When the decisions we have to make are difficult because the options on the table are bad or impossible, contradictions and inconsistencies emerge. It happens so frequently that the world moves more for them than for anything else.
The United States, for example, is about to sign a political ceasefire with Iran: it will relax sanctions in exchange for it not continuing to enrich uranium. The threat of the atomic bomb always works and Iranian women will have to accept the veil, a symbol of chastity and submission.
The president of Iran visited Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua a few days ago, and his wife, a prominent academic, assured in Managua that women are at the forefront of the Islamic revolution. The Persian theocracy and Caribbean communism join hands because they are two corrupt and violent systems united, moreover, by their hatred of the United States.
Revolutions will devour their children and breed gangsters. Democracies, too. Berlusconi, for example, buried with honors in the Duomo in Milan, or Trump, determined to destroy the pillars of the republic, that is, the independence of judges and the peaceful transfer of power.
Which world leaders will attend Trump’s funeral? There were only two to Berlusconi: Orban, the Hungarian autocrat, and Al Thani, the emir of Qatar. In other circumstances, Putin would also have attended. He is the friend who couldn’t quite be. In the club of leaders, interests usually prevail over partying and sympathy.
The rivalry with Russia is one of the great incongruities of the West. At the end of the cold war, in 1989, the whole world attended the bilateral summits between Bush and Gorbachev with hope.
The communist countries of Europe, including the Soviet Union, looked up to the United States with admiration. Gorbachev was very popular in all Western capitals.
Democracy was going to fix everything. Also the market economy. Shock therapy. The transition was going to be so hard that it was better all at once, Western experts advised. Public companies were a disaster. Too big and not productive. Better sell them. That savage capitalism in a paper democracy, as was the Russia of the 1990s, engendered Putin. Gangsters and oligarchs proliferated, violence, corruption, inequality and social chaos spread. He receded the life expectancy. Russian leaders, poorly advised by Western economists, believed in the benevolence of the market. Capitalism, after all, knew how to take care of itself.
From that incongruity emerged identity politics, supreme leadership and justice that is not. Putin would not have existed if the United States had not wanted to take advantage of the dying Soviet Union.
Having learned nothing from Versailles, the treaty that subjugated Germany after World War I, the United States wanted the unconditional surrender of its former strategic rival. Gorbachev’s USSR and Yeltsin’s Russia were subdued.
The West did not know how to win peace. He preferred to make gold. There was a lot of money to be made in that surrender. Both for the Russians and for the Americans. Strategic defeat should not mean economic suffocation. Capitalism is benevolent and loves oligarchs.
The 1993 Megatons for Megawatts deal allowed Russia to sell enriched uranium to the United States. The Americans bought military-grade uranium, that is, from the atomic arsenal that was being dismantled, and reduced it for civilian use in power plants that produced electricity. It was very cheap then, although not so much today.
A third of the uranium that powers US nuclear power still comes from Russia. It serves to produce half of the clean energy in the United States. The Kremlin thus earns a billion dollars a year. The war in Ukraine has not altered the business. The US has no choice. Building his own production system would take more than a decade.
This is the good side of inconsistencies. They also serve to relax. As long as someone has something to sell to someone, wars are more difficult. They are not impossible, as Putin has shown by invading Ukraine, but, at least, as in this case, they are incongruous.
That a large yacht, owned by a Mexican tycoon, rescued dozens of refugees who had been shipwrecked in the Ionian Sea a few days ago, a tragedy precipitated by the previous passivity of the Greek coast guard, is an incongruity to reflect on the scope of private initiative in the face of to the dysfunctions of any administration.
And, finally, the great hope of the inconsistencies has been given to us by Lesly Mukutuy, a 13-year-old Huitoto girl. Thanks to her ancestral wisdom, she and her three little brothers have survived 40 days in a Colombian jungle. All the options she had were bad, including responding to the rescuers’ voices. She knew that there are no good uniformed men in that jungle of guerrillas and soldiers that is also her home and her congruence. Lesly knew how to hide and feed. It was logical with her environment and her environment, Mother Earth, was logical with her. Nothing so easy and complex at the same time.
