“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”.
– Antonio Gramsci
We are now in the formative years of a new period whose name and character we don’t yet know. In politics, as in relationships, beginnings matter. But it will be a new world order.
[ My traditional end-of-the-year essay ]
30 December 2023 – – I do not know what a life is without a future, where every day could be your last day. Where you’ve lost your job and your dreams. Where you have lived in a war that tears families apart, losing your relatives, your friends, your home. Where you have been robbed of your sense of security. To witness the destruction of your country and destruction of your cultural heritage, the destruction of all life.
That is the story of Ukraine and Palestine at the moment. And Afghanistan. And Darfur. And Syria. And Yemen. And in so, so many places. Yes, we have learned about the spirit of a country – like Ukraine where civilians have picked up arms to fight or volunteered to treat the wounded and deliver humanitarian aid. They have learned to survive and support each other under extreme circumstances, in bomb shelters and hospitals, destroyed apartment complexes and ruined marketplaces, under Russian occupation and in areas Ukraine still controls.
But no one is left untouched. This weekend the news feeds were filled with stories about the Kharkiv, Ukraine main city hospital destroyed, massive missile and drone attacks by Russian terrorists, many launched over Polish air space, into Dnipro, Kyiv, Lviv, Odessa, and Zaporizhzia. Residential buildings, tube stations, schools, maternity hospitals, plants and warehouses destroyed or damaged. The number of casualties keeps mounting even as I write this: 75 dead, 100s wounded.
The Russians deliberately targeting civil infrastructure to kill and annihilate. They purposefully destroy peaceful cities without mercy, and they are not planning to stop. They have been accumulating rockets and drones, preparing to strike with everything they have just before New Year’s Eve.
We see it across the world. Impunity. The exercise of power without accountability, which becomes, in its starkest form, the commission of crimes without punishment. In Darfur and Palestine and Ukraine and Yemen and elsewhere this goes far beyond the original invasions. It has included repeated violations of international humanitarian law, which is supposed to establish clear protections for civilians, aid workers and civilian infrastructure in conflict zones every day. There is the slow recognition that few, if any people, will ever face consequences for these crimes.
There has been in inordinate amount of attention on the war in Ukraine. But millions of people in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Haiti, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Yemen and scores of other places have been slaughtered, starved, displaced, left homeless, threatened with torture, destroyed.
And this impunity is only one part of a broader global trend. In conflicts around the world, attacks on health facilities and civilian structures have increased by 90% in the past five years, and twice as many aid workers have been killed in the last decade as in the one before that. In recent years, civilians account for 84% of war casualties — a 22% point increase from the Cold War period. With no accountability.
That lack of accountability for crimes in all of these places simply fuels the culture of impunity we see globally. It’s not just war zones. Impunity is a helpful lens through which to understand the global drift to polycrisis, from climate change to the weakening of democracy. Where corruption runs rampant. Where billionaires can evade taxes, oil companies can misrepresent the severity of the climate crisis, elected politicians subvert the judiciary, and human rights are rolled back.
This is impunity in action. Impunity is the mind-set that laws and norms are for suckers. And it will succeed as we move into a new world order. As Antonio Gramsci said (of a different time) “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born”. And oh, there will be monsters.
Moving into the new world order
Each of the following points deserves a full essay (maybe even a book), and they are all related and emblematic of a new world order. I can only give each a cursory skim, and I fully recognize each needs a plethoras of nuances. Next year. Because – like most of you – I have loved ones to annoy, unhealthy food to still devour – and an overwhelming urge to log off for a few days.
The U.S. : a once aspirational nation just continues to plunge into anxiety and divisions
We all know that power corrupts. And brings with it an enormous level of impunity. But what strikes me – especially in the United States – is the one thing that corrupts more than power is access to power. Far worse than an unstable mind given the reins of power are those who willingly place such a deviant in a position of leadership. A petty man is easier to goad, an unstable mind is easier to manipulate, and an unscrupulous moral center is easier to ply and mold. In “King Lear“, is the real villain the aging monarch whose mind is leaving him – or the fawning daughters who feed his vanity to gain inheritance?
In America’s recent history, are the real villains those who have abused the office of the President and expanded the scope of the presidency far beyond its constitutional bounds – or those who’ve demonstrated such extreme capacity for setting aside principles, morals, and ideological moorings to have the ear of whoever happens to win these popularity contests we ostensibly still call elections?
A group of political assassins is quietly (well, no so quietly) threatening American democracy. But then again, we are idiots. When I was a child in America, we were taught that the Founding Fathers were political geniuses in powdered wigs who created a democratic system that remains envied throughout the world. No. Re-read your history. The Founding Fathers didn’t intend to create what contemporary Americans would call a democracy. The Founding Fathers were progressive and even radical for their time, but they birthed a now-outdated political system that allows a partisan minority in the U.S. to thwart the popular will and rule over popular majorities – the very danger James Madison wrote about in the Federalist Papers. And now, given the demographics of the country, it’s not hyperbolic at all. Given the numbers in this country, the only way to not empower the emerging multiracial majority in America is through nondemocratic means.
I cannot dwell on the U.S. The story is too large. But in a way it’s fate was sealed long ago. Way back in the early 1980s the U.S. was a weakened but still operational democracy. But that’s when New Gingrich and Grover Norquist laid the groundwork for Republican extremism and intransigence at the local, state and regional level. Many Americans reading this will remember Democrat Tip O’Neil and his warning “all politics is local” and told the Democrats that they need to have a plan to battle the Republicans at the local/state level. But they did not.
Gingrich and Norquist had a plan – and stuck to it, as did their successors. They began knocking off Republican moderates, whom they and their lieutenants were beginning to think of as RINOs —”Republicans in Name Only” — which so many people today think is a new term, and they marshaled “Movement Conservatives” to take over the party and the country. It would take time and they knew it.
But then the collapse of the USSR gave the branch of the Republican Party that wanted to destroy the New Deal and Democrats confidence that their ideology was right. Believing that their ideology of radical individualism had destroyed the USSR, these so-called Movement Conservatives very deliberately set out to destroy what they saw as Soviet-like socialist ideology at home. Grover Norquist wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
“For 40 years conservatives fought a two-front battle against statism, against the Soviet empire abroad and the American left at home. Now the Soviet Union is gone and conservatives can redeploy. And this time, the other team doesn’t have nuclear weapons.”
You need to understand that to understand the GOP “revolution”. It is far, far more than Donald Trump.
And so the U.S. has become a dysfunctional, stupefied plutocracy. No matter who occupies the White House, or what the issue immediately on hand in Congress (environment or debt, military spending, immigration, health care, education, the wars on poverty, drugs and terror and fill-in-the-blank), the concentrations of wealth and power impose more laws restraining the liberty of persons, fewer laws restricting the license of property; open an ever-widening spread of income inequality, reserve an ever-larger share of the nation’s wealth to an ever-smaller fraction of its people. That is now fixed.
The nation’s political discourse meanwhile has dwindled into the staging of election campaigns with candidates prized for the gift of saying nothing. Forbidden the use of words apt to disturb a Gallup poll or offend a bagman, they stand and serve as product placements for concentrated wealth, their quality to be inferred from the cost of their manufacture. Machine-made tools so well-contrived they can be played for jokes and presented as game show contestants until on election night they come to judgment before the throne of cameras by which and for which they are produced.
Yes, the 60th U.S. presidential election will be quite unlike any that has gone before as the US, and the rest of the world, braces for a contest amid fears of eroding democracy and the looming threat of authoritarianism. It will be a fight marked by numerous unwanted firsts as the oldest president in the country’s history will face the first former US president to stand trial on criminal charges. Well, unless God decides to weigh in on the race.
But there you have it: a once aspirational nation will continue its plunge into anxiety and divisions about crime, immigration, race, foreign wars and the cost of living. The Republicans have corrupted and gamed the entire political and judicial system. And I am certainly not discounting the dark side – how many of them are subject to Russian kompromat.
Bottom line? Oh, we have not seen anything like what is coming. Opportunists will take full advantage of the climate wars, information wars, famines, migration emergencies, etc., etc. to create self-serving cults even worse than MAGA.
The European Union is dying – but nobody has told it yet
You say you want disfunction? Try Europe. Despite concerted efforts by Western and regional powers to keep the Israel-Hamas war contained to the Gaza Strip, the threat of a wider regional conflict is growing by the day. Drone and missile attacks launched by Iran-backed Houthi forces in Yemen have prompted the United States to try to assemble a coalition of countries to secure safe passage for commercial vessels in the Red Sea, a key trade passage. Taken together with the fighting on Israel’s border with Lebanon, the situation has the makings of a broader fight between Israel, backed by some Western powers, and Iran’s proxy forces across the region.
Except … well, for Europe, the risk isn’t just disruptions to trade. It is being drawn in, even indirectly, to a conflict that’s increasingly unpopular with EU voters. Indeed, while the EU officially condemned the Houthi attacks in several statements, several European countries have rushed to say they won’t be taking part in a U.S.-led Red Sea mission. Rome plans to send a ship — but under Italian command, to protect Italian ships. France has said it supports the operation, but will control its own ships. Spain has said it wants nothing to do with a mission under U.S. command. The subtext? There is growing criticism of the toll of Israel’s war in Gaza, following reports of further deadly strikes by its forces in central Gaza, riling up the voters.
Because now far-right parties are advancing across Europe: climbing steadily up the polls, shaping the policies of the mainstream right to reflect nativist and populist platforms, and occupying select ministerial roles in coalition governments.
Bottom line? The Israel/Hamas war is increasingly driving a wedge between Western powers, as EU leaders grapple with increasingly hostile public opinion toward Israel over the growing death toll, just as Iran’s proxies are upping the ante, and Russia is engineering an all-out assault (cyber and kinetic) across Europe. It’s fine and dandy for the U.S. to get all “moral”. But hey – when you have docile neighbors to the north and south, and fish to the east and west, you have a wide comfort zone.
In Ukraine, the war is over
Ukraine knows the war is lost. Ukarine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly address last night that he’d spoken with Pope Francis to discuss Ukraine’s peace formula. Zelenskyy was referring to the plan Kyiv has been circulating for months, which calls among other things for Russia to withdraw all its troops from Ukraine.
But the fact the Zelenskyy is emphasizing peace is noteworthy given the mood music from Ukraine’s political and financial backers. As many had predicted, the West has no staying power. Without financial and military support from Europe and the U.S., Ukraine has no chance. And now the U.S. has shifted from “as long as it takes” to “as long as we can”. Both U.S. and European aid to Ukraine now is in serious jeopardy, and so the Biden administration and European officials are quietly shifting their focus from supporting Ukraine’s goal of total victory over Russia to improving its position in an eventual negotiation to end the war. According to briefing memos on the military web sites I follow, such a negotiation means giving up parts of Ukraine to Russia.
The White House and Pentagon publicly insist there is no official change in administration policy — that they still support Ukraine’s aim of forcing Russia’s military completely out of the country. But as DefenseOne and RealClearDefense have noted (they are the two military sites who have been most authoritative in this war), along with the Ukrainians themselves, U.S. and European military officials are now discussing the redeployment of Kyiv’s forces away from Ukraine’s mostly failed counteroffensive into a stronger defensive position against Russian forces in the east. This effort has also involved bolstering air defense systems and building fortifications, razor wire obstructions and anti-tank obstacles and ditches along Ukraine’s northern border with Belarus – the same tactics Russia used to defeat Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
Plus, as POLITICO Magazine noted this week, Biden had to make this move. He is navigating the nearly two-year-old war in the middle of a tough election campaign — with Trump and other Republican candidates openly mocking his efforts — so his moves will prove tricky at best. Because as it helps Ukraine shift to a more defensive posture, the Biden administration can’t appear to be handing the advantage to Putin after insisting since the war began in February 2022 that it stands fully behind Zelenskyy’s pledge of victory over Moscow. Ah, realpolitik. What a bitch.
Bottom line? Europe and Washington are on the cusp of awarding Putin that which he cannot militarily achieve: Russian domination of eastern and central Europe and renewed opportunity for Moscow to reassert itself in the Balkans and Caucasus.
We live in a world where everything has been weaponized
This is the topic of my first post for 2024. We are in a new way of war, a new way of politics, and – in my estimation – a new world of war. Something ethereal is afoot. We now live in a world of permanent low-level conflict, often unnoticed, undeclared and unending, and one in which even our allies may also be our competitors. And our emerging future actually echoes the distant past. It is a mash-up of terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and conventional war which actually all predate the current hybrid warfare constructs. Everything from the current climate crisis to education to immigration to information to charity to law to sports can be (and will be) weaponized.
With the blurring and erasure of institutional lines between crime and war, public and private, and soldier and civilian, it is little wonder “everything” and everyone may be “weaponized”. In the process, the lines between war and peace can blur into near-irrelevance, and “victory” just means today was a good day, with no guarantees for what may happen tomorrow.
Bottom line? Hybrid War. Grey Zone Warfate. Asymmetric War. Tolerance Warfare. Unrestricted War. Non-Linear Warfare. A plethora of equally unhelpful new terms has emerged. More to come.
Hamas’s asymmetric advantage
What does it mean … exactly … to defeat a terrorist group? That Israel met Hamas’s violence with violence is not remotely surprising, given the Israeli military’s incomparable conventional military superiority to Hamas. Israel has long responded to Palestinian terrorism with inordinate force. The Israeli military is stronger, larger, and better resourced than Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups, and Israeli planners know that their foes cannot go toe to toe with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Yet Israel’s military advantages are growing slimmer. Hamas has proved difficult, if not impossible, to vanquish with military force. Technology has shrunk the gap between states and terrorists, allowing non-state groups to behave in ways that mimic the operations of countries; Hamas can launch sophisticated attacks and spread propaganda much as Israel can. Ancient tactics, too, such as the construction of a warren of tunnels beneath Gaza, have helped Hamas fend off a more powerful adversary. And Hamas gained leverage by capturing some 240 hostages. States have always struggled to defeat terrorist groups … but the Israel-Hamas war shows why it has gotten even harder to do so.
States no longer have a monopoly on the resources needed to project power and promote narratives. Many advances in technology have disproportionately benefited terrorist groups. Just all part of the new world order.
Bottom line? This will be Benjamin Netanyahu’s endless war in Gaza. He cannot admit defeat. He seems to consider that the permanent state of war – which he is striving to establish by playing on the Israeli public’s thirst for revenge – will offer him his only lifeline.
The global South is back
Russia’s war in Ukraine has reminded Western observers that a world exists outside the great powers and their core allies. This world, predominantly comprising countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, has resisted taking clear sides in the conflict. The war has thus shone a spotlight on the global South as a major factor in geopolitics. Today’s geopolitical landscape is not just defined by the tensions between the United States and its great-power rivals China and Russia but also by the maneuvering of middle powers and even lesser powers. The countries of the global South contain the vast majority of humanity, but their desires and goals have long been relegated to the footnotes of geopolitics. In the second half of the twentieth century, groupings such as the Non-Aligned Movement and the G-77 at the United Nations sought to advance the collective interests of poorer and decolonized countries in a world dominated by formerly imperial powers. Their solidarity was substantially grounded in ideals and a sense of shared moral purpose that did not always produce concrete results. Even before the end of the Cold War, the moralism that motivated these states to band together began to dissipate. The unipolar decades after the end of the Cold War seemed to have sidelined the global South for good as a clear force.
Bottom line? The global South is back. It exists not as a coherent, organized grouping so much as a geopolitical fact. Its impacts are being felt in new and growing coalitions—such as the BRICS group, which may soon expand beyond its original members, Brazil, China, India, Russia, and South Africa—but even more through the individual actions of its states. These actions, driven by national interests rather than the idealism of southern solidarity, add up to more than the sum of their parts. They are beginning to constrain the actions of the great powers and provoke them to respond to at least some of the global South’s demands.
The most important “Bottom Line”?
We have forgotten our history – assuming anybody has actually read it. The arc of the moral universe does not bend toward moral progress and justice. Freedom, democracy, liberalism are mere blips on the screen of humanity. Autocracy, totalitarianism and dictatorships have long ruled the roost. And for those tech nerds among us, we made that constant mistake of correlating advancements in technology with moral progress. We metastasized into an army of enraged bots and threats. That blip of tech nostalgia and cheer has long been forgotten.
So it is not hard to see that the world has come to a critical juncture, a point of possibly catastrophic collapse. Multiple simultaneous crises – many of epic proportions – raise doubts that liberal democracies can govern their way through them. In fact, it is vanishingly rare to hear anyone say otherwise.
While thirty years ago, scholars, pundits, and political leaders were confidently proclaiming the end of history, few now deny that it has returned – as if it ever ended. And it has done so at a time of not just geopolitical and economic dislocations but also historic technological dislocations. To say that this poses a challenge to liberal democratic governance is an understatement. As history shows, the threat of chaos, uncertainty, weakness, and indeed ungovernability always favors the authoritarian, the man on horseback who promises stability, order, clarity – and through them, strength and greatness.
The emergence of liberal democracies was associated with ideals of liberty and equality that seemed self-evident and irreversible. But we know know those ideals were far more fragile than we believed. Their success in the 20th century depended on unique social, political and technological conditions – that have now proved ephemeral.
Everyone, everywhere, lives by a story. This story is handed to us by the culture we grow up in, the family that raises us, and the worldview we construct for ourselves as we grow. The story will change over time, and adapt to circumstances. When you’re young, you tend to imagine that you have bravely pioneered your own story. After all, the whole world revolves around you.
As you age, though, you begin to see that much of what you believe is in fact a product of the time and place you were young in. It was a study of the First World War that turned it around for me. It was monumental in scope, larger and more devastating than anything in anyone’s experience. The factors leading up to it were a confusing tangle of alliances, feuds, and rivalries, and the ordinary person might be hard-pressed to say just what they were fighting for. So many had died, and for what?
Oh, the complexity of the world. And the faux social environment that rewards simplicity and shortness, and punishes complexity and depth and nuance. I simply detest it. To understand the world you need to step outside your usual lanes, and cross disciplines, and cultural boundaries.
And I get it. It ain’t easy. I realize that many of my readers are “commerce monkeys, commerce machines” (not my turn of phrase – provided by a long time reader) – with barely enough time to read and write and produce for your jobs. You barely have time to scan and parse social media to keep up-to-date. I know. I know.
Because to be an informed citizen is a daunting task. We move through myriad, overlapping spheres, ones that are forever entangled. Moving at an exponential pace – living through social and technological change on the scale of the Agricultural or Industrial Revolution. But occurring in only a fraction of the time.
What we are experiencing today – the breakdown of all existing authority, primarily but not exclusively governmental – is if not a predictable result, at least an unsurprising one. All of these other features are just the localized spikes on the longer sine wave of history.
Stay strong.