In the United States, The Washington Post is not an ordinary newspaper but a mouthpiece for the establishment and intel — power structures oriented towards the Democratic Party and American globalists. And all of a sudden — or not? — one of WP’s most respected and experienced columnists David Ignatius publishes an article entitled “Is the sun slowly setting on US power? That depends on us,” where he stuns his readers with the very first line: “The United States might be stumbling toward a decline from which few great powers have ever recovered.” And that’s not a quote by Donald Trump or from a progressive pamphlet but an outline for the RAND Corp.’s most recent Pentagon-requested study.

Notably, RAND is America’s renowned think tank created by the DoD after World War II to oversee global processes. Unlike many of its counterparts, it perfectly survived the Fukuyama-invented “end of history”, which made a considerable number of American eggheads and their analytical organizations relax — why work hard amid victory over the Soviets?

So, before we talk about the extent and scale of RAND’s research, let’s quote another reputable author in the United States, who is also worried about issues The Washington Post has exposed. Paul Craig Roberts is a political and economic observer who was once economic policy assistant to the US Treasury Secretary in the Ronald Reagan administration. Given that the latter managed to take the United States out of a deep economic crisis, Roberts has enormous experience and knowledge. And he writes the following these days: “This is the reason that the United States of America is a totally dead and buried formerly free nation. Americans have sat on their butts and allowed the destruction of civility, the rule of law, the Constitution, and their nation.”

Some will say “he is exaggerating,” but let’s now switch from Roberts to the RAND study titled called “The Sources of Renewed National Dynamism.” Let us trust David Ignatius, who studied the document and shared his observations and conclusions with the audience. First of all, he notes: “This is explosive stuff” featuring phrases like “relative decline in US standing” and weight worldwide.

The RAND paper explains the problem this way: “The US competitive position is threatened both from within (in terms of slowing productivity growth, an aging population, a polarized political system, and an increasingly corrupted information environment) and outside (in terms of a rising direct challenge from China and declining deference to U.S. power from dozens of developing nations)." And this "decline is accelerating," the study warns, as "something is broken in America”. Therefore, "unless Americans can unite to identify and fix these problems, we risk falling into a downward spiral,” David Ignatius emphasizes.

Please note, the piece was not written by outside authors who have nothing else better to do than notice any weak points of the former global hegemon — whether mirthfully or wistfully… It was written by the think-tank instructed by the Pentagon 75 years ago to issue the most accurate assessments of what is going on, so as to rely on them in drawing the right conclusions to formulate America’s defense policy.

“What causes national decline?” RAND authors wonder, citing the list of triggers right away: “addiction to luxury and decadence,” “failure to keep pace with technological demands,” “ossified” bureaucracy, “loss of civic virtue,” “military overstretch,” “self-interested and warring elites,” “unsustainable environmental practices.” The whole enchilada of US present-day problems, though strange to Russian ears. The establishment's challenge is " anticipatory national renewal," the RAND authors argue, which is “tackling the problems before they tackle us." David Ignatius notes sadly that “If we look honestly in the national mirror, we’re all likely to share that assessment.” And then we see a paragraph that sort of deserves granite molding:

“America is on a downward slope that could be fatal. What will save us is a broad commitment, starting with elites, to work for the common good and national revival. We have the tools, but we aren’t using them. If we can’t find new leaders and agree on solutions that work for everyone, we’re sunk." A shocking diagnosis from an outright loyal supporter of Biden and the globalists…

And with such an assessment of America’s fate, one gets an utterly different view of student protests that have flared up across the country at major university campuses, seemingly caused by support for Palestine. Yes, Israeli brutality in Gaza has infuriated American youth, but is that the only essence of unrest? Is there any “double bottom” here? David Ignatius has not dwelt upon this topic, but others have started digging into it, revealing interference in overbalancing things by forces unfriendly to the American state. It’s been up to its eyeballs in challenges, and then there’s… Soros with his tricks! Yes, for sure, it is him who turns out to be funding the entire student disorder.

The New York Post has exposed the “dark side” of the mentioned events when large-scale pro-Palestinian protests in the United States started featuring the SJP, or Students for Justice in Palestine, as it unites tens of thousands of students and has representation in over 200 US universities. The “movement” that has now plunged American colleges into chaos has a really interesting list of sponsors, including the Rockefeller and Soros Foundations (both recognized as undesirable organizations in Russia). They help arrange "camp sites" and finance food delivery to "serial" (that's an NYP term, mind you!) protesters. Sheerest Maidan. But this time at Columbia University and UC Berkeley.

The current student protests’ key activists got $300,000 from the Soros-owned Open Society Foundations since 2017 and also took in $400,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 2019. These funds were kept as emergency stock at their bank accounts, remaining untouched to this day. But, as The New York Post further notes, we are now talking about support worth not even one million dollars (private donations included), but tens, if not hundreds!

As some observers write, and one cannot help agreeing with them, the ongoing protests are sort of a warm-up before more serious socio-political upheavals if the November 2024 US presidential election Biden vs Trump reveals the loser party’s unwillingness to recognize victory of the other. And the public is already electrified, with things about to “explode” along the way.

Moreover, a recent poll by Rasmussen Reports conducted specifically over growing campus violence in the United States has provided shocking data: 41 percent of voters believe that civil conflict is “America’s immediate future.” More than four-in-ten people are sure that "within five years the country will get ripped apart in a second civil war" as student rallies are "getting ugly".

Still, Alex Garland's new political action film Civil War (titled Fall of the Empire in Russia) remains a box-office favorite, with US separatist groups saying it "offers a plausible account of America's rapid descent into brutal anarchy." “The possibility that America could face another civil war soon is not too far-fetched for a lot of voters,” Rasmussen Reports pollsters said in their survey.

Who stands to gain from it? — this question is turning into the most interesting one here.

After the BLM mess timed to coincide with the election of 2020, when Trump was pushed out of power by using protest technologies, the situation in 2024 is going to be an order of magnitude more dangerous for America. Last time it was centralized, orchestrated and made to subside at the right moment, but now America’s social problems and contradictions are so intense that no on can guarantee the feasibility of safely creating “controlled chaos.” Today all of this is playing around with matches in a kitchen where the gas stove is on. And US domestic policy order has been explicitly questioned even by The Washington Post itself.