The mounting cost of unseriousness
If a viable West is still possible, post-America will not be part of it
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Just for grins, just now I did a search for how many times the word “seriousness” and its derivatives have appeared in Precipice posts. It’s been included in five titles: “The Seriousness We Need and Are Not Going To Get,” “Maybe Some Seriousness Is In Order,” “More Thoughts On Seriousness,” “Okay, Folks, Time For Another Seriousness Discussion,” and “An Invitation To Seriousness,” . In May 2023, there was a post titled “Our Unseriousness Is Going To Get Us Killed.” The term “seriousness” also appears in the bodies of several additional essays.
It’s clearly a preoccupation here.
Every once in a while we get an especially bracing taste of how dangerous the world stage is. This is such a moment.
Russia has been inflicting some of the most savage attacks on Ukraine in the three - really, eleven - years of its violation of its neighbor’s sovereignty in recent weeks.
Europe is getting a clue. EU defense expenditures rose 30 percent from 2021 to 2024. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has announced that the West will no longer put range restrictions on Ukrainian missile firings into Russia.
So what is post-America doing at this juncture? Well, its president is giving the international community a sense of his “thinking” on the matter in some social media posts and conversations with the press.
He clearly still views this dire situation in the terms that shape his takes on all foreign-policy matters. If he and a rogue leader personally get on well, why, that makes for harmonious relations between the US and the nation in question. He’s “surprised” at Putin’s ramping up of his barbarity, because, gee, he’s “known him a long time, always gotten along with him.” What got into Vlad, anyway, that would have him engage in icky stuff like “sending rockets into cities and killing people”? And, by golly, “[he doesn’t] like it at all.”
Strong words from Squirrel Hair.
But in Squirrel Hair world, there’s a symmetry that needs to be addressed:
Because Trump’s instinct is to always draw moral equivalence between the invading Russians and the victimized Ukrainians, the president felt compelled to add, “Likewise, President Zelenskyy is doing his Country no favors by talking the way he does. Everything out of his mouth causes problems, I don’t like it, and it better stop.” You see, Putin is bad because he’s slaughtering innocent civilians, and Zelensky is bad because Trump doesn’t like what he says. A pox on both your houses!
Had better stop, doncha know.
As I’ve said before, Trump is odd in the sense that he can indeed be truly thuggish. It seems, though, that he reserves that behavior for going after law firms that have employed people who understood that the 2020 election was clean and fair, and after television news organizations for running unfavorable stories. Domestic disloyalty drives him up the wall. But when it comes to the world stage’s bad actors, he’s nothing but hot air - and it’s really not that hot.
Lots of post-Americans are rightly outraged about such exhibitions of the utter absence of taste, class, graciousness and maturity as the Very Stable Genius’s Memorial Day greeting (which included a particularly noteworthy redundancy: “mentally insane”), and his speech to West Point graduates, for which he wore a red MAGA cap and didn’t stick around to shake hands and congratulate the class, and, of course, included a brag about his having rebuilt the military.
I would say to those who put a great deal of emphasis on how the VSG’s latest antics, like all his antics, are indicative of how quickly he’s imposing authoritarianism, that actually, what they show, with all-caps social media posts, insulting nicknames, the need to take credit for everything and anything he can, and drop-of-a-hat digressions, is his utter lack of seriousness, and, more importantly, his lack of understanding of the nature of seriousness.
Did he really think anybody was going to buy his explanation (that it was said “in jest” for why he hasn't yet resolved the Ukraine conflict within 24 hours? He may well have. He leaves it up to us to decided when he’s being serious.
If there’s going to continue to be a viable West, it will have to be due to the efforts of the grownups in Europe, Canada and the Pacific rim.
I know that I’m out of patience for the cutting of any slack whatsoever to this guy. Let’s have no talk of taking him seriously but not literally. Let’s have no more opinion pieces keeping track of “good Trump-bad Trump” moves. Let’s knock off the hopeful tone about negotiations with Russia, Iran, China or North Korea.
The rubber is hitting the road, and post-America is stumbling about in the middle of the highway.