A black swan is slang for an unexpected event with large consequences. 2020 has brought us two so far: the COVID-19 pandemic and the collapse of oil prices. Each will have potent consequences for the Imperium Americanum. And there is a nest of black cygnets maturing.
COVID-19
In less than three decades, a mere blink of the eye in historical terms, the United States has gone from the world’s sole superpower to a massive foundering wreck that is helpless before the coronavirus and intent on blaming the rest of the world for its own shortcomings. As the journalist Fintan O’Toole noted recently in the Irish Times:
This will not be alleging that democracy is less good than its alternative (dictatorship), because that obviously is not the case; but it is instead about what even democracies cannot avoid, because humans are stupid, which means that only a minority of any human population can think sufficiently clearly and honestly about political issues so as to have the capacity to vote even in their own best interest regarding whom to vote for.
American President Donald Trump this week made the incendiary claim that the Covid-19 crisis unfolding in the U.S. is a greater danger to his country’s national security than Pearl Harbor or indeed the 9/11 terror incidents. Both events led the U.S. into wars.
Once upon a time in the United States there was a consensus among national politicians that there were two areas where there should be a unified approach to policy. They were national security and foreign policy, both of which involved other nations, which made desirable a perception of unity on the part of the president and his cabinet, no matter who was in power. That meant that dissent from individual politicians should never rise to the level of pitting one party against another on the basic Establishment view of what was desirable in terms of U.S. national interests.
America isn’t the only country which is so corrupt as to stand at or near the top of the global coronavirus-infection rankings, but, as the June 2020 issue of The Atlantic headlines, “We Are Living in a Failed State: The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.” Why did this happen?
It’s a grim number. This week sees the United States’ death toll from the Covid-19 pandemic exceeding the total number of American troops that were killed during the decade-long Vietnam War – some 58,000.
In a matter of just a few weeks, U.S. deaths from the disease make that nation the world’s leader, in a macabre way not imagined by preening “American exceptionalism”.
But never mind, Americans can take heart that they have got Donald Trump as their leader. (That’s genuine sarcasm unlike Trump’s brand of fake retro-sarcasm.)
For a few days there, Democrats were feeling good about themselves and the upcoming election – deceptively so as it turns out. Trump had been his usual rambunctious self at his daily coronavirus briefings, taunting the press, quarreling with his own medical advisers, pushing for states to go back to work and then declaring that maybe they shouldn’t because it was too early.
But then, on Thursday, Apr. 24, he offered some advice on how to treat Covid-19 in what will no doubt go down as the most famous words of his presidency:
When in trouble politically, governments have traditionally conjured up a foreign enemy to explain why things are going wrong. Whatever one chooses to believe about the coronavirus, the fact is that it has resulted in considerable political backlash against a number of governments whose behavior has been perceived as either too extreme or too dilatory. Donald Trump’s White House has taken shots from both directions and the response to the disease has also been pilloried due to repeated gaffes by the president himself.
Trump and now the EU appear to be even weaker following the coronavirus and how China is implicated but comes out tougher itself. China, post corona, is set to divide the EU, which will please Trump. But the EU accusing China of fake news? Has the world gone mad?
