Some selective quotation from Mr. Rachman’s essay, with my comments. This paragraph makes clear that The New Cold War is the business of America. Lets include in The Enemies List Iran, North Korea, not forgetting Political Islam in all its iterations/permutations. Nor the burgeoning Left Wing governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba etc. The Global South is the perpetual enemy of ‘Uncle Sam’ ! Recall ‘Pentagonism: A Substitute for Imperialism’ by Juan Bosch of 1969?      

For Joe Biden, on his first trip overseas as US president, it is an opportunity to demonstrate that America is back. Biden has made it clear that he intends to rally the world’s democracies in pushing back against Russia and China.

The political sloganeering of ‘America is back’ is about that ‘New Cold War’. The ‘Biden Team’:  Harris ,Blinken, Nuland, Rice, and Power represent the return of the Neo-Cons and R2P Zealot Power.     

The ‘rallying cry’ of the Biden Foreign Policy is reiterated as ‘pushing back against Russia and China’. That New Cold War takes shape as a defensive maneuver against Global Bad Actors.   

For Joe Biden, on his first trip overseas as US president, it is an opportunity to demonstrate that America is back. Biden has made it clear that he intends to rally the world’s democracies in pushing back against Russia and China.

This reader has to wonder were Mr. Rachman has been, concerning the vexing question of America’s ‘inexorable decline’. Two American, and one British writer on the decadence question!

December 8, 2013 : 

Headline: The Decay of American Political Institutions

Sub-headline: We have a problem, but we can’t see it clearly because our focus too often discounts history.

https://www.the-american-interest.com/2013/12/08/the-decay-of-american-political-institutions/

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June 24, 2014

Niall Ferguson

The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/313194/the-great-degeneration-by-niall-ferguson/

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February 25, 2020

The Decadent Society: America Before and After the Pandemic

Ross Douthat 

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Decadent-Society/Ross-Douthat/9781476785257

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The G7 summit will also send an indirect message to China. The propaganda line pumped out from Beijing is that the west is in inexorable decline. 

…

The success of the G20 in organising international action to avert a global depression seemed to confirm that the G7’s moment had passed. 

…

It is the Biden administration’s renewed determination to push back against Moscow and Beijing that has provided the G7 with a renewed reason to exist.

…

File this under the rubric of ‘understatement’ :

But the fact that the G7 no longer represents most of the global economy — and is skewed towards the Euro-Atlantic region — remains a problem.

On the question Chatham House, these two paragraphs begins answering vital questions, unexplored by Mr. Rachman’s reference this Think Tank, and its historical/political ideologies.

It never really achieved its stated goals, remaining wedded to imperial-internationalism, elitist in character in ‘educating’ newly-awakened ‘public opinion’, and supportive of a racialised world view wedded to Anglo-Saxonism. At the core of the Chatham House project lay the aim of an alliance with the United States as Britain’s imperial power declined. Such attitudes were on full display at the Paris Peace Conferences in 1919-20, where Chatham House was conceived as the British branch of an Anglo-American institute of international affairs.

Saturated with a haughty attitude to inferior colonials considered incapable of self-government, Chatham House elites looked down on an increasingly assertive organised working class, galvanised by the experience of bloody trench warfare, and inspired by the dramatic effects of the Russian revolution, and Lenin’s calls for workers to get out of the war and overthrow ‘their’ governments.

https://thewire.in/world/chatham-house-100-years

…

As Renata Dwan of Chatham House, a UK think-tank, points out, in the 1970s the G7 nations accounted for some 80 per cent of world gross domestic product. That is now down to about 40 per cent.

The G7 are political actors who now seek , from within their decline, to build bridges to Asia:

To compensate, the group have invited four guests to the summit: Australia, India, South Africa and South Korea. The fact that three of these guests are Asian countries underlines the group’s role in pushing back against Beijing.

The ‘West’s Last Chance to Lead‘ is steeped in the shared arrogance, of American and European Technocrats: who still think its 1843, to borrow the date, when The Economist began its life as the voice of a ‘Liberalism’, based on racial superiority, and the notions of social class as the predictor of moral/political worth.

Political Skeptic

https://www.ft.com/content/5cdd1ad4-d7ed-4a91-acef-8ae7ff8873cc