are investing trillions upon trillions of dollars in a space Manhattan project to secure the ultimate high ground, would you begin by relaxing tensions elsewhere to buy time and room to accomplish this objective? Because the other argument is that you push forward against China and Russia, Iran, and others now, and then while they're constrained, you consolidate your control over space. So, you would retrench…
[00:18:41] Curtis Yarvin: The thing is that I would basically be militarily very aggressive in this context in terms of building military technology and, at the same time, couple that with a very soft diplomatic approach that says, “The dream of a global order is over. We are reverting to a multipolar order. And what we are going to do with this power is not use it to govern the entire earth in 20th century style and enforce everyone in Tibet to speak English or whatever we were doing before. We're actually very comfortable with countries being countries. Our goal is to actually end all this 20th century bullshit rather than continue it. So, actually, you don't really have anything to fear from this. And we're going to demonstrate that in 1,000, sort of, little ways on the ground by reducing the posture of our aggressiveness. And so, essentially, when you mentioned Iran…
[00:19:48] Peter Slezkine: In every realm, symbolic, rhetorical.
[00:19:52] Curtis Yarvin: In every realm — symbolically, physically. We're just like, “Hey, Israel and Iran, we genuinely do not care.” And the cool thing about the conflict between Israel and Iran is that it's on the other side of the planet from us. So, it's really hard for…
[00:20:07] Peter Slezkine: So, most places are on the other side of the planet from us, so you would just lower the salience and lower the stakes of [crosstalk 00:19:52].
[00:20:12] Curtis Yarvin: And I would basically say to Israel and Iran, there was this really remarkable moment in U.S. foreign policy where Vice President Vance said to India and Pakistan, “We don't really care about your conflict.” And now, it was just like all the oxygen left the room immediately, right? And to have an America that could say to Israel and Iran, “We don't care about your conflict,” it's a little bit harder because their oil is still real. Oil is still a thing, right? But, like, I think it's still the right message.
[00:20:45] Peter Slezkine: Do you think oil is why we care?
[00:20:46] Curtis Yarvin: I think history is why we care. But I think oil is a reason to care more about that part of the world. And it's just these, like, you have these, sort of, little fragments of, sort of, like, a real grand strategy that, kind of, creeps into this hallucination. It's like you're on, you know, a heavy acid trip and you keep hearing the saxophone, and it's actually your alarm going off.
And so, like, yeah, oil is a real thing, right? But, you know, actually making geography real again and basically saying, “All right, let's control this futuristic space war possibility.” But in terms of, like, LARPing around with these 20th century militaries, first of all, I mean, the Pentagon has already lost, sort of, the… there was this release that came out the other day, this press release. And it's like, “U.S. Army drone drops a grenade for the first time.” Like, oh my god, like, in terms of the, sort of, military contest it's developed in the Ukraine and, like, U.S. $17,000 drone drops a grenade for the first time, it's literally like the Chinese Empire, like the Qing Dynasty sending junks up against battleships. It's, like, ridiculous.
[00:22:02] Peter Slezkine: So, you're saying that, in the 20th century, warfare evolved to its maximum stint on the Ukrainian battlefield and maybe in the South China Sea we have perhaps been surpassed. So, let's just pull back and then skip to the next stage and get total dominance of space, and then we can remain in our North American continent undisturbed?
[00:22:23] Curtis Yarvin: Yes. And maybe figure out how to reverse our balance of trade. Because a lot of the basis of imperialism, and people overlook the… obviously, there's a lot of talk about economic imperialism and so on and so forth, but, like, the whole DNA of Anglo-American imperialism is built around the unconscious assumption of a trade surplus So much of the rationale behind this whole grand strategy of soft power, it's assuming that you're creating markets for the industries of Birmingham or whatever, you know. And they don't make anything in Birmingham now except for kebabs. And you can't even export those. They go bad.
And so, that's how, like, on autopilot this thing is. It's, like, basically, there are just all of these, sort of, classes of policy that assume, oh, we're trying to create markets for American goods.
[00:23:16] Peter Slezkine: So, that's still the underlying logic of American foreign policy, even though we don’t even need markets because we don't make anything anymore.
[00:23:22] Curtis Yarvin: To call it even logic would be like the rogue autopilot from the 19th century. You'll see this in, like, scientific fields where a scientific field becomes stale, where there's this default problem that you're solving, like, say Alzheimer's is reduced to the problem of, how do we reduce amyloid in the brain, right?
[00:23:41] Peter Slezkine: Right. Well, this is the famous Kuhnian paradigm.
[00:23:43] Curtis Yarvin: Yeah, exactly. We're doing normal foreign policy. And like normal foreign policy predicated on this idea that you got to find markets for your goods, right? And you're just like, “Well, we don't really make anything anymore. We borrow, actually.” And then it could be like, “Well, you know, maybe the purpose of foreign policy is to protect our very important borrowing, our credit lines. Like, to keep our credit cards from cutting us off.” That's really what we're trying to do with Chinese, to get the credit card from cutting us off, right? Because we'd wake up one day and all those products with weirdly misspelled names like Uzman or McBO or whatever would no longer be available on Amazon, right? Because the credit card was down.
It's just like you have to see the American Empire as basically operating fundamentally in the space of the surreal… I mean, if your first response is to look at this thing and map it to reality, in a way, that's just not going to be equipped to deal with the craziness of what we're looking at here.
I think one of the clearest ways to see that is the, kind of, hallucinatory post-Soviet presence of the USSR where it's basically just, like, you'll go to these abandoned Soviet space shuttle factories or whatever. And you're just like, “What was the Soviet Union thing? It was just like this acid trip that took physical form. Like, how could this even have existed?” And yet, it did exist and it was real.
[00:25:10] Peter Slezkine: So, I want to draw the final question. I wanted to actually draw on that analogy. So, the Soviet Union was massive and powerful, but at a certain point became a bit sclerotic, perhaps, overextended. And at the start of perestroika, Gorbachev and other younger Russian elites decided that it no longer made sense to subsidize Eastern Europe to keep control over Eastern Germany. If they wanted out, let them leave. They're more trouble than they're worth is, in some sense, the way the Empire collapsed. And so, what began as managed reform and managed retrenchment ended up with total collapse. So, how does the U.S. avoid that?
[00:26:04] Curtis Yarvin: Well, who says I wanted to avoid it?
[00:26:08] Peter Slezkine: Wait. When I go to Moscow, they, for obvious reasons, draw that analogy constantly. They come to me and they tell me, “We see what Trump is doing. We sympathize with some of it. But watch where you're going because we've tried this before. And unwinding an empire slowly and only cutting off the parts that you think aren't worth anything is just the first step. But once you gain momentum, you might not stop until you fall off a cliff.”
[00:26:42] Curtis Yarvin: Yeah. Gorbachev really thought that he could remodel the house. And he basically started on his ambitious DIY project. And very soon, the house was not up to code and he was asked to leave. And then it crumbled and it's, like, sitting there with cherry trees growing out of it.
[00:26:55] Peter Slezkine: Unlike Deng Xiaoping who created a whole new mansion on top of the shack that he inherited.
[00:27:00] Curtis Yarvin: There you go. A lot of things went wrong with that Soviet experience. It was not intended to deconstruct vampire in that way, and yet it did. What it looked like concretely in the fall of the Soviet Union was that the external provinces of the Soviet Empire realized that they had more independence than they were customarily used to exercising. And of course, you remember, like, the Romanias, the Yugoslavias, like difficult Soviet clients are, sort of, always pushing against this.
[00:27:37] Peter Slezkine: Well, Yugoslavia cease being a client after, what was it, 1949?
[00:27:38] Curtis Yarvin: Yeah, but it’s always in there.
[00:27:43] Peter Slezkine: There was the first split-off.
[00:27:45] Curtis Yarvin: There's a relationship. right? And Romania is, like, troublesome, and so on and so forth. But for East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, to, sort of, realize that they're on their own in a way it's, like, a difficult realization. And so, you remember how the wall falls is that someone, like, misinterprets and instructions and the wall is open and then everyone just rushes across this? And so, in a way, Europe is still operating as if it was 1956. And if they try to keep their colonies, Eisenhower is going to cut off their oil, right?
The reality of the situation is however that if some kind of hard right wing, LARPy Kipling-esque party seizes power in Great Britain, which I assure you is not imminent, but if they did and they were like, “All right, we're going to reconquer South Africa and restore order and civilization in South Africa,” this as an example.
What is the U.S. really going to do to stop that? Okay, that's an imperial policy that's relatively unlikely. What about mass deportation? What about, “All right, we are going to send immigrants back home pre-migration.” We're gonna look at some of these grants of citizenship and say, “Hey, you know what? Is this really an Englishman,” right? If you look at the example of Eastern Europe, you basically saw eastern European governments doing things that were considered completely illegitimate by the standards of the Warsaw Pact and that were desired by the population, like, letting them go to Western Europe.
As soon as that barrier breaks and it's clear that this is not going to bring the Soviet tanks in, and then when you basically define power and, like, nothing happens, you get this chain reaction where people are like, “Wow, we could do this, too.” Like, you can't really imagine a situation. In which, let's say Germany is, like, alright, “Actually, we are going to reverse these great migration strategies,” and France is like, “Oh, well, we're just gonna keep being liberals. Like, we're happy with that,” right?
It's basically something where actually what would happen is that populist elements in France would feel insanely empowered and elitist elements in France would basically be like, “Oh my God, we need to feed for our lives. There's still a lot of independent un-Americanized elites in these countries.” And there really is a world where everyone in France wakes up tomorrow and they're ruled by, like, Catholic army officers.
[00:30:30] Peter Slezkine: So, just for the final two minutes. Let's focus on Europe and the transatlantic relationship, specifically. So, if you were to come to Washington, meet with some of your influential friends and tell them what to do about the transatlantic relationship or NATO specifically, what would you advise 'em to do? Keep this, change it, disband it immediately, disband it in stages, what's the policy towards Europe and the transatlantic system as a whole?
[00:30:55] Curtis Yarvin: I would dismantle it as immediately and as completely as possible. I don't think it's essential for anything at all. And I think that, if you're basically looking to have a soft power impact, actually staging decreases that impact… you know, the thing is you need to actually be able to say credibly to France, to Germany, to England. We don't care how you govern yourselves.
[00:31:18] Peter Slezkine: And so, this entails closing down embassies, military bases, and getting outta NATO?
[00:31:25] Curtis Yarvin: The whole nine yards, the total restoration of local sovereignty
[00:31:29] Peter Slezkine: Do you think that it could be done in three weeks?
[00:31:32] Curtis Yarvin: I think it could be done in three weeks.
[00:31:34] Peter Slezkine: So, this is just a matter of, I don't know, sacrificing secret house, that once you do it, you can do it.
[00:31:44] Curtis Yarvin: Once you do it, you can do it. Once you can do it, it basically… when changes of this magnitude gather momentum at enormous speed. And so, you look at, sort of, the shocking awe of the early Trump administration. It built off, literally, a bit of momentum. You could actually sense. It was like, “Wow, the train is actually on the tracks, but it didn’t really have a plan or a direction.” And so, to some extent, Peter, there’s still a whole lot of energy being exercised in Washington. But it clearly doesn’t have the energy to pull down the temple as it is at present. But you saw a little bit of the shock and awe there. And it was pretty shocking, I’ll say.
[00:32:25] Peter Slezkine: So, if there was a renewed campaign of shock and awe, I’ll focus on Europe, a complete and total withdraw over your three-week Blitzkrieg period, what would be the risk? Do we lose anything by leading? Are they an asset, the Europeans, to the American empire, in some future contest with China, restraining Russia or, I don’t know, any other respect. What might we lose?
[00:32:51] Curtis Yarvin: Are they an asset? Like, what do we need Europe for?
[00:32:55] Peter Slezkine: Well, I'm asking you. I don't know. There is an assumption obviously embedded in the Washington system and the whole transatlantic system, that this is the foundation upon which the entire order rests.
[00:33:05] Curtis Yarvin: And I think it would depress me a little bit. For example, it's very easy to get a really good Bordeaux for 15 bucks. But a California cabernet, you're in the 30 buck range, right? If there was something that interrupted that form of trade, I think that would be a little bit of a downer. I'm trying to think of other things we need from Europe. They have ASML, which is, of course… but that's actually an American technology that they acquired and, for some reason, we let the Dutch buy it. Probably would want that back. The extreme ultraviolet, etching, that's a thing. But again, I think that was developed in San Diego. Europe. Europe. What else do we need? I mean, there's tourism that could probably continue in some way.
[00:33:48] Peter Slezkine: What about Western civilization? Does that resonate with you at all?
[00:33:53] Curtis Yarvin: We already got that, though.
[00:33:54] Peter Slezkine: So, Western civilization is something that can move from place to place. It's a cultural legacy and inheritance. Cause they're obviously members of this new right for whom a western civilization as a whole is a very appealing concept and then adds energy to their idea of bringing this whole thing together in a different non-liberal trash, but nonetheless as a block?
[00:33:53] Curtis Yarvin: Actually, if you get out of the picture. You know, sort of, to be really concrete, the differences between the Trump administration using its levers to try and say, “Support the French right,” versus using its levers to make the French left feel utterly unsupported. And in terms of what the US and…
[00:34:39] Peter Slezkine: Putting their finger. The Trump administration putting its finger on the scale in domestic politics in France and Germany in favor of the populist party, is less effective for the populist party than just withdrawing and taking your fingers off the scale
[00:34:51] Curtis Yarvin: Yes, I think it's in fact probably counterproductive. And whereas, taking your fingers off the scale completely, just, like, I mean, even the very minor mild hints of isolationism, for example in JD Vance's Munich speech, made the left feel panicky and weird. And that feeling of being panicky and weird, like you're in a battle, but you go from this mode of oh, I'm fighting to basically being, like, wow, I could just throw out my weapon and run, is, sort of, what you want. It’s, sort of, what you want these, you know, we have seen that, sort of, momentum in the opposite direction really can result in a very, very powerful drop in morale among losing elites.
Among ruling elites. I kind of remember this from 9/11. Actually, this was really a factor, in a way, the ruling elites after nine 11 because they'd been so involved in supporting, like, third world liberation movements, like, all over the world, really felt a sense of shame and guilt that was not really followed up on by their enemies because there's a way in which there's a straight line from Yasser Arafat or Arafat to Osama Bin Laden. And there's also a way there's a straight line from Harvard to Yasser Arafat. And so, nobody wanted that line to be drawn. And everyone's like, “Well, wow, if I waved an American flag, people might not notice.” And of course 0/11 gets modeled as rightest blowback when in a way it's really leftist blowback. And certainly if you read Osama's speeches, he doesn't sound right wing at all. He's constantly talking about global inequality and shit, climate change, you know.
And so, they were desperate to avoid that kind of backlash. And they mostly managed to avoid it. But they looked very, very weak and very defeated for a while. And you can see easily how, if you ramp up the shock and awe by 10 x systems, just crumble. They just crumble, because they basically… everybody starts to smell everybody else's fear and, like, sense that it's over all of these ways of feeling guilty come out. It's very hard to recover from that kind of avalanche, but it has to be delivered really very, very strongly.
So, you think that the U.S. can disentangle itself from the transatlantic relationship, tell most of the world that we don't care and survive as a system without crumbling because of just this feeling. Probably dismantling, managing the financial and trade system is a whole nother complicated thing. But again, it's our system and so it's actually quite possible to, sort of, manage that, into some, kind of, conclusion. As you mentioned earlier, all these financial structures and all these political structures really do go together and all date back to ‘45.
And I think that the main impact of shutting it down will basically be to very, very clearly show Americans that there's an alternative to living this way. Because that's what it showed the Soviets. It showed the Soviets that, basically, if the Marxist Lenin estate could die in Poland, it could also die in Moscow.
[00:38:24] Peter Slezkine: Moscow 1990s was not. Well, I was about to say, it was terribly fun. I think it actually was quite a bit [crosstalk 00:38:31].
[00:38:31] Curtis Yarvin: It was terrible for many, but it was also terrible.
[00:38:33] Peter Slezkine: So, let's end on that.
[00:38:36] Curtis Yarvin: Yes, let’s end on that.
[00:38:37] Peter Slezkine: Terribly fun and not so terrible.
[00:38:40] Curtis Yarvin: And also terrible. I don't want the future to be terrible, but I wouldn't mind if it was terribly funny.
[00:38:45] Peter Slezkine: Thanks for listening to the Trialogue Podcast. Make sure to subscribe to the show so you don’t miss out on any episodes. The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.