If we were not living in an age of nuclear weapons, I would think that we are currently getting quite close to World War III. Some very high stakes games are emerging.
UK leaving the EU means forming an alliance with the US just at a time when the US is developing some new policies that many people in UK will feel uneasy about. But what choice? The mistake that many British people made at the time of the referendum was to naively think that the choice was between one alliance and independence when in fact it was a choice between one alliance and another. If the British think that they had a hard time getting the terms they wanted out of Brussels - well you've seen nothing yet. What change will they get out of the US? May can talk as much as she likes about being treated "as equals" - it is not going to happen.
The new American regime clearly wants the EU to fail and collapse. This makes sense from a business point of view. The EU is the US's biggest trading rival and the Central European Bank is probably now richer than its American opposite number - certainly in gold holdings which are about the only thing you can really rely upon if things get very rough. What will that power be used for? Of course, the EU could break up, but even a rump would still be pretty powerful and those that left would probably drift back if not snapped up by America. However, the US can no longer afford such a strategy. The US also wants its "allies" to pay more to the general defense budget and not rely upon the US to molly coddle them. that makes sense too, except that if EU has to pay a realistic amount it is pretty near to a certainty that it will prefer to rearm and spend the money in its own factories, thereby mopping up all its unemployment problem, making the immigrant problem disappear (because they will be needed), boosting its science base and in the process creating a new super-power. This is the dilemma for the US.
It serves Russia too to have the EU weakened, but it would also serve Russia to have a strong EU in alliance. We are entering into one of those occasional windows of historic time when a lot of things are up in the air and the whole configuration could change. Nothing can be taken for granted at the moment. Britain could be in alliance with Turkey - really?
Up to now the US has maintained its number one position by keeping the EU in tension with Russia, Japan in tension with China (and Korea), and Israel, Arabia and Iran all at odds with each other. The breakdown of any of this pattern would have major knock on consequences. A growing sense of hostility between US and EU could easily upset this apple cart and the resulting splash could sink a lot of little boats.
It is impossible to predict what will happen in detail. One can expect increasing unrest inside the US which will also hamper effective action on the world stage. No doubt the new regime will gradually learn more finesse and one week is too little to judge by, but if Trump is really going to change American culture as much as he intends it is going to involve a lot of conflict along the way (cf Thatcher and the coal miners). In that situation it is easy to blame foreigners which works as long as they are relatively powerless to hit back. However, i would watch developments in France and Germany closely.
From a Buddhist perspective one might say, Why can't they all just be friends? Indeed! However there is a growing sense of belligerence everywhere at the moment and i think we all have cause to worry.
Replies
The emerging Trump agenda
- roll back business regulation: a free for all in the market place, though biassed toward the already rich. What will happen when a "too-big-to-fail" goes bankrupt remains to be seen.
- backtracking on climate change regulation and environmental protection - very worrying.
- pulling back from the UN and other international commitments: a go it alone approach. Of course, this could ultimately result in the rest of the world pulling together.
- wage war upon the press, the judiciary, and other guarantors of freedom, law and democracy: this will be the most important battle to watch and it is pretty hot already.
- expansionary economics while cutting taxes: should lead to higher debt levels, might lead to printing money, could lead to big eventual fall in value of dollar
- erosion of European Union: Poland and one or two East European countries might help him there, but the core EU might well be willing to let them go in return for a stronger, more centralised W Europe. The Franco-German alliance will strengthen.
- attempt to reverse current demographic trends in the US so as to maintain WASP control
- we do not really know yet what line they will take in the Middle East nor vis-a-vis Russia or China. So far it is just talk, most of it not very clear or reliable.
All in all, it is quite likely that the Trump regime in the US, whatever result it brings within the country, may well stimulate the forming or strengthening of consortia of countries elsewhere in the world. The countries that stay attached to America - probably Poland, India, Israel, Japan, UK - are not in a position to make much common cause with one another and, presumably, will therefore become appendages.
History Speeding Up
There is a perceptive article on the Guardian site that explains the Trump phenomena quite well. Trump was something that was, as they say, waiting to happen, and, well, it has happened... perhaps a little quicker than might have been expected. As the article explains, however, many people were hoping that Obama would be the one to overturn the system in the way that Trump looks more likely to do, so some of the Trump win is a sign of disappointment in the Obama presidency, though I have to say that the inertia of any large political system is always very difficult to overcome and Trump may yet also be "tamed" by the establishment, especially since he has to rely upon support from the Republican Party. If he is, then it could either lead to despair and depression in the US or to an even more disruptive explosion next time.
My own feeling at the time of the election was that if Trump were elected it might speed up a number of processes that are, insofar as anything is, historically inevitable. I saw these are being, 1. Europe learning to stand on its own feet instead of sheltering under US protection, 2. The US deconstructing its own debt crisis (possibly leading to the dollar ceasing to be the dominant currency in international trade - a change that would have a number of other knock on effects), 3. The US adjusting to being one country among others rather than the quasi-ruler of the world, a position it can no longer afford to pay for, 4. Some kind of reconciliation between Europe and Russia. I do not mean by this that these were Trump policies. Some run completely against his intention, but his presence in the White house makes them all more likely, both because of what he does and because of that he provokes. There are other world problems that might also progress - the Middle East war, realignment in the Far East, and so on. The one really big problem that is more difficult to call is the eco-crisis. Will the Trump presidency scupper progress on climate or will it provoke stronger action by others? Difficult to say.
Thanks, Robert - chilling.
Picking up an earlier comment you made David, I am astonished at the lack of noticing that things economic, political, social and ecological all hang by the barest of threads yet people continue to take refuge in them. We are in end times I very much sense and the age of the exponential. We have run out of habitat, that is the biological imperative we cannot survive without and I believe this is the driver of all the chaos.
The Shock Doctrine by Klein did reveal how despicable power elites are and what we can expect from them. It is extraordinary also how quiet the world became about nuclear weapons since the eighties and that spark of fear has begun to grow again. M A D did control those who controlled the missiles to some extent but some rather mad types have got hold of the controls these days. But even a 'conventional' war against any nation that has nuclear power these days will bring global nuclear desolation. There are some 450 nuclear power plants on our planet, many located on the coast. They are very easily bombed and would be prime targets.
However the disaster of nuclear war depends on human action. It seems we are past that point now regarding the planets ecology. The science has not been debateable for a few decades now. Scientific hypotheses predicting ecological devastation have been consistently and dramatically understated by measurable reality. Through my lifelong anarchist focus on the political comes this so dark view of where we are now. Maybe from living there so long I have few attachments to state centred political elites.
But I see no way through now, none. So while I still study the political very much, I sense this political impotence is ruling. How to live within this balance of seeing this train wreck unfolding and having no real sense of what is to be done.
Europe is waking up slowly - probably not quickly enough.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38808504
An item that is doing the rounds on Facebook at the moment is interesting...
From Heather Richardson, professor of History at Boston College:
"I don't like to talk about politics on Facebook-- political history is my job, after all, and you are my friends-- but there is an important non-partisan point to make today.
What Bannon is doing, most dramatically with last night's ban on immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries-- is creating what is known as a "shock event."
Such an event is unexpected and confusing and throws a society into chaos. People scramble to react to the event, usually along some fault line that those responsible for the event can widen by claiming that they alone know how to restore order.
When opponents speak out, the authors of the shock event call them enemies. As society reels and tempers run high, those responsible for the shock event perform a sleight of hand to achieve their real goal, a goal they know to be hugely unpopular, but from which everyone has been distracted as they fight over the initial event. There is no longer concerted opposition to the real goal; opposition divides along the partisan lines established by the shock event.
Last night's Executive Order has all the hallmarks of a shock event. It was not reviewed by any governmental agencies or lawyers before it was released, and counterterrorism experts insist they did not ask for it. People charged with enforcing it got no instructions about how to do so. Courts immediately have declared parts of it unconstitutional, but border police in some airports are refusing to stop enforcing it.
Predictably, chaos has followed and tempers are hot.
My point today is this: unless you are the person setting it up, it is in no one's interest to play the shock event game. It is designed explicitly to divide people who might otherwise come together so they cannot stand against something its authors think they won't like.
I don't know what Bannon is up to-- although I have some guesses-- but because I know Bannon's ideas well, I am positive that there is not a single person whom I consider a friend on either side of the aisle-- and my friends range pretty widely-- who will benefit from whatever it is.
If the shock event strategy works, though, many of you will blame each other, rather than Bannon, for the fallout. And the country will have been tricked into accepting their real goal.
But because shock events destabilize a society, they can also be used positively. We do not have to respond along old fault lines. We could just as easily reorganize into a different pattern that threatens the people who sparked the event.
A successful shock event depends on speed and chaos because it requires knee-jerk reactions so that people divide along established lines. This, for example, is how Confederate leaders railroaded the initial southern states out of the Union.
If people realize they are being played, though, they can reach across old lines and reorganize to challenge the leaders who are pulling the strings. This was Lincoln's strategy when he joined together Whigs, Democrats, Free-Soilers, anti-Nebraska voters, and nativists into the new Republican Party to stand against the Slave Power.
Five years before, such a coalition would have been unimaginable. Members of those groups agreed on very little other than that they wanted all Americans to have equal economic opportunity. Once they began to work together to promote a fair economic system, though, they found much common ground. They ended up rededicating the nation to a "government of the people, by the people, and for the people."
Confederate leaders and Lincoln both knew about the political potential of a shock event. As we are in the midst of one, it seems worth noting that Lincoln seemed to have the better idea about how to use it."
If you watch the little film of Richard Blumenthal making a small speech defending the action of Sally Yates - the first martyr of the new regime in USA - you notice the extreme slowness of his delivery. My guess is that the man is afraid. How soon before we are all paralyzed with fear? Robert is astonished that we are blind to the eco-disaster and I am equally astonished that we are blind to the politico-disaster. At some deep level the two are, one assumes, connected. Things could easily get a lot worse quite rapidly now. Once fear takes hold in high places there is no telling where it will end, but one can see the general direction. Very near the end of his life the Buddha was consulted about an impending war.
Ever since 1949 the people of Europe and North America have been spared from this sort of thing happening close at hand. We exported it and fought proxy wars elsewhere. Now, however, without being able to pin down exactly what the next moves will be, we seem to be edging closer and closer to the cliff edge.
At such times people are blind in various ways. We all are. Most people in UK probably did not realise that a vote for Brexit would prove to be a vote for Trump, for instance, but the UK is now in a position where it can hardly afford to say boo to its big ex-colony.
What did Buddha say? He said, in effect, that the Vajjis would be very hard to subdue so long as they stayed true to their good ways of gathering concord, respecting their traditions, respecting elders, protecting the weak, sustaining their religion, and paying attention to the wise. The minister of Ajatasattu who heard the Buddha say this determined to advise his lord to set about fermenting "treachery and discord" among the Vajjis.
This clear description of how politics works in such situations was written two thousand years before Machiavelli. In the immediate future it is going to become more difficult to protect ourselves from fear and the resulting risks of treachery and discord.
From a Buddhist perspective it's also possible - in my opinion - to say that ours is an age dominated by very high levels of non-vision, aversion and attachment. Former equilibria (dynamic and fragile but nevertheless in some way equilibria) are close to a rupture, as David sharply underlines. A situation of this kind has happened several times - in different forms - in what we call history. Our minds have been dominated by ideas such as equilibrium, compromise, development, reasonable agreement, etc.. We practically removed - except than in ritual dates, official discourses, historical analyses, etc.. the issues posed by the "Terrible that already happened". Now we look at what might happen next with a sort of stupor ("aha, look a this: Trump, the end of Europe, Isis, ...") as if there were no continuity of the "Terrible" of the recent past (the Holocaust, the Stalin's crimes, Pol Pot and many more) - not to mention the farer past - with the Terrible of today (e.g., on an example: 4 millions of dead people caused by Western wars in Iraq, Lybia, etc... in the last few years). We have been blinded by illusion (Welfare, economic growth, democratic control...), attachment (to our comforts), aversion (towards the horrible things that continuously happen in this samsaric reality). It's time to change attitude and to penetrate more closely the essence of these poisons, nowadays exponentially growing.
I wish I could tell you so, Robert, but I am as blind on this one as anybody. Your predictions may be right or they might not be. I just do not know. I think it might be worth picking up the hypothetical: how will the human spirit respond if you are right and we face a very rapid decline? That does seem a question worth debating, as it may be a real scenario. We might learn something of value there. I remember that Joanna Macy did very interesting workshops around the prospect of catastrophic nuclear war which seemed like about a fifty-fifty bet catastrophe waiting to happen through much of my early life. Somehow it seems somewhat less likely now - but, again, who knows? Thank you for your repeatedly bringing this dimension in - it is really important. Namo Amida Bu.
My major concern regarding any future projections of where we may end up is held by my understanding that it is highly likely we have entered this runaway greenhouse and by the understanding of science that we are in very advanced mass extinction of life on the planet. The most likely relatively near term outcome is a global famine with agriculture already under severe strain while temperatures are rising abruptly in most areas that grain is grown. That is the end of modern culture as we know it.
It is a worthwhile speculation to put a number on the odds one considers this likely. Following our mass media, easy to believe it is highly unlikely. Though science is now telling us that a mass extinction of all vertebrate life is not only measurable but would be completed by earlier than 2035. I speculate that these 'elites' controlling our affairs must understand this, but maybe avidya totally rules there.
While I agree with the projections of how global politics are likely to grow..... ceteris parabis, I believe it is more useful now to project how this modern hegemony will respond to near term unresolvable calamity. In sanity and empathy it is so highly desirable for us to add this terrible dimension to all of our projections. We are all in denial here to at least some extent and it is so very understandable. While we are we held in denial of this terrible likelihood we are not preparing in any meaningful sense for the massive suffering that will come as our planets ability to support life crashes.
Maybe in such a tragedy we would all become friends. In todays world that seems extremely naïve but I am unable to make any predictions of how the human spirit would turn in such a time. But that's for another paradigm..... We are locked in a paradigm that is ruled by hope and the times seem increasingly hopeless for supporting life. We may be entering a time when sudden nuclear obliteration would save a lot of suffering. But maybe that's being pessimistic. My only hope is that someone can show me I am being a complete fool about all of this. Please tell me so......