Man who predicted 911 attack and fall of Berlin Wall, has the worst prediction for America under Trump.
Johan Galtung, a sociologist credited with
predicting the fall of the Soviet Union has warned that US global power
is in a phase of accelerated decline under the leadership of Donald
Trump
Man who predicted 911 attack has the worst prediction for America under Trump |
The Norwegian professor says America will collapse while the property mogul is the White House.
Galtung
is known as the "founding father" of peace studies as a scientific
subject and is recognised for correctly predicting numerous historical
events, among them the Tiananmen Square uprising in China and the
September 11 attacks.
According to Independent, he attracted controversy in 2000 when he predicted US global power would collapse by 2025.
But under the Bush administration he revised his
forecast for the collapse to 2020. Now, he says that reality that is
materialising following election of the bombastic billionaire.
Trump’s election on an anti-immigrant
platform coincides with one of the final phases of the decline predicted
in the social scientist’s 2009 book The Fall of the American Empire—and
then What? where he forecast the rise of facism before the country's
power receded.
The President-elect has vowed to
deport three million illegal immigrants as soon as he enters office and
build a wall along the American border with Mexico.
Man who predicted 911 attack has the worst prediction for America under Trump |
He told Motherboard the election of Mr Trump
"speeds up the decline", although he qualified the statement, saying:
"Of course, what he does as a President remains to be seen."
Dr Galtung added that the President-elect's critical attitude to Nato also indicated the US would cease to be a superpower.
The
Republican has previously indicated the US might not come to the aid of
those in the alliance if they failed to meet the designated defence
spending.
“The collapse has two faces,” Dr
Galtung told the tech news site, “Other countries refuse to be good
allies and the USA has to do the killing themselves, by bombing from
high altitudes, drones steered by computer from an office, special
forces killing all over the place.
"Both are happening today, except for Northern
Europe, which supports these wars, for now. That will probably not
continue beyond 2020, so I stand by that deadline.”
Yet
Xenia Wickett, head of the US and Americas programme at think-tank
Chatham House told The Independent it was "totally unrealistic" to
believe the US would stop being a global power by 2020.
"The
US is a global power for many reasons. It has the strongest military in
the world, it has the most robust soft power in terms of its
universities, [...] in terms of its companies and in terms of the reach
of its media. It also remains the biggest economy in the world. The idea
that any of these things are going to change in the next four years is
unrealistic."
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s
incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer is whining that Trump
is not getting the respect that he deserves.
It is clear that the president-elect and
his team are very upset about a perceived lack of respect from the media
and the American people.
In an interview with the Hill, Spicer moaned about Trump not getting the respect that he deserves from the press, “There’s
some positive aspects here and there, but largely it still continues to
not treat him with the respect that he deserves.
I
think for a lot of folks inside the beltway, and inside pundit-world,
they don’t fully appreciate the understanding that he has of where the
American people are.
They continue to
mock him in ways, when it frankly just shows the lack of understanding
of that they have of where the American people are and what they think.”
Spicer’s latest comments come one week after he complained to ABC’s This Week about Trump being mocked, “Everything
he does right now, he gets — he speaks for the head of Sprint, gets
5,000 jobs moved from abroad. And everyone starts to mock him. Oh, those
jobs were already announced.
They
weren’t. The sales jobs have been a previous announce. These jobs were
coming from abroad to America. And instead of trying to mock him or
undermine him, it’s time that people started to give him credit for
actually getting things done.”
There has
been very little mocking of Trump in the media. In terms of television,
the bulk of the coverage has been soft on the president-elect.
No comments: