Okay okay okay, I am returning to the real world – via Walrus. Yeah strange word that. It is a Canadian publication. Why they named it that is, quite simply beyond me. What is a Walrus?
Definition: a large gregarious marine mammal related to the eared seals, having two large downward-pointing tusks and found in the Arctic Ocean?
Strange that a walrus be called gregarious. Perhaps that is why the online publication is called gregarious? Now lets look up gregarious. It has two meanings. I was thinking it was (of a person) fond of company; sociable. Used in a sentence she was a popular and gregarious woman. But instead it is • (of animals) living in flocks or loosely organized communities.
I am actually gregarious, there is no doubt about that. Here are my favorite synonyms; sociable, ,convivial, clubbable; outgoing, affable, amiable, congenial, cordial, hospitable, welcoming, warm, pleasant, comradely, hail-fellow-well-met; chummy, pally; matey, clubby, buddy-buddy. I am all of those – but it you mess with me it is dnefwmmcb (DO NOT FUCK With Ms McBride)! I also love writing, hence I love being alone. I also love learning and acquiring knowledge – this too is a solitary sport – for me anyway because I learn from reading not from lectures.
Never mind – this is not supposed to be about me. My inbox included tempting articles from Walrus. So tempting I paid some of my hard -earned money to get this and share it.
Michael Ignatieff is the author of this enlightening and ground-breaking article. I am sharing an Alexis edited version.
‘My excellent friend and former colleague Steve Walt of the Harvard Kennedy School calls them the predatory hegemons. America, China, and Russia are prowling the world, turning a rule-ordered playing field into a jungle in which the rule of the strongest prevails. The middling powers Prime Minister Mark Carney talked about at Davos are scrambling to escape the jungle. Carney’s travel schedule—Delhi, Tokyo, Sydney—maps the emerging contours of a counter-order of defence and economic partnerships.
Middle powers can seek to protect themselves from the predators, but they can’t keep the predators from ripping each other’s throats. So, the biggest question in international politics is whether the predatory hegemons can cease their depredations and forge a new global order instead. From the hegemons’ point of view, a future in which the only question left is who destroys the other first is not a happy prospect.”
Do not you love this?? Who destroys the other first is not a happy prospect. It places a touch of humor with the awful reality of it all. The author returns to the animal kingdom.
“Animal predators tend to stay out of each other’s backyards, feast only on prey that other predators won’t touch, and risk a fight to the death only when the survival of their group is at stake. If this is true in the animal kingdom, it might be true in our fragile human world. As in the animal kingdom, a jungle without rules is too dangerous even for predators. At least once before in history, great powers have drawn back from the fearful implications of a lawless world. We owe the order created in 1945 to the Soviet, American, and British realization at Yalta and Potsdam that armed giants—one possessing nuclear weapons, and another on the brink of doing so—would destroy each other unless they agreed to a basic framework of deconfliction and conflict management. The order was often violated—by the predators themselves—but at least it kept the world free of nuclear war. The question is whether a new order among the three predators is possible.
The author then throws in some reality – telling us what is going on, not only in the present day but in the past. History is so important to understand the present day.
“The current war in the Gulf lays bare just how perilously far we are from any global order at all. The Gulf region that made itself a global travel, energy, and investment hub in the American unipolar moment is now sheltering in place as the hegemony seeks to revenge the 1979 hostage taking in Tehran. America is discovering that, when it settles scores from the past instead of setting up an order for the future, it ends up benefiting only its enemies.” America’s attack on Iran certainly sends its fellow competitors the message that the United States is not afraid to use its frightening capabilities. But every predatory action by America produces an equal and opposite reaction from its competitors. Russia and China’s defence expenditures, currently a fraction of America’s, are climbing as a result.
The author then goes on to explain how this war had a rather devastating but somewhat liberating effect on both China and Russia for different reasons.
“America’s competitors also use their power to settle past scores instead of trying to create a future in which they can thrive. Rather than acquiescing in the collapse of the Soviet imperial space, President Vladimir Putin decided to avenge the loss with an invasion of its sovereign neighbour. Russia’s savagery in Ukraine forced up North Atlantic Treaty Organization defence expenditure and brought Finland and Sweden into the alliance. At the end of four years of war, the Russian predator is weaker now than it was when it began—more friendless, more tyrannical, and more fragile. This is the nemesis that attends any preference for predation over order.
“China is also obsessed with settling old scores, such as the Communist Party’s failure to absorb Taiwan in 1949, instead of accepting the democratic reality of the island and moving toward creating a new order in which its ascent as a world power is recognized and accepted. It has no vision of its hegemonic place to offer but is content to benefit from the mistakes of its competitors. As America bombs Iran, it is rapidly building up its nuclear arsenals. It has also taken advantage of America’s epic episode of self-harm. It is not hammering its universities and research institutes with ideological crusades. It is funneling state resources into the research that produces new technology, while avoiding wasting its weapon stocks—and its limited store of global legitimacy—by raining death on weaker countries.
This a description of what is really going on in the USA – so refreshing to see the truth, rather than, manufactured reality.
As for America, it has been perennially unable to restrain its expansionary and redemptive impulses with a clear-eyed understanding of the limits of its power. Yet since Vietnam, some Americans have learned to temper hubris with realism. A former Pentagon official said recently, in my hearing, that America has war plans drawn up for every possible theatre of operations in the world, but it only has the weapons to fight one war at a time. It has moved two aircraft-carrier battle groups to the Mediterranean and Gulf regions, but that sends a message of weakness to China since it reveals that the US hasn’t the capacity to deploy both to the Gulf region and the South China Sea. Even the most powerful predator has to understand that there are limits to how far its military can stretch. American predation, first on display in Venezuela, now in Iran, is reaching objective limits in terms of its military capabilities, limits forced upon it by the challenge of deterring a rising China.
The benefits of America’s war on China and the Russia is also chillingly expressed.
“America’s war in the Gulf benefits its competitors in other ways. Due to the impact of the Gulf war on oil supplies, China will pay more for its oil, but it has already stocked 400 days’ worth. By forcing up oil prices, America has eased the pressure on the Russian state budget and extended Putin’s capacity to kill Ukrainians.”
Reason is now employed as a conclusion to this enlightening article. Reason seldom raises its head in any media account.
So, a thoughtful predator might pause at this point to ask himself: If raining death on Iran so obviously benefits his competitors, shouldn’t he bring this misadventure to a quick end? Shouldn’t he refill his military stocks and redeploy his assets to areas of vital competition, like the South China Sea? Shouldn’t he reconsider the decision to abandon Ukraine and hence enable a rival predator’s victory? If small wars empower his big competitors, shouldn’t a predator, with an instinct for self-preservation, raise his sights to the longer-term management of strategic competition? Wouldn’t it make sense to reach out to competitors and propose measures obviously in all their interests: deconfliction protocols, agreements not to use autonomous weapon systems, upper ceilings on nuclear weapon stocks, banning killer satellite systems in space? Even predatory powers might have an interest in this menu of mutually assured restraint. Conflict avoidance would be rational behaviour for hegemonic competitors. But are they rational? It was not rational for Russia to invade Ukraine. American behaviour is so self-harming that something strange may be in play in Washington. We may be watching a predator masking its retreat from global responsibilities with a display of hyper-aggressive behaviour which hides from itself the collapse of its own confidence and imperial resolve. A nation whose national security strategy recently warned Europe of “civilizational erasure” may actually fear its own.
I am a problem solver – the Michael Ignatieff is too – here comes the solution.
All the more reason to grasp that if predation has its limits, if even predators need rules for the jungle, then it is time for them all to sit down and figure out how to keep the nemesis of power from consuming each of them in turn. The problem is who takes the lead. In 1945, America had the confidence to be the first mover in solving the post-war world’s problem of strategic order. In 2026, it is in a phase of hysterically bellicose denial of any first-mover responsibility to shape any order in which others may benefit beside itself. Until that changes, or until China and Russia seize the first-mover advantage, the world edges closer to a degree of disorder that will render all the hegemonys helpless.
Today is Sunday in my world. Tomorrow is Monday. I will be fasting. For two reasons: 1. It is Monday and 2. I took off one day during Ramadan and so I am making it up now. My busy days in Kuching did not allow the discipline of a fast. I plan to reflect upon Ramadan 2026 – a learning experience, a purification and an accomplishment.
More photos from Favorites – or what my Apple people think are my favorites. Hahahah
