Dear Friends,                                                                                    The Suez Moment

I remember long ago talking with my friend Jessica about the Bush Jr administration’s ongoing invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. She said that they reminded her of Suez – the disastrous British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt to prevent the nationalization of the Suez Canal by the Egyptian nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1956. Suez demonstrated what was already pretty clear to everyone other than the British, Britain was no longer a world power.

I thought she was right then, and always more and more so as time has gone on. In reality Britain had long ceased to be a world power, but this supremely stupid action trumpeted the fact in brilliant neon lights to the whole world.

No nation holds on to hegemony – regional, continental, international, global – forever, and that’s a good thing. David Hume has a nice essay on this with a kind of invisible hand mechanism (he and Mr Invisible Hand were best bros). He says that the necessary effort by the hegemonic power to maintain hegemony necessarily leads to its downfall. He’s talking about necessary efforts without which hegemony cannot be sustained.

What the British in Suez, the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan were doing wasn’t quite like that, there was no real need for them to engage in these actions. They were own goals. Nonetheless, these needless operations demonstrated their underlying weakness as hegemonic powers, they accelerated global recognition of their weakness.

And here we are again, but now with the most monumental own goal of all time. A president of the United States inherits from the previous president one of the best economies ever bequeathed by one president to another, and in less than four months has brought it to the brink of a catastrophe increasingly likened to the Great Depression. The Wall Street Journal – the Wall Street Journal – has announced that April 2025 will be the worst month for Wall Street since 1932.

However stupid were the British (and the French and Israelis) in 1956, the Americans in 2003, they had some kind of reason, however stupid, for what they did.

There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for what Trump is doing now other than that he seems to have a very deep, and creepy, desire for the word “tariff”, and yes, his desire does seem to be for the word itself. So get him on the couch, and maybe, just maybe, years of analysis will reveal the aitiology of his desire. Yes, but we don’t have time for that. So what now?

Unfortunately what seems increasingly likely is that we – the world – will have to go through a global economic catastrophe. If so, the best hope is that we can get through it quickly. Since it is an entirely manufactured and unnecessary crisis, once its manufacturer – astonishingly enough a single (very stupid and ignorant) person – and his sycophants have been brushed aside, maybe recovery can be fairly swift.

Einstein said “make mistakes quickly”. I don’t think that this is exactly what he had in mind, but maybe it’s the best we’ve got right now.

Love and solidarity,

            Bobby