Opinion Sur
Paul Klee, Angelus Novus[1]
We have to return to an interpretation of the story that was formulated by Walter Benjamin, inspired by Paul Klee’s drawing. The historic hurricane pushes an angel irrepressibly into the future, to which he turns his back, while the debris rises before him to the sky. That hurricane is what we call progress. The hurricane and its debris are for us today demographic, climatic, and technological dynamics that are out of control, as well as wars.
Prince Talleyrand, Napoleon Bonaparte’s foreign minister – as he had been in successive regimes from before the French Revolution until the restitution of the monarchy – famously declared the blunt sentence “It is worse than a crime, it is an unforgivable mistake,” when he learned of the execution of the young Duke of Enghien on the emperor’s orders. Behind the character’s typical cynicism lay a geopolitical truth, namely the sharp distinction between morality and the physics of power. It is the basis of a sober, passionless, and applied analysis – sine ira et studio – that we find in the thought and action of the best political scientists and statesmen, from Thucydides, through Machiavelli, Hobbes, to Bismarck, Clausewitz, and in our own time Kennan, Niebuhr, Morgenthau, Mearsheimer, and Walt.
The history of the last hundred years, without going any further (for which a long dissertation would be needed) unfortunately offers us a series of crimes against humanity closely linked to serious errors of strategy. Moreover, we could say that many of those crimes would not have happened without the errors of strategy. How many wars could have been avoided with a clearer geostrategic vision of what could happen? In this article, I will focus on the most recent ones, without discussing others that are more distant (the Treaty of Versailles, the military decisions of Hitler or Stalin, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, etc.). But, first, I would like to make a general observation.
Many historical narratives weave the facts together as if it were a one-way process with clear and conscious objectives on the part of those who direct political and military action. Here, I propose an alternative view, namely: history, and above all what we call the great History, is in reality a backward advance – something like a vehicle with only one gear, the reverse gear, in its gearbox.
Today, the great themes of geopolitical destiny are three: demography, climate, and technology. A lot is said about the three and very little is done. Neither the political leaders of different countries and powers, nor the owners of large monopolies, nor the heads of various armed forces, have clear long-range strategies, much less control of the three processes. They are, like all of us, observers of processes that appear even before any control. I think, as an example, the birth control policy in the most controlling country in the world: the People’s Republic of China. Their past birth policy, “effective” for several decades, today turns against them (they lose population, which is also aging) without being able to reverse the process. Meanwhile, the “demographic bomb” of the global South (Africa in particular) has already exploded, and is changing the racial and immigration configuration of the planet. As for the total world population, experts expect it to more or less balance out at 10 billion by the end of the century, and to begin to decline from then on (with an overpopulated and stressed planet) by a “natural sociological process” of declining birth rates as long as there is an economic development similar to that of today’s “advanced” countries. But it is nothing more than a projection based on previous experiences.
Something similar happens with the portion of climate change that is attributed to human action. We are heading towards a world that is overheated and much less pleasant than today’s, with all the disastrous consequences projected in terms of living space, displacement of entire populations, extermination of many species, and struggles for scarce resources, which cause wars. Regarding all this, also a lot is talked about but little is done. To illustrate this, one example will suffice: the growing irrelevance of the warnings in this regard by the United Nations. The process – out of control – takes us with great speed to where we do not want to go. We are backwards, looking back and contemplating the wake of disasters in our path. “Walker, there is no path; the path is made as you walk” and the path is to environmental hell.
In the case of artificial intelligence – the leading technological emerging of our time – the benefits it brings in terms of scientific research, medical care, and coordination of difficult situations in complex organizations are outweighed by the dangers involved in its advance regarding autonomous systems, especially in the case of armed conflicts, where decision-making by robots is not far away, and may well escape the judgment and control of humans[2]. To avoid these dangers, the various states (which are the main geopolitical actors) establish rules, but these measures are in the saga of technical progress. In short: in terms of AI, states want to be up to date, but that day always comes the next day. As soon as they establish regulatory rules, they have already been foreseen and surpassed by artificial calculation, which escapes even the “owners” of the large technological platforms and innovation.
If we descend from these conceptual heights to the nearest geopolitical task, it is not difficult to realize that the relationship between today’s states is characterized by the following features:
Strategic myopia. The leaders are short-sighted in both war and peace. They seek immediate results without considering the potential long-range unintended consequences. At most they think about tomorrow but not about the day after tomorrow. This short-sightedness is manifested in democratic leaderships, which change regularly with changes of government, with the following novelty: internal political polarization leads to reciprocal veto or decision-making paralysis. The clearest example is U.S. policy, with its chaotic and counterproductive military intervention in various regions of the planet (especially in the Middle East). But it also manifests itself in dictatorial regimes, not because of polarization or alternation, but because of a hyper-centralization of decisions, incapable of correcting mistakes before it is too late. The clearest example is Russia’s decision to make a lightning rule in Ukraine, which morphed into an indefinite trench war. We must remember that so far, the prevailing type of war is asymmetrical warfare between powerful armed forces and resistance guerrillas. In these wars the most powerful win all the battles but lose all the wars (Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan again, Gaza, and so on).
Favor conflict over collaboration. The shift from a unipolar world to a multi-polar world produces a rise in aggressive nationalism on all continents. From within countries, it is fueled by the emergence of the xenophobic and protectionist right, whose main cause is the weariness of new generations in the face of old and distant institutions of representation and justice. Such a breeding ground means that many agitators can come to power, but once installed behind the wheel they do not know how to drive with sobriety and wisdom[3]. An old Turkish proverb dating back to the Ottoman Empire portrays this situation. It reads: “When a clown enters the palace, the clown does not become king, but the palace becomes a circus.” Nationalisms can copy each other, but they will never make a system. A “nationalist international” is an oxymoron.
The anarcho-capitalist temptation. No news. It is a return to the old anti-statist slogan: “laissez faire, laissez passer; le monde va de lui meme » [Let it go, let it pass; the world marches alone].The French expression refers to complete freedom in the economy: free market, free manufacturing, low or no taxes, free labor market, and minimal government intervention. It was first used by the physiocrats of the XVIII century, against government interventionism in the economy. The problem is that this world “that marches alone” is heading straight for a global version of the well-known dilemma of action in the social sciences: the tragedy of the commons. Individual libertarian action, especially with respect to public goods, leads to their exhaustion and therefore to a collective disaster[4].
Given this constellation of factors, we have to expect a disjointed and more violent world that is going backwards. If it survives, humanity will have to dedicate itself at the end of this century to correcting the errors whose consequences it could not or did not want to anticipate.[5]
[1] In the Hebrew tradition, the angel represents an allegory of the “messianic utopia”, which resists progress and symbolizes endless catastrophe.
[2] Tragedy has been anticipated in science fiction films, and with special mastery in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove (1964), which combines the psychosis of an American soldier with an autonomous Soviet device called the “ Doomsday Device”.
[3] The coming to power by agitation is analyzed in Giuliano Da Empoli’s book, The Engineers of Chaos, Madrid: Editorial Anaya, 2020. In great literature, Thomas Mann portrays the situation in his short novel Mario and the Magician: https://ww3.lectulandia.com/book/mario-y-el-mago/
[4] For example, when a person decides to smoke in a public place, they are pleasing their short-term interests, but in the long term, they are harming both their own health and the health of others. This demonstrates the beginning of the Tragedy of the Commons.
[5] In this regard, I recommend the recent book by a French strategist, General Dominique Trinquand, Ce qui nous attend. L’effet papillon des conflits mondiaux (What awaits us. The Butterfly Effect of World Conflicts) Paris: Robert Laffont, 2023.
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