The latest American reports denounce the rapid expansion of China’s production of medium- and long-range missiles. And it is indeed true that, during the celebrations of the anniversary of the victory over Japan, Xi Jinping surrounded himself with Putin and Kim Jong-un precisely to display that power. What Washington does not say — nor regret — is that this arms race began in the White House itself, when Obama heavily armed the allies encircling China; and NATO did the same along Russia’s borders. In the end, the new order feeds the old military trap.
The war economy overshadows the tomorrows that promise peace, and the world slips back into practices — and narratives — of a distant yesterday, digging up axes supposedly buried in the rubble of the Berlin Wall. There are several explanations that combine here: one is China’s rise as the incumbent of a new world order, threatening the hegemony of the Atlantic axis economically, technologically, militarily, and even in terms of political models; another is purely economic, in the sense that the war economy is one way to revive GDP while strengthening rent-seeking lobbies that are increasingly influential and powerful; and then there is the rise of nationalisms and protectionisms that typically accompany economic crises and the degradation of political regimes. History books show that, in such an environment, messianic discourses leap out of Pandora’s box: on one side, the saints who drink from the Grail a cultural poison that convinces them they have the duty to save the other from hell, offering body and soul to spill whatever blood is needed.
It is in moments like these that we understand that homo sapiens is not as sensitive to History as it believes. There is indeed something in its nature that is drawn to the abyss — some animal muscle disguised as values and culture. And none of this is new. Thucydides long ago explained — and well — the allure of the trap, going back to the era when Athens felt threatened by Sparta. We can find it in every age of History, in successive chaotic wars, in contexts where everyone feels entitled and obliged to kill and die in the name of enchanting stories that, in today’s chaos, manufacture the gods and heroes of tomorrow. It is what it is; we are neither doves nor dolphins — we are simply the animals we are, and it is hard to expect us to be something else.
But there is more — far more. Above all, there is an extensive list of urgent priorities that must be confronted collectively and coherently: a planet sick with the virus of Humanity, which only Humanity can cure by saving itself; a glaring disparity in the distribution of wealth accompanied by grotesque levels of growing poverty; serious threats to the value of manual and intellectual labor in the face of Industry 4.0 and Artificial Intelligence; and that truly minor god — immoral and mortal — of messianism that deceives some with moral arguments, leading them to diminish others, to dominate them, ultimately to “save” them from themselves.
We have all seen this before; our parents saw it; our grandparents saw it. And yet, for reasons Humanity insists on repeating, we once again booby-trap the world and run headlong into the same old patterns. The new cycle, after all, is old; it is more of the same and, as always, deeply dangerous.
*Director-General of Plataforma.
