Hezbollah Secretary General His Eminence Sayyed Nasrallah delivered on Thursday a speech as Lebanon celebrates the 23rd anniversary of the Resistance and Liberation Day.
At the beginning of his televised speech, Sayyed Nasrallah viewed that that ‘Resistance and Liberation Day’ is a great occasion that reminds of the great victory that was achieved in Lebanon. “The Resistance and Liberation Day is a great occasion that recalls the majestic victory which was achieved in Lebanon on this day.”
He further congratulated the Lebanese people on the beautiful and dear occasion. In addition, His Eminence thanked the Lebanese Army, the Security Forces, the Palestinian factions, and all presidents and political powers that supported the resistance, and thanks Iran and Syria who supported and are still supporting the resistance and all its leaders
Moreover, the Resistance Leader thanked all those who contributed to the victory a top of whom are the martyrs, the wounded, the liberated detainees, the Mujahideen and all their families.
Sayyed Nasrallah also thanked all the people who remained defiant and embraced, supported, and protected the resistance in all the Lebanese regions especially South Lebanon and Beqaa.
“After the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, and the withdrawal from Gaza, there is nothing called ‘Great Israel’,” he said, noting that “Today, ‘Israel’ hides behind walls and fire, and it’s unable to impose its conditions in any negotiations with the Palestinian people.”
Meanwhile, His Eminence underlined that “Those who suspect that the battle against our enemy has finished are mistaken as there is part of our land which is still under occupation.”
Sayyed Nasrallah highlighted the necessity of commemorating this occasion by saying: “The Lebanese generations and all people must be reminded that this victory was not granted, but was instead an outcome of long years of sacrifices.”
He also warned that Some sides seek to waste the achieved victory. “We have to prevent this.”
In addition, Hezbollah Secretary General clarified that “Our struggle dates back to May 17, which means the wrong choices, and May 15, which is the Day of Nakba, and reaches May 25th, which represents the right choices.”
“After the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, and the withdrawal from Gaza, there is nothing called ‘Great Israel’,” he confirmed, noting that “The occupation entity’s transformations, which was supposed to be strong and dominant, are the results of the long struggle and the history of sacrifices.”
Sayyed Nasrallah went on to say: “‘Israel’ has no interest in a multipolar world, but rather a one-pole world led by the US.”
“‘Israel’s’ internal division comes at a time the resistance axis enjoys great cohesion and steadfastness,” he stressed, pointing out that “Among the goals of the global war on Syria was to oust it from the axis of resistance.”
According to His Eminence, “The Iranian president’s positions during his latest visit to Syria after 12 years of global war on it confirm the coherence of the axis of resistance.”
Regarding the axis of the resistance’s strength, the Resistance Leader assured that “The pillar of resistance is the human, who believes in his cause and right and who possesses bravery and daring. The axis of resistance has an excellent human capacity as well as spirit in Gaza, Al-Quds, the West Bank, and the entire region.”
Commenting on the recent “Israeli” threats, Sayyed Nasrallah sent sounding messages: “The ‘Israeli’ has miscalculations if he thinks that the great war will be with the Palestinians only or the Lebanese only.
He further responded to “Israeli” PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s threats, by affirming: “You are not the ones who threaten with the great war, but we are the ones threatening you with it.”
On this level, His Eminence unveiled that “Any great war will include all borders and its areas and fields will be narrowed by hundreds of thousands of fighters, and we have tremendous superiority when we tackle the human aspect.”
Moving to the disturbed “Israeli” internal arena, Sayyed Nasrallah explained that “Today, there is a loss of confidence in the entity’s institutions, while our people have overwhelming confidence in the resistance leaders, movements, and countries, as they are ready to sacrifice the lives of their children in this path.”
“One of our strong points is the ‘Israeli’ enemy’s internal front, which is facing an ideological retreat,” he stated, noting that “One of the important transformations is that the ‘Israeli’ internal front is weak and feeble, and that the ‘Israelis’ are ready and seek to flee.”
His Eminence also viewed that “There is hope more than ever to liberate Palestine from the river to the sea. The enemy’s entity has lost its historic leaders.”
Assuring that the deterrence equation is what protects Lebanon, the Resistance Leader asserted that “The ‘Israelis’ backtracked their latest threats due to fear in the settlements and after Hezbollah’s latest wargames. Netanyahu has failed to restore deterrence through the latest Gaza confrontation. ‘Israel’ resorted to escalating its rhetoric after the failure in Gaza.”
On this level, he urged the “Israeli” enemy’s premier, war minister and army chief to be careful and not to make wrong calculations.
“We’re confident and certain that Palestine will be liberated and that we will pray in Al-Aqsa Mosque, as the occupying entity is moving towards demise,” His Eminence reiterated, noting that “Among the major transformations is the development of the resistance’s military capabilities, an example of which is what we have in Lebanon.”
Sayyed Nasrallah estimated that “The one who should fear the great war is ‘Israel’,” underlining that “The ‘Israelis’ failed to strengthen their deterrence and realized that they would pay the price for every attack.”
Moreover, he disclosed that “The “Israelis” retreated from their threats because of the decline in the touristic activity and the ‘shekel’ against the dollar.”
“The enemy must fear, pay attention and not be dragged to any miscalculation by committing any mistake in any country that might lead to a great war,” he added, noting that “The great war in the region will move the ‘Israeli” entity to the abyss and to its demise.”
To “Israel”, Sayyed Nasrallah sent a clear threat “The ‘Israelis’ must know that none of the resistance movements fears them. Any mistake might blow up the entire region.”
Calling on all Lebanese to put bickering aside amid the presence of a true protection umbrella for Lebanon. The resistance Leader underscored that “The ‘army, people and resistance’ equation protected Lebanon as security remains a prerequisite for any economic and political treatment.”
He also viewed that “The ‘Israeli’ entity managed to normalize relations with some Arab regimes, but it was unable to normalize relations with the Arab people. The occupation realized that the Arab regimes are incapable of imposing normalization on their people.”
Moving to the internal Lebanese arena, Sayyed Nasrallah called again the Lebanese to return to dialogue to address their crises. “The regional equations call for optimism,” he added.
His Eminence commented on the issue of ‘the Banque du Liban’s’ Governor: Either he steps down himself or the judiciary takes responsibility because the caretaker government doesn’t have the authority to remove him
“The issue of the Syrian refugees can be resolved through a decision to send a Lebanese government’s delegation to Syria,” he said.
On the presidential file, Hezbollah Secretary General concluded: “Further dialogue and contacts are required and we call for discussing the presidential choices without preconditions.”
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Political analyst Hossam Taleb And Military and strategic expert Dr. Amin Hoteit
Europe must accept the fact that the world today is no longer the Western playground and that the growing anti-hegemonic sentiment among nations is irreversible.
It’s important to emphasize that Europe was not a victim in the current world order run by Washington, but rather a participant. Its contributions were destructive, filled with colonialism, theft, dismantling, and murder of nations that directly led to corruption, poverty, and injustice worldwide.
Europe’s bloody history
Despite Europe joining the global financial systems established by the US in the 20th century, such as the IMF and World Bank, the continent has used these tools to deepen its colonialism and expansion policies towards countries worldwide. It has even leveraged its position with bodies like the UN and UNSC to exploit weaker states and enforce its hegemonic agendas, including wealth looting and proxy wars against rivals politically and economically.
However, the rise of the Global South in recent years has allowed its nations to counter the hegemonic exploitation of international bodies by funneling their resources into their economies to advance in the new world order. By engaging with the Western coalition while shielding themselves from their malicious agendas, these nations can benefit in the long run.
Post-WW2 world order
After World War II, the United States emerged as an unrivaled superpower, untouched by the catastrophic destruction of the war and claiming a barely earned victory. Between 1944 and 1949, milestone events secured the unipolar order under the US and placed the EU under Washington’s direct influence for decades to come.
Bretton Woods in 1944 established the USD as the global reserve and trade currency, while the Marshall Plan in 1945 provided funding to Western European countries that agreed to follow America’s dictates to rehabilitate and rebuild their infrastructure and industrial capabilities (note that the plan’s funds were used to purchase American goods).
The establishment of the IMF and World Bank enforced the new world monetary and financial system crafted by Washington. The Truman Doctrine finally ensured that Western Europe became a follower of Washington’s foreign policies.
Establishing NATO, a war coalition under Washington’s direct control, was the highlight of that period. It served the interests of the United States and ensured that Europe did not attempt to create a sovereign military power but rather relied on the US for protection.
The final blows to Europe’s industrial complex in the 20th century were the Nixon Shock in 1971, where the bloc’s member states found themselves stuck with paper notes whose value was solely determined by Washington, and in 1974 when the United States and Saudi Arabia agreed to peg oil to the USD – establishing the petrodollar. This meant that Europe’s access to the world’s largest energy reserve was now controlled by Washington.
The petrodollar required Europe to maintain an abundance of USD reserves for oil purchases, resulting in increased investment in American treasury bonds and currency inflow to US markets. Despite partnering with the US in its bloody crusades over the past decades, the EU’s interests were not taken into consideration by Washington.
The US has used its European allies as tools in the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the destruction of Libya and Syria, and relations with the Arab world (the world’s richest energy region). Although Europe faced similar political and public backlash, it was the US that acquired the real strategic interests.
Disregarding the changed world we live in, the EU continues to live under a WW2 mentality.
Despite warnings against militarily provoking Russia, the EU doubled down on the American-NATO illusion that being the strongest military coalition worldwide guarantees inevitable victory, and using force to impose the West’s worldview remains a viable option.
Self-destructive tendencies
After years of Russia sending signals and after many world vocal warnings, including from prominent Western figures like Kissinger, regarding NATO’s eastward expansion, European member states made the same mistake and adopted Washington’s doctrine on Moscow, leading to a conflict with Russia. Despite the historic failure of this approach, EU leaders repeatedly attempted to humiliate Russia and publicly claimed that the West aimed to bring Moscow to its knees since the beginning of the war in Ukraine until recently.
The conflict with Russia has deeper repercussions on the EU than just preventing mutually beneficial trade ties that would put both economies on a trajectory of development and growth. The United States aims to fight against the growing Global South, with China at the top, and to cut off any attempts by its European allies to further integrate with Asia’s rising powers.
Following the start of the war in Ukraine, Europe not only faced energy shortages, while US energy companies continued to extract oil from Iraq, Syria, and Libya but also realized how Washington was profiting from the very war they had incited. They were overcharged for LNG at three to four times the price sold within the domestic US market, which itself impacted their major industry’s capabilities to continue production.
On the other hand, the US led an international campaign to force its European allies mainly to adopt a price cap on Russian oil. But despite Washington’s push for this bill, Americans themselves were not affected nor were they directly part of the pressure campaign in Moscow, mainly since they did not rely on Russian oil, and with the petrodollar in place, it did not matter how much the EU paid for oil, as the currency used would go back to US banks.
Soon, Europe, left alone after countries such as Japan did not abide by the price cap, found that it still had to buy Russian Urals but with additional middlemen fees through countries such as India.
The EU witnessed firsthand the US tearing down their economies, which are under increased levels of deindustrialization, with industry giants moving to the US for lower energy prices and a more business-friendly environment crafted by Washington to lure companies mainly from its European allies.
As a result, Europe found itself seeking energy from African nations that it had previously colonized and destroyed. EU officials scrambled through countries like Algeria and Libya to secure gas and oil.
As the world order shifts towards a more multipolar one with a center of gravity shifting towards China, Europe has begun to become aware that the US-led model that has dominated the world order for decades has not brought the desired outcome for the bloc. Despite benefiting immorally from genocidal campaigns and being America’s partner in crime, Europe’s gains were short-lived.
With a history of self-destructive tendencies and after years of psycho-preparation and media propaganda, Europe was politically and economically prepared to repeat its historic mistakes in its approach to Russia and later to China.
The West quickly convinced its public that the rivalry with Russia was ideological and existential, that joining NATO and dropping neutrality (as with Finland and Sweden) was the only secure way to protect against the demons of the East, and that China is at the core of everything against the neoliberal values of the West.
Inevitable Multipolar world order
During a speech to the Council of Foreign Relations in New York on April 18, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde noted that the world is becoming more multipolar, with a fragmentation of the global economy into competing blocs.
Lagarde stated that this new “global map” would have “first-order implications,” with the possibility of two blocs emerging, led by China and the US.
On many levels, Lagarde’s statement hits the core of the current world state of affairs.
The US reintroduced the political bloc mentality on a wider scale through the proxy war in Ukraine, pulling all its strings and employing all its accumulated influence to focus its power on obstructing a Eurasian uprising and realigning Europe’s foreign policy towards dismantling connections with China and Russia.
The post-WW2 era, characterized by bloc politics pushed by the US, is no longer feasible in the current period of deep integration, interest overlaps, and political complexity established by globalization, advanced trading networks, financial intertwining, and complementary production needs.
The West’s expansion of NATO forces to Russia’s border, followed by Moscow’s campaign to protect its national security, has put the global change on a pedestal.
The fallout of the Western-Russian war in Ukraine and the historic barrage of sanctions against Moscow has led to the fracturing of the financial system, and exposed the fragility of the West’s proclaimed “rules-based international world order”.
During an event hosted at Renmin University’s Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies last January to discuss the current state of world powers, the editor-in-chief of the Beijing Cultural Review (BCR) said that the fallout of the Western-Russian war in Ukraine led to events that could have never been imagined earlier.
“These [events] include the fracturing of the financial system, the expropriation and seizure of Russian private assets, and the freezing of Russian foreign exchange reserves. These are all abominable and unimaginable forms of confrontation,” Yang Ping said in his speech.
“The world is moving inexorably in the direction of decoupling. The phenomenon of politics affecting the economy and the capitalist political order no longer upholding the capitalist economic order is extremely striking.”
If not for the war in Ukraine, Ping’s statement regarding the world taking shape would have been shunned by Western experts as an illusion or merely a forecast, but now, and thanks to the West’s undivided efforts, the world is moving inexorably towards decoupling, and the phenomenon of politics affecting the economy is becoming strikingly apparent; a world with limited Western hegemony is on track to becoming an irreversible reality.
Europe’s amputated foreign policy
In recent months, top EU leaders including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, and German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock have visited China amid rising global tensions.
Their visits aimed to balance relations between the US and China as Washington’s hostility towards Beijing escalated, its sanctions against the Asian giant increased, and its provocative actions in the South China Sea intensified.
Macron’s visit, in particular, was noteworthy, as it seemed to reassure China of Europe’s distinct position from Washington’s policies against Asian giants. Despite announcing that the main reason for his visit was to push Beijing against arming Russia and push Moscow to end the war, behind the scenes, Macron’s visit aimed to assert Europe’s position.
He stated that Europe should not be caught up in a disordering of the world and crises that aren’t ours and that the government must build a “third pole.”
“We must be clear where our views overlap with the US, but whether it’s about Ukraine, relations with China, or sanctions, we have a European strategy,” the French leader said then.
“We don’t want to get into a bloc versus bloc logic.”
At first, many European leaders publicly announced or hinted at their support for Macron’s move, considering it a positive approach to their largest trading partner.
But later, some European leaders expressed their rejection of his statements, the most blatant of which was the finance minister in Scholz’s government, Christian Lindner, who said that Macron’s “Idea of strategic autonomy of the European Union,” is “naïve.” Of course, the statement was not objected to by the German Chancellor, signaling that the minister has also voiced Scholz’s opinion.
Following Lindner’s remarks, and after von der Leyen reaffirmed the bloc’s neutral position on the Taiwan Strait issue provoked by the US during an EU parliamentary hearing on April 18, Manfred Weber, who helms the Parliament’s largest group, the center-right European People’s Party (EPP), accused Macron of “destroying” European unity with his trip to China, and that the French president “weakened the EU” and “made clear the great rift within the European Union in defining a common strategic plan against Beijing.”
To counter Macron’s position that the Taiwan issue is not a European concern, Weber also compared the matter to the war going on in Ukraine from Washington’s perspective.
“We shouldn’t be surprised if Washington starts asking whether Ukraine is a European issue,” Weber said. The question they may ask, he warned: “Why should American taxpayers do so much to defend Ukraine?”
His comments, of course, are nothing but shortsighted and delusional, given that the war in Ukraine was created and pushed forward by the US’ decades-long policies on NATO’s take against Russia.
From an outside observer, the contradicting statements – while also taking into account that the bloc members are dividing roles – can only be described as a political mess, a loss of strategic planning, and entails that the union is currently lacking the tools to form a united framework to establish a basis to approach the Global South as a whole, and especially China.
Is the EU’s policy being molded by an actual comprehensive overview of the world’s geopolitical shifts, or is it being dictated by a handful of US pawns that have served nothing but American hawks since they took office?
Blind Economic outlook as bloc
The disunity in Europe extends beyond just their political approach to China, as trade policies with their largest business partner also show division.
In 2020, China and the EU agreed on a trade framework, eliminating Chinese restrictions on European companies and investments in China. However, the deal was put on hold after the bloc sanctioned Beijing for alleged human rights abuses and China responded with sanctions of its own.
Just under two weeks after Macron’s and von der Leyen’s trip to China, the EU leaders said that they consider the deal with China as not applicable anymore, following the events since it was reached in 2020.
“We started negotiations around about 10 years ago and concluded the comprehensive agreement on investment two years ago. A lot has happened since then,” she said, adding that Europe’s “position is that we do have to reassess the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment,” she said earlier in April.
On his part, Macron considered that the agreement today is “less urgent,” and “just not practicable”.
On the other hand, Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz lately has been pushing for “reactivating” the agreement and considered it was time to reinstate the deal and put it back on track.
It is understandable that this dynamic is not unusual between world powers, especially at a time when the globe is witnessing historic geopolitical shifts, and it is definitely not unusual considering that the American influence across Europe and its leaders is still very significant, and Washington’s sanctions sword is constantly raised against its allies.
However, the lack of a united foreign policy within the bloc may negatively impact its position in the emerging multipolar world order and lead to the weakening or collapse of the union. Europe’s incomplete and fragile relations with growing global pillars, especially China and the emerging Global South, may also be observed from Beijing’s perspective.
Losing post-WW2 against Global South
Europe’s lack of clear foreign policy extends beyond its position on China, as it also pertains to the US’s declared soft war on the Asian giant.
For decades, Brussels relied on the assumption of a long-term realm by Washington as the unipolar power, which led the bloc to neglect sustainable and strong relations with the Global South.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the Global South has made unexpected, unprecedented moves, guided by the goal of forming sovereign policies that are far from Western hegemony led by Washington. They declared historic political shifts, leading to the formation of a new and influential world pillar in the multipolar era.
Protectionist economic policies, accompanied by subsidization, act for vital sectors like electric vehicles and batteries.
More systems (such as BRICS and SCO) and countries are growing monetary bodies and alternative trade frameworks to those dominated and influenced directly by the United States. It has become clear that political global organizations such as the UNSC and the UN, which were long exploited by Washington and its European allies to extend their hegemony and colonialism, are slowly losing more relevance and impact on the global arena.
On April 16, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, in an interview with CNN, said that the United States economic sanctions imposed on Russia and other nations have put the dollar’s hegemony at risk as targeted countries seek out an alternative.
“There is a risk when we use financial sanctions that are linked to the role of the dollar that over time it could undermine the hegemony of the dollar,” she said then.
Financial global institutions and systems such as the IMF, World Bank, and SWIFT, are gradually declining as de-dollarization proceeds and countries are finding alternatives to bypass the West’s complete influence, including mutual lending and local currency trade, sovereign projects, in addition to domestic SWIFT alternatives such as China’s CIPS, Russia’s SFPS, and Iran’s SEPAM, to name some.
The movement today is driven by Beijing along with other powers including Brazil, India, Russia, Iran, and South Africa, among others.
Despite all signs in previous years of the emergence of the new geopolitical reality, Europe failed to form appropriate policies and outline a vision to engage and adapt to these drastic global shifts, nor did it take advantage of some of the outcomes that fall into its interest, such as de-dollarization and the end of the petrodollar. Instead, Europe insisted on following Washington’s agenda, further sidelining its world influence.
Sidelined
On March 10, Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed to restore diplomatic relations and reopen missions after seven years of strained ties.
Talks were brokered in Beijing under the auspices of Chinese President Xi Jinping. The Western role, especially that of Washington, in inciting dispute and rift between the two nations was criminal, leading to tens of thousands of deaths, mass destruction, displacement of hundreds of thousands, and feelings of hate among the people of the region.
China managed in just a few months to achieve what the United Nations and other international political bodies failed to do, marking Beijing’s first public political approach to the Middle East. The Beijing-brokered rapprochement between Tehran and Riyadh reveals Europe’s falling influence in the region and the growing tendency of countries to sideline the West in bilateral issues. It also highlights China’s rise as a peace-bringing and key power in the region.
Oppressed nations rejoice
Europe’s centuries-long history of producing global superpowers makes it a hybrid bloc with a combined cultural, political, social, economic, and institutional maturity that can quickly adapt to world geopolitical shifts and overcome emerging challenges.
However, it can be argued that the current world challenges are unprecedented, especially with the concept of globalization and the world’s interconnectedness.
Europe today has limited options that require a new approach and view of the world, with a humble and realistic policy that acknowledges the end of its hegemony and the adoption of sovereignty and mutual respect in bilateral relations.
The EU must also accept that the world is no longer a Western playground and that anti-hegemonic sentiment among nations is irreversible in a multipolar world. Regardless of Europe’s decisions, oppressed nations are watching the declining global influence of the colonial bloc with joy.
Now, it is abundantly clear that the United States’ dishonest and aggressive Middle East strategy, which is at odds with the aspirations of the Arab world, has utterly failed. The establishment of a multipolar world by Russia, China, and Iran was a significant milestone in this process. The convergence of these three nations and the global support for this new diplomatic triangle have been impossible for the United States and its allies to prevent.
Around the world, anti-Russian sentiment is being stoked to confront the White House’s growing Russophobia, Sinophobia, tightening of unlawful sanctions measures, and even outright terrorism: the illegal undermining of the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea and the apparent planning of similar terrorist activities against the TurkStream in particular (the activation of flights of the U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drones in the Black Sea, one of which crashed on March 14, can confirm this).
The US intelligence agencies continue to seek to arm ISIS (a terrorist organization banned in the Russian Federation) fighters, particularly at the US military base Al-Tanf in Syria, in order to exacerbate the chaos in the region. According to incoming information, the Islamists would soon get several dozen four-wheel drive pickup trucks equipped with heavy machine guns, BGM-71 ТOW and NLAW missile defense systems, 9K38 Igla, and other weapons.
While American hegemony, which Washington has been actively trying to impose on the world in recent years, is being eroded with each passing day, the concept of a multipolar world promoted by Russia and China is being further strengthened. Beijing’s efforts to mediate the dispute between Iran and Saudi Arabia were also a crucial stage in the process. This is supported even by American media, which saw the announcement of the restoration of diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran as a direct challenge to Washington’s quest for dominance in the Middle East and around the globe. The signing in Beijing on March 10 of a peace treaty between the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and his Saudi counterpart and the decision to open Embassies within two months show the intention and willingness of Middle Eastern states to solve pressing regional problems without American involvement, to seek ways out of existing conflict situations, the vast majority of which were created and fomented by the White House.
The situation in Iraq, which was invaded by the US and its allies without the consent of the UN Security Council 20 years ago, is a stark example of how Washington’s policies and authority have collapsed. The United States, which had promised to create a “free nation,” has reduced this nation to corruption and the ruins of what was once a powerful, affluent state, and has thrown it into an economic and political catastrophe. The US invasion, civil war and rampant terrorism killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. By international agreement, the United States and its allies’ attack was unleashed to enable the Anglo-Saxons’ unchecked looting of Iraq’s economy and oil fields. According to Orientalists, it was this policy that led to a surge of sectarian conflict, rampant terrorism and a series of civil wars throughout the Middle East. The US intervention, like with past armed aggressions by Washington in recent decades, has shown America’s dedication to militarily interfering in sovereign states and utterly eliminating their statehood, which is openly despised in the Middle East.
Washington made contempt for the interests of the countries in the region the defining feature of its policy in the rush to bolster its global hegemony following the fall of the Soviet Union. And this position was reinforced by the unrelenting US military presence in the region, the continuing attachment of Middle Eastern companies to Western markets, and the regional elites to the “democratic and financial values” of the United States. Following the election of US President Donald Trump, the White House began to focus primarily on the needs of Israel, so that the idea of the Abraham Accords, without resolving the Palestinian issue, began to be misrepresented in Washington as the ideal way to befriend Jews and Arabs on the grounds of instilling fear of Iran.
The White House therefore experienced Iran’s diplomatic successes in collaboration with Russia and China as well as the “treachery” of former American allies, the Saudis, with great agony. Furthermore, Washington’s realization of the decline in American influence in the region was a dreadful wakeup from its previous Middle East slumber.
The United States is currently unable to manage the Middle East crises and build a consensus among the region’s nations due to Washington’s deadlocked relations with the major Persian Gulf powers. This became particularly clear after Russia launched its special operation in Ukraine: except from Israel’s modest actions, not a single nation in the area has applied even the most rudimentary sanctions against Moscow. Concurrently with Trump’s 2015 decision to pull out of the nuclear deal with Iran, relations between Washington and Riyadh have deteriorated significantly in recent years, and against this backdrop the Saudi government has been forced to worry about both their own security and efforts to bring about peace in the region.
As a result of the US credibility being completely called into question by the White House’s tardy backing of the sheikhs’ activities in the adjacent Yemen, Riyadh is now looking for ways to resolve the conflict through direct communication with Tehran. And these contacts proved to be very effective, with Iran agreeing to stop clandestine arms shipments to the Houthi militia in Yemen as part of a historic agreement with Saudi Arabia to restore diplomatic relations. The region’s nations have a chance to move toward peace on their own, without relying on Washington. And since Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has invited Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi to visit Riyadh, these actions will undoubtedly be quite spectacular in the near future.
In light of these circumstances, there is growing discussion in the area about the necessity for the United States to end its aggressive actions in the Middle East and sail back home before a regional wave of protest in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and many other nations forces it to do so.
Valery Kulikov, political expert, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
In Moscow this week, the Chinese and Russian leaders revealed their joint commitment to redesign the global order, an undertaking that has ‘not been seen in 100 years.’
What has just taken place in Moscow is nothing less than a new Yalta, which, incidentally, is in Crimea. But unlike the momentous meeting of US President Franklin Roosevelt, Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in USSR-run Crimea in 1945, this is the first time in arguably five centuries that no political leader from the west is setting the global agenda.
It’s Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin that are now running the multilateral, multipolar show. Western exceptionalists may deploy their crybaby routines as much as they want: nothing will change the spectacular optics, and the underlying substance of this developing world order, especially for the Global South.
What Xi and Putin are setting out to do was explained in detail before their summit, in two Op-Eds penned by the presidents themselves. Like a highly-synchronized Russian ballet, Putin’s vision was laid out in the People’s Daily in China, focusing on a “future-bound partnership,” while Xi’s was published in the Russian Gazette and the RIA Novosti website, focusing on a new chapter in cooperation and common development.
Right from the start of the summit, the speeches by both Xi and Putin drove the NATO crowd into a hysterical frenzy of anger and envy: Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova perfectly captured the mood when she remarked that the west was “foaming at the mouth.”
The front page of the Russian Gazette on Monday was iconic: Putin touring Nazi-free Mariupol, chatting with residents, side by side with Xi’s Op-Ed. That was, in a nutshell, Moscow’s terse response to Washington’s MQ-9 Reaper stunt and the International Criminal Court (ICC) kangaroo court shenanigans. “Foam at the mouth” as much as you like; NATO is in the process of being thoroughly humiliated in Ukraine.
During their first “informal” meeting, Xi and Putin talked for no less than four and a half hours. At the end, Putin personally escorted Xi to his limo. This conversation was the real deal: mapping out the lineaments of multipolarity – which starts with a solution for Ukraine.
Predictably, there were very few leaks from the sherpas, but there was quite a significant one on their “in-depth exchange” on Ukraine. Putin politely stressed he respects China’s position – expressed in Beijing’s 12-point conflict resolution plan, which has been completely rejected by Washington. But the Russian position remains ironclad: demilitarization, Ukrainian neutrality, and enshrining the new facts on the ground.
In parallel, the Russian Foreign Ministry completely ruled out a role for the US, UK, France, and Germany in future Ukraine negotiations: they are not considered neutral mediators.
A multipolar patchwork quilt
The next day was all about business: everything from energy and “military-technical” cooperation to improving the efficacy of trade and economic corridors running through Eurasia.
Russia already ranks first as a natural gas supplier to China – surpassing Turkmenistan and Qatar – most of it via the 3,000 km Power of Siberia pipeline that runs from Siberia to China’s northeastern Heilongjiang province, launched in December 2019. Negotiations on the Power of Siberia II pipeline via Mongolia are advancing fast.
Sino-Russian cooperation in high-tech will go through the roof: 79 projects at over $165 billion. Everything from liquified natural gas (LNG) to aircraft construction, machine tool construction, space research, agro-industry, and upgraded economic corridors.
The Chinese president explicitly said he wants to link the New Silk Road projects to the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). This BRI-EAEU interpolation is a natural evolution. China has already signed an economic cooperation deal with the EAEU. Russian macroeconomic uber-strategist Sergey Glazyev’s ideas are finally bearing fruit.
And last but not least, there will be a new drive towards mutual settlements in national currencies – and between Asia and Africa, and Latin America. For all practical purposes, Putin endorsed the role of the Chinese yuan as the new trade currency of choice while the complex discussions on a new reserve currency backed by gold and/or commodities proceed.
This joint economic/business offensive ties in with the concerted Russia-China diplomatic offensive to remake vast swathes of West Asia and Africa.
Chinese diplomacy works like the matryoshka (Russian stacking dolls) in terms of delivering subtle messages. It’s far from coincidental that Xi’s trip to Moscow exactly coincides with the 20th anniversary of American ‘Shock and Awe’ and the illegal invasion, occupation, and destruction of Iraq.
In parallel, over 40 delegations from Africa arrived in Moscow a day before Xi to take part in a “Russia-Africa in the Multipolar World” parliamentary conference – a run-up to the second Russia-Africa summit next July.
The area surrounding the Duma looked just like the old Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) days when most of Africa kept very close anti-imperialist relations with the USSR.
Putin chose this exact moment to write off more than $20 billion in African debt.
In West Asia, Russia-China are acting totally in synch. West Asia. The Saudi-Iran rapprochement was actually jump-started by Russia in Baghdad and Oman: it was these negotiations that led to the signing of the deal in Beijing. Moscow is also coordinating the Syria-Turkiye rapprochement discussions. Russian diplomacy with Iran – now under strategic partnership status – is kept on a separate track.
Diplomatic sources confirm that Chinese intelligence, via its own investigations, is now fully assured of Putin’s vast popularity across Russia, and even within the country’s political elites. That means conspiracies of the regime-change variety are out of the question. This was fundamental for Xi and the Zhongnanhai’s (China’s central HQ for party and state officials) decision to “bet” on Putin as a trusted partner in the coming years, considering he may run and win the next presidential elections. China is always about continuity.
So the Xi-Putin summit definitively sealed China-Russia as comprehensive strategic partners for the long haul, committed to developing serious geopolitical and geoeconomic competition with declining western hegemons.
This is the new world born in Moscow this week. Putin previously defined it as a new anti-colonial policy. It’s now laid out as a multipolar patchwork quilt. There’s no turning back on the demolition of the remnants of Pax Americana.
‘Changes that haven’t happened in 100 years’
In Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, Janet Abu-Lughod built a carefully constructed narrative showing the prevailing multipolar order when the West “lagged behind the ‘Orient.’” Later, the West only “pulled ahead because the ‘Orient’ was temporarily in disarray.”
We may be witnessing a similarly historic shift in the making, trespassed by a revival of Confucianism (respect for authority, emphasis on social harmony), the equilibrium inherent to the Tao, and the spiritual power of Eastern Orthodoxy. This is, indeed, a civilizational fight.
Moscow, finally welcoming the first sunny days of Spring, provided this week a larger-than-life illustration of “weeks where decades happen” compared to “decades where nothing happens.”
The two presidents bid farewell in a poignant manner.
Xi: “Now, there are changes that haven’t happened in 100 years. When we are together, we drive these changes.”
Putin: “I agree.”
Xi: “Take care, dear friend.”
Putin: “Have a safe trip.”
Here’s to a new day dawning, from the lands of the Rising Sun to the Eurasian steppes.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
Russia and China: a summit of important international agreements and messages
Twenty years after the unlawful and destabilizing US-led invasion of Iraq, Washington must face the ultimate consequence of that war: UNSC powers China and Russia laying the foundation for a genuine, UN Charter-based system of multipolarism.
On the night of 19-20 March, 2003, the US air force began bombing the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. The EU and NATO were deeply divided on whether to join the aggression: While newer NATO members from Central and Eastern Europe were in favor of the war, European heavyweights Paris and Berlin opposed it.
The Iraq war also marked the onset of diplomatic coordination between Moscow and Beijing at the UN Security Council (UNSC). The two countries began in 2003 to apply similar voting patterns in the Council, first on Iraq, then on Libya in 2011, and over Syria in several key votes. That early Russia-China UN coordination has, 20 years later, transformed into a determined joint policy toward “guarding a new world order based on international law.”
Looking back at March 2003 from the vantage point of March 2023, the invasion of Iraq unleashed geopolitical consequences far beyond the obvious ones, like the proliferation of terrorism, a decline of US power, and regional chaos. In 2003, a foundational, global shift in the balance of power was surely the last possible consequence envisioned by the war’s planners in Washington and London.
Disconnecting the dots
The destruction of Iraq, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army by the first “US Consul” Paul Bremer in May 2023, the outflow of refugees to neighboring states such as Syria and Jordan, and the exponential growth of extremism and terror attacks are among the consequences of this misguided war.
The flimsy reasons for the war, such as non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and Baghdad’s alleged support of terror groups like Al Qaeda, were debunked extensively in the following years. By the spring of 2004, evidence was already rife – whether from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or from the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group (ISG) – that Iraq had no WMD program at all.
Rarely before had disinformation campaigns – what is now commonly referred to as “fake news” – been so meticulously executed. The “with us or against us” narrative had firmly taken hold: Western think tanks were out in full force promoting regime change and “democracy” (not a stated goal of the US-led invasion) in Iraq, while those who opposed it were labeled anti-Israel or anti-America.
Despite unprecedented, massive public protests across western capitals in opposition to the Iraq war, the US and its allies had already set in motion their considerable war machine, led by figures such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar.
A false narrative linking Baghdad and the September 11 attacks had already been well-seeded, despite there being no connection whatsoever between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the bombers. It should be noted that there were no Iraqi or Afghan citizens among the terrorists who piloted the 9-11 planes, who were predominantly Saudi nationals.
Unfinished Business
In the autumn of 2001, war scenarios for an invasion of Iraq and regime change were already being laid out in Washington. Johns Hopkins University dean Paul Wolfowitz – an avid supporter of regime-change and US military expansion into Iraq – was named deputy secretary of defense in February 2001, a full seven months before the 9-11 attacks. Wolfowitz’s working hypothesis was that Iraq, with the liberalization of its oil industry, would be able to finance a post-war reconstruction from its own petroleum exports.
The group around Vice President Dick Cheney, which included Wolfowitz and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, was influential in shaping President George W. Bush’s position on Iraq. Unlike his father, George H. Bush, who was an experienced CIA director and analyst, the younger Bush lacked a distinct personal worldview on foreign policy, which he outsourced to his hawkish coterie.
Nevertheless, he was determined to finish what he saw as his father’s “unfinished business” from the 1991 ‘Gulf War’ aimed at expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait. That conflict was executed under a UN Security Council resolution, authorizing legal measures against Iraq as a state, but which did not constitute a war under international law.
In 1991, only Jordan‘s King Hussein took a position supporting Saddam Hussein, with all other nations backing the coalition assault against Baghdad. The US government adhered to the UN resolution, which aimed to restore Kuwait‘s territorial integrity – but not to overthrow the Iraqi government.
Instead, the US supported Iraqi Kurds in the north of the country and encouraged them to revolt against Baghdad. The Iraqi army crushed that rebellion, as it did an uprising in the Shia-dominated south. Perhaps the rebels had hoped for more concrete military aid from the US, but regardless, Hussein remained firmly in power despite military defeat elsewhere.
From Washington’s perspective, the US had failed to unseat Hussein, and within the Bush family, there was a desire to settle a score. For George W. Bush, the invasion of Iraq provided an opportunity to step out of his powerful father’s shadow by executing the elusive regime-change goal. The September 11 attacks provided a justification for this obsession – what remained was to connect Iraq to the US terror attacks and galvanize public and political support for a war, both domestically and internationally.
The UN Security Council in turmoil
In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, there was a great deal of division among UN Security Council (UNSC) members. US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented questionable evidence of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, while the foreign ministers of Germany and France publicly opposed the aggression, for which they occasionally received applause in the Council.
China and Russia, who vehemently opposed the war, began coordinating their decisions and responses, in part because of their respective oil interests in Iraq. This cooperation between Moscow and Beijing set the stage for a coordinated multilateral approach between the two nations. Both governments understood that a war would open Pandora’s box, leading to the collapse of Iraqi institutions and resulting in widespread regional disharmony.
Unfortunately, this is precisely what happened. The subsequent years saw weekly attacks, an expansion of Salafi terror groups like Al Qaeda, the rise of ISIS in 2014, and perpetual internal Iraqi conflict. Anyone familiar with the country‘s conditions was aware of the looming catastrophe when the illegal invasion of Iraq began on 20 March, 2003.
China and Russia and the multipolar order
Twenty years to the day, Chinese President Xi Jinping will embark on a three-day state visit to Moscow, and the focus will extend beyond bilateral energy relations, which have been a consistent priority since 2004.
As previously stated in their joint declaration in Beijing in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart aim to coordinate their foreign policy and advance it together. Their discussions may also touch on the Ukraine dossier, although media expectations in the west may be overestimated.
It may be pure coincidence that the meeting coincides with the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion. Yet it also highlights how extensively Russian and Chinese strategies have intertwined over the past two decades.
Today, increasingly, “orientation comes from Orient.” Cooperative geostrategic leadership and sound alternative propositions to resolve global conflicts are being shaped in Beijing and Moscow – because the old centers of power can offer nothing new.
Twenty years after the US invasion of Iraq, a failed ‘war on terror,’ the proliferation of extremism, millions of dead and displaced in West Asia, and never-ending conflict, China and Russia have finally teamed up to systematically advance their view of the world, this time with more resolve and global clout.
As catastrophic as it was, the Iraq war ended the practice of direct US military invasions, ushering in a war-weary era that desperately sought other solutions. That global division of opinion that began in 2003 over Iraq is, 20 years later, being institutionalized by emerging multipolar powers that seek to counter forever wars.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
Under Chinese auspices, on 10 March in Beijing, longtime regional competitors Iran and Saudi Arabia reached an agreement to restore diplomatic relations, after a break of seven years.
In its most optimistic reading, the deal can be seen as a historic strategic agreement, reflecting major changes underway in West Asia and the world. At worst, it can be characterized as an “armistice agreement” between two important rivals, that will provide a valuable space for direct, regular communications.
The Sino-Saudi-Iranian joint statement on Friday carried strong implications beyond the announcement of the restoration of diplomatic relations between Tehran and Riyadh, severed since 2016.
The statement is very clear:
The embassies of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic Iran will reopen in less than two months.
Respect for the sovereignty of States.
Activating the security cooperation agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran signed in 2001.
Activating the cooperation agreement in the economic, trade, investment, technology, science, culture, sports and youth sectors signed between the parties in 1998.
Urging the three countries to exert all efforts to promote regional and international peace and security.
At first glance, the first four clauses suggest that the Chinese-brokered deal is essentially a mending of diplomatic relations between the two longtime adversaries. But in fact, the fifth clause is far from the standard text inserted into joint statements between states.
It appears to establish a new reference for conflicts in West Asia, in which China plays the role of “peacemaker” — in partnership with Iran and Saudi Arabia — in which Beijing assumes a role in various regional conflicts or influences the relevant parties.
Sources familiar with the negotiations have revealed to The Cradle that Chinese President Xi Jinping did not merely coat-tail a deal already underway between Tehran and Riyadh. Xi has, in fact, personally paved the way for this agreement to materialize. The Chinese head of state delved deep into its details since his visit to Saudi Arabia in December 2022, and then later, during Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s visit to Beijing in mid-February 2023.
More than one round of negotiations was held under Chinese auspices, during which the Iranians and Saudis finalized details negotiated between them in Iraq and Oman, during earlier rounds of talks.
It was by no means a given that the two sides would arrive at an agreement in their last round of discussions (6-10 March, 2023). But the Chinese representative managed to overcome all obstacles between the two delegations, after which the parties obtained approval from their respective leaderships to announce the deal on Friday.
China as regional guarantor
In the past couple of days, much has been written about the strategic implications of a Chinese-brokered Saudi-Iranian agreement and its impact on China’s global role vis-à-vis the United States. The Persian Gulf is a strategic region for both powers, and the main source of China’s energy supply. It is likely why Beijing intervened to stem tensions between its two strategic allies. It is also something Washington, long viewed as the region’s “security guarantor,” could never have achieved.
Undoubtedly, much will be said about Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s (MbS) “strategic adventurism” and his exploitation of global changes to offset the decline of US regional influence. The rise of a multipolar, post-American order allows traditional US allies some space to explore their international options away from Washington, and in service of their immediate national interests.
Saudi Arabia’s current interests are related to the ambitious political, economic, financial, and cultural targets that MbS has set out for his country, and are based on two pillars:
Diversifying regional and global partnerships in order to adapt to global systemic changes that will help realize Riyadh’s grand plans.
Establishing security and political stability to allow Saudi Arabia to implement its major projects, especially those outlines in MbS’ “Vision 2030,” through which Riyadh envisions itself transforming into a regional incubator for finance, business, media, and the entertainment industry – similar to the role played by the UAE in decades past, or by Beirut before the Lebanese civil war in 1975.
In short, regional and domestic security and stability are vital for Riyadh to be able to implement its strategic goals. As such, confidential clauses were inserted into the Beijing Agreement to assure Iran and Saudi Arabia that their security imperatives would be met. Some of these details were provided to The Cradle, courtesy of a source involved in the negotiations:
Both Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran undertake not to engage in any activity that destabilizes either state, at the security, military or media levels.
Saudi Arabia pledges not to fund media outlets that seek to destabilize Iran, such as Iran International.
Saudi Arabia pledges not to fund organizations designated as terrorists by Iran, such as the People’s Mojahedin Organization (MEK), Kurdish groups based in Iraq, or militants operating out of Pakistan.
Iran pledges to ensure that its allied organizations do not violate Saudi territory from inside Iraqi territory. During negotiations, there were discussions about the targeting of Aramco facilities in Saudi Arabia in September 2019, and Iran’s guarantee that an allied organization would not carry out a similar strike from Iraqi lands.
Saudi Arabia and Iran will seek to exert all possible efforts to resolve conflicts in the region, particularly the conflict in Yemen, in order to secure a political solution that secures lasting peace in that country.
According to sources involved in the Beijing negotiations, no details on Yemen’s conflict were agreed upon as there has already been significant progress achieved in direct talks between Riyadh and Yemen’s Ansarallah resistance movement in January. These have led to major understandings between the two warring states, which the US and UAE have furiously sought to undermine in order to prevent a resolution of the Yemen war.
In Beijing however, the Iranian and Saudis agreed to help advance the decisions already reached between Riyadh and Sanaa, and build upon these to end the seven-year war.
Hence, although the Beijing statement primarily addresses issues related to diplomatic rapprochement, Iranian-Saudi understandings appear to have been brokered mainly around security imperatives. Supporters of each side will likely claim their country fared better in the agreement, but a deeper look shows a healthy balance in the deal terms, with each party receiving assurances that the other will not tamper with its security.
While Iran has never declared a desire to undermine Saudi Arabia’s security, some of its regional allies have made no secret of their intentions in this regard. In addition, MbS has publicly declared his intention to take the fight inside Iran, which Saudi intelligence services have been doing in recent years, specifically by supporting and financing armed dissident and separatist organizations that Iran classifies as terrorist groups.
The security priorities of this agreement should have been easy to spot in Beijing last week. After all, the deal was struck between the National Security Councils of Saudi Arabia and Iran, and included the participation of intelligence services from both countries. Present in the Iranian delegation were officers from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and from the intelligence arms of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
On a slightly separate note related to regional security — but not part of the Beijing Agreement — sources involved in negotiations confirmed to The Cradle that, during talks, the Saudi delegation stressed Riyadh’s commitment to the 2002 Arab peace initiative; refusing normalization with Tel Aviv before the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital.
What is perhaps most remarkable, and illustrates the determination by the parties to strike a deal without the influence of spoilers, is that Iranian and Saudi intelligence delegations met in the Chinese capital for five days without Israeli intel being aware of the fact. It is perhaps yet another testament that China — unlike the US — understands how to get a deal done in these shifting times.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
The Western world’s threat narrative seeks to disrupt the concept of multipolarity by imposing sanctions and military deterrence.
On February 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a speech at the Federal Assembly, which received significant attention, particularly from Western media, as the first anniversary of the Ukrainian war approached.
Although Western analysts anticipated an aggressive tone from Putin’s speech, it did not materialize. Their expectation was primarily that Putin would make statements about “shifting gears” in Ukraine and declaring the beginning of a new phase in the operation.
However, Putin’s speech focused more on domestic issues in Russia. He recalled how the Soviet economy faced difficulties in its final days, stating that the Soviet Union began creating a market economy, similar to that of Western countries, but the result was the Russian economy becoming “dependent on the West as a source of raw materials.”
While these are well-known facts following the collapse of the Soviet Union, what made this repetition significant was that it was directly declared by the President of Russia during a time of war. In the same speech, Putin’s use of the phrase “ordinary Russians did not feel sorry for those who lost their yachts and palaces abroad” in reference to oligarchs, was also significant and complementary in this regard.
Regarding the war, Putin’s speech had an ideological tone rather than military, contrary to expectations. In a more clichéd expression, Putin explained how he viewed the “big picture.
Putin openly declared that the war with Ukraine was not only fought against Ukraine but also against the “masters of the Kiev administration,” and that Russia defended not only its interests but also the principle that the world should not be divided into “civilized countries and others,” stating that “Western elites have turned into a society of unprincipled lies.”
The decision to freeze Russia’s participation in the START agreements was undoubtedly one of the most critical issues addressed in the speech. Putin’s remarks preceding this decision indicate that it was made from a historical perspective: “There was a time when the USSR and the USA did not view each other as enemies. That time has passed. Our relations have deteriorated, thanks to the USA’s desire to build a world order based on its model and with only one master.”
The local and regional crises since the USSR’s collapse and the Maydan coup in 2014, which has escalated into violent conflicts, are significant indications that Russia is on the brink of a political and economic transformation. Although the Russian leadership is unlikely to return to a “Soviet model” as feared by the West, this transformation will not only impact Russia but also the emerging new world outside the so-called “Collective West” (US/EU, NATO).
This transformation has already been named: Multipolarity.
Following Putin’s speech, the visit of Wang Yi, the head of the Foreign Affairs Commission Office of the CCP Central Committee, to Russia can be considered as the first handshake of this new era.
As expected, the meeting between Wang and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov conveyed the message that “China and Russia are moving forward confidently towards a multipolar world formation.” During his meeting with Putin, Wang also noted that China-Russia relations are “resisting pressure from the international community and progressing steadily.”
For almost a century, the intellectual circles and policymakers of the West have associated all their theses on the region with first the Soviet and then the “Russian threat”. Because the Russian threat is essential for the consolidation of Europe and the existence of NATO and media design for the Collective West.
With this awareness, Putin said the following not only last year, in 2014, but also exactly 16 years ago in his famous speech in Munich:
“I think it is clear that NATO expansion has no relation to the modernization of the Alliance itself or to ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?”
The answer to Putin’s question was clear, and all the developments of the last 16 years have confirmed it. However, the fundamental perception of the Western public, including Turkey, is that NATO’s expansion and the aid to Ukraine started after the February 2022 attack by Russia.
The Western media had predicted a similar outcome for China’s expected peace proposal. However, unlike the doomsday scenario painted by Western media, China’s peace proposals included rational and practical solutions:
Putting an end to the Western sanctions on Russia, avoiding the use of nuclear weapons, establishing humanitarian aid corridors for civilians, and keeping the grain corridor open.
Regardless of China’s “centralistic” stance, the Western media has echoed the same concerns about China’s alleged military and economic aid to Russia.
Although these analyses may point to specific “threats,” they could also be considered the West’s ’wishes.’ Despite their messages of peace, the Western elites are not afraid of escalation; on the contrary, they seem to want it. This has become the main intellectual preoccupation of the Western ruling classes as the “Russian invasion” narrative.
The threat narrative is designed to undermine the idea of multipolarity, which is being led by Russia and China, through sanctions and military deterrence.
Simultaneously, as the sanctions against Russia backfire on the European economy, the perception of “Russian involvement” is being used to destabilize the socio-economic concerns of the European people, who are becoming an increasingly organized force. This tactic has been frequently employed by Europe, as evidenced by the theories about the Yellow Vest Movement in France, which emerged long before the Ukrainian conflict, suggesting that “Russians are leading the movement.”
Furthermore, the threat is being exploited to propagate the notion that the far right, which has gained strength by taking an “extra-systemic” position amidst crises like the migrant crisis and economic recession, is being “strengthened by Russian support.” By latching onto the “Russian outbreak,” the West is deflecting crises caused by its own policies.
These crises include the global economic crisis of 2008, the Arab Spring of 2011 and the resulting migration movements, the 2014 Ukraine Maidan Coup, the Brexit, and the COVID-19 pandemic that began on December 31, 2020.
The Western world’s threat narrative seeks to disrupt the concept of multipolarity, led by Russia and China, by imposing sanctions and military deterrence. These sanctions, which have hit the European economy like a boomerang, are being used to destabilize the socio-economic concerns of the European people with the perception of “Russian involvement.” This method has been frequently used in Europe, as seen with the theories about the Yellow Vests Movement in France.
Furthermore, the far-right, which has gained strength due to crises such as the migrant crisis and economic recession, is being portrayed as “strengthened by Russian support” through propaganda. The West deflects even the crises caused by its own policies by attaching them to the “Russian outbreak,” including the global economic crisis in 2008, the Arab Spring, the Ukraine Maidan Coup, Brexit, and the COVID-19 epidemic.
While this situation strengthens the demand for security, stability, and prosperity among the peoples of Europe, the potential left-wing centers that could have addressed these demands have been liquidated since the Cold War. The far right has been maintaining and increasing its mainstream position in European politics for years, as evidenced by the rise of far-right parties in Italy, Sweden, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and Belgium.
As a result of this erosion, those who are showcased in the name of the left in the USA and Europe are now positioned against “Authoritarian Russia.” In summary, the immigration wave, economic crises, and far-right tendencies in Europe are basically the result of the Collective West’s actions, of which Europe is also a part. However, the Western media focuses on the “Russian threat.”
The aim of prohibiting or restricting Russian and Chinese media under the guise of “freedom of the press” and accusing them of disinformation and propaganda is to solidify the “Russian threat” narrative. The “Free West” continues to silence alternative voices.
We should recall the US media campaigns against the Soviets in the past and their current operations against Russia in Europe through the US Global Media Agency (USAGM). Organizations such as Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) (formerly Radio for the Liberation of Bolshevism) have been established directly by the CIA, using Nazis, and have expanded to include countries like Cuba and China. However, it is Russian and Chinese media organizations that have been banned, restricted, and labeled as sources of disinformation.
In summary, all these events are connected to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and, even earlier, to imperialism’s attempts to use Ukraine as a base against the USSR/Russia in the last century.
As a result, Ukraine has been turned into a stronghold of czarist supporters during the October Revolution, Nazism during World War II, and extreme right and neo-Nazism after the Maidan coup.
The competition between those advocating complete surrender to the West and those seeking friendship with Russia began in post-Soviet Ukraine and culminated in the victory of the former with the Maidan coup in 2014.
This is the underlying reason for the ongoing military conflict in Ukraine, which is now in its ninth year, with the Russian operation merely ushering in a new phase. The fact that the crisis took on an international dimension was only a matter of time.
It is evident that this longstanding conflict aligns with the picture that Putin drew in his speech. The war’s participants are following a well-defined course.
Even Ukrainian leader Zelensky, in his motivational speech on the war’s first anniversary, highlighted Western weapons such as “Himars, Patriot, Abrams, IRIS-T, Challenger, NASAMS, Leopard” as proof of his country’s resistance unifying the world. However, the new world order extends far beyond the West.
As tensions rise between the West and Russia-China-Iran – core of the emerging multi-polar world – many historic possibilities and opportunities open up for people elsewhere. The cause and the nature of these possibilities and opportunities is briefly outlined here, for those who may sense and wonder about the tectonic shifts occurring.
Honest disclosure: The author is most definitely not an expert in geopolitics or diplomacy. But he finds himself hopelessly stuck with a mischievous mind which cannot resist exploring ideas – particularly ideas which are iconoclastic in nature. The outcomes of the mischievous explorations are shared freely with others, in the belief that others will find something useful in them.
Frozen minds
First, a few necessary words about minds which have lost the ability to explore new ideas – incredibly puny minds which are closed, locked and deep-frozen in ‘higher-us-versus-lower-them’ world-views. A recent ‘jungle-versus-garden’ comment by a certain high official of the EU gives a glimpse of that world view. Needless to say, the author is profoundly thankful to that high official for providing such a superb illustrative glimpse of that world view.
People of this frozen world-view imagine that their world-view – which, sadly, is dearer to them than a million lives – is worshiped by everybody else on the planet. How can it be, they figure, that the most precious thing in their lives is not valued by ‘the wretched rest’? Surely they must be jealous of us! They have to be! Why, even we privileged ones are jealous of one another!
You get the idea. Surely all of us have encountered such frozen minds at some time or another. An example from the EU was cited, but examples can easily be found from almost any corner of our beautiful planet. For ease of reference, we shall refer to such minds simply as ‘frozen minds’.
Necessity is the mother of adaptation and invention. Therefore, when there is no necessity, there is neither adaptation nor invention. This implies that the root cause behind ‘frozen minds’ is privileged life which does not ever necessitate either adaptation or invention.
Outward symbols of wealth and privilege abound, of course, and they are flaunted ceaselessly; but the minds behind the symbols are well and truly frozen. To the un-perceptive, the outward symbols indeed signify something – power, wealth, success, progress … something. In fact the whole elaborate charade is put up to impress the foolish. But there is no substance behind the symbols; the minds are frozen in a pitiful state of ignorance.
‘European values’, ‘liberal democracy’ … et cetera … are no more than empty phrases which are ritually recited in pitiful, laughable and failing attempts to relate the frozen minds to reality. When words and phrases do not resonate with truth – with reality – they are empty, meaningless, ritualistic.
Such frozen minds brook no opposition. Why? Because they are not capable – intellectually or emotionally – of dealing with different world views! Their haughty demeanor and insider-speak is simply a way to hide insecurity. The roots of Fascism lie in the incapacity and insecurity of frozen minds.
So how do these frozen types manage their self-serving politics?
They have devised an incredibly crude and laughable strategy: Try to dumb down the world to a level where the frozen ones feel they can handle it.
The idea is that their level of ignorance and incompetence will then become the lowest common denominator globally. They can then dictate terms as the ‘holy fountainhead of the new religion’. The world should be grateful.
Surprise, surprise! The world is refusing to dumb down! One can understand and almost rejoice at the frustration of the frozen minds.
Also, when understanding of genuinely different world views is impossible, how can diplomacy work? Lack of understanding sows seeds of conflict.
New shoots are inevitable
For people of any country, a primary aim of life is to enhance their material well-being: incomes, health, family life, education … et cetera. If they remain focused on that aim – and avoid being taken in by the pomposity and false promises of the frozen minds – they will map out a path for themselves which suits their history, culture, agro-economic conditions and so on.
That is no more than A-B-C, or common sense. There is so much diversity In human life around the planet, that this simple path would lead to diversity, plurality, originality, creativity and overall – even if patchy – well-being.
But this is beyond the range of understanding and acceptance of the frozen minds. Fascist tendencies of the privileged burst forth: How dare these countries think for themselves when we have already told them what is best for them? Don’t we have the monopoly on ‘progress’? Don’t we have the first call on the resources of that country?
But deception and exploitation cannot continue for too long. As countries around the world become aware of the cruel and cunning games played by the privileged ones, differences and mistrust will grow. ‘Soft power’ will not work as well as it did; coercion will increasingly be used.
At this point, a bit of geometry will elucidate a crucial point.
In a two-dimensional drawing, when the distance scale is doubled, the area making up any region becomes four times as large. For example, if the side of a square or the radius of a circle is doubled, its area is quadrupled.
The space of social, political and economic world views is multi-dimensional. When distances grow in world views between major players in geo-politics and geo-economics, the space available to all players is enlarged many-fold. Then options open up which could not exist in a ‘frozen’ world order, and which remain well beyond the grasp of those with frozen minds.
While this is true in general, the space available to vassals and hangers-on of ‘frozen minds’ actually shrinks. After all, if they choose to hitch their wagons to a certain kind of mule, they remain confined to the mule’s path. They do not have the freedom to benefit from new options opening up.
In a period of transition marked by growing differences, any keen and independent mind observing the goings-on will surely see opportunities and possibilities which a frozen mind will miss. All along, the irrepressible internet facilitates the sharing of ideas, insights and suggested solutions.
There are some two hundred countries in the world. In terms of geo-politics and geo-economics, some are major players, some are in mid-range and some are smaller. People of all countries, big or small, deserve a life of human dignity and self-respect. But that will not come about without wise choices. Nothing comes without effort. Effort is needed to see what lies behind propaganda, to see the difference between propaganda and the well-being of societies.
Soft-power must be based on truth. Where there is a stink of lies and cover-ups, there are no values to be found. Anyone declaiming about values must be judged by what he or she is willing to give up for the sake of those values.
Seeds of new life?
Seeds must be planted for new shoots to appear. In a small and wonderful country, say C – which is deemed by arrogant experts to be ‘underdeveloped’ – we hope an event like the following occurs soon.
A University organizes a symposium on ‘Impact of economic and trade policy on the well-being of societies’. Scholars from all the major ‘poles’ of geo-economics, representing different viewpoints, are invited to the symposium.
The scholars discuss key principles of ‘capitalism’, ‘socialism’, ‘communism’, ‘conservatism’, ‘liberalism’, free markets, regulated markets, banking, exchange rates, modern wisdom, medieval wisdom, ancient wisdom … and so on. Every invited scholar is expected to elucidate his or her viewpoint and answer critical questions posed by students and other citizens.
Students and other citizens of country C and other nearby countries organize the event and moderate the debates. An independent jury evaluates how well and how clearly each scholar makes his or her case.
The debates are not fake debates designed to hide true choices from dumbed down public. Rather, the organizers ensure that all the viewpoints are presented, debated and evaluated against the yardstick of well-being of societies. Name-dropping is not permitted. If somebody claims, for example, that Plato said such-and-such, then that somebody must also explain how Plato’s such-and-such viewpoint will enhance our well-being in the here and now.
The event described here is imaginary. There may be little likelihood of such an event occurring today. But why should such events not occur all the time, in different parts of the world? Is our well-being not at stake?
In an era of major transition, it matters not whether one is tall or short, dark- or light-skinned, rich or poor, this or that race, this or that ideology, this or that religion … et cetera. What matters is whether one is sensitive to truth.
The truth is that the work of attaining well-being cannot to outsourced. Sadly, the delivery of fake ‘well-being’ to others has become global mega-politics run by charlatans. This politics relies totally on propaganda and false promises. As part of political strategy, true paths to attain well-being – that is, faith and one’s own diligent effort – are being deliberately obscured.
Even Universities, where learning and scholarship should be nurtured, are instead subverted into becoming malicious propaganda centres.
Beyond the short time horizons of charlatans, however, the most valuable human asset is that of perceptive, creative, nimble minds which can harness collective strengths towards the common good. One senses that a transition is under way today from the age of brute power and lies to the age of truth and understanding. While it will be painful, the transition is inevitable.
Raisi’s visit to Beijing, the first for an Iranian president in 20 years, represents Tehran’s wholesale ‘Pivot to the East’ and China’s recognition of Iran’s centrality to its BRI plans.
The visit of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi to Beijing and his face-to- face meeting with counterpart Xi Jinping is a groundbreaking affair in more ways than one.
Raisi, the first Iranian president to officially visit China in 20 years, led an ultra high-level political and economic delegation, which included the new Central Bank governor and the Ministers of Economy, Oil, Foreign Affairs, and Trade.
The fact that Raisi and Xi jointly supervised the signing of 20 bilateral cooperation agreements ranging from agriculture, trade, tourism and environmental protection to health, disaster relief, culture and sports, is not even the major take away.
This week’s ceremonial sealing of the Iran-China comprehensive strategic partnership marks a key evolution in the multipolarity sphere: two Sovereigns – both also linked by strategic partnerships with Russia – imprinting to their domestic audiences and also to the Global South their vision of a more equitable, fair and sustainable 21st century which completely bypasses western dictates.
Beijing and Tehran first established their comprehensive strategic partnership when Xi visited Iran in 2016 – only one year after the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or Iranian nuclear deal.
In 2021, Beijing and Tehran signed a 25-year cooperation deal which translated the comprehensive partnership into practical economic and cultural developments in several fields, especially energy, trade and infrastructure. By then, not only Iran (for decades) but also China were being targeted by unilateral US sanctions.
Here is a relatively independent analysis of the challenges and prospects of the 25-year deal. And here is an enlightening perspective from neighboring Pakistan, also a strategic partner of China.
Iran: gotta modernize everything
Beijing and Tehran are already actively cooperating in the construction of selected lines of Tehran’s subway, the Tehran-Isfahan high-speed railway, and of course joint energy projects. Chinese tech giant Huawei is set to help Tehran to build a framework for a 5G telecom network.
Raisi and Xi, predictably, stressed increased joint coordination at the UN and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), of which Iran is the newest member, as well as a new drive along the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
While there was no explicit mention of it, underlying all these initiatives is the de-dollarization of trade – in the framework of the SCO but also the multipolar BRICS group of states. Iran is set to become one of the new members of BRICS+, a giant step to be decided in their upcoming summit in South Africa next August.
There are estimates in Tehran that Iran-China annual trade may reach over $70 billion in the mid-term, which will amount to triple the current figures.
When it comes to infrastructure building, Iran is a key BRI partner. The geostrategy of course is hard to match: a 2,250 km coastline encompassing the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, Sea of Oman and the Caspian Sea – and huge land borders with Iraq, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Every think tank in China sees how Iran is irreplaceable, not only in terms of BRI land corridors, but also the Maritime Silk Road.
Chabahar Port may be a prime Iran-India affair, as part of the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) – thus directly linked to the Indian vision of a Silk Road, extending to Central Asia.
But Chinese port developers do have other ideas, focused on alternative ports along the Persian Gulf and in the Caspian Sea. That will boost shipping connections to Central Asia (Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan), Russia and the Caucasus (Azerbaijan).
And that makes perfect sense when one combines port terminal development with the modernization of Iran’s railways – all the way to high-speed rail.
An even more revolutionary development would be China coordinating the BRI connection of an Iranian corridor with the already in progress 3,200 km-long China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), from Kashgar in Xinjiang to Gwadar port in the Indian Ocean.
That seemed perfectly plausible when Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan was still in power, before being ousted by a lawfare coup. The key of the whole enterprise is to build badly needed infrastructure in Balochistan, on both sides of the border. On the Pakistani side, that would go a long way to smash CIA-fed “insurgents” of the Balochistan Liberation Army kind, get rid of unemployment, and put trade in charge of economic development.
Afghanistan of course enters the equation – in the form of a China-Afghan-Iran corridor linked to CPEC. Since September 2021, Beijing has explained to the Taliban, in detail, how they may profit from an infrastructure corridor – complete with railway, highway and pipeline – from Xinjiang, across the Wakhan corridor in eastern Afghanistan, through the Hindu Kush, all the way to Iran.
The core of multipolarity
Iran is perfectly positioned for a Chinese-propelled boom in high-speed cargo rail, connecting Iran to most of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan).
That means, in practice, cool connectivity with a major logistics cluster: the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of Khorgos, only 330 km from Almaty on the Kazakh-China border, and only four hours from Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital.
If China pulls that off, it would be a sort of BRI Holy Grail, interconnecting China and Iran via Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Nothing less than several corridors in one.
All that is about to happen as the Islamic Revolution in Iran celebrates its 44th year.
What is already happening now, geopolitically, and fully recognized by China, might be defined as the full rejection of an absurdity: the collective west treating Iran as a pariah or at best a subjugated neo-colony.
With the diverse strands of the Resistance embedded in the Islamic Revolution finally consolidated, it looks like history is finally propelling Iran as one of the key poles of the most complex process at work in the 21st century: Eurasia integration.
So 44 years after the Islamic Revolution, Iran enjoys strategic partnerships with the three top BRICS: China, Russia and India.
Likely to become one of the first new members of BRICS+, Iran is the first West Asian state to become a full member of the SCO, and is clinching a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU).
Iran is a major strategic partner of both BRI, led by China, and the INSTC, alongside Russia and India.
With the JCPOA all but dead, and all western “promises” lying in the dust, Tehran is consolidating its pivot back to the East at breakneck speed.
What Raisi and Xi sealed in Beijing heralds Chinese pre-eminence all across West Asia – keenly perceived in Beijing as a natural consequence of recognizing and honoring Iran’s regional centrality.
Iran’s “Look East” strategy could not be more compatible with BRI – as an array of BRI projects will accelerate Iran’s economic development and consolidate its inescapable role when it comes to trade corridors and as an energy provider.
During the 1980s Tehran was ruled by a “Neither East nor West” strategy – faithful to the tenets of the Islamic Revolution. That has now evolved, pragmatically, into “Look East.” Tehran did try to “Look West” in good faith, but what the US government did with the JCPOA – from its murder to “maximum pressure” to its aborted resuscitation – was quite a historical lesson.
What Raisi and Xi have just demonstrated in Beijing is the Sovereign way forward. The three leaders of Eurasia integration – China, Russia and Iran – are fast on their way to consolidate the core of multipolarity.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
The national flags of China and Iran fly in Tiananmen Square during Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi’s visit to Beijing, China, February 14, 2023. (Photo by Reuters)
The key takeaway of President Ebrahim Raeisi’s state visit to Beijing goes way beyond the signing of 20 bilateral cooperation agreements.
This is a crucial inflexion point in an absorbing, complex, decades-long, ongoing historical process: Eurasia integration.
Little wonder that President Raeisi, welcomed by a standing ovation at Peking University before receiving an honorary academic title, stressed “a new world order is forming and taking the place of the older one”, characterized by “real multilateralism, maximum synergy, solidarity and dissociation from unilateralisms”.
And the epicenter of the new world order, he asserted, is Asia.
It was quite heartening to see the Iranian president eulogizing the Ancient Silk Road, not only in terms of trade but also as a “cultural bond” and “connecting different societies together throughout history”.
Raeisi could have been talking about Sassanid Persia, whose empire ranged from Mesopotamia to Central Asia, and was the great intermediary Silk Road trading power for centuries between China and Europe.
It’s as if he was corroborating Chinese President Xi Jinping’s famed notion of “people to people exchanges” applied to the New Silk Roads.
And then President Raeisi jump cut to the inescapable historical connection: he addressed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), of which Iran is a key partner.
All that spells out Iran’s full reconnection with Asia – after those arguably wasted years of trying an entente cordiale with the collective West. That was symbolized by the fate of the JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal: negotiated, unilaterally buried and then, last year, all but condemned all over gain.
A case can be made that after the Islamic Revolution 44 years ago, a budding “pivot to the East” always lurked behind the official government strategy of “Neither East nor West”.
Starting in the 1990s that happened to progressively enter in full synch with China’s official “Open Door” policy.
After the start of the millennium, Beijing and Tehran have been getting even deeper in synch. BRI, the major geopolitical and geoeconomic breakthrough, was proposed in 2013, in Central Asia and Southeast Asia.
Then, in 2016, President Xi visited Iran, in West Asia, leading to the signing of several memoranda of understanding (MOU), and recently the wide-ranging 25-year comprehensive strategic agreement – consolidating Iran as a key BRI actor.
Accelerating all key vectors
In practice, Raeisi’s visit to Beijing was framed to accelerate all manner of vectors in Iran-China economic cooperation – from crucial investments in the energy sector (oil, gas, petrochemical industry, pipelines) to banking, with Beijing engaged in advancing modernizing reforms in Iran’s banking sector and Chinese banks opening branches across Iran.
Chinese companies may be about to enter the emerging Iranian commercial and private real estate markets, and will be investing in advanced technology, robotics and AI across the industrial spectrum.
Sophisticated strategies to bypass harsh, unilateral US sanctions will be a major focus every step of the way in Iran-China relations. Barter is certainly part of the picture when it comes to trading Iranian oil/gas contracts for Chinese industrial and infrastructure deals.
It’s quite possible that Iran’s sovereign wealth fund – the National Development Fund of Iran – with holdings at estimated $90 billion, may be able to finance strategic industrial and infrastructure projects.
Other international financial partners may come in the form of the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank (AIIB) and the NDB – the BRICS bank, as soon as Iran is accepted as a member of BRICS+: that may be decided this coming August at the summit in South Africa.
The heart of the matter of the strategic partnership is energy. The China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) pulled out of a deal to develop Phase 11 of Iran’s South Pars gas field, adjacent to Qatar’s section.
Yet CNPC can always come back for other projects. Phase 11 is currently being developed by the Iranian energy company Petropars.
Energy deals – oil, gas, petrochemical industry, renewables – will boom across what I dubbed Pipelineistan in the early 2000s.
Chinese companies will certainly be part of new oil and gas pipelines connecting to the existing Iranian pipeline networks and configuring new pipeline corridors.
Already established Pipelineistan includes the Central Asia-China pipeline, which connects to China’s West-East pipeline grid, nearly 7,000 km from Turkmenistan to the eastern China seaboard; and the Tabriz-Ankara pipeline (2,577 km, from northwest Iran to the Turkish capital).
Then there’s one of the great sagas of Pipelineistan: the IP (Iran-Pakistan) gas pipeline, previously known as the Peace Pipeline, from South Pars to Karachi.
The Americans did everything in the book – and off the books – to stall it, delay it or even kill it. But IP refused to die; and the China-Iran strategic partnership could finally make it happen.
A new geostrategic architecture
Arguably, the central node of the China-Iran strategic partnership is the configuration of a complex geostrategic economic architecture: connecting the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the flagship of BRI, to a two-pronged Iran-centered corridor.
This will take the form of a China-Afghanistan-Iran corridor and a China-Central Asia-Iran corridor, thus forming what we may call a geostrategic China-Iran Economic Corridor.
Beijing and Tehran, now on overdrive and with no time to lose, may face all manner of challenges – and threats – from the Hegemon; but their 25-year strategic deal does honor historically powerful trading/ merchant civilizations now equipped with substantial manufacturing/ industrial bases and with a serious tradition in advanced scientific innovation.
The serious possibility of China-Iran finally configuring what will be a brand new, expanded strategic economic space, from East Asia to West Asia, central to 21st century multipolarity, is a geopolitical tour de force.
Not only that will completely nullify the US sanction obsession; it will direct Iran’s next stages of much needed economic development to the East, and it will boost the whole geoeconomic space from China to Iran and everyone in between.
This whole process – already happening – is in many aspects a direct consequence of the Empire’s “until the last Ukrainian” proxy war against Russia.
Ukraine as cannon fodder is rooted in Mackinder’s heartland theory: world control belongs to the nation that controls the Eurasian land mass.
This was behind World War I, where Germany knocking out Russia created fear among the Anglo-Saxons that should Germany knock out France it would control the Eurasian land mass.
WWII was conceived against Germany and Japan forming an axis to control Europe, Russia and China.
The present, potential WWIII was conceived by the Hegemon to break a friendly alliance between Germany, Russia and China – with Iran as a privileged West Asia partner.
Everything we are witnessing at this stage spells out the US trying to break up Eurasia integration.
So it’s no wonder that the three top existential “threats” to the American oligarchy which dictates the “rules-based international order” are The Three Sovereigns: China, Russia and Iran.
Does that matter? Not really. We have just seen that while the dogs (of war) bark, the Iran-China strategic caravan rolls on.
Pepe Escobar is a Eurasia-wide geopolitical analyst and author. His latest book is Raging Twenties.
(The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV)
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The wars we are witnessing, whether the military war in Ukraine, or soft wars in the China Sea, or cultural wars in what Neo-Liberalism is distorting and charting for humanity, are all manifestations of a strong opposition by the West to the establishment of this multipolar world.
The core problem humanity is facing nowadays can be summed up as follows:
There is no political or moral leader to this world, as the strongest militarily and financially are pursuing additional military and financial powers, and the system that was produced by the Second World War and established by the agreement of so many countries, is truly collapsing, with no alternative yet in place. The BRICS countries, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and many Asian countries are trying to establish a multipolar system in the world, where no opinion can have an absolute veto over the will of so many countries.
The wars we are witnessing, whether the military war in Ukraine, or soft wars in the China Sea, or cultural wars in what Neo-Liberalism is distorting and charting for humanity, are all manifestations of a strong opposition by the West to the establishment of this multipolar world. While Russia, Iran, India, Latin America, and Africa are trying their best to get rid of the hegemony of the Dollar, the hegemony of NATO’s will, the hegemony of the West that had been looting resources from all over the world over decades, the West is absolutely desperate to establish new alliances through which it may prevent the birth of this multipolar system.
From this very perspective, we can understand the persistent efforts the US is exerting with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan to establish an alliance in the China Sea to threaten China and prevent whatever steps China wants to make in order to ensure the dawn of a multipolar system. The efforts of the US, and what they called an “echo alliance” with Australia and Canada can also be understood in the same context, in order to frighten China from any serious effort in aligning with other countries who might subvert the hegemony of the West in the world.
From the same perspective, we can understand the current competition in Africa between China, Russia, and the old colonialists: France and the United States, and of course the West is not interested in the rise or equality or prosperity of the Africans. All the West is interested in is what these countries have, how they can loot gold and other precious minerals, and how they can loot this wealth without paying anything in return in order to support their economies and build their countries at the expense of the lives and prosperity of Africans.
Latin America is no exception as well. While Chávez, Lula da Silva and other nationalist leaders tried and succeeded in shaking the fetters of the US off their countries, the United States is intensifying its efforts in Latin America to prevent the liberation of the will of all Latin American countries that had been considered for decades as the backyard of the United States.
As for our region, the Middle East, the United States has lately, or last year, added “Israel”, the Zionist entity, as a member of CENTCOM for the first time in history, which means that the US has appointed “Israel” as its military representative in the region in order to do what it sees fit so as to preserve the hegemony of the US, and extend Zionist hegemony over the will of the Arab and Iranian people in the Arab World and Iran. The issue here is not traditional: the Zionist entity is not launching wars on the border with its army and its tanks and airplanes; it is launching intelligence wars inside countries in an attempt to change the political systems in these countries, and turn them into satellite states that echo the will of the Israelis, and by default the will of the Americans and the West.
This, in essence, was the reason for the terrorist war that has been launched against the Syrian people for the last 12 years. This in essence is the reason why NATO countries destroyed Libya and betrayed Russia (and, in fact, did not fulfill their promise to Russia that it was going to be part of their alliance). The result is that Libyan oil is being divided between Italy, France, and the United States; it has been looted by these countries, while the Libyan people remain impoverished, scattered, and unable to secure their subsistence.
This, again, is what has been happening in Iran since last year. “Israel”, the Zionist entity, is using its intelligence to recruit Iranians and others probably, who will be its agents to fulfill its agenda in Iran, without launching a traditional war, and it is within this context that we can observe what is happening in Iran of claims about women’s freedom or other democratic appeals or whatever. If the Israelis and the Americans believe in freedom for women and women’s rights, then tell me what is happening to the 29 Palestinian women prisoners who are being harassed and subjugated in Israeli jails, in an unprecedented way crackdown on women.
The Israeli entity is the most racist occupation in history after South Africa. It is killing Palestinians Point Blank, it is destroying their houses, robbing their property, looting their lands, and perpetrating the worst crimes humanity is witnessing nowadays. Yet “Israel” is the partner of the West in trying to subjugate other countries and undermine the free will of any government and any person that refuses to be an agent of this power that is only interested in military industry, and accumulating more wealth, and bringing more money to the wealthiest in the world who made their wealth by looting other people and other countries.
Hence it is the duty of every truly free person to stand fast and firm against this horrifying process of the West to try and control the will of other countries. And from this perspective, I can certainly say that the war Russia is fighting in Ukraine against NATO is not only a Russian war; it is a world war, and it is not fair to let Russian soldiers and Russian people fight on their own in a war that the entire humanity needs to fight.
NATO has imposed this war on Russia, and it is desperate to defeat Russia in order to terrify any country that may think of standing up against Western hegemony. Russia is leading the way for a different world, and many Western leaders have announced that they are sending trillions of dollars and armaments in order to prevent Russian victory. Russian victory would mean Western defeat, and Western defeat would mean the end of Western hegemony over the world. This is what the West cannot afford, and this is why the West considers this war an existential war. In fact, it is a war for everyone in the world but for reasons different from those of the West.
By switching its allegiances, Italy played a decisive role in the outcomes of both the First and Second World Wars. If Italy were to abandon the US centred world system to join BRICS it could once again decisively turn world history onto a radically different path.
The conflict in Ukraine has brought the world, and Europe in particular, to a turning point. In the coming months the destinies of both the EU and NATO will be determined. The outcome could depend on the position taken by Italy. Should the Italian government continue with its current foreign policies, both the EU and NATO are likely to survive. If Italy leaves either, or even distances itself in favour of closer alignment to the BRICS group, this decision could lead to the collapse of the current US centred unipolar world order and quicken the dawn of a multipolar world.
The BRICS countries today represent more than 40 percent of the world’s population, almost 27 percent of the world’s land surface, and almost one third of the world’s economic output measured in Purchasing Power Parities. The impetus of Russia’s recent intervention in the Ukraine has led to strengthened ties between Russia, China, India and Iran, increased OPEC resistance to US diktat, and has accelerated the shift away from the US dollar as the international reserve currency. Recently, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin called for a transition away from the unipolar US centred world towards a multipolar international order.
But first, a little history.
In 1902 German Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow famously described Italy’s foreign policy as being one of ‘waltz turns’, by which he meant that its government could flirt with other countries but never really change partners. Italy had been part of the Triple Alliance with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire since 1882. With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Italy sought to bargain its non-participation against its allies in exchange for territorial concessions of areas containing majority Italian-speaking populations, in particular Trieste, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Dissatisfied with the response, Italy switched sides in 1915 and joined the Triple Entente with France and Great Britain. Its participation contributed to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1919.
In 1939 Italy was faced with a similar dilemma. Benito Mussolini, its leader, had the choice of siding either with its Axis ally Germany, or remaining neutral in exchange for concessions from the Allies. He dallied for nine months before entering the war on Germany’s side in June 1940. By July 1943 the Allies had invaded Italy from the south, Mussolini was dismissed and Italy’s government switched sides to become a co-belligerent with the Allies. Italy’s participation in the war arguably diluted the German war effort by dragging the Mediterranean and the Balkans into the conflict, and hastened Germany’s defeat.
Although some patronisingly attributed Italy’s apparent inconstancy to the national character and others to its economic weakness relative to the Great Powers of the time, in particular Great Britain, France and Germany, the primary reason for it was geostrategic. Italy is a peninsula with its north attached to the European continent at the Alps and its south almost acting as an island in the strategic centre of the Mediterranean. At the beginning of the modern era the north of Italy was progressively absorbed into northern European economic and political systems while the south, having to contend with the Ottoman monopoly over the sea, atrophied.
This divergence accelerated after unification in 1861, partly because of economic policy and partly because the colonial land grab by the other European powers at the expense of African and Middle Eastern countries deprived the south of its historical hinterland. Initially, Italian governments sought to correct this imbalance by becoming part of the Triple Alliance. By securing the country’s northern borders, this alliance allowed it to embark on colonial adventures, notably the failed first invasion of Ethiopia in 1895–96 and the conquest of Libya in 1911. In the First World War, Italy’s switch to the Triple Entente then enabled it to annex Trieste. When Mussolini came to power in 1922, his foreign policy oscillated between the two options: to expand Italy’s continental ambitions, particularly in the Balkans, or its colonial empire in Africa. One could argue that his inability to prioritise one over the other contributed to Italy’s defeat in the Second World War. However, Italy’s capitulation in 1943 also represented a move away from a Mediterranean-focused policy to a continental one to preserve the country’s heartland.
The post-Second World War order has been more durable than the previous one, largely due to the tutelage of the United States and the Soviet Union, which guaranteed the viability of the newly founded United Nations. Within Europe this global process had its parallel in the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, followed by the European Economic Community in 1958 and the EU in 1993. Italy has been a member of and has played a leading role in the establishment of all three, with old nationalist rivalries largely set aside in this process.
The consolidation of the EU came about under the defence umbrella provided by the North Atlantic Treaty signed by a number of European powers, including Italy, in 1949, with the purpose of defending Western Europe from the Soviet Union. This later became NATO.
Both the EU and NATO have represented the pillars of Italy’s continental strategy for many years. However, these mainstays have recently begun to show cracks under the strain of the Ukraine–Russia conflict. The EU has been imposing increasingly stringent sanctionsagainst Russian imports since 2014. These increased following Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine in February 2022. The NATO alliance, of which Italy has been a key member since its inception, has also provided Ukraine with military assistance.
These measures have forced Italy into a familiar strategic dilemma: should it continue with an EU and NATO oriented foreign policy focused on the European land mass in the face of possible ruin, or seek its energy sources and economic future via the Mediterranean Sea?
Giorgia Meloni, is the leader of the Brothers of Italy Party that gained the most votes in Italy’s national elections held on 25 September 2022. She became Italy’s first female prime minister on 22 October 2022. Her party has neo-fascist roots. It is Euro-sceptic and pro-Russian. To forestall criticism that it is anti-EU and anti-NATO, Meloni has affirmed her fealty to both; in contrast, her coalition partners Silvio Berlusconi leader of the Forza Italia Party, and Matteo Salvini, the leader of Northern League Party, have both made pro-Russian statements.
What has largely been ignored is how Meloni rode to power on the strength of one slogan repeated above all others: ‘The Free Ride is Over’ [my translation].
What does this mean?
It is addressed to external audiences as well as a domestic one. Meloni, who has questioned the EU’s legal sovereignty over Italy, is warning Italy’s EU partners that they will no longer be able to secure a ‘free ride’ at the expense of Italy’s sovereign interests.
Since the end of World War II Italy has mainly followed a continental foreign policy, focused on integrating politically and economically with other European countries. This led to an industrial boom, particularly in the north of the country, while the Mediterranean part of Italy languished. Among its member nations, Italians became the most favourable to integration with the EU. Possibly this reflected a lack of confidence in their own state’s ability to govern the country well.
How then has Meloni come to her anti-EU stance?
The reason is the Euro. Since it began circulating in 2002, Italian living standards and wages have dropped while the cost of living has increased substantially. Entire sectors of Italy’s industrial base have delocalised to other countries. Mass layoffs, the abolition of the lifetime employment guarantee, and low birth-rates have weakened the family unit. Foreign buyers now own 40 per cent of Italy’s large public debt, which has grown to become larger than the country’s yearly GDP. Keeping within the stringent fiscal parameters laid down in the EU’s 1998 Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) has became a political obsession, justifying a string of technocratic governments whose monetarist policies have further compressed living standards. In 2022, almost one fifth of the population is on or below the poverty line.
The few bright spots in Italy’s economy mostly lie within the BRICS camp. One of them was Italy’s trade with Russia. Until 2021 Russia was Italy’s principal supplier of gas with almost 40 per cent of the total. Gas powers almost half of Italy’s electricity. Another positive development has been trade with China. As of 2019 Italy was China’s third largest buyer and fourth largest supplier of goods. Italy was also the third largest destination for Chinese foreign investment. The final bright spot is Italy’s trade with the Mediterranean countries, which accounts for over 22 percent of Italy’s energy imports. As of 2016, Italy was the fourth largest exporter to this region after China, the US and Germany in that order. In 2021, Libyan and Algerian sources combined covered 30 per cent of Italy’s gas imports. Italy’s reliance on energy imports from this region will grow as supplies from Russia decrease.
After Germany and France, Italy is the third largest economy in the Eurozone. Due to COVID, the EU suspended the SGP in May 2020 for an indefinite period. In March 2022, the Italian government called for the suspension to be continued because of the situation in Ukraine. Italy’s government debt to GDP ratio is currently over 155 per cent, well beyond the 60 per cent stipulated in the SGP. The country would default if the EU stopped funding its public debt. But under current circumstances, for how long would this support be forthcoming? Should Italy withdraw permanently from the SGP, the Euro would cease to be a viable currency. Some analysts believe that if Italy defaulted, the future of the EU itself would be at stake.
Enrico Colombatto, a professor of economics, has suggested that Italy would be better off seeking financial rescue from China, in exchange for some strategic assets, in particular access to the port of Trieste. A move towards stronger links with China would imply a shift in Italy’s foreign policy from a continental focus to a Mediterranean one.
EU sanctions against Russia have increased the cost of gas and pulverised Euro exchange rates, both further depressing living standards in Italy and increasing manufacturing costs. Italy’s gas prices have thus increased by a factor of five since 2021, prices of food and other essential goods have increased between 10-25%, and its economy could be facing approximately a 5 per cent drop in GDP next year.
Public opinion in Italy is split over the sanctions, with the Brothers of Italy’s electorate the most opposed to them. In response, the Brothers of Italy platform states that the party intends to renegotiate Italy’s over €250 billion EU COVID recovery plan to mitigate energy costs. It also promises to cut taxes, increase support for ‘traditional’ families and introduce employment incentives.
Similar centrifugal economic pressures are already being visited on other European countries. Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo has warned that as winter approaches, if energy prices are not reduced:
we are risking a massive deindustrialization of the European continent and the long-term consequences of that might actually be very deep … Our populations are getting invoices which are completely insane. At some point, it will snap. I understand that people are angry . . . people don’t have the means to pay it.
This is creating a situation where, according to Indian ex-diplomat and commentator M.K. Bhadrakumar: ‘The plain truth is that the European integration project is over and done with’.
These economic woes have inevitably impacted Italy’s defence and foreign policy. Historically, its membership in NATO was strongly opposed by the Italian socialist and communist parties. Today, public opinion is still against the deployment of NATO forces except for strictly defensive purposes: in May, only 10 per cent agreed to NATO forces directly intervening in Ukraine. A poll in June revealed that 58 per cent of Italians are opposed to sending weapons to Ukraine, one of the highest percentages in Europe. This is not surprising; after all, Article 11 of Italy’s postwar Constitution states:
Italy repudiates war as an instrument of offence to the freedom of other peoples and as a means of resolving international disputes; it allows, on conditions of parity with other states, to the limitations of sovereignty necessary for an order that ensures peace and justice among nations. [my translation]
This opposition to war belies Italy’s pivotal role in NATO: the country hosts at least eight important NATO bases. Naples is the linchpin of the NATO Allied Joint Force Command, which includes the US Sixth Fleet. While NATO has provided Italy with a security blanket in continental Western Europe, it has been detrimental to Italy’s strategic interests in the Mediterranean.
Since the Second World War Italian governments have traditionally espoused a friendly policy towards countries in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Africa. One major reason is its objective to ensure continuity of energy supply; another is to guarantee the viability of substantial Italian investment in those countries.
This policy has brought Italy into conflict with the United States on a number of occasions. During the Cold War there were three salient examples. In 1962, Enrico Mattei, CEO of the Italian state-run petroleum company AGIP and ‘neutralist’ or anti-NATO in his foreign policy stance, was killed in obscure circumstances after he challenged the Anglo-American ‘Seven Sisters’ oil cartel by buying oil from the Soviet Union and because he offered Middle Eastern oil producers, in particular Iran and Libya, a better deal. In 1985, Italian prime minister Bettino Craxi stopped US forces from arresting a Palestinian commando who had previously hijacked the Italian Achille Lauro liner in a stand-off at Sigonella in Sicily. Ostensibly the Italian government wanted to protect its sovereignty. In reality, it wanted to continue its policy of support for Arab nations. In 1986 Craxi’s government warned Muammar Qaddafi, the leader of Libya, that a US attack on the city of Tripoli was imminent, thereby saving his life.
After the Cold War, the US alliance has become harder for Italy to factor into its foreign policy. Qaddafi’s rule in Libya collapsed in 2011, only three years after he and Italy’s then prime minster Silvio Berlusconi, had signed a twenty-five-year ‘Friendship Treaty ’ for reparations and infrastructure development worth 5 billion dollars, which made Italian energy giant ENI Libya’s preferred partner for energy extraction. Libya’s collapse was facilitated by Italy’s NATO allies, in particular France, whose interests conflicted with Italy’s. Meloni criticised France’s intervention at the time, claiming it was motivated by neo-colonialism. The civil war that has ensued in Libya has seen Turkey and Italy pitted against France and Egypt. Currently the situation in Libya is in a state of flux, with alliances being broken and remade. ENI currently controls about 80 per cent of Libyan gas, which covers about 8 per cent of Italy’s total demand. In April 2022 Algeria replaced Russia as Italy’s leading source of gas through a pipeline named after Mattei.
Italy is in a particularly strategic position in regard to future energy supply routes as pointed out by energy geopolitics and geoeconomics expert Pier Paolo Raimondi:
Italy is well positioned to potentially benefit from the overall reconfiguration of energy flows to and within Europe, due to several factors. Its geographical position makes the country a potential transit hub and bridge between Mediterranean energy imports and European energy demand. This would position Italy at the top of the supply chain compared to the previous order.
Recent developments have made Italy’s position even more strategic. Italy now has a new opportunity to source gas directly from Russia and even to supply Europe. The Russian government has recently proposed to Turkey’s prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to expand the TurkStream pipeline, which currently supplies Russian gas to Turkey under the Black Sea. This pipeline does not pass through Ukraine. If expanded, TurkStream could be connected to Trans Adriatic Pipeline that is currently transporting gas to Italy from Azerbaijan, thereby offering an alternative to the gas pipelines passing through northern Europe. In another recent development, Abdul Hadi Al-Hweij, the foreign minister of the Interim Libyan Government based in Benghazi, supported by the Libyan National Army, which is pro-Russian, has invited Italy to buy Libyan petroleum and gas at much lower than market prices.
With the European energy crisis now undermining prospects of economic development, and with a Brothers of Italy-dominated government, Italy’s interest in a Euro-centrist or continental foreign policy is therefore likely to weaken. In the foreign policy section of its platform, the Brothers of Italy party reaffirms its commitment to NATO and the EU. However, it ends with a new assertiveness by advocating a Mediterranean-centred strategy:
Italy has a geographical location that allows it to channel the huge raw energy supply sources coming from North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, becoming a truly strategic hub: it is in the interest of the entire Union to diversify its supply lines as much as possible to free itself from Russian dependence …
Italy must once again become a protagonist in Europe, in the Mediterranean and on the international chessboard …
Italy is a natural platform in the Mediterranean … [Our policy is to] bring the Mediterranean back to the centre of Italian and European policy. ‘A Mattei formula for Africa …’ [my translation and italics]
The reference to Mattei is not coincidental; nor is the concept of Italy being a ‘natural platform’ in the Mediterranean. The latter was a pillar of Mussolini’s foreign policy, as he himself announced in 1936 in Milan: ‘Italy is an island immersed in the Mediterranean … If the Mediterranean for others is a route, for Italy it represents life itself’ [my translation].
In recent developments Meloni’s foreign policy has been pointing away from the EU and NATO. She and her political allies have publicly supported Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbàn, who has attacked the sanctions against Russia, following the EU’s condemnation of his authoritarian policies; Hungary is a NATO member but has signed a separate deal with Gazprom to secure supplies of Russian gas. Meloni’s party is also allied to the governing nationalist Right in Poland, the Czech Republic’s governing Civic Democratic Party, and the far right Sweden Democrats Party that triumphed in elections in September 2022. The German far right Alternative für Deutschland Party was ‘jubilant’ over Meloni’s success; it too has opposed sanctions against Russia and its vote is also on the rise. As in the 1930s, one should not discount ideological and political affinities across national borders, particularly when national interests also align. As Bhadrakumar warns: ‘Do not underestimate the “Meloni effect”. The heart of the matter is that far-right forces invariably have more to offer to the electorate in times of insecurity and economic hardship.’ In the current era, these affinities can be gathered under the broad ideological umbrella of ‘sovereigntism’, putting EU unity at risk.
Should Italy distance itself from NATO or leave it altogether, particularly in the light of Turkey’s ambivalent stance and the possibility of a Russian victory in Ukraine, it is doubtful that the alliance would be able to survive. This is not as far-fetched a thought as it might seem. According to retired Italian General Fabio Mini, former commander of the NATO-led KFOR mission in Kosovo (2002–03), NATO’s expansion to Eastern Europe over recent decades, promoted by the United States, has further undermined the alliance’s cohesion and unity of purpose. The Ukraine–Russia crisis, as pointed out by Thomas Hughes, a scholar of international and defence policy, ‘marks an existential crisis for NATO’. Under these circumstances the United States would find it increasingly difficult to maintain a military presence in Italy.
On 1 October 2022, following news that Germany’s Social Democrat-led government had rejected Italy’s proposed Europe-wide price cap on gas and that Italy would no longer receive gas from Russia through Austria, Meloni addressed a crowd of angry farmers in Milan: ‘Italy’s posture must return to the defence of its national interests … It doesn’t mean having a negative stance toward others, it means having a positive one for ourselves … because everyone else is doing it’.
In response to the explosions in the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic, the Italian navy is now patrolling Italy’s Mediterranean gas supply pipelines. All of these developments bear the hallmark of an Italian Mediterranean policy in the ascendant over a continental one.
Meloni’s slogan ‘The free ride is over’ is eerily reminiscent of Mussolini’s ‘mutilated victory’, which referenced Italy’s ostensible ‘betrayal’ by the Allied powers after their victory in the First World War. Although the post-Versailles outcome was not entirely negative for Italy, Mussolini leveraged widespread resentment at the withdrawal of territorial concessions promised by Great Britain and France to pave his way to power in October 1922. By 1925 Mussolini had turned his government into a dictatorship. Fascist foreign policy, which began with the intent of working with the Allied powers, changed dramatically after Italy’s successful second invasion of Ethiopia in 1935–36, whereby Italy began to carve out its own ‘place in the sun’, a Fascist slogan of the time. Chagrined by British and French opposition to this war, Mussolini joined Hitler’s Germany in an alliance to overturn the post-First World War order, having decided that this was the best option for Italy to secure access to the raw materials its economy so desperately needed and to fashion the Mediterranean empire Italian nationalists had so long desired.
In her inaugural speech to the Italian parliament on 25 October 2022, Meloni highlighted the shortcomings of the EU in the current energy and economic crisis:
… how was it possible that an integration that began in 1950, 70 years ago, as the Economic Community of Coal and Steel … later finds itself, after having disproportionately expanded its spheres of competence, more exposed precisely in regard to energy supply and raw materials …
The war has aggravated the already very difficult situation caused by increases in the cost of energy and fuel, unsustainable costs for many companies that may be forced to close down and lay off their workers, and for millions of families who are already unable to cope with rising bills. …
The absence of a common [EU] response leaves room only for measures by individual national governments that risk undermining our internal market and the competitiveness of our companies. …
The context in which the government will have to act is a very complicated one, perhaps the most difficult since World War II. Geopolitical tensions and the energy crisis are holding back hopes of a post-pandemic economic recovery. Macroeconomic forecasts for 2023 indicate a marked slowdown in the Italian, European and world economies, in a climate of absolute uncertainty. …
Nearing the end of her speech, Meloni directs her audience’s attention to her party’s foreign policy platform:
Next 27 October will mark the sixtieth anniversary of the death of Enrico Mattei, a great Italian who was among the architects of post-war reconstruction, capable of forging mutually beneficial agreements with nations all over the world, a virtuous model of collaboration and growth between the European Union and African nations, not least to counter the worrying spread of Islamist radicalism, especially in the sub-Saharan area. And so we would like to finally recover, after years in which we preferred to backtrack, the strategic role that Italy has in the Mediterranean. [my translation]
Should Italy’s economy and its energy security deteriorate further due to the embargo on Russian energy supplies, or should NATO troops intervene directly in the conflict, it is increasingly likely that the Italian government will consider realigning its international orientation away from a continental strategy centred on the EU and NATO and towards a Mediterranean-focused one that is closer to BRICS. It could even become the third ‘I’ in the BRICS after India and Iran, as one analyst has advocated, creating a tipping point in the global economy. At the very least, the Italian government could decide to oscillate between these two opposing geopolitical options to increase its margins for diplomatic manoeuvre, a traditional aspect of its foreign policy in the past. Should either scenario come to pass, Italy will have made a substantial contribution to the break-down of the current US-centred world and accelerated the passage to a multipolar world order.
Gerardo Papalia (PhD) is a Research Affiliate at the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University in Australia. His expertise is in history and Italian Diaspora studies including literature, religion and cinematography.
What unites China and Russia in a trade/currency warfare against the US is the fact that they both oppose a unipolar world over a multipolar world.
It has been almost a year since the war in Ukraine began. Since then, talk of de-dollarization has picked up speed. Even prominent mainstream economists Galbraith (2022) and Eichengreen (2022) have joined the bandwagon, but they do not see an avalanche that could unseat the dollar yet, and rightly so, but as argued here, they do so for the wrong reasons.
Across the board, the mainstream peddles the point that the US financial market has depth that no other market has, and therefore, the dollar is irreplaceable. That is true for the moment. Where else can financial wealth be placed safely, traded and cashed in quickly other than the US market. I emphasized safely because such a market was not safe for confiscated Russian assets and it is proving to be unsafe for any would-be customer whose politics do not align with US imperial designs. Thus, the issue of depth and safety have subjective twists to them. Moreso, the occurrence of Russian asset seizure by Europe and the US begs the question: the financial market is deep for whom?
Money, it ought to be remembered, is a social convention. It serves a function as a medium of exchange/reserve, as well as a savings medium. Money is also an idea (a form) with an aura whose very allure is to reproduce the social conditions for the creation of more money, through credit of course. Like all conventions, money also holds by some form of consensus. Any currency has to be recognized as value and it attains a status as a symbolic power by the knowledge people hold about it as both means of transaction and a social form. Of all the monies in circulation around the world, the dollar is unusual in the sense that it derives its legitimacy from the knowledge that the dollar is secure from many people of different nationalities around the globe.
The dollar and dollar instruments, like treasuries and bonds, are assumed risk-free. Pension funds for instance, which ensure against old age poverty, scramble to lodge in dollar assets that are set to grow and not lose but gain much value over time. People acknowledge that the dollar is a universal medium of exchange and savings, and such acknowledgment is the source of the power of the dollar. However, such common knowledge, which is the substance of dollar power, must also be constantly produced and reproduced. For that, there are theories that fit the bill.
For instance, instead of theorizing that money depends on real production capabilities, fiat money is said to depend on a capitalism of futurity and a tradability of debt. Although the US accounts for less than 20 percent of world output (production’s worth’, faith in the depth of its financial market and its credibility in the future as a state account for it covering the credit necessary for much of global transactions and savings.
Still, theories are pretty much ideological tools that show or hide some desired aspects of reality in order to serve the interests of different social groups. So, while it is true that the US nominally holds less than 20 percent of global output, much of global output depends on the US’ control of strategic resources and global chokepoints. These are delivered by the demonstrative power of its many military bases and capacity to destruct its foes.
As one can readily see, if the capacity to destruct and to infuse instability abroad are counted as production, then it is obvious that the US accounts for much more in production than the merely 20 percent it registers in its national accounts as GDP. Such a megalithic process is the true substance of the knowledge that upholds the dollar as the world reserve currency. It is this knowledge, reproduced on a global scale by the capacity to destruct, which is the real reason for the deep knowledge that props up the deep US financial market, as opposed to some hallucinatory moneyed economy whose debts are tradable, and it is the erosion of that capacity that is heralded by the rise of the multipolar world when Russia began its de-Nazification of Ukraine campaign. Changing that power structure behind the depth of US finance changes the acknowledgment that the US dollar is the sole undisputed universal currency on account of the universal power of the US. How so?
The resilience of Russia’s economy
When the Central Bank of Russia announced it pegged its national currency to gold, just a month after the conflict erupted, many saw the move as a blow to the dollar status quo – especially for the EU bloc, which heavily relied on Russia for supplies of cheap LNG. For them, it was out of the question to pay for oil in rubles. “We will not be blackmailed by Russia” to pay for gas in rubles, said Germany’s Finance Minister, Robert Habeck. In March 2022, US lawmakers introduced a bill to sanction Russian gold and then the EU followed suit. By June 2022, the Group of 7 agreed to implement a full-scale ban on the Russian gold market, completely sanctioning Moscow from exporting gold. By placing an embargo on Russia’s gold exports, freezing Russian assets and blocking Russian banks from using SWIFT, the West believed it could pressure Moscow. These sanctions against Russia threw Russia out of the dollar loop and were de-dollarizing Russia. The West was partially de-dollarizing the world by imposing more sanctions.
Even though the sanctions did weaken the ruble at first, it did not take too long for the currency to rebound since many of the commodities Russia produces such as gas, wheat and fertilizers are priced in the ruble. In the span of ten months, the Ruble went from a volatile position in March to a stable currency by September. The ruble still stands stronger than pre-war levels, and as Russia keeps carrying out trade activities with third countries via new monetary channels, the situation of the ruble only serves to forecast that the crisis in Europe will exacerbate further and further. If anything, the fact that Russia still manages despite the sanctions proves that there is more to production estimated in dollar GDP to measure the real worth of an economy and its currency. It has become apparent that the commodity control-based standard of the dollar equally applies to the Ruble, which accounts for significant shares of wheat and oil.
Furthermore, Russia’s new MIR payment system, which parallels SWIFT and MasterCard, said that by the end of September it issued more than 161 cards worldwide. By November, Russia decided to take a step further and called on all state members of the BRICS+ alliance to consider the possibility of establishing a single gold trade system. And just very recently, reports revealed that Russia was beginning to test international payments in digital currencies with companies. Unlike Iraq and Libya, and Venezuela, Russia is bigger and has proven resilient, especially with support from China.
Getting ‘at’ China
Besides the vast amounts of money spent on financing Kiev, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself admitted that the war in Ukraine was a war ‘for’ the US. When he delivered an address at a joint session at the US Congress in December, he warned that if Russia were to win the war, the world order established by the US post-WWII would inevitably crumble – with it, the hegemony of the dollar. With China’s economy surpassing the US in real terms and commanding much of global production and trade, the possibility of an alternative financial system is around the corner – unless of course the balance of forces tilts in favor of the US as it defeats Russia in Ukraine and extends its hegemony to the Eurasian corridor.
So what does the US really want with Russia? It wants Russia fragmented and China choked. China, Russia’s de facto ally, has been de-dollarizing its economy over the past decade. But that doesn’t necessarily imply both countries form ‘a bloc’ per se. Both Russia and China remain distinct governments with distinct policies and distinct ideologies. What really unites them in this trade/currency warfare is the fact that they both oppose a unipolar world over a multipolar world. They both want to develop at their own pace, their own way, without the interference of neoliberal or imperialist elements. In that sense, the conflict in Ukraine has a lot to do with China.
Even the most recent Pentagon defense strategy admits that Russia is not as threatening as China is, which it dubs as “the greatest security challenge for the US.” When that report was issued in October 2022, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that China “is the only competitor out there with both the intent to reshape the international order, and increasingly, the power to do so, while Russia on the other hand “can’t systematically challenge the US over the long term. But Russian aggression does pose an immediate and sharp threat to our interests and values.” Unlike the West, it took only seven decades for China to establish itself as a global superpower that has carried out the biggest poverty alleviation project in history. It established such a record without enslaving or geocoding the planet and the environment.
Another important feature of the Chinese economy is the fact that it easily absorbs technologies from abroad and it’s good at meeting the standards of foreign markets. It’s a leading pioneer in a panoply of sectors which include space exploration, financial developments, medical advances, green technologies, urban construction, and military innovations. China’s economy is also relatively insulated from external shocks and capital flight by its non-convertible currency. It draws down on its massive currency reserves denominated in dollars – mainly US government debt – and invested in US treasury bonds, to protect against any short-term capital flow and to preserve the competitiveness of its own currency at times of crises.
What really bothers the West is the fact that China was not only able to propel its entire population to higher standards of living, but it also assisted others in doing so. Through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China promoted infrastructural ventures in some of the world’s poorest economies in a way that complemented their productive assets in facilitating productivity, growth, and economic mobility. The Asian country has defied neoliberalism both as an ideology and as an economic policy by upholding its own brand of socialism based on “Chinese characteristics”.
As part of its commitment to the internationalism of Mao Zedong, China through the demonstration effect, exported that model based on an anti-imperialist and nationalist mode of development to countries of the Global South. Being the world’s largest trading country, the world’s largest exporter, and one of the world’s largest holders of US debt, China never forced anyone to borrow from it in order to financially enslave them and/or to finance its war effort. Adding all this to China’s defiance of abiding to western sanctions against Russia, and you will have Sino-Western relations hitting an all-time low – particularly in light of accusations that China helped Russia circumvent the effects of sanctions.
Given the developmental trajectory of China’s growth, which is detached from militarism and built on a working-class-led resistance, it is rather an arithmetic certainty that China will never morph into a war-mongering nation. It simply does not depend on war to grow. Moreover, having itself been the target of imperialism for centuries is enough to suggest that China in no way intends to pursue such an agenda – but rather strives to resist it, as it always did. Its very existence as a powerful socialist nation is antithetical to the ideological, financial, and military dominance of the post-WW2 Western order.
This only adds to the reasons why the US has been recently waging a series of provocations against China, both economically and politically. On the economic front, the US constrained China from exporting semiconductors to western markets and suspended the transfer of chip technologies to China. It also plans to cut Huawei’s access to US banks over allegations that the company is engaged in “economic espionage” against the US. On the political front, there was the whole Taiwan fiasco which was short-lived after Tsai Ing-wen was humiliatingly defeated in Taiwan’s last election.
China retaliates
At some point, it is only natural for China to retaliate. To strike back at the financial hegemon by decreasing the global demand for US dollars is one such measure of retaliation. China’s de-dollarization strategy can basically be summed up as follows: creating trade payment systems based on the national currencies of trading partners, dumping US treasuries, and breaking the petrodollar system while buying massive amounts of gold.
It may be recalled that China stores a considerable portion of its surplus in US Bonds. The standard idea of weaponizing bonds is often reiterated in what pundits dub the ‘nuclear option’, a theory that supposes China could sell off all of its treasuries in an attempt to destabilize the American economy. But then again that seems like a mythical alternative, which is likely to harm everyone including China. The potential flooding of the global exchange market with billions of dollars of American debt may cause the price of US treasury bonds to decrease and reciprocally interest rates to increase. The interest rates on US treasury bonds are the benchmark for borrowing throughout the global economy. So, in case they are abruptly raised, this may precipitate another global slowdown.
China, as well as others, seek a reasonable solution to the US debt problem and a transfer to a more representative multi-polar currency and world-saving medium. At some point in the past, China held $3 trillion in US debt. In October 2022, it recorded treasury holdings to a 12-year low below the $1 trillion mark. It has been slowly ridding itself of being indebted to the US in the US’s own currency.
Over fears that china will endure a fate similar to that of Russia, that it will lose all its assets and dollars in case tensions increase, China has resorted to converting its bonds into real assets and proceeded by investing them in the third world as a counter-hegemonical strategy. China’s Belt and Road Initiative is the gateway to transform US-denominated money capital into real capital. Whereas US imperialism is about the incapacitation and disempowerment of the developing world, the Chinese funded BRI, which turns Chinese saved US dollars into third world plans and equipment, turns US bonds into weapons against the US.
Breaking the petrodollar system
While reducing transactions in dollars diminishes global demand for the dollar, China and others with trade surpluses need to save in US treasuries for lack of alternatives. Analytically, an alternative to the US savings instruments from a multi-currency saving bond is not difficult to envisage. In fact that is what John Maynard Keynes proposed at Bretton-wood in 1944, but the proposal was declined by the US. The alternative muti-national savings instrument would come as natural outcome of shifting balance of forces globally, especially as the principal strategic commodity, oil, becomes denominated in currencies other than dollars.
Xi’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia is one step towards provisioning an alternative oil payment system. The visit amounted to a diplomatic offensive and was hailed as a landmark event on the strengthening of Sino-Arab ties as on December 20, 2022, the Chinese head of state attended the first ever China-Arab state summit and delivered a key speech “underscoring the importance of carrying forward the spirit of China-Arab friendship featuring solidarity and mutual assistance, equality and mutual benefit, inclusiveness and mutual learning, and jointly building a China-Arab community with a shared future in the new era.”
The move is clearly aimed at disrupting the petrodollar system, which has for the past 50 years upheld the US dollar as the sole currency to purchase oil. As is already known, the dollar-priced oil system is what redeemed the departure of the US from the gold standard in 1971. Being a source of energy upon which life depends, and a strategic commodity that accounts for about 20% of the global trade volume, having dollars is a prerequisite for an economy’s survival, and pricing the oil in dollars keeps the dollar high in demand. The more the US prints dollars to meet expanding trade demand, the more it could live off the rents of dollar seigniorage, or the ability to buy real assets from abroad with the credit it issues. No other empire in history enjoyed such privilege.
The modern imperial tributary system is that the US lends money in its own currency, and in return, it usurps the wealth produced by other nations. So when China says it wants to purchase oil using the Yuan and initiate separate deals, this means it is planning to lessen the global demand for the dollar, therefore lessen the capacity of the US to issue global credit, and hence, lessen its imperial rents.
Gold is ok, but only partially
China has been hoarding much gold. It now has the highest gold reserves. For the first time since 2019, the central bank of China announced it increased its gold reserves with the purchase of 32 tons of gold in November, bringing the total up to 1980 tons amounting to $111.65 billion. Needless to say, the gold standard cannot supplant a fiat money system already based on commodities and production capabilities. However, having gold in addition to developing its own development bank and international lending institutions and payment system, China further securitizes its finance.
Thus, gold demand in China is high because traders and investors consider the commodity as a buffer against extreme fluctuations and an effective store of value. The Chinese government monitors carefully the amount of gold that is brought in and out of the country. Being the biggest gold producer, China safeguards much of its gold production for itself. In addition, China intentionally uses the price arbitrage to get traders to purchase more gold from abroad. Most of that gold was purchased from the West, particularly the UK and the US, where gold is traded at a cheaper price. However, gold primacy alone is insufficient to create the acknowledgment of depth similar to that enjoyed by the US market.
Once more, that confidence in the dollar market is reproduced daily by the power of the US over strategic commodity channels around the world. The US is heir to the European colonial system and its control emerges from the transference between its physical and ideological powers. Therefore, gold alone is possibly only a gateway to dislodging a dollar system based on strategic commodity control.
The alternative to the US financial market is in the making
China has inked separate agreements, especially with Russia, with the aim of purchasing energy with a non-dollar currency. Though the de-dollarization of trade channels may achieve some results, one cannot deny the fact that the world still needs an alternative universal savings medium. On paper, designing a bond whose guarantors are the major powers is not a difficult task; however, such a task, if it were to materialize, undercuts the financial rents of US and US-associated elites.
A real de-dollarization requires a shift in the geopolitical context and an erosion of the consensus around the dollar. The war in Ukraine and the collapse of Europe augur the loss of the US and its dollar primacy. Unlike twentieth-century wars that caused the retreats of Europe to the benefit of the US, the current regression of Europe vis-à-vis Russia and China, also weakens the US. The case may be that the European working class, being more so a clone of capital than its antithesis, continues to self-harm at the behest of its bourgeoisie. It is then that the alternatives to the dollar and, more importantly, its bonds begin to take shape.
With 65 trillion dollars in off-balance sheet debts, and a CDO and Repo market rife with moral hazard, the chances of a major collapse are all too ominous. The transition will be gruesome given the fragile financial architecture. A smooth US debt workout is a must since the US is a huge net debtor in its own currency, which happens to be the world’s savings medium. Yet, the world must part with a system that pawns the future of man and nature by the power of the gun for the interests of so few. China and Russia have taken the bold decision to de-dollarize, to de-financialize wars and pollution and such must be the alternative for humanity.
Posted on December 21, 2022 by uprootedpalestinians
December 20, 2022
Andrei Raevsky
I was recently contacted by my friend Cynthia McKinney who told me that my article about what a Russian defeat would mean for the West was used as part of the course she teaches at North South University of Dhaka in Bangladesh. I have to admit that I was very touched by the idea that students in faraway Dhaka were reading my article, and I offered to answer any follow-up questions the students might have. So I recorded a hour long video in which I answered the follow-up questions from the students. I just want to add here that since I did not have a clear idea of how much these students had already knew, and since I tried to keep the video about one hour long, I had to, at times, simplify some issues (as some of these questions would deserve a semester-long class). Please don’t hold this against me.
I decided to repost this video on the blog (with Cynthia’s agreement) in the hope that at least some parts of this Q&A might be of interest to you.
It matters not how much you, gentlemen, bend down before them, You will never gain Europe’s recognition: You will always be for them, Not servants, but serfs of their enlightened disposition. F.I. Tyutchev, Russian diplomat and poet, May 1867
To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal. Henry Kissinger
Ditching the Ukraine
It is now dawning on the US elite that they totally underestimated Russia in all respects. For instance, on 25 March 2014 the arrogant Obama contemptuously called Russia ‘a regional power, threatening others out of weakness’ (sic!). (Clearly, he was talking about the USA). As a result, blinded by hubris, some in the US are now admitting that the Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe, is a dead duck, the game is simply no longer worth the candle. Apart from being a black hole for Western money and military equipment, the Ukraine is no longer the problem. It is a sideshow, a distraction, a mere symptom of something far more important. The real problem is what is now happening worldwide under Russian leadership – the ending of the unipolar world, of US global hegemony, camouflaged beneath the more innocent-sounding term ‘globalism’.
Following Russia’s decision and ability to stand up to the world’s bully, the whole Non-Western world is now also standing up to him. For example, at the recent G20 meeting in Indonesia, the debate was not about the Ukraine, but about whether or not to continue to accept American Fascist rule (‘the rules-based international order’). All the Latin American and African and four Asian countries said no, it’s finished, the world is now multipolar. Taiwan will inevitably be Chinese and soon – and wait till Chinese troops appear in Mesopotamia to take control of Iraqi oil and gas and rebuild that tragic country. Freedom beckons. Long-deluded Western elitists must be shocked: other ‘regional powers’ are now also standing up to the bully. Perhaps also out of weakness? Zelensky must have suspected that his boss, until now the self-imagined master of the universe, is going to get rid of him. He is a loser and the Yanks cannot stand losers.
As the US realises that the free nations of the world are turning against it, it will not hesitate to blame the Kiev regime. The US must save face. Kiev has been warned: it will have to start negotiating with Russia again. Zelensky had better plan his escape now, because Ukrainians will not forgive him for stringing them along with a pack of lies. Regardless of Zelensky’s delusional assertions that there will be no negotiations with Russia and that it will re-occupy Russian territories, including the Crimea, there are three reasons for him to throw in the towel now, before it all gets much, much worse.
Three Reasons To Surrender Now
Firstly, Russia has now reluctantly moved closer to the US ‘shock and awe’ strategy of destroying infrastructure, as the US did in Germany and Japan (World War II) and then Serbia and Iraq. Power stations and power networks, bridges and ‘decision centres’, such as certain government buildings in Kiev are being targeted. Russia is one or two mass missile strikes away from the knock-out blow which will disable the Ukrainian electricity, water and rail systems. With 50% of Ukrainian electricity infrastructure knocked out by the first three strikes on the electricity grid, demonstrations are starting against the deteriorating situation, with Zelensky sending in the hated and dreaded Ukrainian Secret Police, the SBU, to break them up. He is also banning coverage of them in his heavily-censored media. The electricity system has entered a stage of ‘arbitrary and uncontrolled imbalance’. Ukrainians have been told to leave the country for the winter. Where to? Who wants them anyway? And does this include the military too?
Secondly, once the infrastructure has been incapacitated, Russia’s 380,000 regular and newly mobilised troops will be fully incorporated into the Allied forces in eastern Ukraine. Even without them, Russian forces are continuing to advance in the Donbass. A winter offensive by some half a million troops will make huge gains on the whole front, advancing hundreds of kilometres and multiplying Kiev’s – and NATO’s – staggering losses. After success here, President Putin’s generals have the option of moving a serious force into the western Ukraine from Belarus in order to cut off NATO supply routes from Poland. This could easily lead to the total collapse of the already ravaged Ukrainian forces and their mercenaries. Now Russia is going all the way to Lvov and the Polish border. It has been forced to. The Kiev regime has brought it on itself. All Russia wanted was security for the Crimea and the Donbass and a neutral, non-nuclear Ukraine. It could all have been so simple.
Thirdly, Western countries, including even the brainless Stoltenberg, is suffering from Ukraine fatigue. The Ukrainian flags have nearly all come down in Europe. Support has waned as reality has dawned. NATO countries’ arms stocks have been seriously depleted and strikes and ensuing social chaos have appeared in Europe, This the result of double-digit inflation and economic recession, brought on by suicidal Western sanctions, yes, those ‘against Russia’ (!). ‘We are cold and hungry in our own country because you gave everything to that bunch of losers in Kiev and the Ukrainian freeloaders you invaded our country with’. The foul-mouthed thug Nuland has achieved her aim in Europe. All this makes Russia the strategic winner and is forcing the US/UK/EU to call on Zelensky to talk again. The British financier PM Sunak (who cares little for and knows even less about politics) used a modest British aid package, announced during his recent visit to Kiev, to tell Zelensky that bankrupt London can no longer pay. Kiev must negotiate with Moscow. Following this, there has been a delay in the fourth round of missile strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure. President Putin is waiting to see if Zelensky will cave in and start realistic talks before Russia unleashes the last assault on Ukrainian infrastructure and the winter offensive.
Ditching Zelensky
At least some in the Biden regime are realising (though not Biden himself, he is in no fit state to realise anything – a clear case of elder abuse) that they are going to have to drop the Jewish billionaire as the fall-guy for the Ukraine’s defeat. Just as they have done to countless Latin American, Middle Eastern and Asian tinpot dictators and gangsters in past decades, the US will also do the same to him in his Monsanto/Cargill banana republic. Can Zelensky still entertain any illusions about it? Of course, the US will deny that the war in the Ukraine was ever between the US and Russia and declare it was only ever ‘an internal conflict’ between the Ukraine and Russia. (Ukraine only supplied the cannon fodder for its transatlantic masters, who have controlled the country since their coup in 2014).
Ukraine’s former CIA asset, the actor Zelensky, has now acted up. The Ukrainian missile strike on Poland and the Ukrainian President’s insistence that it was a Russian strike, despite the clear evidence to the contrary, has hit Zelensky’s credibility. The intentional Ukrainian false flag strike on Polish/NATO territory, designed to provoke NATO or at least pathetic Poland into entering the war, is a pathetic embarrassment. Even compared to all of Zelensky’s other ridiculous staged false flags, like Bucha, which venal Western journalists were paid to report, this one has gone too far. The West is getting fed up with Zelensky’s antics. A bullet in the head is much cheaper than continuing to subsidise this clown.
Some are waking up to Zelensky, who is willing to unleash nuclear war in order to avoid negotiating. Some may now even understand that his crazy claims that President Putin always wanted to occupy all the Ukraine and restore the USSR, if not conquer all of Europe, are fairy-stories. These stories are told by Kiev to Western infants only in order to get military and financial aid and above all to draw NATO into the war. (The half-American Churchill spent all of 1941 trying to get the US into Britain’s war against Germany; unlike Zelensky, Churchill succeeded by emphasising his racial compatibility and dangling the Pacific Ocean carrot in front of the Yankees. Zelensky cannot offer either of those). President Putin has clearly stated on more than one occasion that: ‘He who does not regret the USSR has no heart, but he who wants to restore it has no brain’. A desire to restore the failed Soviet Union is a Western propaganda myth used by arms merchants and lying politicians to justify their greed and ambition.
Three Reasons To Run Now
Since NATO has categorically refused to send troops into the Ukraine and since there is no such thing as a ‘coalition of the willing’, apart from a few Polish and Baltic fanatics who are currently being wiped out as mercenaries in the Ukraine, what can Zelensky do? He could urge the Ukrainian commander-in-chief, General Zaluzhny, to open a last (yes, last) offensive in Donetsk or Zaporozhie in order to reboot support from the West. However, General Zaluzhny is fed up with sending his troops to commit suicide. He is, after all, a professional military man. Zelensky, on the other hand, is a White House court jester, who cares only about his own survival. Zaluzhny has other considerations. Here there is potential for a coup d’etat, a palace revolt in Kiev.
On the one hand, the self-deluded and murderous Neo-Nazis in the Ukraine who surround Zelensky and were all given power by the US, will not tolerate surrender. On the other hand, ordinary cold and hungry Ukrainians will ask why was not all of this avoided in the first place by agreeing to Ukrainian neutrality and fulfilling the Minsk 2 promises with their Russian brothers? (A good question, which should be asked of all the Western leaders who also rejected it). So Zelensky is stuck between the Neo-Nazis and the moderate Ukrainian people, between a rock and a hard place. It is lose-lose for him. Russians do not hate Ukrainians, they are brothers. But they do hate Nazis. They are enemies. The Nazis can expect no quarter from the Russians and they know it. The USSR cleared out its part of Germany of Nazis, liberating their German brothers. It is the same now in the Ukraine. With the Russian liberation of the whole of the Ukraine (not originally intended by Russia, but now necessary), a new wave of Ukrainian ‘refugees’ is going to hit Western Europe, maybe even before Christmas. This could be the last straw for a Europe full of refugees from other equally stupid and unnecessary wars of the US Empire: Iraqis, Afghans, Syrians, Libyans, Albanians and now Ukrainians. Europe cannot take it any more. It is collapsing in waves of social unrest and even Britannia cannot rule those waves.
The clueless Stoltenberg (him again) has declared that the defeat of the Ukraine means (yet another) defeat for NATO. Actually, the superfluous NATO was long ago defeated, but Stoltenberg is too clueless to have seen the writing on the wall and join the long queues of now unemployed ex-slaves of the US, Afghan and Iraqi interpreters among them. The US and its NATO vassals must now backtrack. Some statement like: ‘We were let down by those vodka-drinking surrender-monkey Ukrainians (what can you expect from those Slav subhumans?), but we have won the greatest victory in our history because we have triumphed in stopping the brutal Russian beast at the Polish border. Mission accomplished’. That would do the job. The US and its vassals cannot save face, but, since they only care about PR, they can at least pretend to save face – by blaming Zelensky. They could, conveniently, have him assassinated, so he does not tell the truth about what has really been happening behind the scenes over the last few years (he knows far too much), blaming it on ‘extremists’ and making him into a new Jewish martyr. If I were Zelensky, I would leave for Tel Aviv today. Does the Ukraine have any planes left?
Thirty years ago George Bush Senior, the blood of untold numbers of dead Iraqi civilians and children on his conscience, was the first to popularise the term ‘the New World Order’. No doubt he got his inspiration from looking at the slogan on a dollar bill (after all, where else would a man like that get his inspiration from?). The phrase in Bush’s meaning has over the last 30 years been completely discredited. Yugoslavia? Iraq? Syria? Afghanistan? Now we are talking about a real ‘New World Order’. This is being fought for in the Ukraine and in world political and economic fora at this very moment. And its ideological and military leader is the Russian Federation, the only country with the guts to lead the real New World Order. This will be to its credit for as long as the world lasts. In this context the Saker has written an excellent article, titled with the following hypothetical question:
Although the Saker has given an excellent answer, I would give my own, which is a summary of his. This is: A Russian defeat at the hands of the ‘Combined West’ would mean the end of the world and therefore no New World Order. Fear not, since Russia is not about to be defeated, the world is not going to end just yet and there is going to be, and there already is, a New World Order.
Let us be frank, the Combined West has attacked Russia again and again in history. Many do not know that the Teutonic Knights in the thirteenth century were international, pan-Western. The Napoleonic Invasion of 1812 was carried out by twelve Western nationalities. The Crimean War, i. e., the 1854 Invasion of Russia, was carried out by the French, the British, the Ottomans and the Sardinians.
As for the Austro-Hungarian Army and the Kaiser’s Army in 1914, that too was an effort of the Combined West, and if it had not been for the Revolution, Russia would have taken Vienna and Berlin later in 1917. And Hitler’s invasion 27 years later was equally multinational. And such is the case today, with the Kiev regime’s mercenary army, armed by multinational NATO.
Talks
Today the US mentors of the Kiev regime are desperate for peace talks to begin. Peace could have been had at any time between February 2014 and April 2022. The US did not want it then and did not allow it then, so now they will have to pay the price. The US elite knows that they are about to lose big time. This is their last chance and the last chance for the former Ukraine – for that is what we are talking about now. Like so many, these Americans have big mouths, but when it comes to it, it is all just hot air. And although Russia is talking at the US request in order to keep channels open, it is ignoring ridiculous American demands.
Today Russia has no reason to talk. It is successfully fighting against and so demilitarising NATO in the Ukraine. Everybody knows it. However, we are also at a dangerous moment because the US is losing control of its puppets. Just as it promoted Hussein in Iraq or Bin Laden in Afghanistan, ISIS in Syria and any number of Latin American gangster-puppets and then lost control of them because they refused to behave as puppets, so they risk losing control now. The lickspittle Kiev regime and its allies in Poland, the Baltics and even in the UK (there they have been singing even pop songs with an American accent for over sixty years) are being more American than the Americans. The pupil is worse than the teacher.
The recent provocation of a Ukrainian missile landing in Poland and the Poles and Latvians claiming it was Russian is an example, The Americans refused to fall for it. Before that the threat of a dirty bomb being prepared by the Kiev regime was another example. Alarmed, the Americans stopped that nonsense. The UK’s anti-German destruction of the Nordstream pipeline was yet another example. The culprit was covered up, just as the Americans covered up the culprits of MH-17. In Kiev, Warsaw, the Baltics and in London, they should remember what the Americans did to Hussein and Bin Laden. They are quite capable of doing the same again, pulling the plug on them all. After all, people died all the time. And yet these people do not know when to stop. Where does this problem come from?
Self-Delusion
One of the problems of the contemporary US/Western system is that it is based almost wholly on ‘Psyops’, that is to say on PR, that is to say, on what used to be called propaganda, which then became ‘spin’, and then ‘fake news’. Of course, all these are just words for lies. However, the problem with all these lies is that they are so persuasive that the perpetrators actually begin to believe in them themselves. They zombify themselves. They delude themselves.
This is why the contemporary Western elites are suffused with infantilism. As soon as you contradict their lies with solid evidence, they behave like spoilt children and throw their toys out of their pram. But suppose those toys are nuclear? God forbid that anyone should give the kids in Kiev or Warsaw or the Baltics or London control of nuclear toys. (Yes, London does have them, but they do not control them).
The problem with spoilt children is that if you contradict them, they will ‘cancel’ you. As the Americans say: ‘The difference between men and boys (here they mean infantile American men) is the size and cost of their toys’. Thus, the woke West would never impose ‘censorship’. Instead, it imposes ‘editorial control’. Western media are nothing if not State mouthpieces.
In France, for instance, as in so many Western countries, after Presidential elections, the news presenters mysteriously tend to change and new journalists come to the fore. The reason? In central Paris the President has at his disposal 500 apartments, which he can give rent-free to his ‘friends’, though only so long as….. Presstitutes indeed. As for the UK, everyone knows that the BBC is part and parcel of the British Establishment, peopled with MI5 and MI6 assets, and fully dependent on the income awarded it by the British State. If you don’t behave, …..
On Lessons of History
Some may object: ‘But what about history? Can’t we learn from the mistakes of history? After all history never repeats itself’. Such people are naïve. Unfortunately, history does repeat itself and constantly. The first reason for this is that geography does not change. For example, Russia will always be a Eurasian power, in the same position. It will not move to South America or New Zealand. The second reason why history repeats itself is because of human stupidity. Did Hitler learn about the Russian winter in 1941 from Napoleon’s experience in 1812? Did the American Empire’s invasion of Afghanistan learn from the British Empire’s invasion of Afghanistan? Why not? Sheer stupidity, brought on by the blindness of hubris. ‘I am not like them, I am intelligent, I will not do the same thing again’. Here below is another lesson to learn from.
President Putin has been compared to Peter the Great. At the turn of the eighteenth century Peter broke a window through to Europe and so modernised Russia, so that it could compete with and defend itself from Europe. I can see the point in the comparison, but I think a better comparison is with Nicholas II, 300 years later. At the turn of the twentieth century it was Tsar Nicholas who broke a window through to Asia. It was he who built the Trans-Siberian railway, settled millions of Russian peasants in Siberia and built up links with Korea, Japan, China and Thailand.
True, his policy was thwarted by the British who had armed Japan to the teeth, building its dreadnoughts, which duly and treacherously attacked the Russian fleet in Port Arthur in 1904, just as Britain (and the US) had hoped. Thirty-seven years later the US got their just desserts at Pearl Harbour, when the Japanese repeated the same lesson. And the British got their just desserts three months later in 1942, when the greatest British military disaster in history took place. 80,000 troops surrendered in humiliation to the ’Asiatic and primitive’ Japanese. And that led to the end of the British Empire in Asia just a few years later.
Surely President Putin has now completed the Russian breakthrough into Asia? Today his Russia is allied with China and Iran, India, Indonesia, Turkey, North Korea, and much of the rest of Asia stands behind him. Has President Putin not learned from history, thus enabling him to complete the work begun five generations before?
The Future
The American Empire is truly a giant, but truly with feet of clay. The Empire is all based on the virtual reality of Psyops, not on reality. And the real rock of Russia is hitting the giant. And this how the New World Order is being born. It means the gradual end of the American Empire and all the fakes and clubs dependent on it, the UN, NATO, the EU, the IMF, the World Bank, the G7 and the G20, of which latter it has already lost control. They are all being destroyed by the Ukraine, which is the giant’s feet of clay.
Tsar Nicholas II founded the Tran-Siberian Railway, which connects Moscow to Beijing in six days. It is the symbolic foundation of the real New World Order, which will run from Beijing to Moscow, including Tehran and New Delhi, and reach Berlin. For Berlin is the real capital of Europe, and not the overgrown village of Brussels. When the Beijing-Moscow-Berlin axis is formed, even the UK, its absurd anti-English British Establishment by then deposed, will want to join it.
In order to survive, that is to join the multipolar New World Order of the seven billion, the Great Rest, the tiny west, the one billion remaining, will have to eat humble pie. It has already started. The New World Order will be global, but not globalist, imperial, but not imperialist, just, but not woke, based on values that are traditional and universal and human. If I may quote from that great speech of President Putin, made on of 30 September this year, these are the values:
The battlefield to which destiny and history have called us is a battlefield for our people…for the great historical Russia, for future generations, our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We must protect them against enslavement and monstrous experiments that are designed to cripple their minds and souls….Today, we need a consolidated society, and this consolidation can only be based on sovereignty, freedom, creation, and justice.Our values are humanity, mercy and compassion.
Preface: I have no idea about war… I have never experienced one. I understand nothing of military campaigns, strategies, manoeuvres, weapons, etc. I’ve only seen several war films, read novels featuring war and followed the news on various wars…
* * *
I have heard that each war is different, and that comparisons are only useful for “certain aspects”.
I follow the news regularly on Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine. And I have recently read and heard many varying and divisionary views on the withdrawal of Russian troops from Kherson, a city that is now lawfully part of Russia.
Dispensing with the views of the pro-NATO side, which are of no interest, I am observing the division of thought amongst analysts, journalists and commenters in forums siding with the Russians: There are those who are outraged and see the withdrawal from Kherson as “a disgrace”, “a sign of weakness”, “an embarrassment”, “a poor strategy”, “unattractive optics”, etc. Others see it as the outcome of a difficult but wise decision – that was primarily made to save the lives of Russian soldiers, who would have been cut off by a massive flood if NATO were to blow up the Kakhovka Dam. (There may well be additional tactical reasons for the withdrawal, but they are not (yet) known to the public.)
When people speak of the “optics not looking good“… a film set immediately comes to my mind (I have worked in the film world for many years). And that immediately tells me how some people view this operation – as spectators: it has to have a good catchy script, suspense, uninterrupted action and – heaven forbid – no lulls! It has to ultimately supply a dopamine release. It has to have a “Dirty Harry Catharsis”.
This reminds me of similar reactions to the prisoner exchange in mid-September, where some saw it as a sign of weakness to even think of releasing Azov prisoners… or when the Chinese government did not deliver a dramatic retort when Pelosi went to do her skit in Taiwan.
What is at the base of these kinds of reactions? Why such impatience? Why such concern with “appearances”? Why such a need to satiate one’s own personal sense of justice and retribution? Does it have something to do with consuming? Especially in the western world one has become an addicted consumer of not only things but “experiences” that can be lived indirectly.
Today we witness events of other peoples’ wars and battles on computer screens from the comfort of our homes or on our tiny phones from chic cafés… these events can accessed at any moment – just press a key… and they appear – like a scene in a film, a game, a contest, a sports match. Even the dead bodies that lie mangled, bloodied or in gory stumps strewn over the mud become the pieces of a broken puppets on a stage. “Hell, one gets used to it…” The sacredness of Life is gone.
We have become spectators… and our world has become a spectacle.
In his philosophical work and critique of contemporary consumer culture, “The Society of the Spectacle”, Guy Debord describes modern society as one in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” He argues that the history of social life can be understood as “the decline of being into having… and having into merely appearing.” This condition is the “historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonisation of social life.”
I don’t want to veer off into the film world or into a philosophical discourse here… but I just want to ask the question: When are we going to wake up to the real, authentic world?
When are we going to stop fussing about “cool appearances”, “sensational manoeuvres” and “snappy rebuttals”… and start remembering what this operation is all about in the first place?
Isn’t it essentially about LIVES? Not only about the lives of those who have been suffering injustices and atrocities in Donetsk and Lugansk (and elsewhere) since 2014 (at least)… but also the lives of those fighting for the salvation and survival of those other lives… and – by extension – the lives of sovereign human beings on the planet who yearn to live in a better, multipolar world?
President Vladimir V. Putin had tried to avoid a military response in Ukraine for many long years until the Russian people and Russia began to be faced with its devastation from outside, especially with the burgeoning NATO menace and the enhanced cultivation of the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine. It is not an easy decision to take risky military measures to confront an inevitable clash. In his speech on National Unity Day before the historians and representatives of Russia’s traditional religions on 4th November he visibly expressed his horror and personal pain over the profound tragedy of this clash and over what was befalling the Ukrainian people: “The situation in Ukraine has been driven by its so-called ‘friends’ to the stage where it has become deadly for Russia and suicidal for the Ukrainian people themselves. And we see this even in the nature of the hostilities, what is happening there is simply shocking. It’s just as if the Ukrainian people do not exist. They are thrown into the furnace and that’s it.”
Perhaps the “transient” retreat from Kherson is not a setback and can be even seen as a victory, another kind of victory – a moral victory.
In his powerful masterpiece, “War and Peace”, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy depicts the Battle of Borodino as the greatest example of Russian patriotism… The collective engagement of all those involved in the Battle of Borodino is what ultimately attained the end result: despite all their losses and the sacrificial need to evacuate Moscow and burn its resources – in order to save the army and Russia, the Russians, achieved a moral victory in this battle… which ultimately led to the comprehensive victory of the Russian army and the entire campaign.
“Several tens of thousands of the slain lay in diverse postures and various uniforms on the fields and meadows belonging to the Davýdov family and to the crown serfs—those fields and meadows where for hundreds of years the peasants of Borodinó, Górki, Shevárdino, and Semënovsk had reaped their harvests and pastured their cattle. At the dressing stations the grass and earth were soaked with blood for a space of some three acres around. Crowds of men of various arms, wounded and unwounded, with frightened faces, dragged themselves back to Mozháysk from the one army and back to Valúevo from the other. Other crowds, exhausted and hungry, went forward led by their officers. Others held their ground and continued to fire.” [“War and Peace” – book 10; chapter 39]
General-in-chief Mikhail I. Kutuzov’s motto of “patience and time” allowed the Russian army to be victorious when he was able to embrace, as opposed to trying to know, the contingencies of war and prepare his soldiers as best he could for such battle. He knew that, by fighting the pitched battle and adopting the strategy of attrition warfare, he could now retreat with the Russian army still intact, lead its recovery, and force the weakened French forces to move even further from their bases of supply.
“By long years of military experience he knew, and with the wisdom of age understood, that it is impossible for one man to direct hundreds of thousands of others struggling with death, and he knew that the result of a battle is decided not by the orders of a commander in chief, nor the place where the troops are stationed, nor by the number of cannons or of slaughtered men, but by the intangible force called the spirit of the army, and he watched this force and guided it in as far as that was in his power.” [“War and Peace” – book 10; chapter 35… bold script mine]
According to Tolstoy: “In military affairs the strength of an army is the product of its mass and some unknown x. … That unknown quantity is the spirit of the army, that is to say, the greater or lesser readiness to fight and face danger felt by all the men composing an army, quite independently of whether they are, or are not, fighting under the command of a genius, in two—or three-line formation, with cudgels or with rifles that repeat thirty times a minute. Men who want to fight will always put themselves in the most advantageous conditions for fighting. … The spirit of an army is the factor, which multiplied by the mass gives the resulting force. To define and express the significance of this unknown factor – the spirit of an army – is a problem for science.” [“War and Peace” – book 14; chapter 2]
This Russian approach to war opened up an entirely new option: for “the destiny of nations” to depend “not in conquerors, not even in armies and battles, but in something else.” That “something else” Tolstoy explains, was in fact the spirit of the people and of the army, that made them burn their land rather than give it to the French.
The highest qualities of a human being, according to Tolstoy, are: simplicity, kindness and truth. Morality, according to the writer, is the ability to feel one’s “I” as a part of the universal “we”. And Tolstoy’s heroes are simple and natural, kind and warm-hearted, honest before people and before their conscience.
Tolstoy notes that, whatever the faith may be, it “gives to the finite existence of man an infinite meaning, a meaning not destroyed by sufferings, deprivations, or death”. … “I understood that faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives. Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives he believes in something. If he did not believe that one must live for something, he would not live. If he does not see and recognize the illusory nature of the finite, he believes in the finite; if he understands the illusory nature of the finite, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith he cannot live… For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.”
“I understood that if I wish to understand life and its meaning, I must not live the life of a parasite, but must live a real life, and – taking the meaning given to live by real humanity and merging myself in that life – verify it.”
For us to attain a true victory – for a better world… we may need to recalibrate our thinking and values. This is indeed a spiritual struggle… not one just being fought in Donetsk, Lugansk and Ukraine. It is a struggle now within our own selves – whatever one’s beliefs are… What has meaning for us? Perhaps it is necessary for each of us to first define what we hold “sacred” in our own lives.
In an all-encompassing address to the plenary session of the 19th annual meeting of the Valdai Club, President Putin delivered no less than a devastating, multi-layered critique of unipolarity.
From Shakespeare to the assassination of Gen Soleimani;
from musings on spirituality to the structure of the UN;
from Eurasia as the cradle of human civilization to the interconnection of BRI, SCO and the INSTC;
from nuclear dangers to that peripheral peninsula of Eurasia “blinded by the idea that Europeans are better than others”, the address painted a Brueghel-esque canvas of the “historical milestone” facing us, in the middle of “the most dangerous decade since the end of WWII.”
Putin even ventured that, in the words of the classics, “the situation is, to a certain extent, revolutionary” as “the upper classes cannot, and the lower classes do not want to live like this anymore”. So everything is in play, as “the future of the new world order is being shaped before our eyes.”
Way beyond a catchy slogan about the game the West is playing, “bloody, dangerous and dirty”, the address and Putin’s interventions at the subsequent Q&A should be analyzed as a coherent vision of past, present and future. Here we offer just a few of the highlights:
“The world is witnessing the degradation of world institutions, the erosion of the principle of collective security, the substitution of international law for ‘rules’”.
“Even at the height of the Cold War, nobody denied the existence of the culture and art of the Other. In the West, any alternative point of view is declared subversive.”
“The Nazis burned books. Now the Western fathers of ‘liberalism’ are banning Dostoevsky.”
“There are at least two ‘Wests’. The first is traditional, with a rich culture. The second is aggressive and colonial.”
“Russia has not and does not consider itself an enemy of the West.
Russia tried to build relations with the West and NATO – to live together in peace and harmony. Their response to all cooperation was simply ‘no’.”
“We do not need a nuclear strike on Ukraine, there is no point – neither political nor military.”
“In part” the situation between Russia and Ukraine can be considered a civil war: “When creating Ukraine, the Bolsheviks endowed it with primordially Russian territories – they gave it all of Little Russia, the entire Black Sea region, the entire Donbass. Ukraine evolved as an artificial state.”
“Ukrainians and Russians are one people – this is a historical fact. Ukraine has evolved as an artificial state. The only country that can guarantee its sovereignty is the country which created it – Russia.”
“The unipolar world is coming to an end. The West is incapable of single-handedly ruling the world. The world stands at a historical milestone ahead of the most dangerous and important decade since World War II.”
“Humanity has two options – either we continue accumulating the burden of problems that is certain to crush all of us, or we can work together to find solutions.”
What do we do after the orgy?
Amidst a series of absorbing discussions, the heart of the matter at Valdai is its 2022 report, “A World Without Superpowers”.
The report’s central thesis – eminently correct – is that “the United States and its allies, in fact, no longer enjoy the status of dominant superpower, but the global infrastructure that serves it is still in place.”
Of course all major interconnected issues at the current crossroads were precipitated because” Russia became the first major power which, guided by its own ideas of security and fairness, chose to discard the benefits of ‘global peace’ created by the only superpower.”
Well, not exactly “global peace”; rather a Mafia-enforced ethos of “our way or the highway”. The report quite diplomatically characterizes the freezing of Russia’s gold and foreign currency reserves and the “mop up” of Russia’s property abroad as “Western jurisdictions”, “if necessary”, being “guided by political expediency rather than the law”.
That’s in fact outright theft, under the shadow of the “rules-based international order”.
The report – optimistically – foresees the advent of a sort of normalized “cold peace” as “the best available solution today” – acknowledging at least this is far from guaranteed, and “will not halt the fundamental rebuilding of the international system on new foundations.”
The foundation for evolving multipolarity has in fact been presented by the Russia-China strategic partnership only three weeks before imperially-ordered provocations forced Russia to launch the Special Military Operation (SMO).
In parallel, the financial lineaments of multipolarity had been proposed since at least July 2021, in a paper co-written by Professor Michael Hudson and Radhika Desai.
The Valdai report duly acknowledges the role of Global South medium-sized powers that “exemplify the democratization of international politics” and may “act as shock absorbers during periods of upheaval.” That’s a direct reference to the role of BRICS+ as key protagonists.
On the Big Picture across the chessboard, the analysis tends to get more realistic when it considers that “the triumph of ‘the only true idea’ makes effective dialogue and agreement with supporters of different views and values impossible by definition.”
Putin alluded to it several times in his address. There’s no evidence whatsoever the Empire and its vassals will be deviating from their normative, imposed, value-laden unilateralism.
As for world politics beginning to “rapidly return to a state of anarchy built on force”, that’s self-evident: only the Empire of Chaos wants to impose anarchy, as it completely ran out of geopolitical and geoeconomic tools to control rebel nations, apart from the sanctions tsunami.
So the report is correct when it identifies that the childish neo-Hegelian “end of history” wet dream in the end hit the wall of History: we’re back to the pattern of large scale conflicts between centers of power.
And it’s also a fact that “simply changing the ‘operator’ as it happened in earlier centuries” (as in the U.S. taking over from Britain) “just won’t work.”
China might harbor a desire to become the new sheriff, but the Beijing leadership definitely is not interested. And even if that happened the Hegemon would fiercely prevented it, as “the entire system” remains “under its control (primarily finance and the economy).”
So the only way out, once again, is multipolarity – which the report characterizes, rather vaguely, as “a world without superpowers”, still in need of “a system of self-regulation, which implies much greater freedom of action and responsibility for such actions.”
Stranger things have happened in History. As it stands, we are plunged deep into the maelstrom of complete collapse. Putin in fact did nail where we are: on the edge of a Revolution.
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Pepe Escobar,born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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We live in one of the most important moments in history. Perhaps this moment is even more important than the end of the Cold War. Similar to those events more than 30 years ago, major geopolitical shifts are currently taking place today. If the end of the cold war saw the rise of the Western Bloc to dominance, then the start of this new Cold War has seen the return of a new Eastern Bloc, ready to assert its rightful place in the world.
The era of Western interventions, regime change operations and hit and run tactics is almost at an end. Today, countries such as China, Russia and Iran are challenging the US militarily, economically and politically. Many of the former international equations that were true only a few years ago are changing with great speed, especially after the start of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine.
If we consider the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry as the first part of changing the structures of the world, then the key part that would change the entire structure is the moment when Russia decided to say enough to Washington and put their foot down, once and for all.
This has inspired defiance among the oppressed nations of the world. The conflict in Ukraine has proven that most of the countries in the world, which even the United States counted on as allies, are against the policies of the United States and in practice are not willing to go along with the policies of the United States. OPEC’s recent decision to reduce its oil production, while the United States had tried its best to force OPEC to bear the costs of its adventure in Europe, shows that a new world order is being formed. Indeed Washington did its best to pressure Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and other Persian Gulf countries to put aside their own interests in favour of Washington’s interests. We saw that not only did it not work, but it has also created a diplomatic crisis between the once so great “allies” in this region.
Several US senators and even the White House openly threatened Riyadh with consequences to their crime of not committing suicide for the sake of Washington. This could manifest itself in sudden Western public “awareness” of, and campaigns against the Saudi “human rights record” in the near future, or even worse- western backed riots such as those we’ve seen recently in Iran. So far we’ve only seen talks about “stopping arms sales” and/or “withdrawing troops from the region.”
Such a move would likely lead the Saudis to turn towards Tehran and, in extension the emerging Eastern alliance. This would lead to a major geopolitical shift in the region that would endanger Israel, and thus also raise the risk of a large conflict in the region.
Another US ally that is flirting with the East is Erdogan’s Turkey. Erdogan is many things, and one of those things is being a survivalist. His refusal to follow NATO and US policies vis-à-vis Russia shows that he is also prioritizing his own interests before Washington’s. The Eastern alliance, manifested by institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS are expanding and gaining strength, and today many countries in the world are looking for membership in these international cooperation organizations, especially after Iran’s entry into the SCO group of countries. Both Turkey and Saudi Arabia, two countries wielding considerable influence on smaller countries in the region are looking to join these organizations. These countries used to be allies of the West, and of course some are still their allies, but it shows that even Washington’s once so staunch allies are not satisfied with, and most importantly don’t trust the US hegemony anymore, and are looking for alternatives.
When Russia’s red line was crossed in Ukraine, Moscow made an important decision to intervene. This decision was not just about Moscow’s security, or the security of Donbass. Russian President Putin has on several occasions spoken about the ongoing paradigm shift, where the world is moving toward a multi-polar world order. Words echoed by officials in Tehran as well as the Islamic Republic is also at the forefront, together with Russia and China in the bid to end the unipolar world order. Russia’s SMO in Ukraine is of utmost importance for the oppressed countries of the world. Such an open challenge to US hegemony will strengthen the resolve of other countries, especially China and Iran, two countries facing the same enemy as Russia is currently battling.
Washington is in decline, while the Eastern Bloc is on the rise. Even the staunchest of Empire supporters cannot deny this fact. Since Washington and the collective West are in decline, they are also growing more aggressive. This has been witnessed by us all in Ukraine where the collective West have brought mankind to the brink of nuclear war. This can be seen in the aggressive policies regarding Taiwan, violating previous agreements and commitments to respecting China’s sovereignty. This was as clear as day during the recent foreign-backed riots in Iran. In sum, the US basically tried to extort Tehran into accepting a “temporary” JCPOA deal on Washington’s terms and conditions. Seeing as how Tehran would not yield on its demands for guarantees that Washington wouldn’t renege on the deal once more, they created these riots to force and pressure Tehran to accept Washington’s terms.
A desperate attempt to create a color revolution, with the help of hundreds of thousands of Twitter bots, especially since the riots quickly lost momentum thanks to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ (IRGC) vigilance and experience in dealing with foreign-backed plots to overthrow the Islamic Republic. The timing of the riots made it clear for Tehran that it was a desperate move to secure natural gas for the winter, especially since they destroyed Europe’s gas deliveries through NS1 and NS2. If it wasn’t clear enough at first, at least Washington did a good job in clarifying any misunderstandings when both US special envoy for Iran Robert Malley and US State Department spokesperson Ned Price claimed that the revival of the JCPOA is “not our focus right now” and that it “wasn’t even on the agenda”, as Washington was shifting focus to “supporting Iranian protesters.”
Washington’s list of allies will keep growing thinner for every new crisis that Washington creates. There is already widespread dissatisfaction among those countries that constitute the “jungle”, as Joseph Borrell, chief gardener of the EU, so creatively described it, and as we speak, that dissatisfaction is also spreading to the “garden” now. Massive protests are taking place in several EU countries, and these are just the beginning, because it’s not even winter yet! The true pain for European households will come in a month or two.
Washington is fighting on multiple fronts to preserve its hegemony, Secretary of State Blinken was pretty clear about that when he said that Americans “have to be the ones who are at the table who are helping to shape the rules, the norms, the standards by which technology is used,”
“If we’re not, if the United States isn’t there, then someone else will be, and these rules are going to get shaped in ways that don’t reflect our values and don’t reflect our interests.”
The fact that Washington is feeling this pressure makes the Empire more dangerous than ever. It can be said that any chance of saving the world today depends on whether a strong Eastern Bloc can be formed soon enough. If not, the US hegemony will pick off the independent countries one by one, just like they did in Libya.
Sure, if Washington strikes either of Russia, China or Iran militarily, they will have to be prepared for these countries to massively retaliate, unlike the situation in Libya, where Libyans were pretty defenceless on their own. Still, like I said in the beginning of this piece, the era of hit and run tactics is almost at an end. This means that Washington is still bold enough to strike Russia, China and Iran politically and financially through slander, regime change psyops and sanctions. Hence, the need for China, Russia and Iran to hasten the Eastern integration and alliance building projects in order to better be prepared to counter Washington’s long reach.
Of course, even if such an alliance can be formed, there are no guarantees that Washington’s madness wouldn’t still cause a world war that would destroy us all, but at least in such a scenario, they’d go down with the rest of us too. In the end, the leaderships and peoples of the three countries leading the new multi-polar world order would rather die than become slaves of the US hegemony.
Many important countries will soon be forced to pick sides as everything seems to be building up to a major showdown between the East and the hateful West. When and how that will happen is anyone’s guess. The only thing certain at this point is that the end of the Western era of dominance under their “rules based world order” is inevitable.
Posted on October 21, 2022 by uprootedpalestinians
Xi Jinping just offered the Global South a stark alternative to decades of western diktats, war, and economic duress. ‘Peaceful modernization’ will establish sovereignty, economy, and independence for the world’s struggling states
President Xi Jinping’s work report at the start of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) this past Sunday in Beijing contained not only a blueprint for the development of the civilization-state, but for the whole Global South. CPC (China Communist Party)
Xi’s 1h45min speech actually delivered a shorter version of the full work report – see attached PDF – which gets into way more detail on an array of socio-political themes.
This was the culmination of a complex collective effort that went on for months. When he received the final text, Xi commented, revised and edited it.
In a nutshell, the CPC master plan is twofold: finalize “socialist modernization” from 2020 to 2035; and build China – via peaceful modernization – as a modern socialist country that is “prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, and harmonious” all the way to 2049, signaling the centenary of the foundation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
The central concept in the work report is peaceful modernization – and how to accomplish it. As Xi summarized, “It contains elements that are common to the modernization processes of all countries, but it is more characterized by features that are unique to the Chinese context.”
Very much in tune with Confucian Chinese culture, “peaceful modernization” encapsulates a complete theoretical system. Of course there are multiple geoeconomic paths leading to modernization – according to the national conditions of any particular country. But for the Global South as a whole, what really matters is that the Chinese example completely breaks with the western TINA (“there is no alternative”) monopoly on modernization practice and theory.
Not to mention it breaks with the ideological straitjacket imposed on the Global South by the self-defined “golden billion” (of which the really “golden” barely reach 10 million). What the Chinese leadership is saying is that the Iranian model, the Ugandan model or the Bolivian model are all as valid as the Chinese experiment: what matters is pursuing an independent path towards development.
How to develop tech independence
The recent historical record shows how every nation trying to develop outside the Washington Consensus is terrorized at myriad hybrid war levels. This nation becomes a target of color revolutions, regime change, illegal sanctions, economic blockade, NATO sabotage or outright bombing and/invasion.
What China proposes echoes across the Global South because Beijing is the largest trade partner of no less than 140 nations, who can easily grasp concepts such as high-quality economic development and self-reliance in science and technology.
The report stressed the categorical imperative for China from now on: to speed up technology self-reliance as the Hegemon is going no holds barred to derail China tech, especially in the manufacturing of semiconductors.
In what amount to a sanctions package from Hell, the Hegemon is betting on crippling China’s drive to accelerate its tech independence in semiconductors and the equipment to produce them.
So China will need to engage in a national effort on semiconductor production. That necessity will be at the core of what the work report describes as a new development strategy, spurred by the tremendous challenge of achieving tech self-sufficiency. Essentially China will go for strengthening the public sector of the economy, with state companies forming the nucleus for a national system of tech innovation development.
‘Small fortresses with high walls’
On foreign policy, the work report is very clear: China is against any form of unilateralism as well as blocs and exclusive groups targeted against particular countries. Beijing refers to these blocs, such as NATO and AUKUS, as “small fortresses with high walls.”
This outlook is inscribed in the CPC’s emphasis on another categorical imperative: reforming the existing system of global governance, extremely unfair to the Global South. It’s always crucial to remember that China, as a civilization-state, considers itself simultaneously as a socialist country and the world’s leading developing nation.
The problem once again is Beijing’s belief in “safeguarding the international system with the UN at its core.” Most Global South players know how the Hegemon subjects the UN – and its voting mechanism – to all sorts of relentless pressure.
It’s enlightening to pay attention to the very few westerners that really know one or two things about China.
Martin Jacques, until recently a senior fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University, and author of arguably the best book in English on China’s development, is impressed by how China’s modernization happened in a context dominated by the west: “This was the key role of the CPC. It had to be planned. We can see how extraordinarily successful it has been.”
The implication is that by breaking the west-centric TINA model, Beijing has accumulated the tools to be able to assist Global South nations with their own models.
Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, is even more upbeat: “China will become a leader of innovation. I very much hope and count on China becoming a leader for innovation in sustainability.” That will contrast with a ‘dysfunctional’ American model turning protectionist even in business and investment.
Mikhail Delyagin, deputy chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee on Economic Policy, makes a crucial point, certainly noted by key Global South players: the CPC “was able to creatively adapt the Marxism of the 19th century and its experience of the 20th century to new requirements and implement eternal values with new methods. This is a very important and useful lesson for us.”
And that’s the added value of a model geared towards the national interest and not the exclusivist policies of Global Capital.
BRI or bust
Implied throughout the work report is the importance of the overarching concept of Chinese foreign policy: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its trade/connectivity corridors across Eurasia and Africa.
It was up to Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin to clarify where BRI is heading:
“BRI transcends the outdated mentality of geopolitical games, and created a new model of international cooperation. It is not an exclusive group that excludes other participants but an open and inclusive cooperation platform. It is not just China’s solo effort, but a symphony performed by all participating countries.”
BRI is inbuilt in the Chinese concept of “opening up.” It is also important to remember that BRI was launched by Xi nine years ago – in Central Asia (Astana) and then Southeast Asia (Jakarta). Beijing has earned from its mistakes, and keeps fine-tuning BRI in consultation with partners – from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Malaysia to several African nations.
It is no wonder, that by August this year, China’s trade with countries participating in BRI had reached a whopping $12 trillion, and non-financial direct investment in those countries surpassed $140 billion.
Wang correctly points out that following BRI infrastructure investments, “East Africa and Cambodia have highways, Kazakhstan has [dry] ports for exports, the Maldives has its first cross-sea bridge and Laos has become a connected country from a landlocked one.”
Even under serious challenges, from zero-Covid to assorted sanctions and the breakdown of supply chains, the number of China-EU express cargo trains keeps going up; the China-Laos Railway and the Peljesac Bridge in Croatia are open for business; and work on the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway and the China-Thailand Railway is in progress.
Mackinder on crack
All over the extremely incandescent global chessboard, international relations are being completely reframed.
China – and key Eurasian players at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), BRICS+, and Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) – are all proposing peaceful development.
In contrast, the Hegemon imposes an avalanche of sanctions – not by accident the top three recipients are Eurasian powers Russia, Iran and China; lethal proxy wars (Ukraine); and every possible strand of hybrid war to prevent the end of its supremacy, which lasted barely seven and a half decades, a blip in historical terms.
The current dysfunction – physical, political, financial, cognitive – is reaching a climax. As Europe plunges into the abyss of largely self-inflicted devastation and darkness – a neo-medievalism in woke register – an internally ravaged Empire resorts to plundering even its wealthy “allies”.
It’s as if we are all witnessing a Mackinder-on-crack scenario.
Halford Mackinder, of course, was the British geographer who developed the ‘Heartland Theory’ of geopolitics, heavily influencing US foreign policy during the Cold War: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.”
Russia spans 11 time zones and sits atop as much as one third of the world’s natural resources. A natural symbiosis between Europe and Russia is like a fact of life. But the EU oligarchy blew it.
It’s no wonder the Chinese leadership views the process with horror, because one of BRI’s essential planks is to facilitate seamless trade between China and Europe. As Russia’s connectivity corridor has been blocked by sanctions, China will be privileging corridors via West Asia.
Meanwhile, Russia is completing its pivot to the east. Russia’s enormous resources, combined with the manufacturing capability of China and East Asia as a whole, project a trade/connectivity sphere that goes even beyond BRI. That’s at the heart of the Russian concept of Greater Eurasia Partnership.
In another one of History’s unpredictable twists, Mackinder a century ago may have been essentially right about those controlling the Heartland/world island controlling the world. It doesn’t look like the controller will be the Hegemon, and much less its European vassals/slaves.
When the Chinese say they are against blocs, Eurasia and The West are the facto two blocs. Though not yet formally at war with each other, in reality they already are knee deep into Hybrid War territory.
Russia and Iran are on the frontline – militarily and in terms of absorbing non-stop pressure. Other important Global South players, quietly, try to either keep a low profile or, even more quietly, assist China and the others to make the multipolar world prevail economically.
As China proposes peaceful modernization, the hidden message of the work report is even starker. The Global South is facing a serious choice: choose either sovereignty – embodied in a multipolar world, peacefully modernizing – or outright vassalage.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 