Sam Vaknin

1 month ago | brusselsmorning.com | Sam Vaknin

Perfidy is the essence of both empire and realpolitik. Perfidious Albion is now usurped by its former colony, the USA. The self-righteous, sanctimonious, and virtue signaling USA has a lengthy history of betraying its most ardent and loyal allies, especially when they are in the throes of existential crises. In the Yalta conference in 1945, President Roosevelt threw Churchill and the British Empire under the bus so as to curry favor with the demented and murderous Stalin.

2 months ago | brusselsmorning.com | Sam Vaknin

We are heading to a new military conflict, but not in Europe. It is inevitable that the USA and China will clash militarily whether directly or by proxy (a remilitarized Japan) and not only over Taiwan.  Whenever old empires and superpowers (such as the British Empire and the USA) decline and new ones (such as China) emerge, there is an inevitable period of geopolitical instability, friction, and conflict.

2 months ago | brusselsmorning.com | Sam Vaknin

The USA has pivoted from Europe to the Pacific immediately in the aftermath of the Cold War. The USA has always been a Pacific power. The Atlantic Alliance is a relic of an aberration in US history after the USA was forced to reluctantly intervene in Europe twice in the space of 30 years (1917-1945). Trump wants to ally with Russia (and a rearmed Japan) against China. China and Russia are historical enemies.

2 months ago | brusselsmorning.com | Sam Vaknin

College students are unleashed on smug intellectuals and a bloated bureaucracy. Elon Musk’s DOGE? Yes – but also Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Trump is probably using Musk to intimidate the “deep state” into submission. It seems that democracy can never survive for long because it is self-contradictory: voters are barred from deciding to abolish it. In this sense, democracy is as totalitarian as any dictatorship. The electorate in the USA has decided to banish it all the same.

2 months ago | brusselsmorning.com | Sam Vaknin

Africa has been failing to get its act together since the late 1950s. This enormous continent with its vast potential is always rife with internecine civil wars and election fraud. But Africa is not unique and judging it too harshly is racist (a virulent point of view internalized even by African intellectuals). It took 1000 years for democracy to emerge in Europe. Until the 1940s, it resembled today’s Africa.