The world is constantly changing because what has been created excessively is often not produced through honest or natural means. Everything is susceptible to shifts in the political and commercial landscape. Over time, fortunes and circumstances can change unexpectedly. Nowadays, power dynamics evolve at a rapid pace.
Arthur Adams managed to escape from the United States by returning to the ever-safe Soviet Union, where he carried out incredible espionage on the Manhattan Project for a considerable time. Later, he lived an untraceable life in the red sanctuary of Moscow. The Americans could never track the mysterious Adams, one of their army Majors who served the US during the Cold War. He had the advantage of being an engineer, a talent that the US desperately required at that time. Liberal hiring of talents created many fissures for the leakage of secrets, for which the US paid dearly.
The US missed numerous Soviet spies and never realised the extent of the leakage from the nuclear complexes that aided its enemy in building nuclear warheads. Yet, the young couple, Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg—US citizens and members of the Communist Party—were executed in 1953. The world perceived it as a cold-blooded US action at the dawn of the Cold War. Simultaneously, Theodore Hall, the American physicist, was mysteriously discharged from his involvement in the Manhattan espionage. The German physicist Klaus Julius Fuchs was imprisoned for 14 years.
The Soviet Union did not invest heavily in its nuclear weapons programme, which posed a significant threat to the United States. However, the costs of managing the unproven Soviet threat proved substantial for the US. Relief from this tension arrived after the collapse of the Soviet Empire in the early 1990s, allowing the US to exert broader influence over global affairs. NATO countries fared much better than the notoriously dictatorial Soviet allies. The US pursued an international economic rebalancing for a better hold.
A decade after the Rosenbergs were executed, whether seriously or not, the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, told the capitalists, “We will bury you.” Khrushchev did not mean that seriously, though the Americans were terrified. The US had no history of overlooking even a childish statement against it. During the Cold War, the US was excessively cautious. The CIA went into action, split hairs, burned too much midnight oil, and conducted a ‘biopsy’ on the “fruit of the idle talk” of Khrushchev!
Apart from the ‘we will bury you’ statement, Khrushchev allegedly declared on various occasions: “We Leninists are convinced that our social order, socialism, will ultimately triumph over capitalism,” which worried the US further. Yet capitalism proved more powerful than even the capitalists could have imagined. The US is attempting to regain its might as a capitalist, rejecting the rest of the world. MAGA (Make America Great Again) is the symptom of its desire for hegemony that has been sleeping in the US DNA for a long time.
The world was on the cusp of change in the 1950s, and Europe was undergoing a post-war economic revival. The US feared the potential Soviet hegemony, all built on stolen American intellectual property. Europe had dictators in Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia. Dictators like Nicolae Ceaușescu of Romania, Mátyás Rosenfeld of Hungary, and Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia governed their countries with unquestioned authority.
The US even feared that the Soviet Union might one day dominate the future world, beyond the control of Eastern Europe. It ventured into space after establishing nuclear facilities, irrigated once unmanageable land, and occupied a significant part of Europe. That was enough for the US to fear the Soviet Union. Today, Russia is bombing Ukrainian farmlands almost every day, turning it into a land plagued by suffering. The conflict within the erstwhile Soviet empire leaves cancerous lesions on the lungs of Europe. Oligarchs are seizing control of Ukraine’s agricultural lands, which are available at throwaway prices with the assistance of financial institutions.
In the early 1980s, the United States sought to depreciate its currency. Such a notion may sound strange in today’s world! But it was essential for products to be sold in a vast receiving market at an affordable rate. As large-scale production rolled out of massive factories in the US market, currency depreciation was the only way to make it affordable in Europe and the rapidly growing Asian markets like Japan. Leaders from NATO allies such as Germany (then West Germany), France, the United Kingdom, and Japan convened at the Plaza Hotel in New York on 22 September 1985 to discuss new strategies to realign the US dollar with the Japanese Yen and the German Deutsche Mark. The US dollar was set to decline, according to calculations, for the following three years. In 1987, finance ministers and central bank governors from G6 countries—US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, and Canada—met at the Louvre in Paris to rebalance the US trade deficit with Europe and Japan’s trade surplus with the US. Japan needed new means to reverse its negative GDP growth despite its trade surplus with the US. The Ronald Reagan era revisited the post-war US concern with stronger Leninists ruling the Soviet Union in the early Reagan years.
Now, Donald Trump faces the challenge of tackling China, a task that may not be as smoothly won as Ronald Reagan’s victory over the Soviet Union, thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev, who promoted reform and liberation. China threatens the US hegemony, posing a great challenge to the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who currently occupies a powerful position in the world’s most influential country. He wields a magic wand, capable of taming the fiercest rivals and bending the most resilient foes. The US currency is depreciating, paying a price for its effort to make America Great Again. Rivals are joining hands. Musk has inexplicably superior power, the power enough to control the global economy. The US never had it before. Americans are surrendering to the Americans, three and a half centuries after their American rivals surrendered to it.
Tailpiece: Amazon blessed X with ten times more advertising spending in January—the month Trump was sworn in—compared to what it had previously avoided due to the proliferation of hate speech. Now, all the major tech companies are rallying around Musk. Recently, Apple updated its iPhone operating system, enabling T-Mobile users to connect to Starlink satellites.
