Obama left for Trump a letter full of errors

Following a tradition set by past Presidents, at the last minute of his tenure, Barack Obama left a handwritten personal letter for the new White House tenant, Donald Trump.

The content of this letter had not been made public until today's CNN"scoop"; CNN claims to have received a copy of the letter from one the visitors to whom Trump would have shown it in these months. Therefore, it would be only the last “leak” from the White House since January 20 to date. This is odd, because Trump could have made the content of the letter public, as the White House did in previous cases.

(fonte foto: Repubblica.it)

But let's leave aside the topic of the "leaks" (real or invented) from the Trump administration; it is more interesting, for now, to focus on the content of the letter.

The most striking thing is that it contains at least two errors (or at least this is what it seems according to the transcription published by CNN).

The first one appears to be a syntax error. CNN, as an act of kindness, seems to have inserted a "to" that remained in Obama's pen.

But the letter also contains a second error, much more relevant.

Now, here Obama is clearly wrong.

Since the end of the Cold War, in less than thirty years the world turned into a real mess – into something that is exactly the opposite of any kind of "order". Without going back to the 90s – shattered by the wars in Yugoslavia, still to be entirely resolved in Bosnia and Kosovo, or the massacres in Africa like the genocide in Rwanda - let's just recall the most recent examples: Iraq, Afghanistan, Georgia / Abkhazia -Ossetia, Ukraine / Donbass, "Arab Springs", Libya, Syria, Isis; North Korea claiming to be a few steps from the ability to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads; Iran following the same path; a global terrorist threat to which it seems we need to get “used to”; the war in Mali, the regional conflicts in Africa, and so on.

This interactive page by "l'Espresso" is very useful to get a quick idea of ​​the current international “order”.

The global scenario is so "ordered" that one of the most renokwn quotes by Pope Francis is that "perhapsone can speak of a third world war, one fought piecemeal, inchapters" (the Pope made this statement in 2014, on his way back from a trip to South Korea).

So it's hard to tell where and when Obama saw, during his presidency, "steadily expanding" the international "order" that he advises Trump to defend.

Consequently, there are only two possible alternatives.

The first one: Obama wanted to write international "disorder". Therefore it is a spelling mistake, that unintentionally concealed a more accurate description of the current geopolitical situation, based on a rather cynical pragmatism devoted to the principle harm reduction (a World War III fought piecemeal is better than a full fledged World War III, right?).

The second alternative: for eight years Obama governed trying to convince himself that the mess he had before his eyes was some form of "order." This would not be a spelling mistake, but a much more serious conceptual mistake, that perhaps explains why the international "disorder" dramatically worsened during his presidency – as a consequence of his many mistakes and uncertainties.