Opinion | A week is a long time in politics...
By Tom Fowdy
There is a well-known saying that goes "a week is a long time in politics." The saying refers to the reality that politics is in many instances, unpredictable. One thing can happen, and we can draw conclusions or assumptions from it that things are heading in a certain direction or will be limited to a certain paradigm, only for suddenly something else to happen, randomly and unforeseen, which challenges everything we assumed and leads to a completely different outcome if not world.
When viewed in this light, the flow of history has never been so entirely predictable or fluid as it has been the accumulation of such spontaneous, random, and unpredictable events completing the timeline. For example, William Adelin was set to inherit the Kingdom of England from his father Henry I, until one night in 1120 his ship, the White Boat, unexpectedly sank and he perished trying to rescue his sister. The subsequent succession crisis caused a civil war known as The Anarchy. In a nutshell, we assume one thing or path is going to happen, and then another thing does with massive consequences. It cannot be put in more simple terms: Nothing is guaranteed.
The past several weeks have been one of those instances. The mainstream media focused incessantly, perhaps opportunistically, on how a delayed aid package in the US House of Representatives to Ukraine is going to cost Kyiv the war. Of course, we should be mindful such reporting is agenda-laden. While I always expected that aid to be passed eventually and never delayed indefinitely, it was quite something to see how all of a sudden, Israel attacks an Iranian consulate, Iran strikes back with a very publicly announced drone and missile attack, and then all of a sudden from this US Speaker of the House Michael Johnson transforms into a full-blown Neoconservative, says democracy is at threat from an "axis of evil", and then immediately passes the package, with the TikTok ban attached to the bill.
It is perhaps no surprise after this that the media narrative, again opportunistically, flips back to the "Ukraine is going to win mantra" and there is a chorus of optimism, success, and praise following, which is ironic because even with maximum Western aid Ukraine failed to make any headway in last year's "counteroffensive." Naturally, it has always been the attempt of such reporting and discourse to steer the mindset to support the current agenda, thus there is always a complacent assumption of "inevitability" in everything the US and its allies do accordingly.
Hence on another note, it is always the narrative and pushed assumption that China's economy is destined to fail, that Western allies are always "perfectly unified" and thus forth. The past few years have undoubtedly revealed the full extent the Western media is subjected to such manipulation. Any articles hyping up Ukraine's doom were deliberate scaremongering purely to incentivize the push of aid. The Western media works by such theatrics which hype up a problem and depict doom, but then airlifts the solution in and declares victory. It is likewise my experience that they will use any crisis or situation they can to push their specific agenda through.
Of course, that very aforementioned unpredictability of politics and history works both ways, too. There are things that will happen, for all sides involved, that are not expected. This is truer for the nature of war than anything else perhaps, where no "master plan" to conquer a country, no matter how brilliant or calculated it may be, which of course applies to Russia's plan to try and force a quick capitulation of the Ukrainian government, but on the other side of the coin it was assumed Ukraine was going to effortlessly blitz through Russian held territory in 2023, isolate Crimea and then win the war on its own terms. Their side has not quite come to terms with the reality of that failure yet.
However, it seems naïve to assume, contrary to the narrative, that Moscow seriously assumed the aid was "never going to pass" and the claim Michael Johnson is "bought by the Kremlin" is also a lazy, centrist liberal trope that assumes everyone who opposes them is a puppet of Russia. Thus, unless (and until) there is a random and predictable event that we cannot yet foresee, it is safe to assume the Ukraine war is far from over yet, and its outcomes are not guaranteed even if momentum is currently going in one direction. A week is a long time in politics, and thus it is erroneous, for both the West and the other side, to make finite and lasting judgments based on small developments believing we have long foresight when we do not. This is the fallacy of political analysis and I have, as well as others, fallen into this trap many, many times. Things will continue to alternate between these cycles of "Ukraine will win" or "Russia will win" save the very thing that happens, which makes one side win, and we don't know what it will be or when it will be.
The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
Read more articles by Tom Fowdy:
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