It was seventeenth century French Dramatist Pierre Corneille who copyrighted this expression in three-hour long tragedies that are still studied by every child in the French school system. Implying ‘Damned if we do, damned if we don’t,’ it is currently being played out in Trump’s America.

As the November 3rd presidential election draws near, Americans have been warned that this time around both China and Russia, who have an all-encompassing alliance, are ‘interfering’ in their ’democracy’. But as opposition to Trump’s racist agenda grows exponentially, voters are not told why the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, promises a harder attitude toward Russia than Obama. As voters, they are faced with a ‘Cornelian Dilemma’: Trump is destroying the country from within, while Biden would destroy it through war.

Like all presidents since Clinton, Biden (America’s ‘Uncle Joe’) will follow the official Defense Doctrine known as the Wolfowitz doctrine after its bellicose author, Paul Wolfowitz. Its stated purpose is to ensure that no other country gains the ability to dethrone the US as world hegemon, and it singles out Russia’s mineral cornucopia as potentially enabling it to do just that. Several months ago, without referring to ‘Wolfowitz’, which he had been permitted to soften only slightly in his 2017 Defense Doctrine, Trump suggested that the US should purchase Greenland, having leaned that geography blessed that North Atlantic island with mineral assets comparable to those of Russia. In the president’s mind, this would obviate the need to bomb Moscow, where he would like to build a tower. However, America’s pundits, having long ago forgotten the Wolfowitz doctrine if they were ever aware of it, dismissed this as just another hare-brained idea, partly because they did not know Trump’s fundamental attitude toward war.

A recent book by a Trump family intimate explains it. Seeing a ‘good deal’ as the height of achievement, Trump considers that service in the military is for ’suckers’ and ‘losers’, as he has been saying on television recently. The concept of patriotism is foreign to him, as illustrated by his attitude toward the former Senator John McCain, who was held captive for five years after his plane was shot down during the Vietnam War. Trump declares for effect that he likes “heroes who weren’t captured”. Now we learn that long before becoming president, he threatened to disinherit Don Jr., if he embraced a military career, unable to understand why people would risk their lives when ‘there’s nothing in it for them’.

Although Trump burnishes the US military when he wants to threaten another country, warning of its unmatchable capability to inflict death and destruction, he seriously threatens to dismantle NATO if participating countries fail to increase their contributions. Biden’s backers, on the other hand, are heavily invested in the military-industrial complex. Heedless of Eisenhower’s warning, they are convinced that its power to destroy proves that it is equally capable of rebuilding the world (in America’s image, but without the race problem…),

This dyad confronts American voters with a typical Cornelian choice, between two equally disastrous outcomes. By rejecting Trump, they would avoid a race war at home, but face nuclear war with Russia, backed by China. The evidence for this is that Biden intends to keep NATO’s tanks stationed on Russia’s European border, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, condemning President Putin for calling up defensive forces on his side — as if a national leader’s first responsibility were not to ensure the safety of his citizens!

Biden’s backers are invested in the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about, its awesome power to destroy having convinced them that it is equally capable of rebuilding the world (in America’s image, but without the race problem…), while Trump knows that nuclear war would end all deals. He acted upon this conviction by inventing a ‘bone spur’ on a foot to escape peace-time military service, only to accept the backing of white supremacists once he became president. Encouraging his followers to engage in violence against non-white Americans from the safety of the White House, he has probably never fired a weapon, suggesting that on the morning of November 4th he is unlikely to reject defeat by leading his followers onto the South Lawn brandishing a machine gun against Antifa.

He is more likely to abscond in the dead of night to a friendly country such as Turkey, where the ‘longtime-not-seen’ Rudy Giuliani is probably arranging accommodations befitting the former president of the most powerful country the world had ever seen. My hypothesis has been neither echoed nor challenged, however, neither has a more credible scenario been put forth. This leads me to suggest that instead of wondering what they will do if Trump refuses defeat, the Democrats should be taking suggestions from the public for a new constitution, recognizing that ‘checks and balances’ no longer suffice to ensure the rule of law.

Deena Stryker is a US-born international expert, author and journalist that lived in Eastern and Western Europe and has been writing about the big picture for 50 years. Over the years she penned a number of books, including Russia’s Americans. Her essays can also be found at Otherjones. Especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

Fifty-seven years after Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech, thousands of black Americans turned out on the same Washington Mall to reaffirm that ‘Black Lives Matter’ on Saturday, August 29th, setting off speculation that the country may be descending into a kind of civil war.

Black American history began with the importation of slaves from Africa by the first white settlers more than four hundred years ago. Yet neither the nineteenth century civil war that killed more Americans than all of the country’s foreign wars, nor the legislative measures taken since it ended to ‘guarantee’ black Americans ‘equal treatment under the law’, have sufficed: With 15% of the total US population, Blacks continue to live in conditions that in fact maintain the suspicion and abuse that culminates in unjustified police killings.

At the same time however, community colleges as well as a growing number of prestigious institutions seeking to burnish their ‘progressive’ credentials, have enabled black Americans to gain the intellectual tools with which to challenge white intellectuals. Nowhere is this seen more dramatically than in the growing number of black journalists on newspapers, progressive magazines, and major television networks, both as anchors and guest commentators. As I write this, two young black women who report together on the sports world demonstrate a larger remit, pointing out that when a white policeman shoots seven bullets into the back of an unarmed black man while clutching his shirt with his other hand, it is out of fear. Subliminally, that same fear explains why in the face of growing injustice, intellectuals’ respect for the Black Lives Matter movement is dropping.

Meanwhile, athletes are moving in the opposite direction. In 2016, star white football player Colin Kaepernick began kneeling to protest racial injustice as the national anthem was played before games. With ‘taking a knee’ going viral, the football bosses fired Kaepernick, ultimately realizing that they could not do without with this valuable player. And when the assassination by police of George Floyd was followed by that of Michael Black, on the off chance that he might have been carrying a knife (one was safely stored under his car floor), teams across the country issued a statement that they would no longer allow their bodies to be used as entertainment while black murders continued.

This demonstration of political maturity by ‘jocks’ (men valued only for their ability in sports) forced the press to highlight the stark differences in the way police arrest black and white ‘offenders’. When a seventeen-year old took it upon himself to ‘assist’ the forces of law and order in the city where Black was shot, killing two protesters in broad daylight, it showed him being politely ‘taken into custody’ and offered food and water by police. The contrast set off the race war that Trump had been promising were he to lose the up-coming election. Relayed by a media always eager for a juicy story, the President’s derogatory references to black people, referred to as ‘dog whistles’ are bearing fruit.

Donald Trump’s main motivation for seeking the presidency having been to get four years of uninterrupted limelight, however his white supremacist backers hired him to transform a flawed democracy into a race-based dictatorship. His history of run-of-the-mill racism, such as conniving to keep Black tenants out of his rental properties, suggested that he would be a willing accomplice. And while public attention was directed toward accusations of Russian election intervention in his favor, Trump was campaigning to Make America White Again, benefitting from police traditions that hark back to the days when they were tracking down runaway slaves.

But the story doesn’t stop there. While the ‘race war’ occupies the headlines, New York’s Attorney Generals are preparing indictments that could land Donald Trump in jail for the rest of his life once he is no longer protected by his office. To prevent that from happening, he tried to render the post office incapable of counting the mail-in ballots that many voters would prefer to Covid-spreading voting facilities. When that failed, he unleashed a race war, banking on human avoidance of change during a crisis.

Should the election nonetheless go badly for him, in the interval between the November election and the January swearing in of President Biden, Trump will enlist ‘his’ Attorney General, Bill Barre, and the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, in efforts to somehow put his white collar crimes out of reach. Should that attempt fail, Americans can only hope that he absconds to a friendly country, such as Turkey, rather than encouraging all-out civil war from behind the scenes.

The county has entered a perilous moment, that has nothing to do with foreign threats to its democracy.

Deena Stryker is a US-born international expert, author and journalist that lived in Eastern and Western Europe and has been writing about the big picture for 50 years. Over the years she penned a number of books, including Russia’s Americans. Her essays can also be found at Otherjones. Especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

Two weeks ago, to halt demonstrations against police brutality, President Trump dispatched federal troops, as well as private military contractors, to Portland, Oregon, raising fears of authoritarianism. Now, the Republican controlled Senate is refusing to extend relief for workers forced to stay home due to the Covid pandemic, setting the stage for more demonstrations that would ‘justify’ sending federal troops to more cities — especially those controlled by Democrats, as the President threatens.

The media barely suggests that Trump may be a fascist, while old school Republicans fear losing re-election, and the Democrats continue incapable of forceful behavior. Although the polls show their candidate, former Vice-President Biden well ahead, they are wary of counting their chickens before they’re hatched. As COVID deaths mount, first in one state, then in another, from sophisticated California to the deep south, Biden has merely urged people to wear masks.

Unlike more centralized countries whose governments are either run by, or include socialists, the Trump administration has left the individual states to meet the challenge without help from the federal government. The situation is so dire that the Center for Disease Control has approved the ‘death panels’ that anti-Medicare Republicans imagined during the 2016 election: Before admitting COVID patients, hospitals will evaluate the chances that treatment will save them. If not, they are turned away to die at home.

As America approaches the November presidential election, nothing more eloquently illustrates the deliberate withholding of foreign policy information from votes than the accusations of foreign interference by not one, but three ’evil empires’, Russia, China and Iran, which are said to target less educated minority voters on the internet. In reality, not even the most sophisticated American voters know that the NATO troops withdrawn from Germany were not brought home, but moved across the border to Poland. Russia’s historical nemesis is delighted to facilitate the rotation of NATO troops to its border where they have been stationed since the demise of the Soviet Union. Notwithstanding this reality, the latest yarn being peddled is that Russia is convinced that the Cold War is still going on, while the US seeks cooperation.

Of all the terrible things that have happened under Donald Trump, his indifference to deaths from a pandemic that other governments are taming has turned many loyal Republicans against him. Although as yet none have dared to challenge him, the president threatens to postpone the election. Cary Lam just did this in Hong Kong, but the US Constitution prevents Trump from imitating her.

In 1904, the prominent British geographer, Sir Halford Mackinder, realized that: “Who rules Eastern Europe commands the Heartland, Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island, Who rules the World Island rules the world.” Recognizing that Russia, with its eleven time zones, cannot be integrated into any grouping, the Heartland Theory required diplomacy to be in charge of relations, while the labelling of the Americas and Australia as ‘outlying islands’, (with Japan and the British Isles designated as ‘offshore islands’), was wildly off the mark: Since the end of World War I, first Britain, then the United States dominated the world.

The ‘Americanization of the World’ was recognized by friends and enemies alike, until the end of the twentieth century, when China and Russia began to act on Mackinder’s realization that land links made Africa and the Heartland the largest geographic entity on the planet.

Deena Stryker is a US-born international expert, author and journalist that lived in Eastern and Western Europe and has been writing about the big picture for 50 years. Over the years she penned a number of books, including Russia’s Americans. Her essays can also be found at Otherjones. Especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

Am I about to suggest that space flights affect the climate? No, the link is between the race to space and the deterioration of planet earth as a human habitat.

Four years ago, I suggested that the main reason why the US government is funding space exploration is because humans are going to need a new home in our lifetime. The recent ‘splashdown’ of two astronauts from a two-month stay at the international space station was hyped because it involved a vehicle built by a private company, Elon Musk’s Space-X. The reasons for the stay were not mentioned, but when laid side by side with recent warnings about climate, they are clear: earth is now expected to pass the relatively safe temperature increase of 1.5 degrees by 2025, with devastating consequences.

America’s foremost warming expert, Bill McKibben, recently reviewed the latest warning about climate in the New York Review of Books. He quotes author Mark Lynas, a British climate activist stating that:

“If we stay on the current business-as-usual trajectory, we could see two degrees as soon as the early 2030s, three degrees around mid-century, and four degrees by 2075 or so, corresponding to rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere,” (350 parts per million being the number not to exceed). “If we’re unlucky with positive feedback from thawing permafrost in the Arctic or collapsing tropical rainforests, then we could be in for five or even six degrees by century’s end.”

Somewhat superfluously, McKibben adds:

“That’s a paragraph worth reading again. It’s an aggressive reading of the available science (research published in early July estimates we could cross the 1.5-degree threshold by 2025), but it’s not outlandish. And it implies an unimaginable future. Two degrees will not be twice as bad as one, or three degrees three times as bad. The damage is certain to increase exponentially, not linearly, because the Earth will move past grave tipping points as we slide up this thermometer.”

Earthlings first encountered the word exponential in The Limits to Growth, which in 1972 warned about doubling times of population growth as opposed to familiar linear increases. A team organized around Dennis and Donna Meadows foresaw that if trends continued, we would see concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere of 350 parts per million by 2000. According to McKibben’s organization, 350, 400 parts per million was reached in 2013.

Two Hollywood films, Soylent Green, in 1973, and Elysium, in 2013, foreshadow what earthlings could face. In the first, food is distributed by heavily armed police, and in Elysium, they keep a brutal order among the lower classes left behind when space was colonized. Hitler perfected fascism in the name of Lebensraum for the German people – room to live. Trump is updating his methods for The Survival of the Fittest by allowing COVID-19 to decimate the ranks of Blacks, Mexicans and those once known as ‘white trash’. The media accuses the president of disregarding science, when in reality he is using it to defend White Supremacy, winnowing the ranks of unneeded workers as robots take over.

While backing economic warfare between the minority that has accumulated unimaginable wealth and a multi-colored majority, Western governments are laying the foundations for a home in space, whether the moon turns out to be potentially habitable, or man-made planets will have to be built. Authors of the latest books on global warming hope that somehow the human species will be capable of turning the planet around, while governments prepare for a more likely future in which a generation raised on ‘ever more’ will be forced to create a minimalist lifestyle just to survive.

Deena Stryker is a US-born international expert, author and journalist that lived in Eastern and Western Europe and has been writing about the big picture for 50 years. Over the years she penned a number of books, including Russia’s Americans. Her essays can also be found at Otherjones. Especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

A decadent Roman Empire was ultimately brought down by vigorous Germanic tribes, which it viewed as ‘barbarians’. The Pax Americana is being brought down by ancient civilizations that whose commitment to freedom of thought does not lead to freedom to act, whether vis a vis other nations, or individual behavior.

Backing up, as presented to the American public, the standoff with both China and Russia is born of Washington’s ‘disappointment’ in their failure to become more ‘open’ as they became more prosperous. (In reality, being ‘open’ means bowing to American claims of superiority based on is mastery of ‘progress’.) According to a recent, much publicized speech by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: “Beijing bit the international hands that were feeding it,” rebuffing America’s blandishments. Interestingly, the same complaint has been made about Russia’s refusal to become an American. According to the official American narrative, after the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO only moved beyond Germany’s eastern border because Russia ‘believed’ it had inherited its predecessor’s power. As China challenges the US on the economic front, a similar argument is used:

“We opened our arms to Chinese citizens, only to see the Chinese Communist Party exploit our free and open society. China sent propagandists into our press conferences, our research centers, our high-schools, our colleges, and even into our PTA meetings.” (PTA: parent teacher association that help run schools.)

According to Pompeo, prominent American companies have removed references to Taiwan from their corporate websites, so as not to anger Beijing, a gesture that happens all over the world. “I have lost count of the number of times European diplomats have told me they want to work with the US on China but get nervous and reluctant whenever ideology is broached.”

The reason for that seemingly opaque statement is simple: Since the end of World War II, Socialist parties have routinely participate in, or lead, European governments, so voters are immune to warnings over ‘Marxism-Leninism’. America’s Secretary of State, however, can still traumatize Americans by emphasizing that ‘the Chinese Communist Party’ — a more threatening moniker than its real name, ‘the Communist Party of China’ — is oh my God, ’Marxist-Leninist’, its leader Xi Jinping a ‘true believer in a bankrupt totalitarian ideology’.

According to Pompeo, an authority on all things foreign: “It’s this ideology that informs his decades-long desire for global hegemony of Chinese communism. America can no longer ignore the fundamental political and ideological differences between our countries, just as the CCP has never ignored them.” (That’s not what we have always claimed!) “People of good faith can debate why free nations allowed these bad things to happen, perhaps we were naive about China’s virulent strain of communism, or triumphalist after our victory in the Cold War, or cravenly capitalist, or hoodwinked by Beijing’s talk of a ‘peaceful rise’.” (Pompeo provides no proof that China is not interested in a peaceful rise.)

Americans have not yet connected the dots, but that ‘virulent’ strain of socialism has not only lifted 1.3 billion people out of abject poverty, it has enabled them to challenge American economic primacy. Pompeo complains that ‘trading with China is not like trading with a normal, law-abiding nation. Beijing treats international agreements as conduits for global dominance’ — taking a page from West Side Story’s: “Anything you can do, I can do better…”

But there’s more! “We know that the People’s Liberation Army is not a normal army. Its purpose is to uphold the absolute rule of the Chinese Communist Party elites and expand a Chinese empire, not to protect the Chinese people.” Well, our military’s duty is to ‘protect’ the Constitution — and uphold the Pax Americana, by occupying a thousand bases across the five continents.

Pompeo wants the US to “engage and empower the Chinese people – a dynamic, freedom-loving people who are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist Party.” (Who would all those people be who fill the the CCP’s halls at regularly scheduled meetings, not to mention the thousands of local officials who run the country?) With his ‘outstretched hand’, Pompeo is trying to foment a major color revolution, which may succeed in Hong Kong, but not with citizens raised on Confucianism, a twenty-five hundred year old philosophy that emphasizes personal and governmental morality, correctness in social relationships, justice, kindness, and sincerity.

A similar reality characterizes Russia, the other ‘barbarian’ nation, ruled by a ‘ruthless former KGB officer’, the KGB being the Russian equivalent of our CIA, which was run by George HW Bush before he became the president that led the first Gulf War that contributed to the birth of the Wahhabi terrorism we are still fighting — while being told that it’s Shia Iran that is fomenting terrorism by backing Hezbollah, a militia that participates in the Lebanese government on Israel’s border.

In 2016, among those who voted for the Green candidate rather than Hillary Clinton, were Americans who considered that Trump had a saving grace: a rejection of war against Russia, which continues to this day. When recently asked whether he had accused President Putin of paying bounties to the Taliban in Afghanistan, he said they had discussed a much more important topic: the avoidance of nuclear war. (Trump’s reassignment of some American troops from Germany acknowledges Eastern Europe’s participation in NATO’s march up to Russia’s Western border, which happened long before his watch.)

None of Trump’s critics appear to realize that the United States, far from being threatened by ‘barbarians’, is sandwiched between two opponents whose rise is backed by millennial civilizations. In the 9th century, the first Russian Prince converted his country to Christianity, while Taoism (which enjoyed a Western revival in the 20th century), arose in China five hundred yeas before Christ! China is offering a 1 billion dollar loan to make its coronavirus vaccines accessible to countries across Latin America and the Caribbean — as Mexican citizens languish in American cages.

Deena Stryker is a US-born international expert, author and journalist that lived in Eastern and Western Europe and has been writing about the big picture for 50 years. Over the years she penned a number of books, including Russia’s Americans. Her essays can also be found at Otherjones. Especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

Much American ink is being spilt over the fact that Russian voters recently agreed to allow President Vladimir Putin to potentially serve for another sixteen years. This is part of a liberal campaign against authoritarian leaders that pays scant attention to reality: while ‘democratic’ rulers are constantly negotiating with their people’s representatives, evil authoritarians are implementing their decisions. If you think about it, the crucial question is not whether a ruler is ‘elected’, but whether he can be successfully challenged. Peter the Great brought the Boyars (the Russian equivalent of America’s Senators) to heel, imposing fundamental changes to every aspect of Russian life, including the ‘opening to the West’ for which he is remembered abroad, and changing the way Russians dressed.

President Donald Trump is nowhere near being able to rule with a free hand, however, he is ridding the country of what he calls ‘the swamp’, rolling back necessary rules and regulations rather than preventing Congress’s pet projects from getting in the way of ‘making America great again’ (even though this would have to start with eliminating the Corona virus). The governments of European countries are not dependent on Brussels for basic necessities, while the politically independent American states depend on Washington for crucial funds, resulting in an overall inability to, as the mantra goes, ‘get things done’.

While the American President tells Americans to ‘live with the Corona virus’ until it ‘magically goes away’, ordering governors not to make mask wearing obligatory, countries in both Europe and Asia are bringing the pandemic at least partially under control. This suggests not only that more centralized/authoritarian governments are better able to meet crises, but also, that ‘exceptionalism’ can refer to failure. Europe’s democratic socialist regimes have remained in power for decades, whether under center right or center-left governments. In France, where I spent thirty years during two different periods, actions are taken by the Prime Minister chosen by the President, and the cabinet he in turn creates. When taking office, as is currently happening, he presents his program to the parliament, requesting a ‘vote of confidence’. When parliament refuses to cooperate with actions being taken by the Prime Minister on something the President considers vital, he can invoke a law known as 49.3 that allows him to force passage of a bill without a vote (unless the parliament votes a motion of no confidence). While under the American system of ‘checks and balances’, it is proving nearly impossible to rid the country of a terrible president who, in Steve Bannon’s words, is ‘dismantling the state’, without slogans, Europe’s parliamentary systems keep power on a relatively short leash. This is all the more meaningful that in crises such as Covid, the President or Prime Minister can order industries to produce masks or other indispensable items, and to order social security to pay workers forced into unemployment 84% of their salaries instead of the usual 75%.

European parliamentary systems also allow for the occasional authoritarian. Take France’s Charles de Gaulle, for example. An obscure Colonel at the start of World War II, his command of English enabled him to set up a provisional government based in London, prolonging his rule for another two years “in order to re-establish democracy” in formerly Vichy France. Ten years later, as France’s colonies fought for independence, he came out of retirement to create the entirely new, presidential Fifth Republic, leading it from 1958 until a year before his death in 1969, as the left gnashed its (few) teeth. While the Presidents and Prime Ministers that followed him ended in the trash bin of history, he is admired across the globe as it struggles to flatten the Covid death curve.

The most threatening epidemic since the 1918 flu that killed more than 50 million worldwide, Covid starkly illustrates the superiority of centralized government. Recently, the Guardian noted that for decades, in the face of uninterrupted US sanctions, revolutionary Cuba has sent doctors and other health workers to Indonesia, Pakistan, Haiti, West Africa, and recently, to the rescue of Europe’s social democratic health systems brought up short by Covid. The British daily also points out that not all Cuban health workers are happy with the obligation to repay their government for the free training they received from nursery to medical school, however, as usual when it comes to Cuba, the condemnation of ‘democrats’ goes hand in hand with ignorance:

Cuba’s communist rulers have been sending medical teams overseas for decades in a bid to save lives and influence people.

Paul Hare, a former British ambassador to Havana, said Fidel Castro launched the “doctor diplomacy” policy soon after his 1959 takeover as a means of using the island’s highly trained professionals to export revolutionary ideas and make new friends.

While some missions are provided free of charge, other countries pay Cuba for the medical services, bringing in $6.3bn (£4.8bn) annually and making it Havana’s largest source of foreign currency.

It’s true that Cuba has been exporting revolution and making friends around the world, in true socialist tradition, however the claim that when Fidel took power in 1959, Cuban doctors were eager to work in other third world countries is cringingly wrong. There were only enough of them to serve the well-off, and most would soon flee to more lucrative locations. While teaching many Cubans to read, the socialist government trained engineers, agricultural specialists and medical professionals in record time, (including thousands of doctors and nurses from developing countries and the US) tuition free.

Inevitably, under the influence of ‘democratic’ ideas wafting across the Caribbean, some of those who benefit from the system resent having to reimburse it by serving abroad for a number of years, as I learned when revisiting the island in 2011. But it’s not as though they didn’t know what they were committing to, anymore than American students who take out high interest loans in order to acquire one of the most lucrative professions. The policy of all socialist countries is that free training creates an implicit IOU with the government, while the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo describes noblesse oblige in these terms:

Cuban doctors and nurses are being abused and exploited in order to fill the coffers of an authoritarian regime. “The Cuban ‘medical missions’ are exploitation: a for-profit front used to fund the regime’s repression and sow political discord.

Predictably, the Guardian chimed in: “Of course there are big human rights problems in Cuba – as there have been since the start of the revolution,” failing to point out that an American who enlists in the armed forces to kill innocent civilians abroad is a patriot, while a Cuban doctor who agrees to serve foreign patients is a victim.

As I wrote at the beginning of this article, the never mentioned difference between authoritarianism and ‘democracy’ (‘rule by the people’, also known as popular ‘consent’), is that authoritarian rulers are able to implement history-changing policies without domestic battles. Every leader who has gone down in history, including France’s Sun King, Russia’s Peter the Great, George Washington, FDR, Indira Ghandi and Vladimir Putin, has come to power determined to bring sweeping change to his/her country. In my memoir “Lunch with Fellini, Dinner with Fidel”, in 1963 I discovered that both Fidel Castro and the Italian film maker Federico Fellini, whom I had followed for a year, ‘ate, drank and slept’ their respective passions 24/7. (I was not surprised when Cuba’s then President Osvaldo Dorticos, told me that he considered Fidel to be ‘an artist’.)

Currently, for all the indignation over ‘Russian interference’, American elections play a relatively minor role, as politicians challenge national policies or delay their implementation to gain electoral points from their local voters, hindering efforts to deal with Covid 19. Meanwhile, Hong Kong covers the cleaning costs for its schools; South Korea helps them create day care centers open til evening; Germany subsidizes laptops so low-income students can participate in remote learning; Italy gives schools money for more teachers, masks and separations. And in Africa, Kenya’s Zoonotic Disease Unit brings human and animal health experts together with environmental specialists, since their interface is where pandemics occur.

If the outgoing hegemon would work with Xi Jin Ping and Vladimir Putin, they could not only prevent nuclear war, but craft common policies toward pandemics, of which there are certain to be more. The fact that Covid has been found to be airborne suggests that technology could play an important role in its elimination, similar to our ability to seed clouds. Has not the Russian President been shown on video passing through a short decontamination corridor, as pharmaceutical companies around the world compete to produce the best vaccine?

Deena Stryker is a US-born international expert, author and journalist that lived in Eastern and Western Europe and has been writing about the big picture for 50 years. Over the years she penned a number of books, including Russia’s Americans. Her essays can also be found at Otherjones. Especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

Following recent undisguised assassinations by local police of several black men that led to the largest demonstrations in recent US history, President Trump launched his first 2020 campaign rally near Tulsa, Oklahoma, where, in 1921, 300 black citizens celebrating the end of slavery were murdered, leading Black Americans to refer to that date as ‘Juneteenth’. The choice was clearly intended to whip up white racist support, and in the height of irony, while belittling the danger of COVID-19, the President’s re-election campaign required everyone attending the rally to sign a document clearing it of any responsibility should they contract the virus.

What surprises me is that while providing 24/7 coverage of America’s worst crisis in recent memory, the press never mentions the fact that Caucasians — or ‘white’ people — account for only 16% of the total world population. By exploiting the global south for centuries, they have been able to have fewer, better fed and better educated children than black or brown populations, both in the North’s ghettos and in the ‘developing’ world.  Inevitably, this has resulted in Caucasians accounting for a much smaller percentage of the global population than the other races combined.  It’s common knowledge that China is the most populous nation in the world, followed by India; but few people know that Africa is close behind, with more than 1.3 million inhabitants. In the United States, faced with increasing state violence, Black Lives Matter has long called for a global alliance, and following the assassination of George Floyd, it is being heard far and wide, especially in Europe. 

After two centuries of colonialism and five years of black and brown immigrants fleeing US wars ( ‘brown’ here designating Muslims), Europeans now largely accept the fact that they are multi-cultural societies, with its attendant challenges. Very differently, while America’s race problem has occupied the headlines from the time of the country’s founding, Americans are increasingly indifferent to the really existing world below the city on the hill, especially a South no longer willing to be exploited. In a notable exception, MSNBC’s most valuable anchor, Ali Velshi, a Canadian of Gujarati origin, is letting a progressive breeze into the airways, allowing a guest to actually condemn Capitalism, playing a clip of Malcolm X, and interviewing his daughter, who is a professor of law and an activist. None of the other American anchors I watch link the demonstrations taking place in France, Germany, Denmark to police violence against minority citizens, giving the impression that it’s all about us.

Having been under US influence for decades, Europeans, aided by an openly political press, are used to thinking in global terms, while the US media still bans the slogan, ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’. Thanks to George Floyd, this may be about to change: progressives are permitted to identify the spoilers of their demonstrations as White Nationalists, contradicting Trump’s White Nationalist Attorney General, Bill Barre, who in his misleadingly calm voice tags them as Anti-Fa (anti-fascists), or ‘leftists’. 

The United States has come so far from America’s war against fascism that this handle has become a slur, while White Nationalists are rarely criticized. When in 2017 they held a torchlight parade in Charlottesville Virginia, chanting “You will not replace us,” in a now famous quote, Trump opined ‘There were good people on both sides’. Few remember, if they noticed it at the time, that his most powerful backers in 2016 were White Nationalists, ranging from David Duke, the Grand Wizard (sic) of the Ku Klux Klan, to the millionaire hedge fund owner Robert Mercer, who chose several members of Trump’s first cabinet.

The tension between the general population and those charged with maintaining ‘law and order’ is reflected by that between mayors and their police-chiefs. (The failure of a white police chief to adequately confront the death of a black man torpedoed South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigeig’s presidential campaign, and after Floyd’s death at the hands of local police, the young, white mayor of Minneapolis whined about being stressed.)  Two weeks after the assassination of George Floyd, as his brother testified to the House Judicial Committee, and former police officer Chauvin’s accomplices pled innocence (perhaps they feared their superior — whose name, by the way, is French for chauvinist ….) Europeans were listening to those who account for the world’s majority, while an ignorant American minority continues to dance on the head of a pin. 

Deena Stryker is a US-born international expert, author and journalist that lived in Eastern and Western Europe and has been writing about the big picture for 50 years. Over the years she penned a number of books, including Russia’s Americans. Her essays can also be found at Otherjones. Especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

Following Trump’s first formal rally of the 2020 election, ‘Monday morning quarterbacks’ report that the president is furious with his staff and in particular his election team: only one third of the anticipated attendees showed up to a huge amphitheater. (Apparently, many deliberately bought tickets with no intention of attending…) Many devotees may have stayed home for fear of catching the Corona virus, however, the fact that they didn’t take advantage of the outdoor ‘overflow’ area either, suggests Trump’s support may be eroding. Since he was elected, I have often thought he would eventually resign. Here is what I wrote on April 18, 2018, on my website:

I’m going out on a limb here, but as of two days ago, I’m beginning to think that Donald Trump will resign rather than be impeached or removed for incapacity under the 25th amendment.

It’s hard to imagine him sitting down with Mueller.  With his volatile temper, I believe he will throw in the towel alleging that Washington cannot be reformed and that he is not going to allow the hard work of a lifetime in business to be thrown away for a ‘basket of ungratefuls’.”

The United States has changed more in the two years since that post than at any period that I —- with my limited eye-witness experience — can remember. Civil war is openly recognized as a possibility, as the Democratic Party continues to sacrifice its progressive wing to the dictates of Wall Street. With 16% of the population leading the way on the back of Martin Luther King — and increasingly, the Black Panthers — the United States is being dragged kicking and screaming toward the social democracy that has ensured decent lives for Europe’s working class since the end of World War II.

Since that time, the world has been America’s oyster, as the saying goes, but that time is over as it witnesses White Supremacist workers abandoning Donald Trump for failing to deliver.

The latest book on the Trump White House, in stores today, having survived a judicial challenge, is by the former National Security Advisor and uber-hawk, John Bolton, and it is the most authoritative of the steady stream of tell-alls by former Trump staff and government officials, all of which have questioned his fitness for ‘the highest office in the land’. As someone who was ‘In the Room Where it Happened’ Bolton, no white lily, emphasizes Trump’s anti-social, but also, his unpredictable personality, and it was like living inside a pinball machine. I believe that rather than risk another embarrassment such as the one in Tulsa Oklahoma, on the weekend when Black America remembers the destruction of a ‘Black Wall St’ by white mobs in 1921, Trump will ‘go with his gut’ and resign.

He will say something like:”Why should I be stuck in this swamp, when I could be building beautiful buildings in sunny Istanbul — and even frigid Moscow”, leaving America’s White Supremacists to pick up the pieces of their campaign to ‘take America back’ to the time of their unchallenged rule.

The early twenty-first century saw the culmination of an Americanized world. But a hundred years after Western efforts to stop the Russian Revolution in its tracks were defeated in the White Russian Civil War, of 1917 – 1923, America’s black population has not only come into its own, it has empowered the non-Caucasian world majority of eighty-four over sixteen.

Should Trump throw in the towel, Attorney General William Barre is the ‘Musketeer’ least likely to survive. As he fires the Attorney General of New York’s famed ‘Southern District’ who is investigating Trump’s tax returns and other ‘hot button’ issues related to the presidency, a perfectly-timed article, describes him and his brothers as famous bullies at a New York private prep school. Meanwhile, America’s allies will worry less about Barre’s mockery of its vaunted ‘rule of law’ than about National Security under the other two, Secretary of State Pompeo and John Bolton.

A President who listens to his gut is unlikely to ‘stick around’ indefinitely on a sinking ship, nor will he be concerned with the reaction of his gun-toting base, as American cities and towns seek to reform their police forces amidst America’s long-overdue racial reckoning.

Deena Stryker is a US-born international expert, author and journalist that lived in Eastern and Western Europe and has been writing about the big picture for 50 years. Over the years she penned a number of books, including Russia’s Americans. Her essays can also be found at Otherjones. Especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

As the most powerful Empire the world has ever known descends into fascism, all eyes are on Europe to uphold the torch of democracy. Alas, the twenty-eight countries of the European Union are still behaving as they always have since the first Eurasian tribes reached the Atlantic tip of the peninsula: quarreling over everything. While it is customary to analyze their bickering in political terms, it may have been dictated from the start by geography: The rivers of the Eurasian steppe from which the tribes drove westward are hundreds of miles apart, creating a largely barren wilderness, while the peninsula is a well-watered paradise. How would they not fight over the best real estate?

Back in the 9th century, Charlemagne united most of western and central Europe, however his grandsons carved out three nations that have dominated European history ever since: France, Germany and Italy. (Plus ca change…) During the long millennium that followed Charlemagne’s reign, the tip of Eurasia that since the Enlightenment, has been known pompously as ‘Europe’, has proved too exiguous to peacefully contain thirty tribes as diverse as Italians and Dutch, not to mention Gauls and Germans.

For centuries, they fought each other at every turn until they gave themselves a straight-jacket. However, one look at the Eurasian peninsula that, since the Enlightenment, has been known pompously as ‘Europe’, makes clear that it is far too exiguous to peacefully contain thirty tribes as diverse as Italians and Dutch, not to mention Gauls, and Germans.

The latter were first conquered by the Romans, but they have been clashing with the Franks ever since. Italy was largely protected by the Alps, Europe’s heart of stone, which partly separates the three nations from each other, after long being at the mercy of the Spanish and the Dutch, provoking French and German intervention. The boot, as it has been known didn’t modernize until after World War II, and even now, Italy’s status as an ideal vacation spot with an irresistible cuisine prevents it from being taken seriously politically. And yet, thanks to its long Communist tradition, immortalized starting in the nineteen-fifties with the films of Vittorio de Sica and Luchino Visconti, Italy is the only European nation to have maintained normal relations with Russia since the defeat of fascism — on a flight to Moscow, I sat next to a young woman who was going to ride horseback on the steppe. The rest of Europe failed to resist inroads by Washington’s Trojan Horse from across the English Channel, known since the Middle Ages as ‘perfidious Albion’.

The first steps toward what became, in 2000, the European Union were also taken in the nineteen-fifties. Unfortunately, they were based on a fatal decision to reject a federal system such as the US, leaving a political void around Brussels’ rules and regulations, a complex architecture that has satisfied no one.

The top EU job is that of Commission President, and when the term of Luxembourg’s Jean-Claude Juncker was scheduled to end in November 2019, it took months of negotiations for his successor to be named. Although few European male politicians could compete with Ursula van der Leyen’s CV, this former German Defense Minister is the first women to hold the post. Her background in public health may partly explain the fact that Angela Merkel’s Germany has had the most effective response to the Covid 19 pandemic. However, Europe as a whole is reverting to its past: decades after creating a free travel area, known as the Schengen zone, for its citizens, in 2015 it tried to bar African and Middle-Eastern refugees. Finally, when the pandemic hit, neighbors began to close their borders to each other. And when Merkel and Macron, Europe’s bicephal leadership, called for massive loans that would have mainly benefited the south, they were opposed by several well-off northern governments. A situation that not even Charlemagne would have been likely to overcome suggests that as America loses its role as ‘indispensable nation’, Europe’s ‘moment’ has irrevocably passed, leaving the steppe from which it came in charge of the future.

Deena Stryker is a US-born international expert, author and journalist that lived in Eastern and Western Europe and has been writing about the big picture for 50 years. Over the years she penned a number of books, including Russia’s Americans. Her essays can also be found at Otherjones. Especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

In March  I wrote that Trump’s attorney general was signaling to Pompeo that he was ready to join him and former National Security Advisor John Bolton in an effort to prevent Trump from being re-elected.Following the killing of George Floyd, Pompeo has been eerily silent. (Since there is no process other than impeachment for legally ousting a President, it will be up to the voters in November.) However, at this point, it would appear that key members of his own party will ensure that he is not re-elected. While Bolton has since resigned, Barre is among the growing list of top Republicans who are abandoning Donald Trump. It includes former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and more ominously, the country’s top generals. Last to desert the sinking ship, Barre did so without departing his usual mild manner, contradicting the President’s claim that during last week’s demonstrations, he had been ’merely visiting’ the White House bunker. While having every reason to defend the efficiency of those in charge of the President’s safety, who answer to him, Barre has in effect joined the growing list of dissenters.

The misleadingly soft-spoken ‘AG’ indulged in an unconstitutional exercise of his authority when he ordered the US military to implement aggressive crowd control against peaceful demonstrators across the street from the White House on behalf of the President, under the Insurrection Act of 1807 and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 was intended to limit the power of the central government to use federal troops to enforce the law, as codified in the Insurrection Act of 1807. It was enacted by President Rutherford Hayes, following the civil war, and was updated in 1956 and 1981.

Here’s what I wrote about Bill Barre in mid-May:

“From the start, Barre was suspected of being appointed Attorney General in order to do the President’s personal bidding, and indeed he immediately tried to bury the Mueller Report. By controlling the courts, Barre has also enabled the President to continue flouting the rule that he must release several years of tax returns, even as it is revealed that he tried to favor cronies in the development of an anti-Corona medication. Democrats are rhetorically demanding that Barre resign, which can be nothing but a cry in the wilderness.”

Barely a month later, the American political scene is in chaos: while the President called for the military to quell demonstrations against police brutality “His” Generals, as he likes to call them, are accusing him of inching toward fascism. The situation is so dire that the media has even evoked the possibility that if defeated in November, Trump could refuse to leave the White House, setting off a civil war. (In ‘normal’ times, the standing threat posed by his gun-carrying supporters is never mentioned.)

The deliberate death of an unarmed, peaceful black man at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer is probably the most significant event in the history of racism in America since the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 and it was caught on several video cameras. After a week of protests across the country, the funeral of George Floyd was like nothing ever seen before on television. And the fact that so little has changed in America’s relationship with race transformed one too-many police crimes into a world-wide cause, alighting minority populations across the globe. The implication is that having fashioned the post-World War II world in its image, the land of Jefferson may at last be playing a progressive role. For it is still true that as the United States goes, so goes the world.

Deena Stryker is a US-born international expert, author and journalist that lived in Eastern and Western Europe and has been writing about the big picture for 50 years. Over the years she penned a number of books, including Russia’s Americans. Her essays can also be found at Otherjones. Especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

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