'Nothing Ever Happens' to 'Everything, Everywhere, All At Once'

I’ve been thinking about this meme a lot these days. “But we both know what will happen, don’t we? I am calling your bluff, Mr. Trump. Nothing will ever happen.”

Whatever memelord came up with this gem is not alone. Andrew Cockburn recently argued for a more sophisticated and high-brow version of the idea on the pages of Harper’s. Reporting from the guts of the bureaucracy on Musk’s all-out attack, Cockburn quotes ‘a former influential government official’s contemptuous prognosis: “maybe after four years the number of employees will be down 2 percent—maybe.”

I no longer buy this persistence hypothesis. If anything captured the stable world in which nothing ever happened, it was the pyramid of transatlantic relations and the ossified discourse of the parasitic ‘belligerati’ [Tariq Ali] that has grown up around milking the cow of American power. In a stroke, Trump has cut the Gordian knot. The break with Europe represents the most important departure in US foreign policy since at least Kissinger’s revolution, if not 1947 itself.

The break with Nothing Ever Happens became spectacularly manifest this week with the shouting match at the Oval Office. No doubt driven in equal parts by arrogance and frustration, Zelensky threw what appears to be a temper tantrum. On Twitter, I reached for models from Greek mythology to understand our tragic hero. Is he Ares, the Trojan who, blinded by rage, charges into battle and is stuck down by Athena? Or is he Capaneus, killed by Zeus with a thunderbolt for his arrogant defiance?

At any rate, what is clear is that our hero’s days are numbered. The Ukrainians would be well-advised to get themselves rid of him sooner rather than later. European pretensions notwithstanding, Ukraine simply cannot sustain the military struggle without American support. Europe could not replace the supply of American weapons and ammunition—larger than the rest of the West combined—even if they could ramp up military production in short order, which they cannot; and even if there was appetite among European voters for it, which there isn’t. Europeans also cannot replace American trainers. Perhaps even more important, Europe simply does not have the reconnaissance and targeting capabilities that the US has exclusively provided. This last piece is likely of such decisive importance that, if it were to be withdrawn, there would hardly be any point in continuing to prosecute this war. The entire Ukrainian military position would immediately become a rapidly wasting asset.

The dependence on the US is so extreme that if Elon were to shut off Ukrainian access to starlink satellites—and one can hardly rule out such a turn of events—the war effort would immediately collapse. So, the harsh and brutal reality is that the president is correct: Ukraine has no cards to play without the backing of the United States.

In effect, Ukraine’s fate is sealed. It will have to accept whatever peace deal is imposed on it by the Americans and the Russians. The transatlantic belligerati, led by pretentious European power elites, can strike whatever pose they like. But they do not have the wherewithal to move to dial here. So, they too will have to ultimately accept whatever the Americans impose on them. With their grandstanding, the European belligerati are merely setting themselves up for a world historical humiliation. This is why I have come to suspect that we may be watching a collapse of the Western belligerati as a power elite or parasitic class, depending on how one looks at it.

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How, then, did we go from a stable world in which ‘nothing ever happens’ to one where things are definitely happening? Indeed, not only happening but happening at such a blistering pace that it is hard to keep track? This line of questioning raises two sets of related questions.

First, why did nothing ever happen in the first place? Why was the world so stable for so long? What were the structures that reproduced this stable world? And why did they give way?

Second, what are Trump and co up to and why? Do they have a plan? Is it a good plan? Can it work? What is the likely outcome of the implementation of the alleged plan, once all the responses of the other players in the global system is factored in? Ie, what happens in general equilibrium?

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There are two models of stability. One is the hegemonic one from economics. The volatility of quarterly growth in US real GDP in 1947-1986 was 2.3 percent per annum; in 1987-2019, it was 1.1 percent. In the former era, the volatility of US CPI was 1.4 percent per annum; it the latter it was 0.9 percent. This decline in macro volatility was described by Ben Bernanke in 2004 as ‘the Great Moderation.’ Bernanke argued that ‘improved monetary policy’ may have been substantially responsible for the stability.

Source: Ben Bernanke (2004)

What Bernanke argued, in effect, was that it was central bankers’ independence from political authority, and their commitment to fighting inflation after the 1970s stagflation crisis, that quelled the macro instability. In other words, stability was produced by the new, aggressive response function of the Federal Reserve.

We may argue with Bernanke that the abandonment of the procyclical Keynesian policies of the fiscal authority driven by political expediency—and more generally, the politicians’ surrender of authority over the management of the macroeconomy to technocrats—was equally, if indeed not more important a cause of the new stable world that emerged. But this is a formal speech by a sitting chair of the Federal Reserve. Our quibble may indeed be read between the lines already. The point is that the stable new regime was reproduced by the new response functions of power: a neutralized fiscal authority on the one hand and aggressive inflation fighting by the monetary authority on the other.

If this model of the ‘nothing ever happens’ is a good one, the cause of the extraordinary stability of things may be found in long-run structures composed of predictable response functions of stabilizing authorities. This is by design. The stability is helpful for all calculating centers of power: fixed-rate mortgages can be issued for 30 years at low rates; firms can be confident that, absent minor blips here and there, the economy will grow at a predictable clip of 2 percent per annum; they can count on planned obsolescence, with a new iPhone coming out every year just as surely as the seasons turn; and so on and so forth.

But this stable world forged and upheld by power comes with a catch. The very predictability of the system’s behavior means that secular developments accompanying this ‘pyramid of peace’ will go on unfolding in the same direction as before. For instance, if a rising power is catching up rapidly with the reigning global hegemon, that power will continue rising as long as the stable and predictable global system is faithfully reproduced year after year, bailout after bailout, recession after recession, war after war. Or if the working class family in the center country is unraveling, it will continue to unravel. And so on.

So, there are systematic problems that attend the achievement of a stable system. The very commitment to stabilize the system means that there is little room for strategic and tactical reorientation of policy. Most levers are already tied down with the mandate to stabilize the system. Moreover, ruling elites have a vested interest in the perpetuation of the system and its stabilizing mechanisms because their authority, power and influence are directly tied to their stability mandates.

This suggests one explanation for how ‘nothing ever happens’ gave way to ‘everything, everywhere, all at once.’ But we need to dig deeper into the revolutionaries’ minds to understand how and why the strategic decision was made to throw over the table. This leads us to the second model of a stable world where ‘nothing ever happens.’

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Ross Douthat made a very compelling argument for American decadence. His argument was basically that we’re an old society with a log of baggage. There is a secular tendency for things like veto points to build up across the system (most obvious in housing and zoning); for vested interests to hone mechanisms to defend their turfs (too many to mention but the most egregious is probably health insurance); for the cybernetic theory of bureaucratic hypertrophy which may be thought of as a generalization of Parkinson’s law—‘work expands to fill the time allocated to it’. Cockburn, cited above, is fantastic on the formidable power of the “deep state” bureaucrats to block initiatives by the political authorities.

There are many signals to back up Douthat’s thesis. Lawyer density in the US is 400 per 100,000. In Canada, it is 250. In Japan, 30. The US tax code and regs have a combined ten million words. With the relevant case law included, the Federal Tax Reporter reaches 70,000 pages. In 1960, the Code of Federal Regulations contained 22,877 pages. By 2021, it contained 188,346 pages, and ran over 200 printed volumes.

Source: Mercatus Center (2025).

Crain and Crain (2014, written for the National Association of Manufacturers) estimated the total cost of federal regulation to be two trillion dollars in 2012, or about 12 percent of GDP. Even Shapiro (2024), although highly critical of Crain and Crain (2014) and the Mercatus Center estimates, reckon that the total paperwork burden for all agencies was ten billion hours. (Look at Treasury!)

Source: Shapiro (2024). Nature. Appendix.

Outside the state sensu stricto is the para-state proper. The para-state is the reason why the counties around DC are the richest cluster of counties in America. There are 30 registered lobbyists for every Congressman. There are an order of magnitude more professionals directly engaged in politics, including public relations specialists, campaign specialists, political consultants, pollsters, political strategists, etc. Then there are two orders of magnitude more people whose salaries depend on milking the American empire. On the one hand, you have those on the payroll of firms whose revenues depend on government largesse; on the other, you have the vast advocacy complex.

Source: Overflow.

Douthat’s position is that we’re an old society and there is not much anything can be done. Underlying this attitude is Douthat’s philosophical conservatism. But Douthat is the Old Right. The New Right has more radical ideas. And that brings us to the diagnosis underlying the Trump revolution.

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“This is going to be great television,” Trump quipped gamely during his shouting match with our tragic hero in the Oval Office. This is one clue to deciphering confusing signals daily pumped out by Trump world. As always, decisions have more signal than discourse. This is especially relevant here because the signal-to-noise ratio is so poor. Imo, we should disregard a lot of bombs thrown out by Trump: Gaza, Greenland, etc. But where is the signal?

First, the signal is in the break-neck speed with which innovations are being rolled out. This suggests quite definitely to me that there’s a plan, one guided by a diagnosis.

Put somewhat tongue in cheek: Trump & co reckon that Douthat is correct. We have become a decadent society. But this is not acceptable. We will not accept decadence; we will not go silently into the night. No, sir. The moment calls forth a revolution against the entire class of elites who have sacrificed American greatness to stability, to a world where ‘nothing ever happens’ even as we ‘lose, lose, lose.’ We will gut the para-state. We will throw the international table overboard because glory is more important than stability. It is now or never.

What is the evidence for this? I found Mana Afsari’s report from the two conventions remarkably revealing. As I write on Twitter:

NatCon closed with a speech by Orr who began by citing Joseph de Maistre. At the liberalism conference, “panel after panel discusses the sociological, electoral and material—but never the intellectual—causes of post-liberal politics.”

The New Right is yearns for the return of the strong gods. This is not a fascist turn as much as a revolt against disenchantment. The most sophisticated statement I could find of this line of reasoning is The Upheaval by N.S. Lyons. (See especially, The counter-revolution begins.)

All of which is to say that this is not a drill. That Trump and co are serious about their revolution. But that does not tell us the contours of their specific agenda. Having identified the professional class as the enemy, and wokeism as its ideology, they are definitely going after it in earnest to hurt and cripple the enemy (see Lyons on this). In the Musk assault on the para-state, the intent is clear. They want to gut it and reshape it in ways to augment their power position, perhaps by creating a spoils system if liberals’ fears are well-founded, as they might well be.

But the real power of the American presidency is in foreign policy. And here the Trump revolution is completely unprecedented. What is the logic of the Trump revolution in US foreign policy?

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The signal is quite extraordinary. Perhaps the tariff war agenda really is driven by midwit mercantilism; perhaps the point is to accumulate power and forge a spoils system; perhaps it is a power play; perhaps it’s yet another head fake. Let’s bracket that for the sake of argument. To me, two signals stand out dramatically. Not the Oval Office drama, nor the Vance speech that has Tooze frothing at the mouth. What I have in mind has more signal than these spectacles. First, Rubio’s comment on the world being multipolar. Second, SecDef Hasgeth telling his German counterpart in Brussels that the American are definitely leaving Europe for Asia. Both are connected. And both suggest a coherent, if shocking, diagnosis underlying the Trump revolution in American foreign policy.

Trump & co, despite that supremacist bluster, have come to believe that a multipolar world is already here. That the United States’s room for maneuver has narrowed. That it is supremely important to try to rectify the world historical self-goal of Biden & co and break the Sino-Russian forced marriage. This suggests to me that Colby has prevailed but only partially.

If my assessment is correct, Trump & co’s plan is to secure a new great power arrangement. Instead of Jake’s harebrained scheme to contain both Russia and China, Trump & co intend to (a) make China compete for Russia’s allegiance; and, more speculatively, (b) come to a spheres of influence arrangement with the two near-peers that stabilizes the balance of power in Asia and Europe in a way that secures vital American interests.

If this diagnosis is indeed correct, then the Trump revolution amounts to a decisive break with the foreign policy pursued by the United States since the Soviet capitulation in the late-1980s.

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P.S. This has already been a long dispatch. We’ll leave the following questions to a future dispatch.

Is it a good plan? Can it work? What is the likely outcome of the implementation of the alleged plan, once all the responses of the other players in the global system is factored in? Ie, what happens in general equilibrium?