Conflicts cul-de-sac
Everywhere there is violence, as it seems all the ceasefire efforts in the numerous conflicts are stuck in diplomatic cul-de-sacs.
It seems all our current conflicts are in a cul-de-sac. Ceasefire talks in the Ukraine conflict are frozen. The US claims to have brokered a ceasefire in Lebanon, but that is what the White House says. Hezbollah has yet to comment and Israel is basically ignoring the previous ceasefire and continues pounding the country’s north across the so-called Yellow Line. Congress just passed a law that is supposed to stop the Iran war, but everyone agrees that nothing will happen there either. And the EU is in total disarray and can’t even choose a representative to start talks with Russia, who the Kremlin is bound to reject out of hand anyway.
Nothing is working. Not even Western economies which are in a rapid state of decay. I was just reading yesterday that the oil inventories are about to run dry and there is a hard deadline in mid-September when we basically run out if the Strait of Hormuz is not reopened. Demand destruction from rising prices might put that off until January 2027. The rapid growth of green energy and EV use are two more mitigating circumstances. But a crunch is coming one way or another.
We are in a very nasty period where there is pointless violence everywhere. But it is not a strategic military tactic. It’s simply each side walloping the other as hard as they can with no real goal in sight. The drone attack on St Petersburg yesterday as SPIEF gets underway is a good example. The hits to Russia’s oil infrastructure have caused pain, but as we argued, the small drone payloads mean that the damage is not permanent. Those strikes are merely symbolic – as was Congress’ war power act passed yesterday. Increasingly everyone is indulging in gestures and little of substance is being done on any of these fronts.
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This is all incredibly damaging. The EBRD released a report yesterday that says everywhere in its patch is slowing down due to war damage and the knock on effects like an inflation shock and high energy prices. We were supposed to be well past this as a society following the social and political revolutions of the 1960s, but humans are doing the same old bollox they have always done: mindlessly killing each other for no good reason. It now seems that the noughties were a golden era when humanity came very close to realising the dream of universal peace and prosperity, only to throw it all away again when the current batch of incompetent leaders took over.
To highlight the point, I run a commentary by the head of SciPo, France’s top university, who argues that Europe is screwed as it lacks both the political will, but more worryingly, the intellectual capital, to make the changes needed to go back to growth and cooperation.
As I have argued elsewhere, we are now in a period of post Pax Americana, the end of the latest empire, and these transition periods are always very messy. The old guard incumbent powers are reluctant to let go and still retain a lot of clout. The new rising powers are not only reluctant to remain a poor second cousin, but as they rise, they also put on economic and military muscle and eventually start to push back. That is where we are now: the US has dominated but it is now in decline; China was poor but it is now emerging as a major military and economic heavyweight.
Unfortunately, looking back at previous episodes – the fall of the Dutch, Portuguese and British empires for example – we can expect around two decades of this turbulence until a new geopolitical order begins to assert itself and bring back some stability. It’s tempting to say that China will dominate this new order, but that is not a given. My guess is that thanks to the amazing connectivity the Internet has brought, this next phase will be a lot more multinational than previous iterations.
If we survive that is. There is a famous story about Enrico Fermi, the Italian nuclear physicist, sitting in at a lunchtime discussion about aliens when he was working on the Manhattan Project. “Do they exist?” was the question under discussion. Fermi went silent for the rest of lunch before finally exclaiming: “Where are they?” He reckoned that 14bn years after the Big Bang and 4bn years since the universe cooled to the point where planetary star systems could form, evolution on any planet capable of supporting life all started at more or less the same time. So, given how big the universe is, there must be life elsewhere. And they should be technologically as advanced as we are, so we should have at least heard their radio signals by now.
That lunch was the origin of the SETI programme, but it has failed to discover any life elsewhere. That has led to the theory that when a society like ours gets to our level of development there is a fundamental problem: our scientific prowess runs far ahead of our political prowess and at some stage all advanced civilisations blow themselves up with a nuclear war. Given we have at the same time developed both nuclear bombs, and now AI, which was the stuff of science fiction as recently as when I was a university student, concurrent with the appalling incompetence of likes of Trump in the White House and the VDL/Kallas pair in Brussels, this theory doesn’t look so crazy after all.
Depressing, eh? But it does explain why we have not heard from any alien civilisations, and everything else suggests we should have by now.
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