They all won! Hurray!

There is one thing that must be recognized in contemporary global politics: it is consistent. Consistently mediocre, consistently cynical, consistently governed by people who seem to have emerged from a cross between a reality show and a forensic psychopathology textbook. The beauty—so to speak—is that this time, too, no one lost. They all won. In fact, I'll tell you more: they're still celebrating. The cynicism of global politics is something monstrously inhuman that leads only to racking up Pyrrhic victories.

Sit back and relax. I'll tell you how a story ends where the usual suspects win, the world burns, and we, the spectators, pay for the ticket. With presale fees, too! Because we can't say "we didn't know.".

The Most Beloved President in History (by himself)

Let's start with him, the essential. Donald Trump, re-elected in November 2024 and re-crowned in January 2025 at the White House, he recently achieved his ultimate rhetorical masterpiece: he openly declared that “an entire civilization will die tonight“Not a veiled threat, not a metaphor. Just like that, off the cuff, like someone ordering a pizza. A thousand-year-old civilization erased forever, never to be rebuilt.

It takes a certain courage—or a certain absence of everything else—to utter these words in public without even a tremor in your voice. Because let's be clear: evil has always worn a suit and spoken of democracy and freedom. This is nothing new today. What is new is that once upon a time it at least cared to find a presentable euphemism: "collateral damage," "humanitarian intervention," "surgical operation." Not now. Now it simply says that a civilization will die tonight, and the world, for the most part, continues scrolling its smartphone.

Consensus at an all-time low? Detail. Who needs consensus when you have power?

The Institutional Survivor

Then there is Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister, a man who on October 6, 2023, was politically and judicially in dire straits. Corruption trials, government coalitions held together with spit and prayers, an Israeli street that had been revolting for months against his justice reform. He was a finished man. Or so it seemed.

Then came October 7th, and the game was completely reversed. The war achieved what politics never manages to do: it united the nation around the leader, transformed the accused into a commander, suspended trials, and postponed inconvenient questions indefinitely. Today, Netanyahu has not only survived politically, but he holds a negotiating position so strategic with Washington that it would make any lobbyist blush. A victory, even if it was built on the ruins of everything else.

The Regime That Hates Its Own Children

The Iranian regime deserves a separate discussion, because there is something particularly grotesque in a system of power that represses rebellions internal and then complain about external threats. For years the Iranian population has tried to rebel: women in the streets without veils, young people burning photos of Khamenei, workers on strike. The regime responded in its usual way: truncheons, prisons, executions.

But external war is convenient. Extremely convenient. Because when the missiles come from outside, the enemy ceases to be the government and becomes the other. The Iranian theocratic regime has transformed its survival into an art: repressing internally, threatening externally, and using every crisis to bind a nation that would otherwise disintegrate on its own. They too, in their own way, have won.

The Tsar Who Waits

And finally him. Vladimir Putin, the man who in February 2022 explained to us that Ukraine would fall in a matter of days. Four years later, the longest special operation in history continues, the Russian economy is under pressure, the ruble has seen better times, and Western sanctions have done their job.

Yet Putin is rubbing his hands together. Because he knows how to wait. He knows that the global energy chaos, fueled by Middle Eastern crises and geopolitical instability, could do what no diplomatic negotiation has achieved: convince Europe to come knocking on his door again. The EU has declared its intention to definitively cut its dependence on Russian gas by 2027, but in the meantime, it imports record quantities of liquefied natural gas and watches the cost of energy rise. And Putin waits, with the patience of one who knows that winter always returns.

The Pyrrhic Victory of Global Politics: Everyone's Won. What About Us?

The paradox of the global politics It's not that these gentlemen are particularly brilliant. The point is that they're allowed to do so. The complicit silence of international institutions, the weariness of public opinion, the fragmentation of those who should oppose them: all this is the fertile ground on which every form of irresponsible power thrives.

The genesis of contemporary evil is not mysterious. There's no need to search for it between the lines of secret documents or the depths of conspiracy theories. It's there, plainly revealed, unashamed and shameless. And this, paradoxically, is the most disturbing aspect of all.

But there's an answer to all this, and it doesn't come through the ballot box or the halls of power. It comes through culture, through education, through creativity, through art, through the stubborn refusal to normalize degradation. As I said in a recent conversation about music and what drove me to create... Symphonic ReverieI look for beauty everywhere. And if I don't find it, I create it.

Because someone has to do it!