The world’s an open book. You just have to know how to read it.
No one needed a direct line to heaven to know Trump was going to win. It was obvious the American presidential election wouldn’t be decided by abortion, the police or Gaza.
It would be decided by American voters. You just had to understood what they wanted to say.
It was no surprise the coalition government in Berlin collapsed. The surprising thing is that it was formed in the first place, and that it took so long to hit a wall.
Nor was it a surprise that Gerapetritis and his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan had little to say to each other in Athens.
Both men came with “red lines” on matters of sovereignty which couldn’t simply be set aside with a light heart and a spot of legal acrobatics.
But which can allow for peaceful coexistence and calm bilateral relations. I am sure that no one holidaying in the Aegean will calculate their daily dips in accordance with the breadth of territorial waters, the continental shelf and the Exclusive Economic Zone.
In any case, Greek-Turkish relations will need a lengthy period of decompression before they can move on up to the next stage.
So nothing that has happened is a shock, or even a surprise. We just have to understand the world we live in and what we can expect from it.
What is deeply worrying, though, is our inability to do that.
Trump’s victory was a flawed, perhaps even tawdry, challenge to the short-sighted elites who thought they could get a nation to vote for them with endorsements by well-paid celebrities.
The fall of the German government was the natural consequence of delusional political thinking. Three parties forming an effective system of government is a virtual impossibility, even in Germany.
And the Far Right and extremist politicians’ “concerns” about Greek-Turkish relations reflect nothing but their own inability to grasp that a nation’s foreign policy cannot be made without the participation of the nation.
In every case, the real threat to our Western societies lies in the disconnect between the political class (who are, at best, a well-educated elite) and social realities.
Or, worse still, in the construction of an imaginary reality that serves no one but the political class and their preferred lens for viewing reality.
The Democrats paid for it in the US. Scholz’s Social Democrats paid the price in Germany.
I hope we don’t have to pay the price in Greece, too.
