Rubicon

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall. ― Edward O. Wilson

Once upon a time fate deposited me in an office which was in the midst of being hollowed out by mediocrity and negligence—a not uncommon conundrum for any enterprise which grows past a certain ineffable intrinsic limit. It was a slow decline. The degradations crept in on kobolds’ feet, parking themselves in otherwise unoccupied corners at first—files a mess, the coffee machine excreting grounds into the coffee. Then one day a colleague departed with the last comprehension of  some system that would continue to run fine until it didn’t. An impossible project—impossible to understand, impossible to justify, impossible to do—arrived with a trunk the size of a Volkswagen, taking up lodgings in the middle of everyone’s straining schedules. 

And on it went until one evening I found myself turning in my keycard prior to an evening spent drowning my unemployment in Guinness with a couple equally jobless comrades. The company coasted on for a while longer, shedding human flotsam until some larger firm circling in the cold depths below abruptly launched upward and swallowed it like so much chum.

I’ve striven in the words I’ve fired out into the vast arid wastes of the Internet to avoid current events. Simply writing names like “Donald Trump” makes me feel like I’ve committed a vile act of cliché. So much of what’s gone on for the past couple of decades is to politics and society as farts are to dinner, related but not to be celebrated. It’s all so stupid and foolish and already the subject of a vast, nonsensical babble to which I am loathe to add another voice, no matter how frilly and silver with wit. I want my voice to lead through pastures of leisure, for those with the time to appreciate the sinuous sinews of sentences and coiling architecture of words I so particularly love… rather than dropping into the Information Superhighway like a turd into a sewer pipe.

That said, we have to talk about Ukraine. The longer we—the collective West—allow this open wound to fester, the more destabilizing it becomes. It’s strange to find myself saying so, as I’ve opposed pretty much every military adventure the U.S. has been involved in over my lifetime, but the Russian military machine must be properly demolished and soon, and that requires not griping about other countries not doing their fair share, not hand-wringing about what Putin might do in response, and certainly not the kind if internal political squabbling we’ve been watching of late. Rather, we should be arming Ukraine to the teeth. All of the weapons we’ve built over decades for the eventuality of war with Russia—this is the eventuality, and we have a golden opportunity to take advantage of it while sacrificing only money, though that opportunity is rapidly expiring. 

Already events are outstripping my thesis. It may be that the Hamas attack on Israel and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict neither impinge upon nor directly stem from the Ukraine war, but they are manifestly more cracks, and we are ill-prepared to deal with any of them. Consider: thanks to an intransigent GOP we currently have no ambassadors to Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Oman, or Kuwait. We lack a top USAID official for the Middle East and we have no State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism. Thankfully we finally have a Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but almost 300 high-level military officers are stuck awaiting promotion thanks to the stupidity of one man, the execrable Tommy Tuberville, standing athwart history like Governor Joe Brown of Georgia in 1863, who had pikes manufactured for use by citizens in the event that the Confederate army should prove unable to stop the Federals led by William Tecumseh Sherman. Perhaps most foolishly of all we lack a leader in the House of Representatives. The timing of this self-decapitation couldn’t be worse, and it puts me in mind of another rudderless ship: France, believed in the spring of 1940 to be possessed of perhaps the most powerful military in the world, was riven by internal strife. France’s Prime Minister, Paul Renaud, had by May 8 become alarmed by what he saw as the indecision and feebleness of his top general, Maurice Gamelin. He called an emergency cabinet meeting that afternoon, the conclusion of which is detailed in Ernest May’s book, Strange Victory:

The file Renaud read aloud offered a point-by-point indictment of General Gamelin, particularly on a charge of not anticipating Germany’s move into Scandinavia and not showing sufficient diligence in managing the Allied campaign there. Daladier [Minister of Defense and, interestingly, a signatory of the Munich Agreement—the negotiated surrender of the Czech Sudentenland which gave appeasement a bad name] seemed to Deputy Prime Minister Chautemps to be listening “disdainfully,” and when Reynaud finished, Daladier asked for the floor. He said that Gamelin might have faults but, in the particular case of the Scandinavian expedition, deserved “nothing but praise.” He continued, “If he is guilty, then I am.” He tendered his own resignation. A long silence followed. Reynaud, “white-faced… slowly closed his file and said emphatically: “As I cannot make my point of view prevail, I am no longer Head of the Government.” Afterward, he called on President Lebrun at the Élysée Palace and announce that he intended to go to the Chamber of Deputies and try to form another cabinet without Daladier.

Hence, on the following morning, when Germany’s attack commenced, France was technically without a government. 

This is how powerful nations fall into ruin. The cracks form and the crisis finds them. 

A recent Russian pulp novel cover surfaced by Eastern European expert Sergej Sumlenny (@sumlenny).

Do rogues feel empowered by the potential of a frozen conflict in Ukraine? This past weekend’s events would seem to provide an answer. Flush with Russian cash, Iran may well have guessed that this would be the prime opportunity to send their suicidal agents to disrupt a potential detente between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Given there was no predicating event, we can only assume Hamas choose their moment for maximal effect. Secondary fronts often seem detached from the primary action, but there’s always a chain of reasoning connecting them: The disastrous Gallipoli campaign was launched by the Entente (Britain, France, and Russia) against Turkey in 1915 in the hopes that would be a dagger in the “soft underbelly” of the Central Powers. The long campaigns in North Africa during World War II were fought for control of the Suez Canal, which in turn controlled access to Saudi oil, which Germany need to power its drive into Russia. In the current case the relationship may well be incidental, but the effects are not: There are now two countries that will be vying for Western military supplies. 

Economist Noah Smith describes what’s happening as the breakdown of the unipolar world. Whatever one might think of the failures of the Pax Americana, the last 80 years have been among the most peaceful and democratic the world has ever known. And now it’s collapsing:

Like tigers eyeing their prey, the world is starting to revert into a jungle, where the strong prey upon the weak, and where there is a concomitant requirement that every country build up its own strength; if your neighbor is a tiger, you should probably grow some claws of your own. Old scores that had to wait can now be settled. Disputed bits of territory can now be retaken. Natural resources can now be seized.

This is why Poland and Estonia and Latvia are arming up. This is why Finland, long opposed to NATO membership, swung 180 degrees to become the latest signatory. They know what’s happening—they live next to a tiger. The breakdown of order explains to some degree how the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict fits the puzzle, and lends a macabre intensity to the ever hotter question of China and Taiwan, which surely has the potential to ignite a global conflict that would dwarf the Second World War. It may be too late already to avoid this or some other collapse of the world order. Indeed, many have predicted it for a long while. William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote with great specificity about the coming crisis as early as 1997:

Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II. 

The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort—in other words, a total war. 

It’s worth noting that the book in which they revealed this striking prediction, The Fourth Turning, caught the attention of both Al Gore, who bought a copy for every member of Congress, and Steve Bannon, who devoted his career to manifesting the crisis into being—presumably in the hopes that he could position himself to pick up some juicy pieces after the shooting stops. Whether or not the augury of Strauss and Howe is unassailable is beside the point—forces in the United States have been hard at work trying to make it true. And somehow we’ve let them.

It is well past time for this to stop. I don’t know what the solution is to a two-party political system in which one party is bent on chaos—all they have to do to bring about the apocalypse is nothing, and no one can force them to not do that. All we can do are the things—the calls, the political donations, and the votes. This may already be a foregone conclusion by November of next year, and then again it may not. The next cycle of elections certainly look like a potential inflection point; if we make it that far, let’s not make it one that leads inexorably downward. 

In 1939 Ernest Hemingway reported on the Spanish Civil War, which he saw as a chance for democracies to stop the spread of fascism before it engulfed the world in war. He published an article, “Dying, Well or Badly,” in which he wrote:

If the democratic nations allow Spain to be over-run by the fascists through their refusal to allow the legal Spanish government to buy and import arms to combat a military insurrection and fascist invasion, they will deserve whatever fate that brings them. […] But no matter what excuse the democratic countries may have for their ignorance of the necessity for beating the fascists in Spain, history will label their actions in 1936 and 1937, when they refused to allow Spain to arm herself to fight their enemies, as criminal stupidity.

We all like to believe that we would have been like Hemingway. We wouldn’t have fallen for the trick of Munich; we wouldn’t have looked the other way while Jews were slaughtered in their millions. Well there’s no need for imagination: whatever you’re doing now is what you would have done then.

What are you doing now?