Week signals: The shot that never fired
Plus: watch points for Benjamin Netanyahu, Hamas and Fatah, Venezuela, the Quad, and the Olympic Games.
This week:
IN REVIEW. The non-assassination of Donald Trump, the spirits of history, and the Hegelian CEO.
UP AHEAD. Netanyahu visits Washington, Hamas visits Beijing, Venezuela goes to the polls, awkward India, and the Paris Olympics.
The Week in Review: What an attempted assassination says and doesn’t say about history
A week of extraordinary events has been dominated by Donald Trump’s attempted assassination on 13 July, five hours after our last Week Signals was published.
Much has been written of the consequences, as well as those had the gunman not missed, reminding us of other historical counterfactuals. Would World War I have happened if Gavrilo Princip missed Franz Ferdinand? How would we remember Abraham Lincoln without John Wilkes Booth? Would the Cold War have been any different had Lee Harvey Oswald not reached the Texas School Book Depository?
We’ll never know, but we can do some interesting thought experiments. Would Austria have gone to war with Serbia anyway? Would Lincoln have differed to Johnson or Grant in advancing Reconstruction? Would the Vietnam War not have happened if Kennedy survived?
The great debate of history is whether events are determined by the individual (the “great man” – or great woman – theory) or by the structures of environment, geography, demography and economy (“history from below”). We tend to opt for the latter, but unlike many geopolitical determinists, we think leadership does play a role. Perhaps it’s only a 20% role, but like the Pareto principle, sometimes that 20% can make 80% of the difference. Or, at least, appear to.
Team individual had a moment this week. Like Hegel’s concept of the great man (or woman) as being an agent of destiny, Trump’s survival – by a fraction of an inch – not only seemed providential, but his dramatic rise from the stage, fist aloft, almost embodied a latter-day Hegelian “world-spirit on horseback”.
But is Trump really the world-spirit, the weltgeist, or is he merely the spirit of the times, the zeitgeist?