.png)
Steve Bannon Has Called His “Army” to Do Battle—No Matter Who Wins in November
Bannon, a self-declared general of global populists, wants to break the world order. And he’s tapped into something much bigger than Trumpism.
There are times when Washington still feels like what it used to be—a sleepy little Southern city. Generations of some of the most powerful people on earth have spent their days in DC griping that the city is a backwater. But Washington’s modest position in our constellation of great cities was always part of its charm, well-suited to our sprawling continental republic. American power has no center, or rather, it has centers all over—New York for finance, Houston for energy, the low-slung hubs of Menlo Park and Atherton, California, for tech, all the way back to the elite schools of New England, where our scribes and aristocrats are trained to manage the subsystems that keep the American project functioning. America, as many of the most powerful people in the world now fret, may suddenly feel like the Roman Empire entering its age of chaos and decline. But America has never had a Rome.
The DC area has grown immensely in population, wealth, and importance since the end of the Cold War. Its new status as the capital of a free-spending and unchallenged global hegemon made the region into one of the world’s richest metro areas. Washington now even boasts an infrastructure befitting its position as the administrative center of an empire, as the casual phrasing among policy elites now often puts it—one that depends as much on flows of money and information as it does on raw military force. A cluster of cables and data centers in northern Virginia now funnel a huge majority of global internet traffic through unassuming exurbs like Tyson’s Corner, where communications can be conveniently monitored by the experts at the National Security Administration. But this past July, Washington felt barely prepared to host an event like the 75th-anniversary summit of NATO.
The city was in the grip of two kinds of heat. The first was a dome of breezeless humidity and 100-degree days that made even a short walk torturous. The second was the heat that would soon burst forth to make that month into what may be remembered as the most dramatic and consequential in our contemporary political history. But the news of one president being nearly assassinated and another perhaps withdrawing from the race were just the most visible tremors of a geologic shift that was unsettling a system upheld by “the most successful alliance in history,” as NATO’s trim Norwegian secretary general described it.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, NATO’s leaders stood in almost perfect unison, saying the American-led apparatus that had given Washington its new wealth and importance was facing an existential risk. It was “the great battle for freedom,” President Joe Biden said. “A battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.” The theme of this year’s meeting was unity, in standing up to a challenge to America’s ability to set the rules governing security and stability around the world. But just a short, sweaty walk from the summit, a surreal “DC split screen,” as one Politico reporter described it, was unfolding at the Capital Hilton—where insurgents and critics of this system were speaking at the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon). The foreign policy buzzword was multipolarity—a dry-sounding term, but one that hints at an epochal shift away from a world where America and its allies are able to control practically all financial, military, and technological structures. Policymakers in Washington were looking to China and talking in terms approaching panic about how unprepared America was for a new era of great-power conflict. Ukrainian troops would soon be outnumbered five to one on parts of the Donbas front. As the leaders and delegations of 32 member nations began arriving at Andrews Air Force Base, dread was growing that half of America’s electorate was lining up behind an America-first movement that had embraced this multipolar vision as one that would benefit regular Americans at home, even if it saw us lose our overwhelming power abroad. War was already raging at the periphery of the empire. But the more pressing fear was that America might soon have a government run by people who wanted to unmake it from within. “Unity, resolve, purpose, all that good stuff,” one highly placed European delegate said to me in a private aside. “That’s what the show’s for. But obviously there is this gigantic question mark hanging over the whole thing about what’s going to happen in November.”
The night before the summit began, I had a drink at the Old Ebbitt Grill, in view of the White House, with a friend who works for a defense contractor. “This feels crazy,” she said, meaning the frenzied mood suffusing the town. “Everyone is so keyed up, it feels like they’re going to snap.” But this wasn’t just a vibe. It was a response to a very real chance that a shock could come to the whole world order. “I think people don’t fully appreciate that the institutions literally couldn’t function,” Ben Rhodes, who had been President Barack Obama’s most important adviser on foreign policy, told me later. He said the world is “two thirds of the way to a new world war.” But a shock could come even without that. “The G20, IMF, World Bank, NATO—it’s not that the US is the biggest stakeholder,” he went on. “They’re literally appendages of the United States and our interests and our system. When we act as a disruptor of our own empire, the system gets thrown completely out of whack.”
This is what populism, coming from left or right, really means. It’s when voters get to weigh in on subjects that politicians and policy experts like to keep outside the realm of public debate.
This may sound like simple democracy, but in practice it’s not how democracies within the core of the American system, from France to Japan to our own, actually work. The politicians, business titans, and heads of think tanks who set policies for these democracies tend to fear, with some fairness, that if voters get too much of a say on matters of statecraft, they’ll throw whole societies into chaos.
The first great disruption of this era came in 2016, the year of the Brexit vote, when UK prime minister David Cameron called a referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union, confident that the side representing integration, a global and interconnected future, progress itself, would easily win. He was hoping to settle an internal conflict in his Conservative Party between technocratic liberals like himself and a wing of traditionalist dons and nationalist backbenchers. Instead, he lost and stepped down.
Brexit brought stature to an ex-trader named Nigel Farage, who until then had been the gadfly leader of the fringe UK Independence Party, serving in a mostly symbolic role as a member of the European Parliament he wanted to abolish. “When I came here 17 years ago…you all laughed at me,” he told a jeering crowd of fellow EU parliamentarians after the vote. “You’re not laughing now, are you?”
Farage is close friends with Stephen K. Bannon—the single person who has done the most to throw these big systemic questions into the maelstrom of Western public debate. When I got to the NATO summit, Bannon had just headed off to serve a four-month federal prison sentence for contempt of Congress. But Bannon has turned his immensely influential War Room show—which has continued to broadcast after his incarceration, with guest hosts—into a cross between a daily troop muster and a policy training school, which he uses to tutor millions of “peasants,” as he likes to phrase his target demographic, on how this global power structure actually functions. He has made it both a mission and a business to illuminate the “link between capital markets and geopolitics,” as one show focus has it, and the workings of what he calls the “dollar empire.” Farage has said that without Bannon, whose Breitbart London was loudly supportive of the effort, “I’m not sure we would have had a Brexit.”
The Brexit vote was often portrayed in international media as the product of a single-minded backlash to an era of rapid immigration, which radically changed the ethnic makeup of cities across Britain and made London the world’s most diverse capital. Though true, this was only part of the picture. For many voters, and for Vote Leave campaigners like the Bentley-driving son of a baron Jacob Rees-Mogg, who presents more like a character out of a Thackeray novel than as a modern politician, resistance to mass immigration is only one facet of a worldview that runs in almost direct contravention to the one that has spurred the development of the American-led unipolar world.
The best outsider’s portrait of Bannon is a book by the ethnographer Benjamin Teitelbaum, called War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers. Teitelbaum spent years interviewing Bannon and his like-minded allies and associates, from the late Brazilian “far-right guru” Olavo de Carvalho, as The New York Times described him, to Aleksandr Dugin, the philosopher who was, in the years before Russia launched its shadow takeover of Crimea and parts of Eastern Ukraine, one of Russia’s most prominent public intellectuals, in posh hotel rooms and under-the-radar gatherings. He got unparalleled access to Bannon, and he was able to do so in part because he came to him not as a political reporter but as a scholar interested in an obscure school of thought known as Traditionalism.
Bannon’s WAR ROOM show is a cross between A DAILY TROOP MUSTER and A POLICY TRAINING SCHOOL, which he uses to TUTOR MILLIONS OF “PEASANTS,” as he likes to phrase his target demographic.
Capital-T Traditionalism is a mystical philosophy developed by a Frenchman named René Guénon, who converted to Islam and died in Cairo in 1951. His syncretic view held that modern ideologies like liberalism and communism had perverted the natural, sacred, timeless true order of human life. Many inheritors adapted and expanded Guénon’s philosophy, most notably the Italian Julius Evola, for whom the natural order of things meant men ruled over women, and whites and Aryans were above Black, Jewish, and Arab people. Evola used his theories to elaborate a meta-narrative of why nations and empires rise and fall—a small addition to a library of esoteric historiography that now makes for popular fodder in conservative circles. “Traditionalists aspire to be everything modernity is not,” Teitelbaum wrote. “To commune with what they believe are timeless, transcendent truths and lifestyles rather than to pursue ‘progress.’"
Bannon first encountered Traditionalism in his 20s, when he secretly practiced meditation and frequented mystical bookstores while serving on the Navy destroyer USS Paul F. Foster. Teitelbaum does not try to pin Bannon as a devotee, although some people on today’s far right certainly are. The word that best describes Bannon, in quite a few senses, is restless. He’s a compulsive reader, with an ideology that owes more to his own experience, and sense of loyalty to “legacy Americans,” as one Bannon employee put it to me, than to any one philosophy. But as he followed a path into the American elite—from a working-class kid who grew his hair long and lived in a tent while attending Virginia Tech to founding his own Beverly Hills investment firm—Bannon kept up his mystical studies and developed an outlook that shared much with a small-t traditionalist backlash against the financialized and tech-dominated world that was emerging. He saw the “aristocrats” around him as a deadened people, hopelessly disconnected from the blood and sweat and deep sense of shared, spiritual purpose that had made America into a great nation. When he arrived at Goldman Sachs to work in mergers and acquisitions, he discovered he was the only member of his cohort of hires who’d come from a blue-collar background or had served in the military. “The aristos don’t fight!” he told Teitelbaum. “They strictly don’t.”
Bannon developed relationships with Traditionalist-minded critics of the global system all over the world, from former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Some of them, like the openly Traditionalist philosopher Dugin, have been deeply antagonistic to America. Bannon and Dugin are hardly allies, even if Dugin welcomes the idea that a nationalist America might rise up alongside the “Solar” Russia he dreams of, borrowing an idea from Evola. But they share an intuitive sense of “the tradition,” as Bannon said when the two met in 2018. More importantly, Bannon and populists throughout the West came to welcome the vision, now Russia’s guiding policy, of a multipolar world order that will rise in place of the American-led order, which Bannon had come to believe was ravaging Americans.
“America isn’t an idea,” he told Dugin. “It is a country, it is a people, with roots, spirit, destiny,” he said. “And what you’re talking about, the liberalism and the globalism…real American people are the victims of that. We’re talking about the backbone of American society, the people who give the country its spirit—they’re not modernists. They’re not the ones blowing trillions of dollars trying to impose democracy on places that don’t want it. They’re not the ones trying to create a world without borders. They’re getting screwed in all this by an elite that doesn’t care about them and that isn’t them.”
In August 2019, Bannon released an interview with Farage in which he spoke to a mystery that hangs over much of the upheaval in the world order today—why it’s the right and not the traditional critics on the left who suddenly present the biggest threat to the global world order. “The reason is the immigration—they’re not prepared to take it on,” he said about left populist figures like Bernie Sanders and then UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. “We’re prepared to take it on. It’s a global revolt. It’s a zeitgeist.” To Bannon, and for pretty much everyone involved in his diffuse movement, resisting the empire is bound up in a project of preserving the spiritual character of a nation. And there was another thing he later talked to me about at great length that the left shies away from—in part because, in his view, it would mean throwing into question all hopes and dreams of building a stronger social safety net or slowing climate change.
This was the global dollar system. Worldwide use of the dollar to settle international transactions and of American bonds as a trusted means for the world’s central banks to store their currency reserves allows the American government to spend far beyond its revenues, secure in the knowledge that financial markets will act as a credit card with an almost infinite limit. This has allowed America to spend $31 trillion more than it has taken in since the end of the Cold War, because America’s military dominance and stable government serve as guarantees. This system, Bannon warned in a series of pamphlets titled “The End of the Dollar Empire” (electronically published in collaboration with his show’s main sponsor, the precious-metals broker Birch Gold), was falling apart—“not quickly, but inevitably.” If the world actually does abandon the dollar, America’s days as the world’s great military power will come to an abrupt end.
NATO summits are carefully staged public spectacles. Most of the details of military aid and long-term strategic plans had been negotiated via back channels long before the delegations and heads of state arrived in July. Security was tight to the point of absurdity. Hordes of reporters from all over the world had come to cover it, but almost everyone spent their time cut off from the real proceedings, taping spots and waiting around in a massive hall set up as a media center.
Before the official start of the conference, outgoing NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg gave a press conference with Kaja Kallas, the prime minister of Estonia, who has become a hero and an unlikely celebrity as she’s set her little Baltic nation to prepare itself for war. “Estonia leads by example,” Stoltenberg said, as one of only a handful of NATO members to devote more than 3 percent of its gross domestic product to military spending. The alliance’s agreed minimum target for defense spending is 2 percent of GDP, compared to 3 percent for the US, which has an economy almost as large as all of Europe’s. Until recently very few members actually met the 2 percent target—leading former president Donald Trump to repeatedly question why America spends so much to guarantee Europe’s security, and to threaten to let Russia do “whatever the hell they want” to countries that chose to rely on America. That comment sent shock waves around the world. “We are making real progress,” Stoltenberg later told the press, and throughout the summit he proudly cited the fact that now 23 of the 32 NATO member countries have met the minimum. Europe is bracing for war, and for a future in which America can no longer be trusted to guarantee its security.
The war in Ukraine has made painfully clear to the West that money alone doesn’t translate to the kind of raw power it takes to win a full-scale war between modern armies. As our economy became more and more financialized and our manufacturing moved to China, Western leaders began to wake up to a broader crisis of production—which in America has become apparent from the fact that China has 230 times the military shipbuilding capacity of the United States to the fact that the few US factories producing 155-mm artillery shells proved incapable of meeting Ukraine’s needs. Some policy experts here argue that we need to spend far more—6 percent of GDP, even—to rapidly rebuild our defense, guarantee our security to allies from South Korea to Eastern Europe, and prepare for a possible two-front war with Russia and China. The problem is that we really have no way to afford that kind of spending unless we restructure how we pay for benefits like Medicare and Social Security—or add further to our spiraling debt. Europe faces similar impossible decisions.
Long ago, Vance told me that the first political book he ever read was THE DEATH OF THE WEST, by Pat Buchanan, and that the book STILL SHAPES HIS THINKING.
After I’d checked in, I got a text asking if I’d like to visit the small Alexandria house that JD Vance calls home when he’s in Washington. When I got there he was drinking whiskey with a small circle of friends and aides as he relaxed on the couch in sweats and socks with yellow ducks on them. The meeting was off the record, but I am a journalist (one who has written about Vance) and so I could not help but whisper a prayer that Trump would happen to call and I’d be there to witness Vance being asked to join the ticket—a moment that, win or lose, would mark one of the most significant choices of a running mate in American history. “From a systemic perspective there are really only two things in politics that really mean something,” Jeremy Carl, who served as deputy assistant secretary of the interior in the Trump administration, told me later. “Elon [Musk] buying Twitter,” he said, meaning that the right now had an unfiltered channel, “and for someone to emerge who could make the MAGA into something bigger than the man Trump himself.” This is what a potential Vance pick would really represent.
Long ago, Vance told me that the first political book he ever read was The Death of the West, by Pat Buchanan, and that the book still shapes his thinking. I bought and read it after he told me this, and I was surprised to find that it presaged almost perfectly the populist upswelling at the time Vance had just entered the primary for his Ohio US Senate seat. It raised alarms about declining Western birth rates and globalization and argued that immigration was sapping America’s character and social cohesion. Western elites, Buchanan wrote in the introduction, “do not seem to care if the end of the West comes by depopulation, by a surrender of nationhood, or by drowning in waves of Third World immigration.”
Buchanan was dismissed as a “paleocon” when he ran for president in 1992 and 1996. But when Bannon took over as Trump’s campaign chief in 2016, he made Trump’s closing argument a very Buchananite message. The campaign’s final TV ad, released three days before the election, was laughed off by many observers as a bizarre two minutes. “The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election,” Trump said. The ad introduced an idea that’s now almost a cliché on the online right, which has shaped the worldview of younger conservatives like Vance: “You aren’t a citizen of a nation,” the line goes. “You’re an imperial subject.”
The next day I attended a so-called Defense Industry Forum, where the heads of some of the world’s biggest arms contractors sat on panels sharing their opinion that the West needed to quickly and drastically increase its purchases of war materials. Perhaps this was naive, but I had expected to hear people at least pay lip service to the idea that leaders might try to step back from a spiraling geostrategic competition that has us “just on the brink of World War III,” as a former counterterrorism official in the second George W. Bush administration had said to me, “and I’m not trying to be alarmist.”
There was something slightly surreal about hearing all this talk of uncompromising bloody resolve coming from the highest leaders of NATO: They overwhelmingly tend to be on the older side of middle age, svelte and nerdy-looking, with airs more of modernist architects or math professors than managers of war. Stoltenberg, a former Norwegian prime minister, was set to retire as secretary general soon after the summit. I watched as Biden extolled his service at an evening gala as he fastened the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Stoltenberg’s tall, thin shoulders. His replacement as the face of the alliance was to be the liberal former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, cast in much the same mold. “He definitely fits the role,” I heard Francis Farrell, a reporter for the Kyiv Independent, say before it became official that Rutte had the job. “A tall, spectacled Northern European who’s just very clean and on point.”
At the press security checkpoint, I ran into Keith Gessen, the Russian American writer, cofounder of the literary journal n+1, and the younger brother of M. Gessen, one of the world’s most influential critics of the Putin regime. I asked Keith what he was making of a gathering where the world’s most powerful people had agreed that “Russia remains the most serious, immediate, and long-term threat,” as Kallas, the Estonian PM, had put it to me. “I’m…not sure what I think,” he said. He told me he’d been down at the NATO Public Forum, a sideshow put on in collaboration with think tanks like the Atlantic Council—which was, despite the name, entirely closed to the public. He’d talked with some Ukrainians who expressed the grim view that few leaders were willing to admit to in public: “There’s a ‘ceasefire mood’ going around,” they’d said. Ukrainian leaders were now supposedly looking to hold negotiations in Saudi Arabia.
It wasn’t supposed to work out this way. When Biden gave his 2022 speech announcing the war in Ukraine as an epochal fight to save our world order, he had bragged that America had leveraged its power over world commerce in “a new kind of economic statecraft with the power to inflict damage that rivals military might.” He promised to “reduce the ruble to rubble,” and that Russia would see an economic catastrophe. But Russia’s economy has been growing faster than that of any country still in the American system. The sanctions ended up having the unintentionally seismic effect of showing that a major power could be kicked out of the dollar-based financial system without facing calamity.
This was possible, in theory, because the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve have for the last few decades played a unique role in the geopolitical power structure. It’s very complicated for a Japanese automaker selling cars in Mexico to go on the market and trade yen for pesos. So 58 percent of foreign transactions are settled in dollars, even when the trade has nothing to do with the United States. During the early post–World War II era, dollars were backed by gold, but that system fell apart in 1971, when France sent a ship to New York and demanded that the US hand over the physical gold representing its holdings. It turned out that America’s gold vaults at Fort Knox were actually too small, so President Richard Nixon arranged a deal with Saudi Arabia under which the kingdom agreed to exchange its oil solely in dollars—which didn’t exactly mean that the value of the dollar was pegged to oil, but it did establish a guarantee that foreign creditors and central banks would be able to exchange dollars for the commodity that powered the entire world economy. Dollars became America’s greatest “export.” This kept the value of our currency high and allowed the US government to debt-finance itself by selling Treasury bonds on international markets. But there was a cost: The strength of the dollar made goods and commodities produced in America’s “real” economy expensive and hurt its competition in the emerging global marketplace.
This is the system that obsesses Bannon. But it’s hardly just right-wingers who talk about it. “It benefits financial industry elites,” the center-left economist Yakov Feygin wrote in an influential paper in 2020, “who reap the rewards of intermediating capital inflows into US markets, while the cost of non-tradable services like tuition, healthcare, and real estate rises for everyone else.” Outside the US, governments of poorer countries often suppress local wages and run trade surpluses so they can stockpile dollars. All these trade imbalances feed returns, yet again, to global capital holders. “Across all countries,” Feygin wrote, “elites win.”
The dollar system created a perverse dual incentive for the American military that sustains the system. It lets us finance huge expenditures on hypercomplex weapons and allows us to toss off hundreds of billions of dollars to support Ukraine’s and Israel’s wars. “What about the weapons?” I would soon hear a kaffiyeh-wearing pro-Palestine delegate shout from the floor of the Democratic National Convention during Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech. There’s a growing realization in the US, across the entire political spectrum, that this system of geopolitical control now operates to some degree on autopilot. But it also allowed for wasteful spending and a hollowing out of the industrial base needed to produce simple war matériel like the artillery shells and air-defense munitions that the armed forces of Ukraine so desperately need. And the weaponization of the dollar failed spectacularly, because Russia still had lots of farms and factories capable of producing real goods, so being cut off from Western markets didn’t lead to mass shortages. A new danger emerged—that other powers would learn from the Russian example.
Keith and I joined a crowd of journalists in a windowless room where Stoltenberg and Zelenskyy were giving a quick talk. Stoltenberg repeated a vague phrase that had become a buzzword at the summit—that NATO was committed to an “irreversible” path for Ukraine to join the alliance, even if Russia was unlikely to accept a peace deal without a commitment for Ukraine to stay out. We sat with Simon Shuster, a Time senior correspondent who’d written a biography of Zelenskyy titled The Showman and who has reported uncomfortable facts about war fatigue and high-level corruption in Ukraine that many Western reporters have been reluctant to. “Are they going to shoot you when you walk in?” Keith joked. After the question period, Keith asked Shuster what he’d seen that we might not have picked up on. “Zelenskyy is very angry,” Shuster told us. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d had a fight back there right before they came onstage.” I asked him what an “irreversible” path to NATO membership actually meant. He shrugged. “Nothing is irreversible,” he said.
Keith, thinking of the American president, who was supposed to be the face of this whole event, gave a wry look. “Well,” he said, “nothing but time.”
I had a card in my pocket, which I ended up being able to trade. I was pretty sure that Vance would be Trump’s pick. My confidence had nothing to do with anything I’d learned from Vance himself—it came from years of increasing familiarity with the worldview of people like Bannon and of the young, weight-lifting-obsessed men who make up the infantry of the America-first movement. Trump may well have liked the idea of choosing a middle-of-the-road pro-internationalist Republican. But, as Bannon had once told me, Trump is “a fucking moderate” compared to the people who have made him into a symbol of systemic reckoning, and I had trouble imagining that they’d stand for someone like North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, who by all appearances would be confused by the idea that the extent of America’s financial and military power is sapping the vitality of the nation.
I spoke to Bannon during the intra-Republican battle over who would succeed Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House. Bannon argued that this, too, was a fight about the dollar system and the world order. “The whole civil war on Capitol Hill right now?” he said then. “That’s a real fight about money and power, about whether you can keep laying debt on the American people.”
I had never really thought of someone like Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, who comes off mostly as a MAGA culture warrior, as an anti-imperialist renegade. But to Bannon it was all linked. Even populist Democrats are “neoliberal neocons,” a phrase he loves to use to dismiss any politician who doesn’t show an interest in unknitting order. “To be serious you’ve got to be anti-imperial,” Bannon said dismissively of Chris Murphy, the senator from Connecticut I was then writing about, who actually shares many Traditionalist-sounding critiques of how our connected world has left a void of meaning in people’s lives. Bannon said, “He’s out there supporting a $100 billion supplemental for Israel and Ukraine that we absolutely can’t afford. Empire is the core mode of power. Unless you’re prepared to take on Wall Street and the banks,” which for Bannon would mean confronting the very basics of the financial system, “you’re never going to actually do anything. It’s all talk.”
“But people are waking up,” he’d told me. “Once you talk about how the system is financed, they are fucking furious. A working-class audience can understand something’s not right with the system, but they can’t put their finger on it.” Bannon, who calls his audience the “army of the awakened,” has made it his mission to spell it all out. “Populism is system versus anti-system, that’s the whole story. Republicans in all these super-red MAGA districts who don’t get it are gonna get attacked,” he said. “There’s going to be a revolution in this country, one way or another.”
There was a pivotal moment at the summit, long into the parade of pronouncements and panels that had started to blur. At one point I stumbled upon Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau giving a press conference to a dozen bleary-eyed reporters. But everyone was riveted and watching when Biden made his joint appearance with Zelenskyy. Biden, barely two weeks out from his debate debacle, gave his short intro speech. Then he turned and introduced Zelenskyy as “President Putin.”
I’d had a long and candid talk with a senior official from a European power who was so concerned about maintaining the carefully orchestrated presentation of the summit that he at first wouldn’t even let me quote him anonymously. But when Trump picked Vance shortly after the end of the summit, he called me to suss out what the pick would mean and in return he agreed to speak for this piece.
“I’ll tell you from my perspective,” he said about the “President Putin” moment. “Power is a retinue.”
“You’re the president of France, you know, and you have this retinue, and everybody who was important was there with their retinues. And when he introduced ‘President Putin,’ everyone gasped and was looking at each other. It was like—Now it’s all over.”
He sketched a picture of a global power structure that very much rests on a public faith that’s faltering. “The incredible thing about being at that summit,” he said, “is that on the inside you’re walking through these rooms where you see decades and decades of material about how they’ve basically manufactured consent.”
People like Bannon didn’t invent resistance to the American empire. “In the beginning there was this huge skepticism,” this European said, referring to 1949, when the NATO alliance began. “From very early on they set up these things called NATO information centers that were basically think tanks to explain and justify it.”
Organizations like the German Marshall Fund and the Atlantic Council have made it all more sophisticated, occupying a quasi-official role in defending the global order. Public perception is paramount, which is why Biden’s gaffe produced such horror.
“The actual point of NATO is not to talk about values and the global order,” the European said. “It’s about how to scimitar through Russian armies or do operations through the skies of the Baltic.” All that got hammered out in secret. “Then every year at these conclaves they do the political messaging.”
A thunderstorm finally broke the heat that had made setting foot outside so miserable. The sky took on an apocalyptic shade of green as I looked out over the White House. For a while I was trapped at the bar at the Hotel Washington as the storm finally erupted, and for a moment the crazed bustle that had taken over DC paused to let the rain pass.
When the weather settled I took a bike I’d borrowed from my hotel’s front desk and rode over to the Capital Hilton to meet a man named Sumantra Maitra, who’d just spoken at NatCon, where Vance had given the keynote, and people were spilling out to drink and party. We went over to the bar at P.J. Clarke’s to talk. Maitra, 38, was born in India, had been raised in New Zealand and England, and now lives in Richmond, where he has taken on a role as the director of research for the American Ideas Institute, which publishes American Conservative. The magazine is avowedly anti-global, but Maitra seems set to eventually join the long line of émigrés—from Henry Kissinger to Zbigniew Brzezinski to Zalmay Khalilzad—who have had a senior role in managing the American empire.
To me, he used his catchphrase, a “dormant NATO,” to describe America’s security focus shifting away from Europe as it recedes from the role as guarantor of world security. “We can have bilateral relations,” he said, and tell partners, “This is your responsibility now, because we’ve got other things to do.”
“I don’t really think the US is a smart empire,” he said. Our systems of power have grown too haphazardly—it was more by accident that America came out of World War II in a position of unparalleled strength than by any careful design. Even those cables and data centers in Virginia ended up there because a few early web entrepreneurs happened to find the location near Defense Department research centers convenient. “There are two things which you need for an empire,” Maitra said. “One, you need to have an imperial officer class, which you guys don’t have. It’s not like the British Empire. You don’t train people to be imperials.”
The second point echoed Bannon and Vance. “Empires actually benefit working-class people back in the core.” He argued that the British Empire, for all its faults—and Maitra was well aware of these—had effected what Herman Mark Schwartz, the economist, called the “transfer of real resources from the periphery” when defining what it truly means to be an empire. “You don’t get that benefit for someone who’s living in Ohio. The only people who are benefiting are the arms dealers, Boeing, Lockheed, and all that kind of stuff. That’s not a smart empire.”
Bannon sometimes jokes that he’s a Leninist, which may sound strange coming from someone who also says that Trump is barely right-wing enough to be on board with the project he’s advancing. But everything is scrambled these days. Maitra brought up Lenin too, and his idea that “the fundamental clash is not between capital and labor,” as Maitra put it. “It’s between national capital and international capital.” He joked that it would “ruin his career” if I ended up making him out as a Marxist. But “fundamentally Marx was right,” he said, in seeing the forces of international capital and military power as inextricably linked. “And in the US, the national capital lost,” he said, as trade deals like NAFTA and the broader world economic structure sapped the “real” productive economy that populists of both right and left today want to restore. “So it’s an economic problem.”
On the last day of the summit, Shuster, who had to leave early, gave me his pass to get into the so-called Public Forum. The European official had been cutting when he talked about what was going on in this wing of the convention center, saying that the nonofficial types “covered themselves in shame” as they tried to message out a vision of the global order that was completely positive and in which any step back from this vision—like a peace deal that would cede ground in Ukraine—would be a catastrophic blow. This had created a binary: Either you believed fully in the goodness of the system or you were willing to see it blow up.
I arranged to speak with Heather Conley, the head of the German Marshall Fund, a highly polished foreign affairs expert whom I expected to offer a series of boring talking points. She’d just finished a conversation with the Dutch admiral Rob Bauer, marking the final “hot wash” of the summit—an upbeat analysis of what had clearly been a strained few days. “In the West we have to understand it’s not a given,” he’d said. “Security and stability.”
Offstage, Conley gave a surprisingly candid picture. “I think what we’ve done a poor job of is,” she said, “we have lost the American people in this conversation. Our bargain was that we said, ‘We got this’—the Washington elites and foreign policy specialists. And for the last 20 years, it hasn’t felt like we’ve gotten it, right?”
She was ready to face a crisis of faith. “We failed,” she said. “And so now we have to have a very new conversation with the American people to describe what’s at stake, what it’s going to cost, and what happens if we are not successful.”
Conley was acutely aware that regular Americans were suddenly asking big questions about the system that shaped their world. And she wanted to convince them that Bannon’s project of unmaking the empire would have dire consequences. “What we are experiencing,” she said optimistically, “is the rebirth of the transatlanticists. And we have Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to thank for that.” Civilizational struggle is coming.
The bar of the Marriott attached to the convention center had somehow remained open to the public through all the extreme security measures, and that’s where I watched Biden’s final press conference of the summit. I streamed it on my laptop as I sat next to a middle-aged Black NCIS officer who sardonically asked the Russian bartender what he’d thought of the crowds that week. “I was taught that if you have nothing nice to say,” the bartender replied, “say nothing.” A pair of journalist friends I knew from covering the African operations of the Wagner Group, the Russian mercenary outfit, joined me, and we ended up talking to a 25-year-old Ukrainian named Yana Rudenko, who’d been trapped in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha when Russian troops captured it and had survived the massacre of hundreds of civilians before the Russians were forced to withdraw. Now she was living as a refugee in the Netherlands and was leading a crowdsourced effort to produce homemade drones. She’d won something called the NATO Youth Challenge, rewarding people who worked to support the alliance’s mission. She got emotional describing her appreciation for the way that America had, at least at first, unified and made a national effort to support Ukraine’s effort. But she struggled with how Western leaders talked of Ukraine as a signal that it was time to prepare their own countries for war. “Today it was bittersweet when they said, ‘We can learn from Ukraine,’ ” she said. “Fuck off—you’re going to learn from Ukraine, but we’re dying for that knowledge.” She apologized for swearing and said again how much she appreciated NATO’s support. But when you get down to it, the point of the anti-ship missiles and fighter-bombers and drone swarms was to wreck infrastructure and kill human beings. “They’re using us to change the standards,” she said. But it’s Ukrainians who are dying. “So in that sense I’m angry, because they are exploiting us.”
After the summit, I flew to Nashville for a very different sort of gathering to discuss the future of the world order. This was a private event I’d been invited to by the editors of IM-1776—a well-designed intellectual quarterly giving voice to the most nationalist currents of today’s American right. I first learned of the magazine when I heard a podcast interview with Samuel Finlay, an Oklahoman and Afghanistan vet who published a piece in one of its earliest issues called “Kayfabe in Kiev.” The title borrowed a term from professional wrestling used to describe the playacted dramas that promoters hype to sell tickets. Finlay suggested that American leaders were now using the same tactics to gin up support for a grand imperial project. He wrote that there was a “bloodlust running like a current” through liberals, “clearly stoked in them by the Managerial Class.”
In the interview, Finlay described a view that you hear commonly now on the right, and that clarifies the whole confusing picture of how a belief of rootedness and tradition fits with hatred of global capital, and in turn with resistance to the military-industrial complex. The latter two of these views run contrary to everything the American right has stood for since World War II. But now people like Finlay have come around to the same “awakening” that Bannon is trying to foment: that this system works against the interests of the kinds of people who actually believed in and served our military.
Today, Finlay said, “you’ve got this class of people who don’t think in terms of countries.” You’ll often hear in conservative circles that America’s “warrior class”—which on the right is often believed to be from ethnically Scotch Irish, disproportionately Southern families who treat military service as family heritage—have been the ones who bled to build our empire and ended up with NAFTA, fentanyl, and a coastal establishment that sees them and their values as backward and dangerous. Few high-level policymakers or elected officials I’ve spoken to seem to understand how quickly this kind of view has spread in America. But it’s at least part of the reason that, with the exception of the Marine Corps, every branch of the US military is now facing a recruitment shortage. Our military is made up of a diverse set of volunteers and attracts true-believing fighters from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds. But it’s struggling with a rapid drop in recruitment from its traditional base of young white men.
Finlay described going to a veterans meeting and seeing old men who stood up and talked about how they’d fought for God and country. “And I remember getting mad,” he said. “Because I know for a fact that nobody on the other side of their oath thinks in terms of countries, let alone God.”
“They know we believe in these things, and they’ll manipulate,” he said. “Southerners are the janissaries of the managerial class. And that is a fact. We love this thing like nobody else. And yet this thing hates us.”
The IM-1776 event in Nashville was a party and talk with Erik Prince, the Michigan industrial scion and former Navy SEAL who founded the private military company Blackwater, and who during the Iraq War became a figure symbolizing the entire cozy alignment of militarism and corporate power that shaped the second Bush administration. But Prince has spent the last few years telling a very different story about Blackwater’s role in Iraq and why he’d created the company: In this version, awash in fake dollars printed by the Fed, its leaders captured by the totalizing ideology that the whole world should be brought into the American system, the American military became too inefficient and unserious to fight a real war. “Whether it’s a military that can’t get it done in Iraq or Afghanistan,” he said that evening, “or how we’ve allowed dudes in flip-flops to shut down the Suez Canal.…” He let the thought sit for a minute.
And then Prince said that America needs to look—as I once quoted Vance saying in this magazine—to Andrew Jackson, “who was a great president, and by the way against central banking,” he said to a loud cheer. He said that the so-called spoils system Jackson had introduced to the federal civil service, allowing a president to freely hire allies and fire enemies, should come back, echoing what Trump has made very clear he intends to do in clearing house across the government. Then Prince brought it back to the dollar. The military had become “so large and unaccountable,” he said, “because of fiat currency, where Congress can just appropriate an extra trillion dollars a year, spending it on itself and on stupidity.… It’s like America on unlimited doughnuts.”
Mark Granza, the editor in chief of IM-1776, told me that 250 or so people had showed up to the brewery where the event was being held, on the periphery of the massive Bitcoin conference that had brought 20,000 people to town and where Trump himself was soon to give a speech. Prince is a star in these circles, but I was still shocked by how many people I knew who’d shown up—Special Forces veterans and backwoods preppers and a great number of big names from Twitter, some of whom aren’t right-wing. The event was organized in part by Nick Allen, who runs Sovereign House, the downtown Manhattan event space that is the semiofficial headquarters of the Dimes Square scene of edgy and often right-wing writers and artists. Allen introduced me to Prince as I walked in. He was noticeably fit and unassuming, of medium height and dressed casually in jeans and a checked button-down shirt with his sleeves rolled up to the elbow. We chatted for a while about how I’d just been arrested and deported from the Central African Republic under the belief that I was secretly working for an American military contractor (a different one); then I left Prince to the hovering cloud of fans that circled him the whole night. “Stay safe out there,” he told me. “It’s a hard job you’ve got.”
After the event, which was otherwise off the record, I smoked a cigarette with Granza, and he clarified that I could quote what had been said during the question-and-answer discussion Prince had with an IM-1776 editor.
The discussion kept circling back to the dollar. The IM-1776 editor noted that today America spends more on the debt’s interest than on the military. Prince had said we needed to take “whatever legal means necessary” to drastically cut the federal budget. “Do you think we’re at a point,” the editor asked, if drastic measures weren’t taken, that “things spin off the rails fiscally?”
“We are definitely approaching Weimar levels of debt,” Prince said. “And look, the dollar as the reserve currency of the world is underpinned by the illusion of US military hegemony. And when we fail continuously, our friends see that and our enemies really see that, so they’re probing and testing. And the more we overuse sanctions, the more people move away.”
A shift from the dollar as a global reserve currency would cause “wrenching shock in America,” he continued. But it would at least force America to bring its spending back in line with the actual capacity of our production. This would mean wrecking our Social Security system or our defense apparatus, or possibly both, but according to his view our spending is so disconnected from our material reality that it would still be “entirely a good thing.”
He talked at last about the obvious geopolitical issue at hand. “Look, Putin invading Ukraine,” he said, “I’m not condoning that.” But he echoed the view expressed often on the right—and even more often on the anti-imperialist left—in saying that as the NATO alliance expands ever closer to Russia’s borders, it might expect a backlash. “At this point,” he said, “NATO is not really an alliance. It’s a protectorate.”
He praised Trump—echoing credit that Stoltenberg has implicitly given the former president as well, though few in the alliance like to admit what provoked the shift—for pushing NATO members to increase their defense spending. But he still marveled at the fact that America accepts so much of the responsibility for guaranteeing the safety of countries like Germany. “It’s the third-wealthiest country in the world,” he said, “and they’re completely unserious about it. They couldn’t give two shits. I don’t know why we taxpayers need to fund that effort anymore.”
Germany, where Chancellor Olaf Scholz had only recently promised the country would launch a so-called Zeitenwende, rearming itself after more than a half century in which it had shied away from trying to act as a military power, has seen its industrial sector badly hurt by US sanctions on Russian gas exports and has no plans to massively cut spending on its welfare state. The country recently announced that, facing budgetary reality, it won’t even have money to help Ukraine’s war effort. And Germany is, by far, the biggest economy in Europe. Britain’s new Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, came into power promising to bring the UK’s military spending up to 2.5 percent of its GDP, which in the long scheme of history is a vanishingly small portion of a nation’s economy to spend on keeping itself safe. But to do this he will have to find money by raising taxes, threatening to drive London’s already-shrinking financial center to Frankfurt or Paris, or by cutting social services—and the entire basic social contract of European society is built on a promise of health services and a safety net of the kind America has never had.
Not long ago, Prince made headlines by suggesting that the West needs to colonize Africa again. At the Nashville event he circled back to this: Western governments, as he sees it, can barely manage to fund and maintain their own systems at this point. To the people at this gathering, whom he spoke to as savvy enough about the crisis he sees, the opportunity lies in building outside the unraveling system. “It’s not the US government sending people,” he said. “Eff that. It’s private cities’ initiatives, the disciplines that we take for granted here.” He suggested a “privateer” model of irregular warfare against Mexican cartels, and to punish China for exporting the precursor chemicals used to make the fentanyl that kills almost 70,000 Americans every year. “I think fire is an underutilized tool, and burning down all those facilities in China, we send a very good message,” he said. “If you send the US military, that’s going to escalate. But if you just put bounties, and actually pay them, say, on cartel guys, it’s going to go away.”
“You’ll see a lot of independent city-states, smaller pockets of capitalism and good governance, and people enjoying things more locally,” he said. There would be pockets of sophisticated, peaceful, desirable society in a world that grew increasingly chaotic. “The US Navy protecting the world’s shipping lanes,” he said, “that’s not going to continue. The future, sadly, is a lot less certain and a bit more violent.”
I stayed in Nashville through the end of the Bitcoin conference. I watched Trump address the VIPs in a packed hall, which erupted when he promised to fire Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler and promised to create a federal strategic reserve of Bitcoin. This spoke to a distrust of the dollar that is slowly creeping into the mainstream. Heading out of Trump’s talk, I encountered Ro Khanna, the Democratic congressman who represents a district covering most of Silicon Valley. Khanna has an ongoing love-hate buddy act with Bannon, but he shares a critique that often cuts across old left-right divisions. “Bannon has praised me a bunch of times,” he’d told me once. “He says, ‘Watch out for this guy, Ro Khanna, he’s taking our song lyrics.’ ”
“There was a naivete in the ’80s and ’90s that Western liberalism would be the end of history and end of conflict. There was this provincialism about Western liberalism that it was the only path,” he told me. “The policies of globalization have not worked.”
I left and went to the book reading for a writer named Joe Allen a few blocks from the convention center. Allen’s book, Dark Aeon, colors our new tech-dominated society as an infernal machine that has robbed us of, among other things, connection to natural life.
I was surprised to learn that he worked for Bannon’s War Room podcast as the show’s tech correspondent. We had a beer and I asked him how much Bannon shared his worldview. “Steve’s in prison right now,” he shrugged, “and I’m sure when he gets out, he’ll be very pissed about the things I’ve been saying, but what else is new?”
Allen brought up transhumanism, the idea that liberalism, tech, and capitalism have come together in a sort of unholy trinity to distort natural human reality in our new age. “The important connection between the pro-populist and anti-transhumanist in Steve’s mind,” Allen said, “is that Steve is sticking up for the legacy Americans. And legacy Americans are very much creatures of tradition and, by and large, creatures of traditional religion.”
“Steve is extraordinarily hostile to the excesses of capitalism,” he said. “To use a loaded term,” he continued, Bannon saw the entire complex of capital, empire, and tech as “unholy.” This may sound vague, and it may sound illogical, but if there is one thing to understand about the global populist movement, it’s that to many people involved in it, this feeling arises implicitly, without need for explanation. “We each found our way to it,” Bannon told Dugin during their 2018 meeting. “The tradition.”
The night before I left Nashville, I went to a bar alone to hear some country music. The house band closed with a cover of a song that is now probably the single most reliable crowd-pleaser in red-hued America. Donald Trump Jr. uses it as his walk-on music at rallies. It was “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue,” by Toby Keith, who died earlier this year from stomach cancer.
After 9/11, this song became the anthem for a slice of nationalist Americans who still wholeheartedly believed that the US military was a noble fighting force defending freedom and the American way of life. Now it’s a song conservatives often perform at karaoke bars with a tone of irony and wistfulness.
The money line comes in the second verse: “Justice will be served and the battle will rage,” it starts. “This big dog will bite when you rattle his cage.” The crowd got ready, and the cowboy-hatted singer began to slow down so they would be hungry for the payoff. “And you’ll be sorry that you messed with the U S of A…” he sang, waiting for the crowd to get to its feet and be ready to scream along. “’Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass”—everyone was yelling along now—“it’s the American way.”
Two young guys in town from rural Georgia shouted along with this line so loudly and proudly that the band’s microphones picked their voices up from the stage. They hugged and pumped their fists. One of them saw me observing them and gave me a wink and a sheepish shrug. Nobody actually believes in this stuff anymore, he seemed to admit. But it was still fun to get drunk on a Saturday night and pretend that kicking ass and dropping Hellfire missiles serves the cause of the American project.
I first reached out to Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s most influential foreign policy adviser, by email while I was at the NATO summit, hoping to talk without the filter of press minders and handlers. We both live in LA, so when I got home we met for coffee in Venice. He wore a faded black T-shirt and a Zabar’s baseball cap, and he seemed in some ways still exhausted from his years in government. He was very quick to say that the American system was indeed an “empire,” and he had clearly thought a great deal about what this meant.
“There’s two ways of looking at this,” he said. “I think the lazier way is that the US has hundreds of military installations all over the world and has territories that most Americans don’t even know we have.” But this was just the obvious part. “The more accurate version is that most of the system under which the world functions is US-created, -managed, -perpetuated. So everything from the global financial system to the network of security alliances” that we’d built around the world “were all built to plug into American wealth.”
“The dollar is the world’s currency,” he went on. “The US controls the global financial system, the US consistently weaponizes sanctions to try to compel countries to do what we want.” He seemed bemused by the idea that a system like this was anything other than an empire.
“People separate out our military footprint from our financial footprint,” he said. “But the reason that people have to trust that the dollar is a reliable currency is because it’s literally backed by the United States military, even though that’s not what we say the mission of the United States military is.”
We ended up talking for three and a half hours, about the tiring complexity of this system and the incredibly difficult problems he’d experienced in helping manage it. He’d helped negotiate the deal to normalize relations with Cuba, the Iran nuclear deal, and the Paris climate accords. He shares, in fact, many criticisms of this grand imperial system that are being raised now on the populist right.
“I guess where we differ,” he said, “it’s this effort to evolve the system while keeping it roughly in place.” He’d just published a piece in Foreign Affairs arguing for a new global arrangement that would acknowledge an emerging multipolar order while leaving in place America’s system of alliances and the basic plumbing. “I don’t believe in just pulling the plug.”
We talked a lot about why he’d moved to LA with his wife and two kids, away from the DC world where people thought constantly about this stuff, and why he had no desire to go back. It had put him in an impossible bind. “I think the innovation of the Bannon and Vance project,” he said, “is that it’s forced the left to become defenders of the very institutions they’re supposed to be skeptical of, like the CIA, like the broader intelligence community, like NATO.”
“The Social Democratic government in Germany or the Labour government in the UK,” he said, are now propping up structures that “your own constituencies are skeptical of. It’s an uncomfortable place to be.”
He talked about reading as a teenager about CIA-backed death squads in Latin America. “And now suddenly I’m in a party that is the vocal defender of the nobility of the US intelligence apparatus,” he said. “And it’s not just the geopolitical sense. It’s bankers too. We are now defending global capitalism and NATO and the entire enterprise of neoliberalism.”
He gave an anecdote from when he was reporting his book, titled After the Fall: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We’ve Made. “I remember I was sitting with this guy who was in the Hong Kong opposition—in a shopping mall—and I was feeling very sympathetic to him. And I remember realizing, Today in 2019, I have more in common with this guy than with most of America.”
“There’s something new about that,” he said. “When I was growing up, I would’ve just had massively more shared reference points with my family in Texas. That’s something that is a challenge to people, to liberals, because I like the idea that we’re all the same, we’re all equal. I’m just as curious about and value as much the humanity of some guy in Hong Kong as somebody in Texas. Isn’t that where this is all supposed to evolve?”
Global leaders, he said, need to reckon with a world that can never truly be flat, as the optimistic liberal phrasing once envisioned it would be. “Otherwise we’re ultimately going to lose everything—because then Bannon is going to capture that pushback,” he said. “We need to have a national identity that ties this all together,” he said. “And everyone agrees that there is a problem here. We all see it.”
The divide is between people who want to try to bring things down to a soft landing and people who want to blow it up. “The challenge,” he said, is that “nobody has shown me you can blow it up absent a war and a mass disruptive event.”
We paid for our coffee and I headed to my truck, but he lingered for a moment at the Venice Beach outlet of Superba Food and Bread, where it’s always possible to see celebrities having brunch. Of course no one recognized him. Americans have long enjoyed the luxury of not caring much about the people insulating us from war and chaos. No one asked for his autograph or to share a selfie. And no one would have guessed that just a few years ago, his job had been to help keep the whole thing from spinning out of control.
© 2024, Vanity Fair
Comments