The West, including the US, has not been so fragile at any time since WW2. But is that true? You could argue that the Cold War, when the Soviet delivered atomic missiles into Cuba (and the prior installation of the nukes were installed in Turkey by the US) were the most dangerous moments for the whole of humanity. Both sides backed down and both sets of the missiles were withdrawn - at the last minute. (Although the West's leaders never mentioned their own retreat.) But the point of the 'success' which stalled nuclear war was that both governments in the US and the USSR were able to shift these issues. The leaderships in both countries could manage their risk. So the nuclear risk could be manageable, or at least substantially reduced, in the context of the politics and the economics of the day. And that is the difference with the crisis of the West now.
We all know the ticking time bomb that festers in the centre of western politics and economics. It has been constantly hidden for decades. It is still regularly distorted by governments and political parties, for example through organised racism, but is now more and more exposed as the real failure of the West. It is simple. Working class people, the majority of national populations, are having their lives more and more reduced and their conditions are worsening. Wealth is more and more centralised and is generally not used to support social advance. In Britain, owned-assets (houses, rents, land, foreign and local tax havens, etc) are six times the size of the British GDP. (The gross domestic product or GDP is a measure of the size and health of a country's economy over a period of time, usually one year). Britain is not alone. There are a hundred and one examples of the modern growth of poverty in the West and the concentration of wealth.
Our rulers now work within a system of politics and economics that does not, that cannot, provide a context which allows much of a turn-around, even if they wanted to. Historically, the mechanism of capitalism and its national and international engine could be tinkered with, or even considerably altered by 'reformers'. (These who thought capitalism could be permanently turned to the good and others, who were frightened of change but sought shifts. See examples of both Roosevelts or Keynes or Lord Hailsham, he who warned in 1943, 'If you don't give the people social reform, they will give you social revolution.') These 'heroes' could not deliver now. And most of the social democrat parties in the West have long gone giving up any challenge to capitalism. The context of today's capitalism, of globalisation, is organised via not so much by production, more by day-to-day monetisation and most of all by the global creation of wealth, by building debt!
All of the western 'powers' loan wealth massively more than they produce riches. Production, aside from super-rich items and communication kit, do not mainly come from the West anymore. Reforming big corporations and banks, as the Roosevelts did in the 20th century when they broke the 'trusts', or latterly used the state to create mass jobs, no longer applies. Capitalism does not work like that these days. The battle with China (that Biden will continue after Obama and Trump) is, ultimately, an attack on the main centre of production in the world (and its resulting exports.) The battle will use finance and withdrawal of investments, despite the huge US national debt, as a means to stall foreign production. Since 2008, America's national debt has surged nearly 200%, reaching $27 trillion as of October 2020. The debt is owned by banks and the state. The banks sell the debts for profit via the stock exchanges and the moneterising of assets. The expanding and remaining debt and interest on the debt is used to run the US, from pensions to soldiers.
So we get to the time-bomb. Many commentators and politicians now shout loud about the the need for a redistribution of wealth in most Western societies. And here we can see the political barbed wire as well as the economic invincible structure preventing any terms of structural reform. The EU has been called many things, including the extension of the brotherhood of 'man'. It, apparently, has stopped European wars and now stands up to the US as well as China. Less talked about is the extraordinary, completely undemocratic and corrupt lid that has been built, like a ceiling of concrete, across the European nations. This is in respect of the absolute requirement for saving the banks in 2008/9 and crushing any and all nations in the EU into various types of austerity. The EU saved their banks and stock exchanges as a globalist structure that could not even be questioned by 446 million European people.
What's happening? What's happening is a period of revolt and revolution. The left in the US has taken the lead, at least initially, in the struggle in the US. Biden's opposition to Trump will go nowhere, but the anger in a country that is failing large parts of its society will continue to rise from both the right and the left. There will be a modern battle that has to remove the unfinished US's historical civil war. And only a massive shift between wealth and poverty will now be able to carry through a new economics and politics based on the rights of the whole of society. Besides the US, the upheaval across the West takes other forms but all arise from the same source.
The UK government has just allowed the highest proportion of Covid deaths anywhere. Its abysmal failure over the Pandemic and the results of its cock-handed economy based on services, is already breaking up the doubtful success offered by the Tory Brexit among all sections of the working class. Meanwhile Scotland is preparing for the break up if Britain. History goes fast when the fundamental rot in society comes clearer and clearer.
The forward momentum for Irish nationality is now opening another stage because of the weakening of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in the UK controlled North of Ireland. This follows from the combined Irish government (of the ex-mutually hated) Fianna Foil and Fianna Gail - which has not so much doubled their strength, but rather sliced these old corrupt parties in half - in an effort to block Sinn Féin. The clock is ticking fast for a united, radical Ireland.
In France a continuous battle by sources across the country have first cut away the far right's leadership as the main beacon for change. That now continues with a semi-permanent street-led battle against the police and, behind that, the tipping over of Macron's state as yet another mini-napoleonic failure.
These and many other western crises all share two inexorable facts. First, there are no obvious answers in the present system of society, or in the present economics and the politics in the West, that are currently able to provide any clear and sincere answers. Second, a revolt is rising across the West.