Even before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the political, economic, financial, cultural, and moral health of the world have been quite unsettling. Most importantly, for centuries there has existed a yawning gap politically between nations whose constitutional foundations have been based on democratic principles and authoritarian states in which the participation of the people in their governments have been either non-existent or merely fictitious. While in the former elected politicians have been accountable in regular intervals to their respective electorates, in the latter either a single dictator or a small minority have reduced the people to fearful, passive, indifferent, and easily corruptible masses. Adding insult to injury, these authoritarian dictators have pretended to use their unlimited powers to transform their states from poverty stricken entities to developing and prosperous democracies. In reality, their sole objective has been to maintain absolute power regardless of the short and long term harm and damage they have caused to the states they have ruled by ruthless brutality.
To wit, this wholesale demoralization on the state level has metastasized globally and has succeeded to corrupt every single international organization. Presently, under the pretext of the notion of absolute equality of states and the aggressive promotion of multiculturalism, this spirit of authoritarianism threatens to annihilate the international order. Furthermore, it is an axiom of every authoritarian dictatorship that a fellow power-crazed and corrupt state is a better partner than a cumbersome democracy. Anti-democratic disposition, therefore, is an absolute sine qua non of acceptance into the club consisting of these malcontent collections of authoritarian dictatorships. Naturally, under their wretched conditions, an almost unimaginable degree of cynicism, falsehood, ignorance, cruelty, and ruthlessness have flourished. Logically, ideological subversion and psychological warfare have been the necessary global extensions of these authoritarian dictatorships, which comprise the majority of states in the world, to maintain their powers domestically as well as internationally.
Today, the whole world faces real turbulent times due to the coronavirus pandemic. The decline and even the ruin of national wealth in many countries caused by the highly contagious disease, the expected world-wide recession and even depression, the initial and ongoing mistakes and errors of the various bureaucracies, and the lack of coordination in responding to the pandemic have all contributed to the feeling of uncertainty and outright fear across the globe. In this situation, everyone suffers and will suffer. Moreover, general discontent with governments, their bureaucracies, financial institutions, businesses will certainly lead to silent or open protests. Conspiracy theories are already abound resulting in a spike of ethnic and religious hatred. The circumstances are ripe for sowing ideological confusion, pernicious brainwashing, and even extremist revolutionary schemes. The Communist Party of China and a colorful assortment of communist and socialist organizations throughout the world are pushing a mostly corrupted form of Marxism, hoping to capitalize on the peoples’ fresh misery. As usual, they traffic in an all encompassing revolution that will overthrow capitalism and replace it with a perfect earthly paradise. Conversely, the exploitation of the ubiquitous fear momentarily gripping the vast majority of the world’s population is equally dangerous to domestic as well as international tranquility.
The world is in dire need of global political leadership and great statesmanship. Contrary to the prevailing misplaced admiration, China is not ready, and will not be ready in the foreseeable future, to assume even a leading regional role in Asia. Although President Xi Jinping might disagree, he is not a statesman. Rather he is a tactician in the clothes of a dictator. As a dictator for life, i.e. dictator perpetuus, he has accumulated an immense amount of power. Simultaneously, his list of enemies has also grown exponentially. On the one hand, he has continuously violated both his country’s constitution and the constitution of the Chinese Communist Party, of which he has repeatedly declared himself a faithful servant. On the other hand, even with his enormous powers, he has not been able to stop the slow erosion of his government’s powers in the periphery of the People’s Republic. In this context, the continuing disintegration of the Party’s rule is a certainty. Equally importantly, China’s economy has been in steady decline since 2010. Furthermore, China’s finances are a mess, especially within its banking sector. International overextension, mainly driven by President Xi’s personal ambitions and hubris, will only exacerbate China’s financial woes. The undeniable fact that the COVID-19 virus originated in Wuhan will only add to his mounting problems and challenges. Information disseminated by a multitude of officials and media personalities controlled tightly by the Chinese Communist Party, have been mostly lies and fictions. Of course, having been conditioned by over seventy years of ruthless dictatorship, the Chinese people have known better.
However, the least believers in the official propaganda have been those close to President Xi and his colleagues in the Politburo, their top advisers, attendants, and secretaries. Not surprisingly, the most gullible individuals have been those foreigners whose knowledge of China is close to zero. Starting with the corrupt and incompetent director general of the WHO and continuing with the multitude of foreign politicians and journalists, they have been babbling on in unison about how great the Chinese government has been in managing of the coronavirus crisis. Yet, most alarmingly for President Xi, the circumstances of the emergence of this new coronavirus have shed a very negative light on the most vaunted ancient and allegedly superior Chinese culture. The ubiquitous existence of the “wet markets” are stark reminders of the devastating backwardness and periodic hungers of the destructive Mao era. One does not have to possess prophetic qualities to predict that President Xi will fail in his quest to make China the premier superpower. Moreover, it is almost certain that he will not remain the president for life. During his reign and thereafter, China will experience major upheavals and perhaps even a bloody revolution.
Beyond the domestic repercussions, the People’s Republic of China and its Communist Party will certainly face a great and protracted backlash internationally. The list of states demanding to hold China financially responsible for the pandemic and the resulting health, economic, and financial crises is growing daily. In the likely case that China would refuse to pay off, based upon relevant court decisions, confiscations of Chinese properties across the globe must be initiated. Finally, the United States of America must lead the campaign to clean house at the WHO, beginning with the immediate removal of its corrupt and incompetent Director General, the Ethiopian Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Next in line is Russia or as it is officially designated the Russian Federation. As in the case of President Xi, Vladimir Putin is not a statesman. Like the former, the Russian president is also a tactician. Although his declared lofty objective has been to restore Russia to its 20th century greatness, his real political ambition is to cling to power indefinitely. Strategically, Russian politicians have been unable to overcome their geophobia, namely the fact that their territorially immense state stretches from continental Europe to deep into Asia. This geopolitical reality historically has manifested itself in a psycho-ideological schizophrenia. The resulting division between the so-called Westernizers and the Slavophiles has left Russia in a political, economic, and cultural vacuum. This permanent oscillation between two cultures only gave the Russian people uninterrupted misery in the form of autocracy and dictatorship. Byzantine Christianity merely exacerbated the basic characteristics of the Russian people, namely, deceit, dishonesty, falsehood, prevarication, superstition, and fatalism. Putin’s Russia combines all these forces and characteristics into an old fashioned centralized autocracy, in which stagnation and arrested development will keep both the state and the people in shackles. Fundamentally, Russia will never regain its 20th century international status. Beyond its militarism, it will remain both economically and financially a second or even a third rate power.
In its current condition, the European Union is a barely functioning chaotic mess. Unless its member states understand that the key to their survival as a powerful organization is a more perfect union based on undivided solidarity, the European Union’s political, economic, financial, monetary, and cultural disintegration can be predicted with high certainty. Politically, the most important problem is the lack of leadership within and among the various institutions. The European Council presently headed by Donald Tusk has been incapable of providing strategic guidance and of setting policy objectives. The European Commission has been a bureaucratic bottleneck. Its efficiency in implementing EU decisions and common policies has been abysmal. The Council of the European Union, also known as the Council of Ministers, has always resembled more a marauding society than an organ of legislation and execution. The European Parliament has traditionally been the weakest part of the European Union. Its bloated membership and its many caucus groups have relegated the European Parliament to a veritable debating society with questionable legislative benefits.
The United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union might signal the beginning of a mass exodus from the organization. The list of unhappy member states is long. Perhaps with the exception of the founding members and the Scandinavian countries, all the other member states have registered their specific complaints and reservations against the political, financial, and economic policies of Brussels. In short, the vision of a united Europe after two devastating wars was and is still very appealing. Yet, in its current condition, the European Union is unbalanced and highly susceptible to real and imaginary dangers.
One of these real dangers is financial. The other closely related danger is the state of the economy. The EURO and the economy have suffered from the fact that both have been designed as inflexible models, incapable of adjusting to changing circumstances. Unlike the United States of America, China, Japan, Israel, South Korea, Singapore, and a score of other states, there is not a single new company within the European Union that is based on the emerging technologies of the fourth Industrial Revolution, such as Artificial Intelligence.
Compounding the economic stagnation, the single currency has not contributed to the promotion and a more efficient functioning of the single market. As a result, the eurozone economies have shown anemic growth in the last three decades. Even the quantitative easing (QE) of the European Central Bank (ECB) of the last ten years has run its course and has worn off before the pandemic. The obvious solution would be to correct the inflexible structure within the monetary union.
As far as its defense and foreign policies are concerned, the European Union resembles another chaotic mess. The so-called Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) has remained an unfulfilled dream. Disappointments with the competency and efficiency of various organizations of the European Union have caused Greece, Italy, and Spain to act upon their perceived national interests, often to the detriment of the common foreign policy objectives of the entire union. Moreover, the newly admitted members of the now defunct Warsaw Pact have openly revolted against many foreign policy directives of the European Union. In the extreme case of Hungary, its Prime Minister Viktor Orban has pursued a clearly revanchist foreign policy by awarding Hungarian citizenship and voting rights to ethnic Hungarians residing in the neighboring countries.
Emerging anti-Americanism in the guist of anti-Trumpism has only aggravated the already existing tensions between the United States of America and the European Union. Yet, these two powers are also allies in NATO. They both need each other politically, economically, and militarily. The overall effects of the pandemic call for a comprehensive conference with the objective of readjusting the relationship to the new realities of world politics and thus strengthening the alliance between the United States of America and the European Union.
The greater Middle East coupled with South-East Asia are real powder kegs. Enormous domestic problems and challenges have weighed heavily on the politics and the histories of these regions. Centuries old ethnic differences and pigheaded grievances return to inform policies in predictable intervals. Historically, every minority in these two regions has been a volcano ready to erupt at any moment. Religious hostilities disguised as political controversies have been tearing apart families, clans, tribes, societies, and nations to the detriment of their political and economic progress. Added to this mix of enduring miseries are the personal ambitions and hubrises of political leaders that as a rule do not tolerate any competition. Turkey’s Erdogan is feuding with the Islamic Republic of Iran on politics and religion. He also fights the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for the leadership of the Sunni world. Meanwhile, the Arabs do not want to return to the past 1918 Ottoman domination, in which the former were treated as less than second class citizens of an Empire. And then there is the Islamic Republic of Iran. A country that was Islamicized by the sword of the Arabs but succeeded to maintain its Persian character and language. Having had adapted a minority version of Islam in the mid-17th century to fight the Sunni Ottoman Empire, the Shi’a religious establishment have fought hard since 1979, to regain Iran’s historic glory and influence.
Meanwhile, the leading Arab states are facing mounting domestic pressures and international challenges. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is struggling to modernize, while its oil revenues are on the decline. Egypt is on the verge of political and economic bankruptcy and total financial ruin. Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan have been destroyed by the ongoing civil wars. Algeria and Sudan are oscillating between military rule and attempts at civilian transition.
Foreign interference has only exacerbated these situations. None of the intervening powers has contributed to the solution of any major problem in these two regions. On the contrary, they only added new complications to the already existing predicaments. To expect any meaningful changes in the near or longer term is futile. Thus, the greater Middle East and South-East Asia will remain the two regions ready to explode. A second so-called “Arab Spring,” more bloody and more transitional than the first in the near future is a real possibility.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, drew out most of the states of the African continent of their collective socialist slumber. However, this hiatus did not last long. Instead of putting their political houses in order, most of these states reverted back to mild or strict authoritarianism. In this process, they have succumbed to the corrupting influence of Chinese bribes to the detriment of the present and the future of their peoples. Presently, African rulers are busy propping up their autocracies, while keeping the bulk of their nations as near to the lowest degree of miserable existence as possible. Under these conditions, no person could develop his or her abilities without losing every vestige of human dignity, independence, and individuality.
The overall picture is not much better in Central and South America. Mismanagement, corruption, organized criminal syndicates, and masses with mentalities of slaves have rendered the states of the southern hemisphere teetering on the verge of political, economic, and financial abyss. As a consequence, the numbers of peoples voting with their feet and storming the northern borders are staggering. In spite of the new USMCA, the possibility of Mexico turning the corner politically, economically, and financially are fairly slim. The other large South American states, such as Brazil and Argentina are also in dire political, economic and financial conditions. Even Chile, the poster child of the past of good governance, has descended lately into a protracted political chaos.
Indubitably, the only power that could lead a worldwide recovery from the current economic and financial malaise is the United States of America. Although the outbreak of COVID-19, the coronavirus, has been unexpected in its scope and gravity, domestically the Trump Administration has mostly taken the right steps in a timely fashion to curb and mitigate the effects of this pandemic. The closing of the borders, the creation of the Coronavirus Task Force headed by the Vice President, the enhancing of public private partnerships, the stimulus packages, the actions of the Federal Reserve, the harnessing of the nation’s scientific, technological, and manufacturing potential, the rapid increase of tests, and the establishment of daily consultations with the governors, all have contributed to the saving of lives. What is needed now is an exit strategy that will hopefully help the United States of America to move forward by speedily returning to normalcy. Mainly, people must return to work and children to the schools.
Encouragingly the leaders of this nation have been setting a good example. From the daily press briefings at the White House one can surmise that the President, the Vice President, and members of the Task Force understand that the fight against the coronavirus is a learning process, and that mistakes made must not be repeated. Moreover, the stimulus packages and all other measures taken are designed to strengthen the free market by not favoring special groups but the nation at large. In other words, financial and economic assistance is not based on the strength of the players but on what the national economy needs. Finally, the way the Trump Administration has managed the coronavirus crisis has shown the rest of the world the quality of leadership and the character of the American nation.
For the United States of America the question now is: What in addition needs to be done domestically and internationally? For starters, the coronavirus pandemic is not just a political, economic, financial, and health crisis. It is equally important to recognize that the COVID-19 has also unleashed a psychological crisis. To put it more succinctly: the coronavirus pandemic has shaken the entire world and within it almost every large and small community. For these reasons, the recovery measures in the United States of America must be created with a global perspective in mind. Within this global framework solutions must be formulated by strategic thinking. This strategy, in turn, must be based on what the national and the global economies require and not on the political influence and relative economic strength of the players. The rebuilding of the shrinking middle class is imperative. Otherwise, the next crisis will destroy the American economy. Equally important is the need to strengthen the relationship between the politicians and the scientific community. Finally, citizens must vote for politicians with creative ideas and not for political hacks whose only concern is to grab power and cling to it at any cost to the present and the future detriment of the nation.
Internationally, the United States of America is still looking for its place in the world. This search takes place in a world that lacks enduring guiding principles. Presently, nothing is stable. Everything is changeable and replaceable. Consequently, chaos and anarchy are mounting. Disorders are ready to explode into bloody civil wars, regional armed conflicts are multiplying, and even the specter of a larger worldwide confrontation is not out of the question. Under these multiple threats merely managing international affairs is not enough. Successive Republican and Democrat administrations have failed to build on the international successes of the Reagan Administration in the 1980s. Political appointments have been made in the State Department as well as on the ambassadorial levels that have harmed American foreign policy and the global reputation of the United States of America. Civil servants at the State Department have also been hired based on their political leanings and personal connections than their professional abilities. Ambassadors have been rewarded exclusively for their political contributions to presidential campaigns without questioning their suitability to represent the United States of America in the designated country. This practice must be stopped. Otherwise, the United States of America will be considered either unserious or a nation of morons across the globe. Collectively, these individuals cannot inform knowledgeably the policy makers in the federal and local governments.
The multitude of international organizations, starting with the United Nations, must be paid more attention. Discipline must be enforced. Rogue states with outlandish actions must be punished immediately and severely, mostly through economic and financial actions. NATO must be reformed and its cohesion must be strengthened. Those member states that deviate from the political and joint security interests of the organization must be forced to fall in line. The relationship with the European Union must be taken more seriously. Particularly, in light of the present condition of the organization, the White House must rethink its globalist approach and begin to deal more intensively with the individual states.
The bilateral relationship with the People’s Republic of China must also be reevaluated. Instead of viewing it through the fog of five or three thousand years of idealized culture, China must be judged by its past failures and its 20th century misery. Even the successes of the post-Deng era must be objectively analyzed. In particular the role of the Chinese Communist Party that has proven its inflexibility concerning the country’s political and economic progress. The demise of the Soviet Union might provide a fair indication regarding the future prospects of the People’s Republic of China. In this context, to designate China as an enemy does not really help in formulating a coherent American policy. Clearly, Beijing cannot continue taking advantage of Washington and Brussels the old ways. Its expansionist designs must be countered, curbed, and stopped. Its corruption as a tool of foreign policy must be exposed. The inherent racism of the Chinese must be revealed. The false propaganda concerning its successes must be shown to be mostly lies. The substandard quality of Chinese manufactured products must be unmasked. The United States of America must stop relying on the cheap Chinese labor. Manufacturing must be brought back, especially for strategic goods. Otherwise, cooperation where it is mutually beneficial must be maintained and expanded.
In the greater Middle East Iran must be contained without humanistic consideration. The Mullahcracy, particularly an Islamic Republic of Iran armed with nuclear weapons, must be eliminated. The Arab world must be helped to sort out its many problems and challenges. However, getting again involved in the many internal squabbles and rivalries must be stopped. Russia and Turkey will fail abysmally in their quests to benefit from the present chaos and anarchy. The special relationship with the state of Israel must be further strengthened.The only true meaning of a superpower is a system of government that serves as a positive example to the rest of the world. Therefore, the objective domestically must be to strengthen the constitutional principles of the Republic. Within this democratic framework, there is no rational reason to experiment or modify the political and spiritual realms of the nation. Conversely, states across the globe have made repeated attempts at experimenting and modifying their political and spiritual realms. As Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, and Soviet Communism were rejected and defeated in the 20th century, the fashionable cannons of the early 21st century, such as the idiotic doctrine of political correctness, the self-serving call for social justice, and the rallying cry for ersatz human rights, will also end up in the proverbial dustbin of history. In a peaceful and stable world no social policies that contradict the historic traditions of the majority of nations can be sustained for a long time. Due to these factors, the United States of America will continue to remain the shining light of the world throughout the 21st century and beyond, unless the American people will decide otherwise.