On the present - Tom Stevenson in TLS:

‘There is a tendency among members of the establishment in advanced industrial societies to look on the crises of the past decade – the Arab uprisings and their brutal suppression; the Eurozone crisis; the re-emergence of Chinese nationalism; the protracted shocks of 2016, in the forms of Brexit and Donald Trump, not to mention the pandemic and now the war in Ukraine – as part of a slow-motion collapse, with the vague but inescapable sense that the world is coming apart. The global financial crisis of 2008–9 already proved that something could be terribly wrong with an ostensibly invulnerable edifice. Perhaps, the thinking goes, this insight extends further, to the “liberal international order”, or even to globalized capitalism itself? Those who once felt comfortable with the veneer of order presented by American power, or who had mistaken its euphemisms for reality, have been much put out.
In The Age of Unpeace, Mark Leonard confesses his puzzlement at the re-emergence of nationalist resistance to “globalization” – a phenomenon that, for him, appears to lack investment banks, asset managers and the political institutions that surround them. The son of a Europhile MP and a professor of German literature, Leonard is the founder of the European Council on Foreign Relations and the author of a book he now regrets: Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century (2005). In it, he argued that the EU was a symbol of civilized interconnection and enlightened statecraft. He still credits the EU and its predecessors with the elimination of conflict in Europe, omitting to acknowledge the importance of the US/Soviet occupation of the continent, or that Europe remains dotted with American military installations. The past few years have been a tough time for people like Leonard, for whom a world dominated by the US once represented “the dream of a liberal international order cemented by economic globalisation and the internet, and governed by liberal democracy and free-market capitalism”. But theorists of America’s waning hegemony, who were so vocal during last year’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, can at least account for this loss. European rejection of the EU as a perfection of liberal capitalist principles (as represented by Brexit and some continental political movements) remains harder to comprehend.’

(…)

‘To have declared that conventional wars have “all but disappeared”, except “in Africa”, was foolish at the time of publication late last year. It now seems absurd. Leonard’s thesis is that the primary form of conflict has become the “connectivity war”, fought over the internet, trade, border controls and finance. This isn’t a cause for celebration, in his view, because connectivity wars have higher body counts than conventional ones. And it is this phenomenon that is supposed to be responsible for Trump, Brexit and the hollowing out of liberal internationalist designs.
The idea that war might be replaced by competitive commerce is not new. It was a common talking point in the early 1990s. It is even found in Gibbon (but then what isn’t?). In search of novelty, Leonard adds a layer of pat psychology. In seeking to understand why nations compete rather than “[work] together”, he finds that the demons unleashed by digital media and global supply chains are only aspects of a deeper “set of toxic behaviours”. The competition taking place between nations over trade, energy and other resources risks bringing about the “fragmentation of the global system into rival friendship groups”. To fix the problem, Leonard says, the world needs “therapists who can help us accept who we are”. And while connectivity and networks are wonderful things, both China and the US are using them for mass surveillance. The analysis veers from the obvious to the facile as Leonard admixes technological startlement – killer robots! cyber armies! – with irrelevant dating stories and invocations of celebrities.
Leonard’s argument that conventional wars are dying out was always cursory. Not to have foreseen the return of tank warfare in Europe is one thing. To have erased recent or ongoing conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, the Caucuses and Libya is quite another.’

(…)

‘ Computer hacking is war. Diplomatic scuffles are war. “Disinformation” (a term devoid of any serviceable meaning) is war. “Migration is a particularly effective weapon for the weak against the strong.” And so on. But a state getting into a disagreement with a neighbour and ending visa-free travel for its citizens is a relatively mundane event. To call it a “connectivity war” is asinine. The register here is dinner-party chatter in an affected provincial style. Leonard does not have this field all to himself: Bruno Maçães and Ian Bremmer make a very decent living from it. But these preachers to the privileged and perplexed can offer no real insights about our contemporary malaise.’

(…)

‘There are some errors in Disorder. The US had no need to “remake” the Middle East as an American sphere of influence in the 1990s. That was achieved at the latest by the 1970s, when the US took over from the dying British Empire. The US navy had a permanent presence in Bahrain from 1971. Saudi Arabia switched to dollar-denominated oil sales in 1974, opening what Prince Fahd called a “glorious chapter” of American military protectorship. American planners treated the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, hundreds of miles from the Persian Gulf, as a threat to an American possession. Thompson also reproduces the canard that US interest in Middle Eastern oil was motivated by American consumption: imports of Persian Gulf oil declined with the Carter doctrine and never sated more than around 12 per cent of US demand. Multigenerational American military crimes in Iraq are better described as a reassertion of imperial authority than, as Thompson argues, a new bid for it. And to speak of a Russian “return” to the Middle East, or even a Russian military threat to the region, is to lose perspective. Thompson describes the internal politics of the Middle East as “unconducive to any external power looking for stable allies”, but, despite the Iranian revolution, the US has retained hegemony in the region with remarkable success, and, in the case of the core Arab monarchies, with complete stability. External domination has warped regional politics, as it always does.
Power should be dealt with in concrete terms – class, finance, military deployment and energy – and that is Thompson’s approach. It is refreshing to see her description of NATO in terms of the logic of American power rather than as a purely defensive, even noble, shield against Russian marauding. She understands that, within Europe, crises stem not from internet distractions but from a dysfunctional monetary-economic system, persistent German macroeconomic ignorance, the absence of EU democratic accountability, the imposition of technocratic governments in Italy, and the destruction of the Greek economy (with a near 50 per cent reduction in GDP per capita since 2008), not to mention the recent problem of the continent’s main financial centre now being outside its formal political influence. The further problem is that Europeans have not decided on, and are not close to deciding on, where Europe is and hence where it ends. Thompson’s analysis here, in stark contrast to that of Leonard, has become more rather than less relevant in the light of Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, which began on the day Disorder was published.’

(…)

‘The real wages of most of the population of the advanced industrial economies has stagnated or declined. Inequality has worsened across the developed world. The origins of this crisis, which Thompson describes as one of aristocratic excess, also lie in the late 1970s. Financialization has seen states prioritize international capital markets over citizen taxation, in part because of ingenious tax avoidance on the part of the wealthy. Thompson does not cite it, but a recent landmark study conducted at the RAND corporation found that, between 1975 and 2018, the equivalent of $47 trillion had been redistributed from the bottom 90 per cent of the US population to the rich and ultra-rich. These are the brute figures of four decades of one-sided class war (one non-martial “war” that is never mentioned by Mark Leonard). That RAND of all places would publish the definitive quantitative critique of the neo-liberal era is an unusual sign.’

(…)

‘What if the series of recent global crises produces no dramatic transformation but only a terrible stasis?’

Read the article here.

The remark about Bremmer is brilliant (and funny), the rest of the article is slightly less brilliant.

Most so-called real progressives in Western Europe – and probably also in the US – are repeating the same analysis over and over.

A few remarks, Europe and the EU are not the same. Moscow is a European city; nobody believes that Russia will become a member of the EU.

Inequality in the US is different from inequality in Sweden, Germany or France, all EU-members.

The Greek crisis was distasteful, Merkel played a less than honorable role in this crisis and so did many others, but that’s history.
Outside Greece there is no discontent anymore about the Greek crisis, and I’m not sure how big the discontent is in Greece is. I remember that some people predicted that this time the revolution was going to start in Greece, well it didn’t.

Inequality might play a role in the rise of the extreme-right, but I’m not at all convinced that it’s the most important explanation for Donald Trump, Le Pen and AfD, to name just a few.

Give them more money and they will vote for ‘our’ parties is not only extremely condescending, it’s simply not true.
Ideas, nationalism, hatred of certain minorities, play an important role and these ideas are not necessarily connected with economic hardship.

No country is innocent, not even Liechtenstein, no military alliance is innocent, but to blame NATO for the war in Ukraine is a bit like blaming the Kurds for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Interestingly enough, the article ends with the prediction that nothing might change, misery and more misery and still no change to detect in the far future.

Poor idealist, once upon a time the wrecked were willing to overthrow a government in order to bring justice to their country. Not anymore.

Now, Putin has to save them.

And by the way history has always been a series of crises, and always will be. No reason to pooh-pooh every crisis, because of that. But the tendency to believe that the worst of the worst is the contemporary crisis is just ahistorical.