The Big Picture?

Time to read the tea leaves?
 
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IF WW3 does not lay the human world waste.
 
IF a Nuclear Exchange doe not devastate all life.
 
IF Climate Catastrophe does not achieve the same.
 
THEN, this is what we might expect.
 
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The West will turn Neo-Fascist, or more simply darkly Authoritarian.
 
Rights will , increasingly, morph into privileges.
 
The ‘liberal democracy’ modus will , over time, melt away.
 
The East will embrace the China Model of a market economy, managed under the auspices of a benevolent despotism.
 
Rights will be subject to communal norms and cultural values.
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In the former, private power will over-ride public power: in the latter, vice versa.
 
The Rest of the World will, on and off, ally with one or other of the two modes.
 
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Without any question, the latter model will be far more successful,
in simple material terms.
 
NATO will shrink, radically, as will the EU.
 
The UN, IMF, WTO, and The World Bank will be truncated, similarly, with parallel, and competing, Alternates arising.
 
And the US, Australia, UK, Canada, and New Zealand will form a loose, de facto, alliance, to formalise the ‘gentlewoman’s’ agreement that always existed, implicitly.
 
They are, after all, birds of a feather.
 
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It will be a multipolar world, with an end to any Unilateral Hegemony.
 
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Its significance cannot be over-rated.
 
For 400 plus years, the West has ruled the world, the last 2 centuries under Anglo-Norman Hegemony.
 
For better, or for worse, the current global situation is of their provenance, be it wilful or unintended.
 
Typically, they are trying to ‘solve’ the crisis – a Crisis of Hegemony – using the same means/methods that gifted us WW1 and WW2.
 
Violence was how they forged their rule – being the Undisputed Masters of War – , and Violence is how they hope to salvage (what remains of) it.
 
This is to be expected.
 
They are, like us all, creatures of habit, except their habits happen to be inordinately lethal.
 
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Living by the sword has its perks, but its ultimate trajectory is an ineluctable declension.
 
As Napoleon had it, you can do anything with bayonets – except sit on them.
 
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That’s the Big Picture.
 
I will leave others to print out the myriad local snapshots it is composed of?
 

© R.Kanth 2023

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).