How bonkers is America’s presidential so-called election? This bonkers:

Yet “four more years of this” is what the Permanent State is figuring on giving you: the Real Clear Politics electoral-college map now shows the Democrat ticket over the magic 270. No serious self-governing people would anoint Kamala Harris, a candidate who answers questions like one of the ditzier Miss America contestants, but with no discernible skill for the talent round. And half the country loves it.

Meanwhile, back in the real world:

US worries deepen as adversaries team up to challenge dominance

“Challenge” dominance? The other day Joe Biden forgot the name and office of the Prime Minister of India, and we all had a jolly good laugh about it. Au contraire, it amazes me that Mr Modi knows the name of the alleged “Leader of the Free World”: he certainly has no reason to.

This is courtesy of Natalia Drozdiak and Augusta Saraiva at Bloomberg News:

For months, the U.S. has warned Iran not to send ballistic missiles to Russia and told China not to provide military components for Moscow’s war in Ukraine.

But Iran is now doing just what Washington said not to and China is pushing the line. Indeed, the U.S. and its allies are increasingly worried by the speed and intensity with which the three, along with North Korea, are deepening ties to challenge American dominance despite facing some of the most sweeping sanctions the West has ever imposed, according to officials who asked not to be identified discussing matters that are not public.

Funny. These “matters” are “not public” only because the “moderators” of America’s presidential debates prefer to focus on the rental practices of Donald Trump’s landlord dad in the outer boroughs of New York over half-a-century ago. To reprise my old line: Sometimes a society becomes too stupid to survive.

And what’s with the “deepening ties to challenge American dominance”? What “American dominance”? If your definition of “dominance” is the ability to install tampon-dispensers in every Minnesota boys’ bathroom, the US is your go-to guy. But, for every country that’s not nuts, taking twenty years to lose to goatherds with fertiliser and then, after a fifteen-minute tea-break, firing up the world’s most lavishly funded yet entirely incompetent war-machine all over again, this time in Europe, would seem the more telling example. American “dominance” means “liberal” warmongers get to have the Ukrainian flag as a Twitter avatar while on the actual battlefield a generation of Ukrainians are sacrificed in a demographic meat-grinder from which the country will never recover.

The Bloomberg ladies continue:

A Washington-led naval coalition has so far failed to lift a Houthi rebel chokehold that’s crippled shipping in the Red Sea. Washington and its allies have been pushed out of bases in Africa as China and Russia expand their reach. Beijing has only stepped up its aggression in the South China Sea… Some 40 nations that voted to condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine last year decided to abstain on a similar motion in July.

That’s all true. But more relevant to Mr and Mrs America is that, beyond the client states of Europe (or “vassal states”, as Veronica, a Kiwi Steyn Clubber, likes to call them in our comments section), the rest of the planet is busy building the infrastructure of the Post-American world – and (for any US citizens still with a savings account) the post-dollar world.

Right now the world’s leaders are jetting in to New York for the UN General Assembly – an event of absolutely no consequence except that personally speaking, in the days when I guest-hosted Rush from Manhattan, my hotel elevator would be full of dictators and their entourages as a lurid reminder of the unlovely state of the world. But the unlovelies have wised up: this coming week in NYC the leaders of the BRICS – the buck-stops-here (permanently) global organisation – will also take advantage of the UN shindig to get together, on American soil, right under America’s nose. The BRICS nations now represent close to fifty per cent of the world’s population. Earlier this month, Turkey, a Nato member and thus one of those US “allies” Bloomberg News mentioned, applied to join.

Like the X-Men and Avengers and the other lousy superhero groups propping up what’s left of Hollywood, the BRICS superfriends all have different superpowers:

*China is the centre of the global economy, and of the supply chain that starts in some town you’ve never heard of and ends in your local Walmart. Their strategy is to take over the world without firing a shot, and so far it’s going gangbusters;

*Russia, on the other hand, has more nukes than anyone on the planet, and is musing on using them; and

*Islam is demographically insurgent.

This pretty much covers all the bases. Western Europe is Islamising at an accelerating rate: in England, France, Germany, Muslims prop up the fertility rate in every town of any size, constantly replenished by the daily arrivals on the Continent’s southern shore. China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” numbers three-quarters of all the nations on earth: for old-school imperialists such as myself, in the Caribbean and the South Pacific Beijing is picking off His Majesty’s Dominions one by one (including New Zealand).

Even in Europe, certain of the “vassal states” have signed on to “Belt and Road” – because, in a world where America is a busted flush, one must reach one’s accommodations with reality as one can. As Viktor Orbán put it earlier this summer, this is a half-millennium shift in power:

In the past, change was Western: the Habsburgs rose and then fell; Spain was up, and it became the centre of power; it fell, and the English rose; the First World War finished off the monarchies; the British were replaced by the Americans as world leaders; then the Russo–American Cold War was won by the Americans.

But all these developments remained within our Western logic. This is not the case now, however, and this is what we must face up to; because the Western world is not challenged from within the Western world, and so the logic of change has been disrupted. What I am talking about, and what we are facing, is actually a global system change. And this is a process that is coming from Asia. To put it succinctly and primitively, for the next many decades – or perhaps centuries, because the previous world system was in place for five hundred years – the dominant centre of the world will be in Asia…

How did this happen? How did the unipolar hyper-power – the greatest country in the history of countries, as the pom-pom girls of the American right like to say – turn itself into the end-stage of western civilisation?

The other day, a faint memory of an ancient show on the BBC swam up from the recesses of my mind. Back in the early Nineties, the late Lawrence Eagleburger, veteran of the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations and briefly Secretary of State under the first Bush, was on “Newsnight” being badgered by the usually snotty Beeb interviewer. Eventually, Larry wearied of it, and pointed out that the longest period of peace in Europe has been that under the US security umbrella since 1945.

Ah, but… is it really a good idea to relieve some of the wealthiest nations of the responsibility for their own defence? As I wrote almost a decade-and-a-half ago in my boffo bestseller After America:

Greece is broke, and has run out of Greeks. So it’s getting bailed out by Germany. But Germany also has deathbed demographics: As Angela Merkel, the Chancellor, pointed out in 2009, for Germany an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it. Germany has the highest proportion of childless women in Europe: one in three fräulein have checked out of the motherhood business entirely.

Absolved from having to pay for their own defense, Continentals beat their swords into welfare checks, and erected huge cradle-to-grave entitlements.

Larry Eagleburger’s “US security umbrella” helped infantilise a continent: that’s why they don’t need children of their own. And now the same phenomenon has belatedly taken root in America, at a whole other level: we mutilate pubescent girls and render them infertile.

The roots of our present woes go back way beyond America’s squandered “victory” in the Cold War – which with the benefit of hindsight, and given the predispositions of every US institution up to and including the Democrats’ presidential ticket, is looking more and more like a catastrophic defeat. At the dawn of its post-war imperium, America chose to act not as the conventional imperial powers adumbrated by Mr Orbán above, but as something different – a proto-globalist, if you will. It set up the United Nations and its subsidiary bodies. And, in case you haven’t noticed, three-quarters of a century on, almost all those institutions seriously bedevil us – for example, the World Health Organisation: America pays for it, but China runs it.

We are approaching the end-game here. Western civilisation is going off the cliff, and most citizens of western nations aren’t even aware of it. Your children will live their lives as something other. Maybe in the final weeks of a two-year waste-of-space presidential election campaign, we could occasionally bring up something that matters.