In 1989, the world saw the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, more commonly known as the USSR. What many people don’t realize about that collapse is that it was predicted nearly ten years earlier by a Norwegian sociologist by the name of Johan Galtung. He published a book in 1980 that detailed the fall of the USSR through a list of internal contradictions and world tensions that would eventually escalate into an irreparable situation. As a result of his amazingly accurate prediction, Galtung become a renowned academic figure, and his advice is generally taken as accurate.
Since he made his prediction about the USSR, Galtung has moved to the United States, where he now lives and works as a faculty member for the University of Hawaii. Galtung created another wave of controversy back in 2009 when he published another book, this time detailing how the United States would reach a similar fate as the USSR by 2025. He included 15 points of contraction that would ultimately lead to the social and cultural collapse of the country, and many of those 15 points line up scarily well with the rise of Donald Trump. In a recent interview with Motherboard, Galtung said that Trump falls in line with what he called in his book a ‘strong leader’. The results of such a leader gaining power, according in Galtung, will be a steady decline in world power in the decade following Trump’s election. He also leaves the possibility open for a collapse similar to what occurred in the USSR.
According to Galtung, the process will have two primary contributing factors. The first is that the leadership of the ‘strong leader’ will isolate the country from the rest of the world. In doing so, the US will lose the majority of its strongest allies. This will prevent the US from receiving any aid with any foreign wars, which is essentially already starting to happen. There are countries in Northern Europe that still support the wars undertaken by the United States, but estimates show that may not continue for the foreseeable future. In fact, according to Galtung, it could as soon as the year 2020 before such global support ceases.
The second contributing factor of the collapse will be the fact that the United States will be forced to undergo all war operations without any physical support. That means the United States will be forced to take much more responsibility on the world stage for their actions. Even though Galtung made these predictions back in 2009, they are nearly all playing out exactly as he predicted. Many of them occurred within the last few months in relation to the presidential election and Trump’s rise to power.
One of the many areas of contradiction that have emerged is based on the economy. Trump made it one of his primary campaign platforms that he would save the middle class by increasing domestic jobs while protecting new jobs from outsourcing. However, Trump hasn’t even taken the office yet and he has already contradicted himself by allowing his vice president, Mike Pence, to issue tax incentives that will result in the outsourcing of nearly 800 jobs by the Carrier brand.
Trump has made military contradictions as well, such as his demand that NATO offer incentives to the United States in order to guarantee a military alliance, only to then attempt an escalation of conflicts in the Middle East. In terms of political contradictions, Trump has no problem criticizing respected political leaders, like Obama and Romney, yet he also has no problem asking them for assistance when he needs it.