‘…humankind can disappear from the face of the Earth in an instant due to a political crisis where major world leaders are nut cases who cannot be relied on to calmly address the situation and seek a win-win compromise.’
THE state of the world cannot be described better than to say it is in intensive care.
On the economic front, the world is still divided between the more advanced North and the developing South. The North is still the hotbed of technological and financial innovation, while the South remains just a prime source of commodities, the manufacturing hub for products of the North and the key market for the very same products.
Decades after the first UN Conference on Trade and Development, only a handful of developing countries have successfully joined the ranks of the “developed” world. Many, like the Philippines, have been carrying the tagline “emerging” for almost half a century now.
Environmentally, the inability of the global community to achieve targeted reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) portends ill for efforts to slow down climate change. While environmental activists are noisy in many countries, they are also noisy in countries that hardly contribute to GHG emissions, such as the Philippines. For as long as the Big 5 (China, the United States, India, Russia and the EU – which contribute over 50% of global GHG emissions) fail to transition to cleaner energy, the changing climate patterns and intensifying weather disturbances will be a new reality.
Politically, the world is just as sick as it is financially and environmentally. And to me, this is most worrisome, because the end of mankind will not happen due to a financial crisis, and it can happen due to an environmental crisis, but this crisis can unfold over decades. But humankind can disappear from the face of the Earth in an instant due to a political crisis where major world leaders are nut cases who cannot be relied on to calmly address the situation and seek a win-win compromise.
Trump is no JFK, and had Trump been in the White House in October 1962, the world could have seen itself plunge into a nuclear war because Trump and Khruschev would have been at each other’s throats.
JFK was far more sensible and was assisted by fellow adults sitting around the situation room. Trump has Hegseth and Noem and Bondi and the emasculated Marco Rubio to advise him.
There was one day during those 13 days in October 1962 when the USSR and the US were close to rotating nuclear missiles that Kennedy and his advisers were faced with a tough choice. You see, in response to the ultimatum the US gave to the USSR to pull out the missiles in Cuba, the Americans received not one but two responses from the Kremlin.
One was a measured response that agreed to the pullout for as long as the Americans withdrew some of their missiles stationed in Turkey: the other was a hardline position that dared the Americans to enforce the sanctions and blockade they had set up around Cuba. What to do?
Everyone agreed on the next course of action: ignore the hardline position as one coming from the Soviet military hardliners and respond to the more conciliatory one that may have come from the reformists in the Soviet Politburo. Which is what they did, and which led to the standing down of Soviet and US forces all over the globe and a retreat from the brink of nuclear war.
This was only possible because mature adults had their finger on the nuclear button; today with nuclear weapons in the hands of countries other than just the US and Russia, having one madman go bonkers for any reason whatsoever – like ego – and we no longer have to worry about a slowing economy or an environment that gets hotter and wetter by the year.
Because missiles will fly and warheads will detonate and most of humanity will be engulfed in a nuclear war that could have been avoided if only there were adults in the room.
We are in intensive care.
