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CHALLENGES OF TODAY, IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE: Part One



The crumbling of democracy, the rise of radical neo-nationalism, a now multi-tier nuclear threat, the rapid deterioration of the global environment, the growing threat of a new world war, and the barreling advance of artificial intelligence toward a state beyond our control... These are some of the major challenges facing us today, challenges that are apt to have grave and foreseeable consequences in the not too distant future. Be that as it may, they are being largely ignored at present, as individuals and nations alike seem obsessed with the immediate and hopelessly caught up in the whirlwind of current events and election cycles.
At a time when the world has never needed more to be united in the search for peace and cooperation, its leading nations are entertaining the autistic whim of an autocratic minority to embrace isolationist policies and a return to nationalist sentiments. Both literally and figuratively, walls are being erected to divide rather than bridges being built to unite. Would-be authoritarians are courting established ones, as erstwhile allies are being pitted against one another. Extreme nationalists are being stirred to a fever pitch and their skewed sentiments are being legitimized to create an underlying base for authoritarian designs.
These conditions are chillingly similar to the ones leading up to World War II, which killed tens of millions and was the worst war in history. But these are different times, with much more powerful weapons and with sci-fi type technology placed at their service, enough fire power and sinister know-how to self-destruct the entire planet and bring the extinction of Humankind by its own hand. And if war doesn’t do it, the ecologically-driven destruction of our environment and/or out of control cyber-intelligence promise to.
A case in point is a proposal currently on the table from the administration of US President Donald Trump to form a sixth branch of the country’s Armed Forces—besides the current Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard—to confront the possibility of military operations in outer space. It would be called the US Space Force (USSF)—an expansion of an idea floated in 2002 by former President George W. Bush’s flamboyant Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for the creation of a Space Corps.
The US already has a little talked-about military space program that forms part of the Air Force—namely, the US Air Force Space Command. Despite opposition from a multitude of present and former military leaders, lawmakers and space experts, the US president has publicly and repeatedly affirmed that “we are going to have the Air Force, and we are going to have the Space Force,” and has indicated that they would be “two separate but equal" branches of the Armed Forces.
The reasoning behind the eagerness of the current US administration translates into grounds for a new Cold War and for an accompanying arms race—in this case, an arms and space race combined. In 2007, China launched a satellite killer weapon capable of destroying artificial satellites in space. To demonstrate its successful creation of this new hunter-killer device, the Chinese government destroyed one of its own weather satellite. A year later, the United States destroyed one of its own satellites in space as well, and so it began, bringing back an idea backed by the world’s two most powerful nations of war rather than cooperation in space first suggested in former President Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars proposal, which his administration later scrapped after it failed to gain traction in Congress.
Add to this Beijing’s increasing construction of military bases on artificial islands in international waters that it seeks to control—a policy which coincides with Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s move to perpetuate his power by managing to remove the limit on the number of five year terms he can serve—the multi-billion-dollar trade war that the Trump administration has just unleashed on China, and the machinations of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, who is playing China off against the US in negotiations to end his strategic nuclear aspirations (and in which he has received concessions from Washington without giving anything in return), lines are being drawn for increasing hostility and a showdown between these two giants at some point in the future. An eventual shooting war between China and the United States would surely set the stage for a third global confrontation.
Parallel to this, Trump’s administration has angered Russian President Vladimir Putin by supporting the maintaining of certain sanctions on the autocratic leader’s regime, but Trump himself has been reluctant to punish or even criticize Putin for military actions against Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea, clandestine meddling in US presidential elections, or his role in propping up the nefarious Assad dictatorship in Syria, where hundreds of thousands have died in the biggest and most horrible of the world’s current proxy wars.
The opposite is true of Trump’s treatment of Washington’s long-time allies in Western Europe whom he has confused and confounded by showing contempt for the long-standing NATO alliance and has accused European nations of taking advantage of the United States, intentionally giving priority to summits with autocrats like Kim Jong Un and Putin while de-prioritizing the role of the US as a friend and defender of Europe.
So deteriorated are the relations between the Trump administration and what have until now been its closest allies that EU President Donald Tusk felt compelled last week to write, “Despite our tireless efforts to keep the unity of the West, trans-Atlantic relations are under immense pressure due to the policies of President Trump. Unfortunately, the divisions go beyond trade...It is my belief that, while hoping for the best, we must be ready to prepare our Union for worst-case scenarios.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel foreshadowed Tusk’s view earlier this year by telling the G7 and NATO conferences that with Britain’s decision to leave the EU and the election of Donald Trump in the US, the European Union could no longer rely on the cooperation of those two Western nations. Suggesting that the long-standing post-World War II Western alliance was deteriorating fast, at the end of May Merkel said, “The times in which we could completely depend on others are, to a certain extent, over...We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands.” This, as Trump was preparing to extend his trade wars beyond China to erstwhile allies in Europe and Canada.
Meanwhile, in preparing for his upcoming summit with Putin, Trump continued his consistent policy of giving a pass to the Russian strongman, who is surely no friend of democracy, Western Europe or the US, although finally and reluctantly Trump said that he might discuss Russian meddling in the election that he narrowly won in 2016, after months of ignoring intelligence community confirmation of Russia’s role and suggesting repeatedly that he didn’t think Putin had anything to do with it. Furthermore, he blamed his predecessor, Barack Obama for “losing Crimea” rather than rightly blaming Putin for annexing that autonomous republic and later said Washington and Moscow had “agreed to disagree about Crimea”, while Putin’s government said simply that the topic of Crimea was “off the table” for the summit.

Recently, the renowned Brookings Institution—described by The Economist as “perhaps America’s most prestigious think-tank”— hosted a discussion of “Democracy in the Trump Era”, which it prefaced by stating the following:
“From Russia to South Africa, from Turkey to the Philippines, from Venezuela to Hungary, authoritarian leaders have smashed restraints on their power. The freedom of the media and the judiciary have eroded. The right to vote may remain, but the right to have one’s vote counted does not. Until the US presidential election of 2016, the global decline of democracy seemed a concern for other peoples in other lands. However, some see the political rise of Donald Trump as the end to that optimism here at home.”
To be continued...

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