A trip down memory lane as this old engineer sees it...

 In the interest of a short re-cap of what the idea of colonialism has brought to the world, lets take a spin through our world's historical log book.

Notable achievements for the mother ship is economic exploitation provided by labor and resource pillaging. All of this is induced by physical violence which also tends to stomp out cultural identity. None of these heinous attributes seem to have much room in the history books.  The old adage "History is Written by the Victors" is true.  The conquering team doesn't like to recored the double standards associated with subjugation, dispossession, cultural erasure and good old decimation. Other words that mean the same thing are genocide, terror, violence and trauma.  Meh, different words - same oppression.

The notion that Kingdom z wants what kingdom y has and they want to get it without being a friendly neighbor is as old as dirt.  Looking at the current situation in Europe we can read about The Time of Troubles (1598 to 1613-ish) Back then King James and the Muscovy Trading Company put a plan to together to take advantage of the opportunity! Yep, got to create a honey hole and of course dominate the trade routes.  Sound familiar?  What went wrong with that plan? Seems like a leader by the name of Romanov stabilized the country and oops, not so vulnerable any more.

Then came The Great Game.  Now Britain began to see Russia as threat to its "Territories".  Wether the people in those territories actually liked their lot in life is another matter - but I digress. So containment was the new call to propagandize,  Along came the Crimean War.

So the mental construction of a threat to my wealth and my happiness (from the British point of view) has lingered.  This fear has also manifest itself as "we should never let the Russians and Germans (Germany was another peer getting a little too powerful in the early 1900's) get too chummy".  To prevent a German-Russian Economic Axis old enemies became friends with both becoming allied before and after WW1.  That war would kill something like 20 million people - lives lost because of a collision of imperial ambitions, inflexible alliances and failed diplomacy - again history sort of rhymes with today don't you think? The Treaty of Rapallo signed in 1922 got things stirred up again and this time the circle of fright ensnared France as well as Britain in the post WW1 "order".  Order in who's mind you may ask?  

All of this posturing and conniving brings us up to 1939 and The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.  Oopsie, the wrong countries are trying to align and now they have colonial ambitions!  Not satisfactory - only Britain and France are allowed!  Meh, it all went ka-blewie in 1941. That war (WW2) took almost 80 million lives (26 million Soviet lives by the way) in a genocidal campaign of conquest. 

Tick, tick, tick time rolls on. Cold War tensions formed around the same fault lines.  This contest for somebody else's stuff has a very long history.  Looking at the reasoning one might think, what a contradiction. the idea of security became the banner of hegemony.  Policy planners embraced paranoia because that wins contracts. LOL, My opinion of course.  Energy in post WW2 becomes a geopolitical weapon,  Oddly, keep the Russians out fueled the economic engine. Lord Ismay the First Secretary of NATO famously said "...keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in and the Germans down."  Hmmm, not very open to evolutionary thought or diplomatic progress.  Unfortunately these old ideas run deep. They support the economics and oligarchical influencers - who really have no interest in change. When you sit on top of the pyramid everyone else is a minion and who listens to minions?

So let's jump ahead to our current time.  If you have your head bolted on backwards, you are a philosophical Realist.  Interdependence is a weapon - economics is leverage, resources are a knife to the throat.... If you dare to think about change, you may dabble in Liberalism where war is an expensive waste our Japanese friends would call it muda, cooperation is better than conflict but hey - borders are an obsolete idea.  KABOOM, that's a collision.  The underpinning of old school thinking insures the existing oligarchy - it's their happy spot. 

Clinging to old ways suppresses innovation, is forcing deindustrialization and making the people caught in the middle pay the price. This is wrapped up in a manufactured security blanket - we love tho$e.  

Adam Smith, who we claim has it right, espoused free trade.  So just pretend global politics don't interfere with Adam Smith's theory.  Wait a second... it seems like there are rules for thee but not for me.  Let me explain. All of this free trade theory is great when Western interests have unmatched financial power, industrial might and favorable labor,  But when a competitor arises with a better resource base, labor and financial power - we don't like that!  These days a pivot to protectionism is a feeble way of suppressing free trade and trying to make tomorrow just like yesterday.  Not gonna work. Tariffs, restricting technology, blocking exports... it just isolates the head bolted on backwards people from the rest of the world and illustrates the double standards IMHO.

So where do we go from here?  Let us hope that ethical frameworks can be promoted - else a global class of ruthless elites will arise to replace those we have today.  Nothing improves.  So we need cooperation, we need true democratic processes rather than lobbied and deep state driven veneers. So old structures need to morph, but they lack trust.  That's a problem we have never been able to overcome. That's why the West has always favored fascism over communism.  Trust is hard.

Maybe we can reach a collective (global) security policy.  Maybe we can do away with geopolitical partitions based on  the old ideas. Maybe we can achieve a type of renaissance.  We need transparency in our motives and actions, not deep state games. We need a democratized economy which looks like a multipolar system IMHO.  We need to think realistically too. Energy depletion will create a chokepoint with big tech. Eventually, and sooner rather than later, this will matter.  We need to look at history and appreciate centralization never works. It is fragile, usually morphs into tyrannical rule and suppresses enlightened solutions from arising.

Resilience, simplification and analogue redundancy philosophies should be re-discovered and embraced.  Can we evolve this time?

My 2 cents.