Bombs are falling on Iran. In this act of naked aggression many see the contours of another murderous rampage: the invasion of Iraq 23 years ago, which like the Iran adventure was also unwarranted chaos predicated on a tissue of lies.

Here we go again, the war-weary American public groans. But Washington — which, in the name of “democracy,” ignores what the vast majority of Americans wants or needs — is uninterested, oblivious. As with other wars in other times, the neocons of the hour charge ahead, dealing death and jacking up Raytheon stock (see here) while the fake-news media drones on.

However, there is one big difference between now and then: The neocons of a generation ago had to contend with borderless bureaucrats at the United Nations chiming in about UN resolutions and international law. We have almost none of that now. Globalism is dead and a whole passel of other internationalist ideologies with it. The world, in many ways, is back to the way it was before our ideological age began.

Recall that the UN was the setting for a key scene in the political theater before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In February of that year, Secretary of State Colin Powell (1937-2021) appeared before the UN Security Council to deliver a series of shameless falsehoods about the country that the Washington cabal was planning to ransack. When the president at the time, George W. Bush, assembled a “coalition of the willing” to help him and his neocon goons run wild in the Middle East, it was both an extension of Powell’s lies and, in many ways, a continuation of Bush’s September 2002 address to the UN General Assembly. During that other bit of theater, Bush accused Iraq of defying UN resolutions 1441 (giving the Iraqi government a “final opportunity” to get rid of the WMDs it did not have), 1373 (against “terrorism”), and other acts and statements of an international nature. When the tanks, planes, and troops swooped into Iraq a few months later, the justification, although hypocritical in the extreme, was ostensibly internationalist.

Fast forward to 2026. The current president, Donald J. Trump, is proving to be as trigger-happy as his predecessors, Bush included. But unlike during the Bush years, the United Nations is now a muted choir. Hardly anyone even gestures in that direction. Why would they, when the UN has become a sad shell of its formerly proud self? The internationalist factotums that once sucked up Americans’ and many other nations’ citizens’ hard-earned tax monies are reduced to begging for funding to keep the lights on. António Guterres, the fat globalist who heads the UN today, wrote a letter to member states in late January of this year warning of “imminent financial collapse” if unpaid dues were not sent in right away (see here). Most people in the world ignored him. The Trump administration did not bother paying even lip service to Guterres or his globalists before hitting Iran or Venezuela. Trump’s designs on Greenland, Cuba, Colombia, and wherever else might fall in his crosshairs are also largely free of internationalist-themed justification. The UN has become a non-factor, even a non-entity.

Presidents and other heads of state once symbolically kowtowed to the UN and the globalism it stood for. Now, though, the UN is a pathetic joke. What happened?

One proximate cause of the strange death of the UN and of the internationalist ideology underpinning it may be Jeffrey Epstein. The revelations surrounding Epstein and his internationalist-elite cronies — of pedophilia, sex trafficking, massive bank fraud, political meddling, blackmail, espionage, arms smuggling, association with the worst of the worst criminals on the planet — have effectively ended any regard that the average person might still have had for his or her self-styled social betters. After half a decade of lies about viruses, vaccines, lockdowns, and masks, Joe, Zhang, and Khan Sixpack — the working stiffs of the world — have had it with “experts” and everyone else in government and academic employ. Add to that what we now know about many of the “experts” who lied to us during the pandemic — that they were cavorting with Epstein on his child-rape island and his various other enclaves of what can only be described as the ritualistic abuse of minors — and the result is that we little people are just not going to put up with hectoring from the internationalist class over Iran or anything else. Even if, by some miscalculation, Trump were to appeal to the UN for help selling his foreign aggression, I doubt one American in ten would buy it.

The sickening Epstein slime that oozed from wherever the globalists had trod finished off internationalism. That slime wasn’t the main killer of the globalist fraud, however. It didn’t set its demise in motion; it simply hastened an ending that was already under way.

Take a few steps back and look at the past century or so in panorama. Despite obvious technological advancements, the world today and the world of, say, the 1920s and 30s is roughly the same. That is to say, the people of the 1920s and 30s, in whatever country, typically loved their families, worked to protect their livelihoods, favored the health and well-being of their own countries, and did not aspire to suck the marrow out of the bones of foreigners. Of course there were ethnic rivalries, ancient hatreds. There was murder and war as ever. But what there wasn’t was wholesale ideological justification for those horrors. People’s horizons were their day-to-day lives and very few people were prone to getting riled up about abstractions.

This human way of being in the world was ushered out by American globalists. President Woodrow Wilson, backed by socialist internationalists, claimed in 1917 that the world needed to be made safe for democracy. Thus began a century of lying in order to trick Americans into supporting interventionism directly counter to their own loves and interests. This hoodwinking as government policy was bolstered by the advertising and public opinion industries for which lying was a stock in trade. American doughboys got fed into the meat grinder in Europe for the sake of ideological nonsense, a process that repeated, mutatis mutandis, worldwide for more than 100 years. The people in other countries began to buy into the globalist talking points, too.

After World War II, when internationalists finally had the global empire for which Wilson and his cabal longed, the ideological justifications for American sacrifice got cranked up to eleven. Freedom and democracy, human rights, “Western civilization,” liberal values, free trade, globalization, and the American way of life led actual Americans down the primrose path, at the end of which was always unemployment, drug use, broken families, hollowed out communities, rising suicide rates, crime, abortion, and general despair. American boys — and, later, girls: gender equality! — killed and died in Southeast Asian jungles, Middle Eastern deserts, Central Asian mountains, African valleys, and Latin American rain forests for “capitalism,” which, apparently, had to defeat “communism” lest the whole world go up in flames. The whole world did go up in flames, as often as not at the hands of the capitalists. Or the communists, or the globalists, or the War-on-Drug-ists, or the War-on-Terror-ists, but no matter. The ideological show must go on. Internationalism, the post-nation-state world, must be birthed. Even raw statist aggression got window-dressed as global governance. Americans, lied to as ever by Washington, Madison Avenue, and the “journalists” in the Fourth Estate, largely acquiesced in the charade. We hurt ourselves and our families so that some abstract principle — behind which always lurked the board of directors of some godless corporation or thinktank — could prosper.

A man named Trump killed the Wilsonian mirage forever. Say of Trump what you will, but he shouted from the rooftops ten years ago that the Washington imperial class had no clothes. It may be that, now, Trump has joined that class and is doing their bidding. I think that assessment is true. It may also be that Trump was always in that class and was just the best liar of them all. Maybe so. But in the decade since the rise of Trumpism, the American political landscape has been transformed utterly. Only a few stragglers advocate for interventionism, globalism, “free trade,” or “democracy” today. Those dogs won’t hunt. Americans have woken up from their century of Wilsonian ideological slumbers. Like our forebears 100 years before, we are not going to commit mass murder, or mass suicide, for some ideology. If globalists want globalism, then they can die for it themselves.

This seems to me the best way to geopolitically contextualize the Epstein Files. Nothing has changed except that ideology has boiled off and the sins of the “elite” are as stark as they would always have been without that cover. As always, the ruling class is corrupt, criminal, and revolting.

The so-called droit du seigneur, or right of the first night, is sometimes said by modern scholars to be a misunderstanding of historical documents, but the evidence seems to me overwhelming that, the world over, kings and lords and other bigwigs have arrogated to themselves the “right” to use numerous young women and to rape teens and even children. Try counting the women in the harem of your typical aristocrat in the country and at the historical time of your choosing to get a sense of what morality has always looked like for the upper classes. The main difference among the courtiers of, say, Emperor Wucheng of the Northern Qi Dynasty, Soltan Hoseyn of the Safavid Dynasty, and Bill Clinton of the Globalist Dynasty is that the latter found cover for his depredations behind the language of the United Nations and the World Bank. Epstein today or Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s buddy, who ran wild 4,000 years ago — the depravity is the same. What the Epstein Files describe is what those with money and privilege have always done: namely, prey on those weaker than they.

That’s precisely what globalism is, come to think of it.

What the Epstein Files have done is to expose the hateful lies of the globalists after a century of misery for humankind. What comes next will probably be the usual rapine and slaughter, as human nature has changed precisely zero since the Fall. But what will be different is that almost nobody will be trying to justify sin with ideology. If that keeps even some sin from happening, then I suppose that the strange death of ideology is something to welcome.