OUR DECADENCE

We do not answer military and economic aggression any more.

In a power equilibrium between two or three strong nations, when one of those nations starts an aggression with military or with economic weapons, the other nation whose power is thus aggressed must quickly respond in kind, in order  to reset the equilibrium as it was before.
John Kennedy's famous speech in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was one of these responses, immediate and adequate. It re-established the previously existing power equilibrium.
Unfortunately, to the two aggressions that are happening to us right now, we, the West, are not responding.

1.                Russia uses military aircraft to support Syrian President Assad in his civil war against what is called ‘the Syrian Rebels’. In doing so President Putin has a total disregard for human lives, which in itself is a good enough reason to stop his military aggression. Do we not respect human life and are we not proud of it? But a second reason to stop Putin is that his aggression changes the Middle East power situation to his advantage and our disadvantage.  We, the West, either with French of English aircraft, or the US with their aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean, should have made clear to Putin: “if we see your aircraft over Syria again, we will shoot them down”. Putin might then have backed down or he might have called our bluff. In the latter case we should have shot down a few of his planes and we might have lost a few aircraft ourselves but Putin would certainly not have escalated and equilibrium would have been restored.
WE DID NOTHING OF THE KIND.

2.                Since 2001, China is economically most dishonest in its practices. It hinders establishment by foreign companies, does not respect patents, does not respect human workers’ rights etc. In itself this is a reason for us to take responsive strong measures. But more important, due to Chins’ reservoir of 400 million very low paid workers there is huge disequilibrium in trade with China that enriches Beijing into being by far the most powerful economic operator on the world scene. This economic aggression changes equilibrium in a major way, to China’s advantage and to our disadvantage. China now has a huge stash of money that can be freely spent as Beijing sees fit and every year this stash grows with a few hundred billions. The tariffs on selected goods that both the US and the EU are now setting up are woefully insufficient for stemming the so dangerous enrichment. We should stop this free trade situation that weakens us.
WE DO NOTHING OF THE KIND.

Incompetence or blindness, which is worse?
In the US, the narcissist President is glaringly incompetent on both the military aggression in Syria and the economic take-over from China.
In the European Union, due to our inner complications and infightings, our leaders are blind to these two aggressions as well, even though the horrendous Syrian news is on our screens every day.

These are two classical examples of decadence with inevitable consequences.