This implosion forms the background of an accelerating international retreat. As the next presidential election approaches in 2024, the US is entering a legitimation crisis. Even if it is defensible in legal terms, Trump’s indictment confirms that the justice system has become a weapon in partisan political warfare. Intensifying political polarisation poses a question about the capacity of American government to execute any long-term strategy. The idea that a nation now so intractably divided could construct a new international order is far-fetched. Even so, American decline is a trajectory human agency cannot alter. The task is not to shore up a semi-imaginary and defunct Western-led “rules-based order”, but to avoid catastrophic conflict in a post-hegemonic world. John GrayĪ global Weimar riven by new technologies and resource scarcity is our default condition. We have to get used to the prospect of many disappointments ahead. That is why in Ukraine and Taiwan we have to find a middle ground between acquiescence to authoritarian rule and inflexibly demanding perfect democratic outcomes. And precisely because of the shrinkage of geopolitics produced by technology, there will be increasingly greater, even cataclysmic costs for such failures in the future. Suez, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and so on constitute a drum roll of avoidable disasters. And yet unbounded idealism mixed with hubris still threatens disaster. In such a world, all political leaders must be realists, aiming for the lesser evil rather than for the ultimate good. The margin for error narrows, so thinking without illusions becomes necessary. In fact, as world geography shrinks, the price for human error and human malevolence grows. Individuals such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are human agents who have caused a vast and bloody war in Ukraine and are driving Asia toward a high-end military conflict over Taiwan. But human agency need not have positive outcomes. The idealists among us say that geography is not determinative, and that fate is ultimately in the hands of human agency. Above all, we must realise that given such a claustrophobic and overloaded world system, the assumption of linear progress is a dangerous notion to entertain. We have to use fear without being immobilised by it. Tragic thinking encompasses many things, among them the realisation that fear is useful. There is surely trouble ahead that will require anxious foresight and tragic thinking on our part. That is why, like Weimar, our world today seems so anxious, claustrophobic and unstable. As populations rise in absolute numbers, as more and more human beings live in complex urban settings, and both weaponry and communications – especially cyber – develop and become more sophisticated, the Earth will eventually become just too small for its volatile politics. The 20th-century computer scientist and polymath John von Neumann once said that the finite size of the Earth would become a source of instability. It is a global Weimar, where there is always a crisis. Greater interconnections mean that any place or continent can be considered strategic and affect all the others. But owing to the shrinkage of geography caused by technology, there is an emerging world system, in which crises can migrate from one part of the Earth to another. We do not have a world government nor do we have any truly effective world governance. Complex and prone to bickering, Weimar was a classically overloaded political regime that existed in a state of perma-crisis. It was a system composed of a parliamentary upper house, a lower house, small states, and two large ones – Prussia and Bavaria – that were to some extent laws unto themselves. Nevertheless, Weimar constitutes a model of sorts. Our world is unlikely to be headed for such moral darkness. More specifically, Weimar was an unstable political system that existed between late 19, born in the ashes of the First World War and ending with the ascension to power of Adolf Hitler. Weimar Germany connotates the ultimate doom: a cradle of modernity that gave birth to fascism and totalitarianism. Science and Technical Research and Development.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.
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