When the decisions we have to make are difficult because the options on the table are bad or impossible, contradictions and inconsistencies surface. It happens so often that the world moves more because of it than 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 Managua that women are at the forefront of the Islamic revolution. Persian theocracy and Caribbean communism go hand in hand because they are two corrupt and violent systems united, moreover, by their hatred of the United States.
Revolutions devour their children and breed gangsters. Democracies, too. Berlusconi, for example, who was given a funeral with honors in the Duomo in Milan, or Trump, determined to destroy the pillars of the republic, that is to say, the independence of judges and the peaceful transfer of power.
Which world leaders will go to Trump’s funeral? Only two went to Berlusconi’s: Orbán, the Hungarian autocrat, and Al-Thani, the emir of Qatar. Under other circumstances, Putin would also have attended. He’s the friend who couldn’t quite be. In the leaders’ club, interests usually prevail over revelry and sympathy.
The rivalry with Russia is one of the great incongruities of the West. When the Cold War ended in 1989, everyone was hopeful at the bilateral summits between Bush and Gorbachev.
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 had to fix everything. Also the market economy. shock therapy The transition would be so hard that it was better to do it all at once, Western experts advised. Public companies were a disaster. Too big and not productive at all. It was better to sell them. That wild capitalism in a paper democracy, like the Russia of the 1990s, was spawned by Putin. Gangsters and oligarchs proliferated, violence, corruption, inequality and social chaos spread. Life expectancy went back. Russian leaders, who were ill-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 subdued 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 be made of gold. There was a lot of money to be made in that claudication. Both for the Russians and the Americans. Strategic defeat did not have to mean economic asphyxiation. Capitalism is benevolent and loves oligarchs.
The 1993 Megatons for Megawatts agreement 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 the power plants that produced electricity. It was very cheap then, although not so much today.
A third of the uranium that fuels American nuclear power still comes from Russia. It serves to produce half of the clean energy of 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 alternative. Building his own production system would require more than a decade.
This is the bright side of inconsistencies. They also serve to relax. As long as someone has something to sell to someone, wars will be harder. They are not impossible, as Putin has shown when invading Ukraine, but, at least, as in this case, they are incongruous.
That a large yacht, owned by a Mexican tycoon, rescued a few days ago dozens of refugees who had been shipwrecked in the Ionian Sea, a tragedy precipitated by the previous passivity of the Greek coast guard, is an incongruity to reflect on the scope of private initiative in front of the dysfunctions of any administration.
And, finally, the great hope of the incongruities has been given to us by Lesly Mukutuy, a 13-year-old Uitoto girl. Thanks to her ancestral wisdom, she and her three younger brothers have survived 40 days in a Colombian jungle. All the options he had were bad, even responding to the rescuers’ voices. She knew that there are no good uniforms in this jungle of unmilitary guerrillas that is also her home and her congruity.
Lesly knew how to hide and feed herself. She was logical with her environment and her environment, Mother Earth, was logical with her. Nothing so easy and complex at the same time.
