Wherein we pick up from where we left off two weeks ago. We start with the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. in an attempt to unravel the thread and provide a cogent explanation for…why we write this blog.
ON TO AFGHANISTAN, ‘THE GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES’
The autumn of 2001 was a strange time for Greymantle. I was recently married, attending graduate school, and working full-time. My wife was deeply shaken by the attacks of 9/11 and wanted to spend as much time with me as possible, which was understandable. I also wanted to spend time with her when I wasn’t focused on grad school and work. We were newlyweds, after all.
Nevertheless, my brain was crackling with each development that followed from 9/11. Within a fortnight, the Bush Administration had identified the 9/11 attackers as members of Al Qaeda, a relatively obscure (to Westerners) but well-financed group of Islamic religious radicals based in Afghanistan, but with underground cells spread across the world.
The Bush cabinet quickly drew up a plan to invade Afghanistan if the Taliban refused to hand Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders holed up in the Hindu Kush mountains of eastern Afghanistan over to the Americans. As Bush’s threats against the Taliban mounted, I could smell disaster in the air.
Afghanistan has been nicknamed “the graveyard of empires”, and not for nothing. Alexander the Great, the Persians, the Mongols, the Moghul emperors, the British and, more recently, the Soviet Union have all attempted to conquer Afghanistan and subdue her fiercely independent people. All met with disaster, sooner or later, and had fatally compromised their empires in the process.
The idea of the U.S. invading Afghanistan, successfully occupying the mountainous country and then transforming that fractured, tribal nation into a replica of post-WWII Germany or Japan was totally ludicrous. The Afghan view of life is medieval and steeped in rigid tribal customs and traditions. But this was the course of action that Bush and his senior advisers proposed. To me, it seemed wildly reckless and destined for ruin.
When an old friend of mine from New Delhi called me to ask how the American leaders were reacting to 9/11, I mentioned Bush’s threats to overthrow the Taliban by force.
“Has Bush gone crazy?” my friend asked. “Apparently”, I replied. “I guess Bush doesn’t read much history. He seems to have not heard of the mujahideen.” (Apparently, Bush DID read a lot of history. He just never managed to absorb, much less learn from anything he read.)
I shared with him my view that America would spend a generation in Afghanistan and leave ignominiously after a long guerrilla war. In the process, we were going to add massively to the national debt and accelerate latent national divisions that had been bubbling beneath the surface since the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975.
America could not afford another Vietnam. It might trigger a second civil war.
My friend, a student of British and Moghul history and a fine novelist, agreed with me.
GREYMANTLE MAKES A DECISION
The idea of launching an online magazine to cover domestic U.S. politics and geopolitics occurred to me that autumn. I discussed it over lunch with a mutual friend of my wife’s and mine, whom I will call “Vincent”.
Over Brazilian steaks on 34th Street in Astoria, New York, Vincent and I discussed the pros and cons of trying to launch an online magazine with our scant experience in publishing, none in journalism, and no prospective investors, all while holding down full-time work, with me also committed to grad school and a young wife.
The prospects did not seem auspicious. It would be an uphill battle all the way, and I was likely to lose my job, my wife, or both if I let my ‘big idea’ take over my life. After knocking it around my head for a couple of months, I happily let it fade in favor of focusing on my marriage and happy new life situation.
In retrospect, Greymantle made the right decision. It was more important for me to focus on the important life goods I already had, which were tangible, than to gamble what little fortune I possessed on a dream, however exciting it might have seemed.
IRAQ AND THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS
Matters worsened quickly after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001 and toppled the Taliban. Despite a massive bombing campaign and attacks by the U.S. special forces, dozens of top Al Qaeda leaders escaped the U.S. dragnet and went into hiding. Terrorist attacks against Western targets increased.
And then the Bush Administration started ramping up an information campaign against its next target: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
The Iraq War: A Predictable Disaster
Just as I believed that the Bush Administration’s decision to invade Afghanistan was a mistake, I also believed that the invasion of Iraq would be a huge error for the United States. It was a mistake not only for the U.S. government but for the country. It would test our key alliances, and might eventually break them.
From 2001 to 2003, I was convinced that the U.S. should not rely too heavily on military power but should instead fight the ‘War on Terror’ as an intelligence and diplomatic struggle, with minimal use of conventional forces. The use of special operations forces made sense—targeted, limited missions aimed at disrupting terrorist networks—but full-scale invasions and occupations did not.
If the U.S. had made a limited incursion into eastern Afghanistan without toppling the Taliban and committing to nation-building, the mission might have been a success. Instead, we got drawn into a long and unwinnable war. The same logic applied to Iraq. Saddam Hussein was not the problem. Al-Qaeda was.
But the Bush Administration, fixated on finishing what George H.W. Bush had left undone in 1991, allowed itself to be distracted. The U.S. became obsessed with regime change in Iraq and weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, and walked blindly into a quagmire.
Greymantle knew it would be a costly distraction all along. And not just costly in terms of U.S. dollars and military resources, but in American and Iraqi lives. The sheer destruction wrought upon Iraq was avoidable, and it was apparent from the start that removing Saddam without a viable plan for governance would lead to chaos. Too many Iraqis and too many young American servicemen and women paid the price.
The rise of sectarian conflict, the strengthening of Iran’s influence, and the eventual emergence of ISIS were all foreseeable consequences of the decision to invade. The hubris of the Bush Administration was staggering, but so too was the willingness of much of the American public to go along with it.
The Global Financial Crisis: A Bubble Waiting to Burst
Even as the Iraq War dragged on, I saw another disaster coming: the collapse of the U.S. housing market.
By the mid-2000s, it was clear to me that the real estate sector was being driven by reckless speculation and cheap credit. The signs of a bubble were all around us—property values were skyrocketing, mortgage lending standards were virtually nonexistent, and people were taking out home loans they had no business qualifying for. I believed that a massive correction was inevitable and that some markets could see prices drop by as much as 50%.
My wife thought I was being alarmist. But as it turns out, even my worst-case scenario underestimated the scale of the disaster. I thought there would be a severe downturn—I did not foresee a near-total meltdown of the financial system. The interconnectedness of the mortgage market, the securitization of toxic assets, and the sheer recklessness of financial institutions created a house of cards that collapsed with breathtaking speed in 2008.
There was one person who saw the full scope of what was coming: Nouriel Roubini. He was largely dismissed at the time, even ridiculed, but he turned out to be right. The warning signs had been there for years, but few had the foresight to put all the pieces together. Roubini did.
When Lehman Brothers fell and panic gripped the financial world, it became clear that this was not just another market correction—it was a systemic failure. The era of easy money and deregulation had come crashing down. The consequences would be felt for years to come. In fact, they are still being felt.
THE ELECTION OF BARACK OBAMA AND THE RIGHT-WING BACKLASH
In the wake of the financial crisis, Barack Obama’s election in 2008 felt almost inevitable. The country was exhausted—by war, by economic turmoil, by the sheer incompetence of the Bush Administration. Obama represented something new, something hopeful. But from the moment he won, I knew the Republican Party would overreact.
Since the early 2000s, I had noticed that U.S. conservatives have a tendency to respond to events they perceive as threatening with extreme overreach. They don’t just react – they overreact. I based this conclusion on their observable political behavior.
9/11 led to the War on Terror and the excesses of the Patriot Act. The election of the first Black president led to something else: the rise of the Tea Party. This was not just an anti-tax, anti-government movement—it was a reactionary response to Obama himself, a movement rooted in cultural anxiety as much as economic grievances. Conditions were becoming ripe for full-blown demagoguery in the United States.
By 2012, I could already see the outlines of what was to come. A figure would emerge, someone who would channel the deep cultural and economic grievances of the right and turn them into a new political force. I just didn’t know who it would be.
2012: A CHANCE TO ARREST THE RISING TIDE OF POPULISM
In 2012, Greymantle voted for Mitt Romney over President Obama. I liked Obama very much and had voted for him in 2008, but believed that what the country needed instead was an ‘anti-demagogue’ in the highest office. While President Obama was no demagogue, he was an unusually transformative political figure who carried with him a certain utopian glow.
I believed what the U.S. needed instead was a boring, but effective, leader.
Mitt Romney is bright, honest, virtuous and hard-working. He is a square and stolid Midwestern type, the scion to a famous Mormon political family, and a family man with five sons. His election would have reassured restive cultural conservatives that Obama’s presidency had not been a fundamental break with the past but was instead a notable interregnum that showcased America’s growing inclusiveness.
In 2012, I still believed the election of Romney might head off the rise of the demagogue who was just over the horizon. The economy was growing again. If Romney could get elected in 2012 and reelected in 2016, it might head off the rising populist tide if he could pass some meaningful industrial and social legislation. Maybe – just maybe – a looming disaster might be avoided if America elected a politically talented ‘square’.
Because populism was not only rising on the American right, it was rising on the American left, as well.
Since the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2008 and 2009, a younger group of political activists was rising in the Democratic Party and in left-adjacent political groupings like the Democratic Socialists of America. These groups had trenchant criticisms of the social and economic order and were associated with a broad umbrella of movements devoted to ‘anti-globalization’.
Not all of their critiques were off base, but I worried about the romantic attachment many of these activists seemed to hold for Third World liberation movements and Marxist leaders like Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro. Che Guevara posters were in vogue again on certain college campuses.
Alas, my hopes for Romney, and the country, were dashed when President Obama was reelected in 2012. My wife had voted for Obama again and poked incessant fun at me for supporting Romney (with donations and a campaign sign on our front lawn), who she felt was a dullard with no charisma or political sense. “Mark my words,” I told her. “Someday soon you are going to wish that Romney had won.”
By the autumn of 2016, my wife would agree with me.
HOW GREYMANTLE KNEW ROSS PEROT WAS RIGHT
In the summer of 1992, fresh out of college and unsure of my next steps, I worked on an independent film production. Independent film was having a moment in the 1990s, and like many young Gen Xers, I was drawn to that world.
One day, the film’s director and I scouted a location outside Philadelphia—an old steel plant that had been shut down, another casualty of foreign competition.
The man who let us in had been a foreman there, a steelworker who had spent decades of his life in that plant, and I’ll never forget the look on his face as he showed us around. He didn’t say much at first, just pointed out where the machines had been, how the production lines had worked. But as we walked through the vast, empty shell of the plant, the dam broke.
He talked about the jobs lost, how everything had changed after the Japanese steel companies outcompeted American mills, how younger guys he had trained were left with nowhere to go. It wasn’t just the factory that had shut down; it was a way of life.
And there we were—two college-educated kids, dabbling in the “creative economy,” wandering through the ruins of his life, looking for a place to shoot a film.
I remember thinking: Man, that Ross Perot is onto something. This can’t go on. We need an industrial policy in this country. We need to protect people like this guy and his family from unrestrained capitalism.
Ross Perot didn’t win, of course. But his 1992 campaign, with its relentless warnings about NAFTA and the “giant sucking sound” of American jobs going overseas, planted seeds that would take decades to bear fruit. It would take someone with a stronger cultural connection to the American right, someone with a bigger stage, and, frankly, someone with more of a killer instinct to fully capitalize on the forces Perot had identified.
Enter Donald Trump.
THE 2016 ELECTION AND THE RISE OF DONALD TRUMP
From the earliest primaries in 2016, Greymantle had the sinking feeling that Trump was going to win. I wasn’t happy about it—I despised Trump’s vulgarity, his recklessness, his transparent lack of interest in governance—but I understood why he was winning.
Greymantle thought back to that steelworker in 1992, his sense of betrayal, his feeling that everything he had worked for had been taken away. Trump, for all his obvious flaws, spoke to that very real and legitimate grievance like no one else in American politics. He wasn’t just running against Hillary Clinton; he was running against the entire globalized system that had left towns like that steelworker’s behind.
The Republican Party had spent decades preaching the gospel of free markets and free trade, ignoring the economic wreckage it left in its wake. Democrats, meanwhile, had moved away from their old New Deal coalition and embraced a new base of urban professionals and cultural progressives. The American working class, once the backbone of the Democratic Party, found itself politically homeless.
Trump offered them a home. Not just in economic terms, but in cultural and psychological terms. I see you, he told them. I know what they did to you.
For millions of Americans—especially those in the Midwest and the Rust Belt—that was enough. Trump’s campaign wasn’t a traditional conservative campaign; it was a nationalist-populist revolt against both parties. He took Perot’s warnings and turned them into a battle cry: America First. Build the wall. Drain the swamp. He spoke in absolutes, in slogans, in gut-level emotions, and in 2016, that was all he needed.
On election night, when the results came in from Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, I thought back to that abandoned steel plant in 1992. A lot of people were shocked that night. But I wasn’t. Greymantle had seen this coming for years.
Trump’s presidency was a chaos engine, but his political movement—the ‘Make America Great Again’ coalition—isn’t going away. It represents something deeper than just Trump himself: a profound backlash against globalization, against demographic and cultural change, against the sense that American life isn’t what it used to be.
For better or worse, MAGA is here to stay.
WHY WE WRITE THIS BLOG: OUR PURPOSE AND PASSION
Over the years, Greymantle has made his share of wrong predictions. As a kid in the early ‘80s, I speculated about when the Iran Hostage Crisis and the Cold War would end.
Some of Greymantle’s calls were wide of the mark. But I’ve been right more times than I’ve been wrong, particularly as time has gone on, and I’ve also come to trust my instincts about political and historical trends.
The patterns, the fault lines, the way certain forces move—these things have always made sense to me. And while I’ve been wrong at times, I’ve also been right about a fair number of big events – 9/11, the Afghanistan quagmire, the Iraq fiasco, and the property market collapse.
Greymantle saw early in 2016 that Donald Trump was going to win the presidency. Not because I wanted him to, but because I understood the forces that propelled him. I saw, too, that if he lost in 2020, he wouldn’t concede peacefully.
That wasn’t a difficult prediction—anyone with an understanding of Trump’s personality and movement could see it coming.
Greymantle had an advantage there. I grew up in a familial and social environment where I was exposed to a fair number of hard-right thinkers, Nixon loyalists, and the kind of people who believed Douglas MacArthur should have been president. I know what drives them. I know what they want.
Conservative talk radio was a staple at our house. When you listen to that for 10 or 15 years, you get a good feel for what some of your fellow listeners really crave.
If Greymantle had launched this site ten years earlier, maybe we could have had a small impact. Maybe we could have helped shape the conversation. As we explained above, there were solid personal reasons for not doing so – a new marriage, a fledgling career, kids, a dog, a mortgage, etc., etc., etc.
But that’s the point of this project now—to analyze, to predict, and, hopefully, to give people a clearer view of the forces shaping our world.
Better late than never.
Until next time, I remain —
Yours Truly,
Ivor Greymantle
