It’s time for a black president

It’s [checks date] 2022 guys! Which means that it’s going to be… 2024 in the next US election! If you think it’s time for a black president now (if you don’t think so, you’re racist), imagine how overdue it is in the current year plus two!

Trump will be senile and to make matters worse, he’s white!

But in all seriousness, I have to ask you: What has a normal president brought you so far?

With Bush you had two destructive wars that ended up killing more than a million, with an occupation of Afghanistan that lasted two decades and achieved nothing.

With Biden we now face the threat of nuclear war with Russia, where a complete failure of diplomacy led to a Russian invasion. In all seriousness, without condoning the invasion, this was preventable. Putin can’t swallow the humiliation of Ukraine joining NATO. Just make it clear that Ukraine won’t join NATO, that there will be some alternative arrangement to guarantee its sovereignty and you would have prevented that invasion.

It was completely predictable that this would be the outcome. The thing about diplomacy is that you need to negotiate, both sides need to pay a cost, to prevent a more painful outcome. The West refused to do that, because our elites have genuinely grown to believe in the universality of their values.

“Ukraine is a sovereign democracy, so if they want to join NATO they can join NATO.” That’s the only argument you hear from Western leaders. But, that’s a 20th century Western way of looking at it. When it comes to diplomacy, Western leaders take their Western values and pretend that these are somehow transcendental universal absolute truths, rather than just the sort of stuff they learned about in college.

You needed to find a compromise, a compromise between the Western perspective of sovereign democratic nation states making their own independent decisions and the reality that to Russia Ukraine was never going to be just another state with which it happens to share a border. Your job as a leader is to avoid plunging our world into another destructive war. The Russian regime failed at that, but so did the West.

The whole concept of sovereign nation states is not the reality of history anyway. It’s a Western ideal that can be traced back to the 1648 peace of Westphalia, when 30% of the Holy Roman Empire’s population died, neither Catholics nor Protestants had clearly won and everyone decided that it’s best to just stop intervening in each other’s affairs.

That’s a Western experience, that led the Western world to develop a perspective that sovereign nation states should freely associate with one another, even though the reality of history is of course one of invasions, tributaries, vassal states and protectorates. And for me to say this doesn’t make me pro-Putin. It makes me pro-nowarsthatkill100000people. What everyone also forgets is that Putin can only rule with the consent of his clique. Compared to a guy like Kadyrov, Putin is a moderate. It’s not “Putin’s war”, because what Putin decides is just a kind of compromise between what the rest of his ruling elite wants. If Putin were to anger any faction too much, there would be a palace coup.

In the nuclear era, for us to have no wars between great powers is the least we should expect from our leaders. And yet, here we are. That’s a complete failure, but it happened under the Democratic party’s watch. The people who are supposed to be competent, are causing the greatest possible disasters. The guy who is supposed to be a drooling moron, got us through four years relatively intact.

So I would ask: If you look back at it, was the Trump presidency really that catastrophic? If you agree with me that the answer is no, then I would humbly propose it’s time for president Camacho!