The Hegemon has Monetized
First, let me remind you about The Speech at Davos. Remember The Speech? Mark Carney, wearing his finest dress toga, drew a line in the sand, clearly aimed / not-aimed at Trump. (If anyone doesn’t know what Davos is, it’s what you do when you’re rich enough to vacation in Switzerland but tend to fall over while skiing.)
Clearly composed to be a speech for the ages, Carney’s rhetoric managed to sound well-crafted and bureaucratically precise while couching its defiance in weirdly passive, impersonal generalities, though everyone present had no doubt that, embedded in its dressed-to-impress, Greek-referencing vocab was a Trump-tease to rival the Parthenon in the perfection of its proportions.
Carney declared that the time was over when we would betray our middle-power beliefs — and though you might scour the map of Bag End from now to kingdom come, please know that middle-power is not a place, but a state of mind, like, say, Gershwin’s New York or Austria after the Anschluss.
Surely we would not stand idly by, being a punching bag for any old, random hegemon. Remember? Oh, of course you do, it was only about — what has it been like, six years ago? That feels right, six years? It’s definitely a long time ago, anyway. To refresh your memory, he said:
“
American hegemony … helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
and
Hegemons cannot continually monetise their relationships.
and
But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness.
“
And, just as surely as the starry night follows a Fentanyl overdose, we followed up with the only choice possible under the circumstances: We rushed to our Merriam-Webster’s and looked up “hegemon.”
hegemon, noun. : something (such as a political state) having dominant influence or authority over others: one possessing hegemony.
Oh, now I get it! The US is a hegemon! Hegemon: a name for a frightening, unpredictable, mythical yet somehow also pathetic monster with dripping fangs and an insatiable appetite for chaos and Big Macs and innocent maidens on a bun.
A couple of other high points from The Speech, now that we’re into our conversation about World War III, or whatever is transpiring that has engulfed the entire near east, up to “the gates of Europe”. I forget which publication used that memorable colonizer’s metaphor to remind us that Europe is the seraglio, the besieged bower of all that is civilized, the wilting Western damsel-in-distress, about to lose her maidenhead to the rapacious, unfeeling Oriental.
Or maybe we’re simply lusting for the classiest gated community available. Maybe Saudi Arabia has too many doctors, and we have too few Uber drivers, and a simple exchange will solve both problems. That could also be true.
Here’s Carney on values:
“
we aim to be both principled and pragmatic.
Principled in our commitment to fundamental values: sovereignty and territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights. “
and again:
“ And we have the values to which many others aspire.
Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public square is loud, diverse, and free. Canadians remain committed to sustainability. “
Our commitment to sovereignty and territorial integrity… Yet twice Carney has fumbled and avoided and fudged the issue of sovereignty: first, with his seeming admiration of the Trump-led grab-and-go invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of President and Mrs Maduro; second, and more shocking, with his failure to condemn the US bombing of Iran.
Twice he has signalled that the ends justify the means, has failed to reiterate Canada’s support for the rules-based international order.
He calls this pragmatism. I call it self-fulfilling prophecy and a failure of leadership that nullifies Canada’s role as opposition and reduces us to hapless, amoral bystanders.
Both situations present slippery moral dilemmas. Both result in (ostensibly) toppled authoritarian regimes, something that most people, ignoring the specifics, would consider desirable; both situations are camera-ready with scenes of jubilant crowds, tears of joy, the release of political prisoners. The people, formerly oppressed, are liberated.
It’s a Hollywood narrative and we’re in the third act, the dénouement, where the bad guys learn that crime doesn’t pay; the superheroes are vindicated for being scornful enemies of red tape, represented by those bleeding hearts and snowflakes who kept insisting that the bad guys came from broken homes.
Broken homes? The superheroes came from broken homes, and they did just fine!
The oppression and suffering are real. Venezuelans have had financial disaster and Trumpian foolery; in Iran, the state is a juggernaut of theocratic murder, rigid, merciless, employing religious goon squads alert to the slightest infraction of dress codes, deploying intelligence agents worldwide to surveil dissidents, track exiles, plan abductions and assassinations… Iran is the well-oiled machine; Venezuela is the quintessential shambolic republic turned rotting banana; its machines are only notable for their rust.
We ignore as inconvenient that segment of the oppressed people who shout “Death to America!” That response presents a problem, because it arises from people’s frustration and lack of agency. What they want is self-determination, which is the part of the script that got cut because it doesn’t centre the rescuers shoving freedom down their throats.
Bonkers? Or Non-bonkers?
Averse as I am to conspiracy theories, i.e. clearly bonkers tales woven out of collective angst and bad science, I have, like you, had my personal Overton window shoved way to the right during the past ten years, during which the unthinkable has become just another mildly interesting daily episode of Survivor: Democracy.
So cast your tattered brain cells back and remember that one of Trump’s claims around the “stolen” 2020 election, is that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez created Dominion Voting Systems to ensure he never lost future elections; its software allegedly included hidden backdoors or algorithms to flip votes remotely. (Dominion is actually a Canadian company).
All of this was first spread by that quintessential poster girl for PhD-level dipshittery, Sidney Powell, one of the few people I’m aware of who’s so stupid I actually feel sorry for her.
It must be debilitating to be that stupid. How does she even manage getting dressed in the morning? I see her pulling her pantyhose over her head, then thinking, “No, remember, the long bits are for your legs. I’ll look for the Post-It notes and make a reminder.” Then she has a little cry as she calls the Uber to take her to the interview, because she knows something’s wrong, but she’s too stupid to give it a name.
Anyway, back to Maduro. I dismissed this theory when I first heard it online on Leeja Miller’s intense, angry and addictive podcast, “Why, America”. But then I also heard it from, I think, David Frum, and if two people say it, it’s true. Yes, that’s been scientifically proven by no one you’ve heard of, which is why you can trust it.
So the idea is, Trump says to Maduro, “You have a choice. Spend your life in an American jail, or “confess” that the vote-switching technology is actually a thing, and “prove” that the election was stolen. How about it?”
It’s just insane enough to be true. Because there’s no regime change, there’s no one to buy the oil, and Maduro, nasty piece of work that he is, is not and never was a drug king. Proving the 2020 election was stolen is a convincing use of his time. Smoke on your pipe and put that in, as the girls sang in every high-school revival of West Side Story.
Wherever we end up, that’s the plan
There is no follow-up, no plan. There is no power vacuum in Venezuela. The opposition leader, María Corina Machado, in a cringey, blatant buttering up performance, offered Trump her Nobel Peace Prize. He responded by gleefully ripping the trophy from her hands, and from then on completely ignoring Machado (her work was done, after all), as he continued to back the Maduro family to carry on their reign of bargain-basement sleaze, grift and incompetence.
(But we all know Trump has terminal trophy envy. During the State of the Union speech, while bestowing the Presidential Medal of Freedom on the goalie of the US Olympic men’s hockey team, he mused out loud: “I should have one of these!”)
Possibly Trump was able to put Machado’s generous bribe out of mind and convince himself that he was offered the prize directly by the “Norwegian government.” He so deserves it as he spins the dial to find which number the pointer comes to rest on, then charges that as a tariff.
Similarly, there’s no plan at all for regime change in Iran. Trump admitted on air that he has no idea what will happen. “We could end up with someone worse in charge!” he marvelled.
Given that his attacks (or temporary restraint, or negotiation breakdowns) handily coincided with meetings with or phone calls from Benjamin Netanyahu, I can run this data through my HAL 2001 supercomputer and confidently determine that Trump doesn’t know what’s happening next because he can’t find a quarter to make a collect call to Bibi.
This is why those of us with almost preternatural powers of political analysis, plus a family subscription to the New York Times, digital version, can reveal that we have in this Iranian attack a joint effort between Israel and the US. But Bibi, the very model of a shy introvert, is happy to let America take all the credit.
We all do want democracy, as the extended version of western colonialism is called (forget self-determination, the original colonizers still call the shots, but don’t get me going.) We of course abhor Iranians’ persecution by a fundamentalist regime, we want the people of Venezuela to have democracy, security, a functioning economy. We don’t regret that Khameini is dead. We do mourn the schoolkids. Jeezus.
But Trump is lying. Distracting us. He wants to do what he wants to do; he feeds his ego, he feeds his bank account, he takes revenge. It’s a full day. Time for beddy-bye, little cracker, and don’t worry about actually going to bed. You only need to sit at the head of a conference table, surrounded by your entire cabinet, being filmed by twenty-three TV cameras as you nod off.
You should let the world know how hard you’re working! It’s obvious no one appreciates you!
By the way: is the price of oil higher now than it was before the attack? Why, I believe it is!
Prices were previously around $50 per barrel. As I write this, prices have spiked up to $80 due to threats and interference by Iran; expect this to reach $100+ if tensions continue to flare.
I’m not suggesting that Trump attacked Iran as a convoluted way of driving up… what am I saying? I think I’ve been into the cooking sherry again.
Another, Gentler Regime Change (Slow-Cooker Version)
I suggest this comparison: Cast your mind back to apartheid South Africa. Some of you will be old enough to remember how democracy, universal suffrage, and the end of apartheid were achieved through an agonizing, and antagonistic, process that began with violent protests such as the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 and the 1976 Soweto uprising. But the real meat and potatoes of the process was an international program of boycotts and sanctions.
These boycotts were serious strategies that telegraphed universal disapproval of apartheid, and isolated the economy. By the late 1980s, economic stagnation forced the regime to seek talks.
The negotiations began in 1990, following the unbanning of the African National Congress, and the release of Nelson Mandela from prison-he’d spent 27 years behind bars. The first all-race elections took place April 27, 1994, giving the ANC a landslide victory.
Wonderful as it was to think that the boycott of South Africa’s economy had been effective, there were, and still are, problems of land redress (no lands have been “seized” from whites, contrary to MAGA revisionist history) and entrenched economic inequality. And this is after a transition regarded as a shining example of “regime change” achieved strategically and cooperatively through largely non-violent means!
My point is that, if you really want regime change without involving American troops and unnecessary civilian deaths, you have options. It will take a lot of time, but you can succeed with planning and persistence.
But Trump doesn’t want to get involved with regime change. In fact, I’ll bet you a box of Timbits that Trump wanted to assassinate some leader from a near east country to match Obama’s assassination of bin Laden. I guarantee this is one of his top ten reasons. But this is intensely problematic, because international rule of law, if this interests you, would seem to forbid you to engage in acts of aggression — kidnapping and murder, for example — in other sovereign nations.
And the rule of law, whether internationally or domestically, applies to those you find reprehensible equally as to those you find exemplary. All are equal under the law, there can be no exceptions, and the law should apply in context, proportionately, justly. The end game of the law is a fair and just society/world order, not cheating, personal gain, or taking the law into your own hands.
These principles alone make Trump’s actions wrong. It doesn’t matter if the outcome seems good; it has made everyone less safe even disregarding Iran’s outraged response: everyone is less safe because lawfulness and justice are not the driving force behind the raids. The fact that there is no plan, no troops on the ground, no draft constitution, proves the lack of commitment to a democratic outcome.
What I am saying is that, given there is no logic or conviction behind the raids, because there is no respect for sovereignty, because there is no detailed plan for leading Iran from its condition of theocracy missing its supreme leader to democratic republic — and what a long journey that sounds when I see its starting and finishing points — the bombs could just as easily come looking for you. For us.
What is Mark Carney really saying with his tacit praise for these two unprovoked aggressions, two situations where the US has acted arrogantly and in defiance of international law? With the kidnapping of Maduro the US has demonstrated an undeniably impressive ability to channel James Bond to execute an operation against a shambolic banana republic; we’re in a different league altogether in the case of Iran, whose enraged response to the US attack — and they’re only just beginning — could usher in World War III. Any sense of outrage or that moral clarity which Canada typically uses to stake its claim to a different, diplomatic path?
It’s a long, long road from the Suez Crisis of 1956, when Lester Pearson, then our Secretary of State, was tasked with creating a permanent UN peace-keeping force, and received the Nobel Peace Prize for doing so. Carney’s muted reactions are a reminder of how much our political capital, based on liberalism that seeks equity, justice and above all “peace, order and good government”, has been devalued.
Carney seems to be placating Trump; I have to think that, because otherwise I’d be ashamed of how quickly Carney has tossed aside our “unity of purpose and high resolve”. He’s embraced the pragmatic (i.e. appeasement, which never works), more or less ditching the principles as excess ballast.
Let’s not even attempt a rehabilitation of Trump the autocrat defending the noble Iranian people, hungry for democracy, as they risk their lives to protest against an evil state, while, as head of an evil state, he guns down and imprisons, without due process, the American people, who also, I hear, like a little democracy with their morning toast.
(I haven’t experienced this level of cognitive dissonance since my mother sneered at me, aged 14, as she told me not to “flaunt it”, then the next day gifted me with Toronto’s first pair of hot pants for my back to school wardrobe.)
Instead of a reiteration of our core values of old-fashioned liberalism, of which we’re almost the only remaining avatar, instead of David facing down Goliath, Carney offers the world a different paradigm: Bambi meets Godzilla.
Quote of the Week:
Trump addresses the “liberated” nation of Iran:
“To the proud Iranian people, I declare tonight that your moment of freedom is approaching…
“Do not venture outside.”
֎
This is my 300th post on slowpainful.com
Quite a milestone for me, and proof that you learn to write by writing. It’s been a journey during which I’ve found my voice, a certain audience, and the issues that really energize me. As the French writer Colette stated: “Total absence of humor renders life impossible”. So I laugh at most situations, whether world-shattering or merely personally awkward. (Inanity: It’s how I register despair.)
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