Rethinking a year that is about to end and trying to ask yourself how it will be remembered after some time is a useful exercise: it helps to put time in perspective, to place the present in history. Perhaps 2024 will remain in the memory as a year of suspense, which kept the world in tension from the beginning until the end, and which leaves many questions still unanswered.
The suspense concerned, first of all, the US presidential elections. It was immediately known that the challenger would be Donald Trump: who was aiming for a new election after being rejected by voters in 2020 (a defeat he never admitted with the consequences we know about) and who in the meantime has accumulated a large number of judicial convictions .
The looming shadow of Trump's return to the presidency has weighed on the entire world throughout the year: he made and makes no secret of counting on Vladimir Putin, to obtain a peace that would allow him to proclaim victory; so have many leaders of the European right starting with Viktor Orbàn; and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who expects to see his country's main ally reward his policy of inhuman massacres in the name of “the security of the Jewish state”, and to liquidate the warrant issued against him by the International Court of Justice .
The USA and the world remained in suspense for a long time even over the name of the contender: President Biden gave up on running again only three and a half months before the elections, leaving room for a black and female candidate, Kamala Harris, who seemed almost tied in the polls until the vote, only to be clearly defeated by an electorate that was largely very little interested in Russia or Israel but worried about an economic situation perceived as worse than it actually was.
However, Trump's election has not completely resolved the suspense, on the contrary. While it was clear from the beginning that he would dedicate himself to systematically taking revenge on his real or perceived enemies, there is much more we still don't know.
How serious, for example, is the threat of a tariff war not only with China but also with Canada and Europe, which can please an isolationist electorate fearful of globalization until its inevitable weight on prices is felt.
How serious is the promise of a mass deportation of irregular migrants, which in addition to costing billions of dollars would create a perhaps unprecedented crisis of public order. And the month of December brought further causes of uncertainty: the votes in Congress which showed that Trump does not have the iron control over Republican deputies and senators that was generally attributed to him; the rise to power, as well as of figures at the limit of rationality such as the conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy jr. appointed to healthcare, even by the richest man in the world Musk determined to impose, with the consent of the new president, his own political goals.
It is only several months from the beginning of next year that we will perhaps be able to understand in which direction the USA will actually move, the country whose decline many predict but which is still at the center of the political, economic and technological life of the planet.
To increase the suspense there have been, and are, wars: the most visible ones in Eastern Europe and the Middle East and the many that continue ignored and terrible in much of Africa (Ethiopia, Sudan, Congo, Mozambique) and in parts of Asia.
The atrocity is evident and overwhelming in all these conflicts: the frightening number not only of deaths but also of rapes, looting, and the forced displacement of entire populations. But what keeps us all in suspense is the outcome, because what Homer wrote almost three millennia ago is still true, “crazily, you know, war rages”, conflicts are known how they begin but not how they will end.
Indeed, African wars can appear completely interminable, due to the plurality of contenders and the interests (especially Western) at stake. As far as the Middle East is concerned, the fall of the Syrian regime was a warning: even in that area of the world, thinking of the war in the simple terms of two opposing sides is decidedly short-sighted. New and even unknown entities are ready to take the field and call the picture into question at any time.
At the end of the year, the European Union has given itself a fragile leadership that will have to negotiate its stability every day, conditioned in an increasingly evident way by the power of the lobbies: as seen at the beginning of 2024 with the sudden and ephemeral “farmers' movement ” which imposed the revocation of climate protection regulations; and we can see it now with the strong pressure particularly in France and Italy against a trade agreement with some Latin American countries, (Mercosur).
The economic and political fragility of Germany and France itself lead us to imagine that the Union will remain more wavering than in the past. So much so that some American newspapers have presented Italy as paradoxically “more stable”. But if you look carefully you can see that there is little to bet on the stability of an increasingly contentious majority; and the nervous suspense begins to shine through in those parts too.
If what you have read so far did not seem disturbing enough, it is worth remembering the so-called “doomsday clock”: which was invented with a strong metaphor in 1947 by an authoritative magazine, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, to calculate how much the world is close to a possible nuclear catastrophe, and is gradually updated.
In 1991, after the signing by the USA and the Soviet Union of an agreement for the dismantling of a large part of the atomic arsenals, it was calculated that there were “17 minutes left” until final midnight. In January 2024, the time until the apocalypse was calculated to be 90 seconds, the shortest in the entire history. It is realistic to think that at the end of this year, with the explicit alliance between Russia and North Korea and with the continuing threat of even more perfected nuclear weapons, that symbolic “time” will be further reduced.
We can only hope that this dramatic suspense does not just lead to resignation but, at least in some management groups, to reflection.
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