OPINION

Ballot paper solution

Re: "Pressure arises over barcodes," (BP, Feb 24).

I agree with legal eagle Wissanu Krea-ngam that using barcodes during the elections could have violated the constitution, because the barcodes could allow a voter's choice to be traced back to him. True, we'd need a court order for that, but that could be obtained.

With respect, I disagree with ex-EC member Somchai Srisutthiyakorn, who claims that "The absence of serial numbers on individual ballots...allows (surplus) ballots to be printed, or enable multiple ballots to be distributed to a single voter."

But the US has long used mail-in ballots where the voters were clearly identified -- but not how they individually voted. Each voter received a large envelope addressed to him with an inside envelope addressed to the mail-in ballot office. A small hole ran through both sides of the inner envelope. He would also get a ballot with only the names of candidates.

The voter would mark his choices, fold his ballot and mail it to be mail-in ballot director. The voter would also sign his name on the envelope -- so authorities could easily verify who had voted -- but once the ballots were opened (under security) and mixed together, there would be no way to tell who voted for whom.

The mail-in director would have easily seen which returned envelopes were empty by looking through the small holes, and removed them. If there were surplus ballots, or if envelopes had been stuffed, as Khun Somchai fears, the number of ballots would exceed the number of signed envelopes returned by voters. The authorities could easily check if Mr A had voted -- but not who he voted for.

Note, I agree Bhumjaithai Party's leader Anutin Charnvirakul won the election. But in a robust democracy, each citizen must be confident his vote is secret for all time -- and here our EC has failed in its duty. Where constituency vote counts resulted in landslides, I'd let the results stand. Where the outcome is not clear-cut, the citizens deserve a re-run.

US military plays last card

Re: "Minilateralism's necessary rise", (Opinion, Feb 23) and "Going beyond multilateralism", (Opinion, Dec 19).

Never in the history of mankind has anyone been able to view the fall of an empire online, live, and in its entirety. Past collapses, from Rome to the British Empire, were slow burns spanning decades -- imperceptible to the average citizen until it was too late.

Today, however, we are witnessing the erosion of post-WWII Western hegemony in 4K resolution. Every diplomatic misstep, ineffective sanction, Treasury bond sell-off, and military blunder is livestreamed to billions instantly. We aren't just reading history; we are doom-scrolling through the end of an era.

In 1981, futurist Buckminster Fuller noted human knowledge doubled every 25 years. By 2013, IBM projected the "Internet of Things" would accelerate this cycle to double every 12 hours. If the lifespan of an empire correlates with information velocity, we face a terrifying compression of historical time.

The British Empire endured a 50-year long sunset -- from the loss of India in 1947 to the handover of Hong Kong in 1997 -- during an era when human knowledge doubled only once per generation. Today, with the information cycle accelerating by a factor of roughly 150 (moving from 25 years to 12 hours), the historical precedent of a slow decline has been shattered. Sanctions against rising rivals fail in months, not decades. Applying this math suggests the unwinding of American hegemony won't take years, but will effectively "flash crash," compressing a half-century of imperial decline into a few volatile fiscal quarters.

Historically, dying empires launch a final, desperate military gamble when their economic and diplomatic leverage evaporates. For Britain, that moment was the disastrous 1956 Suez Canal invasion. Unable to negotiate or sanction, they invaded. The outcome was a humiliating debacle; the action didn't save the empire, it simply exposed that it was already dead.

Washington's military posture is widely understood as a campaign of hegemonic coercion aimed at isolating China and systematically dismantling its network of trade and economic partners. However, the dynamics of this conflict have been altered by a crucial twist: having learned from being blindsided by the US during last year's diplomatic engagements, Iran has leveraged Chinese and Russian support to rapidly modernise its missile forces.

In a potential clash, Iran does not require a total military victory. By leveraging these new capabilities to inflict catastrophic costs -- perhaps even sinking an American aircraft carrier, the crown jewel of US power projection -- Tehran could shatter the myth of US military invincibility. The final chapter of the American empire is about to be written. The diplomatic off-ramps have been closed, and the facade of US diplomacy -- hollowed out by impossible preconditions -- is rapidly crumbling. The American empire is about to gamble on its final card, and the last show of the US military is about to begin.