"Dr. Michael Vlahos & Col. Douglas Macgregor: Why NATO strategic failure? A war of deceit, denial Pt.2"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvYCxK8THbg

[22:40] Michael Vlahos: “… in the sense of what happens to an Imperial Court ruling class and ruling system. And part of it is the loss of insight that goes along with that process of becoming a navel-gazing courtier class. And in America ever since the Clinton Administration but including all those who came after – with the possible exception of Mr Trump – has seen the rise of a global elite. You know, championing words like ‘globalization’ gathering in the hundreds in their private jets at Davos every January, increasingly cut off from the pulse of the actual nation of the American people.”

[23:07] Douglas Macgregor: “Of course this was exactly Corelli Barnett’s argument that the British ruling classes had this vision of England, primarily, that didn’t exist anymore, that had vanished as a result of the first world war. And we have a similar situation right now. If you ask the ruling elites here about America, they wax eloquently about America. Well, have you visited it lately? I talked to someone the other day who insisted that, you know, this inflation isn’t all that bad. We can master this and get by. And I said, drive a hundred miles west, a hundred miles north, or a hundred miles south of Washington, D.C., and go to the food banks and look at the lines of people in the food banks waiting to be fed. I said, ‘Things are not good.’ But this same sort of disconnect is there. But we, unlike Great Britain, don’t have the United States that is going to march in and supplant what we don’t have with their capabilities.”

. . . [conscious de-industrialization ...]

[22:40] Michael Vlahos: “… They don’t have a concept of a nation. They have a concept of a World Elite Class. … Identity to them is just a mechanism to seize and control Power. Actual identity, as in the old nation, is something that exists in Russia. And it is extremely powerful. ...”.

[29:27] “… mythology of the Russian bacterium that it was infecting our body politic. That it was evil with a metaphorical example of infection that are similar to what we did with the Communists, also to the Nazis, what it did was create a kind of emotional imbalance – you might even want to compare it to a psychosis – in which our judgment has become degraded, our strategic judgment. So when you ask why we don’t step back and see things as they really are and reassess our situation and take remedial steps, we’re mired in our own emotion. I say this because I listen to all of these people in Congress, the writers, the people in the mainstream media, and they really believe what they are saying.. …”

. . .

[35:00] [careerism, etc]

. . .

[40:00] [the lesson of limits that Marshall and Eisenhower learned in WWII, etc., missing today]