Now or Never

Never have our American nation and our human species stood together on such a precipice. The future of both is at stake; the signs and signals are everywhere.

The strongest and most obvious signal is from the Middle East. It’s become a playground for old-fashioned imperialism, despotism and barbarism. Our species has not seen its like since Europe learned its painful lesson from World War II and slowly evolved into the EU.

Now the ghastly civil war in Syria has rekindled, running thirteen years. It’s inflamed by and exacerbates the imperial intentions of Russia and Iran. Their current leadership befits the seventeenth century, but with aircraft, long-range conventional missiles, and even nukes (or the near-term potential for making them).

These days, it’s hard even to tell the “good guys” from the bad. Former terrorists in Syria are now fighting the dismal butcher Assad. Israel is moving toward an apartheid state led by a careless bully. On a daily basis, it produces devastation in Gaza and Beirut mirroring the landscape of post-war Berlin.

Then there are the brutal wars in Ukraine and Sudan. Each creates unimaginable human misery on a daily basis. As far as any external observer can tell, their causes are little more than the imperial ambitions of Vladimir Putin and a handful of more obscure, but no less brutal and heedless, African and Middle-Eastern leaders.

The risk of nuclear weapons being used—and therefore of runaway species self-extinction—has never been greater since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. As I have speculated, this catastrophic feedback loop, in other “intelligent” species far, far away, could be responsible for the Fermi Paradox.

A less obvious signal of advancing chaos is planetary heating. Its global acceleration is now unmistakable. It inflicts misery through wildfires, drought and extreme weather on every continent but Antarctica. Yet trade tensions and American politics are threatening to stop the global conversion to renewable energy, at a time when positive feedback, including methane emissions from “natural” sources, threatens to push our globe over the edge into a self-sustaining transition to a new and inhospitable global climate. A massive reversion to fossil fuels, as suggested by President-to-be Donald Trump in the US and relentlessly driven by Saudi Arabia at COP 29, could easily push us over the tipping point.

As if these two existential threats were not enough, there is a third: a looming pandemic that could be worse than Covid. Avian flu, of the H5N1 variety, is exploding in livestock in America. It threatens to make the transition to humans by way of pigs, which are notorious for helping viruses mutate and leap among species. And a new H5N1 pandemic doesn’t need airplanes to fly it around the world, as did Covid. Birds fly, too. Even now, they are in the midst of their near-global seasonal migration.

The tragic irony is that science has developed the greatest protective measure against mutating viruses ever known: the “programmable” mRNA vaccines first used to tame Covid-19. President Trump took credit for rolling them out quickly during the Covid pandemic, but their technology grew out of scientific research begun decades before. Now a wildly unfit nominee to lead America’s huge and expensive health-care bureaucracy threatens to put all that vital research and development on the back burner just as the next pandemic threatens to emerge.

To add to all this, the postwar “global economic order” put in place under American auspices is falling apart. Its basic premise was that free trade makes everyone better off. But now any unbiased observer can see that free trade does nothing of the kind.

Left to its own devices, free trade creates winners and losers, big time. It raised a billion people in Asia (mostly China!) our of extreme poverty. But it also reduced the US to a make-nothing, paper-pushing society, in which finance, promotion and marketing permeate every aspect of our lives, even making Internet searches more difficult.

In the US, free, global trade is largely responsible for our growing extremes of wealth and poverty. It has left tens of millions of former factory workers in despair and turning to opioids, and a once-proud nation now depending on others for everything from clothes and basic hardware, through personal protective equipment in a pandemic, to the means for producing and using renewable energy.

The mindless meme that “free trade makes everybody better off” is as much a canard as the “best of all possible worlds” meme among the eighteenth-century French aristocracy, which Voltaire satirized in his book Candide, or Optimism.” That canard led to the French Revolution, perhaps the bloodiest in human history (although the two Russian ones also vie for that title). Now our oligarchy’s new canard has led to the precariousness of the US manufacturing economy, and with it the decline in our nation’s superpower status in science and industrial research.

Managing the now-global economy requires more than simplistic mantras or mindless across-the-board tariffs (which helped produce their own past wars). It requires intelligent and future-oriented cooperation among the global economic powerhouses: China, the EU, the US, and countries on their periphery like Brazil, India, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam.

The Chinese word for “crisis” has two characters, one for “danger” and the other for “opportunity.” For the US and the world, the danger is obvious: continuing and worsening all the trends just described. Any single one could produce a catastrophe that could decimate our species, whether through nuclear war, runaway planetary heating, or simply economic collapse or yet more pointless wars.

But there’s opportunity also. It lies in the enigma and contradictions that are Donald J. Trump.

On the one hand, he is more like a cartoon despot than any of our past presidents, even Andrew Jackson. He is vain and self-centered. He seems bent almost entirely on self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment, which (in his mind) require vengeance and retribution against the American system and his perceived enemies. If this side of Trump prevails in our politics, America will have no chance to roll off the steep political, social, industrial and scientific decline on which it finds itself today.

But Trump also has another side. He styles himself a deal-maker and—when he can extricate himself from his paranoia and delusions of grandeur—his deal-making can have good results. He did, after all, get Israel together with the UAE, and push the mRNA Covid vaccines into actual production at “Warp Speed.” And he does dimly understand, as many US oligarchs do not, that global trade needs to be managed so that working people in developed countries, reduced to poverty, indignity and desperation, do not rise up everywhere with pitchforks and torches. The very political forces that elected Trump president twice arise from the neglect of manufacturing workers in developed countries amidst the infelicities of global trade.

So, to continue the Chinese analogy, Trump is yin and yang rolled into one. Encourage his paranoia and self-obsession, and the US falls, and with it much of humanity’s near future. Encourage his creative and adaptive deal-making, and both have a chance.

Let’s take just one example. Today’s “international order” has a fatal flaw. It depends on institutions that require consensus, if not unanimity, for decisions. Therefore they get little or nothing done. The more important and divisive the issue, the less they can resolve it.

The EU often works this way: for fundamental change, it depends on total consensus. COP29 just fell apart because the Saudis ran around its periphery, effectively whispering “not one word against fossil fuels!” in every committee’s ear. And the UN has become a feckless debating society because the big powers after World War II (including Russia, with an economy today the size of Italy’s!) all have veto power.

But what would happen if the really big powers sat down together to solve the world’s problems? What would happen if China, the US, and the EU convened alone, with India, Brazil, Japan and South Korea playing advisory roles? Could they distribute manufacturing jobs reasonably and fairly among developing and developed nations, straighten out supply chains and make them resilient, and support a truly global distribution of vital scientific and industrial research and development? Could they make rules for “strategic” (read “military” and “espionage”) research and production that would allow the rest of the global economy to soldier on, with less social and political disruption?

Say what you want about China under Xi Jinping. The Chinese are a practical people. Although China served as a “proxy” for its warring “buffer states” Vietnam and North Korea, it has not started or waged a war of its own—let alone a war of conquest like Russia’s in Ukraine—since its so-called “Communists” (today, state capitalists) took over in 1949.

I think China’s pragmatism derives in part from the complexity of its written language. But its origin doesn’t matter. Make a proposition that takes China’s self-interest (including long-term interest) into account, and China will likely agree.

So a conclave of the few powers that really matter, including China, might just help solve many of the world’s problems, and coincidentally our own. And Donald Trump could, in his inimitable way, take credit for having enabled the process.

But for this encouraging picture to come into focus, one thing is absolutely necessary. The people whom Trump appoints to key positions must be qualified, competent and even creative. Bomb throwers, ideologues and intemperate people like Matt Gaetz, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, and RFK Jr. cannot, and will not, perform that role.

With them in key positions, the Second Trump Administration will degenerate into a plaything of a deranged geezer focused entirely on himself. And our multiply challenged nation will come to look more like Russia, Syria, North Korea, or (in the best case) today’s Israel, Hungary, or Venezuela.

So it’s all up to our Senate now. Will enough Republican senators stand firm in populating the Second Trump Administration with sane, qualified, competent people with good ideas? Or will they knuckle under to an aging, increasingly senile would-be despot and let our country and our world go to Hell?

That’s the main question—if not the only one—before our nation and our species today. The answer depends on Republican senators like Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, John Thune of South Dakota (the upcoming Senate Majority Leader), John Cornyn of Texas, and (most of all) Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

McConnell himself bears extraordinary responsibility. He could have avoided all this risk of chaos, and saved our nation from all these fateful choices, simply by voting to convict a president already impeached for inciting an insurrection, and whom McConnell himself apparently despises. This is McConnell’s, and the others’, last chance to save our nation and our species from chaos and a new Dark Age.

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