World must navigate decline of the US
The two years of Trump confirms that the decline of the US as the dominant global power continues to accelerate (4 January). Trump is the fourth or fifth US president to deal with US decline. Neither the conservatism of Reagan and the Bushes nor the centrist liberalism of Clinton or Obama has been effective in slowing down the trajectory of decline. The wild card that is Trump will be no more successful, nor will any perhaps moderately progressive successor.
The challenge now is fourfold. First, to ensure that US decline is not the catalyst for conflict; second, to ensure that it does not slow action to deal with global warming; third, to minimise disruption and volatility in the global financial system as the dollar loses it status; finally, to reduce global inequalities.
So, perhaps we all need to hope that God really is on the US’s side. Failing that, can democracy produce the kind of capitalism that is more sustainable?
Stewart Sweeney
Adelaide, South Australia
• I concurred enthusiastically with your 4 January leader on Trump’s year of reckoning, until the last clause. It is a particularly inept reference to someone’s half-remembered Sunday school days: to wit, the destruction of the pagan temple of Dagon by Samson as the final act of his life, and by it, the freeing of the Israelites from oppression by their enemies.
Samson is portrayed as one who the vanity and selfishness abuses his huge natural gift (immense physical strength).
Eventually he comes to his senses, while in his enemies’ captivity, and, now thoroughly humbled, he sorts it all out with God. Frankly it looks a million miles from what anyone can expect of Donald Trump.
Richard Montgomery
Brixham, UK
• To the surprise of some of us, perhaps the elderly, we have survived half the Trump presidency. Were we to see out the rest, then there might be hope for the future. Even with the challenge of climate change.
Ron Willis
Perth, Western Australia
Monbiot is right about state of universities
It is not surprising that, as George Monbiot reports, academic research is helping advertisers to hone their campaigns (4 January). We keep reading reports of the marketisation of universities. British universities, in particular, are said to be marketised to a point that shocks foreign observers, who regard British universities as “the canary in the mine”.
This must also be linked to the prevalence of bullying of academics by line managers. Workplace intimidation, as described in Dan Lyons’s book Lab Rats, is not confined to overtly commercial enterprises.
George Schlesinger
Durham, UK
Population decline is hardly a bad thing
You state that Japan is suffering as its population declines (4 January). With a world population far exceeding our capacity to provide for the environment and humans, I would think that Japan, by reducing its population, is far from suffering, notwithstanding some difficulties that may be no worse than that from continuing growth.
If more countries did as Japan is doing, there is some prospect that untrammelled growth will not be the end of the human species.
Steve Thomas
Yarralumla, ACT, Australia
Workers replaced by robots will still get paid
John Harris paints a disturbing picture about the replacement of workers by robots (21 December), but overlooks what so many other commentators have done – the unemployed workers will receive an income from the state, not out of generosity but because the new regime must have consumers.
There is no point in production that is not saleable.
John Burn
Christchurch, New Zealand
Cold water may inspire, but whisky is good too
A daily polar plunge (Jump right in, 4 January)? Playwright Eugene O’Neill was a religious cold-swimmer – suffering from lifelong depression, alcoholism and Parkinson’s his last decade – during winters in New York City and Cape Cod. Could Boreas be the best of muses (along with a bit of John Barleycorn, of course)?
RM Fransson
Wheat Ridge, Colorado, US
