The Future Is Not Ours (and Neither Is the Past)

* Doesn’t it amaze you how little Washington gets it?  Fierce as the internal disagreements in that capital city may be, seldom has a ruling group collectively been quite so incapable of putting itself in the shoes of anyone else or so tone deaf when it comes to the effects of its own acts.  Take Germany where, starting with Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations, the public response to reports of massive American surveillance of the communications of ordinary Germans and their leaders wasn’t exactly greeted with enthusiasm.  Now it turns out that the NSA wasn’t the only U.S. “intelligence” agency at work in that country.  The CIA and possibly other agencies were recruiting spies inside German intelligence and its defense ministry.  Polls show that public opinion there has been turning against the U.S. in striking ways, but Washington just can’t take it in.  A little noted truth of this level of spying and surveillance is: it’s addictive.  Washington can’t imagine not doing it, no matter the damage.  If you keep an eye on this situation, you’ll see how the U.S. national security system has become a self-inflicted-wound machine.

* Here’s a question for our American moment: Why, in its foreign policy, can’t the Obama administration get a break?  You’d think that, just by pure, dumb luck, there would be a few small victories somewhere for the greatest power on the planet, but no such thing.  So for the post-American Century news jockeys among you, here’s a tip: to follow the waning fortunes of that century in real time, just keep an eye on Secretary of State John Kerry’s endless travels.  He’s the Jonah of the Obama administration.  Wherever he goes, disaster, large or small, trails behind him, even when, as in Afghanistan recently, his intervention is initially billed as some sort of modest triumph.  Consider him the waning American Century personified.

* Think of the drone as a barometer of the American Century in decline.  It’s the latest “perfect weapon” to arrive on the global scene with five-star reviews and promises of victory.  Like the A-bomb before it, by the time its claims proved false advertising, it was already lodged deeply in our world and replicating.  The drone is the John Kerry of advanced weaponry.  Everywhere it goes, it brings a kind of robotic precision to killing, the problem being that its distant human trigger fingers rely on the usual improbable information about what’s actually on the ground to be killed.  This means that the innocent are dying along with all those proclaimed “militants,” “high-value targets,” and al-Qaeda(-ish) leaders and “lieutenants.”  Wherever the drone goes, it has been the equivalent of a recruiting poster for Islamic militants and terror groups.  It brings instability and disaster in its wake.  It constantly kills bad guys — and constantly creates more of them.  And even as the negative reports about it come in, an addicted Washington can’t stop using it.

Last Paragraphs on Turning 70 (a Requiem for the American Century)

* The true legacy of the foreshortened American Century, those years when Washington as top dog actually organized much of the world, may prove apocalyptic.  Nuclear weapons ushered that century in with the news that humanity could now annihilate itself.  Global warming is ushering it out with the news that nature may instead be the weapon of choice.  In 1990, when the Soviet system collapsed and disappeared, along with its sclerotic state-run economy, capitalism and liberal democracy were hailed in a triumphalist fashion and the moment proclaimed “the end of history.”  In the 1990s, that seemed like a flattering description.  Now, with 1% elections, an unmitigated drive for profits amid growing inequality, and constant global temperature records, the end of history might turn out to have a grimmer meaning.

* Global warming (like nuclear war and nuclear winter) is history’s deal-breaker.  Otherwise, the worst humanity can do, it’s done in some fashion before.  Empires rise and fall.  They always have.  People are desperately oppressed.  It’s an old story.  Humans bravely protest the conditions of their lives.  Rebellions and revolutions follow and the unexpected or disappointing is often the result.  You know the tale.  Hope and despair, the worst and the best — it’s us.  But global warming, the potential destruction of the habitat that’s made everything possible for us, that’s something new under the sun.  Yes, it’s happened before, thanks to natural causes ranging from vast volcanic eruptions to plummeting asteroids, but there’s something unique about us torpedoing our own environment.  This, above all, looks to be the event the American Century has overseen and that the drive for fossil-fuel profits has made a reality.  Don’t fool yourself, though; we’re not destroying the planet.  Give it 10 million years and it’ll regenerate just fine.  But us?  Honestly, who knows what we can pull out of a hat on this score.