“… Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans…”

— Count Otto Von Bismarck, predicting the fateful trigger for a general European war, years before the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne did precisely that.

Daily Maverick’s trusty time machine has been out of service for several months, but it is back in action. First, it had to go into the repair shop to fix that tricky flux capacitor. But then, a new problem came along. It has been hard to source the required rare earth metals that actually fuel the flux capacitor, now that China has been making it much harder to import those ores into the US. Anyway, we finally have now gotten the machine running again; but, to conserve fuel, the device was set to carry a time traveller forward until 10 minutes to noon, 20 January 2021. And as for the geographical location, we have picked the west lawn of the United States Capitol Building, just behind some temporary scaffolding erected for television cameras. That is where the swearing-in takes place.

And so, away we went…

It is a cold, sombre, grey day in Washington, DC. Snow and sleet blow through the skies and then fall on to the ground. Given some unique circumstances, there are unprecedented numbers of troops and police on duty along the Mall, and surrounding the Capitol Building, as well as the White House, some 16 blocks to the west. Overhead, military and police helicopters hover in the airspace, and the sounds of police vehicle sirens periodically break what calm is left in the city.

The gathering crowd, coming together to witness the inauguration, seems restive but largely quiet. Most people are dressed for the raw weather, but while there are a few red “Make America Great Again” hats on heads among this crowd, they are scattered like tiny flecks of red pepper in a peri-peri sauce than the overwhelming, essential elements of a recipe.

What has happened to the nation over the past 18 months? The souvenir programmes on sale and discarded newspapers tell the story.

By early 2020, it was already becoming clear troubling economic times were coming. There was, of course, the well-known bond interest rate inversion in which investors had been bidding up the short-term bond rate in order to take what profits they could in an increasingly disorderly world, in place of the security of long-term bonds, but lower interest rates.

But now, other measures such as the manufacturers’ confidence index were dropping precipitously as the US-China trade imbroglio continued unabated after the much-touted Maui major conference had ended in acrimonious disarray as the US president left in the middle of it. As a result, businesses were increasingly aware that rises in prices due to the new US tariffs could no longer be absorbed by importers, wholesalers and retailers, and that the increases would now have to be passed along to their consumers, as products moved into stores or on to online catalogues. Purchasers were unlikely to be thrilled, but there was nothing else businesses could do, and stay in business.

But there was much more to come. In mid-May, amid of some increasingly raucous Democratic primaries, a large flurry of missiles entered Israeli airspace. Most were successfully intercepted by the Iron Dome anti-missile array; a few landed in farmland or desert. But two struck targets. The first struck busy Dizengoff Mall in downtown Tel Aviv on Friday afternoon, destroying shops and killing or wounding many. Almost simultaneously, yet another missile got past defences and struck the Dome of the Rock, destroying the ancient building, causing many casualties there and even killing Jewish worshippers at the Wailing Wall well below the dome.

In the international uproar that followed, it was unclear who had fired those missiles, although the denials, respectively, from Hezbollah, Hamas, the Syrian government, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the Iranian government as well, all had a certain equivocal quality to them. The Israeli government maintained a silence, presumably as they weighed options and calculated the reliability of tracking data. Twenty-four hours after the initial strikes, Israeli missiles fired from one of their submarines, stationed quietly in the waters of the Arabian Sea, destroyed Iranian military and security facilities, including the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guard. There were casualties there too.

Within two days of those missile strikes, a half-dozen oil tankers were sunk in the Strait of Hormuz, blocking shipping through the narrow waterway, thereby causing an immediate spike in global oil prices to well past $100/barrel. That, in turn, triggered massive price increases and shortages at petrol pumps around the world. Quickly enough, stock indexes on all the major markets tumbled by double-digit percentages, as soon as the markets opened for business. Inevitably too, less stable governments such as those in Italy, Spain, Greece, Brazil, and Argentina collapsed, but these events barely registered in the growing economic carnage and the hostilities in the Middle East.

Then, in a surprising show of unity by Russia, China, Japan, the Western European nations (at least those whose governments were not in free-fall), the OPEC nations led by Saudi Arabia, minus Iran and Venezuela, urged restraint on all sides. The American president’s response was initially conflicted, first blaming Iran and threatening “fire and fury” and “total obliteration” but then, abruptly shifting gears to ask the Israelis and Iranians to allow international mechanisms to play their part.

Unfortunately, television cameras, called into the Oval Office to witness serious presidential resolve when Donald Trump spoke with his senior national security team about the crisis, captured, instead, a president whose facial appearance could only be described as a “deer in the headlights” moment. But then there was a sotto voce comment from the president, picked up on an unplanned, hot microphone, saying, “John, Ivanka, Jared, Mike, Mike, what do you think we should do? Should I Call Bibi and ask him? What does Boris think? And our friends Vladimir, Kim, and Xi?”

The resulting public uproar over this clear evidence of a president’s inability to act cogently — presidentially — in a real crisis, rather than in “solving” one he had largely created by himself, brought out thousands to protest all across the nation, including a silent vigil in front of the White House, attended by massed gatherings of black-clad demonstrators.

The president’s cabinet, shocked into action, as opposed to its usual torpor, pulled itself together sufficiently to vote on the application of the 25th Amendment — the presidential disability amendment — over the present moment. Ultimately, the vote went two to one not to relieve Donald Trump of his presidential powers, although the many acting secretaries (now in departments but without senatorial confirmation) had provided the crucial margin not to remove the president. Was this even constitutional? The vote triggered a whole raft of court cases seeking to overturn that decision, that were still working their way through the federal court system.

Meanwhile, the international and economic chaos was obviously affecting the Democratic Party primaries as well, as the left in the party such as candidates Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris (with vocal, public, media-savvy support from the four freshwomen led by Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — AOC), and emboldened by the events unfolding all around them, insisted this was the moment for a breakthrough for the left. They were opposed on the primary trail by centrists like Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, and Michael Bennett. But as the party rolled on into its nominating convention, no one candidate had gained anything close to a lock on sufficient delegates to be nominated.

Ultimately, the convention — and the party — fractured. A significant share of delegates walked out and settled on the leftist dream green team of Harris and Warren when they met in a suddenly convened meeting in a nearby hotel. Warren and Harris — in that order — had been the preference of many delegates in the rump convention, thereby leading to a degree of mistrust with the resulting ticket.

The next task for activists was to get the duo on the ballots of all 50 states. They failed in several cases, but they did succeed in all the big states. The remaining delegates in the original convention, despite pleas to go with the experienced Joe Biden, went with Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (a man praised by conservative commentator George Will over the weekend as a possible winner for Democrats nationally) and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar as his vice presidential running mate to form a true midwestern, all-American ticket that would appeal to those crucial midwestern industrial states.

Bennet, regarding the national crisis, even before the newest economic and security problems, in a book he had authored, had quoted the ancient Greek writer Thucydides (chronicler of the Peloponnesian War that had destroyed Athens as a major power) describing the civil chaos in a neighbouring city, Corcyra, saying:

“With public life confused to the critical point, human nature, always ready to act unjustly even in violation of laws, overthrew the laws themselves and gladly showed itself powerless over passion but stronger than justice and hostile to any kind of superiority.” Or as George Will had written in his weekend column about Bennet:

“Such hostility is the essence of populism.” Think Donald Trump, and perhaps even Democratic leftists.

Of course, the international crisis in the Middle East and the global economic crisis it had helped engender refused to be put on hold. As a result, Republican elders, including many of the “Never Trump” cohort of leading, experienced foreign and economic policy hands who had said they would never serve in his administration, once again began to search for a way forward if the cabinet would not do its duty. There were, of course, many GOP supporters and activists who still backed the president, but by the time of the actual convention, usually a celebration of incumbency with a sitting president, it had become clear to many that things were in a highly turbulent, dangerous place.

After much dissent, the president was renominated, but at this convention, too, a large body of delegates also left the venue and they settled on Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse and John Kasich (a veteran of Congress, a recent governor of Ohio, and the very reluctant candidate who had said he was only doing it for the good of the country) as their alternative slate. This team’s supporters, too, needed to move quickly to ensure their slate’s presence on the ballot across the country, a task headed by the ever-present Republican fixer, James Baker.

For the first time since 1860, the country went into a presidential election with four “major” party candidates vying for votes. The presidential debates were a raucous affair that began showing for all to see that the current president was unable to deal with the horrific global political and economic situation. By the time Election Day arrived, polling data was unable to say who would win. Ultimately, none of the four candidates achieved the 270 out of 538 electoral votes needed to claim victory.

The choice was now left to the newly elected House of Representatives to pick the new president, with each state’s delegation getting one vote, while the Senate was tasked with picking the vice president. The House delegations had tipped towards the Democrats even further than in 2018, due to the economic and political global chaos and they went with Bennet.

Once the presidency was settled, the Senate fell in line to pick one of their own, the Minnesota senator, Amy Klobuchar, especially since the Democrats had a one-seat majority after picking up four Senate seats without losing any of their incumbents up for re-election.

After much politicking and back-room, late-night discussions, and as media and social media comment demanded a definitive decision in the face of the international and economic situation, the House had rallied around Bennet, but only after the two had offered a formal promise to include a significant number of individuals proposed by Senator Sasse for many of the government’s top positions. Not surprisingly, Trump partisans insisted the whole thing was fixed, rigged, a cheat, a con, engineered by, who else but Hillary Clinton. And Harris’s supporters promised to make life miserable for this illegitimate, quasi-government of national unity.

The Washington Post applauded the choice of veteran, experienced hands, but it noted, “the Middle East is still about to break out into more general warfare and the economy remains locked in a downward trajectory, seemingly without any coherent governmental hands on the national tiller… there is more than enough work to do for the country’s new leaders.”

Meanwhile, AOC told her Twitter army that the results proved that “the old white men of the Congress could not pick women of colour — and it means exactly what you think it means.” Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson lamented Trump’s political demise, but promised to find common ground, while Russian President and Chinese leader Xi Jinping both called the president-elect on 19 January to offer their help in the Middle East mess, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel, when asked by reporters what she thought of these Washington machinations, was first overheard muttering under her breath through a very tight smile, “Mein Gott,” before uttering words of support to the new administration.

As for Binyamin Netanyahu and Mohammad Rouhani, the Israeli and Iranian leaders, separately, in astonishingly similar words, both said they would be prepared to listen to ideas for the future, but they would protect their respective nations, no matter what the cost to others. By the day of the inauguration, the Strait of Hormuz continues to be blocked, the oil price remains in the stratosphere, Gulf oil producers are in a desperate state, and the global economic situation remains dire.

On Inauguration Day, as a result, US authorities were forced to guard against respective angry, rival gangs of disappointed supporters — as well as external actors who might see this crowd as a target of opportunity.

Unfortunately, the fuel warning light on the time traveller’s vehicle was starting to flicker by the time the swearing-in was about to start, and so we were forced to return to the present before actually hearing President Bennet’s address.

But we did learn that the now-former president had already been escorted to an unnamed facility so that he might get some needed rest and decompression, and that, at least for the time being, his electronic devices and services would be deactivated to help him recuperate from the stress of the past months. DM