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An inflection point in history [1]

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Date: 2023-10-16  

There is an old truism that one shouldn’t approach a wounded animal, as that is when it is most dangerous. It will flail out, clawing and biting at anything within it’s reach. There are some severely wounded animals on the world stage at the moment, including the Republican Party, the Iran theocracy and Vladimir Putin. Together, they represent the old order of white supremacy, religious domination and autocracy. I would include Donald Trump in this list, but he is a symptom, not a cause.

The wounds these beasts suffer are almost exclusively self-inflicted: Under various guises, the GOP has courted white grievance as a path to power since Nixon. As a result, when Trump rose like a swamp thing in a horror movie, feasting on the hatred that they thought that they had harnessed, the party collapsed into the run-amok disaster that it is today. While the U.S. is progressing toward a multiracial and multicultural future, factions of the G.O.P. are snarling at each other, fighting over the rotting carcass of white supremacy. What was once a powerful force in U.S. politics is coming to an end.

Vladimir Putin has allowed, indeed, encouraged a kleptocracy that turned Russia into a failed state while he dreamed of a revived USSR. Putin’s isolation from any contrarian thinking led him to imagine that destroying Ukraine was his path to glory. Regardless of how the Ukraine war ends, and I hope it ends with the last Russian soldier leaving that valiant but desecrated land, Putin’s hoped-for resurrection of the USSR is dead.

And Iran? As I write this, the surprise attack by Hamas on Israel is dominating the headlines. Is there any doubt that Iran aided and abetted this? The Iranian regime has armed and supported Hamas for years, all while resisting any attempt to improve the lives of its own people. Instead, the mullahs of Iran have focused on the pipe dream of a world where their medieval version of Islam dominates, and Israel is destroyed. The rapprochement between Israel and the UAE, with talks ongoing between Saudi Arabia and Israel, should they result in a safer, freer Middle East, would leave Iran further isolated and irrelevant.

While true peace can never exist between autocrats, there can be marriages of convenience. It is not accidental that one of the primary issues dividing the GOP is support for Ukraine. Why is that? Without Putin, Trump would never have been elected in the first place, and now the survival of Putin’s regime hinges on the end of western (especially U.S.) support of Kiev’s war effort. Not surprisingly, MAGA Republicans want that support to end, and Trump’s connections with Putin no longer examined. As North America, Europe and China move away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy, a move accelerated by Putin’s war on Ukraine, both Iran’s and Russia’s primary source of influence on the world as petroleum suppliers is fading. Iran understands that the collapse of Putin’s Russia will embolden enemies of Iran, both internal and external, and so sends drones and other war materiel to aid Putin’s invasion.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Hamas’ terrorism in Israel and the GOP’s attacks on democratic norms are not the rational acts of long-term thinkers. These are evidence of desperation, spurred by the feeling that time is running out for them, and if they don’t act now, they will shortly be tossed into the dustbin of history.

Still, their very desperation increases the danger that we all face. When all that is left to Putin after the destruction of his conventional military in Ukraine is his nuclear arsenal, is it not easy to imagine that he might prefer a nuclear Götterdämmerung to the ignominy of failure? The recent extension of national emergency broadcasts to cover cell phones and other devices suggests that the U.S. government is not unmindful of this possibility. The GOP’s toleration of threats of political violence, even civil war, smacks of the same: Trump is calling for the execution of traitors, even as he trotted out classified intelligence to impress guests at Mar-a-Largo, and spilled whatever secrets in his private conversations with Putin. Iran cannot evade responsibility for Hamas, even if they cannot control it.

The next few years promise to be fraught with perils. How we navigate those perils will chart the course of history for the next century.

“It depends on us, on the choices we make, particularly at certain inflection points in history; particularly when big changes are happening and everything seems up for grabs.”— Barack Obama

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