So much the kirchnerists like the many who do not want them, they agree that the country is about to hit a wall and that afterward almost nothing will be as it was before. Needless to say, they are not in a position to tell us much about the future that awaits us; The clouds that cover the horizon have become so thick that it is difficult to glimpse what could happen in the coming weeks, while on December 10, 2023, when according to the electoral calendar the mandate of the Fernandezes, seems so distant that few dare to speculate about what could happen in the months that separate us from that date. They only know that soon there will be more poor people and that, even if the next government is a paragon of efficiency headed by a charismatic statist, society has years ahead of them that will be extremely difficult.
But it’s not just about the Argentina. In this respect, it is a pioneer country, perhaps because it ingested the populist elixir before the others and has had plenty of time to absorb the consequences. Be that as it may, a very similar climate prevails in much of the world. It would seem that they are running out, one after another, of those national, political and even artistic projects that, by providing an illusion of order and thereby justifying the efforts of those who made them their hallmark, affected the behavior of virtually everyone. perhaps to be too ambitiousnot even the most promising have achieved the objectives that they entailed in their own way.
The lack of convincing answers to the questions that are emerging, of guiding ideas that are capable of replacing those that already seem outdated, may turn out to be even more dangerous than any concrete problem. Periods marked by uncertainty, such as the current one, have always been conducive to demagogues who sell easy, if not vindictive, fantasies. A century ago, communism, fascism, Nazism and their various variants filled the void left by the chaotic collapse of the nineteenth-century “normality”. Will the creeds that are being elaborated in the minds of those who are fed up with the prevailing restlessness be more benign?
The break with the recent past became official, so to speak, in mid-February with the start of the war of conquest that is being waged Russia in an attempt to seize Ukraine and thus begin with the reconstruction of the empire of the tsars. This bloody conflict broke out just when those in charge of the international economy were beginning to face more seriously the ravages caused by the pandemic that, in almost all countries, induced their rulers to print more money to finance social assistance programs, which assured that, with time, they would be faced with an inflationary wave, hence the adjustments that are already underway not only here but also in North America and Europe.
The somewhat belated efforts of the monetary authorities of the rich countries to defend the value of the dollar, the euro and the pound sterling will harm the poorer countries which, without credit at low rates, will have to rely on their usually very precarious own resources. Some as Sri Lankahave already seen their standard of living plummet. Others, including Egypt, Lebanon and, of course, Argentina, share the same fate. It is also feared that unless the ports through which the agricultural exports of Ukraine and Russiathere are famines in Africa, the Middle East and large parts of South Asia that drive a new wave of refugees towards Europe.
For now at least, the leaders of the rich countries are prioritizing the defense of their own immediate interests and are therefore reluctant to help the poor. Although in some circles the conviction persists that it is up to Westerners to take more responsibility for what happens in theor what some still call “the third world”, the consensus is that it is the duty of local authorities, however corrupt and inept, to solve all the problems that afflict their particular countries. Is such an attitude selfish? In a way it is, but it is understandable that, after the failure humiliating of the attempts to transform societies of traditions that are incompatible with western ones in modern democracies, North Americans and Europeans have preferred to limit themselves to giving advice and offering humanitarian aid without asking much in return.
Shocked by Westerners’ loss of confidence in the superiority of their own values, leaders of China and the Muslim world they are determined to seize what for them is a historic opportunity. From his point of view, the obsessive “self-criticism” of the intellectual elites of USA and, if less viscerally, of certain European countries, it is a sign of weakness, a sign that at last the West, which, less than a century ago, was able to treat the rest of the world like a battlefield in Given that it was given to resolve their internal differences without worrying at all about the opinion of its inhabitants, it is finally beating a retreat.
share such opinion Vladimir Putin; he imagined that the Americans and Europeans would let him take over the Ukraine without doing much more than condemning him in the UN and apply some symbolic economic sanctions. He was wrong. To his surprise, Westerners understood that it would be suicidal to allow him to change the rules that have dominated international relations for decades, one of the most basic of which is that existing borders must always be respected, however arbitrary some may seem. While in dozens of places it is tantalizingly easy to attribute them to historical injustices, to seek to change them by force, as it is trying to do Putin, would unleash chaos. With arguments similar to those used by the Russian autocrat, the Chinese regime could try to take over Taiwan while Turkey, whose “sultan” Recep Erdogan has imperial aspirations much like Putin’s, hints that it has the right to invade a number of Greek islands.
