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The confounding thing about the convulsions at the tectonic level of the global order underway at the moment – the latest being the bloody weekend putsch in Turkey, which not only failed to dislodge the tyrannical Recep Tayyip Erdoğan but ended up only strengthening his sword arm – is that they both invite and at the same time defy “root cause” explanations.

The proposition that the world seems to be undergoing seismic upheavals is the one premise that is without controversy. Beyond that, arguments abound.

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In Europe, owing mainly to a migration and refugee crisis without parallel since the Second World War, aftershocks of a magnitude not felt since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 are opening up deep fissures in the political foundations of several key European Union member states, casting doubt on the EU’s purpose and calling into question the EU’s very survival.

Eight years after voters in the United States elected an African-American president on a platform of “nation-building at home,” the United States lurches from one shuddering tremor to another. According to the results of a just-released poll commissioned by the Washington Post and ABC News, Americans haven’t been this pessimistic about race relations in a generation. Later this week, the Republican Party’s presidential nomination is set to be clinched by white-bigot dreamboat Donald Trump, a character every bit as thuggish and paranoid as Erdogan.