Antonio Navalón
A multiple organ failure:
The situation is not so different from that of the 19th century and the Belle Époque. Everyone knew the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were unprepared for what would come, but people tended to ignore this.
We are facing multiple organic failures and must identify the breaking points. This general crisis originated from the failure of institutions derived from the Second World War. The United States’ only military successes since 1945 are the invasions of Panama and Grenada. They have failed in all the other wars. The United States is the Roman Empire. It has 800 military installations worldwide and spends a fortune on the army. For a long time, it has lived with neglect.
Trump’s electoral recovery is related to what is happening in other countries. We are witnessing a crisis in the administration of freedom and democracy.
The success of disruption:
There are no elements other than the model’s exhaustion. Electing a president like this, just one step away from prison and with proven crimes does not have many interpretations. It is the success of disruption. Milei, Meloni, Musk, and Trump are products of the same thing.
I am surprised by Trump’s moves to shape a new order. He identifies his enemy as China and argues that China’s power is based on the multiple organic failures of the United States. This is a trade war inspired by the withdrawal of the United States of America.
The abandonment of the United States:
The Panama Canal was the most significant infrastructure investment in the 19th century in the United States. The canal does not exist because of Panama; rather, it gave birth to Panama.
The claim to sovereignty over the canal has a determining factor: the Peruvian superport, which the Chinese paid for. The big difference between the past forty years and now is that the United States has cut its presence through companies and is now focused on technological speculation and cheap labor.
Before, the US presence was not only through the dollar or the silent threat of its army. It has become a speculative and technological country. Larry Summers said that when he was Treasury Secretary and head of the economic office, he did not realize the significant change that was taking place in Latin America. Whenever a head of state or a leader asked him for something, he answered with a lesson in doctrine. And a Latin American leader replied: you give me a speech, and the Chinese give me an airport.
9/11 allowed Chávez to come into his own. He monopolized all of America’s attention on itself, but amid the revenge, it abandoned its role in Latin America.
The United States has relied, and to a certain extent rightly so, on its technological and financial control. A financial control that depends heavily on an unpayable debt.
It has also abandoned what used to be an investment—not doctrinal investment, not the defense of freedom, but investment in ports and roads, which is what China has been covering. Currently, the Chinese are leading the way in public works investment. The other large construction companies have disappeared, except for the Indian ones. The mines and the control of minerals of the 21st century have created a new economic reality.
The new order:
The first point is the confrontation with China. The second is that fifty years of a culture of free trade are over. The CUSMA/USMCA/T-MEC is the world’s largest economic association. But instead of refining the Free Trade Agreement, work is being done on the new development of sovereignty.
North America is the concept of sovereignty: it is no longer Mexico, the United States, or Canada. There will be US intervention in Mexican internal security matters. According to the new concept of North American sovereignty, Mexico is the main internal security problem for the United States.
The battle with China is not so much a tariff problem. However, that is also a problem, but rather the de facto domination that, due to the abandonment of the United States, it has managed to create in key places in Africa and Latin America, and it is in a better position to control strategic minerals and rare earths than the United States. We have lived in the comfort of an order that stopped serving long ago.
Today, China is the only economic hegemony capable of challenging the United States. But tomorrow, another element will be present: the relationship between India and China. India is destined to be one of the world’s leaders.
Europe:
The European Union is constituted, shaped, and governed by representatives of failed government models. The rise of the far right is a confession of the failure of administrators who can maintain hegemonic brands but are incapable of creating a social integration model. This leads to democratic detachment.
While Germany was Germany, the model was fiscal discipline and financial seriousness. But now, how does the European Union influence the populist temptations of the Spanish government, for example? It has neither instruments nor doctrine. Why will the European Union be maintained when it no longer has resources to give to the countries of southern Europe? Is the European Union going to inherit French failure and ruin?
They have not been capable of constructing a common defensive doctrine. They have the Schengen area, which is all very well. They did the most difficult thing: they implemented a common currency. And yet they failed in everything else.
Middle East:
Israel is not going to win the war and withdraw. Another question is whether it will be able to maintain the territorial extension it has acquired, which is immense. We are reconfiguring oil control. And the whole crisis of interpretation in the Middle East is the axis of Israel and Saudi Arabia, which has a common enemy: Iran. It is the end of the Balfour map. Hence, the chain reaction of countries falling one after the other as has been happening.
Russia:
We are all children of our legend. The Russian legend has been destroyed. Its army was not all that good: the Ukrainians had contained it for three years. They have lost many soldiers and generals. Their weapons are not as terrible as Putin needs. But the main problem is the lack of inhabitants.
The war has a month left; it will end as soon as the weapons supply runs out. Putin will keep Odesa, and the Donbas territories will be “autonomous,” quote unquote. However, the Russian army has not been able to reach Kyiv. Russia will have a lot of internal work to do, assuming it doesn’t have a coup d’état.
It’s an important country. All the countries that have all those nuclear warheads are important, but there are some that are in a position to fight and others that are not. Russia has shown that it is not in a position to fight.
Keys to control:
What we do know is that we were confused. After the Second World War, we thought two things were the key to control: Oppenheimer’s mushroom cloud and the separation between the free and captive worlds. The new cloud is already the cell, the only government system. That’s why wars are now intelligent. The world as we knew it is dead.
Vienna:
I first visited Vienna 45 years ago on my way to Moscow. At the time, Vienna was the capital of the Cold War, and there were almost as many KGB and CIA members as Viennese. Now I see it, and I hear the goose step again.
The Austrian president’s approach is the same as Hindenburg’s with Hitler. Austria’s organic collapse has made Kickl the chancellor. However, the essence of pan-Germanism is not Germany; it is Austria. If Alternative for Germany wins, it will be a checkmate for the European Union.
Elon Musk:
The important thing is to see what this special envoy of the devil means in terms of unbalancing the European political space. The world pays Apple, the telephone companies, and Iberdrola for what technological development means. But politically, the impact of technological development on the political structure was still unclear beyond social networks. There you have it: an interview with the leader of the German far right. No television station or other media can reach two hundred million people.
Spain:
There is a balance between the two leaderships: neither is good. One is because it destroys the country, and the other is because it doesn’t know how to build it. I think commemorating Franco’s death is a dangerous move. In ’75, no freedom was won. A million Spaniards went to say goodbye to the dictator in his palace. The Spanish left didn’t defeat Franco. He was defeated by phlebitis. Adolfo Suárez, Torcuato Fernández Miranda, and King Juan Carlos are the ones who deserve tribute. It’s like the agreements with the Catalan nationalists. You can pretend to govern Catalonia in order to separate it. That would be disloyal, but it is legitimate. What you cannot do is govern Spain on the basis of separating Catalonia.
At the same time, it’s a trap because we have lost the ability to objectively analyze the government’s actions. It’s propaganda on both sides.
Empires:
The English were possibly the best empire in the world after the Romans. One of the worst was the French. France had Indochina, which became an incredible slaughterhouse, from Dien Bien Phu to Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City. In the Middle East, it had Syria and Lebanon. The United Kingdom had the Balfour Declaration and, through Lawrence, the creation of Saudi Arabia. At this point, that is over, and there will be no going back.
The Golan Heights will be in Israeli hands. The Middle East world has to be projected along two axes. The domination of the Arab world by Saudi Arabia, and for that, it is necessary to do what Israel is doing, to finish off Hezbollah, to finish off Iran, to finish off the Houthis, and then a difficult balancing act, but not impossible, represented by the military and technological supremacy of Israel.
Until now, the world has been watching Israel’s experience: they win, but then they retreat and find themselves surrounded by a hundred million enemies once again. That won’t work anymore. But we don’t know how it’s going to happen.
How is Gaza going to be governed? It seems very difficult to me that it could be governed other than through an alliance with Egypt. Nobody is working on this. We are all very lost.
Hierarchies:
One: every time you play with maps, it costs blood. Two: it is inevitable to play with maps. Three: it is necessary to clarify this tsunami of changes. Try to prioritize the important changes. You can’t keep talking only about Gaza, Syria, the Middle East, or Europe, but about prioritizing what is happening. Who invented the far right in Europe? The failure of governments, not the wickedness of enemies.
I am a child of the Transition. I was lucky enough to participate in it, and I sang my mea culpa: I could not teach my children what I learned for myself. My children had no other goals in life than bricks and euros, euros and bricks. We, the generation of the Transition, did not continue to nourish the country spiritually.
Destruction:
There is a demographic suicide. We are not reproducing. Spain has a little over 46 million inhabitants. Immigrants have provided fifteen million. In the case of Spain, hatred of Spain is not yet perceptible. On the other hand, the hatred of France among emigrants is perceptible. It is also a very serious phenomenon in the United States. Still, in Europe, I can’t even begin to tell you because it is the cradle of ideological and religious struggles.
Europe has had ten centuries of destruction and reconstruction. I’ve lived in the United States for 34 years and had a house in Mexico for twenty. If I am anything, it is North American, and I am fascinated by Europe. I go to the capitals, and my memory reminds me of what they were like in ’46, ’47, and ’50. After centuries of fucking us around, how beautiful Europe is!
Antonio Navalón (Palma de Mallorca, 1952) is a journalist and analyst. He was Adolfo Suárez’s campaign director in the 1977 elections and contributes to media outlets such as Cuadernos para el Diálogo, El País, Forbes Latinoamérica and El Universal. He has published books such as El doctor Cervantes y el señor Quijote and Paren el mundo que me quiero enterar. He writes for El Financiero about international politics, which is the subject of this interview conducted via videoconference by Daniel Gascón and published in Spanish by Letras Libres on February 1, 2025.
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