Glimpses of the multipolar world, 16 September 2023
G20. US debt. Blood, ruins and wars. Automatic writing. Peace. Oliver Stone. Overy and Yeats.
Each week in my newsletter, I offer seven glimpses of the multipolar world, its culture, history and new reality. This week, I share glimpses of:
The Big Story. Indian G20 show US running out of time
Governing the Multipolar World. US running out of dimes.
Using History Mindfully. Blood, ruin and world wars I to III.
Fragments of the Burning Archive. Modernism and automatic writing.
What surprised me most. An old call for peace.
Gratitudes and Works-in-Progress. Oliver Stone.
Reading and Closing Verse. Overy and Yeats.
Have you checked out my online course on Mindful History? If you are interested in my newsletter, this introduction to thinking with history in order to make wise decisions today could help you. It is currently on a special introductory price, but I will be resetting the price at the end of October so now is the time to get some great value that will help you understand the world and live mindfully.
1. The Big Story G20 shows US is running out of time
The big story of the week is the G20 Summit in New Delhi and what it reveals about the new force fields of the multipolar world.
It is significant also since this new disposition of the world sets a different stage for next week’s UN General Assembly meeting. It will be interesting to observe the speeches of leaders at the UN next week. There may well be a few rhetorical and substantial steps away from the wrecked starship of US diplomacy, the USS Exceptionalism.
I published an article during the week in Pearls and Irritations using this metaphor. You can read it in full here. However, one key paragraph sets the scene for next week’s debates.
On reinvigorated multilateralism, the Declaration reaffirms UN General Assembly Resolution 75/1 (2020) on multilateralism, and appeals to “make global governance more representative, effective, transparent and accountable.” It insists the UN be responsive to all members, faithful to its founding principles, and effective in delivering its mandate. Regrettably, it seems there is no breakthrough on reform to membership and processes of the UN Security Council. But it is notable that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has spoken strongly recently in favour of adapting the UN to the realities of a multipolar world.
I ended with a call for the world to unite behind India, that is Bharat, to reform the United Nations, especially the membership and processes of the UN Security Council. To me that is the significance of the G20 meeting. The G20 has progressed, but been put in its place. It has been asked to stick to its knitting, and to let the UN do its job. The task now is to reinvigorate multilateralism where it should occur in the UN and in the UN Security Council. But for that to happen the US leaders must walk away from the wreck of the USS Exceptionalism, before it is too late.
I have followed a few reactions to the summit. Jeffrey Sachs praised the outcome. Indian commentators have rightly praised a triumph for India. Joe Biden appears just more confused. In a speech in Hanoi after the Summit he spoke about the Third World, and then corrected himself to speak of the countries of the Southern Hemisphere. All those briefings on the Global South just have not stuck, even though Willy Brandt coined the term in 1980. Joe Biden’s mind is powered by the outdated tech of the USS Exceptionalism.
It seems, moreover, that the head of US diplomacy has just not got my memo. Anthony Blinken delivered a speech at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) on “The Power and Purpose of American Diplomacy in a New Era”. This institution is consecrated to the memory of that Terrible Pope of American diplomacy, Zbigniew Brzezinski. The speech appears to have been timed to be the icing on the cake of an American diplomatic triumph at the New Delhi Summit. It reveals American leaders are still trapped in the tin can of their broken ideological assumptions.
It has been reported by some as an admission that the old world order has changed because of this remark.
“But there is a growing recognition that several of the core assumptions that shaped our approach to the post-Cold War era no longer hold.”
But Blinken really does not question why the US assumed the world was other than it was in reality, and proceeds to restate the same old grandiose catechism of US exceptionalism taught to generations by Dr Brzezinski.
We must act, and act decisively.
We must live history forward – as Acheson did, as Brzezinski did, as have all the other great strategists who’ve guided America through these hinge moments.
We must put our hand on the rudder of history and chart a path forward, guided by the things that are certain even in uncertain times – our principles, our partners, our vision for where we want to go – so that, when the fog lifts, the world that emerges tilts toward freedom, toward peace, toward an international community capable of rising to the challenges of its time.
No one understands this better than President Biden. And America is in a significantly stronger position in the world than it was two and a half years ago because of the actions that he’s taken.
I’m convinced that, decades from now, when the history of this period is written – maybe by some of you – it will show that the way we acted – decisively, strategically, with humility and confidence to reimagine the power and purpose of U.S. diplomacy – we secured America’s future, we delivered for our people, we laid the foundation for a more free, a more open, a more prosperous era – for the American people and for people around the world.
The successful Indian diplomats who negotiated their triumph in New Delhi will, however, be scrutinising this speech carefully for this remark on the acid test issue of the UN Security Council.
That’s why we’ve put forward an affirmative vision for expanding the UN Security Council to incorporate more geographically diverse perspectives – including new permanent and non-permanent members from Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean.
Such fuzzy vision ignores Bharat, and uses the revealing verb “to incorporate” to reflect the same old mindset that the other nations of the world will follow the US lead. But the delegates of the plural, multipolar world who will gather for the UN General Assembly next week are unlikely to be convinced that this vision displays US command of yet another “hinge moment.” They will have read the editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post that urged the failing elderly US President to step down. They would have watched his arrogant, confused ignorance in New Delhi, Hanoi and around the world. They will know that the power and purpose of U.S. diplomacy are running out of time.
2. Governing the unruly multipolar world: US running out of dimes.
They will also know that the exceptional US nation is running out of dimes to fuel its imperial dreams.
All empires ultimately need to find a way to pay the bills. They often charm themselves into thinking that they can transcend simple book-keeping. But the beliefs that this empire, elite, nation, or set of ideas, and they alone, are exempt from the reciprocity of exchange always prove to be delusions. The money dream undoes them.
And so it seems American exceptionalism has fallen to earth, not only in diplomacy, but in the humble household bills that are sometimes called public finance. The historian Niall Ferguson has pointed out that US debt interest exceeds defence spending. He has studied the British empire, and has long schooled American realists to face up to the civilised man’s imperial burden. His study of the British Empire argued that the tipping point for the British empire was when interest costs exceeded military expenditures. When the Brits could no longer afford the bills, the defence of the empire, on which the sun was never to set, fell apart.
In a Bloomberg column that is behind a paywall but summarised here, Niall Ferguson noted that in the US, for the first time in almost 3 decades, military expenditures match interest costs, and next year interest payments will exceed defence spending.
Debt was $19.9 trillion in 2017, and has risen to $32.3 trillion in 2023. From January 2020 to its peak last April, the size of the Fed's balance sheet more than doubled from $4.2 trillion to just under $9 trillion.
Ferguson has written a biography of Henry Kissinger, and in earlier times coined the term ‘Chimerica’ to describe the uneasy partnership between USA and China, under the shadow of mutually assured economic destruction. Ferguson presented these financial facts to warn that the US cannot afford a war with China, without even considering the question of whether the US could even win a war militarily against China. He argues further confrontation over Taiwan should be ruled out because the US cannot deal with the negative financial consequences of a yet another exceptionalist war.
And yet the US administration this week announced it would increase military spending for the island province of Taiwan. What will it take for the elites of America to face the consequences of their spendthrift regime?
3. Using history to live mindfully in the present.
I have begun reading Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: the Great Imperial War 1931-45 (2021). This new comprehensive world history of World War Two renames, redates and rethinks that conflict that still dominates the mental world of world leaders, as we saw in Tony Blinken’s speech, “The Power and Purpose of American Diplomacy in a New Era”, and the institutional arrangements of world powers. The front page includes a comment by the distinguished historian, Richard Evans that this book is “a masterpiece that will change the way we talk about the war.”
I am only 140 pages into a 1000 page book (including notes), but I can attest to the truth of Evans’ claim. My reading does include the passage in which Overy reinterprets “appeasement” and the events of Munich 1938. These events have become a pivotal myth and crucial mental framework for interpreting every international crisis. For example, there have been many routine references to this story about the past during the conflict in Ukraine. In my online course on Mindful History, I referred to this myth as an example of the thinking traps we can fall into with some fixed stories of the past.
So, let me quote a key passage of this book that demonstrates how you can see the world more clearly and more mindfully with a little bit of quality world history.
“Given the widespread popular fear of a general war and the manifold problems of holding together global empires that were difficult to defend adequately against external threats and internal political protest, the reduction of risk became a central component of both British and French strategy in the 1930s.
The avoidance of risks is usually defined by the term ‘appeasement’, but it is an unfortunate term, as one of its proponenets, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamerlain, later remarked. Appeasement has become the lightning conductor for a long line of critical and hostile analysis of Western behaviour in the face of dictatorship, and a watchword for any current failure to act with firmness against any threat to Western security. Yet as a description of British and French strategy in the 1930s it is highly misleading.”
(Overy, Blood and Ruins, pp 72-73)
Overy’s book is important and crucial to understand the great imperial war of 1931-45, the world orders that followed, and the current crisis that our world leaders are recklessly navigating us through. I shall return to it on The Burning Archive.
4. Fragments of the Burning Archive.
On the podcast this week I did the second of my series on the Nobel Prize, and featured the winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature, William Butler (W.B.) Yeats.
I summarised one list of poems by W.B. Yeats that are commemorated most today in Ireland. This list was:
1. The Stolen Child (1886) the loss of innocence in a life which is “more full of weeping than he can understand”
2. Sailing to Byzantium (1928) the spiritual symbolism of Byzantium
3. Lake Isle of Innisfree – inspired by Ireland’s landscape
4. An Irish Airman Foresees His Death – a poignant war poem “I know that I shall meet my fate / Somewhere among the clouds above; / Those that I fight I do not hate, / Those that I guard I do not love.”
5. Among School Children (1928) inspired by a visit to a Waterford school
6. These are the Clouds (1910) expressing fear of modern life
7. Leda and the Swan based on Irish and Greek mythology
8. Easter 1916 “All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”
9. The Second Coming (1920)
10. Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven - a love poem for Maud Gonne
I read The Second Coming and parts of Sailing to Byzantium on the podcast, and you can listen to some quality actors, including Liam Neeson and Jeremy Irons, read Yeats here.
I have long loved some Yeats poems and yet I learned three surprising new things in preparing this episode.
First, there was the turmoil and complexity of Yeats’ complex emotional life. He had a long unrequited love with a major cultural figure, Maud Gonne, which he later transferred to her daughter. Denied that relationship, he married another spiritualist, Georgie Hyde Lees, who took the name George after their marriage.
Maud Gonne MacBride however is important in Irish history, not just because of Yeats’ obsession. She was a wealthy Irish republican revolutionary, suffragette and actress, and advocate for Irish Home Rule and then for the republic declared in 1916. During the 1930s, as a founding member of the Social Credit Party, she promoted the distributive programme of C. H. Douglas. Her political views differed from Yeats, even if they shared an attachment to the Irish nation.
Here was the second great surprise, the complexity of Yeats’ political and social views. He was an ardent nationalist, but also reeled from some manifestations of extremism and violence. In the 1920s and 1930s, Yeats was drawn to authoritarian, anti-democratic, nationalist movements of Europe. He opposed individualism and political liberalism and saw the fascist movements as a triumph of public order and the needs of the national collective over petty individualism. In context, I see Yeats as wrestling with the mixed legacy of Anglo-Protestant empire in Ireland, and the great traumas of newly liberal democratic societies during World War One, the 1920s and 1930s.
On the other hand he was a mystic, who arguably was ill-suited to politics. In 1923 St John Ervine (another Irish writer and playwright) claimed, with some personal knowledge of Yeats, that he was isolated from the "common life of his time", and that he "had never met anyone who seems so unaware of contemporary affairs... due not to affectation, but sheer lack of interest. He probably would not have known of the War at all had not the Germans dropped a bomb near his lodgings off the Euston Road."
The third great surprise was the role of spiritualist practices, automatic writing and Yeats’ spouse, George Yeats (born Georgie Hyde Lees), in writing the book of occult philosophy, The Vision, that is at the centre of the great poem, The Second Coming.
Listen to the podcast here on Spotify or Apple or other platforms, to enjoy this remarkable story.
5. What surprised me most this week.
After the G20 Summit Narendra Modi shared the text of a speech from 130 years ago that yet spoke to our current moment. It was the speech by Swami Vivekananda in Chicago in 1893 at the Parliament of Religions. It resonated today as a clarion call for global unity and harmony.
Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization, and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honour of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.
6. Gratitudes and Works-in-Progress
I am grateful to Oliver Stone for expressing in some old awards speech that I chanced upon a call to the ordinary courage of the life of a writer who is trying to understand the history and dilemmas of our times.
“I’ve fought these people who practice war for most of my life. It’s a tiring game. And mostly you’ll get your a– kicked. With all the criticism and insults you’ll receive, and the flattery too, it’s important to remember, if you believe in what you’re saying and you can stay the course, you can make a difference,” he said. “I urge you to find a way to remain alone with yourself, listen to your silences, not always in a writer’s room. Try to find not what the crowd wants so you can be successful, but try instead to find the true inner meaning of your life here on earth, and never give up on your heart in your struggle for peace, decency, and telling the truth.”
I am also super-grateful to all my subscribers on YouTube. I passed the 1,000 subscriber milestone this week. If you have not done so yet, check out my YouTube channel, subscribe, and binge-watch a few of my playlists!
This week my works-in-progress and published content were:
on the podcast I published Episode 117. History of the Nobel Pize for Literature and 2022 Winner Annie Ernaux
On the YouTube Channel I published Explorers (Magellan, Columbus, Vespucci, Cook), Statues and the Value of History - which is great and you really should watch it! - and The real history of professions v managers from Florence Nightingale to university - Hannah Forsyth
On Twitter, I promoted my work with one tweet on my podcast with Hannah Forsyth exceeding 1000 views because of the controversy consuming dismissal of history and humanities academics at Australian Catholic University.
On SubStack I deferred my piece on the economic dimensions of the polycrisis
I published The G20 returns to earth on johnmenadue.com
I completed and started loading my Writing in Government Masterclass
Next week, I will be writing the next instalment of my Sub-Stack series on the World Crisis, and focussing on my writing in government masterclass. I am also doing some reflection on my content strategy to make sure I deliver the right content for you, do not spread myself too thin, and can sustain this life as an independent author.
On Youtube, I am releasing the full interview with Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. It is a wonderful conversation so do check it out. I may also do a short video on the Nobel Prize for Literature, and even a live stream on G20 and world affairs.
On Thursday, I am doing an interview with Hrvoje Moric on TNT radio, and will bring that to the YouTube channel the following week.
On Friday on the podcast, I continue the Nobel Prize series and look at the 1973 winner, Australian Patrick White.
Have you bought any of my books?
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat: Writing on Governing
my book of essays From the Burning Archive: Essays and Fragments 2015-2021.
my collected poems, Gathering Flowers of the Mind.
I have given Amazon links for convenience but these books are also available on Booktopia, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and other online retailers.
7. What I am Reading and Closing Verse
This week I have been reading Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: the Great Imperial War 1931-45 (2021) and J. Sai Deepak, This is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution (2021)
My verse this week is Yeats An Irish Airman Foresees his Death, which seems strangely evocative of the times in which we live when we are called upon to commit to things that betray us.
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
Until next week, take care, and stay sane.