By LEONARDO BOFF*
What Donald Trump wants to preserve with tooth and nail is his country as the only power to guide the destinies of the planet.
If we take Donald Trump's imperial project seriously under the slogan "America First“(understood only in America) it is not unthinkable that dramatic and even tragic times may occur. Its basic purpose is to use power in all areas of life. Let us understand the type of power well. Not as an expression of citizenship, but power as domination in the sense that the founding fathers of modernity, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Isaac Newton, especially Francis Bacon, gave to power: it is the will to power/domination over nature, over people (colonization), over classes, over matter down to the last top quark, over life down to its last gene. This project formulated in Europe, with which they dominated the world, was radicalized by Donald Trump. And perhaps it has also come to an end.
Realizing that the American empire was in decline, it assumed power as domination in its most radical form. It ignored the UN, the WTO, the WHO, and international agreements, and did not respect any law. It broke with its own friends, such as the Europeans. It attempted dialogue, but failed to do so by resorting to force and forcing its adversary to surrender. In this thirst for power, in the style of Hobbes, the great theoretician of power, it proposed to add Canada to the US, take over Greenland, and occupy the Panama Canal.
Perhaps the most inhumane and cruel aspect of this is the expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants, dividing families, denying American citizenship to those born in the United States, and to the children of immigrants. His arrogance to “Make America Great Again” (NAGA) has led him to impose high tariffs on imported products and threaten heavy economic and political penalties to countries that refuse to meet his demands. He makes it clear that the United States is the only country whose interests are global and that it has the right to intervene to make “America Great Again.”
All global agreements reached to reduce the greenhouse effect were abandoned by him and considered ridiculous, such as the 2015 Paris Agreement. He encourages the exploration of fossil fuels and coal, the main causes of billions of tons of CO2 and methane released annually into the atmosphere. He is a radical denier, denying science, making deep cuts to the notoriously advanced research in the USA. Carrying out such a purpose that goes against the global trend of concern about global warming, with the extreme effects that reveal that the Earth is changing and has already changed, makes him an enemy of life and Humanity. He has a murderous and ecocidal mind, obsessed with absolute power, subjugating the entire planet as if it were his expanded backyard that he can dispose of as he pleases.
Logically, every absolute power is opposed by another power that resists it and rejects the strategy of world domination. What Donald Trump wants to preserve with all his might is his country as the only power to guide the destiny of the planet. He is radically opposed to a multipolar world, since powerful powers such as China and Russia and possibly the BRICs are in the same political arena, competing for power on the world stage.
As Noam Chomsky and other analysts of world geopolitics have observed, after an economic war a military war follows. Noam Chomsky also observes that there are enough madmen in the Pentagon who risk a lethal war according to the formula 1+1=0, that is, one completely destroys the other and takes all of humanity with it. If this happens, it will be the end of a large part of humanity, the sky will turn white with particles, photosynthesis of plants and forests will be practically impossible, there will be crop failures, great famine, diseases derived from nuclear terror and the death of millions. This was CG Jung's prognostic dream before he died.
Such a tragedy is not impossible because the data is there and our insane culture that established the dictatorship of analytical reason without any awareness or compassion for the consequences arising from it; created the principle of self-destruction; safeguarding all the benefits that this reason undeniably brought to human life. But all of this can be lost.
Other analysts suggest that there will be no lethal wars, but rather a complete re-emergence of the power that arrived late in the development of autonomous artificial intelligence, capable of controlling each person, the entire energy structure and the entire life of a country. That is why there is a desperate race for Deep Seek-type artificial intelligence, because whoever arrives first would paralyze the competitor's country and render its military apparatus completely ineffective. It would be the abomination of desolation, in biblical terms, one drama after another and, who knows, the tragic end of the human experiment. After we murdered the Son of God when he incarnated in our existence, nothing more tragic could happen, according to Christian belief.
We ask ourselves, why have we not developed “radical emotion”, since this is millions of years more ancestral and more fundamental in us than Intelligence? This would never be denied because it is an essential characteristic of our existence, but with the incorporation of the artificial emotion that I prefer to call radical, because it is the root of our deep being and where reason continually waters its roots, the current human situation would be different: more love than hate would prevail, more cooperation than competition, more care than devastation of nature.
Life has gone through immense crises and has always survived, it will not disappear now miserably due to our lack of care and fair measure.
*Leonardo Boff is an ecologist, philosopher and writer. Author, among other books, of Caring for our common home: clues to delay the end of the world (Vozes). [https://amzn.to/3zR83dw]
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