Week signals: Morbid symptoms
Plus: watch points for France, Russia, Ireland, Romania, and Namibia.
This week:
IN REVIEW. A missile into the Trump presidency, the crisis of transition, and three risks for the next two months.
UP AHEAD. The sentencing of Le Pen, Putin's trip to Kazakhstan, and elections in Ireland, Romania, and Namibia.
The Week in Review: An interregnum within an interregnum
The week began with elections in Senegal, a summit in Brazil, two cut cables in the Baltic, and some overlooked but potentially dramatic changes in the Caucasus (and that doesn't include COP29). It ended with the indictment in New York of one of Narendra Modi’s most prominent allies, and an ICC arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu.
But the biggest development was Joe Biden’s late agreement to Kyiv’s use of long-range missiles inside Russia. This coincided with (and in some views, triggered) Moscow’s lowering of its nuclear threshold and the biggest missile barrage of the Ukraine war so far. The barrage also included, on Thursday morning, the use of a medium-range hypersonic missile – the military equivalent of taking a gun to a knife fight.
After months of denying long-range strike capabilities, the White House’s decision, made after the US election, was seen by Donald Trump as a poison pill for future negotiations (the president-elect’s son went as far to say it was an attempt to cause World War III). That’s unlikely. Ukraine has limited missile stocks. Ongoing restrictions won’t change the direction of the war (or the peace). Yet it does say something troubling about the nature of any lame-duck period.
A lame-duck period is often grandly called an interregnum (i.e., “between reigns”). First notably used to describe the brief period of English republicanism (1649-1660), it’s taken other meanings since. In April, we used it to describe our present moment as a geopolitical interregnum between Pax Americana and whatever comes next (probably multipolarity, as we wrote last week). So what does it then mean when there’s an interregnum within an interregnum?
Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist philosopher imprisoned by Benito Mussolini in 1926, took the term from one describing historical kings to one describing historical eras, writing in his Prison Notebooks:
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Gramsci was speaking of the crisis of fascism – an ideology sandwiched between the Italian monarchy and a socialist republic. That republic never arrived, but his concept of transitional crisis was telling and, as we wrote in April, there have indeed been morbid symptoms across other geopolitical interregna, such as the 16th century wars prior to the Peace of Westphalia, and the era of revolution leading to the Napoleonic Wars of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Even the relatively bloodless interregnum between the fall of the Berlin War in 1989 and the fall of the USSR in 1991, was seismic for many. Vladimir Putin called it as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”. And today, as shown in Ukraine, we’re still dealing with the fallout.
This doesn’t mean our present double interregnum is going to be as disruptive, but it’s another reminder to prepare for a wide range of scenarios and contingencies – not business as usual – in your corporate and investment planning. And over the next two months – when lame ducks can be forgotten amid Thanksgiving and Christmas turkey – it’s a reminder that the course of history is in many ways on a knife edge.
Over the next 60 days, besides escalation in Ukraine, we’re looking out for several things in particular: