The age of chaos

In a speech he gave at Harvard in June 1947, then US Secretary of State George Marshall referred to the urgent need for economic help to be given to Europe.

This is how the Marshall Plan came about. It literally saved Europe, which had been ravaged by war.

Two years later the founding charter of NATO was signed, inextricably linking the security of the United States with that of its transatlantic allies in the face of the Soviet threat.

After seven decades, the Euro-American romance is being sorely tested.

According to the perception of the transatlantic establishment of the last eight years, US President Donald Trump is “chaotic.”

But he is essentially a radical politician of the right who seeks to overthrow the existing system rather than improve it.

It is awkward and confusing as any attempt to overthrow the system was always expected to come from the left. But the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan were also radicals of the right. However, behind them was the powerful ideology of neoliberalism.

Those two leaders were facing the Soviet Union while the European Community was still being created and Germany was divided.

Seen in this light, what Trump is undertaking does not really correspond to what was happening in the past and, moreover, the scope of confrontation has broadened tremendously as it includes the challenge of North Korea, on the military level, and of China, on the economic level.

Perhaps the most serious confrontation is over the issue of climate change, which Trump dismisses as something like an “opium for the masses.”

Behind the concept of “saving the planet” a whole new business order has evolved which is underpinned by a whole series of regulatory provisions that are essentially globally binding and which basically impose globalization on production.

It is the third phase, following that of globalization in the financial sector and the concepts of multiculturalism on the social level.

It is the other aspect of communist internationalism but these are two sides of the same coin.

From this point of view, Trump comes from a different era, when politicians and entrepreneurs played leading roles, not multinational faceless capital.

He is trying to disrupt the whole system, creating chaos, but he might be too late. If he ends up staying in power, the world will be a different place.