IT IS not only failed and near-failed states, and the Great Financial Crisis that are threatening the present world system. The climate crisis covers the entire globe. The Great Food Crisis with its sisters – crises in agriculture and environment – are no less Satan. The energy crisis casts its eyes not only on the machines of capital but also on billions of poor. The crisis in democracy now is not only a Third and Fourth World phenomenon. It has surfaced in the First and Second Worlds also. The fundamental questions related to production and distribution, produced by too many and grabbed by too few, remain unresolved. Even a longed economic recovery will not be able to muzzle down, as is expected by a minor section, the myriad problems facing the planet.
Capital since its birth days, and since it started crossing frontiers in its globalisation drive, hundreds of years, has not come across so many crisis, and uncertainty with this magnitude. It, in search of higher profit has entered casino leaving behind manufacturing shop, and thus has intensified the forces of crisis it was carrying in its womb. It is unable to resolve the contradictions it has created.
Capital’s powerhouses are behaving bearish as the economies are in slump, in deep recession. Global trade in 2009, according to the director general of the World Trade Organisation, is likely to fall by more than 10 per cent. ‘We are’, he said in South Korea, ‘not yet out of the woods.’ Citing an estimate by the International Monetary Fund, he said: future write-downs in the world financial system have now been cut to about three trillion dollars. British manufacturing output fell sharply on an annual basis, the Office for National Statistics said. The ONS said a wider measure of industrial production including mining, quarrying and energy was down 8.4 per cent year-on-year. News on industrial production from Germany, as the BBC reported in early December 2009, was also negative. The Japanese government is pumping in billions of dollars to avoid a double recession. The Dubai debt ‘drama’, a recent addition only, once again confirms the analysis of the stream outside the mainstream.
Bankruptcies and near-bankruptcies by banks and states are now known to the audience of media. Referring to Wall Street Journal Fred Magdoff and Michael D Yates write: ‘In the spring of 2009 the IMF, with newly infused funds from the European community, helped Eastern Europe to step “back from the brink of collapse” … by providing loans to Hungary, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, Serbia, Romania, and Poland’ (Monthly Review, November 2009). ‘Countries that relied heavily on exports, such as Germany, Japan, and China, are facing seriously eroded economic conditions…. International economic linkages are working to make the crisis intractable.’
The United Nations now admits failure in at least one of its peacekeeping operations. The WTO is not sailing smoothly. The planned safe yard of the capitalist powers is now riddled with contradictions. The divided world of capital is experiencing increasing competition and contradictions from within as it intensifies its accumulation drive. Unbalanced economic growth, higher density of population in cities, migration by millions, and border restrictions to flow of commodities and capital, admitted by world bodies, characterise the present time.
The centre of the centre of the world system is having a shattered economy with millions of jobless and homeless, an ineffective education system failing to provide support to the ruling system, a controversial health system, a society deeply divided with ideological debates, the banks, the sanctum of its economy, along with its partners coming under a salvo of criticism and becoming void of credibility, and growing people protest, even protest from the white collar employees. An American woman’s protest against bank dramatically turns into debtor’s revolt.
Conflicts of different colours and regional hotspots increased along with the changing geopolitical equation. In 1995 the SIPRI Yearbook 1996 said there were 30 major armed conflicts. With civil wars and multinational corporation-fuelled conflicts the following years were no less bad. The demise of the Warsaw Pact did not make North Atlantic Treaty Organisation the perpetual military arm of the world system. The emergence of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation was a new challenge to the Americanised globalisation. Russia began to overflow with petromoney. Moscow started taking assertive position in comparison to its nadir.
Significant changes emerged in parts of Latin America. The much propagated ‘globalization’ lost its appeal. These along with competition will intensify instability. Resistance to the freewheeling free market began to gain strength. Signs of increasing instability are becoming bold in the world arena.
Forces that shift geopolitical plates are gaining momentum. Great changes in geopolitics are being expected. The hot days of the Cold War, the dismantled and fragmented Soviet Union with no iota of proletarian ideology, the unipolar world, an empire unrestrained, Bush-speak ‘new world order’, Clinton-planned ‘enlargement’ and ‘assertive multilateralism’, a subdued Latin America, etc are now tales from days Gone with the Wind. The music of silence imposed by diktat from a capital is being cracked by Chariots of Fire. Two wars, longer than the World War II, are going on. The Balkan quagmire has not permanently settled down. Brutal civil or regional conflicts are the order of the day. Aspiring hegemons are entering the stage.
An iron lady from the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher, wrote more than 12 years ago in National Review: What we are possibly looking at in 2095 [absent US leadership] is an unstable world in which there are more than half a dozen ‘great powers’, each with its own clients, all vulnerable if they stand alone, all capable of increasing their power and influence if they form the right kind of alliance, and all engaged willy-nilly in perpetual diplomatic manoeuvres to ensure that their relative positions improve rather than deteriorate. In other words, 2095 might look like 1914 played on a somewhat larger stage (‘Why America Must Remain Number One’, July 31, 1995). Those apprehended days are now coming closer.
Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and Nicola Sarkozy are telling only the historical aspect of the financial crisis, promising doles, and hiding root of the crisis and the fact that the dominating capital is incapable of resolving the crises. Their retinue mainstream is chanting the same mantra.
The processes of declining dollar, the debt crisis, and ‘fragmentation of the interests of the global system’s big players and blocks’, according to Global Research (February 17, 2009), will shape the new stage of crisis with ‘two parallel sequences: quick disintegration of the current international system altogether’, and ‘strategic dislocation of big global players’. ‘At the end of this phase of geopolitical dislocation, the world will look more like Europe in 1913 rather than our world in 2007.’ ‘The fallout of this phase of geopolitical dislocation’, it said, is affecting ‘the United States, EU, China and Russia.’ ‘The global system is simply out of order,’ it concluded. To a number of scholars there is striking parallel between the challenges of today and the WWII. ‘Blood, toil, tears and sweat’ that Churchill offered the British nation three days after becoming the prime minister (speech to the House of Commons, May 13, 1940) is echoing in many lands now.
The question of leadership is not isolated from the question of ideology and philosophy the leadership upholds. The philosophy that the world system upholds and earnestly follows, that has grown out of its economy, the economy for accumulation by depriving all but a few is not free of crisis. Rather, it is a reflection of decadence. It continues to show its inability to uphold the interest of the majority, to analyse the causes of the crises, and inability to show paths for changes required. It stubbornly stands for the absolute minority, and to faithfully carry out this ‘holy’ task it tries to dictate the course of history that crowned it with nothing but shame. Philosophy in its history has earned many crises. The present crisis of the dominating philosophy is one of those. Derrida and deconstruction failed to defy and analyse the contradictions the reality of monopoly-finance capital is bearing. Post-modernism failed to analyse the crises of the system. Rather, these only showed their inability to provide leadership in its own sphere.
US global leadership in geopolitics
‘America’, wrote Warren Christopher, a former US secretary of state, ‘must lead….[I]f we do not lead, no one else will’ (‘America’s Leadership, America’s Opportunity’, Foreign Policy, spring, 1995]. ‘We’, said Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker, ‘have to lead the world….If we don’t lead the world…we have a continuing decay into anarchy,…we have a more and more violence around the planet, and…it is highly unlikely anybody will replace us in leadership roles in the next 30 years’ (remarks at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, July 18, 1995). Bob Dole, once a Republican presidential nominee, had the same tone: Only the United States can lead on the full range of political, diplomatic, economic, and military issues confronting the world (‘Shaping America’s Global Future’, Foreign Policy, spring, 19950. These claims to global leadership in the sphere of geopolitics by the United States were not new. ‘If we falter in our leadership,’ said Truman in 1947, ‘we may endanger the peace of the world….Great responsibilities have been placed upon us by the swift movement of events.’
The outcome of the WWII provided an opportunity and resource base to make this claim. The conclusion of the Cold War cemented this position. Global leadership in the sphere of geopolitics, power and security became the guiding principle of US foreign policy. This leadership implied the U S interests anywhere in the world. So, the world found the US as leader as ‘in the community of nations there is no authority higher than America… America is the wealthiest, mightiest, and most respected nation. At times, it must be the policeman or head of the posse – at others, the mediator, teacher, or benefactor’ [Joshua Muravchik, The Imperative of American Leadership, American Enterprise Institute, 1996]. So, in the post-Cold War period the world found Bosnia and other interventions by the global leader.
The US journey to global leadership had the nods of the UN Security Council (David Gergen, ‘America’s Missed Opportunities’, Foreign Affairs, 1992, 71, No 1]. But, failures began to emerge in missions of leadership, and the failures carried significance. Clinton had to say: America cannot and must not be the world’s policeman. The geostrategic circumstances were in a state of flux. Economic and strategic interests of concerned players made adjustments and readjustments in geostrategic policies necessary. New players were emerging on the stage. All the players had drive for accumulation.
The Americanised global leadership was gradually facing opposition or indifference, and other forms of reactions in between the two in the world stage. NAFTA and GATT failed to materialise dreamed goal. Mexican economic crisis was unresolved. Brutal regimes terrorised many countries with the blessings of competing powers. Limitations of the superpower became visible in Somalia.
Instability in international arena was a regular feature. The US began to realise its limitations. The US aid, military power and diplomatic moves continued to lose strength. The position of leadership requires costs. But the US economy was losing ground. The seeds were in the economy. Military power is not enough to hold the position of global leadership in the sphere of geopolitics. Political credibility has a major share in building up this position. The US has, however, begun to lose this credibility since long. Europe is not a single entity. It is not on the seat of leadership. Asia is also in similar position. The Asian ‘miracle’ stories sold by a section of the economists now appear to all as nothing but falsified propaganda.
Missing farsightedness
LACK of farsightedness of the US leadership was evident in a number of incidents having geopolitical implications: it failed to even imagine the future dangers of building up a proxy in its fight against the Red Army of the former Soviet Union. Its present troubles in controlling its former proxy reflect either limitation of military and intelligence prowess or conflicting interests. Its covert and overt ‘wrestling’ with Marcos and Pinochet while getting rid of these dictators it once patronised also showed its limitations in farsightedness. The Middle East remains a living evidence of its limitations of conflicting interests. Its dealing with Ziaul Huq, the Pakistani military ruler killed in a mysterious air accident, and with Gayanendra, the former usurper to the Nepali throne, is another example of its short-sightedness.
These short-sighted policy imperatives were not the product of individuals, though often these are personified. These were the products of institutions a social class has created for serving its interests. Thus, these reflect the limitations of the social class. The period of Hitler’s emergence, his nourishment by a section of capital and the WWII had the experience of two types of leaders: having farsightedness and lacking that. They represented the interests of social class(es), and their ability or inability were the product of the class(es) they represented. Traits of leadership including authenticity, confidence, defiance, intellect, reason were the product of the class interests they were representing. So, the world listened from Churchill: ‘The great warrior Stalin at the head of his valiant Russians’; or “The heroic defence of Stalingrad … the splendid Russian armies are …unbeaten, and unbroken…’ The pronouncement was a compulsion that was imposed upon Churchill by time.
Leadership personified and class crisis
EVEN if the role of class in creating leadership in a certain historical period is ignored, as is ignored by many pundits, the present world stage lacks the leaders who played significant role in shaping the world events: Mao, Chou, Ho, Tito, Naser, Sukarno, and many others. Charles de Gaulle twice took centre stage at crucial moments in France’s history. He restored France’s position in the world. His judgement upon China, as David Gosset wrote, ‘was visionary’. ‘[T]he leader who had first perceived the opportunities inherent in a Sino-Soviet split,’ wrote Kissinger in his 1994 book Diplomacy, ‘was the old man of European diplomacy, de Gaulle.’ Today’s world of geopolitics by the world powers still lacks that visionary personified leadership: handling of the climate crisis or the financial crisis, only two of many, are stark examples. The Castro brothers, Chavez, Evo are from different stream, and they don’t dominate the world of geopolitics.
The crisis in global leadership is not the crisis of leadership in one or a number of countries. It is neither the limitations of a person or persons. It is the crisis of the social classes that dominate the world theatre as these classes have created this leadership, which is composed not only of persons, but mainly with institutions, processes, skills, analytical capacity, needs, visions, imperatives, etc of the classes involved. These classes are going through the crisis with the dominance of capital’s involvement with finance speculation. Its intellect and vision are at the level of speculator that leaves the workshop of manufacturing and runs behind quick profit even at the cost of its own survival. At the same time, its sphere of dominance is narrowing down with the increasing contradiction and competition it generates. Other crises generated long ago are only increasing its precarious situation. This situation will increase the leadership crisis that in turn will put into question the legitimacy of the global leadership getting fragmented.
Winter clouds
MAO, in his Winter Clouds poem [1962] wrote: Only heroes can quell tigers and leopards/And wild bears never daunt the brave. With the rising antagonism the cloud of confusion arising from the crisis in global leadership in the sphere of geopolitics will simplify. The classes will play its historically destined role of providing leadership or of failure. Heroic and intelligent leadership will emerge in the global stage and the dynamics of time will push away the crises.
Capital since its birth days, and since it started crossing frontiers in its globalisation drive, hundreds of years, has not come across so many crisis, and uncertainty with this magnitude. It, in search of higher profit has entered casino leaving behind manufacturing shop, and thus has intensified the forces of crisis it was carrying in its womb. It is unable to resolve the contradictions it has created.
Capital’s powerhouses are behaving bearish as the economies are in slump, in deep recession. Global trade in 2009, according to the director general of the World Trade Organisation, is likely to fall by more than 10 per cent. ‘We are’, he said in South Korea, ‘not yet out of the woods.’ Citing an estimate by the International Monetary Fund, he said: future write-downs in the world financial system have now been cut to about three trillion dollars. British manufacturing output fell sharply on an annual basis, the Office for National Statistics said. The ONS said a wider measure of industrial production including mining, quarrying and energy was down 8.4 per cent year-on-year. News on industrial production from Germany, as the BBC reported in early December 2009, was also negative. The Japanese government is pumping in billions of dollars to avoid a double recession. The Dubai debt ‘drama’, a recent addition only, once again confirms the analysis of the stream outside the mainstream.
Bankruptcies and near-bankruptcies by banks and states are now known to the audience of media. Referring to Wall Street Journal Fred Magdoff and Michael D Yates write: ‘In the spring of 2009 the IMF, with newly infused funds from the European community, helped Eastern Europe to step “back from the brink of collapse” … by providing loans to Hungary, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, Serbia, Romania, and Poland’ (Monthly Review, November 2009). ‘Countries that relied heavily on exports, such as Germany, Japan, and China, are facing seriously eroded economic conditions…. International economic linkages are working to make the crisis intractable.’
The United Nations now admits failure in at least one of its peacekeeping operations. The WTO is not sailing smoothly. The planned safe yard of the capitalist powers is now riddled with contradictions. The divided world of capital is experiencing increasing competition and contradictions from within as it intensifies its accumulation drive. Unbalanced economic growth, higher density of population in cities, migration by millions, and border restrictions to flow of commodities and capital, admitted by world bodies, characterise the present time.
The centre of the centre of the world system is having a shattered economy with millions of jobless and homeless, an ineffective education system failing to provide support to the ruling system, a controversial health system, a society deeply divided with ideological debates, the banks, the sanctum of its economy, along with its partners coming under a salvo of criticism and becoming void of credibility, and growing people protest, even protest from the white collar employees. An American woman’s protest against bank dramatically turns into debtor’s revolt.
Conflicts of different colours and regional hotspots increased along with the changing geopolitical equation. In 1995 the SIPRI Yearbook 1996 said there were 30 major armed conflicts. With civil wars and multinational corporation-fuelled conflicts the following years were no less bad. The demise of the Warsaw Pact did not make North Atlantic Treaty Organisation the perpetual military arm of the world system. The emergence of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation was a new challenge to the Americanised globalisation. Russia began to overflow with petromoney. Moscow started taking assertive position in comparison to its nadir.
Significant changes emerged in parts of Latin America. The much propagated ‘globalization’ lost its appeal. These along with competition will intensify instability. Resistance to the freewheeling free market began to gain strength. Signs of increasing instability are becoming bold in the world arena.
Forces that shift geopolitical plates are gaining momentum. Great changes in geopolitics are being expected. The hot days of the Cold War, the dismantled and fragmented Soviet Union with no iota of proletarian ideology, the unipolar world, an empire unrestrained, Bush-speak ‘new world order’, Clinton-planned ‘enlargement’ and ‘assertive multilateralism’, a subdued Latin America, etc are now tales from days Gone with the Wind. The music of silence imposed by diktat from a capital is being cracked by Chariots of Fire. Two wars, longer than the World War II, are going on. The Balkan quagmire has not permanently settled down. Brutal civil or regional conflicts are the order of the day. Aspiring hegemons are entering the stage.
An iron lady from the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher, wrote more than 12 years ago in National Review: What we are possibly looking at in 2095 [absent US leadership] is an unstable world in which there are more than half a dozen ‘great powers’, each with its own clients, all vulnerable if they stand alone, all capable of increasing their power and influence if they form the right kind of alliance, and all engaged willy-nilly in perpetual diplomatic manoeuvres to ensure that their relative positions improve rather than deteriorate. In other words, 2095 might look like 1914 played on a somewhat larger stage (‘Why America Must Remain Number One’, July 31, 1995). Those apprehended days are now coming closer.
Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and Nicola Sarkozy are telling only the historical aspect of the financial crisis, promising doles, and hiding root of the crisis and the fact that the dominating capital is incapable of resolving the crises. Their retinue mainstream is chanting the same mantra.
The processes of declining dollar, the debt crisis, and ‘fragmentation of the interests of the global system’s big players and blocks’, according to Global Research (February 17, 2009), will shape the new stage of crisis with ‘two parallel sequences: quick disintegration of the current international system altogether’, and ‘strategic dislocation of big global players’. ‘At the end of this phase of geopolitical dislocation, the world will look more like Europe in 1913 rather than our world in 2007.’ ‘The fallout of this phase of geopolitical dislocation’, it said, is affecting ‘the United States, EU, China and Russia.’ ‘The global system is simply out of order,’ it concluded. To a number of scholars there is striking parallel between the challenges of today and the WWII. ‘Blood, toil, tears and sweat’ that Churchill offered the British nation three days after becoming the prime minister (speech to the House of Commons, May 13, 1940) is echoing in many lands now.
The question of leadership is not isolated from the question of ideology and philosophy the leadership upholds. The philosophy that the world system upholds and earnestly follows, that has grown out of its economy, the economy for accumulation by depriving all but a few is not free of crisis. Rather, it is a reflection of decadence. It continues to show its inability to uphold the interest of the majority, to analyse the causes of the crises, and inability to show paths for changes required. It stubbornly stands for the absolute minority, and to faithfully carry out this ‘holy’ task it tries to dictate the course of history that crowned it with nothing but shame. Philosophy in its history has earned many crises. The present crisis of the dominating philosophy is one of those. Derrida and deconstruction failed to defy and analyse the contradictions the reality of monopoly-finance capital is bearing. Post-modernism failed to analyse the crises of the system. Rather, these only showed their inability to provide leadership in its own sphere.
US global leadership in geopolitics
‘America’, wrote Warren Christopher, a former US secretary of state, ‘must lead….[I]f we do not lead, no one else will’ (‘America’s Leadership, America’s Opportunity’, Foreign Policy, spring, 1995]. ‘We’, said Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker, ‘have to lead the world….If we don’t lead the world…we have a continuing decay into anarchy,…we have a more and more violence around the planet, and…it is highly unlikely anybody will replace us in leadership roles in the next 30 years’ (remarks at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, July 18, 1995). Bob Dole, once a Republican presidential nominee, had the same tone: Only the United States can lead on the full range of political, diplomatic, economic, and military issues confronting the world (‘Shaping America’s Global Future’, Foreign Policy, spring, 19950. These claims to global leadership in the sphere of geopolitics by the United States were not new. ‘If we falter in our leadership,’ said Truman in 1947, ‘we may endanger the peace of the world….Great responsibilities have been placed upon us by the swift movement of events.’
The outcome of the WWII provided an opportunity and resource base to make this claim. The conclusion of the Cold War cemented this position. Global leadership in the sphere of geopolitics, power and security became the guiding principle of US foreign policy. This leadership implied the U S interests anywhere in the world. So, the world found the US as leader as ‘in the community of nations there is no authority higher than America… America is the wealthiest, mightiest, and most respected nation. At times, it must be the policeman or head of the posse – at others, the mediator, teacher, or benefactor’ [Joshua Muravchik, The Imperative of American Leadership, American Enterprise Institute, 1996]. So, in the post-Cold War period the world found Bosnia and other interventions by the global leader.
The US journey to global leadership had the nods of the UN Security Council (David Gergen, ‘America’s Missed Opportunities’, Foreign Affairs, 1992, 71, No 1]. But, failures began to emerge in missions of leadership, and the failures carried significance. Clinton had to say: America cannot and must not be the world’s policeman. The geostrategic circumstances were in a state of flux. Economic and strategic interests of concerned players made adjustments and readjustments in geostrategic policies necessary. New players were emerging on the stage. All the players had drive for accumulation.
The Americanised global leadership was gradually facing opposition or indifference, and other forms of reactions in between the two in the world stage. NAFTA and GATT failed to materialise dreamed goal. Mexican economic crisis was unresolved. Brutal regimes terrorised many countries with the blessings of competing powers. Limitations of the superpower became visible in Somalia.
Instability in international arena was a regular feature. The US began to realise its limitations. The US aid, military power and diplomatic moves continued to lose strength. The position of leadership requires costs. But the US economy was losing ground. The seeds were in the economy. Military power is not enough to hold the position of global leadership in the sphere of geopolitics. Political credibility has a major share in building up this position. The US has, however, begun to lose this credibility since long. Europe is not a single entity. It is not on the seat of leadership. Asia is also in similar position. The Asian ‘miracle’ stories sold by a section of the economists now appear to all as nothing but falsified propaganda.
Missing farsightedness
LACK of farsightedness of the US leadership was evident in a number of incidents having geopolitical implications: it failed to even imagine the future dangers of building up a proxy in its fight against the Red Army of the former Soviet Union. Its present troubles in controlling its former proxy reflect either limitation of military and intelligence prowess or conflicting interests. Its covert and overt ‘wrestling’ with Marcos and Pinochet while getting rid of these dictators it once patronised also showed its limitations in farsightedness. The Middle East remains a living evidence of its limitations of conflicting interests. Its dealing with Ziaul Huq, the Pakistani military ruler killed in a mysterious air accident, and with Gayanendra, the former usurper to the Nepali throne, is another example of its short-sightedness.
These short-sighted policy imperatives were not the product of individuals, though often these are personified. These were the products of institutions a social class has created for serving its interests. Thus, these reflect the limitations of the social class. The period of Hitler’s emergence, his nourishment by a section of capital and the WWII had the experience of two types of leaders: having farsightedness and lacking that. They represented the interests of social class(es), and their ability or inability were the product of the class(es) they represented. Traits of leadership including authenticity, confidence, defiance, intellect, reason were the product of the class interests they were representing. So, the world listened from Churchill: ‘The great warrior Stalin at the head of his valiant Russians’; or “The heroic defence of Stalingrad … the splendid Russian armies are …unbeaten, and unbroken…’ The pronouncement was a compulsion that was imposed upon Churchill by time.
Leadership personified and class crisis
EVEN if the role of class in creating leadership in a certain historical period is ignored, as is ignored by many pundits, the present world stage lacks the leaders who played significant role in shaping the world events: Mao, Chou, Ho, Tito, Naser, Sukarno, and many others. Charles de Gaulle twice took centre stage at crucial moments in France’s history. He restored France’s position in the world. His judgement upon China, as David Gosset wrote, ‘was visionary’. ‘[T]he leader who had first perceived the opportunities inherent in a Sino-Soviet split,’ wrote Kissinger in his 1994 book Diplomacy, ‘was the old man of European diplomacy, de Gaulle.’ Today’s world of geopolitics by the world powers still lacks that visionary personified leadership: handling of the climate crisis or the financial crisis, only two of many, are stark examples. The Castro brothers, Chavez, Evo are from different stream, and they don’t dominate the world of geopolitics.
The crisis in global leadership is not the crisis of leadership in one or a number of countries. It is neither the limitations of a person or persons. It is the crisis of the social classes that dominate the world theatre as these classes have created this leadership, which is composed not only of persons, but mainly with institutions, processes, skills, analytical capacity, needs, visions, imperatives, etc of the classes involved. These classes are going through the crisis with the dominance of capital’s involvement with finance speculation. Its intellect and vision are at the level of speculator that leaves the workshop of manufacturing and runs behind quick profit even at the cost of its own survival. At the same time, its sphere of dominance is narrowing down with the increasing contradiction and competition it generates. Other crises generated long ago are only increasing its precarious situation. This situation will increase the leadership crisis that in turn will put into question the legitimacy of the global leadership getting fragmented.
Winter clouds
MAO, in his Winter Clouds poem [1962] wrote: Only heroes can quell tigers and leopards/And wild bears never daunt the brave. With the rising antagonism the cloud of confusion arising from the crisis in global leadership in the sphere of geopolitics will simplify. The classes will play its historically destined role of providing leadership or of failure. Heroic and intelligent leadership will emerge in the global stage and the dynamics of time will push away the crises.
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