The news that a Kushner-backed luxury resort in Albania has ignited protests, with the UK warning against foreign meddling, is a tale so predictably decadent it might have been lifted from Gibbon. We see the same pattern: a billionaire son-in-law, a fragile Balkan state, and the whiff of corruption that makes one long for the relative honesty of Victorian colonialism.
Albania, a nation still finding its post-communist feet, is now the playground for Jared Kushner's latest venture. A luxury resort, no doubt replete with the sort of architectural soullessness that plagues the Hamptons, is being foisted upon a coastline that once belonged to fishermen, not oligarchs. The protests are not merely a local squabble; they are a cry of a people who sense their sovereignty being auctioned off to the highest bidder.
The UK's warning against foreign meddling is rich, coming from a nation that spent centuries meddling from the Balkans to the Bengal. Yet there is a kernel of truth: the West's elite, having exhausted the spoils of their own nations, now turn to the periphery for new playgrounds. It is the same impulse that drove Romans to build villas in Gaul, or British aristocrats to shoot grouse in Scotland while the Irish starved.
What makes this particularly sordid is the connection to Trump, whose own grift was so transparent it bordered on parody. Kushner, the princeling of Mar-a-Lago, now extends his family's reach into the Adriatic. The Albanian government, no doubt dazzled by promises of investment, has forgotten the lesson of every Balkan tale: foreign capital always demands its pound of flesh.
The protests are a healthy sign. They suggest that Albanians, unlike their Western counterparts, still have the spine to resist the blandishments of luxury. But one wonders how long that will last. The resort will likely be built, the protests forgotten, and a new generation of Albanian elites will sip cocktails while their country's soul erodes.
This is the decline of the West in miniature. We export our decadence and call it development. We send our sons-in-law to build resorts and call it diplomacy. And we wonder why the world grows resentful. The fall of Rome was not signalled by barbarians at the gates, but by the moral rot within. Kushner's Albanian resort is just another symptom of that rot.
The UK's warning is a fig leaf. It does not address the systemic issue: that Western elites treat the world as their personal playground, with no regard for the people who actually live there. Until we acknowledge this, the protests will continue, and rightly so.
