Red Sea

Those of us in the comfortable, priviledged part of the world would prefer not to know how bad it is for those on the outside. At the moment it is Gaza that is intruding on our tranquility but if you just travel on down the Red Sea, towards the Horn of Africa, you find it is grim and grimmer. Luckily our media spares us these unpleasantries. You have to want to know about places like Eritrea and do some digging. While those few who care focus on starvation and genocide in Palestine, there are horrors and atrocities occurring throughout the region as tribal factions splinter off and take up arms, as they all scramble for gold or other precious resources, as outside powers like the Saudis, Egyptians, UAE and Turks fight proxy wars using corrupt elites and ambitious warlords. As the U.S. "superpower" trys to "manage" the conflicts, in other words, making sure proxy wars weaken our enemies and strengthen our allies. Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria. Tigrays, Houthis, Druze - who can really keep up? Who recalls the devastating 2020–22 war between the Ethiopian federal government in Addis Ababa and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front which cost as many as 600,000 lives, including hundreds of thousands of civilians? How about the ongoing civil war in the Darfur region of Sudan? The army and a rebel group clashed in 2023 and now more than 150,000 people have died in the conflict across the country, and about 12 million have fled their homes in what the United Nations has called the world's largest humanitarian crisis. There are other conflicts in the region ( Niger, Syria, etc..) and plenty of corrupt regimes, but the point is that the architecture of the so-called global order doesn't work for a vast part of the population. We sit happily in our Western bubble, raking in the wealth and resources from around the globe to support a comfortable, relatively secure lifestyle. Just don't look behind the curtain. Now That Trump has declared the U.S. the number 1 global power and Russia number 2, we Americans can feel that surge of pride that goes along with being on top, being the alpha. This is what capitalism creates; a competitive hierarcy of power. What could possibly go wrong?