Trump and the "brothers" of Amarna

Where is the world going? Where are international relations going?The current war in Iran and the Middle East offers an uncertain panorama. It is a notably asymmetric war in economic and military terms that has several possible outcomes. In these cases, it would not be superfluous to first analyze the observable trends at the present time, and then see if history gives us clues about probable future scenarios.If it weren't so nefariously tragic, a two-week ceasefire pact in which each of the two parties has a different text and which, moreover, both interpret in a different way results in a rather comical and surreal situation. A script that seems to have come out of a night of drinks between Gila and the Marx brothers. An imagined night that would be well worth sharing. There are elements of the recent context that point to the replacement of a scenario in which there has been an indisputable global power in economic and military terms – the US of the last thirty years after the Cold War – by a scenario in which two global powers coexist (the US and China), along with a third with nuclear military power (Russia) and several regional powers (India, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, etc.). These are only trends, but it seems that today there is a basic analytical agreement that an evolution from a unipolar world to a multipolar world is taking place. This is no news, of course. In fact, many historical periods have experienced this type of change... until the appearance of a new hegemonic power that once again tilts international relations towards a de facto unipolarity. When hegemony becomes pluralized, a scenario of balance between powers emerges, which is often convenient for maintaining peace (understood as the absence of war) for a few decades. In optimistic terms, I believe we could be heading towards such a scenario in the coming decades.

To understand international relations well, one of the most convenient sources of knowledge is ancient history. Within the period of the late Bronze Age, about two centuries before the great crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean in which a series of regional powers disappeared –Hittites, Mycenaeans, Alashiya (Cyprus), Arzawa (Western Anatolia), etc.–, the so-called Amarna letters from the Egyptian city of Amarna describe a peaceful period of intense trade throughout the Middle East, which included luxury goods. These are about 400 tablets written in cuneiform signs, mostly in the “diplomatic” language of the time, Akkadian. We are in the mid-14th century BC, in the period of the pharaohs Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaten.The letters reflect a mutual respect between the great powers of the time, but only among themselves. The kings address each other as "brother" or "great king." These powers included Egypt, Hatti (Hittites) – who had just destroyed the neighboring kingdom of Mitanni –, Assyria, or Babylonia. Along with the letters, the "brothers" exchanged gifts, which were sometimes complained about by the recipient, who considered them not to be up to the promises, previous shipments, or their rank. The international situation reflected in these letters shows a balance of power, mutual respect, a more or less egalitarian recognition that includes sometimes undesirable marital alliances for the women involved, and also more or less reciprocal economic relations. It was a period of relative peace between the hegemonic powers, but not in their territorial areas of influence, which do not coincide with the current ones due to the emergence of regional powers, some of which belong to the Global South.Given the current panorama in the Middle East, a situation like this on a global scale would not be the worst-case scenario. It would recontextualize the current problem of the Israeli government and its political culture. However, American democracy is sending warning or alarm signals to all democracies in the world (today in decline in quantitative and qualitative terms). When leaders who come to power in democratic states show ignorant, petulant, and arbitrary profiles, as well as behaviors of unbalanced, paranoid, or criminal individuals, it means that some structural factors of liberal democracies are failing. These are the times when one longs to still have mediocre leaders. Trump and Vance versus Obama and Biden.And Europe? The European Union currently seems like a transatlantic liner lost in the middle of a sea it does not control, with its engines stopped in search of a crew that knows where to steer and how to do it to reach port. And that they are willing to make the necessary repairs to the ship, both on the front of the institutions and on that of procedures and concrete policies. The distrust of European citizens towards the EU is anything but irrational today.Europe and its bombastic rhetoric of rights, model of well-being, etc., runs the immediate risk that the words William Faulkner puts into the mouth of one of the characters in the novel Absalom, Absalom!: “His own body was like an empty garden full of echoes of resounding defeated names”.