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From the earliest kingdoms to late last night, history has been the story not just of the rise of great powers but of their decline and fall. So, normally, there would be nothing particularly out of the ordinary about the aging America of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, a classic imperial power distinctly in decline and threatening to split into pieces. As it happens, though, there’s something all too new about the twenty-first-century decline and fall of that other great power of the Cold War era — you know, not the Soviet Union. After all, the present downhill slide of this country is happening on a planet that itself is distinctly in trouble in terms of what’s always passed for... Read more
Source: A Global Maui Moment appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 10, 2023
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
The Green Great Game Is This Century’s Space Race
[The Diplomat, via Naked Capitalism 9-3-2023]
The rivalry for access to raw materials to facilitate the energy transition will turn the “Green Great Game” into one of the defining geopolitical features of the 21st century.
Hope for a revival of the “Guatemalan spring” — cut short in 1954 by a CIA-backed coup — lifted Bernardo Arévalo’s unlikely campaign.
The post Guatemalans Guarded the Memory of Democracy Through Years of War and Corruption. Now They See an Opening. appeared first on The Intercept.