Short-Sightedness In Politics.

Liz Truss (47) was elected the new Prime Minister in the UK this week, succeeding Boris Johnson, whom she called a friend in her acceptance speech at the Conservative Party meeting on Monday. Her main contestant Rishi Sunak (42), former Finance Minister, or Chancellor of the Exchequer, as the Brits call it, had to give in to the former foreign minister Liz Truss, but with a relatively moderate margin. It probably counted in her favour that she is ethnic British, while Sunak is of Indian heritage, although born in Southampton, UK. It also played against him that his Indian-born wife, Akshata Murty, is one of the UK's richest women, but her wealth is registered in her homeland, where her family wealth originates from, raising questions about her and her husband's loyalty to the UK. In any case, Sunak is for this time out for the top slot in UK politics. But at this particular time of crisis in Europe, it is no envy for anyone to be at the helm. Since Truss is not elected by popular vote, but stepping in well over halfway through a parliamentary term, she has just about two years in office before the general elections must be held, latest by January 2025. In other words, Truss can plan for two years, a shorter time than the normal full five-year period of a PM; on top of it, the time could be even shorter. If she is not already short-sighted in her political tasks, she must learn to be so.

But I shall not only write about British politics and the new PM today; I shall also draw attention to what period all politicians operate under, in general, and in peace and conflict times. Many issues have taken longer to develop and will take longer to solve, such as climate change and global warming, refugee and migration crises, and structural injustices in own country and internationally. They need urgent and long-term attention.

I shall tie the issues in today's article to issues I have written about in recent articles, indeed Russia's and the West's War in Ukraine, but also other conflict situations where there were no proper long-term plans for what to do after the first actions of regime change, such as in Iraq and Libya, and when leaving after two decades of intervention in Afghanistan.

A particular serious neglect on the West's side was the lack of long-term engagement after the end of the Soviet Union in 1989/90. If plans had been in place, Russia's relations with the West, and the conflicts in Georgia, Crimea, and Ukraine for the last eight...