Some time ago, by pure chance, both the full speech that Xi Jinping addressed to Donald Trump in Beijing and the one given by Mario Draghi in Aachen, when receiving the prestigious Charlemagne Prize, were published simultaneously.
My reading of both was long and meticulous, also because a few days later I would “read”, together with a group of students from the University and Polytechnic of Bari, the booklet Notes for a Life Lesson, which aimed to reflect on the need to – as suggested by IDEA – think in scenarios, decide counterintuitively, speak and write in metaphors. And then adapt to the 21st century, the first in history where the ideological aspect will come after business.
Indeed, in Beijing Business was the master. Xi’s speech was entirely based on the mythical metaphor “The Thucydides Trap.” It recalled the terror of Sparta, dominant but in decline, in observing an emerging Athens, therefore destined to replace it, but pushing the course of history towards war. I imagine Xi read “Destined for war. Can America and China escape Thucydides’s trap?” by Graham Allison. According to his calculations, in the last 500 years of world history the Thucydides Trap has led to war 12 times out of 16. Xi’s implicit suggestion to Trump not to fall into it was impeccable, because it could end badly for both. And as a European, I believe it applies to us too: let’s not fall into the unspoken trap of the Germans under Merz who are throwing a thousand billion into the furnace of armaments.
In practice, Xi and Trump agreed on the line of the so-called “Constructive strategic stability even in the presence of controlled disagreements.”
Xi’s speech was that of a pure screenwriter, hypothesizing a 21st century dominated by the alliance between America and China, for the governance of the World and Space, leaving all other world leaders free to side with one or the other, or to play independently. Is this what Mario Draghi suggests in his now repeated refrain? Should we perhaps build a Europe as a great military power?
Draghi has repeated to us, and has done so for two years, the classic growth nursery rhyme: “To grow, Europe needs to be more productive. To be more productive, it must invest in innovation. To invest in innovation, it is necessary to understand that there is no future if we do not make our continent an engine of attractiveness in the field of artificial intelligence.” Impeccable! How can one disagree?
Too bad that Brussels’ policy in terms of execution (the only activity that counts) has managed the so-called sustainable climate transition with ideological methods so extravagant that we have lost the European car industry along the way, we are ideologically riding deindustrialization (with obvious job losses) and thus decarbonization (crazy bill costs, hence companies fleeing). To many of us non-ideological people, this appears not as a sustainable climate transition but as strategic self-harm. But so be it.
It reminds me of a synthesis I coined for the first Cameos of the 2010s: CEO capitalism (patrician and ideological, read woke) does nothing but impoverish the middle class and sedate the poor classes.
Since then about fifteen years have passed, and we are still there! Cheers!
