By Tatalo Aremu
(Have nukes and balls, will travel)
Nothing lasts forever. Do not let anybody deceive or confuse you that things are fixed and eternal. While civilizations take much longer to unravel, hegemonies collapse regularly and routinely after they have reached the limits of their possibility. Between 1870 when the Germans reached the gates of Paris and 1944 when the French with the help of Americans and Allied Forces managed to expel the selfsame Germans from Paris after a four-year occupation, the dominant order was close to collapse as a result of a war of hegemony among leading nations. Between 1870 and 1944, there were over thirty six documented wars which included encounters in far-flung places such as the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa and America’s confrontation with the Spaniards in both Cuba and the Philippines. Lonely isolated encounters and explosion of hostilities do not often herald the end of hegemonies. It is when they come together in a global maelstrom that tongues begin to wag about the end of an epoch. In all human history, if there is anything constant about the relentless wars of hegemonies, it is the centrality of arms and superior violence.
With specific reference to Africa, consider these disturbing facts. Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and the Kingdom of Eswatini formerly known as Swaziland have all fallen off the world map without as much as a whimper. Kenya which again erupted in murderous violence in the past week is probably following close on their heels. The unique nature of postcolonial wars in Africa is that they are fought entirely as civil wars which reflect the vulnerability and fragility of the nation-state prototype imposed on the continent by the departing colonial masters. The peace accord between Rwanda and DRC superintended by Washington is not worth the paper on which it was written.
The international community no longer cares about what happens on the benighted continent. If they care let them kill off and eliminate themselves to the last person as long as they leave the vast mineral resources intact. The minerals are far more important than the multitude of dehumanized humanity. Whatever remains can be put to better use for the rest of humankind in a way its thieving and unhinged elites could never imagine or contemplate. The cradle of civilization has become an embarrassment and an obscene insult to the rest of humanity.
The international community did not reach this conclusion lightly. Its own plate is filled to the brim with combustible combos. It is embroiled and embattled on many fronts. The global order is fractured down the line. A local proverb says that if your garment is up in flames and your child’s fabric is also ablaze, you must first put out the fire singeing through you before you can find the mental equilibrium to deal with filial emergency. The Serbs are still nursing their wounds after they were expelled by aerial bombardment from their genocidal siege on Croatia and Kosovo as Tito’s Yugoslavia unravelled in a spiral of blood and mayhem.
For almost three years, Russia, their fellow-traveller in Slavic hyper-nationalism, has subjected Ukraine to a slow-motion demolition with America, Europe and the rest of the world looking askance unable to do anything about the horrific carnage. The old map of the Middle East has been torn to shreds with Israeli emerging as the new law-giver and colonial superpower. Gaza is reduced to apocalyptic rubble and this past week it was the turn of Iran to be subjected to high-tech blitz by the combined power of America and Israel. Trump spoke of a possible nuclear obliteration of the ancient civilization and the Israeli High Command warned darkly that the Iranian Supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had lost the right to exist. It was a grim reminder of an oxymoronic formulation: civilized savagery or modern barbarism has become the new norm. Even our old primitive ancestors would have winced in fright at the images coming out of Gaza. Their own savagery was delimited and circumscribed by the fact that they had no access to modern weapons of mass destruction.
The world has become a far more dangerous and threatening place. With China warming its cockles for its inevitable Taiwanese dinner, it is going to get nastier. The meticulous and mercilessly precise Chinese are merely waiting for the locked door to swing open on its own before they pounce.
The more modern and civilized humanity has become the more savage and unreconstructed their inner essence has turned out. Weak people and poor nations have no place in the new arrangement. The global subalterns can talk but they cannot be heard. It is the muffled rumbling of impotence. Walter Benjamin famously noted that there is no record of civilization which is not at the same time a record of barbarism. But this time around there is no record of barbarism which is not enshrined in the new code of modernity. With its back to the wall and its hands tied from behind, Iran was forced to eat the humble pie and accept a humiliating Pax Americana handed down by the new Supreme Global Leader, Taoiseach Donald Trump. Let the world know that a new international order has dawned.
As the triumphant convoy of the American president swept past the NATO headquarters this past week with hubristic glee, you got a sense that something was not quite right. The atmosphere was of chilly and chilling solitude. There were no crowds to welcome and cheer on the all-conquering American chieftain. It was a grumpy and self-absorbed old man that slouched out of the sedan wearing his characteristic mixture of a frown and a grimace. The man of peace was not at peace with himself. The strains and drains of the sleepless nights were showing. Unlike the plucky, devil may care Benjamin Netanyahu whose older brother was killed during the raid on Entebbe, Donald Trump, for all the bluff and bluster, is not your natural warrior. He seems to harbor a profound distaste for blood and gore which may yet be the saving grace and abiding luck of Western civilization.
It was after all the Israeli prime minister who showed him how it could be done and how the Iranians with their hysteric ranting could be taken down by high precision bombing and reduced to whimpering nonentities in their own homestead. The Israeli tail has been wagging the American body for quite some time and only God knows how that one will pan out in the coming months. Perhaps that was why Trump appeared so preoccupied even in pomp and glory.
The Netanyahu question is even more compelling than the Putin puzzle as Trump is bound to find out. But what made the NATO drama more compelling was the surreal sight of European leaders tumbling and stumbling over themselves in groveling self-abasement to pay homage and compliments to the American leader who appeared to be the least interested in their sedulous inanities. The American president was in no mood to compliment any of them as he shunned and ignored them as they lined up for photo-ops whooshing and wheezing over the unsmiling autocrat from across the Atlantic who seemed to have a full measure of their cadging and wheedling.
This is not Great Europe as the world knew it. This was no longer the Europe of Winston Churchill, Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, Charles de Gaulle, Giscard Valery D’Estaing , Harold Wilson, Harold Macmillan, Margaret Thatcher and Sir Peter Carrington who once famously dismissed an American Secretary of State as a purveyor of Boys’ Scout Diplomacy.
This was in response to his being privately shaded as a duplicitous bastard by the no-nonsense American four-star general. The new generation of European leaders have grown fat and unproductive on American largesse and are mortally afraid of the feeding bottle being snatched away by a vengeful and furious Trump who has seen through the charade of a multilateralism in which America is expected to pick the tab for protecting Europe against predators and for fighting its wars for them. Not being warrior-statesmen in the mold of Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle or a fierce amazon like Margaret Thatcher, European leaders are content to let Americans fight their wars for them so that the citizens can have a life of bliss and peaceful prosperity. Donald Trump is having none of that subsidized indolence. Although his country remains stupendously rich, Trump is insisting that the pains and pangs of war ought to be more evenly spread around.
With the painful riot act dropped on them from the American throne like a mega-ton bomb, European leaders looked like supplicating sissies before an all-powerful global sovereign this past week. Now that America has abandoned all pretenses to multilateralism, it is going to be a bareknuckle contention all the way and Europe will find itself reduced to the status of a neo-vassal continent. European countries will find themselves in the excellent company of their former African colonies. There is no point in settling the order of precedent between coolies and serfs. This past week one watched with colonial satisfaction as Donald Trump barked at the Spaniards, the first real superpowers of the modern world, for being remiss in coming up with their NATO levies. It was all grimly reminiscent of Benito Cereno, a remarkably clairvoyant novella by Herman Melville, the great American nineteenth century novelist, which accurately predicted the humbling and superannuation of Imperial Spain.
The puny Spanish sea-men cut a truly pathetic figure as the incredibly devious African sailors who had mutinied in high seas ran them aground in an unfurling web of intrigues and silent power plays as the burly, superbly fit Americans watched proceedings with stern interest ready to restore order at short notice.
It was a truly astonishing insight into the absorbing dynamics of historical superannuation such as can only come from a creative genius. It may well be that the European statesmen, as wily masters of historical temporizing, may be playing for time, hoping that the long run of events will restore parity and sanity. It is said in local parlance that sometimes you may have to dress a dangerous mad person in the resplendent garb of a prospective much sought after bridegroom just to assure your safe passage. Unfortunately, the short and long term optics does not appear to favour such rosy optimism.
In keeping with protocols, it is appropriate to end this drama of trading places with another conceit. At the end of the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin, the great American author, inventor, publisher and statesman, arrived in Paris as the ambassador and representative of the new nation. His gaiety, ebullience and devil may care aplomb astonished and alarmed the Parisian high culture in equal measure and led them to conclude that it was only in America that such a person could serve as ambassador. It was meant as a sly putdown but it was an ironic compliment. Last week and centuries after as Donald Trump swept through the NATO Headquarters with his gruff disdain for polite conversation and diplomatic etiquette, the same European high culture would have concluded that it was only in America that such gung-ho militarism and bad manners could be associated with the highest office in the land. The joke is on them. Donald Trump is the supreme law-giver.
Culled from The Nation
