Even as they realise it and try to struggle with its consequences, here is the truth that our rulers cannot afford to admit. Globalism was never a peace project, or a civilisation project, or even, in any serious sense, a prosperity project. It was a looting operation. It was devised by the monied interest as a means of stripping the Western nations of their industrial depth while preserving, for as long as possible, the outward appearance of wealth and power. Montesquieu said of despotism that it cuts down the tree to get at the fruit. That is exactly what has happened. The fruit was cheap labour, easy credit, asset bubbles, consultant salaries, and the fantasy of a world economy arranged for the convenience of finance capital. The tree was the industrial civilisation that had made the West formidable in the first place. The fruit has been consumed. The tree is now visibly dying.

You can see this in Britain. We are still encouraged to think of ourselves as a great power. We have a seat here, a summit there, the occasional speech by some well-connected mediocrity at a dispatch box, and enough military pageantry to amuse old women and foreigners. But these are relics. Great powers make things. Great powers can absorb shocks. Great powers can fight a serious war without discovering, halfway through, that they have outsourced their steel, their energy resilience, their propellant inputs, and half the components needed for their own guided weapons. Britain is not such a power. It ceased to be one when the monied interest took command of its policy and began, a century ago, to prefer commissions and capital exports to the dirty but magnificent business of making things.

The latest evidence, if anyone still needs evidence, comes from the American war machine. Unlike the other writers at the Libertarian Alliance, I have largely ignored the Middle East. This is not because I dissent from the general view of my colleagues, but because it has not so far touched on matters that actively interest me. Now it does. I have just read this article about the US-Israeli war on Iran. I leave aside, for the moment, the moral obscenity of what the Americans and Israelis have done and would like to continue doing. What matters here is what the first few weeks of fighting are said to have revealed.

In the first sixteen days, 11,294 munitions were used at a direct cost of $26 billion. In the first ninety-six hours alone, 5,197 munitions were launched across thirty-five categories. Patriot interceptors were fired in such quantity that four days of war consumed roughly eighteen months of production. THAAD stocks were chewed through at a similar rate. Israeli Arrow reserves reportedly fell by more than half, with rebuilding times measured not in days or weeks but in years. More than 500 Tomahawks were fired in sixteen days, and replenishing them could take as long as fifty-three months. That is more than four years. That is not endurance. That is arson committed against your own inventory.

This is what globalism does. It gives you pretty brochures. It gives you promotional videos of missiles rising out of launch tubes in cinematic slow motion. It gives you panels full of smooth men in dark suits discussing “force projection,” “integrated deterrence,” and “full-spectrum dominance.” What it does not give you is the ability to replace what you fire. It does not give you ammonium perchlorate in abundance. It does not give you gallium, dysprosium, or neodymium processing capacity under your own secure control. It does not give you an industrial system capable of surging under stress. It gives you a procurement state and a consulting industry.

That is because globalism was never intended to preserve industrial civilisation. It was intended to financialise it. The productive core of the Western nations was to be hollowed out and replaced with debt, services, paper assets, and moral preening. The old industrial middle and working classes were to be broken, partly because they were no longer needed in the model, and partly because they were politically troublesome. Men who know how to make turbines or cut steel or maintain machine tools are not ideal subjects of a managerial regime. They tend to have some notion of cause and effect. They are apt to laugh at buzzwords. They understand that wishing does not make a thing work. Much better, from the point of view of the monied interest, to replace them with a mixture of clerks, compliance administrators, delivery drivers, HR women, public sector drones, and welfare clients. These people may still be expensive to maintain. But they are much easier to manage.

The usual defence of this settlement is that the West moved “up the value chain.” Manufacturing went East, but design, finance, branding, and high-end services stayed here. This was supposed to be clever. It was also supposed to be inevitable. Anyone who objected was dismissed as a crank, as one of those disreputable creatures who still imagine that nations should make things and feed themselves and retain some capacity for independent action. Yet what the Iran figures show, if they are even broadly correct, is that the supposedly higher form of power is brittle. The Americans can still design weapons that look impressive. They can still spend vast sums. What they cannot do is sustain the pace of expenditure when modern war starts burning through expensive systems faster than they can be reproduced. Money, in other words, has met a fact. And facts are merciless.

The article makes this point repeatedly. Rebuilding just the munitions used in the first four days would require specific quantities of copper, neodymium, gallium, tantalum, dysprosium, and rocket propellant inputs. But these are not simply lying about in democratic abundance waiting for a Pentagon accountant to sign the form. The supply chains are bottlenecked, and many are dominated by China. Washington, we are told, has a single domestic source for ammonium perchlorate. China controls 98 percent of gallium production, 90 percent of neodymium processing, and 99 percent of dysprosium. This means the Americans have contrived an arrangement in which their military supremacy depends, in part, on supply chains they do not control and on an industrial geography that lies outside the Atlantic world. That is not a mark of genius. It is the geopolitical equivalent of selling your roof to buy a patio umbrella.

Britain has followed the same road, only further and with more self-satisfaction. We have not merely allowed our industrial base to decline. We have often treated its destruction as a mark of enlightenment. The old steelworks closed, and this was called efficiency. The machine shops vanished, and this was called modernisation. Energy was made dearer by policy, and this was called virtue. Whole regions were stripped of their productive core and left to rot under a rain of grants, antidepressants, and diversity training, and this was called transition. You might almost admire the impudence if the results were not so vile.

This is why I find the free-trade purists exhausting. It is not because the abstract case for free trade is false. It is not. If England makes cloth better and Portugal makes wine better, both gain by specialising and exchanging. Ricardo remains right within his assumptions. But the assumptions do not sit intact inside a world dominated by finance capital, cartelised energy, manipulated money, strategic dependency, and political classes that despise their own people. In such a world, “free trade” easily becomes the slogan by which one class dismantles the material independence of whole nations while congratulating itself on the lower price of imported knickers.

I am not arguing for a siege economy. I am not saying that Britain should turn itself into a museum of blast furnaces. I am saying something simpler and more serious. Britain should not be involved in unending crusades to make the world safe for finance capital. It should not send money, weapons, and moral approval into every conflict where the interests of London and New York require another front in the war for global management. It should stop pretending that every foreign entanglement is a matter of democracy or “the rules-based order.” These entanglements are always a matter of someone else’s balance sheet. The monied interests and their friends in the military-industrial complex do not want peace. Peace is bad for margins. Peace does not justify emergency powers, censorship, surveillance, and procurement scams. Peace does not let them posture as the guardians of civilisation while they invoice the taxpayer.

At the same time, rejecting these crusades does not mean embracing national helplessness. Britain needs a functioning industrial base for the wellbeing of its people and for the capacity to defend itself. These are connected. A country that can make little is a country that can do little. A country that imports the essentials of advanced industry will, sooner or later, import the terms on which it lives. And a people that no longer work in productive, technically demanding trades will lose more than wages. They will lose habits of mind. They will lose the kind of practical rationality that comes from living in a world where causes have effects and where reality cannot be bullied by committee.

That, in fact, may be the most poisonous effect of globalism. It has not just hollowed out the material base of Western supremacy. It has hollowed out the mental and moral basis of self-government. A nation of engineers, machinists, chemists, dockers, fitters, and skilled foremen is not necessarily wise, but it is at least anchored in the impersonal world of consequences. A nation of compliance administrators, grant-eaters, lifestyle consultants, social workers, and itemised service providers is anchored in nothing except procedure and appetite. One knows how to repair a generator. The other writes a policy framework about resilience and then takes the train home, if the train happens to be running.

This is where the monied interest has been especially clever. It has managed to turn its own vandalism into a moral system. We are told that heavy industry is dirty, national ambition is dangerous, cheap energy is irresponsible, strategic stockpiles are wasteful, and any preference for making things at home is primitive or xenophobic. Meanwhile, the same people who say this are quite content to rely on Chinese rare earth processing, Gulf energy, and a global shipping system protected by force. They do not object to power. They object only to power that is not theirs.

And now the bill is arriving. The Americans are discovering that technological superiority without industrial endurance is theatre. The British should take note. We do not need to imitate Washington’s delusions in order to learn from their embarrassment. We are already more fragile than they are. If they can burn through years of production in days, what would happen to us in a serious crisis? The answer, I suspect, is that we would be treated to a sequence of solemn speeches about resilience while waiting for someone else to save us.

No nation worth the name should accept that. Britain does not need global empire. It does not need democratic crusades. It does not need another generation of sanctimonious failures flying about the world to make expensive messes in the name of moral abstractions. It does need secure energy, industrial depth, technical education, and the capacity to produce or rapidly scale the handful of strategic goods without which sovereignty becomes a joke. That means treating industry not as a regrettable residue of a dirtier age, but as the foundation of national life. It means favouring patient capital over speculative churn. It means ending the policy war against energy abundance. It means cutting through the regulatory ivy that now strangles every attempt to build anything real. And it means understanding that an industrial base is not merely a line in the national accounts. It is a civilisation habit.

The old Western ruling classes once understood this, even if dimly. Their successors do not. The monied interest looked at the industrial tree and saw only the fruit it could seize immediately. I say again that it cut down the tree to get at the fruit. We are now living among the stumps. The fruit has already been eaten. The illusion of Western omnipotence is beginning to rot. If Britain wants any kind of future beyond managed decline, it must stop listening to the men who sold the axe as progress. It must stop fighting for their global fantasies. And it must begin, slowly and seriously, to plant again.

The facts, after all, are stubborn even when our rulers are not. And one of the facts now pressing upon the world is that military power, like national power more generally, rests not on spreadsheets or financial engineering, but on industry. Once that is gone, the rest is performance. Britain has been living on performance for far too long.

The Americans may still be able to afford the scenery. We cannot.

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