Tom Engelhardt – Informed Comment https://www.juancole.com Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion Mon, 21 Oct 2024 05:26:07 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.10 The Empire is Going Down https://www.juancole.com/2024/10/empire-going-down.html Mon, 21 Oct 2024 04:02:50 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=221093 ( Tomdispatch.com ) – He’s the man of the hour (and you can choose your hour), win, lose, or draw. I mean, who can deny it? Certainly not the crowd at his debate with Kamala Harris that, as he reminded us recently, absolutely “went crazy” over what he had to say. (And it couldn’t matter less that the event had no live audience whatsoever.) In a sense, he isn’t wrong. After all, it’s still all too possible that, in a couple of weeks, he could once again be elected — yes! — president of the United States.

Indeed, it’s as yet unclear whether American voters will decline The Donald, but what is increasingly clear — there can’t be a doubt on the subject — is that he himself is on the decline in a typically wild and mad sort of way. And yet he might indeed still be elected to lead (even if that hardly seems the right word anymore) this country. And what exactly does that tell us about this all-American world of ours?

All too much, I fear. Above all, that it’s increasingly anything but all-American.

Can you believe that only 30-plus years ago, after the Soviet Union collapsed, this country, the very one Donald Trump might once again preside over, was considered (at least in Washington) the “lone superpower” on planet Earth? And in some sense, it actually was. After all, the great European imperial powers were ancient history by then, the Russians in a state of post-Cold War devastation, and Communist China had yet to truly begin its rise. But like all great imperial powers, it should now be far clearer that, in the wake of a seemingly endless series of lost wars abroad, its global “moment” has long been ending. Its ability to command or direct the world now seems largely a thing of the past. There can be little question any more that the (increasingly dis-)United States is an imperial power on the decline.

Make America Grotesque Again?

Don’t misunderstand me. This country remains all too powerful when it comes to its military and nuclear forces. Just check out the latest Pentagon budget or the more than 40,000 American military personnel, battleships, aircraft carriers, jet fighter planes, and who knows what else deployed to a Middle East that Israel is now blowing sky-high. But if you want a measurement of just how far the Lone Superpower has fallen, keep in mind that, once upon a time not so terribly long ago, an Israeli leader like Benjamin Netanyahu would never have dared to pay so little attention to the desires of Washington when it came to his actions in the Middle East. Once upon a time, a figure like Netanyahu couldn’t have ignored the wishes of the top officials of the very country still arming his own in a staggering fashion, while doing whatever he damn well pleased to tear his region to shreds.

Consider him visible evidence that this country is indeed no longer the world’s lone superpower (and not just because of the rise of China either). Yes, the Pentagon budget remains a staggering (and still increasing) affair, but something has certainly changed. Consider it anything but symbolic (though it is that, too) that 81-year-old Joe Biden is by far the oldest president in American history. (Ronald Reagan left office at age 77.) Worse yet, should Donald Trump win re-election this November and last until the end of his term, he would set a new record and leave Biden in the aging dust of history.

While it no longer even occurs to observers to use a phrase like “lone superpower” when it comes to the United States, it still seems that, in a deeper sense, the reality of this country’s imperial decline has yet to be fully taken in here, even by those who no longer see it as the operative great power on Planet Earth. In truth, it’s not just that it has lost much of its grandeur and influence abroad but that, though this is seldom mentioned in such a context, it’s visibly coming apart at the seams right here at home and that should, of course, be a significant part of any definition of imperial decline. As it happens, such a decline of a major global power will always prove anything but a distant foreign affair.

Even if it’s not normally thought about or written about that way, it is, in fact, happening right here, right now, in these increasingly dis-United States of America in a distinctly up close and personal fashion. At this point, you can, in fact, see evidence of it almost any time you turn on the news. In some sense, it couldn’t be more graphic or literal. After all, former president Donald Trump, once again running for president, is, symbolically speaking, declining before our very eyes as he rants and verbally stumbles in a distinctly declinist fashion, even if to the cheers of striking numbers of his MAGA fans and followers. (By the way, in light of recent history, isn’t it perhaps time to redefine MAGA as Make America Grotesque Again?)

And yes, in these years of imperial decline, Donald Trump has gotten (whether positively or negatively) almost unprecedented attention here at home. Sometimes, in fact, it seems as if he (and he alone) is the news. But here’s the truly strange thing: he, the MAGA movement, and Election 2024 are seldom seen for what (at least in part) they really are. He, that MAGA phenomenon, and the 20 million — yes, 20 million! — military-style AR-15 automatic rifles (the best-selling rifle in America) now in private hands — mainly the mitts of those who are White, male, between the ages of 40 and 65, and have accompanied him into this version of America — actually represent the truest sign of imperial decline imaginable in the place its leaders still like to think of as the greatest on Planet Earth.

Yes, Donald Trump is living, breathing evidence that this country is none too slowly coming apart at the seams. I mean, when in our history could you count on the fact that, if one candidate for president loses the upcoming election, he (and yes, it distinctly is a he) will undoubtedly claim that it’s been stolen from him and that he actually won? And his followers, significant numbers of them armed to the teeth, will agree with him and do who knows what (but nothing good). And of course, were he instead to win, four years later you can count on one thing: in some sense, this country is likely to be politically unrecognizable. If you don’t believe me, just check out the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to get a sense of the direction that a whole crew of his former officials and other Trumpian types think it should head. In other words, the United States is not just going down as a global power but potentially, in some fashion, beginning to disintegrate domestically as well, even possibly as a democracy. And if that isn’t both the functional and the literal definition of “decline,” what is?

Let me just say that, if I could bring my parents back from the (long) dead and tell them the fantastic story of Donald Trump and how he became president or, for that matter, how the Supreme Court, led by six right-wing (including three Trump-appointed) justices, essentially immunized a significant range of his illegal acts in office by granting him “presumptive immunity” for them, I guarantee you they wouldn’t have believed such a thing possible. Nor would they have believed that a “businessman,” without the slightest political background, who survived multiple (and I do mean multiple) bankruptcies and was best known for hosting a reality (or perhaps irreality) TV show, The Apprentice, for 14 seasons that tested the supposed business skills of its contestants, could become president of the United States.

Trump’s very victory in 2016 should, in other words, have instantly been seen as the functional definition of American imperial decline — a crucial sign of the weakening and potential collapse of this country’s position in the world translated into domestic politics. And an election victory this November could, in the end, mean both the figurative and literal bankruptcy of the American system, while his defeat, in a nation now armed to the teeth, could give chaos a new name in the imperial homeland.

In other words, whether Donald Trump wins or loses Election 2024, this country is in trouble deep and, four years from now, its situation could be almost unimaginable. It could be run by a degenerating 82-year-old madman or, even with Kamala Harris in the White House, a country in an ever more deeply divided and increasingly violent state of mind. It will not be, as it proudly proclaimed itself once upon a distant time, “the leader of the free world,” nor is it likely to be a fully functional global superpower (though what chaos or devastating violence its “fall” could bring the world, including future conflicts with China, remains hard to imagine).

Chill, Baby, Chill?

And let’s not forget that, in some sense, that may be the least of our problems. After all, as we’ve experienced all too recently with hurricanes Helene and Milton, whatever devastation may lie ahead socially and politically for this country, another kind of devastation is fast becoming a distinct (and distinctive) part of everyday life, here and in the world at large. Whether we’re talking about increasingly powerful storms or ever more devastating fires and floods, we’re on a planet that’s heading for trouble in a big-time fashion.

The fact is that we all now live on a different Earth, one that’s clearly going to experience devastating weather of every imaginable sort. Climate change, in other words, is truly our new reality and it’s clear that the devastation has only begun.

As ever more homelands on this planet become ever less livable and ever greater numbers of us begin wandering in search of places to inhabit — yes, Donald, climate change is indeed creating a previously inconceivable world of “illegal immigrants”! — imagine the once greatest power on planet Earth with a president who still insists that global warming is a “hoax.” Imagine a president on this very planet right now who plans, above all else, to “drill, baby, drill” from his first day back in the White House — and that’s in the nation that’s already the world’s record producer of oil and natural gas.

That should, of course, be the definition of creating a dysfunctional country on an increasingly dysfunctional planet, one where the old imperial dreams of so many “great powers” will have ever less meaning.

Yes, the Middle East is now in ever greater chaos as the Biden administration’s support for Netanyahu only continues, even as he draws even more of the region into disastrous conflict, while hardly bothering to consult with Washington’s top officials. Still, count on one thing: the chaos you see out there now is, in its own eerie fashion, already coming home to roost and if Donald Trump ends up back in the White House, believe me, we’ll need another term entirely than “lone superpower” to describe this country.

Might the planet’s “great stupid power” work?

And mind you, despite the rise of China, it still remains an open question, whether there can be another lone superpower of any sort or even a truly great power on a planet all too literally going to hell in a (flaming) handbasket, one whose land surface and ocean temperatures have already hit record levels with far worse to come.

You might almost imagine that climate change had grasped the withering global power of the United States and decided to act accordingly. In some fashion, we now seem to be on a post-imperial planet in which — if only — the best approach would be: chill, baby, chill.

Via Tomdispatch.com

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Voting for the End of the World: How Trump would (Literally) sink the Planet https://www.juancole.com/2024/09/voting-literally-planet.html Sat, 28 Sep 2024 04:02:56 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=220717 ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Imagine yourself in space, looking down on our world and yet unable to return any time soon.

Consider it our bad luck, in fact, that Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams were the two Americans sent to the International Space Station, 250 miles above this planet, for a few days in June and now find themselves stuck there until perhaps next February. If only it had been Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.

If only indeed.

Of course, in some sense, both of them are already in deep space, far beyond where Wilmore and Williams find themselves. And if you don’t believe me, just ask any dog or cat from Springfield, Ohio.

Here’s the truly sad thing, though: if Donald Trump were once again to become president (and Vance his veep), the rest of us would undoubtedly find ourselves spinning somewhere in space with nowhere to go, nowhere to land, and only piles of AR-15s in sight (and all too sadly in use).

In fact, let’s not mince words. Were Donald Trump reelected this November, he would not only be the oldest president ever to take office, but he might represent nothing less than the all-too-literal end of the world, at least as we’ve known it all these centuries, even if in distinctly slow motion. And typically of The Donald, it would happen slowly enough that, at age 78, he wouldn’t be around to pay the full price or even take the full blame for the nightmare to follow.

Think of it this way, if you want: his election would give the phrase “hot-button issue” a genuinely new meaning. (And believe me, I’m already sweating!)

After all, right now, in September 2024, we’re living on a planet that has never, not at any time in human history, been hotter. Our world has, in fact, been setting remarkable heat records, one after another, month after month — August was the 15th straight month to be the hottest of its kind ever — year after year. In fact, 2023 set a global heat record and 2024 has a 95% probability of smashing that record. And the weather of such an overheating planet should already be taking your breath away, even if we’re still early (more or less) in a process that could indeed create nothing less than a genuine hell on Earth.

All the greenhouse gases that have been and are being sent into the planet’s atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels are creating ever more heat, about 90% of which is at present being absorbed by global waters and is already altering our world in stunning ways. Recently, for instance, there has been devastating climate-change-related flooding globally, whether you’re talking about parts of China, Nigeria, or most recently central Europe that suddenly found themselves underwater (while, by the way, Portugal was burning with more than 100 fires). The droughts have similarly been horrific, while the fires — oh, yes, those fires! — have been beyond fierce, including the recent blazes in Southern California and the 1.9 million (yes, 1.9 million!) acres scorched in Oregon’s record summer fire season. And don’t forget those Canadian fires of 2023 and 2024 that set such grim records in a world where “nearly 12 million hectares [of forests] — an area roughly the size of Nicaragua — burned in 2023, topping the previous record by about 24%.”

And the heat? Well, don’t get me started on that. This year, records have been smashed again (and again) across the American West — and significant other parts of the planet.

And let’s face it, even without Donald Trump, the United States, a country that likes to think of itself as the good guy in so many situations, has historically been the worst of bad guys when it comes to what’s now known as climate change (a term, by the way, that’s far too mild and unassuming for the set of distinctly [un]natural phenomena it represents). It’s true that China, while installing significantly more solar and wind power than the rest of the planet combined (no, that is not a typo!), still beats the U.S. right now when it comes to pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, though its emissions may peak soon.

Thank you, coal, of which China also now uses more than the rest of the planet combined and is still building coal-fired power plants in a striking fashion! Nonetheless, when it comes to filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses, this country might be considered top dog (sorry, Springfield!) if you take into account China’s population size and ours. Not exactly something to be proud of even without Donald Trump.

In fact, to be fair to The Donald, while Joe Biden and Kamala Harris did indeed take some significant steps toward greening this country, mainly through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), during their time in office, the U.S. has remained the leader globally in producing oil and natural gas. In 2023, for the sixth year in a row, it set an all-time global record for oil production and another for natural gas exports. And don’t forget about methane, a truly potent greenhouse gas, where the American record is equally grim.

Still, the man who demanded a billion dollars in campaign contributions from a group of leading oil executives and lobbyists at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago last spring, while promising to reverse Biden administration environmental rules and regulations, has, as Kamala Harris reminded us in their debate, repeatedly dismissed the phenomenon as a “hoax.” Worse yet, it’s obvious that, should he enter the White House again, Trump and his compatriots are planning to let the fossil-fuel companies run wild and wreak havoc. He also plans to do his damnedest to limit the production of electric cars (despite the backing of Elon Musk) — “I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day 1” — and so much else to ensure that we live on what, barring some remarkable surprise in the decades to come, will be a planet from… yes, hell.

Not that Donald Trump has to be worried about that. By the time global warming truly becomes global frying, he (like the author of this piece) will be long gone. If, however, you want an appropriate nickname for him under the circumstances, here’s a possibility to consider: “Satan.” After all, as far as we can tell, he has no hesitation about the idea of taking humanity to hell and back, while he has the time of his life.

And oh yes, that Heritage Foundation plan, Project 2025, that he claims he hasn’t read (and it’s true that, as far as we know, he doesn’t read much, other perhaps than Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf or the collection of that monster’s speeches, which he once reportedly kept near his bed). Still, Project 2025, created by so many people connected to his first term in office, already promises, according to the Guardian‘s Oliver Milman, “a widespread evisceration of environmental protections, allowing for a glut of new oil and gas drilling, the repeal of the IRA and even the elimination of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service so they can be replaced by private companies. The conservative Heritage Foundation, which leads Project 2025, has said a new Trump administration should ‘eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.’”

The estimate is that if Project 2025’s authors have their way, the result will be an added 2.7 billion tons of carbon emissions by 2030 and 26 billion tons (no, that is not a misprint!) by 2050. A cheery prospect for sure on a planet already heating in a historic (or do I mean post-historic?) fashion.

Here’s a simple fact, though not one you would know if you were only listening to Donald Trump and crew: we’re already living on a wounded planet and, were he reelected, he could help make that wound so much deeper. (By the way, in case you were wondering why there are no section breaks in this piece, as there normally are in all TomDispatch pieces, it’s because the Trumpified version of climate change that we might indeed face, beginning in January 2025, will be a genuinely unbroken horror.)

Yes, it’s true that climate change isn’t the easiest way to destroy this planet in an ultimate fashion. After all, the very country Donald Trump might once again preside over invented atomic weapons, using two of them in August 1945 in a devastating fashion to end World War II. Now, of the nine countries that possess such world-ending weaponry, the U.S. and Russia have the largest nuclear arsenals, with China coming in third. And mind you, that all-American arsenal is already in the process of being “modernized” to the tune of perhaps $1.5 to $2 trillion over the coming decades. And don’t forget that, according to former White House chief of staff John Kelly, The Donald, while president, actually discussed using such weaponry against North Korea (and blaming it on another country). More recently, in relation to the war in Ukraine, he suggested that President Biden could threaten Russia with a nuclear attack and dispatch some of our nuclear submarines to cruise off the Russian coast.

And all of this from a man who, soon after becoming president, pulled this country out of the Paris climate agreement and, when he isn’t simply calling climate change a “hoax,” explains what’s happening and what’s going to happen on this planet in this fashion:

“You know, when I hear these poor fools talking about global warming. They don’t call it that anymore, they call it climate change because you know, some parts of the planet are cooling and warming, and it didn’t work. So they finally got it right, they just call it climate change. They used to call it global warming. You know, years ago they used to call it global cooling. In the 1920s they thought the planet was going to freeze. Now they think the planet’s going to burn up. And we’re still waiting for the 12 years. You know we’re down almost to the end of the 12-year period, you understand that, where these lunatics that know nothing, they weren’t even good students at school, they didn’t even study it, they predict, they said we have 12 years to live. And people didn’t have babies because they said — it’s so crazy. But the problem isn’t the fact that the oceans in 500 years will raise a quarter of an inch, the problem is nuclear weapons. It’s nuclear warming… These poor fools talk about global warming all the time, you know the planet’s going to global warm to a point where the oceans will rise an eighth of an inch in 355 years, you know, they have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s weather.

As climate-change expert Bill McKibben points out, such classic Trumpian language isgibberish in the service of something very important and very dangerous: doing all that he can to block the energy transition.”

We’re talking, of course, about the man who generally summarizes his stance on energy and this planet in a simple phrase: “Drill, baby, drill” — sometimes adding “and drill now!” Honestly, you couldn’t be blunter than that, could you, when it comes to the fate of our world?

If Satan were indeed to become president again, you can at least rest assured of one thing. Unlike his first administration, thanks to Project 2025’s planning, this one could be far more effectively organized in a whole range of areas that matter to the rest of us and, all too sadly, climate change would distinctly be one of them.

In fact, consider it beyond strange that, knowing what we do now (or at least what we should know now), anyone would want to vote for a candidate guaranteed to do his and his associates’ damnedest (and that’s distinctly the word to use) to finish Earth off as a reasonable place to exist.

Yes, the wars on this planet — the three of them in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan — are an ongoing nightmare of the first order, themselves pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in an unnerving fashion. In fact, from the devastated Ukrainian borderlands to the utterly destroyed 25-mile-long Gaza Strip, we humans regularly seem to have the urge to create a set of hells on Earth. But none of that, short of actual nuclear war, would do what electing a “hot-button” president would.

A Trump victory could, in every sense, put us in a lost universe, floating not just in space but in a space growing hotter by the year.

It would represent a defeat of an almost unbearable sort for humanity on a planet growing ever less comfortable.

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Trumptopia and Beyond: Is Reality the Biggest Fiction of All Today? https://www.juancole.com/2024/09/trumptopia-reality-biggest.html Wed, 04 Sep 2024 04:02:11 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=220386 ( Tomdispatch.com ) Yes, long ago, I dreamt of being a novelist. Two ancient manuscripts packed away in a distant corner of my closet attest to that (ir)reality, as does one novel focused on the world of publishing (in which I’d been an editor) that made it into print, even if it was barely noticed. Still, from time to time, I’ve thought about trying to write fiction again.

These days, however, when I consider that possibility, I find myself smiling, however grimly. After all, how could you truly write fiction in a world — and I’m not just thinking of Donald Trump (though I most distinctly am thinking of him) — that seems ever more fictionalized? How could you write fiction in a country whose former president and presidential candidate used the word “I” 317 times in a single speech or, in another, spun a tale of near death in an almost-helicopter crash in which nothing he mentioned actually happened? He even — all too conveniently — put the wrong “Brown” (Kamala Harris’s pal Willie Brown instead of California governor Jerry Brown) in the copter that didn’t come close to going down with him on board. Oh, wait, maybe there actually was a helicopter with him and another cast of characters entirely that did at least come closer to going down! And just in case you hadn’t noticed, he’s already claiming, in a strikingly repetitive fashion, that Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential campaign and Kamala Harris’s nomination together represent nothing short of a “coup” in the Democratic Party: “This was an overthrow of a president. This was an overthrow… They deposed a president. It was a coup of a president. This was a coup.”

And if that doesn’t tell you something about the state of the country whose leaders, when the Soviet Union disappeared in 1992, hailed the U.S. as the world’s “lone superpower” and acted accordingly, what does? Honestly (speaking of fiction), if I were now able to time-travel back to that moment and tell those leaders that, less than a quarter-century later, this country would elect a president whose only public accomplishment before entering the Oval Office was to host and be the leading character (and I do mean character!) on a TV show called The Apprentice, who would have believed me? If I could now tell them that, having been in the Oval Office once, and making so many of the rest of us his apprentices for four years, he couldn’t stop trying to return, neither they, nor anyone else then alive (including, I suspect, Donald Trump), would have thought it possible. In fact, such a description of American politics would have been off the charts, even for, say, dystopian fiction.

A Distinctly -Topian World

And speaking of -topias, my more-or-less namesake (since my first name is Thomas and my middle name Moore), Sir Thomas More, produced the first Utopia, inventing that very word as the title for his 1516 novel about a fictional island in the then-barely-known or even imagined New World. And almost half a millennium later, while an editor at Pantheon Books I would put out — or more accurately, stumble upon and reintroduce to our strange world — Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 utopian masterpiece Herland. Still, if either More or Gilman were alive today, I doubt they would be writing utopian anythings. Even the word “dystopian” might no longer seem strong enough for this grim world of ours. Perhaps what we need for 2024 and beyond, on a planet going down big time (even if in slow motion), is an altogether new word — something like “catastropian”? — that would be H.G. Wells or George Orwell multiplied by 10 (or maybe I mean 100) and not faintly in the same universe with More or Gilman.

Our world is now, in fact, mega-dystopian in so many ways it’s almost hard to fathom and I’m not just thinking of the nearly 50,000 people believed to have died in Europe alone last year from the megafires, droughts, and devastating heat waves of climate change. Nor am I thinking of the more than 40,000 Palestinians (and still counting) slaughtered in Gaza over the last 10 (yes, 10!) months in a war that never seems to end on — again, if this were fiction you wouldn’t believe it — a strip of land only 25 miles long and 4 to 7 miles wide. And worse yet, it’s painfully clear that, instead of facing our catastrophian future of ever more disastrous planetary overheating, humanity continues to find itself distracted in a distinctly metatopian fashion by all too many other nightmares that show not the slightest sign of ending. (And if, in this paragraph, I made up a word or two to fit this new world of ours, I hope you’ll forgive me.)

Admittedly, the one thing we’re missing to fully transform an already thoroughly dystopian planet (other than the arrival of devastatingly hostile extraterrestrials in UFOs) is an actual world war. Still, three major conflicts continue to roll (rattle or roil?) on this planet of ours, one in Ukraine (and now Russia, too), one in Gaza (that’s increasingly threatening to spread across the Middle East), and one in Sudan, all of them murderous and none of them showing the slightest sign of going away — more or less ever. Each of them accounts for staggering numbers of humans being slaughtered or disappearing in who knows what horrific ways, even as such wars pour yet more devastating greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, helping ensure that this planet continues to become too hot to handle. (And mind you, the U.S. military alone emits more hydrocarbons than whole countries like Portugal or Denmark!)

I mean, tell me all of that doesn’t add up to a truly big-time, if slow-rolling, version of dystopia or possibly worse. In fact, if, once upon a time, you had been able to put all of this into a dystopian novel, I guarantee you that no one would have found it faintly credible (even as an imagined future). Consider, for instance, a significant power in the Middle East (backed financially and militarily, weapon by endless weapon, by the once mightiest nation on Planet Earth) fighting an unending war with almost any imaginable kind of weaponry short of an atomic bomb against a modest-sized guerrilla force on a tiny strip of land holding a population of about 2.1 million people, essentially destroying more or less everything in sight and still not winning. (Put that in a novel and you’d be laughed out of the dystopian living room!)

And that’s just to start describing the grim fantasy world of present-day reality where, more than 500 years later, even the faintest sense of utopia is all too literally missing in action.

Hey, and while you’re at it, imagine Russia’s leader on a planet where the Cold War is ancient history, deciding to invade Ukraine and fight a never-ending, wildly destructive conflict there, year after endless year, while my country (as if it were indeed still in a Cold War world) backed the Ukrainians to the tune of something like $117 billion (yes, billion!), much of it in the form of advanced weaponry, while no one seems even faintly interested in launching negotiations for peace of any sort. (Whew! That was a long sentence!)

A Mad, Mad Planet

In the context of all this, consider Donald Trump’s latest run for the presidency a sign sent from… well, I won’t even try to guess where… that this country, which its leaders not so long ago considered the only power of significance (and then at least the greatest power) on Planet Earth, is going down, down, down all too fast, fast, fast. Now, don’t misconstrue me on this. The U.S. still “invests” more in its military than the next nine countries combined and well over a trillion dollars annually in what it calls “national defense.” And given that, isn’t it strange how few Americans consider it, yes, strange that this country hasn’t won a war of significance since World War II? And that may, in fact, be one reason it’s visibly heading for hell in a handbasket, even if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz do pull out this election.

Of course, if they do, given Donald Trump and the increasingly mega-dystopian nature of the United States, don’t be surprised to see it begin, in its own fashion, to come apart at the [you fill this one in] ___-topian seams. After all, an estimated one of every 20 Americans now owns at least a single AR-15 rifle (which is about as close as you can get to a machine gun without actually having one) and, no surprise here, mass shootings in this country in recent years averaged more than 600 annually.

Now, assuming Donald Trump doesn’t, in fact, win election 2024, just for a moment try to imagine this country next November. It’s a given, of course, that, should he lose, Trump and his crew will denounce that loss as fraudulent and dispute it big time. (He’s already saying the 2024 election will be “rigged” against him.) With that in mind, imagine the “lone superpower” of Planet Earth a mere three decades ago as it now begins to come apart at the seams. And mind you, were he to win the election, assume that he would be almost guaranteed to use the Insurrection Act to dispatch the American military to the streets of Washington, D.C., and other “Democratic” cities to suppress anyone demonstrating against his victory and the Trumptopia to come.

Were Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to win and not be instantly challenged by a country coming apart at the seams, their administration would undoubtedly continue supporting the wars in Gaza and Ukraine (and largely ignoring the one in Sudan). In her convention acceptance speech, in fact, Harris plugged the sort of militarized foreign policy that’s been ours forever and a day. (“I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists.”) Still, she and Walz wouldn’t be set on quite literally heating the planet to the boiling point in the fashion of Donald Trump and his Big Oil buddies. (Though mind you, even without Trump, my country has set absolute global records in recent years for producing oil and exporting natural gas.)

And I haven’t even mentioned that only recently California, ablaze, had its hottest month in recorded history or that the good news on Planet Earth was that, unlike the previous 13 months, July may not — no, not! — have set a new monthly global record for heat, but merely come in a remarkably close second to the worst July (of 2023) in human history. Mind you, the last 10 Julys have been the 10 hottest ever and climate change was barely mentioned at the Democratic convention, while the Trumpublicans continued to attack Harris and other Democrats for their “war on American energy.”

How You-Topian Can We Get?

Fiction? You must be kidding. Don’t even think about creating imaginary worlds on a planet where reality is becoming the biggest fiction of all and our mega-, catastrophic-, dys-, miss-, piss-topian moment could leave anything the human mind might conjure up all too literally in the dust of history.

So, yes, put that novel you’re writing in a drawer. Ours is now a world that indeed does increasingly threaten to leave fiction in the dust and give dystopian a whole new meaning. In short, you and I are living in a reality that looks ever more sadly fictional.

And it’s up to each of us to — think of this, five centuries later, as Thomas More updated, perhaps even as you-topian — do what we can to bring this planet of ours under some kind of control for, if not us, then our poor children and grandchildren.

Tomdispatch.com

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Trump, the Candidate from Hell, wants to Make America a Hellhole https://www.juancole.com/2024/08/candidate-america-hellhole.html Fri, 16 Aug 2024 04:06:59 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=219999 Donald Trump is all too literally the candidate from hell and, yes, he’s threatening to take the United States and the world to — no place else! — hell and back. He’s the greatest danger to this planet imaginable. And I’m not even thinking about what else he’d do, were he to win election 2024 and return to the Oval Office, having reassured his religious voters that, should they opt for him this November, they’ll never have to do so again. (“Get out and vote, just this time… You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”)

Forget all of that, including the racism, the madness, the urge to transform this country into the all-American equivalent of an autocracy. Forget every last bit of it — even if, yes, that’s one hell of a lot to forget! Instead, focus on just one thing: Donald Trump and his crew, including that gem J.D. Vance, who attacked what he called “the Green New Scam” at the Republican convention, are determined to fossil-fuelize our future in a fashion never before seen, not at least under these circumstances.

And unfortunately, Donald Trump is anything but alone. (Do you hear me, Vladimir Putin?) In fact, according to a recent Guardian report, almost one-quarter of this country’s congressional representatives (100 members of the House and 23 senators) deny the very existence of climate change — and be shocked, very shocked, but every last one of them is a Republican! In what now passes for the mainstream, The Donald and his vice-presidential buddy, the very opposite of “cat ladies,” are extreme but all too common examples of the urge to heat this planet to the boiling point or beyond. Admittedly, the competition is fierce. After all, whatever steps President Joe Biden took in relation to climate change — and he did take them and they will make a difference — American oil production and oil and natural gas exports all set staggering new global records during his term in office.

Still, there’s no question about one thing: Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and crew are determined to fully reject that Green New Scam (as Republicans now love to call it), which means the two of them are intent on making you, me, and everyone else on this planet sweat, sweat, sweat. I say that given the fact that, only recently, humanity experienced the hottest day ever recorded and the very next day set an even more feverish daily global record. And that, mind you, was after 13 straight months each of which (including two Junes) set new heat records for human history (and probably far beyond it), and all of that, in turn (if you don’t mind the longest, hottest sentence imaginable), came after 2023 set a global record as the hottest year ever — and count on this: I’m undoubtedly leaving all sorts of things out.

Yikes, I’m already sweating!

A Green New Scam President?

Given the recent withdrawal of 81-year-old Joe Biden from the presidential race, 78-year-old Donald Trump is now the oldest American presidential candidate ever (yes, ever!), so why should he give a damn about how hot our future could become? Admittedly, there are his kids and grandkids to consider, but it’s not clear that, even when it comes to them (and despite his recent family-ization of the Republican convention), he gives a damn about anyone other than… yes, Donald Trump. Based on the last few years of him, I doubt it. In the most literal sense possible, as far as he’s concerned, he’s always the man of the moment. Any moment. And if the moment isn’t his, then to hell with it and everything else!

And believe me, under the circumstances, I’m not just using “hell” figuratively.

After all, this planet and this country are both growing hotter all too quickly. This was already one hell of a summer in the United States. State after state, city after city simply broiled, while records were regularly set across the globe. (Hey, Las Vegas hit a new city high of 120 degrees Fahrenheit in July and, in breaking local heat records, it was anything but atypical.) After all, June, as I mentioned, was the 13th straight hottest month of its kind ever. And while later in the summer, we might get a slight break from such record-setting temperatures, the future looks all too grim. While you’re at it, consider yourself lucky that you don’t live in someplace like Dubai, where on one recent anything-but-atypical July day the temperature hit 113 and the heat index 144. In fact, the Washington Post now suggests that the Persian Gulf region may be the “most likely to regularly exceed life-threatening heat thresholds during the next 30 to 50 years.”

Of course, only this summer, Donald Trump held a rally in Phoenix, Arizona, where the temperature hit… go ahead, just for hell of it, take a guess!

Yes, 113 degrees! Eleven of his listeners were treated right there for heat exhaustion on “stretchers hooked to IV bags,” while The Donald continued to “rail against wind turbines and electric vehicles.” And mind you, unlike the acts of the assassin whose bullet hit Trump’s ear at that rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the former president’s statements in Arizona blasting any efforts to deal with this overheating globe of ours weren’t considered acts of violence.

And I’m not even including Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation greenhouse-gas nightmare of a document prepared for the possible second term of the president who called climate change “a great hoax” and once said sarcastically, “The oceans are going to rise 1/100th of an inch in the next 300 years and it’s going to kill everybody,” while insisting “that windmills cause cancer and that electric cars are ‘bad’ for the environment.” After all, despite the fact that so many of Project 2025’s creators at that “notorious rightwing climate-denying think tank” were former Trumpian officials and J.D. Vance is closely tied to it, the former president has claimed it has absolutely nothing to do with him. Still, here’s the Trumpian essence of it all: he’s always been a fossil-fuelizer of the first order; the oil and gas industry has backed his presidential runs big-time; and he seems desperately eager to do it all (and more) again. As he so classically put the matter during this election campaign: on day one back in the Oval Office, he’s going to act like a “dictator and, above all, institute a “drill, baby, drill” regime for the next four years (and undoubtedly beyond). He and his key officials the second time around are going to do their damnedest, in other words, to encourage the long-term, full-scale overheating of this planet.

The plans that he and J.D. Vance have when it comes to fossil fuels should make anyone’s hair stand on end (even someone as bald as me). After all, he’s already promised that, above all else, when he next enters the Oval Office, his main goal will be to “drill, baby, drill.” You can’t be more blunt than that when it comes to encouraging the fossil-fuel companies from whom you recently demanded a fortune in election funding.

And that’s obviously just the beginning. He and his crew have promised to wipe out anything the Biden administration did aimed at dealing with climate change and fossil fuels while nixing any steps taken to support the creation of clean energy. Instead, he would “develop the liquid gold that is right under our feet” and “unleash domestic energy production like never before.” From obliterating wind power projects (“I hate wind“) to promoting oil and natural gas drilling from the Gulf of Mexico to the Alaskan Arctic, there’s no end to what he and his cronies have in mind. He and his “team” may even be ready to systematically dismantle, if not obliterate the Environmental Protection Agency (which, in case you’ve forgotten, was created in 1970 by a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who did little else right). Donald Trump’s next presidency, in other words, will clearly force the U.S. government to literally worship at the foot (or the oil rig) of the fossil-fuel companies.

The Slow-Motion Equivalent of a Nuclear War

To put all of this in some grim perspective, the British outfit Carbon Brief estimated that, by 2030, a Trump presidency would add approximately four billion more tons of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere than another Biden administration (or, assumedly, one run by Kamala Harris). And all of that means that a country and a world already overheating at a record pace would do so in an even more dramatically grim fashion.

The startling thing is that, on this distinctly overheating planet of ours, a person whose platform is essentially an oil or natural gas-drilling rig should have the faintest chance of being elected president. It’s not all that complicated really. Leaving aside any other issue, voting for Donald Trump in our already rapidly warming world would be — all too literally — a suicidal act.

And keep in mind that, even before Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office a second time (should he win in November), the news daily has gotten ever worse. As a start, we’re talking about a country that, in the Biden years and despite the money that he and his crew began investing in climate-change-mitigating activities, set its sixth consecutive yearly record in 2023 for producing oil (more than any other country on the planet) and another for exporting oil and natural gas, while the giant U.S. oil companies continued to garner record profits.

Of course, climate change is hardly the only danger on planet Earth right now. There’s the potentially explosive set of horrors underway in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East that could erupt into something far worse at any moment. (Ominously enough, the U.S. only recently dispatched yet more warships and planes to the region.) And there are other dangers, including the possibility of a future war with China, a potential nuclear face-off with Russia, or even (should Donald Trump lose the election this year), a rise in violence in this country, if not some possible version of a civil war here at home.

But put in proper perspective, climate change should be seen as the slow-motion equivalent of a nuclear war on this planet, one that — not in a day, a week, a month, or a year — but over the decades to come, could make our world ever less livable, ever less ours. While a full-scale nuclear exchange could almost instantly create a “nuclear winter” that might result in up to five billion of us dying of hunger, climate change could devastate this planet in a similarly horrific fashion, just over the (very) long term.

So, consider a vote for Donald Trump a vote for nothing less than destroying the Earth as a livable environment for… well, all of those to come. And given the apocalyptic nature of that, don’t you find it strange that Trump’s climate-change views and his ultimate support for the fossil fuel industry above all else (except himself) haven’t gotten more attention in this election season?

Anyone who lived through the last blistering year should realize that global heat of an unprecedented sort isn’t anywhere near a high point but, given the fossil fuels still pouring into the atmosphere (including staggering amounts of methane, a gas that heats the planet faster than any other), at something closer to a low point. And under the circumstances, Donald (“drill, baby, drill”) Trump should be considered, not figuratively but all too literally, the presidential candidate from… yes, hell. Voting for him would be voting for, in historical (and Christian) terms, the devil and that’s not just an image but potentially an all-too-literal reality.

As president, Donald Trump would undoubtedly prove to be a first-class global heat machine and voting for him would be the slow-motion equivalent of putting an atomic weapon in the Oval Office. Quite a prospect, don’t you think?

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Defeat Culture: The Decline and Fall of Presidential America https://www.juancole.com/2024/07/culture-decline-presidential.html Fri, 19 Jul 2024 04:06:07 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=219594 ( Tomdispatch.com ) – It’s not a happenstance or some sad mistake that, barring a surprise, Americans will go to the polls in November to vote for one of two distinctly ancient men, now 77 and 81, both of whom have clearly exhibited language and thought problems for a significant period of time. To put this in perspective, remember for a moment that, until Ronald Reagan entered his second term in office in 1985 (during which he would get dementia before leaving the White House at age 77), the oldest president was Dwight D. Eisenhower and he was 70 (yes, 70!) not on entering the Oval Office but on leaving it after his second term in 1961. 

Of course, that was another America in another age — and my apologies for using that word in a piece about Donald Trump and Joe Biden! It was one in which it seemed all too natural to have the youngest president ever, John F. Kennedy, who was only 46 years old when he was assassinated. 

That happened in 1963, or relatively early in what was already known as “the American Century.” In fact, that phrase was first used in February 1941, before Joe Biden, Donald Trump, or the author of this piece even landed on Planet Earth. It was the title of an editorial in Life magazine by its owner Henry Luce. “The 20th century is the American Century,” he wrote. With a distinctly imperial image of an all-American future in mind, Luce was urging the country’s dramatic entry onto “the world scene” and, in defense of Great Britain, into what became World War II. He was also convinced that the twentieth century would indeed be “America’s first century as a dominant power in the world.”

In fact, he predicted that, if his country ditched its isolationist stance and made itself a true force by taking control of world affairs, the twentieth century would prove a distinctly all-American one. And as it happened, he wasn’t wrong. After the Nazis were defeated and the U.S. dropped those two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War II, the post-war years, the ones in which Joe, Donald, and I grew up, would become the earliest in… no doubt about it!… the American Century. 

Alone and All-Powerful on Planet Earth

It’s true, of course, that when it came to major powers, despite its dominant position, the United States wasn’t then alone on planet Earth. Hence, the global struggle that came to be known as the Cold War, which all too often edged in a far hotter direction with the Soviet Union (and its ally Communist China, whose troops the U.S. actively fought in the Korean War in the early 1950s). It was also true that, by the late 1950s, when Joe, Donald, and I were “ducking and covering” under our desks in school, either this country or the Soviet Union could have ended everything with their ever-expanding nuclear arsenals.

Still, in so many ways, the years from 1945 to the moment the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 were indeed all-American ones and generally felt that way in this country.  Yes, Washington ruled the roost from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO). Admittedly, it also had its problems. Despite (as is still true today) pouring far more money into its military than any other country on the planet, from Korea to Vietnam, it proved incapable of winning a major war in Asia. Still, in so many ways, it was indeed a, if not the, globally dominant power. Kids like me or Joe or Donald growing up in such a world did sense that, to use a phrase I once made part of the title of a book of mine, we were distinctly living in a “victory culture.” And you can still sense some version of American triumphalism embedded in both of those now ancient creatures, Joe and The Donald.

After the Soviet Union disintegrated, of course, all of that seemed beyond self-evident and Henry Luce a prophet of the first order.  At that moment, in terms of great powers, this country was alone and evidently all-powerful on Planet Earth. It was, in fact, a time when American officials liked to refer to the United States as the “last,” “lone,” or even “ultimate superpower.” By then, Joe Biden, almost 49 years old, had already been a senator in Washington, D.C., for 18 years and Donald Trump, 45, was the “successful” president of Trump Management (the business his father had started for which he became “the apprentice”) and, while often losing millions of dollars, he was also the owner of the Plaza Hotel in New York City, the Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, and various troubled casinos in Atlantic City.

In 1991, it certainly seemed as if everyone on the planet (Joe and Donald included), whether they cared to or not, had entered nothing less than — yes! — the American Century in a staggeringly impressive fashion. And given the lack of other great powers — China had yet to begin its “rise” — the phrase “the last superpower” hardly seemed an exaggeration or even braggadocio in an American Century that was then a mere 50 years old and (so to speak) in the prime of life.  It was certainly a moment when power brokers in Washington believed that the world had been left lock, stock, and barrel to us, a mood that naturally infected both the still relatively youthful Joe Biden and Donald Trump. 

Misspeaking the American Century

Today, 83 years after that century began, I hardly need suggest that, whatever this planet may be, it’s anything but an all-American one. You might even think that, in old age, the American Century has become the perfect symbolic place for those two ancient men to face off one last time. In fact, it would be hard to get a more striking sense of just how deeply the American Century has aged than by watching those elderly men, born with that century, once again running for president in an American world that distinctly seems on the downhill slope.

That’s why, in some sense, I would consider neither of them a mistake. In their own unnerving and strangely spoken fashion, they both capture an image of an America heading for some national version of senility and, possibly, if Donald Trump wins election 2024, the all-too-literal end of this country’s democracy. If Joe Biden does capture the presidency once again, we’re still likely to find ourselves in a distinctly bump-stocked world in which all too many Americans might disagree in a devastating fashion about who should be considered president.   

I mean, when you think about the American Century now, just imagine two candidates, one of whom can stumble on a radio show (where his backers provided the interviewer with all the questions) and briefly claim that he was “the first Black woman to serve with a Black president,” while the other can insist that Joe Biden’s reelection could lead us into… yes!… “World War II,” while repeatedly calling him “Obama”!

A Deeply Bump-Stocked Defeat Culture

No, I didn’t watch a single show from the 14 seasons of The Apprentice, though I did wander past Trump Tower from time to time. But believe me, in all those years before 2015, I never imagined that someday I might face a world in which Donald Trump (so unlike any politician who’s occupied a position of ultimate authority in this country) could ever hold power beyond compare, the power, in fact, to potentially make 2024 the last real American election. He could indeed provide the final exclamation point on the all-American world I’ve known all these years, whether he wins the presidency or not.  Of course, you can’t just blame The Donald for that.  He was only there (and remains here) because this country was sinking fast.

Today, there can be little question that, whichever old man takes election 2024, we’re watching a great imperial power going down, down, down on a planet that itself may be going down, down, down. And at my age, which falls just between Trump’s and Biden’s, it seems as if I’ve watched it all from the moment of my birth in July 1944.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, my father, at age 35, volunteered for the U.S. Air Force and experienced that birthing American Century in person in Burma (where he fought the Japanese), while my mother, a theatrical and political caricaturist, spent many of her wartime nights at New York City’s Stage Door Canteen drawing servicemen like her husband heading off to a war that would indeed lay the groundwork for the American Century. And I’ve continued to watch that century develop all these years, often writing about it as well. And yet, somehow, nothing truly prepared me for this moment of ours. 

Of course, growing up in the 1950s, I didn’t think of the United States as an imperial power.  It was my country, a democracy that (or so I thought once upon a time) generally did good in this difficult world of ours.  And now, whatever you may think of it, it seems to be preparing to go down big time in an ever less all-American world — and even faster if Donald Trump takes the reins of a presidency only recently made potentially far more autocratic by his very own Supreme Court.  (Talk about taking down the American Century!)

Today, it’s hard to imagine that a world ever existed in which this country was the unquestioned “lone superpower.” That now seems like such ancient history, as does the all-American world in which Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and I grew up — a world that, for young people today, would be hard even to imagine.

Imagine this, though: in a mere 30-plus years, we’ve moved from a planet with that triumphant “lone superpower” to one in which it’s becoming ever harder to conceive of a super anything. Instead, this country seems in the process of transforming itself into a heavily over-armed, deeply bump-stocked, wildly divisive culture on a planet that’s threatening to go down in a welter of wars, as well as unprecedented droughts, fires, floods, storms, and heat.

And if the ancient Donald Trump, who was recently almost knocked off by a man on a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania, with an AR-15 rifle, is indeed reelected in November 2024, we would undoubtedly also find ourselves in an almost unimaginable version of — yes! — defeat culture. (Maybe that will have to be the title of the book I’ll undoubtedly never write in the wake of turning 80 and heading distinctly downhill myself.)

So, here we are in 2024 with two seemingly confused old men contesting to “lead” the United States into what still passes for the future.  Nothing strange, right?  Not anymore. But all too sad, that’s for sure, given a future in which so many of us are likely to have to “duck and cover” in relation to so much. 

The American Century has been declared over and done with more than once. Still, what might that imperial powerhouse Henry Luce — I grew up with his magazine, LIFE, offering me its vision of an all-American century from the baseball diamond to Hollywood to Washington, D.C., to a planet in this country’s sight lines — have thought about election 2024? What would he have made of those two bumbling old men “running” (a word that, under the circumstances, needs to be put in quotation marks) for president? I suspect his dream of the United States bringing “the triumphal purpose of freedom” to this planet — “It is in this spirit that all of us are called, each to his own measure of capacity, and each in the widest horizon of his vision, to create the first great American Century” — would now seem to him dated beyond words (as dated as those two old men, in fact). 

Welcome, then, to the ancient American Century hobbling along at age 83. 

Via Tomdispatch.com

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“Some Say the World will End in Fire:” Nukes and Carbon, Carbon and Nukes https://www.juancole.com/2024/07/world-nukes-carbon.html Mon, 01 Jul 2024 04:02:05 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=219328 ( Tomdispatch.com ) – I’ve been writing about climate change for so many years now but, in truth, it was always something I read about and took in globally. It was happening out there, often in horrific ways, but not what I felt I was living through myself. (It’s true that, in past winters, Manhattan’s Central Park went 653 days without producing an inch of snow, almost double any previous record, but if you’re not a kid with a sled in the closet, that’s the sort of thing you don’t really feel.)

However, that’s begun to change. As it happens, like so many other New Yorkers, I only recently experienced a June heat dome over my city. Here in Manhattan, where I walk many miles daily for exercise, it was simply brutal. The sort of thing you might expect in a truly bad week in August.

This June, though, it was hot nationally almost beyond imagining. As I began this piece, it was estimated that more than 270 million Americans, 80% of us, were experiencing a heatwave of a potentially unprecedented sort extending over significant parts of the country. There were devastating early wildfires in the Southwest and West (not to speak of the ones burning long-term in Canada). Ruidoso, a small mountain town in New Mexico that my wife, who grew up in El Paso, Texas, once loved, had at least 1,400 of its structures damaged or destroyed by fire and two people killed.

Meanwhile, as I began writing this, the first tropical storm of this overheated season was already forming in the Gulf of Mexico and heading for Texas, not to speak of those record rainstorms that only recently flooded the Ft. Lauderdale and Miami areas in a distinctly unsettling fashion. And then, of course, there was the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s prediction that, given how hot the tropical waters of the Atlantic Ocean had become, this year’s hurricane season could prove to be an all-too-literal hell on Earth. There might possibly be 25 named storms (itself a record prediction). And I was thinking about all of this as I sat at my desk in New York City, stripped to my undershirt in the rising heat of a June day from hell. 

Honestly, it’s not that complicated. In fact, we should give ourselves credit. We humans have certainly proved to be remarkable — or at least remarkably destructive. Yes, we’ve long been that way, but the levels of that destructiveness have, in recent history, grown in a striking fashion. If you feel in a negative enough mood, humanity’s time on this planet can be seen as a history of ever more horrific wars that, in the last century, became global. And, of course, the second of those world wars ended in an historically unprecedented fashion with the destruction of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by a new weapon, the atom bomb, that all too soon proved capable not just of devastating urban areas but of possibly wiping out civilization itself. And that, in a sense, couldn’t be more deeply us. (There are, of course, other histories that could also be written that would be far more encouraging, including a history of literature and of healing, but at least for now let’s leave them aside.)

I mean, give us full credit. In these decades, we’ve discovered — once by the deepest sort of planning and experimentation (think “Trinity,” the code name for the first nuclear test in the desert of Los Alamos, New Mexico, that Robert J. Oppenheimer became so famous for) and then by the inadvertent, if deeply profitable use of fossil fuels — two ways of potentially destroying Earth, at least as a livable place for you-know-who. I’m talking, of course, about the very planet that nurtured humanity for endless millennia.

Nuclear war between great (or even lesser) powers could, of course, quickly produce an apocalyptic scenario that might kill millions of human beings and create a nuclear winter on planet Earth capable of starving most of the rest of us. Climate change, while potentially no less destructive, offers us that apocalypse in slow motion. And that’s obviously why it’s taken me so long, despite all that I’ve written on the subject, to truly feel it myself in broiling Manhattan.

Death by Heat

Oh, and as I sat there sweating profusely in front of my computer on that overheated day, I was struck by a little cheery news when it comes to doing in the planet. As the Guardian recently reported, nuclear spending actually rose globally by 13% in 2023. How farsighted of us!

Congratulations are certainly in order, don’t you think? And to give credit where it’s due, among the nine nuclear powers on this planet, my own country leads the list in increased spending, pouring more billions of dollars into such weaponry than the next eight nuclear powers combined. And mind you, at this very second, two of the planet’s nine nuclear powers, Russia and Israel, are actually at war. While one, Israel, doesn’t mention its nuclear arsenal, the other has repeatedly threatened to use “tactical” nuclear weapons (some more powerful than the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki) in Ukraine or even assumedly elsewhere in Europe.

A third nuclear power, North Korea, has been implicitly threatening to atomize its southern neighbor and foe. Oh, and just for a little even cheerier news, Russian President Vladimir Putin now needs North Korean weaponry so badly to fight his war in Ukraine that he may be willing to aid Kim Jong-un’s scientists in designing “a warhead that could survive re-entry into the atmosphere and threaten its many adversaries, starting with the United States.” So, at the moment, if anything, the possibilities of future nuclear war seem to be on the rise.

Meanwhile, in this planet’s slow-motion version of Armageddon, while we Americans have been experiencing our own extreme weather events from coast to coast, so have other countries, sometimes in an even more devastating fashion. Take Greece, part of a Europe that experienced extreme heat last summer. Only recently, it’s had an early heatwave that scientists say could “go down in history” (at least until next year!) in which at least five tourists have died. And that, in truth, was nothing, not if you shift your focus to Saudi Arabia. There, during this year’s Hajj religious pilgrimage in which 1.8 million well-robed visitors took part, more than 1,300 pilgrims died of heat exposure as the temperature hit 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Meanwhile, South Asia has been broiling, with temperatures there all too literally going sky high — up to 127 degrees Fahrenheit in India and Pakistan — and resulting in increasing numbers of deaths. In India, only perhaps 12% of the population even has air conditioning (which, in any case, simply puts more fossil fuels into the atmosphere). Scores of people have died there from extreme temperatures, including dozens of poll workers during India’s recent election.

Such extremes are becoming a global phenomenon, as is ever wilder weather. Take, for instance, recent record temperatures and a grim drought across significant parts of northern China along with record flooding in the southern part of that country. And mind you, China has done more than any other nation to switch to non-fossil-fuel-producing renewable forms of energy and yet, in 2023, it was also continuing to build new coal-powered plants at a rate of two per week.

Whether cheaper solar and wind energy, which are indeed growing faster than any energy source ever, will leave oil, coal, and natural gas in a historic ditch remains to be seen. In the meantime, our planet is a growing climate mess, with (let’s not forget) us humans continuing to make war on each other in Ukraine and Gaza, efforts that only pour yet more fossil fuels into the atmosphere.   

A Slow-Motion Conflagration

This is just the start of a process of climate devastation that, barring surprises, is scheduled to grow ever more severe in the years to come. And if you want to look for a moment at causation (as with nuclear spending), rather than the death-dealing results of it all, consider my country. It’s still setting startling records when it comes to the production of fossil fuels. In fact, in 2023, for the sixth year in a row, the United States set a global record for oil production (an average of 12.9 million barrels a day) and it’s also now the largest exporter of natural gas on the planet.

Meanwhile, the major fossil-fuel companies and their CEOs continue to make absolute fortunes. As the CEO of Chevron put it last year: “In 2023, we returned more cash to shareholders and produced more oil and natural gas than any year in the company’s history.” Hooray! And think of all of that as possibly the ultimate form of warfare on planet Earth. Consider it, in fact, a slo-mo version of atomic war, even if no one normally talks about fossil-fuelized war or anything of the sort.

Those mind-boggling American records took place under a president who has at least attempted to curb climate change. And yet, keep in mind that my fellow citizens, sweating across the country right now, could elect a man in 2024 who has sworn to wipe out our modest steps towards a greener future on the very first day he gets back into the Oval Office (and essentially ignored a question about climate change during the debate Thursday without being seriously challenged for doing so). He’s proudly met with just about every fossil fuel CEO in sight, promising to “end a freeze on permits for new liquefied natural gas,” reverse any steps President Biden took to limit fossil-fuel usage, and is even more proudly ready, as he’s bragged more than once, to “drill, baby, drill” from his first day in office. Meanwhile, of course, many of the countries of Europe, which until now have moved more decisively against the use of fossil fuels, just elected all too many far-right representatives to the European Parliament and may do the same thing in state-by-state elections, and so, as in this country, could reverse course on climate change.

Imagine this then: next June, if I’m still writing TomDispatch pieces, it may be without even that undershirt on. (Excuse me for a moment, while I wipe the sweat from my face.)

The future, as they say, is now and, believe me, I feel it. Right now! (And I don’t often use exclamation points.) And yet, in the slow-motion apocalypse that climate change represents, the one that’s already starting to slaughter human beings before it even truly hits its stride, this is clearly just the beginning, perhaps — though we don’t yet know — just the beginning of the beginning.

It saddens me beyond words to imagine the future world my grandchildren might find themselves in. It’s true that we should never underestimate ourselves — and not just when it comes to destruction. The switch to non-fossil-fuel forms of energy is distinctly on the rise and they are indeed becoming ever less expensive to install and use. And you never know — you truly don’t — what else the human brain can come up with. Nor, of course, do we know whether, in the grimmest fashion imaginable, we could end all this slow-motion suffering on planet Earth in a nuclear conflagration.

Given our history, who knows what we could do? And I haven’t even mentioned artificial intelligence, have I? I fear I may simply be too old to take all of this in or the ways in which we humans could still prove destructive beyond compare.

Via Tomdispatch.com

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The Enemy is Us: (And I’m not just thinking about Donald Trump) https://www.juancole.com/2024/06/enemy-thinking-donald.html Thu, 06 Jun 2024 04:06:37 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=218931 ( Tomdispatch.com) – Honestly, doesn’t it befuddle you?

I mean, don’t you think we humans are kinda mad? And worse yet, at some deep level, we simply can’t seem to stop. All too often, we just can’t curb our urge to destroy.

Looking back, the desire to make war and obliterate our “enemies” is a deeply ingrained and repetitive pattern in our history. Each individual example can, of course, be explained (away) in its own fashion, but the overall pattern? Hmmm…

I mean, you can certainly “understand” the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Depending on your politics, you can explain it in terms of the threatening expansion of NATO or of a country run by an autocrat willing to see countless numbers of his people die (no, I’m not even thinking about the tens of thousands of dead Ukrainians) in order to take more territory — whether in parts of Georgia (no, not that Georgia!), Ukraine, or god knows where else — and make himself ever more impressively (or do I mean depressively?) imperial. Phew! That was a long one, but explanations about war-making tend to be that way.

And yes, if you want, you also can undoubtedly explain the ongoing nightmare in Gaza, beginning with Hamas’s horrific October 7th attack on Israel and followed by the outrageous urge of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his disturbingly right-wing compatriots to slaughter the population of that strip of land right down to the smallest child. In some grim fashion, given our history, such acts seem all too sadly human.

You could also undoubtedly offer explanations for the endless — yes, that’s a reasonable word to use here! — not to speak of disastrous wars my own country has stomped into since World War II ended, first as the leader of the “free world” and then as the leader of who knows what. Those conflicts ranged from Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s to Afghanistan and Iraq, among other places, in this century. And undoubtedly it’s even possible to explain (away) the nightmarish civil war still devastating Sudan that’s already displaced more than eight million people without being noticed by much of the rest of the world.

Something New in the Planetary Bloodstream

In a sense, war is human history. It’s been the rare moment when we’ve proven capable of not making war on ourselves somewhere on this planet. It seems to be in the bloodstream, so to speak (as in the endless streams, even rivers, of blood eternally being spilled). And in a sense, war, the urge to take someone else’s territory or simply kill endless numbers of… well, us… has certainly been in that very same bloodstream at least since the first great literary work of the Western world, The Iliad, was written. In some sense, you could say that, 3,000 years later, we’re all still in Troy.

Oh, wait, that’s both true and not, because there is indeed something new in the planetary bloodstream. And I’m not even thinking about our endless ability to find ever “better” and more devastating ways to kill one another — from the spear to the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle (reputedly now owned by one of every 20 Americans), the bow and arrow to the AI-driven drone, the hand grenade to atomic weaponry. (And don’t forget that Vladimir Putin is already threatening to use “tactical” nuclear weapons in Ukraine — never mind that some of them are significantly more powerful than the bombs that, in August 1945, obliterated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

No, what I have in mind is that other way we humans have found to potentially devastate our world: the burning of fossil fuels. Yes, it started with the massive consumption of coal during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it’s simply never ended. (China, in fact, now uses more coal than the rest of the world combined and continues to build coal power plants.) By now, with oil and natural gas added to the mix in staggering quantities, records are being set monthly as ever greater heat waves, increasingly violent storms, startling flooding, and devastating fires are becoming part of our everyday lives. Typical was Miami’s May heat index that recently hit an unheard-of 112 degrees Fahrenheit, 11 degrees higher than at any past date in May ever. That should hardly shock us, however, since, as that superb environmentalist Bill McKibben reports, “A new study out today shows that heat waves have tripled since the 1960s in this country, and that deaths from those hot spells are up 800%.” And, of course, far worse is predicted for the decades to come, as those burning fossil fuels continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at record rates.

Forget what we officially call wars (anything but easy to do these days if you happen to be Gazan, Sudanese, or Ukrainian) and consider this the increasingly devastating new way we have of warring on ourselves and our planet. While there’s still a lot to learn about global warming, also known as climate change (terms far too mild for what’s actually happening), we already know far too much not to consider it the ultimate danger — other than nuclear war, of course. In fact, the difference between nuclear war and global warming could be that, since August 1945 (except for nuclear tests), such weaponry has never been used again, while the distinctly apocalyptic “weaponry” of climate change is still ratcheting up in a staggering fashion.


Image by Patou Ricard from Pixabay

A War Against the World as We’ve Known It

Climate change is certainly something Americans should know about. After all, only the other week, Donald (“drill, baby, drill“) Trump sat down with a group of fossil-fuel CEOs and reportedly suggested that, for a billion dollars in campaign financing, a bribe of the first order, he would toss out all of Joe Biden’s attempts to rein in the oil, natural gas, and coal industries and encourage them instead to make further fortunes by turning this planet into a cinder. (In truth, that wasn’t really much of an offer, since he had already made it clear that he was planning to do just that anyway, starting on “day one” of his next term in office.)

Of course, who needs Donald Trump when, as the New York Times reported recently, despite President Biden’s distinct attempts to limit the use of fossil fuels during his tenure in the White House, “oil and gas production have set records under the Biden administration and the United States is the world’s leading exporter of liquefied natural gas. Even with the [administration’s] pause on permits for new [natural gas] export terminals, the United States is still on track to nearly double its export capacity by 2027 because of projects already permitted and under construction.” And mind you, we’re talking about the country that, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “produced more crude oil than any nation at any time… for the past six years in a row,” reaching — yes, indeed! — a new record in 2023.

And despite all of what I’ve just described, consider it an irony that the only true world war of the moment (think of it, in fact, as a slow-motion World War III) doesn’t normally get enough headlines (though there are, of course, exceptions) or the attention in the mainstream media that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine so regularly have. No matter that last year was the hottest in human history and that each of the last 11 months was the warmest of its kind on record. Still, if you want to follow what’s functionally our only true world war in the mainstream world, there’s one obvious place to go, the British Guardian, which regularly highlights reporting on the subject and even has an online “climate-crisis” section.

Here, for instance, are just a few of the things you could have learned from that paper’s reporting in the last month or so and tell me they shouldn’t have been headline news everywhere. Take the Guardian‘s Oliver Milman recently writing that “the largest ever recorded leap in the amount of carbon dioxide laden in the world’s atmosphere has just occurred… The global average concentration of carbon dioxide in March this year was 4.7 parts per million (or ppm) higher than it was in March last year, which is a record-breaking increase in CO2 levels over a 12-month period.” Or the staggering heat waves that struck across Asia this spring “causing deaths, water shortages, crop losses and widespread school closures,” as Damian Carrington, that paper’s environment editor, reported. And mind you, such searing temperatures were “made 45 times more likely in India” by the climate crisis.

Do you even remember when not passing 1.5 degrees Centigrade was the goal of the countries that put together the 2015 Paris climate accord? Well, if you don’t, no problem, since, as Carrington also recently reported, thanks to an exclusive Guardian survey, “Hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above preindustrial levels this century, blasting past internationally agreed targets and causing catastrophic consequences for humanity and the planet.” And almost half of them expect it to hit 3C! Now, try to imagine that future planet of, well, I’m not sure you can say “ours” anymore, or better yet, check out another recent Carrington piece on the kinds of horrors — and they would be horrors of an unprecedented sort — such scientists now think a 3C world might hold for us.

Oh, and as Milman wrote recently, a new report suggests that “the economic damage wrought by climate change is six times worse than previously thought.” That’s already! And we’ve also already crept close to that 1.5C mark. But let me not go on. You get the idea. And each of those stories should have been a blazing headline across a planet that’s already feeling the heat in every sense imaginable, even if, in our normal reckoning, what’s happening doesn’t yet count as a world war (or at least a war on the world as we’ve known it).

Don’t you find all of that breathtaking (given the nature of heat)? And isn’t it amazing that, despite what it means for our future, it’s so often hardly considered headline-making news?

And mind you, there’s so much we don’t yet even know: Is the fierce tornado season that’s recently stretched from Texas through Iowa and beyond another climate-change-induced phenomenon? It’s certainly possible. Will the coming hurricane season set a series of records from hell, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is now warning us, thanks in part to the fact that the tropical waters of the Atlantic Ocean have heated to all-time-record levels? Again, we’ll have to wait (but not for long) to see what happens. And is that record rise in U.S. billion-dollar — yes, billion-dollar! — weather disasters recorded by NOAA in 2023, another climate-change-induced horror? It certainly seems likely.

We are, in other words, already in a mad new world of “war” (as well as the mad old version of the same). And given how possible it is that Donald Trump will become President Fossil Fuel again, we may be left to face an all too literally mad future (along with staggering new profits for the big fossil-fuel companies) in what, until recently, still passed, despite endless disastrous wars, for the greatest power on the face of the Earth. And in retrospect, in climate terms, I suspect that even Joe Biden will seem distinctly lacking and congressional Republicans mad beyond words.

Take, for instance, President Biden’s actions in relation to this planet’s other greenhouse-gas burning monster, China. (While the U.S. has historically been the greatest greenhouse gas emitter, China now tops the list.) Unlike Donald Trump, Joe Biden does indeed take climate change seriously, but he’s also supported Israel in a war from hell that’s throwing vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and, when it comes to China, his urge hasn’t truly been to cooperate. Instead, his focus has been on expanding the U.S. military presence throughout Asia, including putting Green Berets on an island just 10 kilometers off China’s coast. (Imagine how this country would react if — and it would hardly be comparable — China were to assign its version of special forces troops to Cuba!)  In other words, he’s been at work creating the conditions for a new, if not hot, then certainly all-too-warm war between the two greatest greenhouse-gas polluters on this ever-warming planet. 

Brilliant! And the Chinese response? To pal it up with Vladimir Putin! (Equally brilliant!)

As mid-2024 approaches, the question remains: Can we humans stop making war on each other or preparing for yet more of the same and begin dealing with a planet heading to hell in a proverbial handbasket? Can we face the fact that the enemy is indeed us?

Via Tomdispatch.com

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The Decline and Fall of the American Empire https://www.juancole.com/2024/04/decline-american-empire.html Mon, 22 Apr 2024 04:02:34 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=218175 ( Tomdispatch.com) – Let one old man deal with two others.

I turn 80 in July, which makes me just over a year-and-a-half younger than Joe Biden and almost two years older than Donald Trump. And, honestly, I know my limits. Yes, I still walk — no small thing — six miles a day. And I work constantly. But I’m also aware that, on my second walk of the day and then as night approaches, I feel significantly more tired than I once did. I’m also aware that my brain, still active indeed, does forget more than it once did. And all of this is painfully normal. Nothing to be ashamed of, nothing whatsoever.

I also know from older friends that we humans can still be distinctly functional, thoughtful, and capable at age 82 (when Donald Trump would leave his second term in office) or even 86 (when Joe Biden would do the same). But honestly, what are the odds? I’ll tell you one thing that couldn’t be more obvious — not as good as for someone who’s, say, 55 or 60 years old, that’s for sure. Yes, there’s also the reputed wisdom of old age — and it might indeed make Joe Biden a more thoughtful president, were he to get a second term; Donald Trump, of course, would be Donald Trump, at 60 or 82.

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Yes, I invariably bother you for $$$ in these notes above my own TD pieces. And in all these years, I’ve been amazed at how the readers of this site have helped keep it going. But it’s gotten harder. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s a tough time for independent journalism. Some of TD‘s outside support is simply gone, which means I rely on you readers to do everything you can and, over the years, you certainly have. Still, this is a moment when it would be wonderful if you visited the TomDispatch donation page and contributed something. I’d be deeply appreciative. I always see the names of those of you who do so and say a silent thank you. (I wish I could thank you personally, but no such luck.). Anyway, my deepest appreciation for anything you now do to keep this site and me going a little longer on an increasingly unnerving planet. Tom]

And I have little doubt that, whatever age you are, you’ve been thinking somewhat similar thoughts. I mean, doesn’t the very possibility of watching a televised debate between the two of them make you anxious? After all, the oldest president to previously leave office was Ronald Reagan at 77 (and by then he may have had dementia). Before him, the oldest was Dwight D. Eisenhower who ended his second term in 1961 at 70 years old, having had a heart attack while in office. Third comes William Henry Harrison, who entered the White House in 1841 at age 68 and died, possibly of pneumonia, 32 days later.  Now, it’s also a fact that we Americans are generally lasting longer than once upon a time. But is that really where you want to put your political money? I doubt it.

Still, all of the above is too obvious to belabor, so here’s a question: Are there any other implications we can draw from the upcoming battle between those two old men that’s going to grab our attention and steal the headlines for all too many months to come? The answer, I suspect, is yes. Sometimes in our world, the symbolic is all too subtle, but every now and then it impolitely smacks you in the face. And at least as far as I’m concerned, the second Biden-Trump election campaign should more than qualify in that regard.

I mean, the country that still passes for the greatest power on Planet Earth is going to set a limping age record for president, no matter who wins, leaving China’s Xi Jinping, now 70, and Russia’s Vladmir Putin, now 71, as relative youths in an all-American world of absolute ancientness. And that should certainly tell you something about the state of our country and this planet, too.

To be a little clearer about just what, let me add one more factor to the equation. Joe Biden and Donald Trump are preparing a fight to the wire to lead an America that, not so many decades ago, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, was considered the “sole superpower” on planet Earth. Doesn’t that tell you something?

I think it does. I think, quite bluntly (though I’ve seen no one discussing this amid the endless media headlines and chatter about Trump and Biden), that those two old codgers offer a stunning image of the all-too-literal decline and fall of — yes! — the United States. They should make us consider where the country that still likes to think of itself as the singularly most powerful and influential one on this planet is really heading.

A World Without Peace Dividends

As you might imagine, there’s a prehistory to all of this. George H. W. Bush, president at the moment when the Soviet Union went down in 1991, had that very year ordered the U.S. military to launch Operation Desert Storm, which drove Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s troops out of Kuwait. In its own fashion, it also launched what would, in the century that followed, become a set of American military operations around the globe. At the same time, with Russia in tatters and China still a modestly rising power — with, that is, no true great-power enemies left on Planet Earth — that sole superpower would do something rather surprising. It would continue to pour ever more taxpayer dollars into the U.S. military-industrial complex. Yes, there was talk then about a “peace dividend” for this country and its people, but none ever arrived.

Thirty-two years later, the Pentagon budget has almost hit the trillion-dollar mark annually, while the overall national “security” (yes, it’s still called that!) budget long ago soared well above the trillion-dollar mark. Meanwhile, in this century, George H. W. Bush’s son, elected president in November 2000, would the following September respond to the 9/11 attacks, planned and carried out by Osama bin Laden and his small terror group, al-Qaeda, by launching what quickly came to be known as “the Global War on Terror.” And all too global it would be with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. It would also prove a disaster of the first order for the last superpower, whose military would leave literally millions dead across the planet, destroy countries, decimate economies, and create tens of millions of refugees, while costing this country a staggering $8 trillion and counting as, over more than 20 years, the U.S. military lost wars, while terrorism as a phenomenon only grew.

Yes, in May 2011, Osama bin Laden would be killed in Pakistan by a team of U.S. Navy Seals. Still, were he alive today, I suspect he would be pleased indeed. With next to nothing other than his personal wealth, a small crew of followers, and some hijacked airplanes, he managed to outmaneuver and outplay what was then the greatest power on Planet Earth. Thanks to the slaughter of several thousand Americans in New York and Washington, he also managed to draw this country into an endless war against “terrorism” and, in the process, turn it into an increasingly terrorized country, whose inhabitants are now, however symbolically (and, in the future, possibly far more literally), at each other’s throats.

In some eerie fashion, both former President Trump and President Biden might be considered creations of al-Qaeda. And so might the country itself today. I mean, could an American of 1991 ever have imagined that, in 2024, polls would show the urge for violence against fellow Americans reaching eerie highs here? Meanwhile, approximately one in 20 of us is now armed with a military-style AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. Even young people can now possess a JR-15 (for “junior”) child’s version of such weaponry that’s all too deadly.

Perhaps not surprisingly, AR-15s have proven the weapon of choice in the worst of the mass killings that have become commonplace in this country and, in recent years, have been distinctly on the rise. They could indeed be considered “terrorist” activities, involving as they do the repeated deaths of startling numbers of us. And all of this is happening without an American-style al-Qaeda yet truly in sight. Mind you, there are now an estimated almost 400 million weapons of various kinds in the possession of American civilians, a stunning arsenal for any country, no less one increasingly divided against itself. Meanwhile, according to a recent NPR/News Hour/Marist poll, 3 in 10 Republicans (or 20 million of us) claim that “Americans may have to resort to violence to set things straight” in this country, while, on the right, militarized terror-style groups are ever more the order of the day.

Consider that a brief summary of the increasingly divided and divisive American society over which those two old men are now fighting, a domestic world that could, in the end, rip apart whatever fantasies our leaders may still have about American power on this planet.

Coming Apart at the Seams?

As was true of the Soviet Union until almost the moment it collapsed in a heap, the U.S. still appears to be an imperial power of the first order. It has perhaps 750 military bases scattered around the globe and continues to act like a power of one on a planet that itself seems distinctly in crisis. It also continues to organize for a new Cold (verging on Hot) War with China in the Pacific. That explains President Biden’s recent highly publicized “summit” in Washington with the prime minister of Japan and the president of the Philippines, just as it explains the way U.S. special operations forces have only recently been “permanently” assigned to an island only a few kilometers off China’s coast. Yes, as that recent meeting with the Japanese and Filipino leaders and those commandos suggest, the Biden administration is still dealing with China in particular as if this were indeed a Cold War moment, and the sort of “containment” of a communist country the president grew up with was still the order of the day for the globe’s greatest power.

Unfortunately, that’s truly an old man’s version of the world we now live in. I’m thinking about the planet which, each month, sets a new heat record and where, despite much talk about cutting fossil fuels, the U.S. in 2023 produced more oil (13.5 million barrels a day) than at any time in its history, while China’s coal-power capacity grew more rapidly than ever. And that’s just to start down a list of fossil-fuelized bad news. On a planet that itself looks as if it might be going to hell, amid record heat, fires, storms, and the like, the urge to put such effort into organizing alliances of nations in the Pacific (led by Washington, of course) to “contain” China in an ever more warlike fashion represents, it seems to me, folly of the first order.

It’s increasingly an illusion (or do I mean delusion?) that this country has any sort of genuine control over the rest of the planet (no less itself). And today — with those two old men, one of whom is also bizarre beyond compare, wrestling each other for the presidency — this country is threatening in its own odd fashion, like the USSR in 1991, to come apart at the seams.

It’s strange to think about just how distant the America I grew up in — the one that emerged from World War II as the global powerhouse — now seems. If you had told anyone then that more than three-quarters of a century later, there would be well-armed private militias forming in a country armed to the teeth with military-style weaponry or that one presidential candidate would already be hinting at calling out the military to subdue his opponents if he ends up back in the White House, who would have believed you? It wouldn’t have even seemed like convincing science fiction.

And yet today, the greatest country on Earth (or so its leaders still like to believe), the one that continues to pour taxpayer dollars into a military funded like no other, or even combination of others, the one that has been unable to win any war of significance since 1945, seems to be threatening to come apart at the seams. Yes, this presidential campaign could turn out to be about the decline and fall of it all — and, of course, if Donald Trump (“drill, drill, drill“) ends up back in the White House that decline and fall could happen in a fashion almost beyond imagining.

The once-lone superpower, and now perhaps the loneliest power of all, could even be heading for previously unimaginable autocratic waters or who knows what else? If only it were otherwise, but unfortunately, in the months to come, we’ll be watching as an all-American world possibly spins slowly out of control, while the leftovers of the American Century fight it out in a country where all too many of us seem focused on anything but what matters.

As one old man to two others, if only you could stand down, we could face the world we’re actually in before it becomes too late.

Via Tomdispatch.com

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A Slow-Motion World War III? Imperial decline in the Age of Climate Change https://www.juancole.com/2024/03/imperial-decline-climate.html Mon, 25 Mar 2024 04:02:12 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=217742 ( Tomdispatch.com ) – I’ve been describing this world of ours, such as it is, for almost 23 years at TomDispatch. I’ve written my way through three-and-a-half presidencies — god save us, it could be four in November! I’ve viewed from a grave (and I mean that word!) distance America’s endlessly disastrous wars of this century. I’ve watched the latest military budget hit almost $900 billion, undoubtedly on its way toward a cool trillion in the years to come, while years ago the whole “national security” budget (though “insecurity” would be a better word) soared to well over the trillion-dollar mark.

I’ve lived my whole life in an imperial power. Once, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was even “the lone superpower,” the last great power on planet Earth, or so its leaders believed. I then watched how, in a world without great-power dangers, it continued to invest ever more of our tax dollars in our military. A “peace dividend“? Who needed that? And yet, in the decades that followed, by far the most expensive military on planet Earth couldn’t manage to win a single war, no less its Global War on Terror. In fact, in this century, while fighting vain or losing conflicts across significant parts of the planet, it slowly but all too obviously began to go down the tubes, or perhaps I mean (if you don’t mind a few mixed metaphors) come apart at the seams?

And it never seems to end, does it? Imagine that 32 years after the U.S. became the last superpower on Planet Earth, in a devastating kind of political chaos, this country might indeed reelect a man who imagines himself running a future American “dictatorship” — his very word for it! — even if, publicly at least, just for a single day.

And yes, in 2024, as chaos blooms on the American political scene, the world itself continues to be remarkably at war — think of “war,” in fact, as humanity’s middle name — in both Ukraine and Gaza (with offshoots in Lebanon and Yemen). Meanwhile, this country’s now 22-year-old war on terror straggles on in its own devastating fashion, with threats of worse to come in plain sight.

After all, 88 years after two atomic bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, nukes seem to be making a comeback (not that they were ever truly gone, of course). Thank you, Kim and Vlad! I’m thinking of how North Korean leader Kim Jong-un implicitly threatened to nuke his nonnuclear southern neighbor recently. But also, far more significantly how, in his own version of a State of the Union address to his people, Russian President Vladimir Putin very publicly threatened to employ nukes from his country’s vast arsenal (assumedly “tactical” ones, some of which are more powerful than the atomic bombs that ended World War II), should any European countries — think France — send their troops into Ukraine.

And don’t forget that, amid all of this, my own country’s military, eternally hiking its “defense” budget, continues to prepare in a big-time fashion for a future war with — yes — China! Of course, that country is, in turn, rushing to upgrade its own nuclear arsenal and the rest of its military machine as well. Only recently, for instance, the U.S. and Japan held joint military maneuvers that, as they openly indicated for the first time, were aimed at preparing for just such a future conflict with China and you can’t get much more obvious than that.

Another World War?

Oh, and when it comes to war, I haven’t even mentioned, for instance, the devastating civil war in Sudan that has nothing to do with any of the major powers. Yes, we humans just can’t seem to stop making war while, to the tune of untold trillions of dollars globally, preparing for ever more of it. And the truly strange thing is this: it seems to matter not at all that the very world on which humanity has done so forever and a day is now itself being unsettled in a devastating way that no military of any sort, armed in any fashion, will ever be able to deal with.

Let’s admit it: we humans have always had a deep urge to make war. Of course, logically speaking, we shouldn’t continue to do so, and not just for all the obvious reasons but because we’re on a planet that can’t take it anymore. (Yes, making war or simply preparing for it means putting staggering amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and so, quite literally, making war on the planet itself.) But — as both history and the present moment seem to indicate all too decisively — we just can’t stop ourselves.

In the process, while hardly noticing, it seems as if we’ve become ever more intent on conducting a global war on this planet itself. Our weapons in that war — and in their own long-term fashion, they’re likely to prove no less devastating than nuclear arms — have been fossil fuels. I’m thinking, of course, of coal, oil, and natural gas and the greenhouse gases that drilling for them and the use of them emit in staggering quantities even in what passes for peacetime.

In the previous century, of course, there were two devastating “world” wars, World War I and World War II. They were global events that, in total, killed more than a hundred million of us and devastated parts of the planet. But here’s the truly strange thing: while local and regional wars continue in this century in a striking fashion, few consider the way we’re loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and methane while, in the process, heating this planet disastrously as a new kind of world war. Think of climate change, in fact, as a kind of slow-motion World War III. After all, it couldn’t be more global or, in the end, more destructive than a world war of the worst sort.

And unlike the present wars in Gaza and Ukraine, which, even thousands of miles away, continue to be headline-making events, the war on this planet normally gets surprisingly little attention in much of the media. In fact, in 2023, a year that set striking global heat records month by month from June to December and was also the hottest year ever recorded, the major TV news programs of ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox actually cut their coverage of global warming significantly, according to Media Matters for America.

If I Don’t Get Elected, It’s Going to Be a Blood Bath”

I live in New York City which, like much of the rest of the planet, set a heat record for 2023. In addition, the winter we just passed through was a record one for warmth. And I began writing this piece on a set of days in early March when the temperature in my city also hit records in the mid-60s, and when, on March 14th (not April 14th, May 14th, or even June 14th), it clocked 70-plus degrees. I was walking outside that afternoon with my shirtsleeves rolled up, my sweater in my backpack, and my spring jacket tied around my waist, feeling uncomfortably hot in my blue jeans even on the shadier side of the street.

And yes, if, as my wife and I did recently, you were to walk down to the park near where we live, you’d see that the daffodils are already blooming wildly as are other flowers, while the first trees are budding, including a fantastic all-purple one that’s burst out fully, all of this in a fashion that might once have seemed normal sometime in April. And yes, some of what I’m describing is certainly quite beautiful in the short run, but under it lies an increasingly grim reality when it comes to extreme (and extremely hot) weather.

While I was working on this piece, the largest Texas fires ever (yes, ever!), continued to burn, evidently barely contained, with far more than a million acres of that state’s panhandle already fried to a crisp. Oh, and those record-setting Canadian forest fires that scorched tens of millions of acres of that country, while turning distant U.S. cities like New York into smoke hells last June have, it turns out, festered underground all winter as “zombie fires.” And they may burst out again in an even more devastating fashion this spring or summer. In fact, in 2023, from Hawaii to Chile to Europe, there were record wildfires of all sorts on our increasingly over-heated planet. And far worse is yet to come, something you could undoubtedly say as well about more intense flooding, more violent storms, and so on.

We are, in other words, increasingly on a different planet, though you would hardly know it amid the madness of our moment. I mean, imagine this: Russia, whose leader, Vladimir Putin, clearly doesn’t consider climate change a significant issue, is on pace to achieve an oil-drilling record for the second year in a row. China, despite installing far more green power than any other country, has also been using more coal than all other nations combined, and set global records for building new coal-fired power plants.

Meanwhile, the third “great” power on this planet, despite having a president dedicated to doing something about climate change, is still the largest exporter of natural gas around and continues to produce oil at a distinctly record pace.

And don’t forget the five giant fossil-fuel companies, BP, Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies, which in 2023 produced oil, made profits, and rewarded shareholders at — yes, you guessed it! — a record pace, while the major petrostates of our world are still, according to the Guardian, “planning expansions that would blow the planet’s carbon budget twice over.”

In sum, then, this world of ours only grows more dangerous by the year. And I haven’t even mentioned artificial intelligence, have I? As Michael Klare has written in an analysis for the Arms Control Association, the dangers of AI and other emerging military technologies are likely to “expand into the nuclear realm by running up the escalation ladder or by blurring the distinction between a conventional and nuclear attack.”

In other words, human war-making could become both more inhuman and worse at the same time. Now, add just one more factor into the global equation. America’s European and Asian allies see U.S. leadership, dominant since 1945, experiencing a potentially epoch-ending, terminal failure, as the global Pax Americana (that had all too little to do with “peace”) is crumbling — or do I mean overheating?

What they see, in fact, is two elderly men locked in an ever more destructive, inward-looking electoral knife fight, with one of them warning ominously that “if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath… for the country.” And if he isn’t victorious, here’s his further prediction: “I don’t think you’re going to have another election, or certainly not an election that’s meaningful.” Of course, were he to be victorious the same could be true, especially since he’s promised from his first day in office to “drill, drill, drill,” which, at this point in our history, is, by definition, to declare war on this planet!

Unfortunately, Donald Trump isn’t alone. All too sadly, we humans clearly have trouble focusing on the world we actually inhabit. We’d prefer to fight wars instead. Consider that the definition not just of imperial decline, but of decline period in the age of climate change.

And yet, it’s barely news.

Via Tomdispatch.com

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