The Great Switch: Old Ways Fade and are Irrecoverable — Alastair Crooke

What is going on? Is there some unifying thread connecting this sudden outbreak of widespread global tension? Of course all these conflicts have their separate background contexts. But why so many at the same time? Well, in a word, it’s all about change — about the recognition that we are at the cusp of major changes. The world is beginning to pre-position....

We are indeed at a point of inflection. Some westerners may muse that the status quo ante is somehow recoverable (if only Trump is gone, and the ‘populists’ contained). That is delusional. The external world is transforming. China, Russia and Asia will replace US hegemony – not with another hegemony– but with a loose coalition of states espousing a different values and civilizational model. And with their values differing from the Protestant paradigm of the John Locke, John Hume and Adam Smith, they will arrive at other economic perspectives.

And the status quo ante will not be available even domestically in the West. For, the western party political system itself is in irreversible transformation, too. Western politicians of all spectra are trying to adjust to a public life in which the old world is still around, whilst the new one is only emerging.

Antonio Gramschi: The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, “Wave of Materialism” and “Crisis of Authority” (NY: International Publishers), (1971), pp. 275-276, and Prison Notebooks Volume II, Notebook 3, 1930, (2011 edition) SS-34, Past and Present 32-33. Wikiquote

Many in the US seem to assume that when Trump is gone, the country will return to normal. Alastair Crooke disagrees.

The status quo ante is no longer available – even domestically – in the West, let alone externally. The Great Switch is underway. Society has lost its cultural centre of gravity. The old way of life is fading, and is close to extinction.

Strategic Culture Foundation
The Great Switch: Old Ways Fade and are Irrecoverable
Alastair Crooke | founder and director of the Conflicts Forum, and former British diplomat and senior figure in British intelligence and in European Union diplomacy

See also at SCF

Is the Geopolitical Chessboard Now Digital
Tim Kirby