Crazy waters

(novimagazin.rs)

Donald Trump is so angry with Canada that he has decided to rename Lake Ontario Lake America. He refrained from calling it by his last name, which he generously imposes on a number of institutions and projects.

The precursor to such a boom was, where else, than in these parts. Six years ago, Serbs in Kosovo casually put up a sign on which they called Lake Gazivode "Trump Lake", encouraged by official versions that the person in question understood them better than previous White House chiefs. (Until recently, "Trump Towers" almost appeared in the heart of Belgrade, but citizens and the rest of the legality defended the space for the indigenous General Staff.)

It’s not just lakes that betray Trump’s thirst for the big water. He spends most of his time at his Florida estate, offers to turn the devastated Gaza coastline into a “Mediterranean Riviera,” has declared the Gulf of Mexico an American Gulf, and has bombed Venezuelan boats suspected of drug trafficking before kidnapping President Nicolas Maduro. And, enamored with the “Donro Doctrine” for dominance in the Western Hemisphere, he has reorganized jurisdiction in the Panama Canal and fantasizes about annexing Danish Greenland, on the edge of Arctic shipping lanes.

Finally, he threatened to declare the Strait of Hormuz as US territory if he could not reach an agreement with Iran, which would somehow extricate him from the war he had started. With his every move, he provoked questions - whether his so many "waves" were leading to new crises in which the sea would become tight for all kinds of strategic competition.

When the seas become narrow and the mountains burst into flood...

The crisis over the status of the Black Sea is largely ongoing, however, and has been exacerbated by Russia's aggression against Ukraine, from which it has practically torn the Crimean peninsula and, among other things, frequently bombed its important port of Odessa. Kiev's retaliation has been reinforced by swarms of drones, which have reached the Sea of ​​Azov.

The war over Iran and unsafe navigation through the Strait of Hormuz have caused oil and gas prices to rise drastically, while missile strikes in the Black Sea have significantly reduced deliveries and increased the prices of wheat and other grains, of which Russia and Ukraine are major exporters. Congestion and even blockades on these two important waterways have caused energy and food crises in many countries and further destabilized the already fragile world order.

At the same time, there is concern about what would happen if other narrow sea passages were closed. For example, if Turkey were to close the Bosphorus and Dardanelles for its own security, which fortunately it does not do, but is reportedly content with increased control of Black Sea traffic.

And what if the tensions in the Baltic Sea, which is shared by nine countries, including Germany and Poland, as well as new NATO members Sweden and Finland, as well as Russia and its exclave Kaliningrad, get out of control? Or if the Strait of Malacca, a very busy junction between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, or the Taiwan Strait that separates the island from mainland China, were to close?

Analysts fear that China could follow Russia's invasion of Ukraine and attack Taiwan, which it considers its territory. This could lead to a China-US war derby and put the entire world in danger.

Fortunately, the economic ties between the two superpowers have, for now, kept these omens at bay. In the meantime, Beijing is expanding its reach by building artificial islands. It is in dispute with neighboring countries over the delimitation of Pacific waters, and has not recognized an international arbitration that upheld the Philippine claim.

When we add to this the mass drownings of immigrants, such as the recent one in Ceuta and other depths of the Mediterranean, it could be said that we are going through an era of crazy water, in large part because the waters are crazy, which transport us thirsty across the water because we cannot do without water, and increasingly we cannot do with it, next to it, or in it.

Even the persistent warnings of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that global warming is leading us towards a climate catastrophe have not made us wiser. But his words were confirmed these days when, unfortunately, a suddenly melting Himalayan glacier crashed into settlements along the border of Nepal and Tibet. Thousands of people died or went missing in the terrible onslaught of mud and silt.

There would have been 900 more, all students, if the principal of the Nepalese high school, Rajendra Dawadi, had not ordered them all to evacuate in time. As soon as he heard that the horror was approaching, he ordered them to take shelter with him on a nearby hill. If they had been just 10 minutes late, he says, they would all have been covered in eternal darkness.

Davadi does not accept being called a hero. He feels like just another teacher who taught another lesson out of responsibility towards his profession, whose main task is to educate but also to save young lives.

Young people were also hailed as heroes when they led Nepalis to overthrow a corrupt regime last September and hand over power in a party election to reformist engineer and former rapper Balendra Shah, 36. The protesters there were compared to ours as compelling evidence that young people, students and others, can awaken a nation and lead it to change power.

Local leaders, like school principal Davadi, did not understand the danger in a timely manner, so they claimed - until the suffering Deliblato Sands made them blind - that we did not need water from foreign firefighters to put out large fires. They were more concerned with how they were going to divert the Ibar River to impoverish Gazivode and how they were going to expand Belgrade on water, and how it was not their fault that the water mains were drying up, while sewage was being poured into the Danube without treatment, at the bottom of which the remains of sunken ships now "table".

It would seem that we, as well as around the world, have reached the political water's edge. And pre-election polls in various countries, including here, suggest that forces offering democracy without corruption have grown. And that they are fed up with existing mandates based on bringing water to the thirsty.