Since the American and French revolutions, we have witnessed musical chairs in the rise and fall of the great powers, with the European pentarchy – France, England, Austria, Prussia and Russia – imposing itself on the rest of the world. The American War of Independence and the wars of the Revolution and Empire, by raising the question of the legitimacy of power, brought ideology into classical geopolitics; but, throughout the 19th century, in Europe, liberal monarchical constitutionalism – here more religious and conservative, there more secular and progressive – was consolidated, allowing the partition of Africa and other imperial agendas.
The Great War of 1914-1918 and the resulting Bolshevik revolution of 1917 in Russia, which remained outside the European evolutionary matrix, ended “yesterday’s world”. And the era of cosmocratic ideologies came – communism, fascism, liberal democracy – which were asserting themselves, fighting and converging in negotiated syntheses. In 1939, what began as a classic war between states also became an ideological war, following Hitler’s invasion of Stalin’s Soviet Union in June 1941, with all the intolerance of civil wars. It was the outcome of the “European civil war”, which Ernst Nolte speaks of.
After the hot war ended, the Cold War began. Hitlerism and the Axis were defeated by an alliance between Anglo-Saxon liberal democracies and communist Russia; and the United States and the USSR began to lead the new bipolarization, in a unique form of conflict, in which the risk of crossed nuclear annihilation did not allow direct war between the main enemies.
The United States ended up winning the war with some truth and considerable bluff: true, because the world realized that “real socialisms”, which appeared to the foolish as a subchapter of the Sermon on the Mount, were totalitarian, police societies, governed by the Party and terror; and bluffbecause it was through bluff of Star Wars that Reagan led Gorbachev to liberalize. And liberalized communism, without oppression or fear, would never last long. How it didn’t last.
After the end of the USSR, American neoconservatives imposed democratic and capitalist globalism that brought back the socioeconomic abysses of savage capitalism.
Donald Trump and the resurgence of popular nationalism in Europe were the consequences of this globalist drift that deepened the gap between the very rich and their bubble companions (politicians and system bureaucrats) and the people and the middle class.
The conflict is in sight and, for better or worse, revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, Trump seems to be the alternative to the imbalance, showing himself committed to creating a new order and challenging China, the emerging power, to do so.
Therefore, the Xi-Trump meeting discussed the Chinese quasi-monopoly of “rare earths” and the opening up of their export to the USA, in exchange for lower tariffs in America on Chinese products. The Chinese have also promised to control the chemicals that make up Fentanyl, a cheap drug that kills tens of thousands of Americans every year.
The two leaders said little about Ukraine and, presumably, nothing about China’s purchases of Russian or Taiwanese oil. They tried to secure their place in the new game of musical chairs.
Political scientist and writer. The author writes according to the old spelling