Things Are Falling Apart
Aurelien

And the centre's not looking too good, either...
My last essay provoked a lot of comment, including suggestions for taking the analysis a bit further, and trying to look at some of the longer-term consequences for the West of the end of the war in Ukraine, and of its political and military failure there. Here’s a modest attempt, then.
It’s not a prediction. Not only do I not believe in predictions, but it has to be remembered that events are moving at a speed, and with a complexity, that means that what I write now may easily be out of date by the time you read it. In my essay on Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, written a few months ago, I should have mentioned the poor Brigadier Pudding, who spent his spare time writing a book entitled Things That Can Happen in European Politics, only to discover that there were so many possibilities, and so many interactions, that he was unable to keep up with current events (never mind predict the future) and the book was actually going backwards.
That said, it is possible to identify certain directions in which things may (or more importantly may not) go. I want to start with the negative side, because that’s a way of putting some of the more extreme scenarios we read about into some sort of context. I do not suggest that any of these extreme possibilities is inherently impossible, since almost nothing in international politics is, but for the reasons given below I don’t think we should spend that much time on them.