Same Days Mail

Looking for sense in the current affairs of Euro-America? You might have trouble finding even a modicum of reason, or greatness. American has chosen the path of least resistance, flexing their muscle across soft and (uncomplicated) points: Greenland, Venezuela, the Ukraine and even the Gaza strip are all parts of a changing geo-political landscape, but the stakes are lower than the times demand. When tested with power and open-ended history, hegemons would normally respond with their full arsenal of wit, diplomacy and statesmanship. Rather than pivoting to an improved, profitable and more stable world that serves their long-term interests by fully embedding their governing and legal priorities (including, where possible, the civic and commercial know-how for hitching growth -maybe also progress, into some classic or more generous laisser-faire mentality), America has gone into attack mode on the less important, more salient, somewhat provincial issues.

The point with Venezuela is money, Greenland is already available via NATO, the wounds of Gaza were already overlaid by the sheer power of the Israeli military and the catastrophe that made a truce look sensible, and Ukraine remains the furthest, most remote and coldly eerie front between the global order that was and the disorder that follows. I wonder where the foreign service has opportunity to use their experience and apply their learning beyond the simple task of settling 21st-century challenges, like the ascending Communism of industrial China, the huge disparities between North and South in demography and democracy, or the misalignment and miscommunication in the Transatlantic Alliance, borne out in the historical collapse of Russia (an unnecessary enemy), European integration (an unwilling alternative), and its failure to promote American interests in the greatest and most critical powerplay, the energy and trade following the Abraham accords in the Near East. The grid is what Marko Rubio should be focusing on, instead of running another failed state for profit or mistaking Greenland for an obvious and urgent deliverable.

It seems that our imperial reflexes are running on some sort of energy drink, weed and deep misunderstanding: unplugging the trade regimes we have been relying on to exercise capital and financial innovation (although finance and manufacturing have long been divorced) is an astute, high-risk and highly-calculated move. On the other hand, where policy takes the last seat and Donald’s software is expected to compute what’s best for the Imperial legacy he’s heading, things are desperately slow and mundane. After falling to “bring” peace to Eastern Europe, securing Gaza would remain flat for the foreseeable future and nudging their allies towards humiliating self-reflection, Trump decides to put himself in charge of another country, this time without any political or pedagogical context whatsoever. No weapons of mass destruction, no preemptive strikes against an antagonizing enemy, no strategy-laden, complicated knots to resolve or the grand narrative of Empire-first at everyone’s cost to defend. Just gas. There is an immense difference between personal goals, on the one side, and geo-strategic (in America, institutional) objectives, and it’s dangerous to pursuit our ego in the clothing of our credit or country.

This president has managed to vaporize what little moral standing the US was maintaining in the face of their stand-off between national interests and the agenda remaking the world (economic stagnation, technology and its implications, migration, climate change, hard-right politics from Toulouse to Delhi etc.) in record time, together with the value the presidency carried per se. A laughing stock for the rich (across the pond), the intellectual (everywhere), the lefties and the moderates, his own brand of DIY conservatism has to alarm us to the extend to which his drive can ruin the car. If anything, his figure calmy presents the future historian with an unnerving contrast: deadly power and defeat-ready ridicule.

It’s interesting to note the kind of dissidents every primacy creates. From the streets of Los Angele to the Houses of Parliament in the UK, from bipartisan, seething irony in France to the demonstrations in Venezuela, and from China’s fair-first rhetoric (respect for the established rules, massive investments in infrastructure across continents, dialogue and cooperation on the climate, for example) to how Russia’s Putin resists so easily their calls to end the conflict with an intelligible compromise on arms, architecture (for security) and land, the people renovating the White House are out of luck and invitees. Who will listen to some weird-ass, floating cake?

An orange face for an unprecedented coalition of ultra-capitalists, mainstream (white) poor, Republicans and the undeserving, Christians and Hispanics, radicals and those enabled in tradition, Donald J. Trump is the lurid, breathtaking outcome of Silicon-coated civics, what happens when communications at the speed of touch override the Republic. America has always been Caps-lock sensitive, engulfing illegible difference into the orbit of tech and the zeal that spurs empathy, innovation and death. However opaque the binding that sits between ethics, peoples, custom and language, it becomes evident with time on our ship (and with our captain) that this ever-maiden voyage needs practice as much as it uses angst and ambition.

Greed born in (market) exchange and the rich achievements of the recent past (including the Moon landing, or the abolition of slavery and the Civil Rights Act) will not be enough to contain the depths in which popular enmity and financial oblivion can take American opinion, ordinary feeling and common sense. The styling and aims of online platforms, where citizens and immigrants, investors and labor, patriots and humanists collide are unwilling to bridge arguments, unavailable for competition and unsuitable for rights and freedom. If we stop and consider how “social media” (terms that will end up in the bin of history where misnomers fail) harness reason, intent and emotion to increase ads or multiply data ad infinitum (analytics requires this self-propagation of information that breeds information, by way of statistics and unbound from life or context), we are left with 0 reason why we may wonder how reasoning fails and debates break down in faith, angst and acrimony.

As rough as the sea turns out for a novice nation that is unfamiliar with truce, solidarity and grief (continental US remains a continuum of peace and relative rule of law for its entire existence), the only way forward is to learn from this experience and anticipate for the worst. To imagine this can also be a productive exercise.

While America matures, it’s sensible for both power and people to gain an informed awareness and interpret what they are going through. Focusing on Trump as cause is the sweetest trap one can ignore (or, mostly, it seems, choose to do so) when economics, history and demographic details are clear on this, even in hindsight: there is no other basis for Enlightened health policy spurning vaccines, industrial policy rewarding capital and foreign policy eating away at the might and budget of the formerly liberal Imperium, than facts without context, opinion without background, image without caption and reporting without journalism. Donald happens to be the first among equals, an astonishingly fit figure for the presidency of one endless country where speech has no heed for freedom and individual conscience has been sold to the highest bidder. If we have any chance of surviving his agonizing swerve, we must accommodate the Century.