The whole planet awaits with bated breath the avowedly inevitable Iranian response to the attack against its consulate/ambassador residence in Damascus by the biblical psychopaths responsible for the Gaza genocide.
Enveloped in an aura of secrecy, each passing day betrays the immensity of the challenge: the possibly asymmetrical response must be, simultaneously, symbolic, substantive, cogent, convincing, reasonable and rational. That is driving Tel Aviv totally hysterical and the deciding instances of the Hegemon extremely itchy.
Everyone with a functioning brain knows this wet dream of a stunt from the point of view of hardcore Zionists and US Christian zio-cons was a serious provocation, designed to draw the US to the long-cherished Israeli plan of striking a decisive blow against both Hezbollah and Tehran.
The IDF’s Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi all but gave away the game, when he said this past Sunday that “we are operating in cooperation with the USA and strategic partners in the region.”
Translation: never trust the Hegemon even as the notion is floated – via Swiss mediators – that Washington won’t interfere with Tehran’s response to Tel Aviv. One just needs to remember Washington’s “assurances” to Saddam Hussein before the first Gulf War.
It’s impossible to take Hegemon back-channel assurances at face value. The White House and the Pentagon occasionally dispense these “assurances” to Moscow every time Kiev strikes deep inside the Russian Federation using US-UK satellite intel, logistics, weaponry and with NATO in de-facto operational control.
The state terror attack on Damascus, which shredded the Vienna convention on diplomatic immunity, crucially was also an attack on both the expanded BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Iran is a member of both multilateral bodies, and on top of it is engaged in strategic partnerships with both Russia and China.
So it’s no wonder the leadership in both Beijing in Moscow is carefully considering all possible repercussions of the next Iranian move.
Tel Aviv’s purposeful escalation – when it comes to expanding war in West Asia – happens to mirror another escalation: NATO’s no way out in Ukraine except by doubling down, with no end in sight.
That started with the invariably out of his depth Secretary of State Little Tony Blinken affirming, on the record, that Ukraine will (italics mine) join NATO. Which any functioning brain knows is translatable as the road map towards a Russia-NATO hot war with unbelievably dire consequences.
Little Blinkie’s criminal irresponsibility was duly picked up and reverberated by the Franco-British duo, as expressed by British FM David “of Arabia” Cameron and French FM Stephane Sejourne: “If Ukraine loses, we all lose”.
At least they got that (italics mine) right – although that took ages, when it comes to framing NATO’s approaching cosmic humiliation.
“Dual Opposition” to “Dual Deterrence”
Now let’s switch from clownish bit players to the adults in the room. As in Russian FM Sergei Lavrov and Chinese FM Wang Yi discussing literally every incandescent dossier together earlier this week in Beijing.
Add to it the confirmation that President Putin and President Xi will hold at least two bilaterals in 2024: at the SCO summit in June and at the BRICS summit in October.
In a nutshell: the dogs of Forever Wars bark while the Eurasian integration caravan marches on.
Both Lavrov and Wang made it very clear that while steering through “the natural course of history”, the Russia-China strategic partnership will keep seeking a way to resolve the Ukraine tragedy, taking into account Russia’s interests.
Translation: NATO better wake up and smell the coffee.
This bilateral at the FM level in Beijing is yet another graphic proof of the current tectonic shift in what the Chinese usually describe as the “world correlation of forces”. Next month – already confirmed – it will be Putin’s turn to visit Beijing.
It’s never enough to remember that on February 4, 2022, also in Beijing, Putin personally explained to Xi why NATO/Hegemon expansion into Ukraine was totally unacceptable for Russia. Xi, for all practical purposes, understood the stakes and did not subsequently oppose the SMO.
This time, Lavrov could not but refer to the 12-point peace plan on Ukraine proposed by Beijing last year, which addresses the root causes “primarily in the context of ensuring indivisible security, including in Europe and the world over.”
Your “Overcapacity” is Driving Me Nuts
Both Tehran and Moscow face a serious challenge when it comes to the Hegemon’s intentions. It’s impossible to definitely conclude that Washington was not in the loop on Tel Aviv’s attack on Iran in Damascus – even though it’s counter-intuitive to believe that the Democrats in an election year would willingly fuel a nasty hot war in West Asia provoked by Israel.
Yet there’s always the possibility that the White House-endorsed genocide in Gaza is about to extrapolate the framework of a confrontation between Israel and Iran/Axis of Resistance – as the Hegemon is de facto implicated in myriad levels.
To alleviate such tension, let’s introduce what under the circumstances can be understood as comic relief: the “Yellin’ Yellen goes to China” adventure.
US Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen went to Beijing to essentially deliver two threats (this is the Hegemon, after all).
1.Yellen said that Chinese companies could face “significant consequences” if they provided “material support for Russia’s war on Ukraine.”
2. Yellen accused Chinese companies of “overcapacity” – especially when it comes to the electric-vehicle (EV) industry (incidentally, 18 of the top 20 EV companies around the world are Chinese).
The Chinese, predictably, dismissed the whole show with barely a yawn, pointing out that the Hegemon simply cannot deal with China’s competitive advantage, so they resort to yet another instance of “de-risking” hype.
In sum: it’s all about barely disguised protectionism. Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao went straight to the point: China’s advantage is built on innovation, not subsidies. Others added two extra key factors: the efficiency of supply chains and ultra-dynamic market competition. EVs, in China, along with lithium batteries and solar cells, are known as the new “three major items.”
Yellin’ Yellen’s theatrics in Beijing should be easily identified as yet another desperate gambit by a former hyperpower which no longer enjoys military supremacy; no dominant MICIMATT (the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex, in the brilliant formulation by Ray McGovern); no fully controlled logistics and sea lanes; no invulnerable petrodollar; no enforced, indiscriminate fear of sanctions; and most of all, not even the fear of fear itself, replaced across the Global South by rage and utter contempt for the imperial support for the genocide in Gaza.
“The official US position recognizes that it can’t be an industrial exporter anymore, though how is it going to balance the international payments to support the dollar’s exchange rate? The solution is rent-seeking. That’s why the United States says, well, what’s the main new rent-seeking opportunity in world trade? Well, it’s information technology and computer technology.
That’s why the United States is fighting China so much, and why President Biden has said again and again that China is the number one enemy. It moved first against Huawei for the 5G communications, and now it’s trying to get Europe and American and Taiwanese exporters not to export a computer chip to China, not for the Dutch to export chip-engraving machinery to China. There’s a belief that somehow the United States, if it can prevent other countries from producing high-technology intellectual property rents, then other countries will be dependent.
Rent-seeking really means dependency of other countries if they don’t have a choice to pay you much more money than the actual cost of production. That’s rent, the price over value. Well, the United States, since it can’t compete on value because of the high cost of living and labor here, it can only monopolize rent.
Well, China has not been deterred. China has leapfrogged over the United States and is producing its own etching machinery, its own computer chips. The question is, what is the rest of the world going to do? Well, the rest of the world means, on the one hand, the global majority, Eurasia, the BRICS+, and on the other hand, Western Europe. Western Europe is right in the middle of all this. Is it really going to forego the much less expensive Chinese exports at cost, including normal profit, or is it going to let itself be locked into American rent-extraction technology, not only for computer chips but for military arms?”
Graphically, this eventful week provided yet another howler: Xi officially received Lavrov when Yellin’ Yellen was still in Beijing. Chinese scholars note how Beijing’s position in a convoluted triad is admirably flexible, compared to the vicious deadlock of US-Russia relations.
No one knows how the deadlock may be broken. What is clear is that the Russia-China leadership, as well as Iran’s, know full well the dangers roaming the chessboard when the usual suspects seem to go all out gambling everything, even knowing that they are outgunned; outproduced; outnumbered; and outwitted.
It’s a tawdry Greek tragedy remix, alright, yet without the pathos and grandeur of Sophocles, featuring just a bunch of nasty, brutish specimens plunging into their unblinking, self-inflicted doom.
The U.S.’ growing urgency in ‘containing’ China’s development was thrown in sharp relief this week as Janet Yellen arrived in Beijing for what turned out to be an execrable beggar’s tour. Just days prior to her arrival, she had buzzed the punditry with her historically memorable exclamation that China was now operating at “overcapacity”(!!).
What is overcapacity, you ask? It’s a new word for me, too—so let’s consult the dictionary together:
overcapacity noun o·ver·ca·pac·i·ty: ō′vər-kə-ˈpa-sə-tē 1: When an insolent upstart nation’s surging economic activity totally humiliates the reigning hegemon’s own faltering economy, causing the many expensive dentures and porcelain veneers of the ruling class gerontocracy to rattle and grate with moral outrage and jealousy.
1b: An undesirable situation causing Janet Yellen and Nancy Pelosi’s stock portfolio to droop like a pair of botox-sapped jowls.
Granted…my dictionary might be slightly different to yours, I have a rare edition. That said, are we on the same page? Good.
The above definition may be missing in the new official regime argot pamphlet, but it’s safe to say the inept leaders of the U.S. are down to making up creative new euphemisms for describing China’s total undressing and upending of the economic order.
But if you were skeptical about the meaning behind Yellen’s risible “overcapacity” solecism, her speech from inside of China confirms precisely what’s on the regime’s mind:
“China is now simply too large for the rest of the world to absorb this enormous capacity. Actions taken by the PRC today can shift world prices….”
And the bombshell:
“When the global market is flooded with cheap Chinese goods, the viability of American firms is put into question.”
Well, I’ll say.
The important distinction to note in the above statement is that for a long time the ‘cheap’ moniker used to describe Chinese goods often underhandedly referred to their quality, in the secondary definitional sense. Here, Yellen is referring to cheap as in price: the distinction is significant because it’s referential to the fact that Chinese manufacturing processes have simply far exceeded the efficiency in the West, as recently highlighted by videos of the Xiaomi e-car factory with its own native Giga Press that’s claimed to be able to pump out a car every 17 seconds.
The fact of the matter is, China is simply leaping ahead of the decrepit, deteriorating U.S. by every measure and the panicked elites have sent Yellen to beg China to “slow down” and not embarrass them on the world stage.
How is China doing this? Let’s run through a few of the most poignant ways:
[1]
First and foremost, it’s become almost a passe bromide to observe: “The U.S. funds wars, while China funds development.” But it really is true. Think about this for a moment:
The above is factual: Esquire reported that a Brown University investigation found the U.S. has spent an ineffable $14T on wars since 9/11:
And yes, the current U.S. debt is a massive $34T. That means quite literally almost half of the entire current U.S. debt was blown on endless, mindless, genocidal wars in the Middle East.
The U.S. has wasted its entire blood and treasure on war. Imagine what the U.S. could have built with $14 trillion dollars? Where the U.S. could have been in relation to China for that amount? As someone else noted, the U.S. could have very well built its own “one belt and road” project for that money, connecting the world and reaping untold benefits.
China hasn’t spent a cent on war, and puts everything right back into economic development and wellbeing for its own people.
China is winning lion’s share of construction projects in Africa
Chinese companies accounted for 31% of African infrastructure contracts valued at US$50 million or more in 2022, compared with 12% for Western firms, according to a new study.
It is worth to be noted that in the 1990s, about eight out of 10 contracts to build infrastructure in Africa were won by Western companies.
The illustrative statistics for this are endless:
What makes this historic malappropriation of American funds most tragic is that none of it came at the benefit of American people. The entire operation was carried out by an ethnic cabal within the U.S. government with loyalties only to Israel, and no one else. I’m speaking of course of the PNAC clan, who masterminded the entire breadth of the 21st century wars which have engulfed America in wretched shame and misery, irreversibly gutting the country and squandering its global standing. These wars had nothing whatsoever to do with America’s national interests or security, and have done naught but make Americans less safe and the entire world more dangerous and unstable.
China doesn’t have this problem: there is no inimical ‘out’ group parasitizing their country’s leadership, literally assassinating (JFK) and blackmailing their presidents (Clinton). China is therefore able to focus on the interests of its own people.
And yes, for those wondering, it’s now fairly proven that Lewinsky was a Mossad honeytrap used to blackmail Clinton in assenting to various Israeli demands vis-a-vis the Oslo Accords, Wye River Memorandum, etc.
The fact is, Israel is a destructive parasite sucking the lifeblood out of America, causing the host to wage unnecessary wars on its behalf which have utterly removed every advantageous and competitive edge the country might have had over its Chinese ‘rival’.
[2]
As a corollary of the above, beyond just the simple kinetic nature of the profligately wasteful wars, America wastes an exorbitant amount of money just on maintenance and upkeep of its global hegemony. The reason is, it costs a lot of ‘enforcement’ money to strongarm vassals who hate you into compliance.
China doesn’t form vassals, it forms partners. That means it spends comparatively far less spreading its influence because that influence has compounding abilities owing to the fair bilateral nature of China’s arrangements. The U.S. has to spend comparatively inordinate amounts of blood and treasure to maintain the same level of ‘influence’ because that ‘influence’ is totally artificial, confected out of a poisonous mixture of fear, strong-arming tactics, economic terrorism that leads to blowback which hurts the U.S. economy, etc. In short, it is mafia tactics versus real business partnerships.
One big difference between China and the U.S. is that China is open to sharing the earth, willing to co-prosper with the U.S. Conversely, the U.S. is unwilling to abdicate its global domination:
The above was highlighted by Graham Allison, coiner of the Thucydides Trap idiom in relation to U.S./China. The Thucydides Trap, as some may know, describes a situation where an emerging power begins to displace the incumbent global power, and how historically this almost always leads to major war. To popularize the theory apropos U.S./China, Graham Allison used the historical example of the Peloponnesian war, where a cagey Sparta was forced to take on the rising power of Athens.
Allison was recently invited by President Xi to a forum for U.S. business leaders where Xi told him directly:
Contrast President Xi’s magnanimous statements with those of the seething, guilt-wracked, bloodthirstily conniving Western ‘executives’. In fact, Xi called for more exchanges between China and the U.S. in order to entwine the two countries in mutual understanding, to avoid the Thucydides Trap:
This is the enduring image of what global leadership truly looks like, and the principles it embodies.
Meanwhile, when one thinks of America’s progressive decline, the one enduring image that comes to mind is of a bitterly frightened but dangerous, beady-eyed cornered rodent, conspiring on how to inflict damage and suffering onto the world in order to mask its own downfall.
[3]
The U.S. government does a grave disservice to its own development by cooking all of its economic books. Every country does it at times to some degree—and going by U.S.’ notoriously frequent accusations of China in this regard, one would think China to be the most flagrant violator—but in fact, no one does this more than the current U.S. regime.
The recent “jobs” report touted as a major victory by the Biden administration was a disgraceful travesty. The admin touted major jobs figures:
But it turned out every job was either part time, a federal job, or went to illegals:
In reality, the U.S. economy is in atrocious shape with sky-high inflation.
“The Fed chair just confessed that #Bidenomics is just a migrant job fair. There is actually a million less American citizens working today than there were in 2020.”
Biden created 5 million migrant jobs! So don’t be fooled by his propaganda that’s spewed by the liberal machine. YOU DONT MATTER!
The data is cooked even more when comparing to China’s economic situation. As the following Tweeter explains:
While Chinese INCOMES are below American INCOMES, Chinese have much higher NET WORTH than Americans. How? They own apartments at a much higher rate and with a lot more equity than Americans. The MEAN and MEDIAN insight is even more beautiful. This graphic here is pretty much the only thing you need to understand about the difference between the economies of China and United States. But you really need to understand it and you need to have a deep understanding of what it means.
The above naturally springs the question of how China is able to do these things while the U.S. cannot. One of the answers comes by way of this fascinating explainer which shows that, contrary to the West’s depiction of China as some kind of rigidly authoritarian system, forward-looking President Xi is actually utilizing very cutting edge economic experimentation models to keep the Chinese economy as innovative, limber, and supple as possible.
In short, a deep study of thousands of official documents shows a huge upswing in language promoting economic experimentation in the directives issued under Xi’s government.
This is further compounded by the most important point of all: that under President Xi, China has embarked on a meticulous plan of curbing financialization and speculation of the ‘Western model’ in its economy. This is where it starts getting important so buckle up.
The article gives a brief history of financialization, from the Genoese bankers to modern times, observing the historical cycles that have precipitated America’s current deterioration:
Observers of the current American hegemony will recognize the transformation of the global system to suit American interests. The maintenance of an ideologically charged ‘rules-based’ order – ostensibly for the benefit of everyone – fits neatly into the category of conflation of national and international interests. Meanwhile, the previous hegemon, the British, had their own version that incorporated both free-trade policies and a matching ideology that emphasized the wealth of nations over national sovereignty.
In describing the cycle of financialization and its connection to the death of empires, the article notes about Britain:
For example, the incumbent hegemon at the time, Great Britain, was the country hardest hit by the so-called Long Depression of 1873-1896, a prolonged period of malaise that saw Britain’s industrial growth decelerate and its economic standing diminished. Arrighi identifies this as the ‘signal crisis’ – the point in the cycle where productive vigor is lost and financialization sets in.
And yet, as Arrighi quotes David Landes’ 1969 book ‘The Unbound Prometheus,’ “as if by magic, the wheel turned.” In the last years of the century, business suddenly improved and profits rose. “Confidence returned—not the spotty, evanescent confidence of the brief booms that had punctuated the gloom of the preceding decades, but a general euphoria such as had not prevailed since…the early 1870s….In all of western Europe, these years live on in memory as the good old days—the Edwardian era, la belle époque.” Everything seemed right again.
However, there is nothing magical about the sudden restoration of profits, Arrighi explains. What happened is that “as its industrial supremacy waned, its finance triumphed and its services as shipper, trader, insurance broker and intermediary in the world’s system of payments became more indispensable than ever.”
In short: as an empire dies, loses its industrial and manufacturing capacity, finance takes over, pumping up huge bubbles of phony speculative money that gives the brief appearance of economic prosperity—for a time. This is what’s currently happening in the U.S., as it drowns in its self-created agony of debt, misery, corruption, and global destabilization.
One thing to note—if you’ll allow me this not-so-brief aside—is that the entire Western system is based on the actual institutionalized economic sabotage and subversion of the developing world. Books like the following go into some of it:
The rise of the underground economy: The book reveals how the United States’ underground economy evolved parallel to its legitimate economy, exploiting loopholes and leveraging secrecy jurisdictions to facilitate illegal activities such as drug trafficking, arms smuggling, and money laundering.
The “dark” side of globalization: Mills challenges the prevailing narrative of globalization as a force for progress, highlighting how it has facilitated the expansion of illicit networks across borders and allowed criminal enterprises to flourish.
The complicity of financial institutions: The author examines the role played by major financial institutions in enabling money laundering and illicit transactions. He underlines the need for stronger regulations and accountability to prevent banks from becoming facilitators of underground activities.
I challenge you to read notes on the National Memorandum 200, if you haven’t heard of it before:
Incidentally, John Michael Greer just penned a new column (thanks to whoever shouted out this blog in the comments!) about the neologism he coined: Lenocracy, which derives from the Latin “leno” for pimp; i.e. a government run by pimps, or pimpocracy.
His definition of pimps in this case is that of middlemen who are the classic rent-seeking leaches—or rentier class—which extract economic rent without adding any value to the economy—all Michael Hudson territory, for those in the know.
Bear with me, I promise this will all tie together into an overall picture of China.
JMG characterizes the ‘pimps’ as basically all the unelected, bureaucratic, red-tape-weaving, blood-sucking monetary vultures killing growth and livelihoods by each taking their nibbles in turn from the carcass of the working class, exacting some small transactional charge at every step of routine business in Western nations, particularly the U.S. This has served to suffocate the average small business or entrepreneurship in general, not counting the big ticket venture capitalists who are mostly offshoots of global financial and investment firms. This is part and parcel to the lethal ‘financialization’ of the country that has spelled doom for its future.
Now, getting back to Thomas Hon Wing Polin’s precis, and how it relates to this. He notes:
It is noteworthy that the CPC leadership recently launched a major drive to build China into a “financial great power,” with a financial system “based on the real economy.” That would be the antithesis to Anglo-American-style economic financialization.
Read that last part: “…set pure profit-making aside.”
Pay attention to this big kicker:
Beijing is powering ahead with the epic project.
“China’s 461-trillion-yuan (US$63.7 trillion) financial industry and its regulatory regime will be heavily prioritised in a broad economic reshuffle engendered by the country’s top leadership, with the sector remoulded to serve national objectives like sustainable growth and advancement in the global tech race.
Are you beginning to get it yet? If not, here’s the crowning finial:
Specifically, it vowed to rein in Wall Street-style practices seen as unsustainable and crisis-prone, and move toward functionality as an overriding value for the financial system rather than profitability.
It also mandated that Chinese financial institutions have “higher efficiency” than their peers in the capitalist world and provide inclusive, accessible services in the pursuit of common prosperity.
“Like it or not, banks and other institutions on the supply side should expect top-down directives and overhauls cued by the CFC,” said Zhu Tian, a professor with the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS).
And there it is. In essence: China is creating a revolution, striking out a new path of finance which steers away from the wild excesses of the West into a bold new direction. Finance to benefit the real economy, the common man, the people. This is what the fig leaf of Rothschild-pushed ‘stakeholder capitalism’ is meant to be, or better yet: pretends to be.
It’s hard not to wax poetic on these developments, because they are truly groundbreaking. China is paving a new path forward for the entire world. The Chinese banking industry is now by far the largest on earth and President Xi has wisely put his foot down with a bold edict: we will not follow the path of destruction chosen by the West, but rather will set our own new path.
This is an iconoclastic, paradigm-breaking revolution which ends six centuries of Old Nobility world finance dominion, traced from the Spanish-Crown-allied Genoese bankers, to the Dutch then English banking system which now continues to enslave the world, and is referred to by a variety of names in the dissident sphere: from Hydra, to Leviathan, to Cthulu, to simply: the Cabal.
All those 600 years are going up in smoke with China’s repudiation of the ‘old standards’, which privilege predatory, deceptive, extractive terms and practices meant to benefit only the Old Nobility elite class. China’s system is true stakeholder finance: the government will forcibly bend the bankers to its will, making sure that finance serves the common good and the people first, rather than speculation, financialization, capitalization, and all the other wicked inventions of the Western Old Nobility class.
It begins like so:
“…bringing greed is good era to an end.”
The big one:
“Government has called for banks to abandon a Western-style ethos and adopt an outlook in line with broader economic priorities.”
It’s a revolution in the making.
But if you’re thinking my dramatic flights above verge a touch on hyperbole or idealism, you could be right. I, of course, still proceed with caution; we can’t be sure that China will succeed in its grand demolishment of the age-old paradigm. But all signals point to early success thus far, and more importantly, it’s clear that China has a leader that fundamentally understands these things at the most rooted level. Western leaders not only are incapable of even grasping the complexities involved of reining in capital, they are unable to do so for the mere fact that they’re totally bought and paid for by the representatives of that very capital class. The cabal of Capital is so deeply and institutionally entrenched in Western governmental systems that it’s simply impossible to imagine them being able to see ‘the forest for the trees’ from within the forest itself.
By the way, in light of the above, here’s the West’s truly desperate, pathetically envious, face-saving attempt to tarnish and mischaracterize China’s new direction:
The above is particularly astounding in its admissions. Read carefully:
Market-based US and European economies are struggling to survive against China’s “very effective” alternative economic model, a top US trade representative has warned, according to Euractiv.
Katherine Tai told a briefing in Brussels on Thursday that Beijing’s “non-market” policies will cause severe economic and political damage, unless they are tackled through appropriate “countermeasures.” Tai’s remarks came as the EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) kicked off in Leuven, Belgium.
“I think what we see in terms of the challenge that we have from China is… the ability for our firms to be able to survive in competition with a very effective economic system,” Tai said in response to a question from Euractiv.
In short: China isn’t playing fair—they’re actually privileging their people and economy over financial speculation, and this is causing their firms to outcompete ours!
But what she’s really talking about gets to the essence of the difference in the two systems:
The trade official described China as a system “that we’ve articulated as being not market-based, as being fundamentally nurtured differently, against which a market-based system like ours is going to have trouble competing against and surviving.”
These are code words: what she means by “market based” is free market capitalism, while China uses more of a centrally-planned directive system, as outlined earlier. Recall just recently I posted complaints from Western officials that their companies are not able to compete with Russian defense manufacturers due to their ‘unfairly’ efficient ‘central planning’ style.
Here too, what they mean is that the Chinese government creates directives that spurn ‘market logics’ and are aimed at direct improvements to the lives of ordinary citizens. In the West there’s no such thing: all market decisions are based merely on the totally detached financial firms’ speculations and are exclusively at the behest of a tiny claque of finance and banking elite at the top of the pyramid.
You see, the U.S. is threatened because it knows it can never compete with China fairly, by squelching or containing its own gluttonous financial elite—so that leaves only one avenue for keeping up: sabotage and war.
This is the real reason the U.S. is desperate to stoke a Chinese invasion of Taiwan by various provocations, including weapons shipments. Just like the U.S. used Ukraine as the battering ram to bleed and weaken Russia economically, disconnecting it from Europe, U.S. hopes to use Taiwan as the Ukraine against China. It would love to foment a bloody war that would leave China battered and economically set back to give the failing and greed-suffocated U.S. economy some breathing room.
But it’s unlikely to work—China is too sagacious to take the bait and fall for the trap. It will patiently wait things out, allowing the U.S. to drown in its own endless poison and treachery.
No, there will be no Thucydides Trap—it’s already too late for that. The Trap worked for Sparta because it was still at its peak and able to thwart Athens. The U.S. is in terminal decline and would lose a war against China, which is why they hope to stage a proxy war instead, cowardly using Taiwan as the battering ram. But China can read these desperate motives with the clarity of finely glazed porcelain.
By any metric, the World Youth Festival running in the Sirius federal territory (Sochi, southern Russia) on March 1-7 is a stunning achievement: a sort of Special Cultural Operation (SCO) encompassing the young Global South.
It starts with the incomparable setting – the 2014 Olympics park of science and art, nested between snowy mountains and the Black Sea – all the way to the stars of the show: over 20,000 young leaders from over 180 nations, Russians and mostly Asians, Africans and Latin Americans, as well as assorted dissidents from the sanctions-obsessed Western “garden”.
Among them are scores of educators, PhDs, public sector or culture activists, charity volunteers, athletes, young entrepreneurs, scientists, citizen journalists, as well as teenagers from 14 to 17, for the first time the focus of a special program, “Together into the Future”. These are the generations that will be building our common future.
President Putin is once again quite sharp: he emphasized how a clear distinction applies between citizens of the world – including the Global North – and the intolerant, extremely aggressive Western plutocracy. Russia, a multinational, multicultural civilization-state, by principle welcomes all citizens of the world.
The World Youth Festival 2024, taking place seven years after the last one, renews a tradition that harks back to the 1957 World Festival of Youth and Students when the USSR welcomed everyone on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.
The idea of an open platform for young, committed, very organized people attracted by Russian conservative/family values permeates the whole festival – in sharp contrast to the artificial, cancel culture-obsessed “open society” P.R. incessantly sold by the usual hegemonic foundations.
Each day at the festival is dedicated to a main theme. For instance, March 2 was on “responsibility for the fate of the world”; March 3 was for “unity and cooperation among nations”; March 4 was for “a world of opportunities for everyone”.
No less than 300,000 youngsters from around the world applied to come to the festival. So obviously to select a little over 20,000 was quite a feat. After the festival, 2,000 foreign participants will travel to 30 Russian cities for cultural exchange. Exactly what comrade Xi Jinping defines as “people to people’s exchanges”.
It’s no wonder the festival organizers, Rosmolodezh, the Russian federal agency for youth affairs, call it “the largest youth event in the world”. Director Ksenia Razuvaeva noted, “we are destroying the myth that Russia is isolated.”
The Pitfalls of “Asynchronous Multipolarity”
The festival is all about networking among youth groups, intercultural/business ties ranging from the sustainable community level to the larger geopolitical level.
I had the huge honor and responsibility to address a truly multi-Global South audience at the Belgorod oblast pavilion, invited by the Russia Knowledge Foundation, alongside a consultant from Hyderabad, India.
The Q&A session was terrific: ultra-sharp questions from Iran to Serbia, from Brazil to India, from Palestine to Donbass. A true microcosm of the multicultural Young Global South, eager to know everything about the current geopolitical Great Game as well as how national governments can facilitate international cultural and scientific cooperation among young people.
The Valdai Club is running a particularly attractive daily program at the forum, The World in 2040.
A workshop on Sunday, for instance, focused on “The Future of a Multipolar World”, anchored by the excellent Andrey Sushentsov, dean of the School of International Relations at MGIMO, arguably the best international relations school on the planet.
The discussion on “asynchronous multipolarity” was particularly useful to the audience (a solid Chinese presence, mostly PhDs), and elicited ultra-sharp questions by researchers from Serbia, South Ossetia, Transnistria and of course China.
Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor of China studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, elaborated on the key concept of “Asian multipolarity” – the many Asias within Asia, something that totally baffles simplistic Western categorizations. After the session we had an excellent exchange about it.
Yet nothing at the forum compares to going from room to packed room, getting a glimpse of the in-depth discussions and then wandering the pavilions in total networking mode. I was approached by everyone from Sudan to Ecuador, from New Guinea to a group of Brazilians, from Indonesians to an official of the Communist Party of the United States.
And then there’s the special prize: the stands of the several Russian republics. That’s when you get the chance to be immersed in a Yamal tea ritual; to receive first-hand information on the Nenets Autonomous Region; or to discuss the procedure to embark on a trip in a nuclear icebreaker in the Northern Sea Route – or Arctic Silk Road: the connectivity channel of the future. Once again: multipolar Russia in effect.
Now compare this peaceful, pan-global gathering focused on all forms of sustainable community programs, drenched in hopes and dreams, to NATO launching a two-week, massive warmongering exercise dubbed “Nordic Response 2024”, carried out by Finland, Norway and newcomer Sweden less than 500 km away from the Russian borders.
Here’s the key takeaway of these frantic days in Moscow: Normal-o-philes of the world, unite.
These have been frantic multipolar days at the capital of the multipolar world. I had the honor to personally tell Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that virtually the whole Global South seemed to be represented in an auditorium of the Lomonosov innovation cluster on a Monday afternoon – a sort of informal UN and in several aspects way more effective when it comes to respecting the UN charter. His eyes gleamed. Lavrov, more than most, understands the true power of the Global Majority.
Moscow hosted a back-to-back multipolar conference plus the second meeting of the International Russophiles Movement (MIR, in its French acronym, which means “world” in Russian). Taken together, the discussions and networking have offered auspicious hints on the building of a truly representative international order – away from the agenda-imposed doom and gloom of single unipolar culture and Forever Wars.
The opening plenary session in the first day fell under the star power of Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova – whose main message was crystal clear: “There can’t be freedom without free will”, which could easily become the new collective Global South motto. “Civilization-states” set the tone of the overall discussion – as they are meticulously designing the blueprints of economic, technological and cultural development in the post-Western hegemonic world.
Professor of International Relations Zhang Weiwei at Fudan University’s China Institute in Shanghai summarized the four crucial points when it comes to Beijing propelling its role as a “new independent pole.” That reads like a concise marker of where we are now:
Under the unipolar order, everything from dollars to computer chips can be weaponized. Wars and color revolutions are the norm.
China has become the largest economy in the world by PPP; the largest trade and industrial economy; and it is currently at the forefront of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
China proposes a model of “Unite and Prosper” instead of a Western model of “Divide and Rule”.
The West tried to isolate Russia, but the Global Majority sympathizes with Russia. Thus, the Collective West has been isolated by the Global Rest.
Fighting the “theo-political war”
“Global Rest”, incidentally, is a misnomer: Global Majority is the name of the game. The same applies to “golden billion”; those that profit from the unipolar moment, mostly across the collective West and as comprador elites in the satraps, are at best 200 million or so.
Monday afternoon in Moscow featured three parallel sessions: on China and the multipolar world, where the star was Professor Weiwei; on the post-hegemony West, under the title “Is it possible to save the European civilization?” – attended by several dissident Europeans, academics, think tankers, activists; and the main treat – featuring the frontline actors of multipolarity.
I had the honor to moderate the awesome Global South session, which ran for over three hours – it could have been the whole day, actually – and featured several stunning presentations by a stellar cast of Africans, Latin Americans and Asians, from Palestine to Venezuela, including Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Mandla.
That was the multipolar Global South in full flight – as my imperative was to open the floor to as many people as possible. Were the organizers to release a Greatest Hits of the presentations, that could easily become a global hit.
Mandla Mandela emphasized how it’s about time to move away from the unipolar system dominated by the Hegemon, “which continues to support Israel”.
That complemented Benin’s charismatic activist Kemi Seba – who brilliantly personifies the African leadership of the future. In the plenary session, Seba introduced a key concept – which begs to be developed around the world: we are living under a “theo-political war”.
That neatly summarizes the Western simultaneous Hybrid War on Islam, Shi’ism, Christian Orthodoxy, in fact every religion, apart from the Woke Cult.
The next day, the second congress of the International Russophiles movement offered three debate sessions: the most relevant was on – what else – “Informational and Hybrid Warfare”.
I had the honor to share the stage with Maria Zakharova – and after my free jazz-style presentation, focused on over 40 years of practicing journalism across the planet and watching first-hand the utter degradation of the industry, we carried a hopefully useful dialogue on media and soft power.
My suggestion not only to the Russian Foreign Ministry but to everyone all across the Global South was straightforward: forget about oligarchy-controlled legacy/mainstream media, it is already dead. They have nothing relevant to say. The present and the future rely on social media; “alternative” – which is not alternative anymore, on the contrary; and citizen media, to all of which, of course, the highest standards of journalism should be applied.
In the evening, before everyone got down to party hard, a few of us were invited for an open, frank and enlightening working dinner with Foreign Minister Lavrov in one of the magnificent frescoed rooms of the Metropol Hotel, one the grand hotels of Europe since 1905.
A legend with a wicked sense of humor
Lavrov was relaxed, among friends; after an initial, stunning diplomatic tour de force which covered quite a few highlights of the recent decades all the way to the current gloom and doom, he opened the table to our questions, taking notes and answering each one of them in detail.
What’s so striking when you are face to face with the most legendary diplomat in the world for quite some time, in a relaxed setting, is his genuine sadness when faced with the rage, intolerance and total absence of critical thought exhibited especially by the Europeans. That was much more relevant throughout our conversation than the fact that U.S.-Russia relations are at an all-time low.
Lavrov though remains highly driven because of the Global South/Global Majority – and the Russian presidency of the BRICS this year. He hugely praised Indian FM Jaishankar, and the comprehensive relations with China. He suggested the Russophiles Movement should take a global role, playfully suggesting we should all be part of a “Normal-o-philes” movement.
Well, Lavrov The Legend is also known for his wicked sense of humor. And humor is most effective when it is deadly serious. So here’s the key takeaway of these frantic days in Moscow: Normal-o-philes of the world, unite.
Exactly two years ago this Saturday, on February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin announced the launching – and described the objectives – of a Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. That was the inevitable follow-up to what happened three days before, on February 21 – exactly 8 years after Maidan 2014 in Kiev – when Putin officially recognized the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.
During this – pregnant with meaning – short space of only three days, everyone expected that the Russian Armed Forces would intervene, militarily, to end the massive bombing and shelling that had been going on for three weeks across the frontline – which even forced the Kremlin to evacuate populations at risk to Russia. Russian intel had conclusive proof that the NATO-backed Kiev forces were ready to execute an ethnic cleansing of Russophone Donbass.
February 24, 2022 was the day that changed 21st century geopolitics forever, in several complex ways. Above all, it marked the beginning of a vicious, all-out confrontation, “military-technical” as the Russians call it, between the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder, its easily pliable NATOstan vassals, and Russia – with Ukraine as the battleground.
There is hardly any question Putin had calculated, before and during these three fateful days, that his decisions would unleash the unbounded fury of the collective West – complete with a tsunami of sanctions.
Ay, there’s the rub; it’s all about Sovereignty. And a true sovereign power simply cannot live under permanent threats. It’s even feasible that Putin had wanted (italics mine) Russia to get sanctioned to death. After all, Russia is so naturally wealthy that without a serious challenge from abroad, the temptation is enormous to live off its rents while importing what it could easily produce.
Exceptionalists always gloated that Russia is “a gas station with nuclear weapons”. That’s ridiculous. Oil and gas, in Russia, account for roughly 15% of GDP, 30% of the government budget, and 45% of exports. Oil and gas add power to the Russian economy – not a drag. Putin shaking Russia’s complacency generated a gas station producing everything it needs, complete with unrivalled nuclear and hypersonic weapons. Beat that.
Ukraine has “never been less than a nation”
Xavier Moreau is a French politico-strategic analyst based in Russia for 24 years now. Graduated from the prestigious Saint-Cyr military academy and with a Sorbonne diploma, he hosts two shows on RT France.
His latest book, Ukraine: Pourquoi La Russie a Gagné (“Ukraine: Why Russia has Won”), just out, is an essential manual for European audiences on the realities of the war, not those childish fantasies concocted across the NATOstan sphere by instant “experts” with less than zero combined arms military experience.
Moreau makes it very clear what every impartial, realist analyst was aware of from the beginning: the devastating Russian military superiority, which would condition the endgame. The problem, still, is how this endgame – “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine, as established by Moscow – will be achieved.
What is already clear is that “demilitarization”, of Ukraine and NATO, is a howling success that no new wunderwaffen – like F-16s – will be able to change.
Moreau perfectly understands how Ukraine, nearly 10 years after Maidan, is not a nation; “and has never been less than a nation”. It’s a territory where populations that everything separates are jumbled up. Moreover, it has been a – “grotesque” – failed state ever since its independence. Moreau spends several highly entertaining pages going through the corruption grotesquerie in Ukraine, under a regime that “gets its ideological references simultaneously via admirers of Stepan Bandera and Lady Gaga.”
None of the above, of course, is reported by oligarch-controlled European mainstream media.
Watch out for Deng Xiao Putin
The book offers an extremely helpful analysis of those deranged Polish elites who bear “a heavy responsibility in the strategic catastrophe that awaits Washington and Brussels in Ukraine”. The Poles actually believed that Russia would crumble from the inside, complete with a color revolution against Putin. That barely qualifies as Brzezinski on crack.
Moreau shows how 2022 was the year when NATOstan, especially the Anglo-Saxons – historically racist Russophobes – were self-convinced thar Russia would fold because it is a “poor power”. Obviously, none of these luminaries understood how Putin strengthened the Russian economy very much like Deng Xiaoping on the Chinese economy. This “self-intoxication”, as Moreau qualifies it, did wonders for the Kremlin.
By now it’s clear even for the deaf, dumb, and blind that the destruction of the European economy has been a massive tactic, historic victory for the Hegemon – as much as the blitzkrieg against the Russian economy has been an abysmal failure.
All of the above brings us to the meeting of G20 Foreign Ministers this week in Rio. That was not exactly a breakthrough. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made it very clear that the collective West at the G20 tried by all means to “Ukrainize” the agenda – with less than zero success. They were outnumbered and counterpunched by BRICS and Global South members.
At his press conference, Lavrov could not be more stark on the prospects of the war of the collective West against Russia. These are the highlights:
Western countries categorically do not want serious dialogue on Ukraine.
There were no serious proposals from the United States to begin contacts with the Russian Federation on strategic stability; trust cannot be restored now while Russia is declared an enemy.
There were no contacts on the sidelines of the G20 with either Blinken or the British Foreign Secretary.
The Russian Federation will respond to new Western sanctions with practical actions that relate to the self-sufficient development of the Russian economy.
If Europe tries to restore ties with the Russian Federation, making it dependent on their whims, then such contacts are not needed.
In a nutshell – diplomatically: you are irrelevant, and we don’t care.
That was complementing Lavrov’s intervention during the summit, which defined once again a clear, auspicious path towards multipolarity. Here are the highlights:
The forming of a fair multipolar world order without a definite center and periphery has become much more intensive in the past few years. Asian, African and Latin American countries are becoming important parts of the global economy. Not infrequently, they are setting the tone and the dynamics.
Many Western economies, especially in Europe, are actually stagnating against this background. These statistics are from Western-supervised institutions – the IMF, the World Bank and the OECD.
These institutions are becoming relics from the past. Western domination is already affecting their ability to meet the requirements of the times. Meanwhile, it is perfectly obvious today that the current problems of humanity can only be resolved through a concerted effort and with due consideration for the interests of the Global South and, generally, all global economic realities.
Institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, the EBRD, and the EIB are prioritizing Kiev’s military and other needs. The West allocated over $250 billion to tide over its underling thus creating funding shortages in other parts of the world. Ukraine is taking up the bulk of the funds, relegating Africa and other regions of the Global South to rationing.
Countries that have discredited themselves by using unlawful acts ranging from unilateral sanctions and the seizure of sovereign assets and private property to blockades, embargoes, and discrimination against economic operators based on nationality to settle scores with their geopolitical opponents cannot be considered guarantors of financial stability.
Without a doubt, new institutions that focus on consensus and mutual benefit are needed to democratize the global economic governance system. Today, we are seeing positive dynamics for strengthening various alliances, including BRICS, the SCO, ASEAN, the African Union, LAS, CELAC, and the EAEU.
This year, Russia chairs BRICS, which saw several new members join it. We will do our best to reinforce the potential of this association and its ties with the G20.
Considering that 6 out of 15 UN Security Council members represent the Western bloc, we will support the expansion of this body solely through the accession of countries from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Call it the real state of things, geopolitically, two years after the start of the SMO.
There will be no peaceful road towards to Westphalian world order. Fasten your seat belts – it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
A new book by scholar Glenn Diesen, The Ukraine War & The Eurasian World Order, out in mid-February, asks the make-or-break question of the young 21st century: will the Hegemon accept a new geopolitical reality, or will it go Captain Ahab on Moby Dick and drag us all to the depths of a – nuclear – abyss?
An extra touch of poetic beauty is that the analysis is conducted by a Scandinavian. Diesen is a professor at the University of Southeast Norway (USN) and an associate editor at the Russia in Global Affairs journal. He had a stint at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, working closely with the inimitable Sergey Karaganov.
It goes without saying that European MSM won’t touch him; rabid yells – “Putinista!” – prevail, including in Norway, where he’s been a prime target of cancel culture.
That’s irrelevant, anyway. What matters is that Diesen, an affable, unfailingly polite man and an ultra-sharp scholar, is aligned with the rarified cream of the crop who is asking the questions that really matter; among them, whether we are heading towards a Eurasian-Westphalian world order.
Apart from a meticulous deconstruction of the proxy war in Ukraine that devastatingly debunks, with proven facts, the official NATOstan narrative, Diesen offers a concise, easily accessible mini-history of how we got here.
He starts to make the case harking back to the Silk Roads: “The Silk Road was an early model of globalization, although it did not result in a common world order as the civilizations of the world were primarily connected to nomadic intermediaries.”
The demise of the Heartland-based Silk Road, actually roads, was caused by the rise of the thalassocratic European powers reconnecting the world in a different way. Yet the hegemony of the collective West could only be fully achieved by applying Divide and Rule across Eurasia.
We did not in fact had “five centuries of western dominance”, according to Diesen: it was more like three, or even two (see, for instance, the work of Andre Gunder Frank). In a historical Long View that barely registers.
What is indeed The Big Picture now is that “the unique world order” produced by controlling “the vast Eurasian continent from the maritime periphery is coming to an end”.
Mackinder is hit by a train
Diesen hits the nail on the head when it comes to the Russia-China strategic partnership – on which the overwhelmingly majority of European intellectuals is clueless (a crucial exception is French historian, demographer and anthropologist Emmanuel Todd, whose latest book I analyzed here.)
With a lovely on the road formulation, Diesen shows how “Russia can be considered the successor of the Mongolian nomads as the last custodian of the Eurasian land corridor”, while China revives the Ancient Silk Roads “with economic connectivity”. In consequence, “a powerful Eurasian gravitational pull is thus reorganizing the supercontinent and the wider world.”
Poviding context, Diesen needs to engage in an obligatory detour to the basics of the Great Game between the Russian and British empires. What stands out is how Moscow already was pivoting to Asia all the way to the late 19th century, when Russian Finance Minister Sergei Witte started to develop a groundbreaking road map for a Eurasia political economy, “borrowing from Alexander Hamilton and Friedrich List.”
Witte “wanted to end Russia’s role as an exporter of natural resources to Europe as it resembled ‘the relations of colonial countries with their metropolises’”.
And that implies going back to Dostoyevsky, who argued that “Russians are as much Asiatics as European. The mistake of our policy for the past two centuries has been to make the people of Europe believe that we are true Europeans (…) It will be better for us to seek alliances with the Asiatics.” Dostoyevsky meets Putin-Xi.
Diesen also needs to go through the obligatory references to Mackinder’s “heartland” obsession – which is the basis of all Anglo-American geopolitics for the past hundred and twenty years.
Mackinder was spooked by railway development – especially the Trans-Siberian by the Russians – as it enabled Moscow to “emulate the nomadic skills of the Scythians, Huns and Mongols” that were essential to control most of Eurasia.
Mackinder was particularly focused on railways acting “chiefly as feeders to ocean-going commerce”. Ergo, being a thalassocratic power was not enough: “The heartland is the region to which under modern conditions, sea power can be refused access.”
And that’s what leads to the Rosetta Stone of Anglo-American geopolitics: to “prevent the emergence of a hegemon or a group of states capable of dominating Europe and Eurasia that could threaten the dominant maritime power.”
That explains everything from WWI and WWII to the permanent NATO obsession in preventing a solid rapprochement between Germany and Russia, by any means necessary.
The Little Multipolar Helmsman
Diesen offers a succinct perspective of Russian Eurasianists of the 1920s such as Trubetskoi and Savitsky, who were promoting an alternative path to the USSR.
They conceptualized that with Anglo-American thalassocracy applying Divide and Rule in Russia, what was needed was a Eurasian political economy based on mutual cooperation: a stark prefiguration of the Russia-China drive to multipolarity.
Savitsky in fact could have been writing today: “Eurasia has previously played a unifying role in the Old World. Contemporary Russia, absorbing this tradition”, must abandon war as a method of unification.
Cue to post-Maidan in 2014. Moscow finally got the message that trying to build a Greater Europe “from Lisbon to Vladivostok” was a non-starter. Thus the new concept of Greater Eurasian Partnership was born. Sergey Karaganov, with whom Diesen worked at the Higher School of Economics, was the father of the concept.
Greater Eurasia Partnership repositions Russia “from the periphery of Europe and Asia to the center of a large super-region.” In short, a pivot to the East – and the consolidation of the Russia-China partnership.
Diesen dug up an extraordinary passage in the Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, proving how the Little Helmsman in 1990 was a visionary prefiguring multipolar China:
“In the future when the world becomes three-polar, four-polar or five-polar, the Soviet Union, no matter how weakened it may be and even if some of its republics withdraw from it, will still be one pole. In the so-called multipolar world, China too will be a pole (…) Our foreign policies remain the same: first, opposing hegemonism and power politics and safeguarding world peace; and second, working to establish a new international political order and a new international economic order.”
Diesen breaks it down, noting how China has to a certain extent “replicated the three-pillared American System of the early 19th century, in which the U.S. developed a manufacturing base, physical transportation infrastructure, and a national bank to counter British economic hegemony.”
Enter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO); the AIIB; the de-dollarization drive; the China International Payment System (CIPS); increased use of yuan in international trade; the use of national currencies; Made in China 2025; The Digital Silk Road; and last but not least, BRICS 10 and the NDB, the BRICS development bank.
Russia matched some of it – as in the Eurasia Development Bank (EDB) of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and in advancing the harmonization of financial arrangements of BRI and EAEU projects via the SCO.
Diesen is one of the very few Western analysts who actually understands the drive to multipolarity: “BRICS+ is anti-hegemony and not anti-Western, as the objective is to create a multipolar system and not assert collective dominance over the West.”
Diesen also contends that the emerging Eurasian World Order is “seemingly based on conservative principles.” That’s correct, as the Chinese system is drenched in Confucianism (social integration, stability, harmonious relationships, respect for tradition and hierarchy), part of the keen sense of belonging to a distinct, sophisticated civilization: that’s the foundation of Chinese nation-building.
Can’t bring Russia-China down
Diesen’s detailed analysis of the Ukraine proxy war, “a predictable consequence of an unsustainable world order”, is extrapolated to the battleground where the future, new world order is being decided; it is “either global hegemony or Westphalian multipolarity.”
Everyone with a brain by now knows how Russia absorbed and re-transformed everything thrown by the collective West after the start of the Special Military Operation (SMO). The problem is the rarified plutocracy that really runs the show will always refuse to acknowledge reality, as Diesen frames it: “Irrespective of the outcome of the war, the war has already become the graveyard of liberal hegemony.”
The overwhelming majority of the Global South clearly sees that even as what Ray McGovern indelibly defined as MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex) cast the Russia-China partnership as the main “threats” – in reality those that created the “gravitational pull to reorganize the world order towards multipolarity” – they can’t bring Russia-China down geoeconomically.
So there’s no question “the conflicts of the future world order will continue to be militarized.” That’s where we are at the crossroads. There will be no peaceful road towards to Westphalian world order. Fasten your seat belts – it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
About a week ago, Chilean American independent journalist, Gonzalo Lira, died in a Ukrainian prison. Gonzalo Lira certainly had bravado, charisma, and a big ego, and was constantly reinventing himself. For instance, from a filmmaker to libertarian financial journalist, to PUA/passport bro, to geopolitical correspondent, and finally a POW/prisoner of conscious. Regardless, I found him fascinating and enjoyed his geopolitical YouTube videos. Plus his original Coach Red Pill videos were hilarious. He didn’t deserve his fate and its especially tragic, considering he had kids.
While Gonzalo Lira’s case eventually garnered the attention of Tucker Carlson, by then it was too little too late. It was primarily the alternative media that spoke out when he previously went missing. Ideally the US government should have done something to save Lira, free speech should be protected, and I shilled for him when he went missing. However, he should have tried to escape when he had the chance, rather than staying in place, and then speaking out against the Ukrainian regime. Whether Lira sacrificing himself to get his message out is admirable and courageous or foolish is up for debate. One could make the case that he had a death wish, and there is some speculation that he had some terminal illness, and wanted to go out with a banger, and not be forgotten.
Martial Law during wartime is often exploited to get rid of dissidents. For instance, Israel using the war in Gaza to take out Palestinian journalists and intellectuals. However, a regime does not need to execute or assassinate a dissident. Rather it can just imprison them, deny them healthcare, and just allow them to die, thus denying any culpability. This is especially the case if one is already in poor health, as Lira likely was. Lira also said that the Ukrainian prison guards incited other prisoners to attack him. These are common tactics in authoritarian regimes, though are also not uncommon in the US.
Though Gonzalo Lira is technically GenX, he had a boomer mentality in that he operated under the “End of History” paradigm. Basically where one could just travel anywhere and do as one pleases, as one would at home, while taking for granted the protections of a US citizen. Now dissidents are even getting arrested for thought crimes in Western European nations. One has to be extremely cautious about getting politically involved and criticizing foreign governments while abroad. Not to mention when it’s in a hostile regime, like Zelensky’s regime was to Lira.
The same applies to outspoken anti-Putin Americans, living in or visiting Russia, though the State Department is more likely to help them. While it is harder to rescue someone from an adversarial regime, the irony is that Ukraine is a staunch US ally. Thus the Biden admin and Deep State likely intended Lira’s fate, or at the very least were indifferent. There is a paradigm shift where the State Department can no longer guarantee protection to all US passport holders. Perhaps Trump would have been more likely to save Lira, but Trump has disappointed plenty of times.
While Richard Spencer’s shilling for Biden was cringe, from a Nietzschean perspective, he was right in much of his harsh critique of the populist right. If you look at Jan 6th, those involved LARPed as revolutionaries, like the Founding Fathers, but then once caught they were just trespassing while peacefully protesting. Many of the Jan6th protesters wanted to be martyrs rather than having a plan. Certainly many were just protesting and got caught up in the moment. Even though the Left and establishment overblow Jan 6th, the Right wants to have it both ways. They desperately want to be martyrs but are not willing to accept the fate of a martyr. LARPing and living in hyperreality can lead to real life ramifications, though Lira had much more real life experience than most on the dissident right.
Certainly many of those in positions of political power are scum. However, the populist right lacks consistency in how they try to hold their adversaries to some idealistic moral standards, and expect them to be beholden to Classical Liberal principles. Hypocrisy is just power, so there is no point in trying to moralize one’s adversary’s motives, in the way one would with an ally or someone you can negotiate a deal with.
While Classical Liberal principles, like Human Rights, free speech, freedom of the press, and civil liberties, are precious and something to strive for, they are not guaranteed, and are specific to the right circumstances. Those being reciprocity and or a society made up of people with shared values. Civil liberties are increasingly conditional upon which side one is on, and both sides now want to imprison their political opponents. While accelerationists and neo-reactionaries might see the demise of 20th Century Liberalism as something to celebrate, what replaces it could end up being much worse and more oppressive.
The dissident right hates liberalism but then tries to outflank the Left using liberal arguments. For instance, the dissident right will go back and forth between memes about helicopter rides for liberal journalists to protesting that freedom of the press is sacred and must be protected under all circumstances. Another example is Russian shills attacking Ukraine using Western liberal arguments. Liberalism is so ingrained, that all political sides still reply upon liberal arguments.
Much of the Right operates by how things should ideally be, based upon the liberalism that they were brought up in. While it’s one thing for normie and boomer conservatives, a lot of these arguments are made by the radically anti-liberal, dissident right. Basically those who believe that might makes right and that only ingroup vs outgroup distinctions and ethnocentrism matter. Though Gonzalo Lira, being older, did have more Classical Liberal and libertarian leanings.
The allegations that Gonzalo Lira was some kind of Russian plant or paid Russian shill are nonsense. Western media smears likely contributed to his demise. However, he did come across as having a pro-Russian slant. For instance, he said that the Russians would steamroll Ukraine, when it has been more of a stalemate, with Russia seizing about 20% of Ukraine’s territory.
The Ukrainian military has performed stronger, and has shown itself to be more competent than a lot of the anti-Ukraine dissident right assumed. Not to mention that Russia is much larger and more powerful than Ukraine. Lira would say how much respect he had for the Ukrainian people, including their soldiers’ courage. There is also a case that the US and NATO prolonging the war has gotten a lot more Ukrainians killed, in order to weaken Russia. This is a kind of old school liberal argument, of loving a people and hating their government, which increasingly has less legitimacy, especially in times of war and hyper-polarization.
While the dogs of war bark, lie and steal, the Russia-China caravan strolls on.
2023 may be defined for posterity as The Year of the Russia-China Strategic Partnership. This wonder of wonders could easily sway under a groove by – who else – Stevie Wonder: “Here I am baby/ signed, sealed, delivered, I’m yours.”
In the first 11 months of 2023, trade between Russia and China exceeded $200 billion; they did not expect to achieve that until 2024.
Now surely that’s One Partnership Under a Groove. Once again signed, sealed and delivered during the visit of a large delegation to Beijing last week, led by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, who met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and revisited and upgraded the whole spectrum of the comprehensive partnership/strategic cooperation, complete with an array of new, major joint projects.
Add to it the carefully structured breakdown written by head of the SVR Sergey Naryshkin, defining 2024 as “the year of geopolitical awakening”, and coming up with arguably the key formulation following the upcoming, cosmic NATO humiliation in the steppes of Donbass: “In 2024, the Arab world will remain the main space in the struggle for the establishment of a new order.”
Confronted with such detailed geopolitical fine-tuning, it’s no wonder the imperial reaction was apoplexy – revealed epidermically in long, tortuous “analyses” trying to explain why President Putin turned out to be the “geopolitical victor” of 2023, seducing vast swathes of the Arab world and the Global South, solidifying BRICS side by side with China, and propelling the EU further into a black void of its own – and the Hegemon’s – making.
Putin even allowed himself, half in jest, to offer Russian support for the potential “re-annexation” of country 404 border regions once annexed by Stalin, eventually to be returned to former owners Poland, Hungary & Romania. He added that he is 100% certain this is what residents of those still Ukrainian borders want.
Were that to happen, we would have Transcarpathia back to Hungary; Galicia and Volyn back to Poland; and Bukovina back to Romania. Can you feel the house already rocking to the break of dawn in Budapest, Warsaw and Bucharest?
Then there’s the possibility of the Hegemon ordering NATO’s junior punks to harass Russian oil tankers in the Baltic Sea and “isolate” St. Petersburg. It goes without saying that the Russian response would be to just take out Command & Control centers (hacking might be enough); burn electronics across the spectrum; and blockade the Baltic at the entrance by running a “Freedom of Navigation” exercise so everyone becomes familiar with the new groove.
That China-Russian Far East symbiosis
One of the most impressive features of the expanded Russia-China partnership is what is being planned for the Chinese northeastern province of Heilongjiang.
The idea is to turn it into an economic, scientific development and national defense mega-hub, centered on the provincial capital Harbin, complete with a new, sprawling Special Economic Zone (SEZ).
The key vector is that this mega-hub would also coordinate the development of the immense Russian Far East. This was discussed in detail at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok last September.
In a unique, startling arrangement, the Chinese may be allowed to manage selected latitudes of the Russian Far East for the next 100 years.
As Hong Kong-based analyst Thomas Polin detailed, Beijing is budgeting no less than 10 trillion yuan ($1.4 trillion) for the whole thing. Half of it would be absorbed by Harbin. The blueprint will reach the National People’s Congress next March, and is expected to be approved. It has already been approved by the lower house of the Duma in Moscow.
The ramifications are mind-boggling. We would have Harbin elevated to the status of direct-administered city, just like Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing. And most of all a Sino-Russian Management Committee will be established in Harbin to oversee the whole project.
Top flight Chinese universities – including Peking University – would transfer their main campuses to Harbin. The universities of National Defense and National Defense Technology would merge with Harbin Engineering University to form a new entity focused on defense industries. High-tech research institutes and companies in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen would also move to Harbin.
The People’s Bank of China would establish its HQ for northern China in Harbin, complete with markets trading stocks and commodities futures.
Residents of Heilongjiang would be allowed to travel back and forth to designated Russian Far East regions without a visa. The new Heilongjiang SEZ would have its own customs area and no import taxes.
That’s the same spirit driving BRI connectivity corridors and the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC). The underlying rationale is wider Eurasia integration.
At the recent Astana Club meeting in Kazakhstan, researcher Damjan Krnjevic-Miskovic, Director of Policy Research at the ADA University in Baku, gave an excellent presentation on connectivity corridors.
He referred for instance to the C5+1 (five Central Asian “stans” plus China) meeting three months ago in Dushanbe joined by Azerbaijan’s president Aliyev: that translates as Central Asia-Caucasus integration.
Miskovic is paying due attention to everything that is evolving in what he defines, correctly, as “the Silk Road region” – interlinking the Euro-Atlantic with Asia-Pacific and interconnecting West Asia, South Asia and wider Eurasia.
Strategically, of course, that’s the “geopolitical hinge where NATO meets the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and where the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) connects with Turkiye and the territory of the EU.” In practical terms, Russia-China know exactly what needs to be done to propel economic connectivity and “synergistic relationships” all across this vast spectrum.
The War of Economic Corridors heats up
The fragmentation of the global economy is already polarizing the expanding BRICS 10 (starting on January 1st, under the Russian presidency, and without flirting-with-dollarization Argentina) and the shrinking G7.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko – a key Asia hand -, talking to TASS, once again reaffirmed that the key drive for the Greater Eurasia Partnership (official Russian policy) is to connect the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) with BRI.
As Russia develops a carefully calibrated balance between China and India, the same drive applies to developing the INSTC, where Russia-Iran-India are the main partners, and Azerbaijan is also bound to become a crucial player.
Add to it vastly improved Russian ties with North Korea, Mongolia, Pakistan (a BRI and SCO member) and ASEAN (except Westernized Singapore).
BRI, when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, is on a roll. I’ve just been to Moscow, Astana and Almaty for three weeks, and it was possible to confirm with several sources that trains in all connectivity corridors are packed to the hilt; via the Trans-Siberian; via Astana all the way to Minsk; and via Almaty to Uzbekistan.
Russian International Affairs Council Program Manager Yulia Melnikova adds that “Moscow can and should integrate more actively into transit operations along the China – Mongolia – Russia route” and accelerate the harmonization of standards between the EAEU and China. Not to mention invest further in Russia-China cooperation in the Arctic.
Enter President Putin, at a Russian Railways meeting, unveiling an ambitious, massive 10-year infrastructure expansion plan encompassing new railways and improved connectivity with Asia – from the Pacific to the Arctic.
The Russian economy has definitely pivoted to Asia, responsible for 70% of trade turnover amid the Western sanctions dementia.
So what’s on the menu ahead is everything from modernization of the Trans-Siberian and establishing a major logistical hub in the Urals and Siberia to improving port infrastructure in the Azov, Black, and Caspian Seas and faster INSTC cargo transit between Murmansk and Mumbai.
Putin, once again, almost as an afterthought, recently remarked that trade through the Suez Canal cannot be considered effective anymore, compared to Russia’s Northern Sea Route. With a single, sharp geopolitical move, Yemen’s Ansarullah has made it graphic – for everyone to see.
Russian development of the Northern Sea Route happens to run in total synergy with the Chinese drive to develop the Arctic leg of BRI. On the oil front, Russian shipments to China via its Arctic coast takes only 35 days: 10 days less than via Suez.
Danila Krylov, researcher with the Department of the Middle East and Post-Soviet Asia at the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, offers a straightforward insight:
“I view the fact that the Americans are getting involved in Yemen as part of a great game [scenario]; there is more to it than just a desire to punish the Houthis or Iran, as it is more likely driven by a desire to prevent the monopolization of the market and hinder Chinese export deliveries to Europe. The Americans need an operational Suez Canal and a corridor between India and Europe, while the Chinese don’t want it because these are two direct competitors.”
It’s not that the Chinese don’t want it: with the Northern Sea Route up and running, they don’t need it.
Now freeze!
In sum: in the ongoing, ever more fractious War of Economic Corridors, the initiative is with Russia-China.
In desperation, and no more than an option-deprived, headless chicken victim in the War of Economic Corridors, the Hegemon’s EU vassals are resorting to twisting the Follow the Money playbook.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has defined the freezing of Russian assets – not only private, but also state-owned – by the EU as pure theft. Now Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov is making it very clear that Moscow will react symmetrically to the possible use of income from these frozen Russian assets.
Paraphrasing Lavrov: you confiscate, we confiscate. We all confiscate.
The repercussions will be cataclysmic – for the Hegemon. No Global South nation, outside of NATOstan, will be “encouraged” to park its foreign currency/reserves in the West. That may lead, in a flash, to the whole Global South ditching the U.S.-led international financial system and joining a Russia-China-led alternative.
The peer-competitor Russia-China strategic partnership is already directly challenging the “rules-based international order” on all fronts – improving their historical spheres of influence while actively developing vast, interconnected connectivity corridors bypassing said “order”. That precludes, as much as possible, direct Hot War with the Hegemon.
Or to put it on Silk Road terms: while the dogs of war bark, lie and steal, the Russia-China caravan strolls on.
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