Like all establishments, it sees any real change as a threat to be avoided. So long as it reigns, nothing will change.

What are the implications of these three observations? Militarily, they portend continued failure and defeat. The United States will fail to get out of Iraq before the next phase of that war begins, or, worse, an Israeli attack on Iran in an attempt to destroy its nuclear infrastructure will cost the United States the army it still has in Iraq.

The United States will be defeated in Afghanistan because its leaders, including President Barack Obama, will refuse to scale down their strategic objectives to what is possible and U.S. forces operating in that country will continue to alienate the population there with their firepower-intensive way of war.

U.S. policies and policymakers will push nuclear-armed Pakistan over the brink into disintegration, which will be a strategic catastrophe of the first order.

U.S. policies and policymakers will ignore the disintegration of the state in Mexico while importing Mexico's disorder through America's still-ineffective border controls.

The United States and its armed forces will not even be able to stop Somali pirates from their continued depredations.

What does it say about the United States and its people when the whole nation rejoices because the U.S. Navy, the most powerful navy on Earth, defeated four Somali teenagers?

It does not end with this. These foreign policy failures and military defeats -- or even more embarrassing "victories" -- become just two of a larger series of crises, including the economic crisis: The increasing economic depression will be followed by runaway inflation. Then there will be a foreign exchange crisis resulting in the collapse of the dollar. Finally, there will be a systemic political crisis in which no one in the establishment knows what to do, but the establishment offers the voters no alternative to itself. While these catastrophes unfold, the worst energy crisis ever experienced in this nation will erupt as well.

Together, these discrete crises snowball into a systemic crisis, which is what happens when the outside world demands greater change than the political system permits. At that point, the political system collapses and is replaced by something else. In the old days, it meant a change of dynasty in the nations of Europe when they were ruled by royal families. What might it mean today? My guess is a radical devolution, at the conclusion of which life is once again local.

That would be, on the whole, a happy outcome. But I fear this will be a trip where the journey is not half the fun.

(William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation.)

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