Events bubble up from history's cauldron faster and faster. The flames of politically motivated ceasefires spew their gathering heat into each turn of the screw, push hard on each tick of the doomsday clock. President Trump – jester, huckster, peacemaker, empath – struts bombastic peace-through-strength Performances Of The Fourth Kind from the social-media wing of the World Stage, where alien cultures begin (again) to dialogue at each other, turning their volume knobs up and down in baffled irritation at the other side's inability to understand. The theatrics drip drama. The Global Keyboard timidly passes on the output of its endless batterings like a dutiful wife. Who needs an exclamation mark when the caps-lock key is locked down. Who needs freedom of speech when the loudest mouths on earth bellow at your command.
The Great Western They want to protect us, they do. They want to secure their legacy as guardians of all that is Right, Mannered and Civilised (that would be them, by the way). They want to keep the wolves of history at bay, stay out of jail, not be hanged from lampposts by the lumpen proles (that would be us, by the way), etc. And all of this is a storm of its own making – autopoietic – and a storm of more than that besides. Hyperbole is hard to resist, errors of judgment are our daily bread. Even equanimity sounds shrill these days, or sociopathically sanguine; it's hard to tell the difference in the globular (not a typo) media frenzy, the whiplashing news maelstrom that just will not weaken, come hell or high water.
My disbelief gulps every word and image down deep. My skepticism stays knocked off balance, frozen in a strangely dumbfounded stasis, as wave after wave of glitteringly azure historical folly crashes over us, laced with ribbons of blood, slaughtering the destitute of the world's trouble zones, and leaving no one wholly untouched. These are satanically interesting times.
Again I feel compelled to reassess. What on earth is going on? Trump's Big Beautiful Bombing obliterated Iran's nuclear programme, he angrily claims. Intel leaks and reports to the contrary are dismissed as heresy. As the distance between that bombing raid and the present expands, the President's bombast looks more and more threadbare. And yet it stopped the escalation, cooled hot heads, of that there is very little doubt. There is Trumpian rhetoric and bombast as lampooned above ... and there are events on the ground. There is fanfare, distraction, news maelstrom ... and there are the actual events on the ground.
Again: What on earth is going on?
As I have mused in recent, and in more distant, Econosophy posts, my hope has been that the creature Donald J Trump is a maverick one-off of essentially decent impulses that are at root anti-war and anti-violence. He is also a mysteriously narcissistic character – this is not a clinical but a poetical judgment – who is, to my eyes, deeply insecure. But he also has truly heroic courage, or so it seems to me from this great distance. But, again, he is also dangerously illiterate in terms of history and geopolitics, and thus via his insecurity and narcissistic leanings vulnerable to insidious flattery. But, again, I suspect his instincts about people are, at a certain intensity of crunch – that is, when the shit really is about to hit the global fan – eerily accurate. At which point he appears to have a creative and impish political nimbleness that dazzles the mind.
This highly unusual mix of characteristics makes, I'm sure we can all agree, for an extremely unpredictable fellow. I intuit a deeply caring man, one who is a misfit in DC, albeit a controllable misfit. At least up to a point. But what is the manner of that point where his inner compassion kicks in, just when what he is being finessed into doing becomes too ugly for his taste? Well, who can say. But the facts speak for themselves.
The US is pulling out of Ukraine. Yes, it is a hideously ugly and tragic slaughter, but Western hegemonic ambitions of the Halford Mackinder variety are to blame, not Putin's Russia. The slaughter will be ended sooner if the US backs off and leaves the corrupt Ukrainian regime to its inevitable denouement. Had Trump been seduced by The Coalition of the Sniffing – Starmer, Macron, Merz – we would be heading towards WWIII and nuclear conflagration. In my mind there is little to no doubt about this. Further, Putin would not have announced at Minsk roughly a week ago that Russia will be reducing its defence spending next year if he did not trust Trump. As I speculated about a month ago in this article, it looked to me like Trump was backing away from Ukraine for real, albeit in exchange for certain assurances from Putin with regards to Iran’s nuclear programme and the sort of deal the US wants with Iran in this regard.
As stated above, Trump's bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities led to a pause in hostilities without killing anyone, as far as I can tell. True, this resolves no core disagreements, but by taking the nuclear-threat card off the table, and insisting angrily that it is truly off the table, Trump buys time at zero cost in human life, time with which to effect a more peaceful negotiated outcome than the ugly path that regime change would have set in motion. And he has clearly stated that he is against the messiness of a regime-change operation, which would lead to the closure of the Straits of Hormuz by Iran, and the severe economic consequences of that and similar moves Iran would have carried out, not to mention further unnecessary loss of human life. This is not to be sniffed at. Time will tell whether Trump's gambit will lead to better outcomes, or if he is sincere, but on the evidence before us at the moment, this broad interpretation seems at least as viable as any other.
Bottom line: The old power elites in Europe and the UK no longer have anything solid to offer the US in a world that is unstoppably (absent nuclear conflagration) becoming multipolar. The old Western powers have little more than artifice (the media) and deranged inbred arrogance. They desperately need Russian subsoil wealth to recapitalise their banks. The US, on the other hand, has subsoil wealth, but can no longer afford to militarily police the whole world on behalf of, essentially, the old Western powers. It therefore makes far more business sense, which is one of Trump’s primary instincts as a politician, to partner with Russia, help develop and thus mightily benefit from its subsoil wealth, and so remain a major player on the world stage. But this means leaving the EU and UK to their entwined and sorry-looking fates. “Nothing personal, old boy!”
(Main sources for the above: this, this and this. I also want to draw your attention to this X post from Douglas MacGregor, which represents a powerful and eloquent counter argument to the more pro-Trump interpretation outlined above.)
One way or another, we are walking and being walked through a very fraught period of history. I find Putin, Xi, Fico and a few other national leaders to be humanity’s best allies for navigating the very real and grave dangers that always attend epochal shifts in global power balances such as this. When it comes to Trump, I'd rather have him as US president than Harris, but in my case the jury is still vacillating on what role he is playing, on what he, beneath the news maelstrom, is actually bringing to the table, and in which direction he is truly tipping the scales.
More generally still and at the level of the whole human family, my intuitive sense remains unchanged and, in my assessment, is increasingly supported by historical and technological developments. Basically, we need to wise up. I intuit that we in fact feel a growing need, or hunger, or yearning to do just that. And so, to that end…
Towards re-enchantment by way of disenchanting all our mis-enchantments should be our direction, and knowingly. Imagination is not ours to control, it is ours to allow, our scared duty to learn, our most creative dance partner. Open properly to All That Is, everything we live in and through can only enchant us, if we learn to always "kiss the joy as it flies" on and away into history's soil. This is the royal road to individual and cultural maturity, the maturity that would boil off all the excess of all professional-managerial systems of bureaucracy, corporatism, and shallow consumerism, which seek to pin everything down, which would lock everything down for fear of chaos, of vitality, of raw life. Not that we should be aiming ourselves at Neverland, not that we should want to party on in perpetuity, but that we should find the courage to grow through the pains and guilts that hold us back by allowing them up and out. And I mean all of us.
We are mightily invested in multiple interlocking systems of control. Their collapse would be truly terrible. But sustaining these control systems in enmity with a fanatical conviction that There Can Be Only One (hegemon), with the weapons and armies and technologies humanity now has at its disposal, there for us to abuse in pursuit of the impossible, is more terrible still.
There is a middle way: the peace that comes through honesty and transparency. I ask all of us to knowingly want this radical middle way, for yourself and for those around you, but in gentleness and patience, in forgiveness and love. There is too much hate and mistrust in the global air, too much threat, too little humility. If each of us works on ourselves while keeping the evolving qualities of love and forgiveness in mind, this middle way has a chance to right much of what is currently far off balance, and tipping further and further towards collapse.
“Let all that is not rooted in truth and love wither and fall away.” – A line given to me in a dream.
“Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as He is.” – William Blake
“Opposition is true friendship.” – William Blake
“Love thine enemy.” – Jesus Christ
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