Military band and choir during the parade marking the 80th anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II, Beijing (China) © China Daily

Summer has not been a sleepy pause, but an accelerated time in the transformation of the world. After the United States’ attack on Iran in the last week of June, July saw Ursula von der Leyen at a Scottish golf course meekly accepting the tariffs imposed by Trump, who in August rolled out in Alaska the red carpet for Putin, ending the Russian dictator’s isolation, to days later receive in the Oval Office European leaders, seated in a circle like schoolchildren to beg for support in the Ukraine war, and September started with a grand parade in Beijing that flaunted China’s central standing in geopolitics. The 80th anniversary of the end of World War II was commemorated in simultaneity with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, which in Tianjin gathered some twenty heads of state of the Global South, among them India’s Narendra Modi, and both events highlighted the role of Xi Jinping at the helm of a new order that parades military might and soft power in a narrative where China is the guarantor of international stability.

Many of the summer’s front pages conveyed the tragedy of a Gaza Strip besieged by hunger and death, but this genocide is affecting consciences more than chancelleries, as Israel, a small country of two million people which has intervened in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, and Qatar at the same time, defends the interests as much of the West – “doing the dirty work for all of us,” in the words of Germany’s Chancellor Merz at the last G7 summit – as of the Saudis and Emirates, for all of whom Hamas and Hezbollah are arch-enemies. The cruel destruction of Palestinian territory and lives plucks at our moral fiber but barely alters the pulse of the world, which resolves its major conflicts in other latitudes. Trump’s consistent backing of Netanyahu is censured in universities and film festivals, but this does not affect his following in the United States nor his capacity to intimidate in Europe, and all this makes the Middle East as present in media coverage as it is removed from the existential emergencies of geopolitics.

The leaders of the new order taking shape at a dizzying rate are all authoritarians with traditional roots. The Confucian Xi has hosted the Hinduist Modi, the Ottoman Islamist Erdogan, and the Russian Orthodox Putin, but his rival Trump does not lag behind in dressing his imperative nationalism with a conservative varnish of cultural continuity. And although the American president’s unpredictable and narcissistic behavior catches many analysts unawares, the truth is – as Polonius says of Hamlet – that there is method in his madness. Even though many of his decisions in international politics seem to come from the New York real estate ecosystem, both his determination to strike deals and his seemingly insane objectives, from Canada or Greenland to the Panama Canal, have a rational base and cannot be dismissed as mere occurrences. As Baudelaire said about cities, the world changes faster than the heart of a mortal, and in this acceleration of time lies a political, economic, and social logic that strikes and wounds us without mercy.

SCO summit in Tianjin © Alexander Kazakov