In America’s late-imperial phase, conjured realities are preferable to reality. The creak of history’s wheel has become unbearable such that forlorn attempts to silence it are the only remaining resort.
To make the case that those who purport to lead the Western post-democracies lie routinely about what they are doing and why they are doing it will not help you win friends and influence people.
That they are incessantly deceitful has been too obvious to too many people for too long. Never forget your Dale Carnegie and the imperative always to say something interesting.
Lately something interesting in this line has occurred to me.
It came to me last autumn — on Oct. 25 to be precise. I was reading TheNew York Post, as one must to keep one’s head clear in our complicated world, and came upon an opinion piece headlined “Vlad’s war of words.” It was the subhead that drew me in: “Don’t fall for his lies: Russia isn’t winning.”
How could I not read on? By last Oct. 25 it was sky-is-blue plain that Ukraine’s Nazi-infested military was losing its war with Russia and the Nazi-infested regime in Kiev was caught in a spiral of desperation. “Vlad” was hardly the only one to observe — as he did at the time — that Russia’s path to victory was clear.
Some snippets from the column that appeared under the byline of one Jack Keane:
“They’ve taken no major Ukrainian cities since 2022. They are fighting for fields and small towns at extravagant losses they can’t sustain.
… Putin is only still in the game because of Chinese, North Korean and Iranian support.
… Ukrainian drones have denied the Russians the ability to use tanks and mechanized vehicles at scale.
… Most Russian soldiers die in droves to advance just meters at a time.
… Leaked Russian government documents indicate that [the] country suffered on average 35,000 casualties per month from January–September 2025….”
And after 21 column inches of this material, the inevitable punchline:
“The path forward should include not only economic pressure but also increased military support for Ukraine. Force Putin to stop this war on our terms, not his.”
I will let these passages speak for themselves except to say when a writer insists that the vanquished must dictate the terms of cessation to the victor there would appear to be a troubled relationship with reality.
This piece was not the work of lightweights, light of weight as it may be. Jack Keane is a retired four-star general and now chairs the Institute for the Study of War, a regularly quoted think tank staffed with middling hawks well-connected in the active and retired military — David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal, et al.
To locate the institute within the Beltway constellation, it was founded by Kimberly Kagan, sister-in-law of noted neocon Robert Kagan. It does not, per usual in these kinds of cases, reveal the sources of its funding.
Why would people so situated within the policy cliques traffic not only in bold-face lies but bold-face lies anyone paying attention knows are bold-face lies and that they, the people who tell the bold-face lies, know paying-attention people know are bold-face lies?
The mind goes back, as it often does these days, to that remark Hannah Arendt made in a conversation with a French free-speech activist not long before her death, in December 1975. “If everybody always lies to you,” she said to Roger Errera, “the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”
Fifty-one years on, it is time to take Arendt’s thought a step further. In our era of nobody believing anything — nobody who pays attention, I mean, as Arendt also meant — to whom are our liars lying and what is the point of their lies?
And here is what I find interesting. In America’s late-imperial phase, conjured realities are preferable to reality. The creak of history’s wheel, I mean to say, has become unbearable such that forlorn attempts to silence it are the only remaining resort.
In the resulting empire of lies it no longer makes any difference that no one believes anything. It does not matter, in other words, that America makes its way in the world on the basis of endless deceits. The only ones who to have to believe any of the lies are those telling them, and among these people pretending to believe them is sufficient.
Maintaining Meta-Reality
Trump giving Keane the Presidential Medal of Freedom the White House, March 10, 2020. (White House, Andrea Hanks)
I do not mean to lead readers into a thicket of convoluted logic, but we live in a time of densely convoluted logic. When Jack Keane writes an opinion piece of start-to-finish lies, do you think he gives any thought to the readers of TheNew York Post? Of course not.
The only readers that matter to Jack Keane are his fellow ideologues, no one else. He is merely doing his bit to maintain the meta-reality within which the imperium can continue to conduct its illogical business as if it were the logical thing to do.
I have wondered for several years, since it was clear Russia was on the way to victory in Ukraine, how all the Jack Keanes among us would manage defeat in a war they were simply unprepared ever to lose. Now it is clear: They have retreated into a sort of collective psychosis. And in this state they subsist, all by themselves, on fables.
Dominic Lawson, who descends from a line of prominent, minorly titled Tories, published a piece in the Jack Keane line in The Sunday Times this past weekend. “Recent events have confounded the conventional view that Russia is ‘winning,” Lawson writes. And then comes, among much else, the usual gathering of nonsensical statistics — “… last year Russia is estimated to have taken nearly half a million casualties,” etc.
I like the passive voice, always so comforting because so predictable. Estimated by whom?
And then a crop of bold, casually tossed-off assertions that do not survive even cursory consideration: “The poisoner in the Kremlin has no intention of agreeing to peace terms readily available.” Or this:
“Putin’s aims are revanchist, involving wars of annexation, rather than defence. Though, naturally, as in his preposterous claim to be “de–Nazifying” Ukraine, these are and will be expressed as being “in defence of the motherland.”
I love the “preposterous” and the coy quotation marks in the above passage.
Nothing but defeat. Yes, let Ukraine march on to triumph.
Fable Elevated to Thesis
Council on Foreign Relations headquarters in New York. (Gryffindor, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
There are reams of this stuff around just now, more all the time, it seems. And it is not enough to tag it clunky propaganda and leave it at that: This meta-reality is congealing before our eyes into a view of the world, a new geopolitical take, that we can accept if we wish, although it does not matter one way or the other if we do or do not.
Foreign Affairs, house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations, published a piece to this effect in its March–April edition under the title, “The Multipolar Delusion.”
In it, C. Raja Mohan, a professor of big think at a privately funded university in the environs of New Delhi, makes the case that the world as more or less universally understood since Germans dismantled the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Cold War drew to a close was a phantom, a collective misapprehension:
“The Trump administration has embarked on a forceful reassertion of American power by imposing onerous tariffs, intervening in other countries, and brokering peace negotiations and commercial dealmaking across the world. China and Russia have resisted Washington on select issues, but they have been unable to mount a comprehensive challenge to the United States’ effort to restructure global rules….
The reality is that the world is still unipolar. The illusions of multipolarity have not created a more balanced international arrangement. Instead, they have done the opposite: they have empowered the United States to shed previous constraints and project its power even more aggressively. No other power or bloc has been able to mount a credible challenge or work collectively to counter U.S. power. But unlike in the prior period of unipolarity that emerged at the end of the Cold War, the United States is now exercising unilateral power shorn of responsibilities.”
Mohan’s point about the extravagant irresponsibility of the Trump regime can hardly land more squarely. But his argument is otherwise an ahistorical mess.
Mohan ignores the late-imperial desperation that has unmistakably come to drive the policy cliques in Washington beginning in 2001, I would say, and culminating in the Trump regime’s incoherence. He seems not able to understand the long durée of our moment — the gradual process by which one world order will replace another.
The Mohan piece is worth reading. It is fable elevated to thesis. Simplicius makes a similar point, absent my term, in a well-done analysis of Mohan published over the weekend in his Substack newsletter under the headline “Multipolarity a ‘Delusion’ in Face of Trump’s New Imperialism?”
Simplicius’ answer, and mine: The delusion lies with those, Mohan exemplary of them, who take the doings of the Trump regime as anything more than an edifice built on lies and illusions. It represents an inherently unstable interim, not an era.
With Trump’s “massive armada” gathered in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf in apparent preparation for another attack on Iran, Vice President J.D. Vance has been speaking around the country to warn that Iran presents a direct threat to U.S. national security.
Going one better, Steve Witkoff, the New York landlord serving as Trump’s envoy, asserted over the weekend that the Islamic Republic is “probably a week away” from having what it needs to build a nuclear bomb.
This stuff is so unrooted in reality not even the Israeli press has taken Witkoff seriously. But reality, or being taken seriously, are, once again, of no importance to this regime.
Witkoff and Vance can lie, nobody will believe them, and they will know that nobody believes them, but it will not matter. They alone will believe themselves, or pretend to believe themselves, and the meta-reality of our time will continue to elaborate.
My mind goes to the historians as I consider this phenomenon. Will the fables by which so many events unfold in the third decade of the 21st century survive their scrutiny? Will the empire of lies go into the texts of the future as if it were real?
TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them reach a moment that is difficult and full of promise all at once. On one hand, we assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media’s mounting derelictions. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. I am committed to independent journalism for the duration: I see no other future for American media. But the path grows steeper, and as it does I need your help. This grows urgent now. In recognition of the commitment to independent journalism, please subscribe to The Floutist, or via my Patreon account.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
PATRICK LAWRENCE: To Whom Are Our Liars Lying & What Is the Point of Their Lies?
In America’s late-imperial phase, conjured realities are preferable to reality. The creak of history’s wheel has become unbearable such that forlorn attempts to silence it are the only remaining resort.
To make the case that those who purport to lead the Western post-democracies lie routinely about what they are doing and why they are doing it will not help you win friends and influence people.
That they are incessantly deceitful has been too obvious to too many people for too long. Never forget your Dale Carnegie and the imperative always to say something interesting.
Lately something interesting in this line has occurred to me.
It came to me last autumn — on Oct. 25 to be precise. I was reading The New York Post, as one must to keep one’s head clear in our complicated world, and came upon an opinion piece headlined “Vlad’s war of words.” It was the subhead that drew me in: “Don’t fall for his lies: Russia isn’t winning.”
How could I not read on? By last Oct. 25 it was sky-is-blue plain that Ukraine’s Nazi-infested military was losing its war with Russia and the Nazi-infested regime in Kiev was caught in a spiral of desperation. “Vlad” was hardly the only one to observe — as he did at the time — that Russia’s path to victory was clear.
Some snippets from the column that appeared under the byline of one Jack Keane:
And after 21 column inches of this material, the inevitable punchline:
I will let these passages speak for themselves except to say when a writer insists that the vanquished must dictate the terms of cessation to the victor there would appear to be a troubled relationship with reality.
This piece was not the work of lightweights, light of weight as it may be. Jack Keane is a retired four-star general and now chairs the Institute for the Study of War, a regularly quoted think tank staffed with middling hawks well-connected in the active and retired military — David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal, et al.
To locate the institute within the Beltway constellation, it was founded by Kimberly Kagan, sister-in-law of noted neocon Robert Kagan. It does not, per usual in these kinds of cases, reveal the sources of its funding.
Why would people so situated within the policy cliques traffic not only in bold-face lies but bold-face lies anyone paying attention knows are bold-face lies and that they, the people who tell the bold-face lies, know paying-attention people know are bold-face lies?
The mind goes back, as it often does these days, to that remark Hannah Arendt made in a conversation with a French free-speech activist not long before her death, in December 1975. “If everybody always lies to you,” she said to Roger Errera, “the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”
Fifty-one years on, it is time to take Arendt’s thought a step further. In our era of nobody believing anything — nobody who pays attention, I mean, as Arendt also meant — to whom are our liars lying and what is the point of their lies?
And here is what I find interesting. In America’s late-imperial phase, conjured realities are preferable to reality. The creak of history’s wheel, I mean to say, has become unbearable such that forlorn attempts to silence it are the only remaining resort.
In the resulting empire of lies it no longer makes any difference that no one believes anything. It does not matter, in other words, that America makes its way in the world on the basis of endless deceits. The only ones who to have to believe any of the lies are those telling them, and among these people pretending to believe them is sufficient.
Maintaining Meta-Reality
I do not mean to lead readers into a thicket of convoluted logic, but we live in a time of densely convoluted logic. When Jack Keane writes an opinion piece of start-to-finish lies, do you think he gives any thought to the readers of The New York Post? Of course not.
The only readers that matter to Jack Keane are his fellow ideologues, no one else. He is merely doing his bit to maintain the meta-reality within which the imperium can continue to conduct its illogical business as if it were the logical thing to do.
I have wondered for several years, since it was clear Russia was on the way to victory in Ukraine, how all the Jack Keanes among us would manage defeat in a war they were simply unprepared ever to lose. Now it is clear: They have retreated into a sort of collective psychosis. And in this state they subsist, all by themselves, on fables.
Dominic Lawson, who descends from a line of prominent, minorly titled Tories, published a piece in the Jack Keane line in The Sunday Times this past weekend. “Recent events have confounded the conventional view that Russia is ‘winning,” Lawson writes. And then comes, among much else, the usual gathering of nonsensical statistics — “… last year Russia is estimated to have taken nearly half a million casualties,” etc.
I like the passive voice, always so comforting because so predictable. Estimated by whom?
And then a crop of bold, casually tossed-off assertions that do not survive even cursory consideration: “The poisoner in the Kremlin has no intention of agreeing to peace terms readily available.” Or this:
I love the “preposterous” and the coy quotation marks in the above passage.
“There is only one way Putin will leave Ukraine” is the head atop this piece. And Lawson’s conclusion, right up in the subhead: “Nothing but defeat will stop it.”
Nothing but defeat. Yes, let Ukraine march on to triumph.
Fable Elevated to Thesis
There are reams of this stuff around just now, more all the time, it seems. And it is not enough to tag it clunky propaganda and leave it at that: This meta-reality is congealing before our eyes into a view of the world, a new geopolitical take, that we can accept if we wish, although it does not matter one way or the other if we do or do not.
Foreign Affairs, house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations, published a piece to this effect in its March–April edition under the title, “The Multipolar Delusion.”
In it, C. Raja Mohan, a professor of big think at a privately funded university in the environs of New Delhi, makes the case that the world as more or less universally understood since Germans dismantled the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Cold War drew to a close was a phantom, a collective misapprehension:
Mohan’s point about the extravagant irresponsibility of the Trump regime can hardly land more squarely. But his argument is otherwise an ahistorical mess.
Mohan ignores the late-imperial desperation that has unmistakably come to drive the policy cliques in Washington beginning in 2001, I would say, and culminating in the Trump regime’s incoherence. He seems not able to understand the long durée of our moment — the gradual process by which one world order will replace another.
The Mohan piece is worth reading. It is fable elevated to thesis. Simplicius makes a similar point, absent my term, in a well-done analysis of Mohan published over the weekend in his Substack newsletter under the headline “Multipolarity a ‘Delusion’ in Face of Trump’s New Imperialism?”
Simplicius’ answer, and mine: The delusion lies with those, Mohan exemplary of them, who take the doings of the Trump regime as anything more than an edifice built on lies and illusions. It represents an inherently unstable interim, not an era.
With Trump’s “massive armada” gathered in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf in apparent preparation for another attack on Iran, Vice President J.D. Vance has been speaking around the country to warn that Iran presents a direct threat to U.S. national security.
Going one better, Steve Witkoff, the New York landlord serving as Trump’s envoy, asserted over the weekend that the Islamic Republic is “probably a week away” from having what it needs to build a nuclear bomb.
This stuff is so unrooted in reality not even the Israeli press has taken Witkoff seriously. But reality, or being taken seriously, are, once again, of no importance to this regime.
Witkoff and Vance can lie, nobody will believe them, and they will know that nobody believes them, but it will not matter. They alone will believe themselves, or pretend to believe themselves, and the meta-reality of our time will continue to elaborate.
My mind goes to the historians as I consider this phenomenon. Will the fables by which so many events unfold in the third decade of the 21st century survive their scrutiny? Will the empire of lies go into the texts of the future as if it were real?
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being permanently censored.
TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them reach a moment that is difficult and full of promise all at once. On one hand, we assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media’s mounting derelictions. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. I am committed to independent journalism for the duration: I see no other future for American media. But the path grows steeper, and as it does I need your help. This grows urgent now. In recognition of the commitment to independent journalism, please subscribe to The Floutist, or via my Patreon account.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.