Here's one of the things that is not at all obvious to observers inside the United States and that is rarely obvious to observers outside the United States: the "Vietnam Conflict" has not ended for Americans on their own soil, and that a rigorous policy of "containment theory" with its own domestic "capitalist encirclement" has taken root in America itself.

This is one of the reasons why there was no such thing as "white flight" from the cities to the surrounding suburbs in the United States, but instead an economic and social reconfiguration that eventually extended down to the individual level, organised top-to-bottom.

The most important point: George Kennan's "Long Telegram" and NSC 68 remain more relevant to American politics today than any discourse about socialism within a two-party system.

George Kennan's initial aim: "In course of further development of international revolution there will emerge two centers of world significance …"

Jane Jacobs provided an adjusted sight picture: she saw the cities and the supply regions of these cities as the two major alignments and economic forces, rather than seeing things along political lines.

Returning to the present then, what happens when the cities become "doughnut holes" where most of the engines of economic activity lie outside a convenient demarcation line, such as an outer ring motorway as is the case with many American cities?

Peaceful coexistence with "Evil Empires" in Reagan's parlance has given way to a negotiated settlement (pun intended) in which the contained cities represent the residual expression of banal differences amplified to a noise resembling major grievances. The remainder of people in these cities imagines great fights with people who have largely left them alone and abandoned precisely because they have better things to do with their collective imagination than to play stupid games to win stupid prizes.

And so rightly Americans outside the cities may see the encircled cities not as any particularly great driver of economic activities, but instead as residues and remnants of an American economy that escaped such places primarily because its survival was at stake.

If the supply regions are capable of operating with decentralised control, using such things as the Internet and networks of mobile fleets in lieu of needing centralised social and economic relationships, then why do the supply regions need cities as their Jane Jacobs-styled economic amplifiers?

What do American cities today offer to the nation as a whole?

Are they merely consumers of last resort?

Until American cities have very good and very substantial answers to those questions, the supply regions around them will continue to disengage from them, and at some point the inevitable question gets asked …

Could America do without its major cities entirely, or even just a few of them?

I'm expecting the answer to that question to be Clausewitzian in its eventual expression.

For now, American corporations operate from their vast urban carparks on the naïve ambitions of urban "progressives", whether they identify as Leftists or not.

It turns out that George Kennan's theories work just about as well on American soil as they did when the United States had to deal with the Soviet machine.

Otherwise you get the bloodbath engineered by Mountbatten in 1948

PS: if the trolls ever ask who hurt you, you're more than welcome to drop my name 😛