Is This A 1989 Moment?

With the collapse of the international order, there have been many reactions but as yet no responses. Having seen and seized the window of opportunity that the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the USSR afforded, this is a watershed moment for certain. But does 2025 afford an opportunity to change course, as 1989 did?

Living in San Francisco and Silicon Valley leading up to the fall of the Wall, and meeting not only entrepreneurial types but Russians as well, a tremendous opportunity was both foreseen and presented itself.

As a teenager in the mid-late 1960’s, my mother, who was an ardent anti-communist, would often say, “When the Russians finally throw off the chains of communism, we Americans will be there to help them build a democracy and a market.” By the time I was 14, it went in one ear and out the other.

But something must have stuck, and providence put me in the right place to find out if Elizabeth was right. Philosophy became praxis one evening in San Francisco, when I attended a program called, “Soviets, Meet Middle America.”

It sounds like the title for a comedy skit now, but at the time, it was a big deal to meet Russians right off the plane from Moscow. Gorbachev’s glasnost had opened up the USSR for business after he and President Reagan had sown the seeds to end the Cold War with their treaty in Reykjavik to drastically reduce nuclear stockpiles.

One of the speakers, a leading spokesman for perestroika, and I hit it off, and Andrei invited me to Moscow. I had expressed my view that both the USSR and the US were collapsing, just in different ways – the USSR economically and politically, and the US morally and socially. I proposed that we had a window of opportunity to create a new, ecologically and ethically sound market in Russia to the benefit of both our nations.

It wasn’t pie in the sky. With a few associates in Cupertino, I formed a company to help develop the new market, and had meetings with high-level executives in companies as diverse as Ford Aerospace and Price Club. (Just before flying to Moscow alone in mid-January in ’90, one exec uttered a memorable line, “You know,” he said, “missionaries get eaten.”)

I met a lot of Russians in Moscow and Leningrad that winter, and everyone I met loved Americans and wanted to learn how the market worked. But the key person in Moscow, my translator Alla, the smartest and most competent person I’ve ever met, said nyet out of fear and cynicism when it came down to it, despite getting her a good job in D.C.

While I was still in Moscow and Leningrad, Andrei flew to California. On my return, I followed through with the meetings I had arranged with corporate execs and Andrei in the Bay Area before I left, but things went from all doors opening before and during the trip to Russia, to dead ends on my return.

To this day I feel we came close, but obviously failed. Instead of realising our intent to combine the best of Americans with the best of Russians, we now have the worst with the worst, Putin and Trump. It’s a personally painful irony.

The United States, which ran on the fumes of “the indispensable nation” through the 90’s, has become an autocracy whose president is acting in concert with his favorite autocrat, Vlad the regaler.

Is it simply, as one pundit put it, that “the sheer economic size of the US makes its current and future chaos untenable for the rest of the world?” Or is there now a global vacuum, which cannot be filled by the remnants of the implosion of the brain dead international order?

Something new has to emerge, or for the foreseeable future people will be left, as they were after the simultaneous collapse of the USSR and US in the early ‘90’s, picking through the rubble.

A new world order, or more precisely, a true global order, cannot be built on the rotten foundation of the old order. There is an opening in 2025 to change course, as there was in 1989. But how far does the collapse of the international order extend?

The break with the past is much deeper than commentators and academics realise. It extends to the sovereignty of the nation-state, which has outlived its dubious usefulness as an organising principle. It encompasses the Enlightenment, which was based on the false hope that reason and “enlightened self-interest” would prevail in people and between nations.

The present crisis also goes beyond global capitalism, which has become a rapacious juggernaut of extraction for profit of everything and everyone in a heartlessly transactional world. As soulsucking as the current worldwide economic order is, it’s built on disparities in wealth and power and class as old as cities.

The present “polycrisis” has its roots in man’s consciousness itself, which is based on separation, symbol and memory. It has led inexorably to fragmenting the Earth to the point of climatic and ecological collapse.

The planetary climate/ecological crisis on one hand, and the surpassing of human cognition by AI on the other, demands a new foundation for humanity’s relationship to nature and each other. Indeed, the human brain needs a new foundation, one no longer based on symbol, memory, identification and knowledge, but on attention, stillness and insight.

The year 1989 signifies not just the end of the Cold War, but the opportunity for humankind to move in a new direction. That window of opportunity only lasted a few months, before the hellish days in Russia and the halcyon days in America ushered in Putin and 9.11, with all that followed.

1989 was the last chance to change course within the international paradigm. But it is defeatism to insist that “Trump’s ‘America first’ approach – self-interested, transactional, overtly commercial and untroubled by principled considerations of justice, international law and human rights – reflects and entrenches a changed world.”

It’s not a “changed world,” it’s just a world stripped of the surface constraints and pretensions of the post-World War II international order. “Principled considerations of justice, international law and human rights” were always a veneer, which the superpowers, especially the USA, the ostensible leader of a rules-based international order, cherry-picked to serve its national interest.

With America now leading a race to the bottom, there is no choice but to address the polycrisis honestly, which has as many levels internally as it has facets externally.

Martin LeFevre: lefevremartin77@gmail

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