The CFR Called it "Controlled Disintegration"

At the Munich Security Conference this weekend, Secretary of State Marco Rubio did something extraordinary. Standing in a room packed with the very architects and defenders of the post-industrial global order, he blew the whistle on their conscious policy of economic destruction.

“Deindustrialization was not inevitable,” Rubio declared. “It was a conscious policy choice, a decades-long economic undertaking that stripped our nations of their wealth, of their productive capacity, and of their independence.”

Let a few of those phrases sink in. A conscious policy choice. A voluntary transformation of our economy.

Actually, it wasn’t so voluntary. And when you see the receipts, you’ll understand why.

What makes Rubio’s speech so extraordinary isn’t just what he said — it’s where he said it. As Barbara Boyd reported in Promethean Action’s Saturday Brief, the Munich conference was wall-to-wall war-mongers and anti-Trumpers. The official conference theme was “Under Destruction” — a full-on assault on Trump’s policies and on the very concept of national sovereignty.

But lurking between the lines of the conference speeches is this reality: the globalists are no longer in control of the current world dynamic. The conference report itself admits that economic uncertainty is nearly three times higher than during the 2008 financial crisis. But we don’t have banks crashing like 2008 (at least not yet). That uncertainty comes from the fact that Donald Trump and his team have declared that the 50-year-old post-industrial model is over.

The globalists know it.

European Central Bank head Christine Lagarde titled her Munich speech “Preparing for Geoeconomic Fragmentation.” Translated from central banker-speak, this is what her speech meant: We now live in a world being reshaped by an assertive American industrial policy, and we — the global financier elite — are no longer controlling the table.

Then Lagarde let slip something even more revealing. She warned about the fragility of the European financial system, saying the ECB must “avoid a situation where that stress triggers fire sales of euro-denominated securities in global funding markets.”

Fire sales of euro-denominated securities. Is someone getting a little nervous?

She then announced the ECB would be expanding its Repo facility to bail out bad euro-denominated securities. Why? Because for decades, the Federal Reserve has backstopped European financial markets. That’s over. The U.S. is no longer the lender of last resort for the gambling casino run by the City of London.

Promethean Action has been covering statements by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and new Fed Chair nominee Kevin Warsh where they’ve made clear that America’s new economic priorities are the physical economy and household incomes — not saving the financial bacon of international banks. And we’ve put that in the context of the battle between the American System and the British System, which is what defines this entire fight.

But the fragility of European financial markets is only part of the picture. The real story is that Europe is destroying itself physically.

Just days before Munich, the Prime Minister of Belgium delivered a stark message to the European Industry Summit in Antwerp:

“Over the past four years, announced closures in the European chemical industry increased sixfold, representing a loss of almost 10% of the European chemical production capacity. In countries like ours, Germany, the Netherlands, and France, the situation is simply dramatic. We are at the brink of an existential crisis.”

Where does that existential crisis come from?

“The decarbonization of Europe will become synonymous with its deindustrialization and eventually with its poverty and its irrelevance.”

There’s that word again. Deindustrialization.

The Belgian Prime Minister is saying the same thing that Rubio said at Munich and that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said at Davos: the globalist system of free trade and green insanity is a failure and has gutted the industrial base of every nation that succumbed to it.

Now, Rubio called deindustrialization “a conscious policy choice.” That’s the polite version.

In 1977, the Council on Foreign Relations spelled it out in much blunter terms. They called it “controlled disintegration.”

A little historical context for those of you who might be newer to this fight. After the assassination of William McKinley — the last American System president — the British Empire launched a project to return the U.S. to the imperial fold. Part of that project was the founding of the CFR in 1921 as the American arm of the British Roundtable. But despite decades of subversion, the United States maintained some semblance of economic sovereignty and industrial development until the 1970s, when the CFR launched their “1980s Project” — a series of blueprints for dismantling modern industrial society.

One of them was entitled Alternatives to Monetary Disorder. And it let it all hang out:

“A degree of controlled disintegration in the world economy is a legitimate objective for the 1980s and may be the most realistic one for a moderate international economic order.”

Let that sink in. “Controlled disintegration” — a “legitimate objective.” And when you hear the words “moderate international economic order,” translate that into today’s language: the “rules-based order” and “liberal free trade” system that the Davos and Munich crowds are desperately trying to save.

The CFR knew exactly what tradition they were dismantling. They cited Hamilton by name, describing the ideas they opposed as those “eloquently addressed by Hamilton in his Report on Manufacturers of 1790, in which he expressed the opposition of American nationalists to their country’s assuming the role of a raw materials exporter to Britain.”

The British Empire has always known that its mortal enemy is the American System of economics. And in 1977, they called for the “controlled disintegration” of the world economy to stop it.

The mainstream will tell you this is a conspiracy theory. But there it is, in black and white — and it describes exactly what you’ve been living through for the last 50 years.

That is what Secretary of State Rubio just called out at Munich when he said deindustrialization was “a conscious policy decision.” It’s why we lost manufacturing. It’s why we lost our middle and working class and hollowed out our economy and our society. Europe is still doing it. But the Trump Administration has rejected those policies and is recreating an economy which actually works for the American people.

And, by the way, it’s why most of us voted for him.