The UK government appears to be successfully putting down the protests in the UK, making no concession or even acknowledgement of the protestors’ grievances.

People on the Right are very smug about these things when they fail — they love to jump into the Twitter replies and register their satisfaction at being proven right once again.

It’s obviously true that the UK is tyrannical and doesn’t care what its people think in principle — but there are people who have been able to make the government care what they think.

The prevailing attitude toward politics on the Right is like a Melanesian who realizes that his bamboo airstrip and control tower are failing to summon the Cargo — so he knocks it all over & congratulates himself for being too smart to believe in airplanes.

Politics doesn’t work the way you were taught in social studies, but it works — and our side should get a lot more curious about how it works.

In this episode, we review David Kilcullen’s latest book, The Dragons and the Snakes, which addresses how the empire’s enemies have learned to fight it and win.

In the first section, Kilcullen identifies the evolutionary process that has produced the surviving configuration of America’s enemies after 20 years of the GWOT. He discusses how these actors have been shaped by the present technological and cultural terrain — and especially how they have learned to draw power from global-scale economic and cultural power flows without making themselves a global-scale military threat that justifies American intervention.

In the second section, he describes the process of vertical escalation, in which a weaker actor can calibrate its aggressive action to stay below a stronger enemy’s threshold of detection, attribution, or response — especially as practiced by Putin’s Russia.

The Russians’ conventional military has been gutted by the shock therapy and corruption of the post-Soviet collapse, but they still have nuclear weapons and a very effective intelligence service — so they have learned to calibrate their conflict with the West to make best use of their peer capabilities, while avoiding a conventional war.

He also describes how both the Russians and Americans use deniable methods (“election interference”, color revolutions, migrant warfare, etc.) to sow confusion and exploit internal divisions in their enemies’ political systems.

Next, Kilcullen outlines the Chinese adoption of horizontal escalation as described in Unrestricted Warfare — in which a weaker actor fights in domains that their stronger opponent does not recognize as military, and may not even perceive as hostile.

This method of warfare is also described as a “conceptual envelopment”, because the weaker opponent holds the stronger enemy to a standoff in the conventional military domain (in China’s case, building credible radars, AA systems, hypersonics, etc. in the South China Sea), but they conduct their real advance on the conceptual “flank” — in this case, buying strategically significant real estate and politicians, replacing Western manufacturing, encouraging mass third-world migration, and dumping fentanyl in the American heartland.

As with a conventional flanking maneuver, the goal is to roll the enemy up from the rear, and only push through the front when the battle is effectively over.

Kilcullen then suggests some possible ways that the empire might arrest or reverse its decline — but a radical renegotiation of American hegemony looks all but inevitable. We discuss what that might mean for us as ordinary citizens, and as targets of the regime’s hostility.

The good news is that the most important preparation for what is coming is having useful friends you can trust — and making them is 100% legal. Join us at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

* On last night’s full-group call, we discussed raising children in volatile conditions — specifically, how to negotiate their relationship with technology, with families who don’t share our values, and with hate facts.

* Next Tuesday night, we will have a member’s only Q&A with Auron MacIntyre on his book, The Total State.

* Shaolin AI has successfully wrapped their second 6-month machine learning boot camp cohort. Next class begins in September. EXIT guys get a steep discount, so if you’re a member and you’re considering reskilling, reach out.

* I will be speaking at Nowhere Summit next month in Ecuador, hosted by our friends Ben Wilson (How to Take Over the World) and Alex Petkas (Cost of Glory).

* Cocktail hour invites for Salt Lake City (8/16), Houston (9/13), and Washington, DC (10/11) available for paying subscribers (no paywall on this post — you can access the RSVP links here). EXIT cocktail hours are a great opportunity to meet your local guys, and see if the full group is right for you.

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58: Why the UK Protests Aren't Working

EXIT Podcast (private feed for joe.substack@hootman.org)