November 2012: a dystopian dream
On both sides of the Atlantic, senior officials are issuing dire warnings about global political turmoil. In the US, Admiral Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, says instability produced by the economic crisis is now the biggest short-term threat to US national security. In Britain, Ed Balls, a cabinet minister, argues that the financial crisis is “more serious” than that of the 1930s, adding cheerfully: “And we all remember how the politics of that era were shaped by the economy.”
All this is alarming – but also rather vague. So how might world politics look in four years’ time? Something like this, perhaps . . .
It is November 7 2012. At three in the morning, an exhausted-looking President Barack Obama appears before weeping supporters in the ballroom of the Chicago Hilton and concedes defeat. The euphoria of his victory-night speech in Grant Park four years earlier is a distant memory. The Obama administration has been overwhelmed by America’s economic problems. Sarah Palin is the new president of the US.
Elected on a ticket of populism at home and nationalism overseas, President-elect Palin starts to take congratulatory phone calls from foreign leaders. First on the line is Avigdor Lieberman, the prime minister of Israel; then comes President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Five different leaders claiming to speak in the name of the European Union try to place calls – but they are all put on hold. As for the Chinese leadership, the new president is not speaking to them. How could she, after she has campaigned against the “communist currency manipulators of Beijing”?
The Chinese have resisted the temptation to call Mrs Palin a “capitalist running dog”. But Maoist language is creeping back into Chinese official discourse, as the country struggles to adjust to the collapse and closure of its export markets. Alarmed by the large number of unemployed in the cities, the Communist party has abandoned plans to privatise rural land and invested heavily in public works in the countryside and new collective farms. This policy is swiftly dubbed “the Great Leap backwards”.
The world event that had most damaged Mr Obama was Iran’s successful test of a nuclear weapon in 2011. The Republicans had hammered home their message that Mr Obama was “a second Jimmy Carter”, who had been duped by hopes of striking a grand bargain with Iran.
The Iranian nuclear test had also driven Israeli politics even further to the right and set the stage for the rise of Mr Lieberman. His campaign slogan in the 2011 election – “bomb them while they are on the toilet” – was borrowed from Mr Putin and chanted gleefully by Mr Lieberman’s Russian-speaking supporters.
Mr Obama had successfully delivered on his campaign promise to get America out of Iraq. But by 2012, the voters were taking that for granted. Nato’s messy withdrawal from Afghanistan had, however, damaged him. The US and its allies had left behind a country run by a patchwork of more or less co-operative warlords. The new anti-terror strategy was officially called “watch and strike”, and unofficially dubbed “whack a mole”. It involved monitoring potential terrorist camps from a distance and bombing them.
Mr Putin had said that he had no intention of gloating about Afghanistan, before adding: “But the age of American arrogance is over.”
By 2010, Mr Putin was safely installed back in the Kremlin. The gravity of Russia’s economic crisis had led the official media to clamour for a return to strong leadership. President Dmitry Medvedev had taken the hint in early 2010 and stepped aside. His arrest the following year came as an unpleasant surprise.
In 2011, the unstable democratic governments in Ukraine and Georgia had fallen, after weeks of popular unrest. The Russians were suspected of orchestrating events but nobody could prove anything. The Americans and Europeans had protested – but only feebly. Privately, many western diplomats argued that only Mr Putin stood between Russia and fascism.
After the fall of the Merkel government in 2009, Germany was governed by a succession of unstable coalitions and forgettable chancellors. The hope that had accompanied the election of David Cameron as Britain’s prime minister, under the slogan “let the sunshine in”, had swiftly disappeared. The hapless Mr Cameron was now the most unpopular prime minister in British history.
This left President Nicolas Sarkozy of France as the dominant figure in the EU. His divorce from Carla Bruni and marriage to Madonna had only briefly distracted him.
Mr Sarkozy had weathered the denunciations that followed his decision in 2010 formally to withdraw France from the EU’s regimes on competition and state aid. All main French banks and industrial conglomerates were instructed to make 90 per cent of their investments at home. Mr Sarkozy’s move was widely denounced across the EU – but then equally widely imitated.
At home, the French president was under pressure to go even further in a nationalist direction from his main political opponents – “the postman and the housewife”, otherwise known as Olivier Besancenot, a Trotskyite, and Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front. Ms Le Pen cited the rise of Sarah Palin as an inspiration.
As the morning of November 7 wore on, President Palin herself took to the stage in Anchorage, Alaska. Her supporters cheered and waved ice hockey sticks. “I’ve got a message for the mullahs and the commies,” she roared: “America is back.”
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November 2012: a dystopian dream
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Originally Posted by tkubic46
