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There are many wars in the world, visible and invisible, and it is the colossal tragedy of the fateful days we are all living through. Many are asking the question: Who has ruled the world for the past four years? And again: Who really leads the United States and who speaks for America? The U.S. Administration increasingly resembles a force governed on autopilot, with a warmongering paradigm, which threatens to send passengers crashing.
There are many wars being fought in the Middle East, not just those that are immediately obvious: Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Tehran, and the Red Sea. For example, within Israeli society there has long been an abnormal war, a civil war, between the ruling majority and the opposition forces. Within the Palestinian community, a parallel civil war is quietly going on between Hamas and the National Authority, which decided in 1993 to establish the two-state solution. Among both Israelis and Palestinians, there are those who speak of a homeland stretching from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, from the river to the sea; these Israelis and Palestinians consider their compatriots to be hard-core enemies.
In one of the most confusing and dangerous situations, there are those who have very clear ideas and those who are in the dark. Anthony Blinken said he didn’t know: the Americans were not involved in or informed of Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination, and Benjamin Netanyahu certainly didn’t ask his permission. Blinken’s ignorance is matched by an unforgettable article in Foreign Affairs magazine, written by his twin in the control room, Jake Sullivan, and printed a few days before October 7. Speaking of the Middle East, Sullivan wrote cheerfully in his masterpiece: “The region is calmer than it has been in decades.” Comforted by his modesty, Sullivan boasted that he had been able to develop a successful combination of deterrence and diplomacy. Backed by his chronometric predictions, he triumphantly concluded that conflicts had “cooled” in this area of the Middle East. After October 7, the Foreign Affairs online edition tried to rectify the situation by correcting the article, but unfortunately for those interested, hard copies were already in circulation. In any case, Modi, Ignacio Lula da Silva, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud are keeping a copy of the original edition on their desks to show their American guests, always generous with selfless – and above all, prudent – advice.
Thus, the question of “who has ruled the world for the last four years?” is indeed a mystery. Strictly speaking, not Biden, not Blinken and Sullivan, not even William Burns, now being praised for the prisoner exchange, whose role in it is on a par with that of the petty scribblers under George Smiley (Smiley’s People, a novel by John le Carré – ed.). In the oral lore of the intelligence services, Smiley and his men are considered “tough,” but they believe that a prisoner exchange, even as significant as the one that recently took place, cannot compare with the colossal tragedy of today’s fateful days. It will require much more than a mere exchange of prisoners. We will need to move towards a hard-won universal peace.
It has been rightly observed that Henry Kissinger’s famous ironic joke can be reversed today: if someone wants to appease America, what phone number should he dial? Who speaks on America’s behalf? If it were Blinken, Sullivan, Burns, we’d be somewhere between Nostradamus and a puppet theater. Because with them it is not about mediocrity, accidents, or lies, but about an arbitrary scenario, an attempt to rule the world, which we see in action in Europe, where we find the same mentality that led to the collapse in the Middle East.
In the history books Blinken, Sullivan and Burns will be remembered as being responsible for very baleful pages of Europe and the Middle East
We can’t say who has ruled the world for the last four years, but it’s the same mentality that rules the unrulable America, where the quality of life for many has become abysmal, characterized by rampant crime and fentanyl, while high levels of education and health care are luxuries for a privileged few.
In America’s government – more than Blinken, Sullivan, Burns – there was something resembling an autopilot, that is, a militant paradigm combined in the anonymity of its verbalizing proponents, bound by interchangeability, the ability to easily alternate these with those or with others in the same self-righteous banter.
Ignorance ruled by its wrong predictions because this way of reasoning is wrong. This autopilot sends passengers into a crash. Even if they did make prophecies worthy of Nostradamus’s conspiracies, Blinken, Sullivan, and Burns in their own way ruled the unrulable for four years, with the soft hand of a junkyard operator, while claiming to be exquisite architects of chaos. They will be remembered in history books as being responsible for very disastrous pages in Europe and the Middle East. The hope is that they will be replaced in November by individuals capable of promoting a paradigm shift.
