The Pentagon, having never encountered a geopolitical dilemma it could not address by signing an invoice, has duly approved the sale of five hundred Patriot missiles to Ukraine. One can almost hear the satisfied thud of briefcases closing along the Potomac. It is a transaction greeted with breathless relief by the sort of commentators who believe that history is a spreadsheet, and that sovereignty is merely a question of inventory management. That these sophisticated interceptors will arrive precisely in time to prolong an agonizing attritional meat-grinder, rather than conclude it, is an impertinence rarely voiced in polite society. We are offered instead the undeniably moving imagery of Ukrainian evacuees returning from Russian-occupied territory, weeping into the coats of their relatives, an intensely human spectacle that serves, rather conveniently, to distract from the bleak fact that Western policy remains an open-ended subscription to catastrophe.
Further south, in the Horn of Africa, the choreography of power has dispensed with even this thin veneer of procedural elegance. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, whose Nobel Peace Prize gathers dust beneath a steadily accumulating mountain of domestic conflict, has ordered his cabinet ministers into military fatigues for a bout of boot-camp drills. The spectacle of portly bureaucrats sweating through calisthenics in the dirt is, of course, entirely ridiculous, yet it possesses a certain rustic honesty that Washington entirely lacks. It is a reminder that state power, stripped of its multilateral memoranda and carefully staged press briefings, ultimately rests on the ability to command men with rifles to stand in straight lines and look mildly terrifying.
Meanwhile, in Beijing, the high priests of the Communist Party have concluded another solemn conclave dedicated to the twin deities of anti-corruption and ideological discipline. Western Sinologists, whose capacity for finding deep structural meaning in the blandest of Leninist boilerplate borders on the heroic, have spent the week dissecting communiqués that read like instructions for assembling a particularly tedious Scandinavian bookcase. What is actually taking place, behind the numbing litany of loyalty pledges and cadre evaluations, is the ancient and ruthless business of clearing the undergrowth. In modern authoritarianism, as in the Roman curia, a sudden and passionate devotion to administrative cleanliness is almost invariably the prelude to an execution, political or otherwise.
There is something almost touching, amidst this grim parade of ancient impulses, in the juvenile hubris of the digital frontier. Binance, the cryptocurrency exchange whose very existence relies on the collective delusion that numbers invented on a server constitute sovereign wealth, has cheerfully announced it will cover ninety percent of the losses from a six-billion-dollar hack. That such staggering sums can vanish into the ether, only to be refunded by an offshore ledger with the nonchalance of a casino manager comping a buffet, reveals our epoch's true madness. We inhabit an era where fictional billions evaporate in milliseconds, while in the Democratic Republic of Congo, more than five thousand human beings have perished from Ebola in an outbreak that scarcely commands a flicker on the West’s diplomatic radar, occurring as it does in a place devoid of semiconductor factories or strategic transit lanes.
We comfort ourselves, naturally, with the assumption that the world is governed by rational systems: by Patriot batteries that shield, by disciplinary committees that reform, by digital reserves that indemnify. It is a comforting fable for the editorial pages. The reality, as this week’s ledger amply demonstrates, is that the machinery of global order is operated by men doing physical jerks in the dust, apparatchiks checking their mirrors for the executioner, and Western statesmen confusing the dispatch of munitions with the possession of a strategy.
Rupert Halloway