Resist. We are past peak state.

There are a lot of conspiracy theorists out there who think that the state is going to become corporate and fascist. I don’t think so. I think it is bankrupt, and will shrink. Because what we cannot afford we will not have.

But in the process it will be dangerous for all. The State will resist: the clients of the state, such as the academics, will fight dirty.

Remember, every state in history has collapsed. The US Deep State is less powerful and more parasitical than it was in 1990. If we’re lucky, its collapse will look a lot like the Soviet state collapse. If we’re not lucky, its collapse will be more akin to the Nazi state collapse. Most likely, it will be somewhere in between; remember it is the chaos that is more likely to kill you than the last desperate thrashings of the statist parasites attempting to retain power.

Prepare accordingly. The social mood is darkening.

It is clear that the president’s strategy is failing disastrously. Since 2010, total fatalities from armed conflict in the world have increased by a factor of close to four, according to data from the International Institute of Strategic Studies. Total fatalities due to terrorism have risen nearly sixfold, based on the University of Maryland’s Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism database. Nearly all this violence is concentrated in a swath of territory stretching from North Africa through the Middle East to Afghanistan and Pakistan. And there is every reason to expect the violence to escalate as the Sunni powers of the region seek to prevent Iran from establishing itself as the post-American hegemon.

Today the U.S. faces three strategic challenges: the maelstrom in the Muslim world, the machinations of a weak but ruthless Russia, and the ambition of a still-growing China. The president’s responses to all three look woefully inadequate.

Those who know the Obama White House’s inner workings wonder why this president, who came into office with next to no experience of foreign policy, has made so little effort to hire strategic expertise. In fairness, Denis McDonough (now White House chief of staff) has some real knowledge of Latin America. While at Oxford, National Security Adviser Susan Rice wrote a doctoral dissertation on Zimbabwe. And Samantha Power, ambassador to the U.N., has published two substantial books (one of which—“A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide”—she will need to update when she returns to academic life).

But other key players are the sort of people Henry Kissinger complained about more than half a century ago: Michael Froman, the trade representative, was one of Mr. Obama’s classmates at Harvard Law School; Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken is a Columbia J.D.; éminence grise Valerie Jarrett got hers from the University of Michigan. What about Secretary of State John Kerry? Boston College Law School, ’76. Not one of the people who advise the president could claim to have made contributions to strategic doctrine comparable with those made by Mr. Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski before they went to Washington.

Some things you can learn on the job, like tending bar or being a community organizer. National-security strategy is different. “High office teaches decision making, not substance,” Mr. Kissinger once wrote. “It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it.” The next president may have cause to regret that Barack Obama didn’t heed those words. In making up his strategy as he has gone along, this president has sown the wind. His successor will reap the whirlwind. He or she had better bring some serious intellectual capital to the White House.

The current managers of the State are feckless and incompetent. The cracks in the system are obvious. The Marxists do not get much right, but since they are now in power, they will use the instruments of the state to make their revolution permanent, if they can.

But they need the money and cooperation of other people to do that. It is not a time to allow that, but a time to resist.