Antonio Navalón
Seen the world as a whole and taking into account the enemy that sooner or later will end up killing us either in the form of pandemics, floods, tsunamis, or the very inability to manage the environment, it could be considered that the challenge to which we face is greater than we thought. The climate crisis is a problem of the same dimension as the Nazi challenge at the time. The Nazis of our time is climate change, since at the end of the day, little by little, the world is dividing into two parts: between those who seek to delay what seems inevitable as a result of the accumulated damages for so many years and who now it has become uncontrollable and among those who are willing – as is the case of the United States, Canada, and some other countries – to fight, as in their time fought the Nazis, so that climate deterioration does not end up killing us all.
We have reached a point where it is necessary to remember the speeches proclaimed in the 1930s to find and understand the dialectic that currently floods national and international politics in much of the world. Those aggressive speeches delivered by Adolf Hitler, Iósif Stalin, Benito Mussolini, and by their corresponding enemies or political adversaries were sculpting, word by word, challenge by challenge and memory by memory, the current situation. Although those speeches were the product of vinegar and the frustration unleashed after the end of the First World War and, later, of the economic crisis of 1929, they were the inevitable steps that ended up leading the world into a war of proportions and magnitudes unknown until today and that we thought would not happen again. However, the evolution of weapons, armies, and the very deterioration that we have caused the planet have once again placed us in an alarming situation. A situation is taking place on various fronts and requires our full attention and efforts to address it.
After the Donald Trump story. After his election in 2016. After permanent manipulation. After his sophisticated poisonings and his subtle but efficient way of carrying them out, the question that was never able to be answered by the former US president, but constantly hung in the air, was finally answered. Joe Biden claimed that Vladimir Putin was a murderer, putting the bilateral relationship at a critical point. The problem is that Russia is not alone. Their interests and their actions affect the Western Hemisphere, but, above all, they decisively affect the interests of the United States of America in its area of influence, including, for example, Venezuela.
The fact that a president of the United States – who also circulates as a moderate and prudent man – calls the president of the Russian Federation a murderer is a qualitative leap that should not be underestimated. It is because in the midst of all the legends that Vladimir Putin loves about his history – ranging from being a secret agent to how he managed to position himself as president and the most effective and efficient leader when destabilizing countries – is calling things by name or by the simple fact that a president can freely express what he thinks, represents a qualitative leap that in turn shows an alarming vision of the conditions under which it seeks to develop world peace and understanding.
The president, who is classified as a murderer by his American counterpart, leads a country whose main problem is demographic erosion, complemented by a fragile economy incapable of sustaining the largest territory on the planet. But the real problem with this whole situation is the fact that Putin is also the leader of a country that is the second-largest military power in the world and that the Russian leader is a man who has repeatedly demonstrated his enormous capacity for influence, for change, and for management and development of wars –dirty, clean, intelligent and not so intelligent– to alter the territory or position of their adversaries.
As if the above had not been enough – and despite the fact that it really was – the first diplomatic meeting of the administration of President Biden with its Chinese equivalent, held in Anchorage on March 18, also offered a review of how it really found relationships. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken – in an attempt to recover what were the hallmarks of the modern world leader – said that China’s internal affairs affect and endanger world stability. However, it seems that Blinken forgot that that leadership was thrown away and trampled on by the former US president, Donald Trump, who not only was not interested in being the leader of the free world, but his world and its interests began by putting America first and foremost and ended up forming a world of relationships based on what was convenient for his pocket. And not only that, it seems that Trump always sought to maintain a level of internal crisis to maintain internal cohesion in a state of war, opposing the true internal interests of the United States.
Considering this and given the position put forward by Secretary Blinken, the Chinese Foreign Minister responded to the challenge with the same forcefulness. He reminded Secretary Blinken that the United States is no longer the world leader and that the United States – which is also a nation deeply divided by its own internal contradictions and by its domestic conflicts – can no longer speak on behalf of the world that has stopped representing. The United States represents itself and little else. Not content with this stance on how relations will be, China addressed and directly confronted the European Union as well. And basically, it did so because the current of economic penalties and political criminalization on Chinese internal affairs have crossed a threshold in which – without implementing methods as violent or as bizarre as the Russians – they do predict that we are gradually heading towards a world guided by the winds of propagandist wars.
With all this situation, it is necessary to realize that the internal polarizations, the disqualifications, the domestic and civil wars of each country have the importance that they have in the general panorama. And it is that for better and for worse, just as for long time control and elections were won since the conquest of the political center, today what is in fashion and what marks this moment of the era and civilization of the pandemic, is polarization. A polarization is accompanied by different types of civil wars that are quietly being forged and unleashed in a diverse number of countries.
Therefore, stop being scared of outbursts. As it happens in private and personal relationships, know that, from the escalation of words, one passes to other types of escalations beyond the verbal. Right now, it is necessary to determine at what point there will be an inflection to build a new understanding of respect between the powers and that, in any case, it will not serve to be used by those who have made of polarization, confrontation, and internal struggle of the countries a way to govern. Given this, the big question to answer is: when can we establish a system where wars – even though they are dialectical – are so expensive and their consequences so high that it is not worth unleashing them? And it is that in the midst of everything that has happened, with all the dead illusions, with all the living problems, and with all the structural changes created by the biblical plague of the pandemic, we find ourselves – in case you had not realized it – in the middle of a dialectical hurricane that only has the winds of war.
