Antonio Navalón
Mexico’s history is written on unfinished business between New York, Tesla, and yesterday’s demonstrations. At this point, we must define whether we will be an institutionally stable country or not and what kind of opportunities we are waiting for. It is useless to talk about concepts such as nearshoring if we do not understand that there are elements that we still have to resolve to ensure a compelling attraction of investment and capital. To give an example, let’s talk about Tesla. Without the adequate energy infrastructure necessary to attract an automotive giant such as the company founded by Elon Musk, it really doesn’t matter if there is water or not in Nuevo Leon or the conditions in any other place chosen by the President. Without energy, it doesn’t matter where Tesla sets up shop.
As for the demonstrations and sit-ins in squares, it is necessary to remind governments that what once happened in Maidan Square – also known as Euromaidan – has already happened more than once elsewhere and can happen again at any time. The most important thing about yesterday’s nationwide demonstrations is the loss of fear. For many years the powers that be have been able to do and undo things by using the fear they generate. Yesterday’s events showed the President that many people, sectors, and many of those who voted for him… have lost their fear of him. López Obrador can do whatever he wants; he can continue insulting them morning after morning or deny the obvious fact. What he cannot do is continue adopting the position that the Ukrainian government took at the time of the Maidan Square demonstrations or what Hosni Mubarak’s government did when the Egyptians protested in Tahrir Square. Neither the then-Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, nor Mubarak saw that these protests were the beginning of the end. Losing fear is what marks a turning point in history.
And about the New York verdict, this is not a political act, but this concerns and is related to the criminal and punishable. Although, from a historical point of view and as far as our country is concerned, this fact raises a big question: did we have with Calderon a President so incompetent that he was not able to see in six years what was going on around him, involving him directly and indirectly? Or was it simply not incompetence but collusion? Regardless of the assumptions, that is something that the former President has to answer. I do not think that Twitter is the suitable medium for explaining himself, nor that being out of the country is the solution at this time.
On another issue, it is necessary to know and explain what happened in Ukraine last week. For us to accept once and for all the fact that nothing will ever be the same and nothing will ever return to the place it once occupied, a man in his eighties, President of the United States, emulated his predecessor and fellow party member, Franklin Delano Roosevelt – this one walking without a wheelchair or anything to restrict his movement – by walking upright through the streets of Kyiv. On February 20, Joe Biden made a surprise visit to Ukraine to meet with his counterpart Volodymir Zelenski. During his visit and using the slogan “One year later, Kyiv resists”, Biden stressed that the conflict would not end with a Russian victory, as he later pointed out in his speech from Poland.
To some extent, I don’t know if, in the Russian sky itself, U.S. fighter jets protected Air Force One. However, from one point on, the only safety was not to try to fool Russian intelligence, as there could always be leaks or problems. After all, there is only one Air Force One flying around the world, hence the previous decision to communicate to the Kremlin that POTUS would be going to Kyiv. Following this communication, it was concluded that the only way to guarantee the safety of the U.S. President was to involve Russian defense systems and fighters in the endeavor.
Timing – let alone politics – is never a coincidence. Biden’s visit was not only to reiterate and reaffirm U.S. support for the Ukrainian nation, but it came four days before the first anniversary of the Russian invasion and hours before Putin announced that Russia would not participate in the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, also known as New START.
Thanks to the excellent relationship that Roosevelt had with Stalin, not only did they manage to put an end to the common enemy that was Adolf Hitler and European fascism, but because of that, they also managed to establish – at the beginning – a good relationship between Russia and the United States, even better than the one between Churchill and Roosevelt. The relationship between the Soviets and Americans had never been better than when they both ruled. Not only had they achieved what at one point seemed impossible, but both Stalin and Roosevelt knew that the best was yet to come for their nations. As seen in the annals of history, the best went for the two countries after World War II, though not precisely for the bilateral relationship. Ambition, unwillingness to converge interests, and growing global geopolitical tension eventually led to the onset of the Cold War and a complete estrangement between the two nations.
As Vladimir Putin gave the final touches to this year’s address to the nation, which last year coincided – not coincidentally – with the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian leadership was once again seen as imperial as in the time of the Tsars. Interestingly, Putin spoke of the fact that in Western intelligence circles – made up of intellectuals and, one might almost say, neo-liberals – they had decided to do away with Russia. Putin is a President in trouble because, although we do not have precise information, he does give the impression that the Ukrainian experience is serving to demonstrate several things. First, the difference between being a great spy, saboteur, or terrorist and a statesman capable of forming great armies. Second, the Russian military – so great, so beloved, and to which they owe, for example, the Victory Day parade over the Nazis – is not what it used to be. Without an exact number of casualties, what can be seen is that Russia’s technologies and simple military structure have not been up to the task.
In the end, the case of Ukraine could end up being a special warfare action with a trained and modernized army that, among other things, could not finish off their generals because they were talking from unencrypted phones that allowed them to lock the missile directly against the general and kill them while they were talking. That happened in early February when the Russian encrypted satellite phones were hacked by Ukrainian intelligence, forcing them to use their conventional phones, which eventually led to their death sentence.
These are not bad times for the bohemian. They are bad times for all of us who have memories and were, in a sense, not the baby boom generation, but those of us who imbibed all we knew in the examples of World War II and the almost undisputed dominance of the American and Soviet empires.
Today, the U.S. empire’s most significant problems come from internal decay. The people sought to be established by the Founding Fathers and, above all, the unsurpassed talent of Thomas Jefferson are living through a crisis of confidence where their biggest internal security problem lies in how to get along, how to deal with and how to fight with their neighbors, i.e., us. And then there is the question of how to deal with that resistance to pain that the American people have developed because of the health of its citizens and their addictions to painkillers that have made fentanyl the black hand that exterminates them and kills them with a smile on their face but who, moreover, die by choice.
Russia is reinventing itself by dint of defeats. The United States has to reinvent itself by dint of being aware of everything it has lost. And the rest of us are in the middle. In the end, Europe – which is much closer to Russia than we are – at this point is only part of the conflict, not the whole conflict. Even in World War II, with the Pacific burning and Europe on fire everywhere, the war was not as global as it is now. We have external conflicts and internal conflicts, and what seems clear is that we have all – except the Indian people – for one reason or another, lost our way. And the fact is that we are really now jumping not between puddles because of the storms that have been unleashed, but jumping to find our personalities in a combined element that affects China, for some reasons, the United States for others, and Russia and Europe for still others.
To know your role in the world, you must know what world you want to bet on and what you want to be in. By now, it is very obvious, and we have already analyzed the consequences of not wanting to be from here or there many times. In the meantime, from the discomfort of not knowing how we got here but being aware that we are here and what is at stake, what is clear – just like the old newsprint – is how yellow the world we knew has become. Today the danger is not really in nuclear weapons, or only in nuclear weapons; what is nuclear is the loss of direction of societies and the absence of a program that starts with the basics. Peace must be made in Ukraine. Otherwise, war will come everywhere, including those countries that apparently are so far away but that, in a situation of general lack of control such as the one we live in, could end up burning on all four sides.
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