It is Happy New Year here at last. A New Year starts on January 1st, not 16th. There’s no debate about that but there’s no law that says everyone must celebrate it that day.
It could also be on January 16th, 17th or even December 30th, 2026. Hahahaha!
The year rolled in with a disorienting spectacle of one Head of State raiding another one, putting him in handcuffs and sending him and his wife to a trial judge. It seems so unnatural, an atypical word to use for a relativist.
This is not the first time the ‘City on the Hill’ has done it, but it gets more and more tasteless each time it is does that. It gets more and more tasteless perhaps because it is the very antithesis of the humility and gentility of power by its very nature.
Power as an enterprise in humility and gentility is not an arcane morality or naivete but power’s saving grace once it was realised that ‘power is everywhere’ ala Foucault.
If power is everywhere, then a rough rider in power is not manifesting power but anxiety, tension, inner turbulence, a sense of unease.
By the way, has everyone had time to read Prof Amitav Acharya’s The World-Minus-One essay in Foreign Policy?
Intervention hasn’t had the chance to ‘read’ it beyond scampering through. It is certainly not the toughest piece on what happened on January 3rd, 2026 but it has a quality of freshness one associates with what one may call the typical mandarin of International Relations at the American University in Washington DC. Don’t forget, that’s where Patrick Thaddeus Jackson teaches!
