Our times have been changed by the digital and the Green revolutions.
The digital revolution is bottom up, driven by strong popular demand for everything from on line retail to downloaded entertainment, and from social media to business computing. The US has swept all before it with its seven digital giant companies dominating the space in the advanced and non aligned world. China has developed its own powerful parallel systems for itself and its alliance of autocracies.
The Green revolution has been largely top down, pushed onto a reluctant consumer by subsidies, bans, taxes and rules. It has been mainly a feature of the EU and UK. They have been willing to sacrifice large swathes of their high energy burning and fossil fuel based industries, whilst turning to Chinese imports for many of the net zero replacements. China has adopted it to exploit the market opportunity it sees in selling batteries, electric cars, solar panels and wind turbines to the West, whilst itself continuing to increase its use of coal and gas, increasing its own CO2 output. The US has shifted from being a believer to going for massive growth in its fossil fuel sector. The US sees cheap reliable fossil fuel energy as the way to rebuild its industrial power.
We have witnessed the emergence of China as the rival and competitor to the USA for world power and influence, the decline of Europe and the rise of India, Brazil, Indonesia and other populous countries as they they grow faster. China can usually rely on Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and Iran. The US has worked with NATO, the EU, the leading members of OPEC, South Korea, Japan and the Philippines.
US power rests on many foundations. There is the superior force and technology of the large US military, with its capacity to intervene anywhere in the world through a carrier task force or long range warplanes. There is the leading role of the dollar and US commercial banks in world, trade and finance. There is the leadership the US usually gives to NATO as its majority donor. There is the grip US technology companies have over every family and business throughout the free world by supplying the software, communications, data storage and the rest that allow people to live their lives and businesses to pick up and process orders. There is the influence of US film and media entertaining and informing many in the world.
Today this power is under the microscope. Has the US won the war in Iran as they claim, when the Straits are still not open and the Revolutionary Guards still control the Iranian people? Is the yuan and an alternative trade and banking system growing faster as China and Russia seek alternatives to US directed activity? Will the US break up NATO in anger over the refusal of European countries to offer more help against Iran? Will there be more challenges to the US story? Or will the US with its growing control over oil and gas worldwide come to exert more power in a world which may think green but acts fossil fuel?
April 11, 2026
Richard Feynman:- “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled,” was written in his personal appendix to the 1986 Rogers Commission Report regarding the Challenger space shuttle disaster. It emphasizes that physical reality and engineering integrity are paramount, and that scientific facts cannot be ignored or bypassed by management, PR, or wishful thinking.
Not something many our PPE, Classics, Geography (May) and Lawyer politicians ever seem to take on board.
April 11, 2026
Well it is good that Artemis II touches down safely after nine days in space with a broken loo. I wonder if any of the crew in these 9 days have managed come up with any scientific benefit remotely worth the £billions spent yet or why a far more costly manned crew was ever needed.
I am still waiting for something real – just v. expensive show business and politics I guess. The money could have saved many hundreds of thousands of lives and produced a large financial return too on Earth.