Reflectii

The Doomsday Clock has been sitting the past year at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to civilization-ending apocalypse. The United States has done little to quell doomsday apprehensions by ratcheting up tensions with China over Taiwan and its warships in the South China Sea, as well as with Russia over Ukraine, further NATO expansion, and missile deployment in eastern Europe. Will the first-ever Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear-Weapon States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races help to put a damper on any potential conflagration?

On December 15, the Federal Reserve announced numerous quantitative tightening measures that have the intended goal of combating the rising inflation that has been bogging down the American economy. As of November 2021, the rate of inflation has reached 6.8 percent, the highest since 1982, and is unlikely to have peaked yet.

Troubling undercurrents in 2021 – from the U.S. to Afghanistan, Ethiopia or the climate emergency – didn’t send battle deaths soaring or set the world ablaze. But as our look ahead to 2022 shows, many bad situations round the world could easily get worse.

” Foreign involvement in conflicts creates the risk that local clashes light bigger fires. “

After a year that saw an assault on the U.S. Capitol, horrific bloodshed in Ethiopia, a Taliban triumph in Afghanistan, great-power showdowns over Ukraine and Taiwan amid dwindling U.S. ambition on the global stage, COVID-19, and a climate emergency, it’s easy to see a world careening off the tracks.

In a recent Op-Ed, I had outlined the causes and ramifications of a looming supply chain crisis. Shortfalls in fundamental goods and services, however, are just the surface symptoms of a silent, protracted war against human merit.

Throughout history, the most universal and indispensable asset has been human resource. Civilizations were built on human ingenuity. Yet, despite the 21st century hoopla over smart cities, smart workers and smart futures of every kind, it is ironic that talent shortages persist in nearly every critical sector. In the United States alone, labour productivity recently hit a 40-year low even as unemployment claims dropped. How does one explain this anomaly? Perhaps, the “no jabs no jobs” mandate has crushed worker morale?

The power of writing is that the dialogue is not only held with the contemporaries. Writing can reach future generations, too. Great poet Mak says: “when nobody listens, write”. How will we reflect on events of 2020-21 in about 5 or 10 years? How will we explain our indifference, silence and retreat? What will we say to our children?

Back to the pre-Christmas days of 2019, I wrote a short text about the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and our careless joy of unselective deployment of this technology that might irreversibly change social fabrics like never before in history of humankind. Under the title “Future filled with empty choices – Tomorrow (n)ever AI-ies” the text soon after appeared in the Brussels-based New Europe and from there was taken to different outlets all over. Good old pre-Corona times.

Americans performed three very different policies on the People’s Republic: From a total negation (and the Mao-time mutual annihilation assurances), to Nixon’s sudden cohabitation. Finally, a Copernican-turn: the US spotted no real ideological differences between them and the post-Deng China. This signalled a ‘new opening’: West imagined China’s coastal areas as its own industrial suburbia. Soon after, both countries easily agreed on interdependence (in this marriage of convenience): Americans pleased their corporate (machine and tech) sector and unrestrained its greed, while Chinese in return offered a cheap labour, no environmental considerations and submissiveness in imitation. Both spiced it by nearly religious approach to trade.

Throughout much of the past century, the idea of a gold standard for national currencies has been routinely linked with laissez-faire economics and “classical liberalism”—also known as “libertarianism.” It’s not difficult to see why. During the second half of the nineteenth century—as free-market liberalism was especially influential in much of Western Europe—it was the liberals who pushed for the adoption of the system we now know as the classical gold standard (CGS), which reigned supreme in Europe from approximately 1870 to 1914.

“I will continue to take a critical stance against those… who use the liberal structure and tolerance of the constitution to impose totalitarian views of the state and who undermine the rules of the rule of law, using anti-Western indoctrination…. I will not adapt my vision of freedom of expression to…

While “anti-vaxxers” continue to clash with police in various European cities, a whole media discourse has been formulated around the political leanings of these angry crowds, describing them in matter-of-fact terms as conspiracy theorists, populists and right-wing fanatics.

The migration crisis on the eastern border of the European Union (EU), which began earlier this summer and has ramped up dramatically in recent months, came as a surprise not only to the border countries, such as Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland, but also to top EU leaders. After the European migration crisis of 2015, EU politicians became used to the influx of migrants from countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Sub-Saharan Africa travelling through Mediterranean routes and Turkey. When it seemed as though mechanisms to prevent migration flows and control the main transit routes had been developed, a new crisis emerged in the last place anyone would have expected: Belarus. What gave rise to this crisis and what does it mean for the migrants who are desperately trying to enter the EU from Belarus as well as the countries facing a sharp rise in uncontrolled migration?