WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE GLOBAL COP GETS TOO OLD & SICK FOR THE JOB?

There is a time for every thing under Heaven, so the Biblical text & song lyric goes. There is every sign that the time for the western elites to wield overwhelming power in our world is over.

It takes time for those who were virtually all-powerful to recognise that they are no longer strong enough to throw their weight around as they used to do. Those who exist within the echelons of western state institutions used to pulling powerful levels such as military might are constantly encouraged to do the job that others have come to expect them to. The mental circuits of both parties, those in the top ranks and those directly underneath are incapable of instant change or in most cases even gradual change. Like the dinosaurs long before them they are incapable of changing as the environment they live within changes.

The above can be seen exemplified in the person of President Joe Biden. Biden is fixed in a mindset that belongs in the past. The USA, even with its compliant allies around it cannot expect to act as it did even two decades ago. Present events in the Middle East are demonstrating the new limits to the waning power of the West and these demonstrations are certainly going to increase and reveal the new level of impotency that the West has reached.

Meanwhile, as the western powers get their noses rubbed in the mess that they have to a large degree made, a new paradigm for the world is steadily growing in acceptance. That paradigm rejects the notion that it is appropriate to use military might to resolve geopolitical disagreements between nations and that there are mechanisms that can forestall any such early reliance on such violent approaches. Continuing dialogue between parties and the maximum use of diplomacy to generate higher levels of trust and understanding along with intense cooperation regarding trade and other agreements would, in the majority of cases, preclude the need for force.

The western powers, through their signing on to an ideology of superiority and exceptionalism and giving them some innate and even God-given right to remain permanently intolerant toward certain targeted nations has brought us to where we are now, to the edge of a worldwide  tragedy. Through both overt and covert means the USA and its allies seek, on a constant basis, to work against and undermine their targets. They have no use for diplomacy except as a tool to aid in this process. They seek to eliminate and replace systems of governance across a significant number of nations. They conceive that there is no need for trust, except as another weapon with which to deceive and betray. All with an end of increasing their level of in-country interference to maximise the amount of damage they can do.

It is the intolerance of the West in regard to modes of governance that they find anathema that stand out in stark contrast with the vastly more pragmatic stance of the BRICS nations and the ethos they follow of building trust THROUGH tolerance, finding areas of agreement/compromise and building the bridges necessary to construct win-win situations that lead to stability, greater levels of trust, and the minimising of disputes that would otherwise generate antagonisms leading to war.

The approach of the USA and its allies is based at its foundation on intolerance. They see themselves as the epitome of all that is good and right. All others then naturally fall into lesser, inferior categories. In the USA this emerges as a constant approach due to the concept of exceptionalism and the holding of the view that it has a ‘manifest destiny’ to mould the world in its image. In the United Kingdom the attitude of superiority over all others is well known from the colonial era when Britain ran much of the world. Looking down their noses in a very similar way to those in the USA has led us to the point where western powers consider themselves to be indispensable. But present events are revealing that very little in these attitudes or the policies emerging from them hold true in today’s world. They simply do not and cannot fit in these times. They are well past their ‘sell-by date.

Some may bemoan the loss of the days when the USA dominated the world along with its allies. From the end of WWII and for many decades thereafter the status of the West was almost never in doubt. Then, when they brought down the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact western political and military elites in that unipolar moment believed they were on top for good, that it was ‘the end of history’ and they were now in permanent command. How soon all those concepts related to this unassailable status were shattered. Within only a few decades we see that the most vital aspects of the power they held have dissipated and been lost forever. Outside of the use of nuclear weapons that level of power once held by the West will never return. Others, with a different and far more civilised solution have arrived, ready to exert their power to solve the massive problems the westerners have caused through attempting to preserve the levels power they see slipping from their grasp.

Like a man or woman who feels power slipping away from them in old age but does everything possible to resist the inevitable, that inevitable has its effect on them in the end. Though they may rail against the dying of the light that shone so brightly within them at one point there will always come a point when the realisation dawns that their fight has been totally in vain. That point is coming for the political and media elites of the western world through now innumerable sources. Through Ukraine. Through Israel and Gaza, and now through the Houthis in Yemen.

Will the elites of the West grow old gracefully? Nothing points in that direction currently. In their collective dotage it appears far more likely that they will keep using the same old out-of-date and destructive techniques, unable to learn any new ones and destined to end up angry, frustrated and striking out at random, doing everything possibly to ignore their growing impotency, going down to complete disgrace, fighting all the way.