The diabolical community I serve has plenty of reason to rejoice at a moment of history in which diplomacy has been branded a sissy sport. Israel has just brought the point home with a new attempt to assassinate negotiators on foreign soil, in Qatar. I can’t remember which demon it was who successfully inculcated the idea now apparently widely shared by Western leaders that the last thing you should accept to do is speak with your adversary. Dialogue takes time. Time is money. In a world governed by the rules of the free market, money makes decisions, not people. We have long understood that money is precious; people are expendable.

Thanks to this officially adopted wisdom, there will be no demographic crisis in Hell. The bodies of politicians are already beginning to fall. Just in the past few days, France, Japan and Nepal have initiated the trend. As I write, a general revolt, Bloquons tout (“Block everything”), has unfurled across the French nation. This has happened despite the rapid nomination of a new prime minister, Macron “loyalist” Sébastien Lecornu.

This presidential attempt to stabilize the situation by following the tried (and failed) method of the recent past will more likely aggravate the irreconcilable conflict that was on show at Monday’s parliamentary session. That is where we witnessed a majority of speakers, the leaders of the various parties, denounce not just Bayrou, but especially Macron.

France isn’t alone. There’s plenty of hellish political activity taking place everywhere in the world. For sheer intensity, we could highlight the prolonged violence visible in regions of Africa long deprived (by design) of even the possibility of effective political autonomy. But who’s to blame when no one has an idea of who runs, or even has the capacity to run, the show? The nations of the West are run by people celebrated for their capacity and buttressed by their hard-earned (or bought) democratic legitimacy.

In the past few years, the most politically significant diabolical confusion has been taking place not in Europe’s capitals but on its periphery. The sinister contamination began festering more than a decade ago with a cleverly orchestrated coup d’état in the remote region formerly called “the Ukraine.” This predictably led to outright war eight years later, planned with diabolical precision to be a proxy war with a clear goal: bring down Russia. Even further on the eastern edges of Europe, but further south, the Holy Land subsequently offered us a more spectacular example: a sadistic massacre with hyperreal apocalyptical overtones.

No one living in either Europe’s “land of culture” or America’s “land of opportunity” wants to admit it, but the fortunes on the battlefield, especially in Ukraine, have demonstrated that the best-laid schemes of mice and intelligence operators “gang aft agley” (MI6 code for “often go awry), as noted some time ago by poet Robert Burns… no relation to former CIA director, William Burns. In contrast, the massive and ongoing slaughter of civilians in Gaza has been more effective, but despite a heavily one-sided use of force, has failed to achieve its planned vision of victory: the eradication of Hamas and the evacuation and/or annihilation of a people.

Lining up the warring camps

Those two conflicts have had a very different effect. They helped to isolate the two pillars of “Western civilization,” on either side of the Atlantic, from the rest of the world. The combined effect of two crusading wars with US President Donald Trump’s addiction to “tariff blackmail” have produced an unintended consequence. The hitherto rather loose and largely theoretical BRICS alliance has now been incited to get to work and tighten things up.

Though with unambiguously non-military intentions, BRICS appears to be evolving towards becoming an authentic (and permanent) “coalition of the willing.” On Monday, Brazilian President Lula da Silva got everyone together online for a virtual summit. “Trade and financial integration between our countries” was the main item Lula had on the menu. The key would be to offer “a safe option to mitigate the effects of protectionism.” After all, the BRICS partners “represent 40 percent of global GDP, 26 percent of international trade, and nearly 50 percent half of the world’s population.”

Does this forebode a future conflict in which two powerful alliances line up against each other in anticipation of a global confrontation charged with nuclear potential? Western media’s reaction to the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organisation — another international group perceived as hostile — reflects a trend of thinking that plays out along those lines. In contrast to confrontation, Lula recommends focusing on “cooperation founded on nationally based, independent, and regulated ecosystems.” The transatlantic alliance appears to be clinging to the old standby, Western hegemony, as a regulating force. Hollywood may want to begin planning a new blockbuster: The Empire vs. the Ecosystem.

The Times of India notes the West’s “alarm over the growing influence of a multi-polar world.” Our media in the West is convinced that when they see others deciding to cooperate it means they are preparing to attack the West’s established “rules-based order.” With alarm bells ringing, the defenders of hegemonic justice may already be scurrying to the armory to equip themselves for the monumental battle to come.

Our team of diabolical spirits observing from the safe haven of Hell have already begun salivating at the prospect. As the coming spectacle unfolds, our technical crews will do their literal damnedest to make sure there’s room for everyone… and the numbers are likely to be impressive.

Israel’s contribution and Europe’s imminent fall

This is indeed a time of rejoicing in Hell. It’s particularly comforting for our crowd to see powerful political leaders publicly acknowledge in their discourse our own cherished underground nation that never fears global warming. Things were apparently not hot enough in Israel; they needed to boost the temperature. Days ago, NBC News quoted Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz: “The lock has been lifted from the gates of hell in Gaza.” After inadvertently revealing the nation’s apparently exclusive command over those gates, the minister added: “When the door opens, it will not close.” Yours truly may claim to be the devil’s advocate, but Israel has now confessed to being the devil’s gatekeeper. That’s one more job we won’t have to carry out ourselves.

The French government has fallen. We are reminded that things aren’t all that different in Germany and the United Kingdom. The plateauing of powerful leaders at 15% approval ratings seems to have become the new norm. To my diabolical delight, nearly every speech given on Monday at France’s National Assembly that brought down Bayrou’s government lamented the descent into uncontrolled debt, foretelling the collapse of the nation’s economy. To my surprise, no one mentioned the cost of the deeply comic and increasingly tragic folly of Europe’s engagement with Ukraine, so deeply are they committed to it as an existential cause. Not that the existence of France or Europe is at stake. No, it’s the existence of the credibility of the political class that bought into a project initiated by the United States in its own interests lock, stock and barrel. And directly contrary to Europe’s.

Do any of these French or European politicians not see that financing Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt government and its war, while cutting off the supply of cheap energy to Europe’s industries, may have contributed to weakening their nations’ economies? On Monday, everyone, starting with Bayrou himself, lamented the risks provoked by uncontrollable debt. But everyone seems to agree that militarization and engagement in what could become a forever war with the world’s best endowed nuclear power is the way forward.

This may be objectively tragic, but it is subjectively comic in the extreme. None in our team of demons can stop laughing at the irony of Europe’s current predicament. We remember how, back in 2008, the continent’s two most powerful leaders — German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, at the time — boldly warned of the risk of war and economic chaos if US President George W. Bush’s America should be permitted to continue insisting on the expansion of NATO to Ukraine. Six years later, those same nations had erased that episode from memory as they followed blindly when the US, under President Barack Obama, actively put Bush’s plan in action. The comic dialogue reached its pinnacle with the CIA–MI6 led coup that took place in Kyiv, Ukraine, in February 2014. That’s when former Department of State Spokesperson Victoria Nuland called the shots and famously instructed the US ambassador: “And fuck the EU!”

The UK isn’t Europe but they’re all sinking together

As we mentioned last week, France, by initiating the new process of allowing its hubristic leaders to be ignominiously humbled has taken the lead. Bayrou is down and out. Macron replaced him with his good buddy, Lecornu, who has the reputation of a negotiator, but the media hold his longevity in serious doubt. Macron himself is teetering. Even if he survives, he will be the lamest of lame ducks for the best part of the next two years. How long can a nation with two amputated legs stand up?

The fate of other leaders, notably in Germany and the UK, is likely to be little different. Perhaps there will be less immediate drama and more drawn-out agony, the kind of thing that goes on in hell all the time. The European Union, a deeply undemocratic institution that consequently has no distinct concept of being the instrument of its “people” or in any way representing them, is showing the first signs of coming apart at the seams. Dissensions have begun to emerge along several fault lines.

The commentator Thomas Fazi has been working on a critique of the EU and this week published the first part of the study. It is titled: “Europe’s future depends on dismantling the EU.” In his introduction to Part 1, Fazi explains that the study “concludes that the EU’s structural deficiencies are irreparable within the confines of its existing model and questions the viability of supranationalism as a viable governance approach in a multipolar and state-driven global order.”

The UK needn’t feel affected by this since it had the good sense to leave the EU before these contradictions could come to the fore. But as we mentioned last week all is not hunky-dory. Writing for Unherd, author John Rapley offers a piece titled: “Britain is in the eye of the financial storm, Investors are losing confidence.” Among the truths he unveils is the fact that investors, “are losing faith that the world’s leading economies will ever get a handle on their finances.” But it doesn’t stop there. “In all the developed economies, markets are defying the rate-cutting of central banks and driving interest rates higher. Debt is becoming more and more expensive.”

The message is that the market (that living personality — a true AI — that allows money rather than people to make decisions) is abandoning its love affair with those wonderfully stable investment opportunities known as developed nations. “Whereas once the governments of the West had the world’s bond investors largely to themselves, now they’re having to compete with dynamic borrowers in the global south. They’re no longer the prize dogs at the show.”

Europe in particular has truly become a mondo cane, literally, a “dog’s world,” with or without the prizes.

*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition Fair Observer began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of The Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.