500 years of Unipolarity
After the fall of Western Rome in 410 A.D. the Catholic Church decided on a multipolar course, establishing Germanic kingdoms shifting power away from Eastern Rome. Charlemagne's rule constituted a short lived unipolar moment, but immediately reverted to multipolarity. Then, in 1493, Pope Roderic Llançol i de Borja abolished multipolarity and ever since the dominant power in the Americas has been in a unipolar position, first Spain, after the sinking of the Armada in 1588 increasingly England and since the American Revolution 250 years ago the United States.
Obviously, if the goal is to avoid war, it is preferable to appear stronger than in actuality, but likewise it is preferable to appear weaker, if the goal is to win a war.
Hence unipolarity is characterised by aggressive intimidation, whereas multipolarity is by understatement and cautious diplomacy. During some phases of European history both existed side by side, depending on the theatre of war, but since Napoléon failed in 1815 that ambiguity receded.
Rome didn't give up though, but used America's ascent and the greed that came with it to bankrupt England in World War I that Raymond Poincaré had engineered and transfer its financial power to the United States and a private consortium of bankers, allowing it to slowly transform their society.
The spread of technology in a time of limited technological innovation naturally leads to multipolarity and private control of finance has turbo-charged it since the Soviet Union fell in 1991.
Hence we have started to see conflicts in response to the unipolarly driven colour revolutions, dashes to inject chaos, that force the United States to fight on its enemies terms, for instance in Yemen, and this trend will certainly continue: The United States will try to sow civil dissent and its adversaries will force them to bring the war to them on their terms.
So, on the one hand we'll have targeted killing trying to maximise intimidation and on the other gambits drawing the enemy out into an offence that can be countered defensively.
I'm intelligent enough to recognise this for what it is. And I think that most Europeans are. So, apart from a few naive youth and wound up crazies, I don't think that the unipolar centre will be able to bleed its periphery white.
Trump's security doctrine acknowledges multipolarity, stressing the importance of controlling the Americas, while his actions openly embrace intimidation, though in a very publicitywise unsavvy way. the exact opposite of the doctrinal embrace of intimidation combined with comforting words that play well with the public, so in that sense Trump really is anticatholic, but that is neither here nor there, the problem for the United States is that those who call for intimidation and unipolarity in the name of peace and understanding and reject multipolarity and its demands are winning the debate and driving the world to slaughter, and the United States will not be the backstop, because the Europeans won't go along with this, every European understands that if you rule the world, you need to fight, and if the world is multipolar, you need diplomacy, so no matter the intimidation, the United States will have to pay themselves for their ambition.
If the United States military had balls, it would let Iran sink Trump's armada. That would kill the unipolar case right there, like it did in 1588, and ensure that the United States military would get co-operation from its internal enemies. Of course, organisations of this nature never have, contingency planning only allows for so much genius, the effect today would overshadow Pearl Harbor's by far. Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if Iran wouldn't attack, even if given the chance, though maybe after being threatened to do so.
That would be an off-ramp, it would allow the merely figurative destruction of New York City, although for psychological reasons it'd better be physical. Anyhow, Trump is sending Maduro to the Southern District of New York, the same that wanted to put him in jail, now that a socialist mayor is in charge of the city? To what end? Poison the waters? Humiliate it? I'm not betting on these kind of things, but there are several fronts on which he may be humiliated himself, as if to say: If you don't want me to do it, let somebody else try after I've failed catastrophically. It looks to me that he's betting on his stature and the Epstein files are torching statures left and right.
Intransparanet as all this may be, the basic clash of uni- with multipolarity is not. And at the end of the day it's determined by technological facts, though considering where artificial intelligence may go, every believer in unipolarity gets a final chance to prove himself fit for it.
Labels: 42, formalisierung, geschichte, gesetze, institutionen, sehhilfen, wahrnehmungen, zeitgeschichte, ἰδέα, φιλοσοφία
