Top row from left: Germany Chancellor Friedrich Merz, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Bottom row from left: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Finland President Alexander Stubb, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Via.
After the farcical “Liberation Day” I argued that the only way through this situation is unity, that what was needed was to come together. Monday, Europe will arrive at the White House united, with a simple message, the same message Lula sent last month:
The world has changed. We don't want an emperor.
Call it the Lula Doctrine.
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There is a straightforward reality: Trump and Putin are not powerful enough to rule like the tsars and emperors they admire. If Putin were capable of dominating his “sphere of influence” he would have by now. If Trump were capable of coercing a “Mar-a-Lago accord” then the 90-day-trade-deal-orama would’ve gone very differently.
They are not powerful enough because the complexity of interdependence in the world has increased to the point that the system is not controllable. It is complexity which they are specifically attacking, they are attempting to re-impose simple logics (which is what hierarchical power structures are: crude simplifications of complex realities).
Putin is looking for as much land as he can grab, coastal areas preferred. He’s just another petty autocrat in a long line of them, a lunch-money bully, it’s not more complicated than that. 47 is obviously looking for any arrangement in Ukraine that doesn’t involve significant American commitment, because he knows how powerless he is to do anything except damage Russia, which he doesn’t want to do. He doesn’t want to hurt Russia because he is a fundamentally a corrupt landlord, a wanna be feudalist. He seeking freedom to openly receive bribes in Russia as he did in Qatar — Trump Tower Yalta? — while dividing expanding his territorial portfolio.
They don’t want anyone to know that they are not powerful enough, so they stomp and yell and bomb and promise the worst unless you give them what they want. They demand you say thank you, while insulting your intelligence and treating your rights like their toy.
You cannot reason with bully imperialists. It’s been tried. Their wants are limitless, as are their demands. Appeasement is impossible, not to mention morally unacceptable. Their word is worthless, their agreements plays for time to regroup and launch the next attack. Nevertheless they require a response, and they are dangerous.
Respond with solidarity. Immediately. Reinforce the interdependencies by building new links that can bypass the old ones, maintain the complexity through structural evolution: make sure the new links connect new clusters and create new pathways.
"The world needs to find a way that our trade relations don't have to pass through the dollar," Lula told journalists at the end of the BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro.
"Obviously, we have to be responsible about doing that carefully. Our central banks have to discuss it with central banks from other countries," he added. "That's something that happens gradually until it's consolidated."
The money shapes the order. The US has made itself clear: it will extract as much as possible form dollar dependency, trade dependency, security dependency, innovation dependency. The way to defeat that is through escaping from a dependent position to an interdependent position, accepting that this is a process which requires power-sharing but in exchange the power effect is multiplicative.
This is a difficult mission but an achievable one. In fact it will happen. The only question is how damaged the world will be before it does. Greater proactivity today can minimize some of the damage in future days.
More on power and its relation to complex interdependence soon. I’ve drafted posts fleshing out the complex interdependence logic and applying a methodology, but some family stuff took up more time than anticipated this summer. I haven't forgotten, and will return to it.
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