By Pepe Escobar
October 30, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- "Strategic
Culture Foundation
" 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.
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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